Still the bitter aftertaste

technical difficulties .... please stand by

OK - sorry about that...the "technical difficulty" was that I couldn't figure out why Mozilla was not showing my red/blue chart (below) and Internet Explorer was. It's all in the tricky little html coding, and I had to finally figure out that IE would render "background color" and "background-color", but Mozilla would only render the latter.

See? There really are other things to worry about than Bushistan.

So....here's the post, rendered properly (I believe) in both browser types. (Netscape should render like Mozilla, but if you use something else and the chart doesn't appear on your screen, well...I'm tired, and it's not that important anyway.)


I know you are not reading this morning, because it is Sunday, and you have seen the error of your heathen ways, thanks to the election, and you are in church. But when you get back home...

Turning Republican

Because the Republicans are obviously superior in both numbers and cause, and their values oriented agenda should no doubt be a boon to human kind, there's obviously only one thing left to do at this point. Convert. Therefor, in an act of supreme solidarity to our new national conservative alliance and their emphasis on values, I would just like to say, they're right. I'm ready to sign up.

But first I need to declare that I too no longer care about losing millions of American jobs. I too no longer care about health care. Or social security. I also no longer care about education. I no longer care what happens to the poor, the elderly or the millions of American children growing up in poverty, despair and hopelessness. I no longer care that the US ranks a lowly 41st in infant mortality. I no longer care that the gap between rich and poor is approaching third world levels. I no longer care that Fortune 500 corporations can avoid paying taxes by opening an offshore mailbox and I no longer care that the working class will be forced pick up the difference. I no longer care that we've taken a record fiscal surplus and in three years turned it into the largest debt in the history of our country or that it will be our children, and their children, that will have to pay it back. I also no longer care how many Americans die at the hands of terrorists (as long as they're dying over there and not here at home) or how many thousands of foreign civilians die in the course of our projecting American global hegemony. I no longer care what the rest of the world thinks of America, as long as they know to fear us. I no longer care about the science of potential medical breakthroughs nor do I care about slowing the spread of AIDS nor whether we have sufficient supplies of safe vaccines.

Continue reading at Hullabaloo...

There truly is either a huge gap between reality and perception amongst Bush voters, or they simply are more concerned about people unlike them having any rights of which they disapprove. Control freak bigots or willfully ignorant. Either way, it doesn't encourage me about the future of this country. We know the system is filled with fraud and the GOP/neocons have successfully defended their coup, but where is the hope of overturning it when we have such a large population who defend it? I'm sorry to say that I think we will have to wait until we have crashed, and then I think we will have to wait for a military coup against the administration. That could take a very long time.

Another alternative is that the fundamentalists, whipped into a frenzy, will take this opportunity, supported by those who manipulate them and are now firmly ensconced in halls of power, and begin to enact legislation to make of this country a theocracy (which they claim it was intended to be under the founding fathers - yes, they do). In that case, think of Iran as a possible pattern, just with a different god.

Of course, the possibility is there that a grassroots progressive movement will claw and scrape its way back into power, but that means that a lot more people would have to feel the impending loss of their freedoms and even their livelihoods, and it might well be bloody. It wouldn't be the first time in this country. What is depressing is that it always has to be fought for. Christ consciousness is apparently too light on a planet with gravity.

And of course, another option is "none of the above".

New website:

Reload is a group of friends that are pondering the fact that this election season has made "The West Wing" seem unrealistic, but "Weekend at Bernie's" look like it really could have happened.

...Reload is happy to announce that it will be kicking off a program over the next few months to pair off Blue State residents with Iranian citizens to assist them with easing into life in a theocratic state.

...The mentors will help in a variety of different subjects, from knowing how to figure out what books and movies are ok, to the best techniques in faking a devout belief in Allah (or in our case, his militant crusading son Jesus).

It's hard to wrap your head around it, but we here at Reload, after carefully reading the 'Bush Pledge', now understand that in order for our government to bring freedom to people that don't already have it, we have to make sure that the government has even 'more' freedom than us because it would be foolish to waste all that freedom on people who don't have the armies to spread it with.

The red and the blue of it....

Jesus' General been forced to defend a chart correlating state average IQ with Bush vs. Kerry votes in the comments section of his blog as being satirical. The chart has been floating around since the last election and it shows all the states with a population of low average intelligence as voting for Bush and those with high average IQ voting for the Democrat. I don't know where it originated, but it's been passed around a lot. So, in the wake of The General's recent post and battle, here are a couple of other charts, just to keep us on the up-and-up here (yeah, okay, whatever)....

That was found in a link offered by a Jesus' General reader. And, from Netscape News (note: I added the red/blue):

These are the findings of the Education State Rankings, a survey by Morgan Quitno Press of hundreds of public school systems in all 50 states. States were graded on a variety of factors based on how they compare to the national average. These included such positive attributes as per-pupil expenditures, public high school graduation rates, average class size, student reading and math proficiency, and pupil-teacher ratios. States received negative points for high drop-out rates and physical violence.

1. Massachusetts 2. Connecticut 3. Vermont 4. New Jersey 5. Wisconsin 6. New York 7. Minnesota 8. Iowa 9. Pennsylvania 10. Montana 11. Maine 12. Virginia 13. Nebraska 14. New Hampshire 15. Kansas 16. Wyoming 17. Indiana 18. Maryland 19. North Dakota 20. Ohio 21. Colorado 22. South Dakota 23. Rhode Island 24. Illinois 25. North Carolina 26. Missouri 27.Delaware 28. Utah 29. Idaho 30. Washington 31. Michigan 32. South Carolina 33. Texas and West Virginia (tie) 35. Oregon 36. Arkansas 37. Kentucky 38. Georgia 39. Florida 40. Oklahoma 41. Tennessee 42. Hawaii 43. California 44. Alabama 45. Alaska 46. Louisiana 47. Mississippi 48. Arizona 49. Nevada 50. New Mexico

The Morgan Quitno Press study is not to be taken as an absolute fact - after all, they surveyed "hundreds of public schools", and you know how I am about surveys and polls. There are factors to take into account that are unknown, and so, while the whole exercise is somewhat academic, I am inclined to agree with one commenter at Jesus' General's website: anyone who voted for W is the dumbest motherfucker alive, i don't care what iq they can claim.