So you know how it it is – the day after Christmas you feel a little blue.  The excitement is over.  The company leaves.  You take down the tree.  You feel a little blue.

Imagine how you’d feel if you just lost an election that you thought you had bought and paid for.   That’s some blues.  So you can understand this.  It was supposed to be a victory cruise.  Seriously.  They went anyway.

The cruise, featuring the star columnists of William Buckley’s 57-year-old conservative biweekly, had been planned long in advance, and everybody had believed it would be a victory party. An ­e-mail from the magazine’s publisher arrived a few days before we embarked: “Do not despair or fret. At least not next week.”

Onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, no one could follow his advice. “Who sent Obama here to destroy America?” a fiftysomething woman asked me one evening over dinner, as if it were a perfectly reasonable question. And here onboard the cruise ship, it was. If the Nieuw Amsterdam was a kind of ark of American alienation, at least it was an eminently comfortable one. The ship was a country unto itself, eleven stories high, 936 feet fore to aft, with eleven bars, six restaurants, two swimming pools, five hot tubs, a large café, and a library. There was the endless buffet on the Lido deck, slot machines and craps in the casino, an Asian lounge singer who did a mean “Copacabana,” a discothèque and a chamber-music cocktail lounge, cigars and Cognac by the pool, gift shops, and a full-service spa.

You will probably enjoy reading the whole article, where you will learn that we have no morals, we actually allow black people to vote, we are fascists, we are kinda like Goebbels, and we may be on to something with talking to minorities “as grown ups.”

Rasmussen offered some friendly advice about approaching minorities. “You show them that you really care, you talk to them as grown-ups on a range of issues, you get them involved,” he suggested…

These rich Republicans on their Blues Cruise are lacking in introspection and reality, but what the hell – they have a spa and cigars.

Thanks to Rick and Raphael for the heads up.

Get this.  Dick Armey, former Texas Congressman who was the Judas in the Boehner/DeLay/Paxon attempted coup against Gingrich in 1994, has gone into the armed robbery business.  He’s found that it pays better than actually working for a living.

Armey agreed to become head of Freedom Works, the money and propaganda machine of the Tea party.  Freedom Works did not learn from history, either in economics or politics, but were soon to learn about Dick’s loyalty.

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back.

The emphasis of the Washington Post story  is about Richard J. Stephenson, a very strange libertarian dude who founded the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America.  Now let’s stop here for a second.  Let’s pretend that you – God forbid – have cancer.  Would you go to a for-profit treatment center founded by a guy who believes in social Darwinism and Ayn Rand?  Uh, not me.  I figure they’d have no social conscience about ripping off the lame, the last, and the lost.

Anyway, this guy was willing to personally pay Dick Armey to leave.  And Armey and his armed guard took took the money.  How the hell is that different from extortion and armed robbery?

This gun incident happened just two weeks after a shooting at the Family Research Council.

Now nobody on God’s green earth is prouder than I am about Freedom Works wasting $8 cash American money.  And nobody could possibly be happier that Dick Armey is once again exposed as completely untrustworthy.  But he walked away with $8 million dollars for being a snake oil salesman.

And that, my friends, is how right wing politics works.  If they can’t screw you, they will screw themselves.  But, somebody is gonna get screwed.

Thanks to Ralph and UmptyDump for the heads up.

Please feel free to share your Christmas Wishes

Houston, Texas

A Bellaire police officer and an innocent bystander were shot and killed by a suspect in a southwest Houston parking lot Monday, officials said.

Investigators said Cpl. Jimmie Norman, 53, was chasing a suspect when they drove into the parking lot of a Maaco body shop at 5611 Bellaire Blvd. at Alder at 8:55 a.m. Witnesses said the suspect got out of his vehicle and began firing shots.

“The guy stands up out the car and just starts shooting. The gunshots continued even as I ran off. After the first 10, I was thinking, ‘What kind of gun does this guy have?'” witness Stephanie Pacheco said.

The officer was hit, police said, and the suspect continued shooting. A man who walked out of the auto shop was then shot at close range. He died at the scene. He was an employee of the shop.

Norman was taken to Ben Taub Hospital, where he died a short time later. He did not exchange gunfire with the suspect as originally thought, HPD said.

“The saddest thing is that (Officer Norman) didn’t even get an opportunity to pull his weapon and defend himself. That’s how fast it all happened,” said John Cannon with the Houston Police Department.

It’s Christmas Eve, Wayne.

I really don’t know what else to say.  Except, tell me when enough is enough, Wayne.

You gonna suggest an armed guard at every fire?

Oh Dear God, help us all.

I did not realize the Mormons were taking Romney’s loss so hard.

A conservative U.S. senator from Idaho who has said he doesn’t drink because of his Mormon faith has been charged with drunken driving.

Sen. Michael Crapo, a three-term Republican with a reputation as a social and fiscal conservative, registered a blood alcohol content of .11 percent after police pulled his car over in this suburb south of Washington, D.C., authorities said.

But, to be perfectly honest, to believe the conservative junk he believes I’d have to get pretty drunk pretty often myself.

Thanks to Laura for the heads up.