Palin Resigns to Become President of the New CSA?

She quotes MacArthur: "We are not retreating but advancing in another direction"?! Didn't she mean: "We are not advancing but retreating in another direction"? You can't parody this stuff. Well, whichever way she meant it, it oughta be the motto of the Grand New Partay.
She's been utterly discredited in the eyes of 80% (90%?) of Americans since her buffoonish turn as VP candidate. And she's obviously fleeing a scandal in Alaska. So what, pray tell, is she hoping to be elected President OF? South Carolina? That state is crazy enough for her, but won't have a presidential vacancy*.......until it secedes again. Maybe THAT's the plan!

*heck, if Gov. Lovebug stays his present course, the state won't even have a gubernatorial vacancy for years.....

Draft Dodger Dick Runs Amok (again)

Cheney TAKES BACK what he (and almost no one else, at this point) has been saying for 8 years about a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda?!!! What is he doing? Trying to sound rational after a lifetime of insanity? He's always calculating, but what is THIS calculation? Is this how he sounds when he's running scared? He's so public, so un-embunkered, these days. "Wild stuff," as Johnny Carson would say. His handlers need to get him back in his cage.

Lutz's Last Stand

Click here: Robert Lutz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bob Lutz: Responsible for product development at GM during the Bush Admin.

Testosterone loaded ex Navy pilot. Was on Letterman show the other night, and is clearly still immensely pleased with himself. Meanwhile, his company, once the greatest in the world, has gone bankrupt and has 1/10th the employees it had in the 1970's.

He says global warming is a crock of shit. He championed the Hummer (sold to a Chinese firm in a fire sale this week) at GM, was a driving force behind the deathcar gashog Explorer at Ford. Yet somehow, this 76 year old fossil held onto his job until 1 Apr 2009. And of course, there are more masters of disaster in the GM lineup where this blunderer came from. Wow. What does it take to get an exec fired in Detroit?

The magnitude of their failure is perhaps unparalleled in the history of capitalism. Oh, that's right, we just had a multi-trillion dollar booboo on Wall Street. So let's amend that to: .....unparalleled in the history of manufacturing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/goodbye-gm_b_209603.html
Am sputtering and repeating myself, I know, but the proof is in the performance: GM execs, including Bob Lutz, are responsible for the greatest disaster in the history of industry----the bankruptcy and near total collapse of General Motors, once the greatest industrial firm in the world. The mighty colossus is now roadkill. GM once produced 10% of the nation's entire industrial output. Yesterday it was drummed out of the Dow Jones lineup. Saying Hummer-booster Bob Lutz and his fellow dinosaurs are good auto execs is like saying Custer was a good general. How did these fossils, and their hapless predecessors, hold onto their jobs as long as they did? Their longevity says terrible things about the blind, deaf, smug, inbred culture of The Motor City. The only thing they've succeeded in doing is driving the American automobile industry straight into the ground.

Frankly, my dear, they don't give a flying fuck

Click here: t r u t h o u t "They Frankly Own the Place"

Sen. Dick Durbin is scarily correct. These billion dollar swindlers have a great thing going. They can use their taxpayer-bailout money to pay off legislators so the legislators will protect them from regulation and punishment, which is to say, from the taxpayers they have defrauded. The same legislators can also be counted on to pass more laws which will allow the financiers to continue legally robbing the public. Now THAT'S the perfect crime! What a glorious bliss loop! These criminals are the height of respectability in a money-based society and government where possession (of great gobs of ill-got gold) is 9/10ths of the law.

regarding the recent ethics charges against Governor Sarah Pailin

Sarah sucketh.
She sucketh in Wasilla, she sucketh in Alaska,
She sucketh sasparilla in downtown Athabaska.
She sucketh Juneau, she sucketh Chicago,
She sucketh wherever she do go and don't go.
She sucketh whatever she do know and don't know.
She sucketh with wind dat do blow and don't blow.
She sucketh the short, she sucketh the tall.
She sucketh in spring, she sucketh in fall.
She sucketh seashells, she sucketh the shore.
She sucketh now and forevermore.
She sucketh the left, she sucketh the right.
She sucketh always and with all her might.
She sucketh in dark, she sucketh in light,
She sucketh when loose, she sucketh when tight.
She sucketh in church, she sucketh at home
She sucketh in crowds, she sucketh alone.
She sucketh the north, she sucketh the south,
She sucketh east and west, she sucketh with her mouth.
She sucketh when she shoots, she sucketh when she fires,
She sucketh in cahoots, with all them other liars.
She sucketh when she's cold, she sucketh when she's hot.
She sucketh when she is, she sucketh when she's not.
She sucketh jizz and she sucketh snot.
She sucketh the privileged, she sucketh the masses,
She sucketh the upper and the lower middleclasses.
She sucketh with her hair, she sucketh with her glasses,
She sucketh like a moose at men who make passes.
She sucketh the rich, she sucketh the poor,
She sucketh now and forevermore.
She sucketh eggs, she sucketh green ham.
She sucketh whenever and wherever she yam.

Kick 'em to the curb

Click here: SEIU Huge News about Bank of America: Tell Your Friends, Family, and Coworkers Bank of America shareholders have stripped arrogant/swindling Ken Lewis of his chairmanship.

Sweeeeeet. His thieving ass is halfway out the window. But he's still CEO! So kick him the rest of the way to the curb.

Bastards like Kenny Boy II thought they were above the law. Hell, with their paid off Congressmen they were MAKING the laws.....to legalize their looting.

Kenny Boy II is not the only crooked banker/swindler/shitstain that needs laundering. What, for example, is slimy Anthony Mozilo (who looted Countrywide Insurance) doing outside a jail cell?

And speaking of shitstains that need cleaning up: By what insane standard can torture-memo toady Jay Bybee (http://www.truthout.org/050109A) still be considered fit to be a federals appeals judge with a lifetime appointment?! Now that the political wind has shifted, even he himself has recently made statements trying to disown and distance himself from his own 2002 torture memo. Obviously he's an integrity-free zone, a lie-yer like Alberto Gonzalez, who was ready to do or say whatever his Bush/Cheney masters wanted him to say, and the law be damned! And by what repulsively corrupt standard can John Yoo, another torture-memo toady, be considered a worthy professor of law at U of Cal, Berkeley?

Is there a way to embarrass Bybee and Yoo out of their sinecures? I notice that Yoo has already hied himself to hyper-conservative Chapman College to get away from the criticism at Berkeley, but he still holds his post at Berkeley. Is there anything short of impeachment which can prompt the disgraced Bybee to step down from his judgeship? He's an embarrassment to the judiciary, but if he wrote that memo, he's probably shameless and immune to personal guilt and shame. In any case, the spot light must remained trained on this maggot. He's obviously much more comfortably working in the dark.

Poppa's got a brand new teabag or: Through a CRT screen darkly

The Wizards of Ooze

Why do Teabaggers not gag on their bags? Why aren't they in on the gag of their bags? Because they are the obedient servants of symbols and billionaires they do not understand. Murdoch's mouthpieces rearrange the symbols, and the hydrophobic Faux News audience rabidly salivates accordingly.

We humans seem intent on blotting out Mother Nature and replacing her with CRT screens. Clouds of pollutants, the effluents of the artificial matrix, block the very sun and stars. It's only on megapixaled screens that people think they can see clearly. No wonder authenticity grows scarce, as experience, process, or product..... People have contact with signifiers instead of the referents, the things referred to. It's a semiotic (what the fuck does that word MEAN?), symbolic, semaphoric, world. And the moneymen seize the high ground, which is, in this case, the power to interpret, or rather misinterpret, the symbols. It's way past mistaking the map for the territory. Where it's at is purposely MISinterpreting the map, the semaphores, for fun and profit. For the territory itself, the thing itself, is cruelly and/or casually blotted and forgot.

In a world where the citizenry is unplugged from.......the world.....and plugged into the virtual world, no wonder individuals lose the power to think for themselves and turn to the Wizard of Oozes, the video hucksters, on their screens to be told how to think, what to think. But when these obedient ditto-heads, these Teabaggers, gather in person, in the flesh, to Teabag each other, the gatherings are absurd and monstrous, like conventions of half-men half-beasts on the Island of Doctor Moreau. "Are we not men?" "Well, no, you don't quite look or sound like men. More like walking, half-kiltered, sound bites run amok. Walking talking krazy quilts of angry expostulations. Quoters and misquoters of tangled fulminations originally spouted by cynical hucksters like Billy O, Sean H, Rush L, Michelle M." Here, at the Teabag Parties, language comes to die, for it is no longer rooted in the world, and so must wither and starve. All that's real is the anger, confusion, hostility, frustration, of the tantruming Teabaggers themselves, their pouting mouths stuffed with Rupert Murdoch's old, greedy, balls.

As for me, I think I'll take a hike in the hills this morning, just to see if there still IS a world out there, an alternative world, an allegedly real world, beyond my screen.....

A Nation of Cover Bands

I think there was more room in Manhattan, and in the country, for eccentrics when this photo (photo of Capote snapped by Warhol in the 60'shttp://21.media.tumblr.com/xq0gxRbjUlgp4fxilAC83V1co1_500.jpg) was snapped than is the case today.

We had whole GENERATIONS of eccentrics in times past. Admittedly there were legions of wouldbe eccentrics (who were actually new forms of conformists) as well. But it was less expensive to live back then, and fewer of the psychological, social, geographic, and aesthetic niches had been established and filled in. It was still possible to be a pioneer.......or at least a one-off.


Most of the seemingly "originals" today come off, really, as content-free imitators, imposters, poseurs.

Think of what it takes to get into college these days. Children create "brands" or identities for themselves from an incredibly early age. They and their parents make sure they attend the right schools (rarely public), participate in the right organized sports, the eye-catching extra curricular activities, etc. Who dares to simply be and do and learn? One eye is always on pleasing authority, whether that authority is a college admissions office, a community of peers, a corporate personnel officer, or even a prospective mate.

Now it is not uncommon for 6 year olds to design and plan their looks, their wardrobes.......to lay out their outfits, piece by piece, before going to school. This sort of behavior at such an early age was unimaginable a few decades ago. After WWII a distinction was drawn between two schools of acting: the method, as exemplified and personified by Brando, which worked on characterization from the inside-out, and the longstanding theatrical outside-in mode exemplified by Olivier. The first was more instinctive and visceral, the second more conscious and calculated. Of course the method involved a great deal of conscious thought as well, but one needed only to look at its best exemplars to see the power lent to a characterization which had the luxury of discovering itself, surprising itself. The same can be said of Pollock's action painting from the same period. The painting itself was a by-product of the process, the action of creation, which was a discovery, a risk, a gamble, and a zen dance. The artist valued the possibility inherent in the act of creation infinitely more than he/she valued the art itself or the effect the art might have on viewers or the rewards, social/material/sexual/psychological, which might be gained by pleasing others (buyers, curators, critics, fans) with one's work.

The very act of being has been hollowed out. It doesn't flow spontaneously from the inside out. It's not a discovery. The self has become a calculation, a thousand calculations, made by a human rat in a vastly complex social, sexual, and intellectual maze. But wasn't it always so? Yes. But moreso now than ever. There is more pressure now to live a life which is tailored to impress and mollify others. And so we have a society consisting entirely of pretence: citizens pretending to be whatever they need to be to impress others, but the others they are trying to impress are equally hollow and lost. Think of the ongoing financial collapse: was the nation actually producing MORE of something prior to the collapse, was there more of something of VALUE? Or was most of the alleged increased value merely a reshuffling of finances, a prestidigitation of derivatives, a gigantic con or confidence game invented to swindle real value from rubes not sharp enough, or cynical enough, to see through the swindlers' deceptions? And was the nation fundamentally hollowed out, dressing to impress......even BEFORE the collapse?

In centuries and decades past immigrants came to America to seek material prosperity and social mobility, just as they do now. But perhaps most of all they came here to be FREE of the expectations and traps of the old worlds. Here there was ROOM. Room to discover, to surprise oneself, to grow in startling and unexpected ways.

And we who were born here viewed this freedom to improvise one's life as a birthright, a precious legacy. We were a nation of eccentrics, or rugged eccentrics, or so we viewed ourselves, even as we knuckled under, crushed and strangled by an increasingly heavy web of expectations from employers, educators, drill instructors, coaches, spouses, co-workers, peers, fashionistas, and neighbors.

What's the hottest show on TV these days? American Idol. Wouldbe stars, narcissists who may or may not be talented but who are always convinced they are talented, sally forth to impress a woeful panel of alleged experts. The experts are patent idiots, curmudgeons, even drunks, yet they, and the studio audience, and the hungry "artists" themselves, endow them with an absurd power and respect. They are wizards of oz, opening or shutting the stargate. Like St. Peter, or the director of admissions at Harvard, or the personnel director at Goldman Sachs, they control the gates of paradise.

And the audience identifies with the desperately degrading and degraded hunger to please which is all too painfully obvious in every singer. These musicians are not Billy Hollidays or Bob Dylans, whose process of discovery transcended the desire to please audiences, judges, fans. The contestants on American Idol are, by definition, smaller than the process and the authority figures and the fans which validate them.

One could argue that amateur hour/ talent search shows preceded American Idol and Star Search by many many decades on TV and radio. Arthur Godfrey, for example, had one in the early 1950's. But those early amateur hours had modest dimensions. They were small, slightly absurd, entrance ramps into the larger world of self-expression. They had the air of smalltown vaudeville about them.

American Idol is not only national in scope, it's international. And the seething crowds waiting to turn thumbs up or thumbs down are like the desperate Roman mobs jampacked into the Colisseum, thirsting for a circuslike spectacle. And if it's one in which blood is spilled (in the form, on American Idol, of eviscerated egos), then let the blood and bowels pour in torrents off the stage. The defeated contestants don't permit themselves a shred of dignity in defeat, but fall apart utterly, weeping, sobbing, their tripes spilling over the stage as Simon eviscerates them. None seem to have a sense of worth separate from the validation of the judges, none can imagine a life of worth separate from winning the contest. At least the ancient Christians fed to the lions had an apprehension of life, even an eternal one, separate from winning and losing, living and dying, eating and being eaten, in the arena. In the arena of the Faux Network, it's not a single Caesar who holds the power of life and death, paradise and perdition, but a triumvirate of imbeciles/montebanks.

Nothing is real about the process: not the talent, not the performances (which are always derivative and sentimental in the extreme), not the judges, not even the reactions of the audience. Everyone is lost and hollow and posturing and floundering after a grain of authenticity and real value in a laughably fraudulent sea. No wonder the show is so popular. What could be a more exact expression of the ongoing American experience, refined and crystallized and fired right back at the audience?

This audience is laughably far from a collection of free-thinking individuals in a republic. It's a desperate, empty, ill-defined mob clamoring for bread and circuses........and a vicarious experience of redemption.....in a corrupt imperium. Call it the Empire of Music if you like. This Empire has been rotting from the inside out for decades. The very market for music, even hollowed out, meaningless, derivative, music, has been devastated by the Internet.

So what is the paradise to which the winners of American Idol gain admission? CD sales are in the toilet. Presumably a handful of Justin Guarinis can make millions for a few years from live performances and album sales immediately after their big wins on American Idol before sucking back into the blackhole of nobody-ness from whence they came. But what is the shelf life of a completely derivative contest winner who has no identity of his/her own separate from that of the contest itself?

How long will it take them to land on the "where are they now" ash heap, or perhaps, if they're lucky, in a reality show with Dennis Rodman, Danny Bonaduce, and Andrew Dice Clay?

It's hard to imagine them on the nostalgia circuit a couple decades hence because these singers have no music or musical identities of their own. Every note they sing is already a reference to past music and singers. There is no there there. One wonders: can the same now be said of the entire country and its inhabitants? Have we become a gigantic cover band, referring back to a time and place when there was, allegedly, real value, real words and notes to be sung, and real expression and discovery?

Obviously nothing of value can be expressed or discovered within the context of Rupert Murdoch's contests. If we still have a chance to make real discoveries, express something meaningful, experience something of value, it's going to have to be outside all the contests, the swindling, lying, billionaires' contests. But who in America has the stones to live a life outside the markets, the popularity polls, the corporate rat mazes? Do the more recent generations think that the contests ARE the self, the self the contests? And when the contests themselves collapse, what will the contestants have left to say or sing?

Who's still listening to Rush's bullshit?!

The Pornography of Hate, The Banality of Imbecility, The Futility of Credulity, The Audacity of Mendacity

Rush, Hannity, Billy O, & Beck have a constituency of hate that overlaps nicely with the NRA gun crowd. They want the freedom to hear and talk hate-spew about the other: other races, other genders, other religions, other nationalities. This also includes the freedom to ignore the facts, the freedom to forget who wrecked the country over the last couple decades, and the freedom not to connect the dotted lines between the exploitative rich and their own depleted wallets, the freedom to feel sorry for themselves, and the freedom not to take responsibility for the consequences of their own hateful ignorance. This trippple XXX rated hard core lunatic fringe, which fancies itself the real America, constitutes about 18% of the population. It needs to hear the same lies repeated in the spin machine, day after day, because they are unsupported by the facts and so have very short shelf lives unless they are repeatedly, frequently, recycled......

Partying Like It's 1999: Wall Street's Willing Slaves

Why is it that the only time Congress can find bipartisan support for anything is when it sells out the interests of and safeguards for the American public? And the people with common sense, who have learned the lessons of history are always the over cautious naysayers? Yet, when it all goes to shit, the greedy architects of the house of cards insist no one saw it coming or could have predicted it?

A few choice quotes:

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

''The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,'' said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ''I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''

One Republican Senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted against the legislation. He was joined by seven Democrats: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard H. Bryan of Nevada, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wellstone.

In the House, 155 Democrats and 207 Republicans voted for the measure, while 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans and 1 independent opposed it. Fifteen members did not vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html?ref=patrick.net



Wow. I STILL miss Wellstone. No wonder Congress overwhelmingly did away with Glass-Steagall. It was merely obeying the will of its prime constituents/employers/owners: Big Money.

"There is no distinctively American native criminal class...except Congress." ---Mark Twain

"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself." MT

"We have the best Congress money can buy. " --Will Rogers

"There is good news from Washington today. Congress is deadlocked and can't act." --WR
"With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke. " --WR

"Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it. " Cullen Hightower

"You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year. " ---William Jefferson Clinton

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Jake

Click here: A Response to AIG’s Jake DeSantis - Victim, Philanthropist, Media Critic, Quitter : WreckingBallReport.com

There are readily accessible online profiles of Dudley Do-right which list him as a derivatives expert. So how innocent could he be, and could he have been over the past several years, of his own corporate team’s hijinx? He's being, to put very kindly, disingenuous. I'm sure he didn't donate to charity any of his massive bonuses from recent PREVIOUS years, bonuses which were doubtless bloated by AIG's ill-gotten gains trafficking in derivatives.

Thanks, Wrecking Ball, for reminding us about poor selfless Jakie-boy’s MILLION DOLLAR BONUS he was promised along with his $1/annum. And I’d love to know how many millions he’s been paid, cumulatively, over the past many years while working for a diseased corporation which has helped wipe out trillions in middle class savings and may yet help tumble the globe into a major depression.

What do you bet this guy never served in the military, never did any low-paid (Vista, Peace Corps, teaching, whatever)public service, and climbed on the “financial services” gravy boat just as soon as he could and has sailed on it ever since, only scuttling off it now that the heat is on. He’s been wildly over rewarded for his work, he’s in the richest 1/10 of 1/10 of 1% of Americans, and now he’s having a pity party for his poor put-upon righteous self. Wow.

No doubt there will dozens of screeds ripping the creepily self-pitying, grotesquely self-righteous, laughably clueless, obscenely self-entitled, Mr. De Santis in the NYT and elsewhere in the next day or two….. He just doesn’t get it. Why should he? He’s been a boy in a bubble his whole professional life, his avaricious delusions reinforced by his fellow bubble-boys on The Street.

Wall Street Meets the Poet's Corner

Wall Street Meets the Poet's Corner

I enjoy getting bills.
Lets me know at least
SOMEbody cares.
I forgot to pay my Chase minimum
Service charge last month
And my APR has climbed from 4.99%
To 29.99%?
Thanks for reaching out,
Chase.

We’re fighting on three fronts
And need warm bodies
So badly I’ve been re-drafted
And will be sent to a combat zone,
Though I’m 60?
Good to hear from you,
Uncle Sammy.
I was wondering
How you were doing.

My rent has been increased
By 70% per month
And if I don’t comply
Including paying a retroactive
Increase for LAST month
I’ll be evicted?
Thanks for notifying me
Insanely avaricious landlord
Hiding behind
a real estate management corp.
You’re a true friend.

It’s true I’ve never met my friends
In the flesh.
But I feel we have a spiritual connection
Which transcends physical,
If not postal, reality.

And my friendships have solid
Foundations based on money,
Which I must regularly pay
To demonstrate my commitment
To my friendlike substances.

And don’t say
My friends
Could care less
Whether I live or die.
Of course they care.
They need my money
And/or my body
And they’re not ashamed
To say so.
Who else can say that?
Maybe they’re not really human.
Maybe they’re just bloodsucking
Private and/or governmental entities.
Still, they seem passionate
About me.
If I don’t do what they want
They’re going to do something
Really awful to me.
They care enough
To threaten me
To suck my blood
Maybe even to kill me.
And isn’t that what
love is all about?
I’m not alone in the universe
So long as one flea
Is biting me,
One worm is devouring my entrails,
One last buzzard
Is pecking out my eyes.
It’s when I’m
Gleaming,
Scattered,
Cracked,
Bones
And my friends
Start to search
For another host,
Another carcass
To pick clean
That I’ll really start
To worry.

Economic Forbodings of an Everyman

I've wondered and joked, darkly, for years about our economy, whose manufacturing base was clearly shrinking and being outsourced even as the nation's alleged GNP ballooned upward. I could also see, years ago, that the easy credit was sustaining our hyper-speculative mortgage bubble (and the GOP's highly touted "ownership society"). This took no brains, just open eyes and ears. There was an ever-expanding hollowness to the economy, and the real wonder was that the bubble kept swelling up as long as it did BEFORE it exploded. And it was clear there was an intimate connection between the 360 degree deregulation (of everything from the SEC to the IRS to the EPA to the FDA) and the gigantic United States of Ponzi Schemes which we have become. Greed, cynicism, blindness, inhumanity, and injustice took precedence before moderation, idealism, clear & farsightedness, humanity, and justice. The uncollateralized securities, the uninvestigated Ponzi schemes, the grotesque bonuses awarded to bloodsucking executive failures, the untaxed billions snatched by hedgefund managers, the still-hidden and untaxed profits of offshore holding companies, these are but the objective, outward expression of a subjective, inward, rot.

The financial regulators (even if they ARE given their teeth back) are scarcely smart enough to keep up with whatever the next level of financial "innovation" or subversion will be.

But if there is a WILL to regulate and make just, there will be a way. The will has clearly been absent in the White House and the Congress for many long yars.

In the end, even the most diabolically ingenious cons look like more of the same old shenanigans, and transparent, if only we will open our eyes to see them. And by the way, when will we admit we see all that offshore stuff which is so supposedly hidden?

Because you can never be TOO selfish

The NYT spent the day with Blagojevich and paints an interesting portrait of a man who was clearly shocked and saddened by the turn of events but remained defiant. "We should have been more selfish, not selfless," he said. "It sounds probably perverse for me to say that based on what some people are saying about me. But it's true. My family, we didn't take advantage of all these things that people do."


Blago is the patron saint and poster boy for crooked pols everywhere. Like Bush and Cheney, his inability to admit ANYthing is pathological.

By the way, whoremaster Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana has climbed atop his soapbox again, decrying Obama's attempt to clean up the 8 year orgy. Which begs the question: who the hell lives and VOTES in Louisiana?

The Dept. of Thieving Worthless Avaricious Bastardos

And now, from DETWAB, the Dept. of Thieving Worthless Avaricious Bastards:



I was just reading that collapsing, federally-funded AIG paid out $1 billion in "retention" bonuses to its employees, using bailout taxpayer $. Retention pay at a time when these financial geniuses are being fired like capguns? Now THAT's chutzpah! In yo' face, TARP!

Also, Thain,* ex CEO of Merrill Lynch, rushed to pay out $4 billion in Xmas bonuses to his company clowns just days before BofA bought collapsing Merrill Lynch. Both the bonuses & the BofA buyout were made possible by bailout taxpayer $. Bastardo Hijo de Puta Hijo de Putamadre Hijo de Perra Lewis, the CEO of BoA, pretends he has no responsibility in the matter. Actually, you can be sure that Lewis knew what Thain was doing and let him do it so his acquisition of Merrill Lynch could go through. In other words, they colluded.

And Master of the Universe Lewis, what a brilliant move that was, acquiring a company with untold billions in toxic assets. Now you've completely devastated the share value of BoA. Give the man a golden parachute!

And don't get me started on imploded Lehman Bros. CEO Fuld, who sold his $13.5 mill mansion to his wifey for a generous $100 last November to keep his assets away from the creditors he FUCKED. I guess he figured he was giving the dough to somebody he regularly fucked anyway, so what's the difference? Oh wait, he'd have to sell the house to his MISTRESS for that to be true, verdad?

I hear 5 of these TWABS have offed themselves so far (including the French aristocrat who was a shill for Bernie Madoff and the German billionaire who flung himself in front of a train in Der Vaterland). I say these are the 5 most honorable thieves in the creepycrawlycollapsing Financial World, so far. But I look forward to others owning up to their shame and cleansing the Earth of their slimy selves by blowing themselves away with speeding bullets, leaping off tall buildings in a single squishy bound, and/or failing to outrun powerful locomotives.

How can ANY working person vote Repig?

Click here: Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill

The real face of Kapital. Where is the "mainstream" press coverage of this?

"Bank of America is now not only getting bailout money. They are lending their name to participate in a campaign to stop workers from having a majority sign up [provision]," said Stephen Lerner, Director of the Private Equity Project at SEIU. "The biggest corporations who have created the problem are, at the very time, asking us to bail them out and then using that money to stop workers from improving their lives."

Seen: Sad Sack in a lunchroom

There was an old blowhard in the lunchroom where I just ate who was yapping on about how generous the rich are and how they should get big taxcuts. Finally I just told him he was "so full of it it's sad" and left him in his own toxicity.

He clearly wasn't rich. Just a miserable old pensioner. What the fuck is wrong with these fools who defend the rich? I know they're ditto heads, sucking up those radio lies all day, but why do they vote against their own wallets? So fucking sick. They're out of their heads.

Also, he pretends to be smiley. But he's eaten up with hate. And there are 10's of millions like him. Nothing in Bush's 8 years of 360 degree failure, not even the stock market collapse, has given them a clue. How the rich must love these chumps.

Pope Benedict Reinstates Anti-Semitic Bishop

Click here: Pope Reinstates Four Excommunicated Bishops - NYTimes.com

German Pope Benedict....Arnold (and former Hitler Jugend) shows his true colors. He evidently sees his job as making the church safe for anti-Semites. Notice that reinstated "Bishop" Williamson, the Holocaust denier, feels most comfortable in a seminary in ARGENTINA. Yikes!

This is the same Pope who has provided cover for clerics like Cardinal Mahoney of LA, who has, in turn, provided cover for child-molesting priests. So the church protects anti-Semites and pederasts and still has the stones to call itself CHRISTian?! Jesus H. Christ.

Thain Fired AFTER He Makes Off with Our Tax Billions

Click here: Opinion:Thain's Undoing Was Thinking He's Worth It Opinion Financial Articles & Investing News TheStreet.com

I'd like to know what Thain's personal take was in this heist. Did he get a multi-million dollar commission for arranging the sale to BofA, for example? He's been booted out in disgrace after a year in office, his once-great company is in ruins and devoured by BofA, yet I'll bet his golden parachute is $10's of millions if not MORE. Every sentence which compliments Thain should end with the phrase: "for a lying fucking thief and swindler."

As in: "He's a brilliant executive.......for a lying fucking thief & swindler."

Notice that overrated egotistical bastard, greedhead, and self-promoter Jack Welch is also getting a reassessment, now that the big financial subsidiaries that propped up GE's 1990's growth (and his bloated options) are going bust. Remember when he and Alan Greenspan were being sold to us by the worshipful media as the twin emblems of the Brave New Greedocracy/Kleptocracy/Ponziocracy?

The prime motivator for most of these guys is egotism/avarice (who gets the most chips), so why should we be surprised their "success" means short term personal success for them and their cronies and eventual evisceration for the companies they're "leading"?

Chief Justice Roberts Shows His Freudian Slop

I think Roberts fucking up the swearing in was a Freudian slip. Maybe it wasn't even unconscious. He hates it that Obama will appoint guys who will wreck his wretched corporate suckup majority on the so-called court. Court of Fascisti Cronies. Guys like Alito and Scalia (sp?) would have warmed the cockles of Mussolini's blackshirted heart, just as they please Cheney's nuke-powered pump. OK, so Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd all but died on 1/20..........couldn't Cheney at LEAST have had his 5th attack on the reviewing stand? Or is #5 the real reason he was in a wheel chair? I mean, who the fuck seriously believes that bastard was moving his own boxes?! Scut work like that is done by his personal slave pukka boys, who have been secretly chained in his bunker for the past 8 years, along with certain missing neighborhood children and unlucky greased goats. His favorites were spirited out under cover of midnight darkness to his new DC mansion's dungeon/catacomb. The extras, humans & goats alike, were ground into sausage and are being served to unwitting diners in the Senate commissary.

8 things I learned in 8 years of the Bush nightmare

Following was penned by my buddy, the brilliant jazz guitarist Phil Lewis.

Eight Things I Learned in Eight Years of George W. Bush’s Presidency:

1. Anyone can become president – and I mean anyone. Even the most undistinguished, insipid, vapid, angry troll of a man can become president if he is born into the right family.
2. At least half the US population is far stupider and angrier than I had ever imagined.
3. No one is above the law – except the president, vice president, the cabinet, etc., right on down to just above Scooter Libby.
4. Truth is irrelevant, what matters is perception.
5. What we have been funding as the “Dept of Defense” is in fact the president’s (and vice president’s) personal arsenal -- even the National Guard is available to fight the president’s proxy wars and petty disputes. (Who woulda thunk?)
6. So-called “free market economics” is merely a ruse for funneling more wealth to the wealthy. (This I had previously suspected.)
7. Congress is as spineless as it is corrupt.
8. The national news media is in actuality the personal PR agency of the president.

And just for good measure…
9. A new word for torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”).

Lady Caroline Accepts Her Title

When I was kid, I was told that America was different from Europe because we didn't have a peerage. If that's so, then why do we have a House of Lords (and Ladies)? And the other choices for that apparently inherited seat* were Cuomo and Chelsea? From OTHER dynasties?! Well, at least Lady Caroline will feel comfortable with her $100 million Uncle Ted, Lord Jay Rockefeller, Count Kohl, Admiral of the Beer Distributorships McCain, Baron of the Brothels Vitter, the two oil suckups from Oklahoma, Jillionaire John Kerry, Diane "Money Bags" Feinstein, Chuck "What Can I Do for Wall Street" Schumer, and all the other Senatorial swells who allegedly represent the common man.

Below are some more Senate Silver Bags. Sorry the figures are 5 years old (2003) and some jillionaires have stepped down (Edwards, for example, and Frist, thank God) to be replaced by others (Countess Hillary Clinton, Obama, $7 million, but at least he and Edwards are self-made money bags). The estimates below are absurdly low. Anyhow, you DO get the idea, dontcha? Kerry is married to hundreds of millions. Edwards fortune is over $30 mill, Ted K has $100 mill, easy, and so on.

So is America's government a plutocracy, or an aristocracy of inherited privilege, or...? Just don't try to tell me it's a democracy, please. We field hands gots to depend on de massas' noblesse oblige 'lessen we gets sold down de river....

Senate millionaires:
John Kerry, D-Massachusetts: $163,626,399Herb Kohl, D-Wisconsin: $111,015,016John Rockefeller, D -West Virginia: $81,648,018Jon Corzine, D-New Jersey: $71,035,025Dianne Feinstein, D-California: $26,377,109Peter Fitzgerald, R-Illinois: $26,132,013Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey $17,789,018Bill Frist, R-Tennessee: $15,108,042John Edwards, D-North Carolina: $12,844,029Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts: $9,905,009Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mexico: $7,981,015Bob Graham, D-Florida: $7,691,052Richard Shelby, R-Alabama: $7,085,012Gordon Smith, R-Oregon: $6,429,011Lincoln Chafee, R-Rhode Island: $6,296,010Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska: $6,267,028Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee: $4,823,018Mike DeWine, R-Ohio: $4,308,093Mark Dayton, D-Minnesota: $3,974,037Ben Campbell, R-Colorado: $3,165,007Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska: $2,963,013Olympia Snowe, R-Maine: $2,955,037James Talent, R-Missouri: $2,843,031Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania: $2,045,016Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire: $1,916,026John McCain, R-Arizona: $1,838,010James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma: $1,570,043John Warner, R-Virginia: $1,545,039Kay Bailey Hutchison, R - Texas: $1,513,046Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky: $1,511,017Harry Reid, D-Nevada: $1,500,040Sam Brownback, R-Kansas: $1,491,018Thomas Carper, D-Delaware: $1,482,017Ted Stevens, R-Alaska: $1,417,013Maria Cantwell, D-Washington: $1,264,999Barbara Boxer, D-California: $1,172,003Orrin Hatch, R-Utah: $1,086,023Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana: $1,080,014Bill Nelson, D-Florida: $1,073,014Charles Grassley, R-Iowa: $1,016,024

*so why do they even BOTHER with elections? Oh, I know. So the chumps, I mean, citizens, will think THEY had something to do with picking these swells. That way, they, I mean we, are less likely to revolt and overturn the honeypot. Funny joke, eh? And it's on us. And yes, there IS a solution. Don't make Senatorial and Congressional and Presidential elections so dependent on campaign funds. But do you think we can count on these folks to reform THEMSELVES? On the plus side, Obama made a real connection to the common man in the last election and small $ contributions over the Internet were critical to his success. So maybe I should stop being so cynical on the day before the very hopeful beginning of his administration. If one near-miracle can happen, maybe we're in store for more.

Sully seems......UNsullied

Click here: A Pilot Becomes a Hero Years in the Making - NYTimes.com

Go Sully, go Sully, go Sully, go! Sully seems......UNsullied. Named best pilot in his class at AFA. Glider training from an early age. Devoted to his vocation, flying, since boyhood. Respected by his peers and neighbors for his sterling character, cool head, and self possession. Supremely well prepared for this moment. Thirty plus years of experience, but still has the reflexes to correctly decide and then execute in nanoseconds. This amazing intersection of challenge and capacity, mixed with good fortune, transformed a potential disaster into a eyepopping deliverance & triumph. Why, it's almost enough to restore your faith in homo sapiens in general and Americans in particular.

As the article says, what a contrast between this guy's selfless professionalism, courage, and concern for others and the obscene self-seeking and profit-taking/swindling on Wall Street, or in the Bush Administration, for that matter. Makes a beautiful and hopeful overture to the inauguration.

Wishful thinking. But I wish he'd,& we'd,get our wish

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own. -H.G. Wells, writer (1866-1946)

Are you LISTENING, Dick & W? I knew you weren't.

Outta the box solutions for the New Millenium

How outta the box will the Obama-ites be when the "new" Sec. of Treasury is Geithner, who is an acolyte of worldclass failures/thieves Rubin & Summers? And doesn't Larry "Far from Harvard" Summers also, gulp, have a big job in the Obama Tsunami? Who's to be the new head of The Fed? Or will it still be Ben "Burned in September" Bernanke?

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the way WWII was the only thing which bailed us outta the Depression (tho the WPA guys took some nice pics and recorded some lovely folk music). By the way, the stock market was flat during and AFTER WWII and didn't start climbing till the '50's despite all the employment and consumption & production of the '40's. This may have been because progressive income taxes were so formidable that the rich couldn't pump up the market until they stopped paying at 92% (top margin in '45). In those days, after all, the market had not yet been democratized and was mostly for Richie Riches. Now it's like a big family oriented Vegas casino whose tilted tables stoop to rip off even the middle and lower middleclasses (in the form of 201K's,* severed pension funds, etc) along with the Chinee highrollers.

At least in the 1930's we still had all those shuttered factories, ready to jump back into life after Hitler blitzkrieged Poland. Now we're more hollowed out than that. The Rust Belt is rusted, busted, and dismantled. All those folks trying to survive as greeters at Wal-Mart will never be on the assemblyline again. Those lines are in China. And those greeters are average age 82. What would a recovered American economy, productive again, even LOOK like? Service providers taking their jobs back from Bangaloreans? I don't think so. The outsourcing is gnawing even higher on the employment foodchain these days. American programmers may soon be fry cooks. Hell, even diagnosticians won't be able to get their patients back from the Indians. What DO Americans who aren't cops, teachers, soldiers, nurses, pols, bureaucrats, prison guards, do for a living these days? Does ANYbody actually MAKE ANYthing any more? Or will they ever again? I mean besides a few hotshot movie stars? And maybe even the stars may soon become CGE pixels. And please don't say we'll all be assemblying solar panels and other green shit. Even if we DO buy a whole new generation of green cars and supersaver a.c.'s those babies will be manufactured in Seoul & Shanghai. And what will we buy the new green gizmos with? $ borrowed from Chinese & Indians? Or will we swap California for them?

All I can picture is a geriatric population nursed by legions of immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America. America: from Super Power to just plain Super-annuated. From Home of the Brave to Brave New Mega-Nursing Home.


*soon to be 101K's

Let the tilted wheel spin!

Click here: t r u t h o u t Wall Street Robber Barons Ride Again

The difference between Madoff and Rubin is that Rubin is a much more slippery thief who steals for himself and others on a much larger scale and makes sure the "law" is on his side so he never gets nailed. And now Rubin's proteges, Summers and Geithner, will do what they can to make sure the cruel comedy of theft goes on. This is house odds at their most predatory, and rubes & suckers (taxpayers & investors) beware, which they never do. I thought Barack was going to try to clean house, not leave the tilt in place.

Below an excerpt from a Robert Scheer column---(see above link):

How insulting that we must now accept Summers' assurance that the Obama administration will "move quickly to reform a weak and outdated regulatory system to better protect consumers, investors and businesses." This from the guy who, as President Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, pushed the deregulation legislation making the subsequent financial crimes of Wall Street legal. The "toxic derivatives" that we taxpayers are now forced to purchase from the Wall Street hustlers were deliberately shielded from all government regulation, thanks to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Summers got Congress to pass in the closing days of the Clinton administration with the same urgency that he now pushes for the new Wall Street handout.
Back then, Summers was a disciple of Robert Rubin, who just last week resigned from his director's position at Citigroup, the financial conglomerate that grew to unmanageable and corrupt proportions thanks to the empowering legislation that Rubin initiated when he was Clinton's first treasury secretary. Rubin has been paid more than $115 million plus stock options at Citigroup, and despite his horrid record is a close Obama adviser. It is one of the great swindles of U.S. financial history that Citigroup was bailed out with $45 billion in a deal that could eventually cost taxpayers an additional $269 billion to guarantee those toxic assets that would have been illegal if not for the legislation backed by Rubin and Summers.
How did Obama allow himself to become ensnared with the very same folks who are the most culpable? His treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner, is another Rubin protege, who, as head of the New York Fed, worked tirelessly with Rubin to concoct the Citigroup bailout. When candidate Obama gave his major economic address back on March 27, he couldn't have been clearer in condemning the deregulation that Rubin and Summers had engineered:
"Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one - aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner-take-all, anything-goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy."

Roland, Roland, Roland, keep them doggies Roland

Click here: Op-Ed Columnist - The Leaves Have It - NYTimes.com

To quote Gail Collins: "We are rooting for Burris to make it into office, since any Roland who names his kids Roland II and Rolanda is bound to provide a welcome diversion in the gloomy months ahead."

Making off with Rich's riches

It's just too delicious, as in: set a thief to rob a thief.

Turns out Bernie Madoff has made off with 10 to 15 million buckaroonies of Marc Rich's stolen booty. How sweet is THAT? And the hedge fund manager who got swindler Rich entangled with swindler with Madoff is named Merkin. The names are unbeatable.

You remember richie Rich, dontcha? He's the slimeball who fled to Switzerland to evade U.S. prosecution for financial crimes, meaning mega-theft, back in 1983. Yup, the same guy whose curvy blonde ex-wife Denise Rich used to fundraise for Bubba Clinton while simultaneously taking care of some of Bill's other prodigious appetites. Which is why the Clintonator disgraced the final days of his administration, again, by awarding Rich a presidential, gag me with a spoon, pardon.

Turds of a feather flock together.

And now we learn that not only was Bernie using his house arrest to ship jillions in jewels to his family and thus evade creditors, but when he was arrested on 11 December he had $173 million in personal checks sitting in his desk drawer made out to his beloved relatives--- kindly holiday bonuses, yes, from the Bad Santa of Wall Street. One minute it's so sweeeeeet to be related to Bernie, the next, so sour.

The United States of Ponzi-dom

Yet another exciting chapter in this bitter comedy! Tell me, should we be laughing or crying?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090109/ap_on_bi_ge/madoff_false_profits
The above link is a story about investors in Madoff’s collapsed scheme who got out in time with net profits. Raises interesting ethical issues: Isn’t that the perfect economic crime? You get something for nothing yet are not culpable. That is, you could theoretically catch a ride on a Ponzi scheme and then successfully jump off a winner before it collapses and therefore NOT feel guilty of wrongdoing! It’s a win/win! Because, after all, Madoff and his shills are the wrongdoers, not investors such as yourself…. Or that could be your rationale, at least. It’s the pigs who engineer the Ponzi who are guilty, right?… not the poor chumped out rubes sucked into the scheme. If a rube such as yourself is smart enough to get out while the going is good, how can you be deemed guilty? You took your chances of getting reamed along with the rest of the suckers, didn’t you?
On the other hand, anyone participating in a Ponzi scheme, even if he doesn’t know in advance that it is a Ponzi scheme, is either a fool or a crook or both. “If every man is served after his deserts, none shall ’scape whipping.”
It turns out the lucky ones, the net winners, are liable for others’ losses. That is, the smarties, the net-gainers, have to return their ill-gotten profits. But what about a firm like Amway, which is nothing but a giant soap and bullshit based Ponzi scheme? When will THOSE winners be made to return their jillions in net profits?
If all the netgainers from Ponzi schemes had to return their goodies, we’d have to redistribute just about every frigging simoleon in Amerika. Because, after all, these ARE the The United States of Ponzi-dom. The trick is knowing when to jump off the bus before it runs off the cliff. …And learning how to stuff your guilt so you can sleep at night. Of course it helps to be a sociopath. Then you don’t have any guilt to stuff, just ill-gotten gains!
“Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” —Balzac

A new star on the horizon

Anais Mitchell and Rachel Ries singing "O My Star!"

Click here: YouTube - Anais Mitchell & Rachel Ries - O My Star!

An instant classic. It seems to have already existed in the memory and the history of the nation. Is it a new acquaintance, or have we known this song forever, in our bones, in an alternate America? Evocative, mysterious, lyrical, sweetly haunting. For travellers, sufferers, dreamers, everywhere. This song will be covered by many more famous others. But their versions won't be more touching than this unadorned performance. "Oh my heart,don't fail me now that I have carried you from town to town...why are you so heavy for I can't hold you any more...I can't hold you and I can't put you down..." So much better than most corporate, massively marketed, "music."

And below the link to another superb song, Old Fashioned Hat, written & sung by Anais...

Click here: YouTube - Anais Mitchell - Old Fashioned Hat

Beautiful lyrics, angelic, heartwrenching voice. One of the most moving & romantic songs of recent times. "winter's waiting in the wings and we aren't saying anything....that's all right" "I have loved you for so long...even when I could only do you wrong" "youuuuuuuu...look like a stranger in that old fashioned hat" "that was before I made my home in the marrow of your bones" ".....and then we'll have a honeymoon, and then we'll start to fight"

Bernie $50 Billion: orphans and pensioners zero

How about that Bernie Madoff! Ain’t he a special fella? Turns out he’s been shipping out millions in household jewelry (including 18 of his favorite watches) to his beloved relatives while under house arrest in his $7 million prison. Bernie just can’t stop being Bernie. This time the game is Beat the Creditors. What a humanitarian. He’d be a hoot if he weren’t causing so much suffering. Next to the Bernie jewel heist story, in the NY Times, is a tale of a trusting 86 year accountant who has lost his entire $2.4 million dollar retirement nest egg to Bernie’s bust. Now the octogenarian and his 84 year old crippled wife may get evicted from the nursing home where they were hoping to spend their final days. Score another one for Madoff! Is there anybody besides Madoff’s relatives and lawyer who doesn’t think it’s time to toss this white collar reptile in a REAL prison for violating the terms of his house arrest?

As a lover of bad puns, I also want to salute this slimeball's name. Madoff, pronounced "made off," as in "Bernie made off with $50 billion of other people's hard earned money." If Dickens had used this name in a novel, people would have said it was too much. Bernie's destiny was writ large from the beginning, right on his birth certificate. He told credulous investors what he was going to do with their dough just as soon as he introduced himself. But greed, laziness, complacency, stupidity, gullibility, made them deaf. Which reminds me: what about the OTHER Madoffs? The ones who supposedly had nothing to do with this huge operation? What have THEY made off with, besides the jillions in jewels?

Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, RIP

I just want to give the late French aristocrat, yachtsman, and swindler Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet (whew! If I had had that name I would have been beaten to death in gym class decades ago)props for having the balls to kill himself after blowing $1.4 billion of his and his clients’ money in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi pyramid. Maybe he had a heightened sense of honor because he was French, or an aristocrat, which is to say, he wasn’t a native-born American Wall Street rat. Our Street-toughened home grown rattus ratti REWARD themselves for their failures with golden parachutes and other pay-offs while furiously denying any responsibility for their massive malfeasance. At least back in ‘29 some brokers had the decency to fling themselves to their deaths out of their Wall Street office windows…….or was that just a myth, the myth of the floundering financiers with consciences? Anyway, if any more of the present crop of mega-crooks have killed themselves, I haven’t heard about them. And if they DO kill themselves, will they do it because their honor is forever stained, because they feel bad about blowing Other Peoples’ Billions, because they’re terrified of getting publicly tried and possibly jailed, or simply because they have no idea how to live without their evaporated billions? Of course, really smart thieves like Madoff will never be troubled by that last problem. No matter how many Other Peoples’ Billions they’ve blown/stolen, they’ve made sure to pocket unlimited mountains of moolah for themselves so they and their families will never go hungry or yachtless or mansionless. Madoff, for example, is able to visit his other New York area estates during the day before having to crawl back to house arrest in his $7 million dollar Manhattan cell each evening.

Bush had a faithbased constituency, but we all have a faithbased economy. And many of us put our faith in money managers who have conned and lied on an inconceivably grand scale. Now, if we have any money left, we scarcely know where to invest it, for The Street has exhausted its credibility and its credit. When will this crisis of confidence recover? In his column today, David Brooks quotes Christopher Caldwell: “…credit is successfully re-established when financial elites say, ‘When.’ Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class. to say an economy is based on credit is to say it is based on animal mysteries. Glamour, prestige, elan, sprezzatura, cutting a figure….that is what the economy is made of.” Let us not forget that conman is short for confidence man. There is no con without the sucker’s confidence in the con. And there is no eCONomy without investors’ confidence in the con.

But during the last Great Depression, confidence in the con was so devastated not even the ruling class could say “When.” The Depression dragged on, year after year, until the armaments spending of World War II provided jobs and income galore. The rising tide that floated all boats was blood red. It took Mega-Death Himself to restore confidence in the con that was and is the American economy.

Damn damn damn damn damn!

(with thanks to Lerner & Loewe)

Damn damn damn damn damn!
Why couldn’t this president
Have been more like a man?
We’ve grown accustomed to his face
The endless forms of his disgrace
His empty swagger, mindless smirk.
The murk inside this jerk
His lies that blind
Are ties that bind
They’re second nature to us now
Like breathing out and breathing in
We’ve learned
to expect
the worst
of him.
We were serenely independent and content
Before we met
Maybe we can learn to be that way again and yet
He’s ruined everything we knew
The Constitution, too,
He may just sink us all
Before he’s through.


He’s a most unforgiving man
The kind that makes a stupid move
And then won’t budge for years
No matter how much blood and treasure is spilled
No matter how many tears.
And if he came crawling back to us
And asked for our forgiveness
We’d remind him
We couldn’t find him
In any crisis:
On 9/11, neither during, post, nor pre,
Did we get wise leadership from he.
When Katrina appeared
And neared
He went AWOL again
Just as we feared.
When our stocks eroded, then imploded,
He was dizzy, lost, maybe loaded.

…We’re very grateful he’ll be gone
But he’ll be murder to forget
We’re feeling gravely weakened
From all the blood he’s let
And yet
We’ve grown accustomed to disgrace
Hovering round our place
Accustomed to his apelike
face.

How Many as yet Unpeeled Layers Does Madoff Have?

And how many yet-to-be-named liars contributed to his layers, to his gigantic grift?

Now that Madoff has supposedly come clean, has he stopped lying? Or is his present "candid confession" just a cover for his sons and other collaborators and even for himself? How many layers does this slimeball, and his scheme, have?

This is a guy whose whole life has been a web, an inextricable tangle, of lies for many years. Why should we expect him to become entirely truthful all of a sudden. With his poisonality, isn't he more likely to "come clean" as a maneuver to try to minimize his future legal losses? In short, he gives the public a bit of truth, bait, in hopes of distracting it, and the law, from deeper digging. It's a vain hope, but he has lived on lies and hope for many years, and they've worked out for him, bigtime, until now. So why WOULDN'T he use the same prescription again? This is a man who must feel naked, and even lost and disoriented, without thick layers of lies. And he probably doesn't feel comfortable without having a con, or many cons, going, as well. This is his MO, his whole way of being. He could no more suddenly stop being this way than Olivier could stop acting or Cheney could stop hating and, yes, lying, and being arrogant. These traits are integrated into who they are. Without them, they'd have no idea who they are, no idea how to behave, no idea how to fill the next moment, and the next.

And fasten your seatbelts. There will be revelations to come about many MORE collapsing, formerly-bloated-but-now-anorexic, Ponzi-atic hedge funds.

"Oh what a wicked web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

Home, Home on the Street

SEC Commissioner Cox claims he's going to investigate the investigators who didn't properly investigate Bernie Madoff. But isn't Commissioner Cox the head investigator? Jeepers, I'm confused.


Oh give me a home
where the bull-shitters roam
and Commissioner Cox
looks the other way.
Where seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and the liars
have all of the say.

Home, home on the Street,
where the cons and the swindlers play,
where seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and dereg is the rule of the day.

Oh give me a scheme
with profits that seem
to come magically
from within my black box.
Where the rubes are forsaken
and all get taken
and Commissioner Cox is a lox.

Home, home, on the Street
where the investors always get beat.
Where the tables are tilted
and 401K's get wilted
and widows and orphans
bleed and bleat.

Let's pretend if we will
our hands aren't in the till
and our markets
truly are free
and the blindfold
on Justice
was put there by Norquist
so we all can escape
Scot free.

Home, home, on the Street,
where the bonuses
cannot be beat.
Where insiders own
the deed to your home
and plea bargains
are sweeter than sweet.

Now that W's a lame duck
all our income streams suck
and we're worried about Obama.
So we're taking your millions
your billions and trillions
and lighting out
for Bahama.

Home home on the Street
where the crooks and the lobbyists meet
where seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and investors' blood runs in the street.

Bush's latest shot at unions & the working man

Click here: t r u t h o u t UAW's Sacrifices Look to Some Like Surrender

Bush takes one last loathsome shot at fucking the unions and the working man...... Below a quote from the article:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the committee overseeing much of the government financial rescue efforts, was far tougher.
"The president has added an unfair assault on working men and women, which could require them to accept a disproportionately large reduction in what is currently legally owed to them," he said in a statement. "I am particularly opposed to the notion ... that could give foreign auto companies in effect the ability to dictate wages for all American auto workers."

And here are a few inspirational quotes by and about Emiliano Zapata to compensate for the venom emanating from the hateful, avarious, facist, sociopaths in the GOP:


Los que no tengan miedo que pasen a firmar. (English translation: "Those who have no fear should step forward to sign this.") This was said when calling on people to sign the Plan de Ayala.
¡Tierra y Libertad! (Translation: Land and Liberty)
Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny. (In a letter to Pancho Villa)
The quote Es mejor morir de pie que vivir de rodillas. (Translation: It is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees.)
"La tierra es de quien la trabaja." (Translation: The land belongs to those who work it).
"No hay mas leyes que las de la muelle." (Translation: There are no laws other than the law of the gun.)
"Seek justice from tyrants not with your hat in your hand, but with a rifle in your fist."
"I wish to die a slave to principles, not to men."
"No me dejen morir así, digan que dije algo". ("Don't let me die like this, say I said something"). Presumably his last words.

#4 is the best.

Aso said of him: "Zapata vive, la lucha sigue."

And "Si Zapata viviera, andaria." If Z were still alive, he would walk with us (la gente).

Let's Have an Xmas White House Shoe-In!

All this publicity about the sons turning in an errant Daddy Madoff* seems like a PR move to launder the rest of the family and its associates. Madoff would have us believe that his family had an intervention, as in: "Stop daddy, before he swindles again!" Or: "Oh dad, poor dad, he's been stealing billions in the closet and we're feeling so sad." When crooks like this "confess," their confessions are usually tactical retreats, covering lies which minimize damage. He's trying to offer himself and hoping we'll be stoopid enough not to look for his co-conspirators. And what other gigantic ponzi schemes (the nation has been one grand ponzi scheme for the last 8, no, make that the last 28, years....) have yet to emerge?

Regarding my hero, the Baghdad shoe-flinger: Wouldn't a shoe-in at the White House, with the citizenry carpetting the WH lawn with 100 million sneakers & loafers on Xmas, be the right send-off for President Chimp and the First Enabler? Hey, I wouldn't mind see a mob hang their beaten corpses upside down in Lafayette Square, Mussolini&mistress style, with Dick & Lynn trussed up for good measure, but I'll settle for shoes."Use every man after his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" True enough, Hamlet, but if every man deserves whipping, what do the men deserve who have lied a nation into 6 years, and counting, of war?

*I had to laugh at the billionstobusted Noels, who sent their beautiful daughters merrily a'marrying all over the globe and drawing their Italian & South American investor/banker sons-in-law into the Madoff bubble. Splat! Dat's some Xmas present they're giving their extended family. And what a timely surname they have! If Waugh or Dickens had used it, critics would say it's too much.

Oprah's full moon rising

December 13, 2008: NASA predicts biggest full moon of the year

There's a full moon risin'
in Oprah's granny panties tonight....
Big as a barn
It's a helluva sight.
She said she had
a grip on her eats
but she couldn't stop swallering
down her sweets.
Now the audience can barely
see the show
'cause of the lunar ass
she's got in tow.
Cameras try
to home in
on her face
but that big behind
fills up all de space.....
There's not enough room
on the broadest flat screens
for the planetary bootie
of America's talk show queen.

What's under their robes?

Click here: Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage - NYTimes.com

Time to strip this so-called "church's" tax-free status? Is it a church, or a militant political arm of the GOP?

Click here: Editorial - Sonar Over Whales - NYTimes.com

Adjudicating marine mammals into oblivion: Bush's blight continues in the last dark daze of his reign.

As we who had our eyes open could always see, the seemingly benign looking corporate crony Roberts is a killer. Like good fascists everywhere, he bends the knee reflexively not only to his corporate masters, but to his military overlords.

Dick C's Embunkered Branch

A recent WP item agrees with Dick Cheney that it's not clear which branch of the government the VP is in. That's like saying it's not clear which branch of the goverment is the executive branch. Donny Graham's Washington Post has tumbled a long, degraded, bootlicking, way from the courageous newspaper his father Phil Graham and his mother Catherine Graham published. How they, and his publisher grandfather Eugene Meyer, must be writhing in their graves!

Regarding the vexed and vexatious question of Dick Cheney's branch of government: In his twisted, bedeviled, mind it is very very high.......above the law. He holds himself accountable neither to the people, to the Constitution, to logic, to principle, to his compliant boss, nor to himself. Because he is not accountable even to himself, he is free to contradict himself as often as he pleases. Whatever he says or does at the moment he is saying it is the truth and the law and we commoners must submit to his divinely inspired dictates. If he says black is white, so it must be. If he says it, it must be true! If he does it, it must be right! Non-existent WMD's exist! The facts be damned! We must bow to the Oracle in the Bunker! And if this member of the executive branch says he is not in ANY branch, then who in the government would dare to contradict the Mighty Oz? "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

No one in the Federal Government has had the spine nor the stones to take this criminal, this international bunko artist, out behind the wood shed during the 8 years of mayhem he has wreaked. Yet to the people he has made himself the most loathsome and loathed American politician.....in history. Will he EVER be called to account for engineering the Iraq Disaster using a mountain of lies? What about the time he outed the secret identity of a CIA agent in charge of a critical network of anti-terrorist spies? How about the way he covertly allowed Enron crooks to write national energy policy? Or the way this ex-Halliburton CEO conducted the Iraq War as a private piggybank of no-bid contracts for his corporate cronies? Or will he be allowed to scuttle with impunity back to his ranch where he will score a multi-millionaire dollar publishing contract for his memoirs......along with a job as a Faux News commentator?

Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of scoundrels, which is why this war-mongering, draft-dodging ("I had other priorities," he said of his non-service during the Viet War.), traitorous, lying, bullying, subversive, cynical, slippery, con man always wears an American flag on his lapel. Anyone who rushes to this human attack dog's defense instantly and rightfully becomes suspect himself, both politically and psychologically.

Three final dark, dark, thoughts: What further mischief is Dick making in his final weeks in office? What crimes has he committed in the dark which have not yet been brought out of the bunker and into the light? And how are those crimes damaging our already Cheney-ravaged nation?

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came, / Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name. / He shall peep and mutter, and night shall bring / Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King. -Rudyard Kipling, author, Nobel laureate (1865-1936)

Armistice of Wood

An Armistice of Wood

At Shiloh, The Marne, and Waterloo,
Srebenica, Auschwitz, and Dien Bien Phu,
wherever the slaughtered dead soaked the earth
the marriage between man and forest grew.

The skeletrees
embraced the memories
of the long dead, saying:

"You died alone
bleeding into this earth
with no mother
to kiss your eyes.

"Press your face
into mine.
I, your mother,
never left.

"Now we are one
and every spring
we rise again
green, victorious, redeemed."


The Palazzo, Grove Adjacent

"How do young things
afford these rents,
by turning tricks?"
he asked himself
as he parked underground
and climbed in the elevator
with a wobbly sylph
her blurry face framed
by wet, black, curls.
"Twenty minutes ago
I lost my purse, my keys,
and all my cash."
One lovely nipple peeped above
her elastic
halter top.
"If the thieves have your plastic
cancel all your cards
soon as you get home,"
he thought.

But by that time
she had gotten off on the second,
and he was on the third,
wandering the zigzag maze,
looking for his friend,
who wore Ugghs, a denim mini,
a translucent wife beater,
and seemed glad to see him
through her drunken haze.

Obama Poem (In my waking dream)

In my waking dream

In my waking dream
I am Barack Obama.
leading us all
From the Land of the Pharoahs.
I raise my staff
and the Red Sea States are parted.


In my waking dream
I step into the White House
and see it in ALL its colors.
I open the curtains
of the Oval Office
and let the sun shine in
after a 30 year rain.

In my waking dream
I see the tarnished Hope of my beloved nation
redeemed by all our actions.
I look to my fellow citizens
And see brothers and sisters everywhere.
In my waking dream
I am my own best self
leading and following my compatriots
to their own best selves
leading and following my nation
to a brighter dawn.

In my waking dream
my every wrong turn
becomes a right turn
becomes a detour to beauty
and truth
and righteousness.

In my waking dream
I sleep walk
in the light
of my better angels.
I cash in all my suffering
for merchandise
from the Green Stamp Store
Of Hope.

In my waking dream
all the beloved martyrs
Lincoln, JFK, MLK, RFK, Lennon,
of my past
are resurrected
in me
as I take the oath of office.

In my waking dream
I revive 10 million dead Indians,
make right three centuries of slavery,
heal the scars
of one hundred wars,
pin to the mat
poverty, sickness, injustice,
and whatever else needs whuppin’.

In my waking dream
I reverse Global Warming
reduce overpopulation,
return the dodo, the Stellar sea cow,
the passenger pigeon, the great auk,
the ivory-billed woodpecker, the moa,
from extinction.

In my waking dream
I pull Christ, still living,
off his cross.

“Slow down, brotha!” he says.
“I was about to have my big moment.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I say,
“I’m here now.”

“Stick me back on that damn cross!” he says.
“I’ve got a brand to build.”

“He’s not kidding,” thunders God the Father.
“Jesus Christ!” I say. But who am I to argue?
I nail the skinny sucker right back up there,
and the whole grand guignol unfolds again,
right up to the present moment
in my waking dream.

Obama songs

"Somewhere Over the Beltway" (with thanks to Yip Harburg)

Somewhere over the Beltway
Way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a 'Bama-bye.

Somewhere over the Beltway
States are blue
And the dreams that we dream of
Really do come true

This Fall I've wished upon a star
And wakened where the clouds are far
Behind me
Where Cheneys melt like lemon drops
Away above the airport cops
That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the Beltway
Blue states fly
If states fly over the Beltway
Then yes I can.....so can I

If happy blue states
And some reds
Fly high
Beyond the Beltway
So can I.........




"It might as well be ...."

It's November and I've just come through a shitstorm
I'm as jumpy as Sarah Palin's trigger fing...
I'd say that I have Spring fever
But I know it isn't Spring.

I'm starry eyed and cheerfully demented
Like a Dixie Chick without a song to sing
Oh why do I have Spring fever
When it isn't even Spring?

I keep wishing Bush, would move his tush,
and Barack was in the House
Oh why oh why must I wait one more season
For the House to be deloused?

I'm as daffy as a broker selling futures
In a market plunging no where but down
I haven't seen a bailout or bullish offering
Just toxic assets all around.

But I feel so gay in a manly sort of way
Since Obama came to town
It might as well be, might as well
Be
Inauguration day.


"Try on a another race" (to the tune of "Put on a happy face")


Gray heads are going to clear out
Put on a happy face
Sweep all the pallid sneers out
Try on another race!

Take off that sneering mask of Dick Cheney
---That's no smile
It's time we Baracked the House in style!

Pick out a can-do outlook
Now that the Brotha's in
Wipe off that fulla doubt look,
Slap on a happy grin

And spread sunshine all over the place, just
Try on another race!
Try on another race!
Try on another race!

And if you're feeling cross and Reilly-ish
Don't sit and whine
Get all Maddow and Stewart-ish
And you'll feel fine!

I heard a Rush so rotten
He'd never laugh or sing
Unless he took Oxycontin
He was a mean old thing!

So spread sunshine all over the place
And try on another race!


"Got a lotta governin'" (from Bye Bye Birdie's "Got a livin' to do")

Barack
There are states, just ready for governin'
And I mean, to govern a few!
Those states, don't know what they're missin'
I got a lotta governin' to do!

Sizzling states all ready for bastin'
After all the blues they been through
Gotta move, 'cause time is a'wastin'
There's such a lotta governin' to do!

The People
There are men, of forty and seven
Who are wise, and won't play the fool
It's their time, to make US a heaven
We've such a lotta governin' to do!

Barack
There are places to go, people to see
Speeches to say
In the U. S. of A!

The People
There are places to go, people to see
Speeches to say
In the U.S. of A!

Barack
Oh, governing's a ball
If only you know it
And it's all just waiting for you
You're no jive
So come on and show it!

ALL
We got a lotta governin'
Such a lotta governin'
Got a lotta governin' ...to do!

Sarah's Aria

SARAH'S ARIA, to the tune of the wonderfully bouncy Steve Allen hit, "This could be the start of something big"

WOULD be fun to write a revue....... Here's one for W and Sarah?


You're jobless on the street and in the wrong party
Tossed outta the White House then you suddenly dig
You're looking in Sarah's eyes, you suddenly realize
That this could be the start of something big.

You're horny at Crawford Ranch and watchin' your diet
And wondering why hotflashin' Laura don't give a fig
When outta the Arctic sky, it's suddenly gal and guy,
And this could be the start of something big

There's no controlling the unrolling of your fate, my friend,
You can't help it if you wreck all that you touch
But when an icy lover you discover at Troopergate my friend,
Asking for a second chance on love is not too much!

You're up in an aeroplane a'blastin' at wolfpacks,
Or nailing moose together out in the woods
You suddenly hear the bell, and right away you can tell
That this Sarahcuda really has the goods!

"I'm sick of Todd's controls and the statehouse is drafty
Laura's growing old and you're out of a job
Throw in your lot with me, we'll start a third parteee,
The GOP's a carcass, I'm shopping at Neiman Marcus
No more Out of the Closet now I've seen Paree! (still working on the music here)


We're watchin' the sun come up and countin' your money
Plottin' how to help the South rise again,
Sure 'Bama's in for now, but we'll smear him somehow
And Rove will help us orchestrate our win!
'Cause we gonna help the South to rise again!
We're just sure the South will rise again!
Jesus'll help the South to rise again!

Sarah P, Lipsticked Pit Bull, Attack Dog of the North

Was down in Costa Mesa (Orange County, conservative and corporate SoCal) last weekend to see a play and Sarah Palin also happened to be there, haranguing the faithful. The whole vibe was thoroughly ugly. There were armadas of Orange Cty police and patrolcars to "protect" her as she drummed up hatred against Obama. But my sense was that the cops were there more to suppress or at least curb the anti-Palin protesters than to protect Palin. She's hate all dressed up as a moose-shooting beauty-contest-winning hockey mom. She slept at the local Westin hotel that night as some of the cast and I drank in the bar. We could feel The Wicked Witch of the North's evil oooooooze through the walls. Brrrrrrrr!

Fortunately, the banking collapse has ripped the guts out of McShame's campaign. If Obama can just avoid getting shot (I'm serious) for the next few weeks, he'll make it to the White House. This is a big if. The Secret Service must do a better job than they did at a recent McBrainDrain rally where the GOP psychos shouted stuff about Obama like "off with his head" and "terrorist" and "kill him." The Secret Service claimed not to have heard the shouts threatening the life of a presidential candidate. Bull shite! But the media sensation forced them to "investigate" many hours after the incident. Would the SS have been so slow if folks at an Obama rally had shouted "kill McCain"? I think not. But then, that sort of madness would never happen at an Obama rally. The shadow of the assassination of RFK hangs heavy over this campaign.

McDrivel is looking geriatric and feeble and bleached out of late, eh? He needs a rest home, not the White House. The campaign is clearly taking its toll. Can you imagine Palin's fantasies? "Hmmm, the old bastard doesn't look long for this world.... Now if he can just live long enough to get elected and THEN keel over I'll be Dominatrix of the Far North, the Lower 48, AND Hawaii. My first act as Der Fuhrer shall be to blitzkrieg Canada from Alaska and from the 48th Parallel! In not time I'll be Empress of North America. Unt after that? Palinland uber alles! The world is my mooseburger!

The humblest beggar becomes us

"If in the midst of your enjoyment of the world you have a moment, try to help in however small a way those who are downtrodden and those who,for whatever reason, cannot or do not help themselves. Try not to turn awayfrom those whose appearance is disturbing, from the ragged and unwell. Try never to think of them as inferior to yourself. If you can, try not even tothink of yourself as better than the humblest beggar. You will look the same in your grave."
--The 14th Dalai Lama

After the bank bust won't MOST of us look or feel like the "humblest beggars," me included? Except for Bush/Cheney/Rummy of course, they'll still have their rancheros-in-hell. And Fuld (Lehman Bros.), Martin Sullivan (AIG), and Paulson (Goldman Sachs) will still be nestling in their soiled golden parachutes. And Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan will take their pay-offs to their graves....

More on McMaverick

Palin is a gender maverick. Or gender bending Benedictine Arnold. She's ready to be a frontwoman for a patriarchal system. Of course, she's a shill or conwoman working for a conman, McConman, as well. Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, and Alberto Gonzalez similarly turned their backs on their brethren (blacks, black women, Latinos) to shill for Bushco, for The Man, the very very white, rich, corporate, Man.

This is gov't as carnival. The pols are the barkers, the booth operators, those in the know, herding the public, the rubes, off the great white way & into their tents. In this paradigm, the citizenry only exists to be duped, swindled, exploited..........just as they were during the latest mortgage securities bubble/bust.

Remember, McCain was up to his neck (with his patron Charles Keating) in the great S&L swindle of '87. After the bust, McCain rebranded himself as a reformer. Reformer, in this case, is just another wrinkle in the conman's bag of tricks & masks...... So laughable that McMaverick poses as a populist, a man of the people! He's the son and grandson of 4-star admirals, for Pete's sake! He dumped his crippled first wife for a centi-millionaire blonde tootsie who has bankrolled his career! He's all in favor of Bush's tax cuts for the hyper rich! Will somebody pleeeeeze gimme a break! Who buys this guy's act? I know, I know: millions, tens of millions.


Maverick was a gambler, a bit of a dandy (certainly not a working cowpoke). Melville's Confidence Man, a riverboat gambler and conman, was a shapeshifting literary precursor. Of course, the devil himself, going all the way back to the serpent in The Garden, is a poseur using lies to twist his prey.

By the way, somebody who worked with him told me James Garner (the original t.v. Maverick) was (is) a very nice guy with lefty politics. Mel Gibson, rightwing Bible thumping nutjob alky, played Maverick in the remake.

Mobydoug's DC Dictionary

mav·er·ick (mvr-k, mvrk)
n.
1. An unbranded range animal, especially a calf that has become separated from its mother, traditionally considered the property of the first person who brands it.
2. One that refuses to abide by the dictates of or resists adherence to a group; a dissenter.
adj.
Being independent in thought and action or exhibiting such independence: maverick politicians; a maverick decision.

3. (n.)a poseur patriot, a sorryassed mooseblasting douchebag fulla shrill lies and boilerplate bushshit, often seen shilling for a shapeshifting, melanomic, Cold War ghost......

4. (n.) a sadsack excuse for a motor vehicle manufactured by Ford Motors in the Nixon Era. As in: "The Maverick's leaking 10W40 and blowing blue smoke out 'er ass from Anchorage to Juneau. Won't be long before she throws a rod."


[Possibly after Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870), American cattleman who left the calves in his herd unbranded .]

Clay Cums Clean

Now that Clay Aiken has revealed he's gay, what other public revelations can we look forward to?

1) Dick Cheney confesses he's the Spawn of Satan.

2) Sarah Palin allows as how she's an ignorant dumbass.

3) Karl Rove admits he has a problematic relationship with the truth.

4) W raises the possibility that at some time in his life, tho not necessarily during the past 8 years, he may have made a mistake.

5) Barbara Bush adds: The mistake was mine. I gave birth to the little bugger.

6) Rumsfeld admits he "may have jumped the gun" on the Iraq Invasion.

7) And that along with the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns there are "the things you just plain fucking lie about because the American people are too contemptible to trusted with the truth which, anyhow, is something I wouldn't know if I stepped in it."

8) Brownie raises the possibility that that job he did wasn't such a heck uv one.

9) W wonders WHY he spent so much time reading My Pet Goat while the Towers fell. Can anybody tell him? Because he'd like to know.

10) Condie admits those nuclear mushroom clouds over American cities which she promised us were really only nuqular mushroom clouds, harmless, flavorful, nonpoisonous, and excellent in both salad and soup.

Kuttner KO's Hannity

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/09/11/sean-hannity-says-he-writes-the-talking-points-as-he-berates-robert-kuttner/

Hannity's anger sounds pretty desperate. Does he think his show is part of the WWF? Hilarious that mild-mannered wonk Kuttner nailed Hannity on his own turf. It's clear the strain of lying about all the Bushco disasters (failing economy, $1 trillion pissed away in Iraq, Katrina, DofJ scandal, Int. Dept scandal, huge taxcuts for the rich and bailouts for big banks while the middleclass stagnates) is taking its toll on his brittle Irish belligerence. Underneath the bluster, poor Hannity is clearly spooked. It must be exhausting, day after day, trying to sweep those mountains of elephant shit under the rug.
He makes me want to guest on his show and bloody his nose, black his eyes, and bash his lying mouth. But then, I guess that's his appeal, right?
Of COURSE those are RNC talking pts! Hannity's boss, Roger Ailes, has been a major GOP operative for decades!!

You can take the moron outta the jail, but you can't...

Click here: MoveOn.org Political Action: Democracy in Action

McCain looks like a ghost. He can't possibly have 8 more years in him.


Last night was at my favorite newstand (actually, the only one surviving on Westside) and a yahoo was talking in a piggy way about women with the guy at the registar as I was buying a couple mags and I recounted a story an Ethiopian friend had told me: How he was living in Italy with an Ethiopian girlfriend and after a few months the girl said to him, "Don't you love me? You never beat me." And the Ethiopian friend said to me: In Ethiopia there is a saying: For women and donkeys, the whip, every 3 days.

In effect, I was saying to the guy: If you look for the master/slave relationship in women, then how can you say you respect freedom?

He knew he was nailed and claimed to want to fight me on the sidewalk. I only half paid attention to him, I was busy buying my magazines, he was like a flea, and a not very bright flea, a really dim, sad, flea. It was as if he still thought he was in some jail, trying to prove he wasn't the punk he was. Then he rode off on his beach cruiser before I actually stepped out on the sidewalk..........presumably he didn't want to try to make good on his bluff. He just wanted to talk the talk, not walk the walk.

I have a feeling that in some reform school, jail, or penitentiary, some bubba, or many bubbas, made a bitch of him, and he was desperately trying to prove that's not what he still is. These cruel pecking orders are everywhere. For him, even Santa Monica is a perpetual prison, and he has to talk so much about making women his bitches because his life, his self, is such a bitch.

Speaking of which, did you notice John "kiss up kick down" Bolton is bitching about our backchannel feelers to Iran? Even his fellow GOPers* have dumped him on this one. Presumably it's a lock that Israel will bomb Iran in next several months if there's not a diplomatic, negotiated solution to Iran's bomb-building. Oil is $140 a barrel now, that would put it over $200 easy. GM is capitalized at only $5 billion now. At $200 a barrel, it would have a negative capitalization and the once mightiest industrial firm in the world would have to pay somebody else to embalm its corpse while Toyota ate its lunch. But GM is doomed in any case, thanks to its incurably hapless management. It's just a matter of when.

Anyway you look at it, the Big Three are in the toilet. Not that any of the big 3 execs that locked their corps into a gasguzzling, Hummer/Durango/Ramtuff deadend scenario are losing THEIR jobs over the disaster. No, it's the guys on the assemblyline who'll be selling pencils on the street. Then there're the banks. We haven't seen the end of bank collapses, financial collapses, though the dereg enthusiasts are trying to pretend they had nothing to do with it..... Apparently Cleveland is just about as much in the toilet as NOLA. Even Shaker Hts (Shaker Hts!) has 500 vacant houses. It's a second Katrina, and Bushco's policies set it up.



*'cept Dick Cheney's office. Cheney and Addington desperately want to try out some o' dem newfangled bunker buster tac nukes. Cheney's probably wondering: can I at least hunt quail and Texass lawyers with 'em?

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog

Cheney's lucky his son is a lez. That way when somebody asks Shooter why he starts wars but no Cheney ever fights in 'em, he can say: "Don't ask, don't tell."

I used to feel poor. But now I feel rich. Because only a rich guy could owe as much money as I do.

I'm dieting. But the only thing getting thinner is my hair.

I had my first cyber date. I already knew that "on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog." So I wasn't surprised when she turned out to be one... But she was a really really OLD dog. She looked 15 years older than what she said, 25 years older than what she was, and 35 years older than her photo. Maybe she forgot to recalculate from DOG years. Hell, I'm an ugly old sumbitch myself. But at least when I was a pup I was a CUTE pup. She was so ugly she couldna ever been cute. Not even in the litter.

My buddy has had 2 dozen Internet dates. Says it's the InterKennel. As far as he can tell, EVERYbody on it is a dog.

"So why do you keep datin' 'em?" I ask. "That's why they call 'em blind dates," he sez. "Eventually one's gonna be so ugly she blinds me. Then I won't see she's a dog and we'll live happpily ever after."

Besa me mucho

Click here: YouTube - cinema paradiso

I tried to resist the sentimentality of this movie when I first watched it years ago. But today each time I watched this montage it broke my heart. Why did I cry? Because I've gone soft? Because I'm mourning all my lost loves when I see this cataract of embraces? Because these couples are so breathtakingly beautiful? Because their coming together is so joyful and I imagine it's happening to me? Because I know their beauty is now faded and most of them are dead, though they live on eternally in celluloid? Because I know I'll never love like this again, never dive wholeheartedly into a carnal and spiritual reunion like this again? Or is it really the music that sneaks up and shatters me while I focus on the images? Or is it all of the above?

And who is the 3rd woman in the sequence? The brunette in extreme, extreme, ever more extreme, close up? And is she the most beautiful woman who ever was?

Eyes on the $10 trillion Prize

Click here: Michael Schwartz The Struggle Over Iraqi Oil: Eyes Eternally on the Prize

Oil fields conservatively estimated at $10 TRILLION. Does anyone seriously think Dick Cheney, the prime mover behind the war, former head of a oil company, cares about WMD's, democratization, Saddam/Al Qaeda links, or ANYthing but pirating that oil? Everything else is window dressing.

By the way, so far we've made a down payment of half a trillion $, at least, not to mention 3600 dead soldiers, 25,000 wounded, and half a million dead Iraqis. This was more than Deadeye Dick and Field Marshal von Rumsfeld originally contemplated spending in their war on the cheap, but I'm sure they aren't troubled by a little extra, unending, expense-------especially when it involves billion dollar no-bid contracts for Halliburton, Bechtel, and the rest of their cronies. That's a win-win! The longer the war goes on, the more profit for their side.

Maybe the real reason the American people haven't dragged treasonous Cheney out of his bunker and hanged him from the White House Xmas tree is that they're, at heart, oil junkies looking for a quick fix in Iraq. They just don't want to admit it to themselves and prefer to have Deadeye Dick and the "volunteer" military do the dirty work while they keep shopping.

Gonzo with the WWWWWind

Click here: Alberto's Allies Are Scarce

"Stand and deliver.......yo' dead monkey!"


"I strongly support the attorney general in this decision," Bush said. "I also appreciate the hard work and service of the U.S. attorneys who resigned. And I regret that their resignations have turned into a public spectacle."

....I'll bet you do, George.

Is this more beautiful than it is funny, or more gloriously funny than it is beautiful?

It's impossible to parody this stuff:

With all of the news unfolding, a senior Republican Senate staffer said the Bush administration understands the dynamics in play and probably knows it's difficult to "defend someone when you don't know where the dice is going to roll." This aide likened the current administration posture toward Gonzales to its earlier positions on beleaguered officials such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Supreme Court nominee and White House counsel Harriet Miers.
"This is standard White House operating procedure," the aide said. "Defend one of their own for an extended period of time during which they become extremely damaged to the point where they are beyond repair. Then, choose after that period of time to remove them."



"Alberto Gonzalez, you lyin' bootlick, you bin damaged to the point where you are beyond repair. Where you gonna go?"

"Ummmmm, will they still take me at Disney World?"

She died with her asskickers on

Click here: John Nichols | Remembering Molly Ivins & her last column


"Enough is enough. ....We are the deciders."

"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."

I know Molly went to hell 'cause she'd be bored in heaven: no GOP ass to kick up there.

What----Me worry?

Click here: William Kristol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This guy was on TV again this morning, grinning his cheshire grin, talking about how terrible the Demos were for "not supporting the troops" (the same tired old argument and slam Chickenhawks have been using for 5 years, the same one they used to prolong the Nam abortion), how unpatriotic they are to question W's latest "surge." What a sociopathic monster he is.

He's one of the architects of this disaster yet he still claims the moral high ground, tries to identify himself with the very troops he's killing. He not only lives in a Neocon bubble, he was BORN (daddy Irving was father of the movement) in it. Oh, and by the way, he has, of course, never gone NEAR risking his OWN neck in the military. He just stands on the sidelines making a great living urging 21 year olds to THEIR futile deaths.

Note in Wikipedia that he went on TV supporting a 2005 Bush speech w/o mentioning that he helped WRITE it.

Why is this man still smiling? Because he's completely out of his mind? He's the Alfred E. Neuman of the Far Right.

Weirdly, this maggot was once Quayle's Chief of Staff and was known as Quayle's Brain. Is that like being the "Smart Angel"? At least the mobs beat and hanged Mussolini, shot Ceaucescu, beheaded Louis XVI, hounded Pinochet's last days. Will the heat ever be turned on scum like Kristol? I think not. Maybe THAT'S why his grin is indelible. He knows he's got a platinum franchise.

Now take a look at this quote from the 1/14/07 Washington Post:

For all that, some allies said, the administration was doomed to bipartisan criticism regardless of how it handled the review and presentation. "You've got a Democratic Party that doesn't believe in Bush, doesn't believe in the war," said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. "You've got a Republican Party that thinks Bush cost them the election. They could have done it better, but I'm not sure it would've made much difference."
Yet even Kristol, a strong proponent of sending more troops, expressed aggravation at the White House for not showing more urgency about getting Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus dispatched to the region as the new Middle East commander. Asked why it hasn't happened, Kristol said: "Because it's the Bush administration. Maybe you haven't noticed - they're not the most competent at executing the war."

You gotta give Kristol major chutzpah points: He is instrumental in creating the disaster in the first place and then stands on the sidelines and criticizes both those who continue to perpetrate the catastrophic success and those who are trying to fix it.

When will they ever learn?

This "volunteer force" which gets shunted over to Iraq 3 & 4 times w/o scarcely any in-between rest is heavily composed of Red State whites.* Don't you think they'd get a clue by now? Or are they genetically clueless? Impervious to realizing how much they're getting conned no matter how many times it happens? Even their brass says the Army is a broken force or nearly so. Yet Bush's "surge" would force exhausted vets BACK to Baghdad even quicker. And would extend the tours of those already there.

At least a recent poll of the military shows that a majority now think Bush is messing up in Iraq. But sadly, the same poll says majority of the military still think he's an effective President. Unbelievable. Yet all too believable.

I heard Michael Gordon, the NY Times head war correspondent, cite those GI's who spoke to Rumsfeld in Baghdad (remember, they said they "wanted more troops") as proof that the troops on the ground disagreed with brass who said the surge was a lousy idea. But those GI's were green, newly arrived, and who knows LESS than newly arrived trainees? NO ONE, believe me, NO ONE. It says terrible things about who Gordon is that he would even cite such a bogus source. It was clearly staged to make Rumsfeld look good, though nothing can make Rummy look good.

It's so sick how truly indifferent Bush/Cheney/Condi are to the plight of their own loyal troops. Think of how Bush partied and deserted in Alabam while others died in his place in Nam. He's certainly consistent. And by the way, NeoCon invasion-hatchers like the always grinning Bill Kristol (not Billy, Bill) had the nerve to say this morning (on Meet the Press, I think it was) that we needed more troops, which is to say, escalation. I'm SURE Kristol has never put his own ass on the line. Not that being a vet is much better: that would just be McCain, who also calls for more troops and is insane. Or Powell, who lied us into war and knew better.

Much of the country is just stunned that these ghouls will be at the helm for two more years. Of course, media chickenhawks like Kristol will be on the airwaves till death do they part, no matter how many times they're proved liars and hideously wrong.



*nobody expects the illegal-alien Latinos who are trading military service for citizenship to get a clue-----Baghdad probably looks good to them after evading Guatemalan death squads and making it across the Arizona border.

Senator Tim "Stroker" Johnson to Lead Spending Subcommittee

Click here: Senator Tim Johnson to Lead Spending Subcommittee

Brain death might prove an advantage in the Senate. Look how well Jesse Helms did w/o one. It's been years since Texas & Oklahoma sent a Senator with a brain to Washington.

Exit Sesame!

Click here: Levin at Brookings: Redeploy/Withdraw

Two fantasies: One, that a President who has been 100% incompetent up till now will somehow being able to stuff the tiger back into the bag if he just has the right info and advisers. He's the least equipped person in the world to fix this catastrophe. It would be like asking Hitler to fix the Holocaust.

Two: That the Iraqi gov't is "fiddling" and depending too much on us and if we show it it can't do that that it will get down to brass tacks and bidness and rule properly. The "gov't" is a Potemkin tissue created by us. When we stop propping it up the vendetta-crazed Arabs we have unleashed will rip each other even more bloodily than they already are in order to settle who runs this godforsaken patch of sand and its oil. Thing about that is, Sunni nations like Syria & Saudi Arabia will not stand idly by while Sadr's Shiites, aided by Iran, flay the Sunnis. At that point you'll not just have the civil war you have now, you'll have a full-fledged melee involving the whole Middle East. Nice work, Decider in Chief!

Seal Beach Swap Meet

MOMENTO MORI: BACHELOR SUNDAY AT THE SEAL BEACH SWAP MEET

The swapmeet on Sunday, 11/12/06, was the first ever sponsored by King's Bicycle Shop on PCH and was deemed a success by all. Next one to be held in 6 mos.

Meanwhile, the bike gypsies were all buzzing about the NEXT BIG VENUE: the San Francisco Swapmeet next weekend. Too far for me. Turns out there's a Cal Coastal bike subculture that's migrant. Who knew?

The Sunday before, 11/7, was the San Diego Velodrome swapmeet. I actually got up at 430 AM and tried for it. Got as far as San Clemente at 8 AM, kinda gave up, stopped for pleasant breakfast at Tommy's. Strange to see the aging Republican householders dining there. This turned out to be a good rehearsal for this weekend's venture.....

By the way, you do see your own bikes coming and going when you mix in this. I managed a fast last minute sale in the rain at the 2006 Easter Encino Velodrome swapmeet ($1100 in 10 mins, yes! the rained out place looked closed and empty when I got there) and darned if one of my sale bikes, a gorgeous custommade Simonetti with topend Campy and Dura-Ace bits, wasn't on sale at Seal Beach. I had never expected to see it again.

Stunning bike but always a bit too big for me. Guy I bought it from was 6'4" with legs to his armpits. I shoulda known better than to buy it myself but it was just too pretty and too cheap. I always felt teetery on it and sold it before it killed me.

A guy and his towering son-in-law came over to my booth and we started talking about the Simonetti. The dad-in-law says that that the welder, not Simonetti himself but a guy surnamed Howard, was now in prison for child molestation. So maybe that's why Simonettis ceased to be made a few years ago.

And who knew that a pedophile could also work such wonders? Though it IS true that Thomas Edison was one, and they didn't call him the Wizard of West Orange for his way with 5 year olds.

Anyhow, the son-in-law, all 6'6" of him, said he was getting into fixies (fixed gear bikes, for you lay people). And I told him that Simonetti was made for him, had a heavenly wheelset and crank, and that he owed it to himself to snare it before the seller closed down shop and loaded it into his van and trucked it up to next week's San Francisco swapmeet.

The seller was asking $700, which was reasonable. I told the kid to offer a close of the day $600 or at least get his phone number. I assured the pair that even if they tired of the bike, they could easily recoup their investment on Ebay either by selling the complete rig or by parting it out and selling the components. So motivated, the kid went over, spoke to the seller, but came back only with the phone number. He didn't realize that, in some cosmic sense, the bike had been custommade, albeit by a molestor, for him.

As for my own fixie I sold it to a brawny lad named Clint. He kept coming back, staring at the beautifully made steel frame with its pearlescent paint. He had about $140 less than I wanted for the bike. But he kept coming back, staring at, borrowing another $10 here, another $20 there, from friends. Finally I sold it to him for $100 less than I was originally asking. I knew he was the perfect buyer for the bike and that he would prize it for years. And meeting in the middle about price is what swapmeets are for.

The guy from King's Bikeshop who ran the swapmeet was a friend of Clint';s and took vicarious pleasure in the sale. He had very kindly given me an excellent sales slot in the lot even though I got there a bit late. I was able to park my bike-filled junker right next to my slot, which made things 10 times easier for me.

And I had made my peace with selling the bike. I had rarely used it myself because I've got a garage full of them, had had 4 flu's and walking pneumonia during the previous winter/spring season, and the deserving machine had rarely come up on my rotation. It was like a lovely, neglected harem girl in a huge seraglio, a seraglio run by nonagenarian Sheik. It almost never got a shot to show its chops. All of a sudden its life was going to get very busy.

Fixies are all the rage these days. I saw two or three couples on fixies besides the usual male loners. Yes, not just the hubbies but pretty young wives had their single geared rigs. This is something I've never seen in older married cyclists. There are a few middleage wives whose husbands talk them into riding highend road bikes. And a few more who ride tandems----maybe just to keep track of the old man on Sunday mornings. And the nice thing about tandems is that the man can do more of the work. But I've NEVER seen an older couple on fixies.

These cyclists wandered into swapmeet in a steady stream from their journeys south on PCH. Presumably many were headed down the long stretch of Route 1 that skirts the Bolsa Chica wetlands just south of Seal Beach. It's almost unbroken by traffic lights and other intersections because it's bordered by the lagoon to the east and the beach to west and so is ideal for cyclists.

PCH isn't always a paradise for cyclists. The section traversing Pacific Palisades and Malibu, for example, is scenic and looks inviting to unwary roadbikers. But the inland cliffs and coastal beachhouses and parking crowd it on both sides. It scarcely has shoulders. It's jammed with drunks, dopers, sun dazed surfers, wouldbe Paris Hiltons, and menopausal males with Porsches and 'Vettes and SLK's. In short, it's a deathtrap.

Just a few months ago one drunk took out two yuppies, including a bank vice president, in one fell swoop along a shoulderless, scenic, becliffed, stretch of death. Turns out that roadbiking is not only beautiful, it can be dangerous. I spent some time at the swapmeet swapping injury stories with bike veterans.

Clint, for example, told me that he had broken both clavicles and most of the bones in his face in various mishaps. I showed off my own broken shoulder and joked about the IQ points I must have lost when I conked my noggin on the cement of the Dockweiler bikepath after I hit a patch of sand at 20 MPH. I love wearing those little flip brim caps, but anyone in his right mind wears a brain bucket when he rides. Maybe that's why I bought a beautiful, slightly used, red helmet from the team racer in the slot next to mine. The kid was a national criterium champ and had plenty of highend components & accessories for sale at decent prices. This is the norm for professional racers who are paid modestly but who get great, free, equipment each new season from their team sponsors. They make ends meet by selling off the older and extra loot.

I kidded for a while with a geezer on an aluminum Vitus. He was as dry and wrinkled and tough as pemmican. He straddled his bike the whole time we talked. It was clear he practically lived on it. "How many miles a week do you ride?" "200 or so," he said. "Wow," I said. "You've got better knees than I. How old ARE you?" He was coy, only admitting to be north of 60. North, hell. He was up past the Arctic Circle.

He went on and on about his bike, a pretty purple anodized frame that was state of the art about 20 years ago. He said he got his used, with expensive new shifters and derailleurs, for a mere $400. He went on and on about the new White Industry hubs he had added the previous week. The hubs alone cost him $350. Then he segued, exhaustively, exhaustingly, into his SECOND bike, better than the Vitus. What was it again? Oh yeah, a red carbon something or other. I'll remember exactly what in a second. As he droned on and on I realized I had been in the sun for hours and was probably going to get a terrible headache a few hours later, long about NOW as I am writing this. I'm going to get two aspirin and I'll be right back. There. It's not just roadshock I've got to guard again. My big noggin and giant forehead can soak up way too much sun now that the best of my hair is gone.

The bike geezer was still talking, I scarcely knew about what. His image wavered like a mirage before me. Old men sometimes enter another time zone, where it is permissible to say 10,000 words where 100 might do. Half the time, they don't even remember what they're saying and threaten to repeat after pounding you to a pulp with the first interminable barrage. He mentioned that he not only biked 200 miles a week, but also went to lots of spinning classes. Hmmm, I thought. His body doesn't look THAT great. He would have fit right into the later stages of the Bataan Death March. Just because lots of exercise is good doesn't mean exercising ALL THE TIME is better. Half the time he probably doesn't remember that he's ALREADY exercised that day so he JUST KEEPS DOING IT. No doubt about it, the lovable old goat was true geezer. I began to wonder if I were a geezer, too. Not quite yet, but getting there. I'm bald enough to be a geezer but maybe too beefy to fully qualify. Maybe after a bout with cancer and chemo I'll be properly wizened and gain full membership to the club.

Eventually, finally, I managed to pry myself loose from the ancient mariner and took one more circuit around the other booths, looking for bargains. I had $800 in crisp 100's in my wallet and couldn't resist spreading a little of it around. I bought a pair of $200 sunglasses for $20, a $70 lycra jersey for $20, and an $85 rear derailleur for $25. To top it off I needed more gear for my giant, sun ray absorbing, chrome dome. I got two flipbrims for $5. You'd think this was nothing special, but these flipbrims were made of lycra. I've never seen lycra flips-----they're always made of cotton. So that right there was an exciting find for this geezer-to-be. And then I paid $8 for a sweat wicking black lycra skullcap that made me, with my new sunglasses, look exactly like a parolee just released from Atascadero. As I admired myself in the King's Bike Shop window, I thought: "I've never looked scarier." And I got something for nothing as well. Tony, the kid who sold me the caps, gave me a cotton flipbrim for free. To each his own gimme cap. Free stuff, I don't care how jaded or rich you are, is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, or at least until you get the NEXT gimme.

The drive back home, north on the 405, was speedy and uneventful. This can only be true on Sunday mornings these days. The rest of the time it's gridlock. Stoptime. Even the San Diego Freeway deserves a rest, a sabbath, but this sabbath is growing deli thin.

When I got home I was unloading the booty from my junker. A very young mother and her 3 year old approached. They were coming from the children's park at the end of my street. Both had huge cataracts of curls tumbling down their heads. I said, "You two win the curl contest!" She smiled and opened the door of her Veedub for her tiny son. "Hard as it is to believe, I used to have them, too." "Yup, it is," she said, cheerfully yet brutally. And drove away with her tiny charge.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ve crossed deeper into Yeats’s “country of old men” than I want to know or admit.

----END----

Oh Swinger Where Art Thou?

Click here: Renewal of 1960s Marina Blocks Coveted Views and Irks Boaters - New York Times

It's amusing to think of those swinging bachelors circa 1968 still rotting in their one bedroom condos, collecting Social Security, wondering what the fuck happened. Of course, some might say: how different are they from you, Doug?

Best to let the reader answer that, but I'll go on for a moment. I'm more like Bunuel's Simon of the Desert. I was ever the broke hippie. These guys had a primitive, Playboy sense of entitlement and for a couple decades it seemed to be working for them. Or maybe they have ALWAYS been grotesque, deluded, losers and they just never realized it, being the grotesque, deluded, losers they were & are.

They seem the spawn of Hugh Hefner's konsumerist hedonistic vision. I guess it's a vision that, though patently hollow & sterile, still seemed viable as long as their bodies were young. But now that they are old they are doubly grotesque.

Am I just IMAGINING these wild and crazy guys are moldering away on Fiji and Tahiti and Panai Ways? Presumably they themselves would have us believe they're still perfectly plausible & valid. They don't really still hang out at the bar of the Baja Cantina, do they, hoping to pick up myopic Euro tourists?

A few successfully hustled themselves out of the Marina and into Brentwood or Bel Aire. But surely they remained, at heart, hustlers and swingers. So if they're now putative family men, what kind of family men are they? There may be a novel there, but would anyone care to read it? I think the subject was already done 30 years ago in Save the Tiger, the old Jack Lemmon film about the burned out middleage-crisis businessman chasing the young chick and an alternative lifestyle. Oddly, Jack Lemmon almost 20 years before that played the young swinging LA bachelor in Under the Yum Yum Tree. But he was more innocent and endearing and less predatory than the real thing. Also amusing to think that his neighbors in Billy Wilder's The Apartment took him for a swinging bachelor when he was actually just an exploited schmuk. The exploitative schmuk and true predator was his boss, Fred MacMurray. The difference between Fred MacMurray (circa 1960) and the aging lost uprooted swingers in the Marina is that Fred M had his place in society. He was an exec, working fulltime in company, he lived in a bedroom suburb with a standard issue wife & kids, AND he preyed upon his employees in a droit de seigneur (sp?) mode. In short, he had a formidable platform for his not-so-secret predations.

There used to be a health club on a tiny spit of land where the Marina Freeway petered out at Culver Blvd. It disappeared years ago to make way for the new freeway extension. But in the late '90's Erin and I belonged and briefly used the pool and, once, the sauna. Why once? Because it was crawling with exactly the pervy lost middleaged Marina creeps I'm talking about. There was always a jagged vibe about that joint. My wallet was stolen from the lockerroom there. Someone quickly slammed charges on the credit cards before I realized it was missing and cut them off. And when the place shut down to make way for the freeway, the proprietor did it without warning, absconding with the membership fees which many of us had paid in advance. There is so much about the Marina that is not worth mourning.

I think of the actors' manager and putative movie producer who had a condo by the water in the early '80's. He got the place cheap because the previous tenant had quietly committed suicide in there and hadn't been discovered until days later, when neighbors smelled something was amiss. It had to be the stink of his bloated body which told the world he was gone because he had no friends or relatives to notice his absence.

This manager, we'll call him Greg, roomed with a huge former Jets lineman and sometime actor named Tony. Tony, a cheerful and pathological liar, would lure girls he found at the, yes, Baja Cantina, back to the condo with promises of coke. The one true thing he told them was about the coke. He and Greg really did have coke. I remember being over there one night when Greg was feeding one of his clients, a 14 year old moderately famous child actor, line after line. The boy has somehow managed to grow up relatively unscathed and is now a successful, middleaged, TV actor-director.

And what has become of Greg and Tony? They're no longer in the Marina. I saw Tony playing a thug in a Sopranos episode a couple years ago. He must weigh 375 pounds. Greg went on to produce some very bad exploitation flicks. I think he had a wife and kid for a time. Maybe he still does. You can take the hustlers out of the Marina but you can't take the hustle out of the hustlers.

Code Blue: Do NOT resuscitate

Washington Post headline, 11/5/06: Bush Cites Oil As Reason to Stay in Iraq

So the real answer to the question of why we invaded Iraq is: "What I say." Not what I said yesterday or last year or 4 years ago. Not what I will say tomorrow or even later today. Not what anyone else in my administration may be saying now, or said then, or will say in future. "What I say."

Also, keep in mind that "I am the decider" and I'll be making the decisions around here, though I won't be taking responsibility for them. Ever. That'll be up to whatever poopscooper's elected next. Real cowboys never muck their own stables. Horse shit happens.

Finally, pay no attention to what the pinko press sez; I'm doing a heckuva job. And pay no attention tomorrow when the Army, Navy, and Air Force Times all publish editorials advocating that Rummy resign. Rummy's doing a heckuva job, too. He's not going to stop running the Pentagon & the war-which-is-not-a-war until his job is pried from his cold dead hand. So say I. Until I say otherwise. Which might be sooner than I think.

See, it's like this: All the military knows is the facts on the ground. But mine is not a fact-based empire. That's for punkassed policy wonks. I create reality, I don't answer to it, monitor it, or otherwise stay in touch with it. The only power I answer to is a Higher One: Jesus K. Turdblossom. And also Dick C. Christ. And Whoever Else is doing my homework and taking my tests. WWJD. That's what I do. I let go and let W. And so should you.

And when all else fails, blame it on the black secretary. That's what Perle and Adelman are doing. Eventually, when we pile up enough blame, we may just have to hang her from the big apple tree in the Rose Garden. Jes' like we're hanging Saddam, which verdict we've managed to bring in just ahead of the election deadline. But that's just a coinkydink: A final desperate maneuver to keep the sky from falling on Tuesday. Because Homeland Security has set the Threat Level at the highest, CODE BLUE. All my shit is hitting the fan and it won't be long before I'm THROUGH.

George and Jean-Michael's Excellent Adventure

6/16/06

George & Jean-Michael's Excellent Adventure

W sees a documentary by Jacques Cousteau’s son Jean-Michel and shazam! he goes from Destroyer of National Forests and the Arctic Ice Pack to… Savior of Northwest Hawaii!

So have Cousteau documentaries been the missing ingredient all these years? If only he’d seen a Cousteau documentary on Al Qaeda in the Summer of 01! He woulda taken action and the WTC would still be standing! And imagine a Cousteau docu on hurricane threats to the Gulf Coast! Instead of strumming his guitar in the summer of 05, George would have strengthened levees, reformed FEMA, and saved N’awlins.

And would a Cousteau documentary on Saddam have been too much to ask for? Maybe. After all, Cousteau is a wetworld filmmaker and Iraq is dry, VERY dry. Still, maybe it could have been shot from the vantage of Saddam’s swimming pools. Anyhow, if it HAD been shot, and W HAD seen it, then the whole ramp up to war would have gone very differently:

Flashback to September 2002, the Oval Office: “We’ve got to go in there fast, Mr. President, and hit them camel jockeys hard! Shock and awe, shock and awe, shock and awe!”

“Hook ‘em horns, eh, Dick? But I just saw a PBS special and….”

“PBS??! PBS!!!!! That’s commie propaganda, Mr. President! You can’t be watchin’ PBS?! Are you sure this wasn’t a dream? All the TV’s in the White House are locked on Fox.”

“This was a CD, Dick. Cousteau dropped by and showed it himself. According to the pretty movie, Saddam is a paper tiger, the WMD’s are a figment of the Neocon imagination, and Iraq will be a quagmire.”

“Quagmire, Mr. President? You don’t know the MEANING of quagmire.”

“That’s true, Dick, but you’d best not use that tone with me.”

“You’re right. I’m getting very VERY upset. Just a second. Let’s have Karl drop in. You need to talk to a cooler head than mine. Why, I’m so steamed I’m about to blow you away with my quail gun.”

Karl Rove enters. “Mr. President, whatever you saw in that Cousteau documentary, it’s a lie. We MUST invade Iraq. It’s the only chance we have to win the 2002 Congressional elections.”

“But the documentary had pretty pictures.”

“Are you aware, Mr. President, that Jean-Michel Cousteau is FRENCH?”

“Hush yo’ mouf, Turdblossom.”

“French. Just like his father before him.”

“French. Dang.”

“The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape, Mr. President.”

“What can I do, Karl? My brain’s teeming with French lies! They’re eatin’ me alive!”

“You’re going to need an exorcism, Mr. President. We’ll begin with aversion therapy. You’ll be made to watch Canal Plus 24/7 while being force-fed on brie, camembert, hors d’oeuvres, petit fours, and pate. Then Anne Coulter will give you an electro-sulfuric-acid enema while jamming your head in a bidet and thumping your ass with the Paris phonebook.”

“Anne Coulter? Hmmm. Sounds AWFUL SEXY. … In a witchy, bitchy, skinny, hateful hag kind of a way.”

“Then you will be made to sign a document promising never to watch PBS or Frenchie documentaries again.”

“Halleluia, Karl. I AM saved! Matter of fact, my brain feels washed in the blood of the lamb right now! Them stinky French lies are ALL GONE. I am ready once again to be the WAR PRESIDENT and do what Jesus woulda done: Bomb Baghdad. I’m ready to wage perpetual war on pretty much EVERYthing: Saddam, the environment, the social net, New Orleans.”

“You aren’t faking just to get out of the aversion therapy, are you Mr. President?”

“Honest to god no, Karl! I would have LOVED to get a sulfuric acid enema from Anne Coulter. I’ve dreamed about that for years. Matter of fact, I’d like one in any case. Send her over!”

“But what will Laura say, Mr. President.”

“She’ll say what she’s been thinking but not saying for years, that I’m full of it and that an enema is the best thing that could ever happen to me!”

“I’m getting Coulter on speed dial right now, Mr. President! The sooner you’re purged of all that ails you, the sooner you can get back to saving America from the French, the environment, AND PBS!”

Welllll, Ah'll be plumb neoconsternated!!!!

Wellllll, Ah'll be plumb neoconsternated!

Did you see 60 Minutes tonight? It being Memorial Day tomorrow, Mike Wallace followed the lives of some Iraq war vets with missing limbs and shrapnel in their brains. God love 'em for being so optimistic despite their horrific injuries. But there's something not a little grotesque about (octagenarian? nonagenarian?) Mike asking vets who are literally missing chunks of their brains and who can barely talk if they still believe in W's mission in Iraq. They said, with some difficulty, that they did. Of course, that's what W says too, and W has trouble talking, and thinking, as well.

The girl who got a chunk of her brain blown away also said she liked the self she is now, AFTER her IED, better than the she she was BEFORE the debraining..... OK, OK, I'm not being fair. She sounds and looks in unbelievably (is that the operative word?) good shape. But you shoulda seen the photo of her immediately after her wound, with half her skull missing..... Nothing like a lobotomy to help you cheerfully stand (or, if you're in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, sit...) your ground and stay the course.

Here's W issuing his first mealymouthed mea culpa of the catastrophic success: "Not everything has turned out as we had hoped." No shit, Sherlock! And he goes on to say, "No question that the Iraq war has, you know, created a sense of consternation here in America.." Yes SIR, Mr. President. I'm catastrophically consternated over here. I and my fellow countrymen are consternated up the wazoo. "I mean, when you turn on your TV screen and see innocent people die day in and day out, it affects the mentality of our country." Espeshually de mentality of our yung troopers who hab gotten der brains blowed out, massah. He added: "I can understand why the American people are troubled by the war in Iraq. I understand that. But I also believe the sacrifice is worth it and it's necessary." Yup. So long as somebody ELSE is making that sacrifice, it's worth it. But how would you be feeling if Jenna got HER gin-soaked partygirl brains blowed out?

Hell, at least Frontman George is facing the glare of the cameras. Where are the REAL architects of this disaster, the NeoCon Gangstahs Rummy & Cheney & Wolfy & Feith & Perle & Kristol & Libby & ? And most especially did I say Cheney, our embunkered de facto CEO? Does that guy ever take responsibility for ANY of his thousand fuckups? Or does he just go out and shoot somebody when things don't turn out as predicted? Nothing like a nice tipsy walk in the country.....with a loaded shotgun.....and suckups within close close range....to clear the troubled NeoCon mind....

Pump it up! Pump it up!

4/27/06

Pump it up! Pump it up!

I’m a tad puzzled by Fearless Leader's promise to probe gasoline price-fixing. Will he be performing a live proctoscopic exam during a State of the Union address to see how far he can get his head up his own ass? Given how well oiled and stretched his spincter is from constant penetration by oil execs, and given what a pinhead he is, it should be very easy for him to get all up inside hisself, poking around in the blackness, the pipes, the corruption, the stench, trying to find who or what is ripping off John Q. Public at the pump.

Given the love Dick Cheney and Chevron Tanker Condoleeza Rice bear for the oil industry, I think it only fair that they, too, should stick their heads up their rear exits to see if they can find the oily offenders. Maybe, if Dick searches hard enough after penetrating himself, he can find those nasty, greedy, inept no-bid Halliburton contractors that ate $100 million plus to fix a critical Iraq pipeline while accomplishing nothing. Nothing. Nothing but lining their own pockets. Maybe, if Dick is really determined, he can smoke the oil execs who helped determine, and undermine, federal energy policy back in 2001 out of their, and/or his, holes. Maybe, if Dick rummages around hard enough inside that bottomless black hole of Dickdom, he can find the rotten bastards who have scoffed so ferociously over the past 5 1/2 years at any attempt to conserve oil, make domestic energy use more inefficient, impose stricter MPG limits on the auto industry, encourage alternative energy sources, and reduce dependency on foreign oil.

I'm frankly worried about the President's use of the word "probe." Everybody knows it's inverts and aliens that favor probes. What if the President himself has been probed by aliens and replaced by a gay alien? --Because it is impossible to imagine the REAL President Chimp inveighing against greedy oil industry execs. He IS a greedy oil exec. True, he was a complete failure as greedhead of his own, bankrupt, drilling firm. Just as he is a complete failure as President. But that doesn't mean he can't successfully drill himself.

After all, he has successfully drilled the rest of us. He's drilled the American people, he's drilled New Orleans, he's drilled Iraq, and as God is his witness, he will drill the Alaskan Wilderness and as much of the rest of the environment as he can get his drill bit into if it kills him! He’s going to drill the whole World, including himself, or die trying!

Am I remembering wrong, or did W say, at his second inauguration: "Ask not what your country for you, ask what you can do for the oil corporations"? And did he not add: "A filling station divided against itself cannot stand"?

W, a coke addict----and once an addict, always an addict---reminds us that we are all addicted to oil. But I'm not sure I understand what he's suggesting we do about it. Should we shift to positive addictions to Jesus, exercise, and oil, as he did? But we're already addicted to oil and we want to get off the stuff! Oh sure, it's OK for him to be addicted to oil, he can afford it. He takes his counsel straight from The Lord. I'm sure on more than one occasion he's asked: "What would Jesus be addicted to?" And Lord Jesus has told him oil. What could BE more Christian and American than oil? Jesus himself probably has oil, the sweet light low sulfur stuff, running through his veins.

I'll bet when George drinks communion wine, that wine is high octane unleaded. The body of George himself is surely nothing but petroleum and petroleum based products. He sounds like oil, he smells like oil, he looks like oil. He must BE oil. Oil. This is the body and the blood of Our Lord, who died and became organic matter which was subjected, deep underground, to stupendous geological heat and pressure over millions of years and became black gold so that we could be delivered from the bondage of horse-drawn transportation. Same goes for Condi and Dick. They’re the very embodiment of Oil. Oil in three persons, Oily Trinity. So there's only one solution to the oil crisis. Conduct exploratory drilling on all three. They must hold billions of barrels of the stuff. Greatest untapped reserves on the planet.

Now there are some as say that Dick and W are America’s last great remaining unregulated psychosociopathic wildernesses, and that Condi is America’s last great American virgin oil wilderness, and that within them lie great wide open free spaces full of the freedom and free trade and free markets that evildoers hate. There are some as say it would be an outrage to desecrate their oily, oil-based, freedom with derricks and pipelines and big ol’ leaks. But I say that there is nothing freer than oily leaks and that leaking is what this White House does best. True, it’s not OK for others to leak. In fact, if anybody but our Fearless Leaders leak, it’s treason. But if Dick and W and Karl have to leak in order to save us from whistleblowers and covert CIA agents and oil-haters, then God love ‘em!

So leakage in the Bush/Cheney/Rice National Oil-life Refuge will not be an ecological disaster, it will be a beautiful thing. Once again we must ask ourselves: What would Jesus have leaked? And the answer is self-evident: oil. He would have leaked more oil than a ’72 Pinto, he would have leaked oil over the Constitution, he would have leaked it over the caribou feeding and breeding grounds, he would have spewed burning oil and natural gas into the atmosphere until it melted Greenland and sank Florida. Jesus would have done whatever he had to to spread the Gospel of Oil over the wide world, because oil is life and oil is love and Jesus is eternal life and eternal love and eternal oil. Yes, Jesus IS oil. Halleluia and Halliburton! Amen, brother! Feels so nice we better say it twice. Feels so nice we better eat it on Rice. Halleluia and Halliburton! Praise the Lord and pass the petroleum!

IS Irony Dead?

I loved that Colbert ripped all those complacent journalists. Let the corporate media whores writhe on what they thought was to be a night of cozying up to their #1 john. It's the least they deserve. Interesting how satire is beginning to swell so large, eh? Phenomenal how we have lived to see that pathetic swaggering little cowgirl publicly ripped and humiliated thusly. And where are his ball-less shockjocks, the Rushes & O'Reilly's, now? Even that supercilious cunt William Buckley is ripping Bush/Cheney/Rummy, as are the generals.....

Remember how people said, after 9/11: "Irony is dead"?

How did that happen? Around 1970, Time Magazine said God is dead, or at least asked "Is God dead?" By 2001 certain morons were insisting "Irony is dead."

By the way, if there is a God, surely he/she/it is deeply ironic (as well as vengeful, compassionate, indifferent, cruel, forgiving, and with a crueler, kinder, more hilarious & ripping & healing sense of humor than we can begin to imagine). Cosmic joke indeed.

I think I'd like Jesus better if he could come up with a scintilla of irony. But no, he's always groaning and moaning and showboatin' on that cross...... What would Jesus have said at the banquet dais? "George, why hath thou forsaken me, you oily petrol-head"?

Hang down your head Tom DeLay

Click here: He's Gone

"I AM the Federal Government." --Tom DeLay

Oh Tom,
Poor Tom,
You've hung yourself in the House Cloakroom
And we're so glad you're gone.

Strum your geetars, boys!

Hang down your head Tom DeLay
Hang down your head & cry,
Hang down your head Tom DeLay
Poor boy we're bound to die.......laffing
At your lying Texas ass!

"I golfed with him in Scotland
I sold my vote for gold
I'm going the way of Abramoff
I'm played out and must fold.

"In my next life I will lobby
Just like was done to me
I'll lobby for a hobby
But won't lobby for free

"If you should want a
Congressman
to sell his vote to you
Come see me over on K Street
And I'll see what I can do."

The Bush in the Bubble

1/10/06

Click here: William Rivers Pitt: Trapped Like a Rat

The King funeral may be the ONE time during W's entire administration that he has to publicly sit and listen to the very truths he constantly avoids and denies. What does it say about our broadcast and print pundits that their reaction, in the main, to this candor is that it was rude and unseemly? These hairdos aren't in the business of illumination but obfuscation. Better be polite to W than, for example, remind him he strummed while an American city drowned. Better be grateful he attended the funeral at all, however grudgingly and at the last minute, no matter that he did so in search of photo ops with a constituency he has devastated, than mention that the dead woman AND her man were once hounded & spied on by J Edgar Hoover's FBI with the same illegal zeal that W's NSA is now employing in spying on thousands of innocent American citizens. Better mouth Civil Rights platitudes than mention that the Bush Administration is doing everything it can to eviscerate the very Civil Rights MLK died for. Better avoid the topic of the war altogether than remind the Bush in the Bubble that he is pursuing a war policy as bloody, bankrupt, and bellicose as the Viet Nam meatgrinder the nonviolent Dr. King inveighed against. Better step lightly around the topic of economic injustice even as the Republican Congress installs yet another round of tax cuts for the rich and rips new holes in the social net. Better turn up the air conditioning rather than acknowledge the threat of Global Warming... If we admit it's there, we might have to try to do something to save ourselves.

No wonder these same pundits, speaking in chorus with the GOP, seem to think there's nothing worse than an angry Democrat, be she/he Hillary or Howard. There's so much to be angry about. From anger comes the truth this country needs to hear and act upon if it is to survive. It's the last thing Bushcons want to hear----in ANY context. It's the first thing they are working to silence.

Chene Chene Cheneyed

12/27/05

Chene Chene Cheneyed

The day before Christmas was a very good day for Ebenezer Scrooge McCheney. He cast the deciding vote in the United States Senate which insured that Tiny Tims would not get their lifesaving operations, that widows would not get their mites, that aspiring college students would not get their loans, and that the social net would be torn to shreds. He came back to the bunker to find Cratchett Libby, his pathetic clerk, shivering on his stool and looking desperate to go home.

“I hear Fitzgerald’s got you in deep doodoo,” sneared McCheney.

“Nothing I can’t handle, Mr. Vice President.”

“You gutless canary. You’re planning on turning state’s evidence in order to save your own sorry ass, aren’t you.”

“I’d never do that, sir. I’ll always stay with the message.”

“You know what we do to squealers around here?”

“Loyalty is primary, sir.”

“You’re a lying worm. Say one thing about me and that Plame witch and I’ll Gitmoize you AND your family till Habana freezes over. That little cripple of yours will be waterboarding till he’s 90…….if he lives that long!”

“Yes sir, Mr. Vice President.”

“I suppose you’re hoping to go home early to your family, though there are still insurgents to crush, dissenting liberal voices to still, taxes for the rich to be cut, news stories to be spun, and Alaskan wildernesses to be desecrated.”

“Oh no sir!”

“Lie lie lie! That’s all you do, Cratchett. That’s why you’re my bunboy…. Now get the hell out of here and don’t darken my bunker door till 7 AM tomorrow!” And poor Cratchett Libby grabbed his thin tattered coat and scuttled out of the bunker into the howling winter winds of the nation’s capital.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” McCheney thought to himself. “Shall I go upstairs to the Vice Presidential mansion and spend it with that manly Lynn woman who claims to be my wife? And with that diesel dyke daughter of mine? Put presents around the tree? Bah humbug! Families…..and feelings…..are for weaklings, not for masters of the universe!! My country, and more specifically my oil cronies, need me in my bunker, at the helm of the nation….and the world!” And as he spat this out, he felt a zapping twinge in what was left of his heart, as if his pacemaker had briefly shorted out. It was an intimation of mortality, and it gave him pause. He suddenly felt the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. Who would watch over the nation while he slept? He couldn’t trust the Boy King to do the job. Look what happened on 9/11. My Pet Goat indeed! Still, McCheney felt fantastically tired, as if all the Machiavellian striving of four decades was weighing down on him. He lay down on the bunk in his situation room and instantly fell asleep. No sooner had he done so than he was awakened by the ghastly sounds of rattling chains. Standing before him in the darkened bunker was the ghoulish figure of his old boss, now long dead, Milhouse McNixon.

“Milhouse!” gasped McCheney. “Can it be you?!”

“You know it is, Chromedome,” said Milhouse. “I am the ghost of Vice Presidents Past, come to kick your scheming ass and make you sorry you were ever born!”

“Why bear me ill will? I never testified against you!”

“No you didn’t. You used my impeachment and disgrace as an opportunity to advance yourself in my successor’s administration! Is that what you call loyalty!!!!? Mark my words, the time will come when YOU will wear these chains!”

“I can’t wear chains! I can barely drag my own weight around without getting a fifth heart attack!”

“Open up your ears and heed my warning, McCheney, or you will be doomed forever to wander in the limbo of the Federal prison system!” And the horrifying be-chained figure of Milhouse disappeared so instantly McCheney found himself wondering if he had seen him at all, or whether he had merely had a bad dream. Suddenly Milhouse reappeared and said, “And if you’re thinking I’m just a bad dream, well, think again!” And this time Milhouse disappeared for good.

McCheney, more exhausted than ever, lay his bald head down on his skimpy Army issue pillow and was instantly asleep once more. But no sooner did he fall asleep than he was awakened by a new figure, more ghastly than the last. This figure looked like a walking corpse, a corpse who resembled an American soldier blasted to shreds by an IED in Iraq, yet also resembled one of the drowned inhabitants of New Orleans, and even seemed to look like one of the First Responders crushed by the collapse of the WTC.

“Will you get the hell outta here and let a man sleep?!” McCheney snarled.

“I am the Ghost of SNAFU’s Present, doomed to walk the Earth because you screwed up in Iraq, you screwed up in New Orleans, you screwed up in New York, and you’re going to keep screwing up because you never learn!!”

“I don’t make mistakes,” sneared McCheney.

“Come, come with me!”

“I’d rather stay in my bunker. By the by, what kind of security clearance do you have?” But McCheney found himself snatched into the air by the ghostly ghoul, who flew him over the District of Columbia to the vast grounds of Walter Reed Hospital. They found themselves standing in an ICU ward, where Cratchett Libby and his wife and daughter sat anxiously beside the bed of a tiny, legless, veteran almost completely swathed in bandages.

“Can that be Cratchett?!” gasped McCheney in spite of himself.

“That CAN be Cratchett!” thundered the ghost, though the Libby’s didn’t seem to hear or see either the ghost or McCheney. “He comes here every evening after you release him from the bunker so he can visit his beloved son, Tiny Tim the war hero, who was horribly wounded by an IED in Iraq.”

“But how can that teeny tiny Tiny Tim be a soldier?” said McCheney. “He’s no more than three feet long!”

“He was almost SEVEN feet tall when he went to Iraq! But the insurgents blew big chunks of him away! And it’s all because of you and the invasion you orchestrated!!!! And now he needs an operation or he’ll die! And poor Cratchett and his wife can’t afford to save their heroic son out of the lousy wages you pay!”

“But that makes no damned sense! As a wounded vet, Tiny Tim should get all the medical care he needs for free!”

“Nonetheless, he needs a lifesaving leg-repairing operation and he won’t get it because you’re a cheap bastard who gives all the breaks to oil cronies and rich bitches!”

McCheney looked at poor Tiny Tim, swathed in bandages, trying to spoon down some horrid hospital food with his one good arm. Suddenly the poor boy squeaked, apropos nothing: “God bless us, God bless us every one.” “Not that bastard McCheney!” said Tiny Tim’s sister, who was a Goth with scary looking piercings in her brows and lips and nose and ears and god knows where else….. “He deserves to be damned, not blessed!”

But Tiny Tim held up his one good arm and said, “No, bless McCheney too, because he needs it the most, because he has a heart the size of a rabbit turd.”

And when McCheney heard this a sob was wrenched from deep within his hollow, malevolent, soul. He awoke to find himself back on his cot in his darkened bunker, with no one else in sight. Then, suddenly, Anne Coulter appeared! “Do you have a security clearance?” snarled McCheney.

“I am the Ghost of Fuckups Future, here to show you your fate.” And before McCheney could evade her grasping claws, she scooped him up and swept him over to Arlingon Cemetery.

“Look, skank, if you’re going to try to shake me up by showing me the graves of Iraq veterans, don’t bother. The other ghost already tried some of that.”

But Anne, who was skeletally thin, who, in fact, WAS a skeleton, but with long blonde locks flowing over her clavicles, merely pointed a bony finger and said, “Look! Look! For here is where you’ll find yourself if you cannot learn!” She pointed at a fresh grave with a tombstone. “Look!” shrieked the blonde wraith. “Look!”

“I’d really rather not,” said McCheney. Anne kicked him hard in the ass with her bony foot. McCheney landed on his hands and knees on the freshly dug grave. He stared at the tombstone, upon which was engraved his own name!!!!

“Ohhh, scary!” said McCheney sarcastically. “Did you think THIS was going to scare me? I know I’m going to die. But that’s not going stop me from pre-emptively invading and advocating torture and lying and letting oil corp execs dictate energy policy while I’m still alive!!!!!”

“Goddamn,” said Anne. “You ARE a hard case.” And no sooner had she said so than McCheney found himself back in his cot on Christmas morning.

“Well, I’m still kickin’,” said McCheney.

A nurse came into the bunker with a bottle of pills. “Time for your angina pills, Mr. Vice President. And Merry Christmas! Did you learn a thing or two from all those scary ghosts that visited you last night?”

“I learned nothing. I don’t need to learn anything new because I learned everything I needed to know back during the Nixon Administration.”

“But what about Cratchett Libby and Tiny Tim? Don’t you want to send them a fat goose and pay for Tiny Tim’s operation?”

“Operation schmoperation. I’ve got other priorities.”

And when Cratchett Libby came into the bunker at 7 AM sharp on the 26th of December, McCheney said: “I’m firing your lying ass. I know you’re going to squeal to Fitzgerald about Plame. Get outta my sight. You and Tiny Tim and your two witches can starve. Addington’s got your job now.”

Fortunately, Tiny Tim was indeed entitled to free medical care at Walter Reed, just as Scrooge McCheney had avowed. His legs were too blasted to sew back on, but the good news is the Army gave Tiny Tim a beautiful pair of titanium prostheses to strap to his stumps. Sadly, the bad news is Tiny Tim never learned how to use them right because the festering shrapnel in his brain pan and viscera soon killed him. And ever afterwards, it was said of Scrooge McCheney that he knew how to keep Christmas Day horrible, ruining it for millions. Nothing softened his hard little electrical heart, not up to the very moment of his death, not even when he heard that the last words out of the dying Tiny Tim’s mouth were “God bless us, God bless us every one, even that lying hateful vicious Fascist avaricious bastard McCheney.”

----FIN----

Blowtorch

So it turns out the Bushies used illegal cell phone taps back in 2003 to bust an Ohio truckdriver, Lyman Faris, who was planning to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. Wow. Now we know it's that easy won't some pedestrian commuter do it on his way to work? Just to see it happen? And was Mr. Lyman Faris in the news back in 2003? Seriously, folks: how LONG would it have taken him to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch? Two minutes? Two years? Do you think anyone would have noticed while he was blowtorching? You know, some passing motorist, or a stray suicide about him to fling himself into the river? Whew! Good thing NASA, or NSA, or whoever it was, nipped THIS ONE in the bud!

So does this mean maybe the Brooklyn Bridge is all wired up to one tiny nexus, and all you have to do is blowtorch that little joint, or even snip it with a wirecutter, and kabloom!, de whole ting tumble into de East River, mon!!!! You see how it be? It come unraveled, mon!!! All de wires go wild, like de hair on de Rasta mon!

And after de Brooklyn Bridge collapse, why, everybody in Park Slope be STUCK der! Can't get into their good jobs on Wall Street! Have to work outta PC's in der homes! Drive der wives crazy getting into de fridge in the middle of the de day! Always in der hair! Usedta be, wives could entertain milkmen, postmen, all de lovers, while hubby is in Stock Exchange, bringing home de bacon. But what will wives do now? Have to do without that extramarital love what made their marriages and drear lives tolerable! Whole borough of Brooklyn go crazy pretty soon, wit' angry frustrated horny broker wives raging at der husbands, beating on der children, mout'ing off to der mothers-in-law, ragging & raging at der rabbis.

This Mr. Lyman Faris was de very debbil with his plan to destroy de Brooklyn Bridge! And tink of all de swindlers, mon! How dey gonna sell de Bridge if de Bridge tumble down! Suddenly tens of tousandz of swindlers and conmen all over Nort' America be outta work! Whole economy tumble into de East River wit' de Bridge!!

Brokers on Wall Street be wired tight anyway, because der horny wives be beatin' on dem, be screeching day long. Den de economy take de downturn wit' loss of cash flow to de swindlers, and unbalanced brokers panic on NYSE, NASDAQ, start sellin' sellin' sellin', stock markets drop faster den de Brooklyn Bridge! Collapse of stock markets have brokers trowin' demselves into de River, brokers' wives murdering der husbands, sexually frustrated postman going postal all over de town. Pretty soon, American collapse leads to worldwide economic collapse, chaos, Armaggeddon, End of Days!

De Lion King of Judah & Abysinnia, Emperor Highly Salacious, rise outta his grave, giant rasta locks pouring down from his skull, big ol' cigar-sized joint puffin' away in his lipless mout', and take over what's left of de world! He tell all the farmers to forget dat corn, dat sorghum, just plant de hemp. Soon de wartorn world is covered with hemp! Tree year olds in pre-school be toking up like old junkies! 99 year old grannies be sucking down de smoke in de rest homes!

Sure, whole sad world in tatters, gone to hell in a hand basket. But nobody care! They all high! Don't worry, be happy! Dat de real plan of Mr. Lyman Faris. To make Brooklyn, and Wall Street, and de whole world, kind of a paradise! But it ain't going to happen now, mon! Because de Cheney mon spy on Mr. Lyman Faris, foil his miraculous plot! So here we be, still stuck in dis trough of despond, scratching hard to raise a couple sativa bushes in de backyard, dodgin' de cops, no comforting high to protect us from de miseries of de world.

Dot's what dat phone surveillance hath wrought, my friend! More endless turns on the wheel of sufferin' when all mankind really needs is a solid, endless, hempy, high! And don't bogart dat joint, mon! Pass it over here quick! We don't got nuthin' to waste!

Brownie Points

11/26/05

BROWNIE POINTS

... A wire story inside the WP catches up with former FEMA Director Michael Brown. "My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me," says the least popular man in New Orleans. And what does Brown plan to do now that he's mercifully been returned to the private sector? He's setting up shop as a consultant—on disaster preparedness. (Slate newsletter, 11/26/05)

God love Brownie. He’s doing a heckuva job keeping his own self-esteem aloft.

I can’t help wondering who would go to him for help on disaster preparedness. The citizens of Atlantis? But they’re all drowned already.

Maybe the Pompeiians? Nope. Too late. Already wiped out by the eruption of A.D. 76.

As I understand the way Brownie works, he does a heckuva job making a horrible catastrophe even more catastrophic. If he had been consulted on 9/11, for example, he probably would have advised everyone to REMAIN IN THE BUILDINGS even after the planes struck.

Is anyone really going to hire this guy & pay him good money for his advice? Suppose I worked for a company on the Gulf Coast. How could I explain the hiring to my boss? “Sir, we’ve given Brownie a $50,000 retainer….”

“To advise us on how NOT to prepare for the next hurricane?”

“The way we see it, nobody has made more mistakes preparing for disaster than Michael Brown. So he has probably learned more than anyone else.”

“But has he admitted to making any mistakes?”

“Not really.”

“Then if he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, isn’t he likely to make the same mistakes all over again?”

“Well, not exactly, sir. This time he’ll just be advising US to make the same mistakes he did.”

“And why would we want to do that?”

“We wouldn’t sir. I figure that we should do the opposite of whatever he advises us to do.”

“You know what? You just may be on to something there. But what about his boss, Michael Chertoff? Didn't he do just as badly as Brownie, and wasn’t he even MORE responsible?”

“I guess you could say that, sir.”

“Then why not give Chertoff a consulting fee, as well? Or instead? His disaster preparedness advice must be at least as wrong as Brownie’s.”

“You’re so right, sir. That’s why you’re paid the big bucks and I’m still trying to figure out how to cover my mortgage, my alimony, my mistress's rent, and my kids’ tuitions. The problem with hiring Chertoff is that he’s not available because he still has his old job as Secretary of Homeland Secretary.”

“You’re not serious. The guy who was at the switches when Katrina drowned New Orleans still has his job?!!!”

“Yes sir. You see, HIS boss is very loyal. He puts loyalty above just about all the other virtues.”

“You’re talking about the President, aren’t you. The guy that couldn’t think of any mistakes he’d made during his first term.”

“That’s right, sir. During one of the campaign debates with Kerry, W was asked to name THREE mistakes he’d made in his first administration. He couldn’t think of one.”

“Does he think he made any mistakes in New Orleans?”

“He told Brownie he was doing a heckuva job, sir. And he still hasn’t fired Chertoff. So my guess is W thinks he did a heckuva job.”

“Wow. That’s what I call positive thinking. He must be a believer. Shouldn’t we be hiring HIM to advise us what NOT to do in case of disaster?”

“He’s not available, sir. He has three more years in his present job.”

“He’s running the country for three more years? Christ on a crutch!”

“You said it, sir. It’s a shame we can’t hire him now. He‘s fantastic. He knows exactly what NOT to do before, during, and after every crisis. Maybe we can hire him in 3 years, when he stops running the country.”

“Maybe. If there still IS a country.”

PART II

Cindy Sheehan has returned to Crawford to protest the war and spoil W’s Thanksgiving. But there is also a regiment of Bush supporters who have gathered at Crawford to support the war and protest Cindy. What I’m trying to understand is which part of the war they’re so enthusiastic about.

Are they supporting the war because they like wars based on one lie after another? Or are supporting the way because they like being up Quagmire Creek without a paddle---or exit strategy? Are they cheerleading for the President because they want to spend even more than the $200 billion we’ve already spent over there? Or are they just glad because Cindy Sheehan’s son was killed and they want to see even more American mothers’ sons blown up on the road to Samara?

Maybe they’re supporting the war because having a war in Iraq, where Americans are getting exploded daily by IED’s and suicide bombers, makes them feel good about being American-based Americans. No matter how bad they’re feeling, they can always tell themselves that they’re not on patrol in Baghdad.

Maybe they’re not so much supporting the war as demonstrating how much they personally loathe Cindy Sheehan. After all, Cindy is the mother of a dead American soldier and she’s not happy about having a dead son and she won’t shut up about it. That literally makes her an enemy of the state. Plus, she’s rude. Here poor George just wants to eat some turkey in peace and cut some brush and ride his bike and Cindy has the nerve to remind him that his war is still in the toilet and getting stinkier every day. The nerve of her! Maybe what she needs is a good flushing. She should be GLAD her son was killed by a war based on lies. She should be celebrating and waving the flag. She should be out there supporting George, and Dick, and Rummy, and Condi, and Wolfy, and urging MORE mothers’ sons to go over there and get blown limb from limb. That way, at least, her misery will have company.

Anyhow, what right does a WOMAN and a MOTHER have to say anything about war? A woman’s job is put up and shut up. A woman’s job is to shake her babymaker when hubby says and to raise her kids until they’re big enough to go off to die....for a lie. And then when they come home in boxes her job is to dress in black, put a gold star in her window, and wait for other mothers’ sons & daughters to join hers in the cemetery. Only men, and Condi Rice, know how to properly wage war. That’s why George and Company have done such a beautiful job in Iraq. Because they're almost all men and the only woman they listen to is Condi, the same lady who advised George prior to 9/11. At least, we THINK she’s a lady. We HOPE she’s a lady. No telling what’s under those frumpy frocks.

Part III

Which brings us back to our first subject: Namely, whom should a Gulf Coast company hire to advise them on what NOT to do to prepare for a disaster? Why, the obvious choice is Condi, who advised W on what to do prior to 9/11.

“Then,” my boss might say, “hire Condi.”

“Sorry, sir. She’s not available.”

“She still has her old job as National Security Adviser?! After all the bad advice she gave prior to 9/11 AND during the runup to Iraq?!”

“Actually, sir, she’s been promoted to Secretary of State.”

“You mean the previous Secretary of State was even stupider than Condi Rice?”

“That was Colin Powell, sir. And he’s not stupid. Neither he nor Condi are stupid. They’re just wrong…….a lot.

“Then is he presently unemployed?”

“Yes sir.”

“Maybe we should hire HIM as a disaster preparedness consultant.”

“Would we follow his advice, or do the opposite of what he told us to do?”

“Well, for starters we wouldn’t believe one damn thing he said.”

“But he was the Bush cabinet secretary with the reputation for integrity, sir.”

“Sounds like the perfect consultant to me. ----A liar with integrity.”

“And once he gave us his advice, would we follow it?”

“Of course not. We’d pay him no attention. We’d just use him as window dressing to give the firm some cachet. That’s what the Bushies did, wasn’t it?”

“And would we have a second disaster preparedness consultant as well? One who actually knew what he was doing?”

“That won’t be necessary. Look how well the Bush Administration has done without anyone who actually knew what he was doing. They won a second term, didn’t they?”

“I’ve got a better idea, sir. Why not hire Alfred E. Newman as backup consultant to Colin Powell?”

“The ‘what? me worry?’ kid from Mad Magazine?

“Exactly. He’s just a cartoon character. We could probably get him for a fraction of what Powell or Brownie would charge. And he even looks and smirks like the President.”

“You know something, kid? If the next hurricane doesn’t drown us, or the next one after that, or the next one after that, or the next one after that, or the next one after that……you’re gonna go far in this business.”

---FIN---

Even Lone Rangers Have to Spend Thanksgiving SOMEwhere

(Almost everything else on this blog is political satire & commentary. But this is a personal letter to a friend, Dave of Connecticut, about my Thanksgiving Day. I hope you all, even Dick Cheney & Idi Amin & Saddam Hussein, found something to be grateful for yesterday. Maybe it's fond memories of a pre-emptive invasion, or an especially gratifying decapitation, or enemies fed to crocodiles, or a Swiss bank account full to bursting. And Dick, if you're reading this, it's OK to turn off your pacemaker now. If only you had been fitted with a PEACEmaker, instead.)


Thanks Dave, for your kind T-giving wishes. It was an odd but pleasant day, which included a bike ride down the beach in a fog so heavy that great flocks of seagulls grounded themselves on the sand--socked in. T-giving is the most peaceful day of the year in this warlike city, especially when it's swaddled in fog. Even the din of the freeways settles to a low moan, and they are truly free, working the way their builders naively imagined they would when they built them 40 or 50 years ago. As the sun settled beneath the Pacific, interiors of overpriced little bungalows glowed with a warm yellow light; from my passing bike I could see diorama-like showcases: families taking their seats for the greatest feast of the year. For once, Angelenos were out of their cars, away from their cellphones, and were together and at peace.

A friend who didn't want me stewing in my juices dragged me to Thanksgiving Dinner at his cousin's house----a family I hadn't visited in 20 years. In the meantime, they had moved from a tiny cramped dwelling to a really beautiful 2-storey hacienda in a select Westside enclave. She's an interior decorator and her remarkable touches were everywhere. They had had two tiny sons at the time of the last visit, this time they had a brilliant graduate student (and former national 1500 meter track champ) running a 2 million dollar research project at Berkeley, an earth science major and former all city soccer star at UCSB, and a third son (who hadn't existed the first time) who is a budding all-arounder & high school sophomore. Three handsome, well-spoken, lads---any one of them enough to make any parent's heart burst with pride & love. I had feared the evening would involve a lot of draining socializing, but instead I felt perfectly comfortable with everyone, including mossbacked, senile old Republican ancestors, and richly enjoyed house, neighborhood, family, liquor, talk, food, and even myself. At one point, the hostess had to remind me and the boys to stop talking about the terrible things happening to American labor because it was upsetting her ancient, wealthy, rockribbed parents. We apologized and changed the topic to Kobe Bryant's personal soap opera. After dinner but before dessert, the men took a walk around the block, passing houses manicured within an inch of their lives. My garrulous host offered me a Cuban cigarillo. This was the first, and hopefully will be the last, time in my life I actually enjoyed smoking tobacco. The Cuban leaf tasted that good. We talked about how grand it would be to visit Cuba while it was still a time capsule, we wondered how the States could so ignore the tiny, impoverished, nation's amazing strides in universal healthcare & education, and he offered a charming anecdote about Che.

When we returned to the house we ate four kinds of home made pie with whipped cream & vanlla ice cream. Then we gathered in the kitchen and admired the hostess's gleaming, industrial-strength Viking stove, so big she could use it for professional catering, should she so desire.

There remained, and remains, the vexed question of what I had been doing during those same 20 years, what I had to show for it, and what was wrong with me that I didn't pull a wonderful family* and house to house them in out of MY hat. But I'll be the first to concede that some people know how to live better than others, and that I'm clearly in the latter camp. Am, in fact, clueless.

I reached my mother by phone. She is the most peripatetic resident of a memory care unit in Ft Myers, FL. When I phone, there're always a couple minutes while they corral her. When she's finally found she fumbles, sometimes interminably, with the phone, which seems to have become an alien and almost unfathomable device for her. Once she got the earpiece near her ear and the mouthpiece near her mouth and began to hear my repeated greetings she was cheerful, spoke, as usual, about 85% gibberish, but sounded fine. She's been much happier since she lost most of her mind. She's lost so much of it she's stopped trying to retrieve it----presumably the last secret of happiness. Or the secret of lasting happiness. I told her repeatedly that I loved her & missed her. That much, I hope, she understood. Did she know which son she was speaking to? Maybe.

I imagine you had a truly autumnal T-giving, in a charmingly quaint former farmhouse set among trees relentlessly, neverendingly, furiously shedding brown & red leaves, in still-half-rural exurbia. I hope you and those you love found plenty to be grateful for.

Hi-o Silver and away!

Gregor Samsa


*I was so completely comfortable & sociable with these folk that it seemed a bit mysterious why I hadn't successfully built a clan of my own instead of becoming The Lone Ranger. My multiply-divorced friend was similarly struck by our hosts' cheerful industry, fertility, providence, & continuity and joked about a recent New Yorker cartoon in which the main character laments that he should have combined his many divorces into "one big marriage."

Talking Turkey

11/23/05

TALKING TURKEY

I was touched when President Compassionate Conservative pardoned the National Thanksgiving Turkey and sent him to live out the rest of his days in Guantanamo or wherever the Pardoned Turkey Ranch is. To me, it’s proof that the President’s conservative compassion has deepened and grown even more compassionate than it was when he talked about it so much during the 2000 election campaign.

I was wondering where it went, because he didn’t talk about it all in 2004. Or in any other year since 2000. But I’m glad it’s still there and I’m glad there’s so much of it.

He must be WAY more compassionate now than he was when he was Governor of Texas, because, if you’ll remember, he barely pardoned anybody back then, whether they were turkeys or humans. It didn’t matter whether you were nearly retarded or a woman or what your problem was. If your execution number came up while Governor W was in the State House, and hundreds did, baby, you were going into the fryer. And hundreds did. So many that Governor W established Texas as number one in the nation in institutionalized euthanasia. I’m using euthanasia instead killing because it’s a fancy long word with lots of soft vowels & consonants that don't strike the ear as harshly as does killing, with its piercing K sound.

Oh, and to be perfectly accurate, you don’t go into the fryer any more in Texas. Texas traded in the electric chair for lethal injections in 1977. But even if President CC had NOT pardoned Mr. Turkey, I doubt if they would have given him a lethal injection because who wants to eat a turkey that’s been injected with some godawful poison? And they probably don’t put National Unpardoned Turkeys (NUTs) in front of a firing squad, either, because you might get lead caught in your teeth when you bite down on your breast meat. So how DO they execute ‘em? Maybe they hang ‘em. But what if the turkey starts flapping his wings just as the trapdoor drops from under him? I realize domestic turkeys are flightless birds, but they DO have wings. We haven’t bred the wings away completely because who wants to buy and roast and devour a wingless turkey? That’s no fun. Imagine the kids’ tears when they start begging for a wing.

Anyhow, I’m guessing that if and when you did hang a turkey that its natural flight response would kick in at the moment of hanging no matter how dumb he was, and we all know turkeys are almost as dumb as some of those retarded prisoners on death row that Governor W saw fit not to pardon back when he was setting lethal injection records. And even if a turkey can’t exactly fly, he can probably flap hard enough to keep from choking to death for a good long time, which would likely make the hanging look like a performance piece with a live turkey piñata. There’s the turkey, let’s call him Tom, frantically flapping up a storm, maybe flying around in tiny circles, literally at the end of his rope, feathers and turkey shit flying all about in the execution chamber, and this going on for minutes or even hours as the witnesses to the execution start to stare at their watches and play games on their blackberries and eventually they’d all have enough and the head executioner would have to step up, maybe blindfolded, to compassionately give ol’ Tom a fighting chance, and start swinging a Louisville Slugger at that sucker. And maybe Tom could dodge the first 2 or 20 whacks, but eventually the executioner would home in on him with a WHACK gobble gobble WHACK flap gobble gobble and after about a dozen bullseyes poor Tom would give up the ghost and just drop there from his noose, dripping blood not candy, most every bone in his body pulverized. And the witnesses would be wondering how the hell anybody was supposed to roast and eat such a mess, and the executioner would announce that this particular Tom would not prove suitable for roasting because he looked like hell and that instead Tom would be made into turkey soup or turkey casserole or turkey tartar and fed to the penitentiary’s surviving death row inmates.

But what I’m wondering is, what would happen to Tom Turkey if he turned out to be a Dirty Bomb Terrorist, you know, same as John Ashcroft accused Jose Padilla being. And what if that Dirty Bomb might go off at any moment, and only Tom Turkey knew where he had hidden it? Then it might be necessary for President Compassionate Conservative to send Tom over to his Vice President of Torture, ably assisted by Porter Goss, the new Director of Torture.

And once the VP had Tom Turkey embunkered in the Vice Presidential bunker, the first thing he’d probably do is give that dirty bombing bird one of the Cheney/Goss approved Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, such as the attention-getting “shirt grab.” Problem is, Tom Turkey rarely WEARS a shirt. So it would have to be a breast feather grab, followed by a violent shake and “Where’s that damn dirty bomb?!” followed by either silence or gobble gobble from Tom.

Now for all we know, Tom might be trying to TELL the VP just exactly where that infernal dirty bomb is, but who could tell? The government is dreadfully short of translators fluent in Turkey. It is true that Sibel Edmonds, the Arabic translator who blew the whistle on FBI incompetence, is Turkish, but the FBI doesn’t let her translate anymore and has done everything it can to discredit her. Still, these are extraordinary circumstances. That dirty bomb of Tom’s might be fixin’ to blow in any one of a number of great American cities: Chicago, New York, even New Orleans. Though New Orleans already looks like a dirty bomb hit it, so I guess that wouldn’t be all THAT much of a loss. Anyhow, maybe the VP for Torture would pressure the FBI, kinda like he pressured the CIA back in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, and Sibel would be allowed to descend into the bunker and translate for Tom.

“What’s he saying?” the Director of Torture says to Sibel.

“Gobble gobble,” says Sibel.

“I KNOW that. But what does gobble gobble mean in English?”

“Gobble gobble,” says Sibel.

“It means the same thing in Turkish AND English?!”

“Yup,” says Sibel.

“Enough of this shirt grabbing,” says the VP for Torture. “Let’s try one of the other Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, such as stomach punching.”

“OK, fine,” says the Director, “YOU find his stomach. I don’t SEE a stomach. All I see is a giant feathery breast.” And Dick steps up and punches Tom several times in his big feathery breast, and Tom says “gobble gobble,” but doesn’t seem very upset maybe because he has so much padding.

“NOW what does he say?” the VP asks Sibel.

“Gobble gobble,” says Sibel.

“The same gobble gobble he said before or a different gobble gobble?”

“The same one,” says Sibel.

“And it means……” asks the VP….

“Wait,” says the Director for Torture, “lemme guess: Gobble gobble.”

“You are correctamundo, Buffalo Breath,” says Sibel.

“Well I’ve had just about enough of this crap,” says the VP. “Let’s move on to another enhancement, the most enhanced enhancement of all: waterboarding.” And the VP and the Director strap Tom Turkey to a board and dunk him in water until he’s all but drowned and then bring him up. “Now sing, birdbrain! Where’s that dirty bomb?”

And poor Tom shakes his bleary head and spits up some water and says “gobble gobble” and Dick says to Sibel “don’t bother to translate. I can see this Son of a Byrd is stonewallin’ us.” And this time they dunk Tom for what seems like forever and when they bring him up he’s so waterlogged he’s dead and he doesn’t make so much as a peep, much less gobble gobble. “Well, give him mouth to mouth, Goss, or we’ll NEVER find out where the damn bomb is!”

“I’m not going to kiss that turkey, YOU kiss the turkey if you’re such a brave patriot, Mr. Five Draft Deferments and I Had Other Priorities.”

“I’m the Vice President and maybe even the de facto President, not a turkey kisser!” sneers Dick, who then turns to Sibel. “That leaves you. Goddamnit, woman, start kissing that turkey.” And Sibel Edmonds, who’s not only a brave whistleblower but a patriotic turkey kisser, gives Tom Turkey all the mouth to mouth that bird can handle, and by and by revives him!

“Do you see how it is now, Tom?” she says to him in Turkish. “This ain’t no foolin’ around. These boys really want to know and they’ll stop at nothing to find out.”

There’s a long silence from Tom. He coughs up another couple gallons of water. Then: “Well damn. So that’s how it is. Then I’ll tell you anything you want to hear, because that’s what torture victims do. You want to hear the bomb’s in San Francisco because it’s full of queers and liberals? Then fine, it’s in San Francisco.” And the amazing thing is, Tom is talking in English, not Turkish. And it ain’t no gobble gobble English. It’s the Queen’s English, a haughty Oxbridgian honk. “You want to hear the goddamn bomb’s in the bluest city in the bluest state, Boston, Mass? Then that’s where it is, right under the Ted Williams Tunnel. Or maybe you’d rather hear the bomb was in Crawford, or Camp David, and that it was about to blow the titular President limb from limb so that you can finally be in title what you have effectively been in fact: President of These Tortured United States.”

And Dick Cheney gives Tom Turkey a head slap, which is one of the approved attention getters in the canon of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. But it’s such a violent head slap that poor Tom’s neck cracks like a whip, and he keels over before the VP and Director of Torture can subject Tom to that other E.I.T.: standing. But that one wasn’t going to work anyway, because turkeys LOVE to stand, they do it all day and all night, and none of them ever coughs up the truth about dirty bombs or anything else no matter how long they stand. They think standing's a gas.

“Look what you’ve done now, you stupid, arrogant, f…..,” says the Director to the VP.

“Watch your potty mouth, there’s a lady present,” says Dick.

“You tell a senator to f…… off in the Capitol Rotunda and you say I have a potty mouth?!” says the Director. “Anyway, that’s no lady, that’s a whistleblower.”

The three of them stare down at Tom’s body. “Now we’ll never know where Tom’s dirty bomb was,” says Dick. “It’s as deep and dark a secret as the location of Saddam’s WMD’s. And until that bomb goes off, we ALL have something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. That we’re still here. Of course, I’ll be here, safely tucked away in my bombproof bunker, even AFTER the bomb goes off, even if it goes off inside the Beltway. So I guess you could say Lynn and I should be doubly thankful on Turkey Day.”

“What are you guys going to do with that bird?” says Sibel.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says the Director, “but I can’t release his corpse. It's evidence. Anyhow, he’s clearly a tough old bird that would have made lousy eating.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” says Sibel.

“I’m sorry all your legal troubles have so bankrupted you that you can’t afford a turkey of your own, Sibel, but Lynn and I can’t invite you over to share our turkey because you’re a whistleblower and we don’t cotton to whistleblowers.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Vice President. Thanksgiving should be a time when loved ones and dear friends gather to celebrate how the Pilgrims fucked over Squanto. And I wouldn’t feel right sitting down for turkey with the likes of you and Lynn, you know what I mean? My husband and I will wangle an invitation to SOME bluestater’s house, don’t you worry about that.” And the Director and Sibel exit the VP’s bunker.

“Do you REALLY think that turkey had a dirty bomb?” says Sibel.

“Hell no,” says the Director. “How could a turkey have a bomb?! I was just humoring the VP, kinda like the whole country did back when he said Saddam had nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction. You know what I mean?”

“Yup,” says Sibel, “I guess I do.”

---FIN---

Judy, Judy, Judy

Headline in Wall Street Journal: Judith Miller and NY Times Parting Ways

Rather disingenuous of the poobahs at the Times, isn't it, to say NOW that they wish Judy M had told them more back when they backed her? Why weren't they bothered years ago, when it was obvious she was shoveling bullshit for Cheney & Co. re the invasion ramp-up?

Everybody's always trying to cover his ass. Is Bill Keller wondering if he'll go the way of his disgraced predecessor?

And what rag wants to hire an old, fucked out, news ho? I guess her politics are right for the WSJ......

Surely this is the biggest blackeye in NY Times history..... Makes the Jayson Blair thing look like a stubbed pinkie.

What's amazing is that so few civilians raised a stink about Judyjudyjudy years ago. And her fellow staffers must have been silently shitting bricks for 2.5 years.

So they gave Judy a Pulitzer for lying about WMD's, and Kissinger a Nobel Peace Prize for fomenting & prolonging war in Nam. ....maybe it's better to go prize-less if that's who's gettin' 'em. Maybe the time to start worrying about yourself is when you win one.....