GOD WANTS LOW WAGES – Pay them nothing and they will teach.

•   McGill comments get national attention,
• AEA boss gives McGill failing grade

I’ve only half-joked for years that God really needs a better PR team here in the temporal world. Some of the most log-headed charlatans, grifters, and just plain logically-challenged people claim to speak on His behalf. Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and the ethically inept Newt Gingrich are just a few who work non-stop to tarnish God’s image.

Unfortunately, there’s another PR flack trying to grab a share of the ignobility. AL state Sen. Shadrack (Shadrack, really? Shadrack?) McGill is currently charming the nation’s electorate with the fanciful notion that God has issued an edict that teachers should be underpaid, perhaps as foretold in the Book of Ignoramus.

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach. To go and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?”

Oddly, though not surprisingly, McGill doesn’t extend the same “logic” to lawmakers. Last year he voted for a 62% increase in his pay.

Lawmakers: Bribed, Not Called

I suppose this illuminates his idea that lawmakers don’t need to be called to serve, they must be bribed to take on the job. It’s not unlike paying a large retention bonus to the CEO who ran the company into the ground because his expertise is essential to rebuilding the business.

But in his defense, McGill reasons that by paying lawmakers more they’re less susceptible to bribery – apparently bribery from someone other than the unbribable legislators themselves.

Head-scratcher, ain’t it?

It doesn’t do much for his credibility that he voted to tie legislators’ pay to the average Alabama teacher’s pay last year and reversed course this year. It’s OK though, flip flopping is a venerated sport at the Statehouse Country Club and the all seeing, all knowing God won’t really notice a little free play with facts.

Darby McGill and the Little People claim Alabama teachers are the 4th best paid in the country. Now I don’t know about you, but most people know that pretty much everything in Alabama education sucks a big weenie. They usually joust with Mississippi for the 49th or 50th spot in everything – although Propped 13 California is a strong up and commer. The true value of an Alabama teacher’s pay actually ranks 31st in the National Miseducation Sweepstakes.

Smite That Rascal Lord

Hey McGill, wait a minute. If that No. 4 standing is correct aren’t you overpaying teachers and attracting a bad crowd of the unmotivated kind? Shouldn’t you work harder to lower Alabam’s No. 4 ranking to 49th – or at least 45th?

If you’ll excuse a minor blasphemy…my God. If you claim to be serving as God’s on-scene commander, the least you could do is get your story straight. It might also sit better with the Big Guy if you didn’t stand behind his robes and yell, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words and actions will never haunt me.”

God, I know you and I haven’t been on a first name basis for close to 45 years now, but I like to think we at least have a workable truce. So I beseech thee, if you’re really there control people like McGill. They do a disservice to you and just really chap the pants off the rest of us – You-fearing and not fearing alike.

Smite him o’ Lord. Cast him into the fiery pit of the unelectable. Just take away his 62% pay hike before you give him the eternal shove.

Can I get an Amen?

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THE OLD HOMESTEAD – It’s not my grandparents’ shack, but it is a close facsimile. If Mitt Romney would live in a place like this for a week, I’d vote for him.

Much has been said about how multi-millionaire candidates relate to the middle class. Most of them advize Americans who are part of the shrinking middle class to simply get new  jobs. They’re understandably silent on just how to pull that off in the recession they’ve created. In their opinion, any grousing from Americans caught in the vice of diminishing means is just class warfare against the wealthy, Cayman Island, tax-dodging, outsourcing, politically powerful. BANG! You’re very poor.

No Rusty Iron Spoons for Mitt

Candidates, as often as not, speak as though the very poor don’t even exist. Much like their notion that gay soldiers didn’t exist unless you asked if they were gay. And when they infrequently talk of the working poor, it’s usually along the lines of Mitt Romney’s statement that he doesn’t worry about them because they have an adequate safety net. Fine words from a man not born with a rusty iron spoon in his mouth.

I’m very lucky. I started as a marginal middle class blue collar worker and made my way up with a lot of luck and the ability to know to jump ship when I heard the deckchairs scraping. These days, I defy the odds as an upper middle class man with a nice house, good job, health benefits, and enough money to fund a retirement and buy most anything I truly want or need (not yachts and airplanes and multiple summer “cottages” in Vail you understand) without stretching too much.

My parents were more middle-middle class. They were acutely aware that money didn’t grow on trees.  My father was one of those grossly overpaid civil servants you hear so much about these days. Even though he was lucky to have his job, his “overly generous benefits” didn’t cover my mother’s and grandmother’s schizophrenia or my sister’s bipolar illnesses. In fact, it didn’t pay for most extras and most of the disposable income was already disposed of when the check arrived.

But, just because I led a modestly middle class life doesn’t mean I’m inexperienced in the lives of the very poor.

Meet My Grandparents

The "safety net" mental hospital where my grandmother spent decades.

Meet my grandparents. They lived a life straight out of the mid-1800s. My zero grade school grandfather had no steady job because in the backwoods of the Appalachians, there weren’t any, steady or otherwise.  And my grandmother, similarly uneducated and dogged nearly all her life with multiple incarcerations in a state mental hospital that was every bit as scary as those in the mid1800s led a very hard life too.

I know. I visited her there many times and heard the screams of the “patients” and the stink of their urine while she slowly rocked in a chair almost comatose from medication.

They lived in a leaking tar-paper shack one step removed from a cardboard box. Heat and cooking fuel came from wood cut a ½ a mile up a steep embankment. During a particularly bad winter they burned one of the rooms of the house because they couldn’t reach the wood pile in hip-deep snow.

Drinking water came several times a day from a hole in the ground by bucket and was drunk with a community ladle. They bathed and washed clothes in a small creek, polluted from mine waste, behind their tar-paper manse. The outhouse was nearby where, yes, they used actual Sears catalog pages. It was a 2-holer though. They lived over a hole of luxury.

They owned a small “farm” with soil so poor they grew only potatoes and cabbage – everything else died. Meat came from the occasional chicken that stopped laying and daily hunts for squirrel, raccoon, and possum.  Once, my uncle even downed a bobcat. After my mother dropped out of school in the 8^th grade to help support the family she vowed never to eat another ‘coon. And, she never did. But, she never made it back to school either.

The Day Electricity Came on the Back of a Mule

I’m 57 and remember when electricity arrived in the holler. It came from the road a mile away and was strung from the back of a mule slipping and sliding down the almost impassable slope. It dangerously provided one light fixture with no switch in a house without wiring. You unscrewed the bulb to turn it off. My grandparents barely used it. It scared them.

The closest telephone was a mile away at Speed’s General Store. Because of the snow, winter calls were impossible.

There’s more, but you get the essence.

From them, I learned much about the lives of the very poor. It’s easy for people like Gov. Romney to call safety nets with holes so big millions of people fall through them “adequate”. It’s easy for the fast-disappearing middle class to ignore these people…until they’re outsourced and suddenly find the safety net not nearly so safe as they thought.

I’d like to think I would be more compassionate than them, but without my experiences I possibly would have been as blind to the “have nots” as Romney and the Tea Partiers (BTW, I don’t think my grandparents ever drank a cup of tea. They couldn’t afford it).

Just Another Muttonhead With Slicked Back Hair

Had I not had the privilege of seeing the back-breaking labor that stood between my grandparents and, in some cases, death. It would have been possible that I could never have fathomed a life that poor. That deprived. I’d like to think I wouldn’t turn into just another muttonhead with slicked back hair, a limo, and a gold spoon hanging from his mouth. But there for the grace…

I’m willing to vote for anyone in any party if, for once, they’d go live like my grandparents, or in the projects, or under a highway overpass for a week. I’d like to give them a sense of what an “adequate safety net” means.  Just once. Just once.

Gov. Romney, my vote is yours for the taking. I’ll vote for you if you have the courage to live like so many other people in this country for only a week – hell, even a day. After that, I’ll campaign for you if you can just define exactly how it is that our safety nets are adequate.  I’m waiting to give my vote to you right now.

Governor?

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AND THEN I TOLD MARIANNE… – “Darlin’, I got some serious junk here and there’s just too much of Newt to not share the wealth.”

Newt Gingrich has an ego as big as all outdoors, or at least a big as Donald Trump’s. He’s a historian with only a nodding acquaintance with text book history and his own self-professed place in it.  The other thing Newt has is a propensity for pissing people off. People like voters and political allies in his own party. While this isn’t an altogether useless skill in an election, it isn’t so great when a President has to work with people rather than through them. If cockroaches will survive nuclear holocaust Newt will be right there tossing garbage to them.

Newt and the Bulldog
The Grey One has already screwed the pooch in the opinion of most political pundits. Screwed the bulldog just like The Crazy One, The Pizza Deliverer, Governor Big Hair, and The Unknown Candidate. He’s left competing with The Even Crazier One, The Crazy Little Old Man, and The Moronic Mormon.  As long as evangelicals, pissed off white guys, and the rest of the Ignorati from small, unimportant states vote like lemmings he’ll still be winner take all on pure political gutsiness.

Make no mistake, Newt will become the candidate. I’m not a believer in legislating personal behavior , but a man pandering to values voters while having none of his own isn’t a problem. The values folks vote that way all the time and a little pecker-waving is a small price to pay beating The Messiah (oh, and BTW, when’s he going to show us his birth certificate?). By election time, the Mormon will have as big a reputation for never meeting a position he didn’t like and revealing his birth certificate instead of his 0% tax rate forms will be the least of his problems.

Newt is Newt
Newt will stride across the GOP stage like John McTheusela and try to convince the Republicans that running as President and Vice President at the same time is a good thing. After all, he’s Newt and Newt is more powerful than God. Still, some single-payer corporate grifters will kibosh the idea and force Newt to take on a wildly ridiculous running mate, maybe a Dan Quayle comeback.

The Dems will float a Biden Presidential run because they are just as afraid of Newt as the few thinking Republicans are.  But eventually, The Messiah will clinch the nomination after some public cat herding. Eventually, the Obamunator will win by the skin of his socialist nose after Newt’s hubris trips him up by saying something so weird even the Republicans can’t overlook it – perhaps moving into the White House immediately after his nomination.

Never underestimate the power of a man who can schtup wife two while taking on the Stepford Wife with the bad hair and can explain that the whole thing was Calista’s doing.

Hey, it could happen.

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VICTORIA’S SING ALONG TIME – Come on all you right wingers, sing along!

There is no shortage of Americans full of crackpot ideas and imagined conspiracies. They’re usually part of an unknown cast preaching to like-minded goobs. But occasionally someone with a not-so-unknown name takes to the bloody pulpit. 

Truth be told the left and right both have plenty of celebrities in their ideological quivers. But the right’s stable may be smaller and makes up in bat-shit craziness what it loses in quantity.

Ted Nugent is the prototypical conservative in camo. The Nooge never misses a chance to link omnipresent commies to nefarious plots bent on confiscating cross bows or some other equally deranged story. A lifetime of hearing Cat Scratch Fever set to 11 has damaged the man. But Nooge, step aside. There’s a new crackpot in town.

Join the Victoria Jackson Nation

Victoria Jackson made a comedy career of dressing like a 10-year old girl and speaking in a voice that sounded like Carol Channing on helium. The combination was good enough to win her an SNL role and star in a few forgettable movies that required a vacuous girl wearing a tutu and playing the ukulele.

After a long stint playing a Florida homemaker – why is it always Florida – she’s back with a show of her own and a political ideology that makes a Michele Bachmann/Sarah Palin Siamese Twin sound positively grounded.

Vic’s latest rant – branded Victoria Jackson’s Still A Crazy Asshole – suggests she has fallen under the sway of the, President Obama is behind all of this and we will all have to “convert or be killed!” crowd. In her mind, Anti-Christ Hussein Obama will force everyone to join the Muslim Brotherhood and accept sharia as the law of the land. This isn’t an unknown position amongst the ignorati, even though it is illogical using their own logic: How can Obama be too stupid to tie his own shoes yet carry out what would have to be a cover up roughly the size and complexity of the Manhattan project?

Some might argue that her return to TV, helming a show on PolitiChics, is just an extension of her career acting like a bubble head. Others would argue she isn’t “acting”. If she weren’t so damn scary, in the same way Rick Santorum is scary, you could probably take the show and her actions as an inspired comedy patterned after Andy Kaufmann.

But I think she actually believes this stuff. First of all, she ain’t that funny, as her movie Casual Sex proves. Secondly, if Fox News hosts question your sanity, you have to be well and truly beyond the bend.

But the scariest part of her is that she fantasizes these things and is a focal point for her fellow like-minded fans. There are a goodly number of people who share her beliefs and TV makes it all that much easier to rally the outliers.

Even if they don’t wear tutus and play the ukulele.

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Poll watchers are writing the obituary for Newt “I Got My Ass Kicked Over That Name A Lot When I Was a Kid” Gingrich. Pundits are screaming at each other with full-throated vigor and the public stands agog that none of the punditocrisy saw this coming.

“Newt’s a smart guy and will pull it all together!” Newt has too much baggage and doesn’t have a hope in hell” go the chants.

My opinion is that Newt has an ego that would give Donald Trump a hard on. And, he likes to play the “(revised) history professor” to a party well-known as the ignorati since medieval serfs used sticks for shovels… and housing… and, when necessary, food. Besides, everyone had a 7th grade history teacher that hated them. That memory is really hard to overcome.

Newt, the Small Salamander
In the end, Newt will fall into his own mouth and swallow himself into a heftily paid lobbyist and “professor” in some of the nation’s most academically-challenged institutions of higher learning. Besides, he’s named for a small amphibian and that’s a heavy cross to bear.

Noting unusual here. Politicians flame out all the time.  What seems to differ this time is that the Republican field is like the Kentucky Derby with 6 more horses than starting gates.

So far, the ultra-insane wing – Michele Bachmann and Governor Goodhair – have fallen prey to that old political disease, Village Idiot Syndrome. Herman Cain – who passes for a moderate in today’s Republican Party – went down with “I Can’t Keep it in My Pants” Disease.

Rick Santorum is a late bloomer angling for the “Uber-Ultra Insanitite With a Cherry on Top” vote. He’ll fare about as well as anyone who, when Googled, displays a picture of runny shit.

Jon Huntsman will die a quiet political death while trying to explain how his billionaire father has nothing to do with his campaign while accepting more money than God from him. Breeding truly tells.

Ron Paul will pull the hardcore daffies like he’s the second coming of Dennis Kucinich, but daffiness doesn’t sell nearly as well as bat-shit, full-moon lunacy.

That religious cultist Mitt Romney – who’s sole redeeming feature is that he isn’t one of the others – will still lose. It seems what you don’t say is almost as bad a saying something stupid. Wearing special underwear and having been named for a piece of baseball equipment will not overcome his challenges either.

I Love the Smell of Moose Urine in the Morning
Who’s left? No, not Donald Trump. He won’t find campaigning nearly as cool as delusional idol worship, gold-plated everything, and swag lamps. The White Trump House is simply not klassy enough for him.

But, is that moose urine or wolf carcass offal on the tundra I smell? Why of course, Yosemite Samantha Sarah is baaaack!

She’s nowhere as loony as Santorum or Bachmann, but they’ve been genetically bred for maximum hilarity – religious, anti-chimp/anti-evolution claims notwithstanding.  Perry gives her a run for her money, but in the end he still sounds like George the Lesser raised from the dead. And the one thing everyone agrees is that George the Lesser should be exiled to Sardinia… forever.

For some inexplicable reason, people will listen to her. Maybe it’s her folksy delivery or sexy schoolmarm schtick. Maybe it’s her “just plain folks” sensibilities. “She just seems so darn nice,” Republican women will gush. People see her as having the same troubles as them. After all, her reality show was cancelled and it’s replacement withered on the vine. Everyone can relate to that, can’t they?

Of course, Obama will win the election – not because people like him – but because they see how bad things are now and are absolutely terrified it’ll get even worse with someone else in the catbird seat.

Surprisingly, Republicans aren’t driving nails into their own coffin with this baffling array of candidates with donut holes for brains. No, they’ll just look like buffoons until such time as the Democrats out-buffoon them and then put up some yokel with lots of money and no morals for the win.

Sigh…

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