Category Archives: WorldNetDaily

Early Winter Hot Air

A Life Well-Lived

Mandela

Nelson Mandela

Rape: What A Riot

People call the police all day long, every day.

They say their cars have been stolen. That they’ve been threatened by their next door neighbors. That someone passed them a bum check. That their employees embezzled from them. Woman say they’ve been raped.

The list of crimes people report is long. Not a one is considered a laughing matter.

Oh, wait a minute…, one crime is a big joke. Rape.

At least that’s the way some folks in Florida look at it.

A college kid in Tallahassee was accused of rape recently. Normally, this wouldn’t be remarkable news, considering the fact that far too many college boys have about as much control over their urges and impulses as the hyena of the African plains.

But this particular college kid happens to be the star quarterback on the Florida State University football team. FSU is the number one-ranked team in the nation. The kid, Jameis Winston, is a lock to win the Heisman Trophy later this month.

When the rape accusation was first publicized, many, many, many people were saddened and sickened by the news.

No, not because some poor young women might have been violated, traumatized, and made to fret for a period of time that she might have been impregnated as a result of the criminal act. They were aghast that the leader of their team might be indicted, arrested, and suspended. Their dreams of vicarious glory washed down the drain because some stupid bitch cried foul.

Let’s be frank: rape is rape, but a national championship is real, man.

Let’s continue to be candid: You know as well as I do that the young woman who made the charge against Winston was called a stupid bitch ten thousand times in barroom, living room, and office conversations in the Sunshine State. And that was probably the politest thing people called her.

FSU fans breathed a sigh of relief this afternoon when the Leon County State’s Attorney held a press conference to announce no charges would be filed against Winston.

Now, they can get back to the important business of winning that national championship. Or, more correctly, watching others win it. Sometimes people get confused about these things.

The mood during State’s Attorney William Meggs’ press conference was as light and joyous as if it had been revealed that, on second thought, the South had won the Civil War. There were broad smiles, laughter, winks, and nods. It was a day to be joyous.

Tallahassee Democrat Photo

Teehee — She Said “Rape”

Meanwhile, a young woman still insists she was raped.

I don’t care about the details of the case. And I know one of the hallmarks of our system of justice is every accused person is innocent until proven guilty. Especially when the accused can run like the wind and thread a pass through a thicket of defenders to hit the open man.

I only know a young woman considers herself the victim of a crime.

And we don’t laugh when people say they’ve been the victims of crimes. Most of the time.

A Strange Freedom

Actor and director Wm Bullion reminds us on the day Nelson Mandela died that some heroes of this holy land are cut from a different bolt of cloth.

For example, Ted Nugent, gun worshipper, former rock star, Obama hater, and columnist for the paranoiac website World Net Daily, is seriously considering a run for president in 2016.

This, mind you, from a man who favors the sentiment, “Trample the Weak; Hurdle the Dead.”

Nugent

Ted Nugent With His Wife

Nelson Mandela’s not even in his grave yet but I’ll bet he’s already spinning.

By the way, WND bossman Joseph Farah advises us in today’s column, “Don’t Mourn for Mandela.” He explains why but if you can get through more than two sentences of his blathering you have a stronger stomach than I do.

Sunday Morning Hot Air

Hit Or Myth?

The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard back in 1998 really kicked Americans into high gear to begin accepting gay people.

Shepard

Matthew Shepard

Before Matthew Shepard, most straight people in this holy land (that is, pretty much most people) shrugged when the issue of gay rights came up. After Matthew, only hard-core haters and fundamentalist zombies found it acceptable to heap scorn upon homosexuals. Without Matthew Shepard, gay marriage probably would have been an easy ten years down the road rather than the expanding right it is today.

The young University of Wyoming student’s execution was the equivalent of Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses being used against black civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963.

Shepard Fence

Crime Scene

The kid’s death became a touchstone for anyone who wanted to declare her- or himself a supporter of GLBTQ concerns or, for that matter, any minority group. Just saying the name Matthew Shepard and shaking your head sadly communicated to one and all where you stood on a huge variety of issues.

If ever there was a martyr, it was Matthew Shepard.

Now comes a book that portrays Shepard’s killing as revenge for a drug deal gone bad.

The Book of Matt posits that Shepard was a meth user and a mule. The author suggests he’d screwed up an associate’s deal and was whacked for it.

Sounds like a history-jumbling invention by some holy roller who is certain homosexuality will be the downfall of Murrica. The book could have been written by one of the thankfully dead Andrew Breitbart’s apostles or Jerome Corsi or some paranoiac loon from World Net Daily.

Google the words matthew shepard book and take a wild guess what comes up first (below the obligatory ad for several such tomes). Yep, a Fox news headline about Shepard’s purported drug involvement:

From Google

Despite the current general distaste for homophobia, there are still enough dopes out there who are so petrified of catching gay cooties that they gaze fixedly at Fox News for warnings that compulsory sodomy is just around the corner. Oh, and that gay people are really nothing more than meth heads.

The whole thing is creating yet another new brand of Truther-ism, whose goal is to skewer the “gay grievance industry.”

Surprise: Author Stephen Jimenez is gay.

Jimenez

Who Is This Man?

Already, folks are jumping with both feet on Jimenez’s methodology, research, and conclusions. At best, Jimenez is a courageous defender of the truth, at worst a gay analog to the self-hating Jew.

Me? I don’t care what Stephen Jimenez is. For that matter, I don’t care what Matthew Shepard was. I didn’t need the story of his murder — true or not — to be on the side of humanity. All humanity.

It’s a damned shame America needed such a gory story to kick it over to the right side of history and morality.

Your Daily Hot Air

Sometimes I think World Net Daily was made up just for me.

For my entertainment. For my edification. For my sense of superiority over the gang of lunatics that puts it out.

From WND

Maybe this is what I’m missing out on by not being a sexist slob or a racist. Scads of folks across this holy land seem to feel they are better than others simply because said others either possess vaginas or dark skin. It must feel good to know in your heart that women are weak and stupid and blacks are criminal and lazy — and you’re not one of them.

Superiority must be a trip, right? Otherwise, what’s the point of being a sexist and/or racist?

So yeah, I feel superior — moral- and intellectual-wise — to the jabbering chuckleheads who populate the WND universe.

The WND pantheon includes busts of that great philosopher Chuck Norris, who has fap-fantasized about becoming the president of the Republic of Texas after it secedes (oh, please!), and the redoubtable Jerome Corsi. You may recall Corsi swearing up and down during the 2004 presidential campaign that John Kerry had faked his Vietnam wounds. And, more recently, he has posited that Barack Obama is some kind of a Kenyan fag abortionist or something.

Norris

Chuck Norris And Friends

The WND faithful also are regularly treated to the screechings of Phyllis Schlafly and David Limbaugh (who almost makes big bro Rush sound occasionally sane).

Yeesh.

WND is chock full of ads for gold (the preferred safe investment harbor for survivalists), magical vitamins and elixirs, fountains of youth, and even for the newly-martyred Paula Deen. The fly on this pile of horseshit is none other than former baseball pitcher John Rocker, who pens a regular op-ed column for the site.

John Rocker, for chrissakes!

Anyway, wouldn’t you know it, last week’s US Supreme Court decision to coerce all good, white, straight men into butt sex has the WND crew all aflutter.

Some self-described Christian lawyer named Matt Barber, a regular WND contributor, is convinced he’s going to be imprisoned sooner rather than later as a direct result of the gay marriage ruling. And you know what happens in the joint, don’t you?

Prison

Anyway, Barber recounts a hand-wringing email exchange he had with another self-avowed Christian lawyer, who remains nameless in his Monday column. After speculating that the gay marriage OK will lead to the obligatory state-sanctioned unions of brothers and sisters (ick) and rampant polygamy (just a tad less ick), Barber’s pen pal pronounces:

In my 35 years as a Christian, I never seriously believed we might end up in prison for our faith — except, perhaps, for something like a pro-life demonstration. This is the first time it seriously occurs to me that the trajectory of the nation is such that it is possible in five to 10 years.

Because, as you are well aware, the Christians are such an oppressed minority in this country.

Barber couldn’t agree with his friend more. He writes:

Do I believe Christians will face real persecution, such as loss of livelihood, civil penalties, physical abuse or even jail? Absolutely.

So, there you have it. Gay marriage equals Christian concentration camps.

And, yeah, I’m superior to these howler monkeys, moral- and intellectual-wise.

It does feel good. Thanks, WND.

Borrowers, Lenders & The Mob

Margaret, the Big Cheese at the Book Corner, Bloomington’s only independent bookseller where I peddle ’em Mondays through Wednesdays, will probably clunk me in the head for this one but, I gotta tell you, I’m becoming addicted to the library.

Book Corner

Not The Library

I’m reading a couple of books a week now, mainly because I’ve been borrowing from the Monroe County Public Library. I have zero idea why I haven’t done this before.

Think of it: your town or big city has within it a system wherein you can take books, CDs, or DVDs home for your personal use — for free. All you have to do is flash a library card.

You may say, Sure, Big Mike, we know all about it, but when’s the last time you did it?

I mean, even the fire department charges your survivors for sending an ambulance over when your heart explodes from a lifetime of sliders and Pop Tarts. The library doesn’t charge you a penny. How can it be that there isn’t a line around the block when the place opens in the morning?

Anyway, I’m just finishing up a book called When Corruption Was King, written by Robert Cooley with help from former Chicago Magazine editor Hillel Levin. Cooley was a mobbed up, kinky lawyer who was in bed with legendary Chicago First Ward bosses Pat Marcy and Fred Roti, who did the bidding of the city’s Outfit.

Roti

Alderman Fred Roti

The Outfit, of course, is Chicagoese for the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra, wiseguys, goodfellas, or whatever Hollywood wants to call organized crime. According to Cooley, the Outfit, through Marcy et al, controlled Cook County’s courts, much of the Chicago Police Department, and too many city agencies to list here. Suffice it to say if you wanted a quick building permit, a zoning variance that the neighbors had been fighting tooth and nail, or just to get your teenaged kid off for denting the skull of some hapless Puerto Rican with a baseball bat, your lawyer paid a visit to Pat Marcy and slipped a nickel or a few dimes into his pudgy hand.

A nickel, in Chicago parlance, is $500. A dime, natch, is a grand.

So, the First Ward boys were the extra-legal funnel through which all smart city business flowed. Marcy and crew took care of the average citizen in the know as well as the big boys who ran the city’s gambling, vice, and narcotics operations, among other colorful pastimes. Most Chicago crime experts believed Marcy was a “made guy,” meaning he was an officially approved member of the Outfit. And, no, the Chicago mob didn’t have any elaborate ceremonies and rituals, the likes of which were portrayed in The Godfather and every other crime movie made since. In fact, the Outfit was an equal opportunity employer, welcoming members of every ethnic group imaginable into its ranks, so long as they were good earners and were willing to snap a guy’s thumb when called upon to do so.

From "The Godfather"

Fiction

Cooley revealed the fixing of murder cases and the buying of state legislation through efforts of Marcy and his guys. Big circuit court judges who’d previously nurtured reputations as law-and-order hard-asses were in truth, Cooley and Levin wrote, guys who’d fix any case for a buck.

See, Cooley was a big player in these shenanigans until, he says, he got fed up, had a change of heart, and walked into the US Justice Department’s Chicago office unannounced and told the feds he wanted to play ball with them. Cooley then wore a wire when he did business with the First Ward boys. The evidence he amassed led to dozens of arrests and convictions and the eventual dismantling of the First Ward pigsty.

Cooley’s no Raymond Chandler or even John Grisham but his story is as riveting as anything they could come up with.

And, by the way, the kind of pervasive corruption that Cooley helped bring down in Chicago’s First Ward may be a thing of the past now but it was built upon the passing of cash from one hand to another.

The last I heard, cash still buys things. Enough of it can still buy permits, justice, and legislation. Only now, the system is nationwide, or even global, as opposed to Pat Marcy’s petit-realm. Look at the so-called Monsanto Protection Act for proof.

We need a new Robert Cooley.

Your Daily Hot Air

Imperfect Hero

Computer patriarch Steve Wozniak told CNN’s journalist-manqué Piers Morgan the other day that the secret-spiller who blabbed that the NSA is trawling through yours and my phone and interwebs records, purportedly for the purpose of looking for bad guys, is the moral and heroic equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg.

Wozniak

Steve Wozniak (photo by Nik Harrison)

Now, Ellsberg was one of my great heroes back when I was an idealistic (and insufferable) teen rebel. Now that I’m an old man rebel, Ellsberg still holds an honored spot in my pantheon. (And I’m still insufferable.)

Anyways, I’m tempted to agree with Wozniak. Edward Snowden did indeed perform a patriotic service by revealing the NSA’s spook methodology. If the bosses of my gummint are eavesdropping on my conversations or peeping in my garage windows, I want to know about it. Even if they are protecting me from 9/11: The Sequel.

Look, I have no desire to have skyscrapers collapse on top of me (and the way things are going here in B-Town, our heretofore quaint town square ought to be ringed with supertalls by the start of the next IU semester.) Still, if the Feds are honestly trying only to protect us, I want to know how often G-men are going to be rifling through my folded underwear.

Underwear Drawer

Secret Drawers

Guaranteed, there’ll always be one or two true-believer pencil-pushers who want to expand the spy ops to swallow up anybody they disagree with politically or whom they feel might not worship god properly. As long as we know what mechanisms they have in place to harass us, we can at least pretend to resist.

All that said, this Snowden character sure gives me the willies. From his premature Army discharge to his selfie-addicted girlfriend (whom he suddenly bolted from when the story broke) to his habit of wearing a red hood when he logs on to his interwebs browser, he just seems like a guy who sees life more as a histrionic graphic novel than, well, reality.

He calls himself a “spook” and says he’s been spying all his adult life which is like a guy bragging that he’s a member of the Mafia. Real spooks and real mobsters rarely have the inclination to call attention to their job descriptions.

His globe-trotting odyssey keeping him one step ahead of teed-off cops and prosecutors seems a bit overkill-ish. He says he can’t bear the idea that he lives in a country that’s a nest of spies, then he hides out in Hong Kong and, now, Moscow. Honestly? He wants to couch surf in China and Russia to get away from spies?

What’s next — he wants to get a job at McDonald’s because he’s worried about Americans’ eating habits?

None of Snowden’s weirdnesses, in any case, should detract from the importance of what he has revealed. He’s a hero for blowing the whistle. But he’s Daniel Ellsberg with a lot of baggage.

Daniel Ellsberg

No Baggage

When all is said and done, though, I shouldn’t care about the baggage, only the revelations.

The Plot To Oust Obama

It may not surprise you to know that the psychotics who run World Net Daily love this whole NSA domestic spying story.

Their take, natch, is that President Obama, channeling his inner Hitler, spends all his days and nights listening to phone conversations of honest, law-abiding Murricans, hoping to put the screws to Tea Party-ists, militia members, and other pathologically bent individuals.

They’re certain, of course, that Obama’s Secret Black Shirts will be rounding up all gun-fondling, god-fearing, Flat Earthers long before his eight year Reich comes to an end.

Eavesdropping

And they’re not gonna be marched into re-education camps without a fight, god help them.

If they had any sense, they’d wish with all their hearts that Obama actually was listening in on their conversations. Nothing could drive him from office quicker than suffering their paranoiac prattle for anything more than three and a half seconds. He’d be pulling his hair out and bouncing around the Oval Office like Daffy Duck if subjected to (what passes for) their logic.

In fact, perhaps this whole NSA deal is a clandestine operation conjured by the likes of Chuck Norris, Alex Jones, James O’Keefe, and other stars of the Right Wing bedlamite firmament. They know that if the Prez does indeed monitor their respective audience’s jabberings, he’ll be carted away from the White House in a straightjacket before they get to discussing which canned goods they should stock up on for the coming apocalypse .

Who sez Me Party-ists are stupid?

Your Daily Hot Air

Woe Is Them

So, the Me Party-ists will form a conga line before the House Appropriations Committee beginning today to tell the world how mean and rotten the feds have been to them.

The poor things had to fill out extra forms in order to receive tax exempt status for their efforts to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick. It’s tyranny, I tell you! Hitler was a wuss compared to the Kenyan freedom-hater whose name we shall not even breathe [and it’s probably phony anyway.]

Tea Party Anti-Tax Rally

Social Service

See what I’m doing here? Just trying to be as full of horseshit as the Tea Party-ists and their fellow mollycoddlers and squealers.

Natch, breitbart.com and WND are shrieking to high heaven that the Muslim, commie, fag, abortionist who currently occupies the White House illegally is trying to crush the Tea Party and other saintly patriots not via guns or imprisonment but — worse, far worse — through red tape. Oh, the humanity!

Alright, people, looks like I have to say this again. Those right wing conservative groups were trying to game the system by applying for tax exempt status. They are not — repeat, not! — social service organizations.

In fact, their raison d’être is not to feed the hungry, house the homeless, or heal the sick. Quite the contrary. According to the Tea Punks and their philosophical patron saint Ayn Rand, the hungry, the homeless, and the sick deserve to be that way. Rick Santorum and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul are leaders — successes — not because they were born on third base but because they hit a triple.

Rand

Rand: “Me. Me. Me. Me. But, On The Other Hand, Me.”

The sooner this holy land rids itself of the lamprey eels that are the hungry, homeless, and sick, the better we’ll all be.

Why do you think these Radical Right-ists are four-square in favor of slashing funds for social service agencies? The only honest social service agency is the one that recognizes that the mud people and the undesirables have no place in this great free market heaven that once was and will be again.

Tax exempt, huh? Like I’m gonna pay with my tax dollars for them to spread their hork-ish, self-centered, whitey-jive without a fight.

If You’re Unhappy, I’m Happy

Not that the excessive self-love of the Me Party-ists is anything new in these great United States. I was thumbing through Bill Bryson’s neat book, Made in America, last night and came upon this passage:

By 1990, America’s sense of declining economic prowess generated a volume of disquiet that sometimes verged on the irrational. When a professor of economics at Yale polled his students as to which they would prefer, a situation in which America had 1 percent economic growth while Japan experienced 1.5 percent growth, or one in which America suffered a 1 percent downturn but Japan fell by even more, 1.5 percent, the majority voted for the latter. They preferred America to be poorer if Japan were poorer still, rather than a situation in which both became more prosperous.

Honestly, they’d rather suffer as long as the dirty Japs were suffering, too? That’s not schadenfreude; that’s lunacy.

Hiroshima Aftermath

This Ought To Make Those Students Happy

It’s also telling that the poll’s respondents were students in an economics course, meaning they were most likely business students. As in future leaders who, for their very own benefit, will lay off tens of thousands, sully the air and the water, sabotage the success of others, and, overall, commit countless crimes against humanity.

Future Tea Party-ists, in other words.

Living For The City

For a brief, precious moment, we actually gave a damn about the problems of other people. How quaint!

The Pencil Today:

HotAirLogoFinal Wednes II

THE QUOTE

“I have never seen snow and do not know what winter means.” — Duke Kahanamoku

Kahanamoku

GOD SAYS NO

So, a gaggle of Indiana hospital workers is getting axed for refusing to take their flu shots.

And — wouldn’t you know it? — a lot of them are refusing to be pricked due to their religious beliefs.

Flu Shot

Satan’s Prick

What is it about religion that makes people want to hurt themselves and others?

The irony is so many hospitals in the early part of the previous century were run — gasp! — by religious outfits.

Yup. Organizations like the Catholic Church actually practiced succoring the afflicted back in those hazy days, running many big city hospitals. Had you been laid up with lumbago, say, in the 1940s, a nun was as likely to bring you your ginger ale or Jell-o as an LPN.

St. Vincent Hospital, Toledo, Ohio

Nursing School Graduation, 1964

Now, of course, the Catholic Church is more concerned with burning issues like whether you’re getting naked with someone of your own gender.

Anyway, one fired oncology nurse told Fox news she eschewed the needle because it would have violated her nondenominational Christian beliefs.

Wow. Presumably this is a woman who has studied at a university and has specialized in one of the most advanced areas of modern medicine. It’s not as though she’s some backwoods Luddite. Yet, she believes that her god isn’t at all interested in stemming the spread of the seasonal flu virus which, by the way, kills some 3000 to 49,000 Americans a year, depending on the severity of that year’s outbreak.

Pegasus News Photo

As Bad As The Flu

In some years, more people die from the flu than from automobile accidents.

Yet there are highly trained medical professionals who won’t take a simple step to protect themselves and others from this scourge.

Religion, I tell you, is maddening. And mad.

PERSON OF THE YEAR

How fascinating that the petit field marshalls at World Net Daily have named none other than Michele Bachmann their person of the year.

Michele Bachmann!

Bachmann

Bachmann

I mean, I assume I’d disagree with any choice that gang of basket-weavers would make. They and I look at the world through radically different lenses.

They could have tabbed Paul Ryan, who hitched his wagon to the runaway mule that was the Mitt Romney campaign.  I don’t care at all for Ryan’s politics, philosophy, or theology. But had WND designated him POY, I’d have been cool with it.

They aren’t, after all, going to dub Rachel Maddow their top 2012-er.

They could have named Speaker of the House John Boehner person of the year. He did stand tall against a certain Mau Mau, Muslim, commie, abortionist who wants to take away all our precious, sexy guns.

Again, cool. It’s their team; they get to choose the captain.

But Michele Bachmann?

Yes, Michele Bachmann!

Here’s what WND has to say about the Congressperson from Minnesota.

“Bachmann is a gutsy, pro-life fiscal conservative who dared to vote against raising the debt ceiling. She’s a God-fearing, gun-loving advocate of tax cuts and domestic oil drilling — and has proven to be one of Obamacare’s worst nightmares.”

Couple of interesting lines in there. I like the “God-fearing, gun-loving” thing. Shoot, if only sweet Jesus had a good Bushmaster AR-15 in his hands when the Roman soldiers came calling with the intent to nail him to the cross. He would have let his daddy-o sort ’em all out.

Jesus with Gun

Jesus Is Love (Of Guns)

The other thing that caught my eye was that Bachmann is “one of Obamacare’s worst nightmares.” So, a more equitable system of health delivery has taken on anthropomorphic form in the fever dreams of the fringe right, so much so that this piece of legislation even has nightmares.

Man, these folks are whacked.

Wait a minute. Maybe Michele Bachmann is the perfect WND person of the year.

CRAZY, HE CALLS ME

Uh, yeah. Dedicated to those delightful folks at World Net Daily. And their darling, Michele Bachmann

The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.” — H.P. Lovecraft

CAN THINGS GET ANY CRAZIER?

So, if you live on planet Earth, you’ve heard about the loon who is certain the Girl Scouts are out to destroy this holy land.

Who is Rep. Bob Morris of Fort Wayne? And is he of planet Earth?

First, judging by his picture, one must assume he’s cranky because his hair is on too tight.

Morris Talks With Protesters In The Statehouse Earlier This Year

Relax, pal! Have a vodka and lemonade. Kick your shoes off and put your feet up on the coffee table.

And please, please, stop surfing the interwebs for evidence that the Girl Scouts have been taken over by lesbian Nazis/Mau Maus/Marxists/Satanists. Just trust me on this one — they haven’t been.

They’re the damned Girl Scouts for chrissakes!

I mean, if the Girl Scouts are causing you to wet your pants then you’re just scared, period, and it doesn’t matter who’s doing the scaring

See? Have a drink.

Morris joined the Indiana House, representing District 84, in the summer of 2010. He whomped his Dem opponent in the November election, some poor kid named Evan Smith, a schoolteacher who looked to be about 11 years old, with 68 percent of the vote.

Evan Smith — Spanked By Morris

Morris was selected by a Republican caucus to serve out the final four months of Randy Boror’s term and to be the nominee in the fall election. Boror had quit the statehouse so he could become a lobbyist.

The first-term representative runs a nutrition center called Healthkick.

Morris sent a letter to his statehouse colleagues, dated February 18th, 2012, laying out his problems with the Girl Scouts. The Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette published the letter yesterday and within hours the nation was abuzz.

Here are some of the charges he makes:

  • The Girl Scouts of America funds Planned Parenthood
  • “… abundant evidence proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts….”
  • He quotes a Denver bishop as saying the GSA makes girls “more receptive to the pro-abortion agenda.”
  • The GSA trains its leaders to instruct girls to explore various methods of sexuality
  • Many parents are pulling their daughters out of the GSA because the organization promotes lesbianism

Dykes, Sluts, Whores, Etc.

By the way, his sources for these alarming charges? “I did a small amount of web-based research,” he writes.

Among Morris’s sources was World Net Daily, a clearinghouse of information for adults who still are terrified of monsters under the bed.

Morris writes that he’s yanking his daughters out of the Girl Scouts and enrolling them in something called the American Heritage Girls Little Flowers. That’s a Catholic-based group whose member girls are advised that their top aim in life should be purity.

As in sex is icky.

Morris concludes his missive by advising his statehouse mates to think very, very carefully before affixing their signatures to a House proclamation congratulating the Girl Scouts on their 100th anniversary.

Speaking of conclusions, I’ll answer one of the questions I posed at the top of this item. Even though Bob Morris is based in Ft. Wayne, he is not of this Earth.

Today: Wednesday, November 16, 2011

MY NAME IS SUE, HOW DO YOU DO? NOW YOU GONNA DIE.

Heard a great quote from the late economist John Maynard Keynes this morning.

“In the long term,” he said, “we’re all dead.”

Sounds pessimistic, no?

No. I take it to mean, Get the hell going and do something now.

And, in fact, that’s what Keynes was was advocating. He was a crisis economist. His idea was that during periods of financial collapse, worrying too much about the long, long range repercussions of rescue efforts gives short shrift to people who are suffering now.

Yeah, Keynes was being a smart ass when he uttered the line. That’s probably the main reason I like it. The above-mentioned reason, though, ranks a very close second.

We’re all the walking dead. Throughout my entire adult life, my guiding principle has been, What am I gonna think about when I’m laying on my deathbed?

Am I going to think, Man, that was quick; and watching all those episodes of “Two and a Half Men” really made it fly by?

This Is How You Want To Spend Your Life?

So, early on, I decided to do what I love and hopefully, in my infinitesimally miniscule way, give this crazy, mixed-up world something good. I became a writer.

My idea was I could introduce readers to people they’d never be able to meet, describe places they’d never be able to see, and explain things they’d never have an opportunity to think about.

I’ve been rewarded with a rich life of fascinating characters, broadened horizons, and occasional crushing poverty. You can’t win them all.

A pal of mine — let’s call her Thalia — just quit her job. She wants to start her own online business. The going has been slow and stress-inducing. But she’s plugging away almost to the point of jeopardizing her health and whatever sanity she has left.

Thalia visited me at The Book Corner the other day. She danced around my questions about how things were going until, finally, she could no longer evade them. “I’m scared,” she said. “Plus, there’s that voice in my head that says Are you nuts? Whaddya doing? You’ve got no business starting your own business.”

If she was smart, if she was prudent, if she was thinking about the “long term,” she’d have stayed in her job. And died a long death.

She’ll live now. She’ll continue to eat — albeit in smaller portions. But she wants to trade in a product she loves and has been trained in. And she wants to do something that just might do this crazy, mixed-up world some good.

Yep, Thalia will really live now — that is, until she dies.

WHO’S SUE?

Does the previous entry’s headline ring a bell? It’s a line from a very famous song, the biggest hit Johnny Cash ever had, called, “A Boy Named Sue.”

I used to listen to it constantly on the transistor radio I had surgically attached to my ear during the summer of 1969, much to the annoyance of all adults in my general vicinity.

The best line I could think of that referred to death was the one about the boy, Sue. You know who wrote that song? Shel Silverstein.

Yup, That Shel Silverstein

POUNDING THE KEYBOARD

Not every local writer or author is as wildly celebrated as our own Joy Shayne Laughter.

Passing motorists point at her and shout, “Hey, there’s the chick in the fedora!”

Our Joy

She lives a life that’s the envy of South Central Indiana. In fact, she was seen the other day at Kleindorfer’s, shelling out big bucks for the most expensive snow shovel in the place.

Some scribes, though, toil away in anonymity.

Take Larry Eubank. Comes in to The Book Corner every morning for a Herald Times. Always listening to music on his quaint, old-school headphones. Friendly as can be.

He was holding a copy of a brand new book in his hand when he came in yesterday morning. He held it up and said, “Just to let you know, I brought this in. I’m not shoplifting.”

So I put the phone down before the 911 operator could pick up.

“You’re lucky, pal,” I said, watching him through narrowed lids.

Turns out the book in his hand was, indeed, his. As in, he wrote it.

It’s his second book. Ironically, I’d just sold his first book last week to an Ivy Tech student who’d expressed an interest in works on socialism vs. capitalism. That book was called “The Case against Capital.” Larry’s new book is called “Why Marx Was Wrong.”

The copy he had in his hand was an uncorrected galley edition. It’ll be published by AuthorHouse.

Larry and I likely would disagree about everything up to and including whether the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. He’s penned articles for, among others, the website WorldNetDaily, a gang whose very existence makes me break out in hives.

But what of it? That’s one of the reasons I became a writer — to get to know people who I wouldn’t normally pal around with. To broaden, as I mentioned earlier, my horizons.

Larry Eubank is still as friendly as can be. And he’s living his dream. I like that.

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