Forbes released its richest people in the world list this week, and, to no one’s surprise, they are getting richer. Yes, my friends, there are more billionaires this year than last, and they have more money.

In fact,  1,011 billionaires — out of a world population of 6.7 billion people — hold more than half the world’s wealth.

A conservative commenter here at AWOP (one who uses his brain a little more than most) had this to say on my last post, which had something to do with same sex marriage:

The point is that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law; bigotry and intolerance cannot be condoned on either end of the spectrum. To the extent that the state has any interest in proclaiming two people as married (another thorny subject) the state cannot discriminate as to whom you wish to marry, obvious exclusions excepted (siblings, cousins, parents).

Nice sentiment. Too bad it’s bullshit. He’s right, of course, in theory. But we don’t live in theory. We live in practice. Here’s my response:

But if we were all equal in the eyes of the law, there wouldn’t be a DOMA or a DADT and there would be an ENDA. If we were all equal in the eyes of the law, then the insurance commissioner in my state wouldn’t have fought tooth and nail to forbid insurance companies from insuring same-sex partners (he eventually lost, although the decision had nothing to do with equality under law). If we were all equal under the law, there would have been no Prop 8.

Of course, that argument that “we’re all equal under the law” destroys the conservative argument that “activist” judges shouldn’t be deciding if we queers can be protected from discrimination, like, for example, saying that under the law, the government can’t forbid same sex marriage.  The courts are exactly the place for those kind of decisions, not in the legislature and certainly not by ballot initiative — if we are all equal under the law, then you cannot write a law to take away rights. Right?

And that’s why there are non-discrimination laws protecting us, because there seems to be this unwritten exception clause that excludes certain people from that equality thing.

Looks like queers in the District of Columbia are gonna get to marry, thanks, this time, to none other than the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court himself, John Roberts.

And please don’t confuse him with CNN’s John Roberts, who was a VJ on some Canadian version of  MTV back in the day. Justice Roberts did no such thing.

Looks like queers in the District of Columbia are gonna get to marry, thanks, this time, to none other than the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court himself, John Roberts.

And please don’t confuse him with CNN’s John Roberts, who was a VJ on some Canadian version of  MTV back in the day. Justice Roberts did no such thing.

You may not realize this, but there are actually small bands of hunter-gatherers out in the world, hunting and gathering away as they have for, oh, at least 10,000 years.

There are some in the Arctic, in Southeast Asia, the Amazon, but most are in Africa. Not too terribly far from that valley where the oldest human remains have been found.

So I’m listening to some television bloviator going on about something. Oh yeah. It was a 94-year-old dude on death row who died of natural causes. Said bloviator was reading e-mails he’d received about it.

I was already depressed, so the repeated recitings of the many ways Americans can come up with to end a life — as well as the callous disregard, as always, for the possibility that we could execute an innocent person — failed to lift my spirits. I was especially fond of the usual conservative ability to lie like a dog and claim as truth something that is just plain bullshit.

What the hell has happened to us? Eight years of living on the other side of the looking glass have done some serious damage, it seems. We’re worse off now than we were then — and I’m not talking about the direction the president’s been taking us. If not for that, we’d already all be morally and financially dead.

Look at the Republicans, demanding that Democrats stop working to reconcile the health  care bills that majorities of both houses passed, scrap those bills and start over. But we all know that their plan from the start was to kill health care. Remember Jim Deminted and Obama’s Waterloo? They’re all claiming now that the legitimate work of Congress to reconcile bills will results in a “backroom deal.” Oh please.

Andrew Joseph Stack is a terrorist.

He flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, Thursday just because he was pissed off at the IRS. Well, the IRS and pretty much every other part of the U.S. government, especially, apparently, our elected representatives.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

Meghan McCain, not the sharpest tool in the shed, nevertheless has some clarity. She nails the teabaggeries.

It’s innate racism, and I think it’s why young people are turned off by this movement.

Now where would she get such an idea? Never mind the whole last year of “tax’ protests. Meghan made that comment after hearing a speech from inveterate racist Tom Tancredo, who left his seat in the House of Representatives, at the recent Tea Party convention.

People who would not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … named Barack Hussein Obama.

For all the spitting and whining that they’re not the racist scumbags as portrayed in the media — gee, where’d the media ever get the idea? — isn’t it quite telling that there was no Tea Party before January 20, 2009?

Call me crazy, and I know some of you will, but methinks they doth protest too much.

So I’m listening to some television bloviator going on about something. Oh yeah. It was a 94-year-old dude on death row who died of natural causes. Said bloviator was reading e-mails he’d received about it.

I was already depressed, so the repeated recitings of the many ways Americans can come up with to end a life — as well as the callous disregard, as always, for the possibility that we could execute an innocent person — failed to lift my spirits. I was especially fond of the usual conservative ability to lie like a dog and claim as truth something that is just plain bullshit.