Protection from force and fraud.

I have said this before, but I realize I have skipped some details. When I actually was a fresh faced lad, I was registered as Libertarian. This means that in 1976 when I voted for the first time, I cast my vote for Roger McBride, the Libertarian candidate, instead of for the eventual winner Jimmy Carter.

I thought the Democratic Party was too soft on Nixon's worst offenses. If we had any Democratic senators today with the cojones of Frank Church, it would be a dream come true.

I went to a Libertarian meeting, and that one exposure soured me on the party. I had read some of the literature and I understood the first principle of libertarianism at the time, which was that government should protect the people from force and fraud. Hard core libertarians believe in police, prison guards and soldiers as valuable government employees and everyone else is just taking up space. I was upset about illegal wiretaps and the war on drugs. There were some people in the room who could get just as worked up by the idea of the government running the post office. I asked about environmental protections. I was nearly alone in the room in considering the loss or degradation of our common needs, like clean water and air, as force. I didn't go back.

Roger MacBride wasn't an idiot. Seeing that the Libertarian Party was going nowhere, he rejoined the Republican Party in 1983 to form the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group devoted to promoting libertarian ideas inside the Republican party.

Unfortunately, MacBride the non-idiot would never have a significant fraction of the influence of the idiot Ronald Reagan, lionized beyond all recognition. I will grant you that George W. Bush may be duller than Reagan and Reagan did not get us into two wars he did not know how to end, but because Bush's legacy is under such a cloud, I still rank Reagan as the worst president of my lifetime.

George W. Bush is the turd the Republicans flushed. Ronald Reagan is the turd they worship.

Avuncular, well practiced in front of the cameras, Reagan could deliver a line, I will give him that. One of his most revered witticisms is "These are the the nine scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

He repeated this many times at many campaign stops.

As a former Libertarian and past, present and future logician, I could figure out what this really meant.

Government is force and fraud.

Cops, firefighters, teachers, janitors, nurses, construction workers... all just a bunch of parasites that need to be eradicated.

This is the logical conclusion of what Saint Ronnie said, and the Republican Party at the local, state and federal level are following that statement without question today, in the executive, legislative and - possibly most frighteningly - judicial branches around the country.

The worst ideas of the ugly, cancer-ridden cult leader Ayn Rand have become the unquestioned marching orders of one of the two parties in the alleged greatest experiment in democracy.

Some people might view this as class warfare.

To them I say, "Fucking A."

Better class warfare than class genocide. We can't match their money, but as it stands right now, we have a hell of a lot more ballots than they do. We have to use them every chance we get. Until the conservative movement has a better idea than "Fuck you, I've got mine", they deserve the undying enmity of everyone who works for a living.

Here endeth the lesson.

California tries to enter the 20th Century. The Republican Party tries to hold them back.

It's easy to think that America no longer produces oil, but the fact is we just consume massively more than we produce. We have been in this situation since the 1970s.

According to several sources on the Internet, California is the only oil producing state in the union that does not charge the oil companies for extracting oil out of our land. This is not a Red State/Blue Thing. Texas has an oil extraction fee and uses the revenue to fund schools. Alaska uses theirs for a little socialist trick called the Alaska Permanent Fund, where everybody in the state gets a check for at least a grand every year for doing nothing, courtesy of the oil companies being "robbed" by the gummint.

Extraction fees are the standard across the world, except in California. This is an odd legacy from the days when Standard Oil ran our state like it was a company town.

AB 1326, an assembly bill now being considered in California, is more along the lines of the Texas model than Alaska model. Here is a paragraph I lifted from a recent e-mail from a colleague.

*****The measure " requires that California apply a 15% oil extraction fee on the value of each barrel of oil, California's common resource, extracted onshore and offshore. Following Texas' example of devoting this oil revenue to its appropriated for non-capital purposes in the following amounts: K-12 shall receive 30% (approximately $1.08 billion). The California Community College System (approximately 3,000,000 students) shall receive 48% (approximately $1.72 billion). The California ~State University System (approximately 412,000 students).shall receive 11 % (approximately $400 million). The University of California System (approximately 200,000students) shall receive 11 % (approximately $400 million). This will reduce college and university tuition fees, and restore cut class sections. The funding increases will pay to rehire professors, laid-off teachers, and reduce K-12 class sizes.’ The update (as of May 6) on this tax measure as a bill– AB 1326 – is it was approved on a partisan 5-3 vote in the Assembly Higher Education Committee (Democrats supporting, Republicans opposing) and is now headed to the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee. It would require a two-thirds vote in both Houses of the Legislature for gubernatorial consideration. *****

As you can see, the lion's share goes to the community college system, which would be a boon to Matty Boy and other people whose paychecks come from community colleges. I don't know if these percentages are "fair", but I know that a revenue system can't be fixed until it is implemented. If you are a California citizen, please call your representatives and ask them to support AB 1326, most especially if your representative is Republican. The oil companies have been taking the oil out of our soil for more than a century now, and it's time we saw some revenue from them for taking an important resource from our commonwealth.

Weird numbers from the weirdest party in the free world.

Once again, I look at numbers and they don't quite add up. I'm kinda good with numbers, so this sets me to thinking.

I know, always a dangerous proposition.

The website Pollster is now owned by the Huffington Post, but it's still useful anyway. (Anyone else feeling like HuffPo are the emptiest calories you can get on the Internets?) They have plenty of early polling of the Republican nomination. There's an interesting pattern.

When there are national polls of Republicans for favorite candidate for the presidency, whether by Rasmussen or Gallup or CNN, if Donald Trump's name is in the mix, he is doing very well, sometimes leading or tied for the lead, never worse than a close second. But then there are the polls of Republicans at the state level. In South Carolina, Trump is a distant third behind Huckabee and Romney. In New Hampshire, Romney leads Trump 32% to 17%. In the Iowa caucus polling, Trump is in fourth behind Newt Gingrich, and in Iowa primary, it's Huckabee with the big lead and Trump in third, slightly behind Romney. There are a couple of broken links on the page to polls in Nevada and one more to South Carolina, but they show the same thing. When asked at the state level, Trump is not a major player.

I want to make it clear I am not cherry picking these polls. That's what Trump would do and Donald Trump and I have a major difference in character. I'm a nerd and he's not. Nerds are among the most honest people in the world because we actually believe in facts. When my friends Ken or Art stop by to correct me, they are showing nerd love and I recognize the gesture. They've got it right, I had it wrong and I gladly edit the post to make the correction.

Pollster has a long list of recent polls. The polls from March don't even list Trump as a candidate. He's made most of his noise about running in just the past few weeks. And let's be clear, it's just noise. Even if he declares for president, it's still just noise. He has no ideas, he has no clever plan. He is a pathological liar. He says he's going to talk to OPEC and tell them "Look guys, the fun's over." and they are going to listen, because it's all about the messenger.

Have you ever heard a more delusional load of bullshit in your life? For any country that produces more oil than they use, the fun is nowhere near over. Nations like the U.S. that produce less oil than they use are addicts, and if you have a product that an addict craves, you are being an idiot if you charge anything less than top dollar.

I know that it is not impossible that Trump will run. I wish it was impossible for him to win, but the average American is stone stupid. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Governor Jesse Ventura are proof enough of that. But these polls from states around the country taken over the same period as the national polls seem to indicate than when the rubber meets the road, even Republican pinheads swallowing Fox News nonsense day in and day out know that Donald Trump is a joke.

The 11th Commandment becomes the 11th Suggestion.

Ronald Reagan is often credited with being the originator of the 11th Commandment "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican".

Of course, he didn't originate it. He was an actor not a writer. It was first spoken by Gaylord Parkinson, the chair of the California Republican Party back in 1966 when Reagan ran for governor.

It was a very different time forty five years ago. There actually were moderate and even liberal Republicans. More than that, an actor running for public office was still a novelty, and the other Republicans in the race against him slammed Reagan hard as being an empty suit. They also painted him as being from the Goldwater wing of the party, the group that had been responsible for a truly epic loss against LBJ only two years before.

If you go to the Wikipedia site, you'll see that Reagan broke this rule in his run against Ford in 1976, but in general for many years, the Republicans kept their internecine battles to a minimum, at least in front of the cameras.


Then came 2008 and Sarah Palin. The vast majority of the slams against her came from the opposition, but several conservative pundits hit her on her obvious flaw of experience. After the stinging electoral defeat, John McCain became a non-person, George W. Bush went back to Texas to lick his wounds and the media fell in love with Palin, even after she quit the job of governor to seek fortune commensurate to her fame. For months on news sites of every political persuasion, she was the only conservative voice, and due to a mixture of boredom, envy and self-preservation for their party, Republicans in office, out of office and never holding office began to let their true feelings about the heroine of the trailer trash set come through. Palin, who has never shrugged off a perceived slight in her life, started fighting back, and the 11th Commandment of Saint Ronald Reagan was a dim memory at best.


Enter Donald Trump. It's hard to say if the businessman with the multiple bankruptcies actually is a billionaire or just plays one on TV, but his coy "Will I or won't I?" run for the presidency has catapulted him to the lead in several polls, based in large part to his huge advantage in name recognition.

If Palin is prickly and narcissistic, Trump is just a flat out self-aggrandizing asshole. He will say something nice about someone only as a prelude to saying something nicer about himself. While the polls being taken this far away from a general election are as substantial as cotton candy, they are the closest thing to reality that anyone has to go with, so Trump's non-candidacy candidacy is being taken seriously, most notably now by the pro-oligarchy Club For Growth, who recognize Trump as a traitor to his class for saying a tax increase on the rich would be the best way to shrink the deficit back about ten years ago.

Up until 2004, the Republicans allegedly were a coalition of the pro-Jesus people and the pro-Business people, and both groups saw George W. Bush as one of their own. But the stinging loss of 2008 has shown the cracks in those two camps and emboldened the racists, who have always been there, as Californians who saw the policies of failed governor Pete Wilson can attest. Trump, a man with no scruples and no subtlety, thinks he can bring the racists on board by embracing not only birtherism but several goofy and unsubstantiated Internet rumors about Obama, including the one about Bill Ayers writing Dreams of My Father.

Right now, Trump's success looks like The Fred Thompson Effect, named for the actor and senator who was supposed to be a game changer in 2008 but turned out to be no such thing when he actually ran. The excitement about Trump is really the conservative voters saying en masse, "There's got to be somebody better than these palookas." Should he really run, a few weeks or months in the actual political spotlight and Trump will be outed as just another palooka, and the cry for someone else will continue.

Some commentators are seeing Obama's numbers go down and saying it spells trouble, but even so, the Republicans have to put an actual person up against him, and the field so far looks astoundingly weak, The Donald included.

Ayn Rand: Idiot. Crackpot conspiracy theorist. Hypocrite. (Or Ayn Rand: perfect hero for the 21st Century right wing.)

I was going to write about Atlas Shrugged Part 1, the low budget attempt to turn the sprawling 1957 Ayn Rand novel so beloved by shitheads around the world that it still the #4 book on Amazon to this day into a watchable film. But doing a little research, I've decided to start with a post about Ms. Rand herself, a sick and stupid dwarf who has been turned into an Olympian god by minds even smaller than her own.

In 1974, 69 year old Ms. Rand was still a two pack a day smoker. She believed the medical consensus on cigarette smoking on lung cancer was a government conspiracy. The conspiracy, of course, was no such thing, and she had a cancerous lung that needed to be removed or she would die.

This fits the crowd that idolize her today to a tee. These idiots think that all the ways humans have changed the world cannot possibly have a global effect. It's all just a conspiracy, largely because if they really believed they had to change their ways, it would be an inconvenience, and these narcissists cannot be inconvenienced by the mob, the herd of moochers and parasites who obviously never get anything right.

Except, oh yeah, carcinogens and the basic physics of carbon in the atmosphere.

Other than that, they are always wrong.

Okay, she smoked for several decades, she got lung cancer. Maybe quitting when the evidence was in would have given her a few more healthy years, maybe not. She's not alone. Sir Ronald Fisher had a much better brain than Ms. Rand, but when it came to quitting smoking, he was just another fucking pinhead addict.

But according to Evva Joan Pryor of the Rand Institute, when the bills got too big to be paid even for a woman who had a massive perennial best-seller to her name, she went on the dole and took both Social Security and Medicare.

The miserable, deservedly cancer-ridden, ugly hypocrite bitch.

Did you know that Paul Ryan, the asshole who is telling us with a straight face that Medicare has got to go, considers Ayn Rand to be his personal hero?

Yes, hypothetical question asker, I was aware of that.

By all I hold sacred, I hate these miserable cunts.

Here endeth the lesson.

Lying like a rug in service of the greater good.

Jon Kyl said on the senate floor that abortions are 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.

Somebody fact-checked him, the dirty meany bullies. 3% of the services Planned Parenthood does are abortions, and none of those can receive federal funds. Because abortions are more expensive that birth control, abortions are about 15% of the billing at Planned Parenthood.

Still, there's that 90% number. What was that? Kyl's office was reached for comment, and they said that what he said was not intended to be a factual statement.

I guess I could take the time to rip Kyl a new one, but thankfully for the Republic, we have Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac and Stephen Colbert to help out on that front.

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl's Planned Parenthood Statistics
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The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl Lies About Planned Parenthood
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

And, oh yeah, the folks at Fox and Friends are equally full of shit.

What a surprise.

Can I join the Anti-Republican Party?

Barack Obama has started his campaign for re-election. I got a letter from them this week.

I'm not sending any money, at least not yet. I waited until well into 2008 to do any work for the campaign or send them a check, and unless he faces a primary challenger I really don't like, I probably will wait until the end to help out, assuming I have free time or discretionary cash about a year and a half from now.

I'm registered as a Democrat, but right now they don't thrill me much. I'm much more of an Anti-Republican than I am anything else.



Let's consider global warming, or as it is sometimes known, climate change. (Conspiracy theorists on both sides think the other is to blame for the phrase "climate change", but it was being used in the late 1960s long before this became the political football it is today.)

The Republican Party these days is not monolithic. In fact, there are four acceptable views of global warming inside their big tent.

1. It doesn't exist.
2. It exists, but it doesn't matter.
3. It exists and it matters, but humans have nothing to do with it.
4. It exists, it matters and humans may have something to do with it, but Jesus is coming back before my kid's braces are coming off, so it only matters a little bit and not enough for us to change any of our bad habits.

While this means there are a variety of opinions, there is only one policy. Avoid all action at all costs. The House Republicans on the Energy committee are 100% against cap and trade.

Recall that cap and trade was the conservative alternative to the progressive policy of a carbon tax.

That's their way now. Propose some weak alternative that will not solve a problem in the real world, and if it becomes policy, oppose it.



In Mississippi, a recent poll of Republicans showed that 46% think inter-racial marriage should be illegal, while 40% think it's okay and another 14% aren't sure.

Of course, that doesn't matter to Matty Boy, a lifelong bachelor living in California, does it?

Well, here's a picture of my adorable niece Holly Smith-Smith and her nearly as good looking husband, Cleavon Smith-Smith.

Cleavon was born and raised in Mississippi, where his family still lives. I'd like to think they will be safe when they visit his family, but with the boneheads in charge of the majority party back there, I'm not so sure.

So, yeah, it matters to me.



Of course, that's Mississippi, the armpit of the nation, and they are asking Mississippi Republicans, the cancerous lymph nodes of that armpit. I live in California, progressive, forward-thinking, land of fruits and nuts and good things to eat. What do I care about knuckle draggers 2,000 miles away?

A poll last year of Republican voters found that they oppose openly gay teachers in the public schools by an astounding 73% to 8% with 19% unsure.

Think about this. The issue that killed Anita Bryant's career some thirty years ago is still a fight these assholes want to fight.

Once again, you might ask, what skin is it off Matty Boy's nose? I may be a lifelong bachelor, but I'm not openly gay. (I'm not unopenly gay either, though I don't consider it any business of my employers.) I care because it touches the lives of people I care about, dear friends who are public school teachers and openly gay.

The bigotry has to end. The major political party in this country that still openly courts the bigots need to undergo a radical transformation or it should die before it ruins this great country forever.


And then there is the new great villain of the latest incarnation (or should I say mutation) of the Republican Party, unionized public employees.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that public employees banding together to ask for a redress of grievances sounds like a First Amendment right to me. To see the blatant and often clearly illegal union busting that the new Republican majorities are attempting in Wisconsin, Indiana and other places may not be a direct attack on me as a unionized public employee in California, but even in a state where the Republicans need some major sleight of hand to keep from becoming the 21st Century version of the Whigs (or more accurately, the Know-Nothings), I can see that is in my own enlightened self-interest to stop American Republicanism in all its forms with every legal tactic at my disposal.

Here endeth the lesson.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant.

I didn't intend to make a study of the reports of the causes of the financial meltdown. It happened incrementally, with some very intentional steps and others less so.

First and most intentionally, I bought and read Michael Lewis' The Big Short, which I reviewed earlier this month. Next, I rented Charles Ferguson's Inside Job based on several people's recommendations and a sense of duty to watch a few of the Oscar winning and nominated documentaries.

There are major differences between The Big Short and Inside Job. First and most obvious, it's a book versus a movie. It's easier for Lewis in his book to spend more time explaining some tricky ideas. The two of the main weapons of mass destriction, the Credit Default Swap (CDS) and Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO), definitely qualify as tricky ideas, intentionally designed by mathematicians and lawyers to be very hard to understand.

Alliances of mathematicians and lawyers. Even I shudder at the thought, and I'm supposed to understand half of that pretty well.

The second big difference between The Big Short and Inside Job is worm's eye vs. bird's eye. Lewis talked mainly to small players who figured out how to make a profit but had zero power to stop the avalanche. Ferguson got some interviews with the big fish, though there are a lot of times the caption "xxx refused to be interviewed for this film" appears. Glenn Hubbard (no relation), the genius who engineered the Bush tax cuts, is cheerful through most of the questions until he is asked to take some responsibility for the carnage, and there is some talking head from the Business Roundtable, a pleasant sounding name for an evil lobbying group created by the ass covering buffoons who got us into this mess. Almost all of the people who sit in front of the camera and tell the truth are not Americans, people from the governments of Iceland and Singapore and France who got taken for a nasty ride and admit their foolishness and a little of their culpability but make compelling cases that they were among the fleeced and not among the fleecers.

I recommend both the book and the film, so I don't want to give all the juicy bits away. There are parts of the colossal mess that are covered by both. A very fair question is "Where were the regulators?", and both The Big Short and Inside Job have plenty of scorn to heap upon Moody's, Fitch and S&P. One thing both the movie and book agree upon is that it was in the financial interests of the rating agencies to give high marks to repackaged crap. A company would pay a set price to Moody's to rate a CDO, but if it wasn't the highest rating available, maybe that company would ask S&P to rate the next one.

The book goes into more detail than the film on this topic, as was the case regularly when they overlapped. Since the end of the Cold War, a lot of young people good at applied math would go into financial engineering rather than weapons engineering because that was obviously where the money was. Lewis puts forward the thesis in The Big Short that if a young person was going into the field for a big payday (and why else?), then the really good financial engineers (known as quants) would be at the companies giving million dollar bonuses and the second string would be at the ratings agencies who would pay mere hundreds of thousands in salary.

To use a March Madness analogy, it was like a Number 1 seed vs. a Number 16. There was effectively no chance the big money would lose.

To give a point to the film, an excellent point was made in Inside Job as to why the massive financial bailout was voted through in the fall of 2008 by both Republicans and Democrats, an event that was the last nail in McCain's grotesquely mismanaged campaign, doomed to lose six weeks before a vote was cast.

Simply put, the world runs on credit. Sadly then and frighteningly still true today, it's way too much credit, with the big financial players massively over-leveraged, sometimes in the range of 30 to 1 or even 40 to 1 when measuring obligations in the markets compared to cash on hand. While this was a zero-sum game, which means if Company X loses $50 billion, somebody else makes $50 billion, several of these companies were on the hook for more money than they had, so Company X could lose everything, say $30 billion, and others would have $20 billion less than they expected. While all of these were flat out gambling losses, it meant that the people who lent to legitimate businesses had no money to lend. The scary and completely plausible scenario was that airlines would cease to function, because they are constantly borrowing to buy that day's fuel allotment.

No financial service industry, no planes in the air.

Anywhere.

Like... oh, nowish.

No James Bond villain ever made a better blackmail threat.


Add to this mix a talk I heard on the broadcast from The Commonwealth Club by Phil Angelides, the former California state treasurer and failed Democratic nominee for the governorship who was appointed to the blue ribbon government panel investigating the financial meltdown. This was the least intentional step in my search for knowledge, as I was driving down to Santa Cruz and the broadcast came on the radio in my dad's truck.

Yes, my father is a Republican who listens to NPR. I may have to report him to the proper authorities.

The panel was set up after the 2008 elections where the Republicans deservedly got their heads handed to them, so the Dems got six members and the Republicans four. Angelides plays the good boss in this talk, lauding his staff for long hours and excellent work, several of whom are in the audience and mentioned by name. But he doesn't deny the obvious, that this was an investigation done on the cheap by government standards, spending less than $10 million before issuing their report. This is a tiny fraction of the money Ken Starr spent looking for presidential blowjobs, and that total has to be adjusted for inflation. To compare it to another financial investigation from this era, the man charged with looking into the wrongdoing of Bernie Madoff has already spent $200 million.

Charles Ferguson was in the audience at the Commonwealth Club after giving a talk earlier in the week on the same subject, and he was one of many who sent in questions as to why the government hasn't seen fit to prosecute anyone involved in the fiasco. Angelides correctly points out that it wasn't his commission's task to put people in jail, and notes that after the most recent though much smaller similar meltdown, the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, over 1,000 people were sent to jail, including CEOs. As of this writing, there has not been a single person convicted for any wrongdoing. I don't even know of any big wig who has been indicted.

Instead of chiding the judicial system, let me pick up a few sturdy bricks and throw them at the Republican nominees to this committee. Before the final panel released their report, three of the Republican nominees got together to write a rebuttal and the fourth wrote his own separate rebuttal.

Their conclusions were as predictable as the dawn. It was not the fault of their paymasters, the American corporations. It was the crazy Asian investors who had so much cash. It was the semi-government agencies like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. No more regulation is needed. No one is criminally culpable.

I'm not sure if it's actually detectable in my writing, but I'm trying to cut down on the addictive drug of vitriol. I actually understand and agree with some of the underlying points of conservatism, but there is really no one in power making those points. The modern "conservative" movement is a loose coalition of fucking morons who think the world is 6,000 years old and fucking thieves who think a CEO making 6,000 times more than the average employee is perfectly acceptable if the market will bear it.

Ah, that first sip of vitriol! It still goes down smooth.

I don't agree with The Tea Party, but from what I see, it's largely a Revolt of the Morons. If these idiot dogs will go for the throats of their moneyed masters, there will be a blood bath and every fatality is a blessing on humanity. As Neils Bohr or Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard, especially about the future, but I could see an internecine fight like this changing the political power structure in this country. I wish I could be optimistic about the future, but watching the Obama administration, I think the people with money will just let the Republicans wither and buy more Democrats. Watching people in the streets in Wisconsin gives me some hope.

While I see change in the political world as a distinct possibility, sadly there is no political will to force change in the unregulated markets created by the eager-beaver quants on Wall Street, whom I will immodestly call my evil twins. Human greed focused by human intelligence is the most destructive power on earth, and even 9.1 earthquakes pale in comparison.

Knock me down with a feather.

Just when you think you can't be surprised.

The Nigerian government is starting a bribery case against Halliburton and officials say there is a good chance that charges with be brought against Dick Cheney, former president of Halliburton, former Vice President of the United States and currently leader of The Dead Who Walk The Earth. There's talk of an Interpol arrest warrant.
(recent photo from AFP)

Trying to kick the schadenfreude habit, but backsliding from time to time.

Schadenfreude is the pleasure one feels at the misfortune of others. I consider it a trait for a poorly evolved person, so let me say this about Tom DeLay being found guilty.

OOOK OOOK OOK AAH AHH AAAAHHH!

Evolution humor. Heh heh.

Tom DeLay is the quintessential example of why I hate a certain type of Christian. He smiled in his mug shot so people could see the love of Jesus. He said he wanted a speedy trial, but his lawyers delayed and delayed and delayed the proceedings. Of course, that was his lawyers' doing. His hands were clean, not unlike Pontius Pilate's.

The words "liar" and "scumbag" in the dictionary should have this picture next to them.

He and his defenders in the press said the charges were nonsensical and a witch hunt and he would be shown to be completely innocent of all charges. After all, all he did was get a check directly from corporations for $190,000 that he couldn't give to political campaigns, sent it instead to the Republican National Committee who sent checks totaling $190,000 to various campaigns.

In the period of about one business day.

This isn't the textbook definition of money laundering. This is the textbook definition of EXTREMELY BAD money laundering. Money laundering usually follows a convoluted route over an extended period of time. Forensic accountants should be up all night sorting through shadow accounts and dummy corporations and finally at three o'clock in the morning drinking cold coffee say "AHA! That's how they did it. We've got them!"

DeLay and his lawyers are now saying it's a gross miscarriage of justice.

Horse. Shit.

This was a quick trial and the defense was perfunctory. The jurors took 19 hours to deliberate and they get to have Thanksgiving at home with loved ones. The judge thanked them for their service and so do I.

Delay could be sentenced to up to life in prison. I think that is ridiculous when murderers get a couple years. What I would like to see the judge do is count the years between the crime and the trial and multiply that by two. Give Tom DeLay sixteen years in The Big House and tell him it would have been shorter if his lawyers could have pulled their thumbs out of each others' asses a little quicker than they did.

Again, I am not feeling very evolved about this, but Tom DeLay gets off easy. I wish we could find a way to get him to be bunk mates with Joran van der Sloot down in Peru.

Justice in Texas. Unlike Southern California, they don't play.

Are we ignoring the superficial?

Some traits are all a matter of perception. A person might be considered cheap, while others call her frugal. Another is perceived as mean, but well-wishers call him no-nonsense and tough-minded.

With some traits, the best defense is a good offense. If called a racist, a counter-charge of political correctness might soften the blow. If a public person is called stupid, why not call the accusers elitists?

But what can you do if you are called superficial? If still in high school, the counter-move would be to say, "Well, you're not one of the cool kids and nobody likes you!"

If past the age of consent, your options shrink significantly.

Superficiality has gotten a bum rap. My first blog hero was (and still is) Peteykins, the artist formerly known as Princess Sparkle Pony. He looked at politics and diplomacy through the lens of hairdos, dresses, shoes and accessories. Sometimes it was tongue in cheek and sometimes there was more to it. While the official birth legend of The Other Blog is that I awoke from a nap on my birthday with the concept fully formed, I would never have thought about writing about something so superficial had I not first seen a master do it so well.

Consider the two main statewide races in California. There are a lot of similarities. The Democrats have two career politicians on the ticket, the Republicans have two political novices from the world of business. The differences at the big level are that Jerry Brown is much more of a retread than Barbara Boxer, and Meg Whitman can point to a business record of success, while Carly Fiorina has a lot of baggage about driving companies into the ground and sending high paying jobs overseas.

Both Brown and Boxer are leading in their races, but Brown has been comfortably ahead for about a month while Fiorina is keeping it much closer.

What are we missing? Why is Fiorina a better candidate than Whitman? Let's take a closer look at the superficial.

Meg Whitman looks like hell, and it is within her power to do much better. She's a billionaire, for Lenny's sake! She can't find a hairstylist that can give her hair some body, some highlights, a more flattering cut? I'm not saying go crazy with the plastic surgery like she's some Hollywood wife, but straight white teeth would go over a lot better than crooked yellow teeth.

Fiorina was treated for breast cancer and was bald less than a year ago. Her hair came back in salt-and-pepper and she's making it work. High marks for her stylist and high marks for her dental hygienist.

Moving away from the superficial, I deeply hate the political positions both these women take. Should the polls be correct and both of them taken a beating a week from Tuesday, I'll be happier Meg and Carly lost than I will be that Jerry and Babs won. But if there is a reason why one of these women has a slim hope and the other almost none, the superficial goes a long way to explain the difference.

You people.

Regular readers of the blog know I love the show Mad Men. It does a great job of invoking the early and mid 1960s. I was just a fresh faced lad when these shows are supposed to take place, but I know they get a lot of the details right. Instead of giving a full summary and critique of this week's episode, let me give a plot point that is a tiny spoiler, no more than you might get reading a preview. The new firm has a chance to work with Honda motorcycles. Roger Sterling, a WW II veteran from the Pacific theater, hates the Japanese and does everything he can scuttle the possible new relationship.

The show captures the open racism of the time. This is when the n-word was said openly by unrepentant white racists, many of them Southerners. I remember the "genteel" Southerners on TV using the word "nigras", halfway between the then acceptable term Negros and the word they really wanted to use. It had gotten through to them that the n-word didn't play well on the national stage.

There was no such gentility about anti-Asian racism as the time. We've never turned any of the different slurs into "the j-word" or "the g-word" or "the c-word", and I don't hear people say those words anymore. Maybe I just run with a nicer crowd now than I did then, but there is a lot more sensitivity in the general public and definitely in the media than there was back then.


Except when it comes to Muslims. You can say any kind of slander against anyone in the Islamic community in public or on TV and the the press broadcasts it live for all the world to see. All Muslims might as well have Osama bin Laden on their speed dial according to a disgustingly large segment of the American public. There are videos of a protest against the Islamic community center at Park51, which you may know by the name given to it by idiots. A black guy in a skullcap wandered through, the crowd got ugly and the cops escorted him out before things turned violent.

The thing is, the guy isn't a Muslim. It's hard to make out the thing hanging off his necklace in this picture, but it's a representation of the Puerto Rican flag. The white skullcap was made by the athletic clothing company Under Armor. Still, a crowd of idiots could mistake him for a Muslim and focus all their hatred on him and go home thinking they are the people defending the American way.

I started with the picture of Roger Sterling from Mad Men for a reason other than he looks good in that suit and haircut. His character feels 100% justified to hate the Japanese, but the people around him are asking him to get over it because the war is over. In the minds of many Americans, we are still at war with the entire Muslim world. Let me give George W. Bush some credit, because he tried to stop that kind of talk, even though his attempts at diplomacy were often clumsy. I haven't seen a lot of Bush era people at the forefront of this racist nonsense. The people doing most of the rabble rousing are the clever but nasty Newt Gingrich and the stone stupid Sarah Palin, amplified by Fox News and then carried like a virus by all the rest of the media reacting to them like Pavlov's dog.

Freedom of religion and freedom of speech can be hurtful things, but this is exactly why the founders decided to make them rights instead of privileges that might be put to a vote. I'm a die-hard agnostic, and it would be wrong headed of me to expect all Christians to answer for Fred Phelps or the KKK or sectarian violence in Ireland or the Spanish Inquisition, just as wrong headed as Christians stopping the building of a community center in lower Manhattan or mosques all around the country because "you people caused 9/11".

Things have changed a lot since I was a kid, but the central evil of human nature is unlikely to ever go away. The targets may change over time, but the desire to punish "you people" is deep in our genetic make-up.

We don't deserve to survive as a species. Here endeth the lesson.

Take a hint, Dick.

Dick Cheney is evil. I don't say this about everyone I disagree with politically, but in his case, the description is accurate.

Let me be clear. I am not comparing Cheney to Adolf Hitler. That would break Godwin's Law, a rule I believe in deeply. Nor I am not comparing him to Stalin or Charles Manson.

Those people are losers and clowns. They are the Chicago Cubs of evil.

Dick Cheney is a member of the New York Yankees of evil. The truly successful villains are the ones who die quietly in their sleep surrounded by family and loved ones. Dick Cheney is like the guy who invented the concept of the pre-existing condition. Dick Cheney is the spiritual brother of the writer of the memo at Ford that said it was cheaper to pay the benefits to the families of people who would die in defective Pintos than it was to fix the defects in Pintos.

Dick Cheney is the textbook example of how evil wins.

Though I am in general a non-believer in most things supernatural, I do believe people have souls. I consider the heart to be a physical thing unconnected to the soul, so in my world view, it is just coincidence that Dick Cheney has a rotten soul and a worse heart.

Dick Cheney's heart has been trying to kill him for about 32 years now. He has had six official heart attacks and has been hospitalized several other times for chest pains, including this week. He also an Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator or ICD, a little electronic device in his chest that makes it nearly impossible for his defective heart to kill him, no matter how many times it tries or how badly he abuses his cardiovascular system.

Not every thing modern medicine can do is a blessing. I don't know how devout Mr. Cheney is. I expect not very. With every painful tightening of his badly designed chest, he must know a judgment is waiting, and that his best hope is for meaningless oblivion.

Take a hint, Dick. Jud Crandall in Pet Sematary said it best.

Sometimes, dead is better.

Rand Paul is not a racist!

He's an idiot. They are worse.

In most polite company these days, racists know they can't say what they really think, and so they couch it in code words. Idiots have no such compunctions.

Rand Paul is a special kind of idiot. He's a Libertarian. I should have some sympathy for him because I was a Libertarian.

When I was 20.

Then I met some other Libertarians. These idiots are terrifying. Anyone who does even a tiny amount of maturing has to get away from these stunted adolescents as fast as they can. For example, Dennis Miller considers himself a Libertarian. He was a Ross Perot supporter in 1992 when he was nearly 40.

I had an excuse in 1976. I was a snot-nosed kid. Miller does not have that defense. He's just an idiot.

Rand Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the standard propertarian party line. Propertarians are a particularly dull-witted strain of the Libertarian breed. If two people's rights are in conflict, whoever owns more property wins. If some business owner wants to discriminate against me because I'm white or I'm old or I don't attend the right church, the government has no right to interfere according to the propertarian point of view. My money is no good in their store and I can be turned down for a job for which I'm qualified or fired from that same job.

Here's the thing about most propertarians. Most of them think that discrimination is something that happens to other people. More freedom and less government is always the answer. Paul, idiot that he is, is now saying that Obama sounds "un-American" for attacking British Petroleum, the perpetrators of one of the worst environmental disasters of all time that is still an ongoing situation.

Let's review this, shall we? Obama, an American president elected overwhelmingly by the American people is "un-American" for asking for responsibility from a foreign owned corporation legally liable for an environmental nightmare that will disproportionately affect the livelihoods and property of Americans.

As I said. Idiot.

Some people are comparing Rand Paul with Sarah Palin. It's not completely fair. I've heard Rand Paul actually complete a sentence. He not only got through college, he's an ophthalmologist. His problem is that he has steeped in the scum-filled Libertarian gene pool for so long, he doesn't know reality from the weird concoction of paranoid fantasies and unworkable solutions these people openly espouse.

In 2008, Paul was campaigning for his father in Montana, and he spoke of the feared NAFTA superhighway and the "Amero" currency as though they were real. This is what happens when you live in a bubble and everyone you talk to is just as crazy and stupid as you are.

He showed some guts going on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Guts, but not much brains, as one might expect from an idiot. His comments on civil rights were front page news and Maddow, who is not an idiot, tore him to shreds in a fair and balanced way. He is now backpedaling fast enough to win an Olympic medal. He has canceled an appearance this Sunday on Meet The Press, claiming exhaustion. He is the third such cancellation in the show's sixty three(!) year history. The other people who flaked were Louis Farrakhan and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a.k.a. Bandar Bush because of his close ties to the Bush crime family.

Being an idiot does not disqualify a person from elected office. Rand Paul is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Jim Bunning, who has some strong idiot tendencies himself. But Paul has a long campaign ahead of him and a serious lack of experience at this level, and though he currently has a very big lead, his best strategy may be running out the clock.

Sadly for Dr. Paul, one of the main weaknesses of idiots is that they never use the best strategy.

Politics makes me crazy sometimes.

Maybe I should amend the title. Politics makes me crazy most of the time.

I don't care for Meg Whitman, but she has a compelling story that might connect with the voters. She created and ran eBay, which is a real success story, unlike senate candidate Carly Fiorina, who ran multiple existing high tech firms right into the ground. Whitman still has to win the Republican primary next month, but she looks like the favorite to be the GOP standard bearer for governor of California. If you've heard her radio ads, you know she's against welfare. She's also in favor of getting rid of a tax on stock market speculation, though she doesn't tout that as loudly.

Yes, that's the problem with California today. We give too much money to poor people and take too much money away from rich people.

But instead of a discussion of where she stands on the issues, one of Whitman's big problems connecting with some voters on the right because she's a Satanist.

How do we know this? Here's a link to Chris Kelly's piece on the Huffington Post, but the basics are that she worked for Procter & Gamble and the Satanist rumors are still alive, though they have been debunked since I was a teen, that eBay lets people auction Satanist paraphernalia, and she is connected to Hasbro and they sell Ouija boards.

Here's another problem for Meg in 21st Century America. She's a female candidate and she's not pretty enough. Of course, she will likely have the good fortune of running against Jerry Brown, and he looks like the Cryptkeeper's scarier brother now.


Okay, that's California, where our candidates tend to be from the corporate whore wing of the Republican Party and not the "Jesus Gonna Be Here" wing. In Alabama, an underhanded attack ad against gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne alleges that he believes that some parts of the Bible are true and some parts (gasp!)... aren't!

Yes, Mr. Byrne is being accused of believing in natural selection and evolution. Mr. Byrne has issued a press release denying the scurrilous accusation. Heck, he's on the State Board of Education and has a long record of standing by the 100% reliability of the superstitions promulgated by desert addled, pig ignorant dirt farmers from 5,000 years ago. You can read more over at Talking Points Memo.

Seriously. The problems we face as a society are real. Arguing about Ouija boards and talking snakes with legs isn't helping.

The tyranny of the minority.

The use of the super-majority vote in special circumstances has a long history and in many cases, the arguments in favor are strong. Overriding a veto, for example, should clearly need more than just a 50% +1 vote, since that was the type of vote that put the bill in the hands of the executive branch in the first place. The idea that the executive branch can sign treaties but the Senate has to ratify them makes sense, and by tradition it must be a two-thirds majority to ratify. We like to say that politics ends at the water's edge, but we know that's a lie. The Senate did not save us from NAFTA or GATT, but did protect the Big Agriculture monopolies and their patented seed protections. Still, we average less than one treaty per year, so this is not the day in, day out business of government.

But in many states, super-majorities are not needed only in rare instances, but at the very core of the business of government, the signing of a budget. The modern Republican party uses middle class taxpayers and the idealized "small business owner" as human shields against raising taxes on corporations and the super wealthy, and basic services used by the vast majority of citizens are starved to near extinction.


As bad as Schwarzenegger and the California Republicans can be, other places can be much, much worse. Tom Emmer is the Republican party candidate for governor of Minnesota, supported by outgoing governor Tim Pawlenty and Alaskan half-term governor Sarah Palin. According to Talking Points Memo, Emmer wants to institute a law in Minnesota that says no Federal law should apply in Minnesota unless it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the state legislature.

I don't much care if these people want to be called the Tea Party or the Teabaggers or the Dirty Sanchez Coalition, if they think this is the solution to the fact that they lost two elections in a row, they should think about what would happen if people they agree with are running Washington and people they disagree with are in power in Minneapolis.


And then we come back to the Golden State. On the June ballot, there is Proposition 16, sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and patriotically called The Taxpayer's Right To Vote Act. The idea is that if any local government wants to enter the retail power market, it would require a two-thirds majority of a popular vote to allow it. PG&E is promising to spend $35 million to get this to pass, while the anti Prop. 16 side hasn't mustered $100,000 yet.

The supporters of Prop. 16 include the usual suspects, the anti-tax group formed by Howard Jarvis all those years ago and the Chamber of Commerce. Just to show the bipartisan nature of scumbaggery here, it is also supported by Willie Brown, the alleged liberal who has never had any interest beyond getting richer.

I ask all my readers who are California voters to go to the polls next month and cast a no vote on Prop. 16. If it mandated a straight up-and-down vote on the formation of local public utilities, I could appreciate arguments both pro and con. But the super-majority vote is just plain wrong, and don't be surprised if the money PG&E shells out trying to pass this dishonest power grab later becomes "justified" rate hikes for California consumers.

He just wants his country back!

"I also know Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety. The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming."

Meet Don Blankenship, just another humble American patriot trying to take his country back. He's the owner of the mine where 29 workers just died. He's also a major financial contributor to the Tea Party and a member in good standing of the Chamber of Commerce who actively promote the idea that there's no such thing as global warming.

Some people might not recognize it, but I actually do try to moderate my voice when I write here. I don't call the people out in the street "teabaggers". They used to call themselves that but they figured out the sexual connotation, so I will use the title they prefer and call them the Tea Party. But seriously, the people who work in the mines have to realize that they do not share common purpose with the scumbags who cut corners and kill their workers.

Scum like Don Blankenship and his ilk have a lot more in common with Jefferson Davis and John Wilkes Booth than they do with Paul Revere and John Hancock. Critics on the right might say that I support class warfare. When this is the other side, I would say the two options are we fight back and there's class warfare, or we don't fight back and it's just class genocide.

Confederate History Month

Bob McDonnell, Republican governor of Virginia, issued a statement proclaiming April Confederate History Month. His first proclamation made no mention of slavery and this caused protest, even from some of his ardent backers. His later statement corrected this oversight, but it also included that ever popular weasel language "if any Virginian was offended, I apologize to them." This creepy non-apology implies that it is just the thin skinned who might dislike this sort of thing. This is the "fair and balanced" view that there are always two sides and each side should be heard.

This is wrong. Sometimes one side is completely in the wrong, and pretending that slavery is just an insignificant issue when dealing with the Civil War is completely wrong.

So I am going to write a post for Confederate History Month, not as a Virginian but as an American and not just about the four year act of treason the South committed, but the causes and consequences of this dark period in American history.

The stain of slavery and the founding of our nation: Most of the presidents of the United States before the Civil War owned slaves. Some of the non-slave owners had very clean hands, most notably John Adams and John Quincy Adams. It should also be noted they were the only one-term presidents among the first seven, all the rest slave owners.

At least one slave owner, Martin Van Buren, had a major change of heart and became an abolitionist late in his political career. The worst offenders were the richest men, Washington and Jefferson. The three presidents just prior to Lincoln did not own slaves, the northerners Pierce, Fillmore and Buchanan. But they were pathetically weak presidents who made the inevitable war that much worse by their inaction.

The leaders of the Confederacy were fools and the Bible makes that clear: Jesus states in Luke 14:31: "What king, marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king marching upon him with twenty thousand troops?" The situation at the beginning of the war was even worse than this, because the South fired first with an inferior force. Maybe they thought God was on their side. Perhaps they thought their generals as clever as Julius Caesar, who won several battles in the Roman Civil War with smaller armies than those who opposed him.

But this turned out not to be a war merely of battles but a war of attrition, and after Lincoln had run out of idiots to lead the Union Army and installed Grant, the bloody and vicious conclusion was an inevitability as long as the president did not waver in his resolution to restore the Union.

Turning bloody war into uneasy peace: The modern view of history is that though wars end, they often sow the seeds for the next war. Though he was killed by unrepentant traitors only months after the war's end, Lincoln set forward a policy of restoring the Union that worked, though the hard feelings and divisions last to this day. In my lifetime, the uneasiness between Northerners and Southerners has waned considerably, but the violent civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were like low level warfare continuation of the Civil War that had ended some ninety years before the Montgomery Bus boycott.

From the end of the war to the end of the 19th Century, every presidential election was a political re-enactment of the war. Republicans then were not like Republicans now, except that that shared the trait of being bold. It was common for Republican politicians to "wave the bloody shirt", to remind voters that everyone who had been a traitor to his country was a registered Democrat. The polarization of politics today is tame compared to American politics after the Civil War. Many historians claim that the first event after 1865 that brought Americans together as Americans was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana in 1898.

The great political inversion: For generations after the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of the South and the Republicans the party of the North. Glenn Beck, a weak historian with a relatively large audience, believes all evil in this land can be laid at the door of progressivism, and he includes Teddy Roosevelt in his list of villains. (Beck, an obvious buffoon, also thinks Thomas Paine, the most socialist leaning figure of the Revolutionary era, would be on Beck's side if Paine were alive today.) T.R. was definitely a Progressive, and his leaving the Republicans to start his own party is an important step in the Republican Party's move to the right. His cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Democrat, and F.D.R.'s administration is a bellwether moment in the Democratic Party's shift to the left. But even in F.D.R.'s time, the Democratic coalition included the southern Democrats who resisted all efforts to give full de facto citizenship rights to the descendants of slaves.

The civil rights movement made a new breed of Democrats in the South, though credit should be given to Dwight Eisenhower for sending Federal troops to Little Rock, the kind of action that would strike fear into the hearts of the weak minded Tea Party people today. It was Richard Nixon, easily the cleverest Republican president of my lifetime, who made the inversion complete with the Southern strategy. Many of the unrepentant racists of the South, people who were always welcome to air their grievances in the pages of William F. Buckley's National Review, were welcomed into the Republican Party after they realized they would have no seat at the table in the new Democratic Party. A disgusting racist like Richard Russell of Georgia, who died in 1971, would remain a Democrat until the day he died, but those who survived either became Republicans like Strom Thurmond or independents like George Wallace.

I am all in favor of teaching Confederate history, the history of traitors and idiots, both the idiots at the top of the food chain that started a war they couldn't win and the useful idiots at the bottom of the food chain who gave up their lives in the hundreds of thousands to preserve the right to own slaves, a right they would never be able to exercise because they were dirt poor. Virginia in particular should remember their special place in the Confederacy, because it was their Slave Codes of 1705 that allowed the grotesque inequality of wealth that made the bloody conflagration inevitable. Perhaps learning a little Confederate history, the buffoonish people in the Tea Party will realize they are more the descendants the cowardly traitor John Wilkes Booth than they are the heirs to John Hancock.

Here endeth the lesson.

Doing the right thing and other unthinkable options.

There is a saying that became popular after Watergate, "The cover-up is worse than the crime." Like any conventional wisdom, it has its moments and other times, it doesn't even come close to conveying the truth.

We should start with the difference between a scandal and a crime. Michael Steele is the head of the Republican National Committee, and while there have been plenty of scandals during his tenure, none have risen to the level of criminality. The latest, a $2,000 expenditure for a trip to a high end strip club in West Hollywood that ended up as a receipt paid for by the RNC, is getting plenty of play in the press but is of no interest to any law enforcement agency.

It's just embarrassing. Or if you watch The Daily Show, it's just HIGH-larious.

Technically, no crime and no cover-up, just another of many embarrassing gaffes that have been the hallmark of the Steele tenure as RNC chairman, a tenure all liberals and progressives hope will last for many years to come.

Oh, heck, let's go for it. We want Steele as RNC chair for life.

The right thing to do for Steele if he wants to help his party is to resign, but obviously, the right thing is not an option.

Having sex with a woman who isn't your wife isn't a crime, unless some idiot actually succeeds in turning the Ten Commandments into statute law. So in this case the cover-up is worse than the act it covers up, because the cover-up might actually involve crimes. According to reports at The Huffington Post quoting a Nevada political reporter named Jon Ralston, the Justice Department is doing due diligence on an indictment of Senator John Ensign of Nevada for payments he made to the family of his mistress Cindy Hampton. Ms. Hampton and her husband both worked on Ensign's staff, and the odd ways that money got into the Hampton bank accounts may have broken several laws.

John Ensign is one of those upstanding Christians that belong to an odd little group called The Family (no relation to the Charles Manson cult of the same name). The Family maintains a nice little sleepover mansion on C Street in Washington, a Christian fellowship that believe that God's work is done by special people with lots of power who commune with Special Jesus, not that scruffy commie Jew boy who got himself killed about 2,000 years ago.

Ensign came forward and asked for the resignations of both Bill Clinton and Larry Craig for their sexual misdeeds. He could do the right thing, but obviously that isn't an option.

And then there is the cover-up that is nowhere near as bad as the crime, because the crime is multiple instances of the rape of children. Joseph Ratzinger, now going under the alias of Pope Benedict XVI, was deeply involved in the hiding and re-assignment of pedophile priests. I chose this picture of him that makes him look like an old and decrepit underworld boss who cannot be touched by the law because that is what he currently is.

In some ways, this should be a legal matter and not one for the church. The parents of the molested children could have gone to the secular authorities instead of the to church bureaucracy to get justice done, but in a place like Ireland, if the church refuses to co-operate, can anyone be sure the police or the prosecutors or the judges would do the right thing? Would a cop be willing to arrest a priest and would that cop's superiors back him up? If the cops are clean, are the district attorneys? And if the system works all the way up to that point, who's to say some judge won't defend the rights of the corrupt church instead of the rights of the completely innocent victims?

There are times when the power of the church has been severely limited, sometimes in a power struggle with some other powerful institution, sometimes because the faithful rose up in protest. It's time for some of the old grumpy people pretending to be John Hancock and Sam Adams in this country change their goofy outfits and walk around in public pretending to be Martin Luther. The church is unclean and deserves to wither and die if it does not purge itself and reform.

Pope Benedict XVI could do the right thing and resign, but I think you've caught on to the pattern if you've read this far.

LL Cool J keeps it real.

Sarah Palin will be hosting a show about inspiring American stories on Fox News, and in the promo it shows she will profile ordinary Americans as well as famous people like Toby Keith, Jack Welch and LL Cool J.

Except nobody told LL Cool J.

The rapper whose name means Ladies Love Cool James put a message out on Twitter that he gave Fox an interview two years ago, that he had no idea it would be on this show he never heard of, and he considered the whole thing pretty desperate. Fox has reconsidered and pulled his segment from the show.

I am so glad he did this, because I would never again have been able to listen to my favorite Cool J beats. Out of respect for the man keeping it real, I give you his 1989 hit Goin' Back To Cali, pulled fresh off The You Tubes. It's definitely old school, as in hip replacement old, but still I love it.

Cool J and Sarah Palin? Excuse me, I don't think so.