TBGO--La-Di-Da-Do-Di: Sham-wow? Smart ALEC; Part-timers; Christurds; Drug War

Bush's 4th Term (Or Reagan's 9th): Woody and all the rest of us, ALWAYZ knew the Chimperor was faking it, was just role-playing. He faked, and muttered, and mumbled, and stumbled and spat and geened his way through EVERYTHING, and nobody complained because it was expected of him. Nobody EVER mistook Boosh for, and the Chimperor never pretended to be, anything but an empty suit, a figure-head stumbling through his routines, a puppet visibly showing the strings which pulled him..
The difference between the Chimp and Barry LowBar is that the latter presented himself as an "authentic" and sympathetic "candidate of the people," actually PRETENDED with incredible sincerity to want to help people. With his improved diction, and aura of solemn seriousness, Barry LowBar's crimes, therefore, are all the greater, all the more egregious, all the more despicable for his efforts to disguise them...

Who "Lost" the Drug War ?: Woody dunno about "losing."
It depends on if you think the purpose of the war on drugs, mainly, was to fill in for the Jim Crow laws which were used successfully for almost 100 years to oppress and suppress black people and black culture, keeping them perennially in the shadows of debt and prison.
It worked SPECTACULARLY well at that purpose.
See, e.g., Michelle Alexander's work on "The NEW Jim Crow."

No Respect: Woody can have no respect for the "Christian left" until/unless they unambiguously, and unanimously, REJECT the likes of hate-group lewaders and sympathizers like Perkins and Wildmon, Hagee, and Robertson from their "confessions." and repudiate their "ministries." Until they do, the "liberal" religiosos are just as guilty as the conservo-fucktards they tolerate.

Tony Perkin's Family Research Center (see photo) declared a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Along with Donald Wildman's American Family Association, these so called Christian groups are condemned for their 'false claims about the LGBT community that are based on discredited research and junk science!' At last a genuinely Christian organization (SPLC) has the courage to take their stand against the mean spirited bigots who stir up fear and raise funds at our expense. Thank you Southern Poverty Law Center!

Allez, Citoyens! Hey Citizens!
Do YOU know which and how many of your State's legislators are "in the bag" for ALEC; are betraying their legitimate constituents by cleaving to the ALEC line, pushing ALEC bills and regs?
Would you LIKE to know?
LOOKEE HERE: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/ALEC_Politicians
Please, if at all (legally) possible, make their lives a living hell...
Thanks...

Temp-orizing: Wood'z amused: This is the USofFuckingA! We NEVER take a high road.
We unhesitatingly, even confidently, place our lives in the hands of the LOWEST BIDDERS!
Labor is the biggest expense in ANY wage-based system. ANYTHING that can hold down that cost is a guaranteed BOOST in the Bosses' profits, and will ALWAYS take precedence over any other incentive. 

The NY Times this week had an essay on the exponential growth of the "temp employment" economy:

A quarter of jobs in America pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four ($23,050). Not only are many jobs low-wage, they are also temporary and insecure. Over the last three years, the temp industry added more jobs in the United States than any other, according to the American Staffing Association, the trade group representing temp recruitment agencies, outsourcing specialists and the like.
Low-wage, temporary jobs have become so widespread that they threaten to become the norm. But for some reason this isn’t causing a scandal. At least in the business press, we are more likely to hear plaudits for “lean and mean” companies than angst about the changing nature of work for ordinary Americans.
How did we arrive at this state of affairs?

It's taken a while, since the first big temp agencies opened after WW II, but it expanded rapidly after 1970, and REALLY took off under the Raygunauts.

La-Di-Da-Di-Da: Spred Out; Faith-less; Toxicity

  ZAAAAP! This image got over 70 "forwards" (shares)  from my wall alone today. It touches a nerve.

This is the EXACT truth about the Business approach to catastrophic climate change.

• 

 Faith v. Knowing: News out of Mali includes reports that fanatic, religious rebels retreating from Timbuktu had sacked and burned an ancient library, destroying priceless manuscripts.
"Faith"--every and all "faith"--is fundamentally anti-intellectual.
Hostile.
Antipathetic.
Anathemic.
To intellect.
Above all else, against knowledge.
For that reason, more than any other, "faith" should be debunked, exposed for the frauds it perpetrates at every opportunity. "Faith" is not a dispensation from reason...
"Faith" can't survive the concentrated application of knowledge. Like any con game, it falls apart under close inspection.
The grifters who rely on "faith" to fill their collection plates therefore despise and attack knowledge from every angle they can imagine. NOBODY's as imaginative as a grifter protecting her or his grift.
 "Faith" in whatever is basically a stand-in, a surrogate, for knowledge. In the absence of actual data, whatever sounds plausible can be rationalized through narrative. That's ALWAYS how it goes. Then there is "Science," and the "narrative" includes the lab report. "Faith" quickly disperses as an "epistemological" requirement in the face of evidence.

Toxic truisms:
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
But it'll probably kill ya...

La-Di-Dah-Di-Di: Distance; Bumpy; Rides; Really...

  Go for a RIDE?

 

Woody'z dubious: Accepting things as they are is not necessarily contrary to seeking truth, is it? It could entirely be true, for ALL practical purposes, that things all are exactly as they seem, howsoever that might be. That is "real" which is real in its consequences, as WI Thomas wrote in his landmark, 1920s treatise in the nascent field of sociology, "Delinquent Girls."

Irony: Brilliant. Analyst's expression: Priceless!

Rim-shot: This might take a sec...

 

Past Time: Woody notez  (just for some perspective):The V-ger (Voyager 1 & 2) satellites, launched more than 35 years ago, traveling as fast as ANYTHING humans EVER made, have ONLY traversed a distance of less than three-quarters (3/4) of one (1) LIGHT DAY since their launch in 1977...

TBGO: Anti-vaccanoyance; DisAppointment Grows; Hoketh, Thou? Union Busting at the USPO

Eighty, and Counting: This thread spawned 80-plus comments before supper. It's a contentious topic, for some reason:

This (meme) is fucking STOOOOOOPIT!
Just TOOOO fucking STOOOOOOOOPIT!
The fact that we didn't vaccinate as much in the past doesn't mean the diseases weren't there, or that people--especially kids--weren't getting sick from these illnesses..
It means we didn't have vaccines.
This anti-vax crapola is total, fucking dumb-ass ignorance.
Vaccinate!
Ignorance is a MAJOR disease vector.

You can read the whole thread here.

Another Dis-Appointment: Mary Jo White, big-time financial revolving door-rider in the securities industry. The New Yorker is cautiously supportive but David Sirota took a much dimmer view in a column on Salon.
Fine "promises." NONE of which will happen. The purpose of her nomination is to make it LOOK like something will be done.

White's a paid-up, careerist/opportunist who's cycled back and forth through the revolving door between the Gummint and the CorpoRats for her whole career. Her loyalties are to her paycheck and her retirement accounts. Yer de-fuukin-LUSIONAL if you think she'll fix anything if it jeopardizes her NEXT job..
If you read PAST the first graf in the NYer, you learn:

 "While White does have a long track record of prosecuting white-collar crime, she has also—more recently, as a partner at Debevoise and Plimpton—compiled an impressive record defending white-collar clients, including the former Bank of America C.E.O. Ken Lewis and the former Morgan Stanley C.E.O. John Mack, and has represented corporations in S.E.C.-enforcement proceedings. White is, in other words, someone who has worked on both sides."

But Sirota expands the broad strokes, and shows how she got an SEC investigator FIRED foir merely having the temerity to want to interview financial giant/ceo John Mack

With a Hey, Nonnie-nonnie!:
.
I forget if I've posted this here before.. But no matter.
It's quite brilliant.

"The Hokey Pokey, Shakespearean Style" by Jeff Brechlin is a winning entry in The Style Invitational, The Washington Post's weekly humor/wordplay contest.
http://washingtonpost.com/styleinvitational.

SHARE your fun language-related content with us on our Wall or via Messages.

The War on the Post Office: This is a MUCH bigger deal than anybody is letting on. 
There is a fantasy that IT is sufficiently ubiquitous that snail-male can be disposed of (and of course, those inconvenient unions killed off, too). 
I'll bet there are at least 10-20% of the population to whom the Netz are 1) inaccessible (no connection device) or 2) too expensive (lo mismo?) or 3) too technologically forbidding (elderly folks, possibly), and who are dependent on the PO for their ability to do their business, etc. 
It is unjust in the EXTREME to regard them--no matter the proportion--as throw-aways.
The history of the rightard/GOP assault on the Postal Service, which began under Poppi Bush, should make a citizen furious.

• 

The Bleat Goes On: So Exceptional!; Prince Tut; Low Barry

Another Exception: Woody thinkz it a mistake to look into USer politics in search of European-style fascism, as in: "Although fascist nations do often control their ‘means of production,’ (Whole Foods CEO John) Mackey seems to have forgotten that they usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically-motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends.”
Murkin fascism, like all other USer 'exceptionalities,' is and as one would expect it to be, different.
We don't (and probably WON'T) see the jack-booted thugs on the doorsteps in the middle of the night. They won't be needed. Capitalism's evil genius is to make sure everybody has SOMETHING to lose, on the theory that when you have nothing, you've got nothing to lose; but if you have ANYTHING, then you have EVERYTHING to lose.
Check out Sheldon Wollin's "Inverted Totalitarianism" for the schema of OUR special version of the brand. And usual, Hartmann misses the point.

Prince Tut: Woody seez/hearz lotsa tut-tutting about the Prince Harry's remarks about killing gooks in Asia.
It's all bullshit.
The Royal Scion is the fucking EPITOME of ALL "occupation" forces, anywhere, anytime/everywhere every time.
He's not some exception, laughing at the dead ragheads and joking about killing them.
He is the very EXEMPLUM of the breed, par excellence. NOBODY in theatre disagrees with him, either....
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/22/taliban_unimpressed_by_prince_harrys_remarks/

 Lower the Bar: Woody's pretty sure these are things Prez LowBar could, but obviously and SPECTACULARLY WON'T, do? But thanks for your interest...
Pres. LowBar persists in the errors which betrayed him to me as a pimp and a poseur from the first instant, by still acknowledging, and not resisting, the Righturds' frames for critical issues: e.g., 'entitlements," the "fiscal cliff," the "Grand Bargain," etc.
He has no intention of claiming the "crisis" is phony, and no incentive to do so, either . This is "shock doctrine" politics. Every crisis is an OPPORTUNITY to shove repressive,or oppressive, shit down the open-mouthed, fearful populace. Hence, he perpetuates the "crisis" frame, pursuing the agenda of those who DO frame the "crises."

The Bleat Goes On: Anthem; Torque; Balls; Tasty.

I Blame Whitney: When the National Anthem at the Presidential Inauguration becomes an occasion for aural pyrotechnics and a star-turn at the mic, somebody is misunderstanding the purpose of the occasion and their place in it.
Can't anybody sing the fucker straight, any more, WITHOUT trying to out-Whitney Houston?

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Torqued Jaws:  This sorta crap just pisses me off so much, I wanna wreck digits.   

 The warriors are labeled "secularists" and with some cross, and the conflict, according to the text, is results in the "eclipse of reason." Ex-fucking-SCUUSE ME!@

Secularists are, by definition, rational; are, in fact, the party of reason.
Yes, facts are often "liberal." What of it?

In ANY case, virtually every religious conflict since the Sumerians has been waged between partisans of competing sects. Secularism hasn't played any part--except that of the perpetual victim of intolerance by ALL.

This sorta shit--elaborately false equivalences portrayed as the wisdom of the ancients--just tightens my jaws til my fucking teeth crack.

Incoming: Pro golfer Phil Mickelson is now trying to withdraw his dick from his mouth, after complaining the increased taxes approved by the voters would drive him out of California. He now regrets his remarks. Yes, he should have kept his fucking rich, privileged, flapping, fucking mouth shut.
But he didn't.May I say, in all heartfelt simplicity and honesty:
FUCK PHIL MICKELSON!
He inhabits the HIGHEST economic circles on the planet, but resists paying his share of the burden of sustaining him in the style to which he's accustomed.
Dear Phuckstick Phil: 
May I commend your attention to the example of  JK Rowling, who as it happens has contributed A FUCKOFALOT more to the history and culture of the world than you EVER did? Take a lesson, you shit-eating dickwipe?

And NOW I hope he get's pelted with pennies from now on when he steps up to address the ball. To help him pay his taxes, yaknow?


A Tasty Treat:

A ta

The Bleat Goes On: Faith; Round Two

Dear "Faith-People":
If you GOTTA have "God," if you absolutely MUST maintain that idiotic fantasy, then keep the fucker in church where he can't omnipotently fuck anything up; and out of the statehouse, courthouse, and legislatures, where his influence is ALWAYS intrusive upon and destructive to the people's freedoms.







 Obama Begins Inauguration Festivities With Ceremonial Drone Flyover

News in Brief • Politics • ISSUE 49•04 • Jan 21, 2013

The Bleat Goes On: Insecurity; Liberals

Posts this morning have featured the news that CorpoRat CEOs of the "Business Roundtable" are lobbying the White House heavily to make serious cutbacks in "entitlement" sending, including Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs.

Even a cursory consideration of these demands--for such is what they are--reveals the strategy behind them: to INCREASE workers' insecurities. 

"Economic INsecurity" is the touchstone, the holy grail, for ALL bosses in ALL industries. 

Not desolation. Just that nagging, inescapable, dread fear that you might be unemployed tomorrow. What would you do? Bosses LOVE it when workers feel that way. It makes the workers compliant, and unresisting, and more easily exploitable: "What, you don't want to work the Holiday? Okay. I can find somebody who does. What? Overtime? Really?? Hahaha..."

It has long been an article of faith that there should never A certain level of "structural unemployment" (formerly about 4%; now u to around 7%) is the "ideal" for employers. It offers them a pool of unemployed to point to, so as to diminish complaints from abused workers about their conditions. With such a large pool of unemployed, the message is incontrovertible: work for what I will pay you, doing WHAT I tell you, or be replaced.

Revolutions happen when people have nothing to lose. The genius of 'capitalism' has been to make sure the workers always have SOMETHING to lose, because when you've got ANYTHING, you have EVERYTHING to lose. Even if you only "have it" on credit.

SO they gotta be nervous, worried, apprehensive, and willing to do ANYTHING to keep their jobs.
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Geez, peepul:
FDR was NOT a "liberal."
He was a wealthy patrician with a well-developed sense of noblesse oblige, and the sense to recognize that the proles were on the verge of out-right revolt which would have cost his class dearly. He SAVED capitalism!

The Bleat Goes On: Rulez, Militias

  Orthodoxy: One of--if not THE main--the reasons we teach people to read in school is:

SO THAT THEY CAN FURTHER EXPLORE the ideas to which they are exposed in "school," and correct or amend what they've been 'taught' which their own researches suggest is not strictly "true."

All "history" taught in schools is propaganda. Who doesn't know that?
Then it's up to you to find out about and correct it in your own head

. 

 Yes, unfortunately, I am sad to report: living and learning requires some FUCKING THOUGHT. It's depressing, I know but,after all, education doesn't--or at least isn't supposed--to stop with school. 

School is spozed to be the place where you learn how to continue learning. Only an idiotic putz thinks "school" is the end of that trail..

"Organized religion," which for milennia has substituted for knowledge in a world full of ignorance of basic facts of science, is on the ropes, according to a Salon piece recently. The Internetz are the proximate cause. There are five essential factors: 1) Thanks to the technolofgy and access to the web and to the findings of science, sectarian knowledges can inspire with the same fervor as religions did heretofore; 2) the web presentations of the accumulated idiocies which believers believe will not long withstand mockery; 3) it provides an outlet for reporting not merely the silliness of religions but also their (sexually, murderously, tortyurously) darker sides; 4) it fosters support communities for non-believers who hitherto had mainly to be silent, and 5) with wider exposure, the claims of infallibility, etc, are revealed as contradictory in the context of the multiplicity of beliefs.
Faith fears knowledge. It's not a singular coincidence that all "religious" crimes are THOUGHT crimes: Apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege, all are acts inspired by thought, doubt, criticism.

 

 

• 

 "A well-regulated milita" was what the Slave states called their local negro-suppression units, slave patrols, and slave catchers.
The Second Amendment was inserted into the Constitution to appease Patrick Henry (the "give-me-liberty" guy) who was terrified of a slave revolt, and knew the only way to prevent one was to preserve the Owners' guns.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83473699

 

The Rulez:  

RULE # 1: "White people cannot be 'terrorists.'
RULE # 2: If white people engage in terrorist activities, see RULE # 1.

The Bleat Goes On: Breed Matters; Gun Crazies; Tough Talk; Fighting Words

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Tough Talk: Sir Barry bluntly declared that the welbeing of the nation is not to be held hostage to partisan bickering. 
Yeah, right. 
That stern language is gonna stop the GOPhux from leveraging the financial well-being of the Nation for their partisan advantage.
He sher talks gud, tho, dunne?
Woody thinkz:
We'll see, won't we?
Lotta brave talk.
Heard it ALL before.
I personally suspect he'll be "forced" by the debt-ceiling "crisis" to negotiate, while proclaiming loudly how he had no choice, while furiously extolling the virtues of joint sacrifice.

Fighting Words: A smart correspondent just wrote on a posting of mine:

You know why the battles in academia are so vicious? It's because the stakes are so low.

Attributed to Henry Kissinger, I believe; but which is just so much arrant nonsense and patent bullshit in any case.
Battles in academia are not irrelevant or trivial, and the stakes couldn't be higher!
Academia is STILL where the underlying assumptions of culture and society are developed and tested.
The battles among scholars over fine, seemingly trivial points are about the fundamental meanings of the lexicons, and the discourses, and the data, and the books we use to describe and understand the world, and keep creating it.
That "irrelevance" meme is a bullshit, anti-intellectual, rightard/fucktard fiction meant to discredit critical thought and the importance of educated discourse.


 Name Calling:

 Related term: Christard, a person whose devotion and dedication to religious faith completely interferes with their ability to engage in any kind of rational discourse, with the same disclaimer.


 Gun Crazies: Mental health is kind of a cop-out in the debate over firearms, because it's a continuum, not a categorical phenomenon. There is no way of EVER knowing in advance who is gonna go off the rails, or when, or to what effect.
And one must submit oneself to it. It's not part of the normal array of diagnoses.
So if a crazy person doesn't admit to being crazy, there's pretty much no way to get 'em in 'treatment.' 
Or am I missing something?

• 
  

  

Breed Laws:  The degree to which certain breeds of dogs are demonized and marginalized is directly and positively correlated with the number of demonized or marginalized people or identifiable groups who have them as pets.

The Bleat Goes On: Oracular; "Save Our Wimmin!"

  Simple Pleasures:

 These are NOT "simple" things. I used to do a full, one-hour professional presentation on the symbolic and social resonances captured in these "simple" devices. I called them "Oracles." They occur in just about every place IN THE WORLD where "school" is done with paper and pencil. Oracles are part of what I called a "contraband" curriculum in schools. Nobody EVER introduces them in class. They're like cockroaches in the cafeteria. They're just always there. Most teachers confiscate them, and yet they proliferate, from about 2nd grade through about 6th. Their character changes, over that time, too...

They're fascinating things. They work on the same logic as computers do. It's also a lesson in how easily assumptions can be created and manipulated by "mediating" reality. They project the promise of randomness, but it's within a tightly prescribed range.

 I used to assign pre-service teachers the task of constructing one, and then describing, in their academic discourses, what it was they were doing: what necessary skills ere involved, what knowledges were involved... I.e.: You get geometry from the the physical construction; probability from the questions you ask, and binary logic from the manipulation of it. If you remember, you learned how to manipulate the outcome if you were the "owner" or author of the device? 

The object itself is a statement about quality of knowledge that is necessary to construct it, and the capacity of the makers to apply what they know, but don't have the names for, yet. Plus it functions as a tool in creating internal "orders" among kids. Cooties? Remember cooties? In the earliest developmental/age level appearance of these things, they're "cootie-catchers," long before they become language games. They a play a game with object permanence: it was there all along. But "Cooties" are "class" markers; they're the nits--the larval stage--of lice. Having lice sends a social signal: Lice are not found on good, clean people, so if you have cooties, you are of a lower social class.GIRLS have cooties, around second grade...

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Open Season: It's not "theoretical fascists that cause the gun-goons to get all warm an bothered!

What they're terrified of is scary, uppity colored folks comin' to take their wimmins..

THAT'S who they see when the squint down the gun-sights.

The Bleat Goes On: Guns and Race

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

In the context of an earlier discussion this morning, already, these first two Daily Show segments (Jan. 8., 13) are quite apposite (I skipped the McChrystalnacht segments; I'll go back to 'em later).
But it's worth noting that, for all his frankness and (tighteous) outrage, Stewart also dances delicately around what I think is the unspoken heart of the matter of gun violence in America, which, by thje way is what has distinguished USers from our northern neighbors as a matter of national psyche with regard to guns.
As with every other intractable social problem we experience, the unseen burr under the saddle is race, and its consequences. If there is a common thread among the DEFENDERS of the "right" to arm yourself to the teeth and implicitly, at least thereby intimidate their neighbors asnd acquaintances, it is that they are almost ALL angry (though it's an archetypal cover for "fearful"), white and male.
Think about it: Where are the black folks and latinos and Native folks demanding the right to be armed to the teeth? Oh, it happens. Think of Wounded Knee and MOVE in Philaelphia. Leonard Peltier's never been invited onto CNN to threaten open rebellion if "they" come for HIS guns.
If ANY group in this country had a right to seek to arm themselves and to protect the right to do so, it would be communities and people of color. All of them have been targeted (so to speak) by the deadly attentions of armed WHITE people bent on their suppression and/or extermination.
People PROUDLY "white." People consciously spreading the "destiny of the White race" unto the benighted heathens. Keeping the negroes down.
Call it what you will:
 The loudest, most explosive, looniest gun-goons are not members of groups who were VICTIMS of unbridled gun violence, they are of the group which perpetrated those acts. Billy, the Kid, bragged he'd killed 20 men by his 20th birthday, "not counting mexicans and indians." White guys want--demand--these weapons in case their former victims ever get numerous enough to do what the gun-goons would do under the circumstances: Payback... 
 There's a book by Susan Falludi called "Terror Dreams," (2006/ 07?) in which she traces two threads of dread and anxiety common to colonists in "our" America: Indian raids and slave revolt. Guns gave the colonists the decisive advantage, in the long run. 
But the cost to the pretense of superiority of the numerical superiority of their antagonists pressed itself deeply into the cultural memory of the society, a memory that has been burnished by legendary accomplishments ascribed to mighty White warriors in conflict with the "others" they were displacing.



http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-january-8-2013-stanley-mcchrystal

The Bleat Goes On: No Con-Con!; Gurus;

Way Down Upon the Swami: Woody recollectz:
Back in the "day" (late 60s/early 70s), when the Beatles were making regular pilgrimages to India, and Ravi Shankar was on am radio, you couldn't swing a dead cat on ANY campus in the USofA without tangling it in the beard of some guru, swami or other South Asian soi-disant "mystic."

Mostly, after you got to know 'em, what they were interested in was boinking hippie chicks (my then-girlfriend among them), "generous" financial support, and expensive cars, pretty much in that order.

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Con Con-Con: Woody fearlessly declarez:
Friends, you may think you do, but I promise you:

YOU DO NOT WANT a constitutional convention unless you are prepared to see even such tenuous, slender, shaky, fragile, ephemeral "protections" we now enjoy evaporate into the maw of the CorpoRatocracy.

Do not even CONSIDER the prospect.

Do you REALLY REALLY think the Citizens United effect wouldn't apply to the process? That the Owners would NOT use the opportunity to cancel the vestiges of freedom of speech, assembly, etc. 

Do you REALLY believe any personal protections would survive?
Chuy, jodido!

The Bleat Goes On: Cultish Respect; Overturning?

• Respect? I find it risible and wholly laughable that the god-blighted, 'faithful' cultists, who for so many centuries have disparaged, condemned, and proscribed--not to say executed, and certainly NEVER 'respected'-- non-believing people for their 'thought-crimes' critical of "god," NOW howl in righteous fucking anguish when their ignorant, primitive, ridiculous, bloody-minded, patriarchal superstitions are held up as the farcical travesties they so clearly are, and demand that they be "respected" for them...
• Fuck that, and certainly: Fuck you!
  

  
  

  
  

  

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14th And Counting: "Conservatives" have--and have long HAD--their sights set on overturning the 14th Amendment. If they cannot bring it down in one shit, they'll be content to attack it piece-meal, like they attack everything else standing even slightly in the way of the final reduction to absurdity of the notion of popular sovereignty, which is their ultimate goal.
That truculent hypocrite, Rep. Steven King (R-NY), has re-introduced into the new Congress his faux-populist/nativist bill to repeal so-called "birth-right citizenship," which is authorized under a clause in Sect. One of the 14th Amendment. Such citizens are those born in the boundaries of the United States even though their parents were not citizens. Notoriously anti-immigrant, righturd columnist Michelle Malkin is one such, I believe.
I think such "power centers" as there still may be or are on the "left" in DC are notably leery of 1) defending the 14th Amendment and 2) of raising the 14th Amendment defense for ANYTHING in fear of giving the Opus Deists on the SCROTUS an opening to reverse it. It's relevant--it SHOULD be determinative--in MANY current cases and circumstances, including the "debt ceiling," and gay marriage. The debt ceiling is probably unConstitutional, and should not withstand the test of critical jurisprudence before any but the most obdurately anti-democratic jurists.. But Scalia and his house-boy, Clancy Thomas, at least, would vote to overturn it, and probably would be joined by at least Roberts and Alito.
Only FIVE needed to overturn this bulwark and return to those fabled ante-bellum days, where the darkies knew their places.
That's a pretty thin line..