Whistling for their Dogs

Tea Baggers are self-selected, and are carefully groomed by their corporate Astroturf puppeteers, for their immunity to reason and their contempt for learning. 

Anger and fear are all they can hear, along with those dog-whistle calls to racism and fundamentalist Christian jihad that remain inaudible to mature minds.

Father and Son

Now here's a father who will always be a hero to his boy.

‎"I understand that people capable of experiencing actual human emotion perceive these events as tragedies. And I can mimic that response"

From the brilliant Tom Tomorrow

America's Shameless Shame: Sarah Palin

By Dan Hagen

Sarah Palin was paid $15.85 per word she uttered on Fox News, her erstwhile employer. No wonder she babbled on and on so incoherently.

Here's what America's most noted blithering moron Sarah Palin said when asked by Bill O'Reilly if she is intellectual enough to be president.

"I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have -- I believe the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spineless -- a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fat resume that's based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are -- could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I'm not saying that that has to be me."

And there you have it . Another 102 words of completely meaningless tossed word-salad stupidity from the woman who was Great White Hope of the GOP.

So Palin is gone, and the moral is this. What’s most disturbing is the fact that the corporate media was willing to treat Sarah Palin as a credible candidate when they knew, beyond any doubt, that she was in fact a cretin. The corporate media remains perfectly willing to peddle us poison and label it lemonade.

What's the Matter with Kids Today?

Kids. They're all effing the same. Sigh. Photo by Masa Shinmiya, I believe.

Slapped by the Invisible Hand

Never confuse markets with moral worth. That's our problem.

"Hold it right there, would-be mass shooter! I am a steely nerved Certified Public Accountant, and I am taking you OUT!"

From the brilliant Tom Tomorrow

It's Not About Safety. It's About Fantasy

The NRA types may think they back policies like concealed carry for self-defense, but their real motivation is puerile quasi-sexual power fantasy. They don't need guns. They need to grow up.

Unregarded Age in Corners Thrown

By Dan Hagen

As you age, you realize you’re being taken for granted by the young — regarded, at times, with a sort of faintly amused indifference. Spooks you. 

You begin to hear your own voice sound suspiciously similar to those muted brass wah-wahs that mark the voices of the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

But even as you fade into the background, you now see what’s going on around you with a vivid, unsentimental clarity. You discover with a start that you have become Miss Marple.

I remember how I felt when I was in Effingham High School 40 years ago. Seeing a girl I knew reading Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel,” I remember thinking, “Why would anyone ever want to read about that silly old bat?”

Life will have its little cosmic wink of a joke at your expense.

So Do Good, and To Hell With Them

By Dan Hagen

Perhaps the proudest moment of my journalistic career came a week or so after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when I was editor of a small-town midwestern newspaper. I wrote a column titled "History Will Judge Us" in which I said that the invasion was a horrendous, unjustified error that would kill hundreds of thousands of people needlessly, and a war that would continue for years and was based on false claims.
A surging tide of accusations that I was a "traitor" washed over me in letters to the editor. I had expected them.
A decade later, everything I wrote has been proven true, and every letter that denounced me has been proven to have been written by a blind fool.