It is time for great rejoicing. Washington has at last declared war on Texas. It is not a war of guns but of regulations, which is war by other means.

Some Esteemed Comrades may not realize that I live in Texas. There. I feel better. I came out. This Bruno bit is nothing, but I've been hiding my red soul under a potato basket from some of the people here at the Karl Marx Reeducation Center.

Our glorious environmental friends have discovered the sand hills lizard, which is 3” of sheer bliss. It is thought to exist in about five West Texas counties and three New Mexico ones, and being a lizard, it is more important than any of the citizens there, or the economies of Texas and New Mexico. Which is as it should be. Ten million acres and billions of wealth held hostage to a lizard. Wipe your eyes, comrades: it gets better. Better yet, get a fresh cup of borscht, and yes, it's worth the splurge.

We are in the process of holding meetings to see if the lizard is endangered. I am confident that it will be found to be endangered: it has no use whatsoever; everyone has seen thousands of them; and so they are perfect. Their complete and total unimportance is the perfect excuse for war.

If we are lucky in our hearings, the lizard will be considered an endangered species, and that will occasion a two-year study on the impact of, well, work and living, in West Texas and New Mexico. For two years there will no farming or ranching. That's one excellent way to make people quit eating the beef that they like: let the cattle starve in a pen for the rancher can't buy food for them, or have a forced sale at giveaway prices. This is sure to ruin the rancher.

Ranchers and farmers are being cursed by Gaia now, in the worst drought in fifty years. That's why we have these wildfires. Many ranchers and farmers have taken mortgages on their land, often underwritten by the government, that they will not be able to repay. Often the government, very wisely in my view, let them borrow much more money than the collateral would bear. It's not about being a prudent lender. It's about taking OPM by force and lending it under circumstances which can succeed only if nothing goes wrong.
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Fortunately for us, things always go wrong, and if they don't, we'll see to it. Misery for all, all for misery! When the land is foreclosed, it will be worth virtually nothing because of the prohibition on ranching and farming. Not only will the government have managed to waste the money it lent, it will acquire property whose value it destroyed. This is brilliant collectivization. The counties' tax bases will be corrupted, as the property will be exempt from taxation, and since the other property values will plummet, see below, this will further harm the local governments' abilities to extract as much money as possible under circumstances as unpleasant as possible while they still stay in office. By whatever means. No tapeworm ever feels overpaid or unwelcome.

The laying of pipelines across the property will be banned. Any hydrocarbons will have to detour around the lizard's putative range. This will add to the cost of gasoline, which is just what President Obama wants. If the winter is cold in the northeast, gas might be scarce, and there is little need for those gas-fired power plants when we can have wind turbines which turn when it is still, and they will after the CBO decrees it after we wave our Prog Wizard's wand. You know, the one that Paul Krugman sells on late-night infomercials.

There will be no seismic work to prospect for minerals. It might hurt the lizard. But this is fine because all drilling operations shall be curtailed. Two of the Texas counties alone provide 20% of the oil and gas that Texas produces. I wish it were more, to hurt people more. There. I'll come out again. I'm a made prog and I love to hurt people. That's why I'm a made prog. Oh, that and self-righteousness and unlimited self-entitlement. That's why I'm Father Prog Theocritus. If I weren't I, I'd shoot me.

The value of the mineral owners will be destroyed. And most of them are just people who inherited them. Blameless people. They have to go. Seize their wealth—for they're oil barons.

The economies of those counties will be destroyed, forcing house foreclosures and vehicle repossessions. Property values of houses will go into free-fall. I have seen houses sell for half the mortgage, and that was in times which will seem good to the ones we can have here. There will be no takers of the foreclosed homes. The lender will sue the borrowers for a deficiency judgment, which they will have to declare bankruptcy to avoid, and this is wonderful because they're sued and it's not their fault. They were making payments before they lost their jobs. The jobs they sedulously went to in a vital industry, but then again: working people, vital industry. What is that compared to a lizard and my self-righteousness? See how good it is? It's like shocking the dog at random times. Soon the dog gives up and doesn't even try to avoid the shocks. But these are bitter-clingers and so must be made to pay as Lord Obama flies overhead on another vacation. Perhaps he can arrange for the sewage of Air Force One to fall onto a Texas county. How lucky the county would be. And a presidential turd! Be still my beating heart. To think that he shit on us in fly-over country while his government was ruining the bitter clingers who are making money and not consuming it. Yet. It is pure manna from heaven.

More work for attorneys, our party's biggest contributors. At times I think that maggots could go to law school and learn things.

The roughnecks working on the rigs will be fired. They've just bought new pickups to replace the old ones that they had, since the chance of employment, and overtime, and Sunday work, was so high. Also roughnecks tend to live life immediately. They often spend money when they get it, not knowing where they'll go. Not only will this get them, but then the people who put money away will be destroyed by the inflation coming from the printing presses. See? We've got it all. Destroying the impetuous and destroying the prudent. The only safe existence will be, are you ready? Working for government, which is of course all that matters. Government = slavery in the Perfect Prog World. All for the Democrat Party, nothing outside the Democrat party. With this logic alone you can plan re-education camps.

These pathetic red-staters will not be able to service that debt and the pickups will be repossessed. This will cause a glut of pickups on the Texas market, causing even Government Motors to have to cut back on production, although I must say that in the last year I have been seeing more Ford pickups. I don't know why these roughnecks prefer the only auto company that didn't take money from them by force. That's reasonable and oriented toward their survival, meaning that of course it's wrong. De facto wrong, but de jure right. After all, isn't the First Church of Gaia all about de jure right? How else could we make people do things that make no sense whatsoever? De facto? It is to laugh. De jure? Bend over, baby, and get used to it. You'll have a Ford F-250 there next. That's the only way you can keep it. De jure right = de facto might.

I do worry though about those roughnecks who love guns. I don't know why: the Second Amendment is obviously misread, and ought to read that the citizenry must be unarmed at all times, and only the government militia can have arms. The Bureau of Land Management has taken to wearing side arms. [ This is true. ]

The bitter-clingers must be disarmed before anyone can play them the Sierra Club commercial asking terminally ill people to take out a dam as they die. Because that sort of speech is so very reasonable coming from our sort, and pardon me while I sniff, but it's fascist when coming from anyone who is not quite our sort. Bear in mind, we don't like guns unless they're guns our goons are holding on evil people. For which read anyone who is responsible, works, and loves this country. Because that self-sufficiency won't do.

And in counties where the lizard is thought to be, we can use the lack of a lizard as proof that it is endangered. On this logic we can look for penguins or lantern fish in any county in Texas and do it again. After the second time, it's easy. Remember dear Karl's dictum that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. We can play this Washington farce county by county until the entire state, the red state, I remind you, is immiserated and immerded. Which Texas ought to be, because it didn't see the greatness of Lord Obama, and may his feet never touch the ground. He could even shit on us without being in Air Force One. Well, his government is trying to. Such heaven.

There we have it. The destruction of a huge chunk of the Texas and New Mexico economy. Foreclosed ranches and farms. Foreclosed houses. Repossessed vehicles. Plummeting property values. Legally acquired assets which cannot be used. Complete and total human misery for a state which did not vote for Lord Obama and which has taken the entirely mistaken view that Washington is where the Sons of the Boys from Brazil came to live. A Texas which ignored Washington as much as possible—that's the crime of course—and was doing better for it. A low-tax and low-service state. Kill it. Take it behind the barn and kill it with an ax. Can't let them get uppity; more Californians might want to move there, but they won't, when the economy tanks.

Then when the government has bankrupted the agriculture and oil businesses, it can declare the lizard to be at sustainable levels. Lenin forfend that we not have an adequate supply of sand hill lizards; might need to put them in say Utah to steal the property there. The government can either keep the property or sell it, with restrictions on drilling rights, further alienating the owners of the minerals from their property. A private citizen can't do that. But what's with private property? This is the first step toward its elimination. Oh. The tenth step. Do I hear thousandth?

The crippling of the counties producing 20% of Texas' oil, and the best oil counties in New Mexico and just as the oil companies had discovered the technology for producing whole new fields to lower the price of gas.

Anticipate the skyrocketing gas prices. Could we get to $8 a gallon? I surely hope so. After all, Lord Obama's Secretary of Energy wants European gas prices, but then the entire cabinet wants European stagnation and collectivism, as a pit stop on the road to serfdom because nothing will serve until each of has has its own STASI agent.

Pardon me, comrades. This is such a heady draught that I'm squirming in my seat at the utter and complete fulfillment of the progressive fantasy: the ruination of other people's lives under banner of saving something entirely useless. Was there ever greater power? But I get to feel good about being the meanest person in America, next to Lord Obama.

There. You have it. A lizard will bring down the most vibrant economy of all the states. A lizard will make gas prices jump. A lizard will derail the economy. A lizard will pull Texas' teeth.

A lizard. A 3” lizard. A completely unremarkable lizard will destroy the usage of ten million acres of desert land sitting on top of oceans of oil and gas. A lizard.

All hail the lizard king! It wins over the bitter clingers every single time. As long as it has the Washington thugs in its corner.

Sorry. This is too much prog happiness. I'll see you later after I clean up and bite the heads off kittens. Such a wonderful snack. I love deep-fried kitten heads, wrapped up in copies of the Constitution, which I then use to take care of the remains of the last batch of deep-fried kitten heads.

Father Prog: It gladdens my heart so to see that what we did to California's farming industry (one of the "bread baskets of the world") with a non-native fish called the Delta Smelt could be so easily replicated with something as simple as a small ubiquitous reptile. I was very disappointed that in your brilliant treatise on the destruction of Texas' economy there was not one reference to global warming. In the re-write (we are always rewriting history) try to put a nice AGW slant to the whole thing as well.....

Will this increase the price of shovels @ Wal-Mart?

Huckleberry Commons Thyme wrote:Will this increase the price of shovels @ Wal-Mart?

Comrade Huck: Proles will have to make their own shovels and will still need to maintain their beet quotas........

This is terrible! That lizard was doing just fine until now. Thank goodness the Obama administration is on the ball and discovering and taking care of these national problems.

Father Prog,

Is it possible we can make a Malaysian-style satay using the lizards on skewers over charcoal with peanut sauce? I bet it would taste just like chicken.

Whinny, you are inspired. My brother is an unrepentant RethugliKKKan and he is impossible to bullshit. Nonetheless I haven't let out a contract on him. When I steal the money though, all bets are off.

He suggested that we put the wetbacks to good use in stamping them out. Mexicans are strangely unaffected by our pious nostrums, for they've had to live hand-to-mouth. It would not bother them to stamp on lizards.

You see, they're smart enough to know that lizards don't matter compared to human misery. Or in fact to human, well, er, turds. Which could have a use. So they would gladly kill them, and make a satay if necessary. Personally I think they'd put them on the frijoles.

This sense of practicability is why they must go to the wall. It just won't do to have someone make sense. Not on my shift. After all, if somone could look at me without an ideological eye, he'd see nothing but a pompous, bloviating, bag of rotting offal leveling a jaundiced eye at anyone who is useful and therefore paying for him to eat and live, to continue being the pompous, bloviating &c.

You get it.

Useful, out. Useless, fine. Useless and used to hurt people just to Show People I can when I am not in reality worth a used prophylactic. Jeez. I have to go the men's room again.

But of course I am a Made Prog, and so fully expect to sit in a church pew the next time that Lord Obowma graces a racist church in Washington.

Robot, let us never forget Progressive California. When the governors of two states turned down the high-speed rail money, stupidly objecting to the fact that it would be nothing but a money drain that no one wanted except the people who had private jets to fly over it or drivers to pass it, California was glad, in the best prog fashion, to grunt like an #800 sow and shove its snouts and trotters into the trough.

To build a railroad which goes from--empty field to empty field. I am quite sure that the riders, when they materialize, will be glad to cab from their houses to the Terminal in the Middle of Nowhere to take a train to another Middle of Nowhere and then cab to where they are gone. And since they were so green in doing it--and employing two cab drivers--the other people who are going to the meeting but who were stupid enough to take their own death machines (The Holy Gore: "The internal-combustion engine is the worst thing every invented by man, except for the fact that I was born before Roe v Wade, or that's what Mom told me.")

So. There you go. Spending billions of OPM to no purpose so that politicians who are completely irresponsible can feel good about themselves and when it doesn't work, say it would if it had been tried right.

Those words were, by the way, the death-bed utterances of Joseph Stalin.

Father Prog Theocritus,

You are doing your part to make the lizard appear more endangered, I hope. It's about time we forced these roughneck types out of their jobs. After all from each according to his Fried Cat Head to each according to his lizard brain.

and there was great lamenting in the lands of Texas, for the land had been defiled by the evil ones. The rich, barbarian Capitalists were raping the pristine, barren Earth, but there arose a Champion. He took up his lance of righteous indignation. He rode upon the Great Lizard and restored the lands to their rightful owners.

The Lizard King:

Another rare breed that must be protected in the "Congress smelt"!

Major Mistake says he can small it from here!

Our glorious environmental friends have discovered the sand hills lizard, which is 3” of sheer bliss."

I AM HERE TO MAKE A FULL DISCLOSURE SO THAT I WILL NOT BE ACCUSED: all the dead lizards which by some unknown circumstance appeared outside my abode the last week, were not deceased by myself, the Frau!! I would never endanger the livelihood of these filthy glorious .... animals.
I am against Texas oil and for these.... things.... I am thinking someone like Buffoon or perhaps Groucho had involvement with the demise of these things and NOT I.
If you looking closely you can see a footprint that appears to me, to belong to Buffoon!

Rasputin, what a lovely work of art. Thank you. I shall cherish my squamous steed. It will match all the bits and pieces on my carcass which have some, er, slight imperfections from past great labors for the Common Good.

Fraulein, I would never accuse you of killing lizards. Neither would Elton John, I think, but I digress.

Next we shall declare as an endangered species the Rahm Rat. It eats everything, attacks everything, and is meaner than a stepped-on snake, or our Many Titted Empress when she runs out of OPM.

General Confusion wrote:Another rare breed that must be protected in the "Congress smelt"!

Major Mistake says he can small it from here!

The fresh smell of Roe vs. Wade in the dumpster wavering through the air, could life on this planet get any better?
My purple Lennon lenses shattered at the horrible sight of a dead Lizard on dear Frau's pavement, but don't weep for me Comrades, I found some orange ones as a temporary replacement.

Perhaps the Lizard is not dead and after the photo-shoot it was put right Left back on it's feet??? I don't know, maybe???? The inter-webs have been known to have anywhere from 2-5 deceivers within it's midst Comrades, vigilance is required at all times to keep The Party Truth Current ™ .

The solution is for Democrat Texas politicians to announce they want to build a glorious nowhere-to-nowhere hi-speed rail line thru West Texas. Then, watch the lizards get thrown under the bus train.

Opiate, I'm shocked, SHOCKED, at your apostasy. I did talk to someone who attended the meeting last night in Midland and they were gloomy. The government is determined to steal as much as possible, for a lizard. I'm getting excited thinking about it.

A few years ago there was some pressure on Washington about Cap and Trade. I love that; never before have so many efforts been devoted for no purpose to inconvenience as many people as possible, merely to provide the progressive version of a genital-lengthening pill to the regulators.

They were told that they might win on Cap and Trade but they'd lose. By regulation.

All hail the regulatory state. It completely bypasses the proles who pay for it. First, legislation from the bench. Now legislation by unelected, unaccountable, self-satisfied, insensitive, rule-bound, jobsworth bureaucrats who would be best advised to get a poodle to order around, instead of real people producing wealth.

Grigori E.R. wrote:and there was great lamenting in the lands of Texas, for the land had been defiled by the evil ones. The rich, barbarian Capitalists were raping the pristine, barren Earth, but there arose a Champion. He took up his lance of righteous indignation. He rode upon the Great Lizard and restored the lands to their rightful owners.

The Lizard King:

lizard_king_03.jpg

Brothers and Sisters,
Who is like unto Father Prog Theocritus? He is the one the prophesies foretold.

You mean the 13th Imam?????!!!!

Father Prog, I am otherwise speechless.....TEXAS??? You live in TEXAS???? I try to be open minded, but if you'll forgive me, this is a little tough for me.

Царевна, I have to confess that I am a life-long Texan, to my eternal shame. And worse--in the 70s and 80s I knew the horrible Bu$hitler. In fact I played Bach on the harpsichord at the Globe Theatre (in Odessa) for George when he was a stripling out of college, in the company of Stephen, a friend who would go to Harvard, Harvard Law, and who would write the Starr Report.

This is an entirely true story and until now, I've not even told my therapist, Dr. Mengele.

The Bu$hitler was a horrible man. Always pleasant, of good family, paid his bill, kept his word.

I hate people like that.

I'm not the 13th Iman. I am Father Prog Theocritus, against whose blood-red ideology no other faith can compete.

But come to think of it, when you scratch the surface, scratch us all, and we're all red inside. With other people's blood.

Ignoring the Georgia Guidestones and letting them stand has certainly created a looming Nautical Disaster in the atmosphere.

Judge Fraulein Pulloskies wrote: all the dead lizards which by some unknown circumstance appeared outside my abode the last week, were not deceased by myself, the Frau!!

I trust you haven't been hording this valuable source of protein Frau. Likewise their tiny hides when stitched together make lovely shoes and gloves which are in short supply at the gulags.

When can we expect you to deliver the properly preserved meat and skins to Party HQ?

(It's a pity no matter how they died, but we must recycle!)