What was going on? Had decades of sucking down so much high-fructose corn syrup not only made Americans incredibly obese, but also messed with white brain chemistry to the point that some sort of tipping point had occurred?
Get the whole earth-moving eyeful on how “White America Has Lost Its Mind” here, at the Village Voice.
The Pakistanis laughed. So did “The Bangladeshis. The women with head scarves. The blondes. The Indians. The Palestinians. The Jews.”
It was that kind of night, actually, when for a moment you can believe that all the world’s problems could be solved if everyone would just lighten up a little bit (or a lot) and laugh together, at themselves and at each other. The lineup was packed. It was like there’d been an uprising at The Daily Show and Jon Stewart was stashed in a closet somewhere backstage bound in duct tape.
Go to Meera Subramanian‘s piece at Killing the Buddha and read about the night
Comedian Aasif Mandvi, correspondent for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, began ….. “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” at Comix on W. 14th Street in New York …… reflecting on things he missed as a kid growing up Muslim. “Santa Claus. Bacon Bits.” (Pause, the critical tool of the comic.) “Seeing my mother’s face.”
Laughter. The best medicine.
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
Read more in the New Yorker.
Like the robber barons of old, David H. Koch is a billionaire and very generous philanthropist, as though doing some good with some of his money makes up for all the bad he does with the rest of it — including the founding and support of supposed “grass roots movements” such as Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level….. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”
The revolutionaries who held the original Boston Tea Party would never have stood for the machinations of the Kochtopus. These new Tea Partiers, manipulated by libertarians like Koch who spread disinformation and and stir up the disatisfactions of the people who will most suffer if their policies come about, are going to dismantle what is most good about this country. What these misguided citizens don’t realize is that they will ultimately suffer most, as the Kochs of this nation grind their lives to ash.
I like these comments left on a post of the blog of the Investigative Fund.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“I’m wondering if those who support that so-called Tea Party Movement really know where Republicans are leading them? It seems like the Tea Party rank & file are being USED by a bunch of vain, self-serving, evil, power mad, greed stricken, K-Street Con Artists. Paid for by wealthy silver spoon trust fund babies who want to turn the American PEOPLE into peasants. The scum of the earth who hide their hideous faces by using Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin as spokespersons. SUCKERS!Just look at their agenda items. It‘s like wet dream for Ken Lay or Jack Abramoff:
1) Repeal Health Insurance Reform
2) Privatize Social Security or abolish it.
3) End Medicare
4) Extend Bush Tax Cuts for wealthy and Big Oil
5) Repeal Wall Street reform
6) Protect all those responsible for Gulf oil disaster and future environmental catastrophes
7) Abolish or cut funding to Department of Education
..) Abolish Dept. of Energy
9) Abolish Environmental Protection Agency
10) Repeal 17th Amendment
11) Rewrite Bible and school textbooks,
12) Replace JESUS with Glenn Beck, Frank Church with Joe McCarthy…
13) After USA is destroyed by Republican Party low grade thought processes, BLAME Democrats/Liberals
14) be flunkies, soldiers and slaves for silver spoon trust fund babies like George W. Bush, Saudi Prince Bandar and the Koch Bros.
Why aren’t the mainstream media falling all over themselves to unveil the Koch behind the curtain. Sell-outs. All of them.
On September 11, in memory of a co-worker he lost on that day, he wrote:
I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you.
I’m quoting Michael Moore, of course, that guy who has (and shows) the courage of his convictions.
He makes a great suggestion at the end of his piece quoted above, in which he argues that the mosque community center intended to be built near Ground Zero should be built AT Ground Zero:
I say right now. Let’s each of us make a statement by donating to the building of this community center! It’s a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization and you can donate a dollar or ten dollars (or more) right now through a secure pay pal account by clicking here. I will personally match the first $10,000 raised (forward your PayPal receipt to webguy@michaelmoore.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). If each one of you reading this blog/email donated just a couple of dollars, that would give the center over $6 million, more than what Donald Trump has offered to buy the Imam out. C’mon everyone, let’s pitch in and help those who are being debased for simply wanting to do something good. We could all make a huge statement of love on this solemn day.
I never contribute money to any cause. This time I made an exception.
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #17 visual prompt of a female head. Go here to find other writers’ responses.
She was my sister before she was Lot’s wife – Irit, my older sister, who was special to the goddess, although that was a fact only known to the women of Soddom. For it was the men who ruled our town, our lives, our destiny, burrowing into the soils along the edges of the town, along the shores of the salty Dead Sea, bringing up the dark thick substance that held together our walls and our dead. “Mumiya” it was called. You call it “asphalt.” Sometimes a man would fall into a firey pit and drown in it. He would become mummified – forever preserved in a column of stone.
Irit was a good wife, and Lot was one of the better husbands, although that is not saying much, given the place that the new god of men designated for women. That is why many of us kept to the old ways in secret, gathering over our shared cauldrons of stew, rich with the yieldings of the fertile lands we also shared beyond the smokey shoreline. We would give our thanks to the Mother of All, ask for her blessings and prophecies, look to her priestess for guidance.
And that is how Irit came to be caught in the fires finally sparked by the greed of some of our men. She had a vision, Irit did – a vision of the earth quaking and burning, a vision of a darkness billowing out from the underworld. And she told her husband, who was one of the better husbands, who respected the wisdom of women and their ways, and often took his wife’s counsel. But when Lot tried to warn his fellow townsmen to watch for signs, they would not listen, for it was not their god who spoke, and they coveted their riches.
And so when the earth began to tremble and red fires erupted along the shoreline, when the land began to melt and fold in on itself and stony shards shot up into the air, Lot and and his wife, Irit, gathered their family and began to flee north to the olive groves — until Irit heard the screams of a townswoman whose husband held her down on the ground so that she could not run. And so Lot’s wife turned to help her friend.
“No!” I cried to my sister. “No!” cried Lot to his wife.
“No!” cried Lot’s wife as a great dark wave erupted from the earth, engulfing her and leaving her hardened form to withstand the next rain of sulphur-spewn stones.
And that’s when her head broke off and rolled toward me down the slope, landing with her face looking into mine and still calling “No!”
I carried her hardened image with me through all of our long journeys north to the land of Hatti, where I finally settled with a band of women who called themselves “ha-mazan.”
We kept the mummified head of Lot’s wife, Irit, on the altar where we sought the guidance of the Great Mother, whom we all knew by different names – Ishtar, Astarte, Innana, Lilitu — to remind us of Irit’s last word.
I don’t know what happened to Lot and his children. But I do know that what everyone thinks happened in Soddom is not the story I know about Lot’s wife.
[writer’s note: details about Bronze Age towns along the Dead Sea gotten from here.]
I invite you to link here and read my son’s post, entitled as above, which begins thusly:
It says so right on the tin: “[Memorial Day] commemorates U.S. soldiers who died while in the military service”.
The key word in all of this is “died”, not “served” or, for that matter, “serves”. This day isn’t for anyone who ever found themselves in the military of the United States, or for those who find themselves there today. None of these truths dishonors living veterans (who have a day) or active duty personnel.
Death is different. Death is singular. Death is separate. Death is final. The point is to set aside a day in which we remember those whose service took them all the way past that final line. Whether or not they died for a just cause, they died in our name……..cont’d
And while I’m on the subject, I offer for your illuminination Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.”
Magpie Tales features a weekly visual writing prompt, and this is my response to Magpie #16. Click here for more.
I sit on the floor and massage her bony feet, carefully avoiding the hammertoe and bunion that distort her right foot, although both bear assorted signs of 94 years of wear. How she once loved her stash of Ferragamo pumps — slim pointy toes, even slimmer curved heels. In high school, as the size of my feet caught up to hers, I would jam my feet into those Cinderella slippers, wondering if the price of pinch and pain was worth it. Decades have gone by since she chose to suffer for style and status, and those Ferragamos have long since gone to Goodwill. She has no choice now but to shuffle in soft slippers, her frivolous fling with vanity long forgotten. I sit cross-legged and barefoot on the floor and massage her hurting feet, delighting in my straight and polished toes and thankful that I had the good sense to choose otherwise.
The image above was created by Vicki Howell of “I Love To Create” as part of her tribute to Betty White, who co-hosts Saturday Night Live tonight.
At 88, Betty White has achieved a resurgence in popularity and a whole new persona, and the reasons for her current icon status are aptly explained here.
That’s why I was surprised when, linking around from my son’s tweets several weeks ago, I wound up at an article (which I can no longer locate) by a young-ish female criticizing White for the very charms that attract the rest of us. I guess, for that young writer, older women should be sweet, non-intrusive, and very well-mannered. I guess she never read Jenny Joseph’s famous poem “Warning,” which begins When I am old I shall wear purple…
Betty White is a perfect role model for those of us elders who still value sass and surprises.
I bow to Betty.
From here, where you should go and read the whole post:
That’s why I like very much what the Freedom From Religion Foundation is doing: they’ve created wonderful ads with quotes from the Founding Fathers showing precisely how they felt on this issue. The one above of JFK is cool, because his candidacy was attacked for him being a Catholic, of all things. The thing is, he was a religious man, and still understood that religion must be kept away from politics.
At 88 years of age, Betty White still rocks and rules, and she demonstrated on Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show the other night. I hope I can be a sharp as she is in another 18 years.
At exactly my age, Dixie Carter succumbed to cancer earlier this week. I never missed a performance of her Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women.
Dixie Carter and Julia Sugarbaker. Gone but not forgotten.