This week's "This Modern World" cartoon with Tom Tomorrow is titled "Stupid or Lying." It deals with the current spinning by GOP officials and pundits.

In general, I think the GOP-Bush crowd is a mix of stupid and dishonest. Some are one or the other, but some manage to combine the two--David Brooks, for example.

Or perhaps "delusional, toady-ass-kisser is the best description for Brooks.

Get "This Modern World" here.

Love, love, love this guy. I check out The Rude Pundit every day in hopes he has posted a blog. He doesn't blog every day, but often enough to give me another reason to live.

His motto: Proudly lowering the level of political discourse

Seriously, this guy can write and he has a vicious, dark and nasty sense of humor--just perfect for the totally bizarre political-governmental times in which we live. Why do I like his writings? Because we live in a time of great vulgarity in our public life and in our government. Of what do I speak? What do I consider vulgar in America today? Well, gosh, let's see:

• The entire Bush family
• Tom DeLay
• Rush Limbaugh
  
• Bill Frist
• The so-called "Christian" Right believers who are just pawns in the game
• Suburban sprawl
• America's health care system
• Obesity - a country and a culture that wants to eat itself to death
• America's dependence on foreign oil
• Hummer SUVs
• Homophobia
• Immigrant bashing
  
• Karl Rove
• Elizabeth Miller
• Fox News
• Lack of critical thinking skills on the part of 50% of Americans

There--is that enough vulgarity for you? So, no, in the context of all this vulgarity, I do not consider The Rude Pundit to be vulgar.

Be sure to scroll down and read earlier postings at The Rude Pundit. Here are titles of some of my favories (check out the Archives on the lower right-hand side of his page):

• Harbingers of Republican Death
• George Bush's Addiction To Himself
• Dick Cheney Will Destroy Us All
• Karl Rove Contemplates His Leather Slave ("Oh, my")
• Patrick Fitzgerald: The Grown-Up in the Room
• Feeding the Right-Wing Monster With Harriet Miers' Corpse (another "Oh, my")
• Neverending Tales of the Christ Weary
• The Republican In Fall

I am posting the first paragraph from the Pundit's blog today:

11/10/2005

A Warning To Democrats: Beware of Large, Cornered Weasels

The wolverine is the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family. It's a crazed, vicious little fucker that can carry a carcass three times its size. Shit, it can bring down a caribou or a small bear, if it wants to. And its jaws can crush bones. Typically, all a wolverine has to do to drive away other predatory animals is growl, raise the hair on its back, and bare its teeth; that'll scare cougars and wolves shitless. And if you corner it, you better watch out: those bastards'll fight until they tear their way through your body, leaving you stunned and staring at your own viscera steaming on the snow below you. It's better to kill it than try to fight it. Or, if you're all scientific or protective of endangered species, put it into a deep sleep and cage the sharp-toothed weasel. Read entire posting

I swear. How stupid can people be. Always looking for new excuses for OBESITY.

Yes, yes. We are the victims-beneficiaries of our genes. No doubt about it.

But as for obestity, I thought we had figured out the main cause: junk-food eating American suburbanites driving madly around highways in large vehicles and then returning to the cul-de-saced homes in neighborhoods with no sidewalks.

Years ago, a friend said, "They can take away my health insurance because I smoke and have HIV on the same day they take away health insurance from the fat-assed Americans who eat themselves to death."

Indeed.

From The New York Times...

In Study, Hormone Reduced Appetite in Mice

Hungry or full, fat or thin: it is mostly a matter of hormones, dozens of them, carrying messages between the digestive tract, the fat cells and the brain. Eat. Don't eat. Burn calories. Store fat.

Today, researchers at Stanford University are reporting that they have found a previously unknown member of this chemical cascade, a hormone with a much coveted power: it sharply reduces the desire to eat.

The new substance, which the scientists named obestatin (OHB-statin), is made in the stomach and small intestine, and it seems to prompt the brain to send out a signal that says "eat less."

Mice given the hormone for eight days ate half as much as usual and lost weight, the researchers are reporting today in the journal Science. The hormone seems to reduce hunger in part by slowing the passage of food through the stomach and small intestine. Read entire story

It would be the utlimate-ugly-job, but someone has to do it. No idea who created this piece; a friend sent it to me.

Yes, such are the priorities of many Americans: sex is worse than violence-death.