Bad American

This is another topic I’ve been meaning to write about.

This column in CommonDreams

Spurred this post in response from Siouxrose, whose posts I have always appreciated reading:

1. Siouxrose May 9th, 2008 6:13 pm

   What’s really tragic about this is that INTELLIGENT PEOPLE are often clueless. I have friends who are attorneys and heads of businesses and when I see them and we have lunch together and I start going down the checklist of WHAT’S GOING ON they think I am speaking in deluded hyperboles. The LIES have so saturated so many arteries of the MSM that people have TAKEN them to be true. Many do not have the time or inclination to seek our alternative media.

   My best female friend refuses to read the majority of commondreams articles I forward her. Others have also asked me to stop! There is an aspect to the “New Age” spirituality camp that makes existence into a merely personal matter, as if each person has the OPTION to choose their “reality,” and which perceptions they intend to focus upon. A woman I otherwise admired asked me to PLEASE NOT SPEAK of these things (newsworthy events), and for Iraq blithely dismissed the agony of its citizens as “just some karma playing out.” This idea that we are FREE to enjoy OUR lives and OWN no responsibiity to others is a dangerous extension of an advertising/PR concept that has managed to sell to the lowest common denominator: the single digit consumer. How to re-weave the WEB of humanity will become the great challenge. However, communities that have been hit by dangerous weather events often DO work together. It may take hits of this and other nature to rouse the necessary compassion to rebuild the body politic, one far more HUMANE.

There are so many points in this excellent post.

First, is the ignorance organic or willful? That’s a big question. And what Siouxtrose is dealing with here are supposedly intelligent people who are supposed to know what is going on.

I’ve been of the opinion that most people aren’t really as clueless as they seem - they know in their gut there is something very wrong. But they are scared of speaking the truth for fear of losing their jobs or friends or landing up on some no fly list.

The true kool aid drinkers - the Limbaugh listeners, we’re not considering here. They have enthusiastically drank the kool aid and they like it just fine.

I found Siouxrose’s comment about friends refusing to read articles she sends them to be revealing. This has also happened to me. In my case, the people in question have pretty much given up all hope of any positive change and just want to have a little fun before they die. The longer I live the more I can understand and sympathize with that position. It just isn’t in me to do that.

But her comment on new agers is very telling. As I have written before, many people get into new age practice and philosophy as an escape from the real world. They also believe they can tap into some kind of ‘force’ like power in which they can somehow psychically separate themselves from the real world and work on their own perfection while everything around them goes to hell.

The comment from one of Siouxrose’s friends about the situation in Iraq as “some karma that is just playing out” is sadly too common. For many people, new age philosophy (increasingly an upper class affectation) is a convenient excuse to do nothing. It is the flip side of fundamentalist Christianity, which also does nothing to save the planet because the Lord will take care of everything come Armageddon time, which is always drawing near.

And of course, the average American, as she correctly surmises, doesn’t want to know because they don’t want to have to face the truth about the nation that they pledge allegiance too. AND they don’t want to be reminded of how powerless they are or cowardly, to stand up and speak out. They wish to live in their own private bubble until they die.

It can make those of us who are aware feeling quite mad. Many other CommonDreams posters feel like alien beings walking among the remnants of the body snatchers as if they had been transported into some kind of weird science fiction movie or Twilight Zone episode.

In any case, we still have CommonDreams, other lefty sites and the Internet to communicate with each other. At some point in the future, I expect the Internet to be a lot more carefully policed than it is even now.

And when that happens I’m sure there will be many who will try to save themselves and their sanity by repeatedly typing:

This is a free country

This is a free country

This is a free country

This is

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

I had been meaning to write about this so today’s the day.

Brian Dickerson in the Freep

And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.

snip

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”

But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.

“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

OK let’s stop there. One of the very worst problems we face in America is that most Americans lead such meaningless lives devoid of any spiritual or natural fulfillment that they cannot handle being put in positions of authority. There are millions of little Napoleons in uniform with badges and some with guns running around this country just waiting to stamp down on some poor schmuck that runs afoul of the millions of laws in this country that tie us all down.

So we have this lowlife security guard at Comerica Park who sees his big chance to nail someone and he takes it. A simian simpleton could see the dad made a mistake and let it go with a warning. But not in 2008 America. We now train authority figures to have a Gestapo-like adherence to the letter of every law and every violation must be stamped out ruthlessly.

An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.

Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.

“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”

But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who’s getting booted from “Dancing with the Stars” and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan’s children is going about its work.

Yes indeed. Here we have two upper middle class white educated couple being treated like this. So imagine what would have happened if the parents were poorer, minority, or unable to use the University of Michigan’s legal department to bail them out of this mess? Yes, it can happen to you. Don’t believe me - get thee to an airport. And remember it’s to protect the children!

And you if you really think you can tear the average ‘Murkan from his/her trash TV, you’ve got another thing coming buddy.

Now I’m not a big fan of CPS in general but they’ve been taking a lot of heat for this incident. In truth, once a court order is made, CPS basically has to act like robots - they must enforce the order.

Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.

The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.

And there you have it. The officer at the scene who had a real sense that this was an honest mistake and not a crime was overruled by her ’supervisor’ who, in reality, is the one who really escalated this incident out of control. Of course it’s easy if you’re sitting at a desk and you’re only real concern is covering your ass, to flop the case over to CPS. Once that happened, what happened next was probably inevitable.

And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. “This is so unnecessary,” one told Ratte before driving away with his son.

But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.

And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they’d see their little boy again.

Again, it was a decision made at the supervisory level at CPS that compounded the idiocy made at the police department level.

Now there are a lot of letters at the end of the story defending the caseworkers and that’s understandable as far as it goes. There may be no ‘quota’ as they say, for the amount of children seized. BUT, you cannot deny that every child taken is recorded and used as a justification for the budgets of the office and the supervisors. If they don’t seize a certain number of children, perhaps the next budget go around in Lansing, they won’t get so much money. Careers and nice suburban houses are on the line here. So you know what happens.

You can read the rest of this sad and sorry case. Ratte naively believes CPS will learn from this case. They will not. There is a vested interest in seizing children under any pretext. It’s a corollary of the Iron Law of Institution - the institution will do anything necessary to preserve itself - even at the expense of its core principles.

And you know as well as I do how many clear cut cases of child abuse fall right through the cracks of many state CPS investigators. But let some dad mistakenly give a kid a hard lemonade at a ball game and the whole system swings rapidly into gear to take the kid. Seriously, what is going on here?

I liked the response to Dickerson’s column here:

Freep reader reaction

In response to Brian Dickerson’s April 28 column, “Hard lemonade, hard price; Dad’s oversight at Tigers game lands son in foster care”: What hath God wrought, here in the People’s Republic of Michigan? What’s next for Christopher Ratte? Will he be sent away to be rehabilitated? Will the Ministry of Truth seek to delete the Detroit Free Press’ reportage of this episode?

Fortunately, the Ministry of Love reunited Mr. Ratte with his family, rather than submitting him to a purge. The party must have been satisfied he had not committed a thought crime.

When one reads this story, hard on the heels of the previous day’s exposé of the flawed prosecution process for sex offenders in Oakland County, it is clear that in its zeal to protect our children, our state and local law enforcement agencies have gone completely haywire.

Unquestionably, our children are the most powerless and vulnerable of our citizenry, the least able to defend or speak for themselves. Their protection is simply paramount. Nonetheless, whither sanity, reason and justice along the way?

After the Free Press reported the structural failure of the foster care system in Michigan, it would appear that overkill is the state’s solution to that problem. It is not enough that the state ran roughshod on Mr. Ratte; his son, the very victim they sought to protect, must have been traumatized to no end. Meanwhile, how many other children who are truly in grave danger of one form or another are left unprotected by Child Protective Services?

The entire child welfare system, from state agencies to the courts to the law enforcement agencies, is overworked and underfunded. Nonetheless, knee-jerk Orwellian overreaction is not the answer. We must have a thoughtful dialogue on this issue, starting in Lansing.

Lawrence D. Hadley

Can’t add anything more to that except this:

In reality, the state assumes ownership of your children once they are born. You are merely the legal custodians under the law. If any any time, one of the minions of the state feels you are no longer a fit parent for any reason, the state can and will, with guns drawn if necessary, take your child. Yes, there are legitimate cases where kids need to be seized for their own safety - absolutely. But more and more we hear about stories like the Ratte’s. And we wonder what the real aim of all these laws are.

So be ultra-careful at all times when you’re out in public with your children. You never know who is watching - and itching - to be a good German.

From the “wish I had thought of this analogy” file:

Hillary: “Running away are you (Obama)? Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your leg off!”

Seth Greenland compares Hillary to Monty Python’s Black Knight.

Funny stuff!

I guess it all depends on your perspective. But from my perspective I thought I saw something, actually TWO things that really weren’t there. Subliminal advertising? Nah, just a flukey thing that only people with my angle and sick editor’s sense of humor would see. But I wouldn’t put this shot in the newspaper for obvious reasons.

But if you’re out our way, you really should see the Geauga Lyric Theater Guild’s Barefoot in the Park. Now through May 18.

ICH from Radar Magazine

I’m pretty sure I am. How high up I have no idea and probably won’t until the time comes.

I have been reluctant to get into this too deeply. But I believe that it’s necessary to post this story and have the readers consider it.

Listmaking of potential ‘enemies of the state’ go back to J. Edgar Hoover and probably long before that in  one form or another. But with today’s technology, computers can and do keep track of everyone based on the electronic trails we leave while living our normal lives.

In fact, every keystroke I am making right now is being cataloged. If you scoff at this, please read the article.

The core part of the article:

Let’s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and have been aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a “parallel government” that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency’s incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of “militants” and “American negroes” who were to be held at “assembly centers or relocation camps.” In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Just what those “new programs” might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

But do yourself a favor and read the rest.

I don’t think that a system like this is a pipe dream - for our state to function for the benefit of the transnational monetary elite such a system is absolutely necessary. Again, in times of constricted natural resources and economy catastrophe, the single biggest problem for any government of the elite is to control that population. That’s not fiction - it’s fact and is the guiding principle behind the vast majority of continuity of government and disaster plans.

Obama at his breakfast photo op in Greenwood, Indiana Tuesday. And yes, I HAVE been to Greenwood and actually ATE in that restaurant (the food’s pretty good). For more on what one diner patron thought of Obama, see the quote highlighted in blue below. But, according to the NY Times, one of the two guys sitting here said he’d vote for Obama. I don’t know which one that was.

I wish it was because I’m getting sick of the entire charade, but this Democratic nomination fight is not over.

Not by a longshot.

Of course, the pundits are all saying it’s over this morning - that Obama’s North Carolina landslide and squeaker loss in Indiana seals the deal for the charismatic Senator from Illinois. The Huffington Post and the Drudge Report come together in agreement on this issue.

So. How long have some of you been watching the Clintons anyway?

And you really think she’s going to quit?

She’s lending her campaign more millions and her aides are presenting an obstinate face to the TV media this morning.

And check this out:

With few states left, she and her aides said they would step up their efforts to count the disputed results in Florida and Michigan, where the states held contests in defiance of Democratic Party rules. If Mrs. Clinton can win the battle to have the delegations from those two states seated at the conventions on the basis of the vote there, she could greatly reduce Mr. Obama’s lead in pledged delegates.

But neither candidate actively campaigned in Florida or Michigan, and Mr. Obama did not appear on the Michigan ballot.

Still, in a sign of where the Clinton campaign is going, her aides are asserting that the winner will need 2,209 delegates, not 2,025. That higher number reflects the full inclusion of Florida and Michigan, which held their primaries before the date permitted by the Democratic Party.

Maureen Dowd:

Fox News reports that the Clintons are planning a summer campaign with TV appearances, fliers and rallies, between the end of the primary and the convention, to drag back superdelegates trying to flock to Obama. The Democratic race has been a scorpion and a butterfly in a bottle. Hillary tore Barry’s wings off, and so psyched him out with her silly goading — “Enough about the speeches and the big rallies!” she cried — that he gave up his magical trump cards.

But that’s not all: there’s still one very big race card left for the Clintons to play (overtly now) to the superdelegates: that Barack Obama cannot win white America in a general election against John McCain.

And they’ll use this kind of anecdotal evidence (plus the polling data that will back it up) from the Dowd column:

Wandering around Indiana, appearing in neighborhoods and at diners without any advance notice, talking to handfuls of people, Obama strived to seem less lofty and more mortal. Hounded by Hillary, Bill and Rev. Wright, he just looked sort of numb. When Obama went to an 11:30 p.m. shift change at an auto components plant here, a Newsday reporter on the scene noted that many of the white men “were less likely to smile or look him in the eye or seem impressed with him.”

In a restaurant in Greenwood on Tuesday, Obama approached an older white guy who waved him off, muttering afterwards to a reporter: “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”

Which is why Obama, as a nominee is probably a dead duck not only in Indiana, but the entire South, all the Confederate border states and even some eastern states like Pennsylvania.

Check the map

I’ll stand by what I said to a customer in the book store I worked at in Iowa way back in February of 2007: sorry, America is not ready to elect a black president.

Of course if Hillary conceded and threw her wholehearted support behind Obama, he’d have more than a fighting chance: he’d literally be a shoo-in with most of her white blue collar votes following him.

But since her whole reason for drawing breath to live is to be President of the United States, if she can’t have it, neither will he. And she’ll be back in 2012. Count on it.

Not that the country is ready for Hillary either, but that’s another story entirely. She does have a better chance in the electoral college by far, but if she wrestles the nomination from Obama, blacks and disaffected young people stay home and she’s a dead duck too.

At this point all John McCain really has to do is wrap his crinkly white skin in the American flag and bide his time. You can see the train wreck coming from here.

Now if Clinton concedes in the next week or so, I’ll gladly admit I’m wrong. But I doubt I’ll have to.

Hillary Clinton will do ANYTHING she has to to win or she will destroy Obama in the process. Bottom line.

From Rolling Stone by way of Alternet

Perhaps the funniest expose of Christofascist nutbars I’ve ever read. I saw Taibbi on Olbermann the other night plugging his new book, from which this article is taken. I’m absolutely going to have to get it. I love the way this guy writes - snarky and brutal - I can appreciate that.

In the comments section the usual whiners show up complaining that Taibbi is hurting progressives by making fun of these people. First of all, we will never reach these brainwashed types - they WANT to remain willfully ignorant to save themselves the trouble of thinking. Second, these people think far worse of us than we do of them. I personally do not care whether these people go to heaven or hell - but if these people could, they’d probably send us all - to a hell on earth.

I have given up trying to play nice with the Christian fascist right. You cannot reason with people who sneer at reason. I simply want to be let alone to live without having to check some book or some dogma for what I should eat, drink, wear or believe. That shouldn’t be asking much of a supposedly ‘free people.’

But if you have noticed how close the Christofascists and the US military have aligned, there’s a great deal to be worried about if you have more than half a brain. I have no doubt that the Christofascists will be used as the shock troops of the coming clampdown and one should be prepared to fight them by any means possible.

But for now, we can join Taibbi and have a laugh at the nuttier factions of Pentecostalism (not evangelical Christianity as he too broadly paints them). And let us remember that these are the people and the minster aligned with John McCain. Why doesn’t the media pick up on the lunacy and hate of Pastor John Hagee?

Oh, he’s on the RIGHT side of the political spectrum so that’s OK! Thank you so-called ‘liberal media.’

So Taibbi has to infiltrate Hagee’s ‘boot camp’ (or re-education or indoctrination camp is you will). As part of the cult mind altering, they start out with the touchy-feely stuff of confession some deep inner ‘wound.’ When they get around to Taibbi, he has to come up with something quick. This is what he comes up with:

My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn’t use my real past — not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process — but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.

“Hello,” I said, taking a deep breath. “My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes.“

I almost lost my lunch I was laughing so hard at that. And wait until you get to the part about his ‘father’ having to take a job as the Carvel ice cream whale! I almost passed out laughing. And yeah, the fundies bought both stories.

Gullible yes, but unfortunately, they vote.

It has come to this.

Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Risking impeachment, Ohio’s attorney general on Monday refused demands from the governor and other fellow Democrats that he resign over a sexual harassment scandal in his office and an affair with a subordinate.

Gov. Ted Strickland told reporters that Democrats will begin drafting an impeachment resolution against Attorney General Marc Dann right away. Republican House Speaker Jon Husted said Monday that his chamber - which takes the first step in any impeachment - was already reviewing the process.

Virtually every state-level Democratic officeholder urged Dann to resign in a letter late Sunday after Strickland tried twice during the day to persuade him to leave office.

A sexual harassment investigation uncovered an atmosphere in Dann’s office rife with inappropriate staff-subordinate relationships, heavy drinking and harassing and threatening behavior by a supervisor. On Friday, Dann admitted to an extramarital affair with a subordinate after the investigation threatened to reveal the relationship.

We needn’t go into the sordid details of what went on in Dann’s office - you can read the rest of the AP report and it’s been pretty well documented elsewhere. WKYC TV 3 news is featuring the women who brought the complaints against Dann on their news this evening.

And you can check with Jill’s site here about more news from her and other bloggers about the distancing that the ODP is doing from Dann including yanking him off their official website and considering him an independent.

With each hammer blow against Dann, the AG’s office suffers, the state of Ohio suffers, the Ohio Democratic Party suffers and basic trust in government, which we thought could go no lower after the shenanigans of the Taft era, also suffer new lows.

Dann should note the enthusiastic bi-partisan movement to impeach him. Ask yourself when is the last time you saw Democrats and Republicans come together so quickly and with so much enthusiasm on anything?

For the GOP, they needn’t let Dann twist in the win - the damage is already done. And to pile impeachment on top of everything will give them more than enough ammunition against Ohio dems in the next election.

For the Democrats, it’s all they can do to stem the bleeding - remove the cancer now and hope that some recovery can take place before the next election cycle.

For Dann, one has to marvel at the sheer arrogance of the man. He’s a dead man walking politically, yet, he’ll cling to his office until the bitter end.

With many politicians at every level, even dog catcher, there’s a certain segment of them that suffer from grandiose notions of their own entitlement. Many have indeed spent most of their adult lives to get in these positions of power and prestige. What happens on top of that is that, in their minds, the office they hold becomes indistinguishable from their personhood.

What I mean by that is that, for people like Dann, the office becomes who they are - it represents all that they identify with their lives. To lose it would be to suffer a death of their identity. And because of that they will cling, as if to the hull of a sinking ship, until the waves finally take them.

Quaint notions of public service being a public trust have no place in the psychology of people like Dann. But lest you think he’s a rare bird he’s not. There are many like him and they’re all over this state. Think Jimmy Dimora. Or Tim Hagan.

It’s all they know. It’s who they are.

I found this comment by Governor Strickland to be amusing, however:

Strickland said, as a congressman, he opposed former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But he said the two situations are “dramatically different.” His request for Dann to resign is not based substantially on his extramarital affair, Strickland said.

“It goes well beyond that. It involves many, many factors that are much more complicated than that,” he said.

Oooookaayyy governor.

In the meantime, when teachers teach Ohio government, how do they handle student questions about what has transpired in Dann’s office.

And how that squares with what they are being taught about our system.

Busch NA. Approach with caution.

Just for fun and because I like beer.

Here’s Tampa Tribune contributor Joey Redner’s 10 Most Disgusting Beers:

10. Coors Aspen Edge If giving up carbs means giving up any semblance of body or flavor, as is the case with this “beer,” it is probably better to carry a few extra pounds.

9. Milwaukee’s Best I understand this is a sentimental favorite of many, as it takes them back to the old days. Well, human sacrifice harkens to a simpler time, too. If you want to kill your taste buds, try battery acid — it probably tastes better.

8. Sleeman Clear Lager Another low-carb entry, though here the delicate and nuanced notes of lighter fluid and Dumpster drippings on a blistering August day achieves heretofore unknown lows.

7. Cave Creek Chili Beer This is the perfect beer for people who hate themselves and desire punishment. This unholy union of a whole chili pepper and a fiendishly nasty pale lager will get medieval on your tongue.

6. Winter Park Beer While Orlando Brewing makes many fine ales and lagers, they also make this vitamin-infused blasphemy. Generally, when people say things like, “Fruit doesn’t belong in beer,” I think of the many excellent fruit Lambics and disagree. But, vitamins? Vitamin flavor doesn’t belong in beer! Heck, it doesn’t even belong in vitamins — it’s just that the vitamin companies haven’t found a way to make vitamins palatable. And neither have the brewers of this beer.

5. Bootie U95 I thought with a name like Bootie, the makers of this brew were attempting to position it as a dance club beer. Turns out, it simply describes the aroma. Tallahassee Ratebeer.com member Aurelius sums up the Bootie this way: “The name sounds like some sort of nuclear isotope in a barium enema, and it delivers all the flavor the name suggests.”

4. Hurricane High Gravity Lager This malt liquor is to beer what Carlos Mencia is to comedy: crass and phony. The unfettered use of cheap ingredients, designed solely to supply alcohol on the cheap, imparts the aroma of acetone and chemical solvents. Yummy. Safety Harbor Ratebeer.com member Ibrew2or3 has this to say: “Should I be drinking something that smells like an auto shop?”

3. Chapeau Exotic This Lambic is proof that rare Belgian beers are capable of great suckitude. Writes Orlando Ratebeer.com member Boboski: “One sip leads to a joyful drain pour. I hope it doesn’t ruin my sink.”

2. Camo Genuine Ale The can has 5 X’s on it, but all are missing the little skulls that would inform people of what is really inside Camo cans. If lethal doses of corn sugar and nail polish are your thing, Camo is your beer.

1. Busch NA Non-alcoholic beers are bad by nature. Remove alcohol, remove flavor. But Busch NA seems to have gotten around the alcohol part of the beer by steeping corn husks in seltzer water to make a tea that Andrew Zimmern wouldn’t drink.

Here’s the Ratebeer.com site for you to look at. A great site with tons of funny and well-written reviews.

I don’t know who Andre Zimmern is but I wouldn’t drink Busch NA on a dare, nor Busch for that matter. Busch was the beer my father drank back in the 70s because he was too cheap to buy Michelob. That was back in the day before American craft brews were widely available.

So when dad let me finish the last few ounces of his beer so I would not grow up to follow in the family tradition of alcoholism (on both sides) my first tastes of beer were Busch and then Miller Lite, which dad switched to in the late 70s, largely due to their entertaining commercials.

By the way, I loved those old “great taste - less filling” commercials. I had an idea for one of them (I would have made a great ad man too, but I’d like to use my superpowers for good). It would be called “The Lite Flight” and in the script the usual guys would be flying back in coach and Mickey Spillane would ask “the doll” for a Lite Beer and she’d say “ooh, sorry Mickey, I’m all out - the guy in first class wanted them all.”

Well, of course, the guy in first class is RODNEY! (as in Dangerfield) and as he’s getting ganged up on, “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry, piloting the plane of course, wonders what all the ruckus is about.

It would have been great.

It took a student trip to Germany in 1980 for me to realize just how lame mass produced American beer was. We were able to sample beer all over Deutschland and my favorite was the Hacker-Pschorr I had in their own Munich beer hall.

It was the kind of beer they serve in Heaven, if Heaven exists.

Nowadays, even with no drinking age, I doubt American kids would be allowed to imbibe in Germany because of our overweening need to overprotect our kids from the demon alcohol. This is why so many of them drink themselves into crises the minute they get to college - they haven’t been properly trained to responsibly imbibe at home.

But I digress.

It’s a testament to American chutzpah that a beer so watery and awful could actually call itself “Milwaukee’s Best” with a straight face. But what DOES come out of that city any more that is actually worth drinking? Miller?

I use to sing along to the old Miller jingle - “Millers made the American way; mass produced in the USA; just as bland as the people who are drinking it today; Millers made the American way.”

But yes, down at good old Ohio State, Eric’s dorm mates get cases of Old Milwaukee and other brands of American swill like (un)Natural Light delivered to their rooms every Friday.

How?

They found a Columbus beer store willing to pack suitcases with beer, which are wheeled right by the clueless RA’s every Friday night. The HARD part, from what he tells me, is disposing of the empties.

But I digress.

Another universally regarded (by beer snobs) awful beer we drank in college is Rolling Rock, which now suffers from the final indignity of not even being brewed in Latrobe, PA anymore. Why anyone would want to drink “green death” anymore is beyond my comprehension.

Western Pennsylvania is known for awful beers. Iron City is terrible and IC Light is practically indistinguishable from cat piss.

Almost all American light beers I consider to be “beer-flavored water.” That’s the best description I could give of them. Why people drink them I have no idea.

Life REALLY is too short to drink shitty beer. If you’re going to drink beer, and you’re on a budget, for Goddess’ sakes at least drink something Canadian (unless it’s a light beer - Canadians do those no better than we do).

Schaefer is another awful beer that richly deserved it’s awful reputation. I’ve always bastardized it’s slogan when dissing other cheap and awful beers - “it’s the beer to have if you’re having more than six”

But that’s the whole point with a lot of these cheap beers - they are generally torpedoed with the aim to get drunk fast and cheap.

BUT - you pay for that cheapness in the end. The cheapies give you the worst hangover for several reasons (I suspect some of them contain formaldehyde) not the least of which is cheap ingredients and preservatives. Smart kids knew that Michelob was still fairly cheap and a good beer to get smashed on - being rice based, the hangover was far less severe.

And of course, spending money will not always save you from the 7 a.m. pukes either. It’s the same as any alcohol - the darker the beer, the worst the hangover.

Let’s see, what else is bad?

ALL of the low carb beers should be banned by law. They are the worst tasting beers of all time and can really only be served ice cold and even then, they’re weak and awful.

ANY beer with lime already added into it. There’s a new one being marketed now. Forget it. Nothing wrong with lime in your Corona (a middlin’ quality beer I usually avoid), but put it in there yourself. You really don’t want to know how they get the lime tasting substance into the beer at the factory, do you? And then you want to INGEST that?

It DOES seem incredible to those of us old enough to remember when our beer choices were so limited to American macro beers. Hell, getting COORS (which is AWFUL, always WAS) east of the Mississippi was thought of as a major coup (hence the premise of “Smokey and the Bandit”).

Now we’re awash in choices in even the most modest grocery store. Hell, you can usually find at least one decent import at a Wal-Mart. We really should be grateful.

Here are the Rate Beer’s worst 50 in the world.

The worst 20:

1	Olde English 800 3.2	Miller Brewing Company (SABMiller)		0.82	39	Malt Liquor
	2	Busch NA	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.		0.87	112	Low Alcohol
	3	General Generic Beer	Miller Brewing Company (SABMiller)		0.92	22	Pale Lager
	4	ODouls	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.		0.95	314	Low Alcohol
	5	Pabst NA	Miller Brewing Company (SABMiller)		0.98	28	Low Alcohol
	6	B-40 Bull Max	Sleeman Brewing & Malting Co. (Sapporo)		0.98	22	Malt Liquor
	7	Sleeman Clear	Sleeman Brewing & Malting Co. (Sapporo)		0.99	96	Pale Lager
	8	Gluek Stite Light Lager	Cold Spring Brewery		0.99	53	Pale Lager
	9	Michelob Ultra	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.		1.01	823	Pale Lager
	10	Natural Light	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.		1.02	858	Pale Lager
	11	Natural Ice	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.		1.02	608	Malt Liquor
	12	Milwaukees Best	Miller Brewing Company (SABMiller)		1.04	666	Pale Lager
	13	Camo Genuine Ale	City Brewery (Melanie Brewing Co)		1.04	38	Malt Liquor
	14	Black Label 11-11 Malt Liquor	Miller Brewing Company (SABMiller)		1.04	22	Malt Liquor
	15	Hurricane Ice	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.		1.04	14	Malt Liquor
	16	Coors Non-Alcoholic	Coors Brewing Company (MolsonCoors)		1.05	96	Low Alcohol
	17	Tooheys Blue Ice	Tooheys (Lion Nathan Co.)		1.05	12	Low Alcohol
	18	Tuborg T-Beer	Carlsberg Brewery		1.06	47	Pale Lager
	19	PC 2.5 g Low Carb	Brick Brewing Company		1.06	16	Pale Lager
	20	Diamond White Cider	Matthew Clark Cider		1.07	30	Cider

Notice how many of them, um, are domestic. If you want to have fun, read the ratings from the brave souls who drank enough of these dogs to rate them.

Feel free to add your own dogs in the comments.

The main characters from the movie Ironman: War is a force that gives them meaning.

It’s almost impossible for me write a movie review of “Ironman” (rotten tomatoes reviews here) without getting into written hyperventilation that would have all but the most die hard readers of this blog rolling their eyes.

But I’m going to try anyway.

Yesterday I took my 17-year-old son (who is a high functioning young man with autism) to this movie because, and only because, he wanted to see it.

Let me say it right off the top: I hated this movie as I have hated no other movie in my life. I wanted to hurt this movie very badly.

And the reason, quite frankly, is that it is a 100 minute advertisement for the American military-industrial complex.

If you think I am wrong, by all means see the movie and make up your own mind.

The basic story line is that a brash ubercapitalist who makes weapons of mass destruction (Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr), is captured by a bunch of stereotyped Arab badmen and lands up freeing himself by conning the stupid Arabs into letting him manufacture a robo suit instead of one of his killer missiles.

Back in the good old USA (where Stark’s first request is for a “good old American cheeseburger” provided by Burger King) Stark has a fit of conscience (but not really as events will prove out) and decides to start making war weapons for the right reasons.

As if.

OK, no more spoilers. But let’s hit a few of the high points of propaganda that the movie lays on with a trowel.

First: the conceit that somehow there is a disconnect between the US military and the weapons manufacturers. That is, that honest people in the military can somehow check the nastier impulses of the war industry when, in fact, the movie’s introductory premise is the truth: both are joined at the hip.

Then there is the conceit that the US military is always a force for good in the world and that all it takes is a few good eggs within it to right the ship if something goes wrong. Also that the government’s security agents are always a force for good as well. In fact, the one ‘homeland security’ type looks like a heavy early on and lands up being a ‘hero’ at the end. We should pay homage to such people for keeping us ‘free.’

Also notes that Stark comes right from the birthing ground of the military-industrial complex - the US military-university complex. He gets his degree from MIT and then, naturally, takes that know how and puts it to work for the (always good) American empire.

Still, the movie does come perilously close to damaging some of the credibility of the American death merchant industry. That’s why, near the end of the flick, the movie’s producers make a saving throw: look near the end of the movie for the GIANT poster on the wall behind Tony Stark that says “America’s defense industries: the arsenal of freedom.” You CANNOT tell me that the size of the poster, the framing of it in the scene, nor the amount of time the camera lovingly lingers on it was an accident.

Oh, and the media are always enemies of the American state and deserve to be treated as such.

If General Dynamics, the Pentagon, Dick Cheney and Joseph Goebbels had collaborated on the script they could have not done a better job of using cinema as propaganda.

OK, that’s hyperventilating to be sure. But true. See it, but wait until you can rent it rather than add to the box office gross.

And can we PLEASE stop the lie that somehow Hollywood is some kind of liberal cabal? See this movie and see what I mean. If this is the product of a ‘liberal mindset’ than I’m Barry Goldwater.

Sean Gonsalves’ take here. Note the allusion to the original “Ironman” coming from the early Vietnam years:

Iron Man works best when it snarks at Stark and his technology fetish — the sequence dealing with Stark’s first shaky attempts at flight with his hand and foot repulsors, while an oversolicitous robot stands by waiting to douse him with a fire extinguisher, is reliably crowd-pleasing. But this hero’s origin has its roots in grim current events (much like the initial Iron Man outing in 1963, wherein Stark’s armor was forged in Vietnam). At the start, Stark is in Afghanistan, blithely showing off his new Jericho missile to the assembled American military. He gets captured by the usual gang of swarthy mountain-dwelling guerrillas, and he gets videotaped in a scene carrying unwelcome reminders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg. With the help of a sympathetic co-captive, Stark builds a rudimentary Iron Man suit and blasts and burns his way free.

Upon his return, a changed Stark exclaims “I saw Americans die.” He doesn’t say anything about the men who died at his hands — being forced to use his own destructive technology, being forced to become a killer and to see the dead close-up, is not something the movie has time to explore. (that wasn’t the movie’s intent anyway Sean - ed.) Iron Man is as thoughtless as it is weightless. Director Jon Favreau (who brings no particular style or vision to the party) and his four credited writers are too wowed by the high-tech bang to question the morality of making and selling weapons (again, that is by design Sean - ed.)— the problem is that they wind up in the wrong hands because of corrupt businessmen, and if you drop those businessmen through a roof from several thousand feet up, that problem’s solved. I

All of this is inherent in the original Cold War-era material, of course, but why drag it into 2008? Because Iron Man is “cool”? The bullying fanboy idea of “cool” is growing wearisome and is threatening to kill movies (agreed - ed.). And it’s a very strange time politically to insist on the triumphalism of full metal American righteousness. Iron man pumps itself up by exploiting real, ongoing misery without even pretending to deal with it. It’s a tricky balancing act, and Favreau isn’t up to it (sigh, again I think you’re missing the point here Sean - that is what they WANTED to portray - ed.). War, Inc., John Cusack’s satire on the munitions industry, is getting a limited release later this month (opposite Indiana Jones, yet) on its way to DVD (I’ve seen some scenes from it and can’t wait - ed.). Iron Man is getting the ninth widest release in box-office history. Tell me again how liberal Hollywood is.

Indeed. Cusack has to make a real anti-war movie ON HIS OWN because no one in the industry would ever green light such a project.

In fact, I was watching CNN this morning and they were exploring that same point. Most of the anti-war Iraqi War movies like “Grace is Gone” (also Cusack) barely got any exposure. Americans seem most emphatically not willing to confront what the nation has done in their name, either on screen or not. In fact, CNN reported that a few Iraqi war movies have been completed and remain ‘in the can’ waiting for “American attitudes to change.”

Good luck with that.

By the way, read some of the Rotten Tomatoes.com reviews that actually think the movie is anti-corporate. It amazes me that so many otherwise intelligent people who get to review movies miss the point by a country mile.

And yes, I actually used to get paid to review movies for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. One of my reviews, of Ashton Kutcher’s movie “The Butterfly Effect” was used as a textbook example of how to do things right by this book: Reviewing the Arts.

Not that anyone would offer me a job now, of course.

I’d be seen as too ‘political.’