If I were young and unmarried,

I could EASILY overlook Abby Huntsman's politics.

Pat Buchanan has a funeral to attend...

I'm Tired: I saw Bashirlive.com as Batshitlive.com

And thought Michele Bachmann had a show on msnbc.

L'shana tovah tikatevu to all my DU compatriots...

May you ALL be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.

Boy, the execs at CNN must be rending their clothes by now...

you know they were hoping for Gulf War Redux. They are laming out with all of these stupid interviews by Mr. Lemon-ade with all of the 'what-ifs' etc. It is just boring and useless

Frankly, they don't have Peter Arnett and they don't have any credibility left, particularly after the inability of the network to figure out what a Supreme Court decision meant to "Obamacare" or John King, who seems to have disappeared, who really fumbled the ball in the Boston Marathon bombing.

They will never ever regain their stature.

Time to relax...and watch the tail end of Die Hard 3....

Obama's Kobayashi Maru situation:

For those who do not know what those two words mean, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru


Now: He intervenes in Syria he not only risks an outbreak of regional war, but worse, expressions of hostile outrage at Democratic Underground. If he doesn't intervene, then he risks further outrageous behavior by Syria and other countries defying the Paper Tiger which the USA! USA! USA! shall become, assuming that we are not already there.

Now, this is exactly why movies are movies and real life is real life. In a Hollywood film version, Harrison Ford, or E. G. Marshall or the guy from the Allstate commercial would come up with an answer which would be an unqualified success, as scripted by Tom Clancy. In an indie film version, the answer would lead to a catastrophic and most depressing ending, with the associated explanatory end titles. In real life, of course, thousands are going to die, one way or the other. No doubt about that. And President Obama will be the lightning rod from both the left and the right. No doubt about that either.

There will be blood...speaking of movies.

I believe that I was transformed fifty years ago today:

On a hot summer day a ten year-old PCIntern was playing outside in the front yard when a medium-sized truck pulled up to the curb. Out came three men who walked across the lawn and knocked on the front door of my house. My mother answered the door and let the men inside and I followed, curious. It turned out that my family wanted the piano which my virtuoso brother played to be moved to another room and had arranged for it to take place that day.

While standing in my living room, the TV was on, and a live broadcast of the March on Washington was on and there was a black man speaking to a reporter. I have no idea who it was, but it was clear from his position and his authoritative nature that he was important somehow. Even I realized that. The three men stopped in front of the set and one said to the other two, "Oh, an educated n-----." My mother didn't hear them: she probably would have asked them to leave. I knew that that was a bad word and never used by anyone in my family, but that somewhere I somehow knew that it was extreme.

I as a child had always thought that those who lived in the North were on the side of integration and civil rights, and those in the South were against them. That is precisely how limited education was in elementary school in those days. I realized that there was a lot more to all of this than I had ever realized. It was my political awakening which was punctuated and exponentially accentuated just a few months later in November of the same year.

I have never been the same since that day. I realized that I had largely repressed this memory until a few days ago. It became crystal clear in the last 48 hours.

No. No no. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!

NO! It is NOT analagous that "Even if Obama were born in Kenya..." HE WAS NOT BORN IN KENYA! He was born HERE. In the United States of America, in the 50th State WHERE THERE WAS EVEN A FUCKING TEEVEE SHOW CALLED "HAWAII FIVE-FUCKING-O. Because is the FIFTIETH STATE...from 1959! I was alive at the time in Bensalem, PA - I remember when Hawaii became a state.

AND HE WAS THERE WHEN HE WAS BORN TO AN AMERICAN MOTHER.

There is no, not one, iota of truth in that reprehensible birther lie. Not one. It was in the fucking NEWSPAPER at the time.

This is EXACTLY what the Rethugs always hope for: that we'll give an inch, then a foot, then a yard, then a mile, and then the whole game is theirs. NO. This Cruz has a real battle to fight. And that's his and their BIG PROBLEM. DO NOT MENTION Obama's name and whatsisface's name in the same sentence. They are not co-equal. That's what they WANT you to do...that's how it works.

BECAUSE IF YOU DO THIS, then very soon you're going to be seeing posts on D-fucking-U which start: Since we can all agree that the President, whom I adore, may or may not have been born here, then Senator Cruz deserves some respect/consideration/my vote(!).

Mark my words...it'll happen here. It ALWAYS does.
Remember what the guy said in the film 'Spaceballs': Evil will always win out over Good, because Good is dumb.

Lucky-sperm-club-Luke-Russert looks gaunt...

must be on a diet...or he had his pay cut and can't afford to eat.

Probably the former, though he deserves the latter.

IMO, Sanjay Gupta is the medical equivalent of Tweety...

Gee, what way is the wind blowing this year?? Oh...it seems that most of the people who might watch CNN but perhaps don't, believe in legalization of marijuana or medical uses of marijuana? Well...you can just COUNT ME IN AS OF TODAY, sez Dr. Gupta. I can only imagine the discussions in the CNN boardroom prior to adjusting the all-powerful, all-knowing Dr. Sanjay Gupta's brain via a cable-news mind-meld.

You know, or perhaps you don't, that Michael Moore figuratively beat the crap out of ol' Sanjay right there on CNN when they squared off in 2007 when Gupta criticized Moore's film "Sicko". Sure, Gupta's good-looking, articulate, obviously very learned in that rigid medical school/residency fashion - semi-old school with a little verve and an occasional smile to contrast with the "seriousface" which ALL medical personnel need to exhibit on the air. But as a clinician myself, I find his delivery and cocksuredness reprehensible, particularly that he is a specialist in a field, neurology and neurosurgery, which is described by its practitioners as an almost complete unknown. They really know very little, relatively speaking, about the brain, the brain stem or even the periphery compared with the unimaginably complex functions they carry out routinely from the embryo to our death and perhaps even, to some extent, slightly beyond. So, in the vernacular, other than what he's learned in books and practiced over and over and over again, he really doesn't know much about much in the GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS. And I mean the TOTALITY of science and scientific medicine of which we don't know as much as the lay person thinks we know.

He has a Perry Mason courtroom delivery: THIS IS HOW IT IS...even when I am unsure, I speak with certainty, and when called to task, which does not happen often.... I get strangely quiet......

He went on Larry King with Moore and started with a big swagger and then was diced into little bits. If I weren't so mad at the establishment crowd for denying medical care to the poor and middle class at any and all opportunities, I would have almost felt sorry for him. But believe me, I didn't.

So his pronouncement today, as Philip Roth would have his character say in Portnoy's Complaint, "...don't mean shit to a swan."