It’s official…we have lost any credence for being the leader of the free world except in our still overpowering supremacy as a bullying military force. This week we aired some of our dirtiest laundry in the years-long report on CIA torture.  In the ensuing, unprecedented grilling of CIA chief, John Brennan, the hoped for response, that these previously perceived of as abhorrent tactics were, minimally, key to getting some of the baddest guys in the bad guy deck, was instead, “I can’t say for sure that that is true”.  It makes you wonder if the tacit acceptance of torturing captives has trickled down to our street cops.

The CIA and the IRS and the EPA are but a few of the three-letter institutions that rely on governmental budgetary appropriations.  In the latest cluster-fuck of fiscal irresponsibility, 1600 pages of mostly lobbyist-contributed gobbledygook has muscled its way through the HOR to be passed by a barely objecting SENate before its eventual ooze onto the POTus’s desk for signing.  This shameful piece of legislation contains the virtual dismantling of the already meager regulations that Dodd-Frank placed on the banking industry, (allowing cowboy investors a do-over of their failed attempt to totally collapse the world economy), a drastic reduction in environmental protection funding, (including an open-ended continuation of dumping toxic coal waste into Appalachian waterways), an invitation for deep-pocketed individuals to purchase legislators, (I’m sure, as a means to insure that those representatives will fight for the rights and freedoms of all Americans), and a major expansion of licenses to drill, frac and strip mine our asses back into the Stone Age.

None of this is preferable to a government shut down and chipping away at the few sane legislative directives that are truly for The People, rather than for Those People, is only going to get worse in the new, all-Republican Congress waiting for us in January.