Memo to Teabaggers: You Can't Tread on Us, Either

The two questions that first spring to mind are, why isn't Rand Paul campaign coordinator/professional thug Tim Profitt in jail for curb-stomping a defenseless woman and why does he think she owes him an apology? An apology for what, putting her head and shoulder under his jackboot?

Another question I'd like to add is, considering that Profitt is not only still a free man and that there are no pending assault charges and nothing worse than a criminal summons against him, how come Democrat Jon Taylor was arrested, wrestled to the ground and charged with three crimes just for peacefully appearing at an Eric Cantor event with an invitation?

And, while I hate to side with Tim Profitt on this issue, how come Kentucky police let things get so out of hand that a woman was openly assaulted when they were certainly within range to do something about it if not prevent it?

It would be easy to dismiss these random acts of violence visited on Democrats and liberal activists on campaign staffers and supporters but the one fact that no one had addressed is why the police are letting them get away with it? Anyone keeping track of the rise in right wing violence as the midterms approach will see an unmistakable pattern of the police aiding and abetting such violence if not not actually taking part in it. After all, why would Jon Taylor get tossed from a coffee shop when he had an invitation to the Cantor event? It seems to more than suggest that if you're a Republican, you have the right to create your own little (Sorry, Ms. O'Donnell) witch hunt. Just point your finger at a Democrat, tell lies such as him disturbing the peace and the local constabulary will be only too glad to do your bidding. It seems for every Victor Phillips, there are 100 Tim Profitts and Alan Wests.


So, what's going on? Is police protection only for Republicans in spite of the fact that they and they alone are calling for "2nd amendment remedies" and hiring bikers and other camera-blocking, unlicensed thugs to do security at a middle school?

Well, I have had enough. Mrs. JP and I are going to be at the rallies from start to finish. And to anyone out there planning on organizing a counter rally to the Stewart/Colbert counter rallies, I have one thing to say to you:

Try and start trouble, I'll step on you like I would an over ripe grape. Just try to disrupt this rally with your right wing thuggery and you'll be outnumbered probably by at least 1000 to 1 and I'll be right at the vanguard taping the whole thing. It's a public event and anyone can come but that doesn't give you the right to start violence. You start it, I'll finish it if I have anything to say about it.

Because I've had it with us being the nice guys and I think we all know what Leo Durocher said about nice guys. You don't want to be treaded on by our big, bad Socialist government? Fine.

But you can't tread on us, either, starting with me.

Trying to Keep Fear Sane and Rational

Mrs. JP and I will be leaving in a little over 12 hours to drive down to the rallies in DC. If anyone knows the area well, please tell me where the wifi hot spots are on the Mall or between 3rd and 7th streets since I'll be bringing my Dell and will try to videotape and live-blog the event both here at Pottersville and at my new place.

And if you'll be there, too, look for the screaming lunatic wearing a Jason hockey mask, an official rally tee shirt and a black leather jacket. Mrs. JP will likely be standing a respectable distance away pretending not to know me.

If Robots Could Vote...

The French Disconnection

We have been disconnected from France for a long time. Right wingers have been largely responsible for that and the meme of how cowardly the French really are started long, long before they wisely took a pass on Iraq.

And that's a shame, that we've swallowed wholesale these lies about the French as mindlessly and indiscriminately as we do Freedom French fries at McDonald's. It's a shame because the youth and leftist movement of France is carrying on its fourth round of riots (this last one lasting ten days and still going strong) since Sarkozy was elected. The third round was after a rioter was killed by French police last July. The second round was in early October 2006. The first round of riots was in late 2005 or right after Sarkozy was elected.

As is typical with right wing police states such as Sarkozy's, the crackdowns resulted in several protesters losing their lives. But that's a trade-off the French seem willing to make in order to make their voices heard. And the rewards for this latest round of protests is staggering: The nation has ground to a standstill through protesters blocking major roadways, stopping oil shipments and halting production at refineries. (Note worth remembering: When the Grandpuits refinery was virtually shut down by rioters, it also grounded air traffic since they're the major supplier of fuel to De Gaulle International airport.)

When oil companies import oil to our shores through blowouts and leaks, we wind up going to work for them for substandard wages, no health care and allowing them to publish their propaganda ads even on liberal blogs who don't care where their advertising revenue comes from.

Yet, in the five years since the French began the first of what would prove to be four rounds of riots, the United States has not had one major protest that resulted in anything more damaging than the occasional arrest to tarnish one's reputation. As it is, with many reasons to take to the streets with pitchforks and torches, brushes and buckets of hot tar, ropes and shotguns, we Americans, especially we so-called liberals, tremble at the thought of a preemptive Republican charge of "class warfare" at the merest whisper of elitist corporate genocide.

The French government has proposed raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. In our own country, Republicans have somehow managed to propose with a straight face raising Social Security eligibility from 62-65 to 70. France is rioting in the streets over their retirement age getting raised a modest two years. In our country, a Republican majority would all but guarantee a nation of septugenarians working as greeters for Wal-Mart so they can at least have a shot of financing their own funerals after they drop dead in their little blue vests.

The funny thing is, France, according to the CIA Factbook, enjoys the 8th highest life expectancy on the planet at almost 81 years while the United States is a dismal 49th, or barely over 78 years (which neatly sandwiches us between Albania and Wallis/Futuna). That means, according to world actuarial tables, the French would still be able to enjoy almost 20 years of retirement while Americans can look forward, under a Republican plan, to a mere eight years (without factoring in how older workers working until well past age 62 could detrimentally have their health and life expectancy affected).

So why are the French rioting and how come our asses are conforming to the seats of our Laz-E-Boys while watching Jon and Kate and the latest Jackass movie on DVD?

And where did this meme come from that the French are nothing but cowardly, elitist Gauloise-smoking malcontents wearing berets and sipping bitter little cups of coffee in outdoor cafes while spitting even bitterer diatribes against anything smelling of the bourgeois?

The French, while historically being one of the easiest nations to conquer, nonetheless enjoy a reputation of being one of the most perennially difficult to govern. Napoleon found that out after a revolution that beheaded a king. The French obviously have never forgotten their classist roots and are always ready to light up the streets if they see their government is shortchanging them.

And it always seems to be the leftists, the Socialists and the young who are at the vanguard. In this country, with no draft, our own youth would be disconnected from more than just France were it not for the fragile tether to the world provided by Apple iPhones and Dell laptops.

Unlike France, our nation doesn't even have a actual culture as much as a ruthlessly bottom line-driven hyperactive consumerism let alone have a backbone worth straightening. And while Jon Stewart may be putting together a rally on the 30th that preaches bland temperance and civility, such a call would fall on deaf ears in the land that gave us the very symbol of our liberty.

It also ought to be mentioned that raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 in France affects the country's retirement pension plan. In this country, pensions outside the government sector have gone the way of doctors that make house calls and mail delivery twice a day.

We Americans have had so much taken away from us, from pensions to actual interest on interest-bearing accounts, that if we had the sensibilities of the French, Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue on any given day would look like downtown Baghdad in late 2006. But we are not like the French. We have been disconnected from them and the lessons they gave in vain of the value and efficacy of civil disobedience.

Instead, liberals write blog posts railing about the status quo and not progressing beyond the manifesto stage. Right wingers and tea baggers rail about the government for completely different (and invariably erroneous) reasons and congregate in anemic little mobs so they can be ridiculed by the liberals.

Mike Whitney (not to be confused with the Mike Whitney of Firedoglake) in his latest article "Thank God for France" brings up some very good points and rightly excoriates our impotent and complacent cuntry (and yes, that is deliberately misspelled). He also brings up the excellent point that force is the only language tyrannical governments understand. That is a geopolitical truism that crosses all national boundaries. We ought to retest that theory sometime. It worked pretty fucking well against the British in the 18th century (although, to play Devil's advocate, we wouldn't've stood a snowball's chance in Hell were it not for the aid of, you guessed it, the hated French).

I'd say "thank God for France", too, were it not for one painfully obvious truism: We can only thank a good influence if we take those lessons to heart. But when we choose not to heed those lessons in brutal efficacy, we only doom our wouldbe mentors to irrelevancy as well as ourselves to repeat the less palatable lessons of history.

Looks Like We Do Body Counts, After All

...despite what Rummy once told us.

If nothing else, the new Wikileaks release, while it may not contain any revelations that would be shocking to those of us in the reality-based community, at least tells us that the real story is actually, hold on to your hats, worse than we've been told. As has always been the case, if you want a sense of what's going on in Iraq, all you have to do is use "Iraqi bodies" as a Google image search.

If you index your wikileaks search to just murder, you'll get almost 25,000 incident reports filed by both Iraqi and American forces. With each page containing ten entries, you'll have to wade through dozens of pages using a general search just to get past January 1, 2004.

These 391,000+ incident reports, which often make for dry reading (and about half of the particulars are obvious, such as GSW [gunshot wound] to the ___. Virtually all execution-style murders are gunshots to the head), still provide a more comprehensive overview of what the Pentagon and the press have not been telling us.

It shows that not only are we guilty of killing innocent Iraqis but that so is the Shi'ite government that we'd installed in the wake of de-Baathification. The newest Wikileaks disclosures show that we'd relied on private "security contractors" such as Blackwater far more than had been previously admitted. No matter who did the killings, the blood eventually spatters on us because we put that bloody sham of a puppet government in power and we're the ones who'd invaded Iraq on blatantly false pretenses. You have to wonder how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today had we not.

And, above all, even a cursory reading of all the documents shows that far more Iraqi civilians have been killed overall than had been previously admitted by the Pentagon, which claimed years ago to not bother itself doing body counts.

The Pentagon has, indeed, been keeping track and Wikileaks' latest coup shows us why they had not released this information to us.

Plus, you have to laugh and shake your head that the NY Times, with their super-serious-sounding War Logs series, is following the lead of a guy who isn't even a journalist. This is part and parcel to the problem, to begin with: If Judith Miller and the rest of the Times had just chosen to do its fucking job for a change instead of helping the Bush administration beat the war drum, then perhaps Julian Assange wouldn't have had to make this massive revelation and perhaps, just perhaps, we would've left Iraq already if we'd known way back then just how bad the situation really was on the ground.

Read the Writing on the Wall

This is what passes for political discourse in this country and the internet isn't much better. This was taken above the urinal at our local coffee shop. I didn't realize there was someone in the stall next to me and that my phone's shutter sound could easily be heard. Perhaps he thought I was pulling a Brett Favre. Anyway, it reads, "Obama is like crack. Both set African Americans back 2 decades." Beneath it is written, "Ahmen."

So it is written. Being the first African American president set civil rights back two decades, not using a racial stereotype by comparing the president to a drug to which anybody can get addicted.

A Brief History of Political Douchebaggery 2001-2010

This is my first virtual video courtesy of Xtranormal.com. It'll be the first of many.

Iraqi Government Still Paying al Qaeda to Kill Our Troops.

(This al Jazeera piece was broadcast the day after Obama pronounced combat operations were over in Iraq)

So says the NY Times in today's lead story, above the fold. Here's the opening paragraph:

Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents.

Which is followed up a little later with this money shot (emphasis mine):

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency.

Bottom line: Not only have we done a complete 360 and wound up back to where we started at the start of the invasion and occupation in March of 2003, we taxpayers had once paid al Qaeda in Mesopotamia double agents to attack our troops and some of them are still being paid by our man al-Maliki to use our own troop positions, strength, strategies and tactics against us.

(Read the rest here.)

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.