The Coffee Party is at it again.

Desperately seeking a raison d’etre other than NOT to be the Tea Party, the Brew Crew has just issued a Congressional chain-letter which it hopes its tens of followers will co-sign. Pulling no punches, the Political Percolators are telling Congress to…to…well, to quit being so darn mean to Us the People. Here’s the full venti cup of their scalding scolding:

Dear Congress,

Please remember: you are fighting over how to spend our money.  We the People pay 33.7% of the Federal Fund while corporations pay 7.2%. Many corporations pay no taxes at all.  Yet your entire focus during this budget battle has been on how much to hurt the people.

We did not cause the recession, the deficit, or the national debt.  We know this, and we need you to know that we are aware of a corrupt system in which corporations spend their vast wealth to lobby and manipulate you.

We know that’s why the tax code so unjustly burdens us while favoring them. We know this is why Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are under attack from the US Chamber of Commerce and other powerful lobbyists. We know that is why your policies reward multinational corporations, including those that DID cause the recession, with bailouts, bonuses, and tax benefits.

As you wrangle over how much to hurt our quality of life and jeopardize our future, consider ways to create jobs and invest in our future.

Congress should work together on how to help us, not fight over how to hurt us.

Sincerely,

Annabel, Eric B, Lynda, Eric W, Gloria, Mark, Beth, Tina, Corinne and the Coffee Break to Save America Team

The note to Coffee Party mailing list members is oleaginously signed with first names only. But the letter to Congress itself is a rich pu-pu platter of economic naivete.  Annabel Park—the dark liquid organization’s founder—and her co-scolders have obviously never heard of the Laffer Curve—or if they have, they think it’s a baseball pitch.

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After watching the spectacle of blame unfold during the days following the tragic January 8^th Tucson shootings, one angry community is no longer biting its tongue. Saying it will no longer be victimized by political opportunists on the left, the Word community has finally broken its long taciturnity.

An estimated 5,000 very upset words held a rally today in the plaza directly across from the national headquarters of the American Library Association at 50 E. Huron Street in Chicago. The keynote speakers of the group—which calls itself Words of Wisdom (WOW)—were WOW President, the Honorable word Reason, and Vice-President and WOW Founder, the Venerable word Ridiculous.

Reason—a bespectacled old word with a long gray beard—took the podium first. “This just doesn’t make any sense,” argued the six-letter noun.

“Not only is there no demonstrable nexus between the demented shooter and the Tea Party or Sarah Palin, there’s absolutely no proof that the curtailment of free speech will result in fewer crimes of this sort in the future. Civility is nice, my fellow Words—but liberty is nicer.”

The crowd—many of them prepositions, conjunctions, or mere adverbs who came out of a sense of semantic solidarity—cheered in enthusiastic support. “Wooooohoooo!” screamed Exclamation from the back. “Save free speech!” hollered Indignation. “Screw the frickin’ censors!” Vulgarity bellowed.

After Reason’s opening statement, Ridiculous made her way to the podium. Clad in a Lady Gaga meat-dress and light fur, once she opened her mouth, Ridiculous—thankfully—did not live up to her name.

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The loud clanging alarm clock went off promptly at 6:00 a.m. as it always did. I hopped off my government-issue twin mattress right away. As an unmarried single dweller, I’m not permitted to own a queen-size mattress, and concealing a king-sizer could even get me a 90-day jail stint if some overzealous bureaucrat were to come knocking. No, for me the twin-size was deemed sufficient “nocturnal  replenishment space” (governmentese for “mattress”). The government didn’t seem to mind that at 6’4” I find my allotted replenishment space a tad confining.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (opening of 1970 Caspar Wrede film)

Anyway, I leapt right into action. Not like in the good old pre-2013 days when I’d take my sweet time and listen to my favorite morning talk radio show under the cozy covers. Unfortunately, ever since the Obama administration’s Broadcast Airwaves Czar reinstituted The Fairness Act in August of 2012, the talk radio shows one by one all faded from the airwaves. Talk radio was simply no longer commercially viable once the stations had to counterbalance with unprofitable Air America-style programming. Well, if it gets me out of bed and becoming a productive member of the labor force one hour sooner, I suppose that’s for the better. As Mr. and Mrs. Obama have reminded me on many occasions, it’s a shared sacrifice. And I know they’re shouldering their portion of the burden just like me.  I’m sure their Nocturnal Replenishment Space is only a Queen.

Solzhenitsyn in the gulag

Today was the first day of the month, which meant I had to get to the Mortgage Relief Assistance Office by 7:30 if I wanted to get a good spot in line for my subsidy. Since that MRA check covers 90% of my mortgage payment, I’m not about to pass it up—even though I could easily make the payment myself from money I squirreled away before the Equity in Compensation Act of 2012 reduced my handsome programmer’s salary by two-thirds. I guess all those years I spent studying the intricacies of digital architecture were not the wise investment in my future I once thought.

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Jon Stewart’s October 30th bout of rally envy—despite the comedian’s rickety attempts to disavow the patently invidious nature of the convocation—was hubristically (not to mention wishfully) titled “Restoring Sanity.” (Because of its obvious facetiousness, the Colbertian “Restoring Fear” portion of the event deserves no mention here.)

The danger of Stewart’s shedding his Daily Show mask of irony and becoming a full-fledged, Obama-style community-organizing activist is that in officially adopting the views of one political party over another, he devalues the only currency of the satirist—impartiality. Because human folly is an equal opportunity character flaw, the successful satirist must not take sides. He must be able to sling arrows in all directions, else the only thing he has to peddle—the precious honesty of his criticism—is called into question. A satirist who exposes the foibles of one political party and excuses those of the other is as useful as a bus that only goes in one direction. The bus company itself would soon also only go in one direction—out of business.

Those (I suspect Mr. Stewart is among them) who claim that the “Restoring Rally” was apolitical—just  a modern-day Woodstock with shorter hair and fewer hallucinogens, a Peace Train plea for reason and temperance—are either dupes or practitioners of a cunning form of political artifice.

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Forget Waldo. Where’s Gloria?

Gloria Allred—the lawyer who put the ”rude” in jurisprudence—is mysteriously missing in action of late. Surfacing recently from beneath her rock in a cellophane effort to shore up Jerry-the-Clown Brown’s gubernatorial aspirations, Allred came riding to the raucous rescue of innocent Nikki Diaz, poor li’l counterfeit alien girl forced to accept the humiliating, inhumane salary of $23-an-hour from her employer-oppressor, Meg “She’s a whore” Whitman. Victim Diaz was even forced to—terribile dictu—drive the Whitman automobile to—and from!—the supermarket. Forget the Chicago stockyards, o ghost of Upton Sinclair, and get thee to California. It’s a real jungle out there.

Of course, Allred is to be applauded for her unrelenting altruistic efforts to call reprobates like Whitman to account and to champion immigration cheats and forgers like victim Diaz, those loveable naughty miscreants who otherwise would not have a voice in our noble legal system. “What’s in a name?” asked Romeo. But indeed, in Allred’s case, is there an appellation other than Gloria so befitting this self-effacing vindicatrix of victimhood, this scourge of scandal, this Titania of tarnish?

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Most pundits agree John McCain ran at best a lackluster and at worst a completely feckless 2008 presidential campaign. Yet if the GOP does in fact gain control of one or both chambers of Congress this November, its members should fall prone upon the earth and thank their lucky stars that McCain—and not Huckabee, Romney or any of the other 2008 Republican candidates—won the Republican Party nomination.

Why?

Because McCain did the one thing that none of those other men would have dared to do. And in so doing he unwittingly introduced kryptonite into the presence of Barack “Superman” Obama. In 2010 political lingo, kryptonite is spelled in the form of ten other letters: Sarah Palin. When McCain astonished with his choice of Palin as vice-presidential running mate, a chain of events unfolded that created the arch-nemesis of Barack Obama, the one force that would torment the would-be Social Justice-draped crusader more than Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh combined could ever do.

Make no mistake, DC comics readers: Sarah Palin is the agent of paralysis that is now crippling Democrats in the 2010 midterms. “Ah, but the Democrats brought it on themselves,” you cry in rebuttal. “They passed Obamacare and the stimulus bill and cap-and-trade and Cash for Clunkers, all bills that the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of. That’s what’s behind the imminent Republican rout.”

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While browsing the “Antiques” category on eBay today, I came across a most remarkable ad. I had to do a double-take at first but on second glance I saw it really was true. Someone is actually auctioning off Gloria Allred, famed so-called victims’ rights attorney, on eBay. Incredible.

Here’s the verbatim listing, taken directly from the online auctioneer’s website:

“Item:  Sleaziest Lawyer in America

Current Bid: $2.50

Buy Her Now! price: $9.50

Condition: Slimy but still working

Item description:

Item is a 69-year-old American female attorney named Gloria Allred (nee Bloom), date of birth July 3, 1941. Item is a member of the California Bar Association.  Item has a long and checkered history of inserting itself into high-profile or controversial cases (O.J. Simpson, Scott Peterson, Roman Polanski, Tiger Woods) and—as events of this past week demonstrate—even at current long-in-the-tooth stage, item has lost none of its effectiveness at cheap publicity stunts.

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Remember the Coffee Party? Yeah, me neither.

But don’t worry. You haven’t missed your chance to hang with some of the mellowest, most laid-back-est, nicest political activists who ever strummed an E-A-B chord progression on the old six-string or crooned “The Answer Is Blowin’ in the Wind” around a Duraflame 20” electric fireplace.

That’s because the Coffee Party—all twelve or so of its lukewarm membership—is convening this weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. Let your eyes gently glaze over as you listen to Michael Brook’s soothing acoustic guitar accompanying the YouTube ad for the upcoming Brew-haha in Louisville:

Et tu, Karl?

Only Miles Monroe, Woody Allen’s character in Sleeper, could have missed the firestorm Karl Rove touched off during his appearance on Fox News’ Hannity show on Tuesday night. But for the benefit of Mr. Monroe and other hypnophiles out there, here it is:

It’s unusual to witness the typically even-tempered Rove go ballistic like this, but it’s downright discouraging to see the so-called “Architect” of so many successful Republican campaigns hell-bent to sabotage one of his own party. With architects like this, who needs building inspectors?

To make matters worse, with subsequent unrepentant appearances on Neil Cavuto’s Your World program and The O’Reilly Factor, the proudly obdurate Mr. Rove has become for the Democrats (and particularly for Delaware Senate hopeful Chris Coons) the proverbial gift that keeps giving. Rove only ever-so-slightly mollified his O’Donnell caveats on those appearances, more out of self-preservation than a spirit of selflessness. I guess we should be grateful that at least unlike Bill Ayers—the unrepentant Pentagon bomber and Weather Underground terrorist—Rove didn’t say he wished he’d done more to damage O’Donnell.

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If he were alive today, Saul Alinsky would be beaming over President Obama’s Labor Day speech at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council Laborfest. It hit all the right divisive, class-warfare notes, each one sounded to prod the down-trodden Have-nots into even greater envy of the evil Haves. And to no one’s surprise, the Milwaukee mice were more than happy to take the bait—cheering, smiling, applauding, even as the metal bar of the mousetrap is about to snap their necks.

Despite campaigning for the office as the Great Unifier, once in it Obama displays over and over his preferred role of Great Divider. His true talent is not in uniting America, but in fomenting, fragmenting, fracturing it. He wields his Alinskyite ideology like a giant chisel, cleaving America into two fractious lumps of stone, probably beyond reunification, at least under the current will-of-the-people-ignoring administration.

The first third of Obama’s 3422-word oration is dedicated to a platitudinous paean to America’s historically aspirational work ethic, a flattering, feel-good affirmation no one could disagree with. Even so, early on, Obama hints at the class-envy rhetoric that later wall-to-wall carpets his speech:

When I was still a candidate for this office…we talked about how, for years, the values of hard work and responsibility that built this country had been given short shrift…about how some on Wall Street took reckless risks and cut corners to turn huge profits, while working Americans were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat.

In the Alinsky-Obama world paradigm, it’s always Us (the working downtrodden) versus Them (the non-working, reckless greedy). In the A-O paradigm, the housing bubble was unilaterally caused by rapacious brokers and bankers, while borrowing-beyond-their-means Tulipomaniac home-buyers are absolved of all blame.

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Even most native speakers of English don’t realize how many of our commonest clichés—phrases you hear verbatim in venues as diverse as a gabfest on The View, an Elvis Presley song, or a political debate in Wolf Blitzer’s urgently-named “The Situation Room”—were actually invented by 18^th and 19^th-century British poets.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Marv Albert on ESPN describing a triple play? Not exactly. It’s the justly famous first line of John Keats’ pastoral poem Endymion (1818) about a shepherd lad loved by the moon goddess Selene. “Fools rush in.” Elvis, right? The first three words, maybe. But the entire pearl—”Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”—actually hails from Alexander Pope’s brilliant 1711 poetic treatise An Essay on Criticism. And who first warned us “A little learning is a dangerous thing?” Einstein? George Washington? Sorry. Pope, once again. From the very same poem—and to think he was only 23 when he scribbled these sterling epigrams that stubbornly cling to our lips nearly 300 years later.

But what about that ubiquitous ornithological metaphor we all bandy about so freely? You know—the albatross, inextricably wrapped around some poor wretch’s hapless neck? Surely dead bird imagery is too macabre, too contemporary to have crawled out of some centuries-old British poem—right?

Not if the poet is the opium-addicted mystic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the poem is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). With his surreal tale, Coleridge unwittingly gave us the perfect proxy for President Obama, entangled in his own personal albatross—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

When Obama signed the bill into law on March 23, 2010, with the stroke of a pen he became the doomed sailor in Coleridge’s supernatural, foreboding poem. Little did the President know at the time that his pen was the equivalent of the cross-bow with which Coleridge’s mariner killed the fated albatross. (Word to the wise: be careful what you lobby for. Word to the foolish: ignore the word to the wise.)

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Friday’s May jobs figure is vastly skewed because of the hundreds of thousands of temporary census employees—approximately 411,000—hired to perform the decennial enumeration of the U.S. population and gather concomitant vital information. In the coming days, economists will be assessing the distorting effect the addition of these temporary public sector workers has on the restoration or creation of employment and the overall strength or weakness of the economic recovery.

A few non-economists like myself, however, will be asking a very different question.

Namely—what can the history of the cost of performing the once-a-decade head count reveal about how government-run health care costs will behave? Will Obamacare be the exception to the runaway cost rule? Let’s use the census as a yardstick.

To keep this analysis at its most simple, let us compare the rate at which the population increased with the rate at which the cost of counting it (the decennial census) increased. That sounds sensical enough.

According to Appendix A-1 of Jason Gauthier’s 2002 study entitled Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses from 1790 to 2000, the cost to perform the census has risen over the decades at a rate staggeringly higher than the rate of the growth of the population itself. What does this mean? Simply put, that bureaucracy is obese. Morbidly obese.

Whatever the opposite of efficiency is, the cost of taking the census epitomizes it.

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Arizona’s controversial immigration law has prompted many threats of boycotts. Now it’s spawned a new form of protest: the girlcott.

Until today, first place in the Arizona boycott stupidity contest was held by the brilliant MENSA minds who decided to boycott AriZona ice tea. “We’ll hit Jan Brewer and her state where it really hurts—in their pocketbooks,” no doubt went their gleeful thinking. What they failed to realize, however, is that the AriZona Bottling Company, producers of the popular ice tea and other savory beverages, is located in Cincinnati, Ohio. For you statistics buffs, Cincinnati Ohio’s Latino population, according to 2000 Census, was 1.3% or 4,230 residents out of a total of over 330,000 in the state contiguous to no foreign border.

Now—in a full court press of absurdity–a Chicago-area high school has decided to take on the AriZona tea boycotters in the political protest stupidity Olympics. This time it’s Highland Park High School and specifically District 113 Assistant Superintendant Suzan Hebson. You can read the play-by-play here and here, but to recap for those just tuning in, on Monday the school canceled the planned December girls varsity basketball tournament trip to Arizona. Hebson says the junket was junked because “it would not be aligned with our beliefs and values.”

This after the young hoopsters won their first Conference title in 26 years. After they spent months selling cookies to raise funds for the trip. I guess in Chicago, that’s just the way the politics crumble.

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President Obama delivered the commencement address at Hampton University in Virginia on Sunday and, for those accustomed to his usual dose of narcissism, hypersensitivity, and self-serving historical revisionism, the Kvetcher-in-Chief didn’t disappoint. Here’s the text of the speech, courtesy of WaPo.

You have to give the President credit. Even when delivering a speech designed to inspire the leaders of tomorrow, Obama can still sniff out a way to complain about his perceived ill treatment at the hands of the media. Whether it’s Onstar or Garmin, this man’s persecution GPS has pinpoint accuracy. Judge for yourself:

With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all…to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. ..Even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience with that myself.

Notice the provenance of those “clamoring voices” which Obama insidiously cites: blogs (read new media journalists), talk radio (read Limbaugh, Levin, Medved, et al.), cable (read Fox News). Not the network MSM which coddles Obama, not hoop-shooting Harry Smith or soft-balling Brian Williams, whom Obama himself— at last year’s White House Correspondents dinner –joked about being in bed with.

It’s difficult to remember a whinier American president. If this man’s skin were any thinner, it would be diaphanous. You’d think one of his handlers would have told him: in the eyes of followers, victimhood lessens a leader. Did Patton complain of the desert heat? You bet. To the troops? Never.

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In a crowded press-conference at the U.N. on Monday, King Cornelius Pacifus of Unicornia lauded the new Nuclear Posture Review recently published by U.S. President Barack Obama. In New York for the United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference that begins today, Pacificus gave Obama what amounted to a pre-emptive disarmament shout-out. Unicornia’s stance on nuclear matters is usually considered a bellwether for that of other nations on the thorny issue.

King Pacificus pledged his small peace-loving nation’s support for the American policy shift: “Unicornia herself long ago embraced the efficacy of a Peace through Weakness strategy, and today our nation whole-hornedly applauds and supports the American president for adopting a similar attitude,” Pacifus proclaimed.

Fielding softball questions from a room overflowing with docile MSM reporters, the monoceros monarch made clear his country’s reasons for supporting America’s recent radical shift in nuclear posture: “In the bitter Butterfly Wars of the 17th century, Unicornia learned the hard way that standing up to tyrants and cruel dictators not only doesn’t work—it’s also just not nice.” Scholars allege an estimated 3 million Unicorns and 40 million Lepidopterae perished in that protracted ten-year battle over which portion of the air the other species was entitled to breathe. “War is mean,” Pacifus observed, with his classic gift for understatement. “And nuclear war is really mean. Really really mean.”

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