We know “the British are coming,” so don’t sweat what we don’t know.

A Facebook friend whom I’ve never met but would like to one day sent me one of these You Tube clips that gets zapped around the Internet to sow seeds of discontent.

This particular one showed rail flat car upon flat car of up-armored, desert-painted military trucks. The fear spread by this clip was that these were military personnel carriers FEMA was sending out for a war to disarm Americans. Or something equally as silly. My friend wasn’t making those claims. She was just merely looking for the truth which often gets lost this day and age of Internet conspiracies.

I explained to her how FEMA doesn’t have a black budget to purchase secret weapons plus conspiracy after conspiracy spread around on the emergency agency has repeatedly proven untrue. FEMA may not have done a jam-up job in the wake of the early 21st century hurricanes of the Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas coasts, or perhaps even since. But no one has ever cast one iota of evidence that the agency is building concentration camps for housing the “right-thinking.”

My friend, after my explanation, thanked me for putting her mind a little more at ease.

Why should people fear or embrace or even believe the first thing they see come across in their e-mail or Facebook or Twitter? There is real stuff to get scared about.

The U.S. is moving anti-missile weapons to Guam in case the idiot leader of North Korea decides to launch something. Not that we should particularly be worried about the power of the Peoples Republic forces. We should be concerned about the stupid logic and likely bad counsel received by the young dictator of North Korea. The worry should be that Kim does something stupid ridiculously dangerous. Let’s say he launches a missile towards an island and it hits near Seoul, perhaps even near the thousands of American troops. Even something more benign could result in the flattening of what was North Korea. We should worry for all those innocent folks in North Korea as well as our troops and the Korea they protect across the 38th Parallel.

We should be concerned for the vigilant folks who keep the peace in the homeland. Some folks have decided it is open season on officers of the law. An assistant district prosecutor in Texas, a Colorado prison warden, the assistant DA’s boss who was the district attorney in Kaufman County, Texas, along with his wife, and today a sheriff in West Virginia have all been killed within the last two months. Is there a string there? Maybe. Maybe not. The carnage shouldn’t particularly keep the normal citizen up at night. But all those folks affected by this savagery and those who are paid to prevent it all could use some good thoughts, even prayers if you are so inclined.

Plenty of worry finds us everywhere, it seems, in this Internet age. And it is a time we are more informed than ever that “The British are coming.” Sorry, my Brit friends, just a metaphor or perhaps simile. I won’t say: “Don’t worry. Be happy.” But perhaps, “Don’t sweat that which just as easily could be bullshit. Be happy as you have a right to such happiness.”

Texas AG: My name is “Sue.” How do you do?

Fate would seem to guarantee that had Gregory Wayne Abbott been born a girl his parents would have named him Sue. Or so one would think.

As of September 2012 the Texas Attorney General “Greg” Abbott had run through more than $2.5 million of the taxpayers money from having filed 24 lawsuits against the United States. It also appears that Abbott hasn’t run out of things over which to sue the federal government.

An article today in the right-wing Washington Times says Abbott is once again threatening to sue Uncle Sam. This time Abbott plans to waste more scarce tax dollars in litigation should President Obama sign a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

Earlier today the UN General Assembly approved the treaty over 23 abstentions and “no” votes coming from North Korea, Iran and Syria. What great company Abbott is in with his animus toward the treaty!

The UN News Center, the official news site for the organization explains what the treaty will and will not do:

 “The treaty regulates all conventional arms within the following categories: battle tanks, armoured combat vehicles, large-calibre artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles and missile launchers, and small arms and light weapons.

 “According to the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, the treaty will not do any of the following: interfere with domestic arms commerce or the right to bear arms in Member States; ban the export of any type of weapon; harm States’ legitimate right to self-defence; or undermine national arms regulation standards already in place.”

Those darned Europeans and their “misspelled: words such as “armoured,” “calibre,” and “defence!” Why it would make a pure-D, red-blooded American want to go buy a big batch of Freedom Fries.

It’s that Second Amendment right of U.S. citizens which has the AG’s boxers in a bunch. Well, I’m not sure he wears boxers and I suppose men’s undies really shouldn’t be a topic here since Abbott is partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. That’s not to say Abbott is a great leader in rights for the disabled. He’s not. And even though he is of the Republican religion whose tenets say “thall shall not sue,” Abbott started off his career as a de facto serial plaintiff’s lawyer by suing the owner of the tree that fell on the future Texas AG as he was jogging by.

Abbott said in a letter to the president that the treaty fails to recognize an individual’s right to bear arms and to protect their families. He claims the treaty will be carried out by bureaucrats who are not accountable to U.S. citizens.

“I recognize that the ostensible purpose of the treaty is to combat the illegal international trade of weapons into third-world war zones,” Abbott writes. And writes. “The treaty could, however, draw law-abiding gun owners and gun store operators into a complex web of bureaucratic red tape created by a new department at the UN devoted to overseeing the treaty. For instance, the treaty appears to lay the groundwork for an international gun registry overseen by the bureaucrats at the UN.”

His legal rant to Obama is an example of the “black helicopter” style of paranoia that Abbott taps into for furthering his political career. How can one forget his threat during the 2012 elections to order any international election observer arrested who would dare show up at a Texas polling place?

Was it not that the AG was playing to his Tea Party base the litigant-averse Republicans would burn Mr. Abbott, and presumably his wheelchair, in effigy for the filing of frivolous lawsuits. In fact, a law signed in 2011 by fellow mad dog Republican Gov. Rick Perry seeks payment for court costs in suits in which the loser must pay.  Would that happen with all the frivolous suits filed by Greg Abbott?

Well, it is like that old saying that old sayers say all the time, at least Democratic ones: If hypocrisy was a crime, most of our Texas elected officials would be behind the cross bars!

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen

Work is ahead in less than 90 minutes. I have to say something, just to write it down and say: “I wrote something today.”

And so I did. “Mission Accomplished,” as was displayed on an aircraft carrier upon our high-flying former President Gee Dubya’s premature announcement of the end to the Iraq War.

Thus there is always more to say but not always enough time to say it properly, clear, crisp, fresh as a daisy. Huh? Where did that “fresh as a daisy” come from? I would not mind to come out smelling like a rose, but fresh as a daisy is just not my gender. You got it? Less I appear sexist I better stop while I am somewhat ahead.

Time to go to work and be a jerk! Or perhaps, continue as a jerk.

Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. … Justified.

Since I have learned that what I write may end up who knows where — be it here, for Facebook, or on bathroom walls — I have found that it isn’t a very good idea to compose something when you are drunk or mad or both. I am not drunk right now, nor particularly mad although that doesn’t mean both states are impossible to attain.

I felt I should write something as that is the whole reason for this exercise. One of these days I shall decide whether I should write on the Web, strictly for money, as a mind-to-finger-to-mind exercise, or all of it. My part-time job has taken on more of a full-time feel even though I get paid far from full-time and on a much less consistent basis. Then, there is the whole pain thing. Hopefully, some day I will find out whether anything can heal me or nothing but the state of disability.

This mind o’ mine has a lot to think about, and more. So, I think I will get ready to watch “Justified.” It’s a really great show.

 

 

Nitwit East Texas congressman thinks someone cares about his opinion

Once upon a time I lived in what is now the U.S. House of Representatives district held by one Louie Gohmert. Now I can’t claim to be substantially represented by our current but outgoing Republican Congressman Ted Poe. Both Gohmert and Poe are publicity-seeking demagogues whose beds rest in the nuttiest of the nut-wing portion of the GOP. Of the two politicians, Poe is maybe the least abrasive, somewhat tempered perhaps by his years serving as a Houston district judge. Poe was moved to another district through Texas legislative redistricting. Our current district which includes the upper Texas Coast will be held by another Republican, Randy Weber, who will take a redrawn district formerly held by Ron Paul.

Weber had served in the Texas House prior to beating former Democrat U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson in this month’s General Election. Other than Weber being a Republican state lawmaker and winning over a choice I had favored for Congress, I have no knowledge about our new congressman. I have no reason for high hopes with Weber though because it seems every Texas Republican who has been elected to Congress within the last 20 years has been a dud.

This brings me back to Gohmert.The “good” Congressman gained quite a bit of notoriety during the last couple of years because of his spouting ridiculous ideas such as ones that so-called “terror babies” posed a threat to our national security. This stupidity which was a variation on the theme of “anchor babies” — babies born to illegal immigrants and brought to the U.S. to secure legal immigration — but were supposedly babies whose terrorist parents sought a foothold in the country due to the legalities of the 14th Amendment.

The terror baby theory is just one among the rampant absurdities Gohmert has spewed in the national media. Other comments included his opinion that the mass shootings at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in July 2012 was due to the nation’s lack of Judeo-Christian values and the lack of concealed handguns.

Now, on this very day, a Huffington Post article says Gohmert blasted House leaders for not taking the lead in the “fiscal cliff” debate. The Texas congressman foresees most of the rich Americans moving out of the U.S. if all of the Bush tax cuts are not extended. Why anyone would pay heed to Gohmert, a monumental waste of U.S. congressional space, is beyond me.

These are the type of ignorant rednecks we have representing Texas in Congress. There is no proof to anything that Gohmert says about the tax or any other subject. Perhaps he means that he will leave the U.S. if these tax cuts are not maintained. That would perhaps be the first positive accomplished by Gohmert and his cohorts in their years of government service.