Newt rises as others falter
Entries Tagged as 'trusted media & news'
Climbing inside the horse, or: the uses of animals
So anyway, yesterday I was driving down a country road when I spotted a decapitated stag lying in a ditch. The strange thing was that its head had been cleaved neatly from the body, leaving a perfect anatomical cross-section-type view of the interior of the neck. A car accident doesn’t do that – and even if it did, I’d still expect to see the head nearby, surrounded by turkey vultures pecking at the soft parts.
I briefly thought about vivisectionist aliens before settling on a redneck with a chainsaw as the likeliest explanation. No doubt he’d spotted the dead stag during the day then returned under cover of night to remove the “rack” for his collection. [Read more →]
Pray the war lasts to August
It was an election day without candidates on Tuesday, at least around here. There were a couple issues on the ballot. One was to allow carry-out booze sales on Sundays. I favor. The other was for a limited time, special use, educational purposes only county sales tax of ONE PERCENT, morons, not one pennyas it is always said. This, I oppose. These aren’t especially serious matters but examining them might shed a little light on this thing we call Politics (shudder). The Sunday Sales law brings into combat some peculiar coalitions. At odds are two groups: evangelicals and similar religious folks allied with the bar/restaurant industry against a consortium of grocery/convenience and liquor store proprietors supported by forgetful but thrifty drunks. Commercial and personal interests are aswirl. One’s closest ally today is your sternest competitor tomorrow. The result was pretty one sided, though. It was a sweep for Sunday Beer, as it was so quaintly and expertly named. [Read more →]
Remarks by Mr. Cain
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen of the press and America out there in the audience, as you know I have lately and suddenly been the subject of a veritable hailstorm of accusations; very vague and unsupported accusations and I have been required to respond without full knowledge of the events being referred to and these are, as you have seen, all much more than ten years old. I have denied them. They are unsupported and responsible members of the media have moved on. Others have not as is their prerogative. Now. There has been some improvement on that front. There is now a woman, Ms Bialek, who has come forward with lurid details and accusing me of actions that clearly are criminal and violently so. Let me set the record straight right here and right now. [Read more →]
The plague of truths
The sun shines. People forget. There is an eminence front for all people and therefore all candidates. For candidates it must be especially thick and durable as it is liable to come under meticulous attack, if not by the people then by the press and the other candidates. Herman Cain has learned this simple truth. Does his need to learn this lesson the hard way indict him? According to the gunslingers not on the Cain payroll, the gunslingers that are have ham-handed this one. What actually happened or was said is immaterial on this reckoning. It’s all about the optics: how it looks and Cain looks like a desperate fugitive. [Read more →]
A picture’s worth
You know the old saying that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words?’ There’s an interesting discussion of the adage and its origin, and I’m sure many of us can cite at least one occasion from our own, first-hand experience where it has been put to the test, and passed that test with ease.
There are occasions when a picture’s worth might be calculated by other units of measure. For example, might a picture’s worth be measured in terms of how many people are moved to change their hearts and their minds after viewing said picture? [Read more →]
Mr. Gorbachev goes to Mexico
Like many children of the Cold War, I grew up anxious about Nuclear Armageddon, so when Gorbachev eased relations between the USSR and the West I was grateful. For many years I viewed him as a hero, pure and simple. It was not until I moved to Russia that I realized his reforms had been intended to strengthen the USSR, not destroy it.
Oops.
Gorbachev had a rough ride in his homeland in the 1990s, where he was almost universally despised. These days he appears to have settled into the role of Russia’s Jimmy Carter: well- meaning, not quite forgiven, but no threat. [Read more →]
Bourgeois kiddies of the world unite!
When I first saw the mob of pasty-faced bourgeois Bohemian children camped out on Wall Street I thought: not again. Ever since the late 1980s, when all that hippy nonsense turned two decades old, a segment of Western youth has suffered from 60s envy. Thus we periodically witness attempts to rekindle the romantic flame of protest which – we are constantly reminded – burned so brightly in those halcyon days.
Me, I’ve never suffered from 60s envy. Woodstock is to blame: I was 16 when I watched the concert film and was shocked to learn how much of the music was not Jimi Hendrix but rather, puerile and twee garbage like Country Joe and the Fish or John Sebastian. [Read more →]
Clown college reunion — ad infinitum
Homey the Clown. Krusty the Clown. Bozo the Clown. Herman the Clown.Michelle the Clown. Will someone save us from these meddlesome clowns? Dear god…and, I am an anti-theist. [Read more →]
The Declarations of Dependents
On Soapbox, October, 10th 2011 The anonymous Declarations of the thirteen percent united States of Amerika
When in the Course of current events it becomes necessary for one class to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of Mother Earth, the separate and superior station to which the Laws of the People and of the People’s President entitle them, a competent manipulation of the opinions of the Media requires that they should obscure the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all wealth is created from inequality, that it is endowed by it’s Creators with certain unalienable Wrongs, that among these are Strife, Perfidy and the pursuit of Profits. — That to redress these wrongs, Governments are inflicted upon Drones, deriving their just powers from the virtues of the governers, — That whenever any Brand of Government becomes abortive of these ends, it is the Duty of the Masses to cripple and to demolish it, and to institute More Government, laying its foundation on such demands and organizing its powers in such force, as to them shall seem most likely to increase their Stipends and Net Access. Public Relations, indeed, will dictate that Governments long entrenched should not be challenged in plain and transparent language; and accordingly all rumors hath confirmed that man, and Whoa, man! kind are more disposed to pilfer, while victuals are pilferable than to feed themselves by pursuing the work for which they are equipped. But when a short bus of abusers and usurations, pursuing inarguably the same Subjects, convinces the malign to reduce themselves under urban Primitivism, it is the White, and the Moody, who throw offal at such Government, to extract new Revenue for their Social Security. — Such have been the impatient Demonstrations, of these Occupiers; and such is now the necessity which compels them to expand the inadequate Reach of Government. The history of the present President of Amerika is a history of insulting sell-outs and recriminations, all pursuing the equivocal project to establish an invisible Satrapy over these Ingrates. To prove this, let Factoids be submitted to a dated press. [Read more →]
Fast, furious, completely stupid and utterly baffling
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 pelican brief
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 →]
After the fire, or: How the Chihuahua was spared
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 →]
Crackerhead Shoals
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 →]
A Fieldguide to Avian-Americans
The dove is a symbol of peace but symbolism is a tricky business. Perhaps due to its reputed monogamy and habit of living among humans without much friction the dove has been such since biblical times at least. Likewise the corruption of symbols, the dove included, has always been a staple of human interaction whether in a friendly confusion as happened with our Martian friends or with malign and murderous cunning. The dove, like the olive branch, is a somewhat arbitrary vehicle for sentiment and as all good people are learning, sentiment has immovable limitations.
The clear opposite of the Dove, in politics as in fact, is the Hawk. While the Doves are an ancient political race the Hawk, or War Hawk was only conceived around 1812. [Read more →]
What Elizabeth Warren should have said about the social contract
The president of the United States, Barack Obama, has been telling me, specifically, that I have to start paying my fair share. Actually, he has been telling you to start paying your fair share, as well. None of us is off the hook, in fact. He wants everyone to pay their fair share:
“It’s only right we ask everyone to pay their fair share,” Obama said, later adding, “If we’re going to meet our responsibilities, we have to do it together.”
The reason we all have to pay our fair share is because the government, which is run by members of the democrat and republican parties, is deep in debt. It is so in debt that it has actually forced the president to lecture me– me, of all people— about how I need to stop being so damned obstinate and start paying my fair share. [Read more →]
Back off Barack!
New York 9 is all over but the whining. Weprin delivers. He is not too hard on Obama personally but he makes the conventional assertions that shift culpability for losing Weiner and Schumer’s seat to the heretofore invisible Republicans. You see, Weprin tried to make the election about himself and/or Turner but Turner, events and the electorate colluded to make it a national referendum on the Obama Presidency which is lately in deep ordure. Weprin played his part by basically pretending that there was no such thing as an Obama or a President or even a Democratic Party. It is easy to see the poll-dancers’ art and philosophy here. Obama’s numbers are not good, sir. No, not even here. The pukes and punks who counseled every mother’s son to hang on tight to the speeding Obama Train right up until the Great Shellacking was dry, suddenly whisper; just let go and be sure to bend your knees. In their biz, electoral theory runs on mere tropisms like an insect drawn to a light or repelled by a sound. When the numbers are UP, draw near. When the numbers are DOWN, flee! Why such predictable and cliched advice is so richly rewarded is mysterious. What is not mysterious is the fate of these gunslinging genii. They have left the crumpled hulk of the Weprin Express, dusted off their jackets and wiped off their fingerprints as they limp to their new gig. As remunerative as the last gig. [Read more →]
The plague of swans
Ten disasters were visited on Pharoah and not incidentally on Egypt. First was that which turned the Nile waters into Blood. This did not persuade Pharoah to free the Jews as he deemed this event a souped-up parlor trick or possibly an ugly coincidence. So then came the Plague of Frogs. Then of Lice. Then Flies, Pestilence, Boils, Hail, Locusts, three days of unbroken Darkness and finally the Death of the Firstborns; spared of the Jews who marked their doors with ram’s blood. Then Ramses let those people go though as we know, he soon reneged.
Pharoah had it easy. His opponent was nothing more than the nameless god of the Jews and he could tap out at any time. Greater sympathy is due Barack Obama. [Read more →]
Why did a Texas high school eject an Al Jazeera reporter from a football game? The real story exposed!
Recently you may have seen reports in the news about a Borat-style incident featuring a Brazil-based Al Jazeera employee named Gabriel Elizondo who was recently denied permission to film a high school football game in Booker, Texas. Apparently Mr. Elizondo has been traveling around the states trying to gauge the American mood on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, etc. No sooner had he shown his Al Jazeera business card than the high school superintendent, a Mr. Michael Lee, told him to leave the school premises, denying Mr. Elizondo permission to film or conduct interviews. [Read more →]
