Sex is bad, unless it’s for procreation, between a married man and his property… er, um wife. So sayeth the wanna-be Priest in Chief, Rick Santorum, who believes that the US is not only a Christian nation, but a Catholic one. Weed is such a threat to our nation’s moral fiber that we’ll waste untold time and money and ruin lives to entrap teenagers in convoluted pot-buying schemes, and the drumbeat (that’s the rock & roll part) for war with Iran is getting louder. It seems the rightest of the right wing, aided by their media shills, will stop at nothing to drag America back to a time when women (and minorities, the poor, and the disabled) had no rights. It’s apparently not enough for America to be the world’s police – deciding how all the brown people with oil should live – we have to police our own citizens to the point where we’re forcing women to submit to vaginal probes before they can obtain a legal medical procedure.

Can this really be the GOP’s platform? Can the fact that they have no plans, no ideas, no nothing to contribute to a discussion of the economy (which is rebounding, despite their best efforts) really be the reason they’re declaring war – a va-jihad – on women? And who are these crazy people who think Rick Santorum is anything other than a dangerous, backward, misogynistic creep? Any woman who votes for him – or any of the GOP candidates, frankly – has got to be either woefully uninformed, or filled with self-loathing. Why else would you vote for someone who thinks you’re stupid, over-emotional, and not quite as good as a man?

Perhaps we’ve bought into the GOP’s distraction – their plan to stir people up with a cultural and religious war, so we won’t notice the insanity and incompetence of their presidential candidates. But the ramblings of Rick Santorum, echoed in less vehement tones, but echoed nonetheless, by his GOP opponents – cannot be ignored. Pennsylvanians voted him out, and it’s time for the rest of the country to get to know him, and bring his apparent ascent to an abrupt, humiliating halt.

Of course, his nomination could be a gift for the Obama campaign, because surely a man who thinks being impregnated your rapist is a gift from God cannot be of sound mind – and that will become immediately apparent to the electorate once he’s campaigning beyond the evangelical base. But then there’s always the risk that he’ll seem homey and righteous and decent, standing there in his sweater vest, surrounded by his many children and his exhausted wife. If his handlers succeed in getting him to walk back from some of his more irrational statements (The Crusades were a good thing! Feminists duped women into thinking they should have careers! Birth control encourages bad behavior!), the average American who hasn’t really been paying attention to the GOP slugfest might not realize what Santorum is actually all about. So we’ll risk being distracted, if only to make sure Rick’s most lunatic statements are heard far and wide, and over and over.

Toward that end, and to make sure you didn’t miss any of the other craziness in the news this past week, here are the links:

Spreading Romney

GOP’s Surreal Contraception Hearing

State Sponsored Rape

The Drumbeat of War

Obama: the LEAST Socialist President in Modern History

Teaching Children Climate Change is a Hoax

Their Corporate Contributors

GM Defends Contributions

Paul Krugman: Moochers Against Welfare

The Santorum Presidency

More Hypocrisy from Santorum

Seducing for Weed

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, and is perhaps the real right-wing playbook – despite Paul Ryan and Ron Paul and their ilk constantly waving their tattered, sticky-paged editions of  Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in our faces. Why do we say such a thing? Well, it takes place in a society run by a Christian military regime that has thrown out all civil rights in an attempt to restore order after a attack blamed (falsely) on Islamist terrorists,  and in which all women and “undesirables” (minorities, also known as “vermin”)  have been stripped of all rights and property, and where pollution has robbed most of the women of their fertility, so the few who can still get pregnant become the property of men.

Any comparisons to the trends we’re seeing in the GOP’s platform seem pretty crazy – until you consider the some interesting things. The GOP front-runner Rick Santorum believes that birth control is bad because it encourages promiscuity (um, (A) how is that any of your damn business and (B) how about all the married people using it to prevent having more kids than they can afford?). He also believes that if your rapist knocks you up, you should keep the child, because it’s a “gift from God.”  The Pennsylvania legislature has just declared 2012 the “Year of the Bible,” (a repeal has been proposed) and we’ve got Catholic bishops trying to use health care coverage for employees of the church as a way to prevent women – not just Catholic women – having access to birth control and abortion. This, of course, comes on the heels of the very right-wing leaders at the Susan G. Komen organization yanking their Planned Parenthood funding (it was quickly restored, due to public pressure), so you can sort of understand the “they’re out to get us!” feeling many American women might have.

Of course, the gender wars are yet another distraction from the cultural and economic wars already waged. The GOP has still  failed to propose any legislation that would do anything other than cut  jobs, they won’t budge on making tax laws more fair, and the big circle-jerk that is CPAC was the source of so many erroneous statements about the economy and life in general, it would be hilarious – were it not so frightening. The GOP is itching to go to war with Iran, Newt’s campaign is under investigation for corruption, the list of Americans (you know, the people they want so badly to govern) the GOP hates continues to grow, and studies show that conservative people are more fearful than liberals.

Now cautious is good – it’s always good to look before you leap and to have all the facts before making a decision. But fear? It holds things back, and holds people down. It prevents change, it prevents innovation, it silences individual thought and supports the more controllable group-think. It’s what we really should be afraid of – because as the man said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  You know what else we have to fear? The people who use fear to divide and distract us as they conspire (yeah, I said it) to rob us of our rights and our chance to live the contented lives we imagine for ourselves.

So put the baby back in his crib, wipe your hands on your apron, and scroll down through this week’s links. If they scare you, that’s a good thing. If that makes you want to fight? That’s a wonderful thing.

A Handmaid’s Tale, prediction or warning (think 1984)

The Handmaid’s Tale Trailer – note who the “vermin” are and how women are a “resource”  and how the nation’s leaders will “weed out the Godless”

George Carlin on Abortion

Win for Obama (The Bishops and GOP Just Don’t Know it Yet)

Birth Control Coverage

Kill the Gays in Africa

The GOP Billionaire Convention

FBI Report on Steve Jobs

The Report on Afghanistan

All That You Need to know about CPAC

Cons More Fearful than Libs

Romney Invested in Birth Control

Romney (and GOP) Lies

Chrysler Commercial an Ad for Obama?!?

iPhone App for Dreams

The Boss: We Take Care of Our Own

Hey - O & M - switch places!

By the time you’re reading this, the eternal struggle  between good and evil will probably have been decided, and either the Patriots or the Giants will have won the Super Bowl. How ironic that the real Giants – the 1%, masquerading as Patriots – are waging a real battle for control over our nation, and they’re winning. The Koch Brothers had their double super-secret meeting to discuss how they’ll spend over $100 MILLION on the candidates who’ll do their bidding in 2012 and beyond, Multimillionaire Mittens finally outed himself as not giving a flying, um, fig… for the poor, and said he’s not worried about them because they have a safety net. Is that the net you have routinely favored chopping huge holes in, Mitt? The one the Ryan Plan, which you support, would rip to smithereens? The only net that will remain in place if Romney wins in 2012 is the one that keeps the Chinese workers at Apple from leaping to their deaths as they try to commit suicide rather than continue to live and work in abject squalor so we can all have bright, shiny iPhones.

We covered that little story last week, and then we saw a few media outlets and blogs cover it this week, including the fact that the iPhones are made by hand, not because that’s the best way to build them, but because it’s the cheapest way. American corporations, turning people into slaves who drop over dead after 34-hour shifts, who’d rather dive to their deaths than live another day. That’s what American corporations do if nobody regulates them – and they’d love to do it here, were it not for those pesky unions and labor laws that unions made possible. Because Americans are too lazy to die on an assembly line for a few pennies a day, they have to take that work to places where life sucks so bad that a job that makes people want to kill themselves seems like the lesser of evils. Of course, other countries fine and tax corporations who outsource labor to other countries. Here, we reward it.

Speaking of rewarding, it’s been an interesting week in social media, and those of us who tout its value in dissent and grassroots discourse saw that it was not only where the only real coverage of the Komen scandal could be found – of course, how could the networks cover it when they’re all taking hundreds of thousands in ad revenue to promote the upcoming (and seemingly ongoing) Komen 3-Day?  – but it was also where the public’s outrage was successfully voiced, resulting in Komen’s board walking back their attempt to cease funding for Planned Parenthood. Seems their board realized that their having yanked the funding was pissing off the very people they rely on for donations. And, much to our delight, about $3 MILLION in donations to Planned Parenthood resulted. Maybe Komen should try to sabotage women’s healthcare every day! Apparently, there isn’t much money to be made in birth control, pre-natal care, and all the other valuable services Planned Parenthood provides – Komen only cares about the cash machine they’ve made out of breast cancer.

So… speaking of cash, we hope if you had any money on the Super Bowl, your team won. If not, we hope you enjoyed the ads or perhaps Madonna’s half-time show. She said earlier this week that she had to do a good job, because the Super Bowl is “the holiest of holies” in America. Sadly, she may be right. When it comes to an excuse to drink to excess, suck down greasy snack foods, and cheer for grossly-overpaid people committing sanctioned acts of violence, where else would Americans be worshipping this Sunday, other than in front of their large-screen TVs?

Onward, Christian Soldiers! Here are this week’s links:

New Rules for Radicals Austerians Attack

NFL Union

Socialist Super Bowl?

Know Nothing – and Proud Of It?

Chrysler’s Turnaround

What Could Go Wrong? Ari Fleischer and Susan Komen

5 Important Lessons from the Komen/PPFA Fiasco

6 Things you Need to Know About the Komen/PPFA Fiasco

The Whole Komen Story

Komen Foundation Gave Penn State (under investigation) $7.5 Million Grant

AZ GOP Lawmaker Wants a White People Holiday

Koch Brothers’ Super Secret Meeting

Ron Paul is Wrong about “Honest Rape”

Paul Krugman on Mitt Money

The Mormon’s Eternal Plan

Another Reason to Buy Lots of Girl Scout Cookies This Year

Much like the lie-laden GOP rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union address, fruity cereals are artificially flavored and colored, and not very good for you. Not that the True Believers who bought Mitch Daniels’ rebuttal hook, line, and sinker would know that. Surprisingly, it’s not just lack of information that leads to arch conservatism – it’s also due to plain old stupidity. According to a recent study, a low IQ tends to make people follow conservative ideologies, fear change, and support draconian (go ahead, go look that one up - we’ll wait…) laws, policies regarding behavior, and punishments for breaking the law. Who’d a thunk it?

This explains, of course, the fact that only 17% of Fox viewers went to college, and how successfully the GOP candidates can use outright lies to keep their base spun up. Of course, they need outright lies, because the truth undermines their candidates. The economy is getting better. The bail-out of the automotive industry did save hundreds of thousands of jobs and prevented financial ruin. Green energy and rebuilding our infrastructure would generate jobs and stimulate the economy, and the GOP is blocking any forward movement on a jobs bill. The 1% are continuing to ship jobs overseas rather than hire Americans, and oh that’s right – Osama bin Laden is still dead. The list goes on and on.

Of course, the SOTU did have a few holes in it, and we enumerate them in today’s show. It also included misguided support for fracking, a practice that’s already ruining the drinking water for thousands (soon to become millions) of people, livestock, and wildlife living within the Marcellus Shale. So over here on the left, where we may have some bizarre ideas (take care of the poor, support the middle class, stop bombing other countries, don’t deny people the right to vote, take care of the environment), we are completely capable of finding and pointing out fault in our leaders – even the ones we voted for.

Speaking of voting, we hope the residents of Massachusetts will give Elizabeth Warren their votes, and get rid of Scott “Centerfold” Brown. Her 30-second smack-down (see today’s links) of Mittens Romney is proof enough of her wisdom and willingness to call a spade a bloody shovel. Of course, it’s been a while since intelligence and directness were respected traits in this country. We now worship wealth and celebrity, elevating Kardashians, former Playboy Bunnies and reality show “stars,” toddlers in beauty pageants, and illiterate alcoholics from New Jersey to the pedestals we used to reserve for true geniuses and real heroes. We lionize a corporation that needs to install netting to catch the bodies of suicidal employees (we’re talkin’ ’bout YOU, Apple!) and racist wingnuts cheer when an ignorant hag waves her bony finger in the President’s face, in an unforgivable public show of disrepect for that office.

The left may have thought Bush was an actual moron, and we may have expressed real outrage for his policies and lies, but none of our Congresspeople ever yelled “You lie!” during a Presidential address. We, unlike the rabble on the right, know how to sit quietly and behave when tradition and decency require it. We also had enough ammo to oppose Bush based on the real things he did and said, and didn’t have to make things up (we’re talkin’ ’bout YOU, Mittens!)  to invent an opponent one could successfully oppose.

Progressives may also smoke more pot, but according to another study (as you’ll discover in the Lunatic Fringe segment), this is far less dangerous for everyone than drinking. Humans need an escape, they need to zone out – now more than ever. The pharmaceutical companies don’t want weed to be legal, because that’d cut into their sales of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. The government wants to keep it illegal so the for-profit prisons can keep their populations high (so to speak) and we can continue to incarcerate 10% of our population, most of which is poor. It’s also easier to demonize a plant that anyone can grow and profit from and to turn the growers into criminals than it is to get eliminate the reasons people are so damn stressed out in the first place.

So, with or without some herbal relaxation, go have a bowl of Fruit Loops and enjoy this week’s links:

Study Links Low IQ and Conservative Ideology

Unite Against Citizen’s United

9 Crucially Important Issues Obama Ignored in the SOTU

Mitch Daniels’ ReBUTTal to the SOTU

Mitch Daniels Blew It

Apple Driving Workers to Mass Suicide?

Swiss Mitt: Out of Touch

Mittens’ Blind Trust Not so Blind

Warren’s Romney Smack-Down

Could be a Bad Day for the Boehner

Paula Deen: Diabetes Machine

Tacos for Everyone in CT

Jan Brewer Caption Contest

5 Reasons to Get Stoned Instead of Drunk

SOPA is dead, but other dissent-silencing bills (masquerading as anti-piracy bills) are still out there, lurking. The XL Pipeline was rejected, but only for procedural reasons, and there’s still a chance that it will be reviewed and then OK’d after the election, no matter who wins the White House. So we’re safe for now, but we’ll be fighting these same demons again, and soon. The greed and power-mad motives behind these issues won’t just go away.

What we aren’t safe from  – not even for a little while – are the 8,346 GOP debates to go before their convention. The “show” will go on, spinning up their base, gathering donations from the rabid fringe who supports their views, and inventing “news” to throw on Obama. After all, as they’ve admitted, the GOP’s number 1 goal is to get him out of the White House. It’s not jobs, its not an economic recovery, it’s getting the Man with More Melanin out of the WHITE House. Apparently, it wasn’t named for its exterior paint color, but for the desired race of the primary occupant.

You know, maybe it’s true that a major factor in Obama’s election was his race. People wanted to see something long overdue happen. Good people wanted to see an important step happen for our nation. What’s not  a maybe is that the only reason there’s been such a violent reaction to his presidency from the right is his skin color. It’s not his policies or actions, because Obama hasn’t done anything dramatic. “Obamacare” may be considered socialism by some (people whose parents never bought the “S” volume of the encyclopaedia), but beyond that very anemic reform bill, what dramatic, objectionable things has he done? Closed Gitmo? Nope. Got rid of the Patriot Act? Nope. Ended the wars? Nope. He stuck to a timeline for exiting Iraq that was established before he took office, and his troop increases in Afghanistan were heralded on the right. So what’s he done? Reined in the banksters? Nope. Appointed “activist” wild-ass left-wing Supreme Court justices? Nope. Refused to sign a bill that lets the government detain US citizens for no reason? Nope. Signed it. He did give the OK to shoot Osama bin Laden in the face, but even the right-most of the right-wing won’t say that was a bad idea. He also saved the auto industry, which protected and restored hundreds of thousands of jobs – though that’s something the right likes to spin as yet another sign of his “socialist” agenda.  So anyway, where’s the radical move to the left? Never happened. That’s not to say we’d have been better off with The Angry Old Man and Wasilla Barbie. Nor would we be better off with Gingrich or Romney or Paul. Imagine the world they’d make. No middle class, just the very rich and the very poor. One religion. One race.  All to preserve a very cushy way of life for the One percent.

So what can we do? Keep yelling. Keep occupying. Keep informed. Don’t watch just one news channel or read one blog. Check out lots of news sources. You have time. Take the hour you’d have spent watching Paula Deen inject butter directly into her veins and poke around online. Read more than one newspaper. Follow a story for a whole week and see where it leads you. Listen to lots of voices. That, after all, is what a Democracy is all about. Why have free speech if we don’t listen to the people who make use of that freedom every day? We’re just one of the voices. And you have a voice, too, so use it. While you still can.

And here are this week’s links:

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

The REAL Keystone XL Pipeline Story

Obama’s Critics

Wisconsin Recall

Suing the President over NDAA

Wall Street Compensation

Newt”tens” Tax Plan

Mitt”ens” Tax Plan

Frothy’s Tax Plan

Ron Rand, er, Paul’s Plan

Government Investments

Bain (Romney) “Capitalism”

Ron Paul Linked to White Supremacist Island Invasion

Ron Paul Disowns Extremists, But Not Their Support

Kentucky’s “Ark Park”

Take Action! Tell USDA To Do Its Job And Reject 2,4-D (Agent Orange!) Resistant GE Corn

That’s how they’ve got us. From SOPA (the Stop Online Privacy…er, um… Piracy… Act) to the militarization of our local police all around the country, any attempt by the 99% to stand up for ourselves will be met with a set of tools designed to silence dissent and literally stomp on the dissenters. That’s if we can stand up, considering we’re all going to be clutching a chipped bowl and waiting in lines for gruel or ordering from the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s  – if we still have a car to take us to the drive-thru.

Is there a light on the horizon? Any hope at all? Can anyone steer us out of this mess? President Obama, who has been systematically thwarted any of the (too few) times he’s tried to do anything substantial, said that he wants all kids to have a chance to go to college. This is just “hubris,” however, according to Iowa’s almost-darling in a sweater vest, Rick Santorum. And the tension between the 1% and the 99% is just “envy” on the part of the have-nots, according to Mitt(ens) Romney. Oh, and Rick doesn’t want to help “Blaaah People,” and every single one of the GOP candidates is going to repeal health care reform and put an end to any assistance for the poor, the disabled, and the elderly. You know, those lazy drains on society, who would work if only they weren’t being coddled by the Nanny State. They’ve got it all figured out.

Yes, folks, these are the people who hate our government, yet want to run it. They spout their divisive, twisted “logic” to the cheers of their base, a base that bizarrely enough includes people without a pot to piss in, who are out of work, eating soup and clipping coupons, but for some damn reason blame the single mom on welfare  or the family getting food stamps for that, rather than blaming the corrupt bedfellows in our Congress and our financial institutions, for the their plight. They’re our friends and neighbors, being duped by huge corporations who decide what we see and hear and think. Step right this way, folks. We’ll show you who to blame, which group to hate, which things to fear most. Step right this way. Oh, and don’t forget your ID, or we won’t let you vote. Take that, Granny. Just try to vote, Mr. Not White. We figure most of you will stay home on election day anyway, thanks to the Hope and Change that the elitist socialist Muslim in the White House failed to bring you. But just in case you want to cast your vote, we’ve made it as difficult as we can. Oh, don’t be silly. You’re welcome.  It was our pleasure.

So how did this country get its head so far up its collective @ss? When did it happen? Was it having an actual moron in the White House for 8 years? Was it the advent of Reality TV? Can silicone-stuffed “Housewives” and drunken nitwits from New Jersey literally take down a nation? Or was it the systematic purchasing of our media, our government, and by extension, our people by the 1%? The 1% who like being rich, who like how easy it was to get rich, how easy it is to stay rich, and who have no intention of letting anyone else onto the field, let alone leveling it so everyone can play?

Maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe those of us screaming about it are just wasting our breath. But hey, if you’re reading this, we still have the right to scream and we might as well scream while we can still be heard.

And here, while we’re still allowed to share ‘em, are this week’s links:

Voting Guide

Stop Online Privacy

Police State

Evangelicals Love Santorum

Rick Santorum Doesn’t Want to Help Blaaa People

Bill O’Reilly Admits That Most of the People on Welfare are WHITE

Romney vs. the GOP

Teachers are Heroes

Popped Culture

Dolphins with Friggin’ Laser Beams

It occurs to me that at the end of the show, when we listed all the holidays to be celebrated at this time of year — so we wouldn’t leave anyone out — we forgot Festivus. Festivus, For The Rest of Us. It’s a great metaphor for the Occupy Movement – the identification and unification of 99% of us — the rest of us — who live paycheck to paycheck, who don’t have a yacht or a plane or a luxury vacation home. Who may not have had a vacation in years, who have a fixed amount to spend on food and gas, so that the roof and the heat and the lights stay on, who either forgo saving for retirement to pay for health insurance, or just pray that they don’t get sick. For whom a movie or dinner out is a big deal, something to be saved up for, if it’s not a complete impossibility. Most of us.

Part of the celebration of Festivus is the Airing of Grievances, and I think it’s about time more of us did that, in loud voices. That’s one of our goals here each week, to air what’s been kept quiet, to talk about what should have been news, and to point our fingers at the bad guys — the Guardians of Privilege, the religious whackos, the greedy,  and the cruel practitioners of Social Darwinism. The same people who have other countries giggling at us, as our GOP candidates trade moronic statements in their weekly debates. The countries who came through centuries of aristocracies and dictators and famines and plagues, whose streets ran with blood as wars literally took place on their soil — they’re the ones laughing at us because we’re such freakin’ babies. Our 1% are like toddlers who don’t want to share their toys, who’ll rip the head off the teddy bear rather than let someone else hold it in their arms for just a moment. And 99% of us have been — and many remain — mute, accepting the rules like the kid on the playground who just tries to be invisible, rather than standing up to the bully.

So… it’s time to stand up — and continuing our Festivus metaphor, that means it’s time for The Feats of Strength. That’s where one of the guests must wrestle the head of the household, and try to pin him or her. The holiday can’t end until the host is pinned. Of course, the difference between a Festivus wrestling match and our country is that for years, virtually every city and town in the US has been gearing up for the the day when the people would have had enough, and that’s where you get police who use pepper spray like air freshener, where Podunk towns have tanks and a police force with SWAT training. The 1% has no intention of being pinned, no intention of letting their holiday end.

Of course, if we don’t gather our collective strength — our voices, our pens, our keyboards, our dollars, our votes — and pin the bullies, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame when President Gingrich is sworn into office in 2012 or King Bush III (Jeb) is coronated in 2016. Think of the world either of these multimillionaires would build for themselves and their pals — and how much it will suck to be a serf on their land. Their land filled with fracking holes, with water that catches fire, with a McDonald’s on every corner, so they can tell us there are still job opportunities and good food for anyone willing to work for them.

Happy Holidays, folks.

Here are this week’s links:

 Tax the Rich to Heal the Poor

Social Darwinism

The President’s Speech

Occupy Updates including the “Mockupation”

The Saving American Democracy Amendment

Who are the 1%’ers?

How Corporations Became People

Fracking is Bad!

The Drudge Retort: the Postal Service

Save the Debate!

You’re a Mean One Newt Gingrich

Who Watches the Worst Shows on TV?

Death by Orgasm?

Festivus

Several of this week’s stories got Don’s co-host rather spun up. Hopefully, even if you aren’t moved to start yelling and spewing invectives (go get the dictionary… we’ll wait…), you’ll at least be a little irritated by further attempts by the Guardians of Privilege (yes, that’s the GOP) to block taxes and fees on the excruciatingly rich in favor of further reaming of the middle class and poor, the insurance companies’ attempts to circumvent one of the more effective parts of “Obamacare” (you know, the part where the law now requires them to spend 80% of their revenue on providing medical services), and of course, ongoing attempts to marginalize the Occupy movement – literally, by evicting the demonstrators from various parks and public spaces, and figuratively, by critiquing their mic-check events for production value. Who cares if every one of their attempts to speak up and speak out doesn’t go perfectly? That’s the whole point. 99% of us don’t have our own TV and radio outlets. 99% of us don’t have billionaires funding our campaigns. Any noise we make, even if it’s not perfectly-executed, is important and essential to ending the strangle-hold the 1% has on the airwaves, print news, and even online “news” (yeah, we’re talkin’ about you, Newsmax!).

Of course, in addition to all the serious, rant-inspiring news, we’ve covered Donald Trump’s plans to moderate another GOP presidential debate, Herman Cain’s implosion (he’d better hire a food-taster at home, because no court in the land would convict his wife if she poisoned him), and the fact that Frank Luntz (GOP strategist/pundit extraordinaire) is “scared” of the Occupy movement and had some advice for GOP governors, who gathered recently in Florida. “Don’t mention ‘capitalism’,” he suggests, along with “Don’t say ‘bonus’ – say “pay-for-performance’.”  Uh, OK. Keep screwing 99% of the people who live in your state, just be more artful in your description of the rape. Got it.

Of course, we wrap up with the Lunatic Fringe, and this week’s edition includes everything from finally being able to use the bible to support the idea of economic equality to the most horrifying impact of climate change (hint: it could affect the beverage Ben Franklin said is proof that God loves us), and the pitfalls of prostitution. Can you say “Who’s your daddy?”

So on that provocative note, here are this week’s links:

The GOP Presidential Apprentice starring Donald Trump

Herman Cain: The Spin Hurts

Herman Cain Goes Down Swinging the Stupid Stick

Mayor Bloomberg Unplugged

Occupy Evictions

Refusing to Evict a 103 Year Old Woman

LA Mayor: It’s the Children

Roemer: Romney is the 1% and Gingrich is Their Lobbyist

Gingbamacare

GMAC Retaliates

The Payroll Tax

Boehner and Chickensh*t

The 7.77 Trillion Dollar Plan

Minimal Coverage of Defense Authorization Bill

Lunatic Fringe:

Luntz is “Scared”

Professor Bachmann and the US Embassy in Iran?

Oh, Siri

Global Warming Hates Beer

Fox LOVES Solar Power

The Prostitute’s Father

Zach Wahls explains : “The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character.”

Not many of our listeners will see themselves in a list of traits that indicate that one might be a fascist – but you may recognize one or more of the relatives you’ll be dining with this Thanksgiving – so this week’s show is intended to give our progressive listeners some ammo to fire back across the mashed potatoes when Uncle Wingnut starts badmouthing the Occupiers or talking about how great President Cain or Gingrich would be for our country. If anyone speaks longingly about President Perry or Bachmann, you have our permission to dump the closest bowl of those tiny gherkin pickles nobody eats on that person’s head.

So what kind of sense were we able to make of this week’s news? Well, the reopening of the Natalie Wood case is surely a distraction, now that interest in the minute-by-minute goings-on at Penn State have died down. Can’t have the voters watching the news and seeing, um… news, now can we? And what’s more distracting than the thought of  a jowly, bloated Robert Wagner having to face the press to talk about how he’s quite sure he didn’t push his wife off the boat? Or better yet, the always-a-little-bit-crazy Christopher Walken trying to recount the minutes and hours of that fateful boat trip? That beats the heck out of insider trading in Congress or PA’s own (gag) Pat Toomey planning to strip the middle class of all their tax deductions. What a yawn that would be!

And how about the new role peppers play in our lives? Not only are they a common addition to pizza, which has now been classified a vegetable, their eye-scorching, breath-stealing oils are apparently the weapon of choice for cops trying to control the Occupy demonstrators. You must watch the video (see link below) if you haven’t seen it already. Hell, if you’ve seen it, watch it again. It’s great to see our sainted police protecting and serving the sh*t out of us. Are these jackbooted thugs just taking orders? Or does the instruction to “keep order” mean “crack skulls and burn faces” in modern parlance?

Speaking of pigs, we did find out how many of the 4-legged porcine variety were stolen in Minnesota last year, and how many bibles have been to the moon, and that way too many mommies are reading People magazine. The list of interesting facts, figures, and frightening pieces of information appears below – so check out the links. We even give you lots of quotes from our favorite Senator, Bernie Sanders – he tells it like it is, and you can, too.

Hey, you can’t say we didn’t provide plenty of information with which to arm yourselves at Thanksgiving dinner – enjoy your holiday!!!

This week’s links:

OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment

The 99% Deficit Proposal

New Polling on OWS: It’s not what you think

Occupy Cleveland Saves Woman’s Home

 This is Far From Over

Militarizing the Police

Shocking Police Violence

Hey Kids, Want Some Pepper Spray?

The Pepper Spraying Incident Video

Obsessed With Bodily Fluids

Bernie Sanders Tells It Like It Is

Democrats – Stop Caving In

A Guide to the Right Wing Smear Machine

Newt and the 99%’ers

Newt and Freddie

The Great GOP Primary Crash and Burn

Pizza is a Vegetable

Michele Bachmann Sees Giants

Michele Bachmann Gets Mic Checked

The “Purpose” of Banking

The GOP Insiders

Before it was Fast and Furious, it was Wide Receiver

You Might be a Fascist if…

We’ve become a people who cheer when someone says that anyone who can’t get a job should starve, who cheer when someone endorses torture, and who riot when a football coach is fired – after he failed to do everything in his power to stop a retired member of his staff from raping children. The rape of children and the coverup didn’t create the outcry, firing a revered football coach did. How back-asswards is THAT?

The GOP’s candidates – the cheerleaders for cruelty and greed – are clueless, heartless, and truly have no interests other than protecting their wealthy benefactors, and themselves. And several of these contenders are or were elected to public office, by Americans. The only one we didn’t elect is Herman Cain, and he’s a fast food executive – with no knowledge of or interest in history, government, or 99% of Americans he hopes to lead.

The public seems to be waking up, but will we wake up in time to save the millions of Americans who live in abject poverty? The millions of homeless American children? The American kids going to bed hungry every night?  We think entitlements and safety net programs are expensive now – imagine the cost of losing an entire generation of people – who have no job skills, no idea what it’s like to work at a job that pays the bills or live in a decent home  – and trying to run a productive society and support a complex economy at the same time. You can’t let millions of Americans grow up with no chance of ever making a life for themselves and then whine when those same people can’t find work and have given up on themselves and on the system that they never got a chance to be part of, but that now expects them to work within it.

How does a kid who lives in a car or on a cot at a shelter do her homework? How does someone who’s scraping by on >$11K a year support their family and get job training so they can do better than a minimum-wage job? The answer? They can’t. How can the wealthiest nation on the face of the earth survive letting so many of its citizens live this way? The answer? It can’t. Make that WE can’t.

But what are we going to do about it? First, as an eloquent little girl said to the UN, back in 1992, if you can’t fix it, stop breaking it. We have to stop, right now, and decide which way we want to go. The direction we’ve been going doesn’t work, surely. Poverty is at an all-time high. Economic disparity makes some third-world countries look benevolent. The rich are getting richer, yet they’re not creating jobs, and their hand-picked legislators are blocking anything resembling a jobs bill or any kind of regulation of the thieves who put us where we are. We’re cheering death and blame and cruelty, and jeering – and worse – at peaceful protesters who may not have a marketing plan, but they sure know they want answers and they want a better life for everyone.

Are we a nation of greedy, cold-hearted serfs who live to support their billionaire masters? Or are we a nation of people who want everyone to live a decent life and who see the value of providing access to all the tools a person needs to build that for themselves? You can’t “teach a man to fish” if you won’t even show him where we keep the fishing poles and the lake is poisoned. What have we become?

Some of the answers – or at least clues to find them – appear in this week’s links:

Extreme Poverty in the US

Repealing the Tea Party Agenda

10 Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything

Pray Away the Occupy Movement

Financial Transaction Tax: 10 Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything

Audit the B@stards!

The Whole Story on Penn State

Jon Stewart on Penn State

What Do Joe Paterno and Herman Cain Have in Common?

OWS vs. PSU

Daily Beast Op-Ed: Good Riddance, Joe Paterno

Trading Places

Let’s Purge the Muslims

The Fastest Flip-Flop Ever

Earthquakes: God or Fracking

Gitmo: The Most Expensive Prison Ever

The Girl Who Silenced the World