Santa Claus (pn): AKA, Sinter Klaus, Father Christmas, Jolly Old Saint Nick, etceteras. A rotund gentleman with flowing white hair and beard, dressed in a red fur-trimmed suit who, on Christmas Eve, would fly around the world in a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer, delivering presents to good Christian boys and girls. Remember lying in bed as a child, listening for the sleigh bells and the sound of reindeer hooves on the roof? Remember when you were either told or reasoned for yourself that Santa Claus was simply a pleasant fiction? Now … how many of you understand that the same parents who told you about Santa Claus also told you about God…

There’s been a lot of ballyhooing about the famous Predator Drone, technically named the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego, it’s a 27-foot long aircraft with a wingspan of 49 feet. It can be armed with the Hellfire missile and putts along at a staggering 84 miles an hour (less than a Cessna 170) and goes for over $25 million a pop. It was first used in Kosovo and was hailed by that stalwart bastion of veracity, Bill O’Reilly, as “Osama bin Laden’s worst mightmare.

Turns out, not so much. I was reading excerpts from a report penned by Mr. Thomas Christie, the Pentagon’s top systems analyst and testing officer who, as director of DOD’s Operational Test and Evaluation division, should, have a credible opinion of this terror of the skies. He does…

“The system’s limitations have a substantial negative impact on the Predator’s ability to conduct its missions,….(and that) poor target location accuracy, ineffective communications, and limits imposed by relatively benign weather, including rain, negatively impact missions such as strike support, combat search and rescue, area search and continuous coverage.”

Christie’s report concluded “The system is not operationally suitable becaues of the serious deficiencies in reliability, maintainability and human design factors.”

Selah…

This report was slipped under the sheets until finally uncovered by the Project on Government Oversight. There is also mention, from Air Force sources, that since 1995, 17 out of 50 Predators crashed during testing and another five are thought to have been shot down by enemy forces.

The problem with flying in the rain is that the drone apparently becomes disoriented which causes it to lock onto the wrong targets, and also temporarily stops talking to the ground computers that are supposed to be controlling its flight.

It’s also unstable in a stiff wind. How stiff a wind? The kind that’d take your hat off downtown or give minor inconveninece to a single-engine Piper Cub.

Even the Pentagon admits it’s also pretty much useless when flying at night, and, of course, since it flys low and slow, it can be shot down by small-arms fire. Here we have a $25 million-plus UAV that can be shot out of the air by some scruffy Talibanista with a 90-year old bolt-action Lee Enfield. Praise the Lord and pass the millions - your tax dollars at work making America safe.

So the next time you hear about a wedding party being obliterated or some other “collateral damage,” known in English as innocent civilians, being killed, see if a Predator drone was involved. Chances are good that there was.

One of the predominant characteristics of the Ultra-Right Wing that serves to put the “fun” back into fundamentalism is the way in which they promote violent behaviour in the name of the Prince of Peace, apparently harkening back to Luke 22:36 “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” Although this conjures up a disturbing image of pallid, flabby Evangelicals flapping around in their birthday suits wielding cheap knock-offs from The Lord of the Rings, it’s not quite as amusing as the reality.

Christian Dominionists have marketed a video game called “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” in which the player is a foot soldier in a paramilitary organization dedicated to remaking America as a Christian theocracy. To this end, the player must convert Catholics, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals and anyone who believes in the separation of church and state. In lieu of converting the aforementioned apostates, the player simply kills them, usually with the phrase “Praise the Lord” as bullets cut down the unrighteous and infidel.

This would seem to slot nicely into the philosophies of people such as Representative Robin Hayes who, while addressing a Rotary Club in Concord in 2006, noted that “stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ.” Whereas on the face of it, this as foreign policy might be considered as effective as spreading the message of the pork industry among Orthodox Jews, one has to admit that while the subtlety and nuance of the spoken word allows for ambiguity and misunderstanding, violence is truly a universal language. Whether one speaks Iraqi, Finnish or Choctaw, the intentions inherent in a baseball bat upside the head are unlikely to be misinterpreted by even the most abstracted or obtuse. Therefore, proponents of Christian Reconstruction or Dominionism may be commended for the clarity and uncommon forthrightness of their message.

Y’Know, even though I’d never intended to comment so much on day-to-day affairs, the stupid just keeps rolling out as though there were a hole in space-time between us and a dimension inhabited only by the cast of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

Chris Matthews had William Kostric, the Kramer lookalike, on his show, Hardball, the other day to ask him, why, quote “…you brought a sign that says “The tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of tyrants,” and you’re carrying a goddamn handgun at a presidential event.” (Kostric was wearing a fully loaded automatic on his hip, which is legal in Hew Hampshire if you have a license and it’s not concealed.) After this microcephalic babbled on for a while about how income tax was meant to be voluntary, and how social security and medicare should never have been enacted, he finally blurted out that everyone would be safer at these town hall meetings and in the nation in general if everybody was packing a gat.
Matthews asked him, using small words, whether this might not be the visual message to be sending at these contentious town meetings, to which Dipstick replied that he thought it might “pull people in your direction.”
This of course, at a meeting with the President of the United States.
He also blithered on about how carrying a piece was his right. OK - perhaps in a strict legal sense, it is. How about your responsibility? After all, your right to drive a car ends when you decide to do so after drinking a bottle of scotch. Bringing a firearm into the presence of the President demonstrates a paucity of common sense, but perhaps this geek doesn’t mind being on an FBI and Secret Service watchlist for the next four years. Indeed, he’ll undoubtedly claim he’s now considered an enemy of the state by the Socialist-Liberal-Marxist-Commie cabal in the White House.
Fortunately, Fox News ceased to cover the event after a few civil questions were asked because there were no disruptions and hooting. That, and not the President’s message, is what they call news.

Meanwhile back at Camp Hypocrisy, it has been revealed by the Anchorage News in Alaska that a federal review has found that the Alaskan state programs run by the State Senior and Disability Services, intended to help the elderly and disabled are so badly mismanaged that they cannot assure the health and well-being of those they were created to serve. The situation is so bad that the federal government has forbidden the state to sign up any new people to these programs until the situation is corrected. According to a spokesperson for Medicare and Medicaid, no other state in the union is under such a moratorium which will last four or five months and affect around 1000 Alaskans.
The most horrendous aspect of this situation is that in a 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults who were already in the program died waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment to see whether or not they even qualified for help under the program.
Last year, the State Supreme Court ruled that the state had improperly cut off or reduced services to over 1000 people. There are also currently eight lawsuits being brought against the State for incompetence.
One of the reasons for the backlog of people waiting for assessments is that the state, in an effort to save money, decided to hire its own nurses to determine who needed care and how much. However, with a nation-wide nursing shortage, there is a 40% vacancy rate in the nurses tasked with this responsibility. The state is only now beginning to investigate whether the lack of services contributed to these deaths, even thogh physicians and care-givers attempted to bring this deplorable situation to their attention.
This appears to be the GOP’s answer to the public option. So, just a note to ex-cut-and-run Governor Palin on whose watch this occurred: take a tip from your own speech when you bailed on these people and the rest of the state of Alaska, and STOP MAKIN’ SHIT UP ABOUT HEALTH CARE REFORM!

And in yet another Palin Moment, two weeks before Sarah paraded her Down’s Syndrome child, Trig, on the internet, WBNS TV in Columbus, Ohio did a story on Ms. Margaret Druko whose 4 1/w year-old daughter, Emily, also has Down’s Syndrome. She has been forced to quit her job because no day-care facility will take her. However, the truely scurrilous thing here is that Ms. Druko has been told by insurance companies that the only insurance she can get for Emily’s needed physical and occupational therapy is “catastrophic care’ that will run $5000.00 a month. Apparently, the insurance companies consider Emily a “death risk.”
Golly - I’m sure glad we don’t have them evil “death panels” that socialist black guy’s tryin’ ta shove down our throats…

And the Health Care Lie of the Week together with the Unclear On the Concept Award goes to an editorial article that ran on July 31 in the Investor’s Business Daily which dragged Professor Stephen Hawking into the cesspool of crap being spouted by the GOP, the Astroturfers and their ignorant dupes. The creative typing claimed that Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance in the UK where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicap, is essentially worthless.”
OK - at which university is the Lucasian Chair of physics located? Cambridge. And Cambridge is in what country?
England, you flaming idiot!
Professor Hawking (whose voice computer allows him to type at a rate of 3 to 5 words a minute) felt compelled to waste his time replying to this drooling moron”
“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”
Hawking, who has lived over 40 years past his disease’s life expectancy almost entirely due to the efficacy of the NHS, then went back to his job of explaining the origins of the universe.

And finally, the Hypocrite of the Week Award goes to - no, not Sarah Palin, who was certainly in strong contention - but to Mr. Kenneth Gladrey, the Teabagger/Astroturf humbug who has alleged that he was beaten up by union goons after attempting to disrupt a town meeting on health care in St. Louis a little while ago. He is now accepting donations to cover his ‘medical expenses’ because he was recently laid off and consequently, HAS NO HEALTH CARE!

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

It is interesting to speculate how certain famous Bible stories might have been somewhat diminished had they occurred in the more recent past. One might not derive the same inspiration from the miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes had it taken place in Stiff Sock County, Mississippi and the Christ performed the miracle of the Spam and the Cheetos. Similarly, had the Marriage of Canaan transpired in Crackerville, Idaho the spectacle of the Messiah changing water into six-packs of Pabst might have somewhat diminished the moment.

This subject and its contemporaneous semantic and ethical conventions may be summed up in a single word:

“Yeehah!”

Sometimes you’ve got to wonder who approves programs like this. I’m used to stupidity, but this goes beyond the scope of human decency.

There’s a company in Maryland, Robot Technology Inc, which has a Pentagon contract for the creation of a steam-powered self-propelled military robotic “platform” that would be self-fuelling. According to the company, the robot “can find,

Well, there’s an image for you - scores of Transformers with a taste for Long Pig roaming the battlefield crunching down human corpses with a roadkill appetizer.

Recently on the McLaughlin Group, one-man train wreck with the world’s slowest exploding aneurysm, Pat Buchanan, made the claim that under the proposed health care reforms, if you get sick, the government will send someone over to your house to suggest suicide to you, since the Obama administration wants to kill people to save money.
Perhaps he might have read (as was reported last Friday) that the HMO CIGNA recently reversed their decision to pay for a 17 year-old girl’s liver transplant. She died a few hours later and her family intends to sue them. Now that’s killing people to save money!

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin (who recently called for “civility” in the health care debate) had previously posted on her FaceBook site that her Down Syndrome baby, Trig, “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decided, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
Well, golly gosh, Sarah. If people were going to be euthanized on the basis of their level of productivity in society, you’d have been chloroformed several years ago. Please refer to the 17 year-old above. We already have a bureacracy that decides whether you live or die. The nation’s HMOs employ over 200,000 bean-counters between them whose sole job is to turn down claims.

A lady who runs a website called Southern Beale had something to say to the Vanilla from Wasilla, to wit:

“Don’t talk to me about death panels, Sarah Palin. … I’ve been part of a death panel conversation. I know about death panels. YOu have no idea what it’s like to be called into a sterile conference room with a hospital administrator you’ve never met before and told that your mother’s insurance policy will only pay for 30 days of ICU. (emphasis, Ms Beale’s) You can’t imagine what it’s like to be advised that you need to ‘make some decisions’ like whether your mother should be released ‘HTD’ which is hospital parlance for ‘home to die’ or if you want to pay out of pocket to keep her in the ICU another week. And when you ask how much it would cost you are given a number so impossibly large that you realize there really are no decisions to make. The decision has been made for you. ‘Living Will’ or no, it doesn’t matter. The bank account and the insurance policy have trumped any legal document. If this isn’t a ‘death panel,’ I don’t know what is. … (If) you still think the health care system we have now is fabulous and worth lying, cheating and threatening people to maintain, I can only conclude that you lack even the tiniest grain of a soul.”

Gingrich was also on the George Stephanopoulos arguing against the public option roughly 72% of Americans have been polled as wanting. He then went off on a tangent I’ve never heard before, that the Indian Health Service (ie, Native American) is a disaster. Of course it is. And why? Because of the huge cuts inflicted on it by Republicans. The 2.5 million Native Americans receive roughly $1900 a year per capita - about one half of one percent of the overall US health budget. Incarcerated prisoners receive $3800. A convicted murderer gets more health care dollars (and superior care overall) than an Indian. (The US national average is $5000 per person for those not locked up for felonies) The thing here is that Indian health care is a US treaty obligation. And of course, we all know how scrupulously the Bush administration took treaty obligations…

Further news from Wingnuttia, Congressman John Culberson (R-TX) is claiming that he’s not on “socialized medicine” but rather on BlueCross/BlueShield. This is interesting because BC/BS is one of the programs that are used by the government to cover Congressmen, and is subsidized 72% for both him and his family by the taxpayer. The plans also cannot deny coverage due to “pre-exisiting conditions” which, in Rep. Cully’s case, appears to be full-blown metastasized hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned insurance company CIGNA is planning rate hikes that will increase the premiums of a family to up to $44,000 a year.

While we’re on the subject of HMO’s and private insurers, let’s take a look at what the CEOs of these selfless servants of the people make.
CIGN’s CEO, Edward Hanway, vacations in New Jersey in a $13 million dollar ‘cottage,’ so you figure it out…
UnitedHealthCare CEO Stephen Hemsley owns $744,232,068 in unexercised stock options in his company. (Or did. After an investigation by the SEC found fraudulent practices in his business dealings, he was forced to return a mere $190 million.)
Humana CEO Michael McCallister got a salary of $10.3 million in ‘07. (Humana recently raised the monthly rates in Hernando County, NY 27% from $581.55 to $739.37 and raised their rates in Nassau County 24.5%)
Aetna CEO Ronald A. Williams made $23 million in ‘07.
Coventry CEO Allen Wise made $13,052,799.
WellPoint CEO Angela Braly made, in ‘07, a salary of $9,09,271.

These are the same people who are orchestrating the town hall meeting disruptions in an attempt to prevent the government from offering an alternative to some of the greediest, most grasping, egregious, sleazy, userous, son-of-a-bitch corporations in the history of the US; companies whose bean-counters actually condemn people to death by rescission or force entire families into perpetual debt or bankruptcy by capping their benefits and increasing their deductibles.

Meanwhile, in the “There is a God” department, Kent Hovind, a right-wing Fundie who founded Creation Science Evangelism and the Creationism theme park Dinosaur Adventure Land is having the park and its nine properties and bank accounts seized for tax fraud. It seems that Hovind owes Uncle Sam $430,400. He was previously found guilty in November of 2006 on 58 counts and is currently serving 10 years in prison for failing to pay the IRS $470,000 in employee taxes in addition to the $430,400 cited above and making threats against government investigators.
Hovind fought the charges for 17 years, claiming that he was employed by God and that his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes. He himself claimed no income or property.
His wife, Jo, was also sentenced to one year for tax fraud.
In case you may have missed visiting this enlightening park, one of its claims is that dinosaurs and man existed simultaneously, apparently regarding “The Flintstones” as a documentary.

And finally, it is beginning to appear that the recent military coup in the Honduras that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, was engineered by two US corporate bodies, Chiquita Brands International, Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co, both of which had strongly criticized Zelaya’s plan to increase Hondura’s minimum wage by 60%, claiming that this long-overdue increase in a desperately poor nation would cut into corporate profits. There is also growing evidence that the CIA might have been involved.
For those of you who are history buffs, you may remember that Chiqita, then United Fruit and the CIA ousted Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, that International Telephone and Telegraph, (IT&T) together with Henry Kissinger and the CIA brought down Chile’s Salvador Alllende in 1973 and there is talk that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was thrown out in 2004 by the usual suspects for proposing the same workers wage hikes that Zelaya had proposed.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, “two of the Honduran coup government’s top advisers have close ties to the US Secretary of State,” one being Lanny Davis and the other Bennett Ratcliff, both influential lobbyists.
It is also known that Chiquita used the law firm Covington and Burling LLP and its consultant, McLarty Associates when the company was charged with hiring “assassination squads” in Columbia “for protection.” Chiqita finally admitted to hiring organizations listed by the US government as terrorist groups and, in 2004, paid a $25 million fine. A person who was once a Covington partner at that time is now the US Attorney General, Eric Holder.
The Los Angelese Times ran an article that stated:
“What happened in the Honduras is a classic Latin American coup in another sense: General Romeo Vasquez, who led it, is an alumnus of the United States School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.) The school is best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups.”
John Perkins of Information Clearing House recently spoke to a Panamanian bank vice president who he quoted as saying:
“Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call “a leftist revolt” in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya, they are sending frightening messages to all other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

Yessiree, Bob; wouldn’t want them brownskins ta make a dollar an hour. Hell - that’d put the price of bananas at Farmer Jacks up five cents.

Thak God Chiquita and Dole don’t stand to lose any money in the health insurance business…

David Brooks: “(Sarah Palin) represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. … (Bill Buckley) thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. … But there has been a counter, more Populist tradition which is to not only scorn Liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid Sarah Palin has those prejudices.”

David Frumm: “I think Sarah Palin was a huge mistake. … And when you have a candidate who so obviously has never thought about any of the issues that are going to be important to the next administration and whose knowledge is so shallow, it makes people - it doesn’t just make people offended, it makes them afraid.”

Peggy Noonan: “In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed, in fact, rather proud of it. … she wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtul enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative, and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values,” I’m, I’m I’m.”

Take a loofah break, Poppa Boor. Solipsism Sarah has the intellect of a cherry-stone clam and, typical of the grossly ignorant (which is 144 times worse than singular ignorance) is stupid enough to feel superior to most everyone else. Her worst enemy is her own mouth. Unfortunately, I fear that we will be plagued by her reappearance in the future like the quotidian reccurrance of a particularly pennicilin-resistant viral strain.

The testimony of ‘Doe #2′ states; “To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar … Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game.”

Further statements by ‘Doe #2′ indicate that Prince “repeatedly ignored the assessments of mental health professionals, and instead, terminated those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men.” This included, apparently, men who were requesting deployment to Iraq to “kill ragheads” and achieve “body counts.”

Blackwater is also accused of obtaining illegal ammunition from a US company named LeMas, who produces bullets that explode inside the human body.

There are also allegations that Blackwater has been using one of its newly created companies, Greystone, for money laundering and tax evasion. Blackwater owns about a dozen affiliate companies, some of which are conveniently located off-shore.

The charges were consolidated into a 70-page motion by lawyers representing Iraqi citizens who are suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes including murder. Currently, five Blackwater employees are awaiting trial on manslaughter charges with regards to the Nisour Square shootings in Bagdhad on Sept. 16th, 2007, in which 17 Iraqis were killed. A sixth man, Jeremy Ridgeway, has already plead guilty to manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, and is, as the British say, assisting the authorities with their investigations.

Blackwater, which has been an embarassment to the US since its first deployment. Initially operating under ProConsul Paul Bremer’s Order 17 which granted full immunity from Iraqi laws to Coalition military forces and foreign contractors including “security” companies like Blackwater, they were used to operating with complete impunity. It appears, in their hubris, that although they couldn’t be charged with murder in Iraq, the same is not the case at home, at least not now when the Republicans are out of office. I believe I’ll leave the last word with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who’s been on Blackwater’s case for some time.

“Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn’t exist without Federal patronage: these allegations should be thoroughly investigated. … If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians.”

The case goes before judge Ellis on August 7th. I suspect Mr. Prince might soon be taking a vacation to a country with beautiful scenery and no extradition treaty with the US…

And, for all those Tea-baggers who have been disrupting town meetings lately, the AFL-CIO has entered the fray. They are calling on their membership to attend these public meetings and counter the Brown Shirt Brigade’s corporate/lobbyist attempt to make a mockery of democracy. Some of these morons show up at these meetings and don’t even ask imbecillic questions, they just hoot - literally, like baboons in a tree - and make loud noises solely to disrupt the proceedings. The strange thing is that a large proportion of these wingnuts are the elderly. President Obama, while attending a town hall meeting recently cited a letter he received:

“I don’t want government-run health care. I don’t want socialized medicine. And don’t touch my Medicare.”

Well, apart from the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are virtually untouched by the proposed health care reforms, Medicare is a government-run program, you drooling moron! Oh, and if you’re a veteran, the VA is also a government run (and hence, by your definition, socialist) organization. Let’s take both those away and see how long it is before the alter kochers start screaming. And let’s make no mistake about it - these aren’t entitlement programs. The elderly have paid into these programs their entire working life (or at least since the program’s inception) and earned them by honorable and dangerous military service. These aren’t hand outs; they’re their due.

Just to give you an idea of the mentality of those pissing and moaning about ’socialism,’ at one town hall meeting (comprised largely of seniors) a speaker on the floor asked the multitude how many don’t want the government running health care. Almost everybody put up their hand. The Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) then asked how many of the audience had Medicare. Over half raised their hands.

Recently, Arthur Laffer appeared on CNN to pronounce his doom:

“If you like the post office …. just wait until you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.”

OK - let’s say this again, using very small words: Medicare and Medicaid ARE run by the government. (you microcephalic…)

Let’s look at the post office, a government run organization. As Bill Maher has observed, you can drop a letter with a 44 cent stamp into a blue box and within a couple of days, it arrives in the hands of the person to who it was addressed, and further more, that letter is delivered directly to your home or business. Can you tell me any private corporation that delivers such service with such efficiency and reliability? Is there any corporate health care insurer that can rival that kind of competence or expedition?

A recent poll now claims that 73% of Americans are satisfied with their current health insurance. Well, apart from the fact that this flies in the face of the polls that show 78% of Americans support the private option proposal, how many of the alleged 73% have ever had to deal with an HMO for a serious condition? How many of those are among the 25% of the insured who are under-insured? How many will get cancer and have their insurance cancelled when it is revealed by tests that the cancer was a “pre-exisiting condition?” How many will find out the hard way that insurance companies regularly cap treatment of life-threatening diseases at $150,000? (treatment for lukemia usually costs around a million) How many will lose that insurance when they lose their job?

And so on and so on…

Look: since the 9-11 attacks to this day, August 6th 2009, 178,079 Americans have died because they lacked health insurance. That is the equivalent, in numbers, to 59 WTC attacks. I consider both to be acts of terrorism.

The so-called “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz, apparently had a melt-down moment while being interviewed on MSNBC a few days from this writing. Ms. Taint, if you’ll recall, is the woman responsible for ‘discovering’ the Obama Kenya birth certificate which, needless to say, is such a blatent forgery that it wouldn’t fool the blind. (Ms. Taitz, incidentally, was born in the Soviet Union and has dual citizenship; Israeli-US. She conducted the MSNBC interview from Tel Aviv two days after submitting the bogus birth certificate to the courts for “authentication.” She is a lawyer and former dentist and real estate agent.)

I’m not going to go into any details regarding the document (such as the fact that it is from the Republic of Kenya in 1961, even though Kenya didn’t become a republic until 1964 or the fact that it attributes Obama’s father’s birth place in Kenya to a city that, at the time, was not Kenyan, but located in Zanzibar) because it’s just too easy - like finding a half-truth or lie in an Ann Coulter book by opening it at random and placing your finger on a page with your eyes closed. I might remind the gentle reader that another blatent document forgery, that time from Niger, was used by the Bush administration as part of their ‘evidence’ that lied the nation into a bogus war. Since the crux of these pathetic people is the Constitution’s definition of who can and cannot be president, I’ve decided to go to the section of that august and honorable document and see what the Founding Fathers themselves said.

Bear in mind that there are those who believe that the Constitution should be taken literally, word for word, regardless of historical perspective; Founding Fundies, as it were.

Article II, Section 5 of the Constitution of the United States of America:

“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, (emphasis mine) shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to the Office who shall not have attained the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.”

So - using only Section 5, and understanding that the Constitution was formally enunciated in 1787, this would imply several things.

First, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the number of States was 13. Since there has been no ammendment to expand the eligibility of a person for the Presidency past that original number, the Constitutional Fundamentalist opinion must logically be that anyone not born in the States that consituted the original 13 colonies must be excluded from contention. That’s 37 states.

Secondly, section 5 refers to a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” Well, anyone born before the adoption of the Constitution was not an American citizen since the entity, the United States of America as a constitutionally ratified nation did not exist at that time. This means that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc, wouldn’t qualify since prior to the ratification of the Constitution, and regardless of the colonists considering themselves “Americans” after the Declaration of Independence (which didn’t legally create a country or change their previous citizenship) the people residing in the 13 colonies were BRITISH. If you want to do the math, since the adoption of the Constitution, the earliest a person who would have been, by definition, an American could have become President would have been 1816.

In point of fact, the law states that anyone with one parent who is an American citizen is an American citizen too, regardless of having been born outside the country. Were this not true, John McCain couldn’t have been eligible either, since he was born in Panama.

And finally, my quote of the day from the blog “Eschaton:”

“When John Bolton saw BIll Cllinton go to North Korea, his penis got a little bit smaller … and that’s what it’s really about.”

Selah.

ULTRA-RIGHT WING FUNDAMENTALLY

EVANGELICAL RAPTURITE

NON COMPOS MENTIS

So naturally, in deference to this man’s teachings and his personal sacrifice, we have a sub-species whose individuals are dedicated to invoking his name to justify their attempts to re-write the law to control others minds and bodies, accrue great personal wealth and power, promote racial hatred, even genocide and, in general, behave in a manner absolutely antithetical to everything that the Christ is claimed to have either said or done.

(At this point it might be providential to point out parallels with another individual whose birth was considered somewhat miraculous. Born to a humble carpenter, this boy became known and loved of millions. He too had holes pierce his hands and feet. He did not, however, promulgate a world-wide religious following because the individual in questions’ name was Pinocchio.)

Habitat for the species varies as to individual. Some with more humble means (who are likely to sport a T-shirt proclaiming “44 Magnum – God’s Favorite Caliber!”) are mostly to be found in dwellings reflecting the realities of twenty years of minimum wage as a bagger at Farmer Jack’s. Their habitats are often graced with at least one picture depicting the Christ as a blond, blue-eyed Aryan. This might be a tacit clue as to their attitudes towards non-WASP immigration, considering the fact that they number among the very few whites who actually hold jobs that are willing to be done by those recently arrived from the Third World. This sub-species can often be seen being interviewed on television, rendering a vivid description of the sound the tornado made just prior to re-positioning their house trailer in an adjacent county.

The wealthier of the species, whose necktie often represents the monthly income of their less pecunious brethren, reside in whatever luxury the generous donations of the Faithful can afford.