It is now a requirement of Obamacare that every Catholic institution larger than a single church? — and even including some single churches — must pay for contraceptives, sterilization, and morning-after abortifacients for its employees. Each of these is directly contrary to the Catholic faith. But the Obama administration does not care. They have said, in effect, Do what we tell you — or else.

Exactly. In regulating an insurance business decision- and that is all that this is- the critics of Obama see the end of civilization. The fact that no one actually told the Catholic church what to believe apparently doesn’t sink in to the professional victims crowd. In essence, the ruling states that if you sell insurance, then you must be bound by certain laws. If you find those rules too harsh, or not in keeping with your beliefs, then you certainly don’t have to obey them. Just quit selling insurance. For those of us more inclined to reality than Catholics, its not really a that big of a deal.

What if instead of discriminating against women with their ban on offering contraception, what if it were gays? But the same argument made by Catholics to discriminate against women could easily be made against gays. After all, discriminating against homosexuality is the very air that Bill Donahue, Rick Santorium and Michelle Bachmann breathe- and don’t believe that they haven’t thought about “banning the gay”. And if this nation really was a “Christian Nation” in reality instead of their fevered minds, they’d probably do it.

But they can’t. Discrimination does not hide behind the skirts of “religious freedom”, no matter how passionately Fox News bellows. The Catholic church is, just like all of us, free to believe any silly notion it wants. And like us their ability to “swing their fists” ends before they touch my face. But if they want to engage in a business, then you have made the decision to accept the rules of society. What you “believe” means absolutely nothing. You are selling a product, and that product is regulated by the government. You might find the Bible gives you license to tell a woman what she can do with her body- but not everyone does (in fact, not even Catholics believe it). Religion has nothing to do with it.

And if you don’t like it, move. I hear Uganda is nice this time of year.

After questioning the student on his numbers, Santorum rejected them. “I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance. People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare,” he said. “And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to. And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.”

Rick Santorum, meet Alex Chilton.

Oh yeah. You can’t. He died in 2010.

At least twice in the week before his fatal heart attack, Chilton experienced shortness of breath and chills while cutting grass. But he did not seek medical attention, his wife Kersting said, in part because he had no health insurance.

On the morning of March 17, she went to work. Chilton called her after suffering another episode; she arrived home before the ambulance, and drove him to the hospital. He lost consciousness a block from the emergency room, after urging Kersting to run the red light.

Alex Chilton was the leader of Big Star, one of the most influential American bands ever. Before that he was the singer for the Box Tops, you’ll remember them from “The Letter” and “Cry Like A Baby”. Chilton lived a hard life, and smoked, and unlike your American Idol wannabes, he never made much money doing what he did so well.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, between being a lawyer and a Senator, probably had earned outrageous amounts of money. Add in his moronic Presidential campaign, where he’s gotten donations of over 800k- not a lot by Obama and Bush standards, but it ain’t chump change. For what? Rick Santorum is a hate mongering, homophobic theocrat who’s idea of a better America looks a lot like Iran or China. He stands no hope at all of being elected- to anything, at any time, thanks to Dan Savage- but still he gets invited to the debates, so that he can spew his warped sense of right and wrong to the people who cheer capital punishment and jeer gay soldiers. We won’t go into his views on gay rights, other than to say his views are at best misguided and un-Christian. But his recent statements on health care in this country goes a long way to summing up what sort of man Santorum is. To dispute the claim that upwards of 100,000 people die in this country due to lack of health insurance means he’s either stupid- and he’s given ample evidence to that in the past. Or he’s lying, and as I’ve always said, if you have to lie to make your point, you don’t have a point to make. Rick Santorum has undoubtedly had health insurance his entire life, first from his law firm, and then you and I picked up the tab when he was a Senator.

On the other hand, I doubt if Alex Chilton was covered at any point in his life. No musician I know, at least those who make their living solely by performing and recording, has insurance. Barely a month goes by without a plea for donations or a benefit for someone down on their luck with cancer or in a car wreck. It’s tragic, and in a nation so blessed with wealth, its wrong. But as Calvin Coolidge correctly noted, “The business of America is business”, and to that, our health care system is a profit center, putting stock prices first and patient care last. Lying fools such as Santorum and the jackals of Fox trumpet that our health care is second to none, but its not. In fact, by any ranking, we’re about the lowest among Western countries. Our life expectancy is 42nd, and we can barely manage to keep children alive to their teenage years. The people who claim otherwise are making money off it, nothing else. Rick Santorum included. And Rick Santorum will continue to spew his perverted brand of hatemongering as long as the donor dollars continue to roll in, and when Obama is elected again, he’ll go back to being a lawyer or a dinner speaker, and have more kids (he has 7 now).

Alex Chilton, on the other hand, died because he didn’t have health insurance. He’s not going to have any more kids. Or write another song as beautiful as Big Star’s “Thirteen”. He’ll never belt out a New Orleans classic in a smokey bar at 2am. He’ll never do any of that. Because he’s dead. I’m going to Memphis this weekend, home to Big Star, and I’m gonna raise a glass to the memory of Alex Chilton. And when I get rid of the beer, that will be my tribute to Rick Santorum.

I had a stroke in the early morning of August 2nd. It caused me no physical pain, and none of the classic signs of stroke, other than my speech became jumbled. I spent a week in the hospital, and now after three months I have returned to work, so outwardly all is getting back to normal. And I guess it is, at least in the day to day mechanics of life. I awake at the same time, go to work and come home. Other than not really enjoying loud music, it’s almost as if the stroke never happened.

But inwardly, everything has changed. As the old saying goes, you don’t miss your water till the well runs dry. I have never been “cute”, and I tend to gain weight, so I never thought of myself as attractive and popular, but I knew that I was smart. Unschooled perhaps, but well-read and with a burning quest for knowledge. The stroke has changed that- I no longer trust my brain. I fumble when speaking, particularly at end of the day when I’m fatigued. Words do not come as easily as before, and my writing is not up to the level I was accustomed to. My doctor says within 6 months to a year I can regain 95% of my abilities. I say no. The brain reroutes itself in injury, steering blood away from the damaged parts, and learns new pathways for the things it needs to do. So I have set as my goal not 95%- but 100%. Or 150%. Why not take this event as a motivation to get smarter? I read more now, to overcome my problems with numbers I have become addicted to Sudoku. I do logic problems, crosswords, and other puzzles everyday, to keep my brain growing.

Until my stroke, I didn’t “get” Thanksgiving. Until I faced the prospect of not having life- or dealing with far more setbacks that I have so far- I never really looked at each day as the blessing it is. I’m alive, able to exist in the world pretty much as before, but now I see that in a more spiritual way. I am not religious, I don’t believe in deities, but I truly believe that something, somewhere, wanted me to live. It has enthused my life with a greater purpose. I look at my friends, small in number but large in heart, and I am thankful for them. I listen to music with even more appreciation than before, just at a lesser volume. I read stories of stroke victims, including the great My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, and find comfort at the shared experiences of others.

But the stroke, although it has robbed me of some aspects of life, it has given me a far greater gift than anything I am temporarily beset by. It has given me an appreciation of love. When I was in the hospital, a dear friend came to visit. I have known Wade Lowe my entire life, ever since he moved down the street when I was five. His son was one of my best friends in school, and Wade’s guitar shop, Diapason, sparked in me a life-long love of guitars. He arrived in my hospital room, a place he was familiar with considering his two heart attacks, and said that once I got back we would walk everyday. And so we have. I jokingly call him my personal trainer, but he’s far more than that. He is one of the happiest, most loving persons I have ever met. He seems to exist to, as his daughter remarked, “to do good things for people”. He has taken me under his wing many times in my life, far more than I would care to admit. I hope to replay the favor- and the love he has shown me- someday.

My wife Nancy and I are not “people persons”. She would rather draft ten emails than leave a voicemail, and other than friends and family, dislikes the phone. But she forgot all that when I was in need. She worked the phones tirelessly setting doctor visits, getting me setup for speech therapy, and a hundred other things. She finished my sentences when I couldn’t, and listened to my frustration when things got rough without complaint. She took my dietary restrictions as a challenge to her chefing abilities, never once letting it get the better of her. She has comforted me when I am stressed or fearful, listened to my woes, and truly made me know, finally, what a “partner” is. I truly feel I wouldn’t be here without her. This Thanksgiving, unlike years past, is only the two of us. And that’s alright with me. Because until this year, Thanksgiving was pretty much just an occasion to overindulge and eat Nancy’s stellar cooking. Not this year. Having been faced with the alternative, I look at life- and particularly life with her- as a blessing.

I finally get Thanksgiving. I hope you do too.

Phil Elmore, The festering Obamavilles

Phil Elmore writes for World Net Daily, which gives you pretty much everything you need to know about him. WND is a place where facts and reality take a back seat to spurious rumors, internet get rich scams, and of course anti-Obama racism. It’s a playground for the reality-challenged among us, home to the 25% of citizens that just can’t accept Snopes.com and instead read Chuck Norris. As the Occupy movement has grown, the crowd at WND has upped their condemnation of it, of which “The festering Obamavilles” is just the latest example of their blind panic that someone might upset the status quo. “Protesters” and “occupiers” in quotes, because they aren’t really protesting, instead they’re “shiftless losers who don’t care about anything” who “comprise countless lesser terrorist campaigns whose goal is to intimidate and punish the public“.

“Call out the National Guard. Turn on the fire hoses. Send bulldozers. Bring flame-throwers, for pity’s sake. Men and women who give a damn about their country, wearing Hazmat suits and respiratory gear, empowered by the lawful government of this nation, should be marching in ranks on every Obamaville this very moment, prepared to beat with truncheons and shoot with rubber bullets every last filthy hippie. Put a stop to this miserable army of miscreants before they are permitted to rape, infect, or ruin one more person.”

Goodness, methinks Phil- self-proclaimed martial arts “expert”- is frightened. He’s frightened that his Horatio Alger/God Bless America fantasy is finally being shown to be rubbish. Every paragraph in his screed contains a lie, even the title. “Obamavilles” is a misnomer- they can’t stand him, and for all his “understanding” of the movement, he still sicced the DoJ on the protesters in a coordinated effort across the country. Phil can’t seem to find any “message” in the movement- “Their targets range from shadowy corporate interests to equally ill-defined powers-that-are“. Oh no, someone said something mean about a corporation, thank goodness Elmore springs to the their defense. The fact that big business- and particularity the big banks- will grind him up just like everyone else matters not to Phil, as long as “filthy hippies” get crushed.

“They are lib hippie left-wing protesters, and lib hippie left-wing protestors are notorious for flouting basic standards of human decency.” Those “standards” are defined by a good American such as Phil Elmore, one suspects. Drawing attention to the income inequality in this country and stating the common-sense “Corporations Aren’t People” is “endangering the public” whereas his censorship of free speech by flamethrower is a-ok. It’s as if Elmore was in a coma since Woodstock, and like the Japanese troops stuck on islands that didn’t know the war was over, you can almost imagine Phil shouting “Get a haircut!” and racing home to watch Lawrence Welk.

Conservatives and liberals literally have different brains. Liberals cope better with change, whereas conservatives enjoy the status quo, and have a larger part of the brain that deals with fear and recognizes threats. Change to a conservative means potentially abandoning long-held beliefs and practices, and is something to be viewed with uncertainly and doubt. If one begins to question authority, then who will protect you when times are tough? For all the Ayn Rand dribble about “going it alone” and the “individual over the masses”, conservatives crave a big government that can stomp out “the filthy rabble” that dares voice another opinion.

I hate to break it to Phil and his fellow armchair patriots, but their days are numbered. The greed and selfishness that has mired this country in the economic toilet since Reagan is rejected by the 99% movement. They don’t want endless wars, they don’t fear Sharia, or gays, or “illegals”. They don’t want Citizens United to be the law of land, they don’t want BP to poison the Gulf or a pipeline to pollute the midwest. The 99% want equality, not entitlements. They aren’t against corporations, but they don’t want them to own our government. For Phil and his followers, it’s ok to provide socialism when Goldman Sachs gambling goes south, but if a single mother needs healthcare, it’s “not with my taxes!” Billions and billions to fight little brown people in caves, but none to feed a homeless man. They think it’s fine for our tax dollars to go to rebuilding Afghanistan- but not Detroit.

One feels almost sorry for the Phil Elmores of the world, trapped in a make-believe world of “us vs. them”, trotting out tired, disposed of slogans from battles already lost, craving the comforting dominance of authority to make sense of a world that has passed them by. Almost sorry. But not really. Because it’s these people with their craven whimpering for the mommy/state to keep them safe and quash “the hippies” that holds us back, and drags the inevitable evolution of society to a crawl. It might take 5 years or 50, but in time the Phil Elmores and his ilk will be no more.

As someone who will always identify more with the “filthy hippies”, I say good riddance. Your generation has received your final grade- and it failed. Be a man and admit it. Or continue to read World Nut Daily in your mom’s basement- just get out of the way. Some people have had enough of the status quo.

Mississippi Voters Reject Personhood Amendment
Mississippi voters rejected a radical “personhood” constitutional amendment that defined a fertilized egg as a “person,” which effectively banned all abortions, birth control, and couples from conceiving children through in vitro fertilization.

Ohio Voters Emphatically Reject Kasich’s Anti-Union Law
Ohio Democrats, who got absolutely creamed in the 2010 elections, have now won a major victory over Republican Gov. John Kasich — massively winning a referendum to repeal Kasich’s anti-public employee union law.

AP: Maine Voters Say Yes To Same Day Registration
Voters in Maine have approved a ballot measure on allowing same day voter registration. The state had previously moved to require voters register no later than two days before an election. The state Republican Party had run ads urging the issue’s defeat, by suggesting that pro-gay rights groups supported it.

Arizona election results: Russell Pearce ousted, Jerry Lewis wins
The Arizona election results are in: according to the Associated Press, Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce has been ousted by voters and Republican Jerry Lewis has been elected to the state Senate. Senator Pearce was the chief proponent and architect of SB1070, Arizona’s controversial immigration law. According to the text of SB1070, the immigration law was designed “to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States.” However, SB1070 generated an intense public outcry from immigration rights activists.

Hmm. It appears that Americans love affair with the Tea Party has run its course. That was quick, almost like the Kardashian wedding. Since the elections of 2010, where the Astroturf Tea Party garnered impressive victories, folks have gotten a chance to actually live under the rule of the Koch brothers and Dick Armey. Farmers in states where severe anti-immigration laws became law hate it; they have no workers to pick the crops. It’s one thing to carp about illegals watching Fox and Friends, but faced with the reality of your livelihood going down the tubes due to racist demagogues is quite another.

John Kaisch, anti-union poster boy for the ALEC and the Koches, watched as voters emphatically put the smack down on his union-busting law, passed earlier this year. Guess Ohio voters didn’t like their collective bargaining rights stripped away to give more goodies to Republican-backed corporations. Didn’t help the Kaisch is a Neanderthal- check out the shirt he wore at a “Building A Better Ohio” meeting. What a yutz.

In their mad passion for power, the GOP around the country has attempted to limit the voting rights of, lets face it, democrats by various means, all supposedly to combat “voter fraud”, a problem that doesn’t exist- unless you think that voters not voting for them is fraudulent. In Maine they even trotted out the gay card in an attempt to sell their message, but even the “gay agenda” wouldn’t stop people from repealing a law meant to deprive people of their civil rights.

Will the Tea Party blow away? No, not entirely. There are a lot of confused, easily manipulated people out there, and as long as Obama is President, they will continue to blame him for all their woes- its just too easy. But in a recent poll, Americans showed where they stood:

Poll shows Occupy Wall Street more popular than Tea Party
A new survey from Public Policy Polling (PPP) shows that Occupy Wall Street, also known as the 99 Percent Movement, now has much more public support than the Tea Party. The PPP poll of 1,000 American adults shows that 27% have a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” view of the Tea Party, compared to 44% who have a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” view. In contrast, 32% have a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” view of Occupy Wall Street, compared to just 35% who have a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” view.

We’ll just have to admit that for about a quarter of our population (and tragically our corporate-owned media), reality doesn’t intrude. They will carry the posters with “Obama=Socialist” and leap to the defense of CEOs over school teachers, voting against their own interests each time. A rational person can’t debate them- their cluelessness is literally in their genes- so don’t even try. But as Tuesday’s voting around the country shows, the honeymoon is over for the Tea Party.

Thank god.

Whether one agreed with the Iraq war or not, we all own it now. That’s how our country works. Every single brave man and woman who wore the uniform overseas went over there wearing the American flag, representing us and our nation’s ideals.

I’m not Thoreau, just someone touched by his message. I find it reprehensible the statement “…representing us and our nation’s ideals.” My ideals do not include the invasion of a country based on lies. My ideals don’t involve regime change based on the whims of defense contractors. My ideals -and my flag- don’t include murdering innocents because of their religion and/or their geographic relationship to oil. My ideals cannot tolerate Abu Ghraib, the war crimes of Fallujah, or the endless destruction and loss of life that our debacle in Iraq continues to cause.

In Civil Disobedience Thoreau writes:

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answered that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

162 years later, and the disgrace continues. There is no reason to debate the Iraq war again. It was a mistake, a tragedy, and a farce- but I had nothing to do with it, because I had no input in the decision. I voted for no one who wanted to continue it, I marched against it before it began, and I wrote about the horrors and the depravity as it was on going. As much I as could- short of not paying my taxes- I resisted. When I see the “Support Our Troops” stickers I cringe. For those who were forced by our economic system of inequality to enlist, and then suffered brain injury and more because of it, I can understand, somewhat, the rational behind the action, and I feel for you.

But those who convinced themselves that “America’s Way Of Life” needed defending in the sands of some Middle East desert by waging a war against Islam and any other dark-skinned people we could find, fuck that. My nation’s way of life wasn’t impacted – except in the propagandist media – by Iraq. No one sent a scud or piloted a drone remotely so I could vote. Or exercise my free speech. Iraq didn’t threaten me or my country, and anyone who says different is either paid to say it, or a stooge for American Exceptionism, which is even worse. In fact, I’m 49 years old, and no war fought by my country in my lifetime has been a legitimate use of the American war machine. Not Vietnam, not Iraq, not Afghanistan. They were fought because men made money doing it. No other reason. So Paul Rieckhoff, you can keep the war. You made it possible, I didn’t. You made a salary fighting it, I didn’t.

Thoreau said: Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

It’s not my war.

But one of the most infuriating biases you run up against is the conservative manta that global warming or climate change is all a big hoax meant not to save the planet from its most meddlesome inhabitants, but rather a cunningly devised scheme to ban capitalism. Not that capitalism doesn’t deserve it, in a way- eat any shrimp from the Gulf recently? But any mention of cap and trade, or increasing car mileage standards gets the Hannity’s and the Cato Institute in a uproar, and they go on for hours about “evil liberals” and their “environmental activism” that is ruining life here in “…the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.” Now, I recycle and drive a hybrid, so apparently I too want to ban capitalism, by their fractured logic. Funny, I thought I did it to actually reduce my impact on the world. Gosh, I’ve been duped by those evil treehuggers!

Earlier in the week a friend posted this:

with “The picture says it all…” atop it. Now, the gist of the picture is that anytime large amounts of “liberals” get together, they trash the place. You heard the same charge after protesters filled the Wisconsin capital, and it was equally erroneous. The picture above, near as I can tell, is the aftermath of Occupy Oakland, after the police fired upon non-violent protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. When you’re running for your life, you don’t have time to take down your tent. The police did that for you, after the park was cleared, by flattening the protesters personal property in a “search for contraband”. So much for the “picture says it all”- as long as the image can be used for propaganda, it will.

Well here’s an image that Sean Hannity won’t like:

That’s Miami. See, to some Floridians, climate change isn’t a myth, its actually happening in their front yards:

“Kipness says he never saw such flooding until a decade ago, but now sees it up to twice a day during the fall, when tides are especially high. He says he’s watched the undersides of $100,000 cars get rusted away by salt water.

This happens, many experts say, because of rising sea levels attributed to the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. We can expect to see more of the same across South Florida in the coming years, as a warming climate accelerates the faraway melting. Researchers are just now beginning to grapple with what this will mean for the inner workings of the city.”

Cable news was all over the “climategate” myth, all smug and self-righteous that they had vindication of a hoax. But when Richard Muller, a former “skeptic” on climate change published “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” in the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Show found that the 24 hours a day cable news organizations could only devote 27 seconds to the piece. Doesn’t matter the damage they did trumpeting disinformation, just so long as their rhetoric continued. Who cares about the facts? In an age where human beings are undoubtedly the most educated they have ever been, we still have to suffer from religious extremists “debating” evolution, or quoting fairy tales from a book of mythology to deny gay rights. Facts are open to bidding- and the Murdoch’s of the world, they have deep pockets. Maybe when the underside of their Mercedes gets rusted from saltwater in South Beach, they’ll come around.

Of course, then it’s most likely too late.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

King made that remark in a speech entitled Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence. And now, 44 years later, we have arrived at a point in our history where we have finally been forced to confront that edifice. The month-long Occupy Wall Street movement has already achieved more than we could hope, simply by raising the point. The point that government has failed us, big business has abandoned us, and that for the majority of people in this world, life is a narrow straightjacket of economic slavery. King was right, of course; we don’t need coins flung at us. Rather, the system where 400 people in the United States have wealth equal to the bottom 150,000,000 needs to change. Change because it is grotesquely unfair. Change because it is unsustainable.

The dynamic of capitalism is relentless growth, an ever-expanding pool of consumers. For a finite resource such as our planet, this is obviously impossible. We have long past reached the point of diminishing returns. No matter how cheaply you can make them, once everyone has a cell phone or a TV, you can’t sell anymore. The robber barons of Wall Street knew this long before the man in the street, that’s why they came up with default credit swaps and derivatives. They cost nothing but fictional money to produce, deliver vast returns when they work- and even more when they fail. Of course, only the 1% get anything from them. They are the ones who reap the rewards, adding more and more fictional money to their coffers, without producing a thing. The only time the entire arrangement is brought to the attention of the rest of us is when their irresponsible gambling has gone woefully sour and we have to bail them out. At this moment instead of watching Bank of America fail and their management team in jail, we’re about to pay up another 75 trillion because their 3 Card Monte scheme in Europe went belly up. No one but the 1% got anything out of this. Not one job (other than hedge fund managers) got created, not one factory was made, no bridges got repaired.

We have no idea how the OWS movement will end up- I suspect it won’t be pretty- but its a beginning. When people take their money out of the behemoth “too big to fail” banks- at the point of getting arrested- and put their savings in a local credit union, its a beginning. When people who can’t occupy Wall Street instead beginning addressed their concerns via Occupy the Boardroom and cause panic among the plutocracy, its a beginning. When the grotesque imbalance in the pay of CEOs versus the workers in this county results in the public shaming of these leeches instead of flattering reach-arounds on CNBC and Fox, its a beginning.

This is a discussion I never thought I would see in our country. When people are awaken to the truth they can do one of two things. They can ignore it and live their days in a comforting fog of unreality, or they become energized to make a change. I believe we are witnessing the dawn of some sort of evolution in our way of thinking, one that looks past short term gains for long term results. One that values school teachers more than the Chairman of the Board. Where people are not just wage slaves and consumers, but equals. I don’t expect this discussion to be done in my lifetime. And I suspect it will get messy- as Gandhi said First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,… and we’ve seen the inklings of that already, with the fraudulent “We Are the 53%” movement- but remember how the quote ends:

Then you win.

It’s taken 44 years for America to “see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”. How long will it take to find the answer? Who knows. But finally, we’re having the discussion.

Then the hammer fell down on the legions of Facebook/Fox News devotees as Sarah Palin made it official, that she’s not running for president. As one wag said, now she can quit jobs she can’t even get. Not that she could have been elected; she polls in the single digits and outside of a green screen at Fox, she doesn’t exist. But I’m sure we’ve not see the last of her. Five minutes after Obama takes the oath again, she be back on Facebook spewing her own particular insipid vision and hawking whatever TV show or infomercial she has running.

Yes, I said Obama takes the oath again. The eventual GOP candidate is Mitt Romney, and he’s just a pale caricature of Obama himself. The biggest thing against Obama, to the minds of a GOP voter is the Affordable Heath Care act, and it was the brainchild of Mitt when he was Governor of Massachusetts. And I imagine that quip “Corporations are people too” will come back to bite him, as it should. The rest of the woeful crew- Cain, Perry, et al, well, they’re just too insignificant to matter. The only candidate polling better against Obama is “Unknown Republican”, meaning that any of the ones that are actually running are wasting their time. The guy who killed Bin Laden and quotes Ronald Reagan is going to be hard to beat down the stretch, and while the average GOP voter will hold their nose and cast a ballot for Romney, so will the Democratic base-whipped puppy that they are- vote for Obama.

The world has gone into mourning over the death of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, and you know, no matter how much they like their iphones, the attention given to such a liberal giant must be madding to the true believers of the GOP. He made his fortune not by government bailout or derivatives, but by making a product someone wants to buy. Take that, auto industry. The man hand-picked by Jobs to run Apple, Tim Cook? Gay. Take that, hate groups such as American Family and Pat Robertson.

And finally, Occupy Wall Street is growing, with labor unions, nurses and even veterans joining the cause. And don’t think it has nothing to do with you, loyal GOP voter. Sure, Herman Cain can call the protestors “anti-American“, but that’s because he, like his party, are beholden to greed. There is nothing more American than protest, and while I think in the end this drama will end poorly- Major Bloomberg is just itching for the chance to really call out the goon squads and protect his base-hell, you don’t think JP Morgan just gave them 4.5 million for nothing, do ya? No, this probably will not be our Arab Spring- but its a start. As any ’60s hippie can tell you, getting Maced in the face doesn’t make you go home- it makes you angry. And the last thing any GOP voter wants is a bunch of 20-somethings getting riled up- and going to the polls. Nope, the first week in October hasn’t been kind to the GOP, for as much has they try to run from it, reality eventually wins. What did Stephen Colbert say? Oh yeah.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Heh heh.

They came along when I, and most of my generation were shrugging off the ways of adolescence and the enforced conformity of high school and going out in the world. No longer would we be riding in the same cars to the same parties with the same friends listening to either Pink Floyd’s The Wall or the vapid Hotel California by The Eagles. For us, facing life on our own via college or work, meant discovery and the shock of something new. To some this was a heady sensation. I remember discovering a new band every week, from punk to blues to country. I recall hearing Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan and early Jason and the Nashville Scorchers during one month in the early ’80s- and remember, at the time, no one played the blues and certainly didn’t combine Hank Williams and AC/DC the way the Scorchers did. It was grand. About the same time I drove my roommates crazy with a pair of singles- “Too Drunk To Fuck” by the Dead Kennedys and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division. To most of them music was a mindless supplement to whatever else you were doing, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to be as grating and angry as punk.

For those people, R.E.M. was perfect. While they didn’t sound like what you had just spend five years in high school listening to, you could still dance to them, and since Michael Stipe’s lyrics were impossible to fathom, you could safely ignore them. Couldn’t do that listening to Johnny Rotten’s acerbic “Anarchy in the UK”- I am an anti-Christ- or Black Flag. But for 20-somethings in a brave new world- even if that meant the community college down the road- R.E.M. was the soundtrack. And by the reaction that their breakup garnered in the online community, you’d think the last 25 years didn’t happen and “Don’t Go Back To Rockville” had just been released.

When I read “R.E.M.: America’s Greatest Band” in The Atlantic, it gave me pause. To me, R.E.M. had long since faded into the past, kept on a shelf along with Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith; i.e., music that once meant something to me at one time, but that time was past. I wasn’t the same person, and I had no desire to be that person again. But for some, R.E.M. reminds them of a charmed time in their lives when they were young, with the world in front of them. And not the world of mindless work and foreclosed houses, but rather a perhaps the last time you thought of yourself as able to do anything, the skies the limit. After a few margaritas and a spin of “Stand!” these people are able to escape back to a more hopeful time, free of the challenges of adulthood. Some people on Facebook remarked that the breakup meant “The 80s just died“- and for them, it probably has. To spend your life looking backwards at what used to be seems to me a life just waiting out the years, with no joy left to anticipate. And to me, that is inexcusable. I relish the thought of a lifetime yet to come, with new books to read, new musical journeys to follow. It’s what makes life worth doing. I don’t chide my friends for their nostalgia, but I don’t look at life that way. To each his own, I suppose.

And anyway, R.E.M. as America’s greatest band? Good grief, that’s silly. That would be Pere Ubu.