Archive for July, 2016

I watched the democratic convention.

It made the RNC look Fisher Price.

At least Trump won his nomination fair and square.

I adore the first lady.

Her composure and grace always give me pause.  “I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves”.  Damn.

President Obama was magical. Easily the most talented politician I have ever seen.

They spoke glowingly of a woman who would be president. They spoke admiringly of a candidate who is the the most corrupt, the least popular, the most hated, to ever run for president of the United States of America as a democrat.

The truth is awful.

They lied.

They were so good at it I felt like crying.

And then Hillary spoke. Her cadence and style are a belt sander to my sensibilities.  She hit all the right notes.  There was plenty of red meat but it was absent the protein of honesty and sincerity.

The democratic party has become a parody of itself at the very least.  The virus of neoliberlalism has proven to be as prolific as it is virulent.  Nobody seems interested in a vaccine.

A gigantic asshole that could have easily been defeated by a ham fucking sandwich is in contest because the candidate who could have wiped the electoral map with him was marginalized by the DNC and the media while we were throat raped by Hillary Clinton’s coronation.

The choice forced upon us is fucking is dumb.  I have never felt so cornered as a voter.  The Wicked Witch versus Fuckface Von Clownstick.

Maybe she’ll be indicted or arrested, gawd knows there’s enough there.  The problem  isn’t quantity but quality.  And not a lack thereof.  Her shit may just be too big to fail.

So here’s what I’ve decided.

I’m going to change my party affiliation to Green.  But I’m not going to vote for Jill Stein because she doesn’t have a chance. At a certain point, pragmatism informs my cynicism. I will ignore my gag reflex, hold my nose, vote for Hillary and come home to shower.

I will shit hammer the Clinton administration every goddamn week for my humble little platform. I will beat that meat like it owes me money.  Hillary Clinton is about to face unprecedented obstructionism from the left.

My conscience tells me this is the best move I can make.

I refuse to suffer anyone, one way or another for voting one way or the other.

I can’t cover the sun with just my hand.

Drinks for my friends.

*The band is Down By Law from the very first record I ever produced recorded and mixed “Punkrockacademyfightsong” on Epitaph.  One day after finishing some demos I did with them, lead singer Dave Smalley told me I was going to produce his next record and six months later he called to ask me if I was ready.  As records go it went pretty smooth but I was wreck nonetheless, doubting myself the whole way and melting down here and there.  And I managed to meet one of my few brothers from another mother and maintain a long distance bromance with the young drummer Hunter Oswald to this day.  He stole laminated Waffle House menus for me without me asking because he just knew how bad I wanted them.  I am proud of this record.*

 

 

 

So we don’t know if the truck driver in Nice was a jihadist or not.

It doesn’t matter for the reasons you think it does because truth is hard.

Western policy regarding terrorism is shit ridiculous. Our own president won’t even admit to the number of civilian deaths from our drones in half a dozen countries.

Americans have no idea.

We give more money to Israel in “foreign aid” than to all other countries combined.  We support genocide and the illegal occupation of Palestine. More than just tacit approval of an apartheid state.  We inject tons of cash.  We sponsor it “bigly”.  It’s disgusting.

Israel is a moral liability.  The whole region is on fire because we give so much money to them that their college and health care is free while we pay for them to subjugate and enslave an entire people because of ethnicity and/or religious affiliation.  If we just stopped doing that, things would be better in a heartbeat.

America could not be further from righteousness here.

The 24 hour news cycle spins and twists and pines over this tragedy and utterly fails to attempt the right questions. On one side there is an ignorant orangutan calling for the banning of people based on their religious affiliation and on the other we have a would be world leader who never met a war she didn’t adore fomenting for the military industrial complex because that’s her goddamn base.

Palestine has no army, no air force and no navy.

Our long history of intervention is a case study in clusterfuck.

The solution is as elegant as it is simple.  Leave them the fuck alone.  There is zero chance of solving any of this centuries old bullshit militarily.  It makes it goddamn exponentially worse.  Every time, it makes it worse.  We’ll save shit loads of money and lives but there will be no profit for once.

It only goes on because it’s profitable.

And, newsflash, foreign terrorists are hardly an existential threat.  Your chances of being gunned down by a toddler with a gun are far greater.

But we are greedy and they are petroleum product flush beyond belief.  The answer here is simple too.  We are absolutely capable of a power grid dependent almost entirely upon renewable resources.  We are there.  If you believe otherwise, you are gullible.  Developmentally challenged.  Probably a climate denier.

Here’s an idea, take the money we spend to allow Israel to be the biggest dick in the middle east and spend it on our own people who no have access to health care, a decent education or a not so stupid hair cut.

They don’t hate us for our religion, our way of life or our freedom.  They don’t give a mad fuck about any of that. They hate us because we won’t stop fucking with them.  All we have to do is stop.  What we do now is ridiculous anyway.  Battling mosquitoes with machine guns. Ant colonies with tomahawk missiles.  Killing as many innocents as enemies.  We keep spending more and more on the ability to annihilate whole countries when that hasn’t been the problem for decades.

Goddamn this is stupid.

Binary thinking.  Conservatives versus liberals.  Democrats versus republicans.  Socialists versus capitalists.  Islam versus Christianity.  Girls versus boys.

It has to end immediately.

Or it goes on forever.

Drinks for my friends.

*This band was called Number 9.  The whole project was a nightmare.  I recorded some of it, mixed all of it and produced none of it.  The producer was a semi famous songwriter who sat to my right and constructed masks out of track sheets and gear templates so that when I finally looked at him he was full on mocking me with one of my own cigarettes in his mouth.  We were in some cheap ass studio in Chatsworth and this was my best effort.  I couldn’t get any crisp or crunch out of the weird McNeve console.  The label still owes me $800. It’s crazy to me that I did this for a living for almost 15 years.  Goddamn I was good at it. This one is for you Risk Hataway.*

 

 

 

 

To survive the gauntlet of nomination for national office, you absolutely must be some fucking kind of clown.

Bernie proved that it’s possible to be viable without corporate lucre, but then there was corporate media and corporate campaign infrastructure.  Sanders managed to dominate one leg of the tripod so the system demonstrated that two legs are better than one.

We need a third party, a fourth and probably a fifth.  More parties are the answer. More parties are only possible with campaign finance reform.  We must limit our election cycle and mandate that they are publicly funded exclusively, without exception.

If we can’t accomplish this much, we’re fucked no matter what.

I am done being a democrat either way.

We have two parties wholly owned by corporations that are recognized by the supreme court as people.

The nadir of this symbiosis is Clinton and Trump.

Chew on this for a minute.  The republicans have conducted a far more representative and democratic primary than we have.  The evidence is a lying gasbag of a narcissist who beat the living shit out of seventeen other candidates because of the stink of establishment corruption seeping from their pores and because he ultimately knows no uncouth.  It was a breathtakingly stupid decision but it was completely congruent with the will of the majority of republican Americans capable only of breathing through their cake holes.

Our presidential primary on the other hand was not representative of the will of the people at all.  It ignored the overt election fraud, disenfranchisement and purging.  Closed primaries in key states.  Super delegates. It acknowledges that the goal is to select rather than elect a candidate.  That’s some real bullshit right there.

Is it irony that the republicans are way more indignant about it than we are?

Nothing changes until this does.

The liberal media is nonplussed at the fact that Jeb basically said they both suck so bad he can’t have anything to do with either of them. They just don’t get it. I think this was my favorite Jeb performance.  He killed it.  He didn’t have a goddamn thing to lose.  He explained himself fairly well. I’d vote for him over these two losers.

Thing one and thing two.

They don’t get that we’re pissed off about the choice.  The elites are much happier than the rest of us. Clinton has her hand on the brass ring. Goddamn these people are organized. We sell hope and they sell fear.  So we start using fear to sell hope.

I won’t be a part of it any more.

The whole strategy consists of making us so afraid of chronic loser Trump, we vote for serial liar Clinton.  This is why I’m furious.

There are people who think this shit is funny.

Drinks for my friends.

*The band is The Phenobarbidols, it’s a crazy record.  “Fish Lounge”, named after the lounge at A&M with the giant saltwater tank in the wall.  Eclectic.  The singer Betsy, slept in the studio for much of the project.  She made tea in the mornings and flirted with me by giving head to a banana in the evenings.  The label was Sympathy For The Record Industry which means only Long Gone John ever listened to it.  Brought to you by Studio Motherfucking C and at least one Neve 8 channel broadcast console.   A good time was had by all and thanks to Alex Reed,  because he had some idea what we we’re doing when I had none. Special shout out to Michael Whitaker who shared a vision I just wasn’t privy to at the time. There are some spectacular songs on this record.  Beautiful ones, that I didn’t really appreciate until fifteen years after we made it.  I recorded the fuck out of it.  Alex Reed did everything else.  And I mean everything.*    

 

 

 

 

So Elizabeth Warren sold out. She’s thrown all of her considerable integrity and hard earned street cred behind the the most notorious corporate Wall Street whore to ever run as a democrat for president.

She’s been tasked with doing Hillary’s dirty work. Climbing into the ditch to counter the short fingered vulgarian cheap shot for cheap shot while Hillary stands to the side and nods with her patronizing rhythm of tacit approval in a tunic worthy of a Vulcan priestess.

Warren does a great job, it’s easy work. Trump is the worst republican to ever run for president.  Awful in incredibly stupid ways.

Still, it’s hard to watch.

Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Cory Booker, Elijah Cummings, John Lewis, Sherrod Brown……..WTF is going on here? These alleged champions of progressive principles, pillars of social justice, shrink and skulk away when given the opportunity to advocate for the ultimate standard bearer of everything they’ve staked their reputations and careers upon.

It’s breathtakingly craven.

These few elected representatives, including and especially Warren, could have easily facilitated the nomination of the best candidate to ever run in my lifetime.  But they didn’t.

Goddamn cowards.

The DNC has rejected medicare for all, a $15 an hour minimum wage, a carbon tax, a ban on fracking, the expansion of solar power and will not commit to defeating the TPP.

Since Wasserman Schultz became chair of The DNC we’ve lost over nine hundred state legislature seats, twelve governor seats, sixty nine house seats and thirteen senate seats.  She initially scheduled six debates at the worst time possible for likely viewers and ended restrictions on lobbyist and PAC donations to benefit Hillary in the face of a Bernie threat.

This is your brain on the democratic party.

If this collection of malingering invertebrates were still in possession of their own dignity, the opportunity to smash the asphyxiating rule of establishment governance would have prevailed.  A walk in the park, despite media bias and despite a deliberately arcane and archaic voting process.

It’s elementary, Trump is the most beatable republican douchenozzle to run for president ever. He’s an idiot and he celebrates it.

This is the best opportunity we’ve had in decades to elect a true, FDR-progressive brand of democrat.

Instead, we are forced to choose between two candidates under investigation for fraud and criminal malfeasance. Two candidates more interested in winning than governing.  Two candidates that are the most unpopular in our history.  Two candidates that are on record lying over and over and over.

Our first woman president will be a pyrrhic victory.

Just the other day, the state department asked for a delay in making some fourteen thousand emails between Clinton state department aids and Clinton Foundation operatives available to the public for over two years.

Goddamn Hillary is filthy.

Pee Wee Herman could beat a jackass like Trump with this this kind of machine behind him.

It has been said that this election is about authenticity.

I’m hard pressed to imagine anything more ironic.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

The band is The Gotohells.  Produced recorded and mixed by me and Alex Reed at Panda Studios in Clearwater Florida.  Punk rock with rockabilly seasoning.  The drummer remains one of my best long distance friends that I haven’t seen in twenty years.  He played on the first record I ever produced and engineered, “Punkrockacademyfightsong” by Down By Law.  They picked us from the Orlando airport and there was a cold six pack of Budweiser talls in the back seat.  They took their hats off when Skynyrd came on the radio and took us to the original Hooters for lunch.