don't want the Mexican Flu
sure don't got any Mexican Flu
'Cause whenever you say the word MEXICAN
somebody's mad at you

can't have no flu that's Swine
just can't say that flu is Swine
'cause if people think you get Swine Flu from pigs
then pork they stop buyin'

got no use for H1N1
mighty lame name H1N1
'cause clearly announciating four distinct syllables in one name
just ain't American

pronouncin' H1N1 as Hun Nun is no good
callin' it the Hun Nun Flu just ain't any good
'cause when the Huns and the Nuns are all pissed at you
you know you're probably screwed


call it the Al Quaida Flu
Call it the Al Quiada Flu
for one thing they're already mad at us and for another you never know
when the AQ Flu will turn and kill you

Well, Spot, when I asked Uncle George about that, he laughed and called it 'banker porn'. He said, "Where of you been, boy? Don't you know that a big chunk of the general population is so broke they have to sell their retirement funds for pennies - just to survive." "Yeah," I said, "the economy is, like, really really bad, so why...? Hunh HEY!" Uncle George had slapped me on the back of the head like he used to do whenever he thought I'd said something extra stupid. I still hate it and I said so, but he just sit there sipping on his Scotch and looking at me like he was disappointed about something. After a minute he sighed and said, "Bad for who? It's a GOOD rich man's economy, it's a buyers market economy, it's a get-anything-you-want-for-damn-near-free market economy. IF you are truly rich. The only thing that could make it better would be about a trillion dollars of other peoples money, and a nice fat tax refund, so you could buy up even more property while the prices are down. Look," he said, trying to slap me again, "a big chunk of the general population still has stuff to sell at bargain prices. If they all got good jobs and started feeling prosperous they'd quit selling their futures, now wouldn't they? The bargain basement economy would dry up - and The Only Ones That Matter do not want to see that happen!"
I just don't know, Spot, I suppose Uncle George is right. But, if this is what it's like when 5% of the people own 50% of the property, what's it going to be like when 2% of the population owns 90% of everything?

>btr3,
> what do you think of this list I found at Glenn Thrush's Blog
>Spot
>
>A list of programs cut (actually reduced proposed allocations) from the House/Obama bill by Senate negotiators, put together by a Republican leadership aide:
>
>$40 billion State Fiscal Stabilization
>$16 billion School Construction
>$1.25 billion project-based rental
>$2.25 Neighborhood Stabilization (Eliminate)
>$1.2 billion in Retrofiting Project 8 Housing
>$7.5 billion of State Incentive Grants
>$3.5 billion Higher Ed Construction (Eliminated)
>$100 million FSA modernization
>$50 million CSERES Research
>$65 million Watershed Rehab
>$30 million SD Salaries
>$100 million Distance Learning
>$98 million School Nutrition
>$50 million aquaculture
>$2 billion broadband
>$1 billion Head Start/Early Start
>$5.8 billion Health Prevention Activity.
>$2 billion HIT Grants
>$1 billion Energy Loan Guarantees
>$4.5 billion GSA
>$3.5 billion Federal Bldgs Greening
>$100 million NIST
>$100 million NOAA
>$100 million Law Enforcement Wireless
>$50 million Detention Trustee
>$25 million Marshalls Construction
>$100 million FBI Construction
>$300 million Federal Prisons
>$300 million BYRNE Formula
>$140 million BYRNE Competitive
>$10 million State and Local Law Enforcement
>$50 million NASA
>$50 million Aeronautics
>$50 million Exploration
>$50 million Cross Agency Support
>$200 million NSF
>$100 million Science
>$89 million GSA Operations
>$300 million Fed Hybrid Vehicles
>$50 million from DHS
>$200 million TSA
>$122 million for Coast Guard Cutters, modifies use
>$25 million Fish and Wildlife
>$55 million Historic Preservation
>$20 million working capital fund
>$200 million Superfund
>$165 million Forest Svc Capital Improvement
>$90 million State & Private Wildlife Fire Management
>$75 million Smithsonian
>$600 million Title I (NCLB)
>
>
>
>

Ritz Mock Apple Pie

The classic pie, featuring Ritz crackers baked in a golden crust,
is perfect for the holidays.

Pastry for two-crust 9-inch pie
36 RITZ Crackers, coarsely broken (about 1 3/4 cups crumbs)
1 3/4 cups water
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Grated peel of one lemon
2 tablespoons margarine or butter
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon


1. Roll out half the pastry and line a 9-inch pie plate. Place
cracker crumbs in prepared crust; set aside.

2. Heat water, sugar and cream of tartar to a boil in saucepan
over high heat; simmer for 15 minutes. Add lemon juice and peel;
cool.

3. Pour syrup over cracker crumbs. Dot with margarine or butter;
sprinkle with cinnamon. Roll out remaining pastry; place over pie.
Trim, seal and flute edges. Slit top crust to allow steam to escape.

4. Bake at 425 F for 30 to 35 minutes or until crust is crisp
and golden. Cool completely.

Makes 10 servings

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION per serving
413 calories, 3 g protein, 63 g carbohydrate, 17 g total fat,
3 g saturated fat, 339 mg sodium, 0 g dietary fiber.

Preparation Time: 45 mins.
Cook Time: 30 mins.
Cooling Time: 3 hrs.
Total Time: 4 hrs. 15 mins.

_____________________________________________________________

This recipe taken directly from Back of the Box Recipes.
http://www.backofthebox.com/recipes/pies-pastries/ritz-mock-apple-pie.html

This recipe created by Nabisco.

The old Navy pilot and septuagenarian
Senator fumed, in a funk
For his party had vetoed his VP pick, Joe
And the rest of the candidates stunk.
“What to do?” he cried out
With a quavering shout
“Mr. Rove says I need a slam-dunk!”

So he squinted, and pondered, and paced to and fro
Thinking, “Who might appeal to the rubes?”
And then, in a flash, the thought came through at last:
“Hey I know – I’ll distract them with boobs!”
Lovely Sarah said, “Yes!”
“I have that readiness!”
And his campaign went straight down the tubes.

By the Right Reverend P. M. Cavendish

Friends: I had a chance to sit down and catch up with my old pal Sarah Palin for a brief interview. The interview itself happened in a dream, which perhaps accounts for why she wore a sleeveless tk'chita, or traditional Moroccan gown, and occasionally paused to breakdance.

Good thing about this interview, too, because it puts the lie to the idea that she has little foreign policy "experience" -- whatever that is. In fact, Sarah Palin’s got something better. She’s got a divinely-inspired Plan.

Some of you may be saying to yourselves: "It has been a long time since Reverend Cavendish was in our pulpit. Does this mean he successfully completed rehab? And why does he smells a like burnt okra?" To which I say: "Yes it has. No, but almost. And, I can’t answer that until some lab results come in."

These past months have been hard work, especially since I never really recovered after my first choice for president, Rudy Giuliani, crashed and burned.

I am not proud of how I have dealt with my sojourn in the political desert. Friends, I have been wrestling with a new jackal-headed Anubis. But in this case, the jackal had two heads, named Lyndsey and Lacey. Indeed, in following Ezekiel 23:32 “Thus saith the Lord God; Thou shalt drink of thy sisters’ cup deep and large,” I may have erred on the side of excess. But I am back! Fired up by the stellar performance of the McCain/Palin ticket!

Let me get to the point. Sarah Palin is the first person to correctly identify the Iranian threat as one of Witchcraft. Since her pastor, Thomas Muthee, is a noted campaigner against witches, she knows firsthand how to combat them. Indeed, according to his followers, Pastor Muthee’s own method of defeating witches consists of five phases:

1. Staging an air raid.
2. Sending in the ground troops.
3. Rallying an army of prayer warriors.
4. Designating divinely called intercessors
5. Adding in the Armor Bearers.

I asked Sarah about how this approach might be implemented against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

• ILP,S!: "So, tell me, are you advocating intercession against the witch Ahmadinejad through prayer and fasting?"
• Gov. P.: "For individual witches, you use prayer and fasting. For nuclear witches, you let the good guys use WMD’s on the bad guys."
• ILP,S!: "Would you cite Exodus 22:18 'Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live.' as moral justification for a nuclear strike?"
• Gov. P: "Does a moose shit in the woods? And don’t forget Exodus 22:9: 'Whosoever copulateth with a beast; shall be put to death.'"
• ILP,S!: "I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I see..."
• Gov. P: "A wise man once said, ‘Love the dog for its dogness.’"
• ILP,S!: "To get back to Iran, do you worry about this leading to a wider conflict?"
• Gov. P: "Well, I see Armageddon as a feature and not a bug. After all, we will live and dwell with Him there forever following His millennial reign on Earth. This millennial reign will bring the salvation of national Israel and the establishment of universal peace."
• ILP,S!: "But how do you know it will trigger the Second Coming? Isn’t that a gamble?"
• Gov. P: "Goodness, no. My church does not believe in gambling."
• ILP,S!: "Not even throwing down $100 chips at the Foxwoods Resort Casino?"
• Gov. P: "My church believes that there is no way in which a practice can be considered anything other than evil when it violates principles of Gods Word concerning stewardship, consideration of others, and the dignity of honest labor."
• ILP,S!: "Well, as long as that doesn't apply to John McCain."
• Gov. P: "The thing you have to remember is that for five and half years, he had no access to crap tables."

The rest of the interview is hazy, in part because the din those confounded owls were making started to drown out Sarah's dulcet voice! But I found the exchange refreshing, simply because I had not previously appreciated the Biblical imperative to strike Iran. And when I woke up, I found that there was still half a Bermuda Highball winking at me from its perch on King James' back. Amazingly useful book, that.

Amen.

By Cappy Rudyard

Members of the conservative junta are so intent on making sure that the tattered shreds of our economy hold together until the election is over that they will stop at nothing. Today’s news shows that not only are they willing to co-opt Obama’s “change” meme, but have completely plagiarized Debs’ “public ownership” message. But they get it completely wrong.

With 80% public ownership of American International Group (AIG), the McCain/Bush junta has made explicit their plan to “privatize profit, and nationalize debt.” This is, of course, not Debs’ Socialism, but the naked use of government to give the most beknighted of our hereditary financial class a “do-over.” Roll back individual bankruptcy protection, while making corporate bankruptcy protection available for the asking. Regressive taxation in two senses: taking from the poor to give to the rich, and taking from the careful to give to the gamblers.

This may sound like Socialism on a superficial level, but here is Eugene V. Debs to remind us what real Socialism sounds like:

Less than 2 percent of our people privately own our natural resources and our industrial machinery. In virtue of which they have the power to rule the nation and rob the people…
As long as the industrial machinery that feeds and clothes and shelters the people is the private property of the 2 percent minority of exploiting capitalists, the people will be poor, life will be wretched struggle for existence, the divine in human nature will never be realized, and this world will still be nearer to the jungles than to any real civilization.
The Socialist Party says put an end to private ownership of social necessities. The end of private ownership means the end of exploitation, and the end of exploitation means the end of war and the beginning of worldwide peace.

- Debs: The Wall Street Explosion [Sept. 25, 1920]

Zombie Eugene Debs.
Right for America, alive.
Right for America, dead.

There's a Machiavellian Plot to Rule the World... In My Pants!
While Your Reluctant Bartender has a personal policy of stringent, non-partisan distrust of all Power Seekers, there is nonetheless bar to be tended. (Whatever that means.)

We could argue that it's a case of fighting fire with fire against the acidic sexism displayed by the candidate himself, described by Herr Doktor Blume in this space just the other day. But no, when we at I Like [image of pie], Spot speculate about the status of John McCain's private parts, we're just cravenly playing the same game that has been played since that one time in the garden of Eden, when God gave Adam the penis bigger biceps than Eve. It's a game whose rules were concisely recorded back in the early 15's by Nicolò Machiavelli when he contrasted "effeminate and cowardly" unfavorably with "bold and brave" in terms of qualities subjects attribute to their rulers.

In the chapter entitled "That One Should Avoid Being Despised And Hated" of Machiavelli's tome The Prince, we find this advice:

It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock...

Which our rulers today certainly take to heart, though not so much as a way to avoid being despised themselves. Rather, it seems they read the chapter heading as something more along the lines of "That One Should Ensure Their Opponent Cannot Avoid Being Despised And Hated." Which in practice is fantastic for Waveland in terms of entertainment value, though on the whole, tends to make a farce out of concepts like "consent of the governed," "will of the people," "representational democracy," ...

While I confess we may have allowed ourselves at I Like [image of pie], Spot! to be prodded into pumping the story, it wasn't here that the topic of John McCain's genitals first came up. It was on no less a forum than Meet the Press, where no less than Tom Brokaw, (though quoting a third party, on the topic of Senator McCain's solution for Social Security,) uttered the words, "This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation." Words which were rebutted by none other than Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman with the unequivocal rejoinder, "John remains all male. There's no question about that." Perhaps Brokaw's complicity is part of a Waveland conspiracy to somehow recapture the dynamic that so enthralled the country during the Democratic primaries: 'Obama is just black black black!' vs. 'She's a man, baby!'*

We at I Like [image of pie], Spot! are only a tiny cog in this big, sexist machine. We regret any confusion that may have resulted from our actions. In no way did we intend to imply that Presidential Candidate John McCain has had a sex change. --Montag.

BONUS MATERIAL:

Where else, we might ask, can we see our current rulers' misguided interpretations of Machiavelli's admonitions on 'effeminate-ness' in action?

...when a prince acquires a new state, which he adds as a province to his old one, then it is necessary to disarm the men of that state, except those who have been his adherents in acquiring it; and these again, with time and opportunity, should be rendered soft and effeminate; and matters should be managed in such a way that all the armed men in the state shall be your own soldiers who in your old state were living near you.

Look, it's the road map for success in Iraq!


*Oddly, 'She's a man, baby!' seems to turn Machiavelli on his head: perhaps "effeminate-ness" isn't the vice he thought it was, so much as the "icky-ness" when a Prince's gender doesn't precisely align with his or her anatomical dirty bits.

Machiavelli, Nicolò (Trans. W. K. Marriott) (1908). The prince. Retrieved August 7, 2008, from The Constitution Society Web site: http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm

1. Yes, in fact, this is a good end run around the gay marriage controversy.

2. No, there is too much ickiness for mere surgery to compensate.

3. Ewww. Wrinkly and gray, flipping and flopping together, waay too much visual! I can't think about it. What's on TV?

Note:After giving your choice, please comment amongst yourselves until I have something that I can cobble a quote out of.

Now, some may say the media's obsessive preoccupation with the Democratic primaries can only serve to crowd out other candidates and even actual news events. But, as you and I know, it's just the typical Liberal Media inaction in action. So this Sunday let's take a moment to offer the long overlooked Corporate Business-As-Usual Lobby a chance to present their core message.

(T) (F) On 25 July 1554, Mary Tudor married Prince Felipe of Spain in Winchester Cathedral, bringing about a powerful political alliance between the two countries.

(T) (F) Virginia is to Texas as England is to Spain





Jenna Bush weds Virginia politician's son
Sat May 10, 2008

Fill the wide world with fine machines
Build bumper cars, and guillotines
And castanets, and fighter jets...
We'll all rise into the sky!

And forgive us our status quo,
As we overlook all our hearts should know
Help us safely choose when to blithely lose...
Another's slice of higher pie!

And our tired old beauty queen
Shot through cellophane, and vaseline
Given softer lights, and spandex tights...
She'll be younger, bye the bye!

World keeps turning, oceans churning...
Smells like something might be burning.