I, Nicotone

Benjamin Braddock

2011-09-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

He held the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder as he dug for change. He looked at the thin scraps of paper in his palm and dropped them to the floor. He put two coins in the phone and the remaining in his pocket where he felt the tip of the folded letter. He didn’t have to pull it out to know what it was. He read it many times since he received it from his mother two weeks ago. Why did she even mention Grace? She must have known that he wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else if she mentioned Grace, so why did she? And of all things, why did she have to tell him that Grace was getting married? That’s why he was carrying the letter. He put it in his pocket after having read it once more that morning. He already knew that today was her wedding date but he had to relive the torture by reading it over again.

“Irv is that you?” a voice he recognized as Steve’s asked over the line.

“Yeah, I’m here. It’s all set. I’m going.”

“Well hurry, the priest is already here.”

“Jesus Christ, I thought I would have had more time.”

“I’ll see what I can do but you better fucking hurry!” And with that Irving hung up the phone and picked up his tote. He ran out into the rain to the idling car he paid a local kid to guard. He had a little trouble popping the clutch, he rarely drove stick shift and wasn’t very good at it. It wasn’t his car. He fishtailed in the mud a bit before backing off the gas and letting the wheels gain traction. This was the second afternoon rain and it’d last for about an hour. It’d rain at least one more time before day’s end.

“You never listen to me,” he could hear her say. She was always telling him that. He thought he was listening. He never thought they had any problems but he knew that maybe that is what she was getting at. He never noticed when he made her unhappy. He didn’t like making her unhappy. He remembered when he went out and bought her a kitten when her cat had gotten run-over by a hot-rodding teen. He thought he was fixing the problem but instead she got angry that he could be so insensitive to think that her Perrywinkle could just be replaced. Boy, had he played that hand all wrong.

He reached in the glove box for a cassette tape. There were few tapes he could play, most of them were in Spanish. He put in the tape deck The Best of Simon And Garfunkle. The irony that Mrs. Robinson came on didn’t escape him. He could picture Ben Braddock running into the church banging on the window, ruining the wedding. He then picture himself doing the same and an uneasy feeling came over him. Was he capable of doing such a thing? He knew that he couldn't love someone the way he loved Grace but could she love someone else more than him? Sure she was getting married but he knew she was still in love with him.

He slowed to a stop as the rain poured down a bit harder. A couple of men were trying to lead an ox off the road. but the soft ground made the animal hesitant to move further down the sloping path.

“Come on you fucking beast, move your ass.” he said aloud. The men waved him by and he maneuvered around them, partially driving up along the side of the hill. He drove as fast as he could trying not to slide off the road with its many curves and hairpins. He kept his eyes half on the road and half on the clock. He had about 30 minutes to go before he finally got there. Could this get any worse, he thought. What a shitty day this was turning out to be. If he didn’t get there in time he didn’t know what he’d do. He’d freak out for sure, probably even cry. This isn’t something that most people are prepared for.

All the while counting down the kilometers he had left to drive he thought of Grace. He imagined himself running into that church and yelling “I do,” when the priest asked if anyone knew of any reasons why these two should not wed. He wondered how he’d do it. Would he burst in like a mad man yelling for the wedding to stop or would he sit in the back and wait for his moment to arise? How would Grace react to him? Would he read signs of relief on her face ? Or would he see that vein in the middle of her forehead bulge and her jaw clench? The prospect of her not being relieved to see him gave him a bout of nausea. He’d pull over and vomit if it wasn’t for the fact that he was pressed for time.

Up and down the the road the car went, as he traversed one side of the mountain to the next, deeper and deeper into the thick rural plantations he drove. He turned the radio off when Sounds of Silence began to play. It became a nuisance. The rain had finally stopped and the sun began to shine through the parting clouds. He sped up, hoping to catch up on lost time. He could see the hospital down the cobble road as he made it into town,. He zig-zagged between the young men, done with the day’s pick, pushing wheel-barrels heaping with white coffee beans. They waved to him and smiled a little less so than they did on the first day his group arrived. On that day there were greeted as liberators.

When he got to the church, he drove around back to the hospital, added on years before by philanthropists from the United States. When he slammed on the breaks, he slid into the wall. He was wearing his seat belt but still managed to hit hid head against, the windshield. The nuns came running out to see if he was okay. He opened the door and rolled out onto the floor.

“Aw fuck.” He said, wincing.

“Are you okay?” one of the nuns asked in broken English.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said pulling himself up on the car door. He reached in and grabbed his tote. “I’ve got it sisters, I’ve got it.” He said as he quickly made his way inside.

“Irving,” Steve said, “you’re finally back.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got the meds.”

“Irving this is Padre Delgado.” Steve said to Irving. Irving looked over to see balding priest who looked as if he were blind. “He delivered that last rites about an hour ago when I got off the phone with you. It’s too late. Why don’t you have a seat?”

Acorn Parable [333W3C]

2011-09-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

“Squirrel Finn is a liar and he doesn’t know what he speaks about,” Rabbit Dorsey said to the wood land animals.

“His proof is not really proof.” Said Rabbit Jack as the other animals listened.

“This doesn’t effect me, why should I be here for this meeting?” Goat Joesph asked.

“I agree,” Deer Bethany said. “Why do we have to get mixed up in your acorn quarrel with Squirrel Finn, Rabbit Dorsey?”

“Because Squirrel Finn spreads his proof around but we know his proof isn’t real proof.”

“Here, here.” Rabbit Jack shouted.

“So what do you want from us?” Raccoon Samuel asked.

“Tell Squirrel Finn that the acorns belong to everyone in the forest and if we want to use them for carrot fires and our rabbit games of brickledumper and kangerdorfen we can.” Rabbit Dorsey said.

“Well I don’t see why not, this has no effect on me,” Said Goat Joseph.

“Then it’s agreed. We can use the acorns as we like and don’t have to agree to any of Squirrel Finns acorn rules.”

The meeting ended on this note and the many animals went their separate ways. Squirrels Jacob and George went straight to Finn’s tree. “They’re saying you are a liar Finn!” George told him.

“Yeah the rabbits have convinced the rest of the animals that you are wrong.” Jacob added.

“But I’m not wrong,” Finn began, “we are running out of acorns. All squirrels know you have to manage your acorns every year or the tress don't grow back. The rabbits use so much and they are wasteful. They can use twigs for the fires that cook their carrots but they want to use acorns because they’re easier to gather. They’re collecting all the acorns before everyone else because they’re so fast and they have more brothers and sister in their litters to help them gather. I had to cross the creek and go close to the edge of the meadow to gather decent acorns.”

“I know, I know.” Jacob offered.

“They’ve been doing it for a long time too. The newer saplings don’t bear acorns yet. The old trees grow barren.” Squirrel Finn pleaded.

The next morning Finn went to the stump and called on the animals of the forests but they would not listen because the rabbits told everyone that Squirrel Finn’s proof wasn’t really proof. Other animals such as the Goats and Deer didn’t care because they didn’t eat acorns.

All summer long, Squirrel tried to save as many acorns as he could but rarely found any because all the rabbits were using them for their games and their cooking fires. Summer was long and dry. Winter soon came, even though it was really cold, it too was really long and dry. Is didn’t rain much only sprinkling here and there throughout the winter. Only one night did it rain really hard, causing the creek to overflow. The creek rose up and washed away Beaver Samson’s dams.

When spring came there was less green grass than there was last year. There were less new oak saplings growing up from the ground. Still, there was enough food and materials for all the woodland creatures. Squirrel went along telling the rabbits and anyone who would listen that we need to stop using all the acorns and use different materials for fires and games. The rabbits didn’t listen and started selling their acorns. They had left-over acorns while almost everyone else had none.

“These are everyone’s acorns, you can’t sell them to us!” Argued Squirrel Finn.

“Yes I can, they are mine. Right Joseph?” Rabbit Dorsey said.

“I don’t care, I don’t eat acorns.” Goat Joesph said.

“See? You’re the only one who has a problem with my using and selling acorns.” Dorsey said.

“You’re always so bossy Squirrel. Isn’t he bossy?” Dorsey asked the forest animals.

“Yeah stop being so bossy Finn.” Raccoon Samuel said.

“Besides, your proof isn't really proof.” Said Chipmunk Dennis.

Squirrel stopped talking. No one believed him or listened to him any more. He collected all his acorns for the season anyway. Other rabbits had to go to Dorsey to get their acorns to start their fires and play their rabbit games. Chipmunks had to get the acorns from Rabbit Dorsey too.

Again the winter came and like last year the creek flooded, washing away Beaver Samson’s dams. The spring came and it was green but less so than last year. In fact, there was only new grass this season. The were no new saplings. Samson beaver said he was going to move away because there were no new oak saplings for him to use in his damns. Th green saplings are the most flexible and he uses them to tie important pieces of his damn together. So the forest animals threw him a big party before he moved away.

The goats and deer fought over who got to eat the grass because there wasn’t enough green growing plants for them all to eat. Squirrel Finn would still say that we need to stop using up all the acorns but no one would listen to him.

When the winter came it again brought floods but this time there was no damn for it to wash away. It did however wash away a lot of the rich dark growing dirt where the grass once grew. The roots of the grass would hold all the good growing dirt in place like a net but because it was all eaten, there was not a net of roots to hold the dirt in place. The floods washed a lot of the good growing dirt away.

When Spring came, the forest was a lot different. The floods took away a lot of the smaller tress and washed away planes where grass one grew. The grass that grew was very little. The creek dried up because there were no dam to slow and control the water. It moved further away from the forest now. It was obvious to all the animals in the forest that something needed to be done.

“We need grass!” Said the deer.

“So do we.” Said the Goats,

“Why should I care if you need grass?” Said Finn to the Goats and deer, “you didn't care about my acorns.” The deer and goats were too embarrassed to answer.

After much discussion. Squirrel Jacon spoke, “I have the answer to your problems, we need Beaver Samson to bring water back to us.”

“But he can’t build the dams without the saplings to tie them off.” Said Raccoon Samuel.

“We’ll just plant some acorns to grow the saplings.” Jacob said. “Rabbit has the acorns to plant, Rabbit will you give them to us.”

“No, you have to buy them, you all have to buy them from me. I only have a few left so they will cost you a lot.” Rabbit Dorsey said defiantly.

“But rabbit we will surely die if we don’t bring water back to the forest.” Goat Joseph pleaded.

“How is that my problem?” Rabbit said. This caused the animals to get very angry at rabbit. They wanted to attack the Rabbit Dorsey and all his other rabbit friends.

“”Wait, wait!” cried Finn. “I have saplings. I’ve tended to my tree and no one else has. I’ve planted what little acorns I had last year so that the sapling would grow this year.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Why didn’t you tell Beaver Samson before he moved away.”

“I tired but he would never give me the time of day, he would just ignore me.”

“Well we must find him quickly to divert water back to the forest.” Deer Bethany said. “Climb on my back Squirrel Finn and we shall ride to the ends of the forest to find Beaver Samson.

Deer and squirrel brought Beaver back to the forest and all the animals except the rabbits helped Beaver build the new dams to help bring the creek back into the forest. The water soon brought in new grass and animals planted the acorns to grow new trees. Rabbit Dorsey and all his rabbit friends were kicked out of the forest into the meadow and not allowed to use the acorns any more.

All the animals agreed to no longer be wasteful but instead use less and work together to make sure that the forest kept growing new tress and grass. They made sure they managed the water with Beaver so that it didn’t disappear but also that it didn’t wash away the dark growing dirt that they needed to keep growing plants and tress.

The animals found that working together actually made everything easier for everyone. If the animals weren't greedy or wasteful, then all the animals could live together without ever starving again.

Santa Croce

2011-09-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

I kept looking at the timetables and fares and still thought that going straight to Paris would be the best plan economically. I did the math in my head as fast as I could.

“Terrence!”

“Yes?” I answered looking up from my trance.

“We’re going to Venice and that’s final,” Stephanie informed me. I looked over at Brenden who nodded reluctantly. Sighing defeat, “okay, okay.” I said. Stephanie wanted to go to Venice to see San Marcos square or Piazza or was it San Mateo? I couldn't recall. I didn’t really care about Venice. I just wanted to get the hell out of Italy. I wanted to get to Paris. I wanted decent food. I wont argue about the quality of Italian food because I don’t think it was all that great and that’s my conclusive opinion.

We had been in Rome far too long anyway. We spent a whole week there, doing lots of walking, seeing a bunch of old shit in a city struggling to balance the Old World with the modern. It was like any other modern city, dirty and full of assholes.

So now, instead of taking the trains necessary to get to Paris, we were stuck in a cyber cafe trying to book rooms in Venice all before we had to be on the train to take us there. I hated rushing but Stephanie was the one plotting the course. Granted, not everyone was computer savvy, or internet literate in the late 1990s but she didn’t know how to search the Internet for her life.

“Can I help you?” I would ask and she would always say “no,” insisting she knew what she was doing. She did not. To be fair, web pages then weren’t as clean and easy to navigate as they are now. There weren’t the numerous travel websites then as there are now either. We had actually booked the trip through a travel agent. The last time I ever used a travel agent.

“Right click.” I instructed.

“This one?’

“No the one on the right.”

“This is the one on the right?”

“No it’s not.” I said.

“You want to do it? Fine!” She said in a huff and tossed the mouse onto the desk. I looked at Brenden who gave me an exasperated look and then, as if pointing with them, he raised his eyebrows telling me to take the helm of the internet browser.

I could feel Stephanie’s eyes burning over my shoulder as I took the mouse in my hand.

“See? Right click, right click!” she yelled from behind me.

“I did,” I said as I pulled away from her yelling.

“That’s what I did.”

“No you didn’t,” I said as I picked up the mouse. ” You kept clicking this button, I meant this one,” giving her tutorial of the mouse’s nomanclature.

“Oh, so right click doesn’t mean click it with your right hand.?” She asked.

It was cold on the train and we knew we had another one to catch. I sat alone next to the cold window while Brenden and Stephanie sat together laughing about God knows what. I didn’t give a shit, I had been out-voted. Stephanie swayed Brenden to vote for Venice. I didn’t want to spend my money on booking a room in Venice, nor the train tickets to get there, when that money could have went to a sleeper train en route to Paris. Two birds, one stone and a city I was more apt to want to chill in.

I mean Venice is beautiful with all it’s canals and shit but what did I care? Those gondola rides are expensive and I wasn’t in the mood to spend that kind of bread for a saccharine novelty better suited to a young couple. Granted, I was was trying to fuck Stephanie but so was Brenden and neither of us wanted to have to be romantic about it. It’s not that we were all that into Stephanie, it’s just that being Americans who didn’t bother to learn the native tongue wasn’t really winning us any Italian chicks. Any American girls we met where smitten by the dark-haired, blue-eyed Italian boys they saw. We didn’t stand a chance. Well, not a good one anyway. Stephanie was our “fall back bitch,” the girl we fall back on if we couldn’t pull any birds from the clubs or bars. This was a term and concept she did not find amusing.

I looked over at Brenden and Stephanie who were looking into one of the many guide books that Stephanie had brought. I could feel someone looking at me. I raised my head and met the eyes of a guy with an orange scarf staring at me. He’d been watching me. He then looked at Stephanie, then back at me and shook his head. I remembered the guy from when we first got on this train, when it was still crowded. We were running late to catch the train because Stephanie mixed up the schedule thinking that train left at 4:30 when it actually left at 4:05. A fact I had known and stated butt she dismissed me, she was the one holding the train timetable book after all. We also lost some time when the two of them argued over whose turn it was to pay for the hotel. It was Stephanie’s turn but she wouldn’t pull out her credit card to make the payment, so after five minutes of pleading, Brenden finally relented and gave me his card to use.

We barely got to the train’s platform as the doors closed and began to pull away but Stephanie dropped her bags and ran to the door pounding and screaming to let us on. Of course we picked up her bags and followed. The train stopped and the doors opened. Inside it was packed full of people; commuters and holiday travelers, all standing.

“There’s room,” Stephanie insisted and started throwing in our bags at the legs of the many standing in the entryway. You could hear the people moan as our huge 75 lb. bags struck their shins and knees. Stephanie barged her way through and commanded Brenden and I to follow. Both he and I sheepishly climbed aboard trying not to meet the eyes of the Italians who were just assaulted by our compatriot. Our smiles begged for forgiveness as we shrugged our apologies. The guy wearing the orange scarf is the one who held the door into the main compartment open for me, as I passed I nodded and mumbled “grazie”.

The train arrived at our transfer station finally. We sat on the platform waiting for the train to take us from the mainland to Venice.

“Terrence I’m hungry, go buy me something, please.” She asked.

“I’ll miss the train,” I told her.

“No you wont, we’ve got ten minutes.” She said.

“Yeah about nine minutes.” Brenden said and I shot a look at him that made him recoil and tighten his mouth.

“Well, here, give me some Lira, I’ll get us something to eat.”

“I’m fine.” I said.

“Yeah me too,” Brenden said. “Why don’t you just wait until we get to Venice, we’ll eat at the hotel?”

“Because I’m hungry now Brenden that’s why!” Stephanie shot back. “Just give me like a hundred Lira,” Stephanie insisted.

“Why do I have to give you money?”

“Because I’ve used all mine, I have to cash my travelers checks.”

“Fuck, fine,” I said pulling my wallet from out the inside pocket of my leather parka. “Here.”

She walked off to the McDonald’s at the main platform. Brenden and I smoked our cigarettes watching her, counting the minutes until the train arrived. An announcement was made overhead in Italian, which none of us spoke. “Wait, what did she say about Venice?” I asked Brenden regarding the female voice overhead.

“Platform two?”

“Yeah, I think she said it moved to platform two?”

“Yeah let’s go.” Brenden said as he pointed to an approaching train off in the distance.

“Stephanie,” I shouted from platform nine, “meet us on platform two.”

“I'm waiting for my food.” She shouted back as she stepped out from the McDonalds.

“Fuck your food, let’s go!”

“The train to Venice is on nine.”

“They moved it to two.”

“Terrence, stay there, they said it’s on nine!” she insisted.

“This bitch,” I said to Brenden.

‘Well, she does speak better Italian than us.” Brenden offered.

“No she doesn’t, she speaks shitty Spanish. These people are insulted she keeps speaking to them in Spanish. She’s better off speaking in English, at least she has control of the language.” I argued.

We watched as passengers boarded the train. It slowly pulled away from platform two. Stephanie was no longer in sight.

“What the fuck?” Brenden said.

“Did that fucking bitch get on that train?” I yelled at Brenden

“What fucking bitch?” Stephanie asked as she walked up from the stairs onto the platform.

“Oh, we couldn’t see you, we thought maybe you got on the train.” Brenden said.

“I told you, it’s on platform nine, see,” she said, pointing to the train that was approaching our platform. We got on and I chose to sit by myself again. The first two stops came quickly, it was the final stop that took the longest, about 25 minutes before we finally stopped. We then noticed that not only were we the only passengers in the car but we were the only passengers on the train. The conductor noticed this fact as well. He looked shocked to see three stupid American kids standing in the middle of the aisle, confused because they had now found themselves parked in a train yard.

Lugging our shit through the dark of the train yard was by far the most interesting, if not shitty, part of the night. My bag was a bitch of a burden just rolling through a train station, now I had to carry the heavy motherfucker along the rocking grounds of the rails. There was a small station there that had a train bound to the transfer station. We met a couple of guys at this station who took an instant liking to Stephanie which means Brenden and I instantly disliked them. I believe they said they were Moroccan. We told Stephanie in quick whispers to stop talking to them. She wouldn’t listen of course, telling us to be cool and stop being such assholes.

We got on the train and two of the guys boarded the train with us, even going so far as to sit in our cabin with us. Brenden and I really didn’t like this but Stephanie wasn’t our girlfriend so we couldn’t say anything. At the first stop, one of the Moroccans got off and exchanged handshakes and smiles with his pal. Stephanie was confused.

“I thought you said you lived together?” She asked him.

“Yes but tonight, you me, Venice.” He told Stephanie.

Aghast, “What? Absolutely not.” Stephanie said. They had some words and neither Brenden nor I said much. We both stood guard but he didn’t get physical. He simply walked out of the cabin. We saw him get off at the next stop.

“Why didn’t you tell him something?” Stephanie asked us.

“Why should we, we told you not to talk to them.”

“I was being friendly, meeting different people. We’re in Europe for Christ’s sake.” Stephanie argued.

“True but don’t be so fucking naive. You can’t even speak their language, in what way could you be interesting to them other than to fuck?” I told her. She didn’t like that comment and didn’t speak to me much after that. She stood by Brenden holding his arm and resting her head on his shoulder when she could.

After all the trains and transfers we made it to Venice, where it was now past midnight and the water level rose above the side walks. As soon as we were outside I immediately started hailing a water cab.

“Watch my bag Brenden, my passport is in the front pocket. I’m going to go back in the station to see if I can find a map of the city.” Stephanie instructed just as the taxi was approaching. When she was inside and the cab pulled close enough for me to put my foot into it I looked at Brenden and he gave me a nod. He picked up our bags; handing me my bag, then his bag and then he picked up Stephanie's and threw it into the Grand Canal. The cab driver turned and looked at us at the sound of the splash.

“Santa Croce.” I told him as Brenden and I settled into our seats. He shrugged his shoulders and began to pull away.

The Fold & Jay

2011-08-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

Both Boris and Pickles never really understood the curmudgeonly attributes of Cole. True they were different than Cole, both Boris and Pickles were females, years older than Cole. The other main difference was that Cole was a cat and Boris and Pickles were dogs.

Boris, a lovely Rottweiler of calm disposition, was the first family pet. She was named Boris because her young masters were boys and wanted a tough name for their tough dog. The masculine aspects of it escaped them for they were only nine and seven years of age. Pickles a long-haired chihuahua/dachshund mix was quite calm too. She was young and had more energy but because she took her cues from Boris, she often laid around a lot, wishing someone would play with her.

They never said much to one another about Cole except that he seemed so grumpy. He paid them little mind anyway. He reserved no reverence for Boris, not for her being his elder, the family guard or even to the fact that Boris could eat him.

“You want to play tag?’ Pickles asked Cole.

“No,” Cole said.

“How about fetching the ball with me.”

“No.”

“Want to play strings? You pull one end, I pull the other?” Pickles asked circling Cole, bouncing.

“Leave me alone mutt.” Cole said as he stretched and walked off toward the window sill for a nap.

Disheartened, Pickles slowly trotted away.

“Pay him no mind, he is unlike us.” Boris told Pickles in comfort. “He only bothers with our masters because they feed him. He truly only cares for himself. From now on, don’t bother with him. He wont care one way or the other about it and you wont get your feelings hurt.”

Pickles accepted this advice albeit with some sadness.

It had been a week or so of pure bliss for Cole. Neither Boris nor Pickles bothered him with any questions or requests. He enjoyed the silence and peace. As he purred in the sunlight that painted the window sill he heard “hey, whatcha doing?”

To the human ear this question sounded like bird cawing but Cole being a cat knows the language of birds as do all Cats and all dogs and vice versa.

Cole opened on eye and looked outside beyond the window screen and saw standing on a telephone wire a young, fit Blue Jay.

“I’m Jasper.”

“Go away.” Cole said with little effort.

“Go away? But I just got here," Jasper said. “I’m new to the area so I’m trying to make friends.”

“Make friends elsewhere.” Cole said turning on the window sill facing away from the outside world.

“But I live in that tree right there. You’re my neighbor. We should be friends.”

“I’m a cat.” Cole said, his patience growing thin.

“What does that matter? I’ve been friends with dogs and raccoons and...”

“It means I eat you!” Cole said as he whipped around in a leap, ,jumping in the direction of Jasper. He was stopped by the window screen and ended up falling on the floor. He shook his head and looked out the sliding door.

Jasper flew to the ground to speak to Cole through the glass of the sliding door, “Are you okay? Man, that was a big fall.” Jasper said looking back up at the window sill. “You landed right on your side. That’s funny most cats land on their feet. Hmm, I wonder why you didn’t. Well I doubt it is because you are inferior. Even an inferior cat would have landed on his feet.”

Cole didn’t answer, he just turned and walked into toward another room. Jasper stood talking to him through the glass door. He was in the bedroom of his youngest master and jumped on the bed to get to the window sill.

“Is this window better?” He heard someone ask.

“Huh, what?” Cole asked looking up at Jasper staring at him from outside.

“This window, is it better than the last window? Is that why you moved? I do that sometimes, sometimes I like that wire better than the other wire. Or this branch better than that branch. I prefer the shaded branches and wires. You seem to like the sun.”

“Go away,” Cole begged with a drone.

This type of exchange happened daily for weeks. From minutes before the sun’s rise to when the first stars pierced the darkness of the night sky, Jasper would stay within speaking distance of Cole’s many windows asking questions and requesting friendship.

Once in a while when withing earshot, Boris or Pickles would jump at Jasper, in an attempt to swallow him whole and silence him. They too were bothered by his constant talking every once in a while.

That didn’t stop Jasper from coming by. He would just fly up and perch himself anywhere out of reach from both Pickles and Boris. Cole was annoyed at the dogs for their failures. If he didn’t have a screen and was allowed outside, he’d surely catch that gabby Blue Jay.

Being that they were easy going, both Pickles and Boris stopped trying to eat Jasper and let him come by freely. Because they were older, they could easily fall asleep on Jasper if his talking became too much for them. Cole would curse the dogs for entertaining this burden of his. Sometimes Jasper would bring by other Blue Jays, like Jones and Jackson. Sometimes he’d talk with the Doves who stood guard from boys with slingshots or the Crows who worked the fruit trees.

Cole got annoyed to see him talking to the other animals because he knew that eventually Jasper was going to come bother him. He wished he’d just come and get it out of the way instead of making him wait.

“I notice your ears flop. Are you bad luck? I heard black cats are bad luck. But why do your ears flop? Hound dogs ears flop. Harry, he’s a hound dog six houses over. his ears flop all kinds. I can only go there and talk to Harry when the Doves stand by. His masters try to shoot me with slings. He’s very wise he is. Sometimes he tells me tales of his expeditions.”

“I’m a Scottish fold,” Cole said finally. The first time he ever said anything to Jasper that was in the form of a conversation.

“Huh?” Japser asked with surprise.

“A Scottish fold, that is why my ears flop, I’m a Scottish fold.”

“Oh, I’ve never heard of a Scottish fold before. Persians and tabbys. Are you bad luck?”

“Well, you haven’t been eaten so I guess I am. Bad luck to myself but good luck for you.”

“I don’t understand?’ Jasper said.

“Forget it,” Cole said, laughing to himself.

“Jasper!” Desmond shouted. Cole looked up to see a dove on a tree branch.

“Yes Desmond?” Jasper answered.

“The boys are home from school, quickly move along.” Desmond cautioned.

“What does he mean?” Cole asked.

“Your young masters,” Jasper began, “they both got BB guns last winter just after the solstice. A bird is a wonderful prize for them. There are many young boys in this neighborhood.”

“BB guns? My masters?”

“Yes.” Jasper said as he fluttered off.

The next day Jasper came by and for the first time ever upon arriving, Cole did not ask him to leave or jump at the screen. Jones and Jackson too began coming to the window sill to ask questions of Cole. They would stay until Desmond or Darrell would come by and warn that they had to leave.

Cole stretched one morning and noticed that the sun was rising earlier and earlier now and realized the summer solstice would be upon them tomorrow. He was going to enjoy the long summer days, the hours of sunlight. He sat and stretched upon the sill and slowly fell asleep, he didn’t wake until noon when he noticed the sounds of a lawn mower off in the distance and the hissing of a water sprinkler. The buzzing of insects and the hot heat made him a feel a little woozy. Had Jasper been there he’d have woken a lot earlier.

He woke the next day and heard lots of conversations amongst the early working crows, picking off the last of the fresh figs. They had to finish work early he overheard them say. It seems all the birds had somewhere to go to. Cole cursed his masters for never allowing him outside. He wanted to know what all the commotion was about.

“Hey Jackson, what’s going on with you birds, all flying off? Winter isn’t for six months.”

“You don’t know?” Jackson said down to Cole through the window screen. His tone stirred worry in Cole. “Jasper went to go talk with Harry.” Jackson began.

Cole didn’t even hear the rest of what Jackson said. It’s as if the folds of his ears prevented him from hearing. He looked forward to the many minutes that this day would bring, filled with sunshine and warmth. Now it was filled with an empty coldness Cole had never known.

Just Say Now!

2010-08-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

Maybe more of a public relations ploy than an actual act of advocacy, Google has now allowed the ads regarding the legalization of Marijuana that Facebook would not. Still reeling from the disclosure that Google doesn't totally live up to it's mantra of "Don't Be Evil," with regards to net neutrality; this accepting of the pro-pot legislation ads might go over well with your typical net-neutrality advocate.

As November draws closer, if the perception is that public sentiment is in favor of the legalization of marijuana, voters on the fence will most like, too, become in favor of the legalization of marijuana. The powers of perception and the fact that no one wants to be on the losing team has, I've argued, a lot to do with how people vote. By allowing such ads, it leads people to realize that marijuana isn't as taboo or evil as it was once made out to be. Also, it'd be a great cash crop for my home state of California.

Here are some facts retrieved from the Marijuana Advocacy site, JustSayNow.com

Support Law Enforcement and Prison Reform

Since Ronald Reagan began his war on drugs in 1982, the US prison population has quadrupled: The US only has 5% of the world’s population, but we now have 25% of its prisoners — more than China. In 2007, arrests for marijuana possession alone totaled 775,138, greatly exceeding arrests for all violent crimes combined.
There is no evidence that decriminalization of marijuana has increased use: In studies that compare rates of marijuana use in states that have decriminalized vs. states that haven’t, most of the evidence suggests that decriminalization has had no effect. European countries with less draconian drug laws have lower rates of use. And though it is purely anecdotal, it is nonetheless true that following the end of alcohol prohibition, consumption of alcohol actually went down.

Solve our Border Crisis

Border security and immigration hysteria is being fueled by money going to drug cartels from marijuana smuggling: Contrary to popular belief, the shooting at the Mexican border which triggered the recent draconian Arizona search law was precipitated by a shooting over marijuana smuggling, not undocumented workers. To solve the border crisis, legalize marijuana.
Ending marijuana prohibition could cut the profits of Mexican drug cartels by 60%, money that has enabled them to threaten the stability of Mexico: Recently outgoing head of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, warned that drug cartels “threaten … the well-being of the Mexican people and the Mexican state.”

Driving Young Voter Turnout

Drug arrests deny young people access to educational and other opportunities: A 1998 law denies financial aid to any student convicted of even a misdemeanor drug offense. The arrests produce a permanent criminal record, easily accessed on the internet, that can also keep applicants from getting a job, a loan or even an apartment. Over 200,000 students have lost their access to student loans over marijuana arrests.
The issue of marijuana legalization is overwhelmingly popular with young voters: After the 2008 election, President-elect Obama conducted three rounds of voting on his official Transition Team Web site, asking users to submit ideas and vote on them. In all three rounds of voting questions related to taxing and regulating marijuana were the top vote getters.
Marijuana legalization on the ballot is a strong incentive for young voters to turn out: A recent poll by AmericaVotes found that 47% of “surge” voters were more likely to turn out to vote in the midterm if marijuana legalization were on the ballot.

Billions in Tax Revenue

Regulating marijuana like alcohol could generate significant tax revenue: According to a report authored by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron and endorsed by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman it would produce $40 billion a year in taxes. The California’s State Board of Equalization estimated legal, regulated, and taxed marijuana would generate $1.4 billion for the state annually. Prosecuting marijuana offenders contributes significantly to the current state budget crisis: Currently, one in every 15 dollars in the states’ main pools of discretionary money goes to corrections.

This is not a sponsored posting.

Professional Left?

2010-08-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

Press Secretary Gibbs seems to have more disdain for the liberal left wing sect of the Democratic Party, than he does for Tea Party activisists and obstructionist Republican Party. The White House seems to be kicking it's base because it has failed to properly sell any piece of legislation it has tried to pass. It has let FOX news and the Right Wing Media Establishment control the spin of almost all news stories.

The White House or maybe just Press Secretary Gibbs have done an awful job at winning public perception. We will lose many House and Senate seats because this White House has botched up the message. Americans should have been dancing in the streets at the notion that we'd have Medicare for All instead, they took to the streets wearing arms and screaming hateful, racist rhetoric. Obama has pushed through legislation despite the obstructionist tactics of the minority party and yet the perception is that the Democrats aren't doing anything. The Tea Party speaks of throwing the "bums out" in November not realizing that it is their own party members who are done nothing. Republicans have offered nothing to the American people. They have not voted to pass anything and their only idea is to vote "no" against all legislation from the President. No matter the benefits that will be gained by their constituents, they vote against the president purely for political points.

Robert Gibbs seems to not realize who the enemy is. Instead of calling out The GOP and it's minions, he attacks the Left, who put Obama in office. He insults The Left as if suddenly the Left are a bunch of zany nut jobs. He's not even talking about zany hippie left wingers, he's talking about your general liberal. He's talking about the Left who want us to get out of Iraq. The Left who wants us to close Guantanamo, he's talking about The Left who wants investigations into the possible war crimes committed by The Bush Administration. The Left who wants us to end our dependency on OIL, foreign and domestic. The Left who wants solar and wind power. He's not talking about your left-wing equivalent to the Right's Tea-Bagger but rather, your typical left of center Democrat. He's talking about those so many wallets that opened for Obama in 2008.

Gibbs is essentially saying that the White House takes no responsibility for continuing this idealistic stance of rising above the fray. The President and members of his cabinet such as Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel did little to win the public relations fight for almost every battle the Right Wing Media Establishment has waged against them and instead they want to take it out on their supporters. Supporters who are upset that they haven't done enough to stand up against the Right.

They caved on Health Care Reform. We didn't even get a fucking public option for Christ's sake! The White House backed Blanche Lincoln, who was one of the four shittiest members of the Democratic Senate, over her primary challenger. They rewarded someone who voted against their major piece of legislation. What the hell is that? Where's the ball busting? Where's the party leadership? Now we are seeing that all the money the White House put into Lincoln's re-election was for naught because she's going to lose. When Lincoln spoke out against the public option, why didn't party leaders tell her that she would not be given the endorsement of the party if she were to be primaried and in fact that the party itself would fund a primary against her?

This tactic isn't like some purity test that we are seeing in The GOP. This is purely a reassurance of self-preservation. If the Democratic members of the Senate can't stand together and vote as one, they will lose the majority. That is a fact we are seeing come to fruition. The White House has failed to lead the Democratic party and has failed to properly sell any piece of legislation to the public. Losing the battle of perception.

This is why the Left is upset with the White House because despite 98% of Americans having to pay less taxes under this President, the Tea Baggers believe they are paying more. There has been little push back by The White House on so many issues. When they finally do push back, it's too late, the battle of perception has already been won by The Right Wing Media Establishment.

So Gibbs goes on television and blasts the party's base out of frustration that the White House has done a terrible job in getting the message out. Facts are on their side, this shouldn't be so hard. It should be easy. We haven't abondoned The President, we still stand behind him but that doesn't mean we are going to sit there and smile and open our wallets when he doesn't keep a promise or gives away too much to the Republicans in order to attain bipartisanship. Fuck the bipartisanship, fuck the Republicans, they've done nothing but ruin this country. Their ideas, when put into practice, have proven to be detrimental to our country and our economy. They lost the election and both houses of congress. The White House caters to them, solely for the sake of bipartisanship, and wonders why The Left is angry with him. Instead of putting the death nail in The GOP's coffin, The White House's pandering has given them a second life.

Still, I stand by my President because I believe he's a smart man. I stand by my President because I'm not a victim of FOX News. Yet here his Press Secretary comes out and attacks liberals like myself. Gibbs is a jackass. He should own up to the fact that Dana Perino and Ari Fleischer did a better job at selling outright lies than he can at selling true facts. He has better selling points than the opposition and he can't do it. He's mad at the professional left? The professional left is small in comparison to the Right Wing Media Establish and he's going to need them if he want's to win these battles of the public's perception.

Come Gather 'Round People: The Power of Perception and The 2010 Mid-Term Elections

2010-04-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

"He's a fucking capitalist!" my pal Frank said with disappointment. It was sometime, months ago, on a drunken night where we were talking about the impending health care bill. Obama had done little in the health care fight at this point and the public option was considered dead. Obama was getting killed in the polls. Yet what Frank said was counter to what had been uttered all over Fox News and at the vitriolic town halls. Obama was a capitalist? This couldn't have been possible, not with the narrative we were hearing. I was being told, on the daily, by the right wing smear machine that Obama was a socialist.

Of course, unlike 30% of this country, I do in fact know what a socialist is. I also know that socialism has long been an American characteristic. We the people, for the people. I wish Obama was a socialist. Instead of bailing out the the banks, they should have taken them over. Did you know that the state of North Dakota uses a socialized bank? The state runs their own bank, giving loans to its residents. North Dakota suffers from an unemployment rate of 4%. California, the richest state in the nation, is in the double digits. Socialism has kept North Dakota afloat. They've owned their own bank since 1919, two years after the Bolshevik Revolution. If Obama was a socialist, he'd have taken over the banks and the automobile industry, as he should have.

However, Obama, like the rest of them, is a capitalist. He is a friend of Wall Street. Maybe not the best friend but a friend none the less. This doesn't bother me so much because I knew that before hand. He wasn't the messiah or the celebrity as McCain and the GOP tried to paint him as. He was and still is your run of the mill, Harvard educated, capitalist.

An Obama capitalist is still better than anything the Republicans could have offered up in 2008. He is better than anything they can offer up now and it is patently obvious that he is better than anything they can offer up in 2012. Obama is both capable and competent. He is extremely smart and his policies are broad minded. He isn't the perfect liberal ideal but then again, the perfect liberal ideal couldn't get elected anywhere outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Obama is a degree or two off of center. Which is a big change from the far-right administration of George W. Bush. Despite what Glenn Beck lies about, George W. Bush was no progressive. If Glenn Beck believes that, then Glenn Beck is a fucking idiot, who has no concept of what words actually mean.

Yet the "liberal" media calls Obama a leftist. This is completely untrue. Sure he advocates for a woman's right to choose but a large majority of the country supports upholding Roe V. Wade. He ended the torture programs engaged by our military. A majority of people want an investigation into these practices. These are middle of the road stances Obama is taking. He hasn't ended DADT, even though both sides have the aisle have been for it. It should be noted that you can't take into account what Republicans are saying about DADT now because they are being completely disingenuous. They are solely against it now because it is a part of their "No" strategy in dealing with the president. Obama is a middle of the road capitalist, who leans left on some issues but just barely.

Under his tax system 98% of American families are better off than they were a year before. Yet, you have these teabaggers walking around protesting taxes. Not realizing that the original tea party was a result of being tax without representation. These people have representation, they're just idiots who follow along with whatever Fox News feeds them. Even those who don't watch Fox News are affected by the negative press Obama receives which is evident by his 51% approval rating.

His popularity took a huge hit with the debates leading up to the passage of the health care bill. It didn't matter what the facts were, negative press ad nauseum really did damage to his poll numbers. It didn't matter that there was huge support for a health care bill with a public option. All it took was one news station, FOX, to blatantly lie to its audience. FOX was the one saying that this bill was unpopular which was untrue. They said it was unpopular on both sides of the aisle which is disingenuous at best.

The Left was upset with the bill because it didn't go far enough. The Left was upset that the bill was being shaped by those who were against it anyway. They weren't against the bill per se, they were against what it was being turned into in order to attain GOP votes. They were against allowing any GOP input into the legislation. That's completely different than being outright against it like those on the Right.

You omit this fact and it gives you a nominal figure that can be used to sway the masses. People don't want to be on the losing side of anything. People don't want to go against the grain. People are sheep who suffer from group think. If you tell them everyone is doing it, then they too will want to do it. People are chicken shit. No one dares to be bold.

We champion individualism in theory but in reality, we shun it, shit upon it. If you have everyone on the same message disseminating these lies, people will have no choice but to buy into them because everyone is telling them so.

It was barely this past weekend that David Gregory on Meet The Press has started fact checking lies people utter on his show. Sean Hannity lies all the time and there is never any push back except from maybe Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. Which is for naught because those two have been so vilified by the rest of the media, that no one outside of the Left echo chamber takes them seriously. No matter how factually accurate they are. They've been painted as "leftist liberals" therefore their words are not to be trusted.

What this all comes down to is that despite fact, Obama is sagging in the polls. Despite the many accomplishments of the Obama Administration. Despite his many reversals of the Bush era policy. Why? Perception. A plurality of people are angry with him but for opposite reasons. On one side, The Left, wants drastic change at a faster rate. While the other side wants to turn back the clock to the days of yore where Jim Crow ruled and a woman's place was in the kitchen.

The Left needs to be patient. Although imperfect, some will have to suffer injustices longer than others before all wrongs are righted. Specifically gays and lesbians. It's not right but that's they way it'll have to be in order for anything to change. If we continue to contribute to the perception that Obama is unaffected, which is not the case, then it will lead to even poorer poll numbers. The poor poll numbers will translate to less votes come November.

Nothing can be done about the vitriol spewed by these racist Americans. Bill Maher pointed out that if these teabaggers were really worried about deficits and spending, they'd be against the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

They don't really care about "generational theft." Whatever the hell that means. If they cared about future generations, they'd make sure that all children had access to health care no matter what their socio-economic status was. If they really cared about future generations, that means they would have to care about people in general. It is obvious that they don't. Any program that is designed to help those in need, the less fortunate, is met with fierce opposition by these teabagger patriots. You see them insult and berate the disabled, throwing money in their faces.

They don't really believe in the principles they stand up for. For if they did, they'd bother to know the facts. They're much better under Obama's tax system than they were under Bush's. They don't know the facts because it doesn't matter what the facts are. They hate Obama no matter what the truth is. The Obama hate is because of many things, lies perpetuated by the media and the internet but all that could be swept away and he'd still be Black; and they'd still hate him for it.

We can't stop their hate. Ever. A good 20% of this country hates our president solely because he is a Black man. It is funny, they are the first ones to say The United States isn't a racist country because we elected a Black man, yet none of them voted for him. Taking credit for something they had no part in and working everyday to usurp his power. They're trying to take away his majorities in both houses of Congress and eventually his presidency.

We can't let that happen. If we don't stand by him, he will lose his political capital and nothing will get done. Our country will be reverted back to the myopic world we lived under during the Bush era. Forget regulation of the banking industry, forget regulation of your coal mines, of your oil rigs. Forget investment in clean energy. Forget all the political good will we have throughout the world because of the Obama presidency. All will be lost if we allow this president to lose his majority.

We need to stand in solidarity with this president, if only to give the perception that his policies have a majority of support. This posturing alone will garner him support. The GOP is currently imploding from political cannibalism. The far-right, the tea-baggers, are hijacking the GOP. This is now the time to truly send The GOP wandering into the desert for generations to come. If we do the same as them, adhering to far left ideology while pushing out moderate Democrats, we will suffer the same fate. The disdain I have for Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson is great but ridding them might rid us of a majority in both the House and Senate.

We have to accept the fact that left-wing heroes such as Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich don't go far in national politics. Not yet anyway. We have to move in small degrees. With every degree the dividends are exponentially greater. It has taken blue state California over a decade to move from medicinal marijuana legality to a legal marijuana initiative. Once a door is opened, so are minds and public opinion shifts. If we push for too much, the knee jerk reaction is over-compensated; an immediate call for a conservative referendum.

Just as we are climbing out of the mire that was the George W. Bush presidency, we must be wary of reverting back to such a state. If we allow them to take back either one of the houses, the conversation, the progression, will die. We will be stalled from further advancing policies that will benefit all Americans, not just the rich. As partisan as the current political climate is, there seems to be no benefit for The GOP to side with the president. Even after they oppose Democratic legislation, they go on to take credit for the progress said legislation creates. Their strategy of being the party of "no" has resonated with many of their constituents because it further reiterates the perception that Obama is ineffective.

The White House has done a poor job at highlighting the progress they have made since taking office. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the appointment of Sonya Sotomator to the Supreme Court, the passage of the health care and education act, improved foreign relations, the extremely successful cash for clunkers program, reversal of Bush policies on stem-cell research, and the list goes on.

If we forget these massive accomplishments and allow The GOP to to control the dialogue with their vitriolic rhetoric and corporate propaganda, the 2010 mid-terms will be disastrous not only for the President and his party but ultimately our country.

Miscarriage of Justice; The Assault on Women's Rights

2010-02-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Having performed hundreds of dilations and curettages for women who've miscarried A.K.A. missed abortions, I can tell you it is one of the most heartbreaking, traumatic experiences a woman can go through. These women are vulnerable, depressed, soul-searching, guilt-ridden, and bereaved. To criminalize an act of nature, of God, of chance, of life is not only insane it is cruel and unjust.

It seems logic has taken a backseat to religion in Utah. These anti-abortion groups have gone to great lengths to penalize woman who want to procure an abortion, that they are now targeting all women. It is bad enough that they want to take a woman's choice away from her, which is still a patient privacy issue, but now they want to punish her for something she most likely had no choice in at all.

The following is from the blog Balloon Juice:
"In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by “reckless” behavior. Using the legal standard of “reckless behavior” all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn’t intend to lose the pregnancy."

Under this statute it could be argued that a women could be guilty under many scenarios. Take for example a couple who has both had trouble conceiving and a miscarriage in the past. If they continued trying to conceive and the end result was another miscarriage, they'd be guilty under this new law. Except, the man, who was the second contributing party would not be held accountable. A couple who has had a history of miscarriage could be guilty if this tragedy were to befall them again. After dealing with the heartbreak of loss of potential life, they are now stuck in a criminal situation. Excuse me, I mean she is not stuck in a criminal situation.

This law is trying to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling of Roe V. Wade. Any hospital that releases any information about a patient's illness/procedures will be is violation of HIPPA. What is next, they are going to start criminalizing getting lung cancer? Or broken bones? Surely a vast majority of these ailments could have been prevented. Of course not, that would be insane.

This is an assault on women, mothers, and any woman in Utah who eve considers becoming pregnant. This is disgusting. The parties at work here can only be seen as evil and inhumane. Callous, in-compassionate entities using the facade of deity and piousness to continue to subjugate women.

Content of Their Character; Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2010-01-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

I remember it quite vividly because the circumstances were out of the norm. I was in Kindergarten and I usually would walk the 3 blocks to my grandparents' home. Instead on this day, my aunt picked me up from school. The radio station she was listening to was broadcasting fiery oratory being delivered by an impassioned man. I listened but paid not much mind until my aunt asked, "do you know who that is?"
"Who," I asked.
"The man on the radio, do you know who that is." She prodded again.
"No," I answered.
"That's Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King." she informed me. The reason this resonated with me was mostly because of the length of his name, and that he was both a doctor and a king? Hearing him speak on the radio assured me that he was a king. The next day at school my teacher, Ms. Thorton, asked my class if we knew whose birthday was "yesterday." The whole class said my name, my birthday is two days before Dr. King's and we recently had a cupcake celebration. The funny thing was that I was the only one who shouted out "Dr. Martin Luther King's" This surprised even my teacher. She didn't think that any one of her 5/6 year-old students would know.

She went on to tell us how he was a great man and she showed us pictures of him. We took her at her word. The following year, I remember we got Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off from school. Again my teacher told us of Dr. King's greatness. My teacher, Jackie Moore was an African-American woman who I now realize was probably a college student around Dr. King's assassination.

As a child hearing people speak of this man's greatness and hearing his speeches, you can only be led to one way of thinking, he was a great man. He has long stood as one of my heroes. His words hold as much strength as any person's in the history of mankind.

Of course as I grew older, I found out things about Dr. King that weren't as saintly as I once believed. This occurred with many of my heroes; John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, King David etc. No vice, no virtue is evident. The disclosure of Dr. King's philandering has more to do with those who want to discredit him, who are still harping over the fact that he was honored with his birthday becoming a national holiday, than it does about Dr. King himself. His message of peace, equality and justice is not weakened by his actions. Their truth is inherent. His words and civil rights work deserve all the adulation he has coming his way.

He fought for and gave his life in the hope that the people of our great nation could come together and judge one another not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.

He was a King.

Cinequest Film Festival 20

2010-01-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Bay Area is quintessential California, the California you want to live in. Granted, our weather isn't as great as that of Los Angeles but the people, atmosphere, environment are second to none. Sure Los Angeles has the celebrities,the glitz of Hollywood and is super trendy, it still is not as hip as The Bay. Hip and trendy are too completely different terms and mean different things. Trendy is a fluke that passes and is soon mainstream and blase, hip is cool and ever evolving, never mediocre. That is The Bay Area; Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose.

It is because of this sense of hip, progressive attitude here in the Bay Area that it is fitting The Cinequest Film Festival be held in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley. A merging of film-art and technology. San Jose has long embraced its history of technology with both the Discovery and Technology museums. It hosts the biennial 01SJ Festival; the mixing of art and technology is San Jose's specialty.

The festival is proud that it isn't like others. By nature it aspires to be different and forward thinking. There is no referencing John McCain or Sarah Palin when the festival gives out its Maverick Spirit Award every year. The name alone tells you that this festival awards those who are different, outsiders, game changers, mavericks. Just look at the banner at the very top of this posting. It has not only a peace sign, emblematic of The Bay Area's long history of the peace movement but right next to it is a closed fist. A closed fist, reminiscent of San Jose State Students Tommie Smith and John Carlos' "power to the people"/"black Power" salute at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics. That closed fist has meant many things to many people but it is universally meant as an act of showing one's solidarity, usually with the righteous rebel.

The festival attracts film makers from all over the world. Due to the fact that San Jose is a large city, accommodations for all those flocking to the festival are quite ample. It doesn't require one to fly across the Atlantic to a small city in the Mediterranean, nor does it require you to go to an exclusive snowy enclave. It is in a city that has over a million inhabitants that frequently hosts people from all over the world. San Jose, like the Cinequest Film Festival isn't overpriced, nor is it pretentious.

I'm excited to attend this year's Cinequest even without knowing much about the film line-up or who will be awarded this year's Maverick Spirit Award. I have faith that this year's festival will not disappoint. Tickets go on sale January 27th, I suggest you look into it.

Remember Love; John Lennon (Oct. 9, 1940-Dec. 8, 1980)

2009-12-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

It was four years ago today and it was well worth all the hassle and expense. I was hungover to say the least. Having been a fan of Howard Stern I took it upon myself to check out Scores, the strip club Howard frequently mentioned and poured praise upon during his morning show broadcasts. Though the girls were all very pretty, I'd never go there again. Mostly because I'm not a big strip club kind of guy anyway but also the business practices of said establishment are a bunch of bullshit. At one point during the night I was surrounded by four or five huge bouncers ready to kick the shit out of me because I was arguing with the manager. I'd back away from each one defensively yelling, "don't get near me." I know, from the amounts of alcohol I had consumed throughout the day, that I must have been a bit out of my mind. I'd spent the day footing around New York City going to hotel bars; The Ritz, The Plaza and so on, it's safe to assume I was combustible and unstable. They let me stay despite my arguing. At the end of the evening when I got into my second confrontation of the evening with the manager, he tells me "this is the second time we've had to deal with you tonight."
To which I immediately shot back, "that's because it's the second time of the night you're trying to fuck me. Fuck this place I'm leaving."
I walked out and was followed by three bouncers, fortunately there were a few cabs already waiting outside, I hopped in one and gave the command of, "go, go go!"

The next morning, with a horrible hangover, I showered and got dressed trying to put the night's ordeal behind me. Put on my coat, scarf and hat, grabbed my bag and heading out the door. I started my trek from 72nd St and 2nd Ave to Central Park, where I was to navigate my way across the park to 72nd on the Upper West Side. I walked along briskly with a snow covered park as my backdrop, trying to figure out the best path to follow without walking too far out of my way, or getting lost.

The plan was to get to 72nd and check out the Dakota building, then hang out at Strawberry Fields in the park adjacent to The Dakota, take a picture of the "Imagine" mosaic. I was on a pilgrimage. I flew out to New York City from San Jose, specifically to be at The Dakota for the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination. I had long planned the trip and when I say "planned," I mean I talked about it. Like all plans I talk about they all start off as just bullshit. Shit I say I want to do but never really think I will. I had often said I wanted to go to NYC on this particular date for this particular gathering. I never thought I would but many doors and avenues enabled it all to come to fruition. I had been there a couple of times before and knew that someone would be there with a guitar, probably playing music. As the case was when I was there the year before during the summer, visiting my friend Nicole who was attending the Alvin Ailey dance school. I took her to the Dakota and then the park so she could see the mosaic. There happened to be a small band playing Beatles' tunes. Actually, it wasn't really small, their drum set was small; small enough to carry around on say a subway for instance. They had about seven people, on guitars, drums, trumpets, flutes, triangle and God knows what else. It was because I knew musicians would be there, I knew it was where I would hang out. When I got to the park, there were already around 300 people there and I could hear musicians playing I Am The Walrus. I milled about and saw that the mosaic had a barrier around it. Then I walked over to where that same band was playing.

The best thing about this band was not only were there so many of them but they were traditionalists. They didn't alter the songs. they played them as you would hear on a Beatles' record. They played the countdown you hear in the middle eight of A Day in The Life. They played the background noises you hear in Yellow Submarine instead of skipping over them as most bands would. The crowd in front of them was about 50 people or so. I slowly worked my way closer and closer to the front with every new song. Before I knew it I was right in front of them as they sat on their bench along a fence.

People would shout out requests and the band began to play. At the end of every song some British chap would shout out "Sweet Loretta!" By the third time he shouted it out it garnered a few laughs. Sweet Loretta was one of two persons mentioned in the song Get Back. The band conceded about the fifth time he shouted out and played Get Back.

Around Five O'clock it became apparent to me that I hadn't eaten anything all day, nor drank anything, nor used the restroom. I was still standing in front of that band singing along. Unlike earlier in the day, when people were milling about coming and going from the park, people were no longer leaving. People were coming to stay. So even if I wanted to leave I couldn't, I was at the musical epicenter of this vigil, this remembrance. There was no way I could leave and get back into my optimal position amongst the crowd. By now the crowd had swelled well over into the thousands. People were crowding in front of this band and their bench along the fence.

I mention this fence because behind it is an area that is normally not accessible to pedestrians. So everyone was crowding along the benches where this band had set up. As the darkness of the night grew cold I could see coming from behind the band, like deer navigating a forest, people moving towards us. Faces with noses of red from the evening's cold came out of the darkness smiling and joyous. It was surreal to witness. It looked like something out of the Hey Jude video, throngs of people rushing up to complete surround the band. elated to be amongst them, singing along. There I stood, still at the very center. It turns out NYPD had to let people into the fenced off area because too many people were crowding city sidewalks. Crowd estimates were well into the thousands.

One guy, who I spotted drinking from a flask, got belligerent and somewhat violent. We was quickly escorted out by a ranger whom he tried to run from but there was nowhere for him to run. The crowd kept pushing him back toward the park rangers. There was discussion among the crowd whether everyone should kick his ass but the non-violence types in the crowd shot that idea down immediately, saying that was not what John would want. At 10:50 a moment of silence was held to commemerate John's shooting and again at 11:15, his estimated time of passing.

After the singing started back up again, I led the crowd in my throatiest rendition of Twist and Shout. I sang the main verses and they sang the back up. It wasn't planned it just worked out that way. I also figured prominently in the crowd's singing of I Am The Walrus and Happiness is A Warm Gun. I should mention I don't ever sing karaoke. Well two times in my life and during both of them I was raging drunk and had people standing next to me, holding my hand. However, on this night, in a crowd of strangers, sober as it was cold, I sang as loud as I could and I didn't give a shit who saw me. That was another thing. I didn't know anyone in the crowd. I was alone and I was having the best time ever.

I could have used the flask of booze I had in my satchel to help with the cold but I opted not to. I wanted to remember that night. So I stood there singing until the park rangers came to break up the crowds at 1:00 AM. I didn't mind that I was alone or that I didn't know anybody until it was all over and all these thousands of people I shared this moment with were gone. We were all a part of this thing and I didn't know not one of their names. Being the sentimentalist that I am, that aspect of the night kind of saddened me. I also realized that for the 14 hours I stood in the park, practically in the same spot all day, I didn't talk to any of the people around me until I was leaving. I'm not one who doesn't talk. We had all been too busy singing to say much else to one another. As we were leaving it was the people who had came out of town, like the group of girls from Chicago, who lingered the longest. We chatted briefly as the rangers forced us out of the park. That night was very much like John's life, none of us wanted it to end.

President Obama & The One-Year Itch

2009-11-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

I'm not an Obama Superfan. He wasn't my choice for the primary for a number of reasons. One of them being that I grew up admiring the old guard, people like the Clintons, who were the Change and the student movement of the 60s. They were the people on the front lines protesting the Vietnam War. They were people who had been around, they knew some things, they put in their dues. I think for all their work they put in for the liberal movement, that one of them earned the nomination. I'm not ashamed to admit that I totally romanticized this notion. Plus add to the fact that Obama might not have been ready to be president and even if he was, the country wouldn't vote for him. Lastly, he's black and I didn't think my country who elected George W. Bush twice, had it in them to elect a black man. Fortunately, I was wrong on all fronts.

I'm not an Obama Superfan but I am a fan. As a person, I like him a lot. He's seems pretty cool, I mean the guy has beer summits to resolve racial conflicts. What I like about him is that he's smart. Nerd-like even, which is appealing to myself personally because I'm a nerd and maybe even my generation as a whole. The nerd is the patron saint of hipsters, which has gained prominence during this decade and now resides at the apex of all that is cool. Although I am no hipster by any means, I mill around them enough to know that they are into all the coolest shit, namely the arts. Obama is the perfect president for this generation, he's cutting edge, he's smart and he's left of center. As the country's populace recycles, the youth move the country to the left.

Still, I am no Obama Superfan. It's reasonable to assume that I'd lose my shit if I ever met him but the same could be said about just any politician or journalist I would meet. I'm a nerd, these are the people I look up to, hold high regard for. I'm no Superfan but I like him as our president. I'm proud that he's our president. That my country would elect an intellectual is a sure sign to the world that we admit G.W. Bush was a fluke and mistake.

I'm not going to spend time apologizing for Obama's shortcomings as president but I don't think he has failed in his first year. I'd say he receives a "B-." That is me taking into account that Obama is not the leftist the right paints him to be, he isn't a radical. I'm a leftist, liberal radical most definitely but Barack Obama? He's too politically smart for that. I don't claim to be as smart as President Obama and I don't have to be calculating in my opinions and actions. He is smarter than me and he knows better. I've learned some things about our system. It is designed to prohibit change and hinders progress. Obama too, knows that change isn't in yards but rather, inches. This system is not just but it is our system and there are few ways to attain change and to change public opinion.

To expect drastic change would be too disturbing to the country psyche and you'd have too many of the mouth-breathers dragging their feet along with their knuckles. It's bad enough that a centrist, moderate like Obama is being decried as a a leftist, a radical, when he hasn't done much more than suggest we change the health care system so that it is more advantageous for the average American citizen. Imagine how ape shit the Right Wing Media Establishment would go if he actually trying to enact drastic change. More usurpation of power was committed under the Bush regime than any other presidency in the modern era yet the Right was quiet, claimed it was in the interest of national security. So for them to trumpet these claims of socialism and dictatorship is laughable.

He hasn't done everything we've wanted him to do, at the speed which we wanted it done but that's because he's smarter than us. He's calculating his every move and he's not rushing through legislation knowing that doing so in haste hinders its chances of passing both houses. Moving in inches.

It is because I wasn't a Superfan of Obama that I wasn't left with these feelings of neglect or disappointment. I wasn't the zealous youth that overwhelmingly voted for him. It is because of this, that I've grown to like him. I understand his reasoning and I'm impressed by him because he succeeds where I thought he'd fail. I don't subscribe to his philosophy of rising above the fray but I found that this logic of his has a strong success rate. It's astounding to me that it repeatedly works. It's because I've doubted him so much that I am now more apt to giving him the benefit of the doubt.

My knee-jerk reaction to the attacks he received for his stimulus plan was to call all the opposition a bunch of piece of shit liars. I was angry at him for letting them control the dialogue. Instead he let them go absolutely bananas with their rhetoric and when he went on the offensive, the public listened and were on his side. Not only did the Stimulus plan pass but it has created over 650,000 jobs. All of it's detractors are now asking for more funds, the funds that they voted against. He let all of the Stimulus Plan opposition paint themselves into the corner of hypocrisy, namely Governors Jindal, Pawlenty, and Perry. Senators and members of Congress were also exposed as hypocrites for their Stimulus Opposition votes. Many of them came crawling with their hands out for stimulus funds once the legislation was passed. Obama played them brilliantly. Had he done it my way and took them on from the start, the Stimulus Package might have never even made it to the floor, let alone passed.

Obama hasn't ended the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq which he never promised to do and he has yet to do a lot of things that he has promised but we must take into account that it has been less than 10 months. It has been 8 years and their is still a a huge pit where the World Trade Center once stood. Bureaucracy have not allowed for any progress to be made at that site, the same could be said for our country as a whole. There is something wrong with our political system when senators from two different states have a combined population smaller than the city of Los Angeles have so much control over legislation. Max Baucus and Ben Nelson, two of the those lousy Blue Dog Democrats both are holding up the public option and Health Care reform all together yet they represent two of the smallest states in the union. This is what we would call bullshit. It's like a color blind person dictating what colors you should use in your wedding. It makes no sense. Yet that is how the system stands, minority power, checks and balances, so that the majority doesn't infringe upon the rights of the minority. In essence, a beautiful idea but when your minority is a bunch of Right wing fanatics who eat up all the bullshit spewed by corporate lobbyists, we have a problem. The opposition to Health Care Reform is not about spending or being fiscally conservative. These senators and congressmen have sold themselves, they're shills, whoring themselves for big business. They are puppets. Corporate prostitutes. Lincoln, Nelson, Baucus, Lieberman they are all hookers for the insurance lobby.

Obama is trying but with this system we can't move yards if we first don't gain the inches. He's changed a lot of policies of the Bush administration that were detrimental to the environment and the fields of science and medicine. His attorney general wont be making efforts to target marijuana dispensaries. He has secured the release of Roxana Saberi, Laura Ling, Euna Lee and put the hit out on some Somali pirates. Our image across the globe has vastly improved. I saw in the deep jungles of Guatemala an elder gentleman wearing a shirt with my president, Barack Obama on it. America is cool again. People want to deal with us again. That gives us a lot of political capital. Once this Health Care reform passes, I think we are going to see a bolder administration where a lot of these other issues such as DADT, DOMA, will be tackled. I'm not an Obama Superfan but he's impressed me enough with all my initial doubt that I someday could be.

Culture Of Death

2009-10-27T15:45:00.000-07:00

I hated when George W. Bush was our president. I remember that night in 2000, I was getting drunk with my Republican friend, listening to election results. My friends and I treat Election Day the way most people treat the Super Bowl. We were passing a bottle of Jack Daniel's back and forth, listening in to see which states had gone "Red" and which had gone "Blue." Moments before he and I were to go into our evening creative writing class we heard Florida was called for Al Gore, essentially sealing his fate as our next POTUS. I was elated and my Republican pal was a quite depressed. An hour and a half later, when the class was over, we got in the car only to hear that Florida was suddenly "Red." What followed were weeks of legal wrangling by both sides, trying to claim themselves the victor. The Supreme Court essentially gave the presidency to George W. Bush by stopping the vote count in Florida. It is because of the Florida debacle that the majority of American citizens, who voted for Al Gore, questioned Bush's legitimacy. Never did any of those disappointed voters, even the disenfranchised voters, ever call for the assassination of the new president, George W. Bush.

Yet here we are 9 months after President Obama's inauguration and we've seen a litany death threats. The Secret Service is overwhelmed with the number of death threats against the president. This hatred and anti-Obama fervor is fueled by the Right Wing Media Establishment. Yet it isn't solely against President Obama but those in his party as a whole. Glenn Beck advocated on air, the poisoning of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2008, former Arkansas governor and host of his own show on FOX News Mike Huckabee, at an NRA rally made a telling quip about a loud backstage crash. He concluded that the noise was the result of presidential candidate Barack Obama jumping for cover from an assassin's bullet.

Here in this following clip from FOX News, Liz Trotta advocates the assassination of then Senator Barack Obama and then laughs about it. The host of the FOX News at no point asks her to apologize or even reprimand her for her appalling comments.

Rush Limbaugh and other rabid members of the Right Wing Media Establishment spew lies and preach hate against the president to their listeners. They call him both a communist and a fascist, ignoring that these two systems are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They bring guns to presidential events. They refer to him as Hitler. The Right would have had a conniption if anyone did any of these things while Bush was president. Yet the Right Wing Media Establishment, namely FOX News, encourages this behavior and their hosts condone it. One of their own hosts claimed that Obama hates white people. In essence, creating a divide while instilling dangerous sentiments of hate. Hate that inevitable leads to death. Don't take my word for it. New york times columnist Thomas Friedman had this to say in his column from September 29th, 2009:
"I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all."

This is exactly the culture, the atmosphere the Right Wing in this country and Fox News is fomenting. This culture where reason and logic are shouted down by seething anger and hate. Where legitimacy is challenged by violence. When all legal avenues are exhausted, they resort to harrassment and murder.

Supposed moral crusader Bill O'Reilly, who repeatedly assailed Dr. George Tiller is an prime example. Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the nation who performed late-term abortions. Bill O'Reilly's campaign against Tiller was so zealous that O'Reilly went as far as airing the address of Dr. Tiller's clinic. The intentions of broadcasting Tiller's address was for O'Reilly viewers to harass Tiller. O'Reilly did this even after Tiller had been a victim of a clinic bombing. He continued to coax his viewers into harassing Tiller even after Tiller had already once survived an assassination attempt. When O'Reilly used such rhetoric as, "this man must be stopped," what did he mean? What could he have meant. If after a bombing and an assassination attempt Dr. tiller continued, by what means did O'Reilly mean he must be stopped?

Dr. George Tiller was assassinated on May 31, 2009 while handing out programs during his Sunday morning church service by a man named Scott Roeder. Is this a direct result of O'Reilly's campaign against Dr. Tiller? O'Reilly would make declarations that Tiller ran a "death mill," not a women's clinic. Or that Tiller "destroys babies" failing to mention that a fetus is not a baby. Most notably, O'Reilly made it a point to repeat this catchphrase, "Tiller, the baby killer." O'Reilly stood on his pulpit and railed against Tiller's work, which was legal.

So we are clear, if ever faced with an unwanted pregnancy, I would be in favor of having the child carried to term and birthed. However, my input is only that, input, it isn't the final word. The final decision rests with the mother, for she is the one who is bearing the burden of pregnancy and child birth. I don't believe life starts at the moment of conception. The female ovum and the male sperm are both already alive, are we going to start calling these two essential building blocks of life, people? Are we going to give rights to semen? No, that's outrageous. So is calling something the size of a pen's ballpoint, just because it is fertilized, a human being. Whatever is done between a woman and her doctor is no one else's business, that is her right as a patient. That is HIPPA, that is federal law. The abortion issue comes down to this fact, a patient's right to privacy. O'Reilly trivialized and belittled Tiller's work saying that any pregnancy could aborted for $5,000. He doesn't know the issues, reasons, or health concerns that led to these procedures being performed. He's propagating, seething with self-righteousness.

It is O'Reilly's harassment and rhetoric that got Dr. George Tiller killed. Now a fundraiser is being held for Dr. Tiller's murderer, Scott Roeder. How disgusting are these people that they canonize a murderer? I guess I shouldn't be surprised. They are O'Reilly viewers. They read, watch, and listen to the hate emitted by the Right Wing Media Establishment. They live for this culture of death. For that is the only answer they have to legitimate figures. They kill a doctor who is legally practicing his profession and advocate for more murder. They speak of killing elected politicians who were overwhelmingly elected. There is no room for discourse amongst them. They only speak of hate and seek death. We need to challenge their actions, thoughts, and the inherent evil of their words. We need to challenge all those who propagate fallacies. We need to push back against those who celebrate this atmosphere of hate. We need to stop those who instigate this culture of death.

Fair & Balanced? Net Neutrality

2009-10-26T16:56:00.000-07:00

I have a blog, I engage in social media, I read the news, pay bills, and occasionally watch television shows on the internet. The internet is the greatest resource for information and entertainment. I can access just about anything. Last Thursday the FCC voted for a net neutrality rule making process, in essence to keep the internet open. John McCain wants to forbid them from doing so.

Here in the United States, in the wake of 9/11 what we search on the internet is most likely monitored, however our access isn't blocked like it is in Communist China. The Great Firewall of China prevents China's own citizens from looking at information that is not in the interest of the Chinese government. Such as, information on the Tienanmen Square massacre and other uprisings in China's past.

We saw this form of censorship take hold in Iran this past summer. The Iranian government shut down the internet to stop its people from organizing in protest against election results. They cut the internet so their citizens couldn't communicate with the outside world. They did it to control the people and spin the news reports to their advantage. Spreading disinformation and falsehoods. This kind of information control manifests propaganda, which is exactly what we saw with Iran.

We have a huge amount of internet freedom in the United States, our government for the most part doesn't control what information we can and can't access. Senator John McCain wants to hand this type of control to Media/telecommunication conglomerates. His Internet Freedom Act is anything but. First off, can we kill this culture of uber-patriot branding? Especially when it doesn't lead to any type of freedom but instead oppression. This act will force the FCC, which already has voted in favor of net neutrality, to allow your internet provider to filter content. In essence they could slow or block your access to sites that are not advantageous to their own interests. Just as China does to its own people. Essentially giving corporations more control over the information you receive, continuing this culture of corporate propaganda. It's no surprise that this handover to corporations is being championed by John McCain, a member of the same political party as George W. Bush. The corporatization of our country occurred most brazenly under George W. Bush. Giving military powers to a corporation, think Blackwater and KBR. Mercenaries who answer to no one and are protected under corporation statutes.

A woman under KBR employ, was raped and had no power to file suit against her attackers nor KBR until Sen. Franken's bill came to the floor within the last month. The bill it should be noted, was voted against by 30 Republicans, the party of Bush and McCain. They're on the side of the corporations and corporate lobbyists not rape victims. They actually voted against the rights of rape victims.

Corporations are in it for the money and they do not care who is hurt, nor what cost their actions have on any one thing. Whether it be a people, a country, a body of land or water, they only care about their bottom line. What good is it for provider such as AOL to allow its users to access their competition? None. So what will they do? Slow down the speed in which those pages of their competitors load, if not block them altogether.

It's true that just because internet providers would have this ability doesn't mean they wouldn't use it but if we expected corporations to do the right thing, then they wouldn't be blocking health care reform at the cost of 122 American lives every day. AT&T wouldn't force their employees to oppose net neutrality. They would not have turned a blind eye to the KBR worker who was gang-raped and locked in a storage container by her co-workers and then offer her no avenue to attain justice. They wouldn't deny health coverage to a toddler because they were deemed too small or too big.

They wouldn't air FOX News, which is not news but rather the media arm of the Republican party, the corporate lobbyists, and the Right-Wing establishment. It is their outlet for disseminating their corporate propaganda. The openly sponsored the "teabagger" movement, they gin up the numbers of the anti-Obama 9/12 rallies which they also sponsored.

Reporting on "birthers" is one thing but not challenging or dismissing the claims of these people is not only a disservice to their viewers, it is disingenuous, and falls within the definition of propaganda. It is not news. Not mentioning that these people are irrational conspiracy theorists who lack any proof demonstrates that FOX is not news. The fact that Steve Doocy and Sean Hannity blatantly lie on air and present their lies as facts proves FOX is not news. I don't have time to list what lies exactly, but Olbermann does.

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If News Corp. can broadcast a channel that is overtly partisan and say that they're "fair and balanced" while repeatedly reporting falsehoods, distortions and blatant lies, for political/monetary advantage, why wouldn't Verizon, AT&T, or Comcast do the same?

McCain falsely labels net neutrality as a "government takeover" yet argues for more regulation of wireless internet. Which is it Senator, regulation or no regulation? That's right, you don't know but rather, you say whatever those who pull your strings tell you say. If they tell you you're for it, then you are for it. If they tell you you're against it, then you're against it. Because in all actuality you don't even know what net neutrality is. You've already stated that you're "illiterate" when it comes to the internet. It's absolutely ludicrous for someone who knows nothing about the internet to attempt to author legislation designed to regulate it, especially under the guise of "Freedom."

The Thesis

2009-10-07T18:34:00.000-07:00

Tonight Keith Olbermann made an unprecedented change to the format of his show Countdown With Keith Olbermann, instead of counting down 5 topics of the day per usual, he made an hour long "special comment." I have nothing to add to Keith's arguments that he succinctly, emotionally, made except to say that I'm glad he made them and feel fortunate to share them with you.

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Left Out; SNL, The Left & Obama

2009-10-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

As a 20-something who Twitters, I've accumulated a healthy group of followers and followees. Some of those fellow Twitterers are people I know, people I went to school with, people I share drinks with, and the rest are like-minded liberals like myself. We are The Left, the Progressives, or as the GOP called us, during the 2008 campaign, "elitists." Elitists because we favor education and free thought, that we don't possess their layman intelligence. They formed this definition of what Americans are; ordinary, common everyday folk and it is insulting. Insulting, that they think this is who ordinary everyday folk are. As if ordinary, everyday folk don't have the capability to think, that they possess sub-par intelligence. The GOP created this schism were if you were uneducated then the educated liberals were against you, God and America. That they, the liberals, weren't real Americans. This appealed to the lowest common denominator of people, not realizing that they were being insulted in an attempt to exploit their vote. The GOP went after this voting bloc telling them that real Americans, like themselves, were just honest, dumb, working Americans, who didn't get to go to those Ivy League schools like the elitist liberals. Forgetting to mention that no group has been a better friend to working Americans than liberals, with their socialistic plans for the 40-hour work week and unions. I have a T-shirt that I've owned since the 2004 campaign, one of the few T-shirts I own in general, that reads "Liberal adj. - Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behaviors of others; broad-minded."

They call us liberals as if it's a bad word. I wear it as a badge of honor. The opposite of that liberal definition is conservative; opposed to new ideas, intolerant and closed minded. Adhering to the old ways of segregation, racism, sexism, et al. That's what they want to conserve. William F. Buckley said “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"" He said Conservatives were there to pump the breaks, to slow society down. He was one of the the most influential minds of the conservative movement. He was also extremely anti-academia. Something about conservatives and their hate for education and the educated should be an indication of the types of people we are dealing with. Bill Maher recently said that "these people are so stupid that they make ME question evolution."

I've always been proud to be identified as a liberal, it is one of the few labels allow to be put on myself. It is why I follow on Twitter other liberals because it's an echo chamber I'm happy to be apart of. I don't want to hear the rhetoric and vitriol of the other side. Their hypocrisy is so aggravating. It's astounding that they can completely forget all their rhetoric and patriotism during the Bush years. Suddenly questioning and insulting the president is totally patriotic. Which by the way, I think it is. To question your government's actions for love of country is totally patriotic. However they weren't singing that tune during the Bush years. Also, during the Bush years, those who questioned the president and doubted his veracity have all been proven to be correct. We called bullshit on the Al-Qaeda/Iraq connection, on Iraqi WMDs, on privatization, et cetera, et cetera. When we questioned his legitimacy to be the President, it was because he lost the popular vote and the state of contention was also the state in which his brother was governor. There was merit in the arguments made, especially since the Florida's sunshine law allowed news organization to recount the vote and found under every circumstances of full recount, Gore should have won. We weren't making shit up i.e. saying he was born in Kenya.

As a self-affirmed liberal it was no surprise to me that many of my fellow liberals on Twitter overwhelmingly said that Saturday Night Live sucked this past weekend. From it's opening sketch, I knew why. It already set the bar for the episode, it had already pissed off it's core audience, the lefty liberals How so? It went after Obama. He may not be perfect but he is still the Left's guy. Saturday Night Live, with their attacks on the McCain during the 2008 campaign, it could be argued, helped Obama win the 2008 election. Sarah Palin was destroyed by Tina Fey and the SNL gang. She no longer was the media darling but rather, the buffoon. McCain gained solid ground on Obama after selecting her as his running mate at the RNC. He was climbing in the polls with her at his side, until SNL put the kibosh on that. They pulled away the curtain and revealed who Sarah Palin was. She would have done it on her own eventually but maybe by then it would have been too late. SNL and Fey's caricature did as much damage to the McCain campaign as the economic crisis did.

It seemed to be pretty obvious that SNL was most likely in the bag for Obama. It has done little to mock him or criticize him. That is, until last weekend when SNL attacked Obama and his administration. Not the attacks that we've heard from the mainstream media, on cable news and in town halls. No, these attacks came from the Left, the liberals. SIDENOTE This idea that mainstream media is the liberal media is horse shit! Other than Maddow, The Ed Show, and Olbermann, almost all media is right of center. They treat the one nut job who questions global warming with as much regard as the Nobel laureate who argues against him. It's disgusting and disingenuous. He hasn't done anything we've wanted and he's working for "bipartisanship." Fuck bipartisanship! Why are we reaching across the aisle to people who have made it their platform to say "no!" to anything proposed? To people who have been on the wrong side of history, facts, and science.

That is why SNL went after the president. Not because of his health care platform but because he hasn't gotten it passed. These Right Wing Nut Jobs are applauding SNL for taking on the president not realizing SNL's take is for completely different reasons than their own. They applaud the line"jack squat" but the reason he has done jack squat is because of asshole Republicans in Congress and chicken shit conservative Democratic Senators. He hasn't done jack squat on the liberal agenda. The conservative assholes forget that the only thing that Bush got done in his first year in office was read a couple of pages out of a book about a goat while the country was under attack.

SNL went after the president from the Left for such things as DADT, DOMA, and Gitmo, justifiably so. He has done little with his political capital, this voter mandate, this shift to the left. But really, who SNL needs to go after is Congress. They are the ones who are failing. They need to go after Max Baucus who is in the pockets of big insurance. The Senate Finance Committee wants to give a half billion dollar hand-out to the insurance industry with nothing for the consumer, the voter, the people. The GOP is against anything proposed because they know a failure to pass any kind of reform will tarnish the Obama brand. If he gets it passed they look like useless assholes and they pick up less than ten seats in the House come next year. Orrin Hatch says that he is for the right kind of reform but he offers up nothing. Nobody on the GOP side has offered anything, let alone anything feasible.

I'm not against Obama bashing, if it's for the right reasons. Calling Obama a fascists is laughable, especially after 8 years of the Bush corporatization of America and the breaches into our civil liberties pro patria. Those who utter such nonsensical drivel are either hypocrites, ignorant idiots, or both. When it comes to Obama criticism, if you pull The Left out of the equation, the only noise you would hear would be rooted in racism, fear, and falsehoods.

The Right is taking glee in SNL's turn on Obama but they were the ones who called him our messiah, not us on the Left. If they knew anything, Obama's base is farther to the Left than Obama. We realize that Obama is a slight to the left of center guy. We vote in inches, not yards. It is the only way to shift the country. The Left would love someone like the late Peter Camejo or Dennis Kucinich to make presidential policy but those darlings of the Left can't get elected Nationally because we're a country of moderates. We made no illusions about who Obama was. It was obvious when he gave the cop-out answer about gay marriage, that he was for civil unions but not gay marriage. A true lefty liberal would have no qualms about saying that gay marriage was a right. Still he was the best answer to another four years of Republican depravity.

We expected Obama to upset us at some point during his presidency, it was bound to happen, however we figured maybe sometime in year two, not 9 months after taking office. It should be noted that we are upset not by what he has done but rather, what he has yet to do. He has done some great things thus far, that is true. He got his stimulus passed which was needed. It is creating jobs and helping American families despite what cable news talking heads might say. He's done a lot in terms of foreign policy and the economy yet the right has controlled the dialogue, the sound machine. They inundate the airwaves with their fallacies and corporate propaganda. Obama has done little to tout his own successes so all we hear is illogical griping from The GOP. Yet this past weekend SNL has made it clear that the Left's concerns will not be placed on the back burner, we will not be left out. Mr. President the results of the 2008 election were a mandate from the Left, where we voted our wants, our concerns, our hopes and we will not be left out.

Pre-Existing Condition

2009-09-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

My last trip to France I decided against getting a cab immediately from the airport as I would usually do. Instead I opted to use the Parisian subway system. I figured I was gonna be staying there for a few weeks, I needed to re-learn how the subway worked. I had a little trouble switching at one of the stations. I went up a flight of stairs with my 100 lbs. of luggage and then down them only to be right back were I was three minutes before. Which was where I needed to be in the first place. So other than lugging my luggage unnecessarily up and down a flight of stairs, I had little trouble with the trains. I got to my station, Nation, pronounced Nacion, and proceeded to walk to the flat my best pal Frank was staying at. I had mapped out the streets before I left home, so I had a vague idea were I needed to be. It was when I began to walk that I realized there was a lot of dog shit on the sidewalk. Noticeably a lot, not just three times, which still would have been a lot but every hundred feet or so. It was one of the first things I mentioned to Frank when we finally sat down for some wine and cigarettes, "don't these people know how to clean up after their dogs?" I asked. Amazed really, because the prior times I had spent in France, I didn't recall all the dog shit. Frank tells me, "well they're socialist, they think it's the state's job to clean it up, to keep the streets clean." I responded with a perplexed "oh."

This dog shit ordeal had a profound effect on how I thought about government and its role, its necessity,and its obligation toward its people. First and foremost, we have to understand socialism and realize that it isn't a political system as much as it is economic system. Socialism isn't un-American. If anything, the United States has best utilized socialism in many areas except for energy and that whole health care issue.

The 8-hour work day is a product of socialism. All those labor laws, laws designed to protect the worker were all garnered by the Socialists prior to WWI. After WWI, President Wilson used legislation to kill the Socialist movement by making it illegal for any public dissent of the war, which then allowed him to jail members of the anti-war movement, the Socialists. They vilified the socialist as foreigners and utilized falsehoods. Those evil socialists always wanting to protect the workers with their crazy ideas of the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, sick leave, and concepts like the Family Medical Leave Act. The worker has always been who Socialism has long stood to protect. It is through labor law that we have seen the best results of the socialist idea and what socialism means in terms of government. Socialism as government is where the government takes care of its people, where the laws are there to protect them.

To protect them from greedy banks and bad business practices, unethical lending. To protect the public from corporations who only care about gaining profit no matter who or what they exploit in order to attain it. Whether it be the land, the local community's health, waterways, spotted owls, it doesn't matter. Corporations will exploit any thing or one, they don't discriminate against any one group as a potential victim. The socialists of the early 20th century worked, fought, struggled to assure that said corporations didn't have carte blanche with the American work force. We had socialistic laws regulation the banking system since the Great Depression all the way until deregulation in 1999. Less than 10 years later, Wall Street almost collapsed and the world might have seen a second great depression.

Socialism is government set up by the people to provide for its people. What else is government for? Socialism has brought us labor laws, the U.S. Postal Service, The United States Military, your general/county hospitals, your police force, your firefighters, your street cleaners, your road works, public transportation, the interstate freeway system, medicare, public school system and more. So when people argue about socialism being evil, then in their eyes, America truly is the Great Satan. Socialism is a pre-existing condition of the United States of America. Americans have long fought battles in courts, through legislation, through movements to protect the average citizen from corporations and big business via the muscle of the United States Government.

Privatization of services otherwise provided by government is fascism. Think Halliburton, Blackwater, and a litany of other Bush administration attempted policy shifts. Also, so we are clear, fascism is authoritarian rule of the people where no opposition is allowed and the people work only to provide for the benefit of the state. Socialism and fascism are polar opposites of one another.

I bring this up because socialized medicine doesn't sound like a bad idea. In fact it sounds great. This idea of the government providing health care for its people, what is wrong with that? If you ask a Canadian they'll tell you, absolutely nothing. The only people who are afraid of universal health care are big insurance and the politicians who are in the pockets of big insurance. The general public that is against universal health care are those who have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, misinformed; Fox News viewers. I do understand that there are some out there who have a general mistrust of big government. People who would have opposed universal health care under any president, whether it be Bush, Reagan or Obama. Those people have a philosophical point of view I don't agree with. I think they're wrong but I don't believe they are the misinformed and they are not the majority of the opposition. They're definitely a bloc of the opposition but they are different than the rest of the opposition.

The rest of the opposition is misinformed. The rest of the opposition is a bloc composed of xenophobic, uneducated people who toe the lines of racism. They're the ones who spew falsehoods and nonsensical drivel. They're those Fox News viewers who actually believe in such things as government sanctioned "death panels." They believe the president was born in Kenya, they think ACORN is an evil entity on par with the Illuminati. They think fascism and socialism are the same thing, terms that can be interchanged without any thought to what they words actually mean. They think "czars" are something that Obama invented. They think "czar" means communists, when it was the communists who killed the last Russian czar, Czar Nicholas II. In other words, they don't think, they regurgitate the talking points of Fox News.

Fox News isn't fair and balanced, it is completely biased and slanted. It is corporate propaganda. It doesn't serve to inform the public for their benefit but rather misinform them to their disadvantage. Occasionally I'll see integrity shine through in some form from one of their anchors, like when Shepard Smith said the United States doesn't "fucking torture." Even O'Reilly will say some things that aren't filled with lunacy, an event rarer than an eclipse but it happens. However those few moments are completely drowned out by the fallacies repeatedly uttered by Hannity and those morons of Fox & Friends. Outright lies, totally disingenuous statements are frequently made by these television personalities.

Then there is Glenn Beck, an intellectual lightweight and coward. An idiot yet dangerous man. He isn't honorable, he isn't smart, but that doesn't mean he lacks influence. A pied piper of feeble fools. He is dangerous because he goes unchallenged by his own network and his audience is foolish enough to believe him. With his tea bagging and 9/12 movement, he has people buying into this malarkey. These idiots don't even realize that their protest are corporate sponsored events. Essentially, they're volunteering to protest on behalf of big insurance and the insurance lobby because Fox News told them to do so. When spontaneous anti-war protests break out the media goes to cover it. In this case, Fox News paid for, sponsored these protests. Moveon.org is funded by average citizens, which then uses said funds to organize protests or pay for ad campaigns. The money used isn't from corporations, it's from citizens. That is grassroots, that is the difference, people donating the money to help speak truth to power. Whereas these insurance lobby sponsored events are power speaking to squash truth. That's not opinion, that is fact.

They spread falsehoods, use scare tactics and xenophobia so citizens will oppose reform. The health care reform bill explicitly states that illegal immigrants can, under no circumstances receive free health care or opt in for the public health care plan. Yet we have that product of incest* Joe Wilson shouting "you lie" to the president. He's being heralded as a hero by the Right. Never mind the fact that he was wrong, the President was not lying. Never mind that he broke the rules of decorum or that he was insubordinate to his Commander-In-Chief. If it were Bush and he were Pete Stark, he'd be called a treasonous terrorist. His xenophobia and racism caused him to shout out during a joint session of Congress and call the president a liar, yet no one is talking about how he was incorrect except for Keith Olbermann.

Then there is Sarah Palin and her death panels. Either she's a God damned liar or a complete ignorant moron, if not both. She was talking about a provision that would pay for end of life counseling if ever a family was in such a situation. That a family wouldn't have to pay out of pocket for discussing with a doctor end of life treatment. No one gets paid to kill grandma. Absolutely ridiculous. The doctor doesn't make a decision about care, the patient and family do. They discuss if the patient were in a state where resuscitation were needed, they decide whether to give consent to do so. Some patients choose to be resuscitated, others choose not to be. It is up to the patient. The provision provides for counseling and assures that the cost of the counseling isn't passed on to the patient or the patient's family. It doesn't give doctors the right to kill patients or deny them treatment. In fact we have laws in place that require doctors to provide all patients treatment whether or not said patient can pay for it. In other words, it is illegal to let a patient die without at least giving the patient the minimum services needed to sustain life.

What Palin was referring to as death panels was incorrect, that doesn't mean they don't exist. They have long existed. They are called insurance companies. They decide whether or not people receive treatment, or rather, whether they will cover the treatment people receive. Due to the fact that they often refuse to pay for procedures or care, people end up dying because they can't afford treatment. That's your death panel.

I'll tell you a story I recently heard. My cousin happens to be friends with an up and coming local music duo. I've met both guys a couple of times and they're cool guys. I can't say I'm close with them but I think they'd recognize me outside of a dark club, which is where I've most frequently conversed with them. The lead singer wrote a blog about his experience with health insurance. He, we'll call him Eric, long had health insurance and like most people our age, we frequently don't need it. We're young and relatively healthy. We live in the health conscious San Francisco Bay Area. We use our insurance to get eye exams, birth control, flu shots, annual check ups, maybe the occasional antibiotic but never anything major like an octogenarian would. Our health insurance is for preventative medicine more than anything else. We neglect to reflect on its importance. He found out in a letter from his estranged father about the passing of an unknown distant cousin. The cousin died from an embolism onset by a rare blood condition known as Factor V Leiden which causes hyper coagulation of the blood. Meaning blood clotting is more frequent which can lead to embolisms, stroke, aneurysms, deep vein thrombosis. So as his father advised, Eric went and got blood work done to see if he had the same condition. The results came back positive and with that his life was completely altered. As prescribed by his doctor he became extremely vigilant with his body due to his condition.

It wasn't until he returned home from a trip to the Midwest that he began to suffer symptoms. Deep vein thrombosis can often be a result of plane flights, as was the case of my charge nurse who almost died from DVT. Fortunately she worked in a hospital and our chief was able to diagnose her quickly, otherwise, she would have died. Anyway, with these acute symptoms Eric decided, at the insistence of his wife, to go to the emergency room. He was seen and an ultrasound was performed. Nothing was found and he was discharged. A month later he received a letter from his insurance stating that because he had been born with this blood disorder before he became an insurance holder, that it was a pre-existing condition and that they wouldn't cover any medical treatments he received because of said condition. Heart attack, stroke, thrombosis, anything, they wouldn't cover it. On top of that, he received a $3,000 bill for his ultrasound. In other words he can either die or go bankrupt trying to stay alive because his insurance company wont help even though they were happy to take his monthly payments when they thought he was a healthy 20 something year old. That is your death panel and that is the health care system Americans have now.

I want to fall back on Joe Wilson and his shout of "you lie." It would not have been so bad if he had said it to the president at the right time. If when he said it, he was actually correct, it might have been admirable. Like when Bush lied about Iraq and Al Qaeda, WMD, if someone stood up and shouted "you lie," they would have been correct. They would have been politically dead but they would have been on the right side of history. Or even that night during Obama's address, if he had said it at the right time.

For instance, when regarding insurance companies denying coverage Obama said "Insurance executives don’t do this because they are bad people. They do it because it’s profitable." It should have been then that Joe Wilson stood up and shouted "you lie." At least he could have argued that he was correct. Now I don't think Obama was lying but he was wrong as sin. Executives do this exactly because they are bad people. Who else could do this but bad people? People more concerned with their bottom lines than other human beings. Only evil could allow a group of people sitting around a table in a board room and conjure up policy that systematically denies coverage to the people who need it the most. They do it for profit, enabled by greed. The root of all evil is the love of money.

Evil is the pre-existing condition of the American health care system, insurance companies, the health care lobby and members of the United States Congress. This culture of death facilitated by health insurance is something all Americans should oppose. This is a pre-existing condition we should all work to eradicate. Reform health care now!

*Joe Wilson, as far as I know, isn't a product of incest. However his low IQ and geopolitical base leads me to assume that it might be true.

It's Always Sunny

2009-09-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

Season 4 came out on DVD today and I'll definitely have a viewer party later on tonight.
However, this is what I'm really excited, Thursday will be the premiere of the new season.

I relate to these ugly excuses for human beings. They are like the rated R equivalent of a modern day Seinfeld. The characters of the show have little to any redeeming qualities you'd expect to find in decent human beings, Americans, people, whatever you want to categorize them as. Yet, something in their camaraderie is universal. They're wanting to own a bar, be rock stars, play on a professional football team, be famous, accepted by the cool high school kids, be immortalized in a scandalous memoir, they want their fifteen minutes. Their overt shallowness is representative of our culture. That's American. Mostly the show, through the horrible attributes of these characters, tackles such heavy, relevant issues as torture, abortion and the crazy anti-abortionists, our health care system, how Americans don't know what socialism is, racism, our opportunistic culture and how being American means exploiting the lowest common denominator; Rock, Flag & Eagle.
More than it's social commentary, the show is extremely funny. The sheer stupidity of these characters is astounding. Even the most level headed of them, Sweet Dee is selfish, ignorant, shallow, and harbors huge insecurities. The shows take on racism is honest, a rarity in modern television, as was evident in its first episode. I would think people like this didn't exist if it wasn't for identifying with some of these characters on different levels. Though I'm not a great guy, I know I'm not as bad as these people and that's one of the reasons why it is so enjoyable. That great American sentiment, the attitude that, " at least I'm not as bad as them."

Arguably the best sit-com on television, the only show that could possible top it is Curb Your Enthusiasm. Curb is aimed more at an older audience whereas Sunny's appeal is mostly among the under 40 crowd. I wont get into which is the better of the two, on Thursday, Sunny will be, the following Sunday Curb will be. That's how it goes. They're equally funny and both have a lot of the same characteristics. Larry is the only real asshole who does embarrassing things that make one cringe, whereas the whole cast in Sunny does that. So in a way, they bring more fire power to the table. In any case, this will be a great week for comedy, and not because of Jay Leno.

Decorum

2009-09-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

*UPDATE Since the publishing of this post, the 75,000 dollar figured has almost quadrupled. Joe Wilson's opponent has raised over $290,000 since Wilson's outburst. That figure is sure to rise. Joe Wilson proves that freedom of speech can be costly. On that topic, the freedom of speech guaranteed in this country doesn't mean you can go around being an asshole, saying stupid shit. Our freedom of speech means we can't be jailed for political opposition to those in power. It doesn't mean, that if I were to say something racist, that people aren't going to be offended. That advertisers shouldn't flee from me. I still have that right, freedom of speech not only protects the speech we like, it protects the speech we hate. However, as a responsible society, when someone uses speech as a means to hate, we should all voice our dissenting opinions and do our best to hold those accountable for such speech. Let them know, hate and lies will not be tolerated. Whether it be through letter campaigns, boycotts, or in Joe Wilson's case, fundraising for his political opponent. Freedom of speech doesn't equivocate carte-blanche for being an asshole.
Whenever anyone said anything against President Bush during his reign of terror, Republicans were quick to label those who ridiculed the president, a traitor and un-American. Now I never bought that line of bullshit, if the president is wrong, it is our right and obligation to call him out on it. Unfortunately, no one in Congress ever did with Bush and that is how we got led into Iraq. When he gave his State of The Union saying that Iraq was tied to Bin Laden and that they were purchasing yellow cake uranium, I yelled at the television, "liar!" I wasn't incorrect, all the evidence Bush offered up was false. So when I called him a liar through my television, I was correct (it is my belief that the president was lying, that he knew the intelligence he was citing was no good. This hasn't been proven in a court of law). That's the thing, I was in my living room, not in Congress. I didn't interrupt the president while he was speaking. If the Democratic members of Congress behaved the way the Republicans did tonight, the Republicans would have cried "treason." and called for executions.

Their behavior warranted these looks of scorn.

This shot is of Obama, Biden and Pelosi reacting to the piece of shit Republican representative from South Carolina, Joe Wilson. This ass hat, like so many of his Republican colleagues thought that this was one of their lunacy filled town halls. That they could behave like the hate-filled, ignorant racist that go to their town halls. The people who they encourage and never correct from shouting obscene shit, all the while downplaying the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis by comparing Universal Health Care to The Holocaust. They brought into the Congressional chambers bills that they fashioned into protests signs with the intention of interrupting the president as he spoke. Holding up stacks of paper like the President of the United States is going to stop his speech to look at what you shitheads should have offered up months ago. Get the fuck out of here! Really, of all the times to offer up a bill, you do it during a presidential speech? How idiotic, pathetic and childlike, I thought the president's speech to school children was on Tuesday.

I know my language is brash but this is my blog and so I can speak however way I want, er, write whatever I want. I wouldn't do so in a church or a in a business letter. Why, because it is improper. Decorum doesn't allow for one to speak such vulgarities in a place of worship. The same goes for behavior, we act a certain way in a library and we act a certain way in a courtroom. These are social contracts that we oblige by because of respect for the institution. If the Republicans want to sit on their hands when they should be applauding the president that is totally fine, that's acceptable. However decorum doesn't allot for someone to essentially call the president a liar in front of Congress. Especially when what the president has said is true. Truly a shameful act. It does not go without punishment though, within a matter of a couple of hours, Joe Wilson had issued an apology to the President. It was a pathetic apology but he had to give one because the backlash against him was a mighty one. Wilson's electoral opponent Rob Miller, has already received over $75,000 in online donations since Wilson's outburst. It should be noted that Joe Wilson did break house rules with his outburst. He'll most definitely be censured.

In the mean time, support Rob Miller for Congress.

Lastly, a little off topic but it relates to the healthcare debate. O'Reilly suggesting that we shouldn't have healthcare reform because then everyone will have coverage and hence over-crowding which will lead to rationing of care. An outright fallacy and ridiculous point to assert. "They're gonna be busy, real busy." So insurance companies shouldn't add new costumers because doctors and nurses will be too busy? What a crock of horse shit. FOX Corporate propaganda at it again. Also, as a medical professional, we like being busy, we like seeing patients and helping people. That's why we went into the field in the first place. What a fucking tool! I can't upload the video so this whole paragraph is the link.

"We All Want To Change The World"

2009-09-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

I usually save this blog for topics of a political nature but because I am a self-centered creature and this blog is essentially my soapbox, I just want to reiterate how stoked I am about tomorrow! 09/09/09
Say it with me, "Number nine, number nine, number nine..."

Not only the game but the reissue of The Beatles' catalog, which is what I've been waiting for. I've bought the entire catalog in my lifetime twice; once during my high school years.I started getting into the Beatles just before the anthology was released, so it became this pretty big milestone for me. It took me a couple of years to accumulate the whole collection of Beatles' albums but I did it. That collection was my high school life. I had to buy it all back again about five years later, when my collection was stolen from my bedroom during a house party a younger sibling threw. I still have that one, although with time, negligence on behalf of useless younger siblings, this collection isn't in the best of conditions. so I need to buy a new one.

Granted, Apple is probably going to announce tomorrow that they will now feature The Beatles' catalog on iTunes but I don't care. I'm still going to go to some store and purchase my CDs, because I'm a sentimentalist and I always have to have a hard copy. Besides, what's the point of buying the remastered version if they're only going to go on an iPod? Not that I could tell the difference between Apple's highest quality downloads versus my car's CD player but for placebo effect and initial listening. I want to know it's the best possible sound, which is what a compact disc affords.

Listening to Hey Jude in its clearest of forms will make that joyous cacaophony sound spectacular. Again, I can't wait!

Ling & Lee: "They Violently Dragged Us Back...To North Korea"

2009-09-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

With the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling's own account of their apprehension along the North Korea/China border I just want to shame everyone who derided these women. To those who blamed them for their arrest. To those who said they shouldn't have been there and believed they were guilty. You know, I didn't hear this kind of talk when Nick Berg was executed in Iraq. Granted, incarceration and death are drastically different circumstances. Still, Lee and Ling were doing humanitarian work, Nick Berg was a war profiteer. No one said he shouldn't have been there, or blamed him for his own death, or that he should have had to deal with the consequences of his decision.

I want to send an especially deserved "FUCK YOU" to that piece of shit Dick Morris who suggested that "maybe" Lee and Ling should have served out their sentence.

He doesn't know what he is talking about. As I have stated repeatedly, whenever I've written about Ling & Lee, I've stood firm in my belief, they were kidnapped from China. This is how it was first reported and which is what they have reiterated in their aformentioned statement.

These women are heroes for their attempt to "shine light in dark places." They don't deserve to be ridiculed for being led to their capture, in a possible set-up. If North Korean guards can be bought off, who is to say Chinese tour guides can't be bought off by North Koreans looking to purchase some American barter?

This idea that we don't negotiate with terrorists, is a fallacy. When it's your family member, when it's you, you don't care how it looks to the outside world, you just want them home. No matter the outcome, no matter the circumstance with which they were released, North Korea was going to use them for propaganda. It doesn't matter what we did. As if North Korea's propaganda machine has any effect on the world outside of its borders. Everyone knows Kim Jong Il's regime is evil and malevolent. As if our actions would change the trajectory of the story North Korea was planning to deliver to its people.

The United States did little to interject itself into the recent, bullshit election in Iran, yet Iran's propaganda machine still accused the U.S. States and The West of meddling into their affairs of state. We were damned no matter what we did. It is the same with North Korea. Does it matter if Lee and Ling denied or confessed to espionage? No. The North Koreans were told they were spies and so it was. Their denial could serve the same purpose as their confession, except with a confession they might be given leniency. So Kim Jong Il gets to look like a nice guy, who believes that? No one except maybe the people of North Korea? The people who would have believed it anyway. Let's see how concerned Steve Doocy is about America not negotiating with terrorists when it's his son that is being held captive in a oppressive regime. That bitch wouldn't care about such outdated conditions as, "we don't negotiate with terrorist." Right, and the Sunni awakening had to do with their new found love for America, not all the money we were giving them. Essentially paying them off. Essentially, business transactions, business negotiations. We don't negotiate with terrorist? What was Iran Contra you asshole!?! We don't negotiate with terrorist, right, we only fund and train them. Think Ronald Reagan and Osama Bin Laden. I believe it was Reagan who called Osama bin Laden's Taliban "Freedom Fighters."

All this backlash directed toward Lee and Ling is really just a means for those who want to complain about both former President Clinton and President Obama. Instead of celebrating the return home of fellow Americans, we have these assholes trying to ruin their names and reputations. FOX News and the Right Wing Media are laying blame ard derision on all parties involved except for the real villain, Kim Jong Il. Where's the patriotism, where's the love all things American now? Where's the unwavering support? Why is the media letting this story veer away from the truth? Why haven't they focused on the fact that these women were kidnapped from China instead of speculating on what the U.S. "must have" sacrificed in order to gain their release? The media, namely those on the Right, did more to ridicule and discredit these woman than North Korea ever did. In lieu of the truth and facts, they focused on specualtion. The injustice suffered by two American women at the hands of an oppressive foreign regime was merely a footnote to the story developed by the media. Shame on all of those assholes and any of the assholes who ever believed them.

To Laura Ling and Euna Lee, I believe your truth.

Scare Tactics

2009-08-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Oh no the Socialists are coming and they want to kill your grandparents and your babies! The president wants to give everyone health care so he can kill them. *sigh*

Yeah, that sounds insane because it absolutely is.

Olbermann has already made an epic argument to the insanity that is the GOP.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

So there is not much more for me to say that Olbermann hasn't already touched on.

Except for this concept of "death panels." They do exist, they're called insurance companies. Anyone remember that film based on the John Grisham novel The Rainmaker? It was a story about a mother suing an insurance company to treat her son who was dying from cancer. She was suing the insurance company not for his death but to treat him. You see, this mother had been paying her premiums but when it came time for them to treat her son, the insurance companies refused, stating that treatment was in the experimental stage.

The son died. It was later found that the policy of the insurance company was to continually deny all claims. This isn't a far fetched piece of fiction, this story is true and has been true for many American families for decades. It's these insurance companies who say we can't be treated or that the treatment is too costly for the end result; the preservation of one's life. The insurance companies are the entities who have been bankrupting American families.

Yet here we have town halls filled with angry old people shouting about things they do not know. Not even realizing their medicare is socialized medicine. They don't know this because they predominantly watch FOX News which lies to them. I'm not mincing words or anything of the sort. FOX News is not news so much as it is corporate propaganda. These people who appear on FOX have sold their souls and names in order to advance the agendas of corporations. What other reason is there? Why would anyone not want health care for everyone? The only plausible reason for someone to be against health care for all is that they are in the pocket of private insurance. That is the only reason, or that they believe the lies told to them by those in the GOP, Blue Dog caucus and FOX News.

None of these people really care if this new health care is socialism. That's just a code word to scare people. Medicare and the VA are socialized medicine. Those opposed to Universal health care simultaneously say that socialized medicine is inefficient yet claim it'll kill private insurance because private insurance wont be able to compete. In a capitalist society, people will pay for the private insurance if it is better. Think of UPS and the US Post Office. So what's the worry? Why would anyone care about the private sector insurance anyway? They can't compete? So fucking what! I mean, these are the same assholes who hail capitalism, if it can't compete, then it's a victim of the capitalistic nature. Who cares if these assholes who have been robbing and killing Americans can't compete? Surely not the 1000 people being laid off by Kaiser Permanente Northern California after making over $600 million profit last quarter. This NPO is pricing out its costumers while making soaring profits. More and more of their patients are receiving less coverage and paying both higher premiums and co-pays.

Although I will say this about Kaiser, they have got a good, integrated system that should be the basis of our national health care system. Your records would move from hospital to hospital seamlessly, they provide adequate health care and they focus their health care on preventative medicine and education. That last bit of information is vital because preventative care is more cost efficient.

The idea of universal health care is to take the cost burden off of Americans, not to kill them. Those worried about the government having access to all your medical records, surprise, Bush got all your information with the Patriot act and you let him because after September 11th, you were scared and you let him in the name of security. Where was the outrage then?

This rage is the result of two things, the corporate greed that funds their corporate propaganda via FOX news and racism. That is it. They hate Obama so much that they claim he isn't born here as a way to make themselves feel okay about hating him, as if to give it some sort of justification. They oppose him on every front, no matter what it is. On any bullet point of the Obama agenda, it is met with protests, usually funded by big corporations and it is during these protests you see frequently, off topic rhetoric regarding Obama and his race.

There was no rage when Bush pushed further and further in favor of deregulation or when he was lying to the American public about Saddam and Al Qaeda. When he was rewarding no bid contracts to his old friends at Haliburton, who were short changing the troops at every chance they got. These same people who show up at these corporate funded Tea-bagger parties didn't blink an eye when Bush wiped his ass with the constitution.

These corporate bandits are using demagoguery to influence and manipulate a bloc of the American people. They are using the fear and deep seeded racism of these people as a means to get them to fight their battles for them. These people protesting health care reform are tools of these corporations. Victims of FOX news' lies and propaganda.

Guatemala

2009-07-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I wont be adding any images to this posting because it´ll take too long and I still have to head back for more procedures.

First, I´m as safe as can be and I haven´t gone out to any of the cantinas to get drunk, there´s no
need. The refrigerator is always stocked with Gallo, which is a Guatemalan beer. It´s excellent. Especially in this humid climate. The condensation on the bottles as they´re pulled from the fridge beg one to drink from them. It´s so refreshing.

The people I am with are all very nice, like genuinly nice. All the young ladies are very attractive it´s insane. I wont get into any more about that. Use your imaginaion.

The food has been amazing and I have yet to get sick. I´m happy o be here. The people are happy we are here. Cheers all around.

Puerto Rican? Unconfirmed

2009-07-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

It's not typical that Mexican-Americans have to put up with the stereotype "they all look the same," as much as Black or Asian people do. We do however receive the bulk of the identification for our Latino brethren. All Cubans, Puerto Ricans and South Americans are called Mexican, they don't like it and neither do we. Not that they is anything wrong with Cubans, Puerto Ricans or South Americans we just take pride in our own nationality. Although, I should note that there is a strong Puerto Rican/Mexican rivalry when it comes to sports, namely boxing. It's not malicious. As was evident with this Puerto Rican beauty I met in Vegas. We spent the whole evening going back and forth, cutting each other down for her being Puerto Rican and I being Mexican-American. We ended the night fooling around in a hotel linen closet before the maid found us. That's another story for another time.

The fact that Puerto Rico and Cuba are island nations should be a large enough sign that the three countries would have a significant cultural differences like those of Europe, i.e. Ireland, England and Mainland Europe (France). Cubans drink rum whereas Mexicans drink tequila if you needed a simple example of our vast differences.

Yet today, Sen. Tom Coburn R-Okla. imitated Ricky Ricardo when questioning SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor, saying she has "some 'splaining to do." Don't you get it? He's doing the Ricky Ricardo thing because she is a Mexican, like Ricky Ricardo except she is not. She is Puerto Rican and Ricky Ricardo, like Desi Arnaz who played him, is Cubano. Two different islands, two different histories and most importantly two different peoples.

What's upsetting to us, is that we are thought to be so insignificant that we can't have our own separate identity. As proud as I am of Sotomayor for her ascension I wouldn't consider the pride to be rooted in cultural identification. She isn't Mexican-American and she isn't from California. I don't identify with her whatsoever, so there's no way I would stake claim to her like Puerto Ricans of New York and Brooklyn will. I'm proud of her because of her story, because despite prejudices against women, she has prevailed. That is something all Americans should be proud of, a manifestation of the American dream.

I read blogs and the comments made on them and they are overwhelmingly xenophobic and racist. What's more, they say idiotic things like Sotomayor should make some tacos or attribute her ascension to nominee as having something to do with illegal immigration. First off, Puerto Ricans are born American citizens, because the country of Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of The United States, like Guam. Secondly, tacos are a Mexican dish, not to say that Puerto Ricans don't eat tacos. I guess it's a lot for me to ask that people know something about Puerto Ricans or Mexicans.

Yet that's all they can focus on about Sotomayor, that her last name is Sotomayor and not Smith. That she is a she and not a he. Senator Jeff Sessions is being especially tough on her, mostly because he was denied a seat on the Supreme Court because he is a certifiable racist. It kills him to know both a Puerto Rican and a woman will get the promotion he was denied.

All this over her "Wise Latina," comment, which I've already gone on record saying wasn't racist. It wasn't. Read the whole quote. She didn't state as fact that a wise Latina would be better than a white man, she said she "hoped" that a wise Latina, with all her experiences, experiences a white man could never know, would enable her to reach a better decision.

So really, this is just a circus designed to allow the GOP one last chance to sully the image of an Obama nominee. To publicly mock this Puerto Rican woman. She's going to be confirmed and she will sit on the bench yet they are going out of their way to call her a racist. It's funny, that all these white men, with long histories of racial insensitivity are the first to call any and every minority who is about to attain power, racist. Everyone is racist except of course those in their own party. Michelle and Barack Obama are militant racists. Sotomayor is a racist. Tom Tancredo called National Council of La Raza a racist group akin to the Ku Klux Klan. Right, because La Raza has lynched people and put burning crosses in front of people's homes, oh that's right, they haven't. When Cruz Bustamante was running against Arnold in the California recall election, Republicans and FOX News said he was a racist. (FOX News, the network whose anchor just last week claimed that Americans were more likely to have mixed race offspring. That we weren't pure like Sweden or Norway. That whites were having children with other "species." Because Blacks and Asians are of a different species than the revered white man.) They claimed that Bustamante's involvement with MEChA, a student group for Mexican-Americans, made him a racist because MEChA was a racist hate group. That is a fallacy propagated by FOX News. MEChA can be found on high school campuses throughout California and other states. If it was a hate group as FOX News claims it to be, it wouldn't be allowed on public school campuses.

Any advancement of any minority or minority group and the Republicans go crazy. They can't deal with the idea that someone outside their monolithic brotherhood might be in a position of power or receive some type of right or access. Think civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, affirmative action, then think of Republican's response to all of those things. So to combat these advancements of minorities, what do they do? They galvanize their base. In this case, they say that they are being attacked as a whole. Considering they are white men, the best thing to do is say their attackers are misandrist or "reverse-racists" or worse, both. The latter is the rallying cry they are using against Sonia Sotomayor.

She is being branded a racist for a quip she made, that was neither subtly nor overtly racist. She isn't Trent Lott or Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond or Tom Tancredo or numerous other racist GOP members. Yet it's okay for these racist good ol' boys to remain in Congress. Thurmond, Lott and Helms were never forced from office but left of their own volition. They were allowed to remain Senators despite their racism and bigotry. Whereas Sonia Sotomayor is being vilified and slandered because of a quote taken out of context and distorted. So a group of racists gets to decide whether this honorable woman gets to be a Supreme Court Justice, ironic. This is what we call projecting. The GOP is guilty of racism so they want to project that guilt onto Sotomayor, to make them feel better about themselves. Plus, it makes them feel good to ridicule and interrogate a woman of color.

Everything they are saying isn't to Sotomayor's detriment, it is to their own. Lindsey Graham, that stupid little prick from South Carolina, noted that absent a "meltdown," Sotomayor would be confirmed. Why? Well, because if anything, Sotomayor has long stood as an appeals judge adherent to precedent and law. If anything, she isn't a racist. Yet his fellow Republicans can't pass up an opportunity to sling mud at a woman, they'd move mountains to able to sling mud at a woman of color such as Sotomayor. There is no real reason for them to do this other than being misogynists or racist or most likely, both. They haven't found any dirt on her or made any discoveries of skeletons in the closet. They are arguing a battle that was lost months ago. All they are doing, more than anything else, is telling Latinos, whether you're a citizen of the United States or not, that we aren't welcomed. That no matter how long our resume is, how much work we've done, how much more experienced we are than any other candidate, suchas Sotomayor, that all of that is insignificant. The GOP thinks us and our contributions; to our country and society as insignificant. Come 2010, we'll show them our significance and that we don't like being called racist or anything else that we are not, like Cuban, or Honduran, or Mexican or Puerto Rican. We are significant and they will regret ever sending us the message that we were not.

Bat Shit Crazy

2009-07-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

This broad*, Victoria Jackson, is off her fucking rocker! What's worse, there are a lot of people who believe what she believes. I'll get to what that is in a minute.

Before I do, let's talk about the Right Wing. They can bash us as Left-wing Liberals all they want, but we've been right and they've been wrong. They were wrong about Iraq, WMD, Foreign Policy, The Patriot Act, Gitmo, Climate Change, et cetera, et cetera. So really, they have no relevance or authority to speak on anything. They took their positions based on jingoistic idealogy instead of facts and logic. There is no need to seek their approval on anything in order to attain bipartisanship.

Back to this crazy nut job Victoria Jackson. She's said some crazy stuff before but her latest blog entry is priceless. Her Blog words will be in Italics and my responses will not be.

I woke up in the middle of the night and realized the trick.

You see, evil doesn’t just show up. It disguises itself as something nice; so you’ll let it in. It tricks you.

Like Compassionate conservatism?

Murdering babies is called Pro-Choice.

No this is not true. Pro-choice means, a woman has a right to choose what she wants to do with her own body, what she deems is best for her. Also, a fetus isn't a baby. A fetus can't live outside the womb like a baby. An acorn isn't an oak tree. Pregnant women can't get in the carpool lane just because they're pregnant.

Unfair Censorship is called The Fairness Doctrine. Outlandish Taxes and the Death of Freedom is called Cap & Trade. Sounds like Fish & Chips. You gotta figure out the trick.

WTF?

I’d been wondering why the liberals are so passionate about this Health Care thing. It couldn’t be because they actually care about sick, poor people. If they did, they would visit hospitals, and give ten percent of their gross salaries to Compassion International and World Vision, like us stupid church go-ers do. Biden gave $ 62 to charity last year.

Actually, you ignorant twit, I am a liberal who works in health care because I want to help people. Also, I've been donating to World Vision for years. Which brings up another issue. Yes, World Vision is doing great work, they feed children, clothe them and school them but don't be fooled. They are saving these lives in order to convert them into Christians. It's not completely without ulterior motive or selflessness.

No, there’s gotta be a catch. I guess this question was sitting in my brain and during my sleep, my brain was working on it, because when I suddenly awoke at 3 a.m. I had the answer.

Euthanasia!

Social Security and Medicare are broke. Baby boomers, like me, are getting old and will soon be asking for it. Socialized medicine makes people die. You stand in a long, long line with a breast lump, clogged artery, or sharp pencil stuck in your eye, and someone like the DMV person, who can’t speak English, has chewing gum, an attitiude, really long fake nails that curl up at the end, and is talking on a cell phone, enjoying their power trip moment, is finally face to face with you. They mumble something incoherent about paperwork. You die. One less person in line for Social Security and Medicare!

Yeah, she seriously wrote this. Euthanasia, our president wants to kill people, grandparents, senior citizens. "You stand in a long line with a breast lump." That breast lump isn't going anywhere. As someone who worked for Kaiser Permanente, a private insurance giant, they don't take out breast lumps the day they find them. They schedule an appointment with a general surgeon, who then schedules a lumpectomy. In fact, a lot of Kaiser's means of treatment is sending you away and having you come back. Unless of course it's completely dire. It's because you have their insurance, you can schedule clinic appoitments to be seen instead of rushing to emergency rooms. Which is what causes long wait times. If people have insurance they don't have to clog emergency rooms, they can schedule appointments with a doctor instead of waiting for their condition to get worse. If they need to be seen immediately, their insurance allows them to set up an urgent care clinic appointment, thus being treated without burdening an emergency room. If you don't have insurance you can't be seen in these urgent care clinics, you're only option is to go to emergency rooms.

"Someone at the DMV who can't speak English." Really? Just to add little more terror into the idea of Universal Healthcare, she uses racism and xenophobia. Good call. "Really long fake nails that curl at the end."

These people, like Victoria Jackson, are so racist that they don't even realize when they're making racists comments. She probably thinks that the rest of us are going to be reading her words nodding our heads in agreement, like "yeah, those attitude having, long, fake fingernail wearing, people at the DMV who can't speak English, are going to kill us." If those people who you describe really are working at the DMV truly exist, their behavior isn't a product of their working at the DMV. Maybe these people have attitudes because they have to deal with fucking idiots like you all God damned day!

Obama legally kills babies and now he can legally kill Grandmas!

Hitler did this. He killed the weak, the sick, the old, and babies and races/religions he didn’t like. Hitler also controlled the media. (Where’s the public debate between scientists on “Climate Change/Global Warming?”) Hitler had the VW bug invented as the state car. What will O’s nationalized car be? So… kill off the weak. That’s the plan. Tax the workers to death. Erase the middle class. Sounds like the evil governments we studied in high school long ago. The evil governments were : kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist. Now it’s called the Obama Administration. Sounds like candy or a rock band.

Yeah, didn't you know? President Obama sneaks around the country and goes around creeping into people's homes and kills babies in their cribs. Oh, no, wait, she's talking about abortion, that's right. Yes, abortion is Obama's fault, I mean it was only made legal in the United States on January 23, 1973, almost 36 years to the day before Obama took office, by an all male Supreme Court. Sure it's Obama's fault, he was what, 12 years old?

The Obama is Hitler stuff is steeped in idiocy. The only fascist President we've had this century was George W. Bush, who was nationalistic, jingoistic, and grew the government in order to control the people, think the Patriot Act

"Where's the public debate... on 'climate change'?" Is she for real? The scientific community overwhelmingly states that climate change exists and is attributed to human behavior and burning of fossil fuels. The only place you'll find "scientists" who disagree with this consensus is on FOX News Channel.

I was browsing in a Burbank gift shop yesterday and I asked the store owner how business was doing. She smiled, “Well, you know, hit and miss. I’m sure it will be better soon.” The store was empty.

I apologized for not buying anything. “I’m sorry, but my husband now cringes when I order a Hazelnut Iced Coffee at McDonald’s, so I can’t really buy anything.”

Her smile hardened.

“You know, I’ve been speaking at Tea Parties lately. No one seems to know or care that our country just turned Socialist.”

If Victoria knew anything, this country has had a long history of Socialism within it. Socialism isn't inherently un-American, in fact it is an embodiment of American ideals. She groups socialism with fascism, which is laughable. They are contextually opposites, fascism grew as an antithesis to socialism. Whereas fascism is a government that rules the people for the benefit of the government, socialism is a government of the people that works to provide for the people. Gee, why does that sound familiar? Oh yes, that's what Abraham Lincoln alluded to the United States being in his Gettysburg Address. He said of our nation that we are a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." That's Socialism in it's simplest of definitions.

The following is hilarious. Jackson is too vapid to realize the irony in her statements.

She stared at me like a deer caught in head lights.

I continued, “I don’t like politics, but we have to do something. I’m writing to my Congressmen and Senators now.”

Her teenage assistants with no customers had frozen smiles and frozen bodies.

“Did you know Obama uses our tax payer dollars to pay for abortions?”

She shook her head no.

“He even supports killing 9 month old babies, in the womb.”

She became a ceramic knick knack.

I continued, “It’s called ‘late-term abortion’. Now he’s going to kill sick people and old people. Did you know that Cap & Trade will allow the government to regulate how long we take a shower? And that the “New Health Plan”, happy, happy, will allow the government to decide who lives and who dies?”

Crickets. Dead crickets.

As I opened the door to leave, she shook herself into reality and said, “Thank you and come again.”

The bell jingled as the door shut.

I got into my fuel efficient economy car, with the leopard seat covers, and the bumper that used to have the “I RESIST SOCIALISM” bumper sticker, until it got smashed, and I drove away thinking, “Ignorance is Bliss.”

Wow. She is right though, at least in one respect. Ignorance is bliss; she's happy to go about stating her epiphany which was born of ignorance. She doesn't realize that these people weren't frozen because they were ignorant but rather, shocked by how immensely offensive and crass she is; how overtly wrong and ill-informed. If Obama was truly Hitler, he'd put mouth breathers like her and her ilk in concentration camps and work them to death. She wouldn't be able to go around spreading her hate filled fallacies. Of course, she's incapable of realizing this because she doesn't possess the mental capacity and she is bat shit crazy.

*The use of the term broad is not one I commonly use but I attribute it to her specifically for is degrading quality.