TV News LIES

Every time I look up from what I'm doing, another Republican is charging off into some self-made fray, seated backwards, on a mechanical pony -- the kind bolted to the floor, requiring a quarter to rock back and forth -- shouting incoherently, trying to make the metal animal charge faster, trying to make it back up, all the way.

The screeching and screeds are usually about mandating religion in the schools and some neo-creationist harangue, or else revising the history books to show how wonderful and not-at-all demented they themselves are, or about GOP men's rights to dictating vaginal probes into women's vaginas and their God-given rights in specifying women's health care, or else it's some frothy meringue regarding how the non-job-creating but-still-so-called "job creators," corporations and the rich, should be spared paying any taxes as their forbears once gladly did.

I don’t care that the retail Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year. I’m almost continually freaked out that Halloween hasn’t stopped since December 12th 2000. It’s like we’re all living in a demented version of the film, Groundhog day. The alarm goes off, we get up, and something horrible happens. All day long we wish we could change something but the next morning … the alarm goes off, we get up, and something horrible happens.

It’s Kafka’s world … we just live in it. With a little bit of H.P. Lovecraft thrown in to ramp up the creep factor.

I actually believed in the system before becoming what I believe is awake and aware.  I actually believed Obama and all of his lies he spewed in 2008.  I was sucked into the lies and promises, which is what they counted on.

I immediately knew they were all lies somehow on the day of his inauguration.  I don't know how, but as I watched him take the Oath of office, I knew the man would not be what he claimed to be and he would not follow through on any of his promises.

The stock markets in the US dropped 1.5% today from the renewed sturm und drang over the potential Greek bond default. The Euro zone is trying to force a 50% haircut on the holders of Greek bonds in order to avoid their default, but the catch is that it has to be “voluntary”. If it’s not, it becomes an “actual” default and those CDOs (credit default swaps) start kicking in.

The problem with these insane contract arrangements is that they can be triggered by any significant down turn, not just by a major default. A down grade in a credit agency’s rating of a bank or a nation state will do it. They’re all done in secret, so we have no real idea what the risk really is It was a cascade of derivative failures tied to consumer debt, mostly home mortgages, that brought us within a hair’s breadth of ending civilization in 2008.

It's been one wimpering bellow and simpering cacophony after another with these guys, all this empty and voidful claptrap called the GOP candidacy, or coronation, or whatever half-baked appellation you'd care to make of this clammy, hammy, clambake.

Now, to steal a dribble from basketball, welcome to Super Tuesday -- March Madness, Republican Style!  This is a most appropriate banner to stretch over these four lame and leftover horsemen of the GOP Apocalypse, all saddled up on their pygmy ponies, ready to joust with feather pillows.

When the government speaks daily about the existential threat from Iran, and urges an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it ignores the existential threat that looms within. Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French.

The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle. But in Israel the threat is especially acute. And the concern comes not only from its most persistent critics. The former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned of a descent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.