You want the truth, Senator Leahy?

Here’s some truth for you:

Liberty itself has been assaulted, democracy itself has been ravaged, an entire nation has been brutalized by those treacherous BushCo criminals you want to spend some quality truth and reconciliation time with.  But there can be no reconciliation, there can be no forgiveness for what they’ve done, the damage they’ve inflicted is incalculable, the lives they’ve destroyed cannot be given back.  They are obscenities in suits, they are treasonous to the core, they hijacked the government of the greatest democracy on earth and turned it into a wasteland of lawlessness, betrayal, corruption, and deceit.  

Tell them what America stands for, Senator Leahy.  Tell them who we are, show them what justice looks like.  

I’ve been doing some deep thinking, and was going to post three essays today featuring my deep thoughts about the economic crisis, the banking crisis, and the global warming crisis, but the deeper I thought about these deep issues and the deep impact they are having, the deeper I sank into deep crisis fatigue.  So I took a deep break, and realized that except for Norm Coleman and possibly John Cornyn, no one has ever had deeper thoughts about deep issues than Jack Handey . . .

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.

I hope that after I die, people will say of me: “That guy sure owed me a lot of money.”

If you’re a young Mafia gangster out on your first date, I bet it’s real embarrassing if someone tries to kill you.

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”

I have the deepest respect for Jack Handey, but I think it’s more likely God is crying because of all the crap Evangelical Christianists do.  They should listen to Jack Handey.  We all should, after all, he tried to warn us about Wall Street bankers.  When they die, we’ll say, “Those guys sure owe us a lot of money.”  And long after they’re dead, our great grandchildren will say, “Those guys still owe us a lot of money.”  Jack Handey’s deep thoughts encompass more issues than one might think at first glance. Take Daily Kos, for example.   It’s like ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.  

Everyone gets everything he wants.   I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.  It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.  

Your mission is to proceed up the Wasilla River, pick up the trail of returned designer clothes, follow it and learn what you can along the way.  When you find Sarah Palin, infiltrate her team by whatever means available and terminate her political future.

Terminate her political future???

She’s up there in Alaska operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any rational human conduct.  She’s still in office commanding the Alaska National Guard, she’s stark raving mad, but she’s going to run for president in 2012 anyway.

I mentioned the turkey beheading incident and suggested that Palin’s been terminating her political future at a pretty good clip all by herself, so why send me up there?  But they wouldn’t take no for an answer.    

I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn’t even know it yet.  Palin was out there somewhere, still ranting about Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, still raving about liberal media treachery, descending into madness hundreds of Bridge to Nowhere miles from here.

I looked out the window.  Juneau . . . shit, I’m still only in Juneau.  I braced myself for the harrowing journey ahead, a journey that would snake through Alaska like a frozen circuit cable–plugged straight into . . .

In Growing Anger in the Heartland, David Sirota writes:

A few months ago I appeared on Fox News and was told by “anchor” (hereby “cartoon character”) Greg Jarrett that “historians agree” that the New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression.  It was a statement so factually inaccurate that it approached insanity.  

Approached insanity?   Countless Friedman Units of full moons have come and gone since Republicans and their propagandists in the corporate media approached insanity.  They approached it long ago.  They went past it like it was standing still and have plunged into uncharted realms of lunacy so surreal and distant from human experience that psychologists can’t even begin to describe what the fuck is going on inside their thick skulls.

Sirota discussed Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero’s recent interview on FOX and observed that Bernero:

represents the boiling anger that’s roiling the country, and made a point that needs to be hammered over and over and over again over the din of Fox News cartoon characters–how can anyone with a straight face demand blue-collar workers take huge pay and benefit cuts at a time those workers’ tax dollars are subsidizing bonuses on Wall Street?  Part of the answer is that we live in a country whose ruling class is deeply insane.  Hardly a day goes by when you don’t see sociopathy packaged as Serious Opinion.

A typical example of this is Chase CEO John Dimon, who derided homeowners who are getting foreclosed on and declared “we should teach the American people, you’re supposed to meet your obligations, not run from them.”

I feel obligated to tell that highly paid hypocrite to shut the fuck up.  I also feel obligated to update him on the economic catastrophe he and his CEO friends on Wall Street are responsible for . . .  

In a Bill Moyers interview with Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF and now a Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Johnson expressed a pessimistic view of those empowered to lead us out of this economic crisis.  

Jane Hamsher at FDL explains:

Johnson isn’t for “nationalization” per se, he’s for “scaled up FDIC intervention,” breaking down the “oligarchy” by pitting one faction against the other.  Based on his analysis of who is holding the financial keys at the moment, he fundamentally believes that the people in charge of determining the outcome of the situation have a vested interest in not standing up to the banking interests and doing the things that need to be done.  And that is not a comforting thought.

No.  It’s not a comforting thought.  There’s no comfort in knowing that Captain Geithner seems intent upon ramming into the same iceberg Captain Paulson rammed into, there’s no comfort in knowing only the elites will get to board the lifeboats, there’s no comfort in being trapped below decks in steerage class while all of this iceberg ramming is going on.  

I was quite young when I had my first sexual experience.  It began at 9:45 am and ended rather abruptly, but relatively successfully at 9:49 am.  Central Standard Time.  On the morning of December 25, 1969.  The bringer of that brief but memorable Christmas morning gift was a covertly adventurous “older woman” of 18 who lived next door, and was admired by mothers in the neighborhood as a “nice girl” who had no interest in “that hippie music” so many of their daughters listened to when they weren’t busy “sassing their parents”.    

Unlike many first timers back then, who discovered paradise by the dashboard lights, I discovered paradise by the Christmas tree lights.  I was concerned that my parents would come home earlier than expected from exchanging gifts at my aunt and uncle’s and catch us, but the version of paradise I was experiencing would at least have enabled me to wag my finger at them and say “I did not have sex with that woman.”      

I wasn’t concerned about my parents returning early for very long though, my attention focused rather quickly on the gifts being exchanged where I was, not where they were. Since that Christmas morning in 1969, I’ve found love and lost it, found it again and lost it again, but losing love the first time is so heartbreaking.  Breathing the fire of rejection is no fun at all, but we get used to it.  We have no choice.  This world is filled with dark and lonely backstreets, where no one cares, where people just use each other, where love is all too often filled with defeat.  But love is always worth seeking.  It’s worth seeking no matter how elusive it is, no matter how many years have come and gone, no matter how many times you’ve had to overcome defeat . . .        

Blogging is conducted through cyberspace here in the 21st Century, we type on keyboards, we read each other’s words on computer screens.  The technology enabling us to engage in this form of communication is new, but what we’re doing when we blog isn’t new, it’s as old as civilization–we’re talking to one another just as people did thousands of years ago, we’re sharing our thoughts, communicating about what matters, reaching for the kind of future we hope to see.  We don’t want history to keep repeating itself, there’s been too much war, too much killing, too much misery.  

As global war and genocide took the lives of 50 million people only three generations ago, a young girl expressed her hopes for the future in a diary.  Anne Frank didn’t know her words would be ultimately be read by millions of people, but they have been and will be for as long as human civilization exists.  The most brutal and inhuman regime ever to darken the pages of history killed her in Bergen-Belsen, but it could not silence her.  

What was Anne Frank doing?

She was blogging the future.

On Morning Joe recently, host Joe Scarborough shocked the entire Netroots when he confessed, “Perhaps we don’t know what we’re talking about.”  For the first time in his long career of right wing hackery in Congress and on television, Scarborough almost told the truth . . .

Joe . . . Joe  . . . Joe . . . you were SO close!   Just one word away!  

The CEO’s who control the top institutions in our banking and finance system are a clear and present danger to the survival of the United States.  The sooner President Obama figures that out and acts accordingly, the sooner we’ll be able to start formulating rational solutions to the banking crisis and start digging ourselves out of this hellhole they’ve put us all in.

Unfortunately, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is not part of the solution, he’s part of the problem.  

Robert L. Borosage, Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future:

Faced with the failure of the Paulson-Bernanke banking bailout, the Obama administration has decided to double down. The new plan, described in broad outline by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Tuesday, antes up another $1.5 trillion or more to keep the banks afloat. But it won’t convince many that they are seaworthy.

The plan isn’t likely to get the administration where it needs to go for two simple reasons. It is wrong about where we are starting from. And it is wrong about where we’re going to. If you don’t know where you are and don’t know where you are going, it is very hard to get there.

The plan won’t admit where we are: the major banks in the US are insolvent.

The plan won’t get us where we need to go: we need to restructure – and downsize – our financial sector.

There is disagreement between historians and biblical scholars regarding who was the first conservative.  Some biblical scholars contend that the first conservative was Cain, because spying on Abel, murdering him, lying about it, ignoring God’s subpoena to testify, and stonewalling for as long as he could while posturing as a victim of unjust accusations are the earliest exhibitions of conservative behavior recorded in the Bible.  Consequently, they believe they have a solid basis upon which to conclude that Cain was the first conservative.  They also contend that Cain’s words, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was the first conservative talking point, the first expression of conservative economic policy, and as far as can be determined through biblical scholarship, was the first veiled assertion that anything even remotely resembling concern and empathy for another man was a sure sign of latent homosexuality.