naked light bulb

Otis at work

_______

Of This
And That...


• • •

Republicans
To Fight
Emancipation Proclamation Next


10/05/13--
House and Senate Republicans have begun making a wish list of laws they don't like and will attack during the now annual budget showdown next year.

Encouraged by the media coverage (if not actual success) of their current budget-hostage gambit which continues as of  11:59 p.m., Republican lawmakers say they'll use the budget every year as a weapon in their arsenal to destroy the world.

Weasel watchers say the short list of laws they'll attack next year includes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 19th and 13th Ammendments to the Constitution, and even the Emancipation Proclamation itself—if they can figure out where it is.

Those who know about such things say there's no limit to how little lawmakers might do in the 113th Congress if they stick to their guns. Those who know about such things also point out that the 112th Congress set the bar historically low as the least productive in history, and that it would take an unprecedented lack of effort to do less.

Those same people who know about such things note the weasels' lack of effort will be enhanced for the foreseeable future since they won't be able to phone it in like they usually do as the congressional switchboard will be inoperative during the government shut down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



       Vol. 1; Sermon 2      
(Part I)

• • •

 Of Weasels
and Men
...

 

              The Fire Last Time…Why!? Why, Why Why!?...
              Of Housekeeping And Prima Donnas…Who’s Got
              Next!?…


Part I

The Fire Last Time…


10/01/13

Colorado—Junior U.S. Senator from Colorado Michael Bennet has had a pretty darn charmed ride through politics thus far. After appointments to mayoral chief-of-staff and then Denver Public School system superintendent by his former boss (then-Mayor John), he was appointed by now-Governor John in 2009 to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ken Salazaar, who was picked to be Secretary of the Interior by President Obama. Bennet won his very first election in politics by the skin of his teeth over an at best profoundly ignorant and tone deaf (and probably deeply bigoted) Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck in 2010 to retain the seat to which he was appointed. (Buck infamously said homosexuality is “like alcoholism” on Meet The Press in October of 2010.)1

Known as a “progressive” voice in Congress on everything from gun control to healthcare and immigration reform, Senator Bennet has sided with the President on most issues since he’s been in office. In fact, he’s often referred to as the Golden Boy and the future of the Democratic party. (At least New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd referred to him thusly.2 ‘Course Mo goes coo-coo crazy for corduroy and healthcare reform anyway; she must’ve been downright dizzy interviewing the good Senator.)

So what-the-f#%k was that “Nay!” sh!t!?

***

At just past two in the morning on New Year’s Day 2013, the Golden-Boy-life-of-the-f#%king-party voted on Public Law 112-240 (later renamed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012) to avert the scary-ass fiscal cliff that promised to cause airplane collisions in mid-air and our national parks to burn out of control and a credit rating disaster that would no doubt trigger a double-dip recession that with the current political constipation would almost certainly plunge the country and consequently world into spirit-sapping depression and almost certain total-f#%king-damnation, casting his lot with well-known whackadoodle weasels Marco Rubio and Rand Paul (who recently said he thinks shareholder profit maximization godfather-guru Milton Friedman—literally a dead man since 2006—should be named Fed chief)!?3 (Seriously, is it too f#%king much to ask for United States Senators to know whether the person they support for political appointments is dead or alive!?)

To be abso-f#%king-lutely clear, Senator Bennet said Nay! to returning what were supposed to be temporary income tax cuts for the rich, as well as the capital gains tax rate back to their original levels; and Nay! to phasing out ridiculous tax deductions and credits for the rich, and extending federal unemployment benefits for another year to those who suffered most from the weasels’ reckless culture of greed!4

Had he and his nasty nay-saying hater weasel cohorts carried the New Year’s morning vote, tax cuts to poor and middle class families would have expired, thus raising the tax rate for Americans who make between $0 and $50,000 a staggering 17 percent from last year for singles, and an apocalyptic 32 percent for married couples!5 Additionally, a two-year-old payroll tax cut implemented to ease the burden on the working class heaped upon them by reckless politicians and investors in their ongoing rampage of greed would also have been allowed to expire!

Bennet, the Ivy-educated button down puppy dog progressive who makes liberal female columnists wet and fraternity boys sing, chose the course of a potential national nervous breakdown at the very least, and more likely a systemic socio-economic disaster. Had he been a private citizen and said as much (as much being that he would rather destroy the economy and cause cultural chaos and social upheaval than to cast a vote for common-f#%king-sense)—say, over a phone line that was currently under probably illegal surveillance by probably dark skeevy forces in our government—he might very likely have bought himself and those he’s connected with a serious-f#%king-investigation by men in serious-f#%king-suits. Had he been a private citizen he might have been suspected of conspiracy to do bad sh!t to The Good People! A traitor! A treacherous treasonous-mother-f#%ker who oughta be on a J.Edgar-like sh!t list somewhere!

As a U.S.-f#%king-Senator, however, he actually has the power to make that sh!t happen! All it would take is his Nay! vote (and fifty others, give or take a few). Simple as that and as effective as a giant electromagnetic pulse bomb that fries the processes of civilization! Another bomb lobbed in the wretched Weasel War against The Good People! A scorched earth diversion from the skeevy little bastards’ insidious business-as-f#%king-ususal master-f#%king-plan to hi-jack democracy and the march of history—and especially the economics thereof—and rest the future from the hands of the (practically) marauding masses right out from underneath us and right under our noses, and secure it for the wealthy weasel class whack and whimsy!

The whack and whimsy this time? A Nay! vote on a bill that would, if passed, stop the country from bleeding out on the operating table all because the good Senator wants to make a f#%king point!? A point that escapes everyone on the planet except some half-wit Kentuckian who’ thinks the economist whose theories are most responsible for the largest transfer of wealth in history (probably) from the poor and middle class to the wealthy over the last 30 years should be named Fed Chief—never mind he’s been dead for nearly a decade!

If everybody were not running off a cliff, is there really a need to run off it anyway just to make a f#%king point!?

 

Why!? Why, Why, Why!?

 

And just what-the-f#%k was that point the good junior Senator from Colorado thought he was making!? That it’s better to let the country plunge into a fiscal abyss and royally f#%k the government's credit rating, thus undermining investor confidence here and throughout the world—the likely result of which would be worldwide recession that in the current financial climate would almost certainly devolve into global thermonuclear financial meltdown6—than to pass a common sense measure to pay the bills, stabilize the economy, then address specific issues when a more thoughtful solution can be fully debated without the insanity of the politics of fear!? Starving the Beast is the euphemism the whackadoodles came up with (and that the good Senator decided to embrace) to describe their truly bent ideology. Presumably the Beast in this scenario is a government that reaches out to help those most in need get through the sick and twisted and profoundly ugly times the government itself not only allowed but facilitated, as opposed to the fiscally responsible government that reaches out to those most in need and takes back as much as it can so it can give preferential tax treatment to corporations and the rich so they can keep doing what they’ve been doing to our economy!

And just to whom-the-f#%k was the good Senator making this point of sound fiscal policy!? To the families of the poor he says he’s trying to make sure stay in school and get an education!? How much of what they paid for school clothes and supplies and activities fees last year would they have had to put toward the 32 percent increase in their taxes this year!?

Or maybe he’s making the point to us taxpayers, the same ones I’m sure he remembers who saved the world!? The same sad saps who are still trying to get back on our feet after the sea of sh!t the weasel class left us drowning in! The same sad marks upon whose backs the sh!t will no doubt still fall when we’re called on to cough up our truly hard-earned dollars yet-f#%king-again because not a goddamned thing has been done to fix how greedy mother-f#%king bankers and the other weasels who suckle at their teats use and abuse our economy and political process like it’s their prettiest bitch!?7

There is one other possibility: just maybe the good Senator was making a point to the drone hunters out on the eastern plains and the bunkered and armed militias up in the mountains (or just plain old crazy-ass whackadoodles everywhere) that he’s got a crazy-ass streak too, can say Hell Nay! to stuff—just a fellar with a strong independent streak that comes out every once in a while (when the outcome is not remotely in doubt and his vote is more like having your picture taken with the world’s largest ball of weasel lint or opossum sh!t or some such—something he and his clicky buddies can guffaw over, as his apparent dark-haired darker-souled doppelganger Mitt might say—but could look a TV camera (or a crazy horny red head who’ll believe anything he says) in the eye and say, “See, my lips are not on the President’s ass at all, by gosh!” (I imagine him gesturing Bubba-style with a half-closed fist/point for emphasis—just for practice.)

Call me a skeptic, but it seems a stretch to think that disaffected Tancredo-type-troglodytes will flock to the good Senator’s camp on the strength of his nasally, whiny blue-blooded Nay!

 

Of Housekeeping
And Prima Donnas…

 

Our concern here is essentially a housekeeping one. The Good People are nothing if not fair, and ‘t would be presumptuous and shrill to suggest how the rest of the world might be saved without first putting our own house in order. To wit, recently a prescient chill startled me during the change of seasons when the wind started to whip up west of town and a telling whiff of the distinctly sweet ‘n sour smell of weasel urine wafted down from the foothills. If indeed that’s what it is we’ll need to get that poison nastiness cleaned up post haste lest it seep into the fabric of our clothes and our community and our country and our culture and cause all sorts of beastly bad sh!t to happen all the way around! Heaven forbid the skeevy little bastards start to mark and pee on everything (precursor rituals to nesting and breeding); if that happens you can lose everything—including your f#%king mind—if you’re not careful!8

Housekeeping concerns notwithstanding, thoughtful but increasingly nervous Coloradoans who voted for Senator Bennet are understandably concerned. Sure the good Senator votes like the representative we thought he was on the easy ones—gun control, immigration, health care; any dimwit knows these were common sense measures for a dark and desperate time. (Indeed, still yet more needs to be done on all these issues.)  But on the telling issues of economics that truly separate working class heroes from weasel class opportunists, you can see what looks like weasel teeth when he grins. When one looks at the Senator’s votes on these quintessential working class economic issues and takes into account his history as a corporate makeover artist for Very Big Business (the multi-national-multi-billion-dollar Anchutz Group), it’s neither shrill nor unfair to ask which God-for-f#%king-saken team Senator Bennet’s playing on!?

You see this sorta sh!t all the time with the young and usually stupid and almost always arrogant sports prospects who’ve been pushed along from grade to grade and team to team because they appear to have talent that will no doubt shine well upon whomever helps them along and stands next to them. Unfortunately the smug, puffed up little sh!ts are so clearly unseasoned in both the ways of the big boy game and big boy world that the skills they actually do have amount to little more than poster-boy talent. They’re so used to the free-ride they’ve been given that when they have to put up or shut up, their immaturity and arrogance keeps them wondering about how something will look when they go to negotiate a new contract and what might happen for them in the coming seasons instead of being a part of a team playing now to win the game at f#%king hand!

Then it happens, an injury—maybe even career-threatening. Maybe they’re wet behind the ears and don’t really know the game or their position like all the hype says they do, maybe they’re not where they’re supposed to be on a certain play at a certain time and get blindsided by their own teammate. Who knows, maybe they’re not ever the same and the legendary career they and Mo Dowd—and everybody, really—thought they’d have…well, you get the point.  

The hard to figure part is that it’s like Senator Bennet doesn’t get the team concept at all. Not the sorta Pennsylvania-centric team concept he and former Mayor and now Governor John (“Frackenlooper! The Governor’s War Against Colorado” coming soon) have been perfecting for the last decade, the playbook of which seems to have mostly plays that continue to line the pockets of the wealthy and connected (read as heavily invested in oil and gas, esp. fracking!) while laying waste to and exploiting the natural beauty and promise of what is undisputedly (at least by anybody who knows anything at all) the most beautiful place on the planet. Something with more team than two.9

It’s as if the Golden Boy paradigm is all Senator Bennet has to go on; no doubt the idea of working on a team to accomplish something more noble than any single member could accomplish seems quaint to someone with enough money to pay someone else to do whatever he needs done! And for someone who’s been appointed to literally every post he’s held in public service it must be difficult to not only learn the rules of the new positions he’s been slipped into, but even to understand the concept of using teamwork to advance your cause when everything’s been handed to you on a silver f#%king platter like that! It’s easy to see how the good Senator wouldn’t understand the finer points of how you play the f#%king game!

The issue here when the sh!t hits the fan is whether the Senator’s calculated gambit to show his faux-liberal-save-the-seals-Republican-Romney-esque weasel buddies in the Very Big Business world that he favors the capitalism of the chosen few (like Romney and Ryan and Boehner—and even Schumer and Hillary, for that matter) with their magnificent yachts moored in equally magnificent births, oblivious to the peasant storms raging outside, over a culturally responsible measured capitalism of the masses that allows all boats to rise and be safely moored, cared for and sheltered from the f#%king storm, goddammit!, will go unnoticed by those of us who put the good Senator where he’s at, is it not!? Or more accurately, the issue is whether Senator Bennet will be able to spin his unflinching support of community-crushing Very Big Business and wealthy landed bourgeois interests over the interests of the middle class and poor (and the overwhelming majority of his constituents) in such a way that his constituents don’t recognize him as the skeevy, scheming shape-shifting prima donna weasel he’s turning out to be! (Of course, if the past is any indication of future plans, the junior Senator is probably counting on an appointment of some such so he doesn’t have to answer for his skeevy ways!)

The bottom line is that The Good People of Colorado want to know if the folks we hired to look after our interests are truly committed to and are actually looking after our interests!? Or did they simply use our good faith offer of employment as a weasel-foot in the door to the room where they happily sell their souls and reap the fruits there from while they push the agenda of the new owner of their souls!?

To wit: Have the skeevy scheming little weasel-bastards who would hi-jack the processes of democracy and civilization to further their (and their overlords’) twisted agenda, in their frenzied excitement over the impending Day of the Weasel, stained the good Senator with their poisonous weasel pee, thus rendering both his judgment and motives suspect, and in a worst case scenario (because of the consequent moral confusion caused by the seeping of poison weasel pee into his bloodstream), embraced the weasel way!? Or maybe the ease with which the Senator “accomplished” what he has so far convinced him he’s bigger than the game itself…and can even pick another God-for-f#%king-saken team while he’s still playing!?10

Reminds me of a story from the old schoolyard….

 

Who’s Got Next!?

 

There was this guy Bobby, and we used to play ball togther in the late spring and early summer of 1985. I met him at the school gym not more than a day or two after I first moved to town. (I was then as now the sort who’s completely out of sorts unless he has access to a gym or playground court to shoot baskets and figure stuff out.) In those days you could just walk into places without I.D.’s or anything as long as the door was open; it was and I did, and I found my first pick-up game in New York City on the upper west side in the gym at Columbia University.

Who’s got next? I barked as I walked past players watching the game going on. A guy about my height and weight nodded and spoke up. I asked if he had his team yet, he said nope and nodded you’re in, and like so many new best friends for a couple of hours or so made over the years, that’s how we met.

I say Bobby, his name was actually some God-awful long African name which he told me that first day after we finally got beat, slightly out of breath after a good run. I immediately tried to think of something a little more efficient to call him when our next came up again, and just as something popped into my head, he grinned and said “but you can call me…” (something that started with a “B”), “or how about just B,” he said, all at the same time as I blurted out: How ‘bout I call you Bobby. (Bobby was the name of my childhood best friend with whom I'd played basketball and baseball for many years and it just sorta popped into my head. Also, my new friend bore a striking resemblance to Bobby Seale, the Black Panther and African-American community activist and organizer which, in retrospect, may have figured in the process.) 

Anyhow, he said I like that so in my head his name was Bobby.

***

It was clear just a couple of points into that first game Bobby was a natural born playmaker. I’d recently discovered I wasn’t really a point guard at all like my high school coach insisted, but was more of what we used to call a downtown shooter at heart and, I believe, by nature—especially when about that time the three-point line was adopted and one was rewarded an extra point for staying true to one’s nature!

I knew after watching Bobby drive into the lane and launch himself into the air without a clue what he was going to do that my game was going to be perfect just off his outside shoulder. He was a lefty, as I recall, but could go hard enough either way, so I’d take up my new position around the three-point line from the top of the key to the baseline on whichever side he was driving and wait for him to get hung up in the air and start to look around. A nod, a kick out right where a shooter wants it, and nothin’ but net.

That sorta glance and nod confidence in and feel for another’s game happens every once in a while. It's what turns a fun game into a joyous game, and ordinary players into pick-up game princes, if only for a half hour or so.

We didn’t win every game of course, but we won more than our fair share. Enough that good players that wanted to win always wanted in on our next. It was a rare afternoon when we were one and done.

One day early that summer we were on a particularly good run, dispatching teams—often with better players—one after the other. So much so that the previously conquered but now sitting and cussing us were busily putting together a super-team to take our court. We could hear them talking trash about us even as we were taking care of the team we were playing. Nothing new.

Until inexplicably one of our own teammates—quite coincidentally with a blond Ivy League haircut—started trippin! The young wannabe weasel suddenly decided to move his in-the-paint game outside and start jackin’ em’ from the three-point line all while his weasely friends are yucking it up on the sidelines every time he throws a brick up.

Anyhow, we go on and take care of business and sit another team—despite the traitor weasel working against us—while the now-ringer-laced team takes the court. (It looked like the skeevy scheming little weasel wannabes picked up a couple of new varsity recruits since last game.) Now suddenly our traitor weasel decides he doesn’t want to play on our team anymore, whereupon the weasely chuckleheads pick him up as their fifth.

Fresh, there's no doubt we coulda sat those clicky chumps too, but war weary as we were, I believe we took the opportunity to get a beer.

In fact, I think that's when Bobby got that job offer in Chicago.

As I remember it, it was a summer afternoon in mid-July and we decided to walk over and watch the Live Aid concert on the TV at the West End bar across from campus and make a list of the pros and cons of him moving to some place called Chicago!? (He was some sorta community activist or something—tried to recruit me, in fact, that first day in the gym to come work with him to get people to sign petitions or some such. Said it was a good way to meet the ladies, as I recall—which as employment pitches go, ain’t the worst. I declined and he never mentioned it again, but I figured that was the rationalization for the reason he really showed up at the gym almost every day.)

The West End was an historic old dive bar between 113th and 114th streets on Broadway that hosted some of the greatest jazz legends to ever take a stage. It was also a popular, almost rite-of-passage hangout for Columbia students over the years—most famously, undergraduates' Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

The now slightly seedy but still happening hangout at night was virtually empty that time of the day and year so we took a table right in front of the big screen and settled in. I remember Bobby said he was looking forward to the Led Zeppelin reunion a little later that evening. I’d never met a black guy that liked Zeppelin and I liked him on a whole other level because of it.

Anyhow, Bobby took out a pen and got a cocktail napkin and we started in on that list. I remember the first "pro" for him staying put in New York City was the fact we'd (my now-hometown Knicks) just drafted Patrick Ewing, and what with Bernard King's knee no doubt on the mend and him certain to return to glory years form next season, we were clearly looking at the beginning of a Knickerbocker dynasty. All Chicago had was some ball-hog rookie who granted could shoot circus shots out of his ass, but with whom they'd clearly never win a championship.

But that’s another story for another time on down the line....

***

Back to Senator Bennet’s Nay! vote on the American Taxpayer Relief Act… like I said, it reminded me of that young weasel wannabe with the coincidentally blond Ivy League haircut back up at the old schoolyard years ago who decided to audition for his fellow weasels who had next rather than help the team he was already playing on win.

Besides the disease-laden bacteria and greasy steroidal stinch from the creepy partners the good Senator mosh-waltzed with, and the ownership papers for this debacle for the rest of his life (political and otherwise), the issue with the good Senator and his inexplicable Nay! on New Year’s morn, 2013, is that it will be damn hard to forget next time—which as it happens, could be any day now! Turns out yesterday, September 30th, was the end the fiscal year this year just like it is every year, and the date by which Congress is supposed to have passed a budget, and shortly thereafter a continuing resolution (c.r.) freeing up the cash to actually pay the bills and manage the affairs of state so the government can stay open.11

Even more than our apoplectic disgust and continuing loss of respect for an institution that has let self-serving second-rate half-wit loser personalities control the political agenda and national conversation and bring the day-to-day operation of The Republic to a grinding halt as of midnight last night (how-the-f#%k is that not sedition!?), The Good People are concerned the good Senator’s vote last time is an indication he doesn’t share the good team’s goals and mission, and perhaps his true heart lies with his own bourgeois-landed-Romney-esque-corporate-makeover-blue-blood kind!? The Good People are concerned the good Senator has pulled a bait and switch on us, and is really all about pushing an extremist strain of free-based capitalism that he and his corporate makeover weasel buddies have used to strip the poor and middle class of all its power and most of its wealth over the last 30 years!12

According to the Congressional Budget Office, from 1979-2007, the top one percent’s wealth increased 130 percent, while during that same period, the bottom 80 percent’s wealth decreased by as much as 30 percent.13  During the same period, the average yearly income for the top one percent increased from a little over $500,000 to almost $2 million. The average income for the bottom 80 percent stayed virtually the same.14

The most eye-opening statistic of all, however, is this: The share of federal tax revenue from corporations has plummeted from around 30 percent in the mid-50s to about 6 percent in 2007! During that same period, the share of federal tax revenue from payroll taxes increased from around 10 percent to almost 45 percent!15

Maureen Dowd did say Senator Bennet thinks the trouble ain’t so much between Democrats and Republicans as it is between the past and future.16 “I think the inhabitants of the past are fighting hard to keep the rents they acquired in the 20th century,” she quotes Senator Bennet as saying.

I’m not sure whether the ostensibly Good Senator is speaking in terms abstract or concrete, but either way that’s the biggest crock of steaming sh!t yet shat in the 21st century!

 

End of Part I

(go to Part II)

______________________



1. Meet The Press, Colorado Senate Race Debate: Michael Bennet vs. Ken Buck, Oct. 17, 2010. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q46By22r1Ls> (return to text)
2. Maureen Dowd, “The Man Who Said ‘Nay’,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 2013. (return to text)
3. Joshua Green, “Rand Paul On Republicans’ Voter Appeal And The Federal Reserve,” Bloomberg Business Week—The Interview Issue, Aug. 8, 2013. (return to text)
4. Public Law 112-240 (later renamed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012). (return to text)
5. “Will your paycheck fall off the fiscal cliff?”, PaycheckCity.com. November 2012, accessed Sept. 2013. (return to text)
6. Global thermonuclear financial meltdown in this case meaning people living on the streets in the Republic of Boulder—and not just when they’re protesting! Unsustainability all over! Cops shooting pets for food and trophies, and a culture ravaging invasion of critters and varmints—esp. common garden (twat) -weasels—peeing on everything, marking their territory and paralyzing reason and judgment in the Republic! (return to text)
7. This is the same f#%king weasel class from which not a single member has gone to jail for their crimes (save the recent conviction of Fabrice Tourre, a skeevy worker-weasel trader) because the weasel lawyers and lobbyists they hired have peed all over all the right soulless politicians and their powerful access-hungry donor-supporters, insuring every f#%king attempt to date to change the tragic course of the last great civilization would fail! The rich will continue to get f#%king rich, and the poor will continue to get sick, default and die, while the weasels who do the bidding for the rich will circle the carrion and then swoop down like vultures and buy up any assets lying about in the pool of blood that remains where the congressionally sanctioned crime against the American Dream took place, until such time as North America’s poor are relocated to/coalesced around the Siberian-like part of Canada or the Death Valley-like parts of Mexico, while the United States continues its cultural cleansing of the less fortunate (of any race or creed) and becomes the bright shining land built on the promise of profit maximization Mitt and Paul and dead Uncle Milty envisioned when they decided to create their own new Christianity of Wealth! In the culturally cleansed U.S., the word “religion” was made synonymous with “Christianity,” which consequently opened the door for the Texas State School Board to pass measures requiring all their textbooks to replace the word “religion” with the word “Christianity.” As the largest textbook customer in the culturally cleansed U.S., the Texas Stylebook, as it came to be known, was adopted in school systems throughout the C.C.U.S.A.)

Why!? Because the Day of the Weasel is come! The skeevy scheming little bastards are frantically scurrying around trying to put the endgame of their self-serving brand of perpetual profit maximization remote control capitalism into place! Once the weasels’ lobbyists influence (pee on) enough weaseliticians to vote their plan into place and the remote control capitalism mechanism is turned on, the system is designed to automatically maximize itself. If you can’t keep up, the laws of perpetual profit maximization say you’re a liability to the system; in order for the system to move toward maximum potential you must be eliminated from the equation. At that “value-stabilization point” everything in the remote control capitalism system begins to work against you and toward eliminating your presence from the system. The long and short of it is that by virtue of the principles of the perpetual profit maximization philosophy itself, the days of the American middle class are numbered. And forget about the poor—we’re f#%ked right here and right now! When the rubber hits the f#%king road, you better believe it’s the weasel-rich versus the poor (and freedom fighters everywhere) in the Weasel War!

And just what did the good Senator Bennet do to derail this diabolical plan to maximize leisure class profits and comfort while relegating the poor and middle class to a managed mass whose ever-shrinking slice of the American Dream is indexed to the mood and whimsy of the rich and powerful? Not one single god-damn-mother-f#%king-thing, that’s what! Oh sure, lot’s of bluster and showmanship—and some real fine bon mots on his website that smells like so much weasel sh!t—but truly not a goddamn thing! Nay! to raising tax cuts for the wealthy to their original levels; Nay! to stopping ridiculous tax credits and deductions for the wealthy; Nay! to extending tax cuts for the working class; and Nay! to extending unemployment benefits for the working class!

Like pedophile priests and most tellingly of late, gun control, apparently Wall Street/banking reform has become one of those despicable culturally fundamental issues that everybody sees and agrees exposes institutional and even systemic disease in our culture and gets self-righteous bombastic calls for action, but only flailing flurries of nothing until it dies the death of a thousand forgotten promises and disappears into the malaise of the wilting middle class American psyche and is processed as business-as-f#%king-ususal and filed away under whataya gonna-f#%king-do!?

Why!? Because weasels are not f#%king likely to accept restrictions on their access to the henhouse, that’s why! (return to text)
8. There’s been a goddamned in-f#%king-festation of the little weasel bastards up in Boulder recently, but I haven’t seen many around Denver. (‘Course the city weasel is a damn sight more clever than the college town weasel—less dopey and obvious, more devious and shadowy. They tend to hang around city and county buildings and other government buildings looking for a bone tossed from a fellow weasel or even crumbs and scraps, whereas college town weasels tend to hang out around wherever government-financed esoteric project funding happens. Usually when the weather turns cool and the fiscal year funding dries up the college town weasels migrate the twenty-five miles or so down the Boulder Turnpike from the republic into Denver where the funding still flows freely to the connected (i.e., other weasels) from the largesse of a major city tax base—[who apparently as of yesterday! raised the f#%king fine for street sweeping day violations 150 percent to $50 without even so much as a hint that was the new god-for-f#%king-saken policy which I’ll mention here now and address more fully and f#%king pointedly sometime in the damn near future, you better believe it, goddammit!]—as I was saying, a major city tax base whose coffers are likely less depleted this time of the year.

It has, in fact, been an unusually mild and exceedingly pleasant summer and perhaps the skeevy weasel bastards have begun their annual migration of greed early this year. Plus there’s no telling how many of the skeevy little bastards got washed downstream in the floods. Now that I think about it, there’s been what I thought was a wet rat smell that wouldn’t go away for the longest time. Makes me wonder if those shifty little sh!ts haven't been drying their nasty selves off up on the west side of town which mighta been the first chance they’d a had to jump off the South Platte River and Clear Creek when the floods came a couple weeks ago. We may damn well have a f#%king weasel spring from hell next year! (return to text)
9. Who knows, maybe the ostensibly good Senator and Governor John are both auditioning for a team waiting in the national shadowy memory? But that’s another story for another time on down the line. (return to text)
10. Then again, maybe it was just an opossum that got to the good Senator—scary little bitches, but basically harmless. Might cause nightmares and maybe some cold sweats from whatever terror they awakened in you when they jumped up from the dead and hissed at you, but no real danger. Unless of course they peed on you, but that’s a whole other deal. For the most comprehensive and detailed exploration to date of nasty varmints and diseased critters like the opossum, see O. Keyes’ Weasel, Polecat & Armadevil Field and Survival Guide. An invaluable practical resource, it covers everything from how to ID the damn-near endless varieties of critters and varmints, to surviving a bite or scratch—or worse, getting marked/peed on, which can cause all sorts of physiological problems and psychological confusion, and in the case of some of the more nasty and diseased weasels, severe emotional, existential and finally moral disorientation if the poison pee seeps into your bloodstream. (return to text)
11. (Still f#%king waiting!) (return to text)
12. Mischel analysis of Wolff in Alegretto (2010). <http://www.currydemocrats.org/american_pie.html> (return to text)
13. Congressional Budget Office (return to text)
14. C.B.O. (return to text)
15. Senate Joint Committee on Taxation (return to text)
16. Maureen Dowd, “The Man Who Said ‘Nay’,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 2013. (return to text)