The Day Democracy Self-Destructed

The oddest thing of all about the economic disaster that will follow a default on the national debt is that it will have been completely voluntary. No crisis or emergency or massive deregulated financial fraud will have precipitated it. This suicidal outcome will have been freely chosen by a political party whose members either hope to pull power from the wreckage caused by chaos, or are simply stupid enough to chainsaw the very branch on which they sit, laughing like hyenas and demanding "respect" while they do it.

Fox News Has Two Faces, And Both of Them Lie

By Dan Hagen

During the October 2013 Republican Party-engineered government shutdown, Fox News reported that President Obama had personally funded a “Muslim cultural museum.” But I have to contradict Media Matters here. Fox News didn’t “fall for” the story, confusing an obvious, labeled satire with actual news. They were just bald-faced lying in a smear campaign, as per usual.

The lying fascist “news channel” has been working overtime during their longed-for shutdown, and has developed a split personality doing so. Fox News was a cheerleader for the shutdown that it then deplored and blamed on Obama half the time, while still cheering for it the other half of the time.

The oh-so-very complicated news crawl of Fox News: “The government shutdown engineered the GOP is a great thing, really only a ‘slimdown,’ hooray, except whatever parts of it you don’t like, which are terrible and Obama’s fault. He's black, you know. Black, black, black.”

Sound Familiar?

The right wingers work overtime to put guns in the hands of toddlers, lunatics and criminals, but of course want to make sure art is outlawed. Fascism on parade.

When the Right Attacks...

They forgot Superman (for not saying "the American way" enough) and Wonder Woman (the harlot dared to change her costume).

Fox News Engineers, Cheers, Jeers Shutdown

Fox News was a cheerleader for the government shutdown that it's nowdeploring and blaming on Obama half the time, and still cheering for the otherhalf of the time. It is to laugh.

The oh-so-very complicated news crawl of Fox News: “The government shutdown engineered the GOP is a great thing, really only a ‘slimdown,’ hooray, except whatever parts of it you don’t like, which are terrible and Obama’s fault. He's black, you know. Black, black, black."

The World of Books

By Dan Hagen

The orange card was still in the pocket of the hardcover copy of John Cheever’s The World of Apples that I picked up at the Mattoon Library sale yesterday.

It’s a thin yet somehow substantial-feeling third edition, illustrated with a painting of an enormous green apple filling a room. Printed in June 1973, this short story collection proved to be a popular companion, and was first due back home at the library in July 1973.

The library loaned it out 34 times, those lendings filling the front of the orange card and part of the back.

“Put down your lendings,” the naked off-Broadway theatre cast and audience chants at the embarrassed narrator in the collection’s first story, The Fourth Alarm. He was willing to get naked with them but unwilling to surrender his car keys and wallet. So he walks, alone and rejected, back out of the theatre into the freshly falling snow, grateful after all for his clothes and his snow tires.

The book’s lendings ended Nov. 4, 1991. Now, wanted again, it will find a retirement home on my bookshelf, no longer wandering the world, no longer feeling the rough, interested caress of literate strangers.

Guns Don't Kill People, Of Course, But Hugs Do

Like the NRA says, the only thing that can stop a woman with a hug is a man with a gun. Thanks NRA!!!

Actually, this is the perfect metaphor for what the insane gun epidemic in the country is killing — trust, affection, compassion.