All You Need to Know

Not for nothing, but if you ever set out for a short boat ride, a two or three hour tour say, do yourself a favor and keep an extra can of gasoline on board. That’s all I’m sayin’…

So what’s new?

FEMA has learned the lesson of Katrina. That lesson? If you hold phony scripted press conferences, you won’t get any liberal media types like Anderson Cooper asking nosy questions.

Looks like Jin is about to get killed off.

Alberto Gonzales may be in bigger trouble than we thought.

Chris Dodd’s got a pair.

Without question, Garry Kasparov is my favorite politician alive in the world today. Seriously, he’s essentially risking his life and those of his family just to fight to be allowed to lose to Putin’s handpicked successor.

This year’s World Series is thus far proving the old adage, Jesus can get you to the dance, but the devil wins you championships.

Radiohead totally rules.

Bring Out The Gimp

The Right Wing is a big tent, don't you know. Any and all are welcome. From your run of the mill "straight" guys who suck dick in airport bathrooms, to guys who rape their daughters, your attracted to 5-year-old girls types, and on down the line to the dirty, dirty BDSM bitches. And I don't just mean those who would "surprise" his wife with a trip to the slave club, bark out some orders and make her cry. The Republican party and extreme fundamentalist religious right even has room for the submissives too! Take, for example, Liberty University graduate and employee, and Jerry Falwell disciple "Reverend" Gary Aldridge and the tale of The Spanking to Die For... (Click on image below for close up.)


There's a lesson here, kids. A) Don't trust anyone who tells you not to masturbate; he's probably got a contraption in his house that would scare Satan himself. And B) If you go to your preacher/minister/teacher/senator's house - bring a parent or guardian. And pepper spray.

On the other hand, it is refreshing to see Rev. Aldridge use his moment of death to illuminate a lesson he's been teaching his whole life - Jesus cries when you have protected sex with a boy or girl your own age. As the Good Book says, condoms are only for use on the dildos you shove up your ass. Is that from Leviticus? Deuteronomy?

Children Are Our Future And Other Flotsam

First off, I told you a while ago that I wouldn't have as much time for you as I used to. We appreciate that you miss us, but can you call off the attack dogs? I'm busy enough as it is trying to sort out the scam Nigerian princes from the real ones, and now I have to deal with what can only be described as a coordinated effort to make me write more. We at DoG love getting your emails at DelusionsofGrandeurBlog [at] gmail [dot] com, but cutting and pasting an email you found at the online petition loses its effect after the thousandth reading. Move on, people!

But please don't move on, check back from time to time. We miss you too!

Secondly, is it just not having enough time? To be honest, it's not. I may have lost the fire, DoGgers. Yes, Bush still enrages me, but you can only say douchebag and twatwaffle so many times before it loses its intrinsic oomph. Take this Blackwater kerfuffle, for example. The fact that we have more mercenary troops in Iraq than the 160,000 U.S. military solders, and that those mercenaries have no oversight by anyone in the world has been common knowledge for years now. In a single Google search, I found a story on PBS from 2005. And that was just the first page on the search. So should I have been beating my head against the wall for the last two years, or been even a little surprised when they sent Blackwater in to "patrol" New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? It's maddening. So I just keep it to myself. The knowledge is out there; I'm not bringing anything new to the party.

The Democratic congress has been a bigger failure than one could have possibly imagined. I'm not talking about getting the troops out of Iraq. After reading this article by George Packer, I'm not convinced we should ever leave Iraq. No, it's one thing for the Republicans in congress to give Bush his monarchical powers, but when the Democrats bend over and take it up the ass, giving Bush unlimited authority to do anything and everything, it's easy to get tired of the blogging game right quick.

So what am I doing here today? Because today, I have a point of view that is counter to most liberals, from what I can tell. I feel that I have something different to say on this one.

Are you ready?

I agree with Bush for vetoing the child health care plan but I disagree with his reasons for doing it.

In a nutshell, Bush vetoed the child health care plan because of his dogmatic adherence to the principle of the free market. Or to put it another way - to keep the commies at bay. This, in my opinion, is stupid. It's always been stupid. For them, it's always been less a principle, and more of a way to keep the rich richer. Which is to say, not at all a principle and only about keeping the rich richer. The "free market is always right" meme is the rich's way of tricking the poor into following them backwards though time to their Dickensian utopia of starving proletariat in their slums eating their own dead, completely ignored by anyone who can afford to.

However, I agree with Bush's veto because of how the child health care plan was going to be paid for - a tax on cigarettes. Now before those of you who know me personally come down on me for protecting my own self interests, let me assure you, without specifying why, that this tax would not affect me. I'm against it for two reasons:

1) Regardless of how you feel about the supposed immorality of smoking and its inherent dangers, a tax on cigarettes ends up being a regressive tax, meaning it is paid by the people who can least afford it - the poor (much like the lottery, which I am also against). People lower on the income scale smoke in much larger numbers than those with higher incomes. You can call it a moral failing of anyone who picks up the cancer sticks, or you can make a claim that they smoke more because of less access to education about the dangers of smoking. You could even suppose that they have a bleaker outlook for their future with a cigarette providing a small, however brief escape from the daily rigors they must endure. All of that is beside the point. If we are going to expand the federal government -- and we should, particularly by giving our children health care -- it should not be on the backs of the poor. (And as a 1(a): do we really want to rely on people continuing to smoke so that lower income children can keep their health care?)

2) Sin tax. The libertarian streak in me finds sin taxes abhorrent because of the slippery slope it presents. We already tax cigarettes and alcohol to great extremes. What's next? What happens when the exerstapo decides that television leads to sloth, a deadly sin, and slaps a tax on sitting on your ass in front of the tube? (Or as the immortal George Harrison put it - If you try to sit, sit, I'll tax your seat.) The fat police are already in action in New York City shutting down anyone using transfats in their cooking. When's the tax on ice cream going to kick in? I don't think it should be anyone's job in government to decide which products that are going to kill me are bad and should be taxed (cigarettes, alcohol) and which products that are going to kill me should be subsidized (high fructose corn syrup, pharmaceutical industry, chemical industry, petroleum industry, lead-based children's toys industry). Make it illegal, or leave it be. We should be allowed to legally kill ourselves however we see fit.

So I'm glad Bush vetoed the bill, but only because I think we should pay for the children's health care by stopping every and all government subsidy and corporate bailout scheme funneled to massive corporations in the drug, food, oil, and chemical industries. Where's your free market religion when it comes to them, Mr. President?

Come to think of it, if we dropped all the corporate welfare, we'd all have free health care for life. Think about that.

Tomorrow I Woke Up Sucking On A Lemon

What’s going on over at radioheadlp7.com?

They’re counting down to something happening tomorrow morning. We are all aware of a forthcoming Radiohead (greatest band ever) album, but what’s going on tomorrow? Pitchfork tells me that this site has nothing to do with the band, so it’s probably a big scam.

Or is it? I Might Be Wrong, but… I Will remain… Optimistic. If we’re… Lucky, they won’t leave us… High and Dry, and make me look… Idioteque.

(Entertainment Tonight, Extra, anyone else may contact me at DelusionsofGrandeurBlog [at] gmail [dot] com.)

Paranoid Android!

Mad skillz.

UPDATE: Full-on hoax. (Nice Dream)

UPDATE II: However, the new album does come out next Wednesday, October 10th. With a catch. It’s only available for download at their website. Apparently, you can buy the whole liner notes, old school CD whatnot for 40 quid. But for the download, they’ve gone Shatner on us, as we can “name our own price.”

See for yourself. What an interesting ethical conundrum to have placed before me. I love the band, hate the labels, enjoy deciding how much to pay for stuff. Yet, I also hate spending unnecessary money. Hmmn…

UPDATE III: Through further research, I’ve come to discover that Radiohead would typically make in the neighborhood of $1.50 per album sold when working through a major label. That is something to bear in mind when having that selfishness vs. sticking it to the man debate you’re going to be having all this week. That is to say, it’s going to cost you at least $1.50 to demonstrate to the labels that they’re dinosaurs on the verge of extinction if they don’t wake up, and soon. After that buck-fitty, it’s all about how much you respect the band.

Mommy, Make The Bad Man Go Away!

Aren't Republicans supposed to be the tough guy father figures? Aren't they supposed to be able to keep their shit together when the going gets tough? Doesn't look like it from my point of view. First, they curled up in a fetal ball and cried their eyes out because MoveOn.org called General Petreus "General Betray-Us" (Get it? Get it??). Now, people are positively apoplectic because Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in town and speaking at Columbia today.

Oh my god, get a hold of yourself, people! The dude is talking, he's not ethnic cleansing the city. Furthermore, in our history, we have celebrated and met with people much worse than the virtually powerless Ahmadinejad. Mahmoud talks about wiping Israel off the map. Nixon met with Chairman Mao, and he had slaughtered hundreds of thousands. Bush is BFF with the leadership in Saudi Arabia, and they will stone a woman to death for being pregnant. Reagan, the mannest man of all time, met with the leaders of the Soviet Union many times.

This is America. The great thing about America is you can speak your mind, no matter how much of an asshole you are, and other people can just fucking ignore you. Get over it!

Lines I Wish I Wrote

From Bill Maher on The Huffington Post the other day:

Republicans sex scandals are getting to be like Iraqi car bombings. By the time you hear about one, there's been another. Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, Vitter, Craig...

It's like "Clue" only the answer is always "A Republican... in the washroom... with his cock."

Oh, Lord, won’t You please stop sitting around reading blogs and grant me a slice of Bill Maher’s talent?

The Great Satan

Wonkette made a nice catch, seen above, of President Bush once again pledging his undying support (and eternal soul) to the Devil at a 9/11 ceremony yesterday.

I have a simpler, more benign explanation. I think he thinks he's planning a quick escape as his alter-ego, Spider-Man.

Slave 4 Us

As I'm sure you've heard by now, the trainwreck that is Britney Spears made a stop at the MTV Video Music Awards over the weekend, and it was everything you'd expect and worse.

As her life has slowly unravelled before our eyes and millions of cameras, I've quickly found myself in the camp of just feeling sorry for her. I'm not typically one who pities those who are given everything and piss it all away of their own volition, but there are times when I feel complicit in their self-destruction. I don't read TMZ myself, but I read people who do. And where there's a demand for salacious details of people's private lives, there are going to be writers and photographers to fill that demand. As such, there's an element of Schrödinger's cat in a breakdown such as Britney's, which is to say that the act of observing it necessarily affects the outcome. When you're an 18 year old superstar, living your life completely in the public eye and developing an addiction to that praise and attention, it's probably pretty difficult to find your way when it's time to develop a private life.

All of that is prologue for this article you should read in Salon by Rebecca Traister. As she goes on to point out that we are all guilty, not least MTV and Britney herself, she composes some moving paragraphs which are staying with me.

As has been pointed out before, she embodies the disdain in which this culture holds its young women: the desire to sexualize and spoil them while young, and to degrade and punish them as they get older. Of course, she also represents a youthful feminine willingness -- stupid or manipulated as it may be -- to conform to the culture's every humiliating expectation of her.
...

No one would think that the performer, whose music has historically been catchy, but whose live performance appeal has rested on her super-fit ability to writhe around in athletic dance routines that could only succeed if rehearsed with Waffen-level discipline, could pull this off. She was hired by MTV to attract viewers eager to see her make an ass of herself. And she was complicit in her own public flogging, apparently doing nothing to prepare, making no effort to learn the words to her own song, or the dance moves she was supposed to execute.
...

There was also the harsh but deserved criticism of her performance and, more horrendously, of her physique. Spears, it seems, two children and five years of self-abuse later, no longer pleases the public with her hourglass shape. No, her ill-fitting outfit showed off a figure that was not as compact and pink as it was when she was a teenager. Sure, she looked better in a bikini than probably 98 percent of the Americans sitting on their couches and howling at her, but she was no longer porn-star perfect. And in the American lexicon, that equals fat. Wonder why your daughters have eating disorders and hate their bodies? Maybe because they're reading reports that label the thin young woman dancing around in a bra and panties physically unappealing and obese.
...

When I was a kid, my mother told me a story about some men she once saw on a lake in northern Maine. They were in a motorboat, chasing a swimming moose around the lake. They chased it and chased it and chased it until, finally, the moose got so tired and confused that it drowned. This, of course, was the idea: torturing an animal too stupid to swim for shore until it died, all in the name of good fun for the guys at the wheel.

And that's the part that gets me. Let's give her a break. And Lindsey Lohan into the bargain. Are we Romans watching the murder of Christians in the Coliseum? If we stop watching, she'll have no choice but to try to get her life -- her real life -- back on track.

I know my plea falls on deaf ears, but it warrants saying.

Republican Party Rotting From The Inside

You know, I write these articles about the Family Values Republicans and their perverted private lives with a touch of tongue-in-cheek, primarily because were it not for their own religious fanaticism and hypocritical homophobia-mongering to win elections, their so-called perversions would be perfectly fine and dandy. They could blow whomever they wanted, and in the public eye (metaphorically), instead of taking a “wide stance” in the airport crapper and getting busted by the vice squad.

And then you come across a real Republican pervert, and it turns your stomach. St. Petersburg City Council Chairman, Republican John Bryan sexually molested his daughters and once he was found out, he offed himself in the garage. I’m against the death penalty, so I’m not thrilled with his choice, but there are worse things to have happened.

Thing is, that’s not the worst part. Although, I suppose his daughters would disagree with that. They’d be right. Politically, the worst part is that the Republican Party in Florida has known about this man’s sexual deviancy and danger to children for twenty years! That’s fucked up.

The Republican Party - Protecting families by protecting reputations. One sexual deviant at a time. (The children can fend for themselves.)

Premature Adjudication

Larry Craig is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s standing by his story that he’s not gay -- as if -- that by random coincidence he simply had to take a shit in that world-renowned gay hotspot, and dammit, he’s got a wide stance and likes tappin’ his feet while he’s pinching one out. To add to the fun, today he’s actually going to try to withdraw his guilty plea from before, on the grounds that the press was so mean and like all up in his bid’ness.

Have you ever played Texas Hold ‘Em? To me, this situation with Craig is when you have nothing in your hand, but you bluff big time on the turn. Your opponent calls your bluff, and instead of folding (resigning), you decide to raise again on the river. His actions demonstrate a Bushian level of stubbornness and lack of vision that will eventually destroy him.

The guy is gay, or at the very least, he likes to give or receive blowjobs in men’s rooms. All he’s doing is dragging out an unwinnable situation thereby making it longer and more humiliating.

Hmmn… Maybe longer and humiliating is what he’s into.

We Are The Goon Squad And We’re Comin’ To Town

In honor of Fashion Week coming soon to Midtown, I present to you my friend and yours and erstwhile contributor to these pages, Thomas Crowley, competing for the title of Esquire Magazine's best dressed “real man” in the United States. As a finalist, he appeared on the Today Show yesterday morning. Enjoy:

thomas crowley esquire
Uploaded by paddockt

Somebody’s Bakin’ Brownies

I gotta say, I love John Edwards' new proposal:

Edwards Proposes "Brownie's Law" — Has Nothing To Do With Girl Scouts
John Edwards announced yesterday that as president he would have a policy dubbed "Brownie's Law," named in "honor" of former FEMA head Michael Brown. "Edwards will enact a new requirement — 'Brownie's Law' — ensuring that senior political appointees actually are qualified to perform the job to which they are appointed," according to a campaign fact sheet. "Brownie's Law will require that heads of executive agencies and other senior officials have demonstrated qualifications in the field related to their job." It sure says something about the current state of governmental affairs that such a pronouncement could be considered newsworthy.

In the coming weeks, Edwards is also expected to announce his Fredo Initiative, which would make it illegal to lie to Congress; the Turd Blossom Doctrine, forbidding the deletion and/or shredding of important documents of public interest; and the G.O.P. Principle, requiring that government officials and candidates for office demonstrate their heterosexuality prior to embarking on a campaign of demonizing and restricting the civil rights of homosexuals.

Beers, Steers, and Queers

Another day, another anti-gay Republican caught in the men’s room soliciting blow jobs. This time it’s U.S. Senator Larry Craig (R - ID). Hey, at least this one didn’t want to cram cock in his mouth because he’s afraid of all the black people. Nope. Senator Craig just likes him some dick.

He just doesn’t like it when other people like dick. Hypocrisy and homosexuality are a way of life in the Gay Old Party…

As Rove Goes So Goes Alberto

Yes, Alberto Gonzales has resigned. You know how I know? Because I've gotten no less than 15 spams from the Democratic party during the course of the day bragging about how they washed that man right out of our hair.

Yeah, right. The Democratic party was as effective at changing Bush's mind about cabinet members as I am at throwing a 98 mile per hour fastball. If they want to boast about how they are actually doing something good since having taken over congress, then let's see what they do when Bush nominates Michael "The Crony In Charge During Katrina" Chertoff to take Gonzales' place. If they manage to force Bush to nominate an independent, honorable, competent candidate for Attorney General, then -- and only then -- will I applaud their accomplishment. It would be their first.

Welcome To The Jungle

Please make note of and click on our latest What We're, Like, Totally Into Right Now&trade resident, "The Faith Between Us" blog.

As background, friend of DoG Scott Korb and his partner (in business, not in life), Peter Bebergal, have a forthcoming new book entitled The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God. It promises to be an interesting book, one which I am looking forward to reading. I am loathe to speak for Mr. Korb (the Catholic referred to in the subtitle), but it is always entertaining and enlightening to have a discussion about God and religion with Scott because of his unusual attitude about religion. I'll leave it to him to explain, but from my limited understanding, his belief in God is quite contrary to the man sitting in a cloud guiding creation and granting home runs to Albert Pujols idea, as described by many in the religious community.

Please enjoy a taste of their handiwork in this column. In the meantime, I apologize to Scott if I've mangled and/or embarrassingly simplified his point of view, and invite him to comment or even guest post if he would care to correct me. In any case, check out their blog and buy the book on October 30. You won't be sorry.

Right Wing Death Porn

To follow up on my Nuke the Others post of the other day, there’s a recent column from a right-wing think tank called Family Security Matters that advocates -- this is real -- that Bush nuke the whole of the Middle East and declare himself Emperor of the World. Democracy (i.e. - you) is what’s wrong with America.

Read for yourself.

As I say, this is a real organization with the likes of James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, on its Board of Advisors.

White Light Goin' Messin' Up My Mind

"You always have these oddballs in a group and somebody says, 'Ah, we should drop a nuke over Iraq.' The stupid jerk doesn't even know what a nuke is. If he do, he wouldn't say that."
- Theodore Van Kirk, Navigator on the Enola Gay

I just finished watching white light/black rain, an HBO documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just from hearing the one sentence description I know you already know you don't want to watch it, not because you're incurious or willfully ignorant, but because it's brutal and depressing, and you just don't want to spend an evening feeling suicidal. It's worse than you think, and you should watch it anyway.

Learning exactly how war can destroy an individual person's life is a tried and true method of getting people to understand why we should all be against every war except when absolutely necessary. Bush understands that, and it's why he hasn't allowed photographs of the coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since day one. I won't go into that aspect. This movie will affect you without question. The issue that strikes me from having viewed the film is the sense of "Other" that we -- all of us -- feel towards other human beings based only on the fact that they were born outside of our artificially drawn national border.

Whether it's the dirty Mexicans who are stealing our jobs and apparently killing us in our sleep or about the ragheads in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all those other countries over there, somehow we tend to ignore whatever trials and hardships these Others might have to endure. "It don't affect me, so piss off, foreigner." Not in those words, of course. We tend to find reasons why we shouldn't concern ourselves with these Others. They're "illegal" immigrants. They're trying to destroy America. They hate us for our freedom.

The same ideas were pervasive back in World War II. In the film, they interviewed the men who dropped the bombs -- the bombs that went on to kill 370,000 innocent people -- and they hadn't lost a night's sleep over it. Nor should they - they didn't set policy; they were just following orders. My point is that most everyone felt that the Japs deserved what they got for what they did at Pearl Harbor, and if you were up on the topic, for their imperialism and destruction they had wrought upon much of eastern Asia. That's fine except the people interviewed in this film, people whose ribs were showing through their skin, whose flesh had been melted away, whose bodies were ravaged with tumors, were mostly children at the time, and I've no doubt that the hundreds of thousands of dead were mostly innocent too.

Which brings us to today. Yes, there are crackpots who think we should just nuke the whole Middle East. And they can go fuck their ignorant selves. Today, I'm bringing to your attention the fact that while we may not have dropped a hydrogen bomb, there may possibly be 600,000 dead civilians in Iraq or more. And can you really tell me there isn't a sense of Other circulating around that number? Do we really care about these woman and children? Do we really care about the people we torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the dozens of secret bases we've established around the world? The U.S. government has admitted that many of those in Gitmo are innocent, but we can't release them because after all the shit we've done to them, they may not have been our enemies then, but they sure as hell are now.

We have to stop and think about why we consider a human life to have less value just because he or she resides outside of our borders, worships a different god than we do, or has different colored skin. As Americans do we not consider it self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness? Are those unalienable Rights endowed by our so-called Creator only endowed to those who live within these fifty states? Do you really believe that? And should our battles in the name of that document rescind those Rights just because they live in the vicinity of a few who would like to see us killed?

3,000 of us were murdered on September 11, 2001. We murdered 370,000 in August of 1945. We've murdered many, many more since. Exactly when does murder -- the murder of innocents -- become something we can so easily brush aside?

Bush's Brain Dead

Rove resigns. Wow.

Well, Bush said that if anyone in his administration was found to be responsible for leaking the name of Valerie Plame that person would no longer work for him. And I'll be damned if he's not a man of his word. Cheney had better watch his back.

My prediction - Cheney will be ousted from office Januaryish, 2009.

Ha Ha!

You support a team that tacitly encourages cheating and overtly celebrates a farce of a broken record. Therefore the Fates will step in and in the one place where people actually support the chemically enhanced robot freak that is Barry Bonds in huge numbers, a Mets fan on a brief layover will go home with the record breaking baseball.

I don’t even give a shit about this record, or any other for that matter. Mostly, I guess because this overblown season-long tempest has stolen the very last drop of nostalgia and innocence from these cynical bones of mine. But also because while Bonds cheated, the pitchers and half the rest of the non-record-breaking players were cheating too. And who’s to say all those old guys weren’t cheating in some way, to say nothing of the fact that many of those records were set when we had barely even heard of the Dominican Republic and you wouldn't have let Barry Bonds watch a game at the ballpark, let alone step on the field. So, whatever, all records are bullshit. But no matter what, a Giants fan didn’t get the big ball.

Suck it, San Francisco. Now maybe that fat fuck can retire and you can get to the task of rebuilding your baseball team. And your integrity.

Get Well, Get Well Soon, We Wish You To Get Well…

Chief Justice Roberts had a bit of a spill and I hope he’s ok.

I guess in a perfect world, I would hope that he’s well enough not to die, but not well enough to go back to work, but well enough that he wouldn’t feel compelled to step down until 2009 when his sick days ran out.

Oh, no wait! In a perfect world his little seizure would have scrambled his brain just enough such that he kept all his lawyerly schooling and whatnot, but he stopped being a conservabot automaton, reflexively voting in favor of whatever the right-wing powers-that-be have predetermined to be his position. That would be the perfect world. (And he also developed an X-Men style mutation that caused heavy bricks to repeatedly fall onto any condescending Italian Catholic jurists in his vicinity. Yeah!!)

But alas, I doubt it. I’m sure he’ll be fine and back at work undermining the constitution in no time. Whatever. Any excuse to show that picture of his kid getting’ jiggy wit’ it, am I right?