Government Goons & Who’s a Citizen

Those crazy “Birthers” are getting an awful lot of ink and air time lately, offering good comedy fodder for late night television while occasionally making regular people turn away in revulsion. Like the “Teabaggers” weren’t hilarious enough to use the name of a sexual weirdness as their moniker, or to publicize their racist rants and ridiculous charges against the President, after being the very same wackos who accused those who questioned any illegal act of the last administration by calling them traitors.

CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

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Notes to Sarah’s Ghost

Soon to be ex-Alaska governor Sarah Palin has an op-ed published in the WaPo today [July 14] that obviously wasn’t written by Lady SaladMaster, and which derides Obama’s cap and trade policy while promoting ‘the usual’. Drill, drill, drill plus mountain destruction for un-clean coal and going nuclear. While I understand this attempt to keep herself in the ‘Puglican lineup of erstwhile power brokers even in her new persona as a Quitter Extraordinaire, I’d like to take on some of her ghost-writer’s points.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Events in Iran following the outrageous actions of losing candidate Ahmadinejad (try to say it three times fast) and the supreme Ayatollah against massive street demonstrations in Tehran and across the country have turned violent. Though the secondary Ayatollah, the Iranian military and about half of the elite Republican Guard are supporting challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, or at least staying out of the fray.

Six members of the Iranian national soccer team wore green armbands in solidarity during the first half of a World Cup qualifying game yesterday (June 17). The government has tried hard to cut off all lines of communication to the outside world, but sporadic cell phone service has allowed text updates and cell phone videos to be distributed. Twitter put off scheduled maintenance to keep its service going during this dramatic confrontation, incoming posts at #iranelection.

HuffPo’s Live Blog has incoming information day and night, the University of Chicago has opened a dedicated Iran fax line [at 1-888-308-3025 for incoming] as cell service gets more unreliable. Various volunteers have been receiving cell videos from Iran and posting them to YouTube.

Here’s how you can help, and many people have set their computers up for proxy to cover individuals reporting from Iran. Election challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi is posting regularly on his Facebook page, which can be read in English by clicking that version at the bottom of the page. He has called for a national day of mourning for “those killed in post-election clashes” June 18.

The whole world is watching, President Obama said the other day, and it’s true. So wear some green, try to keep up, and let’s all hope for the best outcome.

Wingnuts Go Crazy Again… (Still?)

Alas, the now-marginalized Republican Party is desperately attempting to solidify the ‘base’ it lost in the past two general election cycles, even to the point of declaring wealthy radio hate-monger, opportunist, chickenhawk and drug addict Rush Limbaugh to be their new Dear Leader. Whoa. Can things get weirder than that?

Aparently so. We’ve got Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg talking about beating up editorialists with baseball bats on cable television. We’ve got Total Gym shill Chuck Norris and Glenn Beck talking about setting up sleeper cells, and some actual Senators and Congressmen talking secession! No, that wasn’t just a Sarah Palin deal for Alaskan Independence. They might be serious this time.

Neo-Nazis planning those “dirty bombs” Bush-II used to love so much as a scare tactic, total idiots stuffing the SCOTUS with challenges to Obama’s citizenship while telling troops they don’t have to obey the orders of the Commander In Chief, things are getting weirder by the day. Sedition. Advocacy of open rebellion, talk of terrorist acts and assassination.

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An Old-Fashioned Oklahoma Election

Three of the four registered voters in my household voted more than two weeks ago, just 4 days into the early voting period here in North Carolina. That’s me, my hubby and our grandson who turned 18 in May. Daughter is voting today, mostly because she has this ‘thing’ about voting on election day. Then she and grandson are headed for Asheville to tend lines (I doubt there will be one here, more than three quarters of this end of the county early voted), then to an election party expected to go late into the night. Hubby and I will be off to our county seat, where we’ve been recruited as “Poll Ninjas” by the Dem chair, there to assist in case anybody is challenged, lawyers standing by.

Paper ballots again this year too, since Diebold got kicked out of the state after throwing the 2004 election into utter turmoil (it took months to sort out some state races, so many split-ticket votes had been compromised! Filling in the dot isn’t that hard. Counting them isn’t that hard either.

But it’ll be morning before we know the actual results, so I thought I’d offer a true story about voting out in “real America”…

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Doesn’t Get Any Weirder than This

Well, I was going to report on the St. Paul RNC this week like I did the DNC in Denver last week, but it never quite caught my attention. Hardly anybody went (including the President and Vice-President of the United States, who are the party’s figureheads), Weather was lousy in Louisiana so the first day got put off altogether, and Fred Thompson makes me go to sleep.

But I’ve honestly gotta say, this whole Alaska Momma mooseburger beauty queen thing with Sarah Palin has me utterly and completely befoozled. Bamboozled. Conundrumated. WTF???

First thing out of the gate was that she’s been governator for less than two years, and before that was mayor of a town the same size as Wilburton, Oklahoma (where Granny lives). Then she violated military regulations and operations security by telling everybody her 18-year old son is deploying on September 11. Then she lied about her close relationship with indicted AK senator Ted Stevens and his “bridge to nowhere”, and ‘forgot’ to tell anyone that her own state Senate has her under current investigation for abuse of power. Oops.

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DNC ‘08: 1

Stoopid Network Tricks and Dallying Dems

As I sit here listening to CSPAN pre-convention inanities and old speeches in the background while waiting for the kickoff (and a Teddy Kennedy cry-fest), I figured I’d go ahead and report the first Odd-News story of the ‘08DNC. It certainly gave me a giggle.

The DNC pool coverage this year is being provided by… of all possible sources… Fox News. Just about 12 hours exactly from the opening, the sprinkler system in a Fox skybox was set off, flooding the downstairs concourse and club areas so badly the fire department had to suck it up with shop-vacs. The massive amounts of lighting and broadcasting equipment – and attendant wiring – had to be hastily removed to prevent electrical fire. The link is from KSUA-TV 9 in Denver:

Part of Pepsi Center flooded by sprinkler system

Some immediate pointed asides occurred to me, so of course I perused the bored-as-me blogosphere to see what kind of speculations might be floating around. The best I’ve found so far for satirical or just plain humorous value are:

• Since it’s the Pepsi Center, was it Aquafina?
• Their pants were on fire.
• Pundit hairspray meets Limbaugh’s cigar.
• Hot air from Sean Hannity.
• Methane. Too much bullshit too close to hot lights.

On the fact that some fundamentalists were out front praying for rain…

• Proof positive prayer works.
• Proof that one needs to word prayers carefully.

Hahaha!!! Whew! Presuming Fox’s lighting crew figured out they can’t put those hot spots within a foot of the heat sensors for the sprinkler system, I’ve also been idly watching the interactions between people and groups of people wandering through the convention center. If you thought the YKos and NetrootsNation conventions were regular hotbeds of rampant pair-bonding (mostly temporary), the DNC has to take the cake!

I’m sure there’s an equivalent amount of close encounters that take place during the RNC, so I’m not saying only one side of the aisle is sexier. It’s just that at the RNC it’s mostly chemically-enhanced and happening in the men’s rest rooms. [rim shot]

Hehehe!!! Okay, I think I’m prepared to spend the next four days glued to all-day platform committee hammering, all-evening speechifying and all-night partying – on CSPAN, sans commercials. Should be fun!

Posts to the DNC Series:

Stoopid Network Tricks and Dallying Dems
Assassination Plot Busted, Teddy’s Speech
Hard-Hearted Hillary Made Me Cry
Bill Is Still The Godfather

You’ve Just Gotta Be Proud…

Wow. That’s a real photograph of our dear President representing America at the Olympic Summer Games in Bejing. Pay particular attention to the look on daughter Barbara next to him… Even as Chinese police are slaughtering protesters north of the city and censoring internet access for people from all over the world. Some athletes and journalists covering the games can’t even get their own blogs…

Just for coming-in-January nostalgia’s sake, check out the rest of these fun photos over at Gawker. At the very least it’ll make you not feel so bad about those debate drinking games where you have to chug every time John McCain mentions being a tortured Vietnam veteran or Obama says “we can.”

Link:

Gawker: Bush Looking Drunk at the Olympics

Oh John, You Handsome Cad!

Well folks, it’s 8-8-08, which of course means it’s the End of the World. Right on cue, it’s revealed that John Edwards, best-looking Presidential Wannabe in this nation’s history, was revealed today to have enjoyed an extramarital affair. Might even have fathered one of America’s many (a majority these days) “fatherless” bastards. Wow. I’m so not frothing.

No, we don’t use the word “bastard” anymore to talk about REAL fatherless children. We call him or her our “Love Child.” It’s been that way since the 1960s, becomes more popular every year. Yet the leftist Democratic blogosphere goes absolutely ballistic over this non-news, as if the socialist-leaning, populist, progressive population is this country isn’t the exclusive enclave of Hippies who managed to live through those glorious ’60s (and their children, and their grandchildren, many/most of them fatherless or on step-father #4 by now).

Suddenly they’re all strict Old Testament moralists of the Pharisee variety, buying fake beards and arming themselves with stones. It’s just enough hard core, disgusting hypocrisy to make me sick to my stomach. Get a life, people!

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Anthrax Terrorist: Take 3… Um… 4

…Nobody believes the gub’ment anymore

Sure, there have been tin-foil hat conspiracy theories aplenty for as long as anyone alive can remember. The Jewish bankers got together with the German Illuminati and plotted the ‘New World Order’, getting its first nail in the coffin in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, going straight from there to instigating WW-I with a well-planned assassination in Sarajevo, culling the first wave of accumulated wealth in 1929 to start the Great Depression, which could only be alleviated in the end by WW-II.

And they needed an excuse to overrule America’s strong isolationism at the time, so they didn’t bother to do anything about the incoming Japanese fleet as it sailed en masse toward Pearl Harbor. Not exactly a “false flag” operation, but certainly despicable. REAL false flag operations got famous when the wholly fictional Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ allowed the US military to ensconce itself in perpetuity in South Vietnam, admittedly (by several ‘memoirs’ since, by people who could know) for the purpose of testing the nifty new armaments and chemical warfare agents amassed when they ‘forgot’ to cut the wartime military budget after Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Then there was 9-11. A textbook case made for tin-foil speculation, undoubtedly. Huge skyscrapers imploding perfectly from jet fuel in the upper stories, a whole different, un-damaged skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed in the same fashion late that afternoon for no apparent reason, a hole in the danged Pentagon but zero signs of anything that might have caused it, etc., etc., etc. I doubt anybody’s unaware of the grand conspiracy theories for that dreadful day.

Then, just a week later, some journalists and a congresscritters received letters in the mail containing weaponized anthrax spores and badly printed notes from what we were told was just another Arab terrorist. Only that wasn’t true either, as quickly became known. Why, it turns out that the weaponized anthrax spores came from the US Army’s own bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

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