Tag Archives: politics

August 28, 2015 · 1:55 pm

In Search of the Mythical Socialist Bigfoot

adventurers2x

While the Republican Presidential Clown College continues to shoot their mouths off… and sometimes shoot their own foot off… or put their foot in their mouth and shoot both off… (Dang!  See what you get for being too friendly with the NRA, Republicans?) I decided to track down the mythical creature that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh constantly warn is the socialist-communist-terrorist-really-bad-guy behind everything President Obama and liberals do, Saul Alinsky.

You see, I have been battling the evil Bond villain Badfinger for days now.  He has been exercising his evil on my more Republican and conservative Facebook friends for a while.  They have been posting up a storm of crap about how terrible Obama is, and how false climate change is, and how we should not try to lift up the poor by tearing down the rich… things that sound suspiciously like talking points on Fox News where they mention Saul Alinsky a lot.  (Yes, I do watch Fox News sometimes.  It is always on at my favorite A&W in Lewisville.  And besides, sometimes it is therapeutic to induce vomiting when you’ve had too much poison and disrespect.)

A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.

A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.

Boy, Saul Alinsky sounds like a real monster!  But if Saul Alinsky really said this, and he really is a socialist, why do so many of these sound so much like fascist/capitalist ideas?  The kind of control they are urging is what appears to me to be the thing that would benefit fat-cat oligarchs and rich-old-guy control freaks.  So I turned to Wikipedia to learn more about this evil, very evil guy.  (I know, Wikipedia is discredited because it is edited and referenced by the people who use it… but a source that is factually checked and edited daily can sometimes be more accurate than the rarely updated articles in Encyclopedia Brittanica.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

Saul_Alinsky

Wikipedia says that he was a Jewish-American community organizer and writer.  (Red flags have to go up for Republicans for that alone.)  And worse yet he was focused on improving the lives of poor people in American cities, particularly black people.  He was working with black people in ghettos in New York City, Detroit, and other notable “trouble spots” in the 1950’s.  How did he avoid the wrath of righteous commie hunters like Senator Joe McCarthy doing a work like that?  Oh, wait a minute… It says in the article that William F. Buckley praised him as an “organizational genius”.  How did he avoid prison after being endorsed by a commie like that?  Um, right?

His book, Rules for Radicals, begins like this; “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

There’s the damning evidence right there.  He means to punish the wealthy and the greedy and the powerful by taking away some of their excess and giving it to the powerless who are starving and suffering from want.  No communist except maybe… Jesus Christ… could have proposed anything more radical and perverse.

And look at some of the terrible methods he used.  He once used what he called a “fart in” to disrupt rich folks’ sensibilities at the Rochester Philharmonic concert in Rochester, New York.  He organized a group of classical-music-loving radicals to eat huge quantities of baked beans, then go to the concert and intentionally alter the atmosphere for rich patrons of the arts.  That will either bring down Western Civilization as we know it, or make somebody die laughing.  You can’t get much more evil than that, can you?

When asked whether he hadn’t actually considered joining the Communist Party, Alinsky responded like this;  “Not at any time. I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.”

Man, oh, man!  I owe such a debt to my conservative Facebook friends for exposing this monster to me.  I didn’t know what Fox News was ranting about until now.  I now believe this evil Saul Alinsky may actually be worthy of respect.  They may have actually reinforced my loony liberal belief that the American Government exists to better the lives of all its citizens.  It has definitely opened my eyes to the dangers of…thinking like a Republican.

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August 14, 2015 · 2:19 pm

Playing the Evil Clown Game

One of the biggest dangers of Presidential elections is that one of the fools running for the office has to get elected.  So, how do you decide which of the many evil clowns are acceptable to elect?  It is critical to know what jokes and pranks they are most likely to pull on the American people if given the opportunity to run the show in the Bigtop.

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For instance, Mr. King’s observation here is not a joke.  Senator Cruz is infected with corporate vampirism because his corporate masters are the ancient Nosferatu brothers known as Charles and David Koch.  For years now, these Libertarian vampire overlords have been sucking money out of the middle class and their thirst for more green blood from this country’s financial jugulars is unquenchable.  Cruz is against Obamacare because it puts limits on healthcare-for-profit excesses that prey upon the elderly and the infirm to make their zombie hordes.

But I have spent a lot of time harping on the bad clowns that want to be president.  I haven’t given much time or thought to the good clowns, or the less-evil clowns.  In the Republican field, one has to look for the Stephen-King clowns that have eaten fewer children.  Using “It” as the yardstick, Marco Rubio and John Kasich seem to have cooked fewer kiddies into gingerbread than the majority of the field.  is (3)

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I might also point to Rand Paul, even though he has gingerbread dough on his chin and frosting for hair, except that Wednesday I condemned him as an idiot.  Libertarians do get the concept of what freedom could actually mean if watered and nurtured like a flower.  But unlike his goofy father Ron, Rand uses weed-killer instead of water.

Rubio is a Spanish-speaking Latino from Florida who actually knows what it is like to grow up brown in white America.  He gets it that Hispanics are considered second-class citizens and are to be talked down to as ignorant children that only need to be firmly told what is good for them, and expected to accept the poison pills without complaining about the taste.  He does get that immigrants have needs, and he is willing to help a little with one hand while he builds a wall against Mexico with the other hand.

Kasich actually said some very un-Republican things about illegal immigrants, suggesting they work harder than most people and get less help or benefits than anybody else.  He is for amnesty for hard-working immigrants who are already here, and intends to only wall off the ones who aren’t here yet.   He knows that undocumented workers have bolstered the economy of his home State of Ohio, and he he doesn’t want to get rid of them in Ohio, California, Texas, or anywhere else where they help the profit margin.  He will make them legal and then just pay them far less than they are worth, the way corporate America has been doing to middle-class white folks since the 1980’s.

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If you should choose Alfred E. Newman’s twin brother Scott Walker as your playing piece in this life-or-death Elect a Clown for President game, you should know that I will oppose you to my dying breath.  He has destroyed education in Wisconsin, and he not only destroys teachers’ unions, there is some evidence that he actually eats teachers for breakfast.

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I would like to warn you that I truly believe the only way to win this Evil Clown Game is not to play it with Republicans.  But I know there are enough people in the evil-people/stupid-people coalition to elect a Republican as the next President.  It is my prayer that we are at least smart enough to elect one of the not-so-evil clowns like Rubio or Kasich.  Our planet will be the loser if we elect another flight-suit-wearing rodeo clown like we did a few years back.

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August 12, 2015 · 2:05 pm

Laurel and Hardy Politics

Now, you probably know that I would not ever actually watch the GOP Presidential debates.  I am not a sadomasochist looking to seriously torture my own brain, especially the logic and ethical centers of my brain.  But you cannot help but get some highlights (or more properly, low-lights) from the news.   And the most telling thing that struck me about the bits and pieces of the clown-alley massacre that is called a Republican debate, is that the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are re-incarnated and running for president.  Compare these two images.

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Annex - Laurel & Hardy (Big Noise, The)_07

I mean, you see it, don’t you?  Rand Paul is Stan Laurel.  He has the same eyes.  The same rubbery mouth and chin.  Chris Christie is Oliver Hardy.  Notice the double chin.  The porcine eyes and pig-like smugness.  They have the same political facial tics and brain spasms.

Rand Paul is a Libertarian at heart.  That means he has no earthly idea how things work.  He would just dismantle government if he had his druthers, and he firmly believes that government should keep its hands off everything.  No foreign policy.  No protections from the predatory practices of free-market businesses.  “Leave it alone and it’ll come home,” is his philosophy.  And when he gets in trouble for his mistakes, he scratches the top of his head with one hand while he holds his hat in the other and cries.

Chris Christie is a political bully.  His bluster and bombast attacks lazy folks like public school teachers.  How dare they think they can unionize in his State and demand better wages for the hard job they are doing trying to live up to the high testing standards that he has imposed?  He is angry practically all the time.  When his revenge policies get called out by the news media, he blames others for the problem and throws a tantrum.

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But, wait a minute.  I have seen that pattern in other places too.  The bully and the idiot!  That could be Abbott and Costello too!  Well, of course, Paul and Christie look more like Stan and Ollie.  But the debate had more than its share of “Who’s on First?” routines in it.  Maybe Bud and Lou are reincarnated too in Ted Cruz and Rick Perry.  Ted is bully enough to filibuster and shut down the government when he doesn’t get everything he wants.  And Rick Perry cannot remember three things at the same time.  And they are both from Texas.  That definitely smacks of comedy duo.

In the singular argument that made the news reports between Rand Paul and Chris Christie, they had a spat over government surveillance that had to be a comedy routine.  Rand Laurel cried that he didn’t want government wiretaps to snoop into the business of everyday Americans, though somehow he still wants to collect private data from “terrorists”.  How does he do that, precisely?  Passing a law to make all terrorists wear a bell around their neck so we know who to spy on?

And Ollie Christie came back at him that he could not be considered a patriot if he didn’t allow government spying on everybody to root out the bad apples.  Rand Laurel rebounded with an insult that pointed out that Ollie Christie committed the unforgivable Republican error of hugging Obama during the Hurricane Sandy debacle.  And Ollie Christie tossed a last word back at him with the bombastic equivalent of, “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”

I have to think about this all very carefully.  I may have been too hasty in my judgments.  Perhaps the GOP Clown College debates are something I would get numerous yuks and giggles out of.  I may have to consider actually watching the next mess.

showbiz-laurel-and-hardy

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July 27, 2015 · 3:11 pm

Stooges

borrowed from Wikipedia

borrowed from Wikipedia

Life is like a Three Stooges movie where I get to be Moe.  Yes, you heard me right.  I am the “smartest Stooge”.  And although a lot of the wacky plans my family carries out are my plans originally, I get more than my share of eye-pokes and head-slaps.

Financially I get more than my fair share of head-slaps.  My income has now been frozen in retirement mode for the remainder of my life.  I have to live three more years to get back all the money I paid into the pension plan for Texas teachers.  It is a better pension than teachers can earn now, but it is set up with standards from over two decades ago.  And, well, it is rather a difficult budget to manage when income is frozen and expenses are free to rise at will.  I just paid $45 for groceries at Walmart and got four sacks of edibles.  Seven cans of cheap-meal servings of chili and pork-n-beans (creating an alarming natural gas potential at our house), two cans of Pringles, 24 sodas in cans, two gallons of milk, Oscar Mayer salami, and some shampoo (hopefully we don’t have to eat the shampoo to avoid starving to death.  I remember a time when a similar stash for the pantry cost a mere $10.) The point is, Walmart is treating us like Stooges, in the same way Mr. Dimsell treats his Stooges while working in Dimsell’s Drug Store in the movie, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.

The biggest point I am trying to make, I guess, is that I am at the bottom of Poop Mountain when it comes to the matter of finance and wealth.  (And poop not only rolls down hill, it avalanches down mountainsides.)  Right now the games that rich people and the Mr. Dimsells of the world play with money give us all sorts of head-slaps and eye-pokes.  Being able to own the whole drugstore is an unfair advantage.  Now that Dimsell is the only drugstore operator in the area, he can set prices as high as he pleases without worrying about losing Stooge business to other stores.  And he doesn’t have to treat his Stooges well, either.  He can be mean.  He can cut salaries and pensions in the secure knowledge that his Stooges will still have to come to him to spend their money no matter what.  More and more of the wealth goes into Dimsell’s pocket, and none comes out.  He is not compelled to share.  He doesn’t pay anything to fix the potholes in the streets outside his store.  He is, in fact given tax incentives just to be there and take our money.  So when my car needs repair because the pothole wheel-kicked my car to the point of needing repair, I will be forced to pay Dimsell to fix a problem that he allowed to poke me in the eye financially.  It is a real dumb deal, Porcupine.  (And yes, I know that drugstores don’t normally sell or repair tires, but Dimsell is a metaphor for Walmart, if you hadn’t figured it out by now.)

So, the only answer is to accidentally send myself back to the days of Hercules with a homemade time machine invented in the basement under the drugstore.  It will bring Dimsell to his knees and give him his just comeuppance.  And it will thoroughly prove I can carry metaphors and analogies way too far.

Minions are another form of Stooge... and I now have Kevin, Bob, and Stuart.

Minions are another form of Stooge… and I now have Kevin, Bob, and Stuart.

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July 21, 2015 · 3:15 pm

The Unique Joy of Having Redneck Friends

redneck friends

Yes, I live in Texas… And yes, I know a redneck or two… or 600.  But it is a unique joy that almost has to be shared to be believed.  They do not think like I do.  To them, I am just a commie, liberal, tree-huggin’ atheist with very bad hippie-hair.  But not all of them are automatically unkind to me for who I am… in fact, some of them are my friends.

Now, I have to say that, being a Texan is not an advantage for making friends with rednecks.  The home-grown brand of Texas Mexican-hating, gun-loving redneck are suspicious of me because I was a gol’ dang Texas edjumacator for so many years.  You gotta be suspicious of anybody who teaches, cuz they want to make our children smarter than us.  That’s a gol’ dang liberal trick from way-back-when.  Who knows what kind of communist liberal ideas a communist liberal college edjumacated idiot wants to plant in the heads of our kids?  Oh, and people who are smarter than us are all idiots, because they have all them new-fangled ideas and facts and some-such, but we got common sense.  That makes us better’n them no matter how gol’ dang smart they are… gol’ dang ’em!  (I can’t even write these words without hearing that South-Texas Winchuk-family-from-the-Brush-Country accent in my head.)  Texas rednecks are hard to warm up to unless they’ve already reached the stage of wanting to grill your ass on the Winchuk family barbecue pit.  Then it is entirely the wrong part of you that gets warmed up because they don’t accept that the word “ass” is the Biblical word for donkey.

The majority of my redneck friends are actually from Iowa.  They are the people that I grew up with who knew me as a boy.  They know I am intelligent all the way to insane levels of intelligence.  And while they also believe their common sense trumps my intelligence, they have a soft spot in their hearts for the old egghead Superchicken they used to know in high school.  They mistakenly believe I am still a Republican by nature and probably support Ted Cruz for President, because he seems like a good Christian conservative fellow.  They argue with me about why they have a right to keep their guns and refuse all background checks or gun registration or licensing of guns because, sure you have to have a license to drive a car and get married because those are seriously important and potentially dangerous things, but we are talking about guns here.  They argue about why I should not be offended by their Confederate flags and why I really ought to listen to Fox News because they don’t lie to you like the rest of the liberal media.  And how did they get to be so sunburned on their backs of their necks and all over their political ideologies?  There was a time I voted for Charles Grassley.  But Republican Iowa… the Iowa of Republican Governor Robert Ray in the 70’s and President Eisenhower supporters in the 50’s… has changed right along with the entire Republican party.  They are now goose-stepping along to the conservative beat of drums worthy of Hitler and Goebbels politically.  But they don’t identify with fascism.  They believe conservative means good and liberal means bad… so Hitler was a liberal, right?  They vote in a way that allows racist-fascists like Iowa Congressman Steve King to goosestep all around the country saying ignorant and destructive things, and think that General Eisenhower wouldn’t shoot King as if the Iowa Congressman were one of the enemy were he to hear some of King’s rants in favor of the military industrial complex that Ike himself warned us against.  You can’t convince them that they’re wrong.  They are louder than you, and that makes them right.  But I love them.  I grew up with them.  And I know they are too Iowa-stubborn to ever change their Iowegian minds in a direction that might actually make their lives better.  So bless them and take care of them for me, Lord, because they have common sense… which makes them better than me.

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July 16, 2015 · 3:16 pm

An Anatomy of an Angry Argument (The Stars ‘n’ Bars Controversy)

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I get a little tired of friends, family, and especially online acquaintances calling me a liberal and meaning it as a severe antonym of a compliment.   They are basically conservative by nature and they are trying to hurt my feelings by calling me liberal.  (Or “libtard” or “libturd” or “liberaloon”)  They don’t like my fact-based arguments and strike out at me from the deepest depths of their deeply-held-and-so-long-stored-in-the-same-barrel-that-it-fermented set of conservative beliefs.  Often they pull potentially intoxicating talking points out of the well of watching Fox News and expect me to drink it… even though I know it has intentionally been laced with poison.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag.  It was a part of the Civil War that fascinates me and still stands for the brave regiments of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg who marched into a hail of cannonball-laced death to prove once and for all that an entire way of life can be destroyed on the battlefield.  It was a terrible tragedy and those men paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of that argument.  I believe we should honor them and reconcile ourselves with what  remains of them.  They are indeed still out there.  But we do not have to honor the thing they were fighting for and ended up losing.  Slavery is inherently unjust and evil.  And the racism that is its aftertaste is just as despicable.  It is understandable that in that long gone culture it was normal to view black skin as the sign of an inferior creature.  They treated slaves as working farm animals, like oxen or donkeys.  It is the way they thought of those… actually people… whom they failed to accept as fellow human beings.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag.  But I am upset at the most common uses of it.  Klansmen use it as a symbol of their race-hatred.  They fly it at their protest marches along with the Nazi swastika.  The flag at the South Carolina capitol building went up during the equal rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s as a defiance of the entire movement.  I am not offended by the flag, but I do not like when it is used as a symbol of redneck America believing they’re better than blacks and Hispanics because their skin is white, and that their conservative white values are superior to the values of Jews, liberals, and intellectuals.  I don’t like being told that their heart-felt hate trumps my nerd-boy thinking-too-much.  I don’t like the way they believe they win the argument by shouting at me in a louder voice than I am capable of shouting back.  (Watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and see if he doesn’t do exactly that.)  I don’t like the way they don’t listen to me in the same way that I try hard to listen to them.

People I care about and even love in Iowa are posting things on Facebook about liberals attacking the Confederate flag, and how terrible it is that liberals are trying to take away “our heritage”.  But wait a minute… At the Battle of Shiloh in Missouri, the 5th Iowa Infantry Regiment and the Iowa 13th were embroiled in the Hornets’ Nest, the intense fight all along the “sunken road” that ultimately tipped the horrible battle in favor of the Union.  Iowans were shooting at the Confederate flag.  Many of them were killed by it.  How can that flag possibly be “our heritage“?

I believe the rebel flag is not an appropriate symbol to be used in government buildings or 4th of July parades.  It is a symbol of more than one thing… and some of those things are terrible things.  I am not advocating making the flag illegal in the U.S.  But, consider, the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany.  It is the flag of a defeated rebellion against our government, fought for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery.  Why are my conservative Iowegian friends supporting such a flag?

And I refuse to be insulted by being called a liberal.  Conservative doesn’t mean “good” while liberal means “bad”.  Conservative means wanting to preserve the good things about the past and not change them without good reason.  Liberal means wanting to change things for the better.  I used to be a conservative.  I am only comfortable being a liberal now because conservative powers are trying to protect things that have to change because they are hurting us.  I love all people in general… and I don’t want to see them hurt by their government or their society.  So, if you feel the need to argue in the comments… or if you feel you have to call me a libturd… feel free to do so. But please don’t call me a libturd in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

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July 13, 2015 · 3:07 pm

Have No Fear, Mickey is Here

Beauty and Beast

I have recently had more run-ins with my old nemesis… Fear.  He is a vicious animal that makes my heart race and muddles my thinking (which is ironically very hard to do considering the muddlesome nature of my brain to begin with.)

I posted a political post a couple of days ago suggesting you should shoot yourself in the foot.  Fear tells me he likes shooting.  He is a card-carrying member of the NRA.  Second Amendment rights are more important to him than the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Sixth, and definitely the 15th.  He agrees with Donald Trump about Mexicans.  We have to seal the border, and if they come across to commit crimes, steal our stuff, and mess up our lovely whitebread world, we oughtta be able to shoot them.  Fear likes conservatives in politics.  He knows they don’t really mean it when they ask us to give up stuff and give them more money in return for protecting us from all those scary “other people”, but he likes the notion of guns and military to “protect us”.  Those “other people”, they are scary. and icky, and awful.  We hate them.  Let’s kill them.  Fear really does say this to me, and I am fairly sure that he says it to other people too.  But I have decided I don’t really want to listen.

superchick2Superman 2In fact, I want to stand up to him.  I am tired of listening to people whom I care about repeat fear-fueled talking points from Fox News about why white cops who killed black youths without giving them their right to a trial… especially un-armed black youths… were probably justified and were rightfully afraid for their own gun-fortified life.  I was mortified when the white cop in McKinney, Texas threw the black girl in the bikini to the ground and put a knee on her back.  That was a girl like so many of the ones I have taught in Texas.  Sure, she may have said bad words to him… because she was afraid.  But she had more reason to be afraid than he did.  So, I need to use Mickian magical powers to punch Fear in the nose.  This monster will not beat me, even though I am naked and unarmed.  I am not afraid.

minotaur

And here’s the reason why…  I love people.  I don’t hate them.  I don’t fear them.  I particularly love some of the people that friends and relatives routinely tell me that they fear.  I have had black, Hispanic, and Muslim students that I would die to protect without hesitation.  When I stood between a Hispanic boy with a sharp metal throwing star with which he intended to commit a murder, and the boy inside my classroom he was threatening, I was ready to die.  He was not entering my classroom while I lived to block the doorway.  Fortunately for my stupid, brave self, an even braver History teacher prevented him from getting to me and got him to drop the weapon and run away.  Later that day I cried several gallons of tears and thanked God I did not wet my pants on the spot, but that is not the only time in my teaching career that I stepped between two combatants in order to protect them both and end the fight.  The secret to those victories was never having a gun or weapon to fight back with.  All I had to do to win the battle was overcome Fear… to beat him down and not let him be a factor.  You can always talk your way out of any terrible situation.  If the person you are talking to knows you are not showing fear, and you bother to tell him or her that you care about not letting them get hurt, even by their own actions… even the most wicked-hearted people are still people and still have a heart.  If they don’t, a gun isn’t going to save you anyway.  It would’ve helped Ninja-star-boy to have someone supply him with a gun.  So I say this without fear.  “Fear, you do not have a say in my life!  I do not give you any power over my faith, my politics, my daily life, or my loves.”

Now, I am not made of bricks or steel, and I am definitely not bullet-proof.  But I am not afraid to say, I am a liberal in my politics.  I believe in helping people, not hurting them in the name of Fear.  And so, if you Klansmen and white supremacists are offended by that fact and believe you need to punish me for my commie-liberal-sinner crimes, I am ready to tell you that I respect you as a human being, and disrespect every hurtful thing you stand for.  I will gladly give you your Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights, and do everything in my power to prevent you from exercising your Second Amendment rights on my poor little (Biblical-word-for-Donkey used as a euphemism).

Oh, and I am not about to tell you where I live.  I may be stupid and brave, but nobody is that stupid.

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July 11, 2015 · 1:04 pm

Why You Should Shoot Yourself in the Foot Rather Than Vote for Donald Trump

I confess.   I am subject to the annoying liberal belief that if I check my facts and make properly reasonable arguments, I can save the world from all the political idiots and partisan clowns that are filling the American scene with horse poop.  Of course, I just got back home to Texas from a week-long visit to Iowa, and in both places there are people that I respect and love that feel that everything conservatives and even Tea Party Republicans say on Fox News makes sense.  How deluded can you be?  It almost makes a loony liberal communist anti-Christ like me start using the other word for poop.

political insanity  The problem, I believe, lies in the -ists and the -isms.  For example, racists and racism or anti-Zionists and anti-Zionism (words that I believe Hitler chose to describe how he felt about ants who were from Zion… or something) are -ists and -isms.  The kind of -ists and -isms that makes people from Iowa argue that the Confederate flag represents culture not hatred, even though that particular flag killed a large number of Iowans in the “Hornet’s Nest” at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 in Missouri.  Iowa was on the Union side.  That war, by the way, was a war of rebellion by the South who wanted to be a separate nation so they could keep buying and selling people like they were pet hamsters and working them like they were mules.  (See what I mean… loony liberals let facts get in the way of all the really cool ideas?)

My children and I had a discussion of -ists and -isms at the Burger King today, because the Princess didn’t want to sit next to her brother, because… well, brothers are stinky and bother you and she would just end up being unfairly in trouble for pouring her medium soft drink over his head.  We talked about how people are prone to let prejudices control their behavior instead of using civil, loving, Christian values.  The Princess was being a seat-ist and subject to seat-ism.  And then we noted that if she hopped from seat to seat, she would be a repeat-ist seat-ist.  And if she took a real disliking to the seat, she might turn into a seat-ist beat-ist.  And if she obsessively tried to clean the seat of big-brother cooties, she was being a neat-ist seat-ist.  And we got a good laugh at the expense of seat-ists everywhere.

animal.kukuchew.com

animal.kukuchew.com

And taking Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate this last week is the same stupid thing.  The man opened his mouth during his announcement speech and proceeded to spew horse poop about Mexicans being rapists and drug-dealers and other criminals coming across our borders to take our stuff and rape our women and do all kinds of evil horse poop… because he was reading from a carefully researched speech foot-noted with crime statistics… or possibly because The Donald would never just speak boat-loads of horse poop hatefully off the top of his head.  (Notice I resisted the temptation to use the other word for poop three whole times!  I am a slave to political correctness and need to be called out for it.)

I learned a few things about immigration over the last decade of being an ESL teacher (English for non-English speakers).  If you come from a properly white-skinned country like, say, Finland, you have a relatively easy time immigrating to the U.S.  If you come from a brown or black country, you face a barb-wire-shrouded mine field in the form of a legal immigration process, and once you make it legally to this country, any little slip-up or typo… even those you don’t make yourself… can get you re-classified as illegal and deported.  Parents are deported away from their children.  Children get deported even though they were born in this country and speak only English.  My own Filipino wife is still not a citizen after twenty years of marriage.  And most of those “illegal immigrants” that so disturb The Donald (and Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry. and the rest of the Republican Clown Alley) do important jobs that employers have a hard time filling otherwise.  If they are actually illegal, they pay into the system in the form of income tax and are unable to claim any benefits because they risk discovery and deportation.  Thinking these hard-working, under-loved people are all criminals is horse poop.

But enough with the horse-poop discussion.  I hate when my posts end up full of poop.  Donald Trump is the worst kind of -ist and full of the most terrible kinds of -isms.  If you shoot yourself in the foot, it will heal, at most, in a couple of months.  If you vote for Donald Trump, you may end up having to live in a horse-poop factory for four years.  Do you really like man-made horse poop?  It is a lot more toxic than the organic stuff.  (Dang!  Even loony-liberal political correctness doesn’t keep the danged poop from piling up!)

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July 3, 2015 · 1:44 pm

The Politics of Clowns

It is almost not fair to make fun of presidential candidates.  They are making it so easy.  If you can’t take anything but cheap shots at certain folks, then what value is in your words?   Still, it is a temptation hard to resist.

Kops

So, I have spared no expense in hiring a couple of KlownTown’s finest to watch my every word, and keep me honest.

It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.

It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.

1. Candidate Hair– The field of candidates on both sides of the divide is filled with marvelous examples of clown hair.  I am left wondering how they achieve such effects.  Assuming Rand Paul is not wearing a bad toupee, how does he get his hair to look like a squirrel who fell into a vat of yellow wood-stain shellac and then crawled out and died on his head?  I think his father proved before him that too much Libertarian political purity has a profoundly pickling effect upon your head, and leads to making what hair you have growing out funny.  Donald Trump obviously takes his hair off every morning and steam presses it on wrought-iron ironing boards in a thoroughly Republican flat-tax flattening sort of arm motion.  It’s too bad he is in the habit of taking his hair off at the neck, because the ritual flattening is having a bad effect on the “maybe-I-shouldn’t-say-that-out-loud” centers in his brain.  The Democrats are not immune to the clown-hair scourge either   Bernie Sanders obviously uses my grandfather’s bald-guy low-maintenance approach to hair-styling.  Step out of the shower, rub a towel across the top of your head, and you are ready to roll with that straight-talking brand of no-nonsense socialism that you can get by with because everyone is looking at how the towel Bozo-ed up your hair and distracts them from listening to your actual words.  (Okay, the Klown Kops caught me.  Bozo is not a legal verb.)

I bet you didn't know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.

I bet you didn’t know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.

2. Candidate Words– Yes, the greater part of the clown-offences committed by candidates have to do with words.  Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have a marvelous glibness that defies understanding.   Cruz can go on talk shows and talk with two different tongues at the same moment.  He is smart and Ivy-League-educated, but when he denies climate change he says he is not a scientist (which absolves him of using scientific reasoning in his arguments) but he says the science is not yet settled (which he routinely backs up with facts and statistics that are not true).  Here is a noble statesman who is of Cuban descent and speaks no Spanish.  He was born in Canada but renounced his Canadian citizenship so it wouldn’t interfere with his presidential aspirations.  So, where the heck is he from, and why did we elect him in Texas?  Even Republican Senator John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” for his combative Me-against-the-world political maneuverings.  Who would possibly make a better president?  At least, he is certainly capable of keeping the cartoonists and satirists happy. (The KlownTown Kops are reminding me that I have already passed 500 words and too much politics on the internet is a very bad thing… so maybe I must leave the rest of this topic for another day.)

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June 28, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Winning Easy

20150628_124803Now that Captain Action finally liberated my X-Box from the evil Dr. Evil who was holding it for ransom and not letting me play EA Sports Baseball ’04, I have been able to play Baseball ’04 again.  (It happened in this blog; Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain)  I have been playing this video game now with a passion, as you can plainly see.  You are probably aware that the St. Louis Cardinals are my very favorite team in any and all sports.  Notice, please that I have just pitched Matt Morris’ 30th victory against no defeats over stinky old steroid-fueled Roger Clemens.  It was also his 9th shut out of the season.  This is the first 30-game-winning season since Denny McLain in Detroit, in the 1968 season.  I only had to replay the entire 2004 season 4 times to get there.  Oh, and Albert Pujols has hit 114 home runs and Scott Rolen hit his 70th and 71st in this game.   You are certainly smart enough to figure out by now that I have left the difficulty level of this game permanently set at the Rookie level.  Hey, I’m old.  I like easy wins.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon's first bloom.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon’s first bloom.

This is true in so many areas of my life.  The flower wagon that I posted about on Friday is another evidence of my dedication to the philosophy of the easy win.  It was a victory over many things… depression, tragedy, Texas gully-washers that keep on coming, the tragedy of an old toy that no longer gets played with… things where my decrepit old self with six incurable diseases needs desperately to win.

Flowers in our yard in general are a victory of sorts.  This is Texas.  A couple of summers back we were in a severe drought with like 99 days in a row of high temperatures of 100-plus.  Flowers in June in Texas are a bit of a miracle.  Good flower pictures recently taken are another miracle.  My cell phone camera takes so much better pictures with all its automatic settings than my digital camera which cost twice as much, that it makes me wonder why I ever bothered with it.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Of course, this is pictures the easy way because I am not trying to adjust the color balance (in spite of partial color-blindness), or the brightness compensation, all by my own little self with my modest-to-insignificant photography skills.  (I am just skilled enough at photography to recognize a great work of art photographed by someone else, not skilled enough to take one myself.)

I am retired now.  I have had a long hard career as a public school teacher, and I am working hard at being a good writer (professional or not) in retirement.  I figure I deserve the odd easy win.  Using my writing skills to tackle toxic ideas like prejudice and politics recently I was able to score some real points with some of my very conservative friends.  I discovered by concentrating on the things they believe which I agree are very good things, I was able to make them consider a more liberal point of view, and not cling to Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts.  I can even get them to laugh at things like saying “Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts” because it sounds funny even if you are only reading it silently in your head.  It is an example of arguing towards an Easy Win, and I have become an addict.

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