Jan Brewer - New Voice of Reason in the Republican Party - Egad, I Can't Believe I Just Wrote That

Haley Barbour's Civil War Reenactment campaign has folded before it began. His Dixiecrat strategy failed. He also may have realized defending Mississippi's highest infant mortality rate in the country might not square with his defense of health care availability for his state's poorest citizens. Let 'em go to the Emergency Ward seems to be his state's health plan.

Donald Trump continues his mud throwing at President Obama with birther claims and now questioning President Obama's Ivy League college admittance without actually using the words "affirmative action." Mr. Trump is now claiming religion in his third marriage, changing his positions on a tax increase for the wealthy, he was for it before he was against it, gay marriage - he was for it before he was against it, etc. And for all his China bashing, I saw a report that his Donald Trump line of clothing is manufactured in, guess where, China!

The Birther stuff has gotten so far out of hand that Jan Brewer, Tea Party favorite way conservative Governor of Arizona, vetoed a birth certificate bill in Arizona, which also called for "circumcision records" as a substitute.....and called on Republicans to stop with the Birther nonsense. When Jan Brewer is the voice of reason in the Republican Party, something is desperately wrong.....

Republican plans to kill Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps, The New Deal, The New Frontier, and The Great Society in order to give more tax cuts to the wealthy is meeting resistance in Republican town hall meetings - how fun is that after all of last year's Tea Party yelling at Democratic town hall meetings on health insurance reform? If Democrats can't pounce on this to their political advantage, they are as inept as inept gets.

Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid may even force Republicans to vote on their Republican plan in the US Senate.......talk about dirty politics. Republicans are not happy at the prospect.

House Republican Leader John Boehner calls for an end to $4 Billion in oil company subsidies, but backs away when President Obama voices his approval. That was strange. Mitt Romney comments about large deficits in "peacetime" cause backlash among US Veteran groups; to be expected when the US military has been engaged in wars for a decade now , two of which George W. Bush started, and failed to pay for. In the meantime, Republican state governors continue their assault on worker rights, child labor laws, environmental protections, all the while laying off thousands and thousands of teachers, firefighters, police officers, public infrastructure workers, nurses, social workers, etc., etc.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann have been mysteriously silent this last week. Or at least perhaps the lamestream has started giving them the attention they deserve -- none.

As Republicans prepare to brink the world's economy to the brink of disaster once again with its threatened refusal to raise the debt limit cap, Wall Street is getting nervous, and Democrats are devising ways to capitulate. Republicans determined early on in the Obama adminsitration that they would need to do everything possible to sabotage the US economy in order to have a chance to win the 2012 elections and have actively fought, undermined, dampened, cut every effort by Democrats to bring the US out of the deep recession of the Bush Administration.

And maybe I'm wrong, but the Republican plan to lay off a million teachers, police officers, firefighters, public utility workers, highway maintenance workers, public hospital nurses, etc., etc., etc., take hundreds of billions if not trillions of $$$ out of the economy, end unemployment insurance, end social security, end medicare, cut children off medicaid, break all the remaining unions, eliminate collective bargaining rights, lower peoples' wages everywhere, increase taxes on the poor and middle-class, throw people off their health insurance plans, all the while protecting tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and tax-payer subsidized corporations making record profits while paying no taxes and out-sourcing work to China or India, and let rich people and coporations own and run everything, doesn't seem like a good plan to me. I'm just sayin..........

An analysis of the Republican plan shows $4.3 trillion cuts to programs that help the working poor and the middle class, sick chilcren, the unemployed, end Medicare, etc., etc., etc., while then giving $4.2 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest of the wealthy and big corporations. This would be the largest "redistribution" of wealth in our nation's history......upward.

A Gang of Six has their sights on ending Social Security as we know it and giving that money to Wall Street financial wizards who nearly threw the world into a Great Depression a couple of years ago.

Yikes.



Regards, Bud C


ps. Just after I posted this, President Obama released his "long form" birth certificate. The national nightmare is over. The stock market should soar given the national sigh of relief that is occurring. The cloud is lifted. Donald Trump is proud. The nation can get back to its business. All that Republican birther energy can now be focused on jobs, jobs, jobs at last, like they campaigned on.

Sharia Law - to the tune of Frankie Valli's Sherry Baby

I've noticed Republicans tend to hate everything that begins with the Letter "M" (except for Military/Industrial Complex) -

Mexicans, Moderates, Medicare, Medicaid, Middle Class, Minimum Wage, Mennonites, Methodists, Mainline Protestants, and especially Muslims. Republicans continue their religious holy war against Islam to such an extent that Salon.com is introducing a new regular feature for the next 18 months of the 2012 Presidential Campaign, The Muslim Baiting Tracker. Here a possible theme song: "Sharia Baby" to the tune of Frankie Valli's Sherry Baby.


Sherry, Sherry baby - Sha-ri-a, Sha-ri-a baby
Sherry, Sherry baby - Sha-ri-a, Sha-ri-a baby

Sherry baby (Sherry baby) - Sha-ri-a, Sha-ri-a baby
Sherry can you come out tonight - Sha-ri-a can you come to Detroit?
(Come,come, come out tonight) - Come, come, come to Detroit.
Sherry baby (Sherry baby) - Sha-ri-a, Sha-ri-a baby
Sherry can you come out tonight - Sha-ri-a, can you come to Detroit?

Alluha, Alluha Akbar, Alluha, Alluha Akbar

(Why don't you come out) To my twist party - (Why don't you come out) To my twist party
(Come out) Where the bright moon shines - (Come out) Where the Crescent moon shines
(Come out) We'll dance the night away - (Come out) We'll dance the night away
I'm gonna make you mine - I"m gonna make you mine

Sherry baby (Sherry baby) - Sha-ri-a, Sha-ri-a baby
Sherry can you come out tonight - Sha-ri-a can you come to Benoit?
(Come, come, come out tonight) - (Come, come, come to Benoit)

Alluha, Alluha Akbar, Alluha, Alluha Akbar

You better ask your Mama (Sherry baby) - You better ask your Imama (Sha-ri-a baby)
Tell her everything is alright - Tell him everything is alright

(Why don't you come out) With your red dress on - (Why don't you come out) With your red burqa on
(Come out) Mmm you look so fine - (Come out) - Mmm you look so fine
(Comeout) Move it nice and easy - (Come out) Move it nice and easy
Girl, you make me lose my mind - Girl, you make me lose my mind (or head)

repeat to fade Sherry, sherry baby - repeat to fade Sha-ri-a, Sha-ri-a baby

Alluha, Alluha Akbar, Alluha, Alluha Akbar

Handicapping the Republican Candidates

Undeclared Republican candidates have been tripping over each other, themselves, and you know, facts and stuff like that, in their rightward sprint to say and be more and more Tea Party friendly these last few weeks. Iowa and now New Hampshire are seeing this group of malleable pols. Here's my handicapping so far:

Newt Gingrich - his explanation that he had so many affairs while married to different women - "I loved my country so much" - may not stand the test of time. Plus he's cravenly opportunistic and will say anything.

Donald Trump - he looks and acts too much like Kim Jong-Il, you know, the North Korean Dictator. Donald expects people to jump when he says stuff. His statement this weekend about lowering gas prices by simply telling the Saudis to do so ignores the realities of Wall Street speculators. I'm guessing the Saudis would tell him to go pound sand up his a**. Plus, if he could lower gas prices just by saying --- why hasn't he?

Sarah Palin - She is so last year. Her Tuscon remarks were probably her permanent undoing. I paraphrase: "Too bad about the Congresswoman and the kid, but what about me?" Plus she's mean, petty, narcissistic, vindictive, and willfully ignorant. At her Wisconsin rally over the week end, there were more protestors than supporters. That about sums her up.

Michele Bachmann - The new Sarah Palin of the far right, she's just plain dumb. Despite all her attacks on public education, she graduated from Anoka public High School in Minnesota. She's the walking proof that something is wrong with public education in America. And her understanding of American history rivals that of a potato.

Rick Santorum - just look up his last name on google. Plus he lost his last Senate campaign.

Former Governor Mitt Romney is doomed because of his successful health insurance reform in Massachussetts - his mandatory insurance idea was adopted by President Obama - of all the dirty tricks.

Tim Pawlenty - who?

Mike Huckabee - Mike Huckabee - he can't help himself and says reasonable things on a regular basis; therefore, he has no chance. My brother Jerry calls it Tourette's Reasonableness Syndrome. Huckabee will rambling along perfectly singing the right wing crazy song, and out of nowhere will come a reasoned thoughtful moment, shocking everyone around him.

Chinese Time Travel

Honest to God, the Chinese government is banning television shows about time travel.

According to The Huffington Post and The New York Times translating a statement from Chinese, the Chinese government explains that characters traveling back in time "lack positive thoughts and meaning" and that a program's portrayal of time travel can "casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation." It's hard to believe this issue is even on China's Top 1,000 problems list.

I like theories and stories of time travel - from HG Wells The Time Machine, to the dozens of Star Trek episodes featuring rifts in the spacetime continuum, or runaway warp speed, the continuous loops of poker games and anomalous instances of the number three on Riker's shirt, and all their variations from Hollywood. All the Back to the Futures, all the Terminators, to Bruce Willis' 12 Monkeys, to Bill and Ted, to Connecticut Yankees, to Doctor Who, to Millenium (a favorite of mine), The Philadelphia Project, Slaughterhouse Five (another favorite of mine), all those Planets of the Apes, to Timecop, and Time Bandits, and the dozens of other B time travel movies - Idiocracy comes to mind. The Three Stooges traveled through time in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. From the sublime to the ridiculous, time travel is a time honored genre.

And the science of time travel is interesting. The Twin Paradox says that one twin boards a space craft and heads out into the universe at speeds approaching the speed of light and the other twin remains on earth. In what is only a short time for the space traveler, the twin returns to earth and finds his/her twin to have aged many years while the traveler only hours. And this is backed by Einstein's E=mc2 theories of relativity and space time mathematics. When we look at a night sky, we see a time machine in that we are looking at many different pasts all at once. The light that reaches us as we look up is from thousands of different pasts which converge to our relative point in space time in a rural backyard in Iowa with my 10" reflector looking at distant galaxies and nebulas and even planets with my sweetheart. Light from Saturn takes 76 minutes, for example, to reach the earth. And that's traveling at 186,000 miles per second. Saturn's a long ways a way. And space itself may fold and buckle allowing travel to distant parts of the universe through spacetime worms tunneling through warped timespace.

So in China, some bureaucrat with way too much time on his hands (this has to be a guy), has decided that time travel on Chinese TV needs to be banned. We'll see how well that goes over. If this guy riles up Chinese Trekkies, watch out.

I like to tell my students in my classes that I can prove I can travel into the future. They are usually skeptical. I will then simply say, "Meet me here tomorrow." So there you go.

As China travels into the future, its petty bureaucrats are engaging in work which should be reserved for Jean Claude Van Damme or Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox.

You can't fight time. Time always wins. It's that "arc of history" thing. He may have bitten off more than he can Chu.

Weiners and Losers

Who were the winners and losers in last week's midnight hour battle against Big Bird and Planned Parenthood? Winners: New York Democrat Anthony Weiner is a winner in my book because of his tell it like it is feistiness (and I can make a bad pun in the title of my blog), President Obama looked Presidential but not very strong, John Boehner came out ahead in his three way battle with the White House, the Congress, and the Tea Party who showed it has the ability to successfully push bad ideas to the very brink. Oil companies who still receive huge subsidies and the Koch Brothers are also big winners.


Losers: hard to tell for sure, but Democrats, abortion rights in Washington, DC, poor working people everywhere, the environment, education, clean air, clean water, basic fairness and decency.


Not raising the Debt Ceiling and The Republican 2011-2012 budget plan are the next focus for the Republican House. New Republican Budget Motto - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," your senior citizens, your sick children on medicaid, your disabled, your Medicare recipients, your minimum wage earners with no health insurance so that we may cut their programs and raise their taxes in order give a 25% tax break to the wealthy, cut the capital gains rates, and reduce corporate taxes for the Koch Brothers. "We must raise the taxes on the bottom 90% so we can continue the tax breaks and subsidies for corporations and the very wealthy," Paul Ryan, Republican budget whiz kid, won't say.


The ongoing Budget Negotiations stalemate between John Boehner and the Tea Party threatened to shut down the government last week. The feckless Democrats had already agreed to Boehner's original proposal to cut $33 Billion (well, Boehner's proposal was actually $32 Billion, but the Democrats agreed to $33 Billion); they, in fact, settled on $38.5 billion at the 11th hour last Friday night. Democrats complain that every time they move to the middle, the Republicans move further away. Duh, like we haven't seen that before.


Inexplicably, Democrats have at no point even suggested much less proposed rolling back the extensions of the tax cuts on the richest of the rich -- that 1% or 2% of the wealthiest Americans. I did see a report that the President will finally address the tax cut issue this week for that top 1% or 2% of income brackets as a significant way to narrow the budget gap.


So the Big Question of the week was Do Republicans Want to Shut Government Down? I still say, No. They do not want to shut it down; they want to KILL IT; they want to demolish it and stomp on the ruins of the New Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society;they want to strangle it to death and watch the life drain from its corpse;they want its mangled remains burned to ashes and dumped in landfills..... And they want all the $$$ to be given to rich people and big corporations who run things.


So get ready for Hostage Drama #2 of the budget battles as Republicans hold raising the Debt Ceiling hostage to those who don't want the United States to default on its obligations and thrown the world in to a Great Depression of epic proportions.


And maybe I'm wrong, but the Republican plan to lay off a million teachers, police officers, firefighters, public utility workers, highway maintenance workers, public hospital nurses, etc., etc., etc., take hundreds of billions if not trillions of $$$ out of the economy, end unemployment insurance, end social security, end medicare, cut children off medicaid, break all the remaining unions, eliminate collective bargaining rights, lower peoples' wages everywhere, increase taxes on the poor and middle-class, throw people off their health insurance plans, all the while protecting tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and tax-payer subsidized corporations making record profits while paying no taxes and out-sourcing work to China or India, doesn't seem like a good plan to me. I'm just sayin..........



Regards, Bud C

My Theory of Inverse Evidence/Belief Correlative Republican Dysfunction

The office of Republican Senate Minority Whip John Kyl from Arizona had to release a clarifying statement yesterday after Senator Kyl's fabrications on Planned Parenthood on the floor of the US Senate: "his remark was not intended to be factual..." At the height of the debate, falsehoods were casually tossed around the halls of the US Senate. Ideology trumps facts in this brave new world we live in. Propaganda rules.

If anything sums up the current level of argument as practiced by Republicans these days, this has got to be it.

Couple this with my theory of the Inverse Evidence/Belief Correlative Dysfunction and we'll be in for a fantastic ride the next two years. And I mean fantastic as in "fantasy," as in disconnected from reality.

My Theory of the Inverse Evidence/Belief Correlative Dysfunction states that the more evidence there is of a proposition or theory, the less likely Republican/Tea Party/Fundamentalist Christians will believe it and the more evidence of something, the more inclined Republicans are to deny it. From Global Warming to Creationism, ideology trumps science and evidence every time. Radiation is good for you says Ann Coulter..... Tax cuts for the wealthy will create jobs and help balance the budget....Health Insurance reform includes Death Panels said Sarah Palin....the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery says Michele Bachmann.... The Texas school board takes Thomas Jefferson out of American history textbooks and inserts John Calvin..... President Obama is a socialist they say.... the world was created 6,000 years ago, and in Colorado, bicycle paths for cyclists were a conspiracy to turn Colorado's sovereignty over to the United Nations.

Facts and evidence no longer matter that much. All that matters is ideology and propaganda.

So just remember the John Kyl explanation, what I said was not intended to be factual, and it'll make more sense.

Budget Negotiations

The ongoing Budget Negotiations stalemate between John Boehner and the Tea Party threaten to shut down the government on Friday. The feckless Democrats have already agreed to Boehner's original proposal to cut $33 Billion (well, Boehner's proposal was actually $32 Billion, but the Democrats agreed to $33 Billion); Democrats are now sitting quietly by twiddling their thumbs.

Inexplicably, they have at no point even suggested much less proposed rolling back the extensions of the tax cuts on the richest of the rich -- that 1% or 2% of the wealthiest Americans.

So the Big Question of the Week is Do Republicans Want to Shut Government Down? I say, No. They do not want to shut it down; they want to KILL IT; they want to demolish it and stomp on the ruins of the New Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society;they want to strangle it to death and watch the life drain from its corpse;they want its mangled remains burned to ashes and dumped in landfills..... And they want all the $$$ to be given to rich people and corporations who run things.

I'm just sayin.........

The White Caps on Carter Lake

View from #2 Fairway, Shoreline Golf Course, Carter Lake, IA


Friday afternoon we saw white caps on Carter Lake...the wind was howling.

I've seen lots of things at Carter Lake -

Dozens of Bald Eagles and greyish Hawks soaring overhead.

A bald eagle in its aerie with little eaglet heads bobbing up and down the #1 and #9 fairways.

Hundreds of three-foot long dead carp washed up along the shore of Shoreline Golf Course smelling like, well, hundreds of dead three-foot long carp.

I've seen fish skeletons and portions thereof, with shiny fish scales glistening in the sunshine, like diamonds strewn about the #2 fairway.

Jet skis and motorboats and water skiers and Creighton sculling teams out there on the water.

I've seen the fairways covered in goose droppings when the geese decide to spend time by the lake. "The fairways will be greener with that added nitrogen," we say as we walk by avoiding the droppings on those late winter and early spring days when the course is open.

I've seen baby foxes in culverts looking out curiously at me as I walked by.

My golfing friend Jerry and I saw a horse grazing on the #17 fairway one day, and the horse allowed us to play through.

I've seen Bob, and Jerry shoot eagles on par four holes -- not the bald eagles soaring over the area on those spring and fall days when they are around, but the golf kind, you know a 2 on a par 4 hole. I've had a couple out there myself.

I've seen concrete chunks protruding from sand traps and fairways -- a reminder of Shoreline Golf Course's origins -- an old construction landfill site--- most if not are gone now. I've heard a story about the guy who knew where the old corner stone of the now destroyed Woodmen building was buried in that landfill and about how he sold his knowledge to the builders of the new Woodmen Building for $10,000 so they could include that cornerstone in that "new" building.

I've seen the Shoreline Springs, not the water kind, but the remains of an old mattress hidden in the woods along hole #8 -- sticking about halfway up in its lengthwise vertical orientation. I told my friend Mel that he could have a free drop there one time. You shouldn't have to play with your swing impeded by old rusty bed springs.

I've seen snow, sleet, ice, rain, wind, fog; I've huddled with friends behind clumps of bushes with umbrellas opened trying to shield against the cold blast front of a thunderstorm; I've been out there in below freezing weather and above 100 f.

So, I've seen it all at Shoreline Golf Course in Carter Lake, Iowa, but white caps are an unusual sight.

Nebraska, The Good Half-Life; the Stupid Award; Radioactivity; and Religious Fundamentalism

This week's Stupid Award is a tie between that fundamentalist preacher in Florida who burned a Koran for no apparent reason and the enraged Afghanistani fundamentalists who killed those poor UN workers. Like they had anything to do with it. Sometimes I think they should all just be locked in a far away place and have at it......whoa, now that I think about it, that's a bit what's going on.

After ten years of us bombing their country, carpet bombing their mountains, shooting cruise missiles into their dining rooms, installing and keeping in power a corrupted drug infused narco state government, all the while bad-mouthing Islam and harassing Muslim US citizens, you'd think those Fundamentalist Afghanis would be more grateful......

In the Runner-up category of what to do with old newspapers, having already won the Stupid of the Week Award earlier this year for building a nuclear reactor on the world's most active fault lines, 7 tons of highly radioactive water per per hour is leaking into the ocean at that Japanese nuclear power plant. Japanese workers are trying to stuff old newspapers into the concrete cracks of their water containment buildings to stop the leaking. Talk about low tech fixes to high tech problems.

I looked a map of Chernobyl on Wikipedia the other day and 400 sq. KM are still declared "unlivable." No people are allowed in that zone of death. Scientists are studying the wildlife in that radioactively polluted zone. The Japanese will be vacating large portions of the surrounding land for decades......and probably a "no-fishing" sign will be put up along the coast. Radioactive particulates are are being found in the US from coast to coast.

And speaking of old newspapers, The World Herald had coverage of the WWII Japanese Balloon Bomb that exploded above 50th and Underwood in Omaha in 1945. Over 9,000 of these floating wind-driven bombs were released into the atmosphere by the Japanese in their desperation toward the end of WW II, and a woman and her five children were killed in Oregon by one of these devices. In Omaha, the device is reported to have exploded above the ground and there were no Omaha casualties. And there is a plaque somewhere at that famous intersection. Today, untold trillions of these little particulate half-life time-bombs are falling from the skies and landing here from coast to coast. I will also note that the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant just a few miles north of Omaha is on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's list of three sites that need improved monitoring; and in case you didn't know, a 3.3 magnitude earthquake occurred between Columbus and Lincoln on Nov. 18, 2010, five miles underground.

Experts say the levels of radiation from the Japanese meltdown making it to the US in those same winds are extremely low, and that the half-life properties of these particulate sources of radiation are rapidly diminishing their harmful effects. It's too bad the current varieties of Religious Fundamentalism don't have a half-life like this.

Whatever happened to the religious fundamentals of forgiveness, and love your neighbor, and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and help the sick, and the poor, and the downtrodden? That's the religious fundamentalism I can support and strive to exemplify.