In case you still have doubts!

You might want to forward this to all of your...um...stupid friends, assuming you have a few. If not, George Will and Rush Limbaugh will do.  

Limbaugh: Heat wave is government plot!

JUST AS I WAS beginning to feel a little more comf0rtable with the moderating July heat wave, my upbeat mood suffered a setback when I learned that all of the past scorching days were a government hoax to appease the global warming crowd. That late word comes from Rush Limbaugh, himself a hot-air savant whom I have been trying to ignore in recent weeks. Rush says the temperature is hardly as awful as what we think it is because the government has created a heat index to make your neighborhood seem to be hotter than it really is by a couple of points. We have long known Rush to be a denier of climate change because he denies anything that is anathema to the mindless right-wingers in his dittohead audience. For the extremes that have created an unabated record draught throughout the south, floods, tornadoes and other awful things, Rushbo says you must consider how phony the temperature index is (particularly in his air conditioned den) and the Feds are responsible for your discomfort for raising the index beyond the true reading. (Why they would go to this trouble to fool everybody, I'm not sure.) Well, being the curious sort, I checked the reported temperature on the computer's weather page and it registered 82.6 degrees. The index in dispute was a non-inflated 82! So I would have to rate his comment as they do on PolitiFact: pants on fire.

A featherhead's idea for cluckers

TWO MORE ITEMS for a time capsule that will help future historians define our generation of deep political thinkers:

SUE LOWDEN, a Republican senatorial candidate in Nevada, has proposed a simple solution to the nation's soaring health insurance costs. It works this way: the next time you visit your doctor, bring along a chicken to pay for your treatment. Although she hasn't said so, we presume the chicken is alive. Or is it? Either way, a chicken is the symbol of an old bartering system that Ms. Lowden wants to create. If the doctor refuses to go along with your feathery offer, try to persuade him or her with two chickens. She's confident it will work. "Doctors are very sympathetic people," she clucks. Sounds crazy, I know. But you must remember that Ms. Lowden is the former chairwoman of Nevada's Republican Party.

*****

Glenn Beck, the right-wing oddball, says he celebrated Earth Day by burning his garbage with styrofoam. He also leaves his car outside his studio with the motor idling to do his part for global warming. It would be nice if he made some sense once in a while. But what can anybody do about a guy who was born in a squirrel's nest and lives in a tree?

UPDATE: NEVADA? THE LATEST VEGAS LINE GIVES 500-1 ODDS AGAINST THE DOCS ACCEPTING THE CHICKENS.

At this rate, the future was yesterday

HOW OPTIMISTIC can we be about the future of a nation that refuses to act decisively on its most critical domestic issues? Ho, Ho, Ho. Not very. The issues are plain to see: the raging costs of health care, global warming, the environment, education, the widening gulf between rich and poor, Wall Street - all of these and others have have created a caustic political divide that won't be bridged in this generation, nor maybe the next.

The problem is, sound doesn't travel in a vacuum. Any reasonable attempt to invite the Party of No into the mainstream of rational discussion is futile, as President Obama has finally learned the hard way. When you have a phalanx of racial, religious and broadcast crackpots barging in at every progressive idea on the table, what will change the landscape? I can't think of anything. The old concept of nation-building is now a concept of nation-razing. Is that over-the-top logic? Well, how about this: A recent poll reported that 66 pct. of Republicans say they would vote for Sarah Palin for president. That's the vacuum where sound dies.

Palin and many of her righteous rightists scoff at global warming as evidence mounts that some South Pacific islands live under the constant threat of flooding from rising sea waters. As the Arctic icecap melts, polar bears are slimmer these days as they amble about for food and safer havens. You don't have to be a friend of polar bears to realize that something quite serious is happening. The anti-warming gang sniffs that it is "junk science" when a great majority of scientists insists that an oncoming catastrophe is probable. On the other hand, even the Bible suggests the planet will not be around forever. Should we be planning for that day?

For too many politicians, the future of the planet and your grandchildren doesn't matter beyond the next election as the ascendent cash-flow lobbyists do the thinking for their political recipients. It has been shown that a fair number of senators and congressmen who oppose health-care reform are doing the bidding for their caregivers on K Street. The powerful lobbies will be the last groups standing as the planet disappears.

With few exceptions the national media that once boasted of James Reston, Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite have not only been political patsies within the prescribed ideological guidelines of their corporate owners, but also have fashioned an entirely new world of scatterbrained stars like Palin, Michele Bachmann and Joe Lieberman whose virulent mediocrity has carried them a long way on the national media dole. Bachmann, you may recall, asked her cheering throngs to cut their wrists if that's what it took to stop health care reform. This week she shouted at a D.C. rally that the anti-reform crowd had formed the charge of the light brigade. It became necessary to remind her later that the charge of the British cavalry into the Russian lines was one of the dumbest and most disastrous military decisions on record.

If there is faint hope that the we will survive all of this, maybe it will come from what Conan Doyle dismissively said of the new art of his day: "One should put one's shoulder to the door and keep out insanity all we can."

Well, it's worth a try.

Have you 'we-weed' up lately?

Sarah Palin, the Neo-Webster of Wasilla, claims critics of her Op-Ed piece in the Washington P0st (in which she declared global warming was junk science) got all "we-weed" up. What the hell is that supposed to mean? I couldn't find the term in any of my dictionaries, so Sarah has broken new ground on her insightful use of the English language. Does it mean wetting one's pants? And she's running for president? That, I'd say, is reason enough to wet one's pants.

GOP howling: Old business as usual

NO ONE SHOULD BE too surprised by the stiff resistance by congressional Republicans to the Administration's efforts to clean up the air we all breathe. Aided by those hide-and-seek Democrats who are incapable of rising above their own mediocrity, the GOP's attacks on climate change legislation represent business as usual for a party long identified with maintaining the status quo against all reason. If it's not global warming on this day, it's health care reform that sends the Republicans to the barricades to fire off screeching fears that we will become a nation paralyzed by taxes and deeper unemployment, as squishy as their figures may be..

Nothing unusual or imaginative here. The party of Nixon and Hoover has a well deserved reputation of opposing whatever might help the majority of Americans who don't enjoy their dinners in 5-star restaurants. It assailed the introduction of Social Security in the 1930s, insisting that it would bankrupt Franklin D. Roosevelt's America within a year. It fought Medicare and legislation to assist the unemployed. And now it is armed again to fight any steps, modest though they may be, to deal belatedly with global warming and the tens of millions who are not covered by medical insurance. Thank you Aetna and UnitedHealthcare.

The GOP's only sub-imaginative way of attacking two of most important issues of our time is to howl about the inflated costs. And the costs of doing nothing? The question is too profound for entrenched Republicans and the skittish amorphous Democrats who will never be remembered for noble behavior.

But in response to those who claim to have a better (albeit unclear) idea than the Obama Administration in dealing with these critical issues, a little history: The nation has had Republican presidents for 20 of the past 28 years, a great many of them shared by GOP majorities on Capitol Hill. And during those collegial periods neither the president nor his congressional base worked seriously to change the status quo in health care nor climate change - despite the opportunity to do so. Instead, the party slept, or lived as lemmings by the Bob Lutz Rule. You may recall that Lutz, vice chairman of General Motors, once declared that global warming was a "total crock of shit." Many of his conservative friends in Congress agree.

Some of it can be traced to self-survival at the polls, which for the ordinary pol trumps any issue of national importance. Some of it is also driven by a deep distrust of science, which plays to the evangelical Christian wing of the Republican Party. Whatever the case, the same folks who are whining about the Administration's initiatives in climate change and health insurance had their chance and, you know what? They blew it. So let's pay no attention to anything from their side that suggests they have a better way to solve the nation's cutting-edge problems. They don't - and won't.