Those Middle-of-the-Roaders Who "See Both Sides"

Granted I'm a fire-breathing leftist and all, but I keep coming across my favorite sub-species of right winger online - the "I Live in a Big City or Run in Highly Progressive Circles, and I'm Aware Enough of My Surroundings to Know that Announcing that I Support Trump is Social Death, so I Don't Call Myself a Republican, I Just Tell Everyone I'm Open-Minded, Both Parties are Equally Bad, and Don't Like Labels" type of right winger.

These clowns would prefer to talk about something else when it comes down to the question of for whom they actually voted in 2016, and plan to support in 2020. Then all of a sudden it's: "Labels are bad. I'm open minded," but when it comes to virtually any other political discussion, they are as doctrinaire about so-called Tea Party Issues as they come.

Common attributes include some melange of both-sidesing turned up to 11, anti-vaxx, COVID-19 is overblown, the current Israeli government can do no wrong and if you disagree with me you're anti-semitic, Hillary Clinton is guilty of every crime ever invented, what are they not telling us about 5G, claiming that "you people see Russians everywhere," posting 65 articles in the last two weeks about Tara Reade while never having once posted a single thing about the two dozen Trump accusers, and the use of the terms "lamestream media," and "corrupt Chicago Democratic machine politics." Individual specimens rarely display all of the above, but tend to gravitate towards one or two of these attributes.

If a Democrat or nominal left-winger is caught in some mis-deed it's ALWAYS: SEE THE DEMOCRATS AND LIBERALS ARE ALL CORRUPT ASSHOLES! If a Republican or right-winger faces the same problem, the language is more measured, ALWAYS: Well, the whole durned system is off, they all do it.

Then when you confront them about supporting Trump or the GOP, it's all: "I'm an independent. I don't like labels." They never get around to admitting: "It's just that I voted for Trump, will do so again, and both publicly and privately agree 100% with nearly every single rotten plank of the Republican death cult platform." It's irritating.

Come on folks, embrace the suck. If you believe it, own it. At least I am AWARE that I'm pretty left wing.

The Coke Ad and Reverse Political Correctness: "We Won't Call Them Frothing Racists."

The American wrong wing has been screeching about so-called "political correctness" since that fateful day in the early 1990's, when, between tooth-spitting fists to the jaw, a gay man had the temerity to tell the skinheads who were beating him: "You know, I prefer not to be called a faggot." Ever since then, the long-running 'political correctness' cultural meme has infected our media, our college campuses, and certainly every neuron duet of a meeting of conservative "think tanks."

Most of us know the score on this by now, but to those who need a reminder as to how the wrong wing quote "thinks" unquote, the basic jist is this:

"It's utterly appalling that some of those others (wink, wink, you who I mean) don't like it when we call gay people faggots and dykes, refer to black people as niggers, Spanish-speakers as wetbacks, Asians as chinks and ching-chongs, and so on. Our God-given right, nay duty, to refer to "those people" by the most denigrating and humiliating names we can think of - as opposed to difficult, syllable-y, less pejorative $10 words like African American, Hispanic, Asian American, or gay - is the most important thing in the sphere of all human existence. And to even hear one peep of complaint that perhaps we ought to call "those people" (wink wink) . . . you know . . . "what it is they like to be called," or even "something less crudely insulting," is itself he greatest affront that has ever come about in the history of humanity; because THAT smacks of 'political correctness,' which is naturally worse than Hitler. And importantly, by the way, don't you dare call us racist, because we have a black friend."

Of course, even the best efforts of these mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, hairy-backed, Neanderthal GOoPers ultimately trend towards the predictable stench of failure. Thinking people have mostly moved towards the more accommodating practice of referring to folks in terms that aren't inherently insulting; and - thank you Universe - most Americans have at least come to the realization that being a fucking racist or homophobe makes you a Capital-B Big Capital-A Asshole. Most.

Yet the pushback against so-called 'political correctness' has been real, and in particular, our corporate traditional media has been receptive to the complaints of those who prefer living in the 1800's; very receptive. It has gotten to the point, now, that now matter how obviously despicably racist someone acts, the traditional media Will. Not. Call. Them. Racist.

My most recent reminder of this phenomenon was in the predictable and depressing online backlash to the Coca Cola's Super Bowl Ad. If you're an American reader of this, you probably saw the ad, because as the folks at my beloved Gawker put it: "to not watch the Super Bowl will cause friends and coworkers to look upon you with suspicion." I could care less for the sugary soft drink, and thought the ad itself was rather saccharine and schlocky, but the overall message was nice enough. "America the Beautiful" is sung in seven different languages, and features the glowy visages of a broad array of "not-typically-thought-of-as-All-American" people, thus representing the increasing diversity of the American nation in our globally interconnected world, and oh by the way drink our sugar water. Nice enough right? Harmless enough, one might think.

One would be wrong.

The Wrong Wing's "Don't You Dare Call Us Racist" set was predictably apoplectic at the dystopian images of non-whites singing what entirely-to-many of these . . . let's be clear . . . FUCKING MORONS referred to as "the national anthem," in languages . . . gulp . . . "other than 'American.' These "No I'm not a Racist" hairy-backed Neanderthals went absolutely apeshit all over Twitter, making #SpeakAmerican a hotly trending hashtag, as though 'American' were an actual language that people spoke. #boycottcoke became another trending hashtag, and why? Why? These assholes were more pissed-off than Denver fans, because the sugar-water company had the gall to suggest, through a series of glowy images and a familiar song sung in unfamiliar languages, that perhaps America isn't comprised 100% of white people who speak, I shit you not, "American," thus mildly suggesting that a diverse nation might just be broadly categorized as: "good thing."

Nevermind the simple fact that America ISN'T comprised 100% of white people speaking "American." Nevermind the fact that it's 2014. These fucking assholes just couldn't deal with it. It was the proverbial "bridge too far." And by the way, don't you dare call us racist.

And this? This my friends, is what really galls me about the whole thing. You know, my feelings over the frothing racism of the so-called "Right Wing," empowered by online anonymity, has achieved outrage-burnout. My anger-ometer is just broken, on that score. The turd-throwing racism of the American RepubliCons has become so predictable, so banal, so normal, that I tend to just tune it out. But what really gets me, is that these hateful bigots have been screeching about 'political correctness' for so long; they have been shrieking in an all-caps "DON'T YOU DARE CALL US RACIST" for so many years; they have been pathetically glowing about their black friend for so many decades now, that our lapdog corporate media, will NEVER call these bigots what they are: racists!

Just yesterday, I was listening to NPR's . . . and I'm going to use this term VERY loosely . . . quote "coverage" unquote of the Coca Cola ad backlash, and wanted to slam my head into the steering wheel, repeatedly. On the subject at hand, Steve Inskeep interviewed Code Switch's Gene Demby, the latter of whom is an African American whose very job it is to explore matters of race in America on NPR, and what they did they come up with? Did they castigate these racist assholes for being the big fucking racists they are? Did Demby, about whom one might reasonably suspect had some flicker of deep disdain for this racist behavior, righteously take the mic and expose these pathetic neanderthals for exactly the bigots they showed themselves to be? Did the words prejudice, racism, racist, or bigot even show up ONE TIME IN THE FUCKING INTERVIEW?

The answer to all of the above, is the same. No.

Demby made an oblique reference to "Every time something happens in popular culture, in which a brown person does something kind of unexpected, there's this apoplexy on Twitter," without once pointing out that said apoplexy, was . . . you know . . . deeply fucking racist, to Inskeep's golly-gee hemming and hawing. There was a then a brief allusion to some similar backlashes i.e. the Indian-American Miss America, but the remaining 75-80% of the interview focused on the entirely-more-important (apparently) question of "Is this a good way to sell sugar-water, or isn't it now?" And this is NPR, the supposedly "liberal" "people-powered" news outlet!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Naturally, other news outlets couldn't even pretend to slightly address how racist these responses were. ABC's miserable treatment of the story just noted that "Some" [giant bigots were] "objecting" to the advertisement, and that Coca Cola stood by the message, as if the "some" to which they were referring were no more objectionable than "some teachers," "some Illinoisans," or "some White Sox fans." The omission of the VERY BASIC TRUTH that those objecting are RACISTS AND BIGOTS, gives these assholes total cover for their pathetic responses to the ad. And this is simply par for the course.

When the rabid right says: "Don't you dare call us racist," the corporate media just lays down, and says: "Ok we won't." This is reverse political correctness at its worst. No matter how racist some GOoPer acts, the traditional media cannot call it out as such. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm sick of it.

Banksters to Urban Centers: "Down with jobs. Up with prisons!"

This important article from Les Leopold at Alternet really connects the dots.

How Wall Street Turned America Into Incarceration Nation

Transforming poorer neighborhoods into desirable real estate for the new elites often requires getting rid of the poor: jail becomes the new home for many.

November 25, 2013 | The U.S. leads the world in prisoners with 2.27 million in jail and more than 4.8 million on parole. Minorities have been especially hard hit, forming 39.4% of the prison population, with one in three black men expected to serve time during their lifetimes. How is it that our land, supposedly the beacon of freedom and democracy for the rest of the world, puts so many of its own people into prison? . . .

'Unleashing' Wall Street destroys manufacturing, older urban areas and black America's upward mobility

By the end of the 1970s, our policy establishment embarked upon a new experiment to shock the nation out of stagflation (the crushing combination of high unemployment and high inflation). To do so, neo-liberal economists successfully argued that Wall Street should be deregulated and that taxes on the wealthy should be cut to spur new entrepreneurial activity that would enrich us all. Entrepreneurial activity certainly increased, and with a vengeance. Rather than create new jobs and industries that would promote shared prosperity, a new and invigorated Wall Street set about to devastate American manufacturing. Its goal was, and still is, to make money from money, not to make money by producing tangible goods and services. Wall Street's main product for America is debt. And its profits derive from loading up the country with it, and then collecting compound interest.

Wave after wave of financial corporate raiders (now politely called private equity firms) swooped in to suck the cash flow out of healthy manufacturing facilities. Wall Street, freed from its New Deal shackles, loaded companies up with debt, cut R&D, raided pension funds, slashed wages and benefits, and decimated well-paying jobs in the U.S. while shipping many abroad. The released cash flow was used to pay back the financiers, buy up stock to drive up its price, and pay out dividends. Nearly half the raided companies failed as America's heartland in a few short years turned into the Rust Belt.

Living on the south side of Chicago, and working near Gary, Indiana, I have become intimately familiar with the devastation of the Rust Belt's urban core, and it ain't pretty. Basically, the neo-liberal scumf**x who call the shots in Washington D.C., Springfield, IL, the Mayor's office here in Chicago, etc., have a created an interesting little third-world experiment, right here in the good ol' U.S. of Awesome.

I teach English, not science, but I believe the experimental hypothesis the banksters are operating under is this: "If we wipe out an entire sector of the U.S. economy, and replace it with predatory capitalism specifically designed to bloat our bank accounts to the exclusion of all else, everything will be just peachy, and those newly-jobless urban cores will become like elysian fields of happy, contented, unemployed."

We all know how well THAT'S worked out. You can just ask the good people of Gary, Indiana; Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; or the southside of Chicago, etc. Of course, once they'd shuttered the main engines of the manufacturing sector through sheer, rapine greed, the question for our jaunty neo-liberal overlords became: "What do we do with all these people disposables who have no jobs?"

After all, that real estate still had some residual value, and it's not like they were going to go back on the whole experiment and invest in something to replace the manufacturing sector. Investing costs money, and takes time. The return is so much slower than creating a mega-trillion dollar pseudo-economy based on gambling with derivatives, and other finance-capital parlor tricks. No, they'd already hacked away those jobs like so many overzealous tree-pruners, lopping off barrels-full of apples so they can burn the fragrant wood. No amount of glue can fix those trees, and replanting? I refer you to my earlier remarks regarding the time and money involved in investing. Those jobs were gone forever, so what to do? What to do?

I suppose it must have been a real conundrum for the neo-liberal ha ha "private equity" scumfucks who call the shots. What do you with a whole bunch of unnecessary people disposables who are living eeking out an existence on the land that occupies your next condominium development? Luckily for the ha ha "private equity" vultures, at some point the heavens parted, the light dawned, and that last bump of cocaine brought clarity for a change. Some insightful bankster had a moment of brilliance: "I know what we can do with all those unemployed folks, whose lives, families, and neighborhoods we just served up and gorged upon like succulent marrow. Let's LOCK THEM THE FUCK UP!"

Y voila! Thus were born the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the War on Drugs, the disparity between sentencing guidelines for crack versus "regular" cocaine, stop-and-frisk . . . . why a whole LITTER of incarceration innovations were veritably shat out the asshole of our asexual, protozoan overlords. Thus was born a New-merica; one in which we proudly boast not only the highest per capita rate of incarceration, (which is quite a feat for the "Land of the Free") but the highest raw NUMBER of people disposables incarcerated; more than much-larger nations like India, and the wonder-tastically freeish nation of CHINA!

Congratulations to our Neoliberal Bankster Overlords. We truly are number one.

Good To Know

The rich are much richer than you and me

No shit, really? Thank you CNN! Boy that's a swell effin headline to read! But I think it's just a teensy bit too subtle. Why not just run a headline that says:

"God-damn! Y'all Some Broke-ass Motherfu@&ers"-?

Or how about this:

"Your Teacher's Salary Ain't Shit"-?

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The gap between the rich and the middle class is larger than it has ever been due to the bursting of the housing bubble.

The richest 1% of U.S. households had a net worth 225 times greater than that of the average American household in 2009, according to analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. That's up from the previous record of 190 times greater, which was set in 2004.

The widening gap came even as wealthy households' average net worth tumbled 27% -- to about $14 million -- between 2007 to 2009. That's the first time that they suffered a decline since the three-year period of 1992 to 1995.

Meanwhile, the average family's net worth plunged 41% -- to just $62,200 -- from 2007 to 2009, according to EPI's calculations."

* bold & italics mine

At first I was all: "Well at least some of those rich fu@&s are taking a hit too - 27%!"

Then I saw that the average family's net worth fell 41% between 2007 & 2009. 41%!?!?!?!

Now I'm like "Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn! We are broke as heeeeeeyellll!!!"

Now our right wing friends will no doubt place the blame squarely on President Obama, even though he wasn't President until January of 2009. Some of the less myopic of the bunch will have the intellectual honesty to blame only the Democratic Congress between 2007 & 2009.

Thankfully we're not all such morons, and a great many of us know EXACTLY which party (predominantly) and which President (until about a week and a half ago) is responsible for these "Holy Shit! You're Broke!" headlines. This is the long-term upshot of about thirty years of economic policy geared towards making sure the richest of the rich get theirs first, and telling the rest of us to "get in where we fit in." Ever since Reagan and his advisers dreamed up 'trickle-down' economics in a Singapore opium den, real wages in this country have been stagnant and in fact, since the Bush era, have declined. (That's 20 years of RepubliCon Presidencies and 10 years of Dems if you're keeping count.)

But I have to thank the good people at CNN for linking to this headline right there at the bottom of the story. (I included a screen shot cuz I know they change these pages up pretty often.)
First of all, CNN, thank you for calling it "the death tax." Sure we called the tax on wealth passed down from parents to children "the Estate Tax" for the first 220 years or so of its existence, but I wasn't sure exactly if the conversion to Orwellian Newspeak had been completed. Tonight I can ring in the New Year sleeping more easily knowing that that battle, at least, has been lost. So from here on out we'll call the tax that some of our earliest founding fathers put into law to mitigate the accumulation of wealth into an American aristocracy "the death tax."

Hmm, now that I've been told that "The rich are much richer than you and me," I wonder if I could find a story about billionaires getting away with not paying their taxes. Boy that would really bring in my New Year with a satisfying "Pop!-" like the cork shooting off the champagne bottle I put on my high-interest credit card. Y voila!

5 billionaires who skated on a death tax

Tally up the lost estate taxes from the superwealthy who passed away this year, and that's about $9.9 billion that Uncle Sam missed out on.

And heyeee!! You can click on through the pics of these old dead white-folks and pick out which likeness of Monty Burns you like the best! It's like baseball cards for rich tax cheats! As a long time baseball fan I had to go with Steinbrenner, although I was intrigued by the the "mystery woman," Mary Cargill, the deceased heiress to the agriculture fortune.

I want to thank CNN and Fortune Magazine for helping me make a point for me. Every time we start talking about the income gap in this country - you can set your watch by it - some smug right wing bastard trots out the old Ayn Rand canard and says:

"Well rich people have more money because they're smarter and they worked harder."

Thus did a rhetorical turd drop into your discursive cocktail. Now there are exceptions to every rule, but in general, this is just a blatant lie. Rich people aren't rich because they worked harder, or are smarter. THEY'RE RICH BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS WERE RICH. Think of the rich people you know in your life. How many of them had rich parents? That's right . . . just about all of 'em, eh? This, "oh the rich are just better people" canard needs to die. "Canard" incidentally is also French for "duck," so I'm thinking just grabbin it by the neck and bashing it against a wall will do. Let's call that wall "reality," shall we? Okay. Let's do that together.

And if you want to follow me even further down this li'l rabbit hole of mine, I'll just HAVE to show you another screenshot.
Just check the headlines on that sidebar over there!

Rich make out in tax deal

The tax deal's biggest losers

And who, oh who could it be who doesn't fare so well under this saucy "compromise" worked up by President Obama and the GOoPer Senate leadership? Why it's your broke ass of course!

It's easy to declare the winners in the new tax bill, but let's not forget the unluckiest of them all -- those who have been jobless for 99 weeks.

Boy are we livin in some surreal effin times or what folks?-when it's up to Fortune Magazine to remind us that we've got people who haven't been able to find work in 99 weeks?!?!

No doubt our right wing friends will cluck and and pooh-pooh and say: "Well why don't they just get a job already?" . . . these smug self-righteous pricks. Ooops! There are six available workers for every job opening in the country!!!!

"Well why don't they just split a job six ways?"

See, this is why we need a robust union movement, and the decline of unions has been such a disaster for the country. (Proud dues-payer here, by the way.) Back during the Communistic Eisenhower era, the richest Americans paid 90% of their wealth into the general coffers!

90%!!!!

And around 35% of the American workforce was unionized. It was one of the longest and most productive periods in American history. And the so-called "Economy," was not "so-called" at all, because - to vastly greater degree than it does now - it worked for everyone, and a much higher percentage of Americans were able to find meaningful work.

The rich fu@&s are obviously doing fine. They always will be. Clearly, these folks can take care of themselves, because they make the rules in this economy, and can hire high-priced attorneys so that they actually DIE before they pay the DEATH TAX! The average people, on the other hand - you know, folks like you and I - can only fend for ourselves by banding together. Money is a unit of human power, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. Luckily it's not the ONLY unit of human power.

Only by working together can Americans reclaim our dream. The 2%ers at the top will never hand it over willingly. Their attitude has been made manifest over the past thirty years of Reaganomics:

We got ours, so screw you.

GOoPer-Poopers: America-hating Cowards

So a few days ago Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged "mastermind" of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, was going to face trial in New York City federal courtroom. From the New York Times:

Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that it would prosecute Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in a Manhattan federal courtroom, a decision that ignited a sharp political debate but took a step toward resolving one of the most pressing terrorism detention issues.

The decision, announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., could mean one of the highest-profile and highest-security terrorism trials in history would be set just blocks from where hijackers for Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Mr. Holder said he would instruct prosecutors to seek death sentences for Mr. Mohammed and four accused Sept. 11 co-conspirators who would be tried alongside him.

Now reasonable people might disagree over capital punishment. (I'm not a fan.) But if any case warranted invoking it, I would think that seeking death in a U.S. court of law for someone who helped coordinate an attack on this country that violently ended nearly 3,000 American lives, and ruined legions of others, would be relatively non-controversial.

Of course pants-pissing Republicans have other ideas.

First of all, the GOoPers are positively agog because the Obama administration did something . . . anything.

Second, isn't Eric Holder black? A black Attorney General?!?! They're not sure about "that one."

Furthermore, Republicans claim that this move is soiling their drawers because apparently, they're worried that putting a guy like Mohammed on trial, and sentencing him to death, would somehow damage national security . . . an argument so rusted, so moldy, and so reeking of decay that it collapses into obscurity the second it's uttered. (From the same link):

“We should not be increasing the danger of another terrorist strike against Americans at home and abroad,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York.

Now let's be honest . . . nobody knows what the fuck this moron, Representative King, is talking about. I suppose we are to take it as a matter of faith that somehow, putting alleged terrorists on trial hurts national security. In spite of the fact that no one has a fucking clue what he's talking about, "Representative" King was apparently unmoved to elaborate any further. And this jagbag isn't alone! Just ask Senate Minority Leader Douchebag (R - KY):

“Our past experiences with terror trials in civilian courts have clearly been shown to undermine our national security,” [Mitch McConnell] added.

The senator for Kentucky argued that if convicted and imprisoned in the United States, the Guantanamo detainees would have the right to remain in the country upon their release.

Now folks, if you actually believe that the United States government is going to release Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into the general population, and you are currently wetting your pants because you're afraid of the big bad terrorists, please do us all a favor: kill yourself.

I'm serious. Eat some fucking lead. Have a cyanide cocktail. Drive of a cliff. Get you a rope and find you a tree . . . whatever needs to happen. You are a fucking moron, and a pathetic coward, and this nation and this planet would be better off without you. I'm not joking. Take a deep breath, and make it your last. (If you've spawned, you might think about taking out your children too.) Oh right. You're a coward. And at the very least suicide takes some fucking gonads, and you have none.

One might think that the so-called "patriots" - who are so into America that they get stiff-peckered every time they hear the national anthem at a football game, and who come in buckets of red* white & blue** at the "home of the brave" crescendo - would have a little faith in our criminal justice system. After all, these are the same scum who generally support life imprisonment without parole for adolescents, and locking up potheads for twenty years at a time. They don't seem to have much of a problem with the criminal justice system when it comes to destroying the lives of black and brown Americans for non-violent offenses. What's more, aren't these the assholes who just one year ago - when President George W. Bush's "administration" was still in power - were routinely telling Americans that questioning any governmental function was akin to treason? I mean, don't they have any faith in our so-called "Justice System?" Gosharoonies. I guess they must be traitors.

Apparently the GOoPers' blind faith in the inherent benevolence of any and all incarceration doesn't extend to imprisoning alleged terrorists in US prisons. Perhaps Islamic terrorists are the wrong kind of brown people.

There are two ways to look at why RepubliCons are poopy-pantsed over the prospect of trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others in a court-of-law. Either they're actually so stupid and cowardly that they really are afraid that somehow, for whatever reason, trying alleged terrorists is going to damage national security and fan the flames of terrorism. . . something that we must understand the Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan never ever did, by the way; or perhaps there's something else going on here.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and gingerly suggest that maybe they don't want a courtroom trial for the likes of Mohammed because they know that in such a trial, his lawyers might argue that the man was waterboarded 183 times; and that waterboarding is torture; and that therefore some of the evidence against him is inadmissible. (I don't usually link to Fox News, but you gotta check out this link. Dig the . . . ahem . . . tortured logic of the Fauxies as they try to back up a headline that reads: "Despite Reports, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Not Waterboarded 183 Times".)

Maybe, just maybe, leading RepubliCons don't really want a whole big national discussion about who tortured whom and when; because you know the whole "why are we torturing people" question makes them a little uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, I'm the FIRST ONE to assume that leading Republicans are stupid cowards. But let's not forget the venality and blood-lust either. I'd say it's possible, just possible - call it 95% possible - that RepubliCons can't stand the idea of the likes of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed going to trial because it would understandably be a huge media spectacle, and because the issue of "who tortured whom" would again rise to the surface of the national conversation. As far as these soul-less scumbags are considered, the status quo is just fine - torturing alleged terrorists in far-off countries and trying them at distant military outposts if they ever go to trial at all. Letting these people die in prison of old-age without ever facing justice is a keen option, as far as these guys are concerned.

You know, Americans are far from perfect. We've got our ups and downs, just like any other nation. But as a whole - and thank God at long last - I don't think we're very comfortable with the idea of torturing people . . . not even terrorists or alleged terrorists. These GOoPer-poopers can wax cowardly all they want about their phantom "threats to national security." It's crystal clear these people don't want a spotlight shone on the torture they enabled for much of the Bush Administration.

And thank God again (and I'm agnostic) for people like Representative Jerrold Nadler - (D - NY), who has really been proving himself to be one of the good guys lately:

“New York is not afraid of terrorists,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, adding, “Any suggestion that our prosecutors and our law enforcement personnel are not up to the task of safely holding and successfully prosecuting terrorists on American soil is insulting and untrue.”

*Yep - that's blood.

**No idea what the blue is. This rant wasn't totally thought through, I'll admit it.