DAILY NEWS - JANUARY 10th, 2012

DATELINE: OBSERVING THE CORONATION OF TURD ISLAND’S KING SHIT -- Finally, the damned GOP primaries have started – not a fucking moment too soon, because I was really starting to get sick of the gazillion debates so far. I’m excited. I’m a bit of a politics junkie, and, well, there is no nice way to say this, but the US has become the ultimate crack/speed/LSD fix – always extreme, always ugly, with a surreal quality of constant ‘what the fuck, man!’ that continually offers a follow-up hit with more pizzazz and less time in between, exactly what a junkie longs for. Their new prayer is Thank God for the United States of America and its never-ending election cycle. That said, I do not envy the Republicans their job of gleaning the wheat from the chaff in this weed-infested crop of crooks, hate-mongers and idiots.

I have grown tired of the hypocrisy of Romney and Gingrinch – holy crap, those two have written the damned book on hypocrisy in the extreme! I have given thanks (and even lit a candle) that Palin and Trump decided not to run – yet – and that Bachmann and Cain pulled out, because that was just way too much stoopid to even consider a possibility. That Santorum is still in there astounds me: to my dear friends on the warm side of the border, there are no coincidences – there is a reason that the man’s name is synonymous with frothy semen-filled shit. That ain’t no accident, and is something you really don’t want to be looking at every night for the next 8 years while eating dinner and watching the flatscreen. The man is fucking insane, and will seriously take your human rights back to a point where Kim Jong Il and Stalin would look moderate.

Of the many concerns I have with Ron Paul, the top one is that I can’t look at him without hearing Mr. Magoo’s voice. I can’t imagine the most powerful country in the world being led by a cartoon character. The thought of Mr Magoo strolling into the United Nations building with a passionate plea to call the world to arms, to unite against some heinous mutual threat, would have people laughing their asses off. Sorry, but he may as well talk like Alvin the Chipmunk as well, because as far as credibility goes, anyone who had good cartoon taste as a kid is not gonna take him seriously… and that could be more the danger.

Rick Perry, apart from having terminal Foot-in-Mouth Disease and needing Ed The Talking Horse on stage with him to help him count to three, proudly uses as his big boast the fact that he loves to kill people (just slightly better than Romney stating that he likes to fire people). Yes, thanks to the valiant efforts of Rick Perry, the US is essentially tied for third place at the International Government Executions Olympics in 2011 -- just a handful of lives behind North Korea and Yemen, but miles ahead of the next competitor. With Perry at the helm, you can well expect, with great pride, to give second place Iran, or even the front-runner, China, a run for their money. Does it not bother anyone that there is NO developed country in the world even competing in this event?

Here are the things that make me scream at the set though. How can this incredible collection of excrement stand there and scream about the evils of class warfare while bragging about being a product of it with every other sentence? How can they logically think there is one magic ticket to curing the economic woes of a country? For fuck sake, dropping taxes to the ‘job creators’ is the biggest load of cow crap I have ever heard. It’s the ‘job creators’ taking their jobs overseas, to where they get essentially slave labor at the hands of impoverished, desperate people (and a resultant crap product) that contributed to the problem, as well as Gingrinch’s Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae shit – and sorry, you can paint that outhouse with any color paint you want, but it’s still gonna be nothing more than a hole full of shit, Newt. Historical consultant? My ass! The largest corporations out there right now are sitting on billions, praying for that tax cut, not so they can hire more people on this continent, but so they can line their own fucking pockets and fuck the people over again – while passing handfuls of money under the table to the politicians who are pushing this fucking agenda. Why is this so hard for you dopes to see? There is a desperate need for tax reform, and that does not mean to keep taxing the middle class and lining the pockets of the likes of Gingrinch and Romney, but giving it some mile-long bullshit new name. You wanna talk about fucking class warfare, you better start looking in a mirror, then watchin your ass, because someone is gonna put on their Robin Hood costume and you two dolts are surely gonna be mistaken for that lousy, crooked, evil, heartless Sheriff of Nothingham.

Plus what is this crap about wanting less government, but then saying the government should federally regulate who sleeps with who, who can use birth control, and what church is acceptable? You might be wanting to lead the most powerful nation in the world, but that is not quite the same as being God. A leader with a god complex is… well… Kim Jung Il or Stalin. You want to control religion and ethnicity? Well, Hitler also managed to do that – for a while, but I guess anything is on the table when world domination, your pocketbook and a place in history is on the line. Fucking with this shit in politics is incredibly dangerous, and incredibly stupid, but I guess if the republican party is so narrow-minded and asinine to put someone like this in a position of leadership, they can reap what they sow. That a country the size and scope of the United States of America can only come up with this list of lame-brains to offer as their best and brightest is the saddest fucking thing I have ever seen.

That said, I will go out on a limb and make a prediction. Based solely on the very scientific process of pulling a name out of my ass (the same principle apparently employed by these candidates when discussing just about any issue), I will predict it will come down to sadly, Romney and Huntsman, with a Trump card being played in the end run. Why? Because everyone else on the playing field has had their one major pass, that one chance to take it across the goal line in a hail of glorious cheers, and they have dropped the ball. Bachmann, Paul, Perry, Cain, Gingrinch (twice), and now Santorum all did a meteoric rise to the top of the heap, only to open their mouths with a bit more press coverage and say that thing that made the people go ‘Holy Hell, What Were We Thinking!’. There is a reason for the huge undecided vote among republicans, and that is because the choices they are being offered are about the same as offering them a choice of death by disembowelment or being tied to an anthill and covered with honey to allow the critters to eat them alive. Huntsman has not had that chance to rise to the top yet. He’s a late bloomer, and he will start his holy ascension now, late enough in the game to put him near the top in the end, which leaves the evangelical right with the unbelievable choice of picking from a table with only two dishes – neither one being fish, but both of them belonging to that radical upstart cult of Mormonism. How sad that a candidate’s religion is even a topic of discussion, but if there is one thing it’s easy to scare people about, to bring out the worst in them, its religion.

But what about the Trump card, you ask? Well, I suspect that SOME people, when his choice isn’t going to make it across the finish line, is gonna toss his hat into the ring as an independent. That’s sad on two counts, the first being that he really should not take off any hat that hides that bad comb-over, but is also sad because of the elementary school-yard attitude it portrays. For God’s sake, the man has a golden crapper but still uses a ShamWow on his hair. More to the point though, it will give the Republicans just what they don’t need – another reason to be idiotically divided.

DAILY NEWS - September 22, 2011

DATELINE: ON DEATH ROW, OUTSIDE LOOKING IN – Troy Davis died last night. He did not die of natural causes, he did not die of old age. He was executed for a crime that no one is even sure he committed. While I understand, and yes, even sometimes succumb to the urge to want retribution for those people so brutally, heinously tortured, abused and killed, and for their families as well, there comes a point when you still have to question the whole process. Yes, there are appeals, yes, there are processes… BUT even that is flawed. Rick Perry, GOP leadership candidate, stated that he sleeps just fine at night knowing the number of people he has ordered executed, and that he does not worry about any one of them being innocent. Well, there is every possibility that Troy Davis was innocent. The witnesses who recanted over the years said so. The forensics, when reviewed also said so, but still there was no a mechanism in place to even re-open the case. While I understand that we have all taken great strides towards equality, you still have to wonder if, had Troy Davis not been black, would he be dead today. This was a black man accused of killing a white cop in Georgia, a case with more holes than a block of fucking Swiss cheese. So, while I willingly jump naked into the muddy waters of discrimination and capital punishment, let me ask some questions that are perhaps not asked enough in these situations. Where is the justice in this? If Troy Davis did not commit the crime, or if it was accidental or if it was a wonderful job of the lame evidence offered being planted in order to secure a conviction in a hot-topic emotionally-charged case, did he deserve to be put through years of this emotional torture, the appeals, the stays, and did he deserve to be strapped to a table, left there for an excessively long time, then injected so that he would die a slow death? Is that justice? For one second, put yourself in his place, on death row, on your way to that chamber, knowing you are wrongly accused. What the hell does that feel like? What about Troy Davis’ family and friends? How would it feel to watch as your loved one, someone you know is not guilty, someone who you have been working hard to vindicate, who you have evidence of his innocence, but you can get nowhere for it. Those are people who, for their lives may have believed in the ideal of innocent until proven guilty and guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, those who believe that good and right will overcome, and the true killer will be caught. Do they deserve that hell? At least while he was live, there was hope that the system could be corrected, but now there is nothing. What about the victim? If Troy Davis did not do this, and there is every possibility that he did not, there is another murderer out there, wandering the streets with the people of Georgia, but this one is even more despicable because he has now taken one more life, indirectly, and is fine with that. Does the family of the victim, in this case officer MacPhail, not deserve to know without any doubt that the person who killed their loved ones is someplace where he cannot hurt anyone else, where he is paying for his crime? What about the person who has to actually push the plunger on that syringe or flip the switch or trip the door? It’s a job, something he is ordered to do. What the fuck does this do to his mind? What nightmares does he have? Execution is barbaric, a tool in the arsenal of despots and dictators, something we cringe at in movies about the French Revolution, but that is to be warmly embraced under our own flawed terms? Yes, there are some who are so hideous, so dangerous, so proud of the lives they have taken and the pain they have caused that we want them gone. They are the few, however. Yes, there are Bible thumpers who would cling to, grapple to the old ‘an eye for an eye’, but that same book says to turn the other cheek. Neither is a sound premise for dealing with justice.

FYI – a look at some statistics courtesy of Wiki… The following 23 countries carried out executions in 2010: Bahrain (1), Bangladesh (9+), Belarus (2), Botswana (1), China (2000+), Egypt (4), Equatorial Guinea (4), Iran (252+), Iraq (1+), Japan (2), Libya (18+), Malaysia (1+), North Korea (60+), Palestinian Authority (5), Saudi Arabia (27+), Singapore (1+), Somalia (8+), Sudan (6+), Syria (17+), Taiwan (4), USA (46+), Vietnam (1+), Yemen (53+).As of 5 May 2011 executions have been reported in the following 9 countries during 2011: Bangladesh, China, Iran, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, UAE, USA. That's some pretty upstanding, stalwart, reasonable, rights-respecting crowd there, ain't it.

DATELINE: IN A CAGE IN A PUB IN ENGLAND – Picture it: the beer is flowing, the crowds are screaming, pumping their fists in the air, hollering for that massive take-down punch. The women prance around in their almost altogether, egging the spectators on. In the middle of the room, inside a cage, are the combatants, neither wearing anything but their shorts, fists raised, both murder and panic in their eyes. Sorta takes you back to those good old gladiator days, until you consider the sick twist this now takes. The two in the cage are aged 8 and 9. Yes, there are children fighting to entertain the frenzied adults. That night, before a crowd of over two hundred, children received the screamed requests to ‘kill em’ and ‘knock ‘is bloody teeth out’. The children were the subject of bets and bookie hard-ons. Am I the ONLY one who sees something incredibly fucking sick and perverted with this? How is it possible for authorities to look at a blood sport like this and say it’s sport and there was nothing wrong? It was in a pub, they were in a cage, they were wearing no protective gear – hell, they were wearing practically nothing – there were women wearing the same amount of clothes prancing around, there were adults grunting and screaming like fucking behemoths as they got their rocks off and their pockets lined, and yet there was nothing wrong with this? What the fuck sort of animals are we turning into. They were 8 and 9. What the fuck lessons are they and their friends learning from this bullshit, this abuse, this hideous treatment of those who are among the most vulnerable. That the Brits can’t find a fucking thing wrong with this, says a mouthful.

DATELINE: ON THE AUTOBAHN, ESCAPING THE POOR HOUSE – Pity Angela Merkel – seems that for many, the future of the world is landing on her shoulders. Germany is being implored to save Greece’s economy, save Italy’s economy, bail out those countries in Europe that cannot afford to pay their bills. Germany has become the eldest sister in a family of ‘live for today’ siblings as the doom and gloom predictions regarding the European economic union come to pass. Remember the flack the UK took for not jumping on the Amazing Technicolor Euro Bus? Bet they aren’t one bit sorry for the flack they took. They recognized the potential for problem, a potential we are just now starting to see. The Euro is, was, and always will be a rudderless ship. They are like the Corleone family with Fredo at the helm. They have a currency for all, but no one body with any teeth to control it or maintain it, that takes the needs of the majority into consideration while passing measures to protect, bolster and grow the economy. The system that involves Congress in the US is, as we have seen, VERY far from perfect, but at least, in essence, they will live or die on their own terms (as stupid, stubborn and partisan as those terms are, the jury is still out as to which way it will go), but Europe has nothing, and now it comes to Big Sister Germany to show pity and bail them out. This is not a situation Merkel or the hard-working tax-paying German’s want to be in, and it is a situation they should not be in. As economies the world over teeter on the brink, Germany has to decide if they open that can of worms and save Greece or let that country flounder in its own excrement. If they save Greece, can Italy be far behind? Spain? These are all big countries with big economies to consider. If they don’t bail out their neighbors though, if Greece falls, that could well precipitate a run on the banks in those other countries as the stark realization sets in that yes, the sky really could fall. A run on the banks would be a harbinger for economic death for all of them. The stakes are high, the fallout, either way, is not good, and the irony is that they world is turning to Germany to save it.
As if poor Angela doesn’t have enough on her plate, the demonstrations and protests begin today as the Pope, that bastion of justice, peace, tolerance and sound logic, arrives for his four-day tour. Yes, this is something else for which the Germans will be footing the bill, arbitrarily, and it will not be an insignificant amount.

DATELINE: WATCHING THE LOONEY GO SKY-DIVING – How the mighty have again fallen. In the course of one night, the beloved Looney, the only currency in the world named for a bird AND for the idiots who regulate it, fell a full two cents, and that was at market open. This comes on the heels of the US Federal Reserve announcing their new plan, Operation Twist. You have to fucking love when they come up with these kitschy names for crazy ideas. Operation Twist puts no money into the economy to help encourage it along, and maybe that’s the thing to do. Basically it equates to selling short and buying long (a theory I fully embrace in many aspects of life). While the theory was offered in an attempt to show something is being done, innovative ideas are at work to right the abysmal situation with the economy, investors saw it as a fucking Hail Mary pass and balked at the premise that this was a good thing. With news that Chinese factory activity is down, and Germany’s business growth has started to dig in its heels, we could be in for a bumpy ride. It amazes me though that even yet, no one looks at the way banks have bled the economy for decades, building ivory towers to house their multi-million dollar earning execs, or the self-aggrandizing, pocket-lining pork-barreling done by politicians as something that could have contributed to this clusterfuck, or as something that still needs to be addressed. No worry, though. Chubby Checker weighed in on 'Operation Twist', because the 24 hour news media knows how to dig out those pertinent positions on the issues that matter. "The Twist has always meant money for everybody," the aging twister is quoted as say. Well, then, how can it fucking fail, right?