I know I haven’t updated the blog in a while and for that I do apologize. There’s a couple of factors. One, there is an issue with my site and new versions of WordPress. For whatever reason if I upgrade to anything above version 2.8.6 it screws up my admin control panel. Two, I’ve been actively trying to avoid political news because, quite frankly, I’m tired of making myself depressed. Three, I’ve become more active in updating social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Four, I have the world’s worst case of writer’s block.

All of these have led me to wonder if I should scrap what I have right now and start over new with a full fresh installation of WordPress (or others if anyone wants to suggest one) and a whole new look and feel to the site. Maybe if I do that I’ll feel better about posting and my writer’s block will just go away.

Anyway, if you see any massive changes to the site, don’t panic. I have ever intention of keeping this site going because I do love having it. I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

Take a moment and compose yourself. I hope you didn’t spit coffee on anything that can’t take it.

The Palin/Beck Doctrine: Say something batshit crazy. I mean totally fucking loony. Repeat this lie as loudly and as often as you can. When questioned, blame the non-Fox media for taking it out of context and hide behind the populist rage. Repeat and collect speaking fees from anyone stupid enough to believe you.

Drill Baby Drill.

Can we please start finding an alternate source of renewable energy please? Or do we have to wait until oil is $130 a barrel again and people are paying $6 a gallon? I’ll never understand why the environment we live in ranks a few dozen tiers lower than our wallets.

Hawaii has an admittedly obscure law that states official documents such as birth certificates are to be kept by the state. It’s somewhat of a strange law, but they provide the legal equivalent to any natural citizen which qualifies for any real purpose anyone who was born there should require; driver’s license, marriage license, etc. It’s called a “Proof of Live Birth” certificate.

Now it wasn’t until Taitz realized a black man was being elected to be the President of the United States that this law was even known about outside Hawaii. But since she got the attention of the media, more and more of Obama’s political opponents — all of them right-wing fringers — have taken to the stance of non-accusal accusations that Obama was actually born in Kenya. If that were true, Obama isn’t qualified to be POTUS because of the Constitutional requirement that they must be a natural-born US citizen.

And I am continually amazed by how little evidence it has taken to convince her little lemmings that he wasn’t born in Hawaii, and yet demand unequivocal evidence that he was. They’ve been presented with the Proof of Live Birth, they’ve been presented with archived copies of Barack’s birth announcement in the two newspapers of note, every state official in Hawaii has stepped up and said it is so. None of that is good enough.

Taitz has tried and failed on two separate occasions to bring suit against the federal government by representing soldiers who initially argued that they would not follow orders given by what they perceived was an illegal president. Threats of court martial and dishonorable discharges, and these people changed their tunes like a kid flipping through an iPod. Taitz herself earned the ire of a District Judge for continually bringing frivolous law suits and wasting the court’s time, and he slapped her with a $20,000 fine. She’s still fighting it.

But now a US Army Doctor, Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, has taken that final step off the edge of the cliff.

Formal court martial charges have been brought against Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, the Army doctor who believes President Obama may not be a natural born citizen, for failing to follow orders, the military said today.

Lakin was charged Thursday “with one specification of a violation of Article 87, Missing Movement and four specifications of a violation of Article 92 (three specifications of Failure to Obey a Lawful Order, and one Specification of Dereliction of Duty),” said Chuck Dasey, spokesman at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where Lakin is assigned.

The court martial is likely to raise the prominence of what is already a cause célèbre among Birther adherents.

Okay, this has now reached the level of insanity that I would normally reserve for the criminally stupid — rapists and serial killers. Dear Birthers, and most especially Lt. Col. Lakin: You’re fucking insane. Go seek mental help because there is no proof on this earth that will convince you of the fact that Barack Obama is a natural born United States citizen. It’s a fact. You cannot escape it because you’re a fucking lunatic. You are severely deluding yourself at this point to where no one will ever take you seriously about anything.

A typical example, set sometime in the not-too distant future:

“Terry said it’s not a good idea.”

“Yeah, well Terry didn’t believe that Obama was born in the US.”

“Oh, right…he’s a fucking idiot.”

Water is wet…sun is bright…Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Step away from the cliff and grow some goddamned common sense already.

And this is what I remind myself every time over the past few years that I’ve been reduced to screaming at walls over the seeming reckless abandon that my 14 year-old daughter takes towards her homework for school. It is almost magical the extents that she will go to avoid actually doing her work. And I have no doubt that my daughter is an exceptionally gifted and creative person because the highly-detailed excuses and patent lies that she comes up with that are meant to justify why her work wasn’t done are testament to her genius-level abilities. And I know for a fact that my mother, upon either reading this or listening to any number of my rants about this particular subject, is loving every minute of this. Because I did the exact same thing to her.

And therein lies the dilemma. I’m going to be 36 this June and I think I’ve got most of this responsibility crap figured out pretty well. When I was 14, I was blissfully and willfully ignorant of the nasty outside world and all it pitfalls. I remember clearly my mother speaking to me in exasperated tones of how I can have such creative abilities and not utilize them properly in my school studies. I wish I could shake the crap out of that kid because i can’t do it to my daughter.

Bill Cosby once famously spoke of the “brain damage” curse that parents put on their children, which has been passed on throughout the ages. In short: “I hope that when you have children they treat you exactly how you’ve treated me.” With all due respect to Dr. Cosby, there is no crime punishable by this level of madness. As much as my daughter is an endless supply of frustration and bewilderment to me (especially around report card season) it still cannot be allowed to be passed on to the next generation just a generational karmic corporal punishment. Christ, I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.

Maybe if I make this promise my kid will grow a healthy level of common sense and all will be right with the world?

Yeah, I know…keep dreaming…

If anyone needs me, I’ll be hiding in the basement.

But John McCain has topped them all. (Hat tip TPM)

“Maverick” is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. “I never considered myself a maverick,” he told me. “I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities.”

That may very well topple “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and “Read My Lips: No New Taxes” as the biggest fucking political gaffe in recorded history. And when you throw BFD Biden in the running, that’s certainly no small feat.

This man has spent the past decade building up his street cred as “The Uber Maverick”. He brought in Sarah Palin because she was a “Maverick”, too. They ran their entire 2008 campaign politicking on how wonderfully “mavericky” they were because it created the false impression that they were somehow different than the disastrous Bush Administration and bet the farm they could fool the American people and lost.

Now that he’s facing a hard-core right-wing primary opponent (who is, by the way, one of the ten dumbest human beings on the planet) who is actually making a decent showing against the one-time Republican standard-bearer for the office of President less than two years ago. But, to be fair, he only won that role by being the least detestable in the field of Republican candidates.

But I simply cannot understand why he is now trying to shed his Maverickiness. It certainly polls well for him with the coveted “undecided” voting block. And to lie so easily and blatantly, when anyone with a computer or even a half-baked memory can demonstrably prove that he indeed claimed to be “The Original Maverick“, is mind-boggling. I honestly don’t think McCain possesses the mental capacity to hold his office.

That said: If Republicans in Arizona end up choosing this half-baked right-wing nutjob that is opposing him, there’s a damn good chance the seat could turn blue in the general election. General elections don’t like fringe players, and this so-called Tea Party movement has dragged up the very bottom of the barrel. Put another way: Scott Brown didn’t win in Massachusetts by being an ultra-right candidate — he did so by being very middle-of-the-road. Arizona is much more red, but that doesn’t mean they want an ideologue, which is why McCain’s Maverickliciousness has played so well for so many years there.

And to steal from a commenter at TPM: “How’s that Mavericky thing working out for ya?”

Obama and Biden celebrate history

And to those who doubt the historical impact that this will have, realize that George W. Bush isn’t known for his attempt to privatize Social Security. I’d bet many of you barely remember it because it was such a colossal failure. He’s forever going to be known for his “Mission Accomplished” banner that was engulfed in anything but success in the war he started.

But I think the best summation of events comes from none other than Josh Marshall at TPM. His insight is nearly always right on the mark.

Today, when David Frum wrote that this was turning out to be the GOP’s Waterloo, he had two interlocking points — one focused on policy, another political.

The US has had several runs with major pieces of social legislation. And the record is that they don’t get repealed. They’re expanded and become embedded in the national political economy. That was what was at the heart of Bill Kristol’s famous (or infamous) memo on reform from 1994. Once Health Care reform is passed; the middle class will like it. And there will be no repealing or doing away with it. And its success would create a new generation of Democrats. That was his fear.

To that end, Frum’s policy point was, who cares if the Republicans take back Congress? Majorities come and go. But reform is permanent. For conservatives it’s a catastrophic development and if they’d actually been part of the dialog they probably could have gotten a bill much more to their liking. The second point is political, though he’s less clear in this case. Republicans, he says, are probably overestimating their chances this fall in any case.

To that last point I want to make a special note to watch the future ramifications of the Republicans’ decision to actively obstruct this legislation. Instead of putting forth a genuine effort to come together for the good of reforming a broken health care system, they instead banked everything on turning this into a political shell game with which they could reap the benefits of its failure. I know I’m called a cynic, but I’ve got nothing on this level of cynicism. And it’s all I could think about last night as I watched the final debate and the final votes. To the last Republican member, they flailed wildly, hoping upon hope that they could scare those few Democratic members who may at the last moment change their vote.

And then I saw a tweet from David Frum, who Josh linked above, who correctly noted that this all has and will continue to backfire on Republicans. It was at that point that I realized it was only the hyperpartisan who hadn’t yet realized it. Obama and Democrats invested the lion’s share of his overwhelming political capital that he had won in the 2008 election into this legislation. Don’t think for a moment that its success doesn’t mean they’ll win a great deal of it back. And the opposite is true as well; Republicans are going to ultimately end up losing more than they ever thought possible.

History will not remember the process, they’ll only remember the result. And though much of that process got extremely ugly on the part of the opposition just a day or two before the vote by protesters who called out racial and sexual denigrations towards members of congress, and held up signs threatening the use of violence if this bill passed, the result is what history books will tell.

That said: Yes. We. Can.

Now I tend to agree Chris Hayes of The Nation; I like it when journalists really sink their claws into an interviewee. Those in power must be questioned. That’s a given. And while confrontational, Mike Wallace was infamous for his “going for the jugular” style of interviewing. The problem is, of course, Bret Baier is decidedly not Mike Wallace. As pointed out by Think Progress, Baier’s interveiwing posture differs greatly when he’s dealing with a Republican president. Who led us into war under false pretenses. Took a huge national surplus and plunged into into a huge national debt. Violated the Constitution …ah, you get my point.

Baier is clearly motivated by right-wing politics. That would be okay if he, or anyone else at Fox News, would simply admit it. Fox News was and always will be a channel of propaganda. They have an agenda and they have zero qualms about forcing it down the throats of the American people. They practically revel in it. And the Orwellian doublethink they employ that justifies their actions by stating they’re only being the answer to a liberal media, and then subsequently denying any bias in their vast content is just mind-blowing. Scarier are the millions of viewers who believe it every last word.

To illustrate my point further, allow me to remind you of how Fox News treated Katie Couric’s interview or even Charlie Rose’s interview of Sarah Palin. You know, the one where she was unable to answer simple questions about how government works, the horrific policies of George W. Bush that she supported but couldn’t actually explain, or simply what magazines she read? The wingnuts out there thought that Couric and rose were being unfair. Yet I’m willing to bet they’re frothing at the mouth that anyone would dare question Baier’s constant rude interruptions of a sitting US President. I look forward to a similar treatment of Dick Cheney, but I think I’ll be ultimately disappointed. As usual.

Each year, a group of biology students at the Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, travels to the Natural History Museum in Washington to learn about a theory they dismiss as incorrect — Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The young “creationists” examined a model of the Morganucodon rat, believed to be the first and common ancestor of mammals that appeared some 210 million years ago.

Lauren Dunn, 19, a second-year biology student, was unimpressed.

“210 million years, that’s arbitrary. They put that time to make up for what they don’t know,” she said.

I find it ironic that a creationist, who believes the world is a mere few thousand years old based upon a friar adding up the ages of the characters in the Bible, would refer to scientifically tested dating methods as “arbitrary”. I wonder if she finds the metric system as “arbitrary”.

Its biology curriculum includes a course on “Young Earth Creationism”, which juxtaposes Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” with the Book of Genesis.

“In order to be the best creationist, you have to be the best evolutionist you can be,” said Marcus Ross, who teaches paleontology and says of Adam and Eve: “I feel they were real people, they were the first people.”

What I find interesting about this approach is that I, over the course of my life, have done the same thing with religion and ignorance, albeit without doing so purposefully. The goal of these truly gifted self-medicating ignorance peddlers is to find as many holes in Darwin’s theory of evolution as they can and exploit them as much as possible. Never mind Darwin himself was probably his own worst critic and figuratively hands these jokers the knife to stab him through his masterwork. And while evolutionary theory remains an object lesson in the scientific method, clearly demonstrating how one argument can be replaced by a better one, by doing so it remains the most thoroughly theory in history.

What frightens me about the Liberty University folks is that, despite literal mountains of published work on various facets of evolutionary science, both physical and psychological, they refuse to believe it because it doesn’t fit their extremely narrow interpretation of the human experience; because their god has been left out, it must be wrong.

And ultimately more worrisome is that these folks are planning on careers in medicine and biology. If there was a god, he’d put a stop to this complete and utter nonsense.

KING: Well what’s wrong with majority rule?

BACHMANN: Well because that’s not how the Senate works. The senate works with 60 votes and now what the President is promoting is a “nuclear option” which is 50 votes. So we should have an up or down vote, but it…

KING: But they’ve used that majority rules on the Bush tax cuts. It was 51 votes.

BACHMANN: Well the House uses straight majority rule, the Senate doesn’t. So what this would mean, Larry, is that the Senate has to break their own rules in order to pass the bill.

KING: And that’s wrong?

BACHMANN: Oh I think it is, sure.

Thank you Larry King for being as unbiased as possible so as not to call this woman a fucking liar on your TV show.

Let’s be clear here, because I think it needs special emphasis for our special needs viewers out there who vote against their own interests. US Government 101: The United States Senate runs on a majority rule basis. At least until 2008 it did. I know it’s been difficult to see that since the minority Republicans have invoked the Senate rule of the filibuster to block any and all legislation that makes this president look good, but it is still the case. Bachmann, in her appearance on Larry King Live, is one of two things:

1. Lying
2. Immeasurably stupid

Either option should be grounds for her dismissal from public office, but they’ll let any guano fueled gas bag hold office. That said, Michelle Bachmann is a clear illustration of everything that is wrong with congress. I know she isn’t the only example of this, but she is clearly the front runner in the CrazyStupid Congressional Moron Marathon. She knows nothing of actual public service and instead devotes 100% of her time and energy being nakedly partisan for the pure sake of partisanship. She devotes nothing for the betterment of her country, let alone her constituents. She is an awful person who really should retire immediately, give up all her worldly possessions to the poor and live on the streets of Calcutta for the rest of her life. No joke. She is a waste of taxpayer money and energy.

So, yeah, Bachmann. Don’t like her. I find her embarrassing not only to my state but also my country. I wouldn’t waste precious saliva to spit on her. Moving on…

But what I find funny in the above quote is that Larry tries to point out how hypocritical she’s being by stating that Budget Reconciliation is something Republicans used happily when it came to Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Not to be deterred, Michelle effectively ignored the cold fact and continued lying. To me this points out how utterly desperate the congressional Republicans have become. It’s clear that they’ve failed to stop Health Care Reform. It’s passed both chambers of congress. All it takes is for the House to vote in favor of the Senate version. That’s gonna be a done deal. All Republicans have left is to scare the living shit out of the American people and hope to get them into enough of a fever so as to possibly change the minds of a few spineless Democrats in the House to NOT vote for the Senate version. And that’s all they’ve got.

What you’re seeing from Bachmann is going to continue. And it’s really, really sad. Rather than offering a comprehensive alternative to Democratic proposals, Republicans wanted to play politics in the hopes Health Care Reform would get buried in their patented bullshit sophistry. It didn’t. So now they’re left with the historical badge of “We Fought Progress” which they proudly share with 1960s Dixiecrats who tried to stop basic civil rights. Their mothers would be so proud.