The Klingons Are Coming!

Blue sky? I’ve forgotten what that looks like.

@¡Andrew!: Gar! I’m in the midst of some sort of HTML OCD thing. I will get this damned song formatted correctly! (Yes, I am that bored.)

I was blue, just as blue as I could be
Ev’ry day was a cloudy day for me
Then good luck came a-knocking at my door
Skies were gray but they’re not gray anymore

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see

Bluebirds
Singing a song
Nothing but bluebirds
All day long

Never saw the sun shining so bright
Never saw things going so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you’re in love, my how they fly

Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on

[2]
I should care if the wind blows east or west
I should fret if the worst looks like the best
I should mind if they say it can’t be true
I should smile, that’s exactly what I do

-Irving Berlin

Pfft. Fuck it. I still love this song.

Did somebody have a “happy ending”, as ’twere?

If you wake up during the night and see a brilliant blue light, don’t look at it. Just saying.

5-2 lead for Los Gigantes over Los Arbustos de Dallas!!

8-2 SF. Holy Crap!

@SanFranLefty: Ugh. That looks like DERP show shoe polish on his beard. My cousin did that once. And then he started to perspire, and well, you know. It was pretty gross.

ADD: Seriously. That beard is weirding me out. I might have to pull out the big guns…

@redmanlaw: And Lincecum got a hit and on to first! When’s the last time a starting pitcher did that?

@JNOV: I think he’s using the Ronald Reagan approved Grecian formula. The man is a fucking trip.

@JNOV: I think dudes named Brian Wilson are just crazy.

@redmanlaw: Oh, his whole story is just so fucking sad. Not quite Syd Barrett sad. Or Killer Kane sad. But sad.

But hey, Tony Bennett opened up with “I Left My Heart”

and I’m liking the kind of hot dude from Univision who they have on Fox tonight.

The fireworks are cool, too!

@JNOV: Please, WTF are you Yoo?

@JNOV: Same here. I don’t think I’ll be able to look at lefty for a while.

@SanFranLefty: Yoo’s on first?

Just got back from teaching my first cc class on crimlaw. Oy. I don’t think I can speak for two straight hours about any topic. I may have to start looking up L&O clips on YouTube for filler.

I was hoping to find some comical posts about substantive issues like the wikileaks about US complicity in Iraqi torture, the UN demand that we finally fulfill our treaty obligations regarding the Convention Against Torture, the latest revelations from the Brits about their hand in all of this, or at least the passionate arguments for voting a Democratic ticket to begin to correct these things (that would be worth a laugh!) and such, but um, not finding much.

Par for the course, as when I speak with my quasi-liberal friends about these matters their eyes seem to glaze over or at most they shrug about the current administration’s complicity in these atrocities. After all, we voted for Change and Hope a couple of years ago. Duty done. It’s the Republicans who are obstructing the righteous agenda to restore US America to some mythical virtue of the past.

Nojo and Everyone, that is not meant as an indictment of posters and commentators here. I realize the unrelenting stream of bad news about how entirely fucked up everything is must get to one, to the extent that one must take a few weeks off from addressing the reality and simply wallow in the sole refuge politics can now provide us: an entertainment, somewhat like the Roman circuses in the good ole’ days.

Anyway, it must be thoroughly exhausting to maintain this blog.

Meanwhile, I’m holding my mail-in ballot and seriously weighing the time spent filling it out against the time I might spend more productively masturbating to internet porn.

Perhaps I’ll mail in my ballot without any bubbles blackened, the pages glued together by a sincere and patriotic donation of santorum.

@PedonatorUSA: Careful darling, don’t break your precious little neck falling off that oh-so-very high horse.

Feel free to stick around here for a little while for the ebbs and flows of sanity, and then try again to judge us for not being appropriately outraged on a dime when you decide to swing by.

ADD: OMFG, the Millennial Development Goals, where are they?!?!?

I posted elsewhere that the Brits have changed their camouflage pattern in Afghanistan. “The Man Who Would Be King” look is pretty much over.

We Cover The World.

@PedonatorUSA:

I’d say everyone here is painfully aware of all of those issues and more, but there’s not really anything that we can do about it. Psychologists call it “learned helplessness.” Personally, I deeply resented voting this year since the choices were all so shitty, but I did it anyway.

And as far as the general public’s sudden suicidal embrace of the RepubliKKKans, I can’t really blame them. Most people couldn’t articulate the increasingly subtle differences between the Repubs and Dems at gunpoint, let alone at the ballot box. It’s a cry for help, an act of sheer desperation. Since neither party has the political will to formulate real solutions to the massive structural imbalances and colossal clusterfucks designed into our economic and political systems that are causing the middle class to implode, I expect that the Demons could be poised for huge gains in two to four years after the rePukes inevitable crash and burn. Dying is easy, snark is hard as all hayell.

“Sure. Let’s all revolt.”
-Margaret Foster, the Old Lush
9 to 5

And anyway, this isn’t a mass market political blog. It’s evolved into an intimate little corner of the webz for us to chat about anything and everything, TMI included of course, especially for those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to meet IRL. Deep down, we all need affirmation, affection and acceptance, and the real gift here is knowing that there are others out there like us, that we’re not crayzee, it’s the world that’s mad-mad-mad and other people pretend that it’s sane.

@SanFranLefty: I don’t have a horse to sit on, much less to fall off of.

Sorry if that came off more holier-than-thou rather than utterly defeated at the prospects of any rational discourse making it into the “mainstream” discussion. That truly is not my intent.

Stinque has been a forum for much more enlightened discourse than anyone can find almost anywhere else, mixed in with the fun and games.

I’m just tired of discussions with people who generally agree with my “liberal” politics but can’t seem to muster much outrage at the continued atrocities under the current administration and frankly can’t be bothered with trivial concerns like human rights when something as important as the ECONOMY accelerated redistribution of wealth from the masses to the few is the only possible issue worthy of attention.

And yes, I know this message is diluted by my own relative economic / race / gender privilege.

I’m just wondering, when if ever are economically privileged, mostly lily-white “progressives” going to muster the level of outrage the Teabaggers so effortlessly tapped into were co-opted into? When are the likes of Barbara Streisand and David Geffen going to step up and seriously fund “grassroots” “movements” for progressive social change? I just don’t see it happening.

@¡Andrew!: Since neither party has the political will to formulate real solutions to the massive structural imbalances and colossal clusterfucks

That’s exactly it, I don’t think either party would ever challenge those imbalances and that clusterfuck: because it serves the (two-)party system so well.

The learned helplessness theory would be attractive if it weren’t for the willful, proud ignorance and supreme sense of US American exceptional entitlement of so much of the population.

@¡Andrew!: Personally, I deeply resented voting this year

And that really says it all. We deeply resent exercising the most basic right we have as citizens in a “democracy”. I surely do. The act of voting has become offensive, or at least scatological.

Where are the fucking torches and pitchforks (except from the Teabaggers)?

@PedonatorUSA: Actually, that would be NRO. I can’t compete with professional comedians.

@PedonatorUSA: So vote Green. I’ll be giving my vote to nutty ol’ Cynthia Mc Kinney in 2012, since I can’t violate my personal integrity by voting for Bammerz again.

Hey! Just because I’m going to be in SoCal next week doesn’t mean I’m a Klingon…

@PedonatorUSA: Our establishment media’s job is to propagandize, confuse, and obfuscate, so we can forget about it playing any role in an intelligent discourse. That’s why there’s basically zero representation of true leftist viewpoints, and our talkshows run the gamut from centre-right all the way to neo-nutcase fringe psychopaths. It’s like those stories from the old Soviet Union, in which people had to read between the lines from state-run media to figure out what’s really going on, except OMFG it CAN HAS happened here.

There’s plenty of people who’re mad as all gitout for many legitimate reasons, but Big Media lies ‘n sez they’re all old, dumb, racist, cream-cheese-coloured people who rave about the gummit being run by communoislamofascists while they’re on the way to the bank to cash their SSDI checks.

Anyhoozle, I’m tired and rambling, and I’ve got another mid-term tomorrow. Wake me when it’s time for buttseXXX.

@nojo: Oh yes, you can compete. Maybe not on tv(?), but I’d love to see an exchange between you and Jon Stewart or Keith O via text email posted online. Or on tv.

@¡Andrew!: I do vote Green. Or, I have in the past. And for real I’d like to see someone like Cynthia McKinney in the WH as opposed to the corporate tool we have there now. Despite the crazy depicted in the MSM about her, she has some grasp on the real issues we have to deal with post-haste.

If I vote in 2012, it will definitely not be for Obama. I didn’t expect much from him, but his active disdain for civil liberties alone makes me discount him as a possible better/vs/evil.

@¡Andrew!: Funny line from last week’s The Economist – Chinese press freedom advocates say that Karl Marx could not publish The Communist Manifesto under government restrictions there.

@PedonatorUSA: You guys prolly saw that thing in Common Dreams about how the cost of running for office is so high that we basically have both parties serving corporate interests. Also reported elsewhere: the health insurance industry worked with the Dems to get more people to buy insurance and will now work with the Repugs to ensure the regs aren’t too onerous. I’m still voting straight Democratic this year. The bad guys are just too ugly to even think about letting them get in.

Just nailed a mouse hiding behind my bongo drums under my desk. He did not suffer.

@RML: Did you use one of your many guns or (as I suspect) the heel of your shoe?

@SanFranLefty: I pulled the bongos out and slid a big heavy book on the tile into the inside corner of the desk, which got the mouse. The scope on my pellet rifle is a piece of shit and I would probably take out a window, piece of art, or the TV with a ricochet off the tiled floors.

Just saw another one. It’s getting cold and they’re moving in. The dogs do not care to hunt mice and we can’t have cats because others are allergic.

@redmanlaw: You guys prolly saw that thing in Common Dreams about how the cost of running for office is so high that we basically have both parties serving corporate interests.

No, I didn’t see that. Haven’t frequented Common Dreams for a long time, though maybe I will again. But it doesn’t take an article about the cost of running for office to tell me that basic truth.

“get more people to buy insurance”? Are you fucking kidding me? How much does it cost for someone not on employer-sponsored health-care to buy insurance? 25% of their net income? When many are paying close to 50% of their net income on the fucking rent? What are they supposed to eat? Overpriced meds sponsored by Plan D, which the Obama administration refused to re-negotiate?

This is supposed to be a net gain for the common folk?

Maybe, maybe, maybe it will work out to be a net benefit for people based on the overall population of US America. I will wait to see and if that is the case, well then good.

It still represents a slimy negotiation with the health-care INDUSTRY to force millions into their gaping maw of profit-driven “care” with almost nothing, if anything?, done to reduce the rapacious drive for increasing profits from an enterprise most other modern nations regard as a basic social service.

I do not see this as a proud accomplishment for Obama, his administration, or the Democrats in general.

I don’t see how any rational person could question that both parties are entirely enthralled to corporate interests. The Republicans are more overt about it, and the Democrats pay lip service to looking after the common interest (to get votes from the part of the population that wants to believe there is a choice), but in the end we are all served up on the Oligarchs’ BBQ.

We DO have both parties, not basically but entirely, serving corporate interests.

@PedonatorUSA: Sorry, I’m too busy securing my local food sources and stockpiling for the coming apocalypse. You might try the Onion, though. They sum it up pretty well.

@Mistress Cynica: Yes, the toughest financial regulation package since, um, the Reagan years, when the financial industry regulations were so heinous that Clinton had to undo them.

And then the same economic geniuses had to further the hurt. Into the GWB regime and now into the Obama regime.

Because, rewarding the economic Titans who oversaw the greatest redistribution of wealth from the many to the few is the only logical strategy for dealing with an economic recession incomparable to anything since the Great Depression.

But securing local food sources is a good thing in any economic situation. I commend you for that, it’s probably more than I’ve done except I have an awesome pantry and a copy of Apocalypse Chow.

@PedonatorUSA: Jon Stewart does his homework. I barely have time to skim Memeorandum.

And Keef, well, we did have our exchange. He ran our BozoGate billboard.

But I don’t know what I’d have to say to him. I’d much rather interview Rachel.

@redmanlaw: Your mouse story reminds me of my grandmother (who grew up in Nebraska) saying that the only real use she ever got from taking Latin was that she used her Latin grammar book to kill a rattlesnake.

@PedonatorUSA: My insurance is $8,200 a year. What scares me most is long-term costs if I’m in a bed drooling down my nightie.

The redistribution of wealth is global. Here in the US the banksters have found a way to globalize debt. Debt is how banks make profit. We have exported debt everywhere. If you think it’s bad here try Iceland.

We would be mad not to vote or to vote Republican. If we think this is bad it can get much much worse. Teabagger ‘anger’ is easy to manufacture. For the marginalized anger is all they have.I was listening to Clinton on NPR saying very interesting things about what’s going on.

I have to run for the bus to go to NYC for Musical Theatre.

@PedonatorUSA: I think many of us are finding the choice is that between the proverbial South Park approved douche and turd sandwich.

In Georgia, our main choices are between Nathan Deal, Rethuglicon consistently rated the most corrupt member of Congress and for whom I wouldn’t be surprised if he appears before a grand jury soon over many, many things, and our former (and the last) Democratic governor, Roy Barnes (the libertarian is not included here because honestly he won’t get beyond 5% of the vote. They are also the only parties who have reached the voting percentage threshold to have guaranteed places on the ballot thanks to our restrictive voting laws here established by the Demoncrats when they controlled everything here).

The sad thing is that ‘ol Roy, for as well meaning as he is, is running to the right (I think because he has to in this state) and is following the GOP line of wanting an Arizona style anti-brown-people law, and is also railing against health care reform. He also is anti-gay marriage and has kept silent on civil unions.

We have no good choices in many parts of the country, not the least of which is here, because the Democrats are trying to keel over to the most insane elements of our society who want virtual anarchy rather than some semblance of government. Those elements do not represent the majority of this country but get the most attention because they scream the most and make for the easiest news peg for our lazy national lamestream media.

The only good choice I have is my Congressman, John Lewis (D-Sanity) and I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that we at least have one sane person in the Georgia Congressional delegation that won’t be lampooned for saying Guam will capsize or are the three DINOS representing the dumbest parts of this state — Jim Marshall, John Barrow and Sanford Bishop.

I am currently pissed off at my fellow homosexuals who are trying to shame fellow gheyz into voting and will automatically point some of the blame towards us if the Demonrats lose. Yes, I will vote D because it is the best possible option. But I really fucking resent being told that I have to vote because if I don’t it will be all my fault for having the Great Pumpkin as the Speaker of the House.

@PedonatorUSA: I’m hearing you, Pedo. Myself, I blame our current state of affairs on the fact that Hopey-Changey refused to investigate and indict members of the Bush maladministration for war and domestic crimes. When you abandon the rule of law, all bets are off.

in fairness to hopey, when he was on with jon, everytime he said one of his many catch phrases he added, “BUT” which we all know means “everything i said before the BUT is not true”
YES WE CAN, BUT……..
he’s an honest liar. and i for one am not finished giving him a chance, though i smirked through his campaign. these are politicians people!
jeesh. it’s what makes them so much fun to mock! what is al franken doing? he was my hopey changey. eaten by the machine.

in health care:
when i was screaming in the ER of New York Hospital, i informed them i had no insurance. they said, “oh that’s all right sweetie” it seems if you show up at a teaching hospital, they won’t turn you away or garnish your bank account. who knew?

where’s prommie? i have his answer. the names are fictitious in my book, but the people so thinly veiled it hardly matters. so it will be published by george elliot or posthumously. no worries. also, you dont need to keep me from the crops on the ark. i’m a master gardner and know the prcise hour the stalks should be cut down for drying. this is very exciting–harvest. we’re cutting them down daily now, and i intend to stay stoned til sarah and christine go away. they frighten me into feeling secure about holding other passports. just wait ti 2012..mark me: she’ll be a presidential candidate. save your horror.

i’m a nervous wreck this a.m. Bella gets spayed at 9. wish us luck.

@Benedick:
well lucky you. i would gladly pay 8 grand not to have to drool in israel.
they may shut you up in the ER for free, but you can’t go upstairs.
it’s like last call at the bar:
“you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here”