Infotainment

Show us your papers....

2012-02-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

Well, call me paranoid if you will but I say, 'welcome to the New Fascist America', courtesy of the eight-year Bush/Cheney junta and a bribe-engorged Congress which has relinquished its constitutional responsibilities and become an inept debating society.

Though vigorously texting/chatting, smartphones at the ready - 24/7 - the biggest part of the equation is a politically withered populace now strolling the debris fields of a big-box real estate bubble (which has mutated into a vast wasteland of empty shopping mall spaces). The American voters of 2012 may be found daily standing in line, like lemmings in some bleak, Soviet magazin. Evidently it is acceptable now to most customers that only 2 out of 10 checkout stands are open for business in the supermarkets and large retail outlets of the US (except during the Christmas season).

Recently, out of concern for the declining health of a parent I traveled halfway across the US. I decided to make the trip by train and contribute what I could to the care and feeding of my octogenarian elder during my visit. I planned my arrival to be a surprise.

My train arrived at 4:00 am at my destination, a medium-sized town in the Midwest. As I walked to the small terminal building I was met by two burly men who looked like hockey fans but were in fact, plainclothes state patrol officers who flashed badges as they asked to speak to me. Evidently it is now common practice to stake out the dreary Amtrak stations of such small towns, even in single digit temperatures with 25 mile-per-hour winds (though only two trains per day pass through this station).

In the conversation which followed they asked to see my ID, asked where I had come from, when I bought my ticket, who was picking me up, what the purpose of my visit was, how long I'd been planning it. They asked to search my bags, asked if the items in my bags belonged to me, and how long I had been residing at my home (1500 miles distant). Their final question was "do you have a medical marijuana card?" (I don't). After this obviously routine dismissal of one's Fourth Amendment protections I was asked if I had any questions. I asked, " Yeah...which agency are you guys with?" They said, "State Patrol".

This occurred while a platoon of other plainclothes state patrol officers roamed the station and track area, questioning the other passengers who had just "de-trained" during the California Zephyr's 10-minute stop (a grand total of 2 other passengers besides myself). I counted 8 plainclothes officers as they departed the empty station and drove off into the darkness.

Nah...It can't happen here.

I can only guess that in our United (Police) States if you buy a one-way ticket with cash on the same day you depart, some mysterious flag is triggered in some giant federal database, perhaps linked to the NSA, Homeland Security or (God only knows) some unknown agency. The federal government has been data-mining the phone, email communications, medical records and bank transactions of every American citizen since Bush and Cheney began their warrant-less wiretapping program after 9/11.

Amid record TV sports programming and beer consumption Americans seem oblivious to this development. I am guessing federal dollars are now sprinkled over the local and state jurisdictions like bird seed on behalf of some secret program which most law abiding citizens are blithely unaware of.

It is no secret that software is available which allows an anonymous entity to access your cell phone even when you aren't using it. It can grab all of your text messages, even if you've deleted them. And using GPS and cell tower data, every cell phone on the planet can be tracked every hour of every day. The particulars of these invasions of privacy are not readily apparent, thanks to government and the rich telecom and mobile device corporations. Such clandestine activities are even more effective with a compliant, uninformed citizenry. Recently the Discovery Channel prevented the show "Mythbusters" from doing an episode about RFID chips. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

But, in case I sound paranoid, since my aforementioned train trip there have been some curious headlines popping up:

CBC news reports that "Apple says it is making policy changes to stop iPhone apps from copying contacts in users' address books without permission."
"Twitter says it will make privacy guidelines more explicit after it admitted copying entire address books from people's smartphones and storing the information on its servers" RTẾ reports.
And Android has its own problems. According to PC World, "Peter Harrison, CTO at UK-based mobile security firm BlackBelt SmartPhone Defence Ltd. agrees: “The Android approach is certainly safer than no prompt at all. Unfortunately you cannot agree (to) individual permissions--either you give the app everything it wants or you don't give any permissions." (i.e., no granular control of administration by the user)
AP reported that the FBI is soliciting cooperation from Facebook and other social media companies to give them a data mining tool so that the FBI can analyze the communications of everyone who uses these services.
"Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full" according to the Huffington Post.

Hillbilly Sunday

2012-01-29T23:58:00.000-08:00

On the occasion of the last Sunday in January, 2012 I drove my 88-year old mother to church in a tiny Midwestern American town 12 miles distant from her home. Therein I unfortunately witnessed a bilious, psychotic narcissist in the guise and garb of a Catholic priest verbally beating his attendant parishioners over the head for 90 minutes.

He did this in the middle of what was billed on the marquee at the church front as "Sunday - 10:00 Mass". The fire-breathing cleric invoked the names of President Obama, his daughters and threatened the flock with dire, fearful and apocalyptic-sounding threats and spoke of an impending 'letter' soon to emerge from the secret, holy typewriters of his superiors in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church adjacent to his zipcode.

He also mentioned by name a physician at the Planned Parenthood clinic in the nearby state capital and the street on which it was located and his inflammatory rhetoric described the doctor as "murdering little babies every week." {'One of you deer hunters might want to kill him' seemed the implicit subtext.}

This is the detritus that issues forth from the loud, ordained mouthpiece men of that transnational tax-dodging, real estate and pederasty cult known as the Catholic Church. This is what passes for Christian worship in sectors of the rural Midwest of the United States in 2012.

(Personally, my idea of virtue devolves from reality, not sophistry. Some students of history might recall the Vatican's and the anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII's vast helpfulness vis-à-vis bogus diplomatic documents and false identities to the fleeing war criminals of the Third Reich, including Barbie, Mengele and Eichmann as they jumped ship like the drowning vermin they were after America's (virtuous) George S. Patton had zeroed in on "The Fatherland" following the Battle of the Bulge, showing the vaunted Third Reich what it was like to be on the receiving end of a 'Lightning War.')

The prideful, pompous priest I observed at this Mass was condescending in manner, movement and tone and his unctuous, self-reverential recitations of passages from some of the gospels were punctuated by him reading notes aloud from his personal smart phone, as if he were some high school jock at recess. He also bellowed his exhortations into a wireless earpiece/headset microphone from the beginning to the end of the service as if he were appearing in a tent show or a county fair amateur hour like a deranged street performer. It was 'all about him', and it was loud and snarky. We, - mere supplicants - were expected to moo like dumb cattle at his self-indulgent cutesy-ness before The Altar.

Thank you, Father. You insufferable prick!

This spectacle was not only resoundingly offensive to the assortment of elderly and school-age faithful seated in the pews but was a painful exercise in the sort of "I am the Master" and "you are the sheep" dynamic witnessed and expanded upon extensively by authors both British and American in tales of seminaries, boarding schools, military academies, prisons and orphanages (all prime wards for unwanted buggering, by the way).

The words of this priest, amplified by his headset mic and bellowed at the unfortunates who had innocently shown up for a mere Sunday service sounded slightly less rational than Ted Kaczynski in syntax and and as hysterical in execution as any glossolalia-spewing, ecstatic snake worshipper; who - like a Jihadist - stands on the edge of a precipice, lusting after an all-consuming catastrophe ready to descend upon the tableau of his Divinely-inspired flagellations.

They have names for these delusions and they are copiously listed in the DSM.

This is what some Christians call worship in the rural Midwest of the United States in 2012.

This Catholic priest, wearing the vestments of his Church brought no solace, comfort, concern, humility, piety or kindness to his flock. But rather, only a monstrous, egocentric psychodrama. He berated them and hollered like a stuck pig equipped with a personal head mic, obsessed about and railed against contraception and abortion, {being, evidently devoid of the proper compliment of grey matter to distinguish between the two).

The priest - allegedly a celibate - hatefully targeted women. There was no positive mention of any woman in his spiel and all of his quotations from the Bible and the gospels were from men.

I'm sure it's just coincidence, Father. (You insufferable prick.)

And this fraudulent, Catholic poser in Roman collar stands in an old, beloved, brick church, each week attempting to incite his listeners -- from a locale less than 20 miles from the Kansas line. Bloody Kansas -- where 2 years ago one Dr. Teller was murdered in cold blood as he attended services on a Sunday in his own church -- by another true believer/fellow traveler in this cohort of female-hating Christian hysterics (all men) who think women are but chattel and men are their overseers.

"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an Invisible Man living in the Sky who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the Invisible Man has a special list of Ten Things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn, and choke and scream and cry forever and ever until the end of time. But He loves you."
-- George Carlin

“When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on” - Heine

2012-01-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

That cretinous, corpulent blowhard, Rush Limbaugh - the Father Coughlin of the Bush era - has bared himself once again as a post-literate, preening gasbag, flashing his dim, fearful audience of fat, white country-club pretenders. The scion of a family of lawyers who grew up in a historically Klan-friendly enclave in Missouri, as usual, his mental stance is broad-as-a-barn and deep-as-a-thimble.

Many years ago the Boston Globe reported on Mitt Romney's dealings as a corporate raider at Bain Capital. Nonetheless, Limbaugh recently burped forth his signature, unctuous, fake outrage saying 'someone should explain to me how what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital is any different from what Warren Buffett does every day.'

Well, first someone ought to, perhaps, explain to the smarmiest hick in broadcasting that when you're a multimillionaire radio host who plays golf on the priciest greens of Florida, maybe it is less than becoming of you to pressure your personal 'housekeeper' to buy you ziploc bags of Oxycodone and surreptitiously hand them off to you in a cigar box in the parking lot of a Denny's several miles from your $23 million dollar condo in order to feed your "Hillbilly Heroin" habit.

But, hey, that's just me.

As the Globe reported, Romney and Bain engineered "a number of deals in which the firm had made a lot of money while closing factories, eliminating jobs, using tax-sheltered offshore accounts, and, in some cases, driving the companies it had bought into bankruptcy."

Warren Buffett, on the other hand doesn't perform leveraged-buyouts of companies and then proceed to liquidate their assets (human or otherwise). He invests in a company, leaves the people who know how to run it in charge and holds onto the investment for many, many years. If he hadn't done this very, very, very many times with astonishing success the casual observer might be forgiven for his ignorance. The average multimillionaire may not be.

There are people who invested $10,000 with Buffet when he first began his company years ago. They are now millionaires many times over precisely because private equity firm strip-mining is not his métier. As the head of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is not only donating the majority of his vast personal fortune to charity, when he learned recently of the shenanigans of an executive at Berkshire who had a sub rosa personal stake in a potential acquisition by the firm and evidently didn't think the company's prohibition on insider trading applied to him, Buffett removed the man from his executive position, and indeed from the company with extreme prejudice.

The top brass at Berkshire then forwarded all pertinent information to the SEC prior to any inquiry. Such a single-minded adherence to 'the rules' is, so far, nonexistent in the annals of financial reportage.

In Buffett's words the man's behavior was, “inexplicable and inexcusable.”

Gee, that's an apt description of Limbaugh's every tone-deaf, dumbo utterance.

Can You Hear Me Now?

2011-12-30T16:51:00.000-08:00

A three-judge panel has just upheld a previous ruling which gives America's giant telecom companies immunity from prosecution for violating the rights of their customers: you the citizens of America.

The ruling which was upheld involved numerous lawsuits against Verizon, AT&T, Nextel, Sprint and others. One of the few large telephone/internet/cable providers in the telecommunications industry of the United States which did not participate in this Stasi-like secret program was Qwest, now known as CenturyLink.

Several years ago under the Bush/Cheney junta the telephone companies began to provide open access to the feds for warrant-less wiretapping of their entire customer base. The big telecoms (who are also happily screwing you with backdoor charges, non-existent taxes and secret fees for your cell phone service) certainly have no compunctions about violating the rights of a third party - their customer - without that customer's permission or knowledge. One should kiss Constitutional Protections goodbye if he or she is in bed with these ganeffs.

The practice was going on for several years in secret, until a whistle blower and long-time employee of a California telecom corporation explained in testimony that there was an entire, secret "black room" at the company where he'd spent a career. It had popped up in 2008, kept under wraps from employees and shareholders and was created for the sole use of federal officials. And not the type presenting a warrant signed by a judge, as per the Fourth Amendment, to search a premises. Rather, the phone companies bent over and allowed, without probable cause or warrant, the telephone calls, records, emails, banking and medical transactions of every single customer in their data bases to be fondled and molested at will by federal goons for their personal cyber-gratification. Under the guise - of course - of Homeland Security. A department title designed to make Hitler youth tingle.

This practice began 7 years after the passage of the foul and abominable Patriot Act, which is rivaled perhaps, only by Germany's Enabling Act of 1933 in the brief history of former democracies which collapse and then quickly descend into fascism.

Before the bogus War on Terror became a gravy train for Pentagon contractors and that useless, fraudulent, ineffective and cartoonish bureaucracy known as The Department of Homeland Security was created (again by the Bush/Cheney junta) American citizens, police officers, courts, legislators and even judges were bound by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which reads:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Hello!

Silent Newt

2011-12-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

Perennial blowhard Newt Gingrich can't get on the ballot in his home state!

Gingrich lives in a "mansionette" in a McLean, Virginia neighborhood where average home prices run in the $7 to $12 million range. But Citizen Newt won't be on the ballot in his locale's primary election.

Notwithstanding his boastful claims of expertise as a national leader, budget expert, policy analyst, military strategist, historian and professor the silver-haired influence peddler and insufferable right-wing shill struck out. His campaign staff -- most of whom resigned en masse in June, 2011 -- is unable to summon a level of collective competence to legally place his name on the ballot in the very state where the deranged sycophant resides.

Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus.

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

2011-12-16T02:07:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens, the iconoclastic essayist, writer, commentator and journalist has died. He was diagnosed with esophogeal cancer in June 2010. In his career he confounded and critiqued pundits, other writers, politicians, world leaders and friends and foes on the left and the right. British born, Hitchens lived in Washington, DC and had become an American citizen in 2007. He attacked the high and the mighty, including Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and the Pope and wrote admiringly of figures as diverse as George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson. An atheist, Hitchens' battle with cancer did not diminish his criticism of religion or change his world-view; he continued writing and speaking as his health declined. He was 62.

Louis CK, the $5 Concert

2011-12-15T14:01:00.000-08:00

Comedian Louis CK might be described by some as "edgy". He demonstrated recently that he's certainly on the cutting edge of access and distribution for his performances and his audience. Last weekend he adroitly delineated the difference between open access for the consumer to information and entertainment, as opposed to what various corporate media giants, their lobbyists, lawyers and their minions in Congress are planning (i.e., a digital future on the other side of a very large, dark chasm).

The Washington Post reported, "Louis C.K. entered bold new territory Saturday, as he began selling his most recent comedy special as a $5 downloadable video without copy protections. Or as he put it, “No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap. You can download this file, play it as much as you like, burn it to a DVD, whatever.”

One can only imagine the process if a standard concert taping and broadcast approach to the performance at New York's Beacon Theater had been used. The comedian explained:

"The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. Twelve hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of today we've sold over 11,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges, etc., I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large companty to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again."

Amen. That's how an actual artist thinks.

Feeding at the Trough

2011-12-15T02:16:00.000-08:00

The Daily Beast is reporting that Supreme Group, a Pentagon contractor is being ordered to repay American taxpayers $760 million for overcharging the US Department of Defense.

Among other services, the company was hired by the Pentagon to feed the entire military force stationed in Afghanistan. Though just the latest in a litany of overcharges, fraudulent billings and naked thievery by numerous private defense contractors in the past ten years, the ruling against Supreme Group dwarfs previous similar scams perpetrated on America's unwitting citizenry, such as those by Halliburton/KBR which overcharged the Pentagon $27 million in 2004 and $61 million in 2007.

How Lowe Can You Go?

2011-12-13T21:54:00.000-08:00

The Florida Family Association, yet another fervid Christian hate group from the nation's lightning capital has garnered a lot of publicity of late for pressuring Lowe's, the giant home products retailer to pull their advertising from "All-American Muslim", a TLC reality show.

Personally, I like Lowe's. I appreciate that they filter their air and you find a lot less dust on the inventory when you stroll their aisles compared to other large home improvement stores which also carry lumber, hardware, paint, electrical and plumbing supplies.

But before I saw Russell Simmons advocating a Lowe's boycott on tv I had already decided I didn't want to spend my money any more at a place that was so cowed by a tiny, right-wing lunatic fringe group that they would yank all their advertising from the show. "All-American Muslim's" mortal sin is that it shows several everyday families of Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan as something other than suicidal, jihadist wack-jobs. Heaven forfend! (Dearborn is the home of Henry Ford and traditionally, one of the largest Arab and Muslim communities in the US.)

Sadly, this is par for the course among such fundamentalist, nutso-types and foaming-at-the-mouth automatons when non-Christians or gay people pass in front of their blinders. This same group was previously exercised about the animated cartoon show, "The Family Guy" as well as a Sunshine State institution -- Disney World -- whom the klan at the Florida Family Association deemed insufficiently hateful of gays and lesbians.

During the last Senate election campaign, Sharon Angle, the woman with the room-temperature IQ who ran as a Republican from Nevada claimed that sharia law was being enforced in Dearborn. I'm sure this secret message from on high would have been news to the likes of Ford, Lear, United Technologies and some of the other dyed-in-the-wool American corporations located in this Michigan city. As far as we earthlings know however, this revelation, perhaps whispered in the candidate's ear by some off-world galactic federation was never transmitted by Ms. Angle to any board members of Dearborn's Fortune 500 companies

For those feeling clairvoyant, the NASDAQ symbol for Lowe's is LOW. Last I heard the stock price was going down and I believe it may dip very LOW very soon......

"Dictators of The West"

2011-12-10T09:57:00.001-08:00

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."    -- Benito Mussolini

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
                                                                                                                             -- Henry Ford
                                   ___________________________________________

This week in The Independent journalist Robert Fisk explains how the lame news coverage of the anti-corporate banking protests in the West by the Big News purveyors keeps most people as stupid and uninformed about their own countries now as they are about the "Arab Spring".

"What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people."

"The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters."

"The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them."

70 Years Later, Remains Dumped in Landfill

2011-12-08T07:23:00.001-08:00

The December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan began WWII for the United States. As is appropriate there were observations yesterday to remember the dead and the surviving veterans, though they are becoming few in number.

At that time, even the America First isolationists who did not want America to become involved in the war against the Axis powers realized that this foreign military attack on the United States, the first since the War of 1812 changed everything. The American people responded, as did their President, asking Congress for a Declaration of War and in just over 3 1/2 years, both Germany and Japan were defeated.

Although the US is still "at war" in Iraq and in Afghanistan no end is in sight. There was no Declaration of War, no President called on all Americans to sacrifice, and, of course there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Two useless, undeclared, un-financed, greedy wars which continue today have resulted in thousands of grievously wounded military personnel, numerous fatalities and a largely destroyed American economy.

George Bush and Dick Cheney never sought a Declaration of War from Congress, despite constitutional requirements for such. They also forbade news photos of the thousands of flag draped coffins regularly arriving at Dover Air Force base containing the bodies of every American veteran killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Very sad news about these recent military adventures has come to light as of December 7, 2011. Between 2004 and 2008 --under the administration of Bush/Cheney-- the remains of at least 247 American military personnel were disposed of in a landfill in King George County, Virginia following processing at Dover Air Force Base.

It is perhaps fortunate that most of the veterans of WWII have passed on, unknowing of the disdain for their sacrifice and service evinced by neo-con, chicken-hawk war criminals such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Amid their bogus, poser patriotism they spent eight years enriching their corporate masters and privatizing the United States military to such an extent that private contractors feeding at the cost-plus trough of the Pentagon payroll now outnumber American troops in theater. This expansion of operators removed from the chain of command has resulted in the countless transgressions and perfidy of corporations such as Aegis, Dyncorp, Halliburton/KBR, Blackwater/Xe as well as the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base.

May they burn in hell.

Cue the Calliope Music

2011-12-03T08:26:00.001-08:00

America's Extreme Comb-over (Blowhard Edition):
Donald Trump is slated to 'moderate' a Republican "debate" later this month. The Republican candidates are to appear together with Mr. Points-at-Himself on the basic cable Ion channel in late December.

Evidently Trump hasn't enough juice with his employer, NBC to headline the circus on their channel. That the debates aren't really debates and have become a true clown circus can hardly be underlined by having a reality tv host as the "moderator". When last heard from Trump claimed to have dispatched private detectives to Hawaii in search of President Obama's birth certificate. He also implied that as a Harvard Law student Obama had to be some sort of Manchurian Candidate/stooge to have become editor of the Harvard Law Review.

John Huntsman, the only rational-sounding Republican presidential aspirant hasn't genuflected at Trumpland to kiss the the ring, unlike Cain, Gingrich, Perry and Romney. Huntsman declined participation in the "The Apprentice Debate" as it's now being called, saying the American people "deserve a serious discussion of the issues". A Huntsman campaign spokesman said, "We look forward to watching Mitt and Newt suck up to The Donald with a big bowl of popcorn." Ron Paul declined attendance as well, describing the event as "beneath the office of the Presidency."

It seems as if the Republican candidates have been together on television more often than the cast of a "Real Housewives" show during a marathon weekend. Of the dubious GOP spectacle Bill Maher remarked last month, "I feel like a 9-year old watching "The Three Stooges"."

.

Gingrich, the Hate Monger

2011-12-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

Not at all bashful about explaining that he wasn't a lobbyist because he didn't need the money, (saying he was getting $60,000 a speech) Newt Gingrich has begun spinning some more fevered hallucinations on the campaign trail about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps).

"So more Americans today get food stamps than before. And we now give it away as cash -- you don't get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything. We have people who take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii. They give food stamps now to millionaires because, after all, don't you want to be compassionate?"
-- Newt Gingrich speaking in Council Bluffs, Iowa

(Newt, a chubby multi-millionaire is obviously ignorant of the direct-deposit/debit card sector of e-banking.) In truth, 49% of the recipients of food stamps are children (under 17), 9% are elderly (over age 60) and 16% are disabled. Families with children make up 76% of food stamp recipients. The average gross monthly income for families qualifying for food stamps is $643 per month. Yes -- that's 643 dollars before taxes, Newt!

Gingrich is obviously delusional, perhaps a side effect from unknown pharmaceuticals and he evidently thinks Iowans are all dumb farmers. He didn't mention being paid $300,000 for lobbying on behalf of ethanol subsidies from the Department of Agriculture (the Food Stamp people). He also seems to hate children. And what does he hate more than children? Poor children. The unctuous gasbag continues:

"...children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works."
-- Newt Gingrich speaking in Des Moines, Iowa

Such is the mindset of today's leading Republican presidential contender when he steps outside the Beltway.

Newt Gingrich is "of course, the moral equivalent of a bowel movement."
-- (the late) John Gregory Dunne

Happy Birthday Mark Twain

2011-12-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

"The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet." -- Mark Twain. Hemingway called him "the headwater of American literature."

Aun Sang Su Kyi met with Secretary of State Clinton in Myanmar

2011-12-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

Reptilian Newt

2011-11-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich, the philandering toady who left Congress under a cloud fancies himself a historian. He recently suggested eliminating poverty by replacing public school janitors with grade school-age children.

Gingrich has a $500,000 revolving charge account with Tiffany, the Fifth Avenue jeweler, so you can imagine he might not recall that a century ago child labor laws were enacted in the USA precisely to protect children from the abuses they suffered while under indentured servitude as non-union, low-wage workers.

But Gingrich also hopes America's collective amnesia includes his own recent history. He was paid $1.8 million by Freddie Mac, a GSE for which he lobbied and now claims he never lobbied. Gingrich is also the thrice-married, disgraced former Speaker of the House. He was forced to resign in 1998. There were 84 ethics complaints filed against him. In a vote of 953 to 28 his colleagues in Congress reprimanded him and levied against him a $300,000 penalty. It was the first time in the history of the United States Congress that a Speaker had been thus disciplined. But, history is not Newt's strong suit. It's another of his fake areas of expertise.

Insult to Injury

2011-11-16T16:08:00.000-08:00

As if the entire debacle of Penn State football and its pedophile predicament filling the nightly airwaves weren't creepy enough; Bob Costas, the diminutive idiot-savant of sports minutiae broadcast an interview with the man accused of 40 criminal counts of sex crimes with minor children. Costas is the same man who once interviewed the late, great Ray Charles on television and attempted to press the musician to acknowledge that Elvis Presley was "the king"(!). The ever adroit Mr. Charles asked the tone-deaf sports-spieler, "King of what?"

I'm uncertain of whether Mr. Costas had any breathtaking analysis upon the very weird retirement of Jerry Sandusky from his job at Penn State in 1999. Sandusky left to spend more time with the non-profit he founded, Second Mile. Most other coaches after spending decades with a college team bearing the record and reputation of a Penn State might be expected to pursue lucrative offers from other schools upon leaving or be promoted to replace the head coach after his own retirement. Sandusky, who is out on $100,000 bail (an amount set by a judge who was on the board of the aforementioned charity) did neither, allegedly to spend more time with his charity, where he encountered numerous young, troubled boys between 1999 and 2011 while still having full access to the Penn State football team facilities.

University of Pedophilia

2011-11-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

Joe Paterno was fired; a mere 13 years after crimes of which he was notified occurred 'on his watch'. Actually, they occurred on his campus; were committed by his coach.

The sacrificing of the octogenarian pope of the Penn State Jockocracy is merely a feeble attempt to paper over the moral chasm illustrated by the school's silence and slap-on-the-wrist complicity (for over a decade) following reports of children being sodomized on the premises of the University of Pennsylvania.

It is fitting that the first team the Paterno-less players face in the aftermath of the coach's sacking is Nebraska, another state where college football is a subject of such mindless veneration that the coach of the team would indeed be canonized were the university's mere regents instead a college of cardinals.

Many long years passed between the day Paterno was notified by one of his underlings (who had, on the previous day witnessed a boy, age 10 being anally raped in a shower by a Penn State football coach) and the University of Pennsylvania's decision to fire him. One can only marvel at how catholic that seems. Paterno's response to the abrupt - if long overdue - decision by the board, which follows recent comments that he planned to retire at the "end of the season" was that he "was disappointed".

Really?

I wonder if it has occurred to him before now how disappointed in the schools' adults that 10 year old boy and all the subsequent (or previous) victims must have been. Disappointed too, I'm sure, were they in the evident lack of concern on their behalf and the absence (until now) of a criminal prosecution of that predatory vampire, Coach Sandusky.

A Decade Later

2011-09-09T22:55:00.000-07:00

Only 289 bodies were found at the site of the World Trade Center.
For the official story to be true 60 government agencies have to have failed contemporaneously.
The Keane "9/11" Commission has, for years, kept talking about their recommendations although their report included not a syllable on the WTC7 building.
No other steel frame building on Planet Earth has collapsed from fire since that day. (Nor had one ever before.)
The total number of war games that were going on in the morning of 9/11/2001 involving personnel from the Department of Defense, NORAD, the FAA and Eastern Air Defense Sector is still classified.
The towers were designed to withstand the impact of the largest commercial airliners flying at the time the first tower opened. Those planes weighed over 400 tons.
The official story of what happened is itself a conspiracy theory, so who are the real "conspiracy nuts" here?
Jets were scrambled by the military in the USA 129 times in the year 2000 because of aircraft flying off course or losing contact with air traffic controllers.
The FDNY has been fighting fires in New York City since before the first skycraper was built. They don't blithely send hundreds of highly trained firemen 4/5ths of the way up a building that is structurally compromised.
At the time the 9/11 tragedy occurred the federal government was not permitted to torture people nor monitor their phones, computers, mail, bank accounts or medical records without probable cause and due process, thanks to The Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Sadly, this is no longer the case. In fact, if you question your government in 2011 you are no longer commonly thought to be a patriot honoring a long tradition but rather, an enemy of the state.

Epic Lame

2011-09-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

Some things are too creepy to ponder. September 2, 2011 Dick Cheney and Carrot Top kibitzing on the "Tonight Show" -- a war criminal and a juicer. This show makes "Hogan's Heroes" look like "Shindler's List."

"I've known Jay Leno since 1976 and to be honest he's a bit of a knockwurst." --David Letterman

The Pet Goat

2011-08-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

Why I won't be watching this program.

Despite the previous years of its high reputation with a photographic and nature magazine, the National Geographic Society has a cable channel owned by Rupert Murdoch called the National Geographic Channel.

They have been relentlessly advertising in print and on television an upcoming interview with former President Junior Bush as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches. I do not plan to watch.

It is not only because it is on a channel which is part of Murdoch's reptilian, all-garbage-all-the-time syndicate of media ownership but because there is nothing new to learn from W.

Seven minutes. Thats how long he sat in a Florida classroom like a dim, mute cipher after learning our nation was "under attack"; the words Andrew Card claimed to whisper in his ear as the grade school photo-op continued as if frozen in time. The class read aloud from a book called "The Pet Goat." How ironic.

The blueblood blackout-drinker, trustfund fratboy who never had to work for a living froze in the headlights like a hollow-horned Judas goat, merely eight months after his inauguration. The first moment he was called upon to be a statesman he failed.

Ten years passed. There was never a Congressional investigation of 9/11. The people responsible for the numerous military, civilian, executive, federal and system-wide failures of that day have never been called to account. When a 'Commission' was grudgingly created years after the fact it was funded with $3 million dollars, whereas the Congress spent $100 million dollars investigating the smarmy dalliances of the previous President.

And in 2011 Americans are supposed to believe that the laws of physics were suspended on 9/11. Instead magical, mythic anomalies occurred and that's all our government thinks we simple-minded citizens need to know.

Drink up, America. Put your feet up. Here's some more bogus propaganda from the Neo Con corporate politburo. Enjoy.

Of Peons and Plutocrats

2011-08-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

You may already know that both Bush and Obama administrations have been stealing you blind.

1912 cartoon--

However, there was a recent Bloomberg News story about the "Wall Street Aristocracy" which reveals that the Federal Reserve had secretly lent "banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, (in addition to the TARP/bailout funds) about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley, got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress."

Another War Criminal Hawking a Book

2011-08-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe he'll schmooze the gals on The View or yuck it up with John Stewart, like his chum Rumsfeld did.

Dick Cheney and his new book are adroitly addressed by Glen Greenwald in Salon.

Trivia Question:
Is the United States the only industrialized nation whose former President and Vice President (and a former Secretary of State) are facing arrest by the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague? They are definitely avoiding all travel to Europe......

Who Said This?

2011-08-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

Milton Friedman

John Kenneth Galbraith

Frank Zappa

"Income tax should be done away with anyway because when it was established it was an emergency tax and was supposed to have an end to it. Just like the toll booths on the highway. Income tax is a racket."

"The one thing the income tax does to everybody who pays it is it pisses you off because you earned that money and now the government is taking it away from you. If you gotta pay a tax, pay a tax when you buy something, not because you worked."

"What this really gives you access to -- in terms of tax recoupment -- is the underground economy because when a guy is making a covert buck the goal is to spend the covert buck and at the point where you spent the covert buck you are now being able to tax every one of those guys who has laundered the cash. They gotta buy a yacht someday, a house, they're gonna buy something."

"Well here's the other thing; think about this. Suppose I told you, from tomorrow on, you pay no income tax, no federal income tax. You'd be happy. You'd suddenly realize that you had another couple thousand bucks in your pocket. And it doesn't go in the bank. You'd go out and spend it. And there'd be a spike in the economy that would just go boom! The Dow.... what do you think happens the day after they know that there's going to be no more income tax?"

"What I would propose to do, is have a five-year plan where the sales tax would be at twelve to fourteen percent on certain products. I'd try to exempt necessary foodstuffs, because that's where the poor get hurt. And I don't think that many (drug cartels) are buying that many cartons of milk and eggs and stuff."

"And so you're not really going to cripple the nation's economy by exempting that sort of thing. So for five years you keep that sales tax a little higher just to deal with the deficit. And at the point where the deficit is done away with, then you bring the sales tax down to a maintenance level. I think you can run a pretty good economy that way."
--Frank Zappa, Spin Magazine, 1991

While America Slept

2011-08-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

The past 20 years of vertical integration of radio, television, newspapers, magazine and book publishing have resulted in more and more news and entertainment outlets in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The result has been that both the quantity and quality of programming for Americans has radically declined.

The rebels in Libya began rolling into Tripoli Sunday; a "no news" day in America. The moribund broadcast triumvirate of NBC, CBS and ABC were heavily dependent on foreign news feeds, although NBC still has one journalist on the ground in the Arab world in the person of Richard Engel, who regularly distinguishes himself. There are other reporters who cover the region but in the television world, the amount of news coverage and the evident interest by the executives of the handful of multimedia behemoths in providing it is freeze-dried and fragmentary at best.

A pale ghost of the CNN of 20 years ago was visible with its lukewarm, repetitive coverage of the collapse of Tripoli, though it was certainly not inspiring. But why would it be, these days? Most Sunday evening television (like the other six nights of the week) in America seems to be a rancid buffet of shows about prison, tabloid gossip, and numerous flatline "reality" offerings whose subjects are often trolling waterways in search of alligators, careening across landscapes both urban and unsettled as truck drivers, tow truck drivers, pawn shop owners, or scavengers of defunct storage units and/or "noodling" for catfish. This panoply of mindless drivel is sandwiched between syndicated variations of "Cops" type shows and their sub-genre: a large helping of marginal quality police dash-cam and civilian phone-cam video gruel, relentlessly stuffed into a sausage-like queue made long enough so as to pretend it equals a program. It's fast food made from remnants of non-food. Garbage in/garbage out.

The significant factor in this menu of pseudo-entertainment now clogging the arteries of public discourse is that there are no writers involved. Even the most kindergarten-friendly staples of mindless, popcorn television at its dawn in the Fifties, aimed largely at children or what has morphed into the "family" demographic involved writers.

Although it seems not to be allowed for American consumption by the corporate gatekeepers of America's television terrain -- except in a couple of markets -- Al Jazeera English provided coherent, up to the minute news of the fall of Tripoli. It included commentary by knowledgeable folks who were not yelling at each other.
_____________________

The federal telecommunications law passed in 1996 allowed phone companies to jump into cable and, conversely allowed cable companies to enter the telephone business. Nonetheless, America's promised "Information Superhighway" was never built. Just as large corporations are sitting on record profits today instead of investing in the US, many telecom companies used federal tax incentives to pad their bottom line with little improvement -- and in most cases a vast decline -- in the quality of service delivered to the customer.

This continued a trend in Wall Street's merger and acquisition fever; strip mining, hollowing out and liquidating the assets of companies as they are gobbled up. Meanwhile, the US lags far behind several countries in broadband service and ISPs in America are trying to create a two-tiered internet by jacking up rates for certain users and higher quality while ferociously hyping 'high speed internet' to those with basic access. New monopolies are being created in the post-deregulation no-man's-land of IT in the US.

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." -- Hunter S. Thompson

As the FCC became the hand-puppet of corporate media barons, long standing regulations were gutted. The people who are raking in billions with federally-granted licenses for private use of the public airwaves feel no need to serve the public good and are the last people who want to see public access in service of the public interest or to provide equal time to competing political parties. Instead, their coffers are routinely engorged with fat checks from private, corporate funds every campaign season since they hold a monopoly on radio and television access, servicing the duopoly of the DNC and the GOP in every race from village dog-catcher to Senator.

It is this lazy, corpulent cadre of country-clubbing white collar bandits who most benefit from the continued dumbing-down of America. When you no longer have an educated middle class into which the poorest working class citizens can ascend and you have reduced the longest-standing constitutional democracy to a banana republic of fearful serfs ruled by an elite of greedhead military-industrial plutocrats, why would you care if actual journalism and solid reporting disappear? The American tradition of independent-thinking private individuals who question authority will then have become as quaint a cultural artifact as a buggy whip or a toga.