What use is the Bible Belt if it can’t even keep a Republican’s pants on?

Judge Roy Moore, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. If you see

him coming, lock up your daughters.

Years ago, somebody told me a joke. 

Q: What’s the definition of a virgin in Alabama?

A: “A fourteen year old girl who can run faster than her uncles.”

I used to think the joke was disparaging of Alabamans. It sounded like something out of a novel by Erskine Caldwell. But c’mon, Tobacco Road was almost 80 years old when I first heard the virgin joke. And Tobacco Road happened in a different state. Nice try, but the joke was based on out-of-date information.

These days, I’m not so sure.

Case in point: Roy Moore. Surely you’ve already read at least some of the dirt on  Roy Moore. He’s the ex-judge who was removed from office for defying a higher court's orders to remove a fifty-two hundred pound block of granite, inscribed with the Ten Commandments, from the rotunda of his own courthouse where he had ordered it installed. His refusal was in defiance not only of the higher court, but also of the establishment of religion clause of the United States Constitution. That Roy Moore.

This Bible-thumping Republican from Alabama is running for the Senate and whaddaya know! Turns out that during his days as a thirty-two-year-old prosecutor, he offered to babysit the fourteen-year-old daughter of a woman who was going into court for a divorce. The judge took the fourteen-year-old’s phone number. Not her pretty and about-to-be-divorced mother’s phone number. The cute fourteen-year-old’s number.

Yes he did call. And he took the fourteen-year-old child to his house in the woods. Not once, but twice. And the second time, reports the Washington Post, “she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.”

Now other women have come forward, telling stories about how Moore, when he was thirty-something, dated them or tried to when they were fourteen in one case, sixteen in another, and seventeen in the third case.  Does anybody besides me see a pattern here having to do with minor children?

What’s interesting is that Moore’s defense is all over the map on this matter. Moore himself is denying it. But while Moore, last I checked, was in effect saying all the girls are liars — Moore’s buddy, Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler isn’t denying it. He seems to be saying — read his words and draw your own conclusion — that what Moroe did is okay, because the Bible says so.

“He’s clean as a hound’s tooth,” said Ziegler. “Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist.”

So you see, there it is! Being a powerful older man who spirits a child off to his little love nest in the woods and starts taking her clothes off and feeling her up is a good thing because hey, next thing you know, she’ll give birth to a saint (assuming all those evil abortionists don't get their hands on her first.) And not only that.

“Also take Joseph and Mary,” Ziegler babbled on. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Umm, wait a second there, State Auditor Ziegler. According to the Bible, Jesus was the product of a virgin birth. So if you’re not committing blasphemy by lying about the contents of the Bible tin order to further your own partisan political interests, what does that mean? It would have to mean that either that the Bible is lying, or that Joseph was cuckholding God. Or that contrary to the fundamentalist churches of the south, Jesus was in no way the son of God. And if that literal interpretation of the Bible goes away, what's next to bite the dust of literal belief? Dinosaurs romping with Adam and Eve?

In any case, if, somehow, any members of ISIS are reading this, I do recommend that you put your arms around Moore and Ziegler and give them both great big hugs. Each of them in his own way seems in tune with all of you guys spiriting away teen-age girls and either raping or marrying them. Or maybe both. I thought this was one of the things we’ve been fighting to make stop, but no, according to Moore and Ziegler, it seems to be the American Way, too. Not to mention the Christian Way.

Oh, and this from ths Washington post, in which Ziegler adds to his defense of Moore:

Moore began dating his wife Kayla around this time, according to Ziegler. “He dated her. He married her, and they’ve been married about 35 years. They’re blessed with a wonderful marriage and his wife Kayla is 14 years younger than Moore.”

Umm, Auditor Ziegler? I think that’s part of the point all of us are making.

At any rate, I herewith suggest changing the old joke about Alabama virgins. From now on, I’ll be telling it this way:

Q: “What’s the definition of a virgin?”

A: A fourteen year old girl who can run faster than a Republian.

UPDATE: (November 14th): In addition to a fifth woman having stepped forward to accuse Moore of sexual misconduct since I posted this commentary, the New Yorker magazine today is reporting that while in his 30s, Moore's pursuit, often unwanted, of teen-age girls at a local shopping mall led the mall to ban him from the premises.

Five rumors invented by this blog to concern, alarm, excite, and inflame the paranoia of panicky Republicans

I haven’t posted for the past few weeks because I’ve been left almost dumbstruck by the extent of small-mindedness, unreasonable “reasoning,” fake science, complete disregard for facts, insane rants, and other thinking , either of the stupid or the neo-Nazi kind, that seems to be prevalent in the Republican party.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? That Cruz, and Carson, and Christy, and Carly, and Trump, and (ad infinitum) are full of crap? That it’s alarming how we are tumbling pell mell down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism? That the denial of science is not only stupid but suicidal for the planet? That allowing only “Christians” to immigrate to this country is a de facto establishment of religion in violation of the United States Constitution?

Nah! It’s all being said. Over and over again. And meanwhile, rumors, misinformation, outright lies, and filthy slanders abound to reinforce either the sclerotic Congressional status quo, or the candidacy of whacko Republican candidates. 

One of Trump's towers. Why so big? The

grainy secret is revealed in this blog post.

So if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Here are some rumors I’ve deliberately invented, just to see if the stuff that springs from my head is as good as the stuff that springs from Republican heads. 

1. What the Trump towers are really for.  There are several Trump towers in New York City. One is at Columbus Circle. Another on Fifth Avenue. Still another on First Avenue near the UN building. Other tall buildings bear his name on the Upper East Side. Why so many? Well, currently they contain  hotels and the apartments of millionaires and billionaires. But that is only temporary. Long term, comes the world wide famine caused by global warming, they will be used to store grain.

2. Global warming is real, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, there is an international conspiracy of scientists who are trying to keep the truth from you. They have been paid off by the oil industry and Big Government “libtards” to avoid the total panic that might occur if everyone knew the truth.

The truth is that the earth is heating up because the planet has been knocked off its axis and out of its orbit by too much and too-powerful fracking. Earth is now racing toward the sun on an erratically spiraling path that makes us feel too hot one day, too cold the next. But in the long run, we will all be fried, baked and barbecued alive by solar heat. 

Jeff Bezos in his space duds, practicing

to flee Earth with his fellow billionaires

before we're swallowed up by the sun.

In fact, the reason some billionaires like Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) and Jeff Bezos  (Amazon) are pioneering “commercial” space travel is, they’ve been tipped off that we’re heading on a wobbly course to the solar crematorium. 

Their plan is to sell one-way tickets to another planet for $800,000,000 per seat, economy class, more for Business and First Class. Better upgrade if you can. Seventeen months in a narrow Coach Class seat could be mighty painful on your read end. And yes, baggage, meals and even use of the toilet will be extra. You don’t have that kind of money? Even for Economy? Then you’re toast, pal. Literally.

3. The blonde boy from Brazil.  The late author and playwright Ira Levin, an agreeable guy who at one time was my neighbor, wrote a book called "The Boys From Brazil." It's about a bunch of little Adolph Hitlers, cloned from the original, placed strategically by old Nazis to take over the world. The book later became a movie.

Well, Ira was partly right. There is one “boy from Brazil.” And don't be surprised if you learn that he's Donald Trump. But The Donald was not cloned from Hitler. He was a frozen embryo, fathered not by Fred Trump or by Cranky Adolph, but by Reinhard Heydrich, the “blond beast of the S.S,” who gained Hitler’s favor by making statements such as, “We will Germanize the Czech vermin,” and later became known as “The Butcher of Prague.” 

Reinhard Heydrich (right) with

Henrich Himmler. Note that 

Heydrich was photographed

with his hat on. Want to guess

what's under there?

Heydrich was every bit as good at spreading hatred as Trump is, but other parallels are equally eerie. Both Hydrich and Trump had several wives.  Both were military school cadets, Trump at the now-defunct New York Military Academy. (And by the way, what happened to Donald Trump’s school records, once kept at the military school? Hmm?) Both Heydrich and Trump were efficient organizers and builders. 

Ominously, one of Heydrich’s biographers wrote of him: “Among a crowd of lackeys, imbeciles and unredeemable thugs, Heydrich stands out as the one man who not only seethed with utter hatred mixed with emotional indifference for the welfare of others, but also knew exactly how to do something about it. He was, at that iron heart, a psychopath.”

Need proof that The Donald is The Blond Beast’s frozen embryo son? Notice that Donald Trump has never shown you his birth certificate. Not a legitimate one, at any rate. How can he, when he was born in a test tube? 

4. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are part of a sleeper cell. No no, not Muslim. Cuban. Their so-called “conservative” leanings are only a ruse. They were sent here by Fidel Castro to take over the government by becoming President, and then turn the United States into a Cuban communist satellite. There are two of them so in case something happens to one of them, there will still be another. Mark my words, in 30 years, if the Earth hasn’t been swallowed up by the sun yet, you’ll be speaking Spanish with a Cuban accent, and  driving a 30-year-old Chevrolet .

5. Carly Fiorina is the illegitimate daughter of Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean. Or maybe of Cruella de Vil. I mean, what proof do you Little People need?

Republican idiot economics and the so-called wisdom of markets. (Hah!)

This is a picture of the stock market scaring the crap out of itself

Above, a chart depicting  the Dow Jones Industrial Average from start to close on September 17th, 2015. The Dow opened more or less flat. Then, for a while, it jiggled up and down in tiny nervous increments. There was a reason for that.

Janet Yellen, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, was about to make an announcement. The announcement would pertain to the Fed’s interest rates, which had been hovering only a gnat’s hair above zero, since the Feds took action to help stave off a market crash. The market crash was brought on by deregulation of banking, which gave bankers free rein to treat the U.S. economy like a casino in which they had been gambling with their depositors’ money.

A frisson of jangly nerves

Stock investors had a right, sort of, kind of, to be nervous. If interest rates rise, people tend to take at least some of their money out of stocks, which are risky, and put them into bonds which are safer, and into banks, which we all know are too big to fail.  That would drive stock prices down. (There's an exception for bank stocks, since banks would profit from higher interest rates.)

But to everybody’s surprise, Yellen instead announced that the Fed would not raise interest rates after all just now, not because of the U.S. economy, but because the global economy is messy. Interest rates will probably rise later this year, Yellen said, but not today.

So you’d think “the market," except for investors in banks, would breathe a sigh of relief. That seems to be what happened briefly just before 3 p.m. The Dow began to shoot higher. But then, “the market” spooked itself and plunged to 61 points below where it was at the opening, and well over 200 points below where it was at the day’s high.

In short, it acted overall like a pot-smoking drunk tooling down the highway while tapping the accelerator with one foot and the brake pedal with another in tune to a Rolling Stones performance of “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Struggles, stopped clocks, and 

the synthetic wisdom of Reuters

Reuters, whose writers have to say something that sounds intelligent at least on the surface, reported that the market was leaving skid marks because, “investors struggled to interpret the Federal Reserve's decision to hold off on raising interest rates.”

Why the struggle? Or should I ask, What struggle? The news was perfectly straightforward. It meant what it said. The Fed’s gonna raise interest rates eventually. But not by much. And not now. And meanwhile, frozen near-zero interest rates continue to make things better than investors expected at the dawn of the day. Except for people who invest in banks. Period.

The market’s performance made no sense because markets themselves make no sense. Contrary to conservative belief, markets have no wisdom. Let me haul out a proverb that’s getting kind of weary and remind you that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Markets are a collection of people buying and selling stuff, sometimes out of greed, sometimes in panic, sometimes rationally, sometimes irrationally, and  at mutual cross purposes. So what? 

Bury my knee in

Ayn Rand's gizzard

What it all comes down to is that completely free markets are either disasters waiting to happen or disasters that are already happening. Oh, and while I’m sounding off on this, Ayn Rand was an economic idiot (as well as a second-rate writer).

Markets function best when there’s a cop around to keep the ripoff artists at bay. But scratch a Republican presidential candidate and he’ll bleed free market hosannas. Which is why you’re out of your mind to vote for any of ‘em.

Donald Trump throws his combover into the race for Republican Presidential nominee. Who’s next, I wonder?

   

Narcissistic puppet and former presidential Candidate Howdy Doody, 

Howdy Doody for President

He’s America’s choice

He will never be hesitant

To fight for the rights of girls and boys!

Above, a stanza from the campaign song of Howdy Doody.

He was a string puppet whose late afternoon television antics enthralled seven- eight- and nine-year-olds of my generation back in…well it was a very long time ago, a time  when television was so new that children and adults alike would stare for hours at anything that moved on a blurry 7-inch screen.

Suffice it to say that Howdy never made it to the White House. In fact, given that the coaxial cable had yet to be installed to make possible coast-to-coast television programming, and TV shows were yet to get videotaped, I don’t even know if Howdy’s show made it even as far as Pittsburgh. 

Howdy Doody had a human side kick ostensibly named Buffalo Bob Smith, and a coterie of other puppets and clowns with names like “Mr. X,” “Mister Bluster,” “Clarabel the Clown,” and “Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring.” Does that all sound vaguely like a collection of Republican presidential candidates to you? 

I’d be tempted to say you can’t make this stuff up, but obviously somebody did at NBC, back in the day.

I bring this up because of  the revelation that Donald Trump is “seriously” running for president. Or at least the Manchester, New Hampshire Union-Leader is taking it seriously. Their article states:

Combined with staff hires, Trump’s announcement that he will form an exploratory committee for the first time is a sign the billionaire is seriously considering running for the Republican nomination.

Somehow Trump’s name and the adjective “seriously” in the same sentence reek of more than a soupçon of Eau d'Oxymoron. All the same, given the Republican predilection to seriously consider a huge assortment of clowns and corporate puppets as presidential candidates in recent years, I’ll take any Republican’s  announced candidacy  seriously. 

I mean, please remember that Sarah Palin was once the actual, gen-u-ine Republican Vice-Presidential nominee. How did that work out for ya, Republicans? And Mitt Romeny last time around was seriously the presidential candidate. And among the many people who climbed out of the Republican clown car wearing baggy polkadot pants, bulbous red noses and giant shoes  were Rick Perry and Herman Caine. 

So this year we already have Fat Chris Christie, whose lap band surgery doesn’t seem to have helped much. And Scott Walker, whose backstabbing of his own constituency of Wisconsin working folks has made him the Mister X of a new generation.  And Carly Fiorina, who has a rare talent for swamping  huge corporate enterprises. (Imagine what she could achieve with the U.S. Government.) And Jeb Bush, whose administration as Florida’s governor seems to have been ethically, umm, challenged, not to mention his quirky support of “faith based prisons.”

And also not to mention, as a writer for the Florida Sun-Sentinal put it, that…

… while his tenure coincided with a sizzling economy and an overflowing treasury, Bush's back-to-back terms were marred by frequent ethics scandals, official bungling and the inability of the government he downsized to meet growing demands for state services, including education and aid for the infirm and the elderly.

And now we have The Donald? 

Oh boy, maybe we Dems can win with Hillary and all her flaws after all.

A final thought. Can you imagine going abroad and saying to incredulous foreigners, "This is my president?"

Ding dong, the witch is d….Oh wait. Scratch that. She’s Alive. She...is...ali-yi-yi-ve!!

When Carly Fiorina was finally ordered by the Board of Directors at HP to take a hike from her job as chief executive, a good many of her employees started singing, “The witch is dead!”

Little wonder. During her tenure the value of HP was sliced in half. She asked her employees to take voluntary pay cuts and when all but 14 percent of them agreed to do so, she thanked them for their sacrifice for the company by firing 30,000 of them. 

Jets, not jobs

Not that any of this led her to pinch pennies, or for that matter, to pinch great bulging sacks of moolah when it came to her own well-being at company expense. At the same time those sacrificing HP employees got thrown out on the street, Fiorina, in the position of CEO, “tripled her salary, bought a million dollar yacht, and five corporate jets.”

Oh, and perhaps most horrific of all: she forced her soon-to-be fired employees to train their own lower-paid replacements. Somehow, that seems akin to an invading army rounding up innocent peasants and making them dig their own graves before shooting them in the back.

But if you think Fiorina’s dismissal was the end of her, you’ve been singing "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" again instead of paying attention. It looks like she’s  now trying to become the Republican  presidential candidate, although the right wing National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar has a theory I buy into that’s she’s really running for the vice presidential slot. 

If Palin could do it

why not Fiorina?

Kraushaar makes sense. Fiorina doesn't have the chops for the presidency. She has never held elected office. The one time she ran for the U.S. Senate, despite spending oodles of money (and still owing oodles more to campaign suppliers she has so far stiffed) she got trounced. 

But as a vice presidential candidate she’s be subject to less scrutiny, while possibly serving to foil Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket. And she’d be free to spew nonsense like, “I get so tired of the Democrats in general and Hillary. Their facts are just all wrong.” In this case she was referring to the issue of women getting paid less than men for the same job.

Hey, here’s an idea:

let’s blame the unions

Fiorina’s explanation of why Hilary and the Democrats are wrong is as far out in right field as anything that ever fell out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, another brilliant Republican choice for vice-president. If you have the patience to watch the video above, in the course of witnessing what I can best describe as an overtly friendly interview you’ll get a taste of what we’re in for if Carly ever gets into the White House. Or even a heartbeat away from it. 

What her argument boils down to is, it’s the fault of the unions that women are underpaid, because unions want people paid fairly by grade and seniority, where as Florina would simply pay them according to how she feels they “merit” the money.  Never mind that women have been in the work force in substantial numbers for over 30 years, still don’t get paid equally despite all the time they’ve put in. 

If anything, unions protect all workers, from having their salaries cut and their pensions vanished into the rapacious maws of people like Carly Fiorina.

And having watched what happened at Hewlett Packett, we all know how “rewarding” non-unionized people at the whim of management works out.

Groucho Marx and the Tea Party Glee and Klown Klub sing the sacred Republican anthem

You had to know the permanent opposition to getting anything done in Congress was getting its inspiration from somewhere.

Now we know where.

The Crank’s brother out-cranks the Crank. And the laugh’s on Republican recruiters.

If a Republican recruiter calls you, don't
hang up. There are better ways to stick it
to them.

The Crank’s little brother, himself an old fogey these days – and with lots of time on his retired hands – called last night to tell me about his latest foray into politics.

He had joined the Republican Party, he told me, and for only forty bucks.

“Why would you give them a plugged nickel?” I asked him. “Why would you even join them for free?”

“It’s worth it in entertainment,” he assured me.

Seems a Republican lady called him from some call center and asked him if he’d be interested in joining the party. Before she could tell him why, he was telling her.

“Wow! That means I could pitch in and help the Republicans with all their good work!”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Like we could abolish food stamps,” he enthused. “I’m sick and tired of people eating off the government dole. Let ‘em get a job, or if they say they can’t get a job, let ‘em starve to death in the street, wouldn’t you agree?”

His retort was clearly not in the Republican telemarketing script. The Republican lady sounded flustered. “Well, um, I’m not sure if…”

“And what about all those sluts who want us hardworking taxpayers to pay for their birth control so they can party at our expense? If they get pregnant and have babies, that’s their problem, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Um, well uh….”

“And if they do have the babies, let the babies starve to death. That’s not the government’s business, as long as they weren’t aborted, wouldn’t you agree?

“Err, well…”

“Also, this country needs a flat tax. A flat 20 percent on every penny of earned income, except for people making over $500,000 a year, because those are the job creators and we don’t want to slow down their important work, wouldn’t you agree?”

At this point, the poor woman was getting overwhelmed.

“Also let’s do away with Social Security and Medicare. People ought to take care of their own damn selves. If they can’t, let ‘em die in the street, wouldn’t you agree?”

The recruiter tried to change the subject by getting down to brass tacks. She explained the virtues and benefits of a $70 membership as opposed to a $40 memberships.

“I’ll take the $40 membership,” he said. “There’s no way in hell I’m giving $70 as long as the Republican Party is infested with liberal pinkos like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Throw those lefties like that out and replace them with real Americans, like Ted Cruz and then I’ll pay $70. Did I mention how sick I am of people being deprived of their rights to stand their ground? If somebody plays loud music in your face, you should have a right to blow their faces off with a goddamn shot gun, wouldn’t you agree”

And so poof, he’s a Republican. 

“I still don’t much like the idea of giving those guys $40,” I told him.

“Believe me, they’ll spend it all on postage and begging me for other things fore six months are up,” the Crank’s little brother said.

Personally, I would have left it at twenty minutes – or maybe with any luck, 60 minutes worth of fun. I say with luck because the object of my game whenever Republicans call, is to see how long I can keep them unproductively on the phone – unproductive, that is, except for my entertainment.

Never hang up on a Republican. Keep them on. Keep them talking. Keep them wasting their time. Make them hang up on you.

The not-so-fine Republican art of speaking about Obamacare in self-contradictory gobbledygook

Gobbledygooker Tom Graves

In their desperate attempt to kill something they know the American public will love once they can enjoy it, Republicans resort to a brain-busting mockery of logic. Here's a glaring case in point of their gobbledygook:

"All of us are united in understanding that once you start enrollment [in Obamacare], it becomes a totally different dynamic even though they're not receiving benefits. When somebody enrolls in something, they assume they will be getting them. That's why the American people are expecting us to fight now, not delay the fight until next year some time." — Georgia Republican Congressman Tom Graves

 They must be putting massive doses of Stupid in the water down in Ranger, Georgia, where Congressman Tom Graves hails from. Just read the paragraph above carefully, trying hard not to let your eyes cross.

In that short paragraph, a formidable example of how to deny what you’re saying while you’re still in the process of saying it, Graves is declaring that the American people are begging him to fight Obamacare now, because they’re afraid they’ll like it and won’t want it taken away.

Right. And we all need to wear blindfolds starting daybreak today, because comes a dark night and a blackout, we won’t be able to see what we’re doing.

But what can you expect of a former sandwich shop operator turned Congressman who makes a side business  of selling American flags on his website ($9 and up) where he feels compelled to explain, “The American flag, which is affectionately referred to as “The Stars and Stripes” or “Old Glory is a symbol of freedom and democracy…”

Wow! I guess he bets you didn’t know that.

Ahem, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, I’d like to recommend a new roommate for you

I’ll get to Lindsay Graham in a few paragraphs, and to why I can’t seem to stop wishing somebody would punch him in the face. But first, let me explain why New York City has such a big stake in seeing Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth, put on trial not in Guantanamo, but blocks from Ground Zero.

New York’s stake in

Abu Ghayth’s fate

It seems like every New Yorker knew someone, or at least knew someone who knew someone, who died in the 9-11 attack. And even if you were simply passing through, at the time, you’d have to be devoid of any of your senses not to be aware of the attack’s impact on the lives of New Yorkers.

The walls of many subway station stairwells were papered with scores of heartbreaking home-made handbills, run off on computer printers, showing faces of missing loved ones and pleas to help find them. The handbills would give desperate descriptions: the missing man or woman’s name, age, weight, the company they worked for, the tower they worked in. The photographs alone could make a strong man weep. You’d see a daddy playing with his two little girls. A young couple, close together, clearly in love. A young woman holding her cat. A grandmother. A father. A son. A daughter. 

And after a while you knew they were dead, all dead. Some were lucky enough to die almost instantly. Others were roasted to death in the debris. Or crushed to death. Or burned to death. They were our friends. Our family. Our colleagues. Our neighbors.

Downtown, at the Ground Zero site, firemen, and rescue workers, and ironworkers picking through the debris would find pieces of those people. A severed foot still inside a smoldering shoe. A grotesquely wounded human head, separated from a still-missing body. An arm.  It got so bad for the guys lifting concrete and girders by hand to get to body parts, that in the St. Paul's church where they fitfully napped between shifts on lower Broadway, these big, hardhat working guys had to be given teddy bears to hug as they lay weeping on cots or pews trying to shut the images out of their minds and sleep.

What would a “New York Jury” do?

This week, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth was captured. And transported in chains to New York. And arraigned in a Federal Court to a charge of conspiring to kill Americans – Americans who, in this particular case, were mostly New Yorkers.

New Yorkers deserve the right to listen to the evidence, then declare a verdict, and hand that verdict over to a New York judge who will toss Sulaiman Abu Ghayth into some dark hellhole of a maximum security prison where he can spend the rest of his miserable life rotting in the chilly gloom.

We earned the right to do this. We earned it by losing friends. By losing relatives. By losing colleagues. By living with the horror, and the grief, and the loneliness, and the rage that followed 9-11. And by stepping out of our front doors, for months after 9-11, and smelling the awful odor that was something like burning rubber or melting insulation, coming from the World Trade Center site whenever the wind was blowing in the right direction.

We earned the right to have our proxies on the jury stare narrow-eyed at Abu Gayth, and come back from the jury room, the air reeking this time not of melting insulation but of sangfroid and vengeance served cold.

Senator Graham, butt out

But leave it to the Republicans, not atypically led by the simpering Senator Graham, to complain about trying the accused criminal where the crime was done. Although he and other Republicans fumble for a rationale to lock the guy away in Guantanamo, where he will be perceived by many as a victim of a lawless state, the Republicans’ real reason is simply to make propaganda against the President. Which is remarkably similar to what Abu Gayth did for Bin Laden.

"We believe the administration's decision here to bring this person to New York City, if that's what's happened, without letting Congress know is a very bad precedent to set," Graham sniveled the other day during a press conference with one of his co-snivelers, Republican Senator Kelly Ayote of New Hampshire.

Ayote added, “the last thing in the world we want to do, in my opinion, is put them in civilian court. This man should be in Guantanamo Bay.”

Right. Where he can be either forgotten or perceived as a martyr to a lawless government. Where the world’s press cannot conveniently cover his trial and conviction and help spread word to those who would do us harm that if you choose to destroy us, we will either kill you as we did Bin Laden, or throw you in a hole for the rest of what only a very few would thereafter call a life.

Trust New Yorkers. We will see to it, if America leaves it up to us, thatAbu Gayth will find his hole. It’s just too bad we can’t throw Lindsay Graham in there with him.

Oh boy! Yum yum! Elephant poop coffee! (Is there a message in here somewhere about Republicans?)

As they used to say where I grew up in Brooklyn, “You can’t make this sh*&# up.” And any pun you may detect here is purely a natural product (or perhaps a natural byproduct) of the subject matter.

According to a news story conscientiously and intrepidly squeezed out by the Associated Press and dutifully picked up by USA Today and other fine news journals, they've got a new kind of coffee in Thailand.  It’s made by feeding coffee beans to elephants, then retrieving the same beans from their dung when the elephants finish, uh, processing the stuff.

The coffee goes for fifty bucks a cup. That’s $50. Fifty. Dollars.

Now, as you know, Republicans have long been represented by symbols of elephants. And given the giddy and out-of-control behavior of certain legislators recently, most especially as it pertains to raising taxes on the formidably rich, I begin to wonder which elephants the Thais have been using to process their beans.

Anyway, the notion of having something that was once commonplace, but that only the well-off can afford these days, like a job, or a house, or a steak dinner, or now a cup of coffee, sounds very Republican to me.

But if I never taste it, I’m sure I won’t miss that $50 coffee. I’ve already taken enough crap from Republicans to last a lifetime.