I got into a fight one time in grade school.  Okay, more than one, but this is my blog and I'll tell you about the fights as they become relevant to other stuff.  All I know is that it started with me meeting a kid on my way to CCD at St. Mary's and ended with him picking me up by my ankles and dropping me on my head.  I started it, don't get me wrong, but it ended with me hurting and him not really caring.

The point?  When someone starts a fight with you, end it.  Walk away if you can, but most of the time you won't have any choice save fighting.  And if you have to actually fight in a fight, win.  Just win.

And now, the beef.  So our favorite Communist, Nancy Pelosi, made sure to tell all the people of the free world that "there's a new Congress in town." New York's Chuck Schumer told us that "the rubber stamp days are over."  The people voted these people into a position of almost unlimited power to end the war in Iraq, and they did so for that particular purpose.  We've seen an increase in the minimum wage, we've seen Pelosi bitch about her plane size, and we've seen more American (insert noun here:  fighting people, soldiers, warriors, voters, brothers, sisters, dads, moms, football coaches, English teachers, friends) die in Iraq.

And a rabbit trail:  the other night I was at Perkins with a friend of mine and the lady that seated us told me I looked like a friend of hers.  Then she told me that her friend had been killed in Iraq recently.  This is just one occasion in which I've been told something like that (I got a haircut for my best friend's wedding last week), and there have been more in the last few weeks.  But I digress.

The Demo-Commie Congress has had a chance to do all the stuff they wanted to do and a chance to do what the voters wanted them to do.  The stuff they want to do, like overfund welfare and kick in my door and steal my guns, will happen at some point in the near future, because they're getting around to it.  The stuff they were voted into office to do, like hold the President accountable for his political screw-ups and ending the Iraq war...is another story.

You see, Jimi's Blog Faithful, Pelosi and her little monkey friend Hairy Reid (otherwisedly known as the Senate Blind-leading-the-blind-majority Leader), have taken this opportunity, unprecedented in its scope (only because the Chief has had to stop way before this point), and invited the voters to jam it in their collected ass sideways like a run-on sentence with commas (and parenthetical phrases).  It looks like Schumer's found his rubber stamp collection, doesn't it?

If the Democrats fought the President on the war with the same dedication our fighting men and women have fought the Iraqi insurgency, the President would be huddled under his desk clutching a teddy bear and begging for mercy.  His approval ratings would finally just drop into the single-digit percentages and he'd ask Cheney to go on a crippled bird hunt at the Capitol.  There is one wrinkle, though:  Now that Cheney is a grandfather of a bouncing baby boy, he needs to start thinking about the end of this war before his grandson grows a sack (like his mom's partner has) and fight for something he believes in--in short, this kid could find himself standing in Iraq twenty years from now, or maybe Iran, or maybe still hunting for a ninety-year-old Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.  The Republican party finally has all the reason it needs to end this war, and the Democrats have all the power they need to end this war.  It is truly sad that they can't mix it together with some spine.

And just in case you think I forgot accountability, you're in for a treat, because I didn't.  AG Alberto Gonzales is lying through his beautiful teeth and he's not keeping his lies consistent with his assistant, Monica Goodling, and as a result, our nation has Elle Woods without a script and, as usual, a lawyer lying about political manipulation and a justice system run amok by (oh, tell me you didn't see THIS coming) political hacks with no real governing sense and nothing more than an agenda guiding them through the turbulent waters of the future, ready to crush us like the bugs crushed Earth in "Starship Troopers."

Wait, there's more!  Gay people, I got a couple nuggets for you, too!  First, a point about Dick Cheney's daughter and her baby:  the Commonwealth of Virginia refuses to recognize the rights of Mary Cheney's partner as a parent to this child.  If little Dannielynn Smith has two daddies because somebody's law recognizes fathership as a name on a document, then Spanky Cheney has two mommies, one to take him to the emergency room in case the other is at work (as is needed sometimes), and that's just by way of example.  A two-parent home works much more smoothly when the state, which is instituted by God to serve the needs of the people, doesn't gaybash the hell out of a child's parentage.  Second, the bed-wetting Department of Depends (the Pentagon) have forgotten that we're at war and we need every man we can get, even the ones whose sexual orientation is none of their damned business.

I'd like a state that gets the hell out of my bedroom and doesn't care who my partners are.  I'd like a state that goes to war to kill the people responsible for killing Americans, and only the people who kill Americans, and nobody except the people who kill Americans.  I'd like a state that puts the well-being of the children of America ahead of the political ideologies of its employees and a handful of right-wing nutjobs (one fewer, now that Jerry Falwell is dead) who don't hesitate to exercise their right to their own religious preference and claim some kind of divine mandate to suppress our right to everything else, like whom we worship, whom we love, where we shop, what we think, what we are.  And I'd like a state that can be grateful for the opportunity to serve, and shut the hell up about how we live our lives.

My college roommate, Josh, used to make fun of me for having to use the can sitting down, on account of my crutches.  He meant it all in fun and it was received as such.  His favored amusing epithet was "sissy la-la."  And I was more than happy to call him that in exchange, particularly when he called his girlfriend (now his wife) the nickname I called my girlfriend (now my ex):  "The most beautiful and inspirational of all the creatures of God."  Josh, if you're reading, you can have that nickname, you can keep it, and I'll go ahead and call people who refuse to stand up for themselves "Sissy La-La!"

Start writing your hate mail now.  In the words of Nancy Pelosi, "We must remain focused on the greatest threat to the security of the United States, the clear and present danger of terrorism. We know what we must do to protect America, but this Administration is failing to meet the challenge. Democrats have a better way to ensure our homeland security."

And to quote my dad, "BULLSHIT!"

Before I get started, my prayers, thoughts and sympathies to the families of the victims of the combined shootings at Virginia Tech.  And now, time to get started.

"I'm at the end of my ribbon again,
For those who own to apathy.
You had the perfect opportunity,
but pled the Fifth and walked away."
    -from "Make a Move," by Incubus

I keep getting this image in my head, one which was spawned by a little bit of a brainfight I got to doing with a friend of mine.  He asked, "Say there's been a bank robbery and the cops only know that the robber had a gun, a green coat, and a red hat.  They kick your ass, thinking you're the robber, and then they find the guy.  You can't sue because the information they had at the time had them thinking you were the guy."  (Or something like that.)  And my image goes like this...

A bank robbery has just occurred.  Now there are three women, young and frightened (and justifiably so) and wrapped in wool blankets from the back of an ambulance.  The guy behind the counter has been given a pair of scrub pants because he pissed himself as he loaded money into a bag for the robber.  The guard, an old retired guy whose only qualification for the job was being a cop a long time ago, has a heart attack and will be dead before he gets to the hospital.  I keep wondering who is responsible for the mess at hand, when it dawns upon me.  Taxpayer dollars put those ambulances, EMT's and blankets at the disposal of the young women.  Scrub pants are made available to the counter guy because taxpayers bought them.  And the cop?  Well, he was the only one with a gun.  And now he's dead.  Why the hell weren't the other people armed?  Let them whine all they want about how shit-scared they were, but why were they not armed at all?

So here we are, smashed at high speed into a catastrophe at the hands of a madman.  According to the best information at the time, a Chinese guy killed his girlfriend, an RA, and thirty students in a classroom, before blowing his own head off.  An ordinary Monday morning turned upside-down by a guy who (if the other information is accurate) tested the security response of the school by calling in fake bomb threats, slapped on some body armor, shot the hell out of thirty-two people, and killed himself with his own gun.  Now little of this is confirmed, but the best minds in the business, as well as eyewitnesses and police officers (cops and minds rarely meet), say that this guy wordlessly slaughtered unarmed people.  "Just, like, a straight face."  Stone killer.  Stone.  Cold.  Killer.

Reality check, you morons:  these people do exist.  And tightening gun laws won't change their desire to get a gun, nor will it slow their ability to get a gun, nor will it alter their usage once they get a gun.  Laws don't matter to them.  Lives don't matter to them, not even their own.  You can't stop them before they start killing, but that's the same as bad weather, bad drivers and bad food.  You can only react to them.  Why wait and let a legislative body react to it when your head is in the crosshairs right now?  There is only one way to stop a guy from killing you, and that's to kill him first.

Ignorance will get people killed, and gun control is the finest example.  Gun control, though, should be understood as a concept, not as a political issue.  And to help with that, I'm going to use my favorite method.

GUN is, in the context, a weapon which converts a whole bullet into a spent shell casing and a flying lead projectile;
CONTROL is the authority to manage or direct.

"Authority to manage or direct a weapon which converts a whole bullet into a spent shell casing" is the definition of GUN CONTROL, but sounds a lot like what I do when I'm holding my weapon and firing it.  The concept of gun control is the ultimate desire of the government to steal from you your right to acquire (through purchase or inheritance), distribute (as an item of sale or a gift), use (as a sport device or a defensive weapon) and regulate (whether by means of cleaning or by means of "doping," or verifying battlesight) a gun, with the intent of reducing you under absolute despotism.  Sound familiar?  The Left wants to steal your guns and stop you from getting more, and the Right wants to make you think that they are giving you your rights.  The Left is not able, lest you are too weak of mind and will to resist; the Right is not God, and is therefore impotent to give you anything other than that which you've already earned that was stolen from you in the first place.  Where did gun control in America originate?  Two words:  Jim Crow.  You want to see racism to die in America, here's a good starting point.

So there.  Now you know what's up.  And if you don't, well, bite me, because I've explained it to you and you can't plead ignorance (as you're smarter now for reading what I wrote), or the Fifth (which you only have because your buddies daily plead the Second).  You don't have the right to be safe, and you're only alive because nobody has killed you yet.  Wanna stop them?  What are you going to do, wait for the authorities or lock and load?

Start writing your hate mail now.  To quote Woman Against Gun Control:

Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley,
raped and strangled with her panty hose,  is somehow morally
superior to a  woman explaining to police how her attacker
got that fatal bullet wound.

Check out their website:  www.wagc.com

I have had many favorite television shows in my life, including series of "Star Trek" and single-season shows.  I remember the last episode of all my favorite bygone shows, and keep them in my heart as memorable moments, like the parting of ways with old friends.  Recently, though, I've been thinking a lot about how I spend way too much time on the internet and have decided to stop blogging.

Thank you, Jim's Blog Faithful, for reading, and for paying attention to all my dumbass remarks about a better world and a free country that we can all appreciate and enjoy passing onto another generation, one whose stock I guess I'll never assist in populating.

In this final post, I'll toss in one quote from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Good Doctor himself, from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

"There he goes.  One of God's own prototypes.  Some kind of high-powered mutant not even considered for mass production.  Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Mahalo.

Nathan, this one's for you.  After all, you did ask me a stupid question that begged forty-five minutes of discussion, while only having thirty seconds before I got out of your car and went home.

I am blessed beyond measure, but today I will focus this comment on one aspect of my life:  I am the proud owner of an iPod.  Not just any iPod holds court in my pocket, as I was very discriminatory when I selected the 30GB video model.  One of the things I'm able to do with this magnum machine is watch television shows while I'm eating my lunch at work.  Today, I decided to watch a program from NBC News called "War Zone Diary."  Richard Engel, friend of the blog and previously mentioned as having the biggest huevos in the known world, compiled four years' worth of video diary and commentary and created a one-hour summary of his experiences in Iraq as a journalist.  Some of what he described was horrific, while other bits were simply unbelieveable and almost funny.  We as a people are fortunate to have this man reporting among our troops in Iraq, bringing us a point of view that can transcend our poor power to understand the war and the men fighting it.

As an uncivil libertarian, I am more forceful in my understanding of the world than most.  I prefer to air the laundry quickly, forcibly, and strongly; this way, I am able to preclude others from missing the point, I am able to rip corruption's roots from the ground and attack the fertilizer before it makes problems resurface.  Reinventing the wheel is tedious, and I for one prefer not to have to do that whenever possible.  So I'll air one of my favorites, and I'll let you decide what's up.  In my understanding, there are three things President Bush which constitute abuses of power.

First, the President followed the 9/11 attacks with the midnight passage of the Patriot Act.  In a simple sentence, the Patriot Act created a power structure that has the President and his cronies at the top and a lot of people that fall outside this group at the bottom of a long ladder.  This is particularly not good in that the President has no clue what the hell is going on anymore, if he ever did.  Informing on neighbors, roundabout passage of legislation, rampant misuse of fictitious war powers...for all his references to Hitler's Germany and the Third Reich, President Bush is certainly sewing the seeds of a new kind of fascism, one in which few hold power and many wind up dependent upon his dubious good graces to release them from jails without being charged, tried, or convicted, before a sentence is passed.

The second of his big stupids is the Iraq War itself.  Another staple of the uncivil libertarian platform is the nonintervention of other countries in the form of preemptive warfare.  Bush's doctrine of preemption was misused to start a war with a nation not connected to the attacks on Washington and New York, when the doctrine could be replaced with an actual investigation that would put our troops into nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; it would have our military lending physical aid to nations wanting freedom, like Taiwan and Darfur; it would cut off trade with nations that we currently call friends and force hands among the baddest of the bad.  Instead, President Bush wastes our troops in a toilet not worthy of our time or energy, our lives or our taxpayer dollars, our national identity or our morale.  I guess he wouldn't know anything about fighting a losing war, as he was a deserter and a daddy's boy.

The third, and most historically egregious of his sins, is the one best referred to by its actual name:  The Military Commissions Act of 2006.  As the Great Writ is disemboweled like the defendants whom it was intended to protect from rigged trials and summary executions 900 years ago, President Bush has guaranteed that the very next time we get a President dumb enough to start wars with bogus intelligence and stir up paranoia in our streets, separating people as friends and neighbors until we're all so scared that he pushes us all into a grave that our children will never forgive us for digging.

And in case you haven't been paying attention, he's done just that.  Give it time and you'll see him do all of it.

So, Nathan asked me last night what it would take for me to draw on somebody.  Stupid question, I say, but I have an answer.  There are, as always, three standard scenarios that fit that bill.  Simple, yet not seen in a while, are these scenarios, so I'll say as few words as I must.

1.  Force.  Force is the violence directed at me.
2.  Threat of force.  Self-explanatory.
3.  Fraud.  It is force, in its own right, as it involves the destruction of my property by means of using someone else to do it instead.

I've had all three of these happen to me; for whatever reason, however, my bullets are all still in my gun.  Pity.  I want to kill people who steal from me.  I don't like it when people steal from me.  I don't like people who threaten me.  I don't like violence directed at me.

Jim's Blog Faithful, you're all wonderful, and I thank you for reading today.  I want to leave you with some wise words, but the only thing I think to say is this quote from founding father Benjamin Franklin:  "Fart proudly."  Now write your hate mail.


 

The subject bar is very similar to "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place" in its simplicity, profundity, and stupidity.  Ah, screw it.  Read.

I've had no internet at home for the last week.  C'est la merd.  We're working on it at home, and in the meantime, this is what I did for the last week.  Monday, not unlike most days, was boring.  Well, not boring, per se...I watched a movie.  It's called "A Scanner Darkly," and it's based upon the novel of the same name by author Philip K. Dick.  If you liked "Lord of War," you'll also like this movie.  I'm glad I could help you.

Friday, after working for four days, a friend and I went to our local Catholic church and made the Stations of the Cross.  Now, although I've been Catholic for my entire life, this was my first time making the Stations.  I hope to do this every Friday through Lent, not only for myself, but also because my friend is a very good friend who is awesome.  KP!

Last night, for Saint Pat's, I got off work and hung out with my friends again.  We went bowling at the best bowling alley on South Duff, the 20th Century.  As it turns out, two bowlers stood like the Spartans at Thermopylae and got whupped silly, but we did our damnedest and did not quit.  Afterwards, we went to the best bar in Ames, the London Underground.  Wow, did I get wasted.  I think I may have even made a pass at a woman at the bar.  That's a sharp contrast from not speaking to anybody who ain't in my group.  That best friend of mine had to escort me up the stairs to my place (we bugged out before midnight), and now I'm alive and well and telling the story of my Saint Patrick's Day.

There are a few things that kinda slipped into and out of this story:
1) I was at Best Buy and a guy was playing Guitar Hero.  Specifically, he was playing "Free Bird" and he did the guitar solo at the end almost perfectly.  Sweet!  "Free Bird," by the way, is the anthem of World Tomato Freedom Season.
2) The snow cleared up and I've been riding my bike to work, and that's cool.
3) I thought I broke my iPod, but after taking it home and plugging it into the computer, I discovered that if the headphones aren't plugged in, it won't play.
4) One of the girls at work was indulging me while I was being an idiot; I got this papercut on my finger, so I named it after her.  I don't think she'll even remember when I see her Tuesday morning.
5) Daughtry isn't so bad.  But that's it for people from American Idol.  Simon Cowell is a jerk, Paula Abdul is as stupid as she was in 1989 when she "wasn't" dating Arsenio Hall, and Ryan Seacrest isn't fooling anybody about being gay.
6) Thanks for reading my blog today.

Start writing your hate mail now.  Of course, if you do write me hate mail, keep this Irish curse in mind:  "May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope."  Hee hee.

I am at a loss for words at this moment, but in a few minutes, I'll come up with more.

Okay, here goes.  I just finished watching a documentary (five parts) on a heavy metal band in Baghdad.  I guess there are things not truly covered by those guys on cable news about the Iraq war, and this is one of them.  You see, we all saw that five-member boy band in Iraq on the news about three years ago, but during a routine swing on YouTube, I this header caught my eye:  Heavy Metal Baghdad.

The first two parts are playable on YT, but after that you have to watch the rest at www.vbs.tv and I recommend doing exactly that.  It's an account of the six-day trip that two guys took to Baghdad to meet these guys.  What you see is more than just a rock band struggling to make it.  Think "Some Kind of Monster," subtract all the rehab and Mustaine-brand whining, add real balls and AK-47s, and a four-man band that's struggling while separated to make a living for their families and a future for themselves.  This is the real deal.

Start writing your hate mail after you watch the documentary.  In the words of Walter Cronkite, "There is no such thing as a little freedom.  Either you are all free, or you are not free."

Brothers and Sisters in Christ, this one's for you.

Some time back, there was an episode of "Sabrina: The Teenage Witch" in which Sabrina, in order to keep others occupied while she did her important witchcraft, used these candies called "Astonish-Mints."  With just one candy, the consumer was subjected to a thrill at the "realization" of simple household realities, such as a cat breathing, or a sink running, or a rug on the floor just plain laying.  This is why I named tonight's post as I did.

I am confounded by my brethren at their renewal of energy by readings and teachings from the Bible.  They seem gripped by such realities as the presence of God, the love of God, and the forgiving nature of God.  I can't tell you how many times a girl one year younger than me stood before an assembly and cried into a microphone saying, "I can't believe that Jesus died to forgive even me of my sins."  Whatever that number is, I'm sure it is directly proportional to the number of times I've been irritated at such behavior.

I've referred to myself as a bad Christian, a follower who follows for all the wrong excuses.  I don't pray much, if ever, and when I do, it's because someone else asked me to do so only a few seconds prior.  And even then I keep the subject matter to the request, sometimes even to the text.  I've had friends ask for prayer based upon a bad dream, and prayed--no joke--to God, "Please protect my friend who had a bad dream."

I am grateful to all my friends, those saved and those not, who continue to be the source of my best ammunition against boredom.  By being your friend, I can hold you when you grieve, I can pound fists and throw back drinks when you celebrate, and I can try to look you in the eye at all points which lie between those extemes.  But I've spent so much time committing things to memory that I rarely find my joy in the Lord.  Truly, I am like Jonah in the whale's belly, like Job on his knees, like Nicodemus with his stupid questions.

My personal favorite, however, is the story of Iscariot.  I would like to think that I am the same kind of friend that Iscariot was.  Now, before my friends rise to stone me, hear my talk.  Judas, as an apostle, made no bones about the presence of God in the personage of Christ.  He knew, personally, that Christ was Lord and would save all from their sins.  And he loved Jesus, knowing Jesus loved him.  The only thing stopping Judas from enjoying his life as a Christian was that he also knew that he would have to betray Jesus.  To look a friend in the eye and fulfill prophecy, to kiss a friend who must be betrayed...

Judas had a devil in him.  It's the devil in all of us.  It's the thing that puts the I ahead of the Big Guy.  Christ, indeed, sought to save us from ourselves, in spite of our asinine behavior.  In some cases, He sought to save us in spite of hating Him.

Maybe that's what my friends find so astonishing.  I wish I did.

Start writing your hate mail now.  In the words of Steve Wozniak, "Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such."

So I haven't posted anything worth reading in the last month or so.  So I never really meant for that to happen, as "posting more in my blog" was among my New Year's Resolutions.  Maybe that's what happens when you make a resolution...you get to a point where it's not a big enough deal anymore that it just takes a dump.  Oh well, I'll try to get back to posts on "Animal Farm" and more about the death of Anna Nicole Smith (may she rest in peace), Gerald Ford (may he rest in peace, ave atque vale), and the birth of the six-billionth person on the planet (numbers of deaths notwithstanding).

And if you only see one movie this year, make it the Clive Owen film "Children of Men."  It's based upon the novel by P.D. James, and it's pretty thick.  I had to take a break during the movie, but I'm better now.

In the words of Bart Simpson, "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything."  'Twas ever thus, 'twill ever be.

Let's take a trip into the past...a long and distant past where I was a small, frail, ungrateful miscreant...a bleak time of destruction, and the seeds of hope so small as to be assumed nonexistent...

I read Orwell's "Animal Farm" fourteen years ago, while serving a five-day in-school suspension for disrespect to a teacher, destruction of school property, theft of school property, and unlawful discharge of a run-on sentence in a public place where ladies and children were present and a traffic light was malfunctioning sporatically (all of which constitutes an automatic five-day suspension in the Winchestertonfieldville School District).  I read this book and did a report at the end of the book; as a result of this report, I was awarded a D- for the semester in 6th-grade English (after a semester of little more than F-rate performance).  For fourteen years I had no idea why the school principal told me to read this book.  Now I know, and it's not the reason you think.

I'll never understand the psychic thing about moms who attend churches I attend, particularly how they see in me a potential that I have heretofore failed to develop (historically, they just pray for me and then get disappointed when I fail).  Maybe she thought I was going to become a politician.  Maybe she saw in me the seeds of hope for humankind.  And maybe, it's a stretch, but just maybe she saw me becoming the mountain of a man I am today, the giant of maniacal wisdom I have become in the ensuing dozen-plus years.  In any case, she must have seen me becoming something, particularly something more sophisticated than one of those run-of-the-mill peckerheads that actually thinks that Red Bull gives them wings.

If you've never read "Animal Farm" before, consider my words a spoiler.  Stop reading and begin your poorly-worded hate mail at any time if that bugs you.  It all starts with an old pig voicing sedition against the farmers of Manor Farm, calling all to refuse to be turned into dinner.  Then he dies.  The other pigs, the smartest guys in the barn, mount a successful attack upon the farmers and drive them away from the house.  A sense of order is established and power is placed among the pigs, possessing wistelligic beyond the other animals.  Things go awry as times get more interesting, most pronounced after the puppies of the farm dog are taken away to be "educated," only to discover they have been trained to become a shock-troop force that answer only to the pigs.  The pigs defy the rule of law laid forth by the old pig simply by rewriting it, but use his severed head as a symbol of his acquiescence.  The pigs enter into a commercial agreement with men, to include the sale of eggs belonging to the hens.  The hens protest by flying to a high beam of the farm and let their eggs break when they fall, and the pigs declare them traitors and sentence them (and anyone who helps them) to death.  When the great horse of the farm falls ill, the pigs sell him to a glue-maker; they then tell all the other animals that the glue-maker's cart was bought by the doctor, but that the horse's condition was too far gone to do anything helpful.  In the end, the farm has fallen into disarray, animals dead from cold or starvation, and the pigs sit in the house with men playing cards and drinking whiskey.  Looking through a window at the house, the narrator brings the conclusion:  the pigs and the men look alike.

It should be noted that the pigs were able to keep the animals hypnotized using various methods of distraction.  Though television was employed in movies based upon the book, the tool of mass distraction is more than likely radio programming.  The message, though, is the same:  when the masses stop paying attention, the smartest guys in the room become the drivers of the handbasket, and will lead everyone on the path to destruction for their own carnal desires; children are turned into blind assassins and the unborn is seized by the power base for profit's sake; persons are named traitors without evidence and scapegoated as the panacea employed by leaders who don't want to answer questions, and all dissenters are called collaborators and traitors by association, unfairly dismissing their claims as propaganda and partisan attempts to confuse the weak-minded.

Sound familiar?

In the coming days, I'll be digging through "Animal Farm" and making various points that have been made many times in the sixty years since the publishing of this book.  I'll cut up the Seven Commandments and write briefs on the major characters, and you can decide for yourself which of the pigs is Karl Rove and which is Ted Kennedy--I'm just observing, not assigning.  And particularly pointed is the indictment of politicians who have made their money on the backs of the soldier, the vagabond, the fool, the weakling, and the "dissident," which I'll be mouthing at you soon.

Bottom line:  if you came to my blog to read jokes, your reason for visiting just left for the lamer half of Letterman's monologue; if you're here to arm your brain for the big row with the man, you came to the right place.  Quoting Cobain, "Load up on guns/Bring your friends."  This party is just getting good.

And all are welcome to start writing your hate mail now.  In the words of Martin Luther King, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."  And Mrs. Campbell, thank you.