BartBlog

“We may not always agree,…I don’t always agree with myself.”
– Rudy “Toot Tooty” Guiliani to the Values Voter Summit, Oct. 20, 2007, as quoted by the AP.

– What is it with these Republicans who “don’t always agree” with themselves? Bush Senior said something similar years ago: then he had “strong opinions” with which he didn’t “always agree.” WTF? It’s called knowing your own mind — a quality you might want to have in a president. This is great leadership? “I don’t always agree with myself!” Excuse me, Gen. Patton, but your troops are wandering around in circles. Well, at least this time he avoided the cell phone call from hell with the third spouse: “Hi, Judith — I’m at the Values Voters thing in Washington. Would you like to explain to these fine folks why, as a good Catholic who started attending mass when I announced I was running for president, I wasn’t excommunicated for divorcing my other two wives — one of them in a freaking press conference?”

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Warning to Older and More Cynical Readers: This is a Morality Tale

A girl I knew centuries ago before my hair turned gray and my belly hid my belt buckle told me a tale about her mother. It started as a tragic story: Her father had died in a car accident when she was a young girl, leaving few assets and a pile of bills behind, and her mother was left as sole support of her and her only child.

My friend said her mother went back to college for a few classes to complete her degree and then went out to look for a job, with her only previous experience two years of secretarial work at an ad agency. At the age of 36, and after much rejection due to her gender and lack of experience, her mother was finally hired by a major US corporation as a marketing trainee.

Flash forward a few years, and Mom had been promoted several times; in fact, she had become something of a spokeswoman for the company. (more…)

The Science They Hate Proves the ‘Doors’ of Perception are Shut to the Neocon’s ‘Stone Age Brains’

The sub-head of The Telegraph (UK) article “Did You See the Gorilla?” reads: “Our Stone Age brains may simply be unable to cope with the pace of modern life…”

But not all of us have ‘Stone Age brains’ as the article goes on to elucidate. In the various university experiments testing human perception, about half failed to notice what was going on, roughly similar to the Duke University experiments conducted decades ago to show the weakness of eyewitness testimony.

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– A serious record drought has hit the Southeastern and Western United States, right in the Red State breadbasket. That’s a shame, but it got me to wondering why ditzoid holy roller Pat Robertson isn’t calling this a judgment from God for those areas voting Republican?

- Huckabee Horse-pucky: David “Dum-Dum” Brooks, writing in the NY Times yesterday, offers up this pile of piffle in his adoring take on Mike Huckabee: “He tells audiences that [he was so poor] the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt. ‘There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation,’ he jokes. ‘I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap.’”

This is some homespun BS by Huckabee — back in the day, I used to buy Lava soap and you could find much cheaper brands at the store — Palmolive was less expensive, for example. For that matter, real poor people even made their own soap, cheaper yet. Why do politicians lie about this kind of stuff? And why don’t infatuated maroons like Brooks check on it? The shower probably hurt because any politician is in pain when they have to come clean.

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“I am gross and perverted
I’m obsessed and deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed.”– Frank Zappa, “I’m the Slime,” 1973.

Rejoice, ye progressive lumpencrats — you are witnessing the end of the Reagan/Neoconservative/Christian Right/Bush era. While those of us in the Blue State of Mind helped, it was largely a matter of these Oligarchic Ogres aiming at their own feet — or a friend’s face, in Cheney’s case.

Yep, the neocon Republicans are imploding, returning to the ball of mean, stupid and crazy from whence they came. Let’s look at the record:

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While much has been made (and rightfully so) about Bush’s veto and its impact on children, there is one group that is chronically uninsured and among those in the most need of help to get treatment and medication: those who are mentally ill.

Recently, I checked out the availability of free mental health clinics in my area only to find that the only way to get mental help free or on a sliding scale was to develop a drug habit. Given the inflated costs of medication, a drug addiction may be cheaper than becoming a functional member of society. Most doctors charge at least $60 for a visit, and the medications for some of the more serious mental conditions can run at least $200 a month.

Our health system is a catch-22. In order to be able to hold down a job and remember to pay the bills, a person with mental illness must be treated. In order to be treated, the mentally ill person must have a job with which to pay for the treatment. It is little wonder that so many of the mentally ill wind up homeless.

If we as a society make a concerted effort to treat those who desperately need it, societal ills such as homelessness and drug abuse (which is sometimes called “self-medicating”) would decrease. Why throw away money to treat the effects rather than the cause?