Tea Party Mental Illness Remains Rampent

Nuts on the political far right fringe will lie to your face any time you let them.  Unlike them, I take seriously what the "fact checkers" say.  So I decided I better study up on the whole matter of US spending and what the money is spent on.  Randy Rhodes says we could cover most of the deficit if we did three things.  If we said that drug companies had to compete for the price of medication, and if we raised the income bracket on the top two percent back to Clinton levels,  and if we put some sort of maximum dollar cap on certain types of tax deductions.  What I noted about the figures was how MUCH of the budget is devoted to pension funds.  No longer the Republicans are going after these.  We spend a lot, apparently, on our congressmen and Civil Service employees.  A major lie is that the deficit is 40% of the gross national product or something.  That’s what I’ve heard.  I’ve heard figures higher than that.  Not even close.  It’s just over eight percent, and ALL projections are that the federal deficit will be reduced in the coming few years ahead.  Also MOST of the Obama deficit can be attributed to a drop in revenue due to this recession and not “wild spending”.  But also the FICA rate drop contributes to an SS deficit.  Neither is payment on Intrest what the tea party claims it to be.  It isn’t thirty percent or more.  Not even close.  It’s six percent.  Neither is this a “record” deficit in terms of the GNP.  Not even close.  BOTH world war II and World War II had way higher deficets than our current crisis, and in both cases the deficets came down right after the War was concluded, and there is no indication this deficit won’t drop just as sharply as well.  To sum it up then, the vast majority of what you hear from Judy and the tea party is scare tacticts, pure and simple.

Sometimes I value substance over Politics, or in this case, Bill Handel over the alternative on the other station.  Stephanie Miller lost me when she attacked that called who asked why she hadn’t reported a key provision of the President’s Budget had already failed 99 to nothing in a US Senate vote a few months ago.  Stephanie whigged out and made no sense.  So I turned it to Bill Handel before eight thirty and had that on till nine.  Rush Limbaugh raved about this NBC commentator, Bob Costis, I guess, who briefly mentioned the proliferation of guns in this country and that if guns were harder to get, both Gavon Belcher and Kasandra Perkins would be alive and a three month old baby would not be orphaned.  Rush Limbaugh wanted to blame it on anything but guns.  He raved on about black crime and how it isn’t caused by poverty or bad police relation or lack of education – or even the proliferation of firearms- - but he said “If I told you the real reason – I can’t do that because I would be accused of being a racist”.  I can only infer from that remark that Rush attributes high crime in ghettos to the fact that the perpetraters are Black.  In that case what are you going to do about Trayvon and George Zimmerman, where the perpetrator was white?  And yet the tea party sees the White man as the victum in this case.  But Rush didn’t stop there.  He talked about added salt in foods and trans fats, and compact flourecent light bulbs, as somehow being ills greater than that of proliferation of firearms in US Society.  But then I switched to “Live and Local” and they were talking about the same thing.  This Kansas City Chief killed his wife, and then he goes to the team club house the next day and “thanks his team” before blowing his brains out in front of them.  Another cause Rush didn’t want to tackle was brain damage caused by concussions sustained in football.  Tword the end, Mohamed Ali was babbeling and incoherent and could hardly speak.  Of course besides altered personality you can also have Parkinsins disease, and other perceptual difficulties.    Randy Rhodes opened her show by tackeling the same topic.  But it’s kind of too late for me to weigh in on the matter myself in a blog because unfortunately the story will have run its course given the short shelf life of news stories these days, and If I’d been smart I would have gotten out my own posting about five thirty AM this morning before I was even awake.   You need a license to become a barber, or a plumber, or to drive a car, or to open up a restaurant, but to engage in a pastime where a human life could be taken, the government doesn’t consider that particular pastime worth regulating.  Rush Limbaugh also complained before the fact that massive rules changes in football making the game unrecognizable.  Randy Rhodes says she wouldn’t mind added rules to make the game safer.  In my “A manly sport for manly men” blog a year or more ago, I proposed that we already had too many whoos rules, and we should just let players “play the game”.  After all the game is relatively safe, compared to doing time in the Roman Coloseum.

Certain news is "No News".  The Supreme Court still has not decided whether or not they want to hear the Proposition 8 case in California.  That case is neither on the Accept list nor the Reject list.  In the time they take on whether to decide the case, they could actually be trying the issue.  (Selah)  But they are going to "decide if to decide" again this coming Friday.  The Mars sattelite dug up and analyzed a bunch of Martian earth, and they did not find the vaguest hint of even any potential for life there.  That isn't good news.  It's beginning to look as though not only is there no life on Mars now, but perhaps that there has never been life on the planet.  In Syria there are reports they are planning to use chemical weapons on their own citizens.  Kate Middleton has some violent form of Morning Sickness.  The sex of the baby apparently remains undetermined, ans I guess no matter the gender, new Royal had decreed that the heir will bump Prince Harry one notch down the line of royal sucession.  This morning sickness illness is something Marie Shriver had, and it cam be so violent that you actually vomit blood.  Also starvation of the fetus can insue.

We had cheeseburgers for lunch, at long last.  We also had French fries with catsup, and I had seconds on the soup as well as another half burger.  She had started on the other side of the room but came over to our side.  They were late in opening up the doors and I sat in the front room with a host of other people for a while.  I am not aware that Lynne ever had her Monday class in there today.  I heard no announcement and darkly suspect she has stopped coming.  I had Randy Rhodes on till one.  Brady and Christine have decided to have sex, with very little “courting behavior” first.  Brady seems to think all he has to do is slap a woman around and she will find him irrestable, and the sick thing about it, she was right.  Will may not want to marry Gabriel and may prefer the gay life style, though I suggest he see a therapist about that.  But if he can’t have her he’s going to prevent Nick Fallon from having her.  Even though Nick has offered to marry Gabriel and raise the baby as his own and keep the paternity of the baby a secret.  Will isn’t so hot on the idea saying “secrets always come out”.  In this case- - it’s not a secret that outsiders particularly need to know - - yet.  Meanwhile Samantha, Elvis, and Johnny were having a nice “family moment” bouncing around names for a new brand of lipstick, and they decided on “Proof”.  That is in intriguing name with definite promotional possibilities.  

Leo Le Port was informative today.  Yesterday he said that what he calls 2 K HD, is really two thousand bytes by four thousand bytes, which would make it an eight megapixel picture, what a good camera would produce.  But he says they measure it by the number of horizontal lines or rows.  He therefore claims that 2 K would be four times the resolution of your not so “standard” 1080 HD, which is better than TV stations broadcast in.  He says that one screen away you cannot see the individual pixels with 2 K, but in Japan they have 4 K.  But is 4 K really sixteen times the resolution of 1080?  Scott Wilkinson claims with 4 K you cannot see the pixels no matter how close to the picture you get.  I did a posting early this afternoon, which came out OK.  I had to filter out a lot of preliminary ideas that were floating around in my mind.  I mentally noted that I have tended to sit at tables where the dominant conversational person was to my left.  This was true with Ivon Steel, and Gail Mac Nally, and with Bill Gladstone, and then Loretta Hill, and now it’s true with Irvin Burger.  You have to go back eight years for this axiom not to be so where Dianne Harman (who departed in early 2009) was more dominant than Ceecee, to my left.  Of course in those days Manfred was to my right.  I am easing off on the garlic and the vitamin C and am down to two garlic and one vitamin C per day.  I’m really not sure whether it’s necessary to take the garlic or the vitamin C for health.  I have hopes that the garlic will kill the fungus in the nails in my right hand and also deal with the welts on my right wrist.  Today is 12-02 day or the Palm Street address.  Starting in 1991 I began regarding it as a lucky day.  I will have cigarettes just right about up to pay day this week, and I will have done so without going to the ATM twice like I foolishly did last month.  Breakfast with the Beatles was on from 9:20 onward.  It was an all George Harrison day to commemorate his death on November 29^th of 2001.  At the time I was dining with table mates Pat Weatherbee, Glen, and Jim Hicks.  Glen and Pat were both saddened and surplrised, as was I that George Harrison turned out to be so sick.  They played an in studio recording of “Here Comes the Sun” with other lyrics including “Tambourine Man”.  They played “Deep Blue and “Run of the Mill” and “Tears of the World” which is a bonus track from Thirty Three & a Third, and “This is Love” a throw away track from Cloud Nine they sometimes play, as well as “I Dig Love”, which features Ringo on drums.