Ketchup Is A Vegetable

Today’s news tells me that Walmart has decided to no longer have greeters in stores on the graveyard shift. Greeters, as we all know, are those retired geezers that meet you at the door, help with getting a basket and tell you where you can find stuff.   Its not a great, important position, but most of these geezers are just trying to supplement their puny retirements … and maybe gain a little end of life dignity… moonlighting for America’s favorite retailer. Who needs them anyway?

And what a big money saver it is. WalMart has 3,000 superstores in the USA, each employing one geezer on the graveyard shift. Figuring they earn $8 per hour and another $2 in benefits, the cost to Walmart for all those geezers is about $10 million a year. A LOT OF MONEY.

Walmart reported net income of $6.6 billion last quarter… yes, I said last quarter. Last year’s total income was in excess of $25.5 billion. So you can see getting rid of those old people is very important to ensure that Walmart exceeds its income levels next year. $10 million here, $10 million there. Eventually it all adds up.

I have just sat down to spend a little extra time with my kitteh. She is a sweet red-haired kitteh who likes the top of her head scratched and who sometimes likes to rub her gums on my arm. Yeah, it’s weird. She also likes you to find that one spot just behind her ear. And she loves to be brushed.

I should clarify of course; she’s not really MINE. She belongs to the house. But when I moved here, I would from time to time stop to take a moment to pet her. And pretty soon, she adopted me.

I am spending a little extra time with kitteh today because of this story, which would really get my goat anyway, but I am, I have to admit, somewhat of a fan of the felines. Here, read on:

When Jake Burris, the campaign manager for Democrat Ken Aden, arrived at his home in Arkansas he found the family cat dead on his front porch. The cat’s skull had been bashed in. It’s eyeball was hanging out of its socket. And the word “liberal” was written on its fur.

The full story is here. It is accompanied by a photograph of a dead cat with a look of sheer terror on its face. So tread lightly if you’re squeamish.

I personally think this speaks volumes to the false equivalencies that are often drawn when talking about “liberals” and “conservatives.” I’m sorry, but liberals do not murder doctors in cold blood. We do not cut letters of the alphabet into our faces and claim that some black man had mugged us. We do not murder peoples’ pets. There is, I’m sorry, a pathology on that side of the aisle that just does not exist over here.

Unless, of course, you can point to the news story about the dead cat with the word “conservative” painted on him. I sure can’t.

I have yet to put down any words here regarding the Republigoats and their attempt to select a nominee to run for Preznit of these Untied States of Amurka. I should of course mention that on the subject I am relatively uninformed, as I have not been able to bring myself to sit down and watch a single of the several thousand debates that have taken place.

I would rather sit through an entire episode of “American Idol.” Live.

Fortunately, however, uninformed seems to be the way to go if you’re a voter in these Untied States or if you want to open up your pie-hole and express an opinion. So, for commentary on the Republigoat Preznitdential race, I am just as qualified as your Uncle Stu who farts at church and thinks nobody notices.

First, can we stop saying that Mitt Romney is the “presumptive nominee?” That’s nonsense, for one thing. It is way too early in the race to be placing that shitty crown on anybody’s head. They’re just about to start primaries in the mid-Atlantic states, and everyone’s all like oh, Mitt’s the guy, Mitt’s the guy. The current Preznit did not pick up steam until he hit the south. Until then, everyone’s all like oh, Hillary’s the guy, Hillary’s the guy. Way too early to tell.

Besides, we don’t want these assholes to have a nice clean selection process. We want them to have a bloody mess. We want to send them into a brokered convention. I want them limping and pulling shards of broken glass out of their face when they get to Tampa. It is tempting, even for those of us who just fucking hate the Republigoat Party, to want a clear winner. It’s human nature to want a horse to break out of the pack. But that’s not the endgame we need to see. I want feats of strength contests over every single last delegate. The muddier this contest remains, the better.

I also find the feeble character of this selection process to be utterly reassuring. By this time in the Democratic selection process in 2008, it was clear that there were three candidates whom Democrats really liked. We would have gotten behind either Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards (thank gravity we did not get behind John Edwards; what a mess). At this point in the Republigoat process, it seems that this party cannot find even one candidate that they won’t have to hold their nose to approve. This is simply because they don’t have anyone.

And the candidate they do end up with is going to have a big job in front of him. I have a theory about Mr. Obama, the theory being that he will wear the cape of incumbency well. Mitt Romney found it difficult to appear presidential on a stage with John McBombBomb. Newt Gingrinch won’t pass the Nixon-Kennedy scowl test. Rick Santorum took his dead infant child home with him and made his own children play Red Rover with it. And the issues will not stack up for this “party” either. Foreign policy is off the table because this President has been utterly successful in that arena. The economy is as I type showing true signs of growth despite the best efforts of the Republigoats, so domestic issues will be a tough nut to crack. Even the time-honored tactic of telling wretched, superstitious lies about your opponent will be difficult to do, at least on the debating stage when the man is there to refute the charges that he’s a socialist Muslim communist bastard who was born in Kenya.

No, things are looking up, I think, for those of us with few other choices then to support the Democratic party. I think Obama is damn near impossible to beat in 2012. One can only hope that his coat-tails will bring us more Democrats, and by that I mean REAL DEMOCRATS, not these blue-dog idiots, into the House and Senate so the man can really get some work done.

So say we all.

My guess is that George W. Bush is tone deaf.

“But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

I have long noted that the GOOP is the dirtiest, scumbaggiest, low-down maggot infested unscrupulous bag of crap that ever played the dirtiest game… politics. The GOOP has no scruples about truth or justice or the American Way when it comes to using the levers of fear, ignorance and hatred to get what it wants.

Willard Romney is about to go into the South Carolina primary and face up to the lowest end of the lowest pit of GOOP skullduggery. There are no rules in South Carolina. They once beat John McCain by intimating that he was both a queer and a nigra lover.

I would not wish the worst that South Carolina can invent about anyone on anyone… even Willard, and I have no love for Willard.

But just by way of prediction, since I always want you to hear it here first: by the time the primary is over, every dumb-assed cracker in the Palmetto State will believe that Dain Capital was written by Karl Marx, Mormons worship Satan, One of  Willard’s other wives is black and one is foreign; and Willard uses secret church services to bugger young boys.

A judge brought in to clean up after a “kids for cash” scandal has expunged every juvenile court case decided by a Pennsylvania jurist convicted of corruption.

Senior Judge Arthur Grim was selected almost three years ago to review juvenile court cases decided by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella, who’s serving time in jail for his involvement in the corruption case.

As a result of Grim’s efforts, records have been expunged for more than 2,000 juveniles sentenced by Ciavarella.

Ciavarella and another ex-judge are serving federal prison sentences for sending juveniles to for-profit youth detention centers in return for money.

This is nice and all, but it’s a reminder that we still live in a country where, increasingly, our penal system is becoming an industry. Some judge put prices on these kids’ heads. Coulda just a soon have been your kids. Or you. That’s where it goes, though, when you think that everything’s for sale and that the “free market” (which does not actually exist) can do anything and should do everything.

It is one thing to embed this clip of Failed Presidential Candidate John McBoobies’ slip of the tongue here, and to laugh at it, and to rather inelegantly refer to it as a “Freudian slip” (I do not believe for a moment that John McBoobies actually harbors deep subconscious wishes for an additional term for our current president). However, there is a larger question here.

Why do they keep giving this man a microphone?

Was his incompetence not apparent enough when he was looking around for a running mate and he said hmmmm, how about this completely untested idiot out of Wasilla, Alaska? Was it not enough that this dum-dum nearly put Prudence Palin into the White House?

Admiral Stockdale was a fucking genius compared to this guy. Were I a Republigoat, which I think we’ve pretty much established that I were not, I’d want my party to give this guy a turkey sandwich and an iPod and make him go sit in the god-damned corner.

I heard that Willard Romney was going around sometime today hitting President Obama pretty hard on jobs.

Just wait for the jobs numbers to come out later today. Republigoats do not every acknowledge the egg that’s on their faces. They just allow it to drip and fester there.

Romney will have a fresh coat upon the release of the jobs numbers later today.

When I was young, Christians pretty much kept their mouths shut and went to church. Conspicuous Christians were called holy rollers. They went to little funky churches up in the hollars, listened to Oral Roberts, wore long sleeves and had nervous children. No more.

Sometime in the last thirty years holy rollers got into the main stream. They seriously took on the biblical injunction to testify about the word of GOD… otherwise known as marketing. They even discovered there was a great deal of money to be made at it. So the little holy roller churches became mega evangelical churches with marketing departments and their own television stations. You can turn on the TV almost any day and watch well-dressed adults speaking in tongues. The masses got into Jesus and Sara Palin got saved by a voodoo priest.

And now we have Tim Tebow. A soldier in the culture wars who can’t shut up because he was raised in the Evangelical testifying, drop and pray tradition.

Now that’s all well and good. I don’t mind Tim Tebow dropping and praying in the end zone as long as he does not delay the game. I am for Christians standing up and saying whatever they want about their religion. I don’t even mind the sanctimonious superiority I get from people who think that because they have found JESUS they are somehow superior to us secular humanists. I am more than annoyed, however, at the inability of these Christians to stand on their own in the marketplace of ideas while people who don’t agree with them, and who may have been insulted and annoyed by them, shout back.

These days shouting back is called “attacking” Christianity, “muzzeling” Christianity, “denial of first Amendment Rights.” Anything but what it is… normal, everyday discourse.

Tebow, whose recent statements about how God had chosen him for quarterback of the Denver Broncos earned him the sobriquet “Mile High Messiah,” has become a lightning rod for this dispute. Most especially since Bill Maher suggested after Denver lost to Kansas City that “Jesus had just fucked Tim Tebow bad.” Not necessarily an original sentiment. Hundreds of football fans drinking beer at sports bars around the nation likely made the same observation. I know I did.

But Maher is being called anti-religion (which he is) and Tebow is being made into an offended angel for taking these shots. Here is the truth. Tim Tebow has said God put him in Denver for this purpose, and so when he loses, it would seem natural for sports fans and God skeptics to hold either God or Tebow accountable.

What is wrong here is the inability of the religious right to accept the fact that if they raise an issue, someone… likely a smart assed heretic or street corner skeptic… will call them on it. This is not Massachusetts Colony 1630, it’s the USA 2012. If you are going to get into the game, you gotta know there are no rules.