Today, I got an email from my Senator, Sherrod Brown. Senator Brown wanted to tell me about creating jobs or something and what I should do if I agreed with him, but, I sent this response instead of doing whatever it was he suggested:

With all due respect, Senator Brown, my government is estranged from me. If my government was my significant other, I’d break up with it.

 

I am a life-long Democrat, Liberal, Progressive, Pinko, Socialist, Bleeding Heart who is tired of hoping for change and seeing nothing change. Kids go to bed hungry. Corporations buy you politicians up by the dozen and then you folks have their backs when they ship jobs around the world. People are losing their homes, and you folks could have paid everyone’s mortgage for five years with the money you’ve wasted killing Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis.

 

Writing this email pains me, but I am coming to a realization that has me so disillusioned that I may just stop caring. The game is rigged Senator Brown, and it’s not rigged in favor of the citizens that send you people to Washington and Columbus. The system is rigged to make the rich richer. The benefit to you politicians is that you get some of the financial crumbs from the King’s table…We the People do not.

 

I must admit I didn’t even read your email, and I’m sure you will return the favor. It’s just that We the People are getting exhausted trying to get by here in the best country on Earth. When you talk to us, we hear, “Blah, blah, blah, give me money, blah, blah, blah, vote for me, blah, blah.” You don’t know me, and the circumstances of my life mean very little to you. I used to accept that as a problem of scale, but I kind of think it’s the way you politicians like it.

 

I’m a 56-year-old divorced man. Through the last 14 months or so, I came close to losing my house to Bank of America. I’m caught up now. It was a struggle, but I’m current. It’s a funny story, actually; I blogged about it in three entries in my blog, geneclark.wordpress.com, entitled Why Does Bank of America Hate Me.

 

At least I wasn’t one of the more than 85,000 Ohioans that went through residential or commercial foreclosure in 2010.

 

In the last 10 years, I’ve been unemployed twice for 10 and 5 months respectively. I was without medical insurance or under insured for much of that time. I live 50 miles from where I work, and the petroleum companies decided to really put a screwing to us since Katrina. Natural gas is precious. Electricity is dear. My water is expensive, but at least they send me a letter every year to let me know how much more arsenic is in my water than the year before.

 

But, I have a job which makes me way better off than the nearly 1,000,000 Ohioans that are dealing with these price increases while unemployed.

 

Sooner than I even want to think about it, I am going to be dependent on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the quality of my life. I started contributing to my company’s 401K program at the highest level my company would match, but now that I’ve filed for Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, I am not allowed to contribute to my 401K any longer…well, for the next 5 years.

 

I still get up every day and know that I am in great shape when compared to millions of other Americans.

 

Last night I heard an interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. Terry Gross was speaking to a former United States Marine that spent her tour in Iraq in 2004 picking up and sorting the remains of dead Marines as part of the Marine Mortuary Affairs Unit. She spoke of sorting body parts by race and scooping remains off of roadsides with her hands. She saw so much death that she started to make sure her personal effects were always neat and put together because she saw herself as a potential corpse and didn’t want to be a bother to the Marines that would have to process her body.

 

While you and your buddies have been arguing about how big the rich people’s tax cut should be, America is killing its best and brightest to make the world safe for cheap (my ass) oil and heroin. Tax cuts or stopping the flow of dead people families have to bury…Congratulations, you guys, you have redefined frivolous.

 

Senator Brown, I don’t think you are bad. The system is rigged in your favor, and if you buck the system, we can’t even get the crumbs that fall from your plate. I’m sure you are a fine person, but when you say, “Hey, I know it’s hard out there,” you, like politicians from both sides of the aisle, really don’t know jack about how hard it is out here…you just want to get re-elected.

I have a friend that is a woman, a teacher, president of her local teacher union, and a Republican.

She believes she can change the Republican Party from within. Right now, she is a little angry with the Ohio Legislature and our Governor, John Kasich. They have fired the first salvo in their war against public employee collective bargaining.

Kasich was swept into office in Ohio by the “Oh-my-God-Obama-is-Black” vote with promises of lower taxes and less government.

Here’s the pitch…if we quit paying the lazy, good-for-nothings that are sucking this state dry, we can cut taxes and still provide necessary services. Poor people, unemployed people, and disabled people have gotten so used to the State of Ohio carrying them along even though they refuse to stand on their own two feet…assuming a lack of feet isn’t one of their disabilities…or how ever many feet or stumps or whatever they have. Government is doing way too much for these people, and it has to stop.

That is the pitch. The reality of less government is…

• The pothole in which you busted your axle
• Decreasing the payroll and thereby increasing class sizes in public schools
• Telling the unemployed to go fu*k themselves.
• Telling the poor to go pound sand
• Making sure that public employee unions cannot afford to give money to Democratic campaigns
• Telling unemployed sick people and sick senior citizens and the uninsured that it’s just tough titty for the kitty
• Making sure that the economic climate is good for corporations who will give their political money locally but provide jobs globally

A friend just asked me this rhetorical question, “Who voted for these people?”

The answer is, “The people they are screwing.”

The Republican Party has figured out that you can simultaneously scare white people into voting for you while at the same time selling those voters down the economic river…Brilliant!

Whenever someone starts asking too many questions, Republicans will say things like, ”Look at that Mexican over there. If he gets hit by a car, you will have to pay his hospital bill…That man isn’t unemployed because there are no jobs; he chooses to be unemployed because of unemployment…That tramp wants to screw her brains out and have taxpayers pay for her abortion.”

It works every time.

Another man I know says he doesn’t like public employee unions making political contributions with tax payer money. I asked him when a public employee’s money quits being tax payer money. My understanding was that the money was tax payer money up until it got paid to public employees. From that point on, the money belonged to the public employee…I don’t think he saw it that way.

Politicians don’t have our best interests at heart. That’s true for both Democrats and Republicans. Politicians have their own best interests at heart, and their interests lay in getting re-elected.

Where does that leave us? The words rock and hard place come to mind, don’t they? I think about this kind of stuff a whole bunch, and I am stumped. I keep coming back to something I have been against for a long time…term limits.

I have been against term limits because I felt it was an acknowledgement of our failure as voters to do our jobs. Well, we voters have failed to do our jobs, so it is time to acknowledge it.

Here is the law I would pass:

“No person shall hold an elected office in the State of Ohio or for the State of Ohio for more than two consecutive terms.”

If nothing else, it will get the lobbyists to spread the wealth around.

*****

Did you know that Alabama comes from the Iroquois word for “inbred retard?” Yes, I know “retard” is politically incorrect, but no other word was nearly as insulting. Here are some phrase I rejected as not insulting enough or too inelegant: inbred moron, redneck cousin fu*kers, sheet-headed racist assholes…I think inbred retard is insulting and elegant.

Who knew that the redneck cousin fu*kers in the Alabama Statehouse were that scared of Mexicans. You can’t get rid of the black folk because they are actual citizens of the United States, so you do the best you can with what you’ve got to work with.

*****

The Republicans had their second candidate debate this week. Michelle Bachmann received high marks for her portrayal of a sane person…that’s scary when you consider that she’s crazier than   everybody…an outhouse rat. If she wins the Iowa Caucuses in August, watch for the Republican Party to try and shut her down….BUT, what if Palin enters the race? Remember my blog entry from November 5, 2010, entitled John Boehner (pronounced Boner) to the rescue. I ended that blog with this little graphic…

Cue the Twilight Zone theme…

No one prepares you for it.

For many, it is the second focus of your life. “Whaaaa…I’m cold. I’m hungry. Hey, what are you doing down there? That looks sharp…Whaaaa.”

Some cultures hold a party for it. All your relatives gather together and, “Look it’s Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Sheldon. Who is that man in the funny hat? Hey, what are you doing down there? That looks sharp…Whaaaa.”

Eventually, you stumble across it when in the bath or when rooting around in your diaper for something with which to finger-paint. It’s like any other toy except, if you smack it with your Bob the Builder hammer, it will hurt like a mad bastard.

Early on, you learn that brandishing it about will get you noticed. Tell me it wasn’t a blast the first time you dashed stark naked from the bath and ran through a roomful of family members evading capture.

It’s like having your own lovable Mogwai…but, like everything else, what you don’t know will hurt you.

Mogwai, of course, are the creatures from the 1984 movie entitled Gremlins. You were never to feed Mogwai after midnight or get them wet. Our little friends should never be fed testosterone, but, sooner or later, a switch flips in our brains and our bodies begin producing the Big T.

Then the cute little Mogwai turn into evil, bad-mannered Gremlins. They won’t listen. They want to stay up all night and get into all manner of trouble. By the time we get one fire put out, our Gremlin has started three more.

We can’t help it…we suffer from Peckerosity…the state of having or being a pecker.

Anthony Weiner (how perfect is that?) is just the latest victim of this disease that strikes down millions world-wide every year.

This disease effects our best and brightest…Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, John Ensign, Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, Newt Gingrich, and that Senator who was trolling for gay sex in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport…David Vitter, Kwame Kilpatrick, Eliot Spitzer, James McGreevy, Mark Foley, Christopher Lee, that Italian Prime minister, and that French guy who was President of the International Monetary Fund…Tiger Woods, David Letterman, Charlie Sheen, and that lovable British actor that got caught with the transvestite and then apologized on the Tonight Show…Ted Kennedy, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bob Packwood, Gary Hart, Thomas Jefferson, Clarence Thomas, and that Arkansas Congressman that was caught skinny dipping in the Tidal Basin with a stripper.

This list just scratches the surface of the famous that have been laid low by Peckerosity…however; Peckerosity is not just a disease of the rich and powerful. Everyday men with everyday jobs are cut down in their prime by Peckerosity. In extreme, Peckerosity leads to child abuse and serial murder.

I struggle with bouts of Peckerosity myself, but I offer some of the warning signs in the hope that others will seek help before it is too late:

• Do you consult your pecker when you are planning the weekend trip or an evening out?

• Is there anything so important that you won’t let your pecker interrupt you while doing it?

• Does your pecker’s nickname have anything to do with violence (i.e. Intimidator, Trouser Nuke, Killer, Home Wrecker)?

• Do you think complete strangers will want to have sex with you if they just look at a photograph of your pecker?

• Have you considered putting a photograph of you pecker on special business cards that you only hand out to the ladies?

Guys, pay attention and be honest. How many of your worst problems or mistakes can be traced directly back to your pecker?

Why, then, do you let Mr. Gremlin do the thinking in critical situations?

Politician: “Gosh, I want to run for President, but I want also to have extra-marital affairs. What should I do, Mr. Gremlin?”

Mr. Gremlin: “Why not do both? After all, you deserve it, and there are so many complete strangers that haven’t seen me yet.”

I am disappointed in Anthony Weiner because he was one of the few Democrats that had the balls to call Republicans out on the issues…and he apparently showed those balls to complete strangers on a regular basis…it kind of destroys the message, Anthony.

What men with severe Peckerosity never think of are the people that are counting on them. Sure, there were constituents and other Democrats, but Mr. Weiner and his wife are expecting a child this year. Now, the happy family will look back on what should have been a great year as the year Daddy’s dong was front-page news.

P. S.

Newt G. may not be in this thing long enough to have a cup of coffee. Watch out for that fat, redneck bastard from New Jersey that called teachers thugs.

Tell the truth. Didn’t that headline make you cringe?

America is a place where anyone can grow up to be President, but it is not a place where everyone should be President.

Being President is hard, and Sarah Palin is not up to the job. Sarah was on the Wasilla, Alaska, city council for four years, and she was Mayor of Wasilla for four years. She was Governor of Alaska for two years…nearly one fourth of the time she was Governor, however, she was running for Vice President. She resigned her Governorship in July of 2009.

Ms. Palin went from rags to riches after getting the Vice Presidential nod from John McCain. She turned being the hockey mom maverick into millions of dollars in a very short period of time.

I’m not against getting rich. I’m confused as to why America made Sarah Palin rich. The way I see it, Sarah Palin has made not knowing anything about anything into a virtue. Whenever she gets proven to be an idiot by her own words or lack of knowledge, Ms. Palin screams, “That’s gotcha’ journalism by the lame stream media.”

Sarah’s supporters like to say the lame stream media is out to get her while ignoring the facts. Being President is hard. I don’t care if Dubya proved that any idiot can do the job; I don’t think we can afford to give the job to another idiot.

This very week, while in Boston on her media whore tour, Sarah Palin said this about Paul Revere and his famous ride:

“He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.”

Brilliant!

In my mind, there is a disturbing connection between Sarah Palin’s rise to political prominence and the plot of the 1979 movie entitled Being There. The movie Starred Peter Sellers and was directed by Hal Ashby and based on a novel written by Jerry Kosinski.

Sellers plays a man named Chance who lived on the Washington, D.C., estate of a very wealthy man whom took him in when Chance was a baby and let him live on the estate. Chance served as the gardener when he grew up. The movie opens when Chance is in middle age and his benefactor dies.

The only things Chance knows were learned from watching television. After having never been outside the estate in his whole life, Chance is forced to leave by the lawyers handling the disposition on his late benefactor’s property.

Chance, who becomes known as Chauncey Gardiner through a misunderstanding, has no clue how the real world works and begins wandering through Washington. He is struck by the limo of a rich, conservative Washington couple and taken into their home. Chance’s statements about gardening are interpreted as insightful allegory instead of blissful ignorance, and he begins to be introduced to the conservative elite in Washington, D.C., and, eventually, the President of the United States.

The following is from a synopsis of Being There that can be found at www.imdb.com/ (The Internet Movie Database):

 “Chauncey Gardiner, quickly rises to national public prominence. He becomes a media celebrity with an appearance on a television talk show, and is soon on the A-list of the most wanted in Washington society. Public opinion polls start to reflect just how much his simple brand of wisdom resonates with the jaded American public.”

By the end of the movie, people that have interpreted Chauncey’s ramblings as deep thoughts begin considering running him for President of the United States.

That is what I am afraid of…Sarah Palin is Chauncey Gardiner.

I don’t think there is an intellectual bone in Sarah Palin’s body…I believe Sarah Palin is probably a real hoot to have a beer with, but so was Dubya, and we all know how that turned out.

The Republican who wins the nomination to run for President in 2012 will be running against Barack Obama. Barack is not perfect, but Sarah Palin can’t beat him.

Let’s imagine that Sarah Palin survived the primaries and won the nomination…shudder, shudder…imagine who she would pick as her running mate…dear God, wouldn’t that be a train wreck? The Republicans would go to the voters with almost no legislative victories, nearly no promises kept, and only Sarah Palin to offer America…OUCH!

From the standpoint of this weekly endeavor, Sarah Palin in the race would be great. I’d never run out of fun things to write about, but Sarah isn’t ready and may never be ready to run…unless…

Sarah could buy some image consultants and some tutors and study up on all the things about which she is ignorant during the next four years. Then she might be ready to have Hillary Clinton kick her ass in 2016.

Somewhere in the mists of time, a person woke up one day and realized that they wanted to curl up next to the fire with a person of the same gender. Depending on which timeline you favor, that awakening happened from several million years to 6,000 years ago.

There was no Gay Activist Alliance, no Advocate Magazine, no Gay Pride Parade, and no gay agenda, AND, yet, a gay person came forth unto the world. How did that gay person get to be gay with none of the common influences shrilly proclaimed by the dumbasses that proclaim such drivel?

Did God create that first gay person? Did, GASP, Satan create that first gay person? How did that first gay person get here?

They were born.

Yep, a man and a woman curled up next to the fire one night, and 9 months later a gay person popped out of his or her mother…and so it has gone at the rate of about 1 gay person every 10 births right up until this very day.

Once again, some homophobic assholes, this time in Minnesota, want to make sure the sanctity of marriage isn’t sullied by couples that not only want to curl up next to the fire with someone with identical sex parts but also have the balls to expect to be treated like everyone else.

Newt Gingrich has single-handedly sullied the sanctity of marriage. The homophobics in Minnesota need not worry about gay people.

Minnesota is home to Republican Presidential hopefuls Tim “Yawn” Pawlenty and Michelle “I’m as crazy as a sh*thouse rat” Bachmann. It is also home to America’s gayest city as rated by The Advocate Magazine…Minneapolis.

So, why did the legislators in the land of 10,000 lakes and 1 billion mosquitoes vote on a state constitutional amendment which defines marriage as between 1 man and 1 woman other than because they have their heads jammed up their own asses?

Hell, I don’t know…why do the people of any state do such crap?

At first, I figured that they were scared they would “catch the gay,” as Rachel Maddow says.

“Look Harry,” said Ernest. “Two married queers just moved in across the street.”

“Yep, Ernest,” Harry said. “Drop your pants you sexy stud; I caught the gay.”

My next theory was that they were scared that a gay person would find them attractive, thereby confirming their greatest fear that they are “queer bait” just like the older boys in junior high said they were.

I have speculated that if gay people are welcomed into the general society, people are scared they will have to answer the most frightening question ever asked, “Mommy, what are gay people?” These parents always imagine the answer must contain diagrams and lubricant, when all they have to say is, “Gay people are people that love someone of the same gender the way Mommy and Daddy love each other.”

Another theory I have written about here, is the theory that when kids find out gay people like to curl up next to the fire with people of the same gender, they will surmise that Mommy and Daddy curl up next to the fire. Then the kids will want to know what Mommy and Daddy do next to the fire, and the kids will end up on MTV’s “16 and Pregnant.”

I’m coming to a new conclusion, however. Assholes that flap about the sanctity of marriage or whether God hates gay people or not have finally accepted the fact that they can’t round up all the gay people and have them killed, so they are trying to legislate second-class citizenship instead. If gay people can’t be outlawed, then maybe a little gay apartheid will do the trick.

Minnesota State Representative and wounded Iraq War veteran John Kriesel, a Republican and minus the normal compliment of legs, said his time in Iraq changed him. He held up a picture of a gay soldier that died in Iraq and he said this:

“…Happiness is so hard to find for people. So they find it — they find someone that makes them happy — and we want to say you can be together, you can love that person, but you can’t marry them. That’s wrong. That’s wrong and I disagree with it.”

“This amendment doesn’t represent what I went to fight for. I don’t know about you guys, but I cannot look at this family, look at this picture, and say, ‘You know what, corporal, you were good enough to fight for your country and give your life, but you were not good enough to marry the person you love.’ I can’t do that. I cannot do that and I won’t do that. If there was a ‘hell no’ button right here, I would press it. That would be the one I would press.”

The amendment passed the Minnesota Statehouse without Kriesel’s help by a shameful vote of 70-62.

Huckabee is gone. He announced it at the end of his television program after he played bass for Ted Nugent on Cat Scratch Fever…”I make the pussy purr with a stroke of my hand…”

Trump is gone…or is he? Trump’s ego is easily ten times bigger than Ross Perot’s was when Perot quit and came back in 1996. I think Donald has too many skeletons in his closet and buried in concrete in his many buildings…he is not coming back.

That fat redneck Governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour is out of the race. He barely stuck his nose out of the barn when stories of his racist past started flying. Haley, is not stupid…he sounds real stupid, but don’t let that fool you.

Newt had a moment of clarity on Meet the Press when he said right-wing social engineering was just as bad as left-wing social engineering. The nutty crowd in the Republican Party went ape sh*t on old Newt. He has since claimed it was gotcha journalism.

Put a fork in Newt; he’s done. I saw an editorial cartoon where Newt and his wife were saying something to Arnold Schwarzenegger about Arnold’s problems. In the cartoon, Newt’s wife was labeled “Newt Wife #3.” It’s all over but the shouting.

A quasi-candidate debate was recently held in South Carolina. I say quasi because none of the people at the debate have a snowball’s chance in Hell of ever being the Republican candidate for President in 2012. There might have been a couple of potential Vice Presidential candidates in the bunch, but that’s it.

The debaters were…

…former Minnesota Govenor Tim Pawlenty…“Who?”…exactly.

…former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum…he once said that if you let gay people get married, you’d have to let people marry barnyard animals…there is no truth to the rumor that Rick has his eye on a little heifer of his own. Rick has no chance…he may be a dark horse candidate for VP…dark horse, get it?

…Texas Representative. Ron Paul…Ron is actually more of a Libertarian and that sounds too much like Liberal for most Republicans…plus, Ron says, “Go ahead, legalize drugs.”…Ron will hang around quite a while, but he has no chance.

…pizza mogul Herman Cain…Herman is a conservative Black Republican…he might as well be a unicorn…the Republicans would never nominate a mythical creature. However, since the VP is nearly an imaginary creature, he might have a chance at that

…former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson…he has climbed Mt. Everest…he is a tri-athlete…he is skinny…he has good hair…no one knows him…maybe VP.

Mitt Romney didn’t show up at the debate; neither did Sarah Palin nor Michelle Bachmann.

Mitt has two big problems…he enacted a health care plan when he was Governor of Massachusetts that President Obama copied for his health care plan…and there is, of course, the magic underwear…go ahead, Google “magic underwear” and enjoy.

Sarah…ah, Sarah…you haven’t a chance…not one…not even a ghost of a chance…and besides, Newt is already using your famous “gotcha journalism” excuse for when he gets in trouble.

Michelle Bachmann…crazy as a sh*t house rat and has the bright-eyed stare of a religious zealot or maybe a zombie…if God is telling her to run, he’s kidding like when he convinced Pat Robertson to run back in 1988.

What does that leave the Republicans?

Could it be John “Tiny” Boehner…too orange and rather lazy it turns out…unless you want to strip women of their reproductive rights or vote to continue to give Big Oil billions of dollars a year in subsidies, John doesn’t do much.

Could it be that fat-assed Governor of New Jersey that thinks teachers are thugs…nope.

I believe the person that will win the 2012 Republican nomination and have their ass kicked by Barack Obama is still in the shadows and waiting for the right time to swoop in and clean up in the primaries.

The future nominee is hiding in the woodwork like a rodent or a bug or some other vermin of some kind. He or she is smart enough to wait while the other candidates cannibalize each other and shoot themselves in the foot and to see what the real election terrain will look like closer to primary season.

I don’t see how the secret Republican nominee can hope to win, unless President Obama has a case of Schwarzenegger Zipper Malfunction.

P. S.

Just to be on the safe side, I think we should keep an eye on Marco Rubio, the junior Senator from Florida, and Jeb Bush, a former Governor of Florida and heir to the Bush Presidential throne. I’m kind of hoping Jeb is the brains of his family and won’t run.

If you want to be really paranoid…has anyone heard how Dick Cheney’s health is holding out? That bastard is a heart transplant away from crawling back into politics. Remember I said the candidate is hiding like some kind of vermin.

He has said these things…

• “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics.”
• “I’m not a natural leader. I’m too intellectual; I’m too abstract; I think too much.”
• “If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”
• ‘In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.”
• “What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority. If [voters] care about parking lots, then talk about parking lots.”
• “There were times I was praying and I felt I was doing things that were wrong but I was still doing them. There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards. I knew I couldn’t cast the first stone as I knew I had weaknesses. I drew a line in my mind and said even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed and even on a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being.”
• “I raised so much money over the years, from so many different people that … I don’t owe anyone.”
• “I love the environment, but I’m cheap on the environment.”
• “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”
• “You can’t trust anybody with power.”
• “A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about.”

He has had three wives…

• Jackie Battley (wife 1-1962-1980) was his high school math teacher who he famously visited in the hospital while she was recovering from cancer surgery to get her to sign divorce papers.
• Marianne Ginther (wife 2-1981-1999) was the wife on whom he was cheating while trying to impeach President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. However, that six year affair turned into marriage number 3.
• Callista Bisek (wife 3-2000-2018 if he is a creature of habit) was an aide to him in more ways than one while he was in Congress.

He talks a good game on national defense…

He stayed out of the Vietnam War by marrying his first wife when he was 19 and she was 26 and by being a full-time college student. Deferments were perfectly legal, but it is interesting that he and Dick Cheney are both really pro-Defense with other people’s blood.

He fell from political grace…

His fall was partly because of a book deal he signed for $4.5 million with Harper Collins which was owned by Rupert Murdoch who owned (and still owns) the Fox Television Network. It seems that Rupert’s network was catching flack from a complaint by NBC that Fox was foreign-owned which wasn’t legal. Harper Collins had a habit of offering huge book deals to officials in countries in which his media company was having regulatory problems…hmmmm…coincidence I suppose, but Rupert’s trouble were taken care of, or lessened, whenever book contracts got tossed about.

He wants to be the President of the United States of America.

He is Newt Gingrich…hear him roar!

Please, Mr. G, please! Run for President and let us at you. Let us repeat the stories that tell the truth about what a lying, cheating, and thieving son-of-a-bitch you really are. Please, Mr. G.

Come on Sarah P. Jump in this race for the nomination. Don’t be selfish. Give us a chance to shred whatever dignity you have left.

Come on, y’all, Donald Trump, Michelle Bachman, Mike Huckabee, that fat-assed Governor of New Jersey that thinks teachers are thugs…come on, you pussies.

Get in this thing so you can be fair game…I sure hope you mother**kers can stand up to the heat President Obama has taken. He walked onto the deck of the Swift boat and took over the controls.

I want to see you handle the heat …Please.

I apologize to the cast of Monty Python, but I have been thinking of this all week…

“He has passed on! He is no more! He has ceased to be! He has been expired and gone to meet his maker! He is a stiff…bereft of life, He rests in the ocean! If they hadn’t fed him to the fishes, he’d be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He is trying out his lava hot tub in Hell! He has kicked the bucket, he has shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the freaking choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-TERRORIST!!”

Some might find it strange that a nice liberal progressive like me is very glad that murdering mother**ker Osama Bin Laden is dead. I struggle with the death penalty in most cases, but, damn it, there are people in the world that just need killing. OBL was one of those people. Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler were in the same category as OBL

I’ve heard people on television ask, “What does the death of Osama Bin Laden mean?” It means the son-of-a-bitch is dead…that’s what it means.

OBL signed his own death warrant a long, long time ago when he first thought, “I know how we can defeat the rest of the world, we will kill innocent people and their children in horrible ways. That will scare the camel pee out of them, and they will fall before us.”

It didn’t feel weird at all when I realized I took joy from thinking about a Navy Seal shooting OBL in the face…although, I always thought it would be cool to drop OBL out of a helicopter, on fire from about 110 stories above Ground Zero at high noon on a super clear day.

I once thought that Charlie Manson (another guy that just needs killing) should be paroled in the middle of Montana, but only after telling America where and when he would be released and arranging for all law enforcement officers to be in Wyoming for a picnic.

OBL made me think thoughts like that. I wanted to hear OBL scream for mercy in a nationally televised torture session live from Gitmo. I thought his last meal should be his own balls served raw after being removed with a bowling ball. In the last nearly 10 years, I dreamed up a bunch of really disgusting, painful stuff in almost a decade.

I’ve decided that dead is good enough.

OBL did need killing, but the nearly 4,500 American service personnel killed in Iraq didn’t need killing. The families of the nearly 1,300 dead service personnel in Afghanistan now can feel a sense that the death of their loved one finally means something…What comfort can the families of the Iraq War dead take? There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam and OBL were not in cahoots…

Saddam needed killing, true, but it wasn’t our job.

OBL, on the other hand, was our job…and President Kenyan Mc Commie was in charge when it happened!

Bring the American troops home now, Mr. President. Should some murderous son-of-a-bitch ever f**k with us again, no one will be surprised when he saddle up and go kill them…AND…I believe American support for such a plan would be very high indeed.

It is time to let our service personnel come home to try to heal themselves and their families. Our military and their families have shouldered the physical and physiological burden of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. They have done their duty and would do it again if called, but let them come home.

Dubya and his cronies tried the “kill-them-all-until-they-surrender” model of war. That’s the old model of war. It gets millions of people dead and just keeps the enemy quiet until they get more bullets. We now have a new model that combines foreign policy, bullets, human intelligence, economic sanctions, and technology. Perhaps we had to learn from the mistakes of the last decade, but let’s not forget the lessons.

America is the greatest country on Earth, but it is one country among many. Our country needs to brush up on its relationship skills. The best way to solve problems is to talk, however, war is sometime the only choice. In the past, war was waged with a huge club; today war is waged with a scalpel…

Should you think I am proposing we downsize the military, please make no mistake. Scalpels need to be used by people. A strong military with the best weapons and the best training is sometimes the only foreign policy some people understand.

Where did we go wrong in public education?

I have theories and opinions on this subject, but you know what they…say, “Everyone has a theory and an asshole…and neither should be heard in public.” Anyway…here is what I think.

I used to teach freshman English in high school. I always told my students that my ultimate goal was to help turn them into taxpayers. Taxpayers had jobs and knew how to keep them. Taxpayers contributed to society and didn’t live off of society.

I know, I know, I’m a progressive guy that thinks government should help its citizens when times get tough, but I also believe that people need to be prepared to take advantage when times are good.

It’s elementary…

Way too frequently in America, kids get out of sixth grade unable to read at grade level or even at all. How does that happen? Seriously, how does that happen? If I knew the answer, I’d be rich beyond the dreams of Avarice. Suffice to say, we could do a much better job.

I am a math retard. When I got out of sixth grade, I had second grade math skills. I know why that happened to me. I moved all the time because Dad got moved by the Navy. In one school they taught new math. In the next school they taught old math. In the next school, the teacher was a math retard. Math is math, damn it. Two plus two is four…in old math, new math, future math…two plus two is four. We need to cover adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing until kids can do it in their sleep. I don’t know about you, but I was barely holding my own when they shifted gears and moved into fractions…that’s where they lost me…my point is that I believe we can do better at teaching math.

My day job is writing. My avocation is writing. I’m lucky because I can communicate in written form. By the time you finish sixth grade, you should be able to write in complete, simple sentences and get all the punctuation in the right place. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

I am not picking on elementary school teachers; there never have been enough of them on the ground making sure no one gets left behind. Now that I look back, I guess my third grade teacher figured fear and intimidation was the only way to deal with so many of us at a time.

I believe that the student-to-teacher ratio in elementary school should be no more than 15 to 1.

Middle School Sucks…

Take several boys and girls aged 11 to 13 all suffering from hormone poisoning of degrees varying from mild to severe.

Then…

Remove them from a world of constant media input and world-wide, instant communication and put them in a building together for several hours where they suffer what amounts to sensory deprivation.

Then…

Toss in equal helpings of sex, drugs, and violence.

Then…

Give those boys and girls about one-quarter of the adult supervision necessary to even get them to sit still, let alone learn and to quit destroying what little self esteem each of them has.

And…

You have Middle School pretty much the way it’s always been done.

High School is not for everybody…

Way back in the dark ages, the people that ended up in high school, for the most part, had self motivation or parental motivation or both going for them. Also, back in the day, a kid could trade high school for a job and work his/her way up through the ranks until they retired.

You can’t do anything with an eighth-grade education anymore, but high schools still operate on the myth that everyone wants to be there. High schools do a very poor job of capturing the imagination of the kid that, for whatever reason, has neither self nor parental motivation.

High school is still pretty much based on the values system of the average 17-year-old boy. Think back to those days yourself and remember what it was like to be short, fat, flat, or in any way “weird.”

Balance the sex, drugs, and violence from Middle School…only in High School, we can super-size that happy meal…with the same old problem of not enough adults, and you realize that getting through public school is a real crap shoot these days.

You can’t just add bodies…

If throwing grown-ups at schools were the answer, we could just figure out how to get more money…that is quite a feat in itself, but it isn’t impossible.

Good teachers don’t grow on trees. Good teachers get that way because they learn from their mistakes and they associate with good teachers. In America, we operate on the model that one body is just as good as another body in a classroom. That is not true.

Good teachers need to be identified, nurtured, and cloned. In my opinion, there is no other way out of the education crisis in America…more teachers and better teacher training.

By the way, if you understood “rich beyond the dreams of avarice” without looking it up, give yourself five bonus points and thank a teacher.

Actually, I am going to Carolina on my way to Florida for a week. I fully expected I’d write a blog entry this week about why people won’t support their school districts once they grow up, but, I’m not.

I’m way too excited about my first real vacation since before I was divorced (10 years ago) and my family went to Myrtle Beach on embezzled money (long story). It is the first time in nearly six years that I had a job that gave vacation days.

Gail and I are going to spend a few days with old friends of hers. If you need us, call Florida and ask for Bill and Gail.