Vortex - Wednesday 2:12 p.m. - Blog #1500

I think that we are losing our moorings in this world. We are trapped in some non euclidian scene from Alice that doesn't quite square with our normal notions of reality. If I may riff:

For reasons that I can't really figure, President Barack Obama stirs a level of antipathy and disgust in my conservative friends that seems completely out of scale with any real or imagined mistakes the man may be responsible for.

I am not going to rehash all the supposed sins of our president, the man that many in the conservative right feel has sent our country lurching down the tracks to a stalinist gulag. He's no more socialist than his predecessor, he's just not doling out the same largesse to his friends on Wall St. Or maybe he is? Who the hell can keep anything straight?

Many of my right of center cronies fashion themselves as socially liberal but fiscally conservative. I'm hip. The question becomes, will they let the latter concerns override the former?  Is the threat of health care reform so odious that you are willing to put up with Texas style textbook revisionism? Would you accept the termination of teachers that spoke with hispanic accents a la Arizona if you were guaranteed a fat tax cut?  Does the notion of six catholics on the Supreme Court reconsidering Roe V. Wade ever trump your fantasy of an ideal libertarian government, deregulated and streamlined so that business can do what it does best? Policing itself, of course.

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If I was a conservative, I might give some thought to some very portentous trends in my Republican Party. You were the party of Lincoln, remember? Rand Paul, your standard bearer in Kentucky, has some strange notions regarding civil rights in this country, opining last night about the rights of private businesses to discriminate on the basis of race. His campaign manager, Chris Hightower, was forced to resign after posting "Happy Nigger Day" onto his MySpace page (above the requisite photograph of a black man getting lynched) on Matin Luther King's birthday. There were reports during the last election of his dad getting a lot of white supremacist support. You don't want to get any of this on you. That is, if you care. Paul said today that it was a mistake to go on Rachel Maddow but did not exactly disavow his comments.

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The Gulf Oil Spill considers to lurch towards some armageddon like ending. Today, BP was ordered not to pour so many noxious chemicals into the gulf, fearing a total devastation to marine life.  This has not been a shining moment for this administration, first the ceding of the cleanup effort to BP in the crucial early days of the spill, and now our worst fears apparently being surpassed. BP and Transocean in their fingerpointing duel, BP's minimization of the effects of the catastrophe, along with their enablers on the conservative side like Rush Limbaugh, who maintains that oil spills are a natural part of god's plan and anyway it's all the Sierra Club's fault for not letting the oil companies drill under Mt. Rushmore. BP has not been allowing journalists to film the oil spill and apparently issues marching orders to our own coast guard. My ex landlord Ron was just by and he says that some of his friends think that the whole oil spill in an Obama crafted conspiracy to further his aims towards a stalinist one world government. And the depth of Obama's perfidy can not be overestimated, having salted a fake birth announcement in the Honolulu Register while he was a mere week old.

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Republican Attorney General Tom Corbett is subpoenaing Twitter to get the identities of people who have been criticizing him online. Maybe a little too thin skinned for the job.

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Former SEC head Harvey Pitt thinks that the new financial legislation is designed to fix last year's problem. Such hubris. What exactly were you doing on your watch, Pitt? Talk about reactive. And isn't it amazing that Goldman could have a whole quarter of perfect trades when their investors took such a heavy bath?

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Anti semitic, jewish wackjob Noam Chomsky, is plenty sore after being denied entry into Israel to spread his verbal virus. Why don't the Chomsky's of the world ever plunk their banjos in friendly regimes like Saudi Arabia, Syria or North Korea? Easier to pile on the jews, they think they are so perfect. Quick, name me an arab democracy in the last 50 years...Time's up.

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Lakers/Celtics - go away all you pretenders, the age old opponents assemble yet again to take their place in one of sports greatest and most iconic rivalries.

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Richard Blumenthal, the Senate contender who has recently been caught concocting imaginary Vietnam War experience, is a democrat. There, I said it. What a stupid dick. Like no one would ever find out? Lance Armstrong evidently has a touch of the same arrogant hubris.

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Read the story of an immigrant who died trying to save an American family. They are obviously not all foreign born killers who are here to sell heroin to elementary school kids and blare loud music in their low slung cruisers.

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