Arizona Takes The Whole Month

Just when you think Arizona can't get any stranger, they up the ante.  Not content with racist legislation that will affect legal citizens of the US, their State Legislature has time to pass all sorts of nonsensical bills.

For instance, they passed a bill that states: “intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.” is now illegal.  Wow, were people doing that? If they were it certainly explains why the legislature has their heads up their asses.

Then they really let their freak flag fly.  They sent a bill to the Governor that prohibits ethnic studies programs.  Unless the ethnic group is Caucasian because that is the only correct version of history and the world had better get used to it.

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

Attending military schools most of my life I soon realized that there were seven continents but only two of them were important.  Europe and North America.  And by North America they meant the land between Canada and Mexico.  Canada was a wasteland between us and the North Pole and Mexico killed American heroes at the Alamo.

As far as my history/geography classes went, China was where Marco Polo visited and brought back spices, spaghetti and gunpowder. Genghis Khan may have controlled most of the known world in the 13th century, but he was a barbarian whose contribution to history was summed up in one sentence.  He was a barbarian.

Japan was important because of Pearl Harbor, kamikaze pilots and Hiroshima.  Nagasaki was never mentioned.  Africa was where slaves came from and Egypt wasn't part of Africa, it was the home of Cleopatra and this guy named Livingston was found there. Southeast Asia was mentioned because of Vietnam but it had no history before then.  India was nonexistent except as the name of an ocean and Australia was where British criminals were sent.  New Zealand had sheep and Korea is where MASH was set.  Russia was full of bad guys and South America had some guy named Simon Bolivar.  The Panama canal was built in one sentence, whereas the Suez appeared magically.

Women were famous because of who they married or how they died, they most certainly didn't invent anything.  As a matter of fact, only Caucasian males invented things that were useful to society.  Native Americans were savages that scalped people for no reason and they couldn't hold their liquor so they had to be rounded up and sent to reservations for their own safety.  It's not like they were native born citizens or anything.

Fortunately I was addicted to reading and spent many hours in the 900 section at the library, otherwise I wouldn't have known anything except the pablum that was recited year after year as if it was Gospel.

By all means limit the information to give kids a well rounded background by claiming that ethnic studies foment rebellion, separatism and resentment of a particular race, which is code for Caucasian males.  Somebody has to buy those Texas schoolbooks.

In ten years the United States will be irrelevant as the rest of the world moves into the 21st century and we make our way back to the 19th.  No wonder our economy is tanking.

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I Used To Be An Isolationist, Then I Grew Up

So far Arizona's paranoia has nothing on the French, but I'm sure that will soon change.  The French police arrested a three year old boy as a suspected terrorist.  What the hell is wrong with people?  A three year old boy cannot be considered a terrorist unless he's flinging poo from his diaper.  And even then that assumption would be a little over the top.

We are all human (or are we dancers?) and if aliens came from outer space they wouldn't differentiate) between a Frenchman and a German, or an African and an Asian.  It would be highly doubtful that they would differentiate between a man and a woman, so why are people acting like the country that they are a citizen of is the be all and end all of existence and that only they are entitled to live there?

We may be human, but we have lost our humanity.

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You Can't Fix Stupid

But you can definitely point it out.  The Arizona "Papers, Please!" amendment is the case in point and George over at Skippy's place brings up a valid argument.

will hopi and navajo police officers be able to stop anyone they think is in arizona illegally?

Once again people prove that just because you can have children doesn't mean you are a good parent.  Hiring an evil clown to stalk your child as a birthday present doesn't seem to be in the child's best interests.  And I sincerely doubt that most kids enjoy being terrified, even if there is cake at the end of the week.  And why does the headline say pie while the article says cake?

Umm, duh!  Of course the standard of living is declining for most Americans.  What part of sandwich board guy finally getting a job after two years isn't a clue?  And for fifty percent less than his previous job.

A gay dog?  One would expect to find this story in The Onion, but you would be wrong.

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And The Winner Is...

Senator Tom (I sterilize under age women) Coburn of Oklahoma. Mr. Coburn uses the excuse that he's a doctor (Ob-Gyn) and a deacon when dealing with the blowback from Senator John Ensign's affair so he doesn't have to disclose what advice he gave the cheating senator.  That gets him the Chutzpah award.

The Stupid award is for holding up unemployment extensions for what he terms a "small group of people."  This week that amounts to 212,000 people and next week and the week after that will add many more.  His arrogance prevents him from understanding that the 212,000 only applies to the people receiving benefits and doesn't include spouses and children.

Meanwhile, in the real world that the rest of us live in, 1.2 million households in America have disappeared.

So it's likely that the full impact of the 8.4 million jobs lost and nearly three million homes foreclosed on since the recession began has taken an even bigger toll on the number of American households.

Those numbers probably aren't big enough for Mr. Coburn either. But funding two useless wars, tax cuts for rich people and corporations while enjoying automatic pay raises for Congress, that's okay.

Remember in the early nineties when it seemed like every exit off the freeway and many a four way stop had people with signs asking for help?  That went away under President Clinton but they're back again.  Except now they include children.

Maybe he meant small people?

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Glenn Beck=Stupid

So Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA is unpatriotic.  As one poster remarked, Glenn Beck has finally said something so stupid that even stupid people recognize its stupidity.  You would think he had learned something after trying to insinuate that Revolution by The Beatles was a progressive plot to institute Marxism, but you would be wrong.  I wonder if Beck has read the lyrics to John Mellencamp's Little Pink Houses.  On second thought, his head is still attached to his body so I guess not.  Beck needs a serious vacation time at one of those rehab facilities.  Not to fix his stupidity, he's too far gone for that, but to give the rest of us a break.

Because we certainly aren't getting one from our elected "Representatives".  No public option because Pelosi and company have given up.  Their corporate masters are too strong.

If there was any lingering doubt as to whether the public option would survive the final health care motion, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ended it on Friday morning.

"We had it. We wanted it," Pelosi told reporters at a press briefing. "It's not in reconciliation... We're talking about something that is not going to be part of the legislation."

Why? Was it late for dinner?  More than a majority of the American people want the public option but they might as well be wishing for Santa Claus to be real.  Or for the Tooth Fairy to leave something under their pillow.

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Five For Five

The Supreme Court is going to hear the case of of a man who was forced to listen to, read obnoxious phrases on homemade signs, and in general was harassed while he buried his son on what is usually the worst day in any parents life by a group of so-called religious fanatics.  What makes it even worse is that his son was a Marine who died in service to his country.

I am a strong defender of our First Amendment's rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. but I have to wonder why this is even an issue, much less, has become a case that for the Supreme Court.  It brings to mind the famous phrase "You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?"  As a side note, the McCarthy-Welch exchange was quite insightful and reading it showed me just how far our behavior (and that of a certain South Carolina representative) has fallen from civility.

As the Supreme Court has been exceedingly liberal in its interpretation of the Second Amendment and now considers a corporation an individuals, it shouldn't be that much of a stretch for them to decide that the behavior exhibited by members of the Westboro Baptist "Church" and others like them goes against all decent human behavior and should be called what it is, the equivalent of falsely screaming fire in a crowded theater.

I've never had children, but I have known people who have lost one.  My father's mother had a daughter who died at sixteen and my dad also died before she did.  Her words at his funeral still ring in my mind.  "I never thought I'd outlive him."  She didn't speak much in her remaining seven years and she stared out into space as if she was lost.  She still had her faculties but she wasn't the same woman.

I remember how I felt listening to the proceedings, carrying his casket to his final resting place and watching as the dirt covered him up.  It still affects me the same way nineteen years later and I don't know how gracefully I would have handled the Westboro nuts if they had been picketing my dad's funeral.  Probably not very well.

Since Liz Cheney can't keep her stupid mouth shut over things she knows nothing about, does this mean that John Adams was unpatriotic because he defended the British after the Boston Massacre?  And successfully at that?

Now Cheney's daughter, Liz, has taken up the cudgel by heading what some are describing as a McCarthyite campaign to purge the government of lawyers who dared to defend men, and even a child, accused of terrorism. The lawyers drew particular ire by sometimes defeating in court the Bush administration's attempts to declare itself beyond the law.

Liz Cheney and her organisation, Keep America Safe, have dubbed lawyers who acted on behalf of accused terrorists, and who now work for the department of justice, the "al-Qaida seven". The group has rebranded the justice department the "department of jihad".

President Adams believed that we were a nation of laws, I'm pretty sure he would be appalled at the disrespect the Constitution has been receiving for the last ten years.  You don't pick and choose who gets what rights, they should be apportioned equally and defendants must be treated equally under the law.  It's what separates us from the savages.  Why are she and her father so determined to sink lower than Al-Qaeda and and still act like they're taking the high road as they shred what's left of the Constitution?

Just because it snowed it doesn't mean that global warming isn't occurring.  All it takes is a little common sense.  Is the weather in your area the same as it was ten years ago?  I doubt it.  Places that were hot have not been as warm lately and places that were cold are warmer than they should be.    Change is happening and just because it isn't happening overnight, doesn't mean it isn't occurring.  Considering all the cuts to education that have eliminated critical thinking classes, it is no wonder that nearly half of Americans don't believe in global warming.

The stupid person of the day has to be the woman who crasher her car while she was shaving her pubic area.  Isn't that one of the things you do in the shower at home?

Well of course Pink Floyd music should be sold in album form.  Duh!  All their albums tell a story and other than Money or Another Brick in The Wall, most people can barely name the albums and don't realize what the inspiration for music was.  Most people can't tell you that Dark Side of the Moon is about a plane crash, mainly because they've never listened to the whole album in one sitting and when the songs are sold as singles, the interludes between songs are eliminated and the story is lost.  And yes, playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching the Wizard of Oz Really does work.  Amazingly so, at least until you past Dorothy meeting the Scarecrow. 

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If These Guys Only Had A Heart

Or a brain.  Tom Delay, and by extension, most Republicans and the media that drools over their every word, believes that people prefer to live on unemployment checks that barely cover their rent and that they enjoy standing in line at food banks instead of getting a job.  Like a true Republican he doesn't let facts get in his way.

"You know," Delay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out.

Host Candy Crowley: Congressman, that's a hard sell, isn't it?

Delay: it's the truth.

Crowley: People are unemployed because they want to be?

Delay: well, it is the truth. and people in the real world know it. And they have friends and they know it. Sure, we ought to be helping people that are unemployed find a job, but we also have budget considerations that are incredibly important, especially now that Obama is spending monies that we don't have.

Perhaps if you and Bush hadn't given the rich people all those tax breaks or allowed American companies to move their headquarters and manufacturing offshore so they wouldn't have to pay taxes, there might be jobs available. I'm a person in the real world and as I drive around town I see empty buildings where businesses used to be.  Mr. Delay, you aren't just willfully stupid, you are a jackass.

Walt Baker just couldn't keep his stupid under controleither.  He just had to send an email comparing the First Lady with a chimpanzee.  How a state as pretty as Tennessee can produce such backward people does boggle the mind.  I almost feel sorry for its citizens.

And then here comes Texas,it might not be the largest state in the Union, but it is definitely trying to spread its stupid to every impressionable child.  In a few years the United States will be completely out of the running in technology and medicine.  Or hasn't anybody noticed that a good proportion of the doctors don't speak English as their primary language?  And for those of you who believe that evolution is a theory and not true, I would like to remind you that gravity is also a theory and as of today nobody has said it doesn't work.

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction."

No wonder they don't understand the consequences of inbreeding.

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Wednesday Morning Stupid

Today's stupid award goes to Michael Barone and his idiotic column in the Washington Examiner.  Not content with lying about what the American people want, he slanders Europeans by portraying them as helpless victims because two world wars were fought on their ground.  Perhaps it's because almost every family lost at least one male member, and usually more, during those wars that helped them realize that everyone deserves a chance to live a healthy life after they are born whereas those who are against health care for everyone believes that right solely belongs to proto-humans.  Once they are born they are to fend for themselves.

I am perfectly capable of understanding the ins and outs of health insurance, but not everybody has the time or the vocabulary to understand the fine print that prevents them from getting treatment or finding out after the fact that that whatever they needed to get well is not covered.   And the insurance carriers depend on this.

When one is sick, one usually wants to get better or at least know why they don't feel well.  What they don't want to do is fill out endless reams of paperwork, produce identification, pay their copay and then have to justify their problem.  That was supposedly the theory behind HMOs.  Health care without any hassles.  What a concept.

Today has a runner up and surprise, surprise, it is also in the Examiner.  Being a military brat and attending schools either on base or just outside of it, I had to say the Pledge of Allegiance whether I wanted to or not.  I hated it and thought it had very little use except to give the teacher more time to take attendance and assemble the day's lesson.  When you recite it every day of the school year for six or seven years, it ceases to have meaning and becomes a chore.  If you asked most kids to explain every line, they can't do it.  I used to look enviously at the seniors in high school because they were given the option of sitting it out.  When I became a senior, I sat it out.

For two days in late January, a Roberto Clemente Middle School student refused to stand for the pledge and remained silent in her chair, according to details released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland and confirmed by a Montgomery schools spokesman.

The teacher first threatened detention and sent her to the counselor's office, according to the ACLU. When the same incident occurred the following day, the teacher called on a school security officer to escort the student to the counselor's office again.

"The law is crystal clear that a public school cannot embarrass or harass a student for maintaining a respectful silence during the Pledge of Allegiance," said Ajmel Quereshi, an ACLU lawyer.

When the student's mother approached school administration for guidance, an assistant principal recommended the student apologize for her "defiance," according to the ACLU.

Saying the pledge doesn't mean a thing since actions speak louder than words and since I joined the Army two days after graduation, I think I'm pretty patriotic.  I was willing to lay down my life to defend American citizens right to freedom of speech, or the right to be quiet.

It baffles me how so many people believe that repetitively saying something shows respect. I wonder how many of the people who believe that the girl should be punished have said the pledge since they graduated. I'll bet it isn't many and that most of them don't remember the words, have never served in the Armed Forces and believe that by wearing a stick pin or have a yellow ribbon on their car that they are patriotic.

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Sunday Morning Stupid

Today's stupid award goes to those businesses that believe shareholders are more important than their own workers.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

One would have to be pretty stupid not to understand the consequences of getting rid of your employees so the shareholders can make few more dollars.  And what would those consequences be?  Uhh, no job translates into no money to buy the products or services of said company.  Company eventually goes bankrupt due to lack of sales and shareholders lose money.  All because of greed and an inability to see the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, the GOP and the teabaggers babble endlessly about people needing to pull themselves up their bootstraps, learn new skills as education funding is cut to to the bone, stop depending on government "handouts" and get another job.  When even Wal-Mart posts a loss, how many jobs can there be?  Not many and not for a long time. But the bonuses to the executives continue.

Blaming the president and Congress is easy, but they aren't the ones who outsourced jobs overseas and/or are hiring temporary workers for less pay and no benefits so shareholders can get another 50 cents.  Isn't capitalism a great system?

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Also Worthy of The Title Is

Dick (I shoot my friends in the face) Cheney. Actually, he was yesterdays winner.   Mr. Cheney says he is a fan of torture and for some reason that doesn't surprise me.  What does surprise me is that he thinks waterboarding a man who tried to burn his own balls off would be intimidated by water.

Having suffered a third degree burn on my inner thigh, I can promise you that lying is not an option.  The pain is constant and time is one of the few things that makes the pain go away.  Holding burn cream in front of him would be incentive enough.  Inhumane, but effective.  Mr. Cheney is so in love with his versions of "enhanced interrogation" that sometimes his connection to reality is tenuous at best.

Mr. Cheney exhibits sadistic qualities at every opportunity and is regularly rewarded by the media.  If Bush didn't take his advice, why should Obama?

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Today Belongs To

Ann Coulter.  Yup, the she-man opened her mouth and stupidity spurted out as she supported her imaginary lover.  During the reign of error we were constantly told that if we couldn't respect the man, we had to respect the office.  She does neither.

Our current vice president is neither the White House dog, nor is he a "drunken Irishman".  The latest meme from the almost never right is to accuse whoever they disagree with as being drunk.  How original.  Oh well, if you can't refute facts you might as well resort to name calling.

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How To Become A Third World Country

Today's stupid award goes to Detroit's inner city high schools.  Unemployment is almost 50%, so instead of changing the curriculum to prepare students for high tech jobs, they've decided that classes on how to work at Wal-Mart are more appropriate.

High school is supposed to help you prepare for the future as an adult and to encourage you to dream of a bright future and living better than one's parents, not teach you to the lowest job standards possible.

Remember when Sears employees couldn't qualify for a Sears credit card because they didn't make enough money?  Do we really want to return to those days?  If the only jobs available are at Wal-Mart and McDonald's eventually no one will be able to afford to live anywhere except under a bridge.

Short sighted thinking got us into this mess and more of the same will not get us out of it.  If we don't start providing decent educations to our children we will only fall further and further behind.  Is that what everybody wants?  Pretending that the future doesn't exist and relying on the failures of the past is setting the country on the path to destruction.  It's like being fed a slow acting poison.  You're dead but you don't know it until it's too late.

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Three Days In One

This one is a doozy.  Waterboarding a four year old girl because she either couldn't or wouldn't recite her ABCs.  And as Andrew Sullivan so helpfully pointed out, the original story referred to waterboarding as a CIA torture technique.  Whatever my dad's faults might have been, raising his hand in anger wasn't one of them.

Crazy is as crazy does.  Or something like that.  The new version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Diseases (DSM) is trying for some lovely new definitions.  From classifying Shyness as a disease, they have moved on to childhood temper tantrums.  Two year olds beware!  All a toddler has to do is have a tantrum several times a week and if confirmed by a doctor before the age of ten, instead of surviving the Terrible Twos the toddler will now have a permanent diagnosis of "temper dysregulation with dysphoria".  Mother's little helper will be a whole new class of drugs.

Did you eat too much at the Pro Bowl party two weeks ago and then did it again during the Super Bowl?  You now have a binge eating disorder.  I wonder if Thanksgiving and Christmas count towards that?  But my favorite new disorder possibility is "risk syndromes".  There is nothing wrong with the person.  Yet.

For example, a moody teenager who displays "excessive suspicion, delusions and disorganized speech or behavior" may be labeled as having psychosis risk syndrome. The panel estimated that a quarter to a third of people who suffer from those "symptoms" go on to develop a psychotic disorder, and the writers acknowledged the new category could lead to inaccurate diagnosis of some who are not at risk.

"Given the severity of psychotic disorders, and evidence that early treatment may mitigate its long-term consequences, we believed that it was important to begin to recognise these conditions as early as possible," wrote Dr William Carpenter of the American Psychiatric Association's psychotic disorders work group.

Deviation from the norm must be stopped!  All children should exhibit proper behavior at all times! Or they will be medicated until they do.  Does anybody remember Zager and Evans?  We won't have to wait for the year 3535 before everything we think, do, or say is going to be in the pill we took today.BBB

First Post

I started a new blog because my first one had drifted away from my original intentions.  I have many things that interest me, but politics soon overwhelmed all of the them.  And since I think that much of today's culture consists of things that are so stupid that most of us wish we could whip out a magic wand a la Harry Potter and dispose of the boggarts by yelling "Riddikulous!", I decided to devote this blog to those items and leave my original blog to my many other interests.

So, almost five years later I've decided to try and centralize those items that reflect the decline of logical thinking and the increase in lemming activity.

I have the same feelings about Obama as I did about Bush.  They both reflect the worst that politics has to offer.  Neither one had or has had any interest in helping the majority of Americans unless it was time for an election or they were consolidating the power of their donors and wanted to keep the populace as quiet as possible until the deed was done.

Our so-called elected "Representatives" are about as useful as throwing gasoline on a fire.  They neither represent us nor do they maintain the checks and balances the Founding Fathers envisioned for them.

And the Supreme Court?  The current version is determined to make Dred Scott look like a high point of jurisprudence.  Corporations are not people, they are businesses run by people and should not have the same, or more, rights than a kindergarten teacher.  Besides having more money than most individuals, they now have more influence in an election.  Like a double double at In-N-Out burger.  They get to buy votes as a corporation and the same individuals who decide who the corporation backs also get to throw in their two centsmillions any time they want.  And the best part?  Most of those people sit on more than one board of directors, so they have even more influence.  Isn't that lovely?

Public figures do stupid things all the time so this blog won't always be about politics, but it will be about things that make you go "huh?"

I'm a couple of days behind, so let's start with Tom Tancredo and his "literacy" tests.  I'm all for them.  Especially for the people currently in power.  What the almost never right party of "No, because I said so!" Republicans and the "I can't find my balls with two hands and a flashlight" Demowienies have in common, is a complete lack of understanding of how to run this country effectively.  And they have communicated that to their die hard followers.  The sky is what we should be aiming for, not running into the ground like a plane without a pilot.

Yesterday's favorite was Michael Steele's "after taxes a million dollars isn't a lot of money."  I'm willing to give it a try since I know plenty of people who are living on less than ten thousand a year and they work for a living instead of giving speeches on subjects that affect less than two percent of the American population.

I'm sure that with a little more research there will be more to come.  Unfortunately.

BBB and Debsweb