STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 23 February 2012

[Tansy_Gold]

12. I have a bizarre feeling about today.

I do not consider myself psychic in any way, so there are no claims of having anticipated great disasters or whatever in the past. Today just feels weird.

The BF had the "debate" on the tv while I was washing dishes last night, so I was forced to listen to some of that absolute nonsense coming out of the mouths of grown men whose mothers should have taken them aside and smacked some sense into them many years ago.

The worst of it was that they sounded STUPID. Stuttering and stammering because they didn't have their brains organized enough to make reasoned responses to questions, they came across as not really knowing anything. I don't know which one said there needed to be more federal funds for abstinence education "that works," except it doesn't. Over and over and over, every single study that I've ever seen has shown that abstinence education does not prevent young people from engaging in sex, does not reduce the number of teen-age girls becoming pregnant, does not reduce the number of abortions. It's commonsense sex education that reduces pregnancies and abortions.

If you haven't already, read Charlie Pierce's "Idiot America." Talk about hammer meeting nail! What was on tv last night -- I'm ashamed to say it happened in Arizona, but it did -- was "Idiot America" in action. The lunatic fringe has not only gained a forum for its lunacy, but it has moved from merely being entertaining (in a sick sort of way) to being believed.

Rick Santorum is indeed a disgusting little bully. A mean, nasty little kid who has grown up to be a vicious, frightening bully. The cartoons of him peeering into bedroom windows are no joke -- he wants to get government out of the education business and back into the morality business. He's a latter day Cotton Mather.

I overheard a conversation the other day about Henry VIII, someone wondering who was king after him. There was no answer from the group of idlers in the coffee shop until someone said they thought Elizabeth I came next. Of course, that's the wrong answer. First there was poor Edward VI, the boy king of Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper" fame. Upon his death, there was Bloody Mary, granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the "Catholic Kings" of Spain, who not only financed Columbus but forcibly expelled the Jews from Spain and established the Spanish Inquisition. (The inquisition itself had existed for several hundred years, but the office in Spain was under direct royal control, virtually independent of the Church.) Mary married one of her not-too-distant cousins, Phillip of Spain, and her war on Protestants -- the Church of England was created by her father as a result of the Pope's refusal to grant him a divorce from Mary's mother, Catherine -- began.

"It's not Normans I hate, it's injustice," Errol Flynn's Robin Hood said to Olivia de Havilland's Maid Marian in 1939. So it's not Catholics I hate, it's intolerance.

I do not see anything good coming from Santorum's campaign; I see only hate and loathing and fear and anger and evil. Santorum is evil in a way even booosh wasn't evil. Booosh was a buffoon, a petty bully who liked the power handed to him but who didn't really know how or want to wield it for his own purposes. Santorum is evil, and if given the power he will use it.

But today there is something else in the wind and I don't know what it is.