Lapdog

Here Mittens, here boy. Come on, where are you Mittens?

I’m right here.

Ok, come on boy, over here to the far right.

I’m actually comfortable where I am.

No, no. Remember, you said you were “severely” conservative. Now get over here before I smack your nose with the constitution.

I really don’t want to change my positions.

You’re not serious are you? You change positions every day. You flip and flop like a trout on the bottom of a fishing boat. Besides, if you want to be president you’ll do what you’re told. Here, read the party platform.

This . . . is . . . horrifying.

Yeah, it’s good stuff. We had some young, female delegates who objected to a bit of the language but we told them to shut up and bake some cookies. I love cookies. Anyway, the Republican Party isn’t about youth or women; it’s about old, rich, white men. Like you.

I’m not that rich . . .

And I’m not a liberal journalist so don’t try to sell me cow shit and say it’s mud pie.

Huh?

Son, we didn’t choose you as our candidate because we like you or think you can win or because we believe in you. We chose you because we had to pick someone . . . and . . . you were there. You’re like Mt. Everest. Why will people vote for you? Because you’re there.

But my ideas . . .

The less said about them the better. Mum’s the word. Now I’m going to roll the party platform up into a tube and tie it up with strips of flesh from the working class. Then I’m going to throw it and you’re going to fetch.

I have a fundraiser to get to . . .

Fetch Mittens! Come on boy; bring the toy back to your master. That’s a good boy, who’s a good boy?

Mustainica

In case you don’t know who Dave Mustaine is: guitar player and one of the founding members of Metallica. The band’s nickname in the early days was Alcoholica because of how much they drank. They kicked Dave out of the band for drinking too much. Let that sink into your brain for a minute while you drain your second glass of Chardonnay of the night. Dave then formed his own band Megadeth and they have been one of the most successful metal bands around for about 25 years. Dave also graduated, by his own admission, to abuse of every conceivable drug that can be bought, stolen or manufactured in a storage shed by men with no teeth and gray skin. After 13 trips to rehab Dave was finally clean. Good for him and I mean that. But now I’m wondering about the deleterious effects those drugs had on Dave’s brain.

A few days ago in Singapore, Dave said that President Obama staged the shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin just so he could impose a ban on guns in the United States. Yesterday on Facebook I saw Joe Lynn Turner post that Dave was speaking the truth and he offered him congratulations. Oh, Joe Lynn Turner was the singer for the band Rainbow back in the 80s. I’m guessing even less people know who he is than know who Dave Mustaine is so I’m assuming his post was mostly a grab for attention. Well done Joe Lynn, now off you go, back into exile. No, your Facebook privileges have been revoked for a week, you can’t play Bejeweled Blitz.

So, let me get this straight: the shooting at the theater in Colorado and the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin weren’t just random events. Obama, in his down time between dealing with a bad economy and a presidential election coming in November, hand-picked a whacko and said “I have a job for you”? Then he sent his new slice-of-bread-short-of-a-sandwich henchman out to murder people with assault weapons so he could make a new push to ban them.

The thing about these kinds of conspiracies is the sheer number of people who would have to be involved and keep their mouths shut. The president can’t take a dump without a hundred people knowing about it so how would he stage two mass murders without the following being in on it: secret service, NSA, CIA, FBI? Now consider that you’re hinging your entire plan on an unbalanced person. If they carry through with the attack what’s to keep them from shouting to the world that “President Obama hired me to do this! He paid me in Snickers bars and expired coupons!” Ok, everyone will just say “he’s crazy” and move on, but once he opens his mouth, the idea is in your head.

I’m not buying it. Much like the people who want to believe we never landed on the moon, the whole idea breaks down under the weight of the number of people that would know the truth and would have to not talk about it. You can’t tell your best friend that you were once a woman and swear them to secrecy without them spilling the news to someone the next day and suddenly your neighbor is calling you “Betty”. It’s human nature to gossip. The president is not going to be able to perpetrate mass murder and not have someone screaming about it.

Dave wants his theory investigated. Well Dave, I’m quite sure there will be an investigation. Get ready for the federal government to climb up into your ass and camp out there for a while. Those tent pegs are going to hurt going in.

An Election Elegy

Now that Mittens Romney has chosen his VP candidate in Paul Ryan, people keep asking me what I think of Ryan. Hmm. He wants to privatize social security which in my opinion is one of the most destructive ideas a politician has ever come up with. He wants to get rid of Medicare which would injure my mother and every other poor to middle class senior citizen in the country. His budget, which other republicans eat up like chocolate pudding, has been called by most economic experts “unworkable” and “a fantasy”.

So, what do I think of Ryan? As I construct my answer I realize even I can’t say that many swear words in a row and feel good about myself. He is, in a nutshell, someone I will never understand in a million years. Maybe it’s because I’m not rich, but I can’t not care about the vast majority of the American population the way Ryan and Romney don’t. They’re liars and deceivers. I don’t know how anyone cannot see that.

Mitt Romney made $20 million last year and technically didn’t have a job. His wife goes on campaign stops filled with run-of-the-mill working class people and wears a $900 shirt. How do these people who are cheering for him not vomit all over his designer shoes?

There is a hue and cry for Romney to release his taxes. We don’t need to see them. We already know he has off shore accounts in the Cayman Islands. He’s a tax cheat. There is no reason to have accounts in the Caymans other than to cheat the taxman. Again, explain to me how republican voters aren’t incensed by this. Why would you vote for this man?

In the 2008 Democratic primary I voted for Hillary Clinton. I did not believe Obama had enough experience and should have waited to run for president. When he won the primary I voted for him. I didn’t drink the Kool Aid of hope and ‘yes we can’, I just knew I couldn’t vote for the politician John McCain had become. In 2000 I would have crossed my party and voted for McCain had he won his party’s nomination. But in 2008 he was a different candidate, a desperate one with no original ideas left. So I voted for Obama. Once again I had essentially voted for the lesser of two evils instead of someone I really believed in.

If I had to grade Obama I’d give him a C for his first term. I don’t think the Affordable Care Act is perfect but at least he did something. He seems to have surrounded himself with a cabinet of functionaries, but not visionaries. He didn’t listen to the leading economists about the short comings of his stimulus package and here we are four years later in very much the same swamp of unemployment, high gas and food prices and zero confidence that we are elevating, not descending. I am supportive of his general ideas but his methods of implementing them are not working.

In November I will once again vote for Obama because I don’t have a choice. Mitt Romney has only one idea and that’s to make sure he stays rich. The man can’t think on his feet and his over seas trip recently proved he was even more inept at foreign policy than Sarah Palin. I wonder if he can see Europe from Massachusetts?

Getting Mooned

Six years ago the planet Pluto was downgraded from planet status by attention seeking scientists. One of the ridiculous names offered for Pluto now was trans-Neptunian object. Another was the less eloquent “lump of rock in space”. They settled on dwarf planet. Recently they have discovered a fifth moon orbiting Pluto giving the little ex-planet 5 times as many as big bad Earth, who as of this writing, is still considered a planet by a group of men and women who can’t even agree on the definition of “planet”. I decided to ask Pluto his feelings on his many moons and his lesser status, which because of the lengthy delay in communications between Earth and Pluto, he didn’t even know about yet.

CO: So, the International Astronomical Union has downgraded you from planet status . . .

Pluto: What! How? What? When did this happen?

CO: 2006

Pluto: Crap, my email service out here is terrible. Damn you AOL.

CO: Sorry to have to break it to you like this.

Pluto: What did I ever do to the IAU? I bought tickets every year to their Costume Ball and Fish Fry even though I obviously wasn’t going to attend, and this is how they repay me?

CO: Their main reason was your small stature.

Pluto: Typical. The little guy is always getting picked on. Every time I pass inside Neptune’s orbital path he tries to consume me. Jupiter keeps bragging that he has storms bigger then me. I can’t help my size. I am who I am.

CO: They have recently discovered your 5th moon.

Pluto: Goody for them, I already knew it was there. He sings Bread songs all day long. How many times do I have to hear “Baby I’m a Want You”?

CO: How do feel about having 5 moons to the Earth’s one, but being designated a dwarf planet?

Pluto: I’m simply more “attractive”. Get it? Ba dum bum. I’ll be here all week. No, seriously, I have nothing against Earth as a planet, it’s the scientists. They’ve been slagging on me ever since Clyde Tombaugh discovered me. Clyde was my only real friend on Earth. We used to commiserate over personal problems; his was family stuff mine was the painful itch of asteroids. HA! I’m killing me.

CO: I didn’t know you had such a . . . good . . . sense of humor.

Pluto: Oh yeah, I’ve been working the clubs in the Kuiper Belt for years under my stage name: Shecky Neptune. I’ll do anything to piss off Neptune, he’s a jerk. The IAU should reclassify him as a jerk planet. Hey I have to add that to my act!

CO: Ok, well I have to go.

Pluto: See you around the Oort Cloud.