Stradiotto

Halloween!!!Fifty dollars worth of give away goodies and a grand total of four visitors.

There are all sorts of holiday marketing scams designed to trap the unwary. The prominently displayed bags of individually wrapped candies (I'll get back to this) often cost more than the ones hidden in the regular candy aisle. The corporate artwork "We put the Tack in tacky" costs good money. The placement and thematic packaging is designed to catch the impulse shopper, a sorry demographic.

I don't like to give children (whose diet is already ruined by corn syrup) refined sucrose and other wonders of processed garbage. That's despicable. The best thing would be homemade confections with natural sweeteners or salted nuts and roasted seeds. Paranoia about deliberate poisoning, razor blades in fruit and spolied food makes it necessary to have those individually wrapped packages. Fortunately, there were plenty of sunflower seed, raisin, pecan and walnut single serving packages in the supermaket. In addition to them, I found boxes of of individually wrapped granola type substance bars without refined sugars. It's hard to avoid poisoning children, and it costs a bit more, but I think it's worth the effort. My four visitors were very happy. I was surprised. I thought they would be disappointed. I can only conclude that healthy food is now a novelty.

It's well known that "for the children" is a hollow mantra in the United States. School budget cuts - who cares what grades they get on one-size-fits-no-one tests, paedophilic priests escaping justice, a child protective service set up to encourage anonymous and bogus complaints, mandatory amphetamine treatment for rowdy and bored grade schoolers, humiliating urine tests. . . the list of afflictions would take forever to complete. None of that is surprising. What's surprising is the inclusion of corn syrup sweeteners in dog treats.

Where I live, people go trick or treating with the family dog(s). I thought it would be nice have treats available for them. Every single treat at the store had corn syrup as a major ingredient. No wonder Fido and Fifi are as fat as Fred and Farah. Corn syrup supresses the body's ability to recognize it has had enough. Sentimentality trumps compassion in this country. I thought it would have extended to widely available healthy snacks for family pets. Availability of healthy food is restricted to small specialty shops whose existence is threatened by incompetently run megastores. Welcome to the USSR, now featuring 31 flavors of crap, lousy education and insanely sanctimonious religious sects.

Where was everybody? Last year, at least thirty people rang my doorbell.

From time to time, liberals attempt to come up with strategies for re-framing political discourse to their advantage. Perhaps they could learn something from the recent triumph of style - however debauched and disgusting, over substance - however meagre, in California's farcical recall election.

Reason, logic, appeals to common sense and enlightened self interest are not effective in the face of magical thinking backed by extreme right wing populism. My suggestion is embracing rhetoric that highlights absurdity. For example, when discussing the assault on, and occupation of, Iraq with a "conservative", state emphatic agreement in reprehensible terms. "As a Good American (or moral cretin, as circumstances dictate), I have no objection to sending poor people's children off to die in a think tank's social engineering experiment. I received a tax cut, after all. As long as President Bush keeps the SUV I plan to buy on the road, I am content. I never disagree with authority, so the Patriot Act doesn't bother me. Besides, it only applies to Isalmofascists and their apologists- roughly defined as anyone who has objections to whatever President Bush feels is best for the country".

Excoriating execrable pundits and politicians so steeped in corruption that their own mothers pretend not to recognize them is not winning hearts and minds; especially minds nutured by reality TV. Get your game faces on, liberals. Moralizing about winning ugly may get you book sales - or even blog hits, if you're among the elite! - but it won't capture the enthusiasm of road raging Americans who queu up to vote for the man who will outsource their jobs.

Paul Wolfowitz, chickenhawk, came as close to experiencing combat as a Straussian elite ever has.

I am confident that the story will be "redacted" several times and always isolated from context.

First seen at the Whiskey Bar, which is worth reading in its entirety.