Take last Thursday’s Republican debate in South Carolina.
Hundreds of G.O.P. voters applauded as Newt Gingrich blasted CNN’s John King for raising an accusation about marriage and sex in presidential politics.
These same voters, I have no doubt, would have cheered Gingrich for doing just that in 1998 when he led the charge to impeach President Clinton for his dalliance with a younger woman who worked in his office — or technically, for lying about it, but you see the point.
When Clinton did it, Republican voters called for his impeachment; when Gingrich does it and defends himself, they cheer for him.

A lie is the truth until its not.

And tonight, President Obama will go on TV with his third state of the union message, reportedly carrying a theme of a “a fair shake for all,” but in the actual state of the country, the shaking is from the bottom up.
Supposedly, all kinds of diverse shit will be included in the message, especially any and all important points to consider in his re-election bid — Obama’s scheduled for a three-state campaign trip starting Wednesday.
Here we go…

Accordingly, the prez should do some bullshitting himself — via The Daily Beast:

Obama should—without mentioning them by name—take a couple of whacks at Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
This is a time, with Romney on the ropes and the leading GOP candidate (Gingrich) “enjoying” a roughly -35 point approval-to-disapproval rating, to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
Play some head games.
Have some fun.
Do—if I may—some dozens.
Not “your mama is so fat” dozens, obviously.
But talk some smack.
Drop in one or two that the Republicans will attack as undignified to the occasion.
Put them on the defensive, make them sound whiny.
Trust me, David Plouffe: independents will like it.
They sure didn’t like what you wanted to do last summer (capitulate).
…
If those things aren’t happening, the speech was a political failure.

And the Brits say no laughing.
From the Telegraph:

But any attempt at levity might come off badly.
There’s a reason why over 600,000 people participated in the South Carolina primary: the state’s unemployment rate is 9.9 percent and folks are angry.
Many are suffering in a recession that has run so long it must now be called Obama’s.
Gallup gives him a job approval rating of 44 percent but CBS reports that only 29 percent of the country thinks America is headed in the right direction.
As cold winds blow over the Northeast and hurricanes hit the South, attitudes are likely to harden.
I’ve been travelling across America for nearly a decade and I’ve never known such pessimism.
Gas price increases are making it harder to numb the pain with consumer spending.
And what can be bought is made by child labour in China – a country that now owns roughly $1.16 trillion of America’s spiralling debt.

The big thing, though, Mr. President, is try and not to bullshit with bullshit.

Don’t blame me — let’s just move on.

(Illustration found here).

And on Tuesday night, President Obama makes his annual state-of-the-union speech, his third, with the same feel as fumbler Williams — mistakes have been made, but don’t blame me and let’s just move forward.
According to Bloomberg, Obama’s big punch will be against the current Congress (a group considered the worse in US history):

“The speech will merge what he wants to say in the campaign with what he wants to do.
He’s going to be, as Truman did, attacking Congress as the ‘do nothing Congress,’ and certainly it’s total dysfunctional,” said James Thurber, presidential historian at American University in Washington.
House Speaker John Boehner signaled Sunday that he’s ready for the fight.
“If that’s what the president is going to talk about Tuesday night, I think it’s pathetic,” the Ohio Republican said yesterday on Fox News Sunday.

The Boner should be afraid of anything pathetic.

In polling last month, this particular Congress is disliked by an average of about 85 percent of US peoples — there is most-likely not another group of people as useless as this particular group of shitheads.
And it could get worse.

The US state of the union in 2012 ain’t pretty.

“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 5, 2008

Despite the obvious, none of George Jr.’s entourage has ever even been threatened with criminal prosecution.

(Illustration found here).

In a new view of the Iraqi horror is the word, “bugsplat:” One definition is a software for scanning your computer for registry errors; another is the lack of humanity in warfare.
The US military’s invasion was a nasty example of the latter.
In fact, ‘Bugsplat‘ was the name of a computer program in 2003 used to determine collateral damage inflicted by American bombs.
HaHaHaHa — bugsplat, anyone/anything squashed on the US windshield.

Robert Koehler took a look at this line of bullshit yesterday morning at the Baltimore Sun:

“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.
“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on.
“They call it ‘bugsplat.’
In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid.
On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid.
Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.’”
And this is the foundation of our national security.

Koehler concludes:

Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view.
A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity.
Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.
“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind.
The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.

Without such, death comes by indifference.

This indifference can be applied to the US MSM — news organizations who have turned its eyes and ears away from exposing a rot now fully grown within the American soul.
Watch and listen here to the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s emotional outrage at the Iraqi war — he expresses horror at his own country (the UK) for being involved with such a crime.
And despite the US supposedly being gone, the blood still flows – from Bloomberg on a new report from London-based Iraq Body Count:

“The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led coalition forces has declined steadily from 2009, while the rate caused by Iraqi state forces has increased,” the group said in an e-mailed news release.
Recent trends point to a “persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come,” Iraq Body Count said.
“Time will tell whether the withdrawal of U.S. forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” the group said.

The US media, however, has been most quiet about any bad vibes coming off a war that tore apart the world’s thin fabric and left a country in a position beyond misery – a verbal snapshot of one Iraqi woman seems to sum it up: “Today is better than tomorrow.”

And tomorrow is the Iowa caucuses where the war party starts its machine rolling — horror of ugly horrors, though Newt Gingrich whined and took a bugsplat: “No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.”

The dogs of war fight amongst themselves — bug splatting everybody.

KCNA eventually noted Kim suffered a heart attack and couldn’t be saved despite the use of “every possible first-aid measure” — a heart way-bloated by too much Hennessy, lobster and women.

(Illustration found here).

Keeping it tight, within hours of the announcement, a South Korean news agency said the north tested an unspecified number of short-range missiles in a kind of wake-up notice that just because Kim is dead, his so-called country is still bat-shit crazy.

Kim Jong Un, one of Kim Il’s sons, is believed to be now in charge, though no one knows for sure, in fact, no one seems to even know the boy’s age, other than he’s in his 20s.
And that is the way-crux of the problem — the darkness of information.
Via the BBC: Val Hamer in South Korea tweets: “I live in South Korea. Military on high alert. Choppers everywhere. Strange tension in the air.#kimjongil #northkorea.”
How this whole scenario plays is fairly crucial due to the horrible fact that North Korea is both unstable, and they possess a shitload of material for nuclear weapons, and as the above rocket-launch announcement dictates, can throw that material around the region.

The US White House played it softly, commenting only that officials are “closely monitoring reports that Kim Jong Il is dead.”
The BBC, though, did report President Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak have spoken by telephone, keeping all eyes on the pathic north.

Although Kim Il was greatly disliked by the rest of the world, he scared people.
A retort from a US version of a political shithead: “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” former President George W. Bush once told journalist Bob Woodward, calling him a “pygmy” and a “spoiled child.”

Some background via the LA Times:

Kim was born Feb. 16, 1941, in the Russian city of Khabarovsk, where his father was stationed with other Korean and Chinese guerrillas being trained by the Soviet army to fight the Japanese.
The North Korean propaganda machine later claimed his birth took place a year later on Mt. Paektu, a sacred peak in Korean folklore, and that it was heralded by a double rainbow.
It was only the first of many outlandish legends in a cult of personality that also credited him with writing dozens of books and operas and making 11 holes-in-one in a single round of golf.
…
He borrowed heavily from Christian imagery (nobody was any the wiser since the Bible was banned in North Korea, along with other religious literature) to create the myth of a holy family destined to rule.
He was credited with designing the little red badge bearing a portrait of his father that North Koreans to this day are required to wear on their lapels.
Kim eventually became director of the party’s bureau of agitation and propaganda.
The position gave him an excuse to get involved with one of his great passions: cinema.
He expanded North Korea’s film studios and wrote a book, or at least had one published under his name.
In that 1973 tome, “On the Art of Cinema,” he espoused the theory that “revolutionary art and literature are extremely effective means for inspiring people to work for the tasks of the revolution.”

In 1978, overcome with a passion for movies, Kim IL ordered the kidnapping of Choi Eun Hee and Shin Sang Ok, a South Korean film couple — she an actress, he a director — to improve the North’s film industry.
The couple were held for eight years before escaping:

The pair had covert tape recordings of their conversations with Kim and later wrote a memoir containing one of the few firsthand accounts of his personality.
They described a man who could be alternately imperious and self-deprecating, once quipping to Choi about his height, “Small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?”

A funny, strange little man, who was a self-centered asshole:

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, tales of Kim’s eccentricities spread throughout the world.
Defectors told of wild drinking parties and naked dancers.
Some of the stories were hyped by South Korea’s fiercely anti-communist propaganda machine, but many were corroborated.
Kim imported $650,000 worth of Hennessy’s finest cognac in a single year.
His appetite for women and drink was exceeded by a love for the finest foods.
He hired for his private kitchens a sushi chef from Tokyo and a pizza chef from Italy, both of whom wrote accounts of their experiences.
At the time, North Korea was in the midst of a famine that would eventually kill as many as 2 million people, up to 10 percent of the population, and leave many of them permanently stunted.
Homeless, starving children became a common sight at North Korean train stations.
Kim nonetheless sent couriers on shopping excursions to buy rice cakes in Tokyo, mangoes in Thailand, cheese in France.

And what happens now with the Great Face-Stuffer gone?
The son could keep the hideous shit going like the dad: “The latest move indicates Kim Jong-Un is being put forward formally as a powerful leader like his father,” Sejong Institute analyst Cheong Seong-Chang, a specialist in the succession issue, told the AFP news agency in October. “Jong-Un is known to have the potential to become a strong, ruthless leader,” added Cheong. “He has a take-charge personality.”

Time will tell if he takes charge of some awful shit.

A whole shitload of people don’t deserve any kind of forum, much less on national TV.
On Sunday, nit-twits appeared all over the tube, bat-shit crazy people who shouldn’t even be allowed to face a third-grade gym class, much less pretend they have any kind of sense.
The media in this country sucks.

(Illustration found here).

CBS‘ Face the Nation took the cake — Bob Schieffer should be way-ashamed of himself.
First, pure-crazed Michele Bachmann blubbered that President Obama was an asshole for pulling US troops out of Iraq — seemingly without a clue that it was all (and ‘all‘ means all) George Jr.’s doing, both going and getting out.
Michelle muttered: If you look at every time we’ve deposed a dictator, the United States has always left troops behind to be able to enforce the fragile peace.
In this case, once we’re finished in Iraq, we’ll have more troops in Honduras than we’ll be leaving behind in Iraq.
Schieffer tried to explain to the mind of Michele that the Iraqi people don’t want the US in their country.
Mickey wouldn’t have anything to do with that, replying in a nasty, condescending and racial retort: Well again the — the problem is we’ve — we’ve put a lot of deposit into this situation with Iraq.
And to think that we are so disrespected and they — they have so little fear of the United States that there would be nothing that we would gain from this, that’s why I’ve called on President Obama to return to the negotiating table. The — the Obama administration has said they’ve gotten everything they wanted. They got exactly nothing.
I believe that Iraq should reimburse the United States fully for the amount of money that we have spent to liberate these people.

And ‘to liberate these people,’ and talk about a shit-faced bullshitter — the Iraqi people didn’t ask to be invaded and losing between 100,000 to a million people in the event don’t make them America lovers.

And to follow-up knuckle-headed Michele was Rick Santorum, one of more useless-clueless twits on either side of the political spectrum.
Schieffer also asked Trick-Rick about Obama’s action via Iraq.
Santorum, like Michele, revealed a zero understanding of the last decade: And I think that’s the reason people were so upset that, you know, we’ve lost — in many respects we’ve lost control and lost the war in — in Iraq, because we have Iran having broadened its sphere of influence. And we see what’s — what’s going on.

‘What’s going on?’ — this ain’t no Marvin Gaye song, Rick.

And one of the worse, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, appeared on CNN and continued to exhibit that cold, self-centered sense that oozes from any GOPers pores.
Mush-faced McConnell says firefighters and police ain’t that important, in fact, there ain’t nothing more important than politics.
Via Raw Story:

CNN’s Candy Crowley reminded the Kentucky Republican that a recent Gallup/USA Today poll found that 75 percent of Americans supported President Barack Obama’s plan to provide additional money for teachers, police and firefighters.
“Republicans helped not break a filibuster, if you will, in a procedural vote,” Crowley explained.
“You basically got rid of that jobs bill which would have given money to the states, designed to hire or retain fireman, policeman and teachers. When we look at the polling, 75 percent of Americans supported that and yet, the Republicans were against it.
So, how do you justify that in your mind?”
“Well, Candy, I’m sure that Americans do,” McConnell remarked.
“I certainly do approve of firefighters and police.
The question is whether the federal government ought to be raising taxes on 300,000 small businesses in order to send money down to bail out states for whom firefighters and police work.
They’re local and state employees.”
“The question is whether the federal government can afford to be bailing out states. I think the answer is no.”

Crowley then noted the Republican party appears as going against the will of the American people in several areas, including the most-heinous tax on the rich, and an infrastructure bill upcoming in the Senate.
Mitch responded:

“Yeah, these bills are designed on purpose not to pass,” McConnell asserted.
“I mean, the president is deliberately trying to create an issue here.
Look, the American people don’t think, I’m sure, that it’s a good idea.
Four out of five of the so-called millionaires are business owners, over 300,000 small businesses in our country that hire people.
I don’t think the American people think that raising taxes on business, small business in the middle of this economic situation we find ourselves in is a particularly good idea.”

Indeed — out of step with the vast majority of US peoples.

And to prove it, last Friday the Senate knocked-down two jobs bills, one from Obama (blocked by every GOP senator), the other jibbed-up by the GOP (blocked by Democrats) — McConnell again played the politics-is-all-there-is card, and spun the spin:

“It’s hard to understand why Democrats would block this bipartisan effort to protect jobs — a provision of the president’s bill,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement after the vote.
“I’ve said a number of times in recent days that the president doesn’t want Congress to pass his jobs bill; he wants to blame Republicans and use it on the campaign trail.”

Nothing but ugly air.

Even has-been Republicans are yapping bullshit — Condi Rice, touting her new mempior, No Higher Honor, defended the horror that is Iraq and George Jr.’s ‘freedom agenda.’
Via the UK’s the Telegraph:

In an interview with the magazine (Newsweek) on Monday Miss Rice also claims that Mr Bush’s decision to invade Iraq under his “freedom agenda” facilitated the revolutions of this year’s Arab Spring.
“There is both a moral case and a practical one for the proposition that no man, woman or child should live in tyranny,” she said.
“Those who excoriate the approach as idealistic or unrealistic missed the point. In the long run, it is authoritarianism that is unstable and unrealistic”.

Once again, either clueless, or just don’t give a shit — sometimes hard to tell the difference.

(Illustration found here).

Yeah, well, not so fast there Juan Ponce de León: One might want to place a sorrowful hold on those alliterated adjectives upchucked as literary bullshit.

As a memory’s narrative goes: One can think back, but one can’t call back.

(Illustration found here).

I spent my formative years on the Gulf, enjoying the endless-vacation-like environment of Florida’s panhandle, never truly realizing back then its worth or how truly fortunate we were in having a home in one of the world’s most beautiful locations.
In fact, the panhandle (the major exception being Pensacola) was virtually unknown to the average Jack-American until the late 1960s when apparently everybody and his asshole-brother discovered it, causing the place to go to shit in a wire basket.
Oh, the beaches remained pure white, the waters continued warm, inviting and fairly-clean for the most part, but the entire area quickly became mega-crowded as condos, apartments, houses, golf courses and all other kinds of so-called civilized advancements filled the once pristine near-empty spaces.
For a few quick years, though, growing up there was amazing as “Flipper” and near-about as much fun.

Stretching from the state’s most-northwest boundary with Alabama eastward to about where the coastline makes its ragged jut to the south — leading to Tampa/St.Petersburg, Sarasota and on downward to the Keys — the Florida panhandle is mostly empty, save for the western coastline, as most of the area is still pretty-dense forest or swamp, occasionally spotted with small towns as a ride along I-10 west from Tallahassee will attest.

Panama City Beach has has always been the hot spring break destination for young revelers from Georgia and Alabama; even back when I was a shy, budding-neurotic in high school, PC was where cool, gorgeous chicks seemed to gather in great numbers.

And Destin — in the early 1960s just a nearly-unknown, quiet fishing-village-like place — was where baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams (not the honey-voiced homeless guy from recent nowadays) and other worthies of that era came to fish the Gulf.
One memory of that period was my family’s near-daily visit to the Destin fishing docks and watch the boats return in the evening with the day’s catch — and in less than an hour, a pure circus of fishing admiration.
However, I’ve never really got fishing (my little brother really, really did) and the actual fish didn’t make as much impression on me as did the guy who’d caught it.
Now more than 50 years later, more of a nostalgic-honey-coated remembrance of seagulls, people enjoying people and quiet, easy sunsets.
And like a lot of other places all over, history has inflated the self-styled “World’s Luckiest Fishing Village,” to another level of location where Britney Spears owns a £631,000 apartment and has been marketed/packaged as destin.com.

Mega attraction for the region, naturally, is the pure-white beaches, created supposedly by mostly quartz, pure silica sand, washed down from the Appalachian Mountains over a shitload of time.
The sand “squeaked” or “chirped” when you walked on it.
Taken together as a whole, between the sun and white sand, you could easily fry your ass bad during a beach outing — people picking at peeling skin, however how gross, was nonetheless a familiar sight — and 40 years ago there were miles and miles and miles of near-empty white beaches.

One lingering sad, side-effect, however, of that Florida sand is the shitness of all other beaches in comparison.
Some parts of California’s beach sand actually looks like shit — and having never traveled to the Caribbean or the Bahamas or the south Pacific — that remembered stretch along the panhandle carries the personal title of most-beautiful beaches on the planet.

Away from all that pearly white was the land of the locals — few tourists ventured much-north off the coast — where my family relocated from Alabama in 1957.

(Illustration of Choctawhatchee Bay found here).

Choctaw Bay is an estuary, where Gulf salt water and fresh inland water intermingle, the bay’s only direct entrance to the Gulf is East Pass, just wee-west of Destin.
Growing up, I learned to spell the place only by doing this: Choc-ta-what-chee (or use the short, local version, ‘Choctaw‘).
Still, it was years for me before the whole spelling became near-natural — if one lives in a region, one learns to spell its local places.

My family moved to the western shore of Choctaw Bay, an area dominated (as is much of the central panhandle) by humongous Eglin Air Force Base (seen at left in the above photo, even from space); my dad was in the civil service with the US Department of Defense (we’d just returned a few months earlier from a two-year-post in Japan) and he’d secured a job at Eglin.

The biggest air force base in the world — 724 square miles of land range and 101,000 square miles of air space, which extends over the eastern third of the Gulf — Eglin is also home to a major military Air Proving Ground Center, where all kinds of aircraft, munitions and other assorted nefarious devices are tested.
One near-recent noted test was for an enlarged bunker-buster bomb, constructed in such a way to create an experience similar to Vietnam’s most-wonderful “daisy cutter,” only way-worse, used a few times in the opening rounds of the original Afghan war way back in 2001.

And like all regions located near any military installation, especially one as big as Eglin, everybody and just about everything in the entire area was somehow connected to the base — most of my friends were military brats, or civil-service brats, or in some capacity related directly or indirectly to the vast inner workings of the base.
Of course, mingled minutely amongst the military were the home-born locals, people my daddy seemed to always call, “fish heads” (a native of the west Florida coast), but to my upwardly-mobile middle class, racially-stained, though mega-naive view they seemed to me during those times more in the ‘poor white trash‘ category as anything else — memories remember me mostly feeling sorry for them.

Bigotry is inbred, or so it seems. And having grown up in the US deep south, bigotry is beyond horror, intolerance so much part of the system of life, it’s near invisible (to the white man, of course, not to the black) and the disease so deep, deep-rooted in the white religious-right it can’t help but breed a rather vicious form of hypocrisy.
(Maybe a later post on the mechanics of that attitude toward racial bigotry).

Anyway, back to Eglin Air Force Base and the early 1960s — my family eventually ended up in Shalimar, then a real-small town about three miles from of Eglin’s south gate, right on Choctaw Bay and a junction of two bayous.
In those early, long ago years — 1959 to 1972 for myself, with my parents moving back to Alabama in 1980 — that little peninsula-like knob of land was in the days of a black-and-white JFK, a playground of natural innocence, my own three-year Camelot (fifth through the eighth grades).

Shalimar is situated along major four-lane Eglin Parkway, and in them be-gone days, except for some homes along the shore line and a few houses sprinkled about amongst pines and palmetto, most of the town’s inhabitants didn’t live far off that main drag — the rest of the place was woods and swamp, a most-incredible place to explore and play.
Of course, the town grew, and grew quickly — by the end of the 1960s, a huge chunk of those woods and swamps were replaced by an 18-hole golf course and subsequent housing-subdivision (shown as Lake Lorraine on the little map just above) — and a Goggle Earth look at the place always makes me sad.
And my dad, I guess, helped the process along.
He was one of the town’s first mayors — mention is made of him at shalimarflorida.org:

When Tom Maulden was elected Mayor in 1974, he wanted a real Town Hall with a real Police Department. Blackburn (the Shalimar’s first ‘Police Chief John Blackburn) was hired on as the “Police Department.”
The beginnings were sparse.
Chief Blackburn didn’t have a police car, nor did he have any crime fighting equipment.
He patrolled the Town in his own car.
The Eglin Military Police donated the first RADAR equipment to the Police Department.
…
At that time, Shalimar also hired its first maintenance man and moved to 13 Cherokee Road, a few houses from the current Town Hall.
In April 1979 when Mr. Tom Maulden offered to sell the house at 2 Cherokee Road for $46,000 to the Town, the Commission agreed to pay cash and immediately moved into its new home — a former single family residence.
This old single family facility was extensively renovated and expanded in CY2001.

Dude, be cool, that ‘old single family facility‘ was where I spent them above-mentioned Camelot years.
In fact, while in the eighth-grade I got to see JFK in the flesh.
The visit to Eglin was briefly noted in a USAF Thunderbirds history: President John F. Kennedy was among the spectators at a May 1962 airshow at Eglin AFB, Florida, and in 1963, the “Tbirds” made their first European and North African tours.
The county school system suspended classes the day of JFK’s visit, so a friend and I got on Eglin via his aunt, who worked on base, and had staked out a spot along the president’s motorcade route, and seemingly had waited for hundreds of hours under a baking sun when he came into view, standing in back of an open limousine, waving to people on both sides of the street.
We waved back, don’t know if he actually saw us, but we could see him pretty plain — big guy, with that way-familiar face on a big head with big shoulders — and he quickly disappeared down a small one-lane road heading out to the runway and Air Force One.

Life in May 1962 was fairly simple.
And although the US performed nine nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific during the month, and beyond the paranoid Cold War, the globe was some-what way-more peaceful (or it seems).
The so-called Cuban missile crisis wasn’t until that October, which shortly after the fact only enhanced JFK’s perceived Camelot and even brightened more so its fuel, the Great American Dream — two US home-grown fairy tales.

Snug in the cocoon of illusion, however, makes for a different view.
During those long-ago Camelot days, a whole shitload of activity was water-centric, from swimming, boating, fishing, swimming, water-skiing, walking shorelines/beaches, swimming…one gets the picture…especially for a middle-class, dreamy-headed teen-ager in a way-naive era.

In the lower-eastern corner of Choctaw Bay is the mouth of the Choctawhatchee River (shown on the map at left), its origin found in middle-eastern Alabama, not far from the Georgia state line, and flows south into the bay.
One of the main tributaries off the Choctaw River, is the Pea River (yes, that’s ‘pea,’ but as in sweet pea), which begins as beaver swamps in southeast Alabama, meanders a little west, then back east bit through a few counties, one being the place of my birth, Pike County.
The Pea joins the Choctaw River at about the Florida state line.

My parents build a retirement home on property right on the Pea River.
As did other relatives, who either lived on or near the river — it was a part of a landscape called the ‘wiregrass region,’ which included not only southeast Alabama, but parts of south Georgia and northwest Florida as well (named for the kind of grass, called wiregrass, found in the area).

In my neck of the woods — Pike, Dale and Coffee counties — the Pea River was also a socio-economic barrier: People north of the river tended to be viewed as a bit more drunkard, poor and slothful, closer to lawless status, than those south of the Pea, who were looked upon to be ‘good folks,’ i.e., less drinkin’, fightin’ and such (hypocrisy seemed to flourish much-much-easier south of the river, however).
My parents bridged the gap: She was from south of the river, and he from the north, and there was much acrimony for awhile, from what I could tell in my earliest years, but my dad slowly put aside those quasi-outlaw tendencies of the poor and ignorant to obtain a certain level of life, which included later being elected mayor of a Florida town.
And was ultimately viewed with much affection and trust by peoples both north and south of the Pea River (he died in 1984, my mom in 1998).

And having performed a great deal of swimming in the Pea River during my younger days, the chances are way-high that I’ve also peed in the Pea River — you can pretty-much bet your wet ass anybody that’s took a swim in the Pea has put pee in the Pea.
(Theoretically-biologically, and not to mention way-metaphorically, there were visits to my grandparents in Alabama when I would swim in the Pea River, pee in the river (remember, I’m in the sixth-grade), return back to Shalimar, later on walk a block and go swimming in Choctaw Bay, thus, having a chance (though, way-way-minute) of swimming in way-diluted strains of my own urine).

Thus, the Gulf of Mexico is tied to beyond just the white-beached shoreline, but way-up into soil and life hundreds of miles away — all kinds of fish, birds, and all kinds of other animals and plant life dwell among what has through nature’s time created an environment inter-locked and depended upon waters lapping up from the Gulf.
And, thus, prey to mankind’s Camelot.

Of course, Camelot itself is a lie based on a misty myth bedazzled in journalism — actually living in those Kennedy years, no one called, or even thought about that particular period as any kind of anything, much less a Camelot.
Jackie Kennedy in cohorts with journalist/family friend Theodore White cooked-up the “classic metaphor“ for a heroic national myth to rescue Jack Kennedy’s presidency from reality.

In my own case, the early 1960s were just a good time to be young in that environment –  though, coincidently, within a short space due to circumstance and events, starting in early summer 1963, before Kennedy’s death, and lasting at least through the Beatles on Ed Sullivan a few weeks afterwards, that ’good time being young‘ sense evaporated.

(Illustration found here).

An illusion created by the past made unreal by history.
And Jackie O, herself, has popped up in the news — this year is the 50th-anniversary of JFK’s presidency, and in that regard, a new oral-history book, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which also includes CDs of the audio of interviews she had with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in March 1964.
Reportedly, those tapes paint a picture of a then-34-year-old widow as variously audacious, narrow-minded and unsparingly tart (via LA Times).
And Jackie, though, in “the extreme stages of grief” displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye (via New York Times).
Either deliberate or not, Jackie also really knew how to handle historical public perception.

Despite the tart mouth and the public-tell-all, came this apt comment from a piece in the Christian Science Monitor: But bits of the book remind you why at one point Americans could mention the Kennedy presidency in conjunction with the word “Camelot” and not wince.

Those Americans were most especially us baby boomers.
If you have any inclination to the progressive, you took the bait, hook-line-and-sinker, on the myth of JFK’s Camelot.
And the myth dove-tailed nicely with the late 1960s and Vietnam.

Just as a few simple words from a Broadway musical could unleash a romantic myth, there’s the simpleton fancy that life should continue on as before, only getting better — never-ending human economic growth is a myth — an economic Camelot, if you will.
My family climbed the ladder of the American Dream in the 1950s, a period of robust economic optimism (despite the Russkies), and indeed, for a time appearances indicated life could continue bigger, better.
The last near-200 years, the engine for global civilization moving forward is that economic societies grow and continually expand, thus, moving humanity on down history street.

In 1972 — with the US and the Western world at its peak — was published a book, “The Limits to growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind,” which pretty-much outlined nowadays (though, at the time the book was met with much criticism) in a curb on this so-called expansion.
Physical chemistry professor and writer Ugo Bardi explains about “The Limits to Growth” at cassandra’s legacy: The authors had developed a model that could keep track of a large number of variables and of their interactions as the system changed with time. They found that the world’s economy tended to collapse at some time in 21st century. The collapse was caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution (this last element we would see today as related to global warming). Only specific measures aimed a curbing growth and limit population could avoid collapse.

Yet here we are nearly 40 years later.

The global economic meltdown is just part-and-parcel for a situation that just can’t keep on, keeping on — the resources just ain’t there.
Former World Bank economist Herman Daly in a May 2008 article at The Oil Drum:

The growth economy is failing.
In other words, the quantitative expansion of the economic subsystem increases environmental and social costs faster than production benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high consumption countries.
Given the laws of diminishing marginal utility and increasing marginal costs this should not have been unexpected.
And even new technology sometimes makes it worse.

In other words, life as we know it…

(Illustration found here).

Fueling that economic machine, of course, is oil.
And it’s not just the obvious, like cars, airplanes, and ships at sea — oil dominates the planet:

Oil is everywhere.
It permeates our daily lives in ways we never think about.
It’s in carpeting, furniture, computers and clothing.
It’s in the most personal of products like toothpaste, shaving cream, lipstick and vitamin capsules. Petrochemicals are the glue of our modern lives and even in glue, too.

And that glue is about to harden, get brittle and break into tiny, little pieces.

I actually started this particular post more than a year ago — in June 2010 at the height of the BP horror show in the Gulf of Mexico when it appeared oil would gush out of those pipes for a millennium.
Although the accident was in my old backyard, I never blogged once about the event — instead I opted for daydreaming at the old laptop as the continuing disaster fueled a nostalgic blast from the past.

Although most of the TV news clips were of the New Orleans/Mississippi gulf coast, there was plenty of video of the beaches at Destin, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City Beach, Pensacola, all along my old Camelot haunts — but for some internal reason, I couldn’t put memories into written words, except for little bursts.
So this piece lay buried in my ‘Draft’ box, where I picked at it like some kind of literary sore, adding a paragraph here, removing words from there, doing tons of Google Images search for the early 1960s, or maybe just being caught up in other news of war, death and pestilence, GOPer and Tea Party hypers that once the BP well was capped (supposedly) the post became itself a thing of the past.

Jackie O rekindled the interest.
Since this particular post was on the concept of a Camelot, a myth for just about everything, especially the economic one, and more-than-especially, the Camelot of oil, hearing that strangely-sounding-voice speak across the decades made me really sad.
So sad, apparently, I had to finish this long-winded trope.

And like any good mythical story turned real, the BP disaster in the Gulf is one of those stories that just keeps on giving — and reinforcing the need to go after energy in the worst of places.
An example: The reportedly huge oil reserves offshore of Brazil, to be producing in about two years, are way, way down yonder.
Ian Wyatt, chief investment strategist at High Yield Wealth (via QFinance):

“… most of the oil in Brazil is in very deep water.
How deep?
Well first they must go down through 6,000 to 9,000 feet of water to access the sea floor…Then through 6,000 feet of rock…Then push further through a layer of salt that’s another 6,000 feet deep…Then finally, at a depth of between 18,000 and 21,000 feet they’ll hit the oil reservoir.
That’s the equivalent of three and a half to four miles down.”

Are you shitting me?
Deepwater Horizon’s drill permit was for 18,000 feet, though, apparently there have been indications the drilling had gone another 7,000 feet further.

Just last week, the BP horror show via the weather: A coastal mayor says tests show tar balls washed onto Alabama’s beaches by a recent tropical storm are from last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon said Tuesday the connection was found in preliminary tests performed by Auburn University. Kennon says additional tests will be conducted to determine more details.
The shit will never be totally gone.

Also last week, a new report indicates more arrogant incompetence by BP led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout:

Other investigations have faulted misreadings of key data, the failure of the blowout preventer to stop the flow of oil to the sea, and other shortcomings by executives, engineers and rig crew members.
Meanwhile, interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press show a BP scientist identified a previously unreported deposit of flammable gas that could have played a role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the oil giant failed to divulge the finding to government investigators for as long as a year.

And this the oil industry which is just about regulating itself — a New York Times piece this week revealed just how horribly operated is those pipelines to get that deep-dug oil to refineries and then on to my Jeep Comanche.
Those recent big spills into the Yellowstone and Kalamazoo rivers have drawn attention to oversight of the 167,000-mile system of hazardous liquid pipelines crisscrossing the nation.
Add least we forget, also include that hazardous PG&E-maintained natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, which exploded last September, killing eight people and destroying a neighborhood.
And last month, the National Transportation Safety Board jammed on PG&E, tore the utility a new asshole, reporting the company:

…exploited the lack of monitoring by regulators, who mistakenly placed “blind trust” in the utility.
…
“This represents a failure of the entire system — a system of checks and balances that should have prevented this disaster,” said Robert L. Sumwalt, an NTSB board member. “The seam weld may have been the technical reason, but this was an organizational accident.”

Not only does one have to contend with the high-minded concept of ‘peak oil,’ but having an enormous accident-waiting-to-happen in one’s own backyard.

Mankind is poised most-likely beyond the precipice, gripped in the double pincers of peak oil and climate change — odd ironic circle as both are nefariously interconnected.
Camelot as confounded.

(Illustration found here).

And just chucked-full of black humor.

Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long…
– Ogden Nash, “Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours,” New Yorker, 1959 April 4 .

Happy memories of un-reality.

A major problem is the blow-hole GOP – climate zombies — who lie out their ass concerning evidence on this massive problem facing everybody.
And with weather-shocking record fiscal results: A new report from the National Climatic Data Center shows that in 2011 alone, there have been nine U.S. weather-related disasters that have each caused more than $1 billion in damages. The report estimates these disasters have cost the U.S. $35 billion so far this year. And we’ve still got four months left to go.

(Illustration found here).

And even as the NOAA reports the world has been hot, is hot and is getting hotter still.
From Climate Central:

Abnormally warm conditions in much of the United States, Northern Europe, Western and Eastern Russia, and parts of the Arctic helped propel July 2011 to the seventh-warmest July on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported yesterday.
This makes July the 317th month in a row that global average surface temperatures were above normal.
The year-to-date is now the 11th warmest period on average.
In the U.S., July was the fourth-warmest such month on record, with long-lasting heat waves affecting nearly all areas east of the Rocky Mountains.
Along the West Coast, however, conditions were cooler-than-average.
The heat toppled thousands of records (see our interactive data explorer for details on record warm overnight temperatures), and Oklahoma set a particularly notable record, showing the highest-ever statewide average monthly temperature for any month in any state in the US since instrument records began in 1895.

And warm sea waters:

In the Arctic, the sea ice melt season is entering its final stretch before the Sun sinks lower on the horizon and cooler air arrives once again.
According to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the average Arctic sea ice extent during July was the smallest since satellite monitoring began in 1979, at 21.6 percent below average.

And even the earth’s lesser animals are on the quickening move.
From AFP via Raw Story:

Climate change appears to be forcing many of the world’s creatures to migrate to more favorable locales up to three times faster than previously believed, a study said Thursday.
…
“These changes are equivalent to animals and plants shifting away from the equator at around 20 centimeters per hour, for every hour of the day, for every day of the year,” said project leader Chris Thomas, biology professor at the University of York.
“This has been going on for the last 40 years and is set to continue for at least the rest of this century.”
The study, which appears in the journal Science, was described by York ecology professor and co-author Jane Hill as “a summary of the state of world knowledge about how the ranges of species are responding to climate change.
“Our analysis shows that rates of response to climate change are two or three times faster than previously realized,” she said.

One must remember that a major stroke-turn of climate change the last few years appears to respond to that horrible disclaimer from science reports on the effects: “…faster than previously realized…”
Climate change is here with the worse of it coming pronto!

Yet the shit-slinging assholes of the right are not helping — bullshit spreads.
Listen to a moron  hard enough and long enough…Meanwhile, skepticism about global warming is growing among Americans. A recent Gallup poll found that just 50 percent of respondents think global warming is caused by human activities, down from 61 percent in 2003.

The nit-twit GOP people running for president are a dangerous, amoral lot.
However, they really don’t give a shit about climate change because it’s not at the high of politics — Rick Perry’s fine-tuned ignorance won’t matter because the GOP believes the public don’t give a shit either.
From Politico: Still, Republican campaign veterans shrug off the distinction on climate science as a third-tier issue that will be quickly overshadowed as the candidates engage on topics like the economy and how to balance spending cuts and entitlement programs. “People will tell you it matters,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former top economic adviser during John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. “It doesn’t.”

Read a real-good wrap-up/view of these dumb-ass Republicans at the UN blog, where the lede says it all: The GOP presidential candidates worry me.

They should worry everybody.

And, really, for some crazed reason known only to a crazed mind, Republicans call-out climate change while grabbing big, big, real-big bucks from energy companies.
This denial, however, could backlash and bite ‘em hard on the ass.

(Illustration found here).

Meanwhile, the GOP peoples are striking hard at the US Environmental Protection Agency as if it were the prime cause of all the misery and heartache suffered by Americans — the EPA has been around since 1970 after being okayed by Republican Dick Nixon.
One big-mouth loon, Michele Bachmann, winner of the Iowa Straw Poll last weekend, has continued to hammer on the EPA like a front door to an asylum.
Bachmann blubbered earlier this month: “I pledge to you I’m not a talker. I’m a doer,” she said…“And I guarantee you the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) will have doors locked and lights turned off and they will only be about conservation,” she said earlier today at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids. “It will be a new day and a new sheriff in Washington, D.C.”
In a GOP debate in June, Bachmann said the EPA should be renamed “the Job-Killing Organization of America.”
Meanwhile, she once had hands out for EPA money.
From HuffPost:

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Huffington Post with three separate federal agencies reveals that on at least 16 separate occasions, Bachmann petitioned the federal government for direct financial help or aid.
A large chunk of those requests were for funds set aside through President Obama’s stimulus program, which Bachmann once labeled “fantasy economics.”
Bachmann made two more of those requests to the Environmental Protection Agency, an institution that she has suggested she would eliminate if she were in the White House.

One might call Bachman, at the very least, a hypocrite bitch.

The big bang at the EPA for these clowns is that the agency wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s major utilities, which strikes hard at the GOP cash flow — oil, coal and gas cash.

One dangerous asshole is Rick Perry of Texas, a governor of lying greatness.
From Think Progress:

You may have a point there, because I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized.
I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.
And I think we are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.
Yes our climate’s changed, they’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed.
But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have in some cases found to be manipulating this information.

Perry blubbers of money manipulated — He himself received $11 million in contributions from oil and gas companies between 1998 and 2010 (from Climate Progress).
Perry is a hypocritical bitch-bastard.
And if one thinks Perry’s been a most-excellent governor, look again.
Check out a good post w/chart on just how bad he has been for the state at The Big Picture.
It’s horrible.

The only ray of sunshine off this shit is that all the blubbering might explode in the GOP face.
From the New York Times yesterday:

Opposition to regulation and skepticism about climate change have become tenets of Republican orthodoxy, but they are embraced with extraordinary intensity this year because of the faltering economy, high fuel prices, the Tea Party passion for smaller government and an activist Republican base that insists on strict adherence to the party’s central agenda.
But while attacks on the E.P.A., climate-change science and environmental regulation more broadly are surefire applause lines with many Republican primary audiences, these views may prove a liability in the general election, pollsters and analysts say.
The American people, by substantial majorities, are concerned about air and water pollution, and largely trust the E.P.A., national surveys say.
“Not only are these positions irresponsible, they’re politically problematic,” said David Jenkins of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that believes that conservation should be a core value of the party.
“The whole idea that you have to bash the E.P.A. and run away from climate change to win a Republican primary has never been borne out.
Where’s the evidence?”

The evidence is in those GOP presidential contenders — a wild and dangerous bunch, cruel and with absolutely no sense of moral compassion.
We hope the US voter knows.

Not so fast there, Sherlock.

Humanity loves delusion if the alternative is unthinkable.
Yet even as the morning starts to break here on California’s northern coast, so many situations have put the planet in such peril that the imagination cannot cope with the horror coming quicker than one could say “fiddle-sticks.”
And apparently at this point, there’s not much anyone can do about it except to gird thy loins and get ready to rumble.

(Illustration of Picasso’s ‘Girl with a Mandolin‘ found here).

Even US peoples have a sense of this delusion of the future.
In a poll last month, 84 percent think the economy currently sucks and a good 59 percent say it will continue to suck for at least a year from now in a “very” poor state.
And the ludicrous debt ceiling fiasco just completed (or just started) allows US peoples (and the world’s peoples for that matter) to really witness how the government is now non-functional — our people in DC can’t even budget the FAA.
Neil Bolen, a FAA civil engineer, summed up the whole shit: “Congress doesn’t care about me at all,” Bolen told CNN. “They’re not done with their work and they go on vacation. How do they do that?”
Yes indeed.

Even all this pessimism, most US peoples still walk around as if all will eventually be okay.
Despite the two biggest game-changers in world history coming at us faster than you can say “fiddle sticks” not many are paying attention.
Peak oil sounds farfetched, but the reality of it really means the end of cheap oil — the vast, vast majority do not comprehend the implications — within a decade the engines will coast to a stop.
And that ain’t that long from now, Sherlock.

And climate change?
Despite the boiling, burnt nose on the faces of US peoples sweltering in record-breaking heat, there’s no great awakening to why.
And despite the heat boiling sidewalks and creating a blood-red reservoir, climate change is not mentioned by the MSM.
From Climate Progress: Our science-based institutions, like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, have no difficulty straightforwardly explaining the connection between human-caused global warming and these monster heatwaves. If only our news-based institutions could do the same.
And in turn, inform US peoples.

All which rattles the dream of life’s permanence.
No one like to think of any kind of end, especially to a most-privileged existence found in the US.
My thinking on this subject was cued by an essay by Rod Dreher, a US writer and editor on social, religious and economic issues, on fear and delusion.
The post is found at RealClear Religion.
A few highlights, especially as modification never stops:

Some things never change.
We are living through an extraordinary time, one in which we are desperate to believe that things for our civilization aren’t as precarious as they are, but in which reality advances without pity on the stronghold of our self-delusion.
The world has just witnessed the appalling spectacle of the American government risk the full faith and credit of the United States in a high-stakes game of chicken over the debt ceiling.
Though we appear to have swerved at the last second to avoid a cliff-plunge, everybody knows that the country’s fiscal policy continues to be driven by bipartisan recklessness.
…
This is not just an economic crisis.
At bottom, it is a moral and spiritual crisis.
We Americans have been living as if the historically extraordinary bounty of material wealth and personal freedom are the natural state of mankind.
We — and in a democracy, the government is “we” — have been living far beyond our fiscal means for far too long, and punishing any politician who failed to lie to us about the free lunch.
But our disastrous failure of prudence is not only financial.
Take the indulgent stewardship of our natural resources.
While we are (rightly) consumed by the perils of climate change, for example, few people are paying attention to the growing topsoil crisis.
The world is losing vast amounts of precious, hard-to-replace topsoil each year, much of it disappearing because of wasteful agricultural techniques.
Have we become so accustomed to full supermarket shelves that we think they will continue to replenish themselves infinitely, no matter what we do, or fail to do?
…
Tinder’s essay poleaxed me because it made me realize that the world of abundance and liberty I took to be my birthright as a young American was an illusion.
That is to say, its reality was contingent on maintaining and renewing convictions, practices, and disciplines that increasing wealth and personal autonomy make harder to observe.
It’s a story as old as Rome, as old as the human race.
…
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said during the depths of the Great Depression.
Given where the country was at that moment in its history, that confident pronouncement might have been the right thing to say.
We aren’t there yet, and God willing, we will do what we must to avoid calamity.
For now, it seems to me that the wiser course was suggested by the gloomy British financial consultant, who, reflecting last week on the extremely dire prospects facing his heavily indebted nation, warned BBC listeners, “One thing worse than fear is living in fantasy.”

And the only way to get ride of that fear and the fantasy is to wake-the-fuck up!

Dawn is still about 90 minutes away here on California’s northern coastline, and a thick Pacific fog compels this little corner of a world-gone-utterly bonkers to remain quiet and still.
And bonkers be it — there’s enough ugly going on right now to either make me so sad I want to cry, or get so mad I want to hit myself in the face hard with a claw hammer.

Sucking on an organic yerba maté drink, occasionally taking a bite off a big, delicious bran muffin, life inside this quiet, still moment is so-so-much better than a huge, humongous part of that world beyond — in some places there are no quiet, still moments, and for shit-sure there’s no mint maté drink and absolutely no bran muffins.

In the US, there’s a bad twist going on as the U.S. Census Bureau cited that 21 percent of America’s kids under age 18 in 2009 lived below the poverty line, while 13 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 lived in poverty.
In 2008, 17 million households, 14.6 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were ‘food insecure’ (old definition: no food), the highest number ever recorded in the United States.
One in five US children require food assistance.
What a mess.

Yet, that ain’t nothing to what’s happening the Horn of Africa where a drought has finally reached the famine stage and people are dying quickly, especially children.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the number of Somalis in need of humanitarian assistance has sharply increased to 3.7 million people in the last six months.

People are dying for lack of food — a lot of people would weep at a bit of my bran muffin.

And from Voice of America:

A new report issued by Brown University says the cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and operations in Pakistan — will cost the country nearly $4 trillion.
The report’s total is more than three times higher than U.S. President Barack Obama’s estimate in a recent speech.
When Obama recently announced a drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, he said America’s wars have cost the country $1 trillion dollars.
But a report by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates the total cost at $3.7 trillion.

And $400-a-gallon fuel for Afghanistan — you’ve got to be shitting me.

From former US Congressman Alan Grayson in HuffPost this week:

Last year, we spent $154 billion in appropriated funds on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is in addition to the $549 billion in appropriated funds for the Pentagon — you know, just to keep the lights on.
And the non-appropriated cost of war was even higher — especially when you include the cost of care for the 15% of all the American troops in Iraq who come home with permanent brain abnormalities. According to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the war in Iraq alone is costing us $4 trillion and counting.
That’s more than $13,000 for every one of us, and roughly 8% of our entire net worth as a nation.
The cost of war is enormous.
So enormous that, as I pointed out in H.R. 5353, The War is Making You Poor Act, if we simply funded that cost through the Pentagon’s own budget, rather than through supplemental appropriations, we could eliminate taxes on everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for married couples), and still reduce the deficit by more than $10 billion a year.
…
Guns or butter.
It’s not a new choice.
I prefer butter.
What about you?

Yeah, butter is better on a bran muffin than a F-22 Raptor.