This is the country we live in today:

U.S. employers won’t hire enough workers this year to lower the jobless rate much below the level of 9.7 percent reached in February, three Obama administration economic officials said today.

“We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year,” the officials said in testimony prepared for the House Appropriations Committee. They predicted the economy would add about 100,000 jobs a month on average — not enough to bring the jobless rate down substantially.

Get used to sustained high unemployment. That’s the domestic news. Meanwhile, on the foreign front:

Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.

Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.

The United States just can’t seem to figure out how to keep its people working, but at the same time we’re shipping bunker buster bombs to Diego Garcia for a possible attack on Iran. While the people fall through the cracks, our leaders are busy preparing for another war. That’s vision for you, isn’t it?

It’s enough to make you just want to give up and join the military-industrial complex. The warfare state is here to stay and that’s obviously where all the money’s at. Why waste time trying to beat back the inevitable tide of American history? Shed your humanity, learn to love Big Brother, and just go with the flow. Join the team and make a buck.

Maybe not:

The unemployment rate last year for young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars hit 21.1 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, reflecting a tough obstacle that combat veterans face as they make the transition home from war.

The number was well above the 16.6 percent jobless rate for non-veterans of the same ages, 18 to 24. It was significantly higher than the 2008 unemployment rate among veterans in that age group: 14.1 percent.

The unemployment rate is higher among vets than among other people in the same age bracket. So much for the rewards of service.

I suppose this is the take-away: acclimate yourself to chronically high unemployment, prepare for a new war, and have fun living in a country full of jobless combat veterans, many of whom will suffer from PTSD and become very, very pissed when they realize that they wasted the best years of their lives fighting for a moribund empire that quite simply doesn’t care about them.

Go figure. When you’ve given up, One Fly has the answer, or at least an answer. I’m not totally convinced, but any explanation at all is more than I have.

Click image to enlarge

From Reconstitution 2.0:

According to the Reverend John Hagee, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”

Yes, Hitler the Hunter came to the Earth to do the Lord’s work. This attitude among Jesusistanis is not an uncommon one; the simple fact of the matter is that most Jesusistanis are more or less open anti-Semites. A lot of people seem to think that the unwavering support the Jesusistanis have for Israel “proves” that they aren’t anti-Semites, but that belief is wholly mistaken. In order for the “Rapture” dogma of the Jesusistanis to come to pass, the Jews have to be in Jerusalem to be burned alive and sent to Hell. Understand that this, and only this, is why the Jesusistanis are such unabashed, staunch supporters of Israel.

Joe Bageant is at it again, telling the truth right out where the children could hear it. Not that we’d listen.

…What would happen if America had leadership that stood up and coolly, intelligently described the economic and ecological peril we face, both of which are completely interrelated. What would happen if a president told the people, “What we have been doing has obviously not been working (they’d sure as hell agree on that), so we are going to have to remake America to save it, and it’s going to mean real sacrifice.” And what if he could do so without capitalist forces sending out ideological swiftboats to blow him out of the water, or launching hate campaigns against him, branding him as an evil fascist eco-socialist, or whatever.

I dare say the number of Americans who would respond, be willing to sacrifice and meet a challenge issued by cohesive, focused leadership, might surprise us. They might well do it, if for no other reason than that Americans are the most authority worshiping people on earth, outside of North Korea…

Bart Stupak might want to beef up his obstructionism by weighing down the health care bill with the language William Blum suggests below. Go for it, Bart. There are innocent lives to be saved!

About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: “The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”; the pregnant woman has “an existing relationship with that unborn human being,” a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a “known medical risk” of abortion is an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.”

…I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:

“The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there’s a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.

“No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this ‘stop-loss’. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don’t ever ask any of your officers what we’re fighting for. Even the generals don’t know. In fact, the generals especially don’t know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we’re all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office.”

Here’s Coffee Party founder Annabel Park, interviewed by Tom Schaller on FiveThirtyEight:

Q: Do you think Obama should let his inner community organizer come out a bit more?

A: I don't know what Obama should do exactly other than to keep pointing out the opposition's tactics and communicate directly to people. I personally think that he may be a good driver and I see him trying, but the fact is we are asking him to drive a broken car.

Suggested by my last post, the following excerpt is from William Greider’s 2009 book, Come Home, America:

The U. S. military, despite its massive firepower and technological brilliance, has itself become the gravest threat to our peace and security. Our risks and vulnerabilities around the world are magnified and multiplied because the American military has shifted from providing national defense to taking the offensive worldwide, from being a vigilant defender to being an adventurous aggressor in search of enemies.

The predicament this muscle-bound approach puts our country in is dangerous and new. Go looking for trouble around the world and you are likely to find it. The next war may be a fight that is provoked not by them but by us. The next war may already have started somewhere in the world, perhaps in a small, obscure country that we’ve considered threatening.

From a review of the book by George C. Wilson, the Washington Post’s longtime Pentagon correspondent:

I agree with Greider that there is a new attack elephant in the American living room. The old watchdog that would bark if some stranger knocked at the door but only bite if he broke into the house has been retired. Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates seem to have fallen in love with Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Marine special operators who do their deadly work in the shadows. The top of our government was similarly infatuated with special operations during the Vietnam War until some of the operators got out of control and had to be reined in to discourage what was called “cowboyism” back then.

From today’s New York Times:

…What we had to abandon was quite clear: the rigid ideological, political and economic system; the confrontation with much of the rest of the world; and the unbridled arms race. In rejecting all that, we had the full support of the people.

The words could have been spoken by President Obama in his State of the Union, but weren’t. The author instead is Mikhail Gorbachev, who sacrificed his political career by calling off the Cold War.

Unlike most of us who have been sounding off on the matter, Papa Bonk actually knows the man who recently became his former congressman: Eric Massa. Therefore attention must be paid:

The real tragedy of Eric Massa (who I know personally) is that he was a damn good congressman, a hard working Progressive who took principled stands on tough issues… like Afghanistan and single payer health care. He, like Larry Craig, is in many ways a victim of a culture that causes many citizens to suppress their true selves. If Eric Massa ran again as a gay man I would be there running with him.

Eric made a few big mistakes in bowing out … pointing fingers at Nancy and Rahm, for example. But he also pulled off a major coup … getting on Glennn’s Moron Show for an entire hour. Once inside the viper’s nest, he gave Beck nothing useful and managed to score a couple of points.

He said a good first step towards fixing Washington’s problems would be for the GOOP to stop lying about the facts. He also suggested there would be no real solutions until we had real campaign finance reform. No one has ever been able to say anything quite so true on Fox News without being censored or shouted down. Beck, who is preprogrammed by his handlers to spew fascist silliness for hours at a time … was left speechless.

There is a line in this song that has stuck in my mind for years, and I always realized that, it being an old English ballad, it was once literally true once as far as health care goes, but not anymore. The line goes “if living were a thing that money could buy, you know the rich would live and the poor would die.” I think about women who die in this country of breast cancer because they don’t have health insurance, and heart disease (and my friend Al who died because he couldn’t afford the procedure to fix his heart) and the thousands of other instances where money can indeed buy life.

I think about the death penalty and how money almost always can buy life, I think about... Well, you get the idea, there are so many examples of how a person’s lack of money can kill him or her. Many of our lefty blogger friends demonstrated that lack of health care kills when they wrote about what happened to Jim Cappozolla, the the owner of the Rittenhouse Review and many more examples of posts detailing what we in the left blogosphere lost when Jim died.

Jim’s death could have been prevented with adequate health care, but the recent untimely death of Jon Swift, one of the best “conservative” writers on the net, Jon Swift is an example of one that MAY have been preventable. Maybe not, although a good inexpensive screening can often find a latent aneurysm and the price for the screening is quite inexpensive. My wife and I had a screening for aneurysms done a year or so ago and the price was less than $200. Maybe if Jon Swift (aka Al Wiesel) had been screened for an aneurysm he would still be with us today. We will never know, I guess. But I’m sad to report that yes, Virginia, living is a thing that money can buy and Santa can’t save you from the Republicans who would rather see you die than perhaps be the person who finds a cure for cancer, who invents the solution to the energy problem, or who solves some other problem that has plagued humanity for decades.

Juan Cole reminds us that we are in last place in all the industrialized countries when it comes to preventing deaths that are preventable. How criminal is that? Maybe we should start calling those who are stopping health care reform criminals and murderers, because they are murdering those without health care, and violate the Fifth (or Sixth if you are Catholic or Lutheran) commandment which admonishes us all that we shall not kill. No legislators are excluded. No, not one. Particularly those legislators who are on the record as having stated that we must live by the Ten Commandments. God has a special place in hell reserved for these hypocrites when their time comes.

The chances of such solutions to the problems of humanity happening in this country without health care for all is thus substantially diminished. Some other nation will reap the benefits of that technological breakthrough if our health care system kills the one person here who could have solved that problem or some other problem of equal importance dies because our legislators stopped or held up health care for all the children of God that live in this country.

Thus this song is wrong in one important line. Remember that.

Who, happening across Mitch McConnell’s smooth, shiny, testudine visage on TV, has not wanted to grab hold of his lying words, turn them sideways, wrap them in barbed wire, and shove them firmly where the sun don’t shine?

Not Harry Reid, apparently. Here is the letter he sent the Senate Minority Leader today:

Eleven months ago, I wrote you to share my expectations for the coming health reform debate. At the time, I expressed Democrats’ intention to work in good faith with Republicans, and my desire that – while we would disagree at times – we could engage in an honest discussion grounded in facts rather than fear, and focused on producing results, not playing partisan politics.

Obviously, the opposite has happened, as many Republicans have spent the past year mischaracterizing the health reform bill and misleading the public. Though we have tried to engage in a serious discussion, our efforts have been met by repeatedly debunked myths and outright lies. At the same time, Republicans have resorted to extraordinary legislative maneuvers in an effort not to improve the bill, but to delay and kill it. After watching these tactics for nearly a year, there is only one conclusion an objective observer could make: these Republican maneuvers are rooted less in substantive policy concerns and more in a partisan desire to discredit Democrats, bolster Republicans, and protect the status quo on behalf of the insurance industry.

In fact, the attacks on the health care bill are part of a broader pattern. As has been well documented, your caucus conspicuously shattered the record for obstruction last Congress by demanding gratuitous procedural votes on even the most non-controversial matters, and by stalling the work of the Senate despite the urgency of the serious problems facing our country. Senate Republicans are on pace to again break their own record this Congress, illustrated by Sen. Bunning’s effort to prevent the Senate from acting to extend families’ unemployment and health benefits even after those benefits had expired…

…Read on

From the Associated Press:

A Rome high school has decided to install vending machines selling condoms for its students, sparking angry reaction from the Catholic Church which claims the move will only encourage youths to have sex…

L’Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, said Thursday that sex was being reduced to ‘‘mere physical exercise.’’ The paper lamented that young people these days have no spiritual guidance when it comes to sexuality, and that educators are more concerned with ‘‘the health and hygiene consequences of sex’’ than the moral implications.

We wouldn’t be seeing all this nonsense if choirboys could get pregnant.

Again the Rude Pundit nails it. (Image by Ben Tolman)

Our unending state of stress-out is al-Qaeda’s greatest victory against the United States. As the AP reports today, al-Qaeda got one big message from the Underwear Bomber’s failure: “the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.”

Yeah, it seems like the simple cave dwellers have figured out big, complex, allegedly bad-ass America: we’re just a bunch of sticky fat kids crying because our ice cream fell off the cone. That wedgie-bait, Adam Gadahn (née “Pearlman”), an American in al-Qaeda, taunted, “Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy.” He may be a traitorous asshole who can’t grow a decent beard, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Ask anyone who was at Newark Airport in January, where security imprisoned thousands of innocent people for six hours because some idiot took a shortcut…

Indeed, the right has so successfully torqued the country into what our enemies believe it is, it’s almost as if the GOP is a subversive arm of al-Qaeda. They have nearly bankrupted us, thus making any great social advances impossible; they have turned mild dissent into sedition; and they have turned the Constitution into a loophole-ridden contract, filled with more fine print than a subprime mortgage. They did most of that shit when they were in power. Now, out of power, the right is seeking, as it did in the Clinton years, but even more insidiously, to undermine the very functioning of government…

You’d expect this sort of thing from the Rude Pundit or the Huffington Post. But the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s new cybersheet?

Sarah Palin took a leave of absence from her Russia-watching post in Alaska to become a Fox News contributor. Who could have seen that coming? She represents diversity on Fox as that network’s only non-blonde correspondent…

Sarah Palin does have charisma and a certain following. A woman resembling her once walked into a Florida breakfast place and nearly caused a riot. Folks soon realized she was not the former Alaska governor when she started reading a newspaper.

A confession:

In a note read on Vatican Radio, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, cautioned against limiting the concerns over child sexual abuse to Roman Catholic institutions, noting that the problem also affected the broader society.

From the Washington Post:

Former Representative Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has been under investigation for allegations that he groped multiple male staffers working in his office, according to three sources familiar with the probe.

From Bette Noir’s blog, The Frump Gazette. Which I have just discovered, and recommend. I agree with her about President Obama’s political strategy; I hope we’re both right.

Well, frumps, things are definitely starting to look up for Democrats and the Obama administration if my Lunatic Fringe barometer can still be trusted. I’ve discovered, over the past year, that there is a quantifiable inverse relation between the fortunes of the Obama White House and threats of violence from the far-right reaches of the blogosphere. None too stable at the best of times, these folks have a tendency to fly around the room backwards whenever Obama shows signs of succeeding at advancing his domestic social policy agenda.

Obama has an interesting way of achieving his ends. He allows debate to rage unbridled, allows people to act out and vent melodramatically until we are all simply exhausted by the topic. Then, as we mentally move on, he quietly administers CPR and, next thing you know, dead-in-the-water issues are moving apace toward realization. It’s a pretty impressive strategy, to me, at least.

Just think about the health care reform battle. A year went by while we raged and fumed on our various sides of the issue. As Obama put it in his Health Care Summit, last week, “everything that could be said, had been said.” Gray-haired grannies duked it out with the local teamsters in Town Halls. Conspiracy theorists pumped up the volume and warned us all of The New World Order and/or Socialism/Fascism that lie just around the corner…

Continuing my Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People Series, this time I’ll put up two songs written by a couple of Woody’s Fellow Travelers and deviate from the original script that I set up which was to take only songs from the book by the same name as this series. Woody never belonged to the official version of the Fellow Travelers and the only things he had in common with what those words used to mean was that he was a fellow speaking up for other fellows and he traveled around a great deal. But he never joined any organization such as an “official fellow traveler” might have done. Let me add another fine point here and that is to note that the three men entertaining on these videos, Grant Rogers, Pete Seeger and Jim Garland were all blacklisted in one sort of another, either during the McCarthy era or as Union men. Kind of like what the Republicans have done or are trying to do to a lot of people, including what they are doing to some fine lawyers, the so called by Fox News “Gitmo Nine” lawyers.

But getting away from the past and back to the present, let’s not forget that our current situation with job losses started and accelerated under Bush and is just now starting to level off. It took President Obama a year but there are still a lot of unemployed people out there right now. So these songs are for all of those folks who don’t have a job or have a job that doesn’t allow them to live up to their full potential.

In addition, I’ve added a category for the songs posted in this series and will be going back and adding all the songs I’ve put up in this series so you can just click on the topic in the bottom left hand corner of these posts soon and see a list of all the songs in the series. Both of these selections come from a series that Pete Seeger had on Public Television called Rainbow Question. You can see all these YouTube entries for Pete’s old musical television show by clicking this link .

How pathetic is this, from the Sacramento Bee?

A Sacramento TV station last week reported that unnamed sources saw Ashburn at a gay bar the night before his arrest last Wednesday on suspicion of DUI. The speculation set off a media frenzy, rekindling rumors that Ashburn lived a closeted life.

Gay-rights advocates seized on the news to point out Ashburn's votes against gay rights legislation and his appearance several years ago at a rally in support of a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage.

Ashburn defended his positions, telling Barks he was representing his district, a mostly conservative area running from Bakersfield to Visalia.

“There’s never been a doubt in my mind on the position of the … vast majority of people in my district ... on these different issues,” he said. “And I voted as I felt I should on behalf of the people who elected me.”

It used to be the practice at the old Washington Daily News to write things like, “Police identified the murder suspect as Howard Ignoto, of the 1700 block of Maple Street.” If a more precise address turned out to be even a single digit off, a bedridden 90-year-old bishop’s widow would inevitably be living at that number. Our lofty journalistic principle was therefore, “It is better to be vague than wrong.”

The Epicurean Dealmaker suggests following the same principle when it comes to resolution authority to discipline Wall Street houses judged too big to fail, and his reasons are equally practical:

I like the fact that the proposed resolution authority is currently vague and undefined. I think it should be written into law in as vague and undefined a manner as possible. That would make it much more effective in combating the next (inevitable) financial crisis…

For another thing, vagueness will offer regulators discretion.

This will have two salutary effects. It is well known that financial institutions — like sophisticated businesses everywhere — are expert at structuring their business practices to satisfy the letter of the law, while evading its spirit and intent with maximal effect. The more specific laws and regulations become, the easier it is for these institutions and their in-house and outside counsel to find their way around them.

Should legislation authorizing resolution authority be too specific — in the tools, techniques, and processes regulators are allowed to use in identifying and winding down financial institutions in distress — then you can bet your bottom dollar those firms will exploit this fact to skew the game in their favor. In contrast, purposely vague and undefined resolution authority will not offer its potential objects as many preemptive opportunities to evade its intended jurisdiction or consequences.

In addition, regulatory discretion would foster what I would view as a healthy increase in uncertainty among financial institutions and their stakeholders. Should, for example, a regulator have the authority to unilaterally abrogate, modify, or suspend any and all prior contracts or securities arrangements entered into by a financial institution undergoing resolution — as some might suggest — you can just imagine how much more cautious investors, lenders, and counterparties would become in their dealings with any financial institution potentially subject to such a regime in the future.

The cost of funding financial institutions would undoubtedly rise, as investors become sensitized to increased contractual risk. Firms in obvious distress would see their cost of financing skyrocket and their counterparty business dry up, as no-one with a contractual claim could rest assured it would receive exactly what it was otherwise entitled to in a resolution wind up. But then again, firms in obvious distress see that happen anyway. The point is that regulators charged with cleaning up the mess would not have their hands completely tied by contractual arrangements entered into by others when the failing company was healthy…

From the McClatchy chain newspaper in South Carolina, The State, there appears at the beginning of a story in the paper the description of what is often a rather normal set of circumstances in that state in the quoted section below.

With politicians like Mark Sanford leading the state there, one just has to wonder about the question posed in the headline above. Fortunately Columbia SC, the state capital has a Democratic Mayor, but with all the Republican possums ambling about, one does have to wonder how the residents manage to avoid the nasty creatures:

Robbie Robertson had a good meal, steak and wine, at a downtown restaurant not long ago. As he walked outside, he was struck by a proud feeling that Columbia has become a good city, active and social and beautiful. Then a possum ambled across the parking lot.

Just this one more little cigarette and then I promise I’ll quit for good….

From the New York Times:

…But it seems there has been a genuine shift in Somali policy, too, and the Americans have absorbed a Somali truth that eluded them for nearly 20 years: If Somalia is going to be stabilized, it is going to take Somalis.

“This is not an American offensive,” said Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for Africa. “The U.S. military is not on the ground in Somalia. Full stop.”

He added, “There are limits to outside engagement, and there has to be an enormous amount of local buy-in for this work.”

Most of the American military assistance to the Somali government has been focused on training, or has been channeled through African Union peacekeepers. But that could change. An American official in Washington, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly, predicted that American covert forces would get involved if the offensive, which could begin in a few weeks, dislodged Qaeda terrorists.

“What you’re likely to see is airstrikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out,” the official said.

The name Sven Kramer may not mean much to you unless you’re from the Netherlands where speed skating is the national passion. Kramer, one of the best speed skaters in the world, was about to win his second gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics, in the 10,000-meter event, when his coach frantically signaled him to switch lanes lest he be disqualified. Kramer hesitated but followed the signal, and was immediately disqualified for finishing in the wrong lane.

Kramer’s time would have set a new Olympic record for the distance. Kramer’s a big, strong boy and you could tell he was upset when he started throwing things and kicking holes in the ice. There was reason to fear for the coach’s life but apparently he survived to screw up another day.

Speed skating is a wonder and its appeal is embodied nowhere better than in Apolo Ohno, a superb athlete of great charm, intelligence and overdeveloped thighs. He is a sprinter and he captured all sorts of medals in the short track events. In fact, he won more medals in Vancouver than any American has ever won in a winter Olympics, some gold, some silver, some bronze. He also may have won a medal in one of the relay races but no one can ever be sure who is even racing in the relays, much less who won or came in second or third.

The relays are the Olympic imitation of the Keystone Kops of old silent films, a stew of mayhem, confusion and chaos. In the Olympic version, many, many skaters mill around in the middle of the ice rink while one skater from each of several teams races around the rink’s periphery. Whenever one of the interior skaters feels like joining the race he or she skates into the path of the teammate on the outside and asks for a push, much in the same way a car that won’t start gets a push from another car. The pusher now joins the melee in the center of the ice while the pushee skates like crazy in pursuit of who knows what. The relay race goes on like this until, for reasons that no one understands, it stops. In fact, no one understands anything about the relay races, but they are great fun to watch if you are of sound mind and body.

What are not fun to watch are the bobsled, the luge, the skeleton and other variations of the sledding we did when we were kids. It may be fun to be in a bobsled going ninety miles an hour if terror is your idea of fun, but there’s nothing at all interesting about watching it. Occasionally the bobsleds crash and turn over and that’s kind of diverting, but it doesn’t happen often enough to warrant listening to hysterical commentators go to pieces about the importance of fourteen one hundredths of a second.

I’m not sure I have a sufficiently developed sensibility to appreciate snowboarding and aerialist skiing. While these are amazing stunts requiring great daring and athleticism, wouldn’t they fit in better at the circus, along with the man who can stand on his index finger and the woman who can lift a Volkswagen while eating a pizza? After you have seen a snowboarder or skier catapult himself into the air where he or she performs a dizzying series of somersaults and spins before returning to earth, you find yourself curiously, and immediately, jaded. “Amazing,” you say to your wife. “Let’s see what else is on.”

I am told that much skill is involved in the sport of curling, an Olympic competition of long standing. It is not hard to understand why the sport is often prescribed as a calming antidote for persons suffering from various nervous disorders. Curling has the same effect as many sleeping potions and anti-psychotic drugs without any of the side effects. Feel an anxiety attack coming on? Put a little curling in your life and watch those demons run for their lives.

There have been so many memorable Olympic moments over the years, one could go on and on. Let me close with a personal favorite. For many years Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons have anchored the NBC eleven o’clock news in New York. For reasons only a TV executive could understand Chuck and Sue were dispatched to Salt Lake for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Each night, from Utah, they would broadcast the New York local news from an outdoor perch somewhere near the site of the games in the foothills of the Rockies. Rosy-cheeked and shivering in their matching blue NBC parkas, they would read the news as if they were back in their familiar Channel 4 studio in Rockefeller Center.

It was bizarre, so strange in fact that it seemed to have a deeply unsettling effect not only on us viewers but on the rest of the news team, particularly on Janice Huff, the ever-perky weather person. It was Janice who provided the historic Olympic moment. She, of course, had stayed in New York, where she would do her usual weather thing, and then send it back to Chuck and Sue on the Olympian slopes: “That’s the weather forecast. Back to you, Chuck and Sue.” That was the usual line, but on this night (and this is a true story) Janice gave the weather report and then said, “That’s the weather forecast. Back to you, Suck and Chew.”

From TPM:

A California Republican family values legislator who was arrested early Wednesday morning for drunk driving had recently left a gay club, sources tell a local news channel… [Roy] Ashburn, who has a history of opposing gay rights, issued a contrite apology for the drunk driving arrest yesterday.

Hear this, from the American Family Association:

Chalk another death up to animal rights insanity and to the ongoing failure of the West to take counsel on practical matters from the Scripture…

What about the term “killer whale” do SeaWorld officials not understand?

If the counsel of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed, Tillikum would have been put out of everyone’s misery back in 1991 and would not have had the opportunity to claim two more human lives.

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)

So, your animal kills somebody, your moral responsibility is to put that animal to death. You have no moral culpability in the death, because you didn’t know the animal was going to go postal on somebody.

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)

Via Alternet, from Opium for the Masses, by Jim Hogshire:

In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jefferson's famous estate. Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson's crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison…

Would the president’s health care bill fare better if it wasn’t longer than War and Peace and nowhere near as interesting? If it was cut to, say, ten pages, even Republicans would be able to digest it and it might now be the law of the land.

Might we take Rachel Maddow more seriously if she didn’t wear sneakers on her news show? And wouldn’t her news show benefit from more news and less cuteness? On a recent evening Maddow interviewed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the upstate New Yorker who was named to succeed Hillary Clinton when Clinton became capo di tutti cappi di tutti diplomati. When the camera drew back for a long shot of the two women sitting at facing desks we could see that Rachel was ready for some post-punditry hoops. She was wearing what appeared to be Converse high-tops, black with white rubber trimming. Gillibrand, who has shed a few pounds since joining the August Body, is certainly the best-looking Senator and probably one of the smartest. She was soft-spoken, businesslike, not wearing sneakers, and was not in the least bit cute.

Would Chris Matthews find more viewers if he didn’t constantly interrupt his guests by answering his own questions and spraying saliva all over the place?

During the president’s state of the union address, Justice Alito, who was sitting directly in front of the president a couple of rows back, kept shaking his head from side to side in apparent disapproval of what he was hearing. Shouldn’t our Supreme Court Justices, even those who are runaway ideologues and hypocrites, at least try to maintain some measure of political neutrality?

To be sure, that’s an old-fashioned notion and not one that will find favor with the likes of Alito, or with the oddly creepy Chief Justice, with the sneering Scalia, or Clarence the Clown. These gifted legal theorists have now declared that corporations are the same as people and therefore have the right to spend as much money as they want to elect their favorite candidates. Thus forty or fifty years-worth of laws limiting the pernicious influence of powerful corporate interests on democratic elections was wiped away. And those laws prominently included the McCain-Feingold Act, co-sponsored by the recent Republican candidate for the presidency. Nobody is safe from this court.

What is the O’Reilly factor? Maybe if we could figure out what it is, we could eliminate it. (Ed. note: It is suavity.) Without his factor, might O’Reilly go away, too? Of course, if O’Reilly miraculously disappeared, then Keith Olbermann would have nothing to talk about on his news show and maybe he would also go away. As a recovering MSNBC addict, I can say that might not be all bad. Even if you like Olbermann, you can see that he’s almost as far out of control as Rachel Maddow.

But if Olbermann is out of control, what can we say about Rush Limbaugh? It’s hard to understand the attraction of a man of such spectacular repulsiveness. He’s fat, loud, ugly, mean as a rabid coyote, utterly cynical, totally irresponsible, dope-addled, and breathtakingly dishonest. He spews hate and broadcasts lies, and, despite these traits, or because of them, lots of people think he’s great. A great mystery. But then, lots of people thought Hitler was a fun guy.

A final few tidbits for thought. Why does anyone care what Arianna Huffington thinks? She used to be a loud-mouthed conservative and now she’s a loud-mouthed liberal. Huh?

Who is Glenn Beck and why do we keep hearing about him? There seems to be nothing about him that isn’t reprehensible. Nobody likes him, including his mother. Everything he says is a lie. He lacks charm, wit and intelligence. So why the hell do we keep hearing about him? Let’s put him out with the trash, with Sam Alito’s manners and O’Reilly’s factor.