Should a Man Who Fears Being Sodomized by SpongeBob SquarePants be Planning the Demise of the Courts?

James Dobson, whose sphincter tightens like an anaconda on a piglet whenever he sees a yellow sponge, has been sharing ideas with the likes of Senate Leader Bill Frist and House Majority Leader Tom "Giant Flying Cockroach" DeLay on how to destroy any courts that inhibit their quest to establish a religio-fascist, one-party, one-god state in what was the United States of America. According to audio recordings of meetings with their drooling acolytes in March, Dobson and ally Tony Perkins (head of the Family Research Council, aka Fascists for Reestablishing Tradition in Women as Property, Non-Believers as Slaves, and Gays as Objects to Burn) seek to pressure the Senate to establish the "nuclear option" to deny the filibuster on judicial appointments. That's not news, but this is: In addition to this anti-democratic move, they want to get the Congress to cut the funding of any court that displeases them. According to the Los Angeles Times story,

"There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench," said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session.

What's another way to skin that cat? Tom the Cockroach provided it just six days earlier:

"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse," DeLay said at an April 13 question-and-answer session with reporters.

And Perkins admitted that he had made the suggestion to lawmakers the week before that:

Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was "prominently" discussed. "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them," Perkins said.

He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to "just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."

Now for those of you who think I'm just an anti-Christian bigot, let me point out that beyond casting aspersions on SpongeBob's bedroom activities and promulgating fear about his influence in getting young boys to bare their buttocks to one another, the warmth and fuzziness of Dobson and Perkins goes much farther. According to the LA Times story,

Perkins and Dobson laid out a history of court rulings they found offensive, singling out the recent finding by the Supreme Court that executing minors was unconstitutional.

Yes, Mr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins have been extremely upset that the United States has ceded to Somalia the honor of being the only country on earth that as national policy will put children to death. They should take comfort in our foreign policies, however, which in the past twelve years are partially responsible for the death of a half million Iraqi children, to which you can a some more thousands of innocent lives due to "collateral damage" in this failed oil grab in the Arab world.

But just to show I am as fair-minded as the next guy, I did find one thing that Dobson said that I agree with. His take on the whole SpongeBob affair was that he took a beating in the media because of a misunderstanding. He didn't say SpongeBob himself was gay, only that he promoted a gay agenda. As to the future,

"This will not be the last thing that you read about that makes me look ridiculous," he said.

Fuckin' A, Reverend. You got that right. I know I can count on you to keep the supply of the ridiculous coming in truckloads.

The Money Laundry

We know that Tom “Giant Flying Cockroach” DeLay is a seriously crooked human being in all aspects of his life, so the following bit from the New York Times is no surprse:

Like other charities, the DeLay Foundation, which operates from a post office box near Mr. DeLay's house in Sugar Land, Tex., is not required under federal laws to release a donors' list. Nor does it have to account in detail for how it spends millions of dollars in donations on behalf of abused and neglected children.

But forget that this is DeLay’s charity. Does anything strike you as, well, fundamentally corrupt about this business?

This is the definition of a money-laundering scheme. If a “charity” need not disclose its revenue sources, nor how it specifically disperses those funds, wouldn’t you think that it would be mighty simple to concoct all sorts of ways to shovel dough into your own pockets and those of cronies and bootlickers alike through phony events meant to raise money or awareness of the charity or its “cause.”

This stinks to high heaven, and yet it is another of these perfectly legal systems put in place by people in power who still aren’t satisfied with all the other means through which they fleece working people.

Does that mean that all of these charities are bogus fronts from graft? Not at all. But if that’s the case, why such loose rules? I would hope that any legitimate charity would have no problem opening its books so that donors as well as the IRS could rest assured that the money was being used in the best possible manner for the targeted group.

Of course, a key to why this is permitted under our federal laws may be the fact that the Cockroach is hardly the only legislator who has taken advantage of this mechanism. Read the article for yourself, and by the way, note how the “paper of record” manages to go as light on any investigative details as it can. When the Cockroach finally gets the bootheel crunch, and all the pus of his existence oozes out onto the linoleum, it’s going to be quite interesting to see how many other insect-like lawmakers start scrambling for cover and shedding their charitable skins.

A Nanosecond of Agreement with Karl Rove?

Karl Rove went to speak at a liberal arts college in a blue state, and when I read about his talk, I was flabbergasted that there was actually a smidgen of overlap between something he said and something that I believe. It's blowing my mind. Here's what he said:

Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat

If only it were true. Alas, where Rove despairs that the press has become oppositional, I can only hope that someday it will be so.

Certainly the press should try to be as objective as possible, but that's how they should report what they find. However, in the seeking of news and information they should be relentless in challenging power.

Quoting the journalist Joe Klein, Rove said reporters should understand "how easy it is to make mistakes" in government. But the president has been famously unwilling to acknowledge mistakes.

Bingo! That's why the press should operate without sympathy for those who seek power. Those "mistakes" are matters of life and death, comfort and suffering, and to give a pass on those decisions to people who scrounge and scramble and whore their way into the privilege of public office is a complete betrayal of what the press's role in a free republic should be.

Here we have a presidential administration that is without peer in secrecy, obfuscation, and intimidation in my lifetime. If the press doesn't uncover what politicians don't want us to know, how can we even begin to act as informed citizens? We don't need reporters who are collaborative with power; shit, the government press offices produce plenty of propaganda, and that applies to either party when it holds power.

Here's what I think should be the first lesson in journalism school for any reporter who wants to cover the public sector, as stated by the late, great I.F. Stone: "Governments lie." Democrat or Republican, it makes no difference. That's the starting point.

Another Reason to Consider Belief in the Antichrist

The ejaculatory white emission from the chimney over the Sistine Chapel has signaled that we now have a new Pope. Not much tension there before the climax, which indicates that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger plays pretty good inside baseball in the Vatican.

I'm not sure why I personally should care that the new pope is Ratzinger, now self-named Pope Benedict XVI. I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian for that matter, and the Vatican has always seemed to me to be more of a tourist curiosity than anything else. Granted, Pope John Paul II had a lot of clout, but not because he wielded actual power through economic or military means; rather, his power came from those millions around the world who willingly ceded it to him, acknowledging his "holiness" and using it to validate things like screwing without a condom because, in Monty Pythonese, "Every sperm is sacred." So if tens of millions of Africans become infected with HIV/AIDS as a result, well, gee isn't it interesting that the ascendancy of African Catholics in the last decades has been so rapid? Could there be some link between one thing and the other? A defensive maneuver by the white Vatican? Yeah, I know--I sound like a conspiracy nut.

I doubt that Pope Benedict XVI will soften any of the hard stances established by John Paul II; in fact, based on what I've read, if anything he will tighten the screws on Catholics worldwide, possibly bringing about a modern schism, which I think would be healthy. My American Catholic friends, who practice birth control, have sex for fun, are gay, don't go to confession, and so on, have always baffled me, because for me a church is like a club, and if you don't like the rules, then you start a new club, like Martin Luther did. Well, now it's going to be a challenge to this relaxed form of Catholicism as practiced in this country (Rick Man-on-Dog Santorum excluded, of course) when Ratzinger reaffirms his take-no-prisoners stance on homosexuality, premarital sex, birth control, abortion, and all the rest of the doctrine.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires," [Ratzinger] declared at a pre-conclave Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

"A dictatorship of relativism" is a nifty coinage. Funny how that would be more frightening than a dictatorship derived from an imagined god. Unless, of course, you have asserted the sole power to know the mind of that invisible great white father.

Boltin' Bolton in the UN

Why not confirm John Bolton for US Ambassador to the United Nations? Let's not hide the fact that as a nation we have become batshit crazy, screaming bullies who run roughshod over anything that gets in our way, chasing women down the halls in Russian hotels and throwing things like a crazed baboon. It would also present an honest face to the world that as a nation we have become liars, or at best obfuscators of fact.

The reason I've changed my mind about Bolton is because Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar are having some doubts, and that's a signal that Bolton is becoming a bit of an embarrassment, which is all the more reason to put him out there as a front man for the nation. Wouldn't it be great to learn that he had hurled his own feces at Kofi Annan in the men's restroom one afternoon after a heated floor debate on Iran's nuclear capability? Wouldn't it fit our national character if Bolton threatened Mohammed ElBaradei with a bullet through his kneecap if he didn't resign as director general of the International Atomic Energy Commission? Or if Bolton started a smear campaign about Niger's ambassabor's wardrobe and sexual proclivities? That's clearly his style, and isn't it precisely representative of this administration's approach to diplomacy?

I also think that the UN membership might enjoy a new sport: Bolton Baiting. They could award points based on who could goad the most outrageous display from the brush-lipped bully.

Let's put the pedal to the metal, America. Put Bolton in the UN. Let's get the shit flying fast and hard. This is what Bush wants, so give it to him. Enough rope, you know.