End of the work week, that’s all

December 21, 2012

124389_600So wet and windy this early morning here along California’s northern coast, I feel like it’s wet and windy all over da world.
Just a feelin’…

And due today being today, everything is coming up doomsville: “The odds go up that we go over the fiscal cliff,” said Representative Rob Bishop of Utah, a Republican.
John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner’s infamous “Plan B” escape scheme was shot down last night by his own people — the effort ended at the exact same place where it never started.

(Illustration found here).

Along with a host of problems facing this country, we also have to endure the immoral, cruel and nasty GOP — they live and breathe for the rich:

The bill may be dead, but it is important to look what the House Republicans tried to do.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen pointed out during the debate that Plan B would throw 300,000 kids off food stamps and an additional 300,000 kids off of Medicaid.
According to a White House analysis, Boehner’s Plan B would actually give millionaires a $50,000 tax cut.
A Tax Policy Center analysis of Plan B found that it would result in a tax cut of $108,000 for millionaires.

So Plan B from Outer Space is the lowest form of cut-throat politics, as the necks offered belong to children.
And speaking of children in harm’s way, the asshole NRA is supposed to hold a press conference today in an attempt re-boot, and “offer meaningful contributions” to the ability of US citizens to arm themselves via Seal Team 6.
In a preview of what that dangerous organization might unveil, NRA President David Keene blubbered last month: “Today,” Mr. Keene told a roomful of conservatives in Hawaii, “guns are cool.”
If you think Sandy Hook was ‘cool,’ then okay — or the 40-plus people killed by guns since Newtown, just a week ago today.
Slate has devised a real-time chronicle of shooting deaths in a collaboration with the Twitter feed @GunDeaths, check it out — the data horrifying.

A most-excellent take on this horrible shit comes from alternative-weekly, Nashville Scene, which contrasts the gosh-awful HSBC bullshit and guns.
A couple of bits:

Roughly 24 hours before Adam Lanza reportedly entered Sandy Hook Elementary and killed 20 children and six adults before turning the gun on himself, the news broke that the United States Department of Justice would not prosecute one of the world’s largest banks, despite the fact that this storied financial institution, U.K.-based HSBC, directly laundered the money of Mexican drug cartels and conducted business with bona fide terrorists, marking the latest such non-prosecution of so-called “too big to jail” banks.

There is no statement from the president or lesser politicos on the incarceration rates of black men that rival the number of their ancestors under the yoke of institutional slavery.
The face of a child whose parent has been arrested for a drug charge (or murdered during a drug transaction) is never plastered on our televisions in prime time, nor is the mug of HSBC brass who made money off of that child’s misery, or their Wall Street equivalents.
No, in these stories, it’s always somebody lighting up a joint with their face strategically obscured or outright blurred to oblivion, as if to suggest that it’s a taboo to reveal a drug user’s identity — but if you’re 9 years old and you witnessed one of the worst massacres in United States history, there isn’t enough B-roll in the Western world.
(Media pro-tip: It also helps if you’re American, because footage of foreign kids emotionally scarred by the horrors of drone strikes somehow doesn’t have the equivalent resonance.)

Read the whole post — worth it.
And read Matt Taibbi’s background piece of the way-ugly HSBC bullshit at Rolling Stone — the HSBC story hasn’t been given the national attention it deserves, which is an indication of how screwed the judicial system and the flat-out-fucked-up War on Drugs.

Meanwhile, back to this morning and today, which in ‘normal’ times would be the beginning of the winter season, or what’s called the December Solstice — where I’m located that happened already at 3:12 A.M.
WTF — the apocalypse has passed me by!

My most-favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, wrote it already a long time ago — “I Heard A Fly Buzz,” and living is ending:

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

Onto the other side.

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