Monday, March 30, 2015

How the Capitalists' "God" Weaseled Its Way Into the Pledge and Onto Our Currency



I had always known that the "Under God" and "In God We Trust" additions were products of the anti-Communist 1950s, but I never knew how deeply this Eisenhower-era religious revival was manipulated by corporations and big businessmen for their own purposes just like the current perversions of religion by right wingers:




If you can't see the embedded player above, you can listen or read the transcript to Terry Gross's Fresh Air story about Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by clicking here.

March Is Going Out Like a Lamb (i.e., with fluffy and white snowflakes)...

...which reminds me that there are eleven months of the year other than the one coming to an end in need of weather similes.
Some of these may vary if you live in another part of the nation or the world where spring doesn't arrive with a blanket of the cold white stuff, but here's my current list of lesser-known weather similes for the neglected months of the year:
April comes in like a Dandelion and goes out like a Lamb's Ear.
May comes in like a Chipmunk and goes out like a Wolverine.
June comes in like a Caterpillar and goes out like a Puff Adder.
July comes in like a Mosquito and goes out like a Mosquito.
August comes in like Thermidor and goes out like Fructidor.
September comes in like an Itsy-Bitsy Brown Recluse Spider and goes out like an Antibiotic-Resistant Flesh-Eating Bacterium.
October comes in like a Rash and goes out with Full-Face Clown Makeup.
November comes in like the Old Bosses and goes out like the New Bosses.
December comes in like a Tragedy and goes out like a Farce.
January comes in like the Beatles and goes out like the Banshees.
February comes in like a Scimitar and goes out like a Sea Lion.
and, of course,
March comes in like a Lion and goes out like a Lamb.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

This is what a nation looks like before American bombs fall.

Meet some of the people whom John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick "Dick" Cheney, Bibi Netanyahu, et al. would like to bomb in our name as soon as possible:

I want to travel to Tehran just to have the psychic parakeet at the 3'50" mark of this video tell me my future.

Monday, March 23, 2015

The John Lennon / Ted Cruz Mashup

It's not quite a clown circus yet, but the first clown officially stepped into the ring earlier today at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University (without this piano accompaniment):

If Ted Cruz uses the word "imagine" in vain one more time, John Lennon's heirs will have grounds to sue.

(and if you don't see the embedded music player above, click this link from PRI.org.)

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Never Forget Who's Benefiting from America's Endless Wars.

This video from Fahrenheit 9/11 about the businesses that benefit from war is as relevant to the current saber rattling about Iran as it was to our Iraq invasion. (Halliburton isn't the only beneficiary, despite the title of the video.)


And here's your quote of the day from the 2'20" mark of the video:
"War is always good for certain companies, I mean, that are in the war busi...the business of war."  --Sam Kubba, American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce