Here's a suggestion to Adam Ozimek of Forbes: When trying to make your case, never quote a much better article by a much better columnist.
     Case in point: Ozzie's article entitled, "The Liberal War on Food Stamps." Obviously, this is a title that is designed to be provocative by going for the most ironic sentence and one wrenched 180 degrees from its polar opposite (that would be the truth). This pro-corporate fuckstick immediately goes for the jugular by writing,

I can’t remember a more misguided attempt at attacking corporations than the move to frame food stamps as corporate welfare. Clearly liberals clinging to this think they have found a new clever argument for the minimum wage, but instead all they’re doing is making food stamps look bad.

     Really, now? And how are we doing that? This is where he makes his first major mistake, by quoting an obvious truism about corporate welfare from The Guardian:

Perhaps I’m being unreasonable, but it seems to me that when Republicans are so vocal about how much they hate government programs like SNAP benefits (aka food stamps) and Medicaid and indeed anything that makes life a little more feasible for low-income or no-income Americans, they should surely be able to work up a small sweat at such a blatant example of the system being gamed. Just last month congressional Republicans voted unanimously to cut $39bn from the food stamp program, and I surely don’t have to waste words here outlining their opposition to any form of government subsidized healthcare. Why then, when they have made their objection to welfare programs abundantly clear are they seemingly okay with hugely profitable corporations exploiting these programs while they underpay their workers?

     You would think that logic and basis in reality would be unassailable to someone possessed of a brain superior to a slug's but you'd be wrong because this is a Forbes columnist we're talking about, a so-called economic savant who's obviously an acolyte of Milton Friedman and his ruinous Chicago School of Economics. He then goes on to say,

The McResource help line in question is designed to help workers seek assistance. Here is how the company describes the purpose of this on its website:

     He then goes on to cite as his source McDonald's own mission statement regarding its purpose, which says,

The McResource Line consultant will research your situation to give you current, accurate information and resources that fit your needs.

McResource Line consultants were able to direct an employee to a local energy assistance program and credit counseling after he was told his utilities would be shut off.

The McResource Line was able to find late night and weekend hour childcare solutions for a swing manager when her babysitter suddenly quit.

     Of course McDonald's McResource page isn't going to tell you that its reflexive answer to your concerns about keeping body and soul together is to go to the American taxpayer to get bailed out because the bloated fucks at the top don't think enough of your hard work to pay you a living wage or even one single penny above the federal or state-mandated minimum wage. After all, as Chris Rock reminds us, "When your boss pays you minimum wage, what he's saying is, 'If I could get away with paying you  less, I would.'"
     I'd already written about this a week ago on a post entitled "McDicking Us Over" that got linked by Jon Perr at Crooks and Liars. In it, I savaged the McDonald's McResource line for telling a single mother of two, Nancy Salgado, a ten-year veteran still making minimum wage, to go on public assistance as well as their budgeting page that tells workers if they want to keep their heads above water, all they have to do is take on a second job. In their sample budget, only $20 a week is earmarked for health care and not a penny for a heating bill.
     I'd also mentioned that a joint university study found that 52% of all fast food workers have to go on public assistance at some point or another. These facts are completely absent on Ozzie's little diatribe against liberals and our insistence that everyone, especially those who work hard, deserve to have enough to eat. And, I suspect, if Ozimek's even aware of these facts, he's decided to blow them off as mere liberal propaganda.
     This cruel brand of wingnuttery (check out the barely literate comments at the end of the article) would drive me crazy even if I wasn't on SNAP myself. Ozimek seems perfectly comfortable with the federal government bailing out bottomlessly avaricious corporations like McDonald's who long ago found a way to game the system and get the American taxpayer to assume much of the burden of their overhead expenses such as payroll and health care. He seems to have not the slightest problem with a person such as Nancy Salgado making minimum wage after a full decade with the company and that company telling her, "Rather than pay you even a penny more an hour, go on public relief."
     People such as Ozimek are bottom-feeding scum who for some inexplicable reason thinks it's their holy mission in life to defend corporations who would just as readily victimize him as it does its workers solely in the interests of making liberals look bad even if it involves telling outright lies and ignoring the truth.
     What Ozimek seems blissfully aware of is that it's the House GOP who've cut $39.9 billion from SNAP over the next decade. And, regardless of what happens with that farm bill (and food stamp funding or defunding has never been part of a farm bill before, which usually sailed through Congress with little to no opposition until Teabagger Republicans decided to make everything fair game), by tomorrow $5 billion will be automatically cut from the SNAP program thanks to the expiration of the 2009 Recovery Act, a piece of legislation we haven't heard too much about because House Republicans would like you to forget that it ever existed, let alone that it's set to expire in about 12 hours.
     And people like Adam Ozimek, when they scrawl their pro-corporate screeds, would also like you to forget that as well as the compact that used to exist between companies and their employees until about the Reagan era: You work hard, do your job and stay loyal to your company and we'll give you a living wage that'll actually enable you to pay your bills.
     Then right wing corporations found out they can simply freeze wages decade after decade, oppose any and all proposed increases to the minimum wage while bloating themselves with endless pay raises, perks and stock options then get the American taxpayer to assume the burden of what used to be their overhead expenses.
     I'd like to see how Adam Ozimek would like it if Forbes paid him minimum wage decade after decade for his pro-corporate jeremiads against liberals.

     If I had to pick one Democrat to get primaried like a sacrificial lamb in my own version of political equality, I'd pick Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. As Chairwoman of the DNC (Defeat 'n' Capitulation), Schultz represents, to me, everything that is horridly wrong with the eternally and pre-emptively supine Democratic Party. In a statement recently, Schultz had this to say about Alan Grayson's inflammatory fund-raising email that hit a bullseye in comparing the Teabaggers to the KKK: “Obviously I am disappointed in the use of that imagery. Both sides need to dial back that kind of rhetoric and look to bring more civility into politics.”
     Yes, kiddies, we're back to this, "Both sides do it" mutual finger-pointing.
     Yes, kiddies, we're also back to this belly-showing of the dickless version of the Democratic Party that still insists, despite not a subatomic particle of evidence to support it, that if we finally start showing the Republican Party and Tea Baggers who've made that party their bitch, some civility why then, they'll show us some civility, too, and we can all sit by the campfire at the annual Congressional camping junket and sing motherfucking "Kumbaya" and have a 'smores, a Coke, a smile and a greasy thumb up our ass.
     As a fellow Jewish Representative out of Florida, a state that's had more than its fair share of cross burnings and lynchings, a state suffering through the most horrible Governor in its long, swampy history, one who'd denied Medicare expansion to his constituents because the dickless wonders of the Democrat Party allowed redneck states to opt out of Medicaid expansion out of respect for "states' rights", you'd think Wasserman-Schultz would know better in her ongoing whining about the deplorable state of immoral equivalence.
     And when Wasserman-Schultz finds herself on the same side of an issue as jar-headed psychopath and cordite huffer Allen West, you know something's rotten in the sunshine state of Florida.

Allen West, former Congressman from Florida, is always right on target with his comments, we all know, and his recent Facebook post was exactly right. It’s the “white liberal progressives” who are the real racists in American society. It is obvious that liberals are the real racists here... Worse, they use racism as a tool to fool African Americans into voluntarily walking onto the liberal’s plantation.

     Yeah, a vicious Uncle Tom like West, a guy who was in favor of every voter suppression law and bill that would've disenfranchised his people and who used an exclusively white Hell's Angel's wannabe biker gang as his personal security during the 2010 election and solicited angry, white votes in some Bizarro World simulacrum of post-racism, is claiming liberals like Grayson is leading his forgotten people not to the Promised Land but "the liberal's plantation."
     Well, unless West is talking about Arianna Huffington's bloated blog, I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about. Fortunately, many people in West's district didn't either and they voted out this real-life Stephen of CandyLand after one term. And West is obviously too stupid or deluded to realize he's just a useful house nigger for every teabagger/Aryan Supremacist (but I'm being tautological) who thinks shoving West into the limelight to repeat their prejudices and conspiracy theories actually qualifies them for post-racial status.

     But Wasserman-Schultz's attempt to get her own belly rubbed by the Right Wing Powers That Be has absolutely no basis in fact. Let's pick just a few very recent examples of the Teabaggers' obvious and indisputable ties to the antebellum cross-burners of our day and age:
     White Nationalists Descend on D.C. for National Policy Institute Conference. (Which starts today)
     Steve King and White Nationalist CPAC Panel Warn that America's Greatest Threat is its Diversity.
     SPLC: Former Congressman Tancredo to Address White Supremacists.
     IREHR Report: Tea Parties - Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse. (To which maybe Wasserman-Schultz ought to pay strict attention)
     White Supremacist Stampede
     Steve Smith, White Supremacist, Elected To Republican Party Committee In Pennsylvania County
     "People & Power - White Power USA (Documentary)" (Tea Party)
     Neo-Confederate Behind Pro-Huckabee Flag Ads in South Carolina.
     Video: Ron Paul Gives Speech on Civil War in Front of Giant Confederate Flag
     Ron Paul Curriculum Launched by Reconstructionist Gary North and Neo-Confederate Thomas Woods
     The Ron Paul Institute: Be Afraid, Very Afraid
     Ron Paul to Keynote Catholic Traditionalist Summit with NeoFascist and Overtly Anti-Semitic Speakers.
     Meet the 'Southern Avenger'! Another Member of Rand Paul's Team Has White Supremacist Past.
     Mississippi Tea Party Senate Challenger Attended Neo-Confederate Gatherings



     And that's just a few examples I've found from the past two or three years. Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg or burning cross, as it were. (Just as a personal aside, it's interesting that Wasserman-Schultz chose to take Alan Grayson to task over a fundraising email and not Rachel Maddow, who recently weighed in on this and drew similar conclusions).
     And the indisputable, inevitable, incontrovertible conclusion a thinking person must make is that the Tea Party movement is hardly an original concept and they didn't just spontaneously appear on the scene in the spring of 2009, fully-formed like Athena from the skull of Zeus. These teabaggers are recycled, regurgitated and, until 2009, long since discredited and very politically-incorrect Birchers, KKK klansmen, neoNazis, skinheads and unaffiliated angry, southern redneck Republicans who cannot fathom why so many people could elect a biracial president when, in their razor-narrow world view, no black man should even be called "sir" much less "Mr. President." It was supposed to be the white man's Arab Spring, minus the Arabs and legitimate grievances. But something funny happened on the way to the cross-burning:
     The Koch Brothers and their ridiculously-named Americans For Prosperity ("1% at a Time, Anyways") and Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and various 527s and 501(c)3 groups cynically latched on, spoon-fed them their talking points about how evil arch liberals like Obama were and eventually the parasite seeking populism became the host, with the Tea Baggers being demoted to the role of parasites.
     And now we're seeing signs that the tea bagger fleas and ticks are being scratched off by the increasingly irritated host and they're not too happy about it. Now they're threatening to primary even the Republicans that, during Bush II, we thought were the worst of the worst, such as Mississippi's Thad Cochran, who's now considered too liberal and now has a primary challenger who makes Strom Thurmond look like Jerry Garcia after a brick of hash.
     The Debbie Wasserman-Schultzes and Jon Stewarts seriously need to get their heads out their asses, walk off their sound stages and climate-controlled offices and talk to real Americans (and by that, I don't mean the "real Americans" in Sarah Palin's rose-tinted clown car windshield), specifically liberals and progressives who don't feel the need to throw verbal brickbats and firebombs at the White House when they have legitimate grievances, people who don't throw bricks through the windows of Republican Congressmen who opposed the health care law (as all of them did).
     So, Debbie, do Dallas sometime. Or San Diego. Or Tampa. Or any other right wing cesspool of a city that proudly waves the Stars and Bars and Gadsden flags. Your attempts to get your belly rubbed will only get it kicked. Your genuflections and bowing and scraping before these inexplicably angry teabaggers will only get you curb-stomped.
     And maybe people like Thad Cochran shouldn't get primaried by cryptofascists and neoconfederates. Maybe it's Democrats like you who ought to get primaried so you can make way for the real thing.

     Lou Landrum, Ex. Dir.
     The Spartanburg Soup Kitchen
     136 S Forest St
     Spartanburg, SC 29306
     (864) 585-0022

     Dear LuLu:
     I have read with eminent satisfaction your refusing the charitable efforts of some Godless atheists who have the effrontery and arrogance to volunteer their time and resources to the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen. I am, of course, speaking of those upstart atheists, Upstate Atheists, who seem to think charity can be freely handed out without first securing fealty to our Lord and Savior! As we all know, charity must be faith-based and withheld until allegiance to a God who has yet to get around to helping them (but no doubt will, some day).
     I am glad you amended your "No boundaries" policy in soliciting for volunteers because if you don't nip this atheist indoctrination in the bud, why then, anyone will be tempted to practice random acts of charity and we all know evangelicals should have that market cornered. For, as it says in Luke 6:38, "Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." And who do these heathens think they are trying to shake and pour like a vodka martini their godless manna in the shit and piss-encrusted laps of these poor?
     After all, does your mission statement not state:

• Every human being should be treated with dignity and respect, therefore we treat all people that eat at the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen as our guests and everyone is welcome at our table.
• Feeding a hungry person is the first step in addressing their needs.
• People who are hungry may have broader issues and needs that should be recognized.
• Our volunteers and supporters are a valued asset and we know that they are essential to our success.
• We continue to strive to ensure every volunteer and guest has a positive and safe experience with our Soup Kitchen.
• Everything we do is to glorify God.

     Nowhere does it say exceptions can't be made in the name of glorifying God and that preconditions don't apply. Hallelulu, Lulu!
     On your site's index page is this wonderful photograph of a groundbreaking ceremony using gold-plated shovels that would probably feed all of Spartanburg, South Carolina for a week. What a wonderful message this sends, that humble people of God are pretending to do actual work with gold shovels, symbolic of the riches that will await them. Praise South Carolina native Rev. Ike and Pat Robertson, if they but believe!

     Now, knowing what a humble, if overmade-up, servant of God you are, no doubt you would rebuff like atheist offers of charity any praise that would come your way but I say poppycock! But don't listen to me, your equally humble acolyte from afar. Let's listen, instead, to these wonderful testimonials from your Facebook fans:

---

     Not allowing atheists to help is wrong on any number of levels. Did you ever stop to think that you might be able to share God's love with the atheists who come to help?

---

Lou Landrum is a hateful moron. Won't allow atheists to help the homeless - even though they offered to not wear their shirts (and why shouldn't they wear their shirts?). She is a moron because she somehow believes atheists hang out with the devil. LMAO Lou, you need to learn what an atheist is, and you need to keep your preaching to yourself and just help people, and let others help people. Your help is NOT freely given. Your help is dependent upon people sharing your religious beliefs. Oh, and you suck.

---

Hello, I just read you refused the help of a secular organization, do you often refuse people who are only interested in helping feed people ? Jesus would be so ashamed of you.

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Gee, I'd donate but you don't want my atheist, gay money.

---

Here is what the director of the Soup Kitchen, Lou Landrum, had to say about atheists: " “They can set up across the street from the Soup Kitchen. They can have the devil there with them, but they better not come across the street,” Landrum said."*** Landrum, your ignorance is only eclipsed by your hatred towards those who dont buy into your silly superstitions. You should be so proud of that lump of coal you call a heart.

---

Except if those that want to help and volunteer don't share your beliefs, right? Then screw them and the less fortunate they want to help out, right? Actually helping others only matters if you get to preach and shove your beliefs down their throat because THAT'S what really matters, right?

---

"Great news!!! We are now able to receive donations on-line!" Not `Great news, the free-thinkers/atheists are volunteering their time to help.`? I hope the hungry get mad at you when the money slows to a trickle.

---

You better check Goodwill out also, though. It seems that most, if not all, of these "Christian" organizations are at least partly bizarre in the way they deal with people and reality. And some are truly bizarre.

---

     It was revealed years after WWII that when the Russians began liberating the Nazi death camps, they withheld food from the Jews who did not swear fealty to the Soviet Empire. It is heartening to know this selective, highly conditional tough love has not completely gone out of style.

     Yours truly in Christ, north, south, east, west and thereabouts,
     JP

     In the nearly nine years I've been blogging, I've almost never mentioned McDonald's, a corporation that's responsible for more obesity than sugar, polyunsaturated fats and cheese combined. This is because, largely thanks to Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, I would think that most of us already knew that McDick's represents the very worst in corporations and everything that is wrong with America. They slowly kill us with ersatz, corporately-generated food substitute and had strong-armed the House into passing the Cheeseburger Law that protects their bottom line from tort lawsuits even when it's indisputable their products are killing their customers.
     Their Gordon Gecko-class greed and avarice knows no bounds. Most of their employees are minimum wager earners who are directed to helpful websites set up by the corporation that are so divorced from reality, it boggles the rational mind. The most notorious example of this the now-infamous budgeting page that tells employees if they want to make ends meet, why, all they have to do is take on a second fulltime job and simply not pay their heating bill.
     You would think this is well-known and that we wouldn't need one more voice to add to the growing chorus of discontent. When you're a corporation the size of McDonald's and provide a product and/or service that's addictive for a variety of reasons, then you don't give a shit if people quit their jobs in disgust or if their customers die. We're a nation of over 320,000,000 people, after all. There's always plenty more to take their place.

     But today, I saw highlighted on Twitter the plight of a Chicago-area McDonald's worker and, as usual, our completely worthless mainstream media won't cover this story. She's a single mother of two named Nancy Salgado and she's been working at McDick's for a decade now. Despite that and working fulltime, she's still making $8.25 an hour, minimum wage for Illinois and the only time she's ever gotten a raise is when the state or federal government raised the minimum wage.
     For some inexplicable reason, Nancy still loves her low-wage, clearly dead end job she's held since she was 16 but even she finally got fed up with making minimum wage year after year. When she found out the president of her corporation, Jeff Stratton, was giving a speech at the Union League Club of Chicago (which, ironically, didn't seem to attract many people who would be friendly to a union), she went to the speech and directly confronted Stratton about her plight. After saying she was still making minimum wage after a decade, she asked him if that was fair and the fat fuck's only response was, "I've been there for 40 years."
     For having the effrontery and audacity to publicly protest her impoverished plight before the corporation, Nancy Salgado was arrested and charged with trespassing.
     Undeterred, Salgado then called McDonald's own McResource hotline (Yes, even that has the endemic "Mc" prefix). When she asked her employer for help, they then suggested she go on welfare to make ends meet because, well, paying a living wage was simply out of the question. The McResource help desk person told her to go on food stamps and Medicaid. Because, you know, providing affordable healthcare benefits is also out of the question. Doing so may force Jeff Stratton to actually forego chocolate brioche during a board meeting. You don't believe me? Here's the recording of the call:
    

     In other words, please make it possible for the American taxpayer, which includes, ironically our own employees, to underwrite our bottomless avarice and sociopathic disconnect from the Dickensian economic plight of our own workers.
     Now obviously, McDick's isn't the only mega corporation guilty of forcing the American taxpayer to foot much of the burden of what ought to be their overhead expenses. Far from the Tea Bagger talking point of the working poor being the welfare queens, it's screamingly obvious to everyone else who actually has two neurons to rub together that corporations such as McDick's, Wal-Mart, Burger King and others are the real welfare queens. In fact, just to cite one statistic, the University of California Berkeley Labor Center and University of Illinois discovered over half, or 52%, of fast food workers, have to subsist on one public assistance program or another because their wages are so low.
     Compare that to McDonald's top management compensation, according to a Bloomberg report from last December that showed these executive scum raked in over $8.25 million a year while people like Nancy Salgado were making $8.25 per hour. Still not pissed off? Download this .pdf file of McDonald's profits for FY 2011 (Page 11 will really blow your top. Their Vice Chairman and CEO James Skinner, who retired June last year, made nearly $9 million in '11.).
     As Selena Kyle told Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, "You're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."
     I can only hope to live long enough to see corporations like McDonald's, Wal-Mart and others hoisted by their own petard. If history teaches us anything, it's that evil always catches up to its perpetrators. Places like McDonald's poison us, bankrupt the Treasury and impoverish the very people who keep them in Bentleys and yachts. It's time we stopped footing the bill for their overhead expenses.
     And it all starts with boycotts. Your heart, your wallet and your soul will thank you for it.

     ...don't talk about 2013.
     The beauty of doing mere commentary instead of actual hard news (and by that I'm not talking about the Brangelina or Kim Kardashian's well-hidden stretch marks) is you don't have to do a lot of hard research and provide, as Frank Rich used to do at the NY Times, a surfeit of corroborating links. And one of the beauties of having a liberal byline is you can always take it as a rock-solid, absolutely immovable article of faith that both political parties will do their damnedest to punch themselves in the face in a never-ending masochistic orgy of some perverted self-recrimination. They just go about it in different ways.
     Let's take the obvious example of this: The Republican Party essentially shut down the government for over two weeks, lost $24 billion, cost 125,000 jobs in October, furloughed 850,000 federal workers who still haven't gotten back pay, nearly drove us into default in violation of Section Four of the 14th amendment, nearly crippled our borrowing power and made the Dow Jones Average plunge nearly 900 points...
     ...all so they could, for the 43rd consecutive time, unsuccessfully overturn an existing, adjudicated law called the Affordable Care Act. And they did this at the expense of whatever little credibility and approval they had with the electorate, which historically has a dim view of Congress, and much campaign payola from dependable, longtime Republican donors. The GOP's approval rating, in contrast to Mr. Obama's steady 51%, has plunged to 8%, prompting John McCain to say, "We're down to blood relatives and paid staffers." And I wouldn't even count on the paid staffers, whose bosses tried to deny them subsidized health care. Democrats, as we now know, need to gain just 17 seats to retake control of the lower chamber and out of the 230+ Republican Representatives running for re-election, 22 are in vulnerable districts.
     Ted Cruz's coattails have proven to be as wide as the Rio Grande as many Republicans running for national and state office (Especially Virginia's AG, Ken Coochie Coochie, who now finds himself down 17 points to Terry McAuliffe 50-33, which is what you get when you run on an anti-blowjob platform) are seeing themselves dropping out of contention faster than Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff with an anvil up his ass.
     To help sum it all up, a recent poll showed Republicans were less popular than hemorrhoids and herpes. Even Tom Donohue, the anti-Santa Claus and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce said Ted Cruz should just shut up and sit down. And Cruz isn't doing himself any favors outside of redneck cities like Houston when he compares ObamaCare staffers to Nigerian bankers in some of the most nakedly vicious Republican dog whistle politics since Strom Thurmond and his segregationist platform in 1948.
     Essentially, we can sum up the GOP's antics by comparing it to Fight Club, in which Edward Norton's character finds out he's Tyler Durdin and is caught beating the shit out of himself while Wall Street financial institutions blow up around him. In order to restore order and make the delusions go away, he then shoots himself in the head (Far be it for this scribe to suggest such a drastic and horrible thing to Republicans except to say no one is responsible for actions taken after bylines go to press.).
     So here we find the Republican Party, bloody and on their ass after their self-pummeling, just coming to grips with the fact they were beating themselves up all along while the black guy saturninely stood back and let them. You'd think that would be the end of the story and that we could start licking our collective chops and look forward to another 40+ years of uninterrupted Democratic rule in the House, right?
    Wrong.

     On October 16th, Congress passed an 11th hour bill allowing the government to reopen and to raise the debt ceiling. During the 16 day shutdown, the Republicans submitted what Rachel Maddow called a "long, weird, ever-changing ransom note" to Congressional Democrats and the White House that was consistently and categorically refused. Among the ransom demands: Starting construction on the Keystone XL pipeline, delaying and defunding the ACA and denying President Obama himself ObamaCare. But those were merely the most visible demands submitted by a GOP desperate to save face and to not walk away empty-handed. What were the others?

10) That Rachel Maddow undergo lesbian aversion therapy.

9) An amendment making it a capital offense to laugh at any Bill O'Reilly book.

8) "Your name is Toby, damnit!"

7) Funding for a Ted Nugent-produced white version of ROOTS.

6) A provision not allowing women to vote if they're menstruating, are hysterical or "are or appear to be afflicted with the vapors."

5) Senator Elizabeth Warren, duct tape, staples, Rohypnol, you get the idea.

4) Wendy Davis' gubernatorial campaign HQ must be at a Hooters.

3) Annual Purge Day.

2) The President must use Obamacare to make his skin whiter like Michael Jackson.

1) For one year, Fox News gets to refer to Ted Cruz as a Democrat without retraction.

All he would have had to do is watch The Godfather Part 2:

Labels: President Barack Obama, Republican id-driven two-year-olds

I heard this gorgeous song on Pandora today and have been pretty much a mess the rest of the day. Antoine Dufour, Song for Stephen:



I am probably going to spin off further posts about this new life I'm trying to live into a different blog. It may be public, it may be by invitation. I'll let you all know if I decide to make it by invitation only and you'll be able to request and invitation. But I think that further episodes of the Deeply Personal don't really belong here.

I've gone back to work this week. I think it's good for me, it gets me back to something that passes for normal, it eliminates that irrational raw gnawing fear that they'll forget I work there, and it gets me back into the land of the living. My colleagues have been wonderful. This bunch that balks at gift cards for our administrative assistants raised $420 for the Ramapo-Bergen Animal Refuge, FOCAS, and the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network. I've been pretty much OK this week until I heard the song posted above. Sure, I get a bit weepy, especially when I get home after work, but all things considered I've been OK. But tonight I was driving home and a massive wave of grief just washed over me just as I was getting on 287 north and it was as if the words I WILL NEVER SEE HIM AGAIN were written in fire on a two-by-four that was delivered soundly to the bakc of my skull.

It's a grief tinged with rage, because in a moment of madness last night I decided to listen to some of the recordings I made of medical appointments we went to. In a way, having these recordings make Mr. B. seem not quite so gone because his voice is still there. But it also underscores that concept of "NEVER". Where the rage comes in is just how often the word "hydration" appears, no matter who is talking -- Dr. Chess Club talked about hydration. Dr. Endearingly Nerdy Brain Doctor talked about hydration. The radiotherapy nurse talked about hydration. The oncologist talked about hydration. Hydration hydration hydration, and Mr. B. simply would not do it. In his last few conscious days, he developed a hankering for tomato juice, and went through two 64-ounce bottles in three days; probably 4-5 bottles during that last week. I argued with him that this was not hydration, but he insisted that he was allowed to have juice, and after thirty years, I knew that the more I dug in my heels the more tomato juice he would drink. It is a thing you guys seem to always do and it makes us nuts. So tonight the crying jags are not just about the grief that's really starting to hit now, but they also have an element of YOU DUMBASS...IF YOU HAD JUST HAD SOME GODDAMN WATER YOU'D STILL BE HERE.

I hate this.

Labels: dumbassery, grief, moyamoya, nothing is certain except death and taxes, personal musings