Might I suggest a few more funny things to our conservative friends?

The Punic Wars: critics agreed this was the funniest work to date, though some later critics say the ending is a bit salty.

The Holy Land Crusades: a classic whose comedic influence can still be felt today

The Albigensian Crusade: Christian religious humor so gut splitting you'll want to see it again and again. And again. And again.

The Mongol Invasion: After all these years, still listed in the top three. Not to be confused with the later British Invasion, though it did include a chorus of about 40 million souls belting out "Help! I need somebody..."

From the Conqistadors to the Cowboys and Beyond: A long running sitcom still in production. If your friends don't want to watch with you, a pox on them!

The Atlantic Slave Trade: It'll leave you on the floor screaming with glee.

Franz Ferdinand's "Vacation In Sarajevo": No worries: something this giggly can't be a one shot deal. The jokes keep on rolling in the sequel. Don't miss the director's cut, which includes scenes from the 1918 flu epidemic.

The Armenian genocide: You've been starving to be exposed to humor like this.

And last but not least, the funniest thing in human history. The comedy troupe's humor perfectly parallels contemporary American right wing humor. I'm not supposed to tell you who they are. But for excerpts from one of their books, check this out.

It requires destructive testing even of one-of-a-kind artisan made toys (and afaik, no one has ever caught your average American woodworker coating their toys with lead -- it's the big guys and their imported sweatshop crap that is the issue). As written, it is no longer legal for any artisan in America to make anything for kids (including sewing custom clothes or crafting wooden furniture).

Somehow, though, I doubt that that's what the big guys want changed.

Few are content. Virtually everything complained about here is complained about everywhere in America, though not necessarily using the same terminology and not necessarily with the same detailed knowledge and not necessarily crediting the same party as potential savior or great betrayer.

People are not happy with the way things are.

But it's not enough to be unhappy. People also don't know who to trust, or what to do. They lack leadership. Nothing happens without leadership and vision.

WE (yes, I shouted something important, netiquette police can go complain about trivialities elsewhere) --- WE here should be leaders in our communities. WE should be raising hell on a daily basis for the corporatocracy, providing a focus for this undifferentiated anger. If WE do not provide the focus for the anger in our communities, then I guarantee you the far right will, and then we won't be sitting around discussing "soft fascism" anymore.

Yes, I am a part of "WE". I have something up my sleeve, contingent upon a new power chair coming through (without it, I'm housebound and just a hair short of bedbound). I'd say more, but I don't want to alert my intended target. I can speak generally of a daily picket (dream scenario: 24/7 picket) of one of the cogs of the corporatocracy in my town, and if/when they figure out how to chase us from there, to tenaciously keep at it with other actions that leverage the undifferentiated and undirected anger of my community.

Note: this is not the polite form of protest, where a committee plans for months, gets a permit, has a properly organized rally in Washington DC for two hours, and then goes away. This is the kind that shows up unexpectedly in town and points to bad things hidden in plain sight and which does not rely on the benevolence of the media for its effectiveness.

Too risky for you to go do anything about what is happening? How risky to you (generic "you", not any particular "you", is intended here) is fascism? You have kids to take care of? I'm pretty sure they'd benefit more from a legacy of democracy than they would from whatever material circumstance you had to downsize away in order to fight to give them that democracy. Sometimes I wonder what percentage of griping about people being too comfortable to act is rooted in projection, rather than observation, because I haven't seen comfort around me for a good long while, only lack of direction.

My Valentine's Day ran more or less like this:

I woke up and immediately understood that to have postponed doing something about my deteriorating asthma in order to first deal with a broken tooth had not been the right decision (I was blowing in the yellow zone on my peak flow meter and getting breathless from talking.) But I decided to try one more postponement, so that I could get a desperately needed shower (I'm disabled and need help with my showers, and scheduling problems meant I hadn't had a shower for over a week).

I was feeling even more breathless after the shower. I made plans to call a cab to go to the ER. But first I took some peak flows and used my rescue inhaler. The rescue inhaler I had been sucking on like a hyperactive chain smoker lowered my peak flow readings, which were now in the range best described as burnt sienna in color. This was not a good sign. I thought about what my breathing does when I hit cold air, considered the relative ability at handling asthma attacks between taxi drivers and paramedics, and decided to change my planned mode of transport to ambulance.

The ambulance arrived. Good thing: the ambulance crew did bring along my wheelchair (it would have been even better if they had brought the chair cushion). Bad thing: the ambulance crew had me halfway out the building before I noticed I did not bring my jacket. I was wearing short sleeves. Vermont was being all February.

I got to the ER, was triaged, sat in the waiting room, and played mahjong solitaire on my PDA (power 85%). I was not unhappy as I agreed I wasn't in any immediately life threatening state (the point of going, after all, was to prevent reaching that state) and I want sicker people seen first.

The wait wasn't as long as I expected. I was evaluated by a PA who prescribed a short course of Prednisone and a nebulizer treatment. The treatment and first course of meds arrived promptly. Everything is exactly as I expected. I played more mahjong on my PDA (power 65%)

Enter the supervising physician armed with my medical history. "You've had a pulmonary embolism in the past, correct?" Yes, I say, after a botched gallbladder surgery and an even more botched recovery from the gallbladder surgery.

Clue insertion: a common precipitating factor in pulmonary embolism is abdominal surgery (which, it shall be noted, I had plenty of during the Time of Great Botchedness). Pulmonary emboli are deadly things (the odds of surviving one is worse than the odds of surviving a round of Russian Roulette). Doctors (other than Botch Specialists) don't like to miss PE in any soon-to-be-dead-from-negligence patients. And if one has been flagged as ever having had a pulmonary embolism, however easily explained and personally atypical it had been, however many years or decades or millennia ago it may have been, and then present with anything even faintly suggestive of a pulmonary embolism (like shortness of breath (see asthma, above)), non-botch specialists tend to order many many major tests to exclude the possibility that their patient might be one of the soon-to-be-dead-from-negligence variety.

First among the tests is always something called a d-Dimer test. It is very nonspecific, and many other conditions also cause a d-Dimer positive. Did I mention that I have Many Other Conditions ^TM?

The ritual d-Dimer having been performed, the next step is usually a CT scan. Cue IV nurse to insert a 20 ga. IV shunt in my vein for the CT contrast dye. Except, no human being that has walked this earth has ever inserted a 20 ga IV shunt in any vein that has ever occupied my body, and if one were to be found, it would probably signal the End of Days.

I'm big on body modification. On my upper arms I have multiple instances of a unique form of scarification created by skilled artisans using a device known as a PICC line. A PICC line is something that happens when, in the presence of a particular hospital patient, 80% of a hospital's dedicated IV nurses have been reduced to tears, and the remainder have taken up heavy drinking. Think of it as a kind of semi-permanent spigot attached to a patient's circulatory system, installed so as to prevent any more IV nurses from threatening to jump. While an active PICC line in a hospital patient is a very good thing for staff retention, It is never a good thing for an IV nurse when an ER patient he or she is expected to stick is adorned with this sort of scarification.

It took a while for the hospital IV nurses to put an IV shunt in me. The plural, nurses, is correct: every IV nurse in the hospital had a try at me until the last remaining one, using a portable ultrasound, inserted an extra long IV into one of the deep major veins of the human arm. Consider it a PICC line lite. (PDA power 45%)

At that moment, every individual in their late teens and early twenties on every ski slope in the Northeast fell off a cliff, broke several bones, and was transported to the ER in which I sat. Several dozen other individuals in my city chose that moment to take up a new career as crash test dummy, and were likewise transported to the ER in which I sat. And one momentarily unsupervised toddler chose that moment to explore exactly what can be done with a nail gun and a toddler hand, which caused one panicked and guilt-ridden father to throw said toddler (and of necessity, one nail) into the back seat of his car and transport the two of them to the ER in which I sat.

This bumped me from next in line at the CT scanner to, oh, about 87,125th in line. I played mahjong until the power ran out (about five more minutes). Then I observed my surroundings, largely because they were no longer avoidable.

There were some interesting variants on themes in the ER, which was beginning to resemble a football stadium in population, activity, and volume. Take my roommate, or rather, take one of the many many people to pass through my room while I waited to move up in the CT scanner queue. The woman was in her late teens, and had, predictably, been transported from a Northeastern ski slope to the ER in which I sat. Unexpectedly, she did not fall off a cliff. She was a fellow asthmatic, on vacation from Philadelphia, and from her asthma inhalers, which were also in Philadelphia. After three days on the slopes it became breathtakingly apparent that the trial separation from her inhalers was not going well. She received the standard Prednisone and nebulizer regimen, but as she had either never had a PE or she was brighter than I and knew never to admit to having had a PE, she got to go back to her hotel room.

There were two twenty-something food service workers from one of the resorts at the base of one of the ski slopes of the Northeast where teen and twenty-something skiers had been falling off cliffs. The two did not appear to have fallen off a cliff. One wore a costume looking like a cartoon Turkish Janissary, only not quite as believable. He accompanied another who wore gray pants, the uniform top of a sous-chef, and a dozen feet of gauze wound round his hand.

From my vantage point I could see the station where doctors, nurses, and PAs examined x-rays and CT scans. I discovered that, just as every snowflake on the ski slopes of the Northeast is unique, every collarbone that slid across those one-of-a-kind snowflakes and over a cliff is unique. Some appear to resemble collarbones. Some appear to resemble something like collarbones gnawed on by a Yeti. Some resembled something resembling collarbones with an unrecognizable bony structure sticking out where least expected. The rarest of collarbones resembled a delicate curvy collage of not quite recognizable bony structures.

At some point during this compulsory observation of my surroundings, I fell asleep. Only a fellow asthmatic can appreciate what it takes to put someone to sleep after a fistful of Prednisone and a nebulizer treatment, and while sitting in a cushionless wheelchair in a double room of a noisy, busy ER.

Finally, around the seven hour mark, it was time for my CT scan. I was rolled into the room where a technician armed with two saline syringes greeted me. After several hours waiting in the wings it was time for my very special IV shunt to strut its stuff and prove itself worthy to carry contrast dye.

The IV failed.

The technicians made a few phone calls to find out what to do next. The first was to the IV nurse. They were told that the IV nurses had given up on me. The next was to my doctor, and I was told he would meet with me back in the room to "discuss other options."

After another hour of waiting (as every teen and twenty something skier in the midwest fell off a cliff, was evaluated at a midwestern hospital, and was diverted to the ER in which I sat), a PA arrived to give me my option, which had lost its plural during my wait: they were going to check my legs for a DVT with ultrasound, and if it was clear, they'd send me home. I proposed a alternate option, that I just go home, and they insisted, reminding me that PEs can be very lethal things and that I'm an at risk patient. They said I was next in the queue and it would not be very long.

More time passed. A lot more time. In the bed next to me they brought in a seventeen year old skier from Madrid, Spain. I panicked, thinking that every teen and twenty-something skier from the slopes of Europe had fallen off a cliff and were being transported to the ER in which I sat. I was relieved to discover it was merely an exchange student who had fallen off a cliff in New York State, and had been transported to the ER in which I sat from a small New York hospital which wasn't a regional level one trauma center like the ER in which I sat.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore. My bottom was sore from sitting for hours in a cushionless wheelchair. My legs (which have lymphedema) had been pointed down for far longer than was recommended. I had missed not one, but two of my medication times, and was rapidly creeping up on the third. And I was wearing a Depends in dire need of a change. I am not a big fan of skin ulcers, and there is a point after which trying to rule out the unlikely invites the inevitable. I hit the help button, and waited, as teen and twenty-something skiers on slopes in the Rocky Mountain States fell off a cliff, rearranged their tibia, collarbones, arms, and hands, and were transported to the ER in which I sat.

After another six or seven hours, or maybe forty five minutes, of waiting a nurse arrived. "I want to get my Prednisone prescription and go home". Skiers in the Pacific Northwest began to plunge off cliffs, break body parts, and be transported to the ER in which I sat. Time swirled around me and consumed my thoughts like an army of Dementors. Alien water skiers on Europa ran into icebergs and entered UFOs in preparation for their journey to the Fletcher Allen Health Care ER in which I sat.

The PA arrived to try to talk me out of leaving. In the middle of our argument the ultrasound tech and a portable ultrasound arrived. I agreed to submit to the test, and climbed onto the torture rack they call a cot (I have an orthopedic condition that makes it painful to impossible for me to lay flat), removing my shoes as I did. The test was negative. I could go home.

I searched around for my shoes. I could find only one. I began to pace outside the room in frustration, when I looked up and spotted my other shoe on a high shelf in the nurses station area. Properly shod, I waited another century or millenia or eon or half-hour for my paperwork, checked out, waited an hour for the wheelchair cab, and, wrapped in a thin hospital blanket, rode the few minutes home in a vehicle which could have been used for flash freezing.

Finally, after midnight on the fifteenth, I prepared dinner for myself and my Valentine, who had patiently waited for me: my pet parrot, sick himself with a respiratory infection. We shared a plate of pasta, ate the strawberry shortcake I had purchased specially for the holiday, and crawled into bed.

Happy effin Valentine's Day.

with the election of a man determined to turn the country into a dystopia of unrestrained capitalism. You can't harvest a depression without the growing season of greed.

But yeah. Tonight Bush guaranteed his spot as the one president worse than James Buchanan. The Republicans are probably doomed for a generation or two at least, but that's cold comfort.

You almost have to wonder if the GOP is deliberately trying to fuck things up as badly as they can in the last days before Obama takes office. It's hard to believe anyone would be so stupid as to believe these actions will benefit the country.

Makes the whole "w" of the keyboards myth look silly now, doesn't it? Even if the tall tales of the Clinton Administration vandalizing the White House had all been true, they would have been nothing compared to the act of vandalizing the entire nation before you go.

Uneducated does not mean clueless. "Joe Six Pack" is not so clueless that he will believe anyone who walks up to him and says "I'm Joe Six Pack too".

"Joe Six-Pack" is a very suspicious demographic. Joe Six-Pack is all ears for signs of phoniness. Joe Six-Pack would have noticed the forced and stilted folksiness, the flirting with the camera, and the absolute absence of anything substantial that would indicate that she really did share something in common with him.

Joe Six-Pack may or may not have connected with Joe Biden. But unless the individual sampling of "Joe Six-Pack" is a dedicated Freeper (who would follow Palin and the Republican Party off a cliff if ordered to do so), Joe Six-Pack will find Sarah Palin off-putting.

There was no spectacular meltdown on Palin's part, which some people are confusing with success. But they are missing the real story of the debate for her, which was death by a thousand cuts.

--
Oak, who has a far better claim to "Joe Six-Pack"-hood than Sarah Palin ever will have

I've studied propaganda. That's why I'm not torn.

Hate radio is a clear and present danger to our democracy. I do not equivocate on that in the least. It would be nice to believe that humans are rational actors, or perhaps will be if only they put a little more effort into it.

But the ideal of unrestricted "free speech" fails on exactly same shoals the "unrestricted free market" runs aground on. Listeners to these shows are not purely rational beings, will never be purely rational beings, and they most certainly don't have the infinite knowledge which would permit them to critique all of what they hear.

If you want freedom, you must, seemingly paradoxically, regulate speech. Not at the level where all truly have an equal say (such as the internet) -- here, there are competing voices that dilute the effect of propaganda. But the broadcast media, including cable, must be regulated to insure that:

A) Hate-spewers may not use the medium to promulgate lies with intent to incite. It is absolutely essential that what is broadcast be held to some standard of truth, and to some standard which prohibits hate speech. The standards need not be onerous. Any point of view which cannot be expressed without spewing hate, or which cannot be expressed without spewing outright fabrication, is not an honest point of view, but is the deliberate manipulation of listeners by broadcasters -- indistinguishable from fraud.

B) The medium must carry a diverse range of voices, perhaps within a channel, perhaps within the range of channels available. Anything less is tantamount to handing control over our political processes to a handful of individuals.

and the public finds them interesting, or at least would if the issues were covered half as well as Britney Spears' panties.

It's become either: a self-fulfilling prophesy where there is no coverage of important matters therefore people who aren't news junkies don't hear of them and their lack of knowledge is then given as proof of lack of interest by a lazy media: and/or it's yet another excuse given in the deliberate dumbing down of America by the less than a dozen media moguls who control the major media (take your pick).

I tested one of those "complicated" and "dry" issues that pundits were bleating about as "too difficult" to understand and "not interesting to the average voter". At the height of Plamegate, I took the time to explain the issue to a number of generally uninvolved people who did not follow the news closely and who had not heard anything about the affair (none of my subjects had a college education). Every one of my subjects understood the story, were outraged by it, and were surprised they hadn't heard anything about what they thought should be a top news story. One of my test subjects went on to register to vote for the first time in her life (she is in her 40's), and voted for Kerry, all because of the "too complicated" story of Plamegate.

People are not dumb. Take a look at the opinion polls. A majority opposed the Iraq war before it started despite near-100% support for the war from news outlets. More people hate Bush today (aka "strongly disapprove") than hated Nixon, even though the media has only recently begun criticizing this administration, and the criticism so far has been mild aside from Olbermann and a few columnists.

We here are not in the minority on the issues. We are solidly in the majority on the major issues of the day. To the degree our opinion differs from that of the general public it is that we are better informed because, lets face it, we're news and politics junkies. We work hard to find out that Country X really did not have any connection to Incident Y, even though government and media propaganda suggests that they did, and Candidate X does not really stand for Policy Y even though his or her propaganda implies that they do. Other people don't have the time, opportunity, or interest in making a hobby of tracking down the news.

If we had a functioning media, and (to a lesser extent) an opposition party with a spine, people would not need to work as hard as it is currently necessary in order to see through every detail of the propaganda. But even without being well-informed, the public gets it.

Think about the food safety issue. Who here hasn't heard someone in their circle of acquaintances express concern about food, pet food, or toy safety in the last year? What is "too complex" about "there are more dangerous products sold today because Republicans (and a few complicit Democrats) have relaxed protections, cut the budgets of inspection agencies, and appointed industry executives to watchdog positions"? I can sum it up in one sentence. But the media is either too lazy to cover the story in its detail, or they don't want to tell Americans why it is so.

you can imagine a reverse scenario where a president elected as a progressive goes off the far deep end, and many liberals cling to him or her almost to the bitter end.

Imagine, say, that "President Ofthwall" decides that the US has a racism problem that needs to be addressed (oh so very correct), and that the latest technology needs to be employed to try to eliminate it (a little shakier here, but most are with him). So President Ofthwall decides we need voluntary use of the https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit /> implicit association test , with anti-racism education programs for those who score particularly poorly (so far, we're still with him). But them the test starts to creep into things that are only nominally voluntary: first to enter the military (the argument being that armed racists are a danger to society, and we're still with him. Those who object get labeled racists and freepers), then to qualify for government contracts, then to qualify for government jobs (the unions start to go lukewarm), then to qualify for college financial aid ... all the way down to a requirement for passports and drivers licenses. And the threshhold for re-education incrementally changes to include more and more people, and the "education" itself becomes more and more coercive and ever more about holding power and determining loyalty rather than addressing racism.

When would we bail here? Some of us, civil libertarians who can see the slipperly slope and who stay current on the news, would bail almost immediately and try to warn the rest of us (the "Pat Buchanans" of the left). The rest of us would grow increasingly uncomfortable. Some would speak out in the mid-phase of this. Others of us would try to quietly slip off the back of President Ofthwall's bandwagon without raising much of a fuss, at first lying about our continued support, then going silent. Some of the silent ones would, just before the complete collapse of popular support, begin to speak up, too. Eventually, all who would be left in President Ofthwall's camp would be the totalitarian left and those whose liberalism is really nothing more than a big chip on their shoulders.

I think we'd like to think we'd all be objecting immediately, but we wouldn't. Most of us would feel a party and/or ideological obligation to support the president for as long as we could possibly bear, and for some of us that's going to be for a very long time. And some of us here, lets face it, are motivated by hate, and would never bail on any program used to persecute our opponents, no matter how un-liberal it is in practice.

If you don't think a liberal could ever do this, then you're either not honest with yourself, or you've never had enough power to understand how it can warp someone. The founding fathers put checks and balances into our system of government for a reason: they understood that we can all be corrupted by power.

I say all of this not to defend those of the right who have glued themselves to this Administration . By putting party and ideology ahead of nation and constitution they have done great harm, and they need to understand their errors and shoulder the burden of repairing the damage. But I do think we need to understand them, because we will need to live alongside them, our neighbors, after this national crisis is over.

Unless of course we want to repurpose those Halliburton concentration camps in the name of liberalism, in which case count me out.

I started my morning by examining some of the recent polls. And what of course stood out was the unusual degree of support that he still has among the self-identified Republican base.

Of course that figure is contaminated in that it does not reflect the many of us who deserted the party over Bush and his ilk. It used to be that people like me stayed within the GOP and grumbled during things like recessions, wars, Iran-Contra, and even Watergate. Back then, we'd show up in the polls as an unhappy base. But it has become impossible for many of us to remain within the party. I, a lifelong Republican (albiet the kind that I'm sure would be labeled a lifelong RINO these days), gave up working to save the national party from extremism, as a lost cause, at the time of Newt Gingrich's Contract On America. But I remained active in local Republican politics until 1998 or so when I moved away from my little enclave of traditional NY Republicans to PA and the greater world of irredeemably irrational mutant Republicanism (hereinafter to be referred to as the mGOP). My last act as a Republican was to vote against GWB in the 2000 primaries.

The mGOP, minus a small and vocal band of fascists, should hate Bush. They really should. This is for all practical purposes a board for Democrats, and I'm the last one to be defending the mGOP right now, but I do think many people here mischaracterize Republicans as motivated entirely by hate and greed. Even now, the majority of the mGOP rank and file share the same fundamental American values as most of the people here.

I'm prepared to be flamed half to death for defending the character, though not the point of view, of my former friend Tom Tancredo (a figure who is a "maverick" in the eyes of the Bushites, but who I think is solidly representative of the mainstream mGOP rank-and-file). He is not a racist or xenophobe even if he has become useful to racists and xenophobes. He is a man of extraordinary courage and principle (I've witnessed this firsthand), and he really does share with us many of the same fundamental values, including a genuine concern for the middle class and the poor. He sincerely believes that free market economic policies benefit ordinary Americans, and he has concluded, mistakenly, that the reason the market hasn't actually worked that way has been an artificial excess of labor (i.e., illegal immigrants). This is not a point of view that the vast majority of us here would agree with, and not one that, I think, has any historical support. I think most of us here agree that capitalism needs to be regulated in the interest of society, and that falling wages and increasing poverty are the natural result of too few checks on capitalism. This is a pretty big point of disagreement, with some pretty big consequences, and I do think that Tom can often be, for a smart guy, astoundingly dumb. But this disagreement is not a disagreement over whether government exists to serve the interests of ordinary Americans. Tom Tancredo is not a fascist, and neither is most of the mGOP.

So if all of us but a handful of vocal radical extremists agree on basic American values, and those values are repudiated daily by this Administration, why does the remaining mGOP cling to Bush? I think that, thanks to the hard right propaganda machine, they believe that a very different set of facts are in play in the world, "facts" that rationalize the Administration's conduct.

The liberal vs. conservative difference is eternal and valid. Making up your own facts is not.

I believe that Bush has collapsed in the polls with everyone else but the mGOP rank and file because he is understood to be a liar of the worst sort, someone who cannot be trusted. Right now, if Bush said the sun rose in the east, a third of the country would wonder what deception he was trying to support with that fact, and another third would refuse to believe it without independent confirmation. I believe the rank and file of the mGOP would desert him and his ilk, too, if they saw the lies. But they can't see the lies until they see that Fox, et. al., are lying to them, too. In order to crack the support of the base, then, I think it's necessary to crack the credibility of the propaganda machine.

So how does one get Republicans to question the veracity of their media? That's a real question, not a rhetorical one. Where are the points of vulnerability? How can one hammer on those points till that rock-hard crust of ignorance fissures?

I'm sure there's some useful information that can be squeezed from polls and studies showing the differences between Fox viewers and the rest of us, and the stream of defections of Republicans from the mGOP.

And anecdotal accounts from defectors, too, can shed some light. I'm not sure my personal account is informative since I never partook of the poisonous propaganda and was among the first wave of Republicans to be driven out of the mGOP. If there are any DUers reading this who are more recent defectors from that most defective of political parties, or who know defectors, or who are witnessing a defection in progress, I'd like to hear your observations.