"LA LA LAND LOST!" State Of The Union Address 2006

Listen to AFTER THE BALL IS OVER DOWNLOAD MUSIC HERE

I have felt as though our Nation was somehow transported to some kind of delusional LA LA LAND with the Republican take over of our country. Especially, Bush's rise to fame as the most powerful leader in the world. The evangelicals becoming so embolden to the point of actually believing the nonsense the leaders of this religious campaign spread.

Such as: AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals - If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being. Rev. Jerry Falwell Founder of The Moral Majority

"NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian."--Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," 12/3/97

"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."-- George Bush

"We're going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America." --Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan addressing the anti-gay rally in Des Moines, 2-11-96

"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."--Randall Terry, Founder of Operation Rescue, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 8-16-93

"Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals--the two things seem to go together."--Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," 1/21/93

I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag." --Ralph Reed, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 11/9/91

The lists of rhetorical propaganda from the "religious" right goes on and on... Demonstrating that these people are truly NUTS! But Things are A-CHANGING, thank-goodness to all that's holy and moral!

La La Land Lost is finally taking shape. The cockamamie coo-coo crazies behind the evangelical movement are, at long last, getting defrocked. The human brains inside the unfortunates, taken in by the forces of the power driven maniacs who claim they represent GOD, are irrevocably WAKING THE HELL UP! I came across the article below while searching for a preview (click) to Bush's 2006 SOTU address, I thought this "BUSH A CASUALTY OF WAR" to be better than any other sample I might have gotten about Bush's SHIT-OF-THE-BULL speech he will be spewing this evening. thinkingblue
PS: Just in case you would like an opinion of the Bush address read this:
Can State-Of-The-Union Boost State Of Bush's Presidency?

Bush a casualty of war January 7, 2006
They liked what George Bush represented: a return to the values of a time that never really existed. But they are now disillusioned and have stopped listening. Michael Gawenda reports.

The men are wearing 10-gallon hats, fancy, two-color cowboy shirts and elaborately patterned boots. The women are in long skirts and multi-colored cowgirl shirts and suede jackets, knee-high boots and hair-styles straight out of the '50s. Country and western dancing, the two-step, the women light on their feet, skirts swirling, smiling, eyes scanning the dance floor; the men stern and silent, focused, ageing, stiff-jointed, some of them dancing from memory.

Billy Elenga is dreaming, not dancing. He has lived in Tombstone for a decade, having come from New York where the acting career he pursued failed to
materialize. Elenga thought he had some advantages as far as acting was
concerned: his parents, Ren and Clair Elenga, were quick-draw artists in Las Vegas, the fastest around.

In the '60s, Elenga says, he met all the Hollywood cowboys when they came to Las Vegas to learn how to draw a six gun and do all that other fancy twirly stuff from his parents. He loved those times. Elenga was pretty quick, too, for a kid, though that didn't do him much good in New York.

It didn't do him much good when he applied at the Australian consulate in New York for a work visa. He was told that the prospects weren't great for out-of-work actors or quick-draw artists. Elenga says this was disappointing because he thought that in Australia he would find a real frontier.

"Tombstone is struggling," he says. "I love the old West. There's still some of it around here, but not much. But I can write here. I'm writing a screenplay for a movie. A western. I don't know why they don't make westerns any more."

In the early morning of that Saturday, down the road at the OK Cafe, where buffalo hamburgers are the house speciality, Carmen Mercer, the cafe's owner, is getting ready for her stint patrolling the United States-Mexican border. Her pick-up truck is packed with blankets and ropes and torches. Mercer, who came to the US from Germany in the early '80s, is dressed in jeans, boots and a leather jacket, and once she leaves Tombstone, in a car park beside a supermarket just out of town, she straps on her gun belt with its holstered Colt .45.

Mercer is part of the Minutemen movement that began last April with 800 volunteers who gathered in teams on the Mexican border in Arizona, Texas and California to stop the flow of illegals, mostly poor Mexican villagers in search of the American dream.

The Minutemen movement has grown to 5000 strong, mostly middle-aged men and women who give up their weekends and their holidays to patrol the border. They are convinced that the flow of illegal immigrants into the US is a threat to national security and, more importantly, US national identity.

Standing on the border, alongside the rickety wire fence that separates the two countries, with the flat scrub-covered desert of southern Arizona stretching as far as the eye can see, the Minutemen's demand for a 3500- kilometer wall to separate the two countries is an absurd pipedream.

But the estimated 13 million illegal immigrants in the US and the 500,000 or so who made it there last year are likely to be a big issue in the mid-term congressional elections in October, though it's hard to see how any political party can meet the demands of the anti-immigration activists.

"I voted for Bush but I'm sorry I did," Mercer says. "He's on the side of business, doing their bidding on illegals. Business exploits these people. They are paid nothing, have no benefits, do all the dirty work.

"Bush is a disappointment all round. I was against the war in Iraq, but now that we are there, why can't we just do what's needed to win? We lost in Vietnam because we didn't want to win. Same thing now. And we are hated everywhere. We give money to all these countries; we support them and they hate us in return. How about we look after our own first?"

WHAT comes to mind is inauguration day in January a year ago.

Washington was awash with cowboys and cowgirls that day, triumphant cowboys and cowgirls from Texas, dressed in the finest cowboy and cowgirl gear, white or tan suits and frilled shirts and thin black leather ties, the women in tailored suits and furs, celebrating the first day of George Bush's second term.

There were to be three days of celebrations - dinners, balls, concerts. It felt like a coronation and, with Republicans having won control of both houses of Congress, there was talk among Bush's advisers of a Republican ascendancy that would last for generations.

In this second term, a radical foreign policy, with the goal of nothing less than the spread of democracy and liberty around the world, beginning in the Middle East, would be matched by domestic reforms, including the privatization of social security, that would sweep away the last vestiges of Roosevelt's New Deal.

On the way to Colorado, in Bisbee, a small former copper mining town gouged into the bare mined-out hills between Tucson and Phoenix, on the footpath outside the Bank of America building, at twilight, a group of women dressed in black is staging a silent vigil against the war in Iraq.

Bisbee is a hippie town in the middle of the Arizona desert, its residents all from somewhere else, jewelers and painters and musicians who have renovated the 19th-century shop fronts and the miners' cottages. It is not surprising that there is no great love here for George Bush.

What is surprising, traveling across Arizona, stopping at the small, one-street towns along the way with their 1950s diners and their prefab houses flying the Stars and Stripes and the Utes (sport-utility vehicle) parked outside the fast-food outlets just off the highway, is the almost universal concern, regret, that the US is unloved.

Many blame Bush for this. In small-town America, beneath the friendliness, the often startling hospitality - it is amazing how many people are prepared to invite virtual strangers to come share a meal with them - there is disappointment with Bush.

"It's all very well to spread democracy and get rid of bad men like Saddam Hussein, but we get no thanks for the blood and treasure this has cost us," says Kate Polly, a middle-aged hotel worker in Phoenix. "Then, when it comes to saving and helping Americans after Katrina, George Bush and all the other politicians in Washington do nothing."

Arizona is Republican country, a heartland "red" state which Bush carried easily in 2000 and again in 2004. It is small-government, low-taxes Republican, the home of the late Barry Goldwater, who lost the 1964 presidential election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, but who became the father of the new conservatism which by the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, had become the political and economic orthodoxy not only of the Republican Party, but of centrist Democrats. It was summed up by Reagan when he said: "Government is the problem, not the solution."

Bush swore allegiance to the Goldwater creed, but he has presided over record growth in government spending and record budget deficits. He has become - perhaps he always was - a big-spending Republican, prepared to cut taxes, but unwilling to cut federal programs, a captive, according to many Arizona conservatives, of Washington's big-government elites.There is not much talk of the social conservative agenda in Arizona, not much concern about gay marriage and "liberal" judges who are out to transform a Christian nation into a secular one.

In Colorado Springs, a mountain town framed by the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in central Colorado, in the sprawling complex of the Focus on the Family headquarters and, a couple of kilometers away, at the New Life Church, a mega-church with ties to Hillsong in Australia, the soldiers on the God side in the culture wars are hard at work.

Thousands of them, young men and women, answering phones, mailing leaflets, selling books and preparing radio and television programs in studios with the most up-to-date equipment. Focus on the Family, founded in 1977 by James Dobson, a former child psychologist, is probably the most politically influential, socially conservative organization in the US.

Dobson's daily radio program, carried by thousands of stations across the country, has an audience of about 7 million. He is a regular commentator on Fox News and is close to several senior White House aides, including Karl Rove. Some observers believe Dobson's "personal" endorsement of Bush - Focus on the Family would lose its tax-exempt status if it endorsed political candidates - helped deliver Bush his second term.

And Ted Haggard, the pastor and founder of the New Life Church, is the president of the National Association of Evangelicals which represents 45,000 churches in the US and through its Office of Government Affairs in Washington, lobbies Congress and the White House on "values" issues.

These two men are much loved and respected in their respective headquarters. There are photographs of them and framed quotations and posters advertising their books everywhere you look. No doubt they are inspiring, and no doubt in the culture wars there are no more dedicated and committed troops than here in Colorado Springs.

But are they winning? Has George Bush, born-again Christian, passionate supporter of "a culture of life", delivered what he promised his evangelical supporters: a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, a Supreme Court that would overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade pro-choice judgement, and the harder-to-define support for "family friendly" policies and initiatives?

Asked this question, Gary Booker, the director of international broadcasting for Focus on the Family, says that he is not in a position to answer "political questions" because Focus on the Family is a non-political organization.

"Our major concern is helping families," he says. "Promoting family values, that's our main goal. Yes, we believe that we need a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage because we believe that gay marriage threatens the institution of marriage, which remains the basis of our civilization. And yes, we believe that abortion is the taking of innocent human life.

"I think, personally, that President Bush agrees with us on these things."

Maybe. During the 2004 campaign, Bush promised to push for the anti-gay marriage amendment to the constitution, but he has not mentioned it at all in the past 12 months. White House aides have made it clear that Bush does not intend to make an issue of what they describe as a lost cause.

Nor is it likely that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v Wade despite the fact that Bush had the chance to fundamentally move the court to the right.

In private, leaders of the Christian Right concede that a majority of Americans are pro-choice and that neither John Roberts, the new Chief Justice, nor Samuel Alito, who is almost certain to be confirmed by the Senate to the court, are radicals in the sense that they would be prepared to overturn what has become established law.

In Colorado Springs, those soldiers of the Christian Right produce their radio and television programs that hark back to an America of intact families living in family-friendly neighbourhoods, where there are no drugs or poverty or homosexuality, where mom stays home with the kids - in other words, an America of '50s sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver, an America that has never existed.

On the drive from Colorado Springs to Kansas, on local radio, Dino Costa, the highest-rating talkback radio host in the state is telling his listeners that Bush is no born-again Christian but rather a Mason from a family of Masons, and that Bush has no intention of returning America to its Christian roots.

"He's a fake," he says. "There are homosexuals in his Administration. There are people opposed to Christianity in his Administration. What has Bush done for us? Nothing. There's more pornography and Hollywood trash around than ever. Liberals are destroying our schools. Wake up, people."

Listening to this, you think of Billy Elenga and his Wild West dreams, and Carmel Mercer and the Minutemen campaign to build a wall around America; you think of the anti-gay, pro-family crusade of the Christian Right, and you wonder how much of this is about nostalgia for a time that never was and never will be.

Bush had big dreams on inauguration day a year ago. Having won a clear, if relatively narrow, victory in November, he famously proclaimed that he had earned political capital that he was now determined to spend.

It was hard that day, in the midst of all that Republican triumphalism and the despair of Democrats, with the military bands playing God Bless America, to remember that America was at war in Iraq, that 1300 US troops had been killed in that war, and that the insurgency was growing more bloody by the day.
triumphalism n. The attitude or belief that a particular doctrine, especially a
religion or political theory, is superior to all others.

In a 13-minute speech, Bush used the words "freedom" or "liberty" in almost every sentence. The rhetoric was soaring, almost biblical. America would rise, as it always has, to defeat the tyrants and the terrorists who are the enemies of freedom:

"From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth."

In winter, the Kansas plains look desolate and vast, snow-covered and endless. This is farming country, mainly wheat and some soya beans, and off the interstate highway there is small-town America where the Stars and Stripes fly from virtually every greasy spoon and every suburban house, and where there are signs planted in many dead winter lawns welcoming back soldier sons and daughters who are returning from Afghanistan or Iraq.

Kansas is where the "values" Republicans have had their greatest success. This is where farmers face an uphill battle to hang on to the family farms that are threatened by the big corporations building ever-larger farming empires, and where in the working-class suburbs of Wichita and Kansas City there is increasing dread that big manufacturers like Boeing will pack up and move overseas.

This is where the conservative evangelical wing of the Republican Party has convinced these struggling farmers and dread-filled blue-collar workers that what is happening to them, what threatens them, is the fault of the liberal elites who control the media and public schools and the courts. The goal of these elites, most of them from the north-east, from New York or Washington, is to undermine America and traditional American values.

And so in Kansas, the school board has voted to demand that science teachers tell their students that evolution has big holes in it exposed by advances in molecular biology and that science is not just about finding "natural" explanations for life on Earth. And so the board, controlled by "values" Republicans, is planning to introduce education vouchers which parents will be free to use to send their children to private schools and which many people fear will destroy the Kansas public school system.

At Washburn University in Topeka, Bill Wagnon, a professor of American history and a member of the Kansas Board of Education, says perhaps 25 per cent of Kansans really support the right-wing fundamentalist Republicans who have captured the party in that state.

"But these people are organized and active," he says. "And they appeal to people who feel threatened by change and who are nostalgic for that simpler, less morally confused world that was America half a century
ago. At least that's what they think America was back then."

From Kansas on to Cleveland in Ohio, where in a neat, middle-class suburb a 15-kilometre drive out of town, along the fence of the home base of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, there are fresh flowers and small wreaths laid every day to commemorate the deaths last August of 14 members of this unit, killed in a road- side bombing on a desert road west of Baghdad.

In Cleveland, a Democratic stronghold in a state that Bush won by just 200,000 votes, the war in Iraq is much more about the deaths of these young men, all of them from Cleveland or small nearby towns, than it is about America's mission to spread freedom and liberty around the world.

Yet even here, there are few people, it seems, who want US troops pulled out of Iraq precipitously. Not even Paul Schroeder and his wife, Rosemary Palmer, whose 23-year-old son, Edward, was one of the marines who died on that road near Baghdad.

His parents live a few kilometers from the base where their son was trained and from there, they run Families of the Fallen for Change, a group of a few dozen parents of slain soldiers who want Bush to define what would be a victory in Iraq and under what circumstances US forces could be withdrawn.

"We cannot bring our son back, but what we can do is ask our President to explain just what it is we are trying to achieve in Iraq and how he plans to get it done," Paul Shroeder says.

"We support our soldiers, even if we don't support the war."

In this trip across the US, the war in Iraq was not raised by many people, and when it was raised there was mostly anxiety about the mounting death toll and fear that America would lose and that in the aftermath of that loss, the US would be weaker, more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Alexander Lamis is a professor of politics at Ohio's Case Western Reserve University. In his view, Bush beat John Kerry in Ohio, the key "swing" state in the election, because a majority of people, despite their misgivings about the war in Iraq, believed that Bush was tougher on terrorism.

"Yes, there was some values voting ... but the security issue was the key one," he says.

"Now, some of those people have changed their minds. They believe the war in Iraq has made America less secure."

In a couple of weeks, Bush will deliver his annual state of the union speech to Congress. It is doubtful that the rhetoric will soar, that the dream of spreading freedom and liberty will be repeated with quite the sort of confidence and biblical force that marked his inaugural address a year ago. There have been too many travails and too few triumphs for that. And you wonder whether out there, in small-town America, out there in Arizona and Colorado and Kansas, in Ohio and Michigan, where people feel anxious about the future and nostalgic about the past, when Bush rises to address Congress, they will be listening.

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AFTER THE BALL IS OVER
After the ball is over,
After the break of morn
After the dancer's leaving;
After the stars are gone;
Many a heart is aching,
If you could read them all;
Many the hopes that have vanished
After the ball.
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message into your email signature... spread the word... thinkingblue

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WORD OF THE DAY Gleichschaltung from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The German word Gleichschaltung is used in a political sense to describe the process by which the Nazi regime successively established a system of totalitarian control over the individual, and tight coordination over all aspects of society and commerce. Another possible translation is "making equal". One goal of this politics was to enforce a specific way of doctrine and thinking to everybody, eliminating individualism.
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QUOTATIONS OF THE DAY A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
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The most beautiful experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein