A few days ago, before the USA Presidential election, when right-wing and even mainstream TV networks were still trying hard to sell the image of Obama-vs-Romney as a “tossup” or, worse, a Mitt Romney win, I kept visiting Nate Silver’s election-analysis FiveThirtyEight blog to keep my facts straight. Sure, I sometimes visited the big TV-news operations for occasional comic relief, but the fun fades fast when you realize that everything on commercial television is always a tossup, or down to the wire, or too close to call, etc. It’s like daytime “talk-shows” (mostly overweight folks bashing each other endlessly with folding chairs). Why do the networks roll like that? Hello?  –  TV networks depend on advertisers, who just want lots of audience eyeballs, and audiences are not going to watch a fight if everyone knows how it’s going to end. Got it?

So add to this media unreality a simple sociological fact: Republicans, conservatives, and hardcore evangelicals are all about FAITH. That would be just fine if, for example, the Bible expressly forbade “abortion” (not even mentioned), but in practice it mostly means that even moderate Republican candidates for public office must endure trial-by-fire just to get nominated. There’s always the wild-eyed Christian zealots to fend off before normal Republicans can try for “consensus.” By the time an election actually happens, Republicans have shed a lot of their own blood just trying to prove who is the true believer. It helps if you really believe.

No surprise that so many old white Republicans were shocked that black liberal Democrat President Obama (what’s his middle name again? ain’t he actually from Kenya?) got elected to a second term. What? Say again? How did this happen? Very few news outlets nailed it as well as an article in CBSNEWS.com: “After Romney loss, GOP soul searching begins.”

Let’s see….
In a tight economy, the Republicans offered candidates for President & Vice President who were (just say it) REALLY WHITE, really rich, also just hopeless on the subject of women’s rights, and clueless about what used to be called “minorities” (add up all the minorities nowadays and what do you get?). I mean, would Romney know a chimichanga if it hit him in the head? Meanwhile Obama appoints a Latina to the Supreme Court, and so on and so on. The election was tight, but it wasn’t a fair fight  –  contrary to what the talking heads said on TV.

The USA national media have largely fallen for the current Republican noise that Americans (and American embassies abroad) would be much safer with a Republican President — maybe Mitt Romney (famous for his foreign-policy experience)?

This would be funny if it weren’t tragically ironic. What happened when the last Republican President (remember Dubya?) and Congress took charge of the national economy, the banking and mortgage industries, and national security? Folks tend to forget even recent history if it’s not fresh and stinky, so to bring it all back, here’s a link to the famous, now-retired DIOSA.NET page ”It’s 9-11, Where’s Dubya?“:
http://www.diosa.net/Its911-WheresDubya.html

Who’s behind the curtain? American voters during the Presidential/Congressional 2012 campaign will be exposed to a flood of Republican propaganda attacking everything from same-sex marriage to “Obamacare” to global warming to locally-grown vegetables, with a steady background buzz defending the good ol’ oil industry. Lost in the flood might be any voter awareness about who’s paying for all the television commercials.

Among the big-bucks boys on the Republican side are the mysterious “Koch brothers.” They have a long history pulling political strings. Remember Clarence Thomas (now on the Supreme Court)? Funny thing, he’s another Koch-head black conservative resembling the recently failed Presidential candidate Herman Cain, and another less-funny thing is these guys’ shared tendency toward sexual harassment. Maybe the Kochs assume that liberals and Democrats will vote for any varmint with black skin?

Pass the petroleum, please. A brief reminder that, as usual, BIG OIL corrupts absolutely, and the Koch brothers do love their oil.

Let’s conclude with toilet paper. “Koch Industries” — one of the best (worst) examples of corporate profits funding political evil (including the notorious “Tea Party”) — owns many companies selling many products across the American landscape (and those products are vulnerable to consumer boycott, we should remember). One of those thousands of product types is toilet paper (such as the brands Angel Soft, Quilted Northern, Soft ‘n’ Gentle). If you already have these brands, don’t just wastefully throw it away before starting your boycott; why not use it and then mail it to the Koch brothers?

MUST SEE….

http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/tag/koch-brothers/
(hats off to bloggers Paddy and Laffy!)

http://www.kochbrothersexposed.com/

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/03
/the_kochs_very_bad_week/singleton/

Now I see why “faith” is required to follow Rick Santorum and similar extremist zealots — he imagines facts out of thin air (“Santorum says Obama not enforcing Internet porn laws“).

The truth is that the Obama administration has been quite good about busting publishers of child pornography. Just one example….

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS -
December 3, 2011
“Child porn collection seized in Calif. bust may be largest [in] history”
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-12-03/news/30473009_1_reuters-bust-child

New favorite TV sitcom: “The IT Crowd“, a British show about the trials and sillies of a tech-support (“Information Technology”) crew in a small, quite-believably absurd London corporation. Nerds versus Suits. Brilliant acting, hilarious but painfully authentic scripts and characters. They had me from the first episode: “Have you tried turning it off and on?” Try to find episodes of this show on any on-demand service like Netflix or even Youtube. Note that much of my professional life has been spent in I.T. departments, explaining to beautifully-dressed, fragrant Marketing folk how their Caps Lock key works.

Eeew, PowerPoint. Legend says that Robert Gates, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, banned all PowerPoint from his office and from meetings he attended; logic was that the multimedia-ness did not add to the message or to the information, and he didn’t want staff constantly wasting time “trying to pump up a memo into a feature movie.” Ouch. I have run in parallel with PowerPoint software since Forethought developed and published it for the Mac, then Microsoft ate it and turned it into serious bloatware. My contribution to the PowerPoint shooting-gallery was when I suggested that all the PowerPoint monsters that all the VPs in our corporation laboriously crafted were: (A) hugely time-consuming for our CLIENTS to download (especially back then via modem); (B) could easily be replaced by several fast-loading, crisp, colorful, tightly-formatted Web (HTML) pages in our website; and (C) could quickly be updated as HTML in future on the web-server.

Welcome to CIRCUS DIOSA. We have been thrashing intermittently on the Worldwide Web for many years, with occasional breaks due to reasons such as parenthood, medical leave, summertime (you should always celebrate summer), and the election of a U.S. President with a brain (hint: he’s got game). The reason we have reappeared this time is that another Presidential election is coming up, and we intend (again) to strafe the bozos and support the righteous, using the power of the Internet. We hope you’ll join us.