Sunday check-in and a question

 Got a busy week, but wanted to stop by here and download a couple of thoughts. It's been that kind of day.

The good news is that the Bride's job is reduced only 0.1FTE. We can live with that. I'll have to pick up some more contract work here and there, but we keep ALL the medical coverage, and that's what would hurt the most.

The bad news is that the goddamn IRS refuses to believe that I don't have a quarter million stashed in the Maldives.

Long story, but the bottom line is that my mother's IRA didn't get correctly divided into two inherited IRAs - one each for my sister and me - and instead went 1) into her's and then 2) into mine. There it is; it didn;t get turned into hookers and blow, or whatever the fucking IRA thinks it did. 

But the paper trail is complicated, and I'm not sure how to get the sonsofbitches to see how it worked and that I'm not hiding the money. I've got a FTF appointment this coming Friday and I hope to try and lay out what I have and see if I can convince the guy to see reason.

And fucking Trump has never been dinged so much as a nickel for all his tax chiseling? What a fucking fuckstory.

One thing I've been following with increasing incredulity has been the whole "transpanic" thing.

Fortunately Oregon is fairly insulated from this sort of wingnut freakout. It's not that our wingnuts are less freaky - they are, believe me; nobody who's stupid and twitchy enough to think that it's a great notion to move the less-paved parts of the state into Idaho is anything less than a gibbering loon - but that they're much fewer and much less in-our-faces, living as they do out in the hinterlands far from the decadence of civilization.

But as I understand it the whole idea is that these nuts are utterly unhinged on the subject of transgender people who, as I understand it, are people who are born with one set of genital plumbing but don't think and feel in harmony with that.

I joke about "Sharing the bathroom with a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock" but apparently this is a thing and a thing that utterly drives some people out of their tree; someone who goes to the ladies room and pisses standing up in the stall.

Now WHY this freaks these folks out I have no idea.

I dunno know about them, but I go to the can to do my business and I could care less about what the other people there are doing or how they do it. More than that - I don't want to know. Those excretory and urinary functions?

NOT my kink.

But apparently the whole thing - and I can't believe that it's all purely electoral cynicism; some people HAVE to be genuinely freaky about this for it to gain traction - really DOES freak people out, to which my response is complete and utter bafflement.

Seriously?

WTF, folks?

Why?

Why do you give a shit?

If someone with a cock wants to be called Shirley? If someone with a uterus wants to grow a beard and hang out at the bar with the bros? If they want to be called "them" or whatever?

Why on Earth is it your business to even care, much less "do something"?

No, really.

I totally don't get it.

There's so many things to worry about. So many fucked up problems; global warming, MILF Manor, nonalcoholic beer, exploding freight trains, Dick Cheney, the collected works of Sonny Bono. It's almost impossible to list them all, much less worry and "do something" about.

And you want to fuck around with this?

Like I said; I don't get it.

Anyone help a brother out? No kidding; what's the deal? Not with the cynical GQP scum using it for "culture war" ammo, but the CHUDs out there they're driving with it. What's THEIR problem? Why are these gomers so arsed about this?

Who's Your Daddy? - a political morality tale

Taking a break from all things work- and domestic emergency related - we had yet ANOTHER WonderKids Rescue, this time of the Baby Daddy from the Ford-Ranger's-Clutch-Is-Tits-Up-Emergency trip to our mechanic in Sellwood - to settle down with the advertising-rich pages of the World's Worst Newspaper to find...

...yet another "news" item detailing the venereal stylings of one of our public - or should I say "pubic" - figures, in this case the newly-elected Mayor of Portland, Mr. Sam ("No, Not THAT Sam") Adams.

Seems that the randy Mr. Adams was dipping the mayoral wick in someone named, appropriately, Beau Breedlove (Mister Adams is out and proud - there are some things that you really gotta love about Portland). Question in this case being, when Sam decided to emulate the Greek Army and never leave his boy's behind, was said behind attached to a "boy" (i.e. someone who was under the Oregon age of consent of 17) or a "man"?

Apparently this question came up during his election campaign and was violently quashed, to included making the question-asker (an opponent of Da Mare's) a byword and a hissing. But love and a cough cannot be hid, and now the beauteous lad is babbling like a brook and everyone is full of righteous ire that our City Father lied about being the Sugar Daddy of the little twerp. And, again, we're supposed to be fascinated and appalled by the genital posturings and the lying and...

Well, crap.

I'm frankly tired of all this nonsense. I think we've firmly established that some of history's greatest political leaders weren't going to win the Purity League Order of Truth and Decency First Class. They weren't where they were because their publics trusted them not to try and have sex with their sons or daughters. They were there because they were smarter, more practical, more ruthless, better at governing than the alternatives.I've talked before about how our nation - and I have to say that this is beginning to apply to many societies and nations across the globe - seems to be showing the signs of senilty or, at least, an advanced return to juvenility. And other than the popularity of such utterly moronic dreck as "American Idol" (and what passes for "news" on the networks), ISTM that this sort of utterly vapid fixation on the copulatory activities of our leadership is as good an indication as any that Elvis has left the building.

Dubya can run a whole country based on his idiotic "gut". Dick Cheney can deny that the VP is part of the Executive Branch, order torture and lie about it. Legions of officials from city councils all the way to the capitol building are complicit in chicanery, influence-peddling, shilling for malefactors of great wealth and betraying the People of this nation. And yet our "news" media, and we, would rather talk and worry and fuss about who put whose totem pole in whose donut hole.

Did I mention Teh Stupid?

The whole thing makes me vaguely ill and yet makes me think of another time, when we were another People.

In 1884 the Republican Party - whose place as the spoilt children of the victory was assured by the defeat of the Democrats and Confederates in 1865 - ran a nastily corrupt congressman from Maine. James G. "The continental liar" Blaine was a fairly typical mid-Victorian U.S. Representative, thoroughly in the pocket of the wealthy and involved in the sorts of unsavory deals that pretty much defined "politics" between the end of the Civil War and the reform movement of the turn of the century. This guy, though, was SO nasty that even the other Republicans couldn't stomach him; the contrast between the Mugwumps' loathing of Blaine and the current gang of GOP idiots obesiance to Rush Limbaugh proving that Republicans have descended a long way down the evolutionary scale since 1884 from true humanity to somewhere between the lemurs and the more developed species of fish.

But as luck would have it Blaine's opponent, Grover Cleveland, had handed the GOP a gift when ten years earlier he had danced the horizontal mambo with a rather...difficult...young woman named Maria Halprin that resulted in a strapping lad that Cleveland provided with child support.

Naturally - since Americans then loved a spicy sex story as much as we do now - the tale came to light. And the GOP, who had belatedly realized that their dirty candidate was as popular as a Palestinian oompah band at an AIPAC convention, siezed on the story and ran it round the wires. Blaine campaign crowds marched past Cleveland supporters chanting "Ma, ma, where's my pa!"The horrified Dems ran to Cleveland: was this true? Yep, ol' Grove said, and I'd swive her again and twice on Sunday. Oh dear, oh dear, what shall we do? wailed the Dems, to which Cleveland simply replied:

"Tell the truth."

What an amazing concept! Tell the truth; our candidate has genitals and uses them. So what? You're electing a president, not the proctor of morals at a girl's school. As a smart American, who'd you rather have - the bought-and-paid-for lackey of your plutocratic masters, or a decent man who once decided to do the nasty with an attractive woman?

The story goes that the day after the election Cleveland's supporters marched past the dejected Republicans chanting:

"Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House! Ha, ha, ha!"

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is.

Do I want my "leaders" thinking with their little head(s)? But, then again, what the hell do all these connubial conniptions get us, other than a fixation on the groins of the people that we hope and expect will get us from point A to point B by using what's above their shoulders rather than below their navels?

Overall, I suspect that what this stuff really tells us is something about the cognitive abilities of ourselves, our fellow citizens and the people who own our news media.

And I suspect that the story it tells is less encouraging to our continued political health than the cautionary tale of our new Mayor Adams and the boy across the Willamette with a bottom like a peach.

Who swam quite well, thank you.

MWM/MWF ISO hot Republic for NSA 3SOME

Y'know what?

Screw Thuycidides and all that deep, heavy, philosophical metaphysics crap. All you need to know about the 2008 election is summed up in the movie "Booty Call".

Yep. The GOP - McSame and the Northern Exposure - is off on another electoral booty call.

And we know, that based on past experience, that once they get into America's governmental pants they'll do what they always do: flail around uselessly, pleasing only themselves, clueless and greedy, ignoring the mutual satisfaction of their victim in their relentless quest for what's best for them.

And, after they've gotten their nut (deregulated everything in sight for the greater profit of their corporate masters, lined their pockets and the pockets of their cronies, gone as far as possible to satisfy their christopathic legions with back-to-the-Victorian-Era social policymaking) they'll grin at our fury, our impotent anger and frustration with the results of this goatscrew - the battered infrastructure and ripped social fabric and shredded national honor - and sneer "Wassamatter, babe? Am I just too much man for ya?"

Fucktards. God DAMN them!

The problem the U.S. has right now is that the party that has figured out how to win elections can't fuckin' govern worth a damn. And the party whose goals are closer to the general good can't fuckin' win elections.

Good Christ! We're so fuckin' screwed.