The author is reporting from a Druid gathering, a group now recognized as a religion in Britain, tax advantages and sexy cloaks included.
A lovely Virginia road a weekend ago, autumn leaves exploding, the terror of cop lights flashing ahead. Thinking they'd finally found me and wishing my dog Stu a swell life after I'm arrested, the signs became clear: "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags." Westboro Baptist Church had arrived, protesting a hero's funeral at the Williamsburg Community Chapel, somehow equating dead soldiers with their own (thus God's) disapproval of homosexuality in America. This flock is clearly lost, not in Kansas anymore, Virginia that day then D.C. to defend their 1st Amendment rights this week.
New Justice Elena Kagan will witness the ugliness of America as the Supreme Court starts its new session. Including two cases sure to test the limits of freedom of speech, with the father of late-Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder suing Westboro Baptist Church for defiling his funeral and whether California can ban the sale of violent video games to minors, we will soon see the wisdom of the Court's new makeup.
Unwise are deeply closeted Republicans who won't shut up so close to an election. Georgia Senator Saxby "Awesome Name" Chambliss had to fire an aide for posting "All faggots must die" on a blog, and Michigan Assistant Attorney General Andrew "Bottom" Shirvell is now on leave and banned from the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus after online stalking of openly gay student Chris Armstrong. Shirvell says he's simply an alumnus sharing his concerns about Armstrong's "flagrant sexual promiscuity" and seducing "a previously conservative [male] student." Sounds like the words of a slighted yet unrequited lover, eh?
Good thing there's no connection between officials' angry rants and a recent study that 9 in 10 gay students are harassed, and four times more likely to commit suicide (RIP late-Rutgers student Tyler Clementi).
The right can never be wrong - or educated. To wit: Delaware Tea Party/GOP nominee Christine "Duh" O'Donnell's education is being discredited, such as attending Oxford University when she really just took a course on the campus and mistaking brain-washing at a conservative think tank for a graduate degree. We all know that the Tea Party and Republicans despise "elitists" with diplomas, but the "Pledge to America" highlights how proudly ignorant the Party of Lincoln has become.
As reported last week, "Cancel all unspent stimulus money" ($258 billion or so) was on the Pledge's list of promises. Well that was an easy one to keep, with TARP expiring on Sunday. If you don't know, TARP means "Those Aristocrats Really Profited" - yet it's a Bush-era program that Republicans should embrace, if embracing weren't so gay. All but $50 billion of the $700 billion "troubled assets" will be repaid; in addition to saving our financial system when the DOW plunged to nearly 6,500 in 2008, we might actually make money on insider trading. The DOW is nearing 11,000 and September 2010 was the best Wall Street has seen since 1939.
Only when rich swine eat caviar do we poor suckers get crumbs - and maybe jobs. If you're struggling to find work, pity the 1,200 space shuttle scientists laid off this week by NASA... .Talk about useless skill-sets!
When the dust clears, Tea Party candidates proved unelectable (a Buffalo slumlord thug for New York Governor, really?) and Obama's choice of Pete "Shhh" Rouse to replace Rahm-tard Emanuel as chief-of-staff makes 2012 an afterthought. Rouse is being billed as Emanuel's opposite: Self-effacing instead of offensive, meticulous vs. maniacal, and utterly inverse to anyone who would want to be mayor of Chicago.
"This president has done an incredible job. He's kept his promises." said VP Joe "Did I Say That?" Biden after telling fellow Democrats to "stop whining" at a campaign stop in New Hampshire last week.
Guatemala needs to stop whining too, after we apologized some 60+ years too late for intentionally infecting 1,600 of its people with STDs to gauge the effectiveness of penicillin to treat syphilis, gonorrhea and chancres in the 1940s. Our bad! "The conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the United States... " read the official statement of apology that we issue to every country we unofficially colonize for capitalism, contaminate, then forget. South America has been our bitch since our founding. Ask Nicaraguan diplomat César Mercado, who has criticized the U.S. and defended Iran. Oops! Mercado was curiously found with his throat slashed in his New York apartment the morning Presidents Obama and Ahmadinejad spoke at the U.N. Instead, ask Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, kidnapped last week by his own police in a failed coup. Quit whining, President Correa, be glad our CIA was(n't) involved...
