JUST ASKING...

When Manny Ramirez, Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez get caught doing steroids, stuff they took to make them even better baseball players, is that as bad as, say, the President of the United States attacking a country for no reason at all, resulting in hundreds of thousands of violent deaths? How about Bishops and Cardinals covering up for pedophile priests? Or cops and judges on the take? Judging by the reaction of a lot of loudmouths, you would think all these things are equal. Who elected or appointed baseball players to be the moral barometer of our society? And are crooked cops, bishops, judges or presidents being crooked to make themselves better cops, bishops, judges or presidents? Or just the opposite? How frivolous a society do some people think we are when they elevate athletes to the status of judges, bishops and presidents? Why not include gambling casino operators, strip club owners and rap stars while they're at it? Just asking...

At some point in his presidency, Barack Obama will have to cease blaming Bush and Cheney for the horrible mess they left behind them. That point has not been reached yet. If anything, Obama gets a lot more patience than the average new president. He's not even in office for four full months. His administration still hasn't yet gauged the extent of the damage. While every president leaves office with a couple of things needing to be fixed, those guys screwed up in every way imaginable, not just one or two major areas. So maybe the disgraced right-wingers should lay off their constant tours of every TV show that will have their lying asses. Is there any possible reasonable explanation for attacking the wrong country, letting a major city drown, trying to dismantle the Bill of Rights, stealing all the money or opening up a franchise of the Gestapo? Is there any reason why anyone would look back at those 8 years of having barbaric animals in charge of America with wistful nostalgia? Just asking...

Twitter, which is e-mail lite and the latest inane waste of time, has been financed to the tune of over a hundred million dollars and is already starting to resist being bought out by the internet giants for billions. It's free to use Twitter, so presumably only the phone companies whose lines are being used to transmit the hundreds of millions of dumb-ass messages are getting paid. So, do they make money on sheer volume? No, that can't be right, since a hundred million times nothing is still zero. So how do all those venture capitalists get their money back? What's the angle here? Just asking...

What is Alternative Rock an alternative to? And what is Indie Rock independent of? And just what the hell is Youthful Crossover Alternative Country Rock? Is there some rich guy's unemployable brother-in-law somewhere in the music industry who's been given the job of classifying music and has screwed it up completely? And if so, is it okay to hunt him down and beat him mercilessly? Just asking...

So, a judge in Saudi Arabia says that it's okay for a husband to slap his wife around if she spends too much on one of those black sacks Saudi women are required to wear on their infrequent furloughs from house arrest, like it was their idea to wear black potato sacks in a blazing hot desert. Another Saudi judge twice denied the request of an 8 year-old girl that she be granted a divorce from her 47 year-old husband. In civilized countries this man would be considered either a pedophile or a confused Catholic priest. Saudi women have to put up with all this crap on top of risking death by stoning, lashing or beheading for dressing and acting like a normal female. What is the Saudi judges' ruling on how Saudi men get to treat their teenage boyfriends? And if not to anger management and sensitivity training, where do all those oil trillions go? Air conditioning? Just asking...