I hate to admit it but

I'm gonna miss the Boston Herald when it finally goes for the terminal dirt nap.
Yesterday's screaming headline about a dog in East Boston that had been mysteriously and deliberately poisoned has to stand as an all time local genre classic on a par with "Nuclear Blast Kills Thousands".

Arthur Brisbane that frantic turn of the century Hearstian paragon couldn't have done it better.
A slow news day? Nope that is NEVER the case with the Boston Herald on the job!

I give One Herald Square all due credit, they are zealous in their mission to heat the notoriously chilly blood of Bostonians with tabloid bombast. Their columnists are all thugs and illiterates, the copy is trash, the sports page is littered with strip joint adverts...but the Herald's great theme that its a world of sudden death, slobbering sentiment and shocking revelations goes howling merrily on.

Eventually it will all go to smash, but for the moment its been a riotous ride.

Jacoby wants Rehnquist

out so it seems.
Geez Louise but you don't have to go too far back into Jeff's archives to find him baying like a coyote for to stay-stay-stay on the Supreme Court.
Well that is today's conservative for you, fickle, they swing with one hero and then go chasing after some other clown who promises fresh vigorous kicks.

Maybe Jacoby thinks Roberts is a squish and so wants to make sure some bible worshipping wowser thug gets on the court for sure.
Maybe its just a debauched hunger for the sensation of fresh judicial outrages.
You can never tell with JAcoby, his motivations are always in moral or patriotic terms and therefore are naught but cover for the worst sort of depravity and despotism.

Just a thought...

When Romney finally packs up in the middle of the night and decamps for Council Bluffs or Epsom Circle N.H. d'ye suppose Scot Lehigh will be left standing forlorn in the middle of the roadin a-wailin' "Mitt? Mitt! MITT! DON'T LEAVE ME PUHLEEEEZ!!! DON'T LEAVE ME HERE!!!!Waaaaahhhhhhh!!!!"

The Crash of the Whip Part II

So Romney came back and veto'd the Morning After Pill legislation?
Big surprise there.
That veto was all but set into stone the day that Mitt started cracking ugly on the Commonwealth in front of the wowsers of Spartanburg SC.
Still and all that, its just sad to read his elaborate rationalization for the veto in today's Globe. Romney is just self aware enough to know he has broken a the letter and spirit of a solemn campaign promise made in 2002, otherwise would he need to make such hopeless excuses for his actions?
Why else would he steal a page from the Nixon-Rove playbook and insist that the veto somehow satisfies that pledge not to revise the contraception laws of the Commonwealth?
Pathetic this is just pathetic, Romney hasn't even announced for President yet and already he has made himself a slave of the likes of James Dobson and Gary Bauer.
And not for nothing but, you watch when the time comes, that veto will do him no good in the GOP primaries. His qualifications about abortions, rape, incest, the life of the mother, will all be counted against him as the worst sort of truckling to da liberal establishment.
The men who egged Romney on in this matter will abandon him in favor of some hairy-assed barbarian who will promise to hang every OB-GYN who even thinks about abortion and lock up every fertile woman til' marriage.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

The crash of the whip...

According to yesterday's Globe, Governor Romney is gonna interrupt his NH vacation to fly back to Boston and presumably veto the Morning After Pill legislation now headed for his desk.
Ah but he heard the baying yelps from his real constituents in Spartansburg and Orange County - so really what could he do?
The sad thing about all this is, you could predict practically to the hour that Mitt would fold on this issue. All that mishaugas last week about letting Healey sign the bill was doomed from the start. Gary Bauer and Bill Donovan want this thing vetoed and Mitt came a scurrying like a perfect little lackey.
Anyone out there wanna take odds that Mitt is gonna sign the bill in keeping with his solemn campaign promise of 2002?
Anyone?
Anyone at all?

Beneath the Comfort Zone...

Well, there he was, Governor Mitt Romney down on the Red Line in Park Street Station yesterday, grinning like a mongoloid and gamely trying to reassure commuters that we need fear nothing from terrorist attacks on the subways.
Of course, Romney couldn't even figure out the train fare (despite the fact that its plastered all over Park Street in big black letters)so what the hell does he know about Al Queda's intentions?
Ah but rest assured Scot Lehigh will take this empty preening performance as further proof of Mitt's masterful leadership of the state.
This stupid vain shampoo'd collie-dog of a man is supposed to protect our rights and verty lives?
Ay-yi-yi-yi!
Time to look into Baja real estate I think.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Safire on bended Knee

a more grimly ironic scene cannot be imagined; Bill Safire begging a Republican Dominated Congress for a Federal Shield law to protect rightical chic journalists like Judith Miller.
Oh this is rare sport indeed my friends, I remember Big Bill Safire in his chintziest days when he waged a lonely war to get Billy Carter indicted and throw in jail. Its been all downhill ever since for Safire despite his macher pretensions.
A scoundrel and a liar, now he importunes the very power drunk Congress he helped elect to protect journalists from the all powerful courts and a rampant US Government.
Lordy he had no problem with crusading special prosecutors when the target was Bill and Hilary?
What happened?
Now of course one of his own, the stupid and credulous Judith Miller (a journalist as malevolent as a meat fed pig and dumber than nine chickens) is behind bars refusing to reveal a sourcem, and Bill can't handle it.
Ha-HA!!
My money is on the Gummint in this one, Bill's got some long odds to overcome.
Safire is facing a President and a Congress with no sympathy for him as a journalist and less respect for the law...all men and women whose ascension to nigh absolute power Safire once celebrated in the public prints.
All I can say is, have Bill cited for Contempt of Congress, have the Sgt at Arms drag his ass off to the DC City Jail. If its Rick Santorum swearing out the warrant so much the better!
It'll do Safire some good to hear the crash of cell-doors, sure-n didn't he once fantasize about the same fate befalling President Clinton?

To Quote an anonymous slave..."Shoes on de other foot now Massa".


Sick
Demented
Typical

Did Bush rush out a Supreme Court Nominee

to get Karl Rove's travails off the front page?
Probably, this is Bush we are talking about after all.
Will it make a difference?
Not in the slightest.
If you think (as La Famiglia Arbusto does) entirely in terms of press coverage, spin, and media manipulation, then its a crafty cunning type move.
Mind you it'd a been great to simply shame Karl Rove into resignation and disgrace but these are famously shameless power worshipping people. A little thing like shredding the rules governing national security is nothing to this vile rabble.
However there is a special prosecutor out there and a grand jury and NONE of Rove's meandering explanations have made any sense up until now.
There is also a place were spin's effectiveness is diminished, that is the courts and jury-rooms of this faltering republic.

Sooner or later, Karl is gonna be under oath and then we will see some sh*t.
Try to keep that in mind.

Spineless in Boston

Point .08 and a Donkey in his post last thursday raises the interesting possibility that Mitt Romney might duck the pending "morning after pill" legislation by leaving the state at a judicious moment and allowing Kerry Healey to sign it into law as Acting Governor.
Healey of course has already signaled her own support for said bill so its once of those plausible-on-paper type things.

Of course, I doubt Kerry Healey is allowed to go to the ladies room without a signed permission slip from the Governor but be that as it may.

Well, its an intriguing scenario and even funny when you consider the image of the famously conservative Mitt sneaking off to Utah or New Hampshire to avoid signing or not signing a bill he opposes but i doubt this will happen.
Even a dilettante like Romney has to realize what an indecisive spectacle he'd be making of himself under those circumstances...the wowsers and his constituents would both have to see him as more than slightly hapless.
Still and all that, a moment of truth is arriving for Romney, he has few options left to play in this state regardless of his Potomac Fever.

Culture Notes...

I was taking the bus home yesterday when I discovered that the driver was listening to the "Howie Carr Show". He didn't have the sound up too loud so all I caught was Howie's unmistakable snarky dulcet tones droning on about fags, lesbians, hacks etc etc etc blah blah blah!
This gave me to wonder, why in the world would a well compensated public employee, a member of one of the strongest remaining labor unions on the Eastern seaboard would wanna listen to the famously anti-labor anti-public service Howie Carr?

Well, allegedly Howie is funny.
I think he is the dreariest little putz imaginable but lets face facts, it is a Pauly Shore world out there. Of course, Howie's main targets are the usual sexual others, gays, lesbians and the like. In fact, far as I can tell, Howie is fairly obsessed with homosexual practices great and small.
And clearly his audience digs that the most, why else would he keep harping on it?

One of the things we liberals haven't seemed to assessed yet, is the sheer power or certain conservative cultural signifiers, in this case fag-bashing.
So far as I can see, it can quite easily lead a man far astray from his economic or political interests.
Homo Economicus versus Homo-Phobus...and it looks like the latter is winning by a country mile.
The answer isn't hard to see, the white working class in America has been propagandized on fear for nigh on fifty years now, fear of communists, fear of blacks, fear of women and now fear of faggots and liberals.
Reaction formation posits we often laugh at we are afraid of, hence the endless stream of gay gags from out talk radio.
Fear is also a great source of confusion when it comes to sorting out long term versus short term interests.
So really, behind those signifiers is a great roiling fear...so the challenge therefore is to somehow come up with our own fear-dispersing signifiers.
How to do that is beyond Humble Elias.

Such is the Kingdom of God
On the Congressionally Licensed
Public Airwaves and Elsewhere.
7-14-05
5:45pm EST
God Save the Republic
God Save the Commonwealth.

.08 Acres (and a Donkey) had an interesting

post yesterday about SCot Lehigh's potential source within the State GOP's high command. G'wan over there and read it, he raises some interesting and suggestive issues.

Gotta Give High Pitched Rick Santorum credit

he has the courage of his convictions. Faced with mounting criticism of his 2002 remarks blaming the catholic clerical sex abuse scandal on godless Boston based liberalism...he shrugged and simply restated his voices in that nasty psychotic whine of his.
No doubt, all over the nation he is getting the usual "sez what he means means what he sez props" from the usual suspects.
Of course there is a double standard at work here, if say John Kerry had spent the lead up to Campaign 2004 denouncing "gun toting white trash" in Spartansburg SC or refering to Texas as "a lawless wasteland inhabited by Bible-corrupted peasants" he wouldn't have survived to shake his first hand in New Hampshire.
Alas politics in this country has degenerated to such an appalling degree that Senator Santorum being a proper example of homo conservatus, may indulge in the sin of sectionalism sans serious reproach....at least from his fellow so called conservatives.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Ghod I love Scot Lehigh...

no one else has his talent for abolishing the summer doldrums with sycophantic piffle.
Indeed today's column is a veritable symphony of awestruck groveling. You see it is Lehigh's contention that Mitt Romney really is engaged with his Very Important Job As Governor.
(Please...stiffle those giggles)
For proof, Scot faithfully recycles a shopworn collection of Admin press releases, photo ops with the legislative leadership, a phone call to Dan Grabauskas, a TV appearance and the elevation of a few lackey's to Cabinet rank. To Scot this sort of thing, usual Romneyan show biz dreck, is nigh Churchillian leadership.
I give Lehigh credit, in spite of everything he is still shilling for Mitt week in and week out. If tomorrow, the Governor set fire to the Commonwealth as a burnt offering to Gary Bauer, Lehigh would sigh with sheer worship.
Nothing else matters except that Romneyus August shall be glorified in hot weather as in cold.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Marshall Wittman

seems to have his head on straight.
He pretty much sums up my own feelings towards the emerging Rove Affair in DC. Its a mere matter of watching to see how Karl will escape punishment....nothing more.

An Idle Conjuration...

I sometimes think, on the basis of the scant evidence available to a blogger, that George Bush Jr might just be the first non-literate President of the United States. A harbinger if you will, of the coming reign of the completely illiterate.
Certainly Bush knows how to read, but has no appreciation of reading as an activity nor any real use for it.
Sadly, this is the coming type in US Politics. Unlettered, unread, comtemptuously assured in all things and an insufferable philistine.
Truly outside of school, has Bush ever read a book of his own volition?
I doubt it.
Hell I doubt he has ever read the Baptist Bible whose Sharia type rules he seeks to impose on us all.
Damn, even Reagan read westerns and Harry Truman that proud High School Graduate, read everything he could lay hands on.
Not Bush though, he doesn't need books to tell him the shape of things to come, he has the blissful eye of faith.

Honest to Ghod but

Larry King is a hopelessly senile old coot.
Last night he was interviewing a spokesman for the London Fire Brigade in the aftermath of yesterday's terrorist attack....fine so far.
Then went Larry and actually asked this poor schlub if the famously narrow streets of London were a problem for firetrucks?
The guy put on this pained tight little smile, you could just tell this was indeed the stupidest question he'd been asked since the first bomb had gone off that morning.
However, our boy swallowed manfully and assured all and sundry that London's narrow lanes were no great challenge to the Fire Brigade.

Alas its like this all over the cableverse, CNN sent its cameras out to get some face time off of that blustering clown and Imus in the Morning regular Bo Dietl...he said nothing of any import and then it was off to get commuters reactions.
At a time when we need timely and objective news reportage we are served largely by a collection of sideshow freaks, the likes Brian Williams the Human Collie Dog, Nancy Grace the Prom Queen of Court teevee or the King of the Undead, Paul Harvey.
These are the yaps with the microphones and hours and hours of congressionally licensed airtime with not a single sensible thought among any of them.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

The Globe is trying to build up

the current morning after pill legislation, now headed for the Governor's desk, as the clash of civilizations crapola. Mitt's newly minted sterling conservatism versus the Great and General Court's ever roilin' liberalism....yadda yada yadda look for the usual cliches from the usual suspects.
in fact this whole situation is a good illustration of Mitt's fast shrinking political prospects. Think about it, if he signs it with the usual whining about his private beliefs versus public promises, the out of state wowsers will go predictably apeshit and Mitt will look weak.
If he vetoes the bill, Romney will once again appear to be toadying up to the GOP's theocrats. Again...he will look weak.
Is this the same guy that Scot Lehigh etc insists has superlative political skills?
Mitt has painted himself into so many easily avoided corners that I've lost count.
I mean god forbid he should try to address any issues from the perspective of what is good for Massachusetts.
Alas Mitt is long past that, he has mortgaged himself and his alleged ideals to a fanciful dream of ice cream socials in the Rose Garden...all else that follows is tedious and sadly predictable.

NBC News' Brian Williams is a

a news anchor just made for shark attacks in Florida and kidnapped white kids all over America. His blank punim, his robotic baritone its all so intimate and reassuring.
The summer, traditionally a slow news season is nothing less than Brian's time to shine. Bits on sunburn, the latest beach toys, robot lawn-mowers all Brian's stock in trade.

Of course if you need someone to explain how La Famiglia Arbusto's tax policy is both bankrupting and de-industrializing America you'll need someone else. Thats too big a job for poor Brian.

Blogger.com is still

lingering over a resolution to the whole gap-between-title-n-text problem.
It truly kills my desire to post since the blog looks so amateurish as a result...amateurish by even my elastic standards.

Judgement Passed...

Nothing so aptly illustrates the bankruptcy of the President's Iraq policy than the announcement that the Army is short some eight thousand recruits this year.
Thats about what? Half a combat division?
Seems like small beers but when you've got an all volunteer army, a eight thousand man shortfall can easily double and even treble in very little time.
Such is the nature of this manpower gap, that the President actually had to hype joining the armed forces last week during his wretched little exercise in Iraq war boosterism.
I can't recall a President who had to beg people to join the army in a time of war, not in my lifetime at least.
Shit, there must be eight thousand kampus konservative bundists out there who are willing to sacrifice to fill in those gaps?
The oil industry alone alone must have eight thousand able bodied lobbyists who could be trained up as infantry.
Alas...nothing the call goes out across a silent and distracted nation.

America has passed judgement on this war and they want no part of it. Oh there are no shaggy Abbie Hoffman's in the street preaching riot and ruin, but the nation's abstention from combat is nigh on complete.
We wish the soldiers and sailors well, nobody is hassling them, but it is very much George Bush Jr's war in the minds of the general public.
This is the passive aggressive way America deals with a lot of unpleasant issues, keep the recruiters away from your kids and kill the TV whenever there is grisly footage from Baghdad.
Its not a particularly wise way to deal with the situation, it doesn't address the crippling debt the war is generating or the casualties that mount up. Otherwise we will put up with this misbegotten war as long as our own kids don't have to fight it.
Its not the most admirable attitude but it is realistic and understandable.
Which is why I still say the day the JCS marchs in and sez, either we draft or we sue for peace will be the day Bush folds his hand in IRaq.
of course, Secretary Rumsfeld and all the rest of the Admin's praetorians are working 24-7 towards whatever cockamammie lash up solution that will delay that confrontation even a little bit.

Sick
Demented
Typical

The Song of the Bankrupt

Apparently the President's speech the other night got very low ratings...few people actually watched.
Well its not hard to understand why, the President is morally and politically bankrupt. As a result the polity ignores him and will continue to do so until the bill comes in for the war on terror or he introduces conscription.
The public sighs and is resigned to Bush be it his tangled syntax or his bumbling ideologically driven ways.
However being philosophically destitute hasn't prevented Bush from being re-elected or from acculmulating even greater increments of raw power. He is out of ideas, incapable of listening to good advice, laughably corrupt, and hell bent on his own jealous bitter crusades no matter what the cost...and yet nothing restrains him.
This strange dichotomy the ever increasing autonomy combined with the rapid decline in conservative ideology is a strange hallmark of the current regime. By any normal definition of politics Bush would be trapped in the White House right now, hounded by a half dozen investigations and frantically dodging process servers.
Certainly controlling congress helps, the absolute abandonment of the news media from any pretense of covering Bush objectively (how many of Rove's traps have these pompous dimwits at CBS and NBC fallen into nigh these past five years?)and the public's utter torpidity all play a part.
Ah but then there is Bush's own particular skill to contend with, embittered, narrow-minded, arrogant, and corrupt he is also one who has mastered the art of making decline and declinism work for him.
He is a virtuoso of degeneration in so many ways.