The Enthusiasm Gap: An Open Letter to Young Voters

While the Huff Po's style section has been breathlessly reporting on the week-long flight and eventual crash and burn of the Gap's new logo, they're also telling us that the new logo has been so unpopular that complaints about it have their own Facebook page. Considering the Gap's typical target demographic (a not unreasonable guess would be 16-30), then it only follows that the people most passionate about the Gap's new logo, which is something Mondrian would've done on a lazy day ("Fuck 'em. One square is all they get today!"), would be young people.

OK, fair enough. My three year-old grandson Gavin could've come up with something more creative in five minutes flat and for free. It also sucked a little that the company just foisted its shitty little logo off on their online customers without even soliciting input. But in 100 years, who'll give a shit? 50 years? One year?

What counts and what will ripple throughout history is what our generations do today and that starts with who we elect and throw out of Congress. Where's the outrage from you young people about who's in Congress? How many of the kids who tweeted and texted complaints about the Gap's new logo will actually wind up at the polls on November 2nd?

Priorities, kids, priorities. We've passed down shitty priorities to your generation but that doesn't mean you have to take our cues. We get more emotionally engaged over who the next American Idol will be than we do who will be our next president or Senator or Congressman.

You are the real silent majority, the ones who can put the kibosh on the GOP's pre-election boasting about taking back our government. And think about those words, "take back." Doesn't sound very democratic, does it? Well, Republicans don't believe in winning anything fair and square, as is evidenced by the fact that they stole three consecutive elections between 2000-2004. When they know we won't give them something they want, like a neocon president or a Congressional majority, they just take it. It's really that simple. Ask Al Gore or Max Cleland or Cynthia McKinney. And they're largely able to get away with it because the people who are now your parents and grandparents showed more balls in the 60's than you generally do on your best day. We put our lives on the line for women's rights, gay rights, civil rights and protesting Vietnam.

You protest the Gap's new logo.

We know that those of you who were old enough to vote for Obama two years ago are suffering from sticker shock and for many, many, many good reasons. But the fact that you were largely instrumental in turning a dark horse candidate who four years earlier was an Illinois state senator and making him the first legitimate President of the United States since Clinton was nothing short of a miracle. You did that.

And you'll have your say two years from now when you go decide if Obama deserves to stay in office. But right now we have the midterms to get through and if the Republicans take back even one chamber of Congress... Well, you see what the Democrats have done (or rather, not done) because the pygmy Republican party calls them bad names. Imagine how tough it'll be for Obama to get anything done if even just the lower chamber gets taken over again by right wing Tea Party psychopaths.

And if you don't want to vote Democrat, that's fine, too. How you vote is an intensely personal choice. But the important thing is that you get out there and do your damnedest to keep the Republicans out of power. Remember reading about the GOP's "Pledge to America"? They basically said, "We are already planning on fucking you over for the next three lifetimes if you give us the majority." They will take your Social Security and put it on the craps table of Wall Street. They will take away your Medicare. They will eradicate whatever few good things there are about the health care bill.

And they're the ones who got us into this mess, in the first place. If you're 18 and just about to vote for the first time, keep in mind that since you were in third grade, we have been perpetually at war with one country or another. You have an all-Republican government to thank for that, especially Iraq. If you couldn't get that minimum wage summer job earlier this year because your Dad's out of work neighbor grabbed it, you have Republicans to thank for that, too.

And too many of us working class slobs are all too ready to hand the reins of power back to the same psychopaths that got us into this mess and for what? A few more dollars on our tax returns while many of them will get back more than you likely will make in half a lifetime?

Get out and vote and stop worrying about the Gap's new logo. Everything, regrettably, begins with politics down the quality of the water you drink, the food you eat, the air you breathe, how much you'll get back on your taxes, how safe your work place and first car will be or what you're taught at school. We already have an enthusiasm gap that's threatening to put this country back into the Dark Ages from which we haven't even begun emerging.

Doing Our Best to Keep Fear Sane.

"Oh, shit, JP's going." "There goes the neighborhood..."

Mrs. JP and I decided that, while it would have been cheaper to take one of Arianna's buses all the way to Assclown Central (aka Washington, DC) to the Stewart/Colbert rallies, ultimately we'd prefer to take our new car and to drive back at our leisure. We'd briefly thought about inviting people to go down with us but we'll be spending the 29th and 30th at a friend's house in Arlington then head back up on Halloween, stopping in Mrs. JP's old haunts in Cranston, Rhode Island. Shame. It would've been cool if someone came along to help with the driving and gas money. However, if anyone in the Massachusetts/Connecticut/Jersey area (Jill?) wanted to hook up en route and form a little caravan, we'd certainly be open to the idea.

So if anyone reading this is going to the Sanity/Fear rallies on October 30th, leave a comment or email us at crawman2@yahoo.com and let us know where you want to meet. We can even exchange cell phone numbers and meet on the mall if not on the road. Seize yaaaaaaaa!

Assclowns of the Week Midterms, #(19)84: Midterm Madness edition

¡Hola, amigos! Just when you thought things couldn’t get more bizarre on the seedy right side of the tracks, Sarah “I Said No to Phonics” Palin, Tea Partiers and the Republicans who love them shove our addled heads deeper into the rabbit hole of human lunacy. And really, folks, what did America truly need more than Karl Rove in a red dress?

There was a time when we all thought George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the PNAC lunatics who loped across Capitol Hill like the upholstered jackals they are represented the worst that humanity had to offer. But then we elected an African American as our President and suddenly America regressed into an antebellum melodrama as written by George Orwell.

Now, successful and promising Republican campaigns are being waged not only against Democratic incumbents who apparently have never once thought to respond with competence, compassion, common sense and civility toward their base but also mainstream Republicans judged to be not cruel and heartless enough. So your porcine powerhouse thought it was high time he did a special election edition of some of the most notable psychopaths currently running for public office during the midterms. So hop aboard the Tea Party bandwagon and review some of the conservative darlings who will replace some Democrats and much, much more!

The rest can be found here.

Ronald Reagan is Dead... and We Don't Feel Too Good, Ourselves

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

"People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that's what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we've got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place. If you're serious, now's exactly the time that people have to step up." - President Barack Obama

When I informed the missus yesterday that my next article would be a slam on the Democrats, she said, "That's like shooting fish in a barrel." I responded, "No. Fish have spines."

These days, Daddy Warbucks Barack is doing the same exact thing as George W. Bush four years ago: Hitting the campaign trail for his party in a non-election cycle while he ought to be running the nation. In both cases, their respective parties were expected to lose big in the midterms. Here's the one crucial difference: George W. Bush had the sense not to insult the party's base while trying to get votes for the Republicans. Obama, while he's slapping us on the backs with one hand is slapping us in the face with the other.

During an interview in Rolling Stone and a stumping stop in Wisconsin, Obama chided Democratic, liberal and independent voters under the guise of rallying them. Scared that he'll be faced with an even more hostile Congress than the one with which he's had to deal for the past 20+ months, Obama has made the huge mistake of talking down to the liberal/progressive base that had gotten him elected, treating justifiably disaffected voters as if they're petulant children who want their candy now, as if we have poor impulse control.

That's a characterization that's more befitting Republican/Tea Bagger voters. While the liberal/progressive base that elevated then-Senator Obama from a mere dark horse to the presidency of the United States may feel disenfranchised, at least we never made an issue of his religion, his birthplace or questioned his patriotism or political or ideological allegiances. Understandably, Obama has given up on the Tea Bagger/Fox "News" demographic.

But there are a lot of voters on both sides of the Great Ideological Divide that are deeply unhappy with the 44th administration. Many are going to be voting Republican. Many will be voting ultra Republican. And those voters who actually have their facts straight will be sitting at home on Super Tuesday. Those are the ones who realize two things: #1 That Obama's presidency is not (directly) at stake. And #2, it doesn't really matter which party they vote for. The only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats usually use lubrication and give us a sloppy reacharound.

Let's take stock of the Democrats' proud accomplishments of late:

In the biggest no brainer of the decade, a fat, slow-swinging piñata sans the blindfold, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the Democrats, while tokenly insisting on keeping them for the middle class, caved and put off a final vote because they know they'll cave in the face of the Republican minority yet again and extend them for their fellow Haves and Have Mores.

In another no brainer, the Democrats allowed the minority Republicans to scuttle the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Larry Summers is leaving his post as the head of the National Economic Council so he can spend more time insulting women at Harvard and the rumors are flying that Obama will appoint a Wall Street tycoon to fill his post to dispel any lingering right wing impressions that he's "anti-business."

Stephen Colbert, the faux conservative and darling of the liberal base was openly insulted by John Conyers and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer after the comedian testified before Congress on the plight of immigrant migrant workers, thereby making them sound exactly like the Republicans. In fact, Conyers asked Colbert to leave and to submit his statement to Congress even before he had the chance to speak despite the fact that Mr. Colbert was there at the personal invitation of Conyers' subcommittee chairwoman Zoe Lofgren.

And Harry Reid recently tried to suck up to an unwinnable right wing base by wishing the Cordoba Cultural Center would be built elsewhere.

It's been 20+ months. Unemployment has not gotten any better since right before Bush left office, the deficit has grown, our national debt has grown. Anyone who honestly thought this hobbling by the Bush administration would be magically healed in 20 months deserves to get bitch-slapped by the President.

But the Obama administration, in many ways, is like that computer program that looked so great in the demo at the computer store than, once you install it, it crashes your system.

Not only did Obama install Ken Salazar, a man who never saw an oil cartel he didn't like, as Interior Secretary, he also put in charge of protecting the Interior a man overseeing a Minerals Management Service that allowed BP to pollute the entire Gulf Coast by not making them file environmental impact reports, to allow them to drill without adequate (and inexpensive) backup measures and to submit a laughable oil spill response plan that included dead men, non-working phone numbers and even a Japanese home shopping network. The health care bill is a joke and merely resulting in higher and higher premiums. Yet the only funny thing Obama saw during a recent $30,000 fundraiser were querulous liberals who couldn't get over the fact that Obama championed a public option during his campaign yet swept it from the table when the minority Republicans began grumbling about it.

Granted, it would be grossly unfair to blame Obama for all the ills that he'd inherited just as it would be grossly unfair to blame Bush for the same problems. Many of our problems began under Reagan and, in some cases, Nixon. But Ronald Reagan is dead and we're not feeling too good, ourselves.


Meanwhile, Gitmo is still open despite campaign promises to the contrary, pictures and videos of us torturing innocent people are closed to public scrutiny despite campaign promises to the contrary, Afghanistan has been ramped up to unprecedented levels, the illegal war in Iraq is still being fought only with less US troops, the number of contractors between Iraq and Afghanistan has literally swelled to 2-1 and bailed out corporate executives are paying themselves bigger bonuses than ever.

And, in probably the most egregious example of wet-legged Democratic cowardice, the Obama administration won't even address a UN Human Rights Council's finding that Israeli commandos murdered a US citizen execution-style.

It seems, for many reasons that seem pressing and unavoidable to him, Obama is bound and determined to continue kowtowig to the Chinese even while they're racheting up the trade imbalance and don't seem to care that their products are killing us, sucking up to the Saudis and practically lying prostrate before Israel despite their terrorist activities that are killing US citizens and innocent Palestinians and Lebanese.

This is a trend that began decades ago and, thanks to Obama, the once-proud and independent United States remains the Sick Man of North America. So why shouldn't we call in sick on Election Day?

Up Against the Wall, Mutha!

I swear, in my 51+ years, I've never seen things get this bad. To get a glimpse of a worse state, you'd have to ask people in their 70's or 80's what it was like in the Great Depression. The two epochs, our and theirs, compare favorably if "favorably" can be used in that context.

Our own government, the non-partisan Census Bureau, told us this month that about 44,000,000 of us are living at or below the poverty line. The Dept. of Labor said early this month that unemployment climbed to 9.6% with no end in sight. We're hearing from other organizations that the top executives of the 50 companies that shed the most jobs took home bigger salaries and bonus packages than ever. And continuing the Bush tax cuts for these same people is half the GOP's campaign platform.

It could be plausibly said that the only thing that keeps us from rioting on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Ave. is hunger and distracted desperation to find any work.

Mrs. JP and I are just two people who fell through the cracks. We're both skilled, hard-working people who'd much rather make our own way the way we're expected to. Yet the system's not cooperating. The MA DET's official website has been either down or slowed considerably since yesterday and I'm not getting the final check from my 12 week federal extension. Even with both of us drawing unemployment, we were pulling in less than $300 a week, which is insufficient for rent, food, car insurance, internet, gas, electricity, gasoline and whatever comes up.

Anything you guys could do would literally make all the difference this month. We're still about $300 short just for the rent that's due on Friday, which is the $300- we should have gotten by tomorrow. We're doing everything we can. Last Friday, we drove as far out as Concord, about 20 miles east of us, looking for work to no avail. Temp agencies call me for my resume, I give it to them then they don't call me back. Either people aren't hiring or the 9.6% unemployment rate gives them an excuse to shrink their strike zone down to the size of a molecule.

We really do want to be self-sufficient and to start paying it forward. We could cut down on our living expenses by going to the local food banks. But we've avoided them out of both pride and the realization there are other others who are hurting worse than us. But this is the closest we've come to facing actual eviction and there aren't even any homeless shelters in the area.

Pottersville Has Moved

This blog is going down as of right now. The real articles have been been posted at Give Us This Day Our Daily Dread. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

The Colbert Retort

These videos have probably by now made the rounds all over the liberal blogosphere but Stephen Colbert's 5 minute-long performance/testimony on migrant workers before Congress is too good not to help disseminate.

This was the closest Colbert ever came to stepping out of character, when he told Congresswoman Chu, "I like talking about people who don't have any power...I feel the need to speak for those who can't speak for themselves....We ask them to come and work, and then we ask them to leave again. They suffer, and have no rights."


We unknowns in the blogosphere point out that contradiction every day and no one listens to us. Perhaps Colbert's celebrity will get them to thinking about that despicable contradiction.

Still Perfect

Anyone who's ever gotten their first pair of eyeglasses in years will know what it's like: You run outside and start counting leaves on trees, reading the license plate numbers of strangers driving by and seeing how far away you can stand from a calendar while still being able to read it. This is what today is like for me since getting my own pair from Perfect Glasses.com. It's almost like having painless, outpatient eye surgery that restored my vision after years of blindness.

After Mrs. JP got her bifocals in the mail five weeks ago and they proved to be a smashing success, I had the temerity to ask my contact guy Chad Thomsen if I could get a pair of bifocals of my own if I agreed to write another article. He immediately said Yes. So I got another eye exam, submitted my script and order that day then sat back and waited a couple of weeks.

Some places give you your glasses in an hour but then again, that doesn't leave more than a few cursory minutes for a quality control check, does it? Take it from an old ISO 9001-trained QC guy, you cannot scrimp on quality, especially if you want to run with the big dogs. Perfectglasses.com has a stringent quality control apparatus in place so they can ensure your script is exactly as the doctor specified. When you combine the value ($19 for mine had I paid for them) with the relatively brief wait (two weeks on average) plus the superior quality of the lenses and frames, waiting by the mailbox for a couple of weeks seems a small price to pay.


Of course, the drawbacks to getting new glasses is that I'm seeing for the first time how old and decrepit I am and exactly how bad of a housekeeper I am but there's nothing poor Chad can do about that.

What he can do for you, however, is give you affordable, timely high-quality eyewear that's literally 10% of what a lot of places in the meat world will charge. I got quotes a year and a half ago and what I was hearing was up to $200 for bifocals with progressive lenses. So, once again, if you happen to be in the market for eyewear, you definitely want to check out Perfectglssesusa.com. My style, in case you're curious, is the Live Wire model.

Fox News at its Finest, Part XII

Fox: We Stay on Top of the News!


"What's that spell? RDGCGON, that's what!"


That's... that's horrible! Or, it would be if the two automakers in question, Tesla and Fisker were European as Fox claimed. They're not. They're American.


Yeah, but hitting the power button on the remote is still easier.


And if news of Goldman Sachs' bundled mortgage-backed securities can't sustain your interest, take a gander at these tronches...


Uh, I think I'll let Christine field this one...


Oh, no. Perish the thought.


"Tell us, damnit, or we'll fucking blow your brains out!"




"...and now, here's Jesus with the latest on the Lions vs Christians championship..."


Absolutely. Facts ought to reside in one skull at a time.


Until they go to prison, that's about the summation of a typical college Republican.


Oh, so that explains this and this, then?


Nah, we'll pass. But if Nazi Germany ever makes a comeback...


Ah, but is it still legal to be legal in Arizona if you don't have your papers on demand?


Look like Little Jack Horner's stuck his thumb in something worse than a plum pie.


Yeah, authors need teleprompters to sign their own names on invisible books during their book signings all the time. And your point is...?


Ah, yes, Whenever I think of national unity, the first decade that springs to mind is the 60's.

Flashback: November 15, 2007

Bill O'Reilly's not above using blackmail to get guests on the O'Reilly Factor. He's just threatened to do it to Christine O'Donnell. You see, O'Reilly's massive ego is still bruised by O'Donnell recently canceling an appearance on Fox.

Ever the company man, O'Reilly's not the voice of reason that he sounds. He still keeps insisting on feigning confusion about the insistence of "the left" to ridicule her for making several flaky comments that just make her sound like Sarah Palin-lite (which is scary enough, since Palin's an intellectual flyweight to begin with). However, O'Reilly did remind his viewers that Bill Maher's not the only guy who can dip into his video vaults to show O'Donnell in a less than flattering light. On his show last night, O'Reilly seemed to briefly threaten to drag out these clips.

This is probably what he was thinking about when Fox, inexplicably, brought O'Donnell in as a guest on O'Reilly Factor to weigh in as the conservative viewpoint on stem cell research and cloning, a highly technical and complicated topic that's perhaps best discussed among experts and truly informed pundits.

Toward the end of this video, O'Donnell said, "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this experiment."


Sorta like this. Which was the same weird, Island of Dr. Moreau shit that Bush was blathering on about almost two years before that during his 2006 State of the Union Address when he pleaded with Congress,

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids...

This, as with all rumors, lies and innuendos, starts out with a grain of truth. Back in January 2005, National Geographic created quite a stir in Fundie Land when they announced that Chinese scientists "at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs." And scientists at Stanford University were doing experiments involving injecting human brain cells into the brains of mice.

Both Bush and O'Donnell had years and years to think about what was actually done yet in their reptilian, reactionary brains, somehow this morphed into ten foot tall chimeras and mice with "fully developed human brains." Bush got to leave office on his own terms after eight plastic bubblicious years comfortably shielded from the truth. It's like playing Telephone only with higher stakes.

But the intellectual trogs are still winning elections and primaries. Christine O'Donnell is proof of that. By winning Delaware's GOP senate primary earlier this month, she already has more pure political capital than Sarah Palin and the last fucking we need is another Sarah Palin.

Caption Contest

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat will now do a re-enactment of the Wall Street bailout.

Top Ten Things Not to Say When You're Pulled Over

Recently, Yahoo! News published a feature on what not to do if you ever get pulled over by a police officer. Conspicuously missing from the feature were what not to say in that situation. What are the top ten worst things to say to a police officer after getting pulled over?

10) "You must be new in town or fresh out of the academy. OK, you go straight, hang a right at the next set of lights and Dunkin' Donuts is right there on your left."

9) "No, I'm not a lawyer but I slept in a Holiday Inn last night with your wife."

8) "You know, if it wasn't for the two headless bodies in the trunk, I could've outrun you."

7) "I'd pay your salary with my taxes if I didn't cheat on them every year!"

6) "I don't know where the registration is, Officer. Pop the trunk and ask the owner."

5) "Riddle me this: What drives a motorcycle, is dressed in blue and too stupid to pass the detective's exam?"

4) "My other car's the Batmobile and you're about to blow my secret identity, flatfoot!"

3) "Sucks for me that Wal-Mart or the mall's not hiring security guards."

2) "I've been waiting for this opportunity. For months, I've been practicing reciting the alphabet backwards while dead drunk."

1) "What are you packing, a 9 millimeter? I'm sorry about your small penis."

Jimi Hendrix: 40 Years Ago

Jimi Hendrix died 40 years ago today. God, that makes me feel old. I went to a bar tonight and played "Voodoo Chile" in his memory.

I literally grew up with Jimi. From the age of 11, when my contemporaries were grooving to Donny Osmond and the black Michael Jackson and his brothers, I was already veering into dangerous territory, diving headfirst into the music that would come to partially define me. At about the same time I was discovering Hendrix right after his death, I was also listening to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Black Sabbath and the other bad boys of rock.

But Jimi resonated with me in a way that no other musician had. I never thought that he was communing with me either deliberately or coincidentally but even at the tender age of 11-12, I got where he was about musically and never looked back.

The above video is perhaps not a good way to memorialize the 40th anniversary of his death but it's the last full concert he ever gave, one in Fehmarn, Germany. He'd played since. His last public appearance was in the Balkans, a concert in which he'd played one or two songs then abruptly stopped and said he couldn't do it anymore. He walked off the stage dragging his guitar after him. The night before his death, he'd played with Eric Burden's new group, War. That was perhaps the last time he'd ever touched a guitar.

He had a court appearance the next day and at Monica Danneman's house that night, he took a handful of a narcotic call Vesparax (a potentially lethal cocktail comprised of 50 mg brallobarbital, 150 mg secobarbital and 50 mg hydroxyzine) and they were made by Danneman's father's pharmaceutical company. Jimi was unfamiliar with this narcotic and didn't know they were so powerful they had to be quartered before ingesting. He took a handful and it paralyzed his gag reflex even after his stomach rejected them. The paramedics stupidly put him in the ambulance in a sitting position and actually held his head back, thereby guaranteeing the vomit couldn't leave his airway.

Vesparax, sadly, was banned only long after it had killed Jimi Hendrix. And, in a Housmanic way, we'll never have to see Jimi age, grow decrepit or run out of hits.

Why is it When Some Teabagger Douchebag...

...wins a primary or manages to not completely alienate voters, it's a major news story? But when real progressives defeat middle-of-the-road Blue Dog Democrats (as was the case in New Hampshire last night), it gets short shrift, hardly meriting a yawn?

If you were to look at this morning's New York Times, you'll be treated to a breathless lead story, above the fold, of Tea Baggers like Christine O'Donnell winning the GOP primary against moderate Republican Congressman Mike Castle.

It's not even as if a Palin endorsement as one given to O'Donnell is an automatic guarantee of success. Brian Murphy got Palin's nod and still got his ass handed to him by fellow Republican Robert Erlich in the Maryland gubernatorial race. So what's the common denominator and why is the MSM treating this groundswell of opposition as if it's on a par with the populist movement that swelled around Obama three years ago? Especially since a typical nose count of Tea Bagger hatefests can be counted in the hundreds rather than the thousands (over 70,000,000 of us voted for President Obama, it ought to be noted).

First off, the only common denominator besides badly-spelled signs is dissatisfaction with the establishment GOP and government in general. What we're seeing is the emergence of a fringe group, the Michele Bachmann/Steve King feathers of an already insane right wing. And all the MSM are doing is magnifying the importance and scope of the Tea Bagger "phenomenon" at almost Fox "News" proportions and, in the process, creating the same echo chamber as the one that deafened us into submission in the 2002-2003 run-up to war with Iraq.

Secondly, I think it's still easy to laugh off the efficacy of a badly educated, willfully ignorant and criminally stupid and racist element such as the Tea Baggers because O'Donnell's primary victory last night came from just 57,000 voters. Even in tiny Delaware, that's just a small fraction of the entire electorate.

Therefore, one can conclude that the Tea Baggers are, #1 artificially embiggened by the MSM much in the way that outnumbered troops are instructed to make noise when approaching the enemy so as to appear twice their actual size and, two, their disaffection with government (if genuine, an understandable one shared by progressives) is actually little more than thinly-veiled racism. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to speculate that if Biden, Dodd or Hillary Clinton won the presidency the Tea Party would be small enough to stuff inside Newt Gingrich's mouth.

But the "vast left wing conspiracy" that is the "liberal media" is so enamored of the Tea Baggers, they treat them in a quasi-romantic sense as if they're so many Scarlett Pimpernels and that it's 1789 Paris all over again.

Let's also not forget one other thing: If the Tea Baggers are throwing out the so-called Old School Reagan Republicans, the New School Republicans are ready to school them as to the true nature of political scumbaggery. Scott Brown, another Tea Bagger favorite here in Massachusetts, gladly accepted their money and support then in the first vote he cast in the Senate, he sided with the Democrats and so far has been voting like a pretty moderate Republican. What makes them think it can't happen again?

Don't forget one more thing: When revolutionaries stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, there were little more than a small handful of drunks to free. The pundits and historians of the time got it wrong as they always do with historical events then and they're getting it wrong now. And George Santayana either weeps or chuckles.

The Mean Streets of Hudson

So, about a half hour ago, Mrs. JP is at the computer and she happens to look out the kitchen window. And what to her wondering eyes did appear? Not one, not two but three Hudson police cruisers in our neighborhood. Was JP up to his old tricks, enraging his psycho ex by having the impertinence and the gall to remain alive? Sorry, not today.


This is my neighbor's house across the street. So what did my old buddy do this time? We all know he has a spotty reputation with the local constabulary. Why O why was literally 75% of our municipality's cruisers parked in front of his house, leaving one to patrol the entire town for the better part of a half hour? Could it be domestic abuse or violence? Uh, not exactly.

We saw one of the three cops dispatched to the scene walk out of our neighbor's garage and he walked across the street and asked us, "Are you the ones who called?" "No. What's going on?" "Oh, nothing," he replied, "we just got a call about someone abusing a chicken."

After Mrs. JP and I laughed ourselves sick, I took these pictures to document the fact that three of our four cruisers were dispatched to one house because, apparently, the Hudson, Massachusetts police department takes animal abuse seriously. Either that or they're incredibly bored. The four previous occasions when the last Mrs. JP had an epileptic seizure and sent the cops to my house, I never rated more than one and I'm a former Navy Seal and they know it. I'm almost insulted.

I can't wait to read the police blotter in the local paper in the next couple of weeks: "Area man chokes chicken, local police paralyzed as a result."

The ironic thing is the chicken never materialized nor did Mrs. JP nor anyone else see it save for someone who also has too much time on their hands.

Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town: September 11th edition

Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to, Big Boy?

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Much has changed since 9/11. Yet the more things change, the more they stay the same, as The Rude Pundit reminds us from Ground Zero. And just when you think that humanity can't sink lower in the sewer, you find out that less than a decade after 9/11, the most horrific attack on American soil has been tamed into a mere marketing gimmick.

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Walt at BlondeSense is asking post-9/11 America, "Where are you going?" Good question. We hired a guy to lead us to the Promised Land and instead he's taken us deeper into Afghanistan and into the poor house.

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Some lib whackjob is asking very much the same questions over at Brilliant at Breakfast. Brave New World? Please remind me again when and where the "bravery" comes in?

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Earthbound Misfit also has his retrospective and summation of what kind of nation we've become. The bottom line, when one waves away the smoke and breaks the mirrors, is neither Afghanistan nor Iraq ever had, have now nor ever will have any relevance to September 11th.

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It's not a blog but a newspaper. Yet the Kansas City Star is reporting that Shirley Phelps, daughter of noted homophobe and war veteran funeral protester Fred Phelps, has claimed to have burned Korans in 2008, long before Terry Jones planned to do it today. The publicity that Jones got and which eluded the psychopaths at Westboro Baptist Church is what has her up in arms. Oh brother.

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Finally, this has nothing to do with 9/11 but this post from the ladies at Newshounds ("We incur irreversible brain damage watching Fox so you don't have to") is worth noting because of the stratospheric level of its lunacy. Because, according to a Tea Party doctor, Barack Obama didn't legitimately win the presidency. No, no, he was voted in office through some mass hypnosis like something out of Halloween 3.

Top Ten Reasons Terry Jones Postponed his Koran Burning.

After exhorting his followers on his Facebook page to burn a Quran on September 11th, the Reverend Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida has decided to postpone if not cancel the event. The Rev. Jones cited a deal being reached with the Park51 authorities as the reason why he has suspended the burning of the Muslim holy book yet no one associated with the Park51 project had ever heard of such a deal. What were the top ten real reasons for Rev. Jones to suspend the burning of the Koran?

10) Monty Python's Terry Jones protested it would make the British comedy troupe look silly by association.

9) It would rob fellow conservative Ted Bundy of his notorious association with Gainesville.

8) Jones & Co. decided a more respectful way to observe September 11th is to hold a pig roast at a mosque.

7) Followers constantly confused as whether to burn a Koran or a Quran.

6) Rev. Jones afraid of singeing his Fu Manchu moustache that gets him "shitloads of pussy at the local bars, dude."

5) Deal breaker in negotiations was Imam Muhammad Musri's insistence on using Sam Walton's autobiography and the Rev. Franklin Graham as kindling.

4) Republicans couldn't find enough adults to supervise bonfire.

3) Not enough Gainesville homosexuals willing to allow themselves to be used as sacrificial virgins.

2) Rev. Jones still not permitted by his therapist to play with matches after another incident involving the Christian Science Monitor and its refusal to publish his pornographic limericks.

1) Evangelicals and Republicans have yet to discover, invent or steal the secret for making fire.

Osmosis Jones Backs Down

Fucking unbelievable.

The last thing we need is self-appointed white blood cells to go attacking entities they view as harmful. I'm referring to this decade's answer to Osmosis Jones, or the Rev. Terry Jones, the asshat who planned to burn Qurans on September 11th. Jones changed his mind after intense pressure came to bear on him both domestically and internationally.

What makes his surrender especially stomach-churning is his insistence on portraying it as a victory and claiming that he'd backed down only after a satisfactory compromise had been reached with the Powers That Be.

We'd be able to laugh this off were it not for the fact that Imam Muhammad Musri of Florida was standing next to him as if he and Jones were friendly colleagues. Furthermore, Musri fell in line with Harry Reid and every right wing rectum who ever opposed the Cordoba Center by agreeing that the cultural center shouldn't even be within two blocks of Ground Zero, by saying, "I told the pastor that I personally believe the mosque should not be there, and I will do everything in my power to make sure it is moved."

He did contradict Jones' lie, however, and said that no deal had been reached with the Cordoba Center Initiative by adding, "But there is not any offer from there (New York) that it will be moved. All we have agreed to is a meeting, and I think we would all like to see a peaceful resolution."

The "news" also came as a surprise to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the real driving force behind the center.

The radical right wing lost again and they're trying to portray it as, well, "mission accomplished." And a representative of the very same people who've been demonized by Jones was standing next to him in solidarity. Gag me with a falafel stick and call me Bill O'Reilly's squeeze.

Note, also, that as with Musri, the AP, as usual, got the story wrong and kept insisting the Cordoba Cultural Center was a "mosque".

"It Was a Dark and Spermy Night..."

I hear you, Michael Corleone. Just when I think I'm out, some right wing asshat pulls me right back in.

Some of you may recall Jon Stewart tearing Eugene Delgaudio a new one on the Daily Show last April. Delgaudio is a man who plainly has issues and even a layman such as me can make a pretty persuasive case that this man is about two glasses short of a pitcher of Koolaid.

Delgaudio is the District Supervisor for Sterling, VA and he's renowned for his bizarre fundraising letters in his ongoing battle against teh gays. Because of the very nature of the internet, with one mouse click leading to another, don't ask me how I crossed paths with this waste of trace elements but the important thing is I did.

Remembering that the Rude Pundit is famous for subscribing to Tony "Who's the Girl, Norman?" Perkins' Super Duper Prayer Team over at the Family Research Council, I went to this asshat's official website and took a brief survey. Despite the fact that I answered all six questions about gay rights the way you'd expect a liberal bisexual like me to answer them, I was immediately inundated with congratulatory emails from Degaudio's organization, Public Advocate (his unofficial job title). I thought it prudent to save his letters.

Now, before I continue, let me draw one distinction between genuine homophobes like Delgaudio and what I call (thank you, Bobby Gibbs) the professional homophobes. The pros are simply currying political or religious favor. They honestly couldn't give a shit if Elton John married David Furnish because they know it has no impact on their marriage. After all, you're responsible for the upkeep of your own relationship regardless of sexual orientation. That's just common sense and even your more pragmatic right wingers would admit as much if you were to bend elbows with them at a Bennigan's.

People like Delgaudio are something else entirely. His Twitter account that often screams about "the thought police" is good for a cheap chuckle but in order to get a more comprehensive view into his particular brand of unhinged lunacy, you simply have to subscribe to his fund raiser newsletters. Delgaudio is the most dangerous kind of homophobe: The kind that not only believes with all his heart that the LGBT community is out to get him, but even imagines stuff out of whole cloth.

Take, for instance, this Bulwer-Lyttonesque excerpt from last spring that was reproduced in full by Steve Clemons of the Washington Note:

One stormy night I drove to a mailshop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses. I'd heard something was up and wanted to see for myself.

As I rounded the final turn my eyes nearly popped. Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses.

Trembling with worry I went inside. It was worse than I ever imagined.

Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling.

My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers. And still more petitions were flying off the press.

Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, "Delgaudio what are you doing here?" Dozens of men began moving toward me. I'd been recognized.

As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, "This time Delgaudio we can't lose."

Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right. This time the Radical Homosexuals could win...

But wait. Delgaudio's particular insanity, like fine wine and leather, just improves if not mellows with time. Because his latest fund raiser email is not only chock-a-block packed with the usual homophobic lunacy, it even comes with 40% more Freudian slips!

First the Homosexual Lobby rammed their disastrous Thought Control Bill into law.

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The Homosexual Lobby is whipping up a tsunami of political momentum.

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Jurassic, if we don’t act now, the Homosexual Lobby will ram it right down our throats.

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If the Homosexual Lobby rams through the Gay Bill of Special Rights, the federal government will hand control of the American economy over to radical homosexuals.

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If Public Advocate is going to to mount a successful lobbying campaign against the Gay Bill of Special Rights, I must have you sign the petition to your Congressman by clicking here.

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Hmmm... Ramming. Ramming down our throats. Whipping. Mounting. Is anyone else getting turned on by this steamy, manly rhetoric?

But wait, it gets even better because Gene then figuratively pulls up a chair, skooches over and tells us in no uncertain terms how his crusade is affecting him personally:

Honestly, sometimes my job feels like the loneliest in the world.

It seems as though I have so few allies in my fight to defeat the Gay Bill of Special Rights. Every day, as I walk through the halls of Congress, I feel the eyes of radical homosexuals on me. Their hatred is obvious, and they are everywhere. They seem to have gotten to nearly everyone who was weak or wavering...

Now, granted, I'm not exactly what you'd call a purveyor of adult gay literature. But I would imagine the seedier examples would sound a lot like Delgaudio's weekly begs, sort of a "Dear Editor" contribution to Ramrod Monthly.

Indeed, in his fictions, poor Eugene seems to be surrounded by manly, longhaired, earringed, confident, forceful studs whose eyes slither over him. It is dark and stormy (or spermy. Who knows what his muse is holding back?), making one ask what he's doing skulking around warehouses looking for pro-gay literature during dark, stormy nights in the first place.

The funny thing is, Delgaudio said in his April newsletter that "homosexuals" make up only 1% of the population yet in his sweat-drenched fantasies, they always seem to surround him, as if he, I dunno, attracts them. Plus, we haven't the slightest idea of what percentage of the US population is gay, lesbian or bisexual on account of so many of us remaining in the closet. But I think most of us can agree that gays alone make up more than 1%. They don't all live in P'town, San Francisco, Fire Island and the Castro.


But making up facts is the least of Delgaudio's evils because this man is not only unhinged and living in some delusion that sounds like a John Waters version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers but this particular man is an elected official.

The Republican Area 51

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

“Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.” - Erstwhile alternate historian Newt Gingrich in opposing the Cordoba Community Center on Fox

In a paraphrase of the old bromide against the Irish, it can be said that God invented Koolaid to prevent Americans from running the world for too long.

When people of other countries put their lives on the line in the act of defending their democracies and addressing real life or death issues, about the most I can expect of my fellow Americans is to color their Twitter avatars green and change their time zone to Tehran’s. At the end of the day, however, we find ourselves on the couch with a Red Bull in one hand and the remote in the other and tuning in to Fox “News” and ensuring that Rupert’s funhouse mirror dimension remains the highest-rated cable channel. And people wonder why I criticize my country so much.

Let me impress upon you one inescapable, incontrovertible, ineluctable fact: We are simply the stupidest and most willfully ignorant nation on earth. We’re the world’s biggest racial, national and religious melting pot yet the most bigoted. As Maureen Dowd reminded us yesterday, we panic in herds yet come to our senses, if we ever do, one at a time. Our eyes snap open like a doll’s when we’re alarmed yet when we awake from one soporific or another, we need to rub those eyes for a few minutes. Stupidity and ignorance has a much longer half life than truth and the facts. If stupidity was made of hydrogen and oxygen, our country would look like New Orleans the day after Katrina. And if racial or religious bigotry was gold, there’d be a rush of grubby Republican prospectors every year or so.

And need we look any farther than the biggest news story of the day, the “controversial” “mosque” at “Ground Zero” for a glimpse of how stupid we are? If you throw enough money for ink and pixels to convince an entire nation of something, even one as rich in colleges and universities as ours, you will sway public opinion at least temporarily. When the media blitz subsides, people slowly, very slowly, come to their senses. We see it with every election cycle because we depend on people to tell us what to think and for whom to vote as well as what buy, eat, drink and even how to fornicate. It’s hard to believe but it seems almost as many Americans are as ignorant as to what’s going on at Park51 as they are of Area 51.

Frank Rich also reminded us yesterday of the wildly vacillating poll numbers regarding the very religion of our president. A recent Pew poll showed that 18% of us still persist in believing that President Obama is Muslim, a number that was as low as 11% at his inauguration (long after McCain and RNC money stopped telling us what to think). Barely over a third of us know that Obama is Christian, down from nearly half in March '09. And the day after Pew published its results, Franklin Graham, who should never be put on television even to pitch juicers on QVC, told John King that Obama is both and "born a Muslim." This is not coincidental because it’s directly tied to the chief executive coming out two Fridays ago to support as he should’ve the Cordoba Community Center two blocks from Ground Zero.

The wingnut response was wearisomely predictable: “Well, if Obama’s all for it, should that surprise you? He is, after all, a refugee from a madrassa and a terrorist-coddling Muslim who wasn’t even born here.” Obama is Christian, is making progress on multiple fronts in the battle against terrorists and was born in the US. But the more stubborn and durable a lie is, the more it begins to resemble a truism because in this country, seniority equals legitimacy.

After we’d been pelted by catapulted propaganda, invading Iraq also seemed like a good idea as did Afghanistan a year and a half before that. Yet 31% of us still think we belong in Iraq and 38% of us feel the same way about Afghanistan despite trillions being thrown into these twin meat grinders that have produced hundreds of thousands of corpses, no real infrastructure providing even basic services to either nation, two corrupt Three Stooges parodies of democracy and no discernible enhancement of our national security.

But these shrill, strident Republican hate merchants like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, without realizing it, find themselves in an absurd position: Smearing the name, character and allegiances of the same president who did exactly what they wanted him to do, which is to escalate the war in Afghanistan (and maintaining our crusade on Islam) and keep it going for years. Who cares that, after nearly a decade of trying, we can’t chase from one country a region-specific rump terrorist organization like the Taliban much less a global terrorist network like al Qaeda?

In the inevitable response to the outrage over Gingrich’s insanely stupid comments on Fox, he said in an email (emphasis mine), “Americans must learn to tell the truth about radical Islamists while being supportive of and inclusive of moderate Muslims who live in the modern world, respect women’s rights, reject medieval punishment and defend American laws and the American Constitution.”

One can surmise that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the community center’s driving force, isn’t included in Newt’s short list of “moderate Muslims who live in the modern world”, even if this particular one has helped bridge the gap between Islam and Christianity and Judaism for both Republican and Democratic administrations. Yet what else can one expect from someone so hypocritical and insensitive to others that even while he screamed for impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair he was diddling his own (younger) aide while his wife was recuperating in a cancer ward? Just once I’d like to see anyone, anyone publicly challenge any of these Republican organ grinders and their 100,000,000 Capucin monkeys to unpack their arguments just to prove there isn’t enough in there to fill a change purse.

And, as Frank Rich points out, Afghanistan’s precisely what the “controversy” is all about: It’s not the so-called mosque at Ground Zero that’s the issue to them: It’s the one-two punch of Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange throwing the moral purity and efficacy of Afghanistan into a harsh light. We got back at Hastings for his article on McChrystal by refusing to embed him with the troops (his Republican critics should at least give the man props for wanting to go to Iraq, which is more than we can say for most of them). We got back at Julian Assange by hounding him out of America all the way to Sweden and calling him a rapist in a Rovian whisper campaign.

What is this, high school where we spread rumors about our petty rivals being homosexuals and scrawl on bathroom stalls, “For great head, call 555-…”?

But we’ll always believe the sensational over the factual no matter how disingenuous or ill-sourced it is as long as it appears to have a point, especially one that pushes an emotional panic button. In this case, the point is, “Muslims knocked down our big buildings now ten years later they want to cockwand about it and dance in our end zone by putting up a mosque in the deepest part of Ground Zero.” That would be like us nuking Mecca or Medina and erecting a 100 story flaming cross in the middle of either. Ask the Saudis how they’d feel about that.

(As a personal sidebar, it’s notable that not one person of any consequence has publicly said, “Even if the Cordoba Center was put in the middle of Ground Zero, so what?”)

And the anti-Islamic rhetoric emanating from Fox sound stages is so amplified it would be easy for Muslim and Arab countries to mistake that for national consensus and to react accordingly. Indeed, to anyone outside the US following our news, they’d most immediately read about California’s Proposition 8, Arizona’s SB 1070 and the bipartisan nation-wide hysteria beginning in the seat of our government over a proposed Muslim community center and come to the same conclusion that we in the reality-based community have: That we are still very much a nation of homophobic, xenophobic, white Christian fascists. This is the hopey changey thingie Sarah Palin was so scared about?

Those of us who actually graduated kindergarten know that there’s no mosque in the proposed Cordoba Community Center but a small prayer room, it’s going to be two blocks from Ground Zero and within the same perimeter are places that are more objectionable yet equally legitimate such as the New York Doll’s Gentleman’s Club (a strip joint, to the poor and middle class) pictured above. Putting up the Cordoba Center would facilitate the creation of a much-needed private pre-school for children of all faiths. Plus, its two block proximity could even be close enough to begin to heal the widening divide between Muslims and our nation’s other faiths and denominations, a schism that was perfectly delineated by the nine year-old gaping hole where the Twin Towers had once stood.

Conveniently not mentioned is jailbird Bernie Kerik’s little love shack overlooking the devastation, all but 12 Republican congressmen voting against aid to 9/11 rescue workers, George W. Bush’s casual dismissal of hard, specific and prescient intelligence warning him of the attacks to come or the militant, crusading Christian evangelizing of our military in direct contradiction to the Constitution so beloved of Gingrich and with belligerent disrespect to other religions and the choice of none.

Rich is right: If McCain was in office, the right wing would be just as silent about the Cordoba Community Center as it was in the first five months after news about it broke. But now that we have a guy with a Muslim/African-sounding name in the Oval Office, it’s an issue when the president was forced to elevate a neighborhood matter to a national one in an effort to reassert some common sense in our immature, stupid country.

And we need at all times a president who will honor in both word and deed the laws and principles that distinguish us as a country, not one who has to waste his valuable time reminding us what those laws and principles are.

Name That Tune

It's going to blow your mind when you find out who and what it really is. And no, it's not the Photon Wave Orchestra's "Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands" sped up or Vangelis on the Bladerunner soundtrack.

It's Justin Bieber's "U Smile" slowed down 800% so now it's a 35 1/2 minute, New Age epic. I wonder what else we could (re)discover if we were to do this to the millions of songs that have been written since the dawn of mankind?

Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to, Big Boy?

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Jill Hussein at Brilliant at Breakfast pretty much encapsulates the news story to which she links in three pithy words. I have another dimension to add: How come more of us in the reality-based community didn't also warn aloud that hysterical wingnut opposition to the Cordoba Center near Ground Zero could be used as a recruitment tool for al Qaida?

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Towleroad provides us with a video of the day The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur covered the desk on The Ed Show and had Rep. Alan Grayson. The topic of discussion was the GOP being caught with its flaming pants down around their ankles and not having a plan for unemployment and lack of health care and trying to manufacture relevance by hoarsely screaming about the abovementioned Muslim center near Ground Zero. And, once again, Grayson is right: Fox is largely to blame for this in giving these Republican lunatics a million dollar megaphone. He calls Fox "Monty Python's Lying Circus."

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The Rude Pundit gives a pretty bleak picture of the unemployment problem in this country that the GOP is trying its damnedest to pretend doesn't exist or isn't worth addressing. People with four year degrees showing up by the hundreds at McDonalds' out west and fighting for minimum wage jobs at 20 hours a week. Pretty soon, job interviews will be like the scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker snaps a pool cue in half, throws one half on the ground and says, "Let's have tryouts. Hurry up."

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My Timing Sucks

What else is there to say about a guy who doesn’t discover that he’s bisexual until well into middle age, after he’s lost a lot of his hair and virtually all of his looks?

Consider this my coming out. I’m bisexual. There, it’s out. I said it. That closet was getting awfully claustrophobic. The only good thing about the closet is that you can only walk out of them, not in them.

For years, I’ve been wanting to tell you guys this but have been afraid to on account of certain former acquaintances here in town that would turn it into fun fodder (and for those of you ready to post homophobic comments, save your energy: They’re moderated and I will not tolerate anything that slurs the LGBT community.).

But then I realized that I shouldn’t let small-minded people dictate the depth, width and breadth of my self-expression, the yaw, pitch and roll of my thought. Like everyone else, I have no wish to be defined strictly by my sexual identity. But for years, I’ve been struggling with my emerging bisexuality and my desire to tell you guys this. I want to put it out there and then walk away from it and move on. It’s no different from declaring my liberalism or love for animals.

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that when I first got an inkling of my real sexual identity, I was in even more of an uncomfortable spot than I’m now in. One person in particular would’ve been absolutely crushed and it would’ve been a devastating déjà vu. Up until a few years ago, when I first found out I was attracted to other guys, no one would’ve been prepared for such a bombshell. For the first 45, 46 years of my life, I was a flaming hetero who spent hours a day thinking about having sex with women. An ex girlfriend even uncharitably called me “a womanizer.”

And when I was actually worth looking at, I’d been approached several times by gay and bisexual men and I recoiled in horror. Whatever homophobia I had then is long since gone, trust me, but the thing I must remind myself is that only my emerging, increasingly powerful bisexual urges are responsible for that homophobia’s permanent retreat.

And when I say “bisexual urges”, I’m not talking about mere bicuriosity or just wondering “how the other half lives.” I’ve harbored romantic feelings for at least one guy in the recent past and that was the experience, brief and chaste as it was, that proved to me beyond a doubt that my soul craves more than just casual, anonymous gay sex. If I was single and I met my Mr. Right, you’re damned straight I’d take advantage of Massachusetts’ legal recognizance of gay marriage.

But Mrs. JP should not worry. Unlike some people I can name, I’m not the cheating sort. It’s really no different than being a pure heterosexual who’s still potentially capable of being attracted to the opposite sex but still knows enough not to touch.

But no one was more surprised by this than yours truly, who for the first four and a half decades of his life never felt the slightest attraction toward any male. There were no clues, no hints, no nothing to warn me about this looming crisis. After all, I still hold that in almost all cases, we’re born with our sexual identities. No one wakes up and decides to switch hit or simply turns gay or bi. It has nothing to do with morality aside from whatever conduct we adopt in our respective relationships and it’s not a lifestyle “choice” as the wingnuts are fond of insisting while we let them thusly frame the debate.

Yet my attraction to certain types of males was undeniable. Personally, I go for sweet, smart, younger, clean-shaven, long-haired guys with slender builds. But never in my callow, shamelessly heterosexual past was I ever in the slightest attracted to even those guys. I can’t understand it. It was like Kafka’s Metamorphosis as filmed by John Waters. And suddenly, I started seeing more and more gorgeous guys that made me turn my head. Some of them I saw only once and to this day, I still think about them.

Maybe it was my emerging liberal sensibilities, the ones that drove me to become a blogger, that helped put me in touch with my real sexuality. Taking up the good fights, especially gay rights, helped me to sharpen my self-awareness as well as my political and social acumen and IQ. It was a synergistic thing. The more outrages I saw being committed against the LGBT community such as Prop 8 and the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, the more it personally outraged me because I knew that I was now personally involved. Their struggle became mine. Gay and bisexual characters began tip toeing into my fiction, starting with American Zen.

Sadly, since I am in a committed, heterosexual and still very happy relationship, my urges will have to continue to be sublimated for the rest of my life (the age difference between me and the guys I go for will help keep me honest, too). But Mrs. JP has caught me looking at one stunningly gorgeous guy in particular and I’m not as subtle as I thought I was. As she said to me a couple of nights ago, “Women always know when their men are looking at others.” I’ll never know what it’s like to kiss a handsome guy on the mouth or to be loved by one. But then again, I’ll also never get to bungee jump off Mount Rushmore or get to spit in George W. Bush’s face. It’s just one more regret I’ll have to learn to live with.

So there. It’s out. I said it. I’m bisexual and while I’m not necessarily proud of my true sexual orientation (as George Carlin said, it’s like being proud of being 5’ 10”), it’s nonetheless part of who and what I am. I’m a huge believer in full disclosure. And as long as I was keeping this under wraps, I felt I was being dishonest with you readers, hypocritical toward the LGBT community that I passionately champion and, worst of all, to myself.

But to any young gay or bisexual person reading this, please heed my words and listen to me when I say how very, very important it is to be yourself. Don’t prove George Bernard Shaw’s axiom of youth being wasted on the young. If you know what you are, be what you are while you still have youth, health and beauty momentarily on your side. And in the grand scheme of things, they are momentary, as briefly-lived as a snowflake on a 33 degree day or a petal on a dogwood tree.

Be yourself and love as hard, as passionately, as unconditionally, as bravely and as honestly as you can while the whole world is still yours to take.