Intravenous Caffeine

Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

The REAL War on Christmas

“Enough of that UN-mandated Socialistical ramp--here, your old crutch will be in better keeping with your home schooling...”

If you think this doesn't make any sense, join the club...

Bill O’Reilly and the Faux News crowd are in the middle of their annual War On The War Against Christmas, dredging up every incident of Happy Holiday-ism they can find in an effort to show how anti-Christmas America has become. Bill also argued that Christianity isn’t a religion, but a philosophy. Not to say that a good Catholic boy like O’Reilly has a fundamental misunderstanding of either Christmas or Christianity, let’s take his statements at face value for a moment.

As the Spirit of Christmas Present says to Scrooge (in the Alastair Sim movie but not the book), “We Spirits of Christmas do not live but one day a year, we live the entire 365.” And what is that “spirit of Christmas”? Buying gifts? Setting up Nativity scenes? Randy office parties? Santa Claus? No, the true Christmas spirit is “Peace on earth, good will towards men.” It means not going to war unless you really have to. It means giving to those less fortunate. It means going the extra mile for your fellow man. Not just in December, but all January through November as well. Above all, it means ANYTHING but paying attention to Ayn Rand.

That’s the Christian philosophy in a nutshell, Bill. And your cohorts, the Republicans in the Senate, showed just how much true Christmas spirit they had when they turned down the UN treaty on the disabled. Never mind that John McCain endorsed it, George H. W. Bush endorsed it, Bob Dole was wheeled in from his deathbed (as Jon Stewart put it) to endorse it. Never mind that it was based on OUR OWN LAWS. The Republican bloc but a handful voted it down because it raised serious concerns about our sovereignty (all treaties do–that’s part of the reason we have them), it was a socialist plot from the hated UN, it was an attack on home schooling according to Paul Ryan, the idiot we were spared from having as Vice President a few weeks ago. But above all, because Barack Obama wanted it.

Nice going, guys–maybe you’d like a chance to repeal our own disability laws now. After all, building ramps might cut into corporate profits.

Oh. And Merry Christmas.

Happy Hanukah to all our Jewish friends (as they say on the news). We will be taking our winter hiatus after our annual HOLIDAY card next week.

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Will Sanity Be Restored? Not if WE can help it…

A screenshot from Fox News showing the Stewart-Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear snowed out--in October

And FoxNews viewers from DC swear they saw it--but forgot their names


Well, it’s not a cartoon, but damn, it’s been so long since I posted anything, I just had to post SOMETHING. First of all, my bronchitis is “mostly” gone. I feel better but my strength isn’t up completely back to where it should be. It will be by the end of the week. Thanks to my well-wishers who expressed good wishes. We won’t mention what I wish for those who wished the opposite 😀

I DID get to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear on Saturday. Wish I’d done more to publicize it, although the boys certainly did not need MY publicity. The subway (errrr Metro–how gay is that? –Samantha Bee) was incredible. There were lines 20-30 minutes long to buy tickets and then olive oil was spread on the riders to get them all squeezed into the cars. When the doors finally opened at L’Enfant Plaza, it was like projectile vomit as the trains disgorged their charges.

By the time I actually made the rally location–and I admit I was moving slowly due to my energy levels–you literally could not get two blocks from the mall before foot traffic slowed to a shuffle-along. The DC police had wisely shut down several streets. My own uninformed crowd guesstimates said there was at least 150k people there and possibly as high as 300k. I think the TOTAL number of people who came to the Rally was close to the latter, but because of the difficulty getting within site and sound of the stage–and there were video feeds with huge sound systems to relay the proceedings to the further away, BUT THERE WERE THAT MANY PEOPLE THERE–that the back of the crowd was very fluid with people arriving, staying for a while, and then leaving to get a better view ON THE INTERNET. In fact, I couldn’t stay to the end because I couldn’t find a good place to both see and hear what was going on. The CBSNews paid for crowd count said 215,000. That’s a reasonable number for the amount of people who were there at any single moment in time.

It was odd to see how the news media handled it. Although pre-rally shows began at 10 am, and some people had been there since the night before, I could not find any crowd estimates on the cable news stations. It was as if nothing was going to happen. Contrast that with the ballyhoo that characterized Glenn Beck’s revival meetin’. By Sunday, the coverage rapidly evaporated after 6 am–yesterday’s news. DId they get wind of what the main point of the Rally was? That the media, fanning the flames of partisanship, is one of the major contributors to the chasm that is seen between political viewpoints today? As people, we work together everyday despite differences–Jon Stewart likened it to merging into the lanes of a tunnel–a very apt simile for someone in the NY/NJ area. Yet in politics, there is this perception of near civil war, at least the way the news media provides soapboxes to the MOST extreme elements.

Some of my progressive friends have opined that Jon and Stephen STILL missed the point–after all, the most extreme elements are all ON THE RIGHT. That may be so. But the point of the rally wasn’t to point fingers at THEM. It was to point fingers at the people on the sidelines who are busily asking both sides if they need more gasoline to put out the fire. They are no longer informing us. They’re like the reporter in Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival who prevented the rescue of the man trapped in a cave to prolong the news story. In the movie, the trapped guy died. But now, we’re the people in the cave. Will we have a release like the Chileans? Or do we go down in the interests of real journalism?

Thanks Jon and Stephen. It was a good rally.

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Carrie Prejean to donate tapes as educational aid!

A day in SELF LOVE 101--Lab Session

Carrie Prejean's tapes will become educational aids...

Readers, I have never been one to minimize the importance of self love. In fact, I’d say there was no one in the world I had more respect for than myself…and I will even respect myself in the morning, which is one of the advantages of a dissociative personality. It goes without saying that if you don’t love yourself, you cannot love anyone else, so I won’t say it, no matter how hard I force myself.
Woody Allen explained in Love and Death that the reason he was such a great lover was because he practiced so much when he was alone. Which brings me to my next topic. It seems the Extramadura region of Spain has developed a program to educate young teens in the practice of “self love”. And by “self love,” they don’t mean “positive thinking,” although it is claimed the practice will certainly perk up your self-esteem, along with certain other parts of your anatomy! Although the BBC article doesn’t mention it, I’m sure two of the reasons for touching on this topic are that it will reduce teen pregnancies and slow the spread of STDs, not to mention that it will serve in later years to maintain prostate health. After all–aren’t we talking about the safest sex there is? And you don’t even mind if your partner is unfaithful–more power to it! What I want to know is–does it take more than one class to explain it? Are there be special techniques which must be explained and explored? Use of magazines and the internet? Perhaps an advanced class on “self love à deux”? What about lab sessions? And just what will the homework be like?
Naturally, the Catholic Church and conservative political groups in Spain have exploded over this immoral class, spewing heated pronouncements about the dire effects of using those body parts for fun instead of producing babies. No one, as far as I can tell, has suggested that perhaps if priests had practiced more self love, there would be fewer altar boys with problems sitting down. Perhaps nuns would be less likely to bring out the old yardstick after a few self confidence sessions.
Which brings us to our favorite model of morality and former beauty pageant queen, Carrie Prejean. Carrie, you will remember, is so honest that she felt she had to state her convictions at the Miss California pageant that gay marriage is sinful and immoral because it says so in the Bible. Carrie is not prejudiced against gay people–some of her best friends, including her hairdresser, are gay and she’s heartbroken that so many nice people are going to burn in hell for the rest of eternity. And she is honest–after all, she owned up about her boob job after California pageant officials demanded she repay them for it for breaching her contract. Having your own boobs filling out a bathing suit is so passé–only in California would you be judged honest by admitting you had a boob job when the evidence is right out in front of you–sort of like Sean Hannity admitting his production staff doctored the tapes of the other week’s Michele Bachmann Tea Party only after he’d been caught by Jon Stewart (and then tried to explain that it was inadvertent–as if you could accidentally mix up tapes from one day with coverage of an event almost two months before–obviously they’d both been shot on the same VHS cassette).
Now, Miss Prejean has argued vehemently that the Bible says NOTHING against having a boob job–my suspicion is that it never occurred to Moses since silicone hadn’t been invented, although he might have thought it violated the false witness commandment in that Carrie’s boobs were bearing false witness against themselves–and so Carrie counter-sued the Pageant, only to drop everything when, what to my wondering eyes should appear, it became known that Carrie had made a little sex tape for her then boyfriend–nothing too serious, just a spot of driving Miss Daisy–not even a threesome or girl-girl action! She settled quickly and, when she thought the old lecher was asking her about it, she nearly walked off the set of Larry King during an interview. Suffice it to say, she said that making that tape was the worst decision she ever made in her life. Not counting the other 7 tapes she made, which must have been the seven other worst mistakes in her life. Or the 30 topless mistakes she also sent him.
Now you may think this is just a tempest in a teapot, and you’d be right! After all, I have nothing against pretty naked girls (darn it!) and if any wants to send me any pics or videos of herself, please, go right ahead–just send me an email. I promise it will NEVER get out of my hands–so to speak. But I also think that Carrie should offer some amends for having diddled the skittle about her lily-white honesty quotient. If just to provide us with the moral example we so obviously need from her. Therefore, I call upon her to send her tapes to Extramadura to serve as study aids! And let THAT be a lesson to them!

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Palin’s Pick, Preferred by Pawlenty, in Potsdam and Plattsburgh, got Plainly and Powerfully Pwned

Sarah Palin is offered THE BOX--press the button and a million dollars in publicity, but a conservative has to lose an election--PRESS PRESS PRESS PRESS PRESS

Also starring Doug Hoffman and Frank Langella

This is going to grab me no readers–after all, the results of this past Tuesday’s election are already wrapping yesterday’s fish. Which is odd, considering the runup which made it seem like it was the most important election after the last election (as Jon Stewart noted). Yesterday we had 24 hours of “Was this a referendum on Obama?” or “Was it just local politics?” Myself, I think it was a little bit of the former and a LOT of the latter. But That is NUANCE. And Cable TV News doesn’t do nuance. Leaving aside Faux News as a propaganda machine, the other two 25/8 news networks wouldn’t know nuance if it grabbed a mallet from hammerspace and hit them over the head. I mean, when Wolf Blitzer accidentally got a confession from Balloon Boy, someone had to whisper it in his earpiece before he even noticed what he’d tripped over. And over on MSNBC, Chris Matthews’ idea of a debate resembles more a college wrestling match than any intellectual exchange–2 out of 3 throws. But I shouldn’t take them to task–even the newspapers don’t do nuance any more–and they wonder why they’re being run out of business by the Internets.
Anyhow, to return to Tuesday’s election, pretty much everything happened the way it could really be expected–no matter how much anyone hoped otherwise. But the fun race of the day was Congressional District 23 of New York. District 23 has gone Republican for the last 2000 years, and this year it promised no difference. IF it hadn’t been for the teabaggers who decided that the Republican candidate, Dierdre Scozzafava, was a closet lefty, planning to bring socialism down on the heads of her constituents. After all, she supported abortion rights and gay marriage, the next thing you know, she would be demanding the re-distribution of wealth. So they sent in their ringer, Doug Hoffman. Hoffman, who had to be told where the 23rd District was, had no idea what its issues might be–he was being sent in to defend the country from Kenyan aliens masquerading as Hawaiians. Soon Sarah Palin descended upon the 23rd District, tho’ invited by none. Along with Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, they supported the hell out of Dougie.
Now you know the deer in the headlights look. Imagine that deer suddenly noticing a 16-wheeler coming hellbent down the highway at 85 mph and you’ll have a good idea of how Doug Hoffman started to look. I mean seriously, I’ve never seen a candidate with a more shell-shocked expression on his face–if he opened his eyes any wider, they would have exploded from the pressure differential. Because of or in spite of Sarah’s help, he started taking Scozzafava’s voter base and Scozzafava dropped out–instructing her supporters to vote for the DEMOCRAT, Bill Owens, who was at least playing fair. Despite that clue, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and the rest, all fell over themselves predicting a landslide for the carpetbagger. The entire MSM called it the most important race of all time because it would show how much support Obama had lost and how important the teabaggers had become.
Then Dougie lost. The 23rd went Democrat for the first time in two millenia and … everyone switched gears and started discussing NJ and VA and THAT became the referendum on Obama. And by Monday, no one will even remember if we had the most important off-off year election of the century last Tuesday.
Have a good weekend folks 🙂

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