Sad news, sad news, come to where I sleep...

The ongoing spat in DC about the debt ceiling seems to be staggering to a close like some cheesy 10 round county fair boxing match between two fat guys so I thought I’d browse through the Sunday papers to see what else was going on.   Unfortunately it’s as if today was “depressing news only day” because after a couple of passes through the local rags I wanted to eat about 100 pancakes and just go lay down.   Random death, insanity, perversion and Amy Winehouse, someone who sadly personified all of them at once, comprised the news of the day, making the noxious stew of political snake oil and bile seem palatable by comparison.  Everywhere you turn people are killing each other, deliberately or accidentally. 

A gunman opens fire at a roller rink, killing 5 people before killing himself.  Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.  It was probably the disco music.   I have never understood the pissed off guy – almost always a guy – who runs amuck and then kills himself.  If you’re that unhappy just jump right to that last part and get it over with.  I always wonder if the mentality is some kind of analogue of the Muslim suicide bomber – they do something incredibly horrible and senseless thinking that they get the girl in the end – or girls in their case.   There’s a special corner of hell where all these guys are sitting around going, “Wait…they said there’d be chicks…and falafels”

An eleven year old girl sitting on her cousin’s bed in San Francisco was shot while waiting for a snack of carrots and peanut butter at 11:30 at night, too excited to go to sleep after watching Iron Man with her little brother.  Dirt bag gang bangers, probably pissed off at each other because one of them looked at the other one wrong, decided to shoot it out in the park across the street and – because they are such stupid idiots – they didn’t hit each other but managed to pump a few rounds through the wall of her uncle’s house and hit her in the chest.   She’s alive but they shouldn’t be.

Then there was the shoot out at the low rider corral in Washington state, another case of somebody getting “disrespected” or some shit and whipping out the nine-mils at a car show.  Ten people ended up shot and taken to the hospital.  With any luck, it was the dumb asses with the big guns and tiny dicks and not some innocent kids thinking they were just checking out some cool rides.

Of course, not all the idiots are gang bangers; some of them are just drunks in boats.  In Wisconsin a pontoon boat loaded with liquored up knuckleheads celebrating an upcoming wedding wandered blindly into the path of a speedboat, killing two people and leaving two more missing and presumed dead – a typical bit of summer madness at the intersection of alcohol and machinery. 

Locally the news is still full of the aftermath of the three hikers who – against every single sensible impulse – climbed a guardrail, ignored multiple signs and wandered into the river above Vernal Falls in Yosemite, where almost inevitably they slipped and went over in a nightmarish and tragic daisy chain in front of nearly 200 horrified fellow hikers.  Their bodies have not turned up yet after falling over 300 feet.  

And of course there is the almost indescribable horror in Norway, a country where violence of this magnitude has been absent since WW II.  An Aryan-looking Timothy McVeigh wanna be decides that – in the interest of some hare-brained manifesto on European independence – he simply had no choice but to ruthlessly kill everyone he encountered at an island summer camp until the police showed up, whereupon he laid down his gun and surrendered.  This miserable lunatic didn’t even have the decency to kill himself in the end.  And in Norway he will probably get some kind of prison sentence and not the hypodermic in the neck that he deserves.  

After riding this relentless battering ram of bad news and sordid testament to the worst in human behavior I turned the final page and there was a picture of John Boner and Harry Reid, heads together obviously discussing matters of grave concern to the republic.  Somehow it seemed fitting…

No taxes, got it? Nothing that smells like a tax increase, looks like one, hints at one, or even contains the words, OK?

Even 55% of republicans now agree that a budget agreement should include a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases.  Yet so many of these freshmen Tea partiers have signed the goof-ball Grover Norquist no taxes / no way pledge that they now find themselves with quite a dilemma; they can’t do the right thing, even if they want to.  Pretty sweet, I think.   Brain dead hard line single issue politicians should stay home and run for the local community college board where the collateral damage from their stupidity can be limited. 

But it looks to me as if Obama has these chumps right where he wants them.   He has shown a willingness to compromise and the republicans have not, proving again that they are less concerned about actually getting anything done than about undermining Obama and continuing the rhetorical nonsense about how closing corporate tax loopholes will kill jobs, even as those corporations aren’t creating jobs and are just sitting in front of a vault full of cash.  68% of voters registered as independent favor a mix of cuts and revenue.   In general over 60% of the public supports this position.  But Boner walked away from talks for the third time, muttering darkly about Hobson ’s choice and November, 2012. 

Two things appear to be in play here; first, Boner is not in control of his own party in the House and so he cannot trust that a deal made with Obama wouldn’t blow up in his face when presented to the screaming rabble with the torches.  And second, if he compromises on the revenue piece – an otherwise entirely sensible thing to do – it looks, on some level, like Obama “won”.   Even as Obama is getting hammered by the left for his willingness to compromise, he still wins because the left isn’t going to vote for any of the current crop of republican candidates nor, for that matter, any potential republican candidate lurking in the weeds, (Sarah, this includes you…).  

This explains why they are peeing –their- pants scared of him.   But even republicans have to be scratching their heads over why this circus is still in town.  Obama offers a 3-1 ratio of cuts to revenue and it still isn’t good enough?  If they’re serious about long term deficit reduction, how can they turn that down?  The fact is, they aren’t as interested in the deficit as they’d like everyone to believe – not if it means the hedge fund manager on his 50-footer in Newport has to worry about paying more in taxes so that average people have enough money to buy the goods sold by the companies in the very fund he manages.  And no, that doesn't make sense.

Obama’s best move now is to lay that all out and tell them to pound sand and not bother him until they decide they’re serious.  The longer this goes on and the more damage is done, the more the republicans look like petulant, spoiled children who don’t really want a deal if it is in any way good for Obama.  They only want a deal that hurts him politically and furthers their real ambition – to destroy him and simultaneously take back the senate so a newly elected republican king can reign o’er the land.  (Shudder…)

The thing that bothers me and makes me uneasy about the whole nasty, silly drama is that Obama doesn’t seem inclined to put the hammer down on these clowns.  It’s as if he can’t believe what’s happening; he keeps expecting someone to man up, act like an adult, deal with the situation, and every time he thinks he has a deal, Boner shrivels up to the size of a raspberry and slinks off claiming with great, puffed up indignity that Obama has stabbed him in the back.  That this hilarious spectacle continues through another weekend, with the economy teetering again on the brink and desperate for political leadership, holds up a shiny fun-house mirror to the patriotic protestations of the tea-intoxicated bumblers trying to lead the loyal opposition.   Of course they don’t give a shit about the debt ceiling really; of course they will work something out so we don’t default; of course they hope to inflict as much damage as possible before doing so.   It’s up to Obama to make them pay for it - or I will be really disappointed. 

What the world, needs now, is knives, sharp knives...

I was driving home tonight, kind of zoning out, when I drove past the pale blue bunker that is the local tittie bar and noticed their sign out front; it said, “Watch the game with us.”  Now I was left wondering, what kind of guy goes to a tittie bar to plop down $6.50 for a beer to watch a baseball game on a big old flat screen instead of going in to see…well, titties?  It had to be that the owners are getting desperate to attract customers and thought that baseball would draw guys in to drink over priced beer when bare breasts would not.   This is puzzling to me and I take it to be a metaphor for the sorry state of the economy in general. 

In order for our economy to thrive, we all have to spend money – buy stuff.   If the owners of a tittie bar have to resort to offering big screen broadcasts of Giants games, it seems a clear indication to me that our ability – or willingness – to spend money and buy stuff has hit a serious snag.  Which calls into question the whole damn idea of a consumer based economy in the first place.  When you stop and think about it, is it realistic that we all are just going to go on buying stuff endlessly?  Won’t we all end up with a house full of extra stuff?  How many flat screens can you really support with quality viewing?  Is having one in each bathroom what’s required to pull us out of the slump? 

Personally I’m not a shopper – I am more of a buyer.  If I need something I’ll go get it.  I’m not interested in driving around “shopping” for the best price – I am far more interested in actually acquiring whatever it is I need and taking it home and using it.  And while I’m at it, I’ll try to buy a pretty good one so it will last a long time and I won’t need to buy another one.  But now I realize this goes against everything that this great country stands for.   If I get, say, a new couch, I can’t see going and getting another one - unless of course I get another house.   But if 2/3 of the economy depends on us constantly buying stuff, there has to be more and more stuff to buy - it is almost my duty to go and buy another couch.  This explains a couple of mysteries of modern America.

The first one is the size of the average American house.  Depending on who you ask, the average American house is somewhere around 2,500 square feet, almost double the average size in 1970.   And given the number of those 1970 houses still around, that means that when these guys build a new house these days, it is giant sized.   Seriously; unless you’re going to have an upstairs and downstairs maid, what on earth do you want with a house that big?  At the same time as mini-mansions became all the rage, the average American household has shrunk in size to a robust total of 2.7 people per house.   What does this mean?  It means you have to have a lot of stuff that you probably don’t really need to fill the damned things up.  And with the average working American’s wage being basically flat for the better part of 20 years, it also means that this stuff is cheaper and mostly sold at Wal-Mart.   And made in China…

This phenomenon also helps explain the mind numbing variety of crap that’s available to buy and nowhere more extravagantly and enthusiastically glorified than on late night TV, and especially on cable.   There are more hucksters on late night cable TV than at every carnival midway that’s ever existed anywhere.   My personal favorite is The Knife Show, where these two goofball guys sell 20, 30, even 50 knives at a time.   I’m not talking about silverware – these are everything from little folding knives to Bowie knives that Sarah Pain might use to skin griz up on the tundra.  It goes without saying that people buy them, probably to put in one of those big-ass new houses they bought.  They better damn well not leave that one kid home alone by himself – they’ll probably find him playing mumbly-peg on their Brazilian rosewood floor.  

It isn’t enough to have some cookware to make dinner; you need dedicated special pans to facilitate making meat loaf.   We have stores specializing in freaking candles.  Stores are overflowing with cheap clothes, sheets and towels, toys, electronic gadgets that all the nerdy analysts say make us more productive but at what?  Updating your Facebook page?  Is it really a boon to modern life to be able to tell your TV what channel you want to watch?  Do I need a granite countertop that’s $100 a square foot?  A six slice toaster that also make julienne fries?  A food processor and a blender and a juicer and a Mix Master and a double oven?  How many turkeys are you going to cook at Thanksgiving?  What the hell are we really thankful for?  A clap-on bedside lamp?  Forty pairs of underware?  Designer cat food?  Scented toilet paper in packages of 20? $8.00 lattes? 

I fear that we’ve come to the intractable edge of an economic cliff, where we need to continue to spend money that we don’t have for stuff we don’t need – or even want, in some cases - or we're all going down.   The credit cards are all maxed out, our jobs suck, we’re all surrounded by idiots and we have an enormous house we don’t need and can’t pay for to boot.  Christ…I’m going to the tittie bar to watch the game…

"Well, in history today, Patty..."

Big news today - Michele Bachman has leaped into second place in a poll of likely republican voters, trailing only nominee- in- waiting, Mitt Romney in the field of 10 little Indians or 7 dwarfs or whatever it is called this week.   The two of them polled 46% of the votes, with the other 54% scattered among the other announced candidates, plus Texas evangelist, governor, and erstwhile candidate-to-be, Rick Perry.  In a poll of Tea Party-aligned voters, Romney’s lead is much narrower – 24% to 20% - and among voters who identify themselves as “very conservative”, she actually leads 24% to 22%.   What does this reveal about the republican electorate?   Well, they’re either sedated, crazy as loons, dumb as a box of rocks, or some twisted combination of all of them.  Or they’re self-serving, rich people who hate all taxes and big government unless it benefits them…yeah, I think that covers all the possibilities.

In the ultimate irony, Jon Huntsman, the most normal, sensible, non-psychotic one of the bunch is trailing the field – dead last.  It’s probably a function of him just entering the race and being from Utah but Bachman hasn’t been in the race all that much longer so it’s not just that.  The guy has a pretty spiffy resume for an elephant – work for both republican and democratic presidents, multiple ambassadorships, a degree in international politics, two-term governor of Utah, re-elected with 78% of the vote, 6 honorary doctorates, and founder of the Pacific Council on International Policy.  I have to say, I am impressed.  He would make a very worthy and tough opponent for Obama in 2012…among people with the capacity for rational thought, that is.   Luckily for Obama, that apparently doesn’t describe the majority of republican voters, who seem to have mistaken Bachman, a woman with her hair on fire, for Lady Liberty holding up the torch.

In contrast to Huntsman’s impressive resume, Bachman’s accomplishments consist of sponsoring 38 bills since 2007, none of which even made it out of committee, let alone became law.  She and her husband run a some kind of Christian counseling service, where they apply half-baked psychological theories to try to un-homosexualize homosexuals and perform other feats of evangelical Christian witchcraft.  That’s pretty much it.  Oh, and she got pregnant and had 5 kids of her own and cared for a number of foster kids – all teenage girls, many with eating disorders.  Evidently, while republicans seem to have some weird aversion to sex, they procreate like rabbits – Huntsman has a handful of kids too. 

With the rest of the republican field becoming irrelevant faster than J-Lo, those seem to be the primary – so to speak – actors in the neat little drama unfolding over the next year or so.  Newt can’t figure out why he’s running, Herman Cain is a half-baked pizza baron with a little too much pepperoni, Ron Paul makes too much sense, Pawlenty has a search party looking for his charisma and Sarah Palin – lurking in the weeds and basking in the glow of her docu-comedy film debut, The Undefeated – can’t make up her mind whether she wants to be Eva Peron or Jennifer Aniston.   So that leaves Bachman and Romney, along with Perry when he finally throws his Stetson in the ring for real and – I hope, for the sake of the country – Huntsman.   Barack, if you just don’t drive the bus off a cliff, you should be OK.

Meanwhile frustrated republican members of the house have pushed through a bill that would freeze the national budget and require a constitutional amendment to change it, a radical, unwieldy and largely symbolic exercise, in exchange for voting to allow an increase in the debt ceiling.  You have to admire the focus of the mostly freshmen house members – they keep saying they were elected to reduce the size of government and that the one thing they intend to do.  Of course, idiot savants are focused too.  These folks don’t seem to realize their constituents have the attention span of 4 year-olds and have already moved on to caring more about the finals on So You Think You Can Dance than something as esoteric as the size of government.  And the first time the unemployment check bounces they’ll have something else to be pissed off about in any case. 

John Boner gave the obligatory verbal thumbs-up to this nonsense, all the while continuing to cut a deal behind the scenes and scheming with his senate pals to come up with something to save face after Obama essentially called their belligerent bluff about shutting down the country for its own good if they didn’t get their way.  It was always clear that that wouldn’t happen, despite dire warnings and the most elaborate political theater since Ninja Newt went a few rounds with Clinton in 1995 and lost his ass in the process.   Thirteen years after leaving the political arena, he’s still looking for it and McConnell and Boner and Cantor don’t want to end up in the same leaky lifeboat so they are finally taking off the Kabuki make up and cutting a deal.  Honestly – there is nothing more boring than a political slap fight where both sides are trying to make sure their hair doesn’t get mussed up.   Let’s get back to something serious like getting the troops out of woe-be-gone Afghanistan – that would be accomplishing something important.

Hey everybody...want another credit card...?

Not going home for the traditional 4^th of July recess seems to have exacerbated a certain group of senators’ predilection to put partisanship before anything else – DC is a pretty insular place.  Well, anything except their sycophantic quivering at the loins of their Wall Street bosses, as their continued intransigence over raising the debt ceiling – and their ridiculous semantic gymnastics in justifying their position – illustrates.  Today, however, brings news of a fresh bitch slap to the face of every consumer in the country, as all 44 republican senators have vowed to block the appointment of ANYONE to head the newly created Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -  Machiavelli, Grover Cleveland, J. Edgar Hoover, Mickey Mantle, Elvis…anyone.

No, they are still pissed off that they couldn’t block creation of the agency last year when it was created so now they will just symbolically take their ball and go home, once again doing the bidding of their corporate overlords, who look at any kind of regulation of the high stakes poker they play with other peoples’ money like you or I look forward to a colonoscopy from a jittery, doped-up internist with a grudge.  And they are so sure that the public is going to get sucked into their “If Obama’s for it, we’re against it” tiny-brain nonsense that they just come right out and admit it.

They propose that, instead of a single person running the agency, a 5 person board be appointed, that it is subject to the always-political plate of spaghetti that is the appropriations process  and that bank regulators have greater oversight – essentially insuring it will never accomplish anything and turning it into a gelding.  Having an agency run by committee with greatly reduced power to get anything done is now the in-your-face strategy republicans are employing as a fall-back position to try to protect the ability of the big money boys to run amuck. 

This kind of partisan gamesmanship may play well with the Tea party knuckle draggers and Wall Street lobbyists but to most of the rest of the country, it looks more like a bunch of pimps and double-dealers more interested in one upping Obama and taking care of the fat cats who write the checks.   Again…

I was very happy to see Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley call these disingenuous pricks out in no uncertain terms, saying what has been obvious since Obama was elected – the primary goal of the republican party ever since has not been fixing the economy, crafting intelligent foreign policy, punishing the criminals who brought the house down in the first place or providing a loyal opposition – it has been to make sure Obama loses in 2012, period.  And you gotta love it when another politician just comes right out and calls a spade a spade: "They know that their formulations, their policies of less revenues and less regulation badly failed our country and plunged us into this recession. So their only way of evening the playing field is to keep the president from being successful in the jobs recovery.”  He went on to say that, "through their intransigence, they have cleverly set up a situation for America's economy to fail, either by needlessly driving us to default, or needlessly driving us into massive public sector layoffs."

You could barely hear yourself think for the resulting, outraged harrumphing spewing out of republican headquarters like some bilious fart straight from between Michael Steele’s butt cheeks.  He called it an “unhinged partisan rant”, a nice turn of phrase but a laughable example of pot kettle black, coming from the spokesman for John Boner.  The republicans as born-again deficit hawks remind of when I was eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War in the early 70’s and the guys who were always first in line for the fraternity house gang bangs suddenly found Jesus and became conscientious objectors. 

The same snarling anti-deficit attack dogs today were puppies rolled over on their backs hoping for a belly rub when Bush was racking up deficits and spending the surplus accumulated during Clinton’s two terms.  Now they want to write republican – Wall Street – economic priorities into the constitution in exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, something they are bound by their oaths of office to do anyway.  No way, fellas – that kind of cynical, transparently self-serving bullshit is so noxious that even with the full support of Faux News the public will see through it in the end.  My advice to you guys would be, make a deal.

"This just in...Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead..."

It was good to see Rupert Murdoch publically flogging himself yesterday for the phone hacking scandal that is currently blowing up into armageddon for him and his blow-hard media empire.  Frankly, other than NPR, it would be good to watch any of the current owners of a media empire get a public spanking, so culpable are they for the sorry state of “news” – at least in this country.   But to have the leading light of the relentlessly anti-government yet shamelessly pseudo-patriotic republican cheerleaders at Faux News getting what for every time he steps out into the public eye does my heart good.   I haven’t kept up on how his brain-dead band of “personalities” and “commentators” is reporting this dust up but it must be pretty funny.  I would watch in the name of research but my gag reflex just won’t relax enough when I see those garish sets and smiling Obama-haters so I am not sure I can do it.    But word has it that they have managed to basically ignore it, giving lie to the notion that they are even a rumor of a legitimate news organization – more like the republican politburo.

Speaking of my gag reflex, there was an entirely predictable response from the republican poo-bahs after Obama once again explained his position on the debt ceiling debate/ pissing match/slap fight earlier yesterday.   John Boner actually had the gall to say – and I am paraphrasing – “we are not going to sit back and let the president increase taxes on job creators.”   Ha!  Good one, John – job creators; I get it.   But that always begs the question; if they haven’t had their tax increased yet – or anytime recently, really – where are the jobs?   They’ve had these tax breaks for years and jobs are disappearing and nowhere on the horizon.  If we cut three trillion in spending, and ask for 1 trillion in increased revenue, that’s not enough for you guys?   Why don’t you come right out and say that you don’t give a shit about the poor and the weak and the doomed middle class? 

For its part, the majority of the national media – obsessed with ratings and not really given to exploring much of anything in depth – doesn’t seem to remember that one time Tea party pin up Paul Ryan’s budget also would require an increase in the debt ceiling.  Michelle Bachman – when confronted with the seeming disconnect between supporting a plan that increases the deficit while demonizing any attempt to raise the debt ceiling – momentarily had an epiphany and was reported to reply, “Christ, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about most of the time – why should this be any different?”   Instead the new clones breathlessly report – every god damned day – that “there was no progress on the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling and prevent a government default”.   Hey fellas – how about delving into why there was no progress?   Instead their reporting is about as useful as the insights gleaned from one of those gortex-wearing bimbos who stick their microphones into a football coach’s face as he’s leaving the field at halftime and ask, “What do you think happened there in that first half, coach?”   It always amazes me that the guy who’s losing doesn’t go completely over the edge and suggest some anatomically difficult gymnastic moves to these twits.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the nationwide opening of the Sarah Palin docu-comedy, The Undefeated, not to be confused with the 1969 film about post civil war cavalry man and notorious Hollywood party boy, Rock Hudson, a guy ill-suited to play the role of a heroic man on a horse.  But I digress.  Sarah’s relentless publicity machine enthusiastically spread the word about the film through the ubiquitous “social media” and its opening night crowds of listless teen aged girls thinking it was a new Justin Bieber music video and horny republican guys wearing their dress- camo suits were sure to raise the specter of the moosey Palin entering the republican race and injecting it with her own brand of inspired lunacy, non-sequitar-laced campaign rhetoric and historical nonsense.   And it would make the next debate actually must-see TV.   Keep your fingers crossed…

"This must be heaven, man...!" Wavy Gravy

I never have watched the TLC channel program, Sister Wives, about the Brown family of Utah – Kody Brown, his four wives and their sixteen children.   I stopped watching TLC when it went from being a relatively sane if boring educational channel to a channel with programs like “I’m a Big Fat Pus Bag” or “My Mom Sold me to Dwarves”.  But apparently this show was a pretty popular and not completely absurd showcase of the polygamist life style – one that seems incredibly taxing for the man and sort of unsatisfying for the women but a choice with a long, if outlaw tradition in the West.  It is not true, however, that it was sponsored by Cialis and had a commercial showing the guy and his wives in a daisy chain of hand holding in five claw-foot bath tubs staring at the snowy Wasatch Range.  That was just a rumor.

As polygamy is against the law in Utah, it turns out that the Browns intended that the show would result in prosecution or an investigation by Utah authorities and give them an opportunity to challenge the Utah law in court on the basis that prosecution of polygamists is an unconstitutional breach of their right to privacy – a test case.   Personally I think this is a great idea – there is far too much biblical moralizing and brain-dead religiosity in this country and high time to confront it head on.  That’s all well and good.  Have at it.

What interested me, however, was the supreme court case upon which they were preparing to base their suit – Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark supreme court decision from 2003 overturning Texas’ anti-sodomy law.   Sodomy laws, and indeed, all of the various laws prohibiting sexual conduct between consenting adults are unsupportable on their face – Alabama’s law against sex toys, Milner v. Apfel, a law which stated that legislatures are “permitted to legislate with regard to morality”, and a Maryland law that actually holds, “a person has no constitutional right to engage in sexual intercourse, at least outside of marriage”, a ridiculously blatant spit in the eye of the separation between church and state.  And that’s the real point – there is no place for high-minded, if well intentioned, moralistic notions based on the Christian bible to instruct the laws of this country. 

The court sided in favor of the accused in Lawrence v. Texas by a margin of 6-3.  The dissent was largely authored by Antonin “Don’t touch my butt” Scalia, who thunders on and on like Abraham come down from the mountain with the divine word of god in hand to smite the damned fornicators with a righteous wrath.  He goes on for a very long time with, “the court, blah, blah, blah, sodomy, blah,blah,blah blah, homosexuals, blah, blah, sodomy, blah, blah, sodomy, blah blah, blah.”  Early in the dissent he throws in this sentence which nicely summarizes the problem; “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices.”  LAWS BASED ON MORAL CHOICES!  Maybe they shouldn't be sustainable.  Bowers was a case that was also thrown out by the majority, thereby rendering it ineffective in bolstering the case against the Texas gay couple in Lawrence.

Throughout his dissent, Scalia refers to a long tradition of society disapproving of various sexual acts and practices as an entirely reasonable basis upon which to continue to arrest and criminalize citizens who engage in them.  I don’t know about Antonin himself but if we can all get arrested for jerking off they better start building more jails this morning. 

Recently Michael Krazny, host of Forum on KQED public radio in San Francisco, wrote a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, opining that the use of religion as a political bludgeon was declining in the country, and pointed to the growing acceptance of gay marriage as his principle evidence but when 1^st century biblical morays are fundamental to the entire legal structure of the country, I am not so sure.  There are still countless examples of politicians wielding their own old testament ideas of morality and holding them out as a call to arms for fellow believers to take back the country from the sinners and…well, liberals, who have co-opted it and stolen their children’s birthright.   Never mind that they often end up with their pants around their ankles in some seedy motel or that some of those very children are likely gay themselves.  It almost always pays to flaunt religiosity in public life and the culture renders suspect anyone who doesn’t.

The sputtering fury evident beneath the surface of Scalia’s dissent – and he does insert the Seinfeldian phrase, “I have nothing against homosexuals myself” – begs the question; do we really want someone on the court who bases their decisions, not on common sense or societal evolution over 200 + years, but on the old testament?  I don't.   Is this what the right rfers to as a "strict constructionist"?  

In a rare break with their standard hand-holding, Scalia and his half-wit sidekick Clarence “Crickets” Thomas did not dissent together, although Thomas did dissent.  He apparently couldn’t get himself worked up into the same froth as Tony – his randy, inappropriate, women-harassing past may have prevented him from doing so.  He satisfied himself by saying that he thought the Texas law against sodomy was “silly” but he defended the state’s right to put it on the books regardless, a simpleminded opinion that begs discussion another time.

So I am hoping that the Brown Family – all 21 of them – march into court together and make a compelling and cogent argument that a guy having four wives is no biggie.  After all, plenty of guys have had four wives – hell, Sinatra had four.  It just usually isn’t all at once.  But hey, it’s a lifestyle.