If You Want Respect Mr. Chief Justice . . .

It is said that Chief Justice John Roberts is concerned about the American People's perception of the Supreme Court. He is worried that we might consider the court less objective than partisan. Well it is a little late for all that, Sparky. Most polls show that at least 75% of us believe the Justices vote their political ideologies, and that the Constitution like the Bible is a movable feast easily interrupted to mean anything some slick, grandstanding shyster or political mouthpiece says it means.

Perhaps it would be different if we the people weren't treated like pets of the powerful - tossed a bone now and again and patted on the head. Particularly, when we show up on the Washington Mall wearing stupid hats with tea bags hanging from the brim. Maybe if we weren't treated like guard dogs or cats on rodent patrol in the barn, the only reason for our existence a purely utilitarian invocation of our name by seedy, manipulative politicians serving a self-promoting agenda.

The American People need, the American People want, the American People must have, is the battle cry shouted from chamber to chamber and roof to roof in Washington by demigods who couldn't possibly care less if the American People slipped quietly into an irreversible coma - save on April 15th.

If you want respect Mr. Chief Justice, try giving a little. No flowers today. My ladies have categorically refused to appear with the United States Supreme Court.

Life on Olympus

Here is the sad deal, the Supreme Court is considering the following:
Can Congress create commerce – as if health care weren’t commerce and needed to be created?

Can Congress force citizens to participate in commerce? Hence, Scalia’s brilliant broccoli argument.

Does everyone have an expectation of needing health care?

I thought these people were bright.

Only Justice Ginsberg seems to get it. She wants to know if the anti-mandate boys realize that people within the health care arena and without insurance impact directly upon people who do have insurance?

80% of uncompensated care is paid for by insurers. That money does not fall like manna from heaven. It comes from our rising premiums, which we forfeit to uphold the law against refusing care.

So while the boys on the right pull each other’s dongs and the boy and girls on the left try to keep Obama’s thoroughly incompetent Solicitor General from stepping on his dick, Justice Kennedy swings in the middle like Hamlet who isn’t sure whether or not he has seen his father’s ghost. He argues on the one hand that the government may not have justification for enforcing its mandate. On the other hand, he thinks it may be necessary.

The Attorney General from South Carolina – who if I am not mistaken organized this circle jerk – when asked directly by Chuck Todd of MSNB, who will pick up the shortfall, who will pay for the uninsured, jumps like a startled rabbit and hops right back into to the Constitutionality of Congress creating commerce. We have come full circle.

I thought these people were bright.

This is about one thing and one thing only, slapping down a sitting president. The fact that the court agreed to hear it makes me wonder if we couldn’t replace all nine of them with two cans of Kal Kan and a mascot.

Guns, Guns and More Guns

In the motion picture made from Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” Humphrey Bogart takes a gun off of a vicious hoodlum and says, "You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail." And so it goes. Guns make us real, make us whole, makes us right, make us strong, make us superior to our fellows. Thus, everyone and everything that trips our trigger finger is fair game – young men wearing hoodies and armed with dangerous bags of skittles, women, children, dogs, cats, rabbits, Girl Scouts selling cookies, your mechanic, the mailman, circus performers in makeup are all fair game. This is the world we live in, a swelling and soulless wasteland of our own making.

Those of you who know me well know that I am a UFO nut. I study them. I research them. I believe in them and in the implication of extraterrestrial visitation they imply. People meeting me for the first time often ask if I truly, absolutely and without question believe in the existence of intelligent life in the universe other than us. I answer, “Yes, I believe in the existence of intelligent life in the universe, excepting us.”

We forfeit our claim to intelligence whenever a child is killed in the street by a lunatic with a gun where his brain should be. We forfeit our claim to intelligence whenever we elect some NRA/gun lobby slut to the House or the Senate who propagates the idea that the 2nd Amendment is the only amendment that matters – shattering the graceful reciprocity of the Bill of Rights, indeed the Constitution itself, with every shot fired. We forfeit our claim to intelligence whenever we allow some moronic governor to sign into law a bill that shields homicide behind the mantle of self-defense. We forfeit our claim to intelligence whenever we accept as individuals or as a nation the proposition that a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.

Come Again

If I am not mistaken, two things are true. First, following the loss of a case against the FEC attempting to overturn the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader of the Senate, headed to the U.S. Supreme Court with a brief supporting Citizens United v FEC. Five of his butt boys on the court rolled Citizens United over into law. Secondly, Mitt Romney in his current bid for the Republican nomination to run for the highest office in the land has used very little if any of his own money. He has relied instead upon his bloated PACs – a direct result of Citizens United.

Now we hear the Santorum campaign and to a lesser degree the Gingrich and Paul campaigns whining about being outspent in advertizing markets flooded with Romney money. I don’t suppose it has ever occurred to these imbeciles that the problem with rigging a game is that the other side, even the other side within your side, might just hang you in that rigging. With the precision of near boomerang Karma we now see the possibility that the base’s least acceptable candidate may well be the last candidate standing. I can’t overstate my nausea at never hearing our so called free press make this point when the sniveling starts from the Right.

I have said before, I will say again, Obama has no option but to use PAC money – not if he wants to be competitive in this race. Idealism is a wonderful thing. I have been an idealist all of my life, however, it won’t feed your kids, send them to school or put you in the White House. I am looking with great anticipatory enthusiasm to see President Obama thread Mitt Romney’s scrawny neck through his own party’s rigging.

The Hidden Hook

I have a friend who is a conservative. He is not a Bible-thumping, fire-breathing, loaded-on-religion conservative. He is a real conservative. He understands money, its applications and uses in society and for government. We differ on how to use money, and government, to serve the people. After all, money and government are bloody tools, nothing else. They are not entities in their own right.

I don’t give a damn about money; have never had enough of it to acquire a taste for it. I am a far Left Liberal, leaning Socialist, a member of the revolutionary-counterculture '60s generation. I freely admit that we Liberals made a mistake in the heady days of love and flower power. We wanted to feed the world you see, so we gave people fish instead of the fishing pole. Two generations later we realized that many of them couldn’t feed themselves. This is perhaps not a mistake that my conservative friend would have made – such are the wages of youth and idealism.

Still and all mistakes aside, I am deeply committed to Liberal principles. As I view them they are these: social and economic justice for all; helping the very old, the very young and the very poor; honoring and facilitating the success of the Working Class; upholding the principles of FDR, JFK and LBJ – the social safety net, Civil Rights, Voting Rights and the knowledge that there is no Exceptionalism in an America where only a few can afford to play.

My friend and I often go to the canvas over issues. As I said to him, we are like Reagan and Tip O’Neill, going to our corners, coming out swing hard and looking for a brawl. Once in the middle we find that we often share enough to form some common cause. This is the way government should work. This is the way it used to work.

There is no place in politics or government for rigid ideologies. They torture discourse and freeze reason. There is no place in politics or government for religion. They are incompatible, contraindicated and irreconcilable. Politics and government are secular and quantifiable. Religion is neither – no one can prove the existence of God, because no one can prove the non-existence of God. Thus attempting to build a political system or government on any god is like attempting to sit on the wind.

This is why our Founding Fathers said, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . .” They were not protecting churches, as some on the Right say. They were protecting people from the oppression and persecution of religious tyranny.

There is a tidal wave building in this country. In state houses and at the federal level, there is an enormous swell of religious bigotry - power grabbing, control seeking intolerance. It will roll over people like my wonderful atheist friends, who are decent and moral human beings without the agency of a higher power. It will roll over my beloved spiritual brothers and sisters, who follow a different path. As do I. It will roll over my cherished friends in the LGBT community, whose finest expression of their humanity has been a justification for this filthy agenda for years. It will roll over someone we all know and love.

Laws are being made today that will force us to live by the tenets of a religion we have no interest in following. Thus because those tenets will carry the force of law a state religion is being established. There is only one point to religious tyranny, and that is tyranny - nothing to do with God. Most of my readers know that I am insane for the X-files. So, in the words of my much admired Chris Carter, “Fight the Future!”

Early Spring Show

First little Iris of the season. She is true-blue and gold. Not more then two inches tall and two inches across her flower head, this little lady will flower in the snow if need be. She is a bulb and makes a wonderful tiny boarder plant for first season show.

The Anomaly

I often wonder if in the deep recesses and secret chambers of Wall Street, Corporate America or the Vatican there is a video of Republican executives and legislators from all over the country and Washington having sex with farm animals. What else but blackmail can explain the rash of suicidal legislation that has erupted across this country? Take Bill McDonnell or Governor Ultrasound as Maddow calls him, of Virginia. This guy wanted to be the VP nominee for the Republicans. After signing a highly controversial bill that his constituents overwhelming disapprove of, nobody in their right mind would put him on a national ticket. He is term limited. His career could be over.

Scott Walker in Wisconsin is looking at recall. Last I heard Ohio’s Governor Kasich has an approval rating hanging tight at 30%. People in his state had enough of him within the first few months of his reign of terror. Again last I heard Rick Scott of Florida is enjoying an all time high approval rating – 38%. This is another chump who wants to balance the state’s budget on the backs of the most vulnerable. Rick Snyder has a recall movement gaining on him. He is the sap who decided that Michigan towns (particularly poor towns) could be taken over by Emergency Managers effectively displacing the authority of elected officials in those towns. There are others, but this is enough to demonstrate that the Republican Party is on the verge of self inflicted eradication. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care. However, the fact that it is happening at all is of some interest and for the same reason that any anomaly in nature is interesting.

On the moral rectitude scale I have always placed most politicians somewhere between family annihilators and child molesters. So, the fact that the Governors mentioned above are displaying all the class of a cop beating up a drunk, as Raymond Chandler would say, and are doing unethical, misogynistic, racist and vile things is to be expected. On the self love scale I place politicians right up top with Emperor Tiberius and Catherine the Great. So, the fact that they are doing these things to their own detriment is very much unexpected. We are watching a bunch of self aggrandizing, self promoting narcissus commit suicide. It is incongruent in the extreme.

Think about Jonestown and a bunch of delusional people willingly swallowing poison Kool-Aid. Perhaps if one considers Citizens United the Kool-Aid and the poisonous idea that no matter what you do in office gobs of money will keep you in office the parallel is exact. Neither Citizens United nor the Kock brothers seem to be able to stop the snowball rolling toward Walker. Let us hope that the others take heed and understand that when the people get feed up there isn’t enough money in the world to save their ass.

A Walk in the Fog

The Blunt Amendment is an end run around Obama's Affordable Care Act. It is collusion between insurance companies and employers, aided and abetted by politicians, with women's health as a smoke screen. Beyond the proselytizing about birth control and someone being made to pay for someone else's sexual behavior is the old movable moral feast inherent in the marriage of dirty politics and carnivorous capitalism to a free market valued above the human beings it is suppose to serve. This Amendment would eventually extend into every area of health care, every procedure, treatment option and preventative care regime for every working American and their family. It is my opinion that Blunt is a duplicitous stooge. He doesn't give a damn about birth control, fetuses, sexual behavior or God. Blunt has found a new way to have oral sex with his contributors.

This game is as old as politics itself – tell someone who has nothing that someone else is stealing from them. Then invoke the Puritan Ethic as a way of bringing the “thieves” to book. In the end the money changers will be let back into the temple and everyone else thrown out – all of this in the name of a much feared, motherless-father God.

It is impossible to overestimate the American people’s naiveté. It is impossible to overestimate the tendency of those who think shallowly to follow closely those who have been corrupted deeply. Thus, by the time the good sheep wake up they are being led to the inevitable slaughter without the slightest idea how they got there.

The Blunt Amendment died in the Senate, yesterday. Fear not, like the ghost of Jack the Ripper, it will return in another form. The devil can always find a new playground. Then the tug-of-war begins again between the dishonorable and the marginally principled with the American people being trampled in the middle.

Just a Few Questions, Senator

Questions: Had the Blunt Amendment passed today, or should it pass in the future, will men be prohibited from having vasectomies? If employers can dictate care and treatment plans to their employees will they use cost as a criteria for lodging a quasi moral objection to access to health care? If a necessary procedure is denied to a man or woman resulting in death what is the employer's liability? It seems to me that all these politicians on the Right are blowing smoke out their ass to the detriment of their own party’s political future.

None of this is about birth control. It is about hating women and seeing yet another opportunity to grind the Working Class underfoot.