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In fourteen hundred ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Want to party like it's 1899? Well, now you can--sort of. After nearly a century-long ban on absinthe in the U.S., a federal agency has begrudgingly allowed two European distillers to sell the mysterious liquor Stateside. Often referred to as the Green Fairy, absinthe gets its chartreuse hue from wormwood, an herb that contains the chemical thujone, which is reputed to cause hallucinations. But despite years of research discrediting the transcendental effects, new bottles can be sold in the U.S. only if they are classified as thujone-free.
Victor Hugo's 1831 opus The Hunchback of Notre Dame begins during the Renaissance in 1482, the day of the Festival of Fools in Paris.Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer, is introduced by his crowning as the King of Fools.
The world has always been overpopulated by fools, and fools must have their king.
The election of 2008 is over, the fools have spoken.
It is a defining indicator that the embarrassing, self inflicted dumbing down of America is all but complete when people vote against their own self-interest.
I'll say it: it is obvious that many Americans are not very smart. Quite dumb, actually. To listen to the radio interview with Obama voters from Harlem mindlessly cheering on Obama as the interviewer attributes McCain's policies to the Democrats is pathetic and an inescapable indicator of the blind leading the blind. Not Godbless or goddam America! God help America.
Trying to explain how our economy works and why lowering taxes is always better for them and their country, than imposing higher taxes is an economic bridge too far for many of the Obama sheep. Unfortunately there is no "See Spot & the Economy Run" book for the hooked on phonics crowd. Many of these numbskulls can't balance a check book or spell "e-c-o-n-o-m-i-c-s" but they sure know who will give them stuff. The lie is impossible.
Expecting these idiotcitizens to have analyzed the tax positions of Obama and McCain and arrive a t a decision that truly benefits them and America is wishful thinking. The reason is that they know zilch about how the economy operates and worse, don't care. Bama will take care of us. Four very scary things- a sow grizzly with cubs at close range, a coiled rattlesnake in striking distance, me in a rental car in the left lane, and dunces with credit cards.
And indeed they are dunces, products of a tax burning, failed public education system. That is if they even bothered to complete high school. They don't read newspapers or books, and even if they did, I got twenty bucks that says they couldn't comprehend what they read. They are morons in the first degree. And clearly, they vote.
If and when President Obama attempts to impose his wrong-headed, punitive tax structure, their stupidity is going to come back to thump them upside their vacuous heads with a very painful crowbar of reality. The economy works in strange and wondrous ways and has a unique way of severely punishing fools. Rare justice is a beautiful thing.
The dunderheads have no clue how the economic mess was largely caused by Democrats, including Obama. But Obama, recognizing how gullible, naive and dumb many of his supporters are, drummed it into them that the economic mess was caused by President Bush and the Republicans and that he is going to give 95% of Americans a tax cut when 40% of Americans don't even pay and federal taxes. Investing in deception capital in the stupidity of his supporters was a very wise move on Obama's part. That is if you don't really care about anything except getting elected.
McCain had no marketable answer to Obama's charge because McCain knew that attempting to explain the economy to dumb people is impossible in 30 second commercials.
Fantasy driven clowns like the idea of believing they are getting something for nothing. What they receive however, is always scraps from the economic table. They are too dumb to recognize this and thus condemn themselves to a pathetic life clinging to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Their stupidity sentences them to a life of poverty and despair.
The Obama tax plan punishes the producers- the people who employ the majority of Americans. In Joe the plumber terms, economic crap will quickly flow down hill and punish the employees. I mean former employees. The result of spreading the wealth around is spreading the unemployment around.
Come on baby...don't fear the reaperThrough me you pass into the city of woe
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye
Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd
to rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love
Before me things create were none, save things
eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here
Such characters in colour dim I mark'd
over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'd
-Dante Alighieri
Two weeks after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., John McCain and Sarah Palin were striding forward toward victory.
They had erased the eight-point lead Barack Obama had opened up in Denver and watched as one blue state after another moved into the toss-up category.
That is ancient history now.
Since mid-September, the stock market has cratered, losing half of the $8 trillion that has vanished since October 2007. All five of America's great investment banks- Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have either ceased to be independant or ceased to be.
The nation's largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, and the largest insurance company AIG, have gone belly up, with the federal bailout of the latter costing $100 billion and counting.
Perhaps $3 trillion of the $8 trillion in stock value that is gone disappeared after passage of the $700 billion federal bailout of Wall Street.
No bottom is in sight to the worst market crash since 1929. Recession is now certain. George W. Bush has fallen to 26 percent approval, a level unseen since Richard Nixon was driven from office in the Watergate summer of '74. Four in five think the nation is on the wrong track.
Yet, Obama has only a six-point lead in an averaging of national polls. While he has moved ahead in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, one senses America is not so much rallying to him as running away from a Republican brand that is now on the same shelf with Chinese baby formula.
Obama still has not closed the sale. He has overtaken McCain not because of any brilliant campaign he has conducted but because of the dreadful news pouring out ot Wall Street. McCain and Palin are being dragged down by Dow Jones, Not Barack Obama.
As of today, the country is not so much voting for Barack and the Democrats as it is preparing to vote against the Republicans.
Consider: the Congress, whose Democratic ranks the nation is getting ready to expand- the Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid- has an approval rating half that of Bush.
Indeed, looking back on the Year of Barack, 2008, it is clear he has never closed the sale, either with the people or his own party.
Each time the voters take a long second look at Barack, their positive first impressions seem to dissipate. Barack is a weak closer.
Herein lies McCain's hope. The country wants change, but it has not concluded it wants Obama. But if John McCain cannot raise grave doubts about his agenda, his associates, his record, his character, his fitness to be president, Obama is going to win by default.
Obama has succeeded in the debates by playing defense. By his cool demeanor and persona, he has diminished apprehensions about an Obama presidency There is no evidence of surging enthusiam.
The Obama media are well aware of Obamas' Achilles' heel, his great vulnerability, the doubts about him that still exist in the public mind. That is why they are near hysterical about Palin's ripping of Obama for palling around with domestic terrorists like William Ayers the Weatherman radical who conspired to bomb the Capitol and Pentagaon.
The mainstream media call this irrelevant as it was so long ago.
This election is not over. Yet, even if McCain gets a bit of luck, a dead cat bounce on Wall Street, he must persuade the nation that Obama is an unaccepable occupant of the White House if he is to win.
Palin appears ready to take the heat to make that case. But McCain seems abmivalent to the point of being bipolar on whether he wants to take responsibility for peeling the hide off Barack Obama.
Perhaps it comes down to what McCain really thinks about an Obama presidency, and how he wants to be remembered by history.
In the spring, NASA had unexpectedly decided to change the planned mission for Apollo 8.
The original plan had called for a flight which would test the Lunar Lander in low earth orbit in advance of the expected moon landing the following summer.
The Grumman Company which was building the lander was behind schedule and the LEM was not going to be ready for the Apollo 8 mission.
Instead, NASA planners decided on a new and radically different mission: fly to the moon and orbit. In one Hail-Mary pass they would make history and beat the Russians.
Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered Lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968.
That evening, the astronauts, Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did a live television broadcast from Lunar orbit in which they showed pictures of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon.
It was a vision that just blew us all away. This tiny fragile blue marble suspended in the blackness of space like a terrarium in a closet- maybe God's third grade science project. Lightning bugs in a jar.
That night no one felt they were Captain of their destiny- merely deckhands on a life raft.
Lovell said, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.
William Anders:
"For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you."
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light
And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness."
Jim Lovell:
"and God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Frank Borman:
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: and God saw that it was good."
Borman then added, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you- all of you on the good Earth."
Of course, Apollo 8 returned safely to earth and we returned to the business of beating ourselves to death in earnest. If only for a short while, on that Christmas Eve forty years ago we shared the rarest of visions: our precarious place in the universe.
Like the original Epiphany it is remembered too seldom and the lesson is often lost.
It was a year and a night I will never forget.
