Please Don't Eff This Up (Any more than you have to)

A quick couple requests of some top Democrats: Harry Reid would you for once in your life please stop being such an ineffectual wussie. Barack Obama would you please tell the Republicans to either get on board or go jump off a damn cliff already. Get this DONE and get it done THIS MONTH.

That is all.

Nostalgia

Why do things always seem better after you are 10 years removed from the situation? Music, relationships, life in general...all seem so much better once they are all relegated to the cobwebbed section of your mind. Memory has a way of erasing the negative and accentuating the positive. If only the mind would allow things to look so shiny/happy when you are actually living in the moment. Anyway, I always wondered why when I hear a song that brings me back a decade or more, I get this warm, fuzzy feeling when I know damn well I had just as many problems and worries (and probably more) than I do now. At least I can tell myself I am older and wiser than I was back in the day. So here is Lyte and Missy taking me back to the '90s groove. Ahh the 1990s, things were soooo much better then. Yeah right! Well actually the music was MUCH better than the crap passing for entertainment these days. That much no one can argue with!

Why Can't We be "Too Big to Fail"?

Banks get bailed out, people get kicked out. That's a lesson I learned during the financial crisis of the past year. I have seen families in my town go through the humiliation of having their furniture carried out and piled near the curb in the rain. Some of them were kicked out the day before Thanksgiving last year. The scene has been repeated ad nauseum and continues to this day, while 2 trillion dollars of our tax money is largely unaccounted for. This was money given to the banks by their buddies, in our name, to not only help the biggest (read greediest) of them stay solvent, but also to ostensibly give loans to people who need them. The only chunk of that 2 trillion that has resurfaced has been in the form of big bonuses for Wall Street execs! What a surprise! Did we truly expect anything less, given the track record of these people who, thanks to the revolving door between big business and government, are all intimately interconnected?

Meanwhile, the foreclosures continue with no end in sight. Disappointingly, but not really unexpectedly, the policies of the current administration are all too similar to Bush and Clinton before, which is why it is so laughable and frustrating to hear the wingnuts call President Obama a socialist. Here's the socialism he is presiding over: The ill-advised speculative risks of large financial corporations are socialized, while the ill-advised financial decisions of the underclass are paid in full. And the cost to them includes the emotional trauma of the innocents; children whose lives are disrupted. How do you even put a price on that?

If you are in or near Chicago this weekend, let the bankers know you are paying attention.

Please make this STOPPPPPPP

Some of you may have seen this story. It goes to the heart of my problem with the fashion industry, i.e., their continuing attacks against women and girls' self-image by pushing these unreal (literally) photos of glamorous stick figure-women. My question here is...who really thinks the feminine ideal should be that of a prepubescent boy? Besides child molesters. No heterosexual man would find a bony ass attractive (unless they are hung like a fruit fly, but I digress). Real men want curves, especially in the hips and butt area! I apologize in advance if this sounds homophobic or anti-caucasian, but I think the problem comes from two places...old white women and gay men. They are the two demographics that dominate the fashion industry here and in Europe and they are the ones imposing these ideas of the feminine ideal on the rest of us. These old Salukis (google it) hang out at the gym and starve themselves to maintain as flat an ass as possible and they expect women of child bearing age to look just as dried up and barren as they do. Gay men like the young, svelte, narrow-hipped boy look. So young women are brainwashed to the point of anorexia and bulimia to meet these standards. I've had enough of this bullshit! Bring back real women models with butts and breasts NOOOOOWWW!!

Their Money or Your Life

The United States is the laughingstock of the world these days, thanks to the health insurance companies that have thoroughly subjugated our democracy. The changes that the large majority of people want are being drowned out by a lunatic fringe that represents about 3 percent of the population. Meanwhile, thousands of people die every year thanks to the for-profit industry that dominates health care in this country. This state of affairs is nothing short of domestic terrorism, and it is supported by some Democrats and virtually all Republicans, who are being showered with one million dollars a day to keep things exactly the way they are. Washington, D.C. has proven itself again as nothing more than the world's largest whorehouse. Then there is the wonderful mainstream media, which is conglomerated with the same insurance companies that brought us this horror show. Which explains why they don't ask one obvious question: Why can we have trillion dollar wars, yet we can't have single payer or the public option? Why don't we hear anything about the deficit when the next 100 billion dollars leaves the treasury for Iraq and Afghanistan? No, we only hear about it when it comes to actually saving people's lives rather than killing them. What a disgusting joke of a civilization we have allowed ourselves to become!

The Real Swine Flu: Why Capitalism Must be Eradicated From the Face of the Earth

Here's the state of the nation on May Day 2009: the financial terrorists that ruined the global economy still aren't in jail. In fact, not only are the immune from criminal prosecution, they have been rewarded. With our money. Billions of dollars of our money. The so-called socialists in our government gave it to them. It seems hard to believe, until you realize how things work here. While the less fortunate (lower class schmucks) die from lack of adequate health care, the power brokers in the world of finance own both political parties and all the branches and of our federal government and get to be bailed out on our trillions of dimes. It's a good thing most people aren't paying attention or there just might be a real revolution here. We can always blame the Mexicans for spreading some scary virus or whatever other diversion CNN is trumpeting. It helps to get our minds off our retirement/college funds being wiped out and our home foreclosed on.

April is National Shooting Spree Month: Have you hugged your Assault Weapon lately?

"I'm not afraid of Al Queda, I'm afraid of Al Cracka"

~ Chris Rock

Ahhh Springtime, the time of flower blossoms, birds singing...and violent, bloody, bullet-riddled rampages. Why is it that a time of year known for the renewal and promise of life is also the time most likely to result in mass murders? The sad litany of place names includes Waco, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, and about a dozen more places have been added so far this month. The problem appears to be that we we have a lot of guns and a lot of crazy people, and we tend to allow that combination to occur more often than most places on earth. But it's more than just crazy people, it's a societal ill that is borne out especially harshly this year. With the economy tanking, the alienation and contradictions of a very cold system of competition is intensified. Not only has the safety net for the lowest 98 percent of the economic order been torn away in the last 30 years of bipartisan attacks on us native working schmucks, but the fallout from the loan scams have added to the ferment. Things get bleaker each Spring it seems as the greedfest of Wall Street is relied upon by our government to drive the economy. As long as that remains the case, and there is NO sign of it changing anytime soon, the Easter Bunny will need to wear kevlar.

Another scary development is the recent gun buying binge of right wing lunatics. These are the people that are genuinely afraid that Obama is a Muslim who will outlaw the Jesus-declared right to own a machine gun, and then ship them off to concentration camps where their women flowers will be pollinated by swarthy Muhammadians or some such outrage. So they stock up on ammo and semi-automatic weaponry. The good news is that statistically they are much more likely to accidentally kill themselves than purposefully kill anyone else, but the bad news is that they remain a danger to innocent family members and to you and I. If only the authors of the Second Amendment could have foreseen these nutjobs and edited the document to read:

A well regulated Militia*, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

* a well regulated Militia does NOT refer to some beer-swilling yahoo with his car up on blocks and an old washing machine on his front porch who wants an assault rifle because he thinks he saw a black "heldicopter" watching him!