Sophianotloren

Yeah, things are obviously far, far better nine years on since Hurricane Katrina came ashore and tore asunder New Orleans and a good chunk of the surrounding area. But, you know, if people aren't stranded on rooftops and on the interstate highway, then it's a damn sight improved. There has been much rebuilding all over. But in some areas, things have just gone back to a state of nature, like this site that used to have a home on it in the Gentilly neighborhood:


Or some places have been abandoned in the same state they were in August 2005, like this house in the Lower Ninth Ward in a photo taken recently:


Both of these places are surrounded by new or refurbished houses. But they are constant reminders of what happened.

Of course, it's New Orleans, so the cops are still shooting people (and, yeah, yeah, black-on-black crime), poverty is even higher than it was, the schools are almost all charters (like some Republican wet dream), black men have a 53% unemployment rate, the rents have skyrocketed. As the current and former heads of the African American Leadership progress put it, New Orleans suffers from "the self-medicating illusion of progress."

Then there's this:


The amount of wetlands loss in combination with climate change-driven rising water has resulted in a shocking shrinking of the amount of just plain above-water ground.

As we consider this ninth anniversary of the storm that opened up a wound that has never healed, bear in mind that even the most optimistic plan to save New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta region is based on the hope that sea levels do not rise too fast and that the federal government will invest $50 billion in it.

You can bet that Republican intransigence to spending and corporate-driven shortsightedness will drown the area again.

We’ve all read at least one: from “Against YA” to “Against Happiness,” essays that promise to dismiss entire abstract concepts using only rhetoric make for great click-bait. In The New Yorker, Ivan Kreilkamp explains why we keep overstating the case:

“Against [X]” is a symptom of a liberal culture’s longing to escape its own strictures; it’s the desire of thoughtful and nuanced people to shed their inhibitions and issue fearsome dicta. We feel that we must be fair and evenhanded in our prose, but in our titles we can fly a pirate’s flag.

Related Posts:

• This Week in Short Fiction
• Notable NYC: 8/23–8/29
• Rereading James Baldwin
• This Week in Short Fiction
• Gratification Be Postponed

I’ve believed in the possibility of reincarnation since I was seventeen.  Now, I won’t say I believe in the classic Eastern religious definition of the ins/outs and hows/whys of it.  For me, it is more a speculative concept — as I said, a possibility.  If human life is viewed as a vital energy, if energy is not created or destroyed — where does it go when our physical bodies fall down finished?  (Yes, now I have doubtless offended hard science sorts — get in line with the hard polytheists, please.)  Why would it not be possible that some less ephemeral bit of us be recycled?

Mind you, I don’t think it is necessarily the only option.  I have a bit of an issue with the ‘either/or’ and ‘all or nothing’ simple bits that my nation seems so fond of; you can blame my doubtless incomplete notions about quantum physics for this: particle or wave (or more!) means CHOICE to me!  And my mind merrily goes off singing “In microcosm, so in macrocosm; as above, so below.”  Shoot me, I’m a panentheistic pagan with a light side of science.  But IF you shoot me?  I won’t necessarily be gone.

I could be, in some sense, the tree seedling that comes up the next spring…or the wind that moves its leaves.  Some of me could be the raindrops that fall on said sapling, the water that was me evaporated in my cremation to rejoin clouds overhead.  Even if all there is a physical recycling, I am content.  So why do I think reincarnation is something that can happen?  Surely you knew there would be a story, right?

When I was seventeen, the summer after my high school graduation, I woke shaking and sweating after a very vivid dream.  The dream itself had a surreal calm about it; though I recall, in the dream feeling like a moth caught in a bottle and wanting to scream.  In the dream, I was somewhat like myself — fair skinned and blonde, but much taller.  I was standing in the rain in a much trampled muddy yard surrounded by barbed wire.  I felt a sense of complete unreality, as in “This simply cannot be happening to me.”  About three meters away stood two soldiers, smoking and talking and I could understand them perfectly.  They were speaking German and their uniforms were those of the Third Reich.

Now, as a child, I had spoken German for three years; at 17 I still had a child’s vocabulary for the most part — and degraded from lack of use.  It should not have made what the words of the guarding German in my dream intelligible to me.  But I remember it vividly: “Sie ist zu hübsch, sie kann nicht jüdisch sein. Und sie is so blond.” (She is too pretty, she can not be Jewish.  And she is so blond.)

My own words, with a voice raised to carry over the rain-patter, were what made me want to scream, even in the dream-state I was filled with horror and shame hearing myself speak them: “Aber ich bin jüdisch, sagen sie mir; wie kann es wahr sein? Ich komme aus Berlin?(But I am Jewish, they tell me; how can it be true? I come from Berlin.)

I woke just as they stepped towards me, smiling.  I was filled with shame and sure that I had been on my way to a concentration camp, a German Jewess who doubtless fucked her way to freedom.  For months the dream haunted me and I had trouble sleeping.  I told myself this was just the result of rather overmuch study of WWII history in my senior year.  Slowly, I dismissed the notion that I had seen something revelatory of another lifetime.

Then, years later, in the Army, I returned to Germany.  I had never been to the walled city of Berlin as a child, a military brat who lived in Stuttgart when the Wall around East Germany went up as we practiced bomb drills in school.  And yet, Berlin felt peculiarly familiar to me.  Believe me when I say, not any place in Germany is alike — even the German spoken in Berlin was not the same as the childhood dialect I used in Bavaria.  Berliners thought I WAS Bavarian — until they were told I was American.  And yet, I felt so at home that I was happier than in the last decade of my life.  Until the dreams resumed.

For most of the next three years vivid dreams would wake me – sometimes screaming, and sometimes in German.  Not only was the content disturbing, but the sensual reality was beyond normal dreams.  Not only visual, these dreams — but with taste, smell, hearing and even sensations of pain, all intense as waking life.

I dreamed of running through dark streets, hearing shouts behind me, “Halt, Hände hoch!”  I dreamt of a gap-toothed goon running his filthy hand up my leg beneath my dress as I sat handcuffed to a bench.  I dreamt of running though woods, smelling snow.  I dreamt of being in Israel carrying a pistol and smelling cordite in the air.  I dreamt it was 1948, in May when the British were leaving.  I dreamt I died, gunshot as I tried to rescue someone (a lover?) from a make-shift APC that was a-fire in the streets.  I believe I died in Israel in 1948.  I’d really prefer to believe that I had seen the movie “Exodus” once too often — but since I had NOT seen the film or read the book till AFTER I returned to the United States in 1979, it’s hard to blame that as a cause.

Every time I relax a bit, tell myself dreams can mean anything or nothing?  Something comes along and head-slaps me.  I can’t watch Holocaust related films; though I did see many documentaries in high school.  Such things now?  Make me get cold, nauseated, and sometimes almost paralyzed feeling.  It freaks me the fuck OUT, so I avoid such material…or get thoroughly shit-faced before attempting to watch. (Ask me how bizarre it was for my husband, while in Berlin, to be an extra in the mini-series “The Holocaust”, playing an SS troop attacking the Warsaw Ghetto.)

But it gets me anyhow, unexpectedly.  Earlier this summer, I engaged in the ‘summer novel’ — a recreation of the Sherlock Holmes genre by Laurie King.  She makes her female lead, Mary Russell, the daughter of a Jewess.  It didn’t seem a big part of the story until the tale took them to Israel to hide out from a villain.  Mary suddenly recites, as she lands in Jerusalem: “Simchu eth Yerushalaim w’gilu bah kal-ohabeha.”  I had not even read the translation of the Hebrew (Rejoice for Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her.) when tears suddenly sprang into my eyes and a shiver shook my body.  I felt utterly certain I had spoken those words at some time in my past — my past life.

Imagine my surprise to learn, later in my study of several religions, that some branches of Judaism do teach that reincarnation can occur in special circumstances.  And there are those who believe the victims of the Holocaust did reincarnate to get the lives stolen from them in hatred and horror, even if not re-born Jewish.  So, yes, “R” is for reincarnation and I am stuck with my own unverified personal gnosis (UPG) of what might have been my last life before the one I was born into in 1953.  I did not, like some others who believe they are reincarnated Holocaust victims, hate all things German.  I hated myself, for surviving the Holocaust to die later in Israel.  I think I wanted to die, I was foolhardy and too much into taking risks in that last dream.  When I felt the punching sensation in my chest and looked down at my own blood on my chest-clasping hand, I had the only sensation of peace and satisfaction that existed in any of the serial-dreams.

I had my sons circumcised, not only for medical reasons and because their father was similarly ‘snipped’ ….but out of a deep sense of solidarity with those who suffered and died because of the unmistakable evidence of “otherness.”  My children grew up celebrating Hanukkah and learning some basics of Judaism so they wouldn’t be anti-Semitic shitheads.

And my last time in Germany?  I met a lovely Jewish woman whose Polish parents had hidden her with a Catholic family so she would survive what they did not. She embraced me, weeping, when my youngest son was born and circumcised over the objections of the doctors at the German hospital where he was born. She lit candles at Hanukkah with us and brought my children gifts as if they were her own grandchildren – she never bore children in the world that had eradicated her own family.

I will never see Israel in this lifetime — and I am angry at the nation for acting as harshly as those that once sought their ending.  I do not believe I was an observant or religious Jew in that life; but I believed in surviving, obviously.  “Live and make better the world,” is a singular commandment I could honor.  No matter how many lifetimes it takes.

(My entire personal pagan alphabet can be read by clicking HERE.)

 

 

Tagged: death, dreams, holocaust, israel, pagan blog project, quantum physics, reincarnation, UPG

Enhanced interrogation, was it?  Just some close questioning and extra motivation, was it? Thank you SO much 21st century White House – to Bush and Cheney to the world.  You ALLOWED torture and so now, Americans abroad face the same from the people you helped to radicalize.  James Foley was waterboarded before he was murdered by the ISIL/ISIS crew.

THIS is what a bad example leads to Mr. Bush; say, why don’t you go have a non-alcoholic beer with those guys and set them straight, ok?

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, War & No Peace Tagged: chickens coming home to roost, James Foley, torture

Perfidy of an ex-cop snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Matron’s stories told defy the truth,

Gropes remember’d from their youth,

Liz Dux’ ego, and Meirion’s sting,—

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Gall of Spindler, and slips of Yewtree

Sliver’d in BSkyB’s eclipse;

Nose of Murdoch, and Winsor’s lips;

Finger of the dead tree press,

Ditch-deliver’d by broadband,—

Make the gossip thick and slab:

Add thereto t’internet’s chaudron,

For the ingredients of our caldron.

 

Don’t get too excited – you’ll need to be patient, but we now have an idea how long it takes for a witch-hunt to die down – 332 years!

Next Sunday, hundreds of modern witches will gather at Rougemont Castle to call for a posthumous pardon for Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards from Bideford, north Devon, who in August 1682 became the last three women in England to be hanged for witchcraft. 

Mary and Susannah were arrested having been seen begging for food with Temperance in Bideford. At their trial a month later all three women made no attempt to deny witchcraft.

Under the law as it stood there was no onus on the prosecution to prove the case against them – it was for the women to prove their innocence.

Apparently, the women were convicted on hearsay evidence, which included one of them being accused of turning into a magpie. Even the Assizes Justices at the time did not believe they were guilty but were forced to respond to an angry mob that was baying for a hanging. The mob got its way.

Jackie Juno, a modern day witch, said: “By getting them pardoned we are making a statement that humanity could change for the better. It would also be laying the women to rest in a way that resolves the mistakes of history.”

Some of the comments under the local paper coverage of this event are interesting:

“But 300 years ago it was considered a real crime. Beliefs change. Laws change. We cannot judge what happened 300 years ago by the standards of today.”

and:

“What a waste of time. They were found guilty of a crime over 300 years ago, and sentenced as seem fit at the time. No new evidence has come to light, so there is no reason to pardon them. Whatever next – the pardoning of all the criminals sent to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread?”

How curious – the same sort of people who comment on local newspapers are as sure that there is no argument in favour of ‘historic pardons’ as they are in favour of ‘historic convictions’. Courts convicting people on hearsay evidence without proof – for fear of the baying mob getting out of control? Judging what happened in the past by the standards of today?

For more information, email jackiejuno@yahoo.co.uk.

The phone call came in at 3:46PM. Having worked the night-shift, I was half-asleep when the phone rang. My usual routine is to sleep from 5AM to 10AM, wake up so I can listen to the news on the radio so as to maintain some semblance of a grip on the outside world, then take a short nap in the afternoon before getting ready for work.

One of the managers on the job was on the line... one of her underlings hadn't shown up for work in two days. This young woman is very conscientious, and has been on the payroll for almost five years. She's not the type to blow off work. The manager told me that she and our chief operating officer had both called the young woman several times, with no answer, and a follow-up phone call to her emergency contact, her mother, had also been unsuccessful. Needless to say, the manager, who is a very caring, empathetic woman, was distraught. She asked me if I would accompany her to our missing comrade's apartment building to check up on the situation.

It's no secret on the job that I used to investigate questionable insurance claims back in the '90s and worked as a Census enumerator in 2010, and had a knack for "canvassing" a neighborhood for information about the whereabouts of an individual. I assured the manager that we'd follow a procedure which almost always worked for me- after trying the apartment, we'd contact the building superintendent and, if that were unsuccessful, we'd ask her neighbors if they'd seen her. If we'd exhausted those options, we'd look for her car in the vicinity and then inform the police that our co-worker was missing.

Before hanging up, I asked the manager if they had explored all of the avenues of inquiry that could be pursued in the office. The I.T. guys had checked her e-mail account to see if she had requested days off, nothing out of the ordinary there. I opined that, before heading out into the field, it's important to follow all of the leads one can, gain all of the information that could be gleaned. I asked her to double check the full range of procedures that they'd gone over with the head office, and told her I'd shower up and head out.

While I was performing my ablutions, the manager checked the missing employee's Facebook page, and checked out the various contacts. Sure enough, she discovered that our friend and co-worker, with her mother, had been involved in a serious car accident, and that the two of them were in critical condition in a hospital in New York City. I had two text messages waiting for me as soon as I got out of the shower, telling me that there was no need for shoe-leather work.

Needless to say, today has been a bad, bad day on the job... it was bad five hours before it began.

Every year, Hyperallergic pays tribute to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the classic sci-fi thriller, with a 12-hour journey through videos we discover littering the internet. Sometimes it can feel like you’ve fallen into a rabbit hole, so jump in and let us be your guide.

The following poem is by S.M. Hill, a Swedish immigrant to Oregon, circa 1916. I take it from here.

America

They boast a great deal about equality,
they loudly proclaim you are free.
Without answering I’d rather swallow my annoyance
and not pay attention to our slavery.
Here, gold measures human worth
here, everything is right as long as it succeeds,
here, food is given the highest value,
weak ones are crushed by the iron heel.

We are not tormented by aristocrats,
we don’t sigh under a king!
Nonsense! Here we are ruled by rascals,
the power of the multi-millionaires is oppressive.
Politics is merely a system of plundering,
the penniless become downtrodden
and honesty seems to have left us,
and those who steal gain honor and power.

No, my friend, you won’t find paradise here,
here, too, there’s a difference between rich and poor.
You change your name and receive the prize,
and praise yourself so heartily.
Yes, the race of Adam lives here, too
and sin rules here as well.
The beautiful land that your eyes saw,
lies far away and high above the sky!

Do you ever feel like the art world is sort of like high school, or life at a small liberal arts college? Or maybe just a blowout party you’re not actually sure you were invited to, but you decided to show up anyway?

Me too.

Take “Picasso Baby,” for instance — that “performance art film” that Jay Z shot last year at Pace Gallery. I wasn’t invited. My boyfriend was. I lived. But the pictures and videos that came out of the gallery still fascinate me — they seem to expose something about the art world and its love of celebrity (and lately, the return embrace), something about the insideriness, the perpetual performance, the mixture of honest creativity and hucksterism that characterize this industry. It’s never been clear to me if Jay Z set out to capture all that, or if he just happened to do so along the way to wanting in.

Artist Elisa Kreisinger, aka Pop Culture Pirate, picked up on this too, and fortunately for all of us she made a video that amplifies it. Taking four minutes of footage from Jay Z’s “Picasso Baby,” she set it to Taylor Swift’s saccharine song “22,” which celebrates being young, “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time,” having one-night-stands and dressing up like hipsters. That sounds a little like the art world, doesn’t it? The mash-up is technically simple — just straight images from Jay Z’s video and Swift’s voice — but the pairing is bitingly brilliant.

It’s miserable and magical oh yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhhh …

I can remember events that date back to being three years old – but they are ‘fixed images’ rather than a ‘video’ rendition of events. I have a clear image of my Father, bent over an old Rayburn, cooking bubble and squeak for me – but if you ask me ‘what was on the table in that room’ or ‘who else was present’ I couldn’t tell you – I don’t have the ability to ‘replay’ the entire sequence of events as I do for later memories.

Even at age 8, the memories are fairly static – and here I can draw on some that might properly be described as traumatic in that I was in hospital for many months, undergoing surgery, and didn’t see or hear from my parents during that time. You might have thought that event was traumatic enough to be imprinted on a child’s memory – but in fact I had totally forgotten until my brother came up with a letter written by me, found in my Father’s papers, which referenced in my childish hand writing, that I hadn’t seen them for two months, and hoped they might find time to visit me.  No sooner did I see that letter than it brought back a host of other memories, including the name of the young lad in the bed opposite me, the fact that his Father was a farmer, and that he had managed to blow his chin off twice with his Father’s shotgun – in search of rabbits. I was particularly upset about him for it had been necessary to give him a glass eye, which he used to take out every night…

I am quite confident that if someone had shown me an article 50 years later regarding a man called Jim, of farming stock, with a glass eye, perhaps a reference to the Oxford area, or a childhood shooting accident – I could easily convince myself that it was ‘Jim’ from the bed opposite. (if perchance you are reading this Jim, I apologise for bringing back memories of the screaming creature with all the tubes in the bed opposite you…but you did give me terrible nightmares).

I was minded of these memories when I read the NHS report of the allegation made against Jimmy Savile at the Roecliffe Manor. The NHS investigator had no trouble believing that ‘the informant was a sincere and honest individual’ nor that life in that convalescent home was ‘harsh’ – a nurse confirmed that a child had been tied to a chair for bed wetting; whilst such treatment might seem horrific in 2014, I was tied to the bed frame for repeatedly pulling out my ‘tubes’ so find it totally believable, and in keeping for the times. Children’s hospitals and convalescent homes weren’t the cuddly ‘mummy lying next to you’ ‘decorated with balloons’ and ‘nurses that make you laugh’ establishments that we expect today.

However, patient ‘A’s recollections proved harder to match to reality. Despite claiming to Operation Yewtree that he had placed an advert in the Leicester Mercury which had brought forth 47 e-mails from ‘other children abused by JS at Roecliffe’, he was not willing to hand over details of who those people were. Repeated advertisements in the same paper and a variety of other papers by the investigators failed to elicit a single response. Requests for patient ‘A’ to contact the 47 himself and ask them to come forward elicited the response that they didn’t want to talk to the investigators. Who were the 47? Assuming they existed, were they people who scented another compensation claim and had come forward to him and reinforced his belief that it was JS at Roecliffe?

Whatever the answer to that question, by this time, patient ‘A’ was quite sure that the person who had abused him at Roecliffe was called Jim, had dark hair, did ‘odd jobs’ round the hospital three out of four week-ends, wore a brown porter’s coat, sometimes worked on the hospital radio, and drove an old van ‘like a butcher’s van’.

By the time of his third interview, the best part of two years after constant media attention on Jimmy Savile, the butcher’s van had become a ‘camper van’, ‘Jim’ had lost his dark hair and was identified from a contemporary photograph as being the peroxided Jimmy Savile, and patient ‘A’ had remembered being taken to meet Slade, T-Rex – and, of course, Garry Glitter, in a motorway service station – and offered as corroboration that he had since been told that it was well known that these stars were often seen in that motorway station…

It is not hard to see what has gone on here – nor to sympathise with patient ‘A’. Old disjointed memories of an unhappy and frightening period of his life have been shorn up by modern stories in the media. From the report we can glean that he is today, a ‘fragile’ individual. Was he sexually abused – or did he undergo some painful medical procedure at the time? He remembers a nurse ‘comforting him afterwards’. If we accept, as I am quite happy (happy is probably the wrong word in this context) to do so; that he was abused by someone who worked as an odd job man at the hospital – we know that he wasn’t called Jim – they had never employed anyone called Jim.

Neither, after probably the most exhaustive and painstaking investigation carried out by any of the NHS Trusts, was there any record of Jimmy Savile ever having been near the place – and their dedication to the task is to be applauded.

That’s not a ‘false allegation’ – that is a painful memory being given socially acceptable validation in a modern context; it’s not malicious, it’s trying to make sense of that memory of the glass eye…

This incident, in turn, came to mind when I saw the photograph at the top of this page. It’s a Village Hall in Hampshire. There are Village Halls like it all over the country. People use them for low-key weddings, the annual dinner and dance of the Geranium Society, and the Council Rates rebate office letting their hair down at Christmas. They are cheap to hire, and if you don’t go with the brown Windsor soup apparently being served in our picture, you can dismiss the tables and cram 150 people in there to listen to the newsagent’s son and his three friends squark out a rendition of the latest hits and jig about a bit.

My photograph was taken in 1969. If you weren’t alive back then (JuliaM???) you will have to take my word for the fact that it is utterly representative of the scene that you could have photographed in hundreds of similar halls the length and breadth of the country. Soberly dressed people having what passed for a fun packed evening out in those days. No fights, no punch-ups, nothing exciting happening.

Except that one young lady does remember something happening in that very hall. Not that it should be described as exciting – traumatising would be the word. She remembers that a man put his hand up her skirt and touched her vagina over her clothing. She was the same age as patient ‘A’ in 1969. She’s never forgotten that incident, nor his ‘hairy hands’. The man had got up on stage and was singing an old song that has been around since 1902, but had recently been reissued.

The song was ‘Two Little Boys’. Everyone knows that Rolf Harris released ‘Two Little Boys’ to world wide acclaim around that time. Everyone knows now that Rolf Harris doesn’t have hairy hands. In fact everyone knows that despite exhaustive inquiry that rivals that of the NHS investigators there is absolutely no record of the extraordinary event that would have been Rolf Harris, world famous entertainer, appearing on stage after the Brown Windsor soup in Leigh Park Community Centre. No record of it at all – and no one else come forward to remember what would have been a staggering event in sleepy Havant in 1969.

The Rolf Harris jury were asked to chose whether they believed the word of ‘three victims’ (who must be believed) or the word of a man who had twice deceived his long-suffering wife by having lengthy affairs, who was roundly condemned as a liar for not remembering being at ‘It’s a Knock Out in Cambridge’ (he wasn’t – he was at a TV program called Star Games, which he might well have remembered). The jury, who were ‘confused and unable to come to a decision on Friday’ had by Monday, made a decision between a ‘deceitful liar’ and someone ‘who will be believed’ and jailed Rolf Harris as a paedophile. 

Am I alone in seeing similarities between the ‘Leigh Park Incident’ and patient ‘A’ who spent long periods in Roecliffe Manor and the tricks that memory can play on you when your memory is jogged?

Am I alone in wondering how Slater and Gordon manage to juggle the hundreds of ‘historic abuse cases’ they are now handling as a result of the ever helpful media – and the fact that last year they also recovered £13,000,000 in personal injury damages for 1,050 Police Federation members.

People served free food at a bar with their drink order, 19th century. The horror.*

God knows I love me a rant. And a lot of them are pointless but if there’s one thing I am never going to rant about, it is being served free food in a bar:

The common defining characteristic of free-pizza bars is that they are geared toward the very, very drunk and the very, very impressionable. Have I accepted free pizza from a free-pizza bar when I was drunk enough to believe it to be a pizza-shaped, cheese-flavored pint of beer? Sure. Did I go to free-pizza bars when I was young, wide-eyed, and enamored of novel ideas like body pillows and home-cooked bar snacks? Of course. Now, I see the light. I’d rather seek out mediocre-to-good pizza on my own time, resulting in personal satisfaction in both belly and spirit, than be tossed a platter of cooked flour and tomato sauce straight from my middle school cafeteria just because I showed up to get blottoed.

I should not be rewarded for drinking heavily. The reward for drinking heavily is drinking heavily. Part of the understood struggle of drinking heavily (as all good must come with bad) is that food must be sought out with wanton but fierce dedication. If you find pizza, which is almost everywhere in every city in America and most often at late-night hours, you will feel infinitely happier than if you settled for some grimy bar’s unwarranted handouts. And if you’ve stayed out too late and nothing is open, your punishment has been writ and you shall bear its truth.

If free pizza from a bar tasted like fucking caviar, maybe I’d try it once and a while. But it doesn’t. Pizza that is given to you from a bar always tastes like three-days-old diner grilled cheese. The tomato sauce is high fructose corn syrup swamped in red dye and the crust, well, there isn’t one—the whole thing is a mistake, its a blurry facsimile of pizza’s bastard son. It’s what a drunk person would say if they were asked to describe pizza to a person who’d never cooked it before.

There are so many problems here. First there is like a 200 year old history of bars serving drunks food to keep them in there. The term “bum’s rush” is a reference to bouncers watching the food buffet at 19th and early 20th century American bars that served free food if you bought a beer (mostly paid for by the breweries who had monopolies over the bars). When I go to Oaxaca, Mexico, it is standard there to be served free food with drinks. At worst, you get awesome roasted peanuts with garlic and chile and a ton of salt–making it the best bar snack ever. At best, tacos and who knows what else. It’s amazing.

Second, of course you deserve to be rewarded for drinking heavily. Isn’t this the common thread that holds LGM together. We even tolerate a vodka drinker in SEK because at least he still drinks. Do I need to expand on this? No, I do not.

Third, who cares if the pizza is bad? Why does this really matter? You are drinking. You know what is good while drinking? Fatty, salty, low quality food. I don’t even want the pizza to be that good because after a bunch of beer, would I even enjoy it? And if this does matter to you, I have a secret–you can always decline and let others enjoy their pizza. The 19th century food wasn’t necessarily all that great either (seriously read the link, which is a New Yorker article from 1940 about McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York). But it fed you.

This is all very silly. But I want to make one thing clear. I went to a bar last night. It was free plate of fries night with a beer. And those fries were tasty. Also they were free.

In a related story, even I have standards. Which are not to drink beer with offensive names and labels. I will drink Stone because I don’t find arrogance particularly offensive, but Flying Dog Raging Bitch, no. Why would I do that? With that many options, even in beer weak Rhode Island? I am just not going there. And as for that beer with the medieval “wench” whose breasts are exploding out of her top, I’d rather dump it down the drain than buy it. Knock it off bros, beer should not be for sexists. I will say though that Will Gordon is great and I look forward to his daily beer reviews as long as they last, especially has he goes into comments and smacks jerks down hard. Not that I’ve ever wanted to do that.

* I have no idea what the central theme in this image is supposed to be. Some sort of violence, perhaps anti-Chinese? In any case, it’s the only image I could find of people eating at bars in the 19th century.

carocat:

http://www.playboy.com/articles/should-you-catcall-her-flowchart

Allies in strange places.

Libertarians In Name Only

AUG 26 2014 @ 1:17PM

by Dish Staff 

Tim Fernholz highlights new Pew data on libertarianism in America, which shows that only 11 percent self-describe as libertarian and understand what the term means:

The survey showed a fairly even split among Americans considering whether the regulation of businesses does more harm than good, or if aid for the poor helps or hinders, though a majority does think that corporations make too much profit. Libertarians, meanwhile, leaned strongly against any interference in business or help to the poor, though not as strongly as you might think: 41% of libertarians saw government regulation of business as necessary, and 38% supported aid to the poor.

Indeed, perhaps the most interesting finding is that self-described libertarians favor US involvement in world affairs more than the average citizen, despite their reputation for an isolationist lean. And, even more weirdly, 16% of libertarians said US citizens need to be willing to give up some privacy in exchange for greater security.

Kilgore thinks that “Pew has at the very least cast some massive doubt on all that ‘libertarian moment’ polling from Reason“:

These findings of the non-particularity of “libertarian” views, mind you, is after Pew has melted the category down from 17% of the public to 11%, since a lot of “libertarians” could not accurately distinguish “libertarian” from “communist” or—get this—“Unitarian.”

Allahpundit’s analysis:

What you’re seeing in the poll results, I think, is a bunch of doctrinaire libertarians having their brand diluted by a bunch of conservatives/ Republicans who are disgusted with those labels right now, for whatever reason, and are thus hoping to claim “libertarianism” for themselves. Do you support aggressive policing, a muscular foreign policy, and a social safety net but are disgusted with how big and intrusive the federal government’s gotten and how complacent the GOP has gotten about it? Congrats, you might be a “libertarian.” In fact, this reminds me of what David Frum said recently about the “libertarian moment”...

...

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

...

So, for example, when you hear the same people who fanatically supported President George W. Bush when he famously told Iraq war critics to fuck off --

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

-- now insisting, less that a year after the 2008 elections, that President Barack Obama needs to:

"...scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over."

or when you see the mobs on the Right being whipped by talk of secession or revolution or spilling the "blood of tyrants" into a nearly-pornographic frenzy, understand that what you are witnessing are the echoes of political decisions made in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Political decisions that trained the Right to believe, on a visceral level, that a sufficiently bloody and horrifying disruption to the life of the country can -- if properly exploited -- wash away their eight otherwise-unforgivable years of sin and restore "their country" to its proper, wingnut default setting.

That if the right sacrifices are made to the right Gods in just the right way, then they can be virgins again.

...

The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.

Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.

If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".

In Latin.

Backwards.

Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!

A good man is dead. And it feels like there should be some mechanism by which I can scream that at the sky loud enough to tear the universe apart. A good man is dead and everything should stop now. No jokes should be told, no flowers should bloom, no wine drunk except in the pursuit of some respite from the aching sore of its unfairness.

A good man is dead and the world should shut the fuck up and be mute for a while. Colours should bleach to bone. Gulls should drop out of the sky, stopped in flight.

A good man is dead and, for long minutes, I have forgotten how to breathe. I’ve forgotten how to cry; the misery that should rise is trapped somewhere in my skull, it’s taken a wrong turn and can’t find its way to my tear ducts. I’ve resorted to typing nonsense on a screen for fear that if I stop, I will break apart in the stagnant clutch of the moment.

A good man is dead and I am not. A man with beautiful children and a beautiful wife and a life worth living five times over. While I am older, smoke thirty cigarettes a day and think walking is exercise. He loved life and I do not. He lived in his skin and I ignore it. He was kind and smart and the loyalest of friends. How is it that his goodness did not buy him a quiet death in old age? When I have squandered mine?

It happens every day; this obcene imbalance. A good man is dead.

Remember the 1955 movie “Marty”? It was a respected oldie when I was a kid (it’s one of only two films to win both the Best Picture Oscar and the Cannes Palme d’Or), but it’s now pretty obscure. I saw the movie in the 1980s as part of a screenwriting class.¹

“Marty’s” title character, plain-faced, chubby, and not great at talking to women, despairs that no woman will ever love him. The screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, thought of the “Marty” story after he saw a sign posted in a ballroom, which said “Girls, Dance With the Man Who Asks You. Remember, Men Have Feelings, Too.”

Marty eventually meets a wonderful woman and begins a relationship, although he has to overcome the resistance of his jealous mother, and of friends who mock him for dating a “dogface.”² In pop culture, everyone – or at least, everyone who isn’t a terrible human being – eventually meets someone wonderful and falls in love.

But in real life, that’s not how things always work. Some people don’t want romantic love at all. Others want romantic love but will never find it. That’s life. I’m beginning to accept, at age 45, that probably “true love” will never happen for me. I have a bunch of factors working against me – I’m physically conventionally unattractive, I badly lack confidence, I’m sort of a weirdo, as I get older I meet new people less often, etc..

To tell you the truth, I resent the situation. It’s not an all-consuming bitterness or anything – on the whole, I’m a happy guy³ – but I irrationally feel cheated of a fundamental human experience.⁴ And although I’m happy for my friends who are in great relationships, there’s also some ugly jealousy in me on the subject. And I’m really fucking sick of movies and TV about the sad troubles of stunningly attractive people who somehow can’t find love until they meet some other stunningly attractive person, blah blah blah complications ensue and are overcome happy ending credits roll.

I don’t bring this up to ask people to feel sorry for me, or to ask for dating advice. (GOD NO!!! Please don’t give me any dating or romantic advice, folks; if I haven’t specifically asked you for it, I don’t want to hear it.) I bring this up because I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Because in human culture, we do something called “signaling” a lot. And, on the internet, men complaining that they don’t have the romantic success they want, that they feel they should be more attractive to woman then they actually are in practice, etc., have all become signals used to indicate alliance with the manosphere.

When I read someone from the manosphere talking about their lack of dating success, I always emphasize empathize. How could I not? They’re pretty much describing my life story. Except then they keep on talking, and suddenly the repulsive bitterness towards women or feminists (or both) comes out. And the empathy is now accompanied by a strong desire for a shower.

I don’t want to be even momentarily mistaken for part of the manosphere. Because while not everyone in the manosphere is a bitter, angry woman-hater, lots of them are. And those who aren’t overtly woman-hating seem to find the misogyny among their comrades either invisible, unobjectionable, or excusable.

Those hatebags have directed abuse at me personally – fat jokes, “you’re just trying to get laid,” name-calling like “Mangina,” and so on. I’m not bothered by such insults, but it sure hasn’t endeared their community to me.⁵ I get off relatively easily; the abuse directed at well-known female internet feminists (Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, and Anita Sarkeesian are the most obvious examples, but the ever-moving hatefest is always seeking new victims) is stunning in quantity and vileness.

Gore Vidal once groused that the once-useful word “turgid” now belongs to the porn writers, because it has become impossible to use the word without sounding like a porn writer. The manosphere has done something similar to unattractive men’s romantic problems. They’ve flooded the discourse with misogyny and anti-feminism, and it’s nearly impossible to rescue discussion of being male and unwanted from their bitter waters.⁶

1. Actually, I’m not positive I’ve ever seen the movie – I may have seen the 1953 television play that the movie was based on.
2. Marty’s love interest, played by Betsy Blair, was too pretty to be plausible as someone men would label “dogface” at a glance. But nearly all “ugly” female characters are played by pretty actresses because Hollywood.
3. Seriously, don’t worry about me, folks. I’m not lonely, I’ve got lots of good friends, I’ve got a great job. My life is good.
4. What’s irrational about it is feeling “cheated,” rather than merely “lacking.”
5. Actually, one time my feelings were hurt. I attended a blogger dinner, where I was seated next to an anti-feminist who had clashed with me online. We had, I thought, a terrific conversation. He offered me a ride home after the dinner, and we agreed that we should meet again sometime. The next day, in a forum he didn’t know I read, he wrote that I clearly wasn’t into feminism to get laid, because I was (he said) so fat no woman would ever have sex with me. The insult was too pathetic to hurt, but that he was so extraordinarily two-faced stung.
6. Said waters are no doubt made up of male tears.
   To tell you the truth, I don’t feel natural making that joke – see Ally Fogg – but I’m making it anyway, because I hope it’ll get the goats of people who had vapors over Jessica’s sweatshirt, while remaining silent about the immeasurably worse comments Jessica receives from anti-feminists on a daily basis.

IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. — Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group...

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. 

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a “mega-trap” for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays...

BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.

It's not clear to whom the company would pay the compensation.  Presumably to the families of the dead birds.

Further details at the Calgary Herald, via the QI elves.

Addendum:  A hat tip to reader Wales Larrison for providing a link to a detailed study of avian mortality at the facility.  I'm dismayed to note that the researchers also noted significant insect mortality, including many Monarch butterflies.

Today’s reminder that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was awful:

Even some Democrats seem to think that Mr. Gore’s attacks occasionally go over the top…Today Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat who supports investing some of the Social Security trust fund in private markets, took issue with [Gore’s use of] the word “privatization.”

“That’s a scare word,” said Mr. Moynihan, who supported Mr. Bradley in the primaries but has since endorsed the vice president.

Although, in fairness, it must be noted that after doing perhaps more than any Democrat to make bad welfare reform policy possible Moynihan did cast a wholly meaningless vote against the final version.

This episode illustrates a rather obvious problem with the “Overton Window” concept, the 21st century version of the Laffer Curve (that is, a sloppy cocktail napkin concept with a grain of truth used to make difficult problems conveniently vanish.) The assumption seems to be that if a president (or perhaps other public official) proposes something it shifts the ideological spectrum in that direction even if it doesn’t pass. But Bush’s push to privatize Social Security, to the extent that it affected things at all, apparently had the opposite effect. In 2000, a Democratic senator from New York was running interference for Bush’s nutty Social Security policy. Now, House Republican budgets refuse to propose any changes to Social Security, and the biggest “threat” to Social Security is a bad nominal proposal to slow the rate of benefit growth intentionally presented in a form that have no chance of passing, a pretense that Obama has thankfully given up. There’s no reason to believe, in either theory or practice, that trying and miserably failing to do something will make it easier to do next time.

Obviously these are not kind of Jews Elie Wiesel or Bibi Netanyahu want speaking out:

Hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors have signed a letter, published as an advertisement in Saturday’s New York Times, condemning “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza” and calling for a complete boycott of Israel.

According to the letter, the condemnation was prompted by an advertisement written by Elie Wiesel and published in major news outlets worldwide, accusing Hamas of “child sacrifice” and comparing the group to the Nazis.

The letter, signed by 327 Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors and sponsored by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, accuses Wiesel of “abuse of history” in order to justify Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip:

“…we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.”

The letter also blames the United States of aiding Israel in its Gaza operation, and the West in general of protecting Israel from condemnation.

I love that everyday Bulgarian citizens are painting over remaining Soviet-era monuments to reflect their own feelings at the time and I equally love that the Russians are really getting upset about it.

Men.

Men and love.

It was like being in the driver’s seat of some huge American car, with power everything: steering, brakes, cruise control.  It would start up and take off like a 747, with the windows down and the music playing loud on a massive, sunny six-lane highway, then slowly the day would cloud over, the music would switch to a station that made her feel like the world was closing in. The accelerator would get twitchy and stick to the floorboard, then the brakes wouldn’t work, the steering would lose power and suddenly it felt like she was trying to keep a fifty ton tank from going off the shoulder.

She got mean, then, needling, sarcastic, belittling. She’d push and push, scratch and bite, turn condescending when they placated her.  They’d give and give and give, like malleable, half-asleep passengers.

The smart ones with any kind of instinct for survival woke up and left.

The ones rendered stupid by love let her grind them to paste and became irrelevant. She didn’t dump them. She didn’t have to. After a while, they just turned to liquid, leaked down through the floorboards, and were gone.

Carmen’s world was full of nice men. And she ate them. Not one of them ever hit back, bit back, pulled the car over and left her by the side of the road. Not one, until Craig.

Craig came with the car keys and a road map and a fixed destination: a ticket to Buenos Aires that could not be changed. He drove the car. He seduced her. Every time she reached for the wheel, he slapped her hands away.  Every time she aimed a dart at his eye, he ducked and fucked her into an exhausted haze. As if he knew there was an invisible thread, strung taut, between her malice and her cunt or some hidden well of rage that could only be depleted through physicality.

He played games without telling her the rules. He moved so fast, there was no keeping up. He was infinitely perverse, as if his brain was a machine for crafting new edges, as if he could smell the boundaries of her tolerance and pushed her to the precipice of each of them.  He didn’t give her time to refuse.

The night before he left for Argentina, he took her to the chain link fence that bordered the runway at the airport, and did her there, with her face pressed into the metal mesh, watching the planes take off. An unsubtle ending to a sore three weeks, but Carmen had been in love.

The kind of love that makes you gasp for air, reach to grasp and fail to grab anything that might settle the vertiginous feeling of the plummet. Unsafe, uncontrolled, uncivilized. Love that only has the body as its harness as it walks across the wire. Where only the muscle spasms, the pleasure, the pain, the stink of sweat and the acrid taste of semen ground you and save you from autodestruct.

It had the end written into it from the very beginning.  And Carmen learned that it was the only kind that kept her from turning into a monster.  She’d kept her eye out for them ever since.

And here, she thought,  as the writer closed the door of the shop behind him, balancing the pressed paper coffee tray in his other hand, was another.

 

Molly at the breakwater.

Submitted for

Listen up children.  Alcohol will make you do and say things you’ll regret.  Here’s foxy dad to explain:

“Sorry I promised my dad I wouldn’t drink.”  Wow.  Talk about saying something you wish you hadn’t.  This brilliant new multi million dollar public awareness campaign is brought to you by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)  — your government advertising good old fashioned demon possession.  Here’s another:

“Alcohol can lead to so many things, none of them good.”   Well mom newsflash: sometimes kids do things that they know they shouldn’t, and sometimes they take risks that will lead to trouble.  Kids are rebellious by nature.  Why give them another excuse?

Obviously the purpose of this campaign is to heighten children’s fascination and fear of alcohol as a demonic ‘forbidden fruit’ to ensure a steady flow of ever younger newcomers to AA, the drinking club  / blood cult of mischief, and to create more robot zombies to drugs and alcohol and mind controlled slaves to the New World Order who will kill themselves on command.

OK seriously I don’t know the exact goal.  But really the conversation wouldn’t be much different if the kid was talking to the devil himself.   (Watch it again and see.)  This line from the Big Book comes to mind: “The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.”  Clearly the government has been infiltrated by the 12 Step cults, and they thirst for the blood of your children.

Call me crazy.

Anyway.  What should the parents say instead?  How about first of all talk to the friend’s parents and make sure they’re not AA members.  And then tell your kid: “You are responsible for your behavior whether drunk or sober.  I don’t ever want to hear the excuse, ‘The devil made me do it.'”

We tried that one before and it didn’t turn out well.  This may not be the Garden of Eden but I think we have it pretty good, and I wouldn’t want some idiot messing it up for the rest of us.

Tell SAMHSA what you think about their new campaign:

• Underage Drinking Press
• Contact SAMHSA
• Media Services Team: 240-276-2130

Did you like this article?  Please Like/Share:

…please, please, don’t tell me that sex work is ALWAYS “violence against women.” Don’t tell me that my sweet, awkward, unable-to-find-dates client who pays me for two hours and MASSAGES me, without having sex, in a candle-lit room, because I tweeted that I had a bad day, is exploiting or violating me. Don’t tell me […]

Jimmy Carter may have been well to the right of the Democratic majority in Congress and tried to create policy from such an untenable position.

Bill Clinton may have signed NAFTA, created Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and ushered in welfare “reform.”

Barack Obama may not have lived up to the dreams of those naive enough to believe any president could bring in hope and change.

But at least the Democratic Party has never elected someone as antithetical to its core principles as the British Labour Party and Tony Blair, who is a terrible human being.

Tony Blair gave Kazakhstan’s autocratic president advice on how to manage his image after the slaughter of unarmed civilians protesting against his regime.

In a letter to Nursultan Nazarbayev, obtained by The Telegraph, Mr Blair told the Kazakh president that the deaths of 14 protesters “tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress” his country had made.

Mr Blair, who is paid millions of pounds a year to give advice to Mr Nazarbayev, goes on to suggest key passages to insert into a speech the president was giving at the University of Cambridge, to defend the action.

Mr Blair is paid through his private consultancy, Tony Blair Associates (TBA), which he set up after leaving Downing Street in 2007. TBA is understood to deploy a number of consultants in key ministries in Kazakhstan.

Human rights activists accuse Mr Blair of acting “disgracefully” in bolstering Mr Nazarbayev’s credibility on the world stage in return for millions of pounds.

The letter was sent in July 2012, ahead of a speech being given later that month by Mr Nazarbayev at the University of Cambridge.

A few months earlier, on December 16 and 17 2011, at least 14 protesters were shot and killed and another 64 wounded by Kazakhstan’s security services in the oil town of Zhanaozen. Other protesters, mainly striking oil workers, were rounded up and allegedly tortured.

Tony Blair is like the love child of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Lanny Davis. Combine neoliberal economic policies, warmongering, and profiting off of advising dictators and you have quite the individual.

Yesterday Willard “Mitt” Romney and his former running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) met up for the first time since their 2012 tilt at the White House.  The two got together for a little bromantic back and forth, waxing poetic about each other’s “presidential timber,” and to discuss the Republican Wunderkind’s entry in the 2014 preliminary round of the “Does This Serious Book Make Me Look Presidential” book writing fair. 

Ryan’s book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea is, I have to assume, Rep. Ryan’s plan for renewing the “American idea,” whatever that is when it’s at home . . . perhaps he felt that the old standby, “American Dream,” creates overly grand expectations among the 99%?
Brother Romney, an “action man,” himself, had this advice :

If people want to actually see action in this country and dealing with problems from education to health care, immigration to our fiscal needs ... they’re going to have to vote for Republican senators and ... a Republican president, as well.

 

For those who need a little more to go on than Willard Romney’s word for it, looking for historical support for Romney’s advice is a blessedly short research project because, in the last 60 years, there has only been one administration in which the modern Republican party controlled the presidency as well as both houses of Congress. 

And that would be part of the inglorious reign of C+ Augustus (George W Bush).  [Thank you, Mr. Pierce]

So.  Without further ado, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and assess the records of the 108th and 109th Congresses which should give us a contemporaneous view of what to expect from the autocratic government that Mr Romney recommends, shall we?

The One Hundred Eighth United States Congress convened from January 3, 2003 to January 3, 2005, during the third and fourth years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

On the 108th’s watch the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003; on May 1, 2003, George W Bush became the first sitting President to make an arrested landing, in a fixed-wing aircraft, onto an aircraft carrier where he proceeded to announce Mission Accomplished aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

In July 2003, the Valerie Plame CIA Leak Scandal came to light, the 9/11 Commission filed its initial reports and, in November, George W. Bush “swiftboated” his way to re-election with the narrowest ever popular vote for an incumbent president.

The 108th Congress gave us several new laws to include the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, additions to the Bush Tax Cuts and the Project BioShield Act to protect us all from biological WMDs which were always very much on the minds of Bush&Co.

Congress also delivered the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act to enhance the invasion of Americans’ privacy through warrant-less search, data-mining and domestic surveillance, while simultaneously expanding American meddling in foreign countries, as well, with the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, and the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004 to which the Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko, said “thanks, but no thanks” because Belarus, among others, considers the act an intervention into the internal affairs of Belarus.

The 109th Congress, or the Do Nothing Congress [Part I], as it was dubbed, ran from from January 3, 2005 to January 3, 2007, during the fifth and sixth years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

This Congress had the dubious distinction of helping their President thoroughly eff-up Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief, as well as kicking off huge nationwide immigration reform protests by introducing H.R. 4437, which proposed raising penalties for illegal immigration and making it a felony to help undocumented immigrants who either enter or remain in the US. 

In 2005, the Do Nothing Congress, with nothing much else to do, decided to jump into the Teri Schiavo case and make everything just that more nightmarish for the Schiavos because, as Brian Darling, legal counsel for Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), advised his boss, “the Schiavo case offered ‘a great political issue’ that would appeal to the party’s base and could be used against Senator Bill Nelson,” a Democrat from Florida.  Well played, GOP.  Nelson won.

Another reason that Republicans in the 109th Congress didn’t get a whole lot done was because they were forced to spend considerable amounts of time away from their legislative pursuits tamping down numerous scandals involving congressional Republicans: Tom DeLay (R-TX), Mark Foley (R-FL), Bob Ney (R-OH), and Duke Cunningham (R-CA) all contributed to a world of hurt for Republicans in the 109th Congress.

Moreover The 109th’s legislative feats do nothing much to counter the charge against them of being a Do Nothing Congress.  The list is a frothy little confection bound to warm the cockles of social conservatives’ hearts without being much good for anything else real-world . . .

There was the Class Action Fairness Act, an exercise in tort reform, which Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) described as “the final payback to the tobacco industry, to the asbestos industry, to the oil industry, to the chemical industry at the expense of ordinary families.”

And, of course Teri’s [Schiavo] Law which broke just about every constitutional guideline for legislation in one go:  Bush signed the law before it passed the Senate; it skated perilously close to being a “bill of attainder” (ie, it applies to only one individual); it violated separation of powers (Executive - Judicial) and finally, it failed to create any substantive rights.

Then came the The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act which, despite its name, actually made it a lot harder for “consumers” to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy and should have been called the “Credit Card Issuer Protection Act.”

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was essentially a subsidy for various sectors of the energy industries and created a handy-dandy loophole for frackers—nicknamed the Halliburton Loophole in honor of Vice President Dick Cheney’s contributions in crafting the law—that exempts companies drilling for natural gas from disclosing the chemicals involved in fracking operations normally required under the Clean Water Act.

There was also the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act which contained the infamous Bridge to Nowhere earmarks; the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act which precludes suing gun manufacturers for shooting injuries. The NRA effusively thanked President Bush for signing “...the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in twenty years into law.”

And, of course the usual suspects coming out of a Republican-controlled Congress: a Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act, a Deficit Reduction Act, a Secure Fence Act, and a Tax Relief and Health Act.

But the high point of the 109th Congress was that by the time these Republican controlled Congresses were giddy with majority, American voters cleared them out and replaced them with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

So, by all means, if you find this parade of horribles a compelling argument for handing total governance over to Republicans, take Mitt’s advice and vote straight Republican.  If, on the other hand you are sane, and facts and history mean something to you, tell Mitt and Boy Blunder to give it a break, we already know how this story goes. 

Twenty something years ago I lived in Brighton. This town is full of memories for me from a time when I was just starting out in the world. I felt so grown up here, away from home for the first time in my life, free to be my own self, make my own rules, be…

I’m a firm believer of action when it comes to battling against the injustices that happen in life. In every instance, every person can do something to help. The problem is, a lot of people have no idea how to help in situations like this.

“It’s been 20 years since New Jersey’s Legislature passed Megan’s Law. The two decades since have been filled with legal challenges and disappointment it didn’t accomplish what many thought it would. It’s what happens when politics and emotion team to shortcut the legislative process.”

Link to article

I have been wondering what to post today. I am on a touching ban at the moment, so although I am very aroused, enjoying my body and sharing an aspect of it is difficult. Instead, I have decided to share my reality this morning. Instead of my hand between my legs as I build towards my morning orgasm, I am using it to hide from the light that is clearly declaring that it is time to get up.

Who else is sharing a Sinful Sunday. Click and see.