One of the reasons we are told that we are to seek Christ is to live forever, for immortality.  That’s a catch 22, for many cultural reasons.  I suspect, that hard-wired into our consciousness, from the most primitive levels is this desire for immortality, to have a part of us live, forever.  That’s a nice sentiment, but is it Biblical, or anthropological?

As I grow older, I think about my legacy.  Will my writing live beyond me?  As far as immortality is concerned, genetically, I have none.  Having no children, genetically, I’m doomed.  I’m dead.  There is no immortality.  I’m a dead branch on the family tree.  Dead branches on family trees have a tendency to be forgotten, and pruned.  I’m a genealogist, I know that I am doomed to extinction.  My sister, with her three children and an adorable granddaughter is blessed with genetic immortality.  Unless my writing lives beyond me, I’m not much better than dust, dirt, nothing.

That’s the cynical view of things.  But, because I am a follower of Christ, I know I will be with Him forever.  I don’t give a rip about so-called immortality.  I have chosen to spend my time with Christ.  As for Heaven, I’m an original Trekkie.  My view of Heaven is warping through the stars, on an endless trek across the galaxy.  I want to be able to explore the cosmos.  I happen to see that as Heaven.

Heaven is also not being separated from the Lord, from Christ.  Hell, on the other hand, is being separated from the Lord, being separated from Christ.

Now – that is pure hell.

If I truly believe John 3:16, then anyone who doesn’t believe in Christ, who hasn’t confessed their sins, is doomed to spend forever, eternity on the outside, without Christ, without the Lord.

That – is pure hell.

One of the big problems we have in this country, is the fact that we are currently living under the misconception that this is a “Christian Nation” founded by “God Fearing” men (no women).  The country was founded on the requirement of freedom from religion, not freedom of religion.  There’s a big difference.  It is all about not having religion, no matter what it is, forced upon any individual.

Currently there is what I’ll kindly call an urban legend going around about the military not allowing evangelism and ‘praying’ in the name of Christ.

Wrong….

The US military does not allow evangelism outside of the chaplains.  One of the so-called ‘Christian’ leaders who was caught in this trap was a LTC who ordered – O – R – D – E – R – E -D those of a lessor rank, to attend a Christian evangelical meeting.  Wrong.  That is a violation of the Constitution.  He legally cannot do that.  Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, the man should be court-martialed.

Have you ever had religion forced on you, and have you been persecuted for what you believe?  I have.  No, it wasn’t much, but when you are in the sixth grade, and your teacher threatens to have you whipped because you don’t believe in her version of religion.  I was raised Presbyterian.  She was Southern Baptist.  My family believes in infant baptism.  She thought you should be dunked, and proceeded to tell me that not only was I going to hell, but so was my entire family.

It left me with a terrible taste in my mouth, to put it mildly.  As far as I am concerned, there should be no religion at all in public schools.  You want a so-called ‘Christian’ education for you children, the put them in a private religious school.  Kids who don’t happen to come from the same religious background as others in a school deserve not to be harassed the way several of the Catholic kids were in my class.

I guess you can tell I’m not big into public evangelism.  I find it distasteful.  I find going up to someone and ‘witnessing’ to them is also distasteful.  If my life doesn’t reflect Christ, then there’s something wrong with my life and my relationship with Christ.  If someone can’t tell I’m a Christian by my love, then I’m in deep shit, not them.  (I find someone who approaches me, demanding to know if I have been ‘saved’ to be insulting.  It’s  a matter of taste).

No, our Founding Fathers weren’t all that religious. Of these, only John Jay can be considered an orthodox Christian. As Congress’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he argued (unsuccessfully) for a prohibition forbidding Catholics from holding office.

On October 12, 1816, Jay wrote, “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

It is John Jay that the modern Christians have in mind when they talk about the Founding Fathers? Luckily for the rest of us, and all freedom-loving Americans, he was not in the majority.

As far as this so-called ‘Christian’ nation thing, let’s examine this little canard more closely.  Of our leading funding fathers only John Jay was an ‘orthodox Christian’.

Ben Franklin was a member of the Hellfire Club.  If you are up on your Regency history, you know the Hellfire Club was basically an S&M club with possible over-tones of the occult, and maybe even the beginnings of modern Satanism.  Modern Satanism grew out of the legacy of the Hellfire Club.  Don’t even consider Franklin a Christian.  He was not.

He wrote: “…As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion…has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble.” He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.[1]

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved– the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”

John Adams was a Unitarian.  He was not a born-again Christian.  In a letter to Thomas Jefferson he wrote:  “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.  Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.”

“Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?”[2]

Thomas Jefferson was a Deist.  He was so arrogant that he rewrote the Bible to suit his womanizing and bigoted life-style.  He also was a brutal and cruel slave owner.  Don’t make the mistake of calling him a Christian.  Jefferson wrote:  “…The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.”[3]

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” Thomas Paine was an atheist.

James Madison wrote: “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”[4]

Ethan Allen was a Deist. “That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words.” In the same book, Allen noted that he was generally “denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian.” When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised “to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God.” Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those “written in the great book of nature.” [5]

George Washington was something of a Deist, also. The father of this country was very private about his beliefs, but it is widely considered that he was a Deist like his colleagues.

Historian Barry Schwartz writes: “George Washington’s practice of Christianity was limited and superficial because he was not himself a Christian…  He repeatedly declined the church’s sacraments.  Never did he take communion, and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited for her outside the sanctuary…  Even on his deathbed, Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to Christ, and expressed no wish to be attended by His representative.” [6]

“…Clearly, then, one cannot assume from Washington’s presence at church services and his membership in the Truro parish vestry that he was a Christian believer. Is there any other evidence to suggest that he was a Christian? The Reverend Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, preached a sermon in October 1831 in which he stated that “among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism” (Paul F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, pp. 14-15). He went on to describe Washington as a “great and good man” but “not a professor of religion.” Wilson said that he was “really a typical eighteenth century Deist, not a Christian, in his religious outlook” (Ibid.). Wilson wasn’t just speaking about matters that he had not researched, because he had carefully investigated his subject before he preached this sermon. Among others, Wilson had inquired of the Reverend Abercrombie [identified earlier as the rector of the church Washington had attended] concerning Washing ton’s religious views. Abercrombie’s response was brief and to the point “Sir, Washington was a Deist” (Remsberg, p. 110). Those, then, who were best positioned to know Washington’s private religious beliefs did not consider him a Christian, and the Reverend Abercrombie, who knew him personally and pastored the church he attended with his wife flatly said that Washington was a Deist….”[7]

In February 1800, after Washington’s death, Thomas Jefferson wrote this statement in his personal journal. “…Dr. Rush told me (he had it from Asa Green) that when the clergy addressed General Washington, on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never, on any occasion, said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion, and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to disclose publicly whether he was a Christian or not. However, he observed, the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly, except that, which he passed over without notice….”

Why are people so shallow and so afraid of what they believe, that they must inflate and lie about our founding?

“…The most damning evidence of a non-Christian past is a humiliating 1797 treaty with the Barbary Pirates. President Adams sought to stem unremitting Muslim raids against Mediterranean shipping and protect American sailors from African slavery. This obscure treaty submitted, “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”…”[8]

It’s quite sad.

Evidently Christians, in this country, today, are so shallow, they must bend and twist the founders into creating this great Christian nation.  We are not.  We are a nation built on the freedom from being harassed about a state religion.  If that means that there are no Christmas trees in a public school fine.  It’s better than dealing with a dozen other religions. Once upon a time, when we had a nation where there were two religions:  Protestant and Catholic, then a Christmas tree in a school was fine.  Today it is not.

This canard about our nation being a ‘Christian’ nation is leading certain batsh*t crazy politicians and TV pundits to beg that God destroy our country because we aren’t doing what THEY think the Lord wants us to do.  When you filter out the crap, and realize they are either rankly ignorant or lying about what they believe, what a mess.

They are an embarrassment.

I don’t know about you, but my belief is not shallow.  I don’t need to hang on the words of a pathetic little football player to makes this big deal about praying in the end-zone after doing something great, on the field.  I don’t need to make up false history of this country.  By liberating myself from the fake history of this nation, I get to have more time to love people the religious purists don’t want loved.  You know the ones – the kind of people Christ hung out with, social outcasts, the ones who really aren’t welcome in many churches today.

Newt Gingrich

One reason The Pink Flamingo keeps harping on the GOP and the problems is because, once upon a time, I expected better of them.  I guess my real problem is that I still do, and am constantly disappointed by their behavior.  During the Clinton years, I will confess that no one was as bad as was I, in the outrage business.  When GWB went into office, the Far Left was even worse about Bush, than we were about Clinton.  They were literally unhinged.

Then came Barack Obama.

No, The Pink Flamingo did not want him elected, the first time. I will admit to being as consummate in the outrage department as anyone could possible be.  I was just repeating the hate I’d heard from FOX, Rush, Medved, and the far right. I said terrible things about Michelle. In fact, The Pink Flamingo was the first one to call her Michelle Antoinette, and compare her to at ill fated Queen of France. I fell for every piece of crap that was spoon fed to my washed brain.

Then, one day, I realized that Michelle Obama’s wardrobe problem was not her own doing.  To my own credit, when they were running the first time, I went back and found photos of her, and mentioned that she had excellent wardrobe instincts, that someone was sandbagging her.  I truly think someone was.  Once she gained the confidence she needed, there in the White House, her wardrobe began changing.  The real Michelle Obama started showing, and she was starting to become an iconic First Lady.

That’s when I realized I was being a total jerk and was tired of it. I turned off Rush.  I turned off Hannity, and then turned off FOX.  I began to realize that what they were spoon feeding good, decent Republicans was pure, unadulterated crap.

Let me go back a little – my distrust of FOX began when they began pushing the anti-immigration agenda and then when they began backing the Tea Parties, I knew something was wrong. I love being right.  Something is wrong, and it isn’t moi.  It isn’t the left – it’s the brainwashing of the Republican voter by the usual suspects.

We’ve been dealing with this now for about six years.  The outrage machine has become outrageous that it is coming unglued.  So is the right.  So is the GOP.  Suddenly, we can see that there is a very real agenda at work here – and it is not good for the country.

First of all – the IRS is an equal opportunity harasser. They go after everyone, not just far right noons.  You want harassment?  Try being a small business and having your accountant going to prison for keeping your with-holdings.  Just see what happens there.   Even if you are innocent they put a lien on your house, threaten your bank accounts and your business.  This was FAR from political.

• Fox Guest compares IRS mess to Nazi Germany?  Be sure to note that his was one of the organizations investigated.  Tom Zawistowski was harassed.  Maybe he needs to be less dishonest about the way he launders campaign money for the Koch Machine.

• “…This week, a report by a Treasury Department inspector general revealed that IRS staffers singled out tea partiers and other conservative groups which had applied for tax-exempt status for special scrutiny. Now, Republicans and Democrats are howling with outrage and demanding that heads roll. One result of this debacle, ex-IRS director Marcus Owens told me, is that the IRS will certainly shy away from cracking down on those nonprofits that do abuse the tax code…”

• Even though she, herself, is being investigated for ethics violations, batsh*t crazy Michele Bachmann wants Obama impeached.  She is so dishonest (allegedly), in Ohio a special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate her Presidential Campaign.

• In 863 Days House GOP Has Offered 0 Jobs Plans While Voting to Repeal Obamacare 34 Times
• The far right can be irate over IRS investigations into what rightfully should be investigated, but want something done about the AARP’s homosexual agenda.
  

  •   “…AFA executive vice president Buddy Smith added: “Be very careful that you know what your fees are going for because the AARP is not on your side. If you are a Christian and believe in biblical values, you can pretty much count on the fact that everything that you are in favor of, the AARP is opposing….”

• It’s about a way for the billionaires on the far right to control the conversation and attempt to stage their own version of a coupe, to control the country, to push their agenda.  They’re doing a good job at it.

• So what is dark money? How does it wind up in our elections? Say you’re a billionaire and you want to give $1 million to anonymously influence an election. You’re in luck: you can give that money, as many donors have, to a nonprofit organized under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. That nonprofit, in turn, can spend your money on election-related TV ads or mailers or online videos. But there’s a catch: unlike super PACs, the majority of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit’s work can’t be political. Note, though, that where the IRS draws the line on how much politicking is too much, and even what the taxman defines as political, is very murky.And until Congress and the IRS straighten all of that out, donors wanting to influence elections have a mostly scrutiny-free way to unload their money.This type of nonprofit has a long history in U.S. politics. The Sierra Club, for instance, has a 501(c)(4) affiliate, as does the National Rifle Association. But in recent years, political operatives and wealthy donors have seized on this breed of nonprofit as a new way to shovel secret money into campaigns. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status spiked from 1,500 to 3,400, according to IRS official Lois Lerner.During the 2010 campaign, politically active nonprofits — “super secret spooky PACs,” as Stephen Colbert calls them — outspent super PACs by a three to two margin, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis. Take the American Action Network (AAN), run by former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. The group purports to be an “issue-based” nonprofit that only dabbles in politics, but its tax records suggest otherwise. From July 2009 through June 2011, as Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted, 60% of AAN’s money went toward politics. (An AAN spokesman called the complaint “baseless.”)Because they’re so lacking in transparency, some nonprofits have been emboldened to bend — if not break — the tax law. One of the more egregious examples was benignly named the Commission on Hope, Growth, and Opportunity (CHGO). Created in the summer of 2010, it informed the IRS that it wouldn’t spend a penny on politics. During the 2010 elections, however, it put $2.3 million into ads attacking 11 Democratic congressional candidates. Then, sometime in 2011, CHGO simply closed up shop and disappeared — a classic case of political hit-and-run. And it wouldn’t have happened without a secretive wealthy bankroller: of the $4.8 million raised by CHGO, tax records show that $4 million came from a single donor (though we don’t know his or her name)….”

• 

  Alternet

•  Mark Steyn says that he and his racist little bunch of bigoted jerk friends will destroy the country if they can’t have their own way.

• If Jennifer Rubin is trying to make something of the AP leakgate, then there’s nothing to it.  She was a shill for Romney, and is probably still shilling for him.

• Peggy Noonan has lost it.

• They’re making things worse, looking like idiots trying to embarrass Obama.

• Glenn Beck went off the deep end with even more insanity than usual. Evidently Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington would be ashamed of the NAACP today!

What we have here is a mess. We have far right shills of the Koch Machine who will do anything and say anything to hurt Barack Obama. It really doesn’t matter what they do or say, as long as they hurt him. They aren’t capable of even dealing with the fact that we have a disaster when it comes campaign finance reform.  That’s what all of this is about – refusing to acknowledge that we need campaign finance reform.  They can’t do that.  The GOP House and Senate can’t do that.  Their billionaire pimps might cut off their money.

The GOP is out of control.  They have become so dishonest they will do just about everything to destroy Obama.  If this is true, that Republican sources were doctoring emails about Benghazi, then this takes on whole new meaning.

LGF

Now what?

Maybe we should start asking about Darrell Issa‘s criminal background.  We have Republicans who sent out bogus email, to make Obama look bad.

Where does it end?

Let’s see:

• House Republicans want the IRS to audit the AARP.
• FOX is pushing the idiocy that the IRS will kill conservatives with Obamacare.

We know that Benghazi is already starting to backfire on the GOP after it was discovered that they altered the documents that went to ABC News.   What’s going to happen is they’re going to keep this up until the elephant dies.  It really won’t matter.  They will take their little enablers like Glenn Beck, and then destroy what ever political party arises from the ashes of the cremated elephant.  This bunch of tea partying Koch Machine whores are incapable of learning from their mistakes.  Don’t expect anything but more of the same, as they turn the entire country, including The Pink Flamingo, against the once mighty Elephant.

Let’s face it, the far right has reached the point where they are a total joke.  Yes, we now must deal with umbrella gate.  Evidently the moronic far right haters don’t quite realize that, as Commander and Chief, Barack Obama can order the Marines to hold an umbrella over his head.

LGF

Deal with it.

It’s here.
Today is the day.
I’m going to try to get to the first showing. If I do 3D, I can get in at 1PM. If I do 2D, which I prefer, I can do it at 3:50. Let’s be honest here, we all know what time I’ll be there, even though I truly dislike 3D.  Even if it isn’t William Shatner, I’m such a James T. Kirk junkie!  It looks like I’ll be able to get to a late showing.  It’s parents’ day tomorrow.

Critics don’t appear to much like this one.  That’s okay.  I’m not in it for critical gushing.  It’s a science fiction for gosh sakes, not Shakespeare, even though, good science fiction should border on Shakespeare.  Since I’ve not seen it, I can only mention that Gene Roddenberry, the Great Bird of the Galaxy thought that great science fiction should be first conceptualized as a western.  If the story plays out as Wagon Train in the Stars, then it works.

There’s a reason for this.  Great science fiction should be always be plot and character driven and NOT special effects, blasters, space ships, and cool tech.  It is basically classic theater, told in outer space.  It’s like the line in Star Trek, the Voyage Home, where Kirk is told that he had to be from  outer space.  His reply: “No, I’m from Iowa. I only work in outer space.”

The other reason Star Trek succeeds is because of Gene Roddenberry’s vision.  He saw humanity as something hopeful. During the darker hours of the cold war he saw humanity as surviving our insanity, living long and prospering.   So far, we haven’t blown ourselves up.  Maybe he was right.

There are numerous discussions about which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Star Wars fan, but I am first and foremost a Trekkie.  I guess I should admit that I’m an original Trekkie.  So, which is best?

Star Trek, of course!  Which Star Trek is best?  There is no other logical answer but Classic Trek!  We need to pay attention to one salient and logical fact:

“...George Lucas has said that he was writing “Star Wars” during the heyday of “Star Trek’s” syndication. He watched the show and even attended “Trek” conventions. “ ‘Star Trek’ expanded your mind in terms of what was possible,” he said. “The story is what makes it work.”

Simply, without “Star Trek,” you wouldn’t have “Star Wars.” “Star Trek’s” foundation and philosophy has and continues to give us “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It inspired the science fiction and fantasy that has come after its pioneering days on television in the 1960s, boldly going where no one had ever thought possible and paving the way for future stories….”

Sure, there are mistakes, but so what?  So far, the reviews are not all that kind.  Please show me a good science fiction movie that was well reviewed.  My sister, who is not a Trekkie loved the movie.

This is also about the Koch Machine using fake outrage to demand the IRS be defunded.

Don’t political operatives on both sides of the aisle get tired of waxing irate all the time?  Currently, they are enjoying the best of times.  The far right is irate over the IRS targeting of the tea parties and the left is irate over the fact that an AP reporter has been subjected to – oh the pain – accountability – for outing a CIA undercover agent in a life and death situation.  The press has the right to do anything, with impunity, right?  It really doesn’t matter if our national security is compromised.  The ‘public’ has a right to know.  It is the very best of all worlds.  The liberal press is pissed.  The conservative pressed is pissed, John Boehner wants the IRS agents to allegedly went ‘rogue’ to go to prison.  They want Obama impeached for Benghazi.  And – the usual far right jerks get to lie about liberals not being targeted by the IRS.  Only their precious tea party darlings were harassed.

It’s all about fake outrage.

“..Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill and campaign finance watchdog groups are pressing to expand congressional hearings to encompass everything the IRS is doing concerning nonprofits, including whether such groups should be allowed to spend money on political efforts at all.

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which is conducting its own IRS investigation, has introduced legislation with Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to require all groups spending money on politics to disclose their donors.

“These problems will continue as long as there is an absence of clear and enforceable rules,” Wyden told reporters yesterday. “In the absence of clear and enforceable rules the bureaucracy pretty much makes it up as they go along.”

Political spending by nonprofits incorporated under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code has increased since the U.S. Supreme Court (1000L) in 2010 removed limits on independent corporate and union spending and other court rulings paved the way for wealthy individuals to spend unlimited sums in elections.
$1 Billion

Outside groups — including nonprofit social-welfare groups that don’t disclose their donors — spent $1 billion in the 2012 elections, three times as much as they did four years earlier, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, based in Washington.

“The real problem is that phony 501(c)(4) groups are exploiting the tax laws to protect donors who don’t want to be held accountable for vicious, deceitful political ads,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

In early 2011, the IRS denied the tax-exempt status of an affiliate of the San Francisco-based Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. The agency said it was disqualified because the group’s activities were “conducted primarily for the benefit of a political party and a private group of individuals, rather than the community as a whole.”…”

Political Carnival

There’s just one little problem with the targeting of ONLY those pure, wonderful, precious, adorable little tea partiers who are basically laundering illegal campaign cash into extremist tea party candidates for the Koch Machine.  How do you explain this one?

“…In 2012, The Chicago Tribune reported on the IRS denying tax exempt status to a liberal political group, The IRS announced in May and June that it took the actions against two groups defined as tax-exempt under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. The IRS on Thursday declined comment on its tax-exempt final rulings. Tax-exempt groups raising money for both major political parties ahead of the Nov. 6 election walk a fine line between promoting “social welfare” for tax-exempt purposes and purely political interests.

A 501(c)(4) group denied tax-exempt status by the IRS would run afoul of Federal Election Commission rules and could be required to disclose its donors. Emerge America, a group which helps Democratic women seeking elected office, said it lost it tax-exempt status last October. The IRS invoked the “private benefit doctrine” barring 501(c)(4) status for any group promoting a candidate or political party. The IRS announced its final decision in May.

In June the IRS said it denied 501(c)(4) tax-exemption for an unnamed political group also under the private benefit doctrine. The IRS is barred by law from disclosing the group’s name and the group has not publicly identified itself. The group had one objective: to serve the political goals of its founder, the IRS said. A 501(c)(4) group can spend some funds on political advocacy, but electioneering cannot be its sole reason for existence or comprise a majority of its spending…”

We all know this is about the tea parties illegally dumping money from Charles & David Koch into their tea party candidates.

Never mind that, in the spring of 2012 something like 31 Republicans demanded that Eric Holder investigate the AP leak.  They seem to forget that elephants allegedly never forget.  These conservative fake elephants who reek of rancid tea forced upon them by the Koch Machine can’t remember a damn thing, right?

“…“The numerous national-security leaks reportedly originating out of the executive branch in recent months have been stunning,” they (Republicans) wrote to Holder. “If true, they reveal details of some of our nation’s most highly classified and sensitive military and intelligence matters, thereby risking our national security, as well as the lives of American citizens and our allies. If there were ever a case requiring an outside special counsel with bipartisan acceptance and widespread public trust, this is it,” they wrote….”

They were for investigating the leaks before they were against them.  You can’t have it both ways – can you?  Is it possible all of this is to hide the fact that Obama has presided over the most rapid deficit reduction since World War II?  Is it possible that big spender Obama isn’t such a big spender at all, and the little tea party owned whores in the House and Senate are the real big spenders?  This can’t possibly be fun:

“...Here’s a real bitter irony for the GOP. At the same time as their ideology took an ugly beating in the reality department, the man they are determined to destroy has a better record at deficit reduction than any of their recent Presidents. In fact, government spending under President Obama has grown at a slower rate than it did under any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, according to Bloomberg (that’s over 50 years ago, if you’re counting). Ironically, this fact is due in part to their own obstructionism and President Obama’s endless compromises with them….”

It’s all about repeating the lies about Barack Obama.  If they can’t destroy him one way, they’ll try something else.

Politicus USA

The Pink Flamingo never thought I would be in a position where I would be defending the IRS.  Just how much of the GOP Benghazi witch hunt costing?  Yep, I’m defending the IRS.  It isn’t about far right ire, but about destroying the IRS.  It’s about destroying the IRS to protect the Koch Machine.

It’s nothing more and nothing less.

Oh, it’s also about seeing how stupid the GOP in the House and Senate can possibly be.

It’s also about watching the far left wax poetic in their ire against the evil Obama Administration going after the poor little AP reporter who betrayed a CIA agent.

Evidently false ire is an equal opportunity emotion, for both the far right and the far left.

Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here on this planet!

“...The goal has always been, Charles says, “true democracy,” where people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money.” (“Now in our democracy you elect somebody every two to four years and they tell you how to run your life,” he says.)…”

There is nothing wrong with having wealth. The Pink Flamingo aspired to it on a daily basis. I was once ‘well off’ but no longer am. My lack of financial where-with-all is due, as is much of the nation, to the economy, the real estate crash, and unbridled greed. A single individual cannot effect the economy. Real estate crashes have been happening on a somewhat cyclical basis for most of this nation’s history. That’s life. What isn’t acceptable though, is having one’s future and financial security stripped, through no fault of their own, other than the fact that the older generation was far too trusting in their choice of financial planners, institutions, and brokers.

What is wrong is when wealth becomes so concentrated, and so much of a means to an end that those who have it will literally do anything, to keep it, regardless of who they destroy in the process.  If it were just The Pink Flamingo’s parents who were caught in this trap, I would say, that’s the name of the game.  You snooze you lose.  But, I learning, in what is almost a weekly basis, that good men and women, decent people who have worked hard their entire lives have been cleaned, some of them by brokers they trusted most in this world – godchildren, even.

The frequency of hearing more and more about honorable, honest people who have worked hard, their entire lives, have saved, played the game the by the rules, put up a considerable nest-egg, and then being subjected to the indignities of having that nest egg stripped by pure greed is becoming alarmingly frequent.  The ones who are hurting the most are the real “Makers” the men and women who built business, made a small fortune, and trusted that fortune to see them through the rest of their lives, and to see that their children got a little something.  Most don’t have a pension.  Most of them put a bare minimum into social security.  They were so busy being taxed at upward of 40-50% that they couldn’t afford it.  They would stash and build a nest egg.  Once they retired, that nest egg was put out at interest, used to purchase land, or handed over to a broker to invest.

People who had a cash flow and income of at least $150K a year, are now barely making due on $15,000 social security.  They are being forced to liquidate, with the vultures who scammed them out of their hard-earned savings stepping in to pick at what is left.  They are being harassed on an hourly basis by credit card companies, over a bill that is two days late, and maybe a hundred bucks.  The problem is, when you don’t have enough money to pay for food, you need that hundred bucks.  There is no end to the merciless vulture culture that has been created in this country.

Economist View

In many ways, it is reaching the point where it is almost evil.  Greed is a vice.  Greed is not good, it is evil.  It is the basis of much of the heartache and trauma of the world.  Greed destroys.  It kills.  It ruins lives, and those are just the lives of the greedy.  What it does to those who are stepped upon in order to enable the greedy is even worse.

Paul Krugman once wrote:

NYTimes

The Unites States of America, once that shining city on a hill, is no longer that shining city.  It has become a fortress of gold-pressed latinum, where only those who are part of this new power structure are allowed to enter.  It is a power structure where the ultra wealthy, thanks to Citizen’s United, are allowed to spread their wealth in a most alarming manner, completely undermining the basic tenets of our Republic.  When individuals of great wealth are allowed to spend more than the rest of us, to purchase political favors and candidates, it is the end of our world as we know it.

Mother Jones

It is about the Rise of the Oligarchs.

“…Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning “few”, and ἄρχω (arkho), meaning “to rule or to command”) is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who pass their influence from one generation to the next.[citation needed] In his 2011 book Oligarchy, Jeffrey A. Winters defines oligarchy as “the politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors.” In Winters’ definition, massive wealth is the key factor in identifying oligarchs.

Throughout history, oligarchies have been tyrannical (relying on public obedience and/or oppression to exist) or relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy….”

CNBC

What do they want?

“...From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation….”

This is so wrong:

Forbes

 ”...And yes, I am going to call “conservatives” fascists in this post, because the people who cheer the death of their fellow citizens aren’t good Americans. They aren’t good Christians either. If you hate the poor and wish death upon the sick, you aren’t a Christian, you’re a Roman. If you believe in torture and the death sentence I don’t understand how you reconcile the torture and death penalty imposed upon Jesus, but more importantly to my point, if you believe in small democracy and a limited democracy that subservient to the wealthy and business interests alone, you don’t believe in democracy, you believe in Oligarchy.

The idea of “Free Markets” is a direct assault on the central idea behind Democracy. The idea that Democracy via Government has no place in Governing the commerce conducted within the state is a method of thwarting democracy. If one wealthy Oligarch can have his will over the combined will of millions of his fellow citizens than he is not their peer, he is their King.We have an Oligarchy in America, that can not be disputed.

There are billionaires who control multi-billion dollar industries who exert enormous wealth and power, and they are the bribe makers, they are the men who bribe our law makers and law enforcers to subvert our democracy to their interests, and not only have they succeeded, but they have declared a silent, coded all out war on the heart of American Democracy itself.

Coded language such “economic freedom” means the freedom of the rich to do as they please and the freedom for the victims of their robbery to die in the streets. “Social Justice” can only become the enemy of economic freedom when the basis of that economic freedom is fraudulent, that is why the bribe taking lawmakers hate “Social Justice”, because social justice means an end to the “Economic Freedom” to commit their fraud and do as they please.

What conservative fascists call “Socialism” is anything that stands in the way of their undemocratic “Free Markets”. Duckspeak was the word used by George Orwell in 1984 to describe the dumbing down of language into a incomprehensible system of relaying talking points to the brain that fitted perfectly within party approved discussion. When I hear conservative fascists speak the same talking points ad verbatim in a mishmosh of disconnected lunacy, Duckspeak is what I am hearing….”

Right now, The Pink Flamingo is having a very difficult time writing this post.  Thanks to the wonderful greed of the brave new world, much of what remained of my world has come crashing down on me, this evening.  The good news, or the bad news is that I’m not the only person having my life pulled out from under me.  It appears to be the name of the tame today.  If you’re not part of the 0.1% in this world, you are fodder to be trod under their feet.

No, I did not feel like this, once upon  a time.  I thought I was part of the upper 5%.  At one time, I was.  But, the way the game is rigged, today, even what remains is so easily taken from you by greed and selfishness, by cruelty, lies, and cheating.

The worst problem with the new American Oligarchs is the fact that they are sad, pathetic selfish little people who are willing to destroy our country, just to have their own way.  They are richer than anyone in history.  That didn’t work out for King Solomon.  It didn’t work out for Midas.  It didn’t work out for Caligula or Nero.  It’s not going to work out for them.

Oh, they may be spared the humbling, gift of problems, that turn us into real, feeling individuals.  They may not need to worry about not being able to pay their bills, have their lights cut off, or not be able to afford their medications.  They might not need to worry about their parents and their loss of financial stability.  After all, they are part of the problem.

They don’t need to worry about much of anything in their strange and convoluted version of Randian socialism.  They are removed from all the problems of life to the point where they have no real grasp of reality.  They’re spoiled, selfish, and terribly childish.  One of these days, some of these men are going to go off the deep end and start making Caligula type demands on the American people.  I wonder if anyone will say anything?

It’s not like the far right really cares.  People like Rush Limbaugh, Sean  Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and the usual punditry suspects really aren’t all that in to worshiping money.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is that they are worshiping the wealthy.

That’s a sad state of affairs that allow the oligarchs to grow increasingly more powerful as they continue to purchase great chunks of our society.  The own the Republicans in the House, Senate, and throughout the states.  They basically control the Supreme Court.  They can do anything they want.

That’s what an Oligarch is.

Unlimited power that has corrupted, in unlimited ways.

from Sierra Madre, Ca.
May 3, 1922 – April 18, 2013

After nearly a month of heavy fighting U.S forces were able to capture the island of Iwo Jima. A flag was raised to seal the victory. When asked is anyone had a larger flag it was Lt. Wood who was able to provide one and a picture that has come to symbolize the sacrifice and heart of the military was taken. On April 18, Alan Wood passed away at the age of 90.

You can read more about Lt. Alan Wood here
his Post Was Suggested By Katie

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives just so others may get to enjoy freedom. For that I am proud to call them Hero.
Those Who Say That We’re In A Time When There Are No Heroes, They Just Don’t Know Where To Look

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

The Pink Flamingo is beginning to wonder if the GOP has lost all reason? The IRS Commissioner who has allegedly targeted tea party groups is a Republican. Do they even comprehend how stupid they are when prevented with the salient facts?

Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars has the best summary of what is going on, that The Pink Flamingo has seen, to date.

The Pink Flamingo is trying to go back and remember the process. I was trying to put my non-profit together during the Reagan years. As a “good” Republican, I had found favor with everyone in DC, to put my group together. Both US Senators from South Carolina were helping me. I had several other Republican senators helping me. Newt Gingrich’s office was helping me. The newly formed Congressional Space Caucus was helping me. My local Congressman was helping. The Congressman in the next district was helping me. The White House Science Office was helping me. I had far more approved assistance out of DC than any of the so-called targeted Tea Party groups had, and I gave up after a year. Add the fact that my accountant was a former IRS official, and maybe you can begin to see how near the entire process is – unless you have a tremendous amount of money behind you.

If you have political money behind you, trying to form a non-profit, and dealing with the IRS, that alone sets off alarm bells with the process.

I’m trying to detail the process, for me, in order. It may have changed a little, but this will show how difficult it was.

1. Set up organization, with workable name
2. Establish board of directors who pass IRS scrutiny
3. Approach celebrity advisers (I had a whole slew for this)
4. Set up checking account
5. Get letterhead with board of directors
6. Establish by-laws that are IRS approved
7. Detail where funds will go if the group is dissolved
8. Apply for SC corporate status
9. Wait to see if the name is approved
10. If name is approved, pay on the dotted line
11. Apply for SC tax status
12. Start IRS paperwork
13. If – at any time, you take money you can’t account for, anything you do must be labeled “For Profit”
14. Just don’t bother taking donations – it further screws up the process

This was at least a year.

I finally gave up. It wasn’t worth it.

Everyone knew I wasn’t crooked. The publicity I received, and it was quite a bit, was fawning. I was publishing a small news magazine that had readership of about 10,000 people, that went to the highest levels of NASA, the aerospace industry, Congress, and the White House. My reputation was so good, I could easily score any interview I wanted, and did I ever get the big interviews: Carl Sagan, Deke Slayton, Jack Schmitt, Newt Gingrich, Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy, Gerald P. Carr, James Doohan, and numerous NASA officials.

The bottom line here is that, if I had a difficult time dealing with IRS paperwork, then I can only imagine what organizations like the Tea Parties, where there are constant rumors of corruption, and actual evidence of corruption, would go through. For the GOP to start becoming postal over this is just plain protesting far too much. To even discuss impeaching Barack Obama is stupid.

FDL

One reason the IRS is not targeting liberal and Democrat organizations like they are targeting the right is quite simple. The Dems don’t have near the grass roots organizations like the tea parties. They don’t have big Koch money behind them. There is something unspoken, that needs to be said. The Koch Machine is directly responsible for the tea parties. It’s not about citizen involvement but two obscenely rich men who are so corrupt and so evil they are trying to bring down the United States as we know it, so they can get even richer by having no regulations. They founded the tea parties.

“…In an article in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, author Jane Mayer links the billionaire brothers David Koch and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries to tea party movement funding. Mayer writes,
The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.

Reports indicate that the Tea Party Movement benefits from millions of dollars from conservative foundations that are derived from wealthy U.S. families and their business interests. It appears that money to organize and implement the Movement flows primarily through two conservative groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

In an April 9, 2009 article on ThinkProgress.org, Lee Fang reports that the principal organizers of Tea Party events are Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, two “lobbyist-run think tanks” that are “well funded” and that provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. Media Matters reported that David Koch of Koch Industries was a co-founder of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), the predecessor of FreedomWorks. David Koch was chairman of the board of directors of CSE.

CSE received substantial funding from David Koch of Koch Industries, which is the largest privately-held energy company in the country, and the conservative Koch Family Foundations, which make substantial annual donations to conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, etc. Media Matters reported that the Koch family has given more than $12 million to CSE (predecessor of FreedomWorks) between 1985 and 2002.

Koch Industries has denied specifically funding Freedomworks or tea parties directly, however. The company’s director of communications wrote “”Koch companies value free speech and believe it is good to have more Americans engaged in key policy issues. That said, Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch and David Koch have no ties to and have never given money to FreedomWorks. In addition, no funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.” Koch’s director of communications did affirm, however, that the company funds Americans for Prosperity (AFP). TPM’s Lee Fang reports that “AFP was founded in part by the company’s Executive Vice President, David Koch. He is currently the chairman of the board of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.”

Media Matters also lists the Sarah Scaife Foundation as having given a total of $2.96 million in funding to FreedomWorks. The Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation is financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune.

The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, also controlled by the Koch family, has donated more than $3 million to Americans for Prosperity. …”

The bottom line here is that the tea parties were formed so that Charles and David Koch could dump money into organizations in order to game the system.

“...There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president….”

It’s time for abject honesty here.  This is NOT about political targeting of the poor, pathetic, sacred, adorable little tea parties.  This is about a very dishonest and corrupt group of organizations, created by extremely dishonest and corrupt obscenely wealthy men to game the system.  This isn’t about IRS abuse.  It’s about IRS incompetence, but not abuse.  Abuse is what the Koch Brothers are doing to the system.  It is about a pair of very wealthy men who have morphed into some sort of James Bond type villains, determined to mold the United States into what they want, in order to become even wealthier and more powerful.

The tea parties are NOT about liberty, patriots, or the Constitution.  They are about warped and twisted men (mostly men) who are determined to destroy what is good and decent about this country.  They are using the John Birch Society, NRA, FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the network of tea party “patriots”, over one-third of whom are of a specific religious ideology, to almost take over this nation.

The want to do away with all environmental rules and regulations, minimum wage, worker’s rights, the IRS, and basic freedom for those of us who appose them.  When one considers the fact that they want to do away with the IRS, all of this makes a heck of a lot of sense.  Way too much sense.

In this country now, when you smell a rat, look for Charles & David Koch.

The Pink Flamingo is beginning to wonder if the GOP has lost all reason?  The IRS Commissioner who has allegedly targeted tea party groups is a Republican.  Do they even comprehend how stupid they are when prevented with the salient facts?

• When is alleged abuse of power really not abuse of power?
• When is hand-wringing about abuse of power political grandstanding?
• When is the right going to get a life?
• What if alleged abuse of power were simply incompetence?
• What if the alleged abuse of power was based on conservative stupidity?

According to Kevin Drum:

“...The problem is that the explosion of 501(c)4 groups is a genuine problem: they really have grown like kudzu, lots of them really are used primarily as electioneering vehicles, and the IRS has been either unwilling or unable to regulate them properly. So the fact that some of the folks responsible for processing these applications were looking for a way to flag potentially dubious groups is sort of understandable.

But understandable or not, they bungled it horribly, leaving themselves open to equally understandable charges of politicizing the IRS. Conservative groups are as outraged as liberals would be if the Bush-era IRS were flagging groups with “environment” or “progressive” in their names. So even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn’t matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation. They suspect there might be more to it, and so would I if the shoe were on the other foot. We need to find out for sure whether this episode was just moronic, or if it had some kind of partisan motivation.

What’s really unfortunate about all this is that it will probably put an end to any scrutiny of 501(c)4 groups, and that’s a shame. The IRS should be scrutinizing them, and it should be doing it on an ongoing basis. More than likely, though, Congress will step in to neuter them completely on this score, and the current Wild West character of 501(c)4 fundraising will continue unabated….”

What if this is all about Glenn Beck being targeted by the IRS for practices that, according to a Pink Flamingo source, were not quite kosher.  So was Sarah Palin. Sean Hannity was ripping off his non-profit that went to go to vet’s children for college.  Palin used the money from her group to support herself.  Beck was taking money in various location and not accounting for it.  The Pink Flamingo knows for a fact that Beck was collecting money, not giving receipts, and selling his book for far more than it cost on Amazon.  Everyone who goes near Glenn Beck knows he’s crooked.

There are rumors that the GOP, tea parties, and far right in the 2012 election were dirty as hell.  The FEC is terribly understaffed.  Simply investigating Mitt Romney’s campaign and the dirty contributions there should provide job security for an IRS agent.  When you add the money that came in from the Koch Machine, Sheldon Adelson, and the possibility that there was a conduit to funnel money from Saudi Arabia into Romney’s campaign that anyone who gets near it needs a shower it’s so dirty. We are looking at the most crooked, dirtiest, most illegal campaign season in history.  When you consider how tacky the Clinton campaign was, and then go back to Nixon, this is pure unadulterated filth.  It’s the political donation version of hard core S&M snuff porn.  It’s that obscenely dirty.  It is so dirty even a XXX rating isn’t enough.  It is pure, unadulterated filth, hard-core abject political pornographic filth.

And…Karl Rove is even worse.
So are….

• Charles Koch
• David Koch
• Glenn Beck
• Mitt Romney
• Sheldon Adelson
• Pete Peterson
• Bradley Foundation
• Americans for Prosperty
• ALEC
• Freedom Works
• Tea Party Express
• Tea Party Nation
• Tea Party Patriots
• Michele Bachmann
• Allen West
• Jim DeMint
• Crossroads GPS
• American Crossroads
• Misc. “religious” organizations
• NRA

These people deserve to be targeted!

MSNBC

Maybe if these organizations and groups like Z Street would play by the rules, maybe this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.  But – they don’t play by the rules.

Once again, we are dealing with the fact that the far right doesn’t quite live in the real world.  Have you ever considered applying for non-profit status with the IRS?  Years ago, The Pink Flamingo did, with a lobby organization I had created. Trust me, it isn’t worth it.  It was a pain in the tush. I finally gave up, after numerous meetings with an attorney and an accountant.

Anyone who has ever tried to do a tax-exempt non-profit knows how miserable the process is.  The process is so expensive and so miserable, The Pink Flamingo wonders why each and every little tea party group wanted their own non-profit status.  I finally gave up on the process.  It just wasn’t worth it.  None of this matters to the minions of the far right.  All they can see is abuse of power, because Obama is in office.  They are so determined that Barack Obama is the root of all evil that they can’t see the fact that the tea parties are dirtier than anything else the Democrats and the left are doing – currently.

From the Washington Post:

“…Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Sunday called the Internal Revenue Service’s singling out of conservative groups for extra scrutiny “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort. “This is truly outrageous and it contributes to the profound distrust that the American people have in government,” Collins, a moderate Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It is absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review, and I think it’s very disappointing that the president hasn’t personally condemned this and spoken out.”

The IRS apologized Friday for flagging groups seeking tax-exempt status with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names for extra attention. The official who oversees tax-exempt groups at the agency said the effort was not motivated by partisanship. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Obama was “concerned” about the reported behavior “of a small number” of IRS employees….”

A reasoned approach as suggested by Doug Mataconis.

Outside the Beltway

Okay…

“...“Mistakes were made,” the agency said in a statement. IRS official Lois Lerner explained that staffers used a “shortcut” to sort through a large number of applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status, highlighting organizations with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names. The IRS insisted emphatically that partisanship had nothing to do with it. However, it seems that groups with “progressive” in their titles did not receive the same scrutiny.If it was not partisanship, was it incompetence? Stupidity, on a breathtaking scale? At this point, the IRS has lost any standing to determine and report on what exactly happened. Certainly Congress will investigate, as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) promised. Mr. Obama also should guarantee an unimpeachably independent inquiry.One line of questioning should focus on how the IRS’s procedures failed to catch this “shortcut” before its employees began using it. Another should center on how this misguided practice came to light, and on what the IRS planned and plans to do about it. Ms. Lerner was responding to a question when the news first came out; it’s not clear whether the government intended otherwise to disclose what had happened. Nor have officials been clear whether disciplinary measures have been taken….”

Joe Klein has basically figured it out.

The Swampland

The right is forgetting about going after ACORN.  We all know that Karl Rove’s American Crossroads is dirty. The process of filing for IRS non profit political status is egregious.  You do get stuck answering absolutely absurd political questions.  I’ve been there and done that.  The American political memory is little more than walking amnesia.  We forget that dozens of these organizations sprang up, almost over-night.  Why would so darn many of these fly by night groups think they should be non-profit?   They should not have non profit status – they are political organizations.

Raw Story

When I was working on my non-profit political, lobby, education status, I was approved in South Carolina for a 501-C3 – if I could get my corporate status.  In order to do the corporate status, I had to work with established groups to set up my organization with by-laws that would be approved.

Part II of Tea for Two & the IRS will conclude tomorrow with an expose of the roots of the tea party movement.  Anyone who thinks this is simply about innocent politics is out of their minds.  The Pink Flamingo figures someone near the Koch Machine is assuming they are in hot water with the IRS.  Their tactics are to divide, conquer, then destroy.

The Pink Flamingo smells a Koch Rat in all of this.

If you haven’t noticed, The Pink Flamingo is an opera freak.  More accurate would be the statement that I am a confessed, highly addicted Baritone Barihunk Junkie.  I love the male voice, having a very low tolerance for tenors, mezzos and most sopranos.  When I go to an opera, I want to hear the men, not the other voices.  As a confessed Barihunk Junkie, I like my male voices well (or perhaps not so well) costumed.  I like my opera, like I like my history, accurate, well staged, and don’t want my intelligence insulted.

I love opera.  I want to be able to go to an opera and take my mother or a niece of nephew.  I can’t do that when we’re dealing with what can only be described as an x-rated performance where the principle characters prance around naked, on stage.  There was a recent staging of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail that had an overture which could only be described as a pornographic S&M fantasy.  Sorry, but that’s gone way too far.  Granted, Mozart and De Sade were contemporaries, and society at the time was far less prudish than it is today (seriously, folks) but still, enough is enough.

NO MAS!

I guess that’s why I have a tendency, now not to go see opera on stage.  It’s insulting, for the most part.  It’s deplorable, reprehensible, sometimes pornographic, and quite frequently an insult to the game. (I have a tendency to wax into baseball terms when describing opera.  There’s not much difference between the two sports).  And yes, I consider opera to be a sport.  One only needs to look as far as Barihunks to understand that a well trained baritone must be as well trained as baseball player.

Barihunks

Opera is a wonderful medium that combines the very best of everything:  music, theater, acting, special effects, costuming, and baritones.  It should be a visual feast for the eyes, an audio orgy for the ears, and a near spiritual experience for the soul.  One should leave a well-staged opera nearly stoned, the way The Pink Flamingo did one infamous night back in the 1980s after hearing Sherrill Milnes (the greatest baritone ever) do Simone Boccanegra.

(It is at this point The Pink Flamingo must mention that Milnes, in the prologue was one of the greatest visual feasts a woman could ever want to experience….sigh).  It is also at this point where The Pink Flamingo to admit to being such a Milnes fanatic that it was embarrassing.  My gosh the man could do a wild Giovanni!)

I was staying at the Plaza, and ended up, alone, on an elevator with one of the greatest hunk, heart-throb movie stars of my generation.  I was so stoned on the after-effects of Milnes’ Boccanegra that I did not even realize who I was visiting with – very nice man, wonderful manners – until I was off the elevator.  He’d been to the same performance, on the other side of the Met from The Pink Flamingo.  I did discover we had the same subscription seats as his best bud and his wife did on a different night.  Let’s just say the pair starred in a now iconic western from the 1970s, that was also a visual feast to the female eye.  My mother always appreciated our seats, more, when she learned just who was occupying them the night before we would!

I digress….

Opera, as theater, should be celebrated, dramatic, and exciting.  Currently, the Metropolitan Opera is suffering from floundering ticket sales.  If you don’t know why, just start looking at their current and past performances of current leadership.  To put it succinctly – THEY SUCK.

Opera is fantasy.  It should be staged as such.  It is also important to be stages as the composer wished it to be staged.  There are currently times when what is put on stage, production wise, is disgusting.  Case in point is the current staging of David McVicar’s Giulio Cesare.  I don’t give a rip if it is well criticized.  It’s disgusting.  It also reflects the very real problem facing opera and the world today.  Giulio Cesare is about Gaius Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.  It is NOT about some fantastical staging about the British Empire.  It is about very real men and women who lived and died at a given point in history.  Now, granted, in Handel’s day staging would probably have reflected his Baroque era, but, if we bow to tradition, then staging today should be quite modern.  Frankly, The Pink Flamingo would rather see staging that would be out of the HBO Mini-series Rome.  Let’s face it, you keep this up and someone’s going to set Aida as a step child to Gone With The Wind before it’s over.  (Actually, the wouldn’t.  That would take a knowledge about costume and fashion, and today’s opera reflects none of that).

The Pink Flamingo is a costume freak.  I am currently doing early edits and revisions on a book that contains nearly 2200 unpublished photos reflecting American fashion from 1860-1910.  I know my fashion and my costume.  Before his Alzheimer’s set in, my father could look at a car and tell you the year.  I can look at a women’s dress and tell you the year.

Once in awhile you can get away with a different staging.  The Pink Flamingo happens to think that Don Giovanni is one of those operas that can be an anything goes with staging.  If reflects the life of Don Juan of Austria, the illigimate son of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (Verdi’s Ernani), who is currently being reassessed by historians.  A womanizer, he was also responsible for beating back the Muslim forces at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.  If he has not died of typhoid, and had not been held in check by his half-brother, Phillip II, the outcome of the Spanish Armada would have been entirely different.

Don Giovanni was first staged in 1787.  Because Mozart was probably the first modern rock star with the life-style to prove it, I think you do anything to it, and that’s what is happening.  Once upon a time, The Pink Flamingo was involved in a correspondence with the late, great Boris Goldovsky about the Don Juan Legend.  Goldvosky felt the legend was eternal.  The Pink Flamingo has spent thirty years researching it.  It basically does not appear before the late 16th Century, almost contemporary with Don Juan of Austria.

Because of Don Juan’s nature, staging can be fun.  The Pink Flamingo would love to see a Regency version of the opera, complete with Don Juan as Mr. Darcy.  Modern versions of the character are part of our contemporary every day culture:  James Bond and Captain James. T. Kirk. Both settings would make a wonderful staging of the opera.  Frankly, the Trekkie in me would love to stage Don Giovanni as Star Trek with Don Giovanni as Captain Kirk (old uniforms, please).  FYI, The Pink Flamingo prefers Simon Keenlyside’s Giovanni. He is quite elegant in the role.

You can have fun with opera.  The other night I was reading an opera post about recent stagings that basically border on the pornographic.  Burkhard C. Kosminski, who did the production, is pushing the envelope way to far, in my humble estimation. I suspect what brings this post on, now, is a current staging of Tannhauser that is an obscenity.  There is no other way to describe it.  The Pink Flamingo doesn’t care that there are those who say the production should not have been canceled.  It should never have been allowed in the first place.  During the overture (my personal most favorite piece of music in the whole world – aside from Live and Let Die) a group of naked Jews are executed, by the Nazis.  I’m sorry, but that’s going way too far. With a little bit of luck, this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and brings some sense and beauty back into the staging of opera.  One should not require a NC-18 rating on an opera production.

This is one of those operas where we have a very real date of when it should take place.  Wolfram von Eschenbach, a principle character in the story – and one of the greatest baritone arias ever – lived from c. 1170 – c. 1220.  It is high Medieval, with all the beauty of the period.  Don’t make it anything else.  The Pink Flamingo did see a clip from a version where they turned it into a Gauguin moral play.  It might work in that era, but I can’t see putting it anywhere else.

One recent exception is Willy Decker’s recent staging of Verdi’s La Traviata.  While Traviata might have been Wyatt Earp’s favorite opera, it is not mine.  In fact, until I saw the Decker staging, I never cared for the opera. I suffered through it one time at the Met, simply because Sherrill Milnes was doing Germont.  Decker’s staging transformed the opera.  I don’t like modern renditions, but putting it in the era of AIDS, makes a heck of a lot of sense.  I don’t mind adding that I prefer Dmitri Hvorostovsky to Sherrill Milnes as Germont.

The problem is the fact that we’re dealing with such cultural illiteracy and such historical ignorance that the fortunate few who end up scoring the big productions are making fools of themselves, and the opera going public by exposing their ignorance like the cheap dirty flashers they are.  They have no grasp of history, of costume and the role of history in stage-craft. Instead of turning out something quite remarkable, they turn operatic productions into perversions of what the composer originally wanted.  As a writer, and as someone who has written a couple plays, I have written directions on exactly how I want them performed and staged.  If the production can’t follow my requirements, then don’t do the play.  It’s insulting.  I know exactly how I want my one man Doc Holiday performance staged.  I know exactly how another of my plays should be staged.  I have even written explicit instructions for costuming.  It is about respecting the material.  If you can’t respect it, don’t perform it.

Eschenbach wrote Parzifal. (And yes, The Pink Flamingo has read it).  That’s another opera that is suffering from the modern obscenities of staging.  Parsifal is an Arthurian tale. It is about Sir Percival and the Holy Grail.  As someone who has studied the Matter of Britain almost as much as Tombstone and the Wild West, the subject should be sacred.  It should be performed in an almost sacred manner, and once was.  Now, though, it is one of those operas that is subjected to what can only be described as x-rated insanity.

When dealing with operas like Tannhauser, Parsifal, and the Ring (don’t even get started on the Met’s latest insanity there) it should be a Tolkin fantasy come to life.  With all the advances in modern staging and the current trends in fantasy, these operas should be such a lush, fantastical feast for the eyes, that people would be standing in line to see them, not avoiding them like the plague.  Yes, it is a Pink Flamingo fantasy to one day stage The Ring.  If I were doing it, Tannhauser, and Parsifal, it would be like Camelot meets Lord of the Rings with a little bit of Star Wars tossed in for good measure. One could even make an argument that the Ring could be staged as a version of Star Wars, and get away with it.

The argument is that the modern audience is so stupid and brain dead they can’t comprehend traditional staging, beautiful costumes, see an opera as it was intended, and not understand what is going on without turning it into something so pornographic it rivals an x-rated film they would show after midnight on Cinemax.  Where is the art and beauty?

It’s like the recent Met production of Un Ballo in Maschera.  Don’t get me wrong, Dmitri Hvorostovsky in a Fedora puts Indiana Jones to shame, but still, the staging defies logic.  The story is about the 1792 assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden.  When he ran into trouble with the censors (as usual) Verdi put the staging in colonial America.  If you follow Verdi’s example then you do what the Met did back in the 1980s and did just that, staged it in colonial America.  I saw the production with Sherrill Milnes, and the great Luciano Pavarotti.

The new production defies imagination.  If you know anything about history, then you know that there are very few times in history when the storyline could take place would be from that 1792 about 1816 at the latest.  It was the era of revolution.  If it was the era of revolution, why not place it in that time?  If so, then you do early Regency costumes.  The production would be incredible. Could you imagine Dmitri costumed like Mr. Darcy?  Could we even stand it?  Let’s face it, there’s NOTHING anywhere like Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy.  They even refer to it as Jane Austen pornography!

I suspect this is what defies imagination.  If the various and sundry renditions of Jane Austen movies had not done so well at the box office, or miscellaneous fantasy and super hero movies did not do so well (look at the Lord of the Rings or Titanic) maybe the culturally depraved individuals who think that young audiences don’t want anything with costumes and special effects might have a point.  They don’t.  They are so completely out of touch with the realities of our culture, that they are ruining opera.  Reality is is something so lush and so romantic that people salivate over it.  You don’t even get decent box office takes for the modern or for logic depraved versions of S&M that are explicit they require an NC-17 rating.  It doesn’t work.  If people don’t go to see those movies, why would you think they would waste their money on an opera with the same sort of staging.

They don’t.

Now, The Pink Flamingo has a difficult time dealing with alleged Christians who are constantly demanding God’s Judgment upon this nation, just because they aren’t getting their way.  They remind me spoiled five year old little brats who are going to hold their breath until they get their own nasty way, or pass out in the process.

From what The Pink Flamingo can ascertain, Rush Limbaugh is trying to find a way to blame the captivity of those poor women in Barack Obama.  Never mind the fact that they were abducted when GWB was in office.  We don’t need no stinkin’ logic when it comes to hating Obama. Evidently, because Ariel Castro is a registered Democrat, all Democrats are evil?  Is that their way of thinking?   Jim Hoft blames it on the Democrats. He gets his information from some stupid American Thinker article by Oleg Atbashian.  Of course Jim Treacher would repeat the blather.  So does Weasel Zappers.

In other words, these abject jerks, don’t give a damn about there women who have been horrible abused, molested, raped, and tortured.  All that matters to them is that the monsters who did this were Democrats.

Memeorandum

FYI:  Ted Bundy was a Republican.  In fact, it appears that something like 80% of serial killers are Republican.  Gary Ridgeway, Dennis Rader, David Berkowitz supported Ross Perot.  Jeffrey Dahmer was a Republican.

The Other McCain

You, know all of this makes perfect sense, when one considers that Rush Limbaugh has become nothing but a far right welfare queen.  What is fascinating is that Rush is defending racist and bigoted Jason Richwine, but damning Obama by pointing out that a very bad man was a Democrat.    Of course Rush is defending him.  Rush is now nothing but a two million dollar whore for the Heritage Foundation.  In other words, considering that the Koch Machine basically controls Heritage, Rush is a Koch Whore.

When does this insanity stop?

I don’t know which is worse, the fact that Rush Limbaugh tried to pin a horrific and brutal abduction, assault, and rape of innocent young women on Barack Obama or the fact that he saw a need to trivialize the incident.  Then again, he may have morphed into nothing but an attention whore.

It’s time to get out that scorecard. Once again we have been treated to the extreme right’s racist view of Hispanics.  In 1994 Charles Murray, who now works for the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a book called The Bell Curve.  The most recent Heritage Foundation study on immigration was authored by Jason Richwine, who wrote a dissertation based on Murray’s work.  Even more interesting is the fact that Richwine was a research fellow for the AEI.

“…Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.‘…”

Is this racist?  It sure reads racist to The Pink Flamingo.

Maddow Blog

Once again, it all goes back to John Tanton.  Doesn’t it always?

“...Richwine’s anti-immigrant language is reminiscent of that used by the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group that “funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the ‘science’ of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities.” The Pioneer Fund supports the notoriously anti-immigrant and fellow SPLC hate-group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded by nativist John Tanton who publishes The Social Contract Press. Richwine spoke at a 2010 event for The Social Contract Press on the “myth of immigrant crime,” and, according to the group, argued that “immigrant and illegal alien crime is higher than crime committed by other demographic groups.” After joining the Heritage Foundation’s Domestic Policy Studies Department in January 2012, Richwine spoke at a Social Contract writing workshop last September about the “connection between culture and immigration” as part of a weekend event hosted by anti-immigrant and white nationalist organizations….”

There’s another very serious problem here, one that The Pink Flamingo has only now noticed.  The American Enterprise, which is home to Charles Murray of The Bell Curve, where Richwine was a research fellow, is a very important libertarian conservative institution.

Right Wing Watch

The Pink Flamingo, over the years, has been accustomed to finding Tanton’s racists in fringe organizations.  I never even thought about those which are mainstream.

Right Wing Watch

“...He then goes on to prove each point. On the question of IQ, he relies on a broad variety of research, from the American Psychological Association—to underscore the extent to which established measurements have found racial differences in intelligence—to the work of the late J. Philippe Rushton who argued that these differences were genetic in origin. He cites one article that deals with the differences of the “negroid brain.”

In trying to explain the IQ differential between races, Richwine borrows from Rushton, arguing that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ.” He tries to hedge against accusations of racism by noting that you can’t blame “obvious biases in test construction and administration” for the differential. And he gives an example of what he means when he says one racial group is less intelligent than another. These differentials, he writes “places the average black at roughly the 16th percentile of the white IQ distribution.”

There are a host of problems with “IQ” as a measurement, including the degree to which it corresponds with what we understand as “intelligence” and the extent to which IQ measurements reflect long-term systemic bias. Let’s set those aside. The more obvious problem is with trying to measure “racial” differentials in the first place.

Remember, racial groups are imagined communities; there’s nothing biological or genetic that makes someone “black” or “white.” These are social distinctions. What does it mean to measure “Hispanic” intelligence, when Hispanics come from a huge variety of socio-cultural backgrounds and environments? Hispanic isn’t a “population” as much as it is an umbrella term for populations, namely, people with heritage in the Spanish-dominant countries of the Americas….”

They have him on video.

Little Green Footballs

One would expect, anti-Hispanic bigot Michelle Malkin to stick up for Richwine.  After all, she writes for VDare which is one of the most infamous White Supremacist, racist, and bigoted sites online.  They are associated with Stormfront, American Renaissance, and the entire Tanton Network.

Let’s be honest here, it’s the racism, stupid.

The Pink Flamingo is only touching on things that have come up in the past day or two.  I could do more, but let’s just stick to the basics.

Let’s start with the NRA.  Their ‘youth’ based magazine is suggesting that kids build a firing range inside, and shoot BBs.  I’m not quite sure just what sort of a person would even allow their child to have a magazine from the NRA, but let’s put it even more succinctly.  It doesn’t matter if you are anti-BB guns or not.  Any fool knows that you put a child and a BB gun lose in a house, and you have a recipe for disaster.  My sister and I have been there and done that, shot out a few windows – from inside the house, the wall, and each other.  This isn’t even about NRA indoctrination camps, which they have, but just plain common sense.

NRA Insights

I think, if a kid lives in an area where there is hunting and an outdoor culture, yes, they should learn gun safety.  It is a part of their lives. Living where I do in New Mexico, I can think of any number of reasons someone living on a ranch or down one of the many dirt and gravel roads that lead, almost to nowhere, need to learn how to use a gun. Honestly, if I had a kid, and I lived where my parents did, they would be taught gun safety.  No, it’s not for protection from humans, but from wildlife.

Here in New Mexico, as in many places in the southwest, things are a little strange.  Due to the many fires and lack of rain and snow, the predators are moving out of the wilds and approaching civilization.  In the Hondo Valley, mountain lions have reached such a proportion that they are almost epidemic.  In the past two years, my parents’ neighbor has shot three of them, on our property line.  There is one that has marked my parents courtyard and patio area, claiming it as its own.

When this happens, even if you aren’t elderly you don’t go out at night without making a heck of a lot of noise.  It isn’t safe.  On some canyon  property we own, bobcats are so numerous a person is not safe on the property. Where I lived in South Carolina, thirteen years ago, coyotes packs were so large, one did not go out in certain portions of my parents’ yard if you heard them.  You didn’t go out at night.  It wasn’t safe.

We have rattlesnakes.  We have bears, which Game and Fish handle.  That’s not the point.  If something happens and you need to defend yourself, you need a gun. Ergo – if you have kids, who are responsible and over a certain age, yes you do have them properly trained in fire-arm safety.  I have a friend who told me, not long after moving here, to make sure that anyone who comes visiting, from back east, comprehends the fact that you do not go anywhere around here, on a hike, or even just for a long walk, without being armed with a pistol and a shot gun.  It’s that simple.

There is nothing wrong with a gun and knowing how to shoot.  There is something inherently wrong with suggesting that kids shoot a BB gun in the house.  Forget the injuries and ‘death’ from BBs.  The death will come from kids being killed by their mothers after taking out the china cabinet.  I know this, because my sister shot a BB in the house, that just missed one of my mother’s curio cabinets by about two inches.  She shot out the patio door, from inside the living room.  She missed a very expensive lamp by a couple feet.

Then, there is Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh has completely lost it.

“...Limbaugh said, “Three women missing nine plus years, found alive, all were teenagers when they disappeared. Does anybody know yet why? Has the story advanced yet? Three brothers..their brothers, Three brothers, but not related to the three women have been arrested in Cleveland, which voted Obama. Not that that has anything to do with anything. One of who has a baby. Double welfare benefits if one of the women has a baby. No, I don’t know. Fascinating that the same thing happened on Hawaii 5-0, and I guarantee you people watch it. It happened on TV. It is for real.”…”

Here’s more.

Addicting Info

The Pink Flamingo is a Hawaii 5-O fan.  I watched Monday’s episode.  From what I can remember, the murdered 18 year old had also been subjected to sexual assault.  There’s nothing wrong with detesting Barack Obama.  It’s a free country.  I detest the likes of Mitt Romney and the tea parties enough to have vote for Obama.  That’s freedom.  There comes a point though, when one’s hatred and editorial stand become so completely outlandish and devoid of reality that it’s just plain disgusting.

I wonder if Rush even watched that specific episode of 5-O?  Something tells me he didn’t.  If so, he would have known that there was a bottom line of sexual assault, and sexual slavery and pedophilia that went almost unsaid.  There was something horrific and chilling about the episode, one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a long time.

Now, let’s use some reality here.  There was a little child by rape.  She was born in the home, and hidden.  There was no birth certificate.  She was hidden.  How the heck was the freak going to get her registered for benefits?  How the (I want to use some bad language here, but I’m not) heck was the abductor going to get welfare benefits for three kidnapped women who were held captive all those years?

I’m not getting this one.  The only thing I’m getting is the hatred the man has for anything Democrat.

While we’re at it, the other day Rush went off demonizing young female college grads as liberals who purchase all the advertising slots, ergo, they don’t like him, ergo he’s losing his advertisers.    There’s something at play here, and it’s becoming more and more obvious.  Rush Limbaugh has a problem with young female college graduates.  He doesn’t like young professional women. He treats them like dirt, demonizing them.  His acolytes pick up on this and do the same thing.

Maybe the real problem is that Rush Limbaugh is a charter member of the He Man Woman Haters Club.

I truly wish I had more vices. I rarely drink, don’t smoke, and avoid anything fried, like the plague.  I rarely consume any form of meat, don’t eat desserts, and am allergic to eggs.  My primary vice in life is Sonic Iced Tea – plain, NO sugar.  I can’t stand sugar in tea.  It’s nasty.  It’s disgusting, vile, and perverted.  Unfortunately, a goodly portion of the 2.2 billion gallons of tea consumed in this country, not only is iced, but much of it is sweetened in one way or another.  It may be that 60% of all tea consumed is in the South.

The real irony is that it is viewed as a purely American drink, but, from the recipes I’ve been able to trace, it began during the Regency period, in England.  I know this is going to come as a total shock, shattering some nerves, but Jane Austen may have drank a version of sweet iced tea called Regent’s Punch.

Lord Have Mercy!

In fact, Jane Austen may have sampled the ‘sweet’ tea, chilled, before anyone across the pond ever did.

The oldest known recipe for sweet iced tea is found in a 1879 cookbook called Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree, who was born in Texas.  True Southern Sweet Tea contains up to 22 Brix of sugar.  That means that 22% of the liquid is pure dissolved sugar solids – twice the amount of sugar you would get in a Coke. What truly fascinates The Pink Flamingo is the fact that in England, by 1811 a Prince Regent’s Punch, that was basically iced tea, with sugar, and about a million parts of other beverages, was quite common.

What’s Cooking America

A Route 44 Sweet Tea has 400 calories and 100g of sugar!  The same size Coke has 101g of sugar, and only 370 calories!  A plain unsweet Route 44 Iced Tea has NO calories, and no grams of sugar. You can get a diet green with 10 calories.  At Starbucks, a Trenta Iced Tea – sweetened, has 140 calories and 36 grams of sugar. Un has none.  One packet of Sugar in the Raw (which I have a tendency to use with Starbuck’s tea) has 20 calories and 5 grams of sugar.  There are 122 calories in a 12 oz can of soda. With fountain drinks, 32 ozs of classic Coke have 310 calories and 86 grams of sugar.

There’s another reason not to drink sweet tea.  Ever spilled iced tea into your laptop?  The Pink Flamingo has.  It was a disaster.  I ended up with a new computer.  One reason I now drink iced tea in a Sonic container is because it makes it more difficult for the cat to knock it over into the keyboard.  That’s only one of the dangers.

There are tales of kidney stones.  There are some Luddites who are determined that drinking iced tea with a meal isn’t good for you.  I’ve been doing it all my life.  Do I really care that drinking cold tea isn’t good for you?  Give me a break. Soda isn’t good for you.  Booze isn’t good for you.  Drinking the wrong kind of water isn’t good for you.  FYI, now we are to cut back on chocolate, nuts and spinach to prevent kidney stones.

What the H – E – Double Toothpick are we to eat and drink?

You can’t smoke.
Can’t eat sugar.
Can’t have gluten.
Can’t have fat.
Can’t have a lot of red meat.
Not to have a lot of good cheese.
Need to leave off the mayo.
Stay away from soda.
Lay off the ice cream.
Orange Juice is now evil.
Grapefruit juice interacts with medications.
Pasta has carbs.
Potatoes are evil.
Butter is something criminal.

I give up….

I’ll have a burger, meat well done, slice of raw union, mayo, ketchup, mustard, pickles, maybe lattice, fries, and onion rings, topped off with a half gallon of UNSWEET tea.

Or…

I could just have a chili dog.

They talk about all the things that soda does to a person, but what about sweet tea?  What about that obesity epidemic?  When you’re drinking a beverage that is 22% pure sugar, don’t talk to me about healthy, diabetes, or anything else healthy and swizzle that pure sugar.  Every time a person drinks one of those tea based drinks, if they aren’t ‘diet’, they’re loaded with sugar.

Sweet tea anyone?

Maybe people should start drinking their iced tea plain, the way it was originally intended to be consumed!

480th Tactical Fighter Squadron
April 13, 1942 – January 22, 1968

On 9 November 1967, while on a flight over North Vietnam, Captain Sijan ejected from his disabled aircraft and successfully evaded capture for more than six weeks.

During this time, he was seriously injured and suffered from shock and extreme weight loss due to lack of food.

After being captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, Captain Sijan was taken to a holding point for subsequent transfer to a prisoner of war camp.

In his emaciated and crippled condition, he overpowered one of his guards and crawled into the jungle, only to be recaptured after several hours.

He was then transferred to another prison camp where he was kept in solitary confinement and interrogated at length.

During interrogation, he was severely tortured; however, he did not divulge any information to his captors.

Captain Sijan lapsed into delirium and was placed in the care of another prisoner.

During his intermittent periods of consciousness until his death, he never complained of his physical condition and, on several occasions, spoke of future escape attempts.

Captain Sijan’s extraordinary heroism and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty at the cost of his life are in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Air Force and reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Armed Forces.

You can read more about Capt. Sijan here

This Post Was Suggested By Michael

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives just so others may get to enjoy freedom. For that I am proud to call them Hero.
Those Who Say That We’re In A Time When There Are No Heroes, They Just Don’t Know Where To Look

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

Monday was one of those days for The Pink Flamingo.  I got a kick out of the Kobe Bryant story, simply because of the years my mother spent nagging requesting my sister and I remove our things from her house in Fair Play.  She was going to dump it when they moved.  She didn’t.  The movers packed it up and it’s sitting in either a storage unite near moi, or in the White Elephant, my father’s $100K storage ‘shed’ and office. (That’s now an extra guest room and will be used for nurses, when we need them, so that sorta worked out).  That’s not the narrative, it’s about holding on to things, having them disposed of, and having other people use what isn’t really theirs.

I look at it in one of two ways.  My research and writing is good enough to be used, without citing me.  The bad news is that the author who did it made out quite well financially.  She has been wined, dined, interviewed on CSPAN for an hour, and is making money on playing fast and lose with the facts – other peoples’ stuff.

On Monday, one of the things I did was do the meals on wheels thing for my parents.  I spent five hours cooking yesterday, so my mother could have a break.  When I was down at their house, listening to her explain why Princess Sadie (their Bichon) had gained so much weight, I told her about the Kobe Bryant story.  Before I go any farther, Sadie is gaining weight because my father gets up in the middle of the night, for a snack.  He eats a cookie, and Sadie eats a cookie.  He has peanuts and Sadie has peanuts, etc. etc. etc.  Alzheimer’s works quite well when you are a mooching 5 year old Bichon.

My mother started laughing about some very dear friends of ours, who are no longer with us.  When Tim and Bonnie were ready to move here to New Mexico, from Dallas, Bonnie did not have room for her grown childrens’ things.  So, she and Tim boxed them up, and called, telling them she was putting everything by the big trash bin, at the edge of the drive.  The garbage would be collected within the hour.  She hung up and watched.  Furious with her, all four converged on the house within fifteen minutes, taking everything home with them.

And so… “When are you going to go through the things you have next door.  If you would get rid of what you don’t want, I could move things from the storage unite and save that money.”  Never mind I’m putting my 1988 LeBaron Convertible Series B with the Maserati chassis there in the storage unit as soon as I can afford to have it moved from my carport to storage.  It is in nearly perfect condition – I’ve kept it that way…

“If you sister doesn’t come get things, I’m giving them to the church for the garage sale.”

“What do you think the girls would like?  They need to come go through things, or I’m giving them away.”

The threats get old.  She’s not going to give anything away. If she had, she would have done so, decades ago.  My mother even has a box, still, with a collection of plastic bed-pans collected from her numerous hospital stays.  You think she’s going to get rid of a set of old pots and pans or china?  My mother?

When does a person’s stuff they had as a child become the property of their parents?   Does it ever become the parent’s property?  Let’s face it, this is about respect, plain and simple.  It’s also about love, kindness, and caring about a person enough to treasure their treasures.

Then again I come from a family of legendary pack rats.  When the parents moved from South Carolina to New Mexico they not only brought with them 56 years of living, but things that belonged to my mother’s parents.  Then there were the things that belonged to my father’s mother’s family.  I swear, they never threw a durn thing away.  When you’re dealing with day by day memorabilia from the turn of the 19th Century and earlier, that is now a very good thing – if you want to endow a private museum.

There’s no way you can get rid of the 1880s trunk filled with generations of wedding dresses, my great-grandfather Froehlich’s long johns, and things like that.  You don’t get rid of 150 years of family photos.  You don’t get rid of the 17th century dresser that came over on the Mary & John not too long after the first Mayflower landing.   So – you get rid of the junque.  The problem is – that’s my junk!  When my 5 month old niece is my age, it will be worth something!

It’s about respect and tradition.  Let’s face it Kobe Bryant’s mother is coming across as a bitch.  I can’t imagine her spending $1200 a month to have it stored.  If so, bill him, don’t sell his treasures. She must really be pissed with him.

I should add that, after the recent fire scare here (2 years ago) I took advantage of my mother’s good graces to send a pick-up load of Sterlite boxes down to the White Elephant for storage. I also sent 2200 antique photos I’m using for a book.  I think there may be a half dozen boxes of Christmas ornaments.  I might have sent some furniture I wasn’t using.  (She is using my grandmother’s hutch in her TV room, so she can’t complain about that).  I don’t know what she wants.  I gave her a couple bottles of really good Kenwood, Jack London cab to make up for the inconvenience.

Look, I kept that one set of paper dolls here, in Aunt Mabel’s God Knows When chest. She can’t complain about that.  Thinking back on it, it could be the set of Cuisinart cookware I stored in the White Elephant, taking up quite a bit of storage space.  That might have pushed her over the top, as well as a heck of a lot of plastic picnic ware.  My sister took the Cuisinart with her last summer.  Can’t be that, can it?
I bet it was the set of lamps I’m not using.I can see how Kobe would be a little riled up about things.  I get annoyed just thinking that my mother might donate a box of cooking utensils I took town there two years ago.  No, Rachel took those home with her – I think.Okay, so it is funny.  I must add, though, that many of the items you see piled up in this photo now reside at my sister’s home in Memphis.  The stuff on the shelves is still on the shelves.  I suspect it will be on the shelves until Kobe Bryant’s mother comes to put it up for auction.

P. S.  I don’t know what my mother’s going to do when I get someone to help me haul two huge packing barrels of Star Wars and Star Trek memorabilia down to her house!  I suspect that could be the straw that breaks her camel’s back.  Somewhere in one of those boxes are the ticket stubs from all the games I saw Hank Aaron play.  I also have about 100 of those old Burger King Star Wars glasses.  I need to sell those.  I wonder if anyone wants a backing barrel of space shuttle press memorabilia?My mother wouldn’t get rid of that stuff, would she?

FYI, when last I spoke to my mother, she’d just finished drinking half a bottle of 1978 Buena Vista Private Reserve Cab.  She was quite mellow.

If you answered yes to any one of those questions, you may just be a brain-washed member of the great NRA Cult. Yes – cult. There is no other logical explanation for the brainwashing that is going on in the ranks of the far right.

“...a. A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader.
b. The followers of such a religion or sect.
2. A system or community of religious worship and ritual.
3. The formal means of expressing religious reverence; religious ceremony and ritual.
4. A usually nonscientific method or regimen claimed by its originator to have exclusive or exceptional power in curing a particular disease.
5.a. Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.
b. The object of such devotion….”

They say that the liberals, the liberal press, and the fake POTUS will stop at nothing to get their guns.  It looks like the far right freaks who now control the NRA are the ones who will stop at nothing, with their continuing thinly veiled racist attacks on a POTUS who isn’t lily white. The new NRA president, Jim Porter says it’s about Obama and his revenge – against what I’m not quite sure, that is the problem.

“…“Revenge is what is motivating the president’s unremitting challenge to gun owners today,” said Jim Porter, who will formally become the group’s president on Monday. “Obama is meeting and plotting with the who’s who of the gun ban movement.”…”

Media Matters

Glenn Beck says he’s not going to comply with the new gun regulations.

“…“They want to fundamentally transform our country and they’ve just about finished the project,” Beck said. “They feel they must regulate us until we comply, but I will not comply.” Beck warned that if Americans allow the government to infringe upon their right to ‘bear arms’ as enshrined in the second amendment of the US Constitution, then every other right and fundamental freedom will also be lost. “The second amendment was written to protect our natural rights, and we have also the responsibility to throw off the chains of tyranny,” he claimed….”

It’s like this, if there were background checks on guns could Beck, an alleged cokehead, even qualify to be allowed to own one.  Does he even own one?

News Corpse

Libertarian radio host, and disgraced former Marine, Adam Kokesh wants 1000 ‘patriots’ to join him, with loaded rifles, to march on Washington, on July 4.  He wants to abolish the federal government.  I guess he’s considered a patriot by some.  The Pink Flamingo considers him a traitor.  So far, 900 idiots have sent in their RSVP.

“...On the morning of July 4, 2013, Independence Day, we will muster at the National Cemetery & at noon we will step off to march across the Memorial Bridge, down Independence Avenue, around the Capitol, the Supreme Court, & the White House, then peacefully return to Virginia across the Memorial Bridge. This is an act of civil disobedience, not a permitted event. We will march with rifles loaded & slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated & cower in submission to tyranny. We are marching to mark the high water mark of government & to turn the tide. This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent. Should we meet physical resistance, we will peacefully turn back, having shown that free people are not welcome in Washington, & returning with the resolve that the politicians, bureaucrats, & enforcers of the federal government will not be welcome in the land of the free….”

Kokesh plans for his open rebellion to be peaceful.  The problem with the idiots who represent the far right gun fetish patriots is that they have a bad habit of shooting themselves, because they are so damn stupid!  They won’t be violent.  They’re bullies.  They’re also craven cowards.  If someone said boo, they would shoot themselves in the feet as they run away from anyone who would challenge their stupidity.

The Pink Flamingo has been a Republican my entire life.  I consider myself a Reagan Republican.  By today’s standards, I am a raging liberal, even if my political beliefs have changed, very little.  I’ve not changed, but the far right has grown so increasingly insane, I don’t even want to be associated with it.  I’ve reached the point where I don’t even know if I can continue to call myself a Republican.  The extremists who control the party no longer reflect what I believe.  They are an embarrassment, not only to the party, but themselves.

One of the reasons The Pink Flamingo is pointing this out, is because, low and behold, there are now conservatives who have had enough of this stupidity.  In this country, a teenager who may or may not be disturbed, can be arrested for terrorism threats yet, jerks like Kokech and Ted Nugent get a pass.  Wonder why?

American Thinker

The Pink Flamingo was shocked to discover that Rick Moran was quite logical about the whole thing. Moran is one of the first to speak out against the idiocy.

“...Second, the professor is on to something. There was a lot of unnecessary hysteria generated on the anti-gun control side, claiming the government was going to go after anyone with a gun – eventually or in the immediate future. While there may be legitimate slippery slope arguments about what was in the bill, such fears were unfounded given the the actual legislation and what was being proposed. But if you believed the NRA and others who claimed the government was coming for your guns, it would seem logical to assume that such a move would be resisted with armed might.

The left will make a big deal out of 44% of Republicans agreeing with the statement, but since the overwhelming majority of the party opposed the recent gun control bill, we should probably be surprised it wasn’t higher.

The bottom line is that the chances for an armed revolution are extremely small because the chances of the government going gun grabbing are equally slim….”

If you read your history, you will find that only a third of the Colonists supported a war against the Brits.  Jazz Shaw is now talking some sense.

“…Showing up with a thousand (or even a few hundred) people openly carrying loaded weapons and marching toward the Capitol is not something that law enforcement is going to play around with, particularly when you announce it in advance. And they’re not going to allow the march to proceed “peacefully” either. Normally I’d write this off as a bad idea that wouldn’t gain widespread support, but the problem here is that it doesn’t need widespread support. It would really only take a few hundred really upset people to get it rolling. And even if most of them intend it to be peaceful, when the officials show up to arrest them, weapons drawn, you have the potential for disaster which Rick Moran foresees….”

When you are dealing with abject paranoia from the NRA, please, don’t expect sensible behavior.

TPM

They are out of their minds.

When do we get to overtly state that these people are unreasonable and completely brainwashed?

Think Progress

Their hatred for Obama is even worse that we thought it was.

LGF

You want to know how out of touch and brainwashed NRA members are? Glenn Beck was their keynote speaker.

Just one final question:  Were all FOX Tabloid News Pundits special speakers at the NRA convention, or did it just look like that?

We’re dealing with people who have completely lost touch with reality.  There’s also a competence problem with the best of them to the point where, they’re not competent to carry loaded guns.  They’re their own worst enemies.  Now, the idiots want a 1000 loaded rifle march on Washington on July 4?  They’re not competent enough to carry a loaded rifle.  The simple law of attrition, idiots with loaded guns, and the Barney Fife factor will guarantee that someone is going to get hurt.  No, it won’t be intentional.  It will be accidental.  With luck they’ll just shoot one another and not hurt reasonable and normal people.

Is it possible for gunpowder to cause homo sapiens to de-evolve by altering the DNA that allows for intelligence, reason, and thought?

Unfortunately, what happened to Harper Lee happens every day, each and every day, to good, decent, and trusting men and women in this country.  It is quite common, unfortunately.  The Pink Flamingo began noticing the way the elderly are taking advantage of, when I saw a show in ID about POAs (Power of Attorney) and bilking the elderly.  It then came to my attention that there was an individual in my community who was doing the same thing.  The first time I paid attention to this was at least 7 or 8 years ago when a very dear women who went to our church was subjected to the same thing by her sister.  The sister waited until her closest friends and attorney were out of town.  She swooped in, used a different attorney, had herself declared POA and ruined the elderly woman’s life.  Packing her up, she put her in a nursing home to die, which she soon did. Her sister was greatly enriched.

I never thought that any of this would ever hit home.  But it has.  This is the story of the past two years of my life.

The Pink Flamingo’s father is now well into Stage 4 of Alzheimer’s.  It is trying time, especially for my mother, who basically has no help.  Once upon a time she would have had someone to help him, but now, we can’t afford it.  Fact is, we can’t afford much of anything.  The Pink Flamingo is now at a point where I must balance getting a hair color of paying for food, not only for myself, but the cats.  Thanks to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, I am learning what it like to live on absolutely nothing, while I watch my mother, who has never wanted for anything, do without all but the basics of life.

It didn’t start out this way.  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.  They have a fortune in real estate that, thanks to the far right and austerity, their mishandling of the economy, cannot be sold.  My sister and I can barely pay the taxes. My parents, who have paid millions of dollars in taxes are now limited to $1200 social security a month, nothing more.  Their medication costs about $300 a month, and that is using generics.  If we lived where they could shop at Costco, they could cut that in half.  We don’t. Their medicare supplement is $360 a month.  I think you get the picture.

My father did everything right.  He worked hard, paid his taxes, supported not only his parents, but helped my sister and I when we needed it.  (Before you comment about that, I depleted my savings and checking account last year, helping them.  My sister is now doing the same thing).  He bought land, sold land, and made millions.  He had the required three-fold portfolio, with cash, land, and investments.  Three years ago we were fine.  Then I started doing the books, and getting into a storage building he spent about $125K to build.  That’s when we noticed something was wrong.  Normally, my father would never do something like that.

What a mess!

By the time his accountant went back several years, at my request, on his own, without billing us, we discovered that it is going to take a forensic accountant to figure out how my father’s broker and his assistant managed to reassign, to to speak, nearly a million bucks, over a period of a few years.  When my poor father realized something was wrong and a $249K transfer for a land payment was not showing up – anywhere, it was too late.  Thank goodness he put the receipt for the wire transfer in is brief case, or I would have nothing to go on.  What did he do?  He took all of his financial records to the very person who had taken his money, asking for his help.  When I asked if I could keep the records, he told me that they would be safer with his broker.  I was given no recourse.  When my mother and I went back to find them, of course they were gone.

That’s the charm of Alzheimer’s Disease.  Until it has completely wrecked your life, you don’t know it’s there.  Other people, the predators of life, pick up on it, and take advantage of it.  According to an email from John Hopkins Med Alerts (I’m on their Alzheimer’s list):

“…Today, one in ten people 65 and older has Alzheimer’s disease (AD) – about 5 million of us – yet only half of these people have actually been diagnosed with the disease. The rest don’t even know they have it! And it’s estimated that by 2050 as many as 16 million of us will have Alzheimer’s….”

Before we were able to stop him, my father ran up a $9000 bill with his Target Visa.  When we started having financial problems, I had a difficult time paying the light bill, let alone the Visa.  A year ago, I was able to move some money around and come up with enough to keep the parents going for several years.  Unfortunately, I made the mistake of listening to Dave Ramsey.  I paid off their credit cards, paid all the debt, and thought we were in good shape.  I paid over $7000 on the Target card.

Back in December, the auto payment I was making via my bank was a day late.  They added a late charge.  I didn’t catch it, because I figured everything was fine, and $55 was going to cover it.  The phone calls started, every morning at 8AM.  They continued, day after day, four times a day.  My sister made the required payment.  Then, just trying to keep them alive, after another glitch, we have not paid the bill in about ten weeks.  Yes, it’s only about $150, but right now that $150 will pay their power bill.  It’s that trying here.

About six weeks, I told the 8AM caller that I would get the payments caught up, when I could.  As she could see by my record, I had done just that.  “Well, if you don’t, it will damage Albert’s credit and he can’t get another credit card.”

“He’s 89 years old and has Alzheimer’s Disease”

“He might need a new credit card for something.  Can I talk to him?”

“He doesn’t even know what day it is.”

“Well, if if you can’t pay, the calls will continue.”

The calls continued, day in and day out, every morning.  I work late into the night.  Every day, after only about three or four hours sleep, the phone would ring – 10 times. It would ring again at noon, at four in the evening, and at eight at night.  Day in and day out.  There was no let-up and no mercy.  Thanks to following Dave Ramsey’s stupid advice, I had put my parents in a terrible bind.

(Let me digress.  Dave Ramsey is a fool. His pay everything off works only if you have an income.  If you are dealing with seniors on a very fixed income which is well below the poverty level, it will destroy you.  Listening to him destroyed my parents.  Too bad I can’t sue the shit out of him.)

So, the calls have continued, day after day, unending.  Finally, on Thursday, I picked up the phone and went after the guy,  “Well, Albert needs to get credit counseling so the interest payments can be lowered.”

“He is 89 years old and has Stage 4 Alzheimer’s.  He doesn’t even know what day of the week it is.”

“But, he needs….”

“Do you know what Alzheimer’s Disease is?”

“Yes.”

“Then, maybe you can comprehend that I am doing the best I can.”

“You need to fax a POA so we can work with you and avoid the calls.”

“I did that 18 months ago.”

He paused.  “Oh.  I see that you did.  Evidently the notes for that were on the back of your file.”

I exploded.  “Look, I am going to pay the bill, when I can. You can see that I have worked in good faith.  That’s the problem with this country today.  There is no mercy, no decency, and no humanity.  No one gives a damn about anything but squeezing the last bit of money out of someone, who is dependent on his daughters for survival.”

My mother has been harassed by the same calls, every day.  Target was told, 18 months ago, not to call their residence because of my father.  The calls harass and upset him.  The calls continued, day in and day out for months, the same as with me. On Friday morning, there were no calls.

I don’t know what angers me the most, the calls, the harassment, or the fact that I was stupid enough to believe Dave Ramsey.

What I have learned is that people are cruel.  They are vicious and merciless, quickly taking advantage of anyone who is not in a position to fight back.  I have basically given up on the concept of kindness, mercy, decency, goodness, and basic compassion.  It no longer exists in this world.  I’m tired of being lied too, cheated, and scammed.  I am tired of living in a world where, if you are struggling, or having a financial problem, you are sub-human, worthy of contempt.

I don’t know where to turn.  The way of the world won’t allow me to mortgage land we’re trying to sell.  The parents’ have several million in real estate up for sale  On paper, their real estate portfolio is worth millions.  Right now, I don’t know how we’re going to pay the basic bills this month.

You want to talk about stress?  I now burst into tears at a moment’s notice.  My hair is falling out.  I can’t sleep.  I have tachycardia.  I’ve not known a moment’s peace in 3 years.  The other day, we were in a situation where my father spoke to the broker who reinvested his money.  The man pretended not to notice the two little, whipped, senior citizens hoping they could get a break.  I have learned how to forgive.  I just don’t understand how people like that can sleep at night.

So, about 2 year ago, when I went to speak to this man’s replacement, I discovered that their accounts had been deleted.  If they had been allowed to remain, like many market investment accounts, their portfolio would have grown with the market.  There was nothing, no record, no nothing.  I have one brokerage statement to even prove the account existed.  I was told, by the replacement broker, that everyone knew my parents were incompetent.  I was better off having put in a nursing home, selling what they owned, and walking off to let them die.

And – people want to know why I no longer have any respect or regard for big business or unbridled capitalism.  It’s nothing but a euphemism for legalized theft.  To keep our parents alive and safe, my sister is living on the edge, at times.  I’ll start selling my jewelry next week.  I don’t expect to get anything for it.  There’s no need.  I need money and the bottom-feeders who now populate this country see it as a way to gain some profit.

I keep thinking about my father.  He never turned anyone down when they needed help.  He was always there to help his family, who would almost drain him at times.  When I’ve asked for help for him, doors have been slammed in my face.

That’s life with Alzheimer’s Disease in modern day America.  If you are not the 1%, you end up in the gutter, no matter how honest, honorable and decent you have been in life.  Our country didn’t start out this way, but that’s what we’ve become.  We are a libertarian, profit loving nation of blood sucking emotional and financial vampires who live to gain profit, while destroying those around them.  The bitter irony is that these are the very same people who call themselves ‘Christians’.

Wanna’ bet?

Do I sound bitter?  I’m bitter about a culture in this country who now views people like my parents as ‘Takers’, rather than Makers, even though they have paid millions to the IRS in income taxes – much of it at the 50% bracket.  My parents, the takers, have so far, have received about $360K in social security benefits.  They have paid millions in taxes.  Please, explain why they are now Takers, rather than Makers.   They’d still be paying taxes if their money had not been re-routed to server a higher power.

That’s what I resent.  I see people like my parents who worked hard, did what was right, and are now getting the shaft because greed is good and the name of the game is making life a living hell for anyone who isn’t playing the Ayn Rand game.

Have we become a nation of fake Christians who now worship a psychopath?

They sure aren’t worshiping Christ.

Since telling the guy from Target that I was going to seek legal recourse against Target for their illegal harassment, my phone has not rang one time, other than normal calls.  This means I was getting 4 calls a day on my land line, 4 a day on my cell, my mother was getting 4 a day on her land line, and four a day on her cell from Target Visa.  The ones on my cell would start at 8:03, right after the 8AM calls stopped.  I think that constitutes harassment.

Early Wednesday morning, The Pink Flamingo finished the second novel of what I hoped will be a murder mystery series.  This story involved the elderly, POAs, and how lives are destroyed by predators going after the weak in our culture.  It is becoming an epidemic, as the goodness and decency is flushed out of our lives.  People no longer care about helping others.  It is all about getting rich, no matter who you destroy.

Now Washington wants to tamper with Medicare, evidently putting a cap on what can be paid out for catastrophic events.  This is going to have a chilling effect on the elderly.  We’re dealing with a libertarian Republican party who can only think about the money they are going to save billionaires who no longer want to pay their taxes.

If they continue this path, thousands of good, honorable senior citizens who have paid their taxes and done what was required of them are going to die.

No one gives a damn.

“...Orchard Gardens’ refocus is emblematic of  studies linking arts education with academic achievement. A 2012 study by the National Endowments for the Arts found that “At-risk students who have access to the arts in or out of school also tend to have better academic results, better workforce opportunities, and more civic engagement.” Chris Plunkett, a visual arts teacher at Orchard Gardens is starting to see that play out….”

Taking away the prison camp feel also made the kids more secure.  Their grades went up and they began to behave better.  It seems like Andrew Bott has stumbled onto the problem of what ails this nation.  It is all about not having guns, security guards, and having the arts.  Get it – the arts.

It is now acceptable, according to the 2nd Court of Appeals in NY, to discriminate against a person with a high IQ.  Speaking of a low IQ, the new President of the NRA fantasized about whipping those of us who want reasonable gun control.  Jim Porter will take control of the organization in Houston, as Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, John Bolton, and Glenn Beck join him, as speakers.  As low IQs go, 20% of Americans think that armed rebellion might soon be necessary.  Against whom?  Those of us with higher than normal IQs?  According to one source, the Koch Brothers are behind the call for armed rebellion against Obama.

How about a teacher interrupting a 4th grader’s hospital stay, for brain surgery, because he needed to take a standardized test?  What about a child being taken from his parents because they wanted a second opinion on heart surgery?  Thank goodness for a decent judge.

Something is terribly wrong with a nation where a pregnant woman is docked, and eventually fired because she needs to go to the restroom – on doctor’s orders.  Our economy is so bad, and people are so afraid of losing their jobs that now, restroom breaks are monitored.  There are, according to Paula Brantner, executive director of Workplace Fairness, no legal requirements for employers to allow their employees to use the restroom.  Eric Cantor wants to end overtime pay for hourly workers.  Why not do away with the minimum wage while he’s at it?  Don’t worry, he will soon make the attempt?

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, a five year old boy, who was given a rifle for his birthday, shot and killed his 2-year-old sister. The coroner said it was just one of those crazy accidents.  Meanwhile, in Florida, if  you are Black and sixteen years old, and do a science experiment, you can be expelled and charged with terrorism.  If you are poor, and live in Ohio, just plan on going to debtor’s prison.

According to Pat Toomey, background checks died because the GOP didn’t want to help Obama.  Michele Bachmann’s eithc’s probe is heating up, but so much for that one.  Don’t expect her to be disciplined.   Billy Long, a Republican Congressman from Missouri says that the American people want more sequestration.  In New Hampshire, Republican, Edmond Gionet thinks the US is due for an armed revolution over  immigration rights.  He’s just reflecting the fact that some polls indicate that almost half of Republicans think that we might need an armed revolution.

Sequestration is effecting Meals on Wheels.   According to the Eagle Forum (in an email):

“…There is no biblical mandate for mass Amnesty for illegal aliens. Make no mistake, the current Senate proposal allows all illegal aliens to come forward to receive “Registered Provisional Immigrant” (RPI) legal status within six months after President Obama signs the bill. That is Amnesty.

Scripture clearly commands individuals and the Body of Christ to show kindness and compassion to “strangers” or “sojourners,” terms that imply a person is in a foreign land temporarily.  However, that is not a command to the government. Government is charged with protecting its own citizens and administering justice so its citizens remain free to exercise compassion and generosity.

America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. The individual exercise of compassion and generosity are an integral part of the American dream. In order to protect the American Dream for everyone who seeks it, we must implement sound policy. Amnesty is not sound policy.

We are saddened that people of strong faith have been called nasty names (racist, isolationist, nativist, and xenophobic) for demanding that our government institute policies that keep us safe, protect jobs for law-abiding citizens and immigrants, stop adding pressure to an already crumbling economy, and stop adding dependents to a welfare system which is already unable to keep the promises already made.

It is not racist, isolationist, nativist, or xenophobic to demand the rule of law and to demand that government obey the immigration laws that have already been passed….”

The Pink Flamingo has serious problems with the Eagle Forum and their version of “Christian” when they advocate sequestration.  Evidently it’s quite Christian to allow seniors who are in dire need help, to suffer and starve.  It’s only fair, making them learn from the mistake of not being wealthy.  Evidently there is no Biblical mandate against allowing the least among us not to suffer, either.  It’s all about Ayn Rand and the wonderful billionaires who need our worship.

The religious right is now down on birth control.  There’s a woman in Phoenix who belonged to one of those discourage birth control churches.  She just killed her new baby.  She had 9 kids.  I guess, because she did not have an abortion, that’s okay?  Evidently the true blessing is to have children, many many children, according to Mitt Romney, who basically proved he was a tool of the Quiverfull Movement.  It also proves The Pink Flamingo was right about Mittens.

FYI, a little bird has told The Pink Flamingo that there are those who now think that Mittens’ speech was an overture to the hard right to start shaping his plans to run in 2016.  Word is, he’s already playing around in DC, to start promoting another FAILED campaign.  It all makes some sick, perverted sense.  Rand Paul and Ted Cruz go for the nomination, Mittens steps in and takes it again…GOP DOA.

The Bishop of Providence Thomas Tobin, warned his flock against attending gay marriage ceremonies.  It’s one thing to hold birth control as something sinful, and another to tell members of one’s church not to even attend a gay marriage ceremony.  There’s something terribly lacking in love and compassion. In order to obey the church, a person who has a family member or love one who is gay cannot support their family member, thereby alienating themselves from their family.  How does this express the love of Christ?

“...At this moment of cultural change, it is important to affirm the teaching of the Church, based on God’s word, that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2357) and always sinful. And because “same-sex marriages” are clearly contrary to God’s plan for the human family, and therefore objectively sinful, Catholics should examine their consciences very carefully before deciding whether or not to endorse same-sex relationships or attend same-sex ceremonies, realizing that to do so might harm their relationship with God and cause significant scandal to others….”

The church has every right to oppose gay marriage if they so desire.  That’s not The Pink Flamingo’s observation here.  My concern is how attending a same-sex marriage ceremony could cause a scandal and harm one’s relationship with God.  How does showing love for someone, who may or may not be involved in breaking one of the Ten Big Ones harm one’s relationship with God?  Sorry, I don’t get this one at all.  If a sin is defined as breaking one of the Ten Big Ones, and we are all guilty, then how is this any different from associating with a known liar, or turning a blind eye to that banking official who knowingly allows employees to steal from customers?  I don’t see a difference, then again, I’m an evil Episcopalian.

The Obama Administration is now persecuting Christians in the military.  Evidently it all goes back to the fact that certain ‘Christian’ organizations are now classified as hate groups. (I think that’s being kind).  So, religious rights are issue.  Soldiers who share their Christian faith may be subject to Court Martial.  It’s like the lies they told that military chaplains could not pray in the name of Christ.  Never mind that they’re also clamping down on tattoos.  It’s all about command officers demanding that those who have a lower rank attend religious based meetings.  Sorry, but that’s illegal.  Chaplains can promote meetings, etc. but not command officers.  There is no ban.  Glenn Beck wants God to destroy the US.

Kelly Ayotte voted against equal pay for women because she said we have enough laws.  Is there something in the water in New Hampshire?  State GOP Rep Stella Tremblay says the Boston Bombing was an inside  job because the bombers looked calm.

As bad as the far right’s war on women is, their war on science is even worse.  It is a war on reason, real education, expanding one’s mind, and learning how to think critically, instead of being a sheeple.  A FOX dingbat guest, Penny Nance, CEO of the Christian activist group Concerned Women for America said that science and enlightenment lead to the Holocaust. Yes, she really did say that.  You can’t have it both ways.  She stated that the Age of Enlightenment lead to the Holocaust, but, the Age of Enlightenment is what lead to the American Revolution.

Glenn Beck, who is truly becoming unhinged, says the latest shooting in Houston, by a severely disturbed man, was a set up to take down the NRA in a Reichstag moment. Yes, he really said that.  The NRA, whom he supports are marketing guns for children.  You should buy at gun at age five?

NRA?  If the Orchard Gardens School of Roxbury is any indication, then the NRA is literally dead wrong.

Is our society falling apart at the seams, or are people just plain old batsh*t crazy?  How much of this is the fault of the far right media trying to destroy Obama?

The police said the child had explosive materials:  An empty plastic water bottle, piece of foil, and some bathroom cleaner.  She was arrested and charged with a felony for making, possessing, or discharging a destructive device with possession or discharging weapons on school grounds.  For this, she will be branded as a felon for the rest of her life.

Not only was she charged as a felon, her photo was released.  Her home address was made public.  She did a a popular boneheaded experiment and is now going to pay for it for the rest of her life.  An honor student, she is now expelled.  She won’t be able to get a scholarship, go into the military, get a student loan, or pass a security clearance for certain jobs.  The record will be sealed when she is 24, which then brands her as a serious terror suspect and violent criminal for the remainder of her life.

She was given less consideration than a student who is a rapist in Ohio.  She was given less consideration than the 5 year old little boy who used his first rifle to kill his 2 year old sister.  His parents aren’t even being charged with child endangerment.  A baby is dead.  Everyone feels sorry for the white family.  A young Black woman in overtly racist Polk County does something on school property that should not even be considered a suspendable offense, and her life is ruined.    The real mistake young Kira Wilmont made was being born Black, in Polk County, Florida.  In Florida, these days, being born Black seems to be a ticket to go directly to jail.

That’s what happened to this young woman.  She was arrested and taken to juvenile lock-up, treated worse than football players in Ohio who rape girls.  They’re the poor victims.  This poor victim of zero tolerance, racism, and pathetically stupid and cowardly school administrators deserves our pity, our help, and someone to take her side.

All she did was try a science experiment they tell you not to do at home, on Mythbusters.  She followed directions and didn’t do it at home.  There was no explosion.  There was no damage.  No one was injured.  Only a 16 year old girl who is going to pay for the cowardly bigotry of Polk County for the rest of her life.

This is from the conservative Daily Caller:

“...The school board did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but released a statement standing by the decision to expel and arrest Wilmot:“Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. Unfortunately, the incident that occurred at Bartow High School yesterday was a serious breach of conduct. In order to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment, we simply must uphold our code of conduct rules. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff.”But multiple media commentators have expressed the opinion that the school district exercised worse judgment than the student, urging authorities to revisit the matter….”

The liberal Hinterland Gazette:

Hinterland Gazette

The Ledger

The Ledger

“….So even though Wilmot’s principal acknowledges that the 16-year-old wasn’t trying to hurt anyone and simply made a “bad choice,” the school’s rules said she had to be expelled. Police, meanwhile, have charged her with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device.

The other most common question about her story is what kind of chemicals she was mixing. Lauderdale says she doesn’t know.

Riptide has requested a police report from the Bartow Police Department to try to find the answer. They’ve promised to send it our way but so far it hasn’t arrived. We’ll update this post when we get our hands on it.

In the meantime, Lauderdale says Wilmot can challenge her expulsion, but says she’s unable to discuss whether or not the teen has done so because of student privacy rights.

The spokeswoman says the school district stands by its rules. “We urge our parents to convey to their kids that there are consequences to their actions,” she says….”

My favorite headline about this story is “When Science is Criminalized, Only Criminals Will Do Science”

In other words, when toilet bowl cleaner is outlawed, only criminals will clean toilets.

It’s great how they are “respecting” the student’s privacy rights by naming her, charging her as an adult, publishing her photo, and her address.  They’re respecting her rights by expelling her, and ruining her life.

And – now you know why The Pink Flamingo has absolutely no respect for educators and administrators.  They’re a bunch of cowardly jerks.

There is something terribly wrong with our society when a promising young woman has her life destroyed, not because of a boneheaded experiment that any normal teen would have tried, (The Pink Flamingo included) but because educators are so lacking in courage and decency that they have turned the least little thing into a criminal offense.  Normal behavior for little boys, which can be remedied by recess, is now turned into a disciplinary problem and the kids are drugged.   The things The Pink Flamingo did as a kid would have landed me in jail, and I was a goodie-two-shoes.  Heaven only knows what would have happened to my father for tipping outhouses (with his girlfriend’s father in one) or letting the air out of all the tires at a PTA meeting.

No wonder kids get in real trouble these days.

For the record:  The Pink Flamingo, in the 8th grade, assembled a volcano out of modeling clay.  It stood nearly a foot high.  I put said volcano on the teacher’s desk.  I filled it with a quart of vinegar and a half box of baking soda.

Yes, I am also a criminal.

I blew up a volcano on the teacher’s desk.  It overflowed.  It went all over everything including his grade book.

FYI – I received an A+ on the experiment.  Then again, I’m white.

I have zero tolerance for zero tolerance.

The Pink Flamingo is a fifteen year survivor of melanoma.  Of all the deadly cancers, melanoma is one of the easiest to detect at an early stage.  Of all the deadly cancers, if you catch melanoma the way I did, there is a 100% cure rate – as long as the proper excision has been made and the pathology on the disease is accurate.  That’s the real killer, having a physician who doesn’t know what they are doing.  It is how Diana Ashby, wife of astronaut Jeff Ashby died.  Her physician, an old family retainer did bad path.  He misdiagnosed the level of the cancer, basically killing her.

If you have a mole that is flat, irregular, larger than a pencil eraser, with spots of black in it, and you do nothing about it, YOU WILL DIE.  You will die a horrible, miserable, obscene death by cancer with the end stages being brain cancer.  There are those of us who believe that quite often, brain cancer is the result of misdiagnosed melanoma that has spread to the point where you can’t tell what it is.

Are you at risk?  If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, go see your dermatologist.  If everyone would visit their derm once every six months, we could basically end melanoma as a deadly cancer.  It’s that simple.

1. Has anyone in your family ever had melanoma?
2. Do you now have, or have you ever had, noncancerous, but unusual looking moles?
3. Have you been diagnosed with melanoma in the past?
4. Are you taking any medications that might weaken your immune system (for example, corticosteroids)?
5. Do you have more than 50 ordinary moles?
6. Did you have one or more severe, blistering sunburn as a child or teenager?
7. Do you have many freckles?
8. Do you have fair skin and light eyes?
9. Do you live in the Southwestern United States?
10. Do you frequently spend time in the sun between 10 AM and 4 PM without skin protection?

I must answer yes to #1, #2, #3, #5, #6, and #8.  Scary, isn’t it?  For every primary, there is usually a secondary.  John McCain is the perfect example of someone who had had more than one melanoma primary removed, at different times in his life.  I’ve managed to catch a second primary in 2000 or so.  We caught it just as the cells were beginning to start their evolutionary process into cancer.  Because I caught it so early, it wasn’t even ‘pre-cancer’.   Like many others who have had melanoma, I’ve had every possible primary mole removed.  There’s nothing left but a number of small battle scars of honor.

If you even suspect that you have a bad nevis you must never ever ever allow the site to be removed by “punching”, freezing, or a casual cut.  You want a specific “wide excision” that, at times can be performed with a razor blade, if your derm thinks you are catching the nevis before it goes bad.  I only recommend this if you know that your derm is board certified and specializes in melanoma.  Mine specializes in the early recognition of the disease, so I am more comfortable with him.  But, he will listen to me.  If I want a wide excision, he will do one.

Melanoma stages: 5 year survival rates:
Stage 0: Melanoma in situ (Clark Level I), 99.9% survival
Stage I / II: Invasive melanoma, 89–95% survival
T1a: Less than 1.0 mm primary tumor thickness, without ulceration, and mitosis < 1/mm2
T1b: Less than 1.0 mm primary tumor thickness, with ulceration or mitoses ≥ 1/mm2
T2a: 1.01–2.0 mm primary tumor thickness, without ulceration
Stage II: High risk melanoma, 45–79% survival
T2b: 1.01–2.0 mm primary tumor thickness, with ulceration
T3a: 2.01–4.0 mm primary tumor thickness, without ulceration
T3b: 2.01–4.0 mm primary tumor thickness, with ulceration
T4a: Greater than 4.0 mm primary tumor thickness, without ulceration
T4b: Greater than 4.0 mm primary tumor thickness, with ulceration
Stage III: Regional metastasis, 24–70% survival
N1: Single positive lymph node
N2: Two to three positive lymph nodes or regional skin/in-transit metastasis
N3: Four positive lymph nodes or one lymph node and regional skin/in-transit metastases
Stage IV: Distant metastasis, 7–19% survival
M1a: Distant skin metastasis, normal LDH
M1b: Lung metastasis, normal LDH
M1c: Other distant metastasis or any distant metastasis with elevated LDH
Based upon AJCC five-year survival from initial melanoma diagnosis with proper treatment.

The very term “biopsy” should never even be used in conjunction with melanoma.  There are those of us who think that the very practice of cutting into the cancer causes it to spread.  If you even suspect there is melanoma, a wide excision should always be done, even if it is literally a pain.  I recommend an in office surgical procedure that includes going at least a quarter to half inch around the entire area.  Personally, I opt now, for a half inch.

“…Following a visual examination and a dermatoscopic exam, or in vivo diagnostic tools such as a confocal microscope, the doctor may biopsy the suspicious mole. A skin biopsy performed under local anesthesia is often required to assist in making or confirming the diagnosis and in defining the severity of the melanoma. If the mole is malignant, the mole and an area around it need excision. Elliptical excisional biopsies may remove the tumor, followed by histological analysis and Breslow scoring. Punch biopsies are contraindicated in suspected melanomas, for fear of seeding tumor cells and hastening the spread of the malignant cells…”

What you are looking for are the ABCDE’s of Melanoma:

• Asymmetrical skin lesion.
• Border of the lesion is irregular.
• Color: melanomas usually have multiple colors.
• Diameter: moles greater than 6 mm are more likely to be melanomas than smaller moles.
• Enlarging: Enlarging or evolving

“…ABCD rule illustration: On the left side from top to bottom: melanomas showing (A) Asymmetry, (B) a border that is uneven, ragged, or notched, (C) coloring of different shades of brown, black, or tan and (D) diameter that had changed in size. The normal moles on the right side do not have abnormal characteristics (no asymmetry, even border, even color, no change in diameter)….”

There are different opinions about how the initial removal of the nevis should be performed.  I’m not a fan of Mohs Surgery.

“...Excisional biopsies may remove the tumor, but further surgery is often necessary to reduce the risk of recurrence. Complete surgical excision with adequate surgical margins and assessment for the presence of detectable metastatic disease along with short- and long-term followup is standard. Often this is done by a wide local excision (WLE) with 1 to 2 cm margins. Melanoma-in-situ and lentigo malignas are treated with narrower surgical margins, usually 0.2 to 0.5 cm. Many surgeons consider 0.5 cm the standard of care for standard excision of melanoma-in-situ,but 0.2 cm margin might be acceptable for margin controlled surgery (Mohs surgery, or the double-bladed technique with margin control). The wide excision aims to reduce the rate of tumor recurrence at the site of the original lesion. This is a common pattern of treatment failure in melanoma. Considerable research has aimed to elucidate appropriate margins for excision with a general trend toward less aggressive treatment during the last decades. Mohs surgery has been reported with cure rate as low as 77%and as high as 98.0% for melanoma-in-situ. CCPDMA and the “double scalpel” peripheral margin controlled surgery is equivalent to Mohs surgery in effectiveness on this “intra-epithelial” type of melanoma….”

The good news – it looks like there is a cure on the horizon.  I’ve heard stories, talked to people in trials.  There is reason to be very, very hopeful.

Melanoma is the most curable of all the deadly cancers.  If you catch it early, there is a 99% cure rate.