PLUTOCRACY BARKS, REPUBLICANS OBEY

Rep. Connie Mack pushes bill benefiting big donor  Rep. Connie Mack, head of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, has scheduled the panel's first markup of the year – on a bill that would benefit a big donor to his campaign. www.usatoday.com

If only Republicans were this tough on their good friends, the offshore American companies that evade paying taxes. In the House of Representatives too...their special stronghold where the Republicans do much to hold back American progress and protect the plutocracy that owns them "lock, stock and barrel" as the saying goes. The plutocracy barks and the Republicans leap, asking first, "How high, boss man?" If only their boss were the average American Joe.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY ANYONE?

This should be called Republican "ouchreach" rather than "outreach". I can't believe this woman is still around and sounding as awful as always. With a mere change of a letter or two, her name becomes more symbolic of her activities. Phyllis Schaftly.


I just took out all my insulting language. Think I'll just let you judge for yourselves by reading her words. 

ALZHEIMER'S MAKES FOOLS OF US ALL

Does anyone else find it interesting that Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan both moved from liberalism over to pretty far out conservatism as older men and that both of them also suffered and died from Alzheimer's? How soon they forget, eh, the reason for liberalism's necessity as a force to oppose the jungle mentality of dog eat dog capitalism. 

 

A little wealth can go a long way toward altering one's conscience sometimes. Today from my AARP magazine, I learned that the wealthy Mick Jagger endorses British conservatism. I suggest he get a mental checkup soon. — feeling amused.

THE RED AND BLACK CAFE: REVOLUTION, ANARCHY, GOOD FOOD

Wife and I went to the vegan Red and Black Cafe today for dinner after a movie at Living Room Theaters. Good food, great to see they were packed. The clientele is on the younger side and wear the hippest damn clothing and hair styles to be found anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. Hope they don't mind an old man, calling their apparel "hippest". You use the language you was brung up wit'. 

This fine cafe is cooperatively owned and all who work there are in the IWW. They support so many causes I don't know where to begin. Many pamphlets on display—an old dude's eyes get blurry reading. Go there and see for yourself, if you don't believe this woid a mout'. 

If you got any money left over for eatin' out after the attacks mounted on the wage earner by the plutocracy thru the likes of Reagan and the Tea Party, eat at The Red and Black Cafe, why don't ya! Can you imagine a better place for blue collar folks to veg out? 

PS: They're currently on the hunt for another owner to buy in. If I were younger and could stand on my feet for long hours...ah, well! An experience of a lifetime just waiting for someone to trip over.

IGNORANT RELIGIOUS FOLK MIGHT END OUR SPECIES

Ignorant religious folk can easily bring us a new Dark Ages. Muslims, just like religious fundamentalists everywhere, are afraid of the facts of life. Their fears can be the undoing of the human species. Religious folk long for what they imagine was a simpler time, forgetting all the while, about the disease and ignorance that inhabits those distant times....

ScienceInsider: Turkish Scientists See New Evidence of Government's Anti-Evolution Bias - ScienceInsider

AKA THE SILENT BOOMER

Within this ancient breast, cheek by jowl with the political identity that writes this blog, live a pretty good poet and a passable fiction writer. They currently share another blog, The Silent Boomer, dedicated to the act of writing and to the farcical idea of being a writer. Quite a battle rages within my withered anatomy as to which of the three synaptic patterns gets the most conscious attention from the OS the conscious world calls George Thomas.

The political synapses are always one headline away from breaking into a boil and spewing steam and bubbles everywhere, paying no attention as to whom or what they damage. Quite often, the pot itself receives the most damage—a burned bottom or a too-hot-to-handle handle. The poetic set of synapses, on the other hand, already has a couple of books of poetry available on Amazon. 

Meanwhile, the fiction writer wistfully works to get at least one of his four completed novels published before he hits the final skids into a brief but fiery afterlife in the cremation oven. Because he's busy on a stylistic rewrite of his novel, Angie's Choice, the fiction writer ostensibly receives the most attention from Operating System George [OSG]. It's a mild adventure tale. If made into a movie, Angie's Choice compares to The River Wild set on mountain roads. Unfortunately, political headlines constantly cause the novelist to lose sleep when the political self seizes control and writes away the night on the commentary websites of his local newspaper, the Columbian. 

The novelist, unlike his historical brother and sister novelists, has a daunting task ahead of him. He has been told in no uncertain terms that to get published these days, he needs a "following" on his blog! He must prove the novel worthy of being read before anyone reads it. Almost sounds like a political problem, doesn't it?

U.S. Fiscal Cliff Deal Leaves House Republicans Angry, Deal In Jeopardy

All I know is that with 70% of Americans saying NO to any cuts in Medicare and Social Security, I hope these recalcitrant, destructive, obstructionist Republican Tea Party Republicans will understand that those are still hot button issues that they can't tamper with. They aren't even close to the majority party when it comes to those matters.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

EXERCISE AND CABBAGE HEADS

EXERCISE AND CABBAGE HEADS

I’m 75. A recent magazine article informs me that our brains—if we take care of them—might hold out until we enter our 90s. After that, decline is inevitable. Keys run off and lose themselves, people go for walks without their pants on, and one’s children might as well be cabbage heads for all the attention we pay them when they visit. However, that same magazine tells me I can hold off embarrassing displays of nakedness to the very last moment by exercising the meaty organ that resides in the bone home between my ears. For example, I can work crossword puzzles and solve math problems—as if fractions weren’t hard enough for me when I was 10. Also I can keep the old brain humming along by dabbling in the art of the Sudoku and—my favorite—by reading several filthy novels a month. Well….

Honestly? The article suggests only that I read. The reading material itself is left to the reader’s imagination. Think of all there is to read! History, biography, science, poetry? Or fiction—whatever fiction catches your fancy—desperate females tied to chairs in detective novels or, if you’re a woman, muscular hunks with shredded shirts in Harlequin romances. Some of my friends study books on gardening in case they want to grow more cabbage heads like the ones that keep showing up in their retirement homes. 

With only a middle school education, my churchgoing Baptist Grandmother, Eve, was a reader. She not only read but she worked crossword puzzles all her life to improve her vocabulary. Born in the final decade of the Victorian 19th Century, she displayed a complete set of Dickens’ novels on a shelf in her living room, but she took a fancy to trashy novels late in life after a stroke partially immobilized her and she could no longer take in work as a seamstress or make lace by hand which she had taught herself to do. After the stroke, she read nothing but dirty novels into the last months of her life, and she lived to be 100. 

An interesting thread connects my grandmother’s youth to today’s young women. In 1897, a year before my grandmother’s birth, Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out. Today’s young girls seem particularly fascinated by the thought of being ravished by a long-fanged vampire. I wonder if my grandmother read Mr. Stoker as a girl and what she thought about his novel? When a particularly devout daughter-in-law displayed a reluctance about my grandmother’s late-blooming taste in novels, Grandma told her, "It’s only life, dear."

I’m also told we seniors can continue to remember that our children aren’t vegetables by eating a healthy diet and by exercising to keep our brains oxygenated. I’m encouraged by every senior publication I read to stay with the vegetarian diet my wife has recently prescribed for us. The diet makes my colon empty itself more times a day than I care to think about, and I fart like a brewery dray horse who’s nosed into the barley. Under the new dietary regime, I’ll become even more of a stinker than I’ve been in the past, but I’ll live longer. The analogy reminds me that Eve’s father, my Great-grandfather Thorp, who taught me to play the card games Big Casino and Seven Up, drove a team of horses for a brewery in his youth. 

Exercise is specially good for the brain. I’m encouraged to climb stairs no matter how much my eyes gaze longingly at the elevator doors a few steps from every stairwell. Parking long distances from mall entrances and walking the corridors of those malls are both encouraged in every book having to do with senior health. Tires me out, thinking of those stairways and long mall corridors. To keep me interested in mall walking, I’ve added a twist to mall walks. I walk when the shops are open and circle through the stores themselves. I like to stride hungrily through the tool section at Sears and stroll through the brightly lit, sparkling Macy’s at one end of my favorite mall. When I feel daring, I whistle my way through Victoria’s Secret. Nothing much remains secret after a turn through that old, Victorian queen’s underwear. Not too long ago, they added a Frederick's of Hollywood to my mall which I plan to visit on a future walk…whistling all the way, of course. 

Who knows? Maybe if I’m lucky and stick to my regime, I’ll live into my 100s and forget all about exercise, find myself in the middle of a mall one day, wondering why I’m in the mall? And not wearing pants!

Jim Greer, Former Florida Republican Chairman, Says Party Officials Discussed Suppressing Black Vote

Although I think of Florida as separate from the rat race that is the South, it seems they are as corrupt as the rest of the Bible Bib states.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Ed Gillespie: Mitt Romney 'Retired Retroactively' From Bain Capital

So, I guess this is an admission that Romney accepted compensation for work he did not do? Isn't that some sort of fraud? Or, on the other hand, he was RESPONSIBLE for putting thousands of Americans out of work because he was IRRESPONSIBLY not at the helm of the company he was supposed to be responsible for? He still must take responsibility for everything that happened while he was captain of the ship. Here's another failure by business types to do their jobs responsibly and with the best interests of the citizens of this land foremost.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost