I’m not sure that any of them are left except in the careerist types who went to work for Republican causes like some folks went to work for General Motors, but the rational Republican who rode the Tea Party/Bush/Cheney clown car as a career choice has got to be having second thoughts. [Read more →]
As you may have heard, yesterday saw yet another Occupy Wall Street (OWS) confrontation with the cops. This time the protestors attempted to storm the Smithsonian, of all places, to protest the use of unmanned drones by congregating in front of an exhibit in the museum. The episode is quite comical, since attacking the Smithsonian is the absolute LAST thing you’d expect from groups which have been labelling the TEA Party as the “anti-science” group.
Now, I’m a HUGE supporter of the public turning out and peacefully protesting the establishment’s mistakes, don’t get me wrong. I love watching the massive, widespread exercise of the 1st Amendment as citizens rattle the bars on their cages, BUT, as Glenn Reynolds said on Instapundit yesterday: Bad Optics. A movement needs the respect of the average voter, and getting arrested in confrontations with police in a museum full of families on vacation isn’t the way to go about gaining it. I can promise you that actions like that are doing more to put the lie to the 99% claim as anything else. No responsible, reasonable voter is going to want to associate with that sort of scene.
Remarks by The Speaker:
Americans, there is no doubt that we are in dire economic straits. It is sometimes hard to believe that everyone up here at the Capitol, although yes, we still have OUR jobs, for the moment, we all, everyone who sits in these Chambers, all our hearts go out to the nation. That is Republican and Democrat alike. I assume that both of the TEA Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements and of every citizen in between and outside of these groups that represent a very great fraction of the public. Of course this extends to the President as well. I say this to both Right and Left and Center and whatever politics you can imagine, there is no one up here trying to destroy or harm this country. Not me. Not Barney Frank. Not Senator Reid nor McConnell is trying to harm the economy either from spurious actions or malign neglect and most assuredly, no, neither is the President. What we have are different interpretations, different views of what is possible, what is wise and what is legal. Yes, these are wildly divergent views; these are certainly antagonistic views but what we try to avoid, with mixed success, is being antagonistic with each other and above all, antagonistic to the Constitution. [Read more →]
From the producers of that whole “health care reform” thing that was going to save everyone money, and “green energy subsidies,” and the endless wars in the Middle East, and the policy of frisking children and cancer patients at the airport, and the program that sold guns to Mexican drug cartels, and attacks on medical marijuana patients, and the same people who haven’t passed a budget in two years, and, well, fill in whatever nonsense you want, comes an exciting new program!
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
Do you feel safer?
Not to be confused with this.
Youth coaches should get a start-up package when they begin coaching: A whistle, a handbook, a clipboard, maybe a golf shirt and a visor. They should also get a foldable chair — perhaps with a seat belt. [Read more →]
Like frogs on the Nile, yes, fools are always with us but they do not always rain from the sky. Now they do. Unlike Pharoah we have no excuse to be surprised. Self-employed fool and liar Michael Moore gave us probably the earliest warning when he appeared on the Rachel Maddow show just in March with a pair of handcuffs pledging to slap them on some generic Wall Streeter and/or the lucky krillionaires of the Forbes 400. Did he not know that his good friend and ideological playmate Oprah is on that list? Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett are as well. Yes, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are there but are we really going to raid the blimp-born fortress of everyone’s favorite currency trader, George Soros? Doubtful. Moore isn’t merely offering up his friends and financiers though. With Steve Jobs death yesterday there is a solid chance that Moore has moved onto the precious pecking order. So I suppose Moore could surrender his wealth to himself, to be administered for The Good of the People, but will he also then run Oprah’s Book Club or Buffett’s trading empire? It seems that what he means is that the offending assets will be auctioned and the cash doled out on demonstrated need. Who would be bidding in such an auction is mysterious but with his self-indicting and incoherent rant he manages to claim the intellectual high ground amongst his peers.
We haven’t heard from Roseanne Barr in many a moon but she has decided to howl yet again. From her sprawling macadamia ranch in Hawaii she swarms in, having traveled on solar aircraft, naturally, to declare a nostalgic fondness for the guillotine. [Read more →]
A few months back I read about a truly mind-blowing scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco. Apparently the organization had been supplying guns to Mexican drug cartels which – unsurprisingly- had since been used to kill people.
Now in many parts of the world you would assume that corrupt members of the ATF were boosting their income by moonlighting as arms dealers. In Mexico the police, government and gangs are closely interlinked, and nobody is shocked. In the 1990s some Russian soldiers sold weapons to the Chechen militants they were fighting. Why? Everybody knew: to supplement their miserable earnings.
But America is more complex than that. [Read more →]
The cover of this book says: “Infidelity can be deadly.” Murder on the Down Low
According to Wikipedia, “on the down low” refers to men who identify as straight, but still have sex with other men in secret. Obviously, this is not limited to the African American community, but this novel’s focus is on black women and their reaction to it. A group of friends — Venetta, Special, J.C. and Nichelle — are determined to avenge the death of their friend, Maya. Maya died of AIDS, and she was exposed to it by her fiance, Eugene, who is on the down low. They want to use the law to get justice for Maya and to bring the issue to the attention of the larger community: they file a lawsuit against Euguene for wrongful death. [Read more →]
One of the loose collective of my friends — The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop — a Vet who’s trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he’s take some classes…and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. [Read more →]
I will refresh your memory of this crappy movie without refreshing my own. The Julia Roberts character is a young law clerk who has stumbled on a terrible secret while fulfilling an academic exercise. A Supreme Court Justice has been assassinated. Why? America can only theorize as this fictional jurist was a solid conservative on a panel pretty evenly split and certain to be quickly replaced with another. Now, if he were the swing vote, everyone could understand why he was offed. Whatever the next case coming up, the culprit is whichever party stands to gain from this unexcused absence. QED. How the setting for these events, ostensibly America in the 90s, became a place where political murder was as routine as in Rome, or even on Romulus, we are not informed. But the baddies are off after a galloping Julia who has discovered that corporate Black Hats were about to do something mean, like drill a nasty hole into the ground and release the black goo within upon the surface world. And the only thing that could stop them, in court anyhow, was the status of a certain indigenous pelican as an endangered species. The late judge, certified Rightwing wanker though he was, apparently had a soft spot for sea-birds or birds altogether. He threatened an upset decision favoring the pelican so he had to die, naturally. Never asked is whether the claims of the pelican to nest and feed undisturbed were clearly superior to our claim to the oil beneath? Also never considered is whether it was quite clear that the oil drilling would be a serious, or indeed even a NOTICEABLE encumbrance to the joyous, omnivorous life of the pelican? [Read more →]
Last week, my friend Sandy sent me an email:
“Dan, do you want to come with me to Bastrop? I’m going to shoot some pictures of the ruins.”
Sandy is a photographer who documents disasters, and since Bastrop just suffered the most destructive wildfire in Texas history- a raging inferno laid waste to 1,600 houses and 34,000 acres of land – he was keen to record the aftermath for posterity. As for me, I had never witnessed the effects of Biblical hellfire before, so I was curious. I agreed to go. [Read more →]
An embarrassing story has erupted around the President who now, more than any President in memory, must conduct himself as a candidate if he wishes at all for another term, or perhaps even to fulfill the balance of one. Indeed, he declares himself the underdog and the outsider, an astonishing gambit for an incumbent three-fourths through his mandate. It implies that not only did Mr Obama “inherit” nothing but disaster, he also has not yet gotten the dustpan out. Through no fault of his own. That strategy may thrive or perish on its own merits but a sticky bit of a distant past threatens to stain the Executive Threads. By now everyone has heard the story. Obama’s grandparents, the Dunhams, for many years rented a remote patch of land off of Lake Verret, Louisianna, just north of New Orleans. Here they retired many autumns to camp, fish and sometimes shoot fowl as a family. The name of this vacant place on the map, as you have all heard, is Cr@#&$%head Shoals. [Read more →]
As a teacher and as a writer and musician, I often find myself in the precarious position of knowing that lessons can be extracted from my life and that those lessons can be shared with some benefit to either students or my audience. The danger is that talking about one’s self can be seen as vanity. Well, I hope you will see this as I truly intend it: a chance for some readers to learn from an artistic life in progress. I’m an old-hand in the music game at this point, but I sill keep getting pestered by those pesky life-lessons.
So, more of a meditation than an essay this week . . . [Read more →]
Holy shit. Apparently, summer is over.
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been rather MIA from blogging during the past few months, although I assure you it’s not for lack of trying.
In fact, I just went through and browsed the many drafts that had been started — and left unfinished — trying to get an idea of what’s been going on/what my mindset’s been as I sit to write this prodigal son blog after months of silence.
And it seems all these drafts seem to center around a common theme, or at least a common emotion: melancholy. [Read more →]
Sir John Keegan’s modest, mighty book contains five chapters, each describing a separate age of human warfare. The first is a primitive state where monkeys who threw their shite at one another have descended and stood straight(er) to hurl spears and stones. This has its roots in predation and animalistic defense of territory. The Age of Stone begins when a few of these hominids, sick of being attacked or doing the attacking, begin to lay one stone on another and another and another and another proto-man comes and another and also lay stones until there is a wall. Fortification was the great weapon in the Age of Stone. This continued until the Age of Flesh; that would mean horseflesh mostly but also the Age of Flesh involves the invention of something you could call an army. Warriors at the command of a chief would include far more than his cousins. With hordes of this size and mobility the siege became possible, starving out the fortress masters or breaching their walls in massed attacks. Fourthly comes the Age of Iron, not meaning iron weapons although the era is about right. Rather this is the coming of iron discipline; think Greece, the Macedonians and Rome. The modernization of fighting comes naturally with the modernization of life. The art of fortification is mated to iron-willed and stone-hearted defense, counter-attack and long-ranging strategic forces executing sophisticated political solutions to domestic problems, often involving wealth and power being in the wrong hands. The Fifth Age, the one we inhabit now, is the closest they come to being well yclept. The Fifth Age is The Age of Fire. [Read more →]
Major League Baseball is considering adding a second wildcard team to each league’s playoffs at some point in the not-too-distant future. My initial reaction to this is negative, as I have always appreciated the fact that it is much harder to make the playoffs in baseball than it is in any of the other major sports. There is something to be said for making the regular season count for as much as possible. NBA teams commonly make the playoffs with losing records, which is ludicrous. Flat-out bad hockey teams play in the postseason with regularity. In baseball, though, the teams need to be genuinely good to see action in October. It would be a shame to dilute the playoffs by adding less deserving teams. At the same time, if that leads to more excitement like that which we saw on Wednesday night, I might have to change my mind. [Read more →]
10. “All of this year’s required textbooks are by L. Ron Hubbard”
9. “We’re working with a local prison this year on a new program called ‘Scared Smart’”
8. “So, over the summer, did that thumb-sucking problem ever clear up?”
7. “Good news! Instead of dissecting a frog in Biology this year, we were lucky enough to procure the remains of the recently deceased James Arness!”
6. “Those with head lice, please line up on this side of the gymnasium”
5. “I is your new English teacher”
4. “Today’s lecture on Evolution will be delivered by guest speaker Michele Bachmann”
3. “I’m your gym teacher, and I say that’s what wrestlers wore during the original Olympics: nothing!”
2. “Today, for a change of pace, we’ll be pledging allegiance to the Powers of Darkness”
1. “Your grades will be determined by how well you rub my feet”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
September ends the quarter. Many financial disclosures are made because of that. As we are heading into the Christmas season retailers are ramping up. We have to remember that the term Black Friday, meaning the Friday after Thanksgiving, is not called that because crowds of shoppers descend on poor little cashiers and blot out the sun. Black Friday is when the retailer, whether it is Nordstrom’s or Target, goes from debt for the year into surplus. Yes, for most sellers of paper towels, jewelry and Gameboys, their annual costs of payrolls, rents, medical, insurance, utilities, taxes, fuels and inventories are MORE than they are making until Christmas season begins in earnest and begins well. Those who earn their pay managing this delicate pivoting operation have made their sentiments known. The big retailers have announced their plans for the holiday shopping season just beginning and they will not, repeat not, be adding the usual part time and temporary jobs they need to handle the traditional Christmas rush. While their costs have all gone up the sales projections have all gone down and that is not all. What volume of sales they DO expect will be on much smaller margins, that is to say discounting will be extreme. You love that of course, but absent the profits, what is the point of opening the doors? Many many retailers are teetering on that fulcrum with only a massive spike in overall sales able to save them. Not likely. So Black Friday is destined to come and go leaving retailers AS A SEGMENT OF THE ECONOMY still in the red and mightily imperiled. I hate to be the one to inform the nation but as an economic event, friends, Christmas is canceled. [Read more →]
