FIRST, A CLARIFICATION. Just as it is Carolyn Plath’s assigned role in The Benicia Herald to lighten your day, to bring a smile to your morning, it is clearly mine to bring thunder, lightning and a downpour of whatever pain I can inflict in a handful of paragraphs.

Today, once again, I take my cues from this modern GOP, an organization devoted to making my task as simple as possible.

But remember, I don’t do this maliciously — it is in my contract. As a person, I believe I am thought to be kind, generous, gracious and forgiving. OK, I have no data on this — but who does?

From this point, this does get grim fast. I open with a Media Matters story about the reporting of a domestic violence story, “Fox’s Scott Blames ‘Overly-Vindictive Women’ For Arrest Of Man Who Violated Restraining Order,” on the Olivia Kittel blog, Jan. 10, 2014:

“Fox News made light of the real threat that domestic violence and stalking pose to women during a discussion of a man’s arrest for violating a restraining order.”

While discussing these issues, “Happening Now” co-host Jon Scott “downplayed the gravity of violence against women by suggesting that men don’t take restraining orders seriously because they ‘know there are a lot of overly-vindictive women out there.’ Guest Fred Tecce similarly made light of stalking, joking that the email should have said ‘I’m cold hanging out here hiding in the bushes behind your house.’ Tecce and fellow guest Arthur Aidala quickly swept aside co-host Jenna Lee’s observation that the perpetrator may have had a history of violence, as Tecce joked that ‘she had to get a restraining order because the guy was trying to get his ring back and she just didn’t want to give it back to him.’

“Contrary to the nonchalant attitude of Scott and his male guests” — and, need I add, given domestic violence realities, an incredibly stupid and callous attitude! — “violence against women is a serious issue. According to a 2010 survey by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of women in the United States — 35.6 percent — have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.

“Scott’s dismissal of women who file restraining orders as hyperbolic flies in the face of the reality that most women file for restraining orders only after experiencing severe violence at the hands of their partner. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that more than half of women who filed for restraining orders suffered severe physical abuse, with 45 percent reporting physical injuries and up to 48 percent reporting sexual violence. According to a University of Pennsylvania study, 11 percent of women killed by an intimate partner once had a restraining order against that partner.”

Next up, going back to the near past: “Virginia Cuts State Employees’ Hours To Avoid Providing Obamacare Coverage,” by Annie-Rose Strasser, Feb. 11, 2013:

“As part of his state’s new budget, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and his administration are trying to force potentially tens of thousands of public sector employees in the state to work fewer hours so that the government can avoid providing them health care.

“The 29-hour limit” — what a neat idea! — “is on its way to becoming state law, thanks to language inserted into the state budget at the request of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s administration. The language appears in both versions of the budget adopted Thursday by the Senate and House of Delegates.

“Anticipating legislative approval of the policy, the state Department of Human Resource Management has advised all state agencies to implement it now.

“The state has more than 37,000 wage employees. More than 7,000 of them have been working at least 30 hours a week, according to a recent survey taken by the department.”

Tacking ever so slightly, we find this gem from Daily Kos: “Conservatives Condemn Censorship of Stories of ‘Kind Slavers’ and ‘Contented Slaves,’” by TomP, March 4, 2014:

“I think we have a racism problem in this nation. It’s a white problem. Too many whites think their skin color makes them superior to African Americans (and other people of color). It’s scientific bull—, but it seems to make some whites happy to believe this hateful (and Hitleristic) racist crap.” (Yes, really. Hitler believed such things also — white, Aryan racial superiority was what he and the Nazis were about.)

“So these whites cannot face the truth of our history. Let’s start with what should be a non-controversial proposition: Slavery was an evil system. You know, Abraham Lincoln and all that, the Civil War. Slavery was bad. Ending slavery was good.

“My point? An attack on the move ‘12 Years a Slave’ (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture) by a conservative in a conservative magazine, the American Spectator, as follows: ‘If ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that Mr McQueen does not want us to hear about it. This, in turn, surely means that his view of the history of the American South is as partial and one-sided as that of the hated “Gone With the Wind.” Yes, there was much cruelty and hardship in the slave-owning South, as there has been in most of the rest of the world most of the time, and Mr. McQueen’s camera is all over that. But it strains ordinary credulity to suppose that there was nothing else.’

“Just like ‘Schindler’s List’ failed to show the contented Jews in Auschwitz and kind concentration camp guards. One of the things that the movie showed is that even people with a shred of decency were bound in an evil system. By definition, there are no kind slavers. They are enslaving human beings.

“This is the modern conservative movement. Defending evil in order to hold on to dreams of racial superiority. If there is a just God, he will damn them all.

“We have much work to do to overcome our racist heritages. Whites can start by looking at the truth and accepting our history.”

Finally, we have a bit from Nation of Change about the loving relationship between corporate agriculture and the world of nature, “Top 10 Companies Killing the Natural World with Pesticides, Also the Biggest Seed Producers,” by Christina Sarich, May 21, 2014:

“In a report released by etcgroup.org, the world’s six largest agrochemical manufacturers are also controlling the seed industry. According to the report, agrochemical is running the show, not by providing food to the people of the world, but by poisoning the seeds they provide with chemicals. All of these companies are also gene manipulating, GMO-giants. There is an inextricable link that cannot be ignored.

“It breaks down like this:

“The biggest agrochemical company in the world, Bayer, is also the seventh-biggest seed company.

“The second-largest agrochemical company, Syngenta, is the world’s third-largest seed company.

“The world’s biggest seed company, Monsanto, is the world’s fifth-largest agrochemical company.

“The world’s second-biggest seed company, DuPont, is the world’s sixth-largest agrochemical company.

“If you’ve ever worked with heavily drug-addicted individuals, they will deny there is a problem and seek greater and greater doses of their ‘drug’ in order to get the same high. The agroscience industry has created the same paradigm. The worldwide market for agrochemicals grows another 10 percent every year. It’s a $40 billion/year market to sell the world these chemicals. Furthermore, weed killers like Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide account for one-third of the global pesticide market. About 80 percent of GMO seeds suck down this toxin like a crack-addict. There is no herbicide resistance in GMO plants, as we are told. There is only glyphosate and herbicide addiction. This is why Dow is making a new herbicide called Enlist Duo. It is because the pests are now becoming immune to glyphosate and even greater toxins will have to be used to destroy the super-bugs created by these poisons.

“Despite skyrocketing fuel and fertilizer costs, high grain prices created soaring demand for commercial seeds and pesticides in 2007. Today’s GMO seed sales are chump change in comparison to herbicides and pesticides, but they keep a farmer addicted to the chemicals these … idiots sell. Pesticide sales are up all over the world, particularly in South America.”

… And where do we learn the discipline of avoiding breathing?!

Jerome Page is a Benicia resident.