Columnist – John Sammon
Can you see the logic?

The close relationship, the natural progression, from one thought to the next?

Each year at Christmas we celebrate the birth of a First Century AD Galilean holy man and prophet, who preached, according to what we find in the Bible, humility, forbearance, sweetness and frugality. We celebrate this with an orgy of retail spending.

We also celebrate this short and obscure life, for there isn’t much hard historical evidence of the details, by promoting the mythological arrival on your roof of a German fat man in a red suit, in a sleigh pulled by wild bovines, one of whom has an incandescent nose.

Doesn’t it make sense? It all makes perfect sense to me.

This German fat man squeezes his way down your chimney, and leaves presents for your kids that you know you bought and weren’t left by the German fat man. But you tell your kid you didn’t buy the gifts. They were left by a German fat man who as he sailed away into the night yelled “Ho! Ho!”

You tell your kids this story until about the time they reach the age of 14, when they finally realize on their own, or are told by friends, it was all a lie. Thus, even from their earliest memories, you show them you love them by foisting a lie. And not just a small lie. A WHOPPER!

That’s supposedly because you’re a giving, generous person.

Interestingly, even when they’re small, your children sure know who to complain to if they don’t feel they got enough, or didn’t get what they want. YOU! For some reason, they don’t even bother searching for a fictional German fat man.

I’ve threatened to boycott Christmas for years.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1.   Let’s smell the coffee. Okay? Christmas is about spending, not about Jesus, not even about the concept of giving. If you doubt me, try spending a third what you normally spend. That’s still giving, isn’t it? Your kid will run sobbing to her room. You’ll feel guilty. A bad person. You didn’t spend enough. Don’t try to blame it on the German fat man. Try explaining to your child about the spirit of it, the thought that counts, not the amount of the merchandise. About Jesus. Yeah right! Your kid will get up and run sobbing into another room.

2.   This ritual requires an expenditure of at least $700 per year. That’s small. If you’re a rich airline pilot, it could be $1,200, maybe $5,000. If you’re like a lot of people, you don’t have the money. The cost of everything goes up. Even the Christmas tree now costs more than I once paid for a used car. You borrow money for it on credit cards and go deeper into debt, to please your kid, or whomever.

3.   Scrooge got a bad rap. He was a Republican businessman. If he killed and robbed people to get money, I’d be less sympathetic. But he made money by being ruthless, and didn’t want to share it. That’s just the American way. You know the story. Scrooge sees the light after being threatened by three ghosts. At the end, he’s throwing money at charities and anyone who will take it, and he’s a good person. Next year, when the charities come back for more, he’s out. He gave it all away. Now, instead of being an SOB, the charities call him a goddamned fool.

The moral is clear. People evaluate your character based on how you spend your own money, money you earned from hard work, and whether or not you give them that money.

4.   Most of the merchandise purchased is made by slaves or low income peons in China, ruled by a ruthless regime. Thus, the slave laborer sits in his Chinese jail cell putting together a DVD player that costs his jailer $7.95 to produce. They ship it and sell it to you for $198.95. With each purchase, you are helping China to become a superpower that will supplant the United States, and you are helping American crook corporate executives who are shipping jobs overseas to take advantage of slaves. What does this, and an overpriced DVD player, have to do with Jesus?

5.   Turn on the TV set. Look at the expensive cars being glorified. Look at the beautiful, supposedly rich, glamorous Hollywood actors portraying successful people giving and getting upscale gifts. It creates envy. You want to be like them. Happiness is not the inner being. It’s how you look, how much you have, and what you spend. Material possessions.

6.   It doesn’t take long to figure out that much of the economic growth of the military industrial colossus that the US has become depends on this single event. If you save too much, if you don’t go into high-interest debt, the powers-that-be don’t like it. Like the oil companies, they need you as a sucker.

7.   Each year the ritual involves visiting relatives. But not me. My malicious conservative relatives hate my guts and consider me a mama’s boy, a lazy bum, a coward, an anti-American traitor, a weakling and probably a pervert. I only agree with about half of this negative assessment.

8.   Statistics show Christmas is the time for suicide and depression psychologically because of the forced gaiety, decorations, inevitable caloric weight gain, tinsel and lights, and because again you don’t have enough money.

9.   Jesus wasn’t born on December 25. We don’t even know the exact year of his birth. Who picked the 25th? Everybody crowds airports at the same time to celebrate the not-the-day of Jesus’ birth.

10.   Despite personal responsibility, Christmas nevertheless encourages binge alcohol consumption, drunk driving and overeating in an already chronically obese society.

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Writes: Paul Jenkins

The GOP’s White Supremacy

When a 19 year-old white supremacist recently gained a seat on the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee, the election created such an outcry that embarrassed local politicians used a technicality to block his seating.

The entire process was buffoonish, although the views of the spawn of a grand wizard of the KKK and his supporters were not. Events such as this, or the stunning success of David Duke in Louisiana in 1990, occur every few years within the GOP, a reminder of the party’s racist faction.

   Dead GOP Elephant

Even more standard for Republicans, especially in the year that saw Barack Obama’s election, are the off-key comments about uppitiness, Senators whistling Dixie, and, most recently, a funny little party-endorsed mailer called "Barack the Magic Negro."

All of this stupidity, and hatred, is a symptom of the larger problem for the Republican Party: it is utterly unrepresentative of America in the 21st century. Its Congressional representation is nearly uniformly white, and overwhelmingly male.

So much so, in fact, that there is not one single African-American GOP member of Congress (out of 219 or 220); nor, for that matter, are there any black GOP Governors (out of 22).

There are just four Republican Latinos in Congress, all Florida Cuban-Americans; one of them, Senator Mel Martinez, has
announced his retirement. He is the only non-white or Hispanic GOP Senator…..[Continued]

| Read More At The HuffingtonPost |

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Watch Zbigniew Brzezinski Skewer the ALWAYS WRONG ReTHUGliNUT Joe ‘Marlboro‘ Scarborough, as his daughter Mika Brzezinski watches. Dr. Brzezinski Called Republican Scarborough — ‘Stunningly Superficial.’

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 Columnist – John Sammon
I did it! I finally did it! Got revenge on Christmas. I found a way. You can do it too.

It was so easy. I just took all the sh.’t back. Returned it all, and got back the money. But don’t call me Scrooge, because that wouldn’t be fair.

Here’s the deal.

I’m one of these brilliant noble guys who have a hard time making a living. I’m not clever (I don’t want to be), and I don’t scheme and cheat people. I don’t trade land, buy and sell it like a real estate shark. I don’t do the things that most pot-bellied average simpletons do, get themselves ensconced into some government job where they can be incompetent and still work there because it’s the government. Like a leech sucking blood.

I also don’t do the corporate scene where you have to suck up to some no-good coward two-bit-punk-in-a-pin-striped-suit manager.

I’m a man. Like Kit Carson. I go my own way.

For this I’ve paid the price. I can’t meet my bills. Fu.’k ‘em.

Then along comes Christmas, a yearly ritual that every assho.’e in the country has to observe. It’s supposed to be celebrating the birth of Jesus, a Jew who we don’t know much about. So what do we do? Buy things made in China by slave laborers.

The holiday celebrating a man who wore only a robe and who died miserably nailed to a cross is celebrated by an expenditure of cash, money that you don’t have. How did this holiday get started, who thought it up? Was it the wise men? They brought gifts to the baby Jesus.

If they thought a bribe would get them a cushy place in heaven, they were wrong. The Christian religion doesn’t work on bribes (Jesus himself overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple).

Christmas used to be just giving a carved stick to a kid, and that was it. Now, you have to spend a thousand dollars, because our house-of-cards economy depends on it.

You go into debt to play this yearly game.

You string lights on a tree that now costs $100, more than a used car I once bought. You go to a shopping mall just like a million other fools, all burning gas and polluting the air with their cars, jamming in at the same time like lemmings (a furry rodent) mindlessly marching over a cliff.

Then you buy the junk. Sh.’t. Mostly plastic sh.’t, soon to be collecting dust in your house that will soon be foreclosed because you overspent and can’t make your payments. I’m not fuc..’in Scrooge. He had money and didn’t like people. I don’t have money and I like people okay as people go, and I go into debt with this lousy holiday that I’ve come to hate because every year it sets me back.

If you spend money you don’t have you’re not Scrooge. You’re just a goddammned fool!

Don’t you hate those puky Christmas songs you hear every year, the same ones. Turn on the TV. There’s an ad where a guy is giving a new Mercedes Benz to his wife, with a big red bow on the top of it. I can’t afford a car like that. Did Jesus drive such a car? He rode a donkey.

I threatened to boycott it. Shine the whole thing. A holiday commemorating Jesus that we celebrate in our perverted way by buying stuff, expending cash, and then saying a German fat man in a red suit squeezed down our chimney and left the presents

I DON’T EVEN GET CREDIT (SANTA DOES) FOR THE PRESENTS THAT I BOUGHT THAT ARE NOW GOING TO BANKRUPT ME!

I RESENT IT! I REALLY DO!

Fu.’k Christmas, and Santa, and the reindeer he rode into town.

I threatened to become a Muslim so I could ignore this holiday. No! I came up with something better. It’s so diabolical. I love it. I’m in rapture.

I take the sh.’t back. That’s it.

We ran out of money and couldn’t meet our bills and our checks are bouncing on other bills because Christmas wiped us out. We returned all the stuff we bought and got the money back.

I’m in heaven. I can make it until the end of the year. I put Santa the fictional fat man and those greedy retailers who sponge off me every year…in their places.

Save your tags.

It’s simple. We buy the crap. Wrap the gifts. Open the gifts. Make the necessary praise, “ooh-ahh! I love it!” Then the next day, take the stuff back, and get our money back.

We had our fun. It didn’t cost us a cent.

There you are. Is Jesus happy? Is Santa happy?

Everybody’s happy. Ho ho ho!

I no longer have to sing, “it’s the worst time of the year, it’s the worst time of the year.”

© Copyright 2008 by SammonSays.com

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References:

1. Oh man, fuck Christmas!
2. “It ’tain’t necessarily so! It ’tain’t necessarily so! The things that you’re liable To read in the Bible . . .It ’tain’t necessarily so!” — (Porgy and Bess) | God doesn’t exist! He never did . . . he never will. Wake up . . . grow up . . . and get over it!

“President Hugo Chavez ordered construction halted on a major shopping mall in Caracas on Sunday, saying the government will expropriate the unfinished building.

The Venezuelan leader said it would be out of line with his government’s socialist vision to allow the new Sambil mall to take up precious urban real estate — and that unbridled consumerism isn’t his idea of progress either.” Ian James, Associated Press Writer

Shopping malls, with shoppers scurrying like ants to buy things they don’t need and can’t afford, are the perfect symbol of consumerism run amok. The president’s timely action is more powerful than any Christmas sermon delivered by Rick Warren or Pat Robertson. At this time of the year our heads shouldn’t be filled with visions of Victoria’s Secret, Macys and Best Buy, but with images of the poor and needy who need our help.

“The president also has urged Venezuelans to shed their materialism and their taste for designer clothes, sport utility vehicles, Scotch whisky and plastic surgery” — AP

A statesman speaks the truth in love to his constituents, Chavez rightfully rebuked the Venezuelans for embracing American-style rampant consumerism. It’s instructive to contrast the Venezuelan president’s rebuke of his people with Bush’s advice to Americans in the aftermath of 9/11. Instead of calling upon Americans to make sacrifices in a time of war, he advised us to shop till we drop.

American critics of Chavez quickly labeled his action “socialist“, some of these same folks uttered not a word of protest when Bush was nationalizing banks, insurance companies and now automobile manufacturers. Bush and Chavez are both enamored with socialism, but there’s one big difference: Dubya takes over companies to bail out the wealthy; Chavez expropriates private buildings to help the poor. Chavez didn’t take over the mall to hand it over to an insurance company, he’s going to convert it into a facility that will serve the people of Venezuela.

If a politician with the integrity of Chavez had been president of the United States for the last eight years, our economy would not be in shambles and we would not be entangled in two unnecessary and pointless wars.

Viva Hugo Chavez!

Bush, don’t let the door hit you on your way out!

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References:

1. Can Obama Save Capitalism? [Fareed Zakaria]– The great sociologist Max Weber described the power of charisma as “a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Some of Barack Obama’s supporters have at times sounded as if they saw “the one” in these terms. There’s no doubt that Obama is intensely charismatic and that it provides him with unusual political capital. But very soon — say on Jan. 20, 2009 — his powers will start to mutate, and they will derive less from his persona and more from his office. He will shift, in Weber’s terminology, from wielding charismatic authority to legal authority. — [READ MORE]

2. Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism [Arianna Huffington] — The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls, the ideology is still alive and kicking. The only place you can find an American Marxist these days is teaching a college linguistic theory class. But you can find all manner of free market fundamentalists still on the Senate floor or in Governor’s mansions or showing up on TV trying to peddle the deregulation snake oil. — [READ MORE]