Is PBS on Koch

 

 

For many years I have been a fan and patron of PBS.  I have been a loyal viewer and when possible a contributor to what is known as the Public Broadcasting System.  Recently, I learned via Chris Hayes that David Koch is a board member of PBS, and by offering or threatening to withhold generous donations, he can control programming.  This is unacceptable to me.  He is hardly a representative of the public.  In point of fact, a credible argument can be made that he is an opportunist exploiter of the public and our institutions.

Some of PBS’s programming is British television.  I am partial to this programming because the Brits are capable of writing stories that are original, actually having some literary and artistic merit.  Women in England don’t have be twelve-years old with breast implants to work.  They have to be able to act.  However, I will no long watch or contribute to what is laughingly referred to as Public Broadcasting, even for the Brits. 

It is interesting to note that as David Kock’s creatures in the House serially threaten to cut PBS and NPR’s funding, the man himself apparently stands mute.  Is it because he hopes to replace that funding and thereby control our access to the arts as he seemingly controls our access to good government? Give it some thought.

It is Only Sex

 

I don't give a shit what Weiner does with his dick.  I don't think anyone has a right to tell Ms. Weiner how she should respond as a number of people seem to think they have a right to do.  I have been married longer than a lot of the geniuses on TV and in other parts of the media have been alive, and this I know; no one has the right to speak to another person's marriage because they don't know what goes on behind closed doors and just don't know what the hell they are talking about. 

However, I am sick of watching Democrats follow their little head into scandal.  Clinton got away with it.  It remains to be seen whether Weiner and Spitzer will do the same. Clinton was barely a Democrat; Weiner and Spitzer were crusading Liberals.  In the latter two instances I am particularly disgusted by the double standard.  What double standard you may ask?  This double standard: Democrats screw women; Republicans screw everybody.  Democrats parade their generous charms on the Internet; Republicans parade their ungenerous hate on the Internet and everywhere else. 

In the final analysis this issue is for the City of New York to decide.  The rest of us who don't have a dog in the hunt might want to save our judgmental sanctimony for the people kicking children off of food stamps.  It is only sex for Goddess sake, not drone strikes or attempting to deny people with cancer healthcare insurance or defunding public education to give billionaires tax breaks. It is only sex!

Voices from the Echo Chamber

Yesterday the mutts in the Republican House passed a farm bill that cuts food stamps 100%.  The largest concentration of food stamp recipients is in the red states, particularly the south.  Now, one of two things is going on.  The Right side of the House is suffering from tertiary syphilis and their tiny brains are full of wholes like Swiss cheese, or they are convinced that their constituents are so afflicted.  Either the political hacks on the Right believe that a "Praise Jesus," "I am prolife," or "Obama was born on the Planet Mongo," chanted three times a day will keep the them in office; or the wilted lettuce that is their base will starve for the principles of the rich over the poor, the powerful over the weak and guns are our future - our children only get in the way.  You decide.

Contagion

 

 

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

We have daily proof of Dr. Einstein's theory in this country. Most recently the Zimmerman Trial taught us that stupidity is not only limitless but infectious - like Cholera or Bubonic Plague. It is thought-borne, ideology-borne and religion-borne. It is carried on and exacerbated by the Jetstream of fear; and I believe, although I have no clinical evidence, that it first attacks and paralyses the heart before moving on to the head. The prognosis is devastating and degenerative, both locally and systemically. There is no known treatment.

From the Mind of a Master

 

The following quote by one of my literary heroes, Raymond Chandler, can be applied today to most our entire media.  It is a festering pustule of innuendo, speculation, half-truth and ugly rumors.  It has taken logic to an all new low; makes no pretense of being capable of inductive or deductive reasoning; panders to the lowest common denominator; speaks on a level appropriate only to a poorly educated eight-year-old and has made a mockery out of morality, a jest out of justice and a trick bag out of truth.  So read the words of the master Hardboiled Detective writer and remember - beware of the Fourth Estate.

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."

The Deadly Tampon

 

 

So … they have been confiscating tampons at the Texas State House.  Feature this: you’re waiting in line to enter this publically funded building, which you helped fund as a member of the public, and ahead of you twenty-two guys carrying assault weapons are allowed in with a nod and a “Howdy do, partner.”  Then low and behold, you get rousted for a tampon.  Is it any wonder that the rest of the world thinks we are bat-crap crazy – the beacon of Liberty and floodlight of madness?  Apparently, the Republican Texas State Legislature is terrified that a woman will throw a tampon from the gallery and hit a male lawmaker who will then suddenly jump up with an irresistible urge to run right outside, sit down at a bus stop and breast feed.

I can’t help but think that this is the symbolic expression of a profound and primal terror of women.  It isn’t bad enough that the feminine has been banished from the realm of the sacred, relegated to the status of the Whore of Babylon, but now we must have our feminine hygiene products seized like weapons of mass destruction.  This is a Jungian wet dream. 

Symbols are very important in Jungian psychology.  Symbolism is the language of the unconscious.  Within the personal unconscious resides the Shadow which is a watershed for all of the individual’s greatest fears.  I suspect that in the collective unconscious of Texas Republicans there resides a twenty-five foot woman with enormous ball-busting bosoms, a man-eating vagina and a nuclear tampon. 

These people are deeply and terminally disturbed.  They are not fit to hold the public trust or to make public policy.  Indeed, they should be shut away in a missile silo in the middle of a vast desert and allowed absolutely no public contact.

The AMA to the Rescue, Maybe

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the AMA is opining from its moral high ground regarding the trauma and humiliation of force feeding prisoners at Gitmo? This would be the same AMA that has remained conspicuously silent while untrained, uninformed, ignorant, even stupid legislators presume to undermine the doctor/patient relationship that physicians are sworn to uphold in confidentiality and protect in perpetuity with regard to women’s reproductive health.

Don’t get me wrong, Gitmo is a shame and stain upon our national character.  A person being held indefinitely after having been cleared of any wrong doing is an obscenity.  Force feeding is certainly traumatic and humiliating.  Indeed all of this is the kind of abomination that could only have originated in the festering and fulminating mind of a Dick Cheney, his party and other smug and self-satisfied politicians regardless of party. 

However, forcing a woman to seek permission from her governor before having a pregnancy terminated, even when her life may be at risk; forcing a rape or incest victim to carry the product of these cruel and vicious acts to term; expecting women to decide to abort before they know they are pregnant are also acts of grievous indifference, inhumanity and overreaching by the state and very well can result in trauma, humiliation and worse.  So please someone tell me, where in the fuck has the AMA been with its white steed and shining sword of ethical truth?

The Legacy of 9/11

 

Since 9/11 every tin-pot tyrant in this country has used the threat of terrorism to seize power from the American people. From Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney and his hand puppet Bush to John “Lord High Inquisitor” Roberts, the rights of the people have been trashed as the Constitution is shredded. I have no doubt that Jefferson and the boys are somewhere pulling their powdered wigs apart out of sheer rage and frustration. From the Patriot Act of dubious Constitutional authority and questionable merit to the FISA court that is said to govern domestic surveillance – in and of itself a suspicious activity; from the clandestine functioning of the NSA to the United States Supreme Court which apparently has no relationship to the American people other than to collect our tax dollars to pay their lucrative salaries, we are being protected at the expense of our rights and a growing threat to our freedom. We have been told loudly and often that the terrorist, including those who brought down the planes on that horrible day some twelve years ago, are waging a war to destroy both of these values. Seems to me they have already won.

A Shadow Supreme Court

 

 

Ezra Klein spoke about this tonight while covering for Rachel Maddow. I was shocked and appalled by what I heard. Everyone knows about the FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court). Everyone knows that it meets in secret, and its function is to govern the national surveillance state per the Patriot Act. However, it appears that this so-called court is making laws in secret - laws which only it can interpret. Neither Congress nor the American people have knowledge or input. Further, it appears that the eleven "justices" on this court were appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts who has unilateral control over these appointments without Congressional oversight.

We are being asked to take a lot on faith here. That is to say that we are being asked to blindly believe that the people he has appointed, all appointed to other courts by Republicans save one, are doing what is in the best interest of the American people; and that unlike the man who appointed them they are not simply political partisans.

In addition to all of this when the government comes before this court it almost always wins. That could be because the other side of any question is not heard. Call me stupid, but this sounds more like a rubber stamp then a court. Call me doubly stupid but it seems to me that these legal paramours of King John 1st are beginning to function like a Shadow Supreme Court. By the shade if Franz Kafka, this is wrong in a democratic state.

See Mr. Klein's blog below.

 

Wonkblog