Political fashionistas, Nazis in the municipal building, botched executions, and a prayer to shove down the Supreme Court Justices’ throats. Or maybe up some other part of them.

Mr. Adolph Schickelgruber is
is one of several evil people
mentioned in this post. Read on.

I know, I know, I’ve been gone so long you were wondering if I was…hors du combat as the French say.

No such luck, dudes. After a long dry spell, a brief gush of income-producing work bashed down the door of my cranky office and demanded – demanded! – that I immediately stop whatever else I was doing, and instead do my thing for them.

Hey, as the U.S. Supreme Court perfectly well knows, money talks, and it talks one hell of a lot louder than words. Loud enough, in fact, to drown out any real speech.  So I temporarily abandoned my cranky blog. But now, while I wait for the people who hired me for thruppence ha'penny to pay up…and wait…and wait, I have a few moments to try to play catch up here in Blogistan.

And so, I went through the old and the new news this morning, and discovered more than a few items fighting for my attention.

Let’s deal with the frivolously weird stuff first. High fashion is is about to get highly political. First Cosmopolitan Magazine announces that it’s going to have a mink-coated person covering hard news and politics. Not even two weeks later, Marie Claire announces that it is going to have a political beat, too. Isn’t that a little ill-fittingly weird? You know, sort of like The Wall Street Journal having a rock and roll reporter, complete with his own Twitter feed, to keep its readers at bond law firms and hedge funds au courant? Oh, wait.

“Happy birthday dear Schickelgruber” Back during WWII, there was a campaign to hurt Adolph Hitler’s feelings while we fought a war to the death with him. “Call him by his real name, Adolph Schickelgruber,” said posters, and ads, and little squibs in magazines. In fact, Adolph’s father actually  had changed the family name from Schickelgruber to Hitler, but who cared? Well, now Schickelgruber’s ghost is stirring up the local nincompoops in the tiny French-Alsatian town of Oltingue, population something like 700. Or are the nincompoops local?

Seems a group of people went to the little town’s mayor and asked to rent out a room in town hall for a birthday party. You know, a little Alsatian wine, like a nice cold, crisp Gewirtztraminer perhaps, a tempting wedge of cake, some friendly folks wishing grandma well, that sort of thing? Hah!

Instead, somewhere between 150 and 200 neo-Nazis held a 125th (that’s one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth) birthday party for their beloved Schickelgruber, using his stage name, Adolph Hitler. Was there local outrage? For bien sur, and deservedly so. But now some people are wondering if the troublemakers didn’t actually come from Germany, which is right across the border from Alsace, a French province where they speak both French and German. 

Mein Gott and Mon Dieu, das ist une grande scandale!

Rat Poison Mary. Don't let her serve
you dinner in the Governor's mansion.

Rat Poison Mary investigates herself. You couldn’t possibly have missed this one: Oklahoma last week botched an execution, thanks in part to the Governor Mary (call her Rat Poison Mary) Fallin. She overruled  her own state’s Supreme Court –or perhaps defied is a better word – to speed up the execution of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett, refusing to say what chemicals he’d be injected with to kill him, where they came from, or why separation of powers, a principle upon which our nation was founded, doesn’t seem to hold any water in Oklahoma.

Well, you know the story. Lockett died a slow and agonizing death. So slow and agonizing that finally officials drew the curtain around the death chamber so that the press and other witnesses couldn’t observe what ghastly stuff was going on. They say Locket died of a heart attack after the execution was called off. Maybe. Or maybe they switched over to rat poison and kept pumping it into him until every last one of his blood vessels hemorrhaged. Or maybe somebody put a pillow over his face and smothered him. Or clubbed him to death with a ball peen hammer.

We may never know, because Rat Poison Mary arranged for a so-called “independent investigation,” to be conducted by a department that reports directly to herself, and to be led by a man who is a former Oklahoma Department of Corrections employee who was present at the execution. He was there because…uh…well. they’ll probably tell you it’s none of your business. Can you say "coverup?"

Until somebody incontrovertibly proves otherwise, using completely independent experts rather than political hacks, I’m going to stick with my rat poison theory. Moreover, I’m going to start calling the Oklahoma governor Rat Poison Mary every chance I get. I wish you would, too.

May God keep the five right wing members of the U.S. Supreme Court – preferably in a dark cell in Guantanamo.  Freedom of religion used to mean you also had freedom from religion. You wouldn’t want somebody walking into your home, uninvited by you, to tell you that Satan, or Zoroaster, or Zeus is the only true God. So why should anybody have to put up with it in a town meeting of the pathetic little backwater dump of a usually-freezing-cold burg called Greece, N.Y.?

Turns out, the town governing body had been starting out with a prayer to Jesus, which is fine if you believe that’s who God is and if you also believe in God, and if you’re religious enough to pray about it. But some folks were offended, one thing led to another, and the whole matter was before the other kind of supreme beings, the old dudes in black robes.

Chief Justice Kennedy: "What Constitution?"

Sure enough, justices Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito did the expectable, and voted in favor of the establishment of an official religion, in direct violation of what the U.S. Constitution says “shall not” happen. 

Listen, I don’t want to knock religion. It brings many people comfort when nothing else can. And while I would argue that you can’t possible know if there is a God, I believe the same logic dictates that you can’t possibly know there isn’t, regardless of my own opinions on the subject.

So what should we do about imposed Christianity, just legalized by the five right wing  court totalitarians? Well, since the court’s position is that you can’t “censor” religious speech, let’s have more of it. I urge every appointed or self-appointed member of religious and quasi-religious sects to go up there to Greece and demand equal praying time.

How about a prayer that begins, “Oh beloved Satan, sworn enemy of  the false gods of the west…

The goddess of Lust. Put her
in your church and pray to it,
Mr. Justice Kennedy.

How about an invocation calling for the imposition of Sharia Law in the town of Greece?

How about prayers to Zoroaster, and Zeus, and Dionysus? Or to Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of lust, carnality and sexual misdeeds? In concert with deeply held religious beliefs, the minister or shaman could name various body parts that might concern Tlazolteotl, and what should be done with them, and by whom, and for how long, and in whose bed.

Of course, the five Supreme Court justices would rule against that sort of prayer, using whatever excuse they could think up, once Greece bounces back to court with them. But at least, the justices would clearly put their own preferential religious politics on display.

However, I think we could work on the preferential bit, too. How about a national day of mass prayers, to the diety of your choice, calling for the Sacred One of your choice to either strike justices Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito dead or, better yet. to afflict them with a stroke that robs them of their own speech, not to mention the ability to flee from church once the next round of prayers to Zoroaster and Tlazolteotl begin.

Hey, it's all just an exercise of your freedom of speech.Right Supreme Courtiers?