ROMAN HANDS

Roman Polanski, as we speak, is free again.
Or rather he is under house arrest in his chalet in Switzerland where he has "entertained" young girls for years, according to The New Yorker.
Too bad. He never got what was coming to him.
I wish I could send him back in time to 1977 and lock him up in prison for two years.
I wish he'd been subjected to forced sex every day, where huge men would pat him on the cheeks and tell him how cute he was before they did to him what he did to that 13-year-old girl.
Maybe after two or three years he would get the point: Forcing yourself on children is not OK, no matter who you are, or how famous you are, or what else you have been through, or what you think.
It's a lesson he never seems to have learned.
Maybe it isn't too late.

SUMO GOLF?

You have got to be kidding.
Golf has been admitted to the Olympics?
Why? Golf isn't even a real sport. Sure, it takes great concentration and skill, but so does cooking an omelet. So does making love. So does bridge. OK, it takes more physical skill, and Tiger Woods looks like he works out.
But golf?
Ridiculous.
Pretty soon every physical skill will be in the Olympics.
What about billiards?
Bowling?
Miniature golf?
Where do you draw the line?
I don't think archery should be in, or badminton, or table tennis, or handball, or synchronized swimming, or sailing. All those are in now. They don't seem right either.
If we're going to have golf, what about competitive eating?
The most hotdogs, or the most tacos, or the most pancakes?
What about competitive singing? American Idol?
Ballroom dancing? Those people certainly sweat.
Writing? A poetry slam?
I think golf might work if you combined it with a real sport. How about sumo golf, with those big sumo wrestlers playing golf and fighting on the greens?
That would be fun to watch.
And it would be a real sport.

OBAMA FOR PEACE!

It was amazing today. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. I was shocked at first. I even laughed out loud.
And then I thought about it.
Yes, it was undeserved. He hasn't done anything yet.
But on the other hand, it was wonderful.
Because he represents hope.
Our new president spreads hope around the world.
Hope for peace.
Hope for a rational and non-ideological approach to the world's problems.
Hope for Israel and the Palestinians.
Hope for the starving Africans.
Hope for Arabs and Asians, hope for Muslims and Christians and Jews.
Hope for a peaceful resolution to the conflicts between immigrants and their reluctant hosts in Europe.
Hope for an end to racism.
Hope for an end to senseless wars.
Hope for a stronger economy.
Hope for the world's environment.
Hope for a better way and a break from the past.
Now let the real work begin.

THE POLANSKI OF CELEBRITY

In 1977, the renowned movie director Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles. He admitted guilt and skipped the country to avoid prison.
He has basically been free ever since. For a recounting of the story, see Steve Lopez's column in the Los Angeles Times today, 9/20/09.
Polanski was (and probably still is) a sexual predator, and if the law is to have any meaning, he should pay for his crime.
I wonder how many other children he has raped or seduced over the years he has been free.
Why do people get outraged over sex criminals and perverts, and yet have a different reaction when the man is a bigshot?
Isn't it obviously wrong for a grown man to take advantage of his celebrity and use it to gain access to a child?
Celebrities have enormous personal power.
Polanski misused his.
I doubt if the girl's mother would have allowed him access to her if he wasn't famous. She probably hoped he'd put her in one of his movies.
By the way, have you seen his movies?
In "The Tenant" a severed head rises and falls in slow motion endlessly, one of the sickest scenes in all moviedom.
Have you seen his version of "Macbeth"?
Severed limbs all over the landscape.
Sick.
Sure, he escaped the Nazi Holocaust.
Sure, his wife and unborn child were murdered.
But does that give him the right to rape young girls?
Where do we draw the line?
Should we turn over our children to famous pedophiles for their sport?
If the law has any meaning, Polanski should come back to L.A., where the crime occurred, and take his punishment like a man.
If he is a man.
As they say, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

PALIN'S 'DEATH PANEL' LIE

Sarah Palin wrote on her FaceBook page that her son, who has Down Syndrome, might have to face a "death panel" under Obama's health plan.
What an obvious and hysterical fabrication.
Please, people, let's do everything we can to point out that this outrageous statement could not be true. It's like the Nazis telling the German people that the Jews were destroying their country. A very dangerous lie.

Take a look at the New York Times on this topic:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/sarah-palin-has-weighed-in-on/?scp=1&sq=%22death%20panel%22&st=cse

(Copy and paste into your browser address window.)

I WISH I LOVED BARACK THE WAY I USED TO

OK, it's been six months since Obama took office, and I haven't seen nirvana yet. The so-called "War On Terror" is still terrifying innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans are still dying. Gitmo is still functioning. And single-payer universal health coverage seems like a distant dream.
More and more, Barack sounds like George in foreign policy.
Change is slow a-coming.
What happened?
Politics, that's what.
Seems to me that Barack, being the smart politician that he is, is looking forward to the next election and trying to find a way to win again.
The dilemma is this: Do you go for it, and try to bring new policies into every arena all at once? Or do you look at the long haul, and figure you have got to keep winning elections to win the big battles?
It looks like Barack has taken the long view.
He's probably right, but I wish I loved him the way I used to.
Oh well, he's still a million times better than Bush and his band of cronies, sycophants, morons and war criminals.

SARAH PALIN: STILL CRAZY

You've heard the one about Gov. Sarah Palin resigning before her first term was up?

There once was a governor named Sarah
who didn't want to be a pariah,
so she sang and she danced,
she had ants in her pants,
and she resigned so someone
else could pay her.

Rumor has it that she resigned because she could make more money with a big book deal.
My theory: She never should have been in big-time politics in the first place.
Whatever happened to those responsibilities she crowed about when she was running for vice president?

LET THE MULES OUT

Free at last!
We used to sing a rhyme when I was in grade school:
"School's out, school's out! Teachers let the mules out!"
That's how I feel now, only I am the teacher. Or a teacher.
And I am the mule who is out.
I am so excited to be free for eleven whole weeks.
Oh, Lordy, it's such a great feeling.
Usually I write about politics in this blog, but today I'm going personal.
I'm hoping to go on a long road trip, either by rail or by car.
My dream trip: L.A. to Vancouver by rail.
Maybe another train trip to Denver.
Wish me luck.
More later.
-- Roger

DICK CHENEY'S "FOCUS"

I have a right-wing friend who said he met Dick Cheney once.
My friend was impressed, partly with how "focused" Cheney was.
My friend didn't say what Cheney was focused on, but I bet the old war dog was focused on what he did best: screwing the American people out of billions of dollars.
And where did those billions of dollars go?
Into the military-industrial complex, of which Cheney was and apparently still is a glowing part.
Remember when Cheney left Halliburton to run for vice president?
Remember that he was given a golden handshake worth, I think, $50-million?
Remember when people in Iraq were throwing bundles of American cash around as if they were footballs?
Remember when we had semi-trailer trucks hauling full loads of American cash around Iraq?
Remember when we paid, what was it, $30-million, for the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's sons, whom we then assassinated?
Where did all that cash come from?
Out of our pockets, ladies and gentlemen.
Part of Dick Cheney's focus.
He focused on us and our money.
We know. We saw the results.
But did any of that help the USA?
Did any of it make us safer?
Was the War On Iraq justified by a connection to 9/11?
No, not that I can see.
But then, I don't have Dick Cheney's "focus."

DICK CHENEY: MORON OR DOG?

It would be tempting to call ex-Vice President Dick Cheney a moron. He spouts obvious hokum about water-boarding and the myth that the last Bush administration kept America safe by its phony "War On Terror."
I disagree with Cheney and think his statements are stupid and misdirected.
However, I don't think he's a complete fool.
His reactions are dictated by the only-human truth that "Where you stand depends on where you sit."
I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Tell me who signs your paycheck, and I'll tell you your political views," or something like that. (I wasn't able to find it using Google.)
Cheney is worth many millions (so says Newsweek) and he got those millions from the military-industrial complex via Halliburton.
In that regard, he is like Pavlov's dog. The bell of big money rings, and he salivates. Big money in this regard comes from the huge dollars made by Cheney and his cohorts from the War On Terror and much of that from the War Against Iraq.
So Cheney is still salivating and is sorry the bell may someday cease to ring.
Ding-dong, Dick. Ding-dong.
Let's call him Ding-Dong Dick.
Do not send to know for whom the bell rings.
It rings for Dick.

THE BULL OF JESUS

I'm tired of hearing about God.
I'm tired of hearing that "everything happens for a reason."
Bull.
A child gets run over in the street.
What's the reason for that?
I'm tired of seeing football players and baseball players point to the heavens when they make a touchdown or hit a home-run or win a game.
Bull. God had nothing to do with it.
Do they think God prevented a tackle or guided the ball or choose the Angels over the Dodgers?
Why would God do that?
Doesn't God have bigger problems to solve?
I'm tired of reading about the Pope as if he had a direct pipeline to God.
I'm tired of churches and synagogues and prayers and worship services and Sunday mass and midnight mass and Sunday school and the Bible as the word of God.
I'm sick of hearing that bull.
Believe me, fellow earthlings, here on earth, God's work must truly be our own.
No one else is to going do it.
Don't wait on Jesus, my friends, he isn't coming.
Not to my house or your house.
Not to any church or mosque or synagogue we know.
Not any time soon.
Don't hold your breath.
As the Arabs say, "Believe in Allah, but tie up your camel."
Amen to that. Allah is not going to retrieve your camel if it is stolen or wanders off into the desert at night.
Jesus isn't going to prevent you from getting a ticket if you run a red light, especially if it has one of those camera things on it.
Doesn't matter how much you pray. Or how many gods you pray to. Or to which God.
God isn't going to take that test or attend those classes for you.
God isn't going to pay your credit-card bills or pay off your mortgage or ask that pretty girl out on a date.
You can believe in as many religions as you want, and you can listen to the preachers all you want, but none of that is going to do you any good.
You might feel better about yourself and kid yourself that you are now a better person than you were before.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but all those prayers and all those church services and all that tithing and all those televangelists and all those preachers and ministers and saints aren't going to save your worthless keister or tukas or derriere.
The only one who can save your worthless rear end is you.
Welcome to the real world.
You might as well pray to a ham sandwich.
Lettuce pray.
Add mustard and mayonnaise.
And some cheese.

DO WE NEED GOD?

I believe we are surrounded by The Great Mystery.
We don't know where we come from, why we were are here, or where we are going.
We don't know if we existed before we were born, or if we are going to exist after we die. All that is part of The Great Mystery.
We can't know these things, and I don't believe we need to.
Here on earth we need to take care of ourselves, we need to take care of the Earth itself, and we need to take care of each other.
As a friend of mine says, here on Earth, all we have is how we treat each other.
We know that if we don't take care of the Earth, it will become so polluted that it will not sustain life.
We know that if we don't take care of ourselves, we will lose our health.
If we don't take care of each other, we will promote conflict and killing, disease and death.
We don't need religion to tell us these things. They are just common sense.
My theory is that people didn't want to face The Great Mystery alone, so they invented religion to make them feel better.

Here is a link to an article in the NY Times that prompted this post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/us/27atheist.html

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

This L.A. Times op-ed column by humorist Bill Maher is funny and full of truth:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-maher24-2009apr24,0,927819.story

It's about the bitter exile of Republicans, who will have to wait at least another four years before they go back to acting like Attila the Hun. And before they invade another foreign country and cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people for no good reason.
But while they're in political exile and out of power, they can, as Maher says, "...learn to cherish the memories. [They'll] always have New Orleans and Abu Ghraib."

WEAK PRESIDENT?

I was incensed yesterday to hear former Vice President Dick Cheney call Obama a "weak president."
No, Dick, that isn't weakness, it's intelligence.
Cheney criticized Obama for "apologizing" in Europe and Mexico for past U.S. actions.
Obama is right to strike a new course for the USA.
No more torture, no more illegal wars, no more giving the finger to the rest of the world.
No more "You're either with us or against us."
No more mindless ideologies.
No more paranoid right-wing fantasies that millions of rabid Muslims are out to destroy America.
No more politics driven by fear.
No more stupid statements like "Mission Accomplished" and "You're doing a heckuva job" when the person isn't even doing his job.
Bush treated the government like a giant cash cow, funneling money to his friends and to his "base," the very wealthy, instead of spending it for the good of the nation.
No, Mr. Cheney, we don't have a weak president.
We have a strong and smart president.
For a change.
Thank God.

THE OTHER VIEW

If anyone out there thinks my blog is too left-wing, take a look at the other view, a right-wing web-site called RedState:
http://www.redstate.com/
I welcome comparisons.
I'm sure they would, too, in the spirit of a free and open society.

THE WAY WE SEE THE WORLD

There is an old saying: "We don't see the world the way it is; we see the world the way we are."
I believe that.
I think right wingers' view of the world reflects their inner turmoil and their inner fears, which are often suppressed.
They see boogie men everywhere.
They think millions of people are out to destroy us, and they think the poor are hell-bent on stealing the money of the rich.
Not true.
Most people just want meaningful work, a happy life, and to raise their children in peace.

SOCIALISM

I don't get the current right-wing uproar about "socialism." It's fine by the right wingers when Halliburton and Lockheed Martin make millions of dollars off the illegal and unnecessary Iraq war. That's OK. It's fine when big companies get corporate welfare. It's fine when the rich get richer through government subsidy. But talk about helping poor people raise themselves up by their bootstraps, and the right wingers cry, "Oh, Lordy Mama! Save us from the evils of socialism."
The right wingers seem to enjoy seeing poor people, especially blacks and Latinos, hurting and living in ghettos and dealing drugs.
They should watch "The Wire." That's what's really happening in this country.

OBAMA & COMBAT

I was very happy to see the Navy SEALs rescue Capt. Phillips from the pirates off Somalia. Sounds like it went perfectly.
I'm glad Obama gave the word to use force. We need a balanced approach to world leadership. As Teddy Roosevelt said, "Walk softly and carry a big stick."
The U.S. right wingers don't get this. They think we should "Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" and "Drill Baby Drill," pushing for simple-minded tactics to try to solve complex problems.
Thank heaven Obama has a more nuanced view.
It looks to me like Obama is leading us to our rightful place in the world, not as ideological bullies driven by fear, but as thoughtful, strong leaders who have the whole world's best interests at heart.

OBAMA MAKES ME PROUD

I am so happy to have a person with a brain in the White House and so happy to be rid of those ideology driven morons. I wish I could think of a more polite way to characterize former Pres. George W. Bush and his cohorts.
It's a pleasure to see the USA reaching out to cooperate with other countries instead of throwing its weight around like the stupid bullies we had before.