TV News LIES

The following is an open letter to the French Ambassador to the United States, His Excellency, Francois Delattre: Dear Mr. Ambassador,

Our countries have a long history together.  And, we Americans are not particularly gracious in granting any nation any gratitude -- or even, any latitude. (This recalcitrance could be the result of our being a still-adolescent nation, one with inflamed hormones and short attention spans, and a terribly self-centered upbringing.)

In case you’ve missed the good news on the corporate media; the total GDP of the US is now greater than it was before the Bush crash. Not surprisingly, President Obama gets no credit for this. Just saving the auto industry is a big deal. Let’s cut through the Republican crap on this; the loans to GM and Chrysler weren’t designed to save those companies per se.

Detroit automakers could have in theory recovered using traditional bankruptcy protections, in other words by stiffing their creditors. The problem with this “solution” is that it would have in fact killed not only GM, Chrysler and Ford; but Toyota had said flatly that they would cease North American operations under the Republican solution pushed by Mitt Romney and Senators from the southern states.

If you have a good bearing, know of human nature, and want to pick up some quick cash, take your laptop and head to the nearest Republican watering hole -- one with wifi -- and chat up some suits.  You're stalking big game and bar bets.

Set up your computer, going on purpose to FOX or some other right wing site, to set the mood, so everyone can see it, displayed right on the screen.  Start up some chit-chat, about good web sites to check things, places that can be trusted.  You might have to suggest some fact-based sites, so be ready to suggest some.  Once there's agreement, go to your next move.

Trying to follow the slow-motion demise of The U.S. of A. has turned me into Jo-Jo the idiot circus boy after being given an exploding cigar laced with a low grade nerve gas. It’s hard to make sense out of things when my neurons are winking out one by one like cheap Christmas tree lights. It’s a bad acid trip on every level I can think of.

On one hand we have a complete fraud as a president. While campaigning he presented himself as a force of change, but after being elected only changed things for the worse. Unless of course you’re talking about the members of the moneyed class. For those guys he did everything they asked him to except stop being a black guy.

Capitalism shouldn’t be confused with business or anything else that’s good for you.

Simply put, capitalism is the buying and selling of someone else’s business, whether it’s the looting of companies by the Leveraged Buyout Specialists at Bain Capital, or the monopolization of a particular commodity by the likes of Enron. A capitalist by definition does not create, does not produce, and does not contribute to anything but his or her own bottom line.

The grating thing about unannounced or ongoing tests is not so much the surprise factor as never being quite sure what it is, exactly, that's being tested.

That suspicion intersects with another, that almost everything in and about life these days -- pick something, anything at all -- is really just meant as a test of our sanity, of how much we can take, how much craziness we can jam into the ever-closing, finite spaces all around us, and how much lunacy we can tamp down and cram in, into the potentially infinite space between our ears.