Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama

It’s happened again. This time it was the Iranian Fars News Agency that ran a story based on one that ran in The Onion, “America’s Finest News Source.” The article claimed satirically that most white rural voters would prefer to share a beer or go to a ballgame with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than with President Obama.


Funny, in Austin yesterday I was surprised to see a paperbox on the street with print versions of The Onion. Maybe the State Department would consider making this paper available in all foreign capitals.

Masters of the Universe?

Heard a funny piece today from Heidi Moore at Marketplace Radio about financial astrologers and Wall Street traders. She spoke to two of these fortunetellers who advise thousands of clients in America’s financial capitol, some of whom receive their newsletters in a plain brown wrapper. Astrologer Karen Starich was sounding warnings about the upcoming congressionally-induced “fiscal cliff,' saying something about “Saturn squared to Neptune.” Soothsayer Arch Crawford, a former stock analyst at Merrill Lynch warned about making financial moves when "Mercury is in retrograde." All this might be alarming to some who like to believe that the US economy is in capable hands. This reminded me of a story GOP candidate Willard Romney told in his acceptance speech about tough times when he was starting out in business at Bain. He said that he considered investing the pension fund from his church, but decided not to because “he didn’t want to go to hell.” Surveys tell that a slight majority of Americans believe in hell, with a slightly higher number professing a belief in heaven. At least Romney hasn’t started talking about the End Times like Ronald Reagan did..

Houston Chronicle September 10, 2012 Child accidentally shoots, kills man A 21-year-old man died when a juvenile apparently shot him accidentally at an apartment complex in northeast Houston, police said. Several people were in the apartment at 1000 Sydnor, near buck, when the shooting occurred about 12:20 p.m. Sunday, HPD said. I appeared that a pistol owned by the man had been left accessible to the juvenile, a preteen, who may have unintentionally fired the gun.

Chupacabra Report

Let’s drop political talk of God


This was the title of an op-ed piece in the Chronicle today from Lutheran bishop Michael Rinehart. It’s a remarkable article, and I’m happy to think of it passing before the noses of the multitudes who fail to see the contradiction involved in their advocating a state religion –as long as it’s their religion, and think that they’re being persecuted if they are denied special status and indulgences.

Here’s some..

“There is simply too much talk about God in politics these days.

“It may surprise you to hear a bishop of the church say it, but it seems that God is being used as a political football, and this borders on idolatry. The prophets thought so as well.

“The Commandments warn us never to use God's name in vain. The prophets would say invoking the name of God doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you aren't establishing justice for the poor, for the orphan, widow and alien. The prophet Amos got sick of superficial talk about God. "Take away from me the noise of your songs … and instead let justice roll down like a mighty waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

“I'm more concerned about our parties' policies than their talk of God. Anyone can talk about God. Isaiah said, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."

“I'm a Lutheran, so I subscribe to Luther's doctrine of the Two Kingdoms: The kingdom on the right is the church. The kingdom on the left is government. Luther was not in favor of a theocracy. Neither were the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers believed in God, but they did not want a theocracy. They clearly rejected the wedding of church and state. Luther said he'd rather be governed by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.”

-I had to laugh at a column by Kathleen Parker yesterday in which she is ‘shocked, shocked that there is politicking going on at MSNBC.’ She reported that MSNBC has been pursuing a progressive agenda “ advancing their personal political agendas and, conveniently, that of the Democratic president and party.” This with hardly a mention of Fox News on the other side, drawing two or three times as many viewers. Sorry Kathleen, what’s sauce for the goose.. Maybe you’d like to call for a return of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine that governed TV news from 1949 up to late in the Reagan administration that required broadcasters to present public issues in an honest and equitable manner.

Notes on the Republican Confabulation

Hearing Texas tea-party darling Ted Cruz speaking Spanish, I wonder how well that went over with the ‘English only’ crowd. You’ve heard people bitch when they get telephone prompts “para continuar en español, pulse dos.” I’m sure that a lot of them would be happy to build a border wall around the ‘big tent.’


Should we consider it ominous when the entertainment is the Oak Ridge Boys from The Atomic City, home of the bomb?

John McCain was trotted out to pontificate on foreign policy, and for those of you who have not been following his dotage, McCain’s policy these days is to “Bomb bomb bomb” everybody. He didn’t disappoint here, with his seeming call for open-ended war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria.

Condoleezza Rice followed with her admonishion “we cannot lead from behind.” Somebody ought to tell Paul Ryan about this, seeing that he described his foreign policy credentials as having “voted to send people to war.” If that’s not leading from behind, nothing is.

Rice then surprised me by telling the truth when she said “When I look at your zipcode can I honestly say it doesn’t make a difference in your education?” Any real estate agent can attest to this; that when young families shop for a neighborhood they first shop for good schools. Unfortunately, the Republican platform calls for fixing this problem by defunding public schools with voucher programs, one more example of the Republican ‘ownership society’ -where you’re on your own, and devil take the hindmost.

Many folks say that Paul Ryan is a nice guy, but he’s been annoying me for some time. He got my goat early, saying that “young people should not have to live out their twenties in their childhood bedrooms wondering when they can get going in life.” He said those kids were looking at old Obama posters; well a lot of them could be looking at old yellow ribbons and flag pins from the Bush years, still waiting on the job growth promised from tax cuts and de-regulation. Many more were part of the ‘economic draft’ of young people from depressed rural áreas who were among the million Americans to serve in Bush’s elective war in Iraq.

Ryan spoke of a time when”families weren’t just getting by.” Jeez, Paul, when was that? Middle class household income has been flat for forty years now. Aren’t you like, forty-two years old?

I’m not going to pile on Clint Eastwood. He’s a great actor and director; he’s eighty-two years old. I’m concerned, though, about the company he’s keeping; that would push him out on stage like that without a script. I do expect that Betty White will be funnier than him though.

Well, then there was Romney. Old ‘Windsock Willard’ looked a Little haggard to me, gaunt and stooped. All that pandering must be hard on him. Maybe he’ll do himself a favor and lose his voice like Bubba used to do on the campaign trail. Silence could be golden for a gaffe machine like him. He spoke about paying down the debt and rolling back déficits, though economists say that the Romney and Ryan plans to cut taxes and make unspecified budget cuts presents would actually add debt. He spoke about families being able to “put aside a little money for college.” That made me laugh after he told some college students last summer that if they needed money for school they should borrow some from their parents. Worked for him, I guess.

When Romney talked about when”you lost that $22 an hour job with benefits you took two Jobs at $9 an hour” didn’t he know that some wag would suggest that you lost that $22 job because Bain Capital took over your company?

And he brought up religión, saying that at school, guys “cared more about sports teams than which church you went to.” Sports teams; like NASCAR teams, some of his friends own them.

In the film bio beforehand, and in his address, Romney said that his dad was born in Mexico and left there to escape the revolution. This bit of family history cracked me up because it just served to remind me that Romney’s grandfather escaped to Mexico to escape the prohibition of polygamy in the U.S. The same when he talked about his boys being young and needing “to re-enact a different World War every night." This brings to my mind the fact that niether Romney nor any of his five sons served in the military. This in itself doesn’t bother me until he starts talking about “Obama’s trillion dollar cuts to the military” (which are projected under the Budget deal the GOP extracted in Exchange for raising the debt ceiling after they already messed up the countrys credit rating,) or when he trots out that old line about “preserving a military so strong that no nation would dare to test it.” Or as I would put it; a military so strong that we’re tempted to send it all over the world meddling until it blows back on us. Or maybe a military so expensive that we collapse under the weight of it.

But talk like this, even from a chickenhawk, is like red meat to the GOP crowd. That’s a reason that I usually stand with the other party.

Sun Myung Moon Reunited with the Souls of Hitler and Stalin

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon's first church built with Won Pil Kim out of U.S. military ration cartons in Pusan, South Korea in 1951. Photo from The Washington Times

Korean Cargo Cult founder Sung Myung Moon is dead at the age of ninety-two.

Moon, who reported a teen age vision of Christ, founded his Unification Church in 1954 and parlayed it into a multi-billion dollar empire in manufacturing, real estate, media and Republican politicians.

Americans may remember his addled followers hawking roses on the street and their plastering of U.S. cities with their “One Nation Under God” signs. He was known to perform mass weddings of his followers in sports arenas around the world.

He made a bid for the mainstream by buying the Washington Times newspaper in 1982, which provides an outlet for countless right-wingers to publish their screeds while losing money every year, for the benefit of such fans as Ronald Reagan. Moon spent billions keeping the paper afloat, but what’s a couple of billion when you’re fighting Communism and other devils. He did the same thing for Jerry Falwell when his paleo-fundy Liberty University faced bankruptcy.

Moon was convicted of tax evasion and conspiracy in 1982 and served thirteen months in the Federal Prison in Danbury Connecticut, but his Cold War theocracy and colorful business dealings never interfered with his connections to public figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jung Il, Mikhail Gorbachev, King Abdulla, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and numerous Senators and Congressman, who found that Moon’s money spent just fine.