Endorse'd and abandoned

I must be the only person on the internet not awe-struck by Al Gore's endorsement of Governor Dean.
Oh endorsements are nice things to have, don't get me wrong, my candidate John Kerry has a fistful of them.
At best though, endorsements are symbols of a candidates allegedly diverse appeal....and Gore plays to Dean's base a rebellious democratic iconoclast.
Y'know almost everything Gore is not.
However the Deaniacs on line are having themselves a jubilee today....but then almost anything sets that crowd off in paroxysms of self congratulation. Frankly Dr. Dean could defecate on the deck of the U.S.S. Massachusetts and wipe his ass with the state flag and his supporters would fairly writhe on the floor like ecstatic snake handlers.
The matter is going to be resolved by money, luck, foot soldiers, and stamina in the snows of New Hampshire.
And the polls are an unreliable indicator of what will happen up there next month...if they were, then Mario Cuomo would've broken out of history's footnotes.

Meanwhile Kerry used the eff word in an interview with the Rolling Stone and the puritans, both left and right in this country are up in arms.
I say good for Kerry, it is a fucked up situation in Iraq, and getting more fucked up every damn day...I think he should swear some more...hell he was a sailor once he knows the lexicon.

Drive Time Dialectics

So...last week Don Imus, apparently overcome by a fit of jollity, called Howard Stern's girl friend Beth Ostrovsky a "bimbo".
The I-man then went on to air an skit in which it was implied that Beth had herpes or something like that.
Predictably Stern reacted with visceral hatred and rage promising dire if vague revelations about Imus' personal life before settling down today to promises of "a lawsuit".
In short just another typical day on drive time radio in America....the battle for ratings has entered the house-to-house fighting stage with no end in sight.
Imus is a senile old wretch and Stern is a corrupt reprobate and little more than a pimp with an F.C.C. license....their political views are remarkably similar both are loud righteous war-hawks who'd bat not an eye if Baghdad was nuked tomorrow morning.
Don and Howard have made millions off a lawless broadcasting milieu and a genial cracker barrel brand of demagoguery that is grotesquely called "entertainment" in these euphemism stricken times.
Both are craven George Bush worshippers of the lowest and crudest type and both of them have a pronounced authoritarian streak and a growing contempt for democratic society.
Let us not forget their morbid habit of wishing death on celebrities who deviate from their own dishonest pseudo populist line...these unfortunates run the gamut from the spineless (Bill Maher) to the crazy (Ted Turner).
So is it any wonder they are at each other's throat?
Yes I know, these two have a history, but they are also fighting over a static cohort of radio rightish listeners.
A sort of vulgar dialectic has set in, despite their rough similarity of their views Don and Howard are locked in a zero sum game for that magic white male listener stratum...the one with all that lovely moolah to spend.
Therefore, they've got nothing else to fight over except whose slack jawed trophy wife is a hottie...but fight over that they will because the outcome is a deadly serious paying proposition despite the surface tawdriness of it all.
Frankly at this point, I have to give the edge to Imus, any lawyer who would actually put brainless Beth Ostrovksy with her frightening little-girl voice on the stand is just asking for trouble.
Five minutes of testimony will be enough to conjure unhealthy visions of Beth dressing like a schoolgirl for the delectation of Howard in the minds of the jury.
She is truly that vapid I assure you.
On the other hand, Imus has to be raking something off the top for his so called "Cancer Camp" in the South West...the man is a sixty year old deejay fah crissakes he didn't last this long on the radio by indulging a puritanical refusal to steal.
And Imus has been married how many times with how many kids??
If it ever reaches "Court TV" I'll happily videotape every session as the resultant legal saturnalia will be a delightfully decadent forecast of the downfall of talk radio U.S.A.
Was it Lenin who said that competition is never more savage than just prior to the collapse of the olde order?
:)
Ah but I mock, no doubt Don and Howard's respective lawyers have warned them off this gaudy collision noting that the only victor will be Sean Hannity...or perhaps (dare I say it?) Jay Severin.
Who am I kidding here?
It is nice to think that sheer internecine warfare will kill off rightical chic talk radio but the supply of hosts is inexhaustible and there is apparently no limit to the potential loutish stupidity on the congressionally licenses public airwaves.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

School Houses and Jail Houses...

The Boston Phoenix pointed out yesterday that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is now spending more on prisons than it does on higher education.
Oh thank Ghod...we've caught up with Louisiana in the "incarceration race"!
Nothing so perfectly encapsulates screwheaded value system of the Romney Administration....we are building more prisons and lockin' em' up faster and faster meanwhile higher education falls to pieces.
And not for nothing, but what is this hang up with crime and punishment anyway? Isn't the crime rate low in the Commonwealth?
Have we become Texas, where lawless brutes do roam, armed to the teeth, and soused to the gills?
Why all the Department of Corrections spending?
Simple cause' the vast roiling independents, mortgaged to the hilt, and near bankrupt in their frigid suburbs live in perpetual fear of crime they must be appeased and placated.
We cannot expect anything resembling a sensible education policy out of Kolobian Viceroy...the few pronouncements he has made on the subject seem to revolve around semi-privatization and other inane warmed-over dreck.
Here again Governor Decaf seems unaware of a simple fact...one of Massachusetts chief exports is knowledge in the form of education.
Stiffing higher education means poor returns on one of our few real money-makers in the Commonwealth.
You'd think a former CEO would get that...but then Romney was more a crony capitalist than a genuine free market free thinker back in the day.
He mostly loaned money to other rich white men, that somehow makes him a titan of the business class.
Like most of our current financial princeling class, Mitt has internalized a harsh Manichean view of the public sector...he doesn't care if we all become stupid, brutal and ill educated...as long as there are plenty of prisons administered by "small government" then all will be well.
Which brings me to a rare serious point, Romney may be inept, callow, vain, pretentious, duplicitous, shallow, and opportunistic...but the ultimate reason why Mitt Romney is a bad Governor for Massachusetts is that he embodies the wrong value system for our state.
Romney believes in prisons not colleges...
Romney believes in private wealth and public penury....
Romney believes in class warfare if it means setting his beloved middle class in direct conflict with the poor.
Romney believes in an ideology...he has little use for real ideas.
Ultimately Mitt Romney is a entirely undistinguished movement conservative, his loyalty is to the best interests of that "philosophy" and not to Massachusetts as a polity.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

Open Letter to Kim Thurlow:

According to today's Globe, Kim Thurlow a Winchendon High senior had the audacity to confront Governor Romney about the MCAS.
Ms. Thurlow led a special needs student she'd been tutoring down to Romney's podium and asked just how this kid was supposed to pass the MCAS?
Predictably, Governor Romney responded with a swift cataract of fatuous nonsense.
Ms. Thurlow was left with nothing by way of a coherent explanation.

Dear Kim,

Speaking the truth to power is always a tough gig....speaking the truth to a vain unfeeling yanker like Mitt Romney is an especially lonely unpleasant business.
His reply to your simple query was vintage Romney...
A perfect example of malevolent buncombe it was...the MCAS which is ruining the lives of thousands of Massachusetts high school students is naught but a measure for avuncular old guys like him to assess school performance!
Like the olde misanthrope sez, what rubbish!
These "well meaning" old timers won't spend a penny more on your education but they damn well will make sure that you jump through a few more hoops on your way to college!
Mitt Romney is a former CEO who rose to prominence on the strength of his family name, his ideology is one of raw power worship, and his goal is to massage the process along until he either wins the New Hampshire Primary at some future date. This is assuming he isn't driven for office by a torch wielding mob.
Romney has NEVER give one hoot in hell about people like you Kim! If he could, he'd cheerfully disenfranchise you and all your friends. Hell Mitt is looking forward to world without elections wherein Princely sorts such as he can have you and me banished with the wave of a hand.
Hence his contemptuous and disdainful dismissal of your very legitimate concerns.
Your only mistake was in asking him a question, all that did was give Romney as chance to dissemble and prevaricate.
To paraphrase the late William S. Burroughs "he has nothing to offer but his bad intentions".
You can't expect Romney to give a straight answer to your question because the miserable phony hasn't answered anything honestly since the day he announced for governor.
If he did reply with candor he'd have to own up to the MCAS being a shuck-n-jive statute designed to exploit the fears of the mortgaged white middle class while loading up the student population with ever more insufferable petty irritations.
Torturing students with endless testing composed by the pedagogues of the State Legislature is good politics for a posturing fraud like Romney.
They wouldn't stand for this kind of bureaucratic abuse at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, yet Romney and his ilk will cheerfully visit punishments ten times worse on you and yours.
Kim darling, what does that tell you?
I am not painting a pretty picture here Kim sorry.
Don't despair though, you have two important weapons on your side kiddo, time and the vote.
It is a cliche' but people like you are the electorate of the future, when it comes time in 2006 to vote remember how little Mitt Romney thought of you.
Remember how out of step Mitt is with the Commonwealth and how often he resorts to arrogant piffle when confronted with an unpleasant truth.
Remember Kim, and vote on that remembrance.....the time will come when your generation will inherit the earth, nothing speeds that process along like ending the political career of a gruesome charlatan like Mitt Romney.
Keep your chin up and stop asking these jackoffs for help, start telling them what they need to do, you are the power, you are the Commonwealth.
Good luck
and happy holidays

Grace note for a cold December Afternoon

Neal Bush, the President's ne'er do well brother is in bed with the People's Republic of China...or so the unsealed documents from his divorce do attest.
He's been skimming an easy assed sixty thousand a year from a semiconductor concern run by Jiang Zemin's son.
What ANYONE in La Famiglia Arbusto knows about semiconductors is a sacred mystery.
Even the dimmest of Bab's nasty offspring knows to how to work their rolodex and land a cushy sinecure...it is increasingly a clan tradition.
These documents make interesting reading, at one deposition the feckless lout is forced to admit dallying with whores in Thailand.
You heard that right...whores in Thailand.
Alas for the electronic snoopery of our modern age, his wife's lawyer declined to ask Neal the simple follow-up question, "did you know the ages of the prostitutes that were sent up to your room?"
Thailand being the regional capitol for under-age prostitution....for a serious elite horn-dawg with a taste for young young flesh, Thailand with it's lax vice laws is a virtual mecca of gruesome sexual delights.
So much more here than meets the eye-but is anyone willing to exploit it?

Baghdad Blues:

Now the word from DC is, that resistance in Iraq will collapse once we nab Hussein.
That sounds like an explicitly neocon line of reasoning...ergo willfully optimistic to the point of delusion.
Once Saddam is strung up from a street light, Messr's Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld can presumably go back to their dreamy dreams of a free market, democratic, and Fox News oriented Middle East.
Dick Cheney can finally resume playing "Risk" with real countries in the game room of his undisclosed location.
All sounds like beer and skittles to me.
Yeah...and secretly bombing Cambodia was supposed to bring the Viet Cong to their knees.
We've heard all this before.
My thinking is, nabbing Hussein is the only remaining obstacle to a pell-mell evacuation of U.S. Forces from Iraq....by next summer at the latest and much sooner if we catch Saddam in the near term.
The occupation is a botch, the WMD's don't exist, the President looks like a liar and a willful sort of a weakling...not a pretty picture for a politician desperate to assert his manly bona fides at every opportunity no matter how inappropriate the occasion.
***
The handwriting was on the wall about this one long before Bush snuck into Baghdad under the cover of darkness for a tidy Thanksgiving Day photo-op with our soldiers.
Does anything else so perfectly illustrate the anarchic situation over there than the spectacle of an American President arriving at a military compound in a blacked out convoy under cover of darkness?
"Bring it on" indeed, just wait til Bush gets clear of Iraqi airspace willya?
Good lord, Lyndon Johnson had more freedom of movement in Saigon back during the Viet Nam War!
Ghod you just know that was the ass-end of some Rove extravaganza that originally included Bush riding a golden chariot in a Roman style triumph through the streets of Baghdad.
Perhaps the cheering throngs would've been treated to a Caligula style harangue threatening dire consequences for those Senate Democrats who opposed him...all breathlessly broadcast live on the Fox News Network.
As it was the poor wretch had to be guilt tripped into going by Massachusetts' own fixer maximus Andy Card.
And even then Bush looked all the world like a hobo who'd just been invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Salvation Army.
Yup, Bush has blown it, and Condoleeza Rice is gonna have to work sixteen hour days from now til next August to extricate our President from a catastrophe borne entirely of his own insufferable vanity.
No doubt more than a few well known names in the Admin will be up for the chop in due course... Wolfowitz? Cheney?
Who knows?
But don't you worry, Bush will survive this, no matter how much blood and money it costs, no matter how many of his followers must take the rap....regardless of all the lies that must need be told.
Sick
Demented
Typical

he Black Hole of CalThomas

I generally don't read the Boston Herald.
Now if I wanted to read wire service copy of world events, I just go to
Yahoo.com.
However, I was killing time in a bar and damn thing was sitting there.
Cal Thomas, that stalwart Reaganolate and columnist was predictably mad about something.
These ex-moral majority yankers are seemingly always pissed off.
The only time they are happy, you can be sure it is because some liberal somewhere is
getting a hard time.
Cal was up in arms though, the GOP dominated congress, ignoring the DC
punditariat has gone and loaded up the budget with billions of dollars in pork
barrel spending.
So there we find Cal hrrumpphing ominously about the GOP's abandonment of
it's "small government" ideology.
Never mind the fact that the current GOP has NEVER been for small government
as Cal Thomas understands it, they've always been pretty explicitly for big
government as the public service arm of their wealthiest campaign contributors.
The perpetual hallucinatory dream world of the modern rightical chic
columnist merely mistakes this avaricious czarism for "small government conservatism".
And anyway, nowhere in this naive' polemic does Cal question George Bush's
leadership or firm resolve to sign off on those wasted billions in the budget.
The good lord willin, and Karl Rove's heart standin' the strain Bush will
happily endorse trillions more in waste fraud and abuse before his nightmarish
presidency ends.
No amount of whining from Cal Thomas is going to change that, where is this
poor deluded fool to go to see his childish fantasies of small
government made real??
Nowhere quite frankly...if Cal Thomas wants homos locked up and liberals whipped in the streets then he must reconcile himself to billions of dollars in highway funds being hijacked by Republican congressmen.
Since he is not going to give up on mainstream conservatism's anti-liberal crusade, I'm betting he'll learn to live with the wholesale theft of public funds.
It hardly matters, like most DC columnists, Cal is utterly cowed by the mere mention of
George Bush's holy name.
He is content,like most other democracy-hating editorialists to blame
congress and only congress for the current round of orgiastic spending.
Cal does propose a solution though, it is laughable but also highly
instructive...so remember it.
He writes, by way of a closer "Isn't it time for another revolution?"
Isn't it just hilarious when a silly little pompous ass like Cal Thomas wakes
up and finds the whole shebang really has been run by men with the morals of
the Hell's Angels??
That the peasants must be ruled by strength?
It's got to be traumatic enough to make a good gawd-fearin' sap like Cal
start spouting like a true blue Trotskyite.
According to Cal Thomas, if the first revolution is sold out (or in this case
simply sold) then just keep making ever more conservative revolutions until
society is battered into an acceptable shape.
This is the mindset of the GOP's hard right, it is entirely revolutionary and
anti-democratic in character. It may even be, in time a revolution fully
capable of consuming Bush and his political apparatus.
But for the moment, my money is on the President to weather this storm on the
right...patronizing yelping dogs like Cal Thomas is second nature to the
commander in chief.
Calvin is a fool, and a naive' fool at that. But he is also a fool with dreamy-dreams of peasants with pitchforks and drums rolling around the Capitol.
Remember that....