Archive for the ‘Don Carlson’ Category

I knew this was coming.  This blitzkrieg of all things Sarah.  I knew the book was coming.  I understood that no matter the political wisdom of every move she’s made from quitting as governor to tragically inserting herself in the district NY 23 race, that her intentions and decisions are far from nuanced.  She’s an attention whore.  A high school cheerleader with an insatiable thirst for fame or even infamy.  The nature of the attention we pay is as unimportant as the truth to her.

She milks us with tremendous success.

What confounds and disgusts me so much is that she is able to do this.  To do this to us.  That we are apparently so complicit.  That we are so willing to afford her audience.  To command our attention despite such a voluminous cornucopia of lies and empty rhetoric, absent policy, minus substance and with such prurient intentions.  Americans, at least some of us, adore idiots.

I know I do.

It’s true, I can’t help it.

But I can’t stand that she’s getting over on us.  Nixon fled the office of the Presidency with a near 25% approval rating.  So did Dumbya.  That proves that about one of four of every person I encounter is a dipshit.  So be it.  I hate that but what can I do?  She’s on Oprah, talking to Barbara Walters, being discussed on the network news and obsessed over by cable news.  She is literally fucking everywhere.  She’s selling mad books to all of us.

Or is she?

The Human Shitsmear declared her book one of the most substantiative on policy he’s ever read.  I don’t doubt that for obvious and numerous reasons.

Wallmart has her book at $8.98 and the right wing rag Newsmax, is offering it for five bucks and throwing in a four month prescription er, subscription.  Way off the $28 cover price.

Hmmm.

Let me tell you something, the fact that she has allegedly written a book (sans index), is proof that she has written more books than she has read.

What I want to know is why do so many of us pay attention?  Is it because we consider her to be compelling or is it the spectacle?  Is she interesting or is she a multi car pileup with flames and blood and sirens, highway flairs and stuff?

That she is already at odds over the facts with the McCain campaign staffers and personnel, belies her version of events at the very least, and her assertion that she was billed $50k for being vetted gives me pause.  Given what we now know and understand about her character and personality, the sudden and abrupt nature of the of the selection and glaring lack of process, it’s difficult for me to believe that any more than a few hundred bucks was thrown at the entire thing.

Gimme a break.  I doubt that much was even spent.  I think McCain woke up with his first piss hard on in months or even years and picked up the phone.  Two or three days later it was a done deal and they had a press conference that left us asking who?

She’s a one hit wonder.  She’s got no legs as we used to say in the music business.  She may yet exist in our periphery as some sort of pundit or talk show host but she will never again run for office, she has not the fortitude.  By 2012 she’ll be a mere memory of spoiled Alaskan fish on the palates of the intelligent or empty competition for the great unwashed on daytime television.  Probably both, but she’ll be a bigger threat to Springer than to Oprah or Martha or Ellen.  It is where she belongs.  I don’t think she’s dumb, just obviously intellectually lazy.  I can spot a person that hasn’t had their ass kicked in life and that’s because I have had mine own kicked up and down the block.  I’m here to tell you she hasn’t.  What is worse and potentially far more dangerous is that she has had her ass handed to her and she refuses to accept or even recognize it.

The latter is the truth and that makes her crazy and perhaps destructive, but only to the GOP.  Ha!  Good stuff.  Methinks disasters like hurricanes may be on the horizon for the party of “no”.

We’re just about the same age and she is as naive and arrogant as I have ever seen.  Not talking about a river in Egypt here, know what I’m sayin’?

It speaks volumes about the Republican party that she remains their most impressive marquee, their most convincing and visceral star.  I admit, this does excite me.  That their tank is still this empty…….do the math.  Romney?  Guy Smiley, seriously?

Sheezus.

My brother in law was the first person I ever heard describe George W. Bush as an “empty suit”.  I’ll happily co-opt that term in describing Sarah Palin.  Um, pantsuit though.

I know women like her.  Personally.  They exist in my own family with all the vindictiveness, jealousy and capacity for baseless recrimination.  They are loathed, feared or laughed at.  Those that are closest to them are the most disgusted or confused.  Occasionally they get punched down from above by those that are merely weary of their shit.  We do like that.

Drinks for my friends.

Here I am in Carson City Nevada.

Back on the grid.  Internet access achieved.  Kinda proud, as I’m a bit of a luddite.

The capital of the great state of Nevada, merely titular as the seat of power.  Since the seventies or early eighties,  the actual force and center of political influence has resided with indefatigable dominance in Clark county, some five hundred miles to the south, by virtue of the voracious development and a subsequent population explosion in Las Vegas.

Despite all that, Carson City remains a cracklingly political town.  My sister tells me it’s all about to change.  Power will return to it’s rightful place in the North.

Between nation trotting sojourns with my father in an RV better appointed and more luxurious than most apartments I’ve lived in, my retired mother still oversees vital components of the bi-annual legislature.  They are somewhere between small towns in Washington state as I write this.

My sister swings a heavy municipal bat.  She has big plans for this town.  A media center unrivaled on either coast.  Her husband, whom I’ve known since grade school, wields substantial influence with Nevada’s nearly omnipotent Gaming Control Board.  Friends of the family are the wealthy, elite and intelligentsia as well as the kind, humble, ordinary and delightfully quirky.

Hello, Don Carlson, Harry Reid and the rest of you.

Not at all out of the ordinary for me to crack my hometown paper to find an article or editorial written by my uber talented and modestly ambitious sister.  Just last week while having lunch in an ordinary burger palace, I enjoyed such occasion.

Their lives are impossibly full.  Easy to envy.  Very busy and purposeful people.  Even my sister’s three children, two in college and the youngest a senior in high school,  are elaborately involved.

The net effect of all this furious activity and humble accomplishment  allows for me to feel distinctly and unmistakably slovenly.  Sloth like.  As I sit writing this from my parent’s kitchen counter, my trophy, a gold record, prominently adorns a living room wall.  Not much in the scheme of things, but I’ll take what I can get, at least until I’m a famous and/or critically acclaimed writer.  Or maybe head of the cheese department at Whole Foods.  

Another thing that impresses the crap out of me is the depth and breadth of both my mother’s and sister’s larders.  The culinary treasures in each are enough to sustain one through the apocalypse.  Exotic condiments, mustards, pickles, oils and dressings of all kinds.  Cheeses and sausages.  Canned fruits and vegetables.  Spices, soups and seasonings.  Refrigerators and freezers stocked with meats and nuts, breads and more vegetables.  Everything from freshly frozen hand picked huckleberries to chicken nuggets, huge sides of mammals, frozen diet meals and seafood.  Sauces from barbecue, to soy ginger and sesame, vidalia onion and fig, chili, rice vinegar and raspberry pecan.  Tomato paste, tomatoes chopped, tomatoes whole.  Soups and pasta, raw beans and crackers.

Slim fast in a can and baby corn in a can.  Microwave popcorn and Cups O’ Noodles.

Alcohol from fine wine to to cheap champagne.  Malibu Rum to Creme De Menthe, blood orange liqueur, vodka, gin, whiskey and Amaretto.  Soda, beers and juices.

All manner of candies and chocolates.  Jams, jellies and preserves.

Farm fresh eggs from my brother in law’s chickens and home made pies from my sister’s oven.  She has an herb garden and shops the farmer’s market every Saturday morning.  She runs marathons.  Her husband is soft spoken, brilliant and absurdly funny.

Not much substance here I know.  Been away from the wheel for awhile so give me some room.

I will tell you this.

Without a public option at the center of any health care bill, all is lost.  Obama will have squandered too valuable political capital for next to nothing.  The only efficacious mechanism for curbing corporate insurance greed, for legitimate reform, will be missing.  Without it, it will be a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.  Consequences of a bill without it will be dire.  All momentum and any mandate from an overwhelming majority will expire.

The ideas of hope and change will atrophy.  No bill will be failure.  A bad bill, without a public option, will be a stage for blame deserved, optimism smashed and the very last chance Americans will ever have at fair and equitable health care will fade to black.  The best promise of this administration will be shit.  Obama’s presidency, and our last best hope, will surface out past the breakers, missing a limb.

Fuck the Republicans.  Take one lesson from them and get the goddamn Democrats to march in step.  Marginalize the flat earthers by excluding them.  I’m weary of the vagina monologue here.  Tell the assholes that would terrorize their constituents  with stories of “death panels” and grandma’s plug being pulled to shut the fuck up.  Go to those states and wage war.  Get proactive.  Get medieval on their asses, with the truth.

Chuck Grassley should be invited to suck his own dick.  He’ll never vote for health care reform unless he’s shamed into it.  Obama needs to go to Iowa.  I’m not sure what Ted Kennedy’s status is but wheel him in.  Get proactive.  Fight, you you pussies.  More than health care is at stake here.  Don’t you see it?  Hope and change hinge on this.

Absent a public option will be proof that Democrats are unable to even lead a horse to water.  A majority in the House and Senate will be meaningless and it will all be for nothing.  Not a goddamn thing.  All for naught.  God will whisper in Michele Bachmann’s ear and she’ll be your next President.

You think the last eight years sucked?  I’m just sayin’.  It’s all about this.  Right here.  Right now.

Drinks for my friends.

Johnny Angel Wendell is actually owed credit for the subject matter here, a left leaning radio talk show host, by simply voting yes in a facebook poll as to whether Sarah Palin should run for the Presidency in 2012.

I too am in favor, if only for the burlesque it promises.  After reading “It Came From Wasilla” in the latest Vanity Fair, I’m convinced that the entertainment value of such an endeavor would be no less than awesome by way of spectacle.  And really, if by then that’s the best the GOP can do, it will guarantee a  second term for Obama or whomever else the Democrats see fit to choose.  Just think of the gritty pathos.  The humanity.  The vacuum of humility.

Now, 2012 is a political millennium away.  To be honest, I estimate Palin’s political career, much less her aspirations, to be toast crispy and black.  Stick a fork in her.  Sarah Palin is a dry, overdone pot roast no gravy can mitigate.  So yes, it’s a fantasy.  Forgive me; it would be grande.

The thing is this, the Republicans have nobody.  Not one man or woman.  Not one credible individual with even the remotest potential to entertain the notion of leading the party to any elected office other than say, dog catcher or assemblyman.  Bereft of leaders, message or even philosophy.  Reaping what they have sown.  Karma not just nipping at their heels but ripping chunks from their asses.  Callow adolescent diphshits and geriatric has-beens.  The C Street house of cards collapsing on what would have been potential stewards like Ensign, Pickering and Sanford.  Not so much burlesque as an ill advised, asinine dress rehearsal.

It get’s harder and harder to watch.  More and more disgusting.

As much fun as there is to be had here, this shit is pathetic.  It’s embarrassing.

There are members of congress who believe the earth is but six thousand years old.   Yep, Republicans almost all.  We look to these assholes for leadership?

I feel a rant coming on.  Yep, it’s in the back of my throat.

I’m coughing.  It’s like a goddamn sagebrush.  This is gonna hurt.  Sorry.  Feels like a tumbleweed.  Yep.  Sorry.  Got any grape Kool-Aid?

Ahem.

Go ahead, read your Bible or your Qur’an or whatever gets you through the night.  I’m less sick of your shit interfering with my life than it so violently and presumptively interferes with the lives of everyone else.  Then, it influences my life.  This is no way to run the world.  My God can beat up your God.  Wanna race for pink slips?  Archaic and absurd.  Fonzi vs. Ponch.  Two would be Italians, one played by a Jew the other an Hispanic.

We really need to leave this shit behind.  It’s stupid.

Catholicism is dumb and hypocritical and evil.  A religion based on ancient, obsolete treatise and decorum as much as rampant Church sponsored pedophilia.  Fuck these cocksuckers.  Pun violently intended.  Bullshit from the ground up.  The bureaucracy of this institution has no excuse and even less shame.  They steadfastly protect those who have or would have diddled your children.  Those who have or who would have ass raped your little boy or girl.

Yet they posture in front of you and deign to share God’s will and the way to a moral life with you.  Snake oil.  Charlatans.  Idiots.  Pretenders.  Phonies.  They don’t know or understand shit.

Them having never shared their pudenda with a mature female makes them sacred?  Holy?

Bullshit.  They stick it wherever they can.

I use the Catholics as an example because I loathe them.  But really, all organized religion is the same through the jaundiced lense of hypocrisy and evil.  So many of you need to go play in the street.  You’re not relevant and don’t deserve to be tax free.  You hurt and damage far more than you help and your “faith” is literally based on an imaginary man in the sky.

And they believe the earth is six thousand years old.  I’m done with you people.

Shut up.  Go away.  Jesus is not the way, if he existed at all he may have been a nice guy.  That’s it.

I hate religion.

Drinks for my friends.

“The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.” -1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life.”

It’s a trite understatement to say he lived a full and long life.  My first memories of Walter Cronkite are from a handsome cherry wood Zenith console television, the smell of hot vacuum tubes and visions of astronaut endeavors in black and white.  The Columbia Broadcast System was the only channel with reliable reception on the outskirts of a very small town.

Rabbit ears but no foil.  We were a class act.  Roger Mudd.  Eric Sevareid.  Walter Cronkite.

CBS, NBC and ABC.

CBS.

The great improviser, who declared the Vietnam war unwinnable, after seeing it himself.  Pretty much ending the presidency of LBJ.  Legitimately speechless when Neil Armstrong declared one small step for man.  Yep, he paused when announcing the death of JFK.  Maybe teared up a little.  Unafraid to cover America’s civil rights struggle.  Back then there was the newspaper and the evening news.  The evening news was Walter Cronkite.  An icon who managed to eclipse Edward R. Murrow as America’s pre-eminent journalist.

Comforting that he wasn’t felled early like Murrow, Jennings or Russert.

But oh, what he must have thought of contemporary journalism.  The bar he hoisted so high, disgraced, disregarded and ultimately ignored.   Charlatans like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh et al. Infotainment and Fox News.   Rampant unfounded celebrity worship.

He came from an era when network bosses weren’t sure if America would tolerate a half an hour of hard news as opposed to fifteen minutes.  They did.  They craved it.   To then witness our attention span shrink and atrophy.  Popular culture force fed to America and the rest of the world, a phenomena that eventually rendered actual news not entertaining enough, no matter it’s truth or content.  Mr. Cronkite was already on the sidelines.  Retired.  How this felt to him must have been devastating.

One could argue that America has gone to shit since Cronkite retired.  Sure seems like the time we really began to lose our way.  I’m thinking Reagan era.  Could have used him then.

His own truthful ideal obsolete.  Forced to witness it decline from there.

Graceful and honest.  A surrogate for the people’s necessary information.  He chose to color outside the lines but once or twice.  When he did, he did so with the best intentions and the result sent magnificent waves through all of America.  He affected change by telling HIS truth.  Otherwise, he did a little bit less.  He told us THE truth.

We ended up with Nixon.

He told us what we needed to know as best he could.

Yes, I’m old enough to remember him quite fondly.  The smells of my father’s aftershave and dinner in the kitchen, waiting for Mr. Cronkite to finish with the day’s events.

Good luck old man.

My hope is that you went gentle into that goodnight.

Drinks for my friends.

I hope you’re not yet tired of me railing against all things Dick Cheney.  I know I’m not.  History will will estimate him to be nothing more than a misanthropic war criminal.  Besides that, I admit again that it’s morbidly cathartic.  What began as an effort on his part to rewrite history and burnish his legacy, has morphed into a risible rhythmless boogie of dodging bullets fired at his feet by truth empowered gunslingers.

Today he tells us that there was never any evidence of a connection between 911 and Iraq.  Um, no shit.  This despite his persistent insistence that there was ample evidence, long after it was thoroughly discredited. He said:  “pretty well confirmed” that a 9/11 hijacker met with Iraqi intelligence officials before 9/11. -thinkprogress.org

Understand how deliberate this dog and pony show was.  In the ’04 Presidential election, over 70% of people who voted for Bush/Cheney believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the attacks on 911.  One could rightfully argue that these two assholes were re-elected by and large because Americans believed their lies and the spell of fear they so successfully instilled.

You gotta love the great unwashed.

He also tells us that those memos he wants declassified don’t necessarily prove, as he claimed just days ago, that torture saved thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of lives, but rather the entirety of the interrogation program did.  What the hell does that mean?  Olbermann wondered if he was referring to instances like the fact that we gave sugar free cookies to a diabetic terrorist.

Then, he has the audacity to blame his lies on George Tenet.  That’s right, the infamous dickhead in charge of the CIA at the time, who said that making a case for invading Iraq to the American people and the world was a “slam dunk”.  As if to say, it wasn’t his fault because that’s what Tenet told him.

After months of pressure and obtuse harangue by Dick truly and his mob.

For his part, Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It’s gets better.  He now claims we missed 911 because of former terrorist czar Richard Clarke.  I suggest you read Clarke’s book on the matter.  One of the very first insiders to be overtly critical of the reckless and ideologically driven Dick-in-Bush administration and the Keystone Cops approach they took to every single circumstance after that fateful day.  If Clarke is to be believed, and I believe him, he had been ringing the bell since day one.  The book is titled “Against All Enemies” and it’s a page turning indictment of the whole crew, from Condoleezza Rice, on up.

While you’re at it, pick up of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s book, “The Price of Loyalty”.  An astounding glimpse into the pre-911 days and the Bush administration’s determination, even then, to to invade Iraq.

What baffles me is how so many talking heads, Dan Rather included, seem wont to purchase that at the very least, Cheney is sincere, that he believes what he says.  No sale here.  He’s a charlatan and should be tried and convicted for war crimes.  Every prediction has been wrong.  Every “fact” he’s ever foisted has been a lie.  The idea that this prick is able to command a single American’s attention on any public airwave, makes me want to puke in technicolor.

Here’s where we are.  No WMD.  There never was and there remains no credible reason to tell Americans it was…..was.  No connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.  No connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussien and the events of 911.  Again, never was and no credible reason to tell Americans there was.  Nothing, no symbiosis between a secular dictatorship and an extreme religious movement.

No was.  None.

Here we are.  Not a single fucking reason for invading a sovereign country that posed no threat to us or even it’s neighbors in the foreseeable future.  No reason for killing hundreds of thousands if not more than a million innocent people.  No reason for displacing millions of innocents.  No reason for the deaths of thousands of proud American men and women.  No reason for the incalculable grief visited on millions and millions of fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers across the entire planet.  No goddamn reason at all for any of it.

No was and no is.

I usually endeavor to bring a little humor to you the reader, while drawing your attention to the horrible events that surround us all in this world.  Forgive me, this just isn’t funny.  There’s nothing funny about it.  It’s all tragedy kids.  A long slow, brutal and still developing nightmare that will disturb the world’s sleep for decades because Richard Bruce Cheney was somehow allowed to have far too much influence on the course of human events.

More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for a consummately unjust war with Iraq.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the abject and utterly reprehensible torture America visited with malice and viciousness on America’s “enemies”.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is culpable for America’s woefully reduced standing in the world.  More, than any single other human fucking being, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the hole that we are now at the bottom of.

One of the prevailing messages of the Obama administration is to look forward and therefore not dwell too zealously on our recent past.  It is ever more apparent to me that however wholesome and well intentioned such sentiments are, they are naive and for lack of a better adjective, simple, in an increasingly complex world.

Richard Bruce Cheney shits where he eats.

Hold Dick Cheney responsible.  Show the world that accountability is still a respected idea in America.  Prosecute this prick.  In so doing, we will demonstrate the best we have to offer as a first step, to ourselves and the rest of the planet.

Fuck this guy.

Drinks for my friends.

To not see a man’s eyes is hardly ever a comfortable thing. Take off your sunglasses if you want me to talk to you.

Giving is receiving, yet people are people wherever you go.

Forgive me for getting didactic on your ass, but I’m about to.

Electricity always goes to ground. So automatically, being “grounded”, looks like a bad thing.

I’ve lifted the ground, flopped the phase and inverted polarity. I have a friend who invented a device that allows for the shifting of polarity at any point along 180 degrees of the protractor. Other than that, I’ve devoted very little effort and much less time to the idea.

Fuck that. As a former electron director, I was obsessed with phase. Still am. Enough to feel guilty. I was a phase fag.

I dreamt about it last night. I wasn’t good at it. Woke up despondent. Cold feet, sweaty brow. Today kinda sucked.

It’s a tricky thing. It borders on Voodoo. Put the batteries in the remote incorrectly, effectively opposing the crest to trough relationship on which the appliance is designed to operate, and the circuit functions not at all. Drag. Might take you awhile to figure out if you’re baked.

Tesla invented the polyphase motor, making alternating current (AC) far more practical, efficacious and safe than Edison’s model for the distribution of electricity, direct current (DC).

Had Edison prevailed, it would have really sucked. We’d all been killed.

Mustard and pickles always on a grilled cheese. Always.

Flop the phase on the kick drum or bass guitar right before you print and sometimes the bottom end of the mix blooms or at least tightens. Sometimes Pandora’s box yawns long into nightmare. Polarity can be a drum of serpents.

I can’t tell you how many engineers I worked with that had no concept of phase. Any given piano in any given contemporary recording is at least forty five to ninety degrees out. If you reverse polarity and can’t hear a difference, you’re probably ninety degrees out. Do the math.

Wanna hear good phase on a piano? Fiona Apple, “Tidal”. That’s a large piano.

Well paid engineers, with two microphones literally facing each other and never even looking at the button on either module. That used to kill me.

I promise I’m going somewhere with this. Can you tell I like my subject?

Word has it the earth’s magnetic field may be inversing. The last such event, the “Brunhes-Matuyama reversal”, occured some 780 thousand years ago. Planet earth may be on the verge of reversing it’s polarity. It’s like the world is changing it’s own mind.

Speculation as to the effects are exploding. Migrating birds, fish and mammals suddenly unable to find their way. Dogs and cats living together. Republicans voting Democrat. Photomats making a comeback. Seismic events. Volcanic stuff.

I don’t worry about it because there’s nothing I can do.

On the other hand………

Almost without reservation, I welcome the rather dramatic shift in American politics that’s manifested over the last few years. Americans, indeed people in general, are reluctant to change, much less throw everything into reverse.

Now, with what appears to be a near consummate abruptness, people seem willing at least, to subsume drastic new direction. A can of beer for each of you.

No secret there, it’s because it’s all so completely fucked up.

Change is hard and not always good. Don’t doubt that it can be necessary. This movement is beyond necessary. It is vital. Our last best chance? We have long since lead the world in cutting off our noses, to spite or perhaps despite , our own faces. Incredibly reckless and self destructive behavior.

Fucking stupid.

We’ve behaved like dope fiends. An appropriate metaphor for how difficult, Herculean, this change will be, is that of a crackhead. Time for rehab kids. If you’re successful, you’ll alter your entire intellectual construct in order to exclude this addiction. You will change your own mind.

It will not be without considerable sacrifice and pain. The most pious and indoctrinated among you will suffer the most. It will, however, touch us all.

With that, some luck and hope or maybe your God, the crests and troughs will begin to align with more congruency, coherence and maybe cooperation. See what I’m saying?

Forty five degrees to right of north on the old oscilloscope.

For those of you who don’t understand or haven’t yet busted a move; “phase” is the best analogy. The simplest. This way or that way. Allowing greed, “values” and fear to dominate our very conversations about how we should and would be governed has been Democracy’s biggest mistake. As I write this, it is exactly why we are so fucked. Time to hit that button and walk the other way.

It’s trite, but one definition of insanity is performing the same action over and over while expecting a different result.

This one’s for Don Carlson.

Drinks for my friends.