Art Pottery, Politics and Food

2008-09-12T14:15:00.001-04:00

Nowhere on this 1950 dated one hundred dollar bill does it say "In God We Trust"...
(click pic for larger image)

Photo: sean

Midwest Pottery

2008-08-15T23:01:00.003-04:00

2008-07-31T13:35:00.002-04:00

Image: hayward.edu, johnmccain.com

2008-05-23T22:00:00.002-04:00

Vogue-ly Mummified

Hatshepsut McMummy models her size 0 swaddling on the veranda of the McMummy's seaside palace for Vague Magazine.

Modified Image: FoxNews, Vogue

2008-05-07T14:15:00.000-04:00

Modified Image: Columbia Pictures, Reuters

2008-05-03T12:19:00.001-04:00

A Candle In The Shed

Goodbye Deborah Jean.
Though I never paid you at all,
You had the grace to kill yourself
While those about you crawled.
They crawled out of your black book.
And they whispered into your phone.
They hanged you from a rafter
And made good your dirty name.

And it seems to me you wished your life
Didn’t vanish in the shed.
Never knowing who to sing to
When the news set in.
And I would have liked to have used you
For a goat and sin
Your wishes burned out long before
My urges ever did…

Image: Polaris

2008-04-21T09:19:00.008-04:00

David Carr, writing in the NYT, is a good example of fellow media (or 'colleagues' in windbag vernacular) helping a debate-scorched ABC with a shoulder shrug and an "Oh well".
Sez Mr. Carr:

While it’s tempting to blame ABC...the news media’s values haven’t really changed...

Of course, a real story would say that the "values" have changed and offer this brief history.
As the media market expanded with cable in the late 70s and early 80s ratings for the more powerful older and original broadcast franchises declined and print saw readership losses.
Broadcasters started down the path of sensationalizing news and cutting staff while newspapers and magazines began emulating TV to plug audience leaks with emotional 'grabbers'.
In the mid 80s and 90s, the Federal regulations governing use of the public airwaves (in place since the 30s and rewritten for TV in the 40s) were eliminated and modified (these changes allowed programs such as Howard Stern and Sally Jesse Raphael to be classified as news and be exempt from the Equal Time Provisions and ultimately midwifing the name-calling format of Rush Limbaugh et al).
Also, as the 80s progressed under the Reagan revolution, media corporations took advantage of the new regulatory conditions and expanding marketplace possibilities to expand ownership while minimizing work force cogs and streamlining editorial policy and control in the guise of “product maintenance”.
A vast, unruly domestic print and broadcast environment (many privately held) mutated into a mere unregulated, profit-bent handful and this handful proved to be very easy pickings for the fascist velociraptors orbiting the Bush scion.
So, while I can understand why a modern media institution like the New York Times would prefer to imagine that “media values haven’t really changed”, history would tend to convince the impartial observer otherwise.
Further proof was found on ratings-crazed ABC last week.
The Gray Lady, perhaps smelling blood and an audience, potentially, adrift showed a glimmer of tooth in the final, somewhat less enabling, paragraph:

It was a disgusting spectacle, a tableau that etched not the bankruptcy of politics but of the people covering it.

Maybe, but will this general “train wreck” consensus remain after the frenetically candy-coated musings of Op-ed enablers?

Image: ABC News, HealthStones.com, SXC.hu

2008-04-18T17:06:00.002-04:00

Dr. Strangerodham

"We will provide a deterrent backup and we will let the Iranians know that, yes, an attack on Israel would trigger massive retaliation, but so would an attack on those countries that are willing to go under this security umbrella and forswear their own nuclear ambitions."
--HRC at the Philadelphia Debate

Modified Image: Dr. Strangelove, MSNBC

2008-04-11T11:28:00.001-04:00

Modified Images: Discovery, FOX, White House

2008-03-28T16:18:00.003-04:00

Photo: The Washington Times

2008-02-20T14:28:00.003-05:00

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

--William Wordsworth - Ode: Intimations of Immortality, V

Image: BarakObama.com, NASA

2007-10-25T14:09:00.000-04:00

I remember wondering why a few of my favorite bloggers just up and vanished over the years.
A couple seemed, perhaps, a tad paranoid but a high profile government or military IP address making a blip(s) on your blog’s web tracker can, on first sighting, have that effect .
My initial misgivings turned to shameful pride and fed my silly photo-shopped intensity with every EOP, DARPA, GOV, MIL, TREAS and even EPA visitor.
I drifted from my beloved blogging not for fear of steel boots but for a Bush-weary boredom with the clamorous metallic noise and toothsome visage of the seeming Teflon corporate media’s iron grip on discussion and agenda.
Though equally needy and prone to weediness, my garden was rewardingly goal-oriented, far less edgy and genetically non-fixated on past and present trivia.
Sure a hot freak (hello Larry) always has the potential to lure me with its lusty siren song.
But, I have to admit, my “occasional posting” quickly turned more pictorial, ephemeral and, of late oddly, audible than I had originally intended.
I shall not, Prospero-like, infest my mind with beating on the strangeness of my web comings or goings but shall follow the teaching of Zen master Doris Day’s que sera, sera.
Blogging has been and remains tragicomic and a great way to endure the Bush strain of Stockholm Syndrome but I pity the far future’s history researchers doomed to wade through our collective bloggy e-scribblings.
My past posting, perhaps too simply put, was more or less a manifestation of a sort of post 2000 Election and September 11 kind of Stockholm Syndrome where myself and other poor tele-viewing Pavlovian slobbers were held hostage to a strange mix of horror-movie cliché, national marketing and family heritage.
Unlike Stockholm Syndrome’s most famous sufferer Patty Hearst, my personal captivity, as measured by self-published words, has lasted several years.
As it stands, the star and hostage-taker of so many of my blog posts will soon leave office or commit some final tragic palimpsetting of American and World History.
I will continue to try and co-witness it occasionally in this space and with as much humor as is possible in these dark times.
It’s a given that, until unplugged, something will happen that triggers a shiver, a gush of words and a flashback of not so Pattyesque semiotic liberation.

Image: umkc.edu

2007-10-23T11:26:00.001-04:00

From Our: "Was There a GOP Debate While I Dozed?" Department
Mike HuckaBooBoo

Uh-oh, another holy-roller politician with pesky Judeo-Christian fact-related aphasia:

"When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them. I still believe that. "
--Mike Huckabee, Orlando GOP Debate

PolitiFact.com:
"Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon...A few more of the signers were former clergymen, though it's a little unclear just how many. The conservative Heritage Foundation said two other signers were former clergymen. The religion web site Adherents.com said four signers of the declaration were current or former full-time preachers. But everyone agrees only Witherspoon was an active minister when he signed."

But, heck, isn't Mike a 5K year-old Earth and dinosaur co-existance neo-believer?
Will the Chief Justice say, "Mr. President-elect, place your left hand on these live, wriggling snakes, raise your right and repeat in tongues after me..."?

Modified Image: ivory-bill-woodpecker.com, lucasmiller.net

2007-10-15T15:26:00.001-04:00

"Steller!"

Blanche duGiuliani possibly added to her trusty looming threat repertoire yesterday with the aid of a young boy, a hulking alien caller.
As reported by the AP and a blog:

During a town hall meeting in Exeter, a young questioner asked…"If (there's) something living on another planet and it's bad and it comes over here, what would you do?" Giuliani, grin on his face, said it was the first time he's been asked about an intergalactic attack. "Of all the things that can happen in this world, we'll be prepared for that, yes we will”.

I’ll grant you that Rudy, male or female, is scary enough to frighten any self-respecting space creature lusting after this island Earth.
However, all death ray wielding tripods aside, the Donald’s favorite perfume model just may find it necessary to take another cue from Tenessee’s slightly more appealing Blanche:

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths.

Desire, the name of that rattle-trap UFO that bangs through the Solar System…

Modified Image: LabsNews.co.uk, WindyPundit.com

2007-10-08T18:43:00.000-04:00

Somewhere in Foggy Bottom...

CondiBot: Thanks Chris!

2007-10-07T19:51:00.001-04:00

Thank God he was just a brain-damaged patsy and not an out of control paranoid drug addict like Rehnquist or a sex pervert like, uh, well, you know...
As the New York Times reports:

Domenici, who is 75 and in his sixth term, revealed on Thursday that he had...a family of diseases that damage parts of the brain that control language, behavior, planning, organizing, decision-making and movement. Patients can have either speech problems or behavioral ones, or both, and the symptoms can vary from subtle to flagrant. There is no treatment or cure.

Modified Image: mikesciosciastragicillness.com, New York Times

2007-09-26T12:27:00.001-04:00

El Jefe de La Guerra

El Monstruo, better known as the curiously elected 43rd President of the United States, has been caught in yet another lie to the American and global citizenry blessed with personal memory, recording technology and a modestly free press.
Madrid’s El Pais newspaper yesterday published a transcript of a conversation between Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and El Jefe on February 22, 2003 somewhere within la Estancia Crawford.
Possibly riding jeep back our horse and likely cow-fearing first Texan is quoted as saying:

“They are left two weeks. In two weeks we will be militarily ready. We will be in Bagdad at the end of March”.

American corporate nooz outlets, seeming stumped with the mysterious Spanish language, were late arrivals, as usual, to the story.
Venerable seekers of truth like the hard-working Editor & Publisher staff curiously had a somewhat different take on the leader’s verbatim conversación.
A quoted phrasing, however that smacks of news style rewrite more than simple mistranslation by the Google algorithm which I used for the first quote in this post:

"If there was a United Nations Security Council resolution or not....We have to get rid of Saddam. We will be in Baghdad at the end of March."

The Google translation service, while goofily amusing on occasion, does, I think, accurately distill El Jefe’s palabras.

Modified Image: EB.com, Reuters

2007-09-13T12:45:00.001-04:00

L to R--JasonRobert Drake, Patrick McHenry, Jeff Gannon, David Dreier, Lindsey Graham, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Dave Karsnia and Mitch McConnell (click for larger image)

Pam's House Blend has been trying to uncover the latest, filthiest and, perhaps, most sinful back-burner GOP sex scandal.
Reader beware.

Modified Image: House.gov, New York Times, ScrutinyHooligans.us, Senate.gov, TheSmokingGun.com, Washington Blade

2007-09-05T20:59:00.000-04:00

Thompson Finally To Zzzz!

Gripping the Senator's arthritic hand, Evita er, Jeri woos Wolfie for a Cabinet post at this year's WHCA dinner.

Image: WDCPIX.com

2007-09-02T16:46:00.001-04:00

The (Toilet) Maven

Once upon a mid-flight stopping, as I pondered toilet hopping,
Over many a soft and absorbent roll of tissued softness,
While I fumbled, nearly crapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some hottie gently rapping, rapping on my potty floor.
“’Tis some trick,” I fluttered, “tapping on my potty floor,
Only piss, and lust for sure.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was pre a bleak September,
And each tumescent waving member wrought its goo upon the floor.
Eagerly I skipped past law so; mainly I had sought to swallow
On my knees surcease from man so-man so filled with Gany’s mead-
For the rare and smelly spillage from the angel stalled next door-
Next door here forever more.
Quoth the officer, “Nevermore!”

Apologies to Edgar Allen Poe

Modified Image: HandlingInnovations.com, The RNC

2007-08-30T12:53:00.000-04:00

"I want to thank you'all for coming..."
--George W. Bush

Modified Image: HuffingtonPost.com, NetworkCleaningService.com

2007-08-16T11:29:00.001-04:00

"AT&T has constructed an extensive -- and expensive -- collection of infrastructure that collectively has all the capability necessary to conduct large-scale covert gathering of [Internet protocol]-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well."
--J. Scott Marcus

Modified Image: AT&T, Buckeyeplanet.com

2007-08-13T14:02:00.001-04:00

WH "Turd" Flushed

Modified Image: CNN

2007-08-06T11:57:00.001-04:00

...Measured by fear,
it may become necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume amidst the tatters the separate and re-equalized station to which they once were entitled by Nature and God.
Our present history is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has endeavoured to prevent border protection; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to Acts of pretended Legislation.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has excited domestic political insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to further divide the inhabitants of our social frontiers.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms:
Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
A man whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our Legislative and Media brethren.
We have warned them from time to time of attempts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.
We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity to disavow these usurpations.
They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.
We must, therefore, acquiesce to our characterization and hold them Enemies.
Therefore, we the people of the United States of America solemnly publish and declare, our oppressive corporatized elite ought to be a separate and independent State.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our reacquaintance with the concept of sacred Honor.

Image: September 11 Digital Archive

2007-08-03T10:24:00.001-04:00

Senator Chris Dodd's straightman personality scores...

Modified Image: MediaMatters.com, Opposable-Thumbs.com

2007-08-02T09:07:00.000-04:00

Buck-passing and no one really responsible...Sound kinda familiar?

An empire…inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities…Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without.
--Kirkpatrick Sale, Imperial Entropy: Collapse of the American Empire

The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.
--Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005

Images: AP, CrystaLinks.com, FlonNet.com, KOMOTV.com, September 11 Digital Archive

2007-08-01T17:35:00.000-04:00

According to Raw Story and as telewitnessed by your humble blogger:

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) revealed in a Wednesday hearing that Lieutenant [sic] General Philip Kensinger, who was censured Tuesday by the Army...has evaded a subpoena..."General Kensinger refused to appear today," Chairman Waxman said..."His attorney informed the committee that General Kensinger would not testify voluntarily, and if issued a subpoena would seek to evade service. The committee did issue a subpoena to General Kensinger earlier this week, but US Marshals have been unable to locate or serve him."

Modified Image: AP, CivilAffairsAssoc.org, FPP.CO.uk

2007-07-31T13:45:00.000-04:00

In the mysterious workings of the internets' tubes, hate-filled liberal bloggers (I prefer the raspberry-filled ones) begin a web blizzard, generate individual comments , turn-tables with a visit to the tranquil suburban driveway of an infamous cable TV talking, or perhaps screaming, head and allow the techno and like minded to repost on personal blogs for wider dissemination building towards a blog storm of epic proportions…All with minimal individual/group funding.
Freedom-loving patriots occasionally feel a twinge of gratitude toward our mega-trillion dollar Military Industrial Complex for the post holocaust communications system that became The Internet.
A certain talking head might not...

Modified Image: FoxNews, Mike Stark

2007-07-27T13:07:00.000-04:00

Not Quite So Total Recall

Folks, to use the President’s favorite colloquilism, are wondering if America’s tiniest Attorney General is plain stupid, or like his higher-ranked amigo, craftily complex with specifically imprecise language used before the Senate Judiciary Committee to describe certain White House-instigated activities undertaken by unknown agencies and suddenly objected to by then-new DOJ officials and forcing a late night and ill-fated March 2004 hospital trip with Andrew Card to the medicated bedside of John Ashcroft.

Click for larger image

Perhaps this handy graphic from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (note "Transactional Data") in conjunction with this January 28, 2003 White House Fact Sheet can be retroactively more illuminating than this afternoon’s White House press flurries:

Since September 11, 2001, our government has been working together and sharing information like never before…ensuring that intelligence information from all sources is shared, integrated, and analyzed…[and] to close the “seam” between analysis of foreign and domestic intelligence…The FBI [will]…ensure that the collection and dissemination of intelligence is given the same institutional priority as the collection of evidence.

Is it possible that DOJ officials were objecting to “sharing…like never before…from all sources” without judicial or legislative oversight?
You can bet a block of gel-packed cheese on it as the super-computer crunches the data!

Images: AP, Eff.org, Shutterblade.net

2007-07-25T16:19:00.001-04:00

Oh, Ladybird, send her an A-line...
Did I say, "(yawn!)"?

Photos: AFP, AP, Reuters

2007-07-20T13:24:00.001-04:00

"No amount of evidence will convince the Palestinians that Arafat was a homosexual, or that his death was caused by anything other than Israel’s machinations."
--Today’s New York Daily News

Chairman Arafat on his last hospital trip

On November 9, 2004 I speculated about the possibility that PLO leader Yassir Arafat was HIV+.
I wrote this about the culturally closeted bi-curious Arab male:

Certainly anyone even briefly associating with Arab men would notice the same untoward and denial-laden interest in male homosexuality that in-the-know Americans observe in our own contra sexually obsessed Christian Fundamentalists.
I, personally, remember vintage 1980's Washington scuttlebutt regarding President Reagan's enjoyment of a CIA report detailing Colonel Khadafi's fondness for red pumps and wonder if President Bush didn't sweeten his Libyan deal with a lifetime discount at Shoetown for the cross-dressing Colonel.

Ah, the heady lusts surrounding taboos and the men who break them...

Modified Image: Volokh.com

2007-07-11T21:10:00.001-04:00

Modified Image: BBSNews.net, RopeOfSilicon.com

2007-07-03T21:00:00.001-04:00

We've Seen So Many Idols Fall...

...Today he's half-forgotten,
But it's the presidency that got small
He is the greatest decider of all.
Then, you can't imagine,
How fans would sacrifice themselves to touch his shadow...
--Max/Karl

Modified Image: DVDbeaver.com, HuffingtonPost.com

2007-06-29T15:13:00.000-04:00

The disgraced corporatist neoconservative movement, fresh from the ongoing Bush calamities designed with the collusion of a big media made more pliable via deregulation, mergers, and downsizing have once more focused their close-set, gimlet eyes upon the Reagan-era means by which they secured long-term victory, the outlawed Fairness Doctrine and the ongoing but unenforced Equal Time Provisions of the Federal Communications Code.
As with the Iraq War failures and all things Bush, shills paid by the corporatist group minds would have us believe a scarier, for us, and more lucrative, for them, set of imaginary beliefs rather than facts culled from the yet unscrubbed historic record and recent news cycle transits.
According to corporatists like Wall Street Journal Deputy Editorial page Editor Daniel Henninger, the years before the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine within the broadcast media were:

Once a mostly exclusive liberal country club…[that] ensured that incumbents got "free" TV coverage across their terms while challengers got crumbs.

The "free" use Henninger mentions was actually fair use in a news event as described in the federal law.
Henninger's alleged "crumbs", the niggardly bits reserved for electoral challengers, reflect flabby enforcement by political appointees at the Federal Communications Commission over time rather than any deficiency with the federal code, but this WSJ hack doesn't want you to know that.
Henninger wants to misinform and play on the popular unease and governmental mistrust following Immigration Reform's noisy clubbing.
A newly rating-challenged right wing Echo Chamber is basing a new straw man on various reworked, debunked themes involving ratings, popularity and talk radio’s influence upon the immigration debate (kind of an “up yours” to fellow media megalomaniac Lou Dobbs) and are now implying that the Fairness Doctrine they eliminated would, if reinstituted, ban listener or viewer call-in programs and thus kill the (wink, wink) supposedly free and open public debate forums we’ve allegedly enjoyed since Fairness was strangled shortly before Rush Limbaugh’s first national broadcast in 1987.
Contrary to the freshly minted winger deregulation myth that “Reagan tore down this wall in 1987”, the record clearly shows that this intentional destruction, coupled with other intentional deregulatory acts, poisoned the “public interest standard” which had governed broadcasting since Section 315 [47 U.S.C. §315] of 1933 Radio Act was amended in the 1940s to allow broadcast entities, as license-proven guardians of that public interest, a broader editorial influence in locally-generated content.
The rules, such as they were and still are, govern broadcasting entities and not, as the corporatists imply, ordinary citizens.
As Fairness was eliminated, Reagan’s FCC also loosened the classifications for what constituted news programming, a programming classification generally exempt from the still extant Equal Time Provisions of the Radio Act.
The Equal Time Provisions simply ensured that equal broadcast time was given to all legally qualified candidates for public office outside of “bona fide” news programming.
If a public official, running for office, appeared in a “bona fide newscast, news interview or news documentary” commenting on that days issue in their role as a current office-holder this appearance would not require an extension of equal time to the other candidates and would constitute "fair use".
If that office-holder appeared on a program not classified as "news" or, in a bona fide newscast made a non germane remark or attacked an opponent, the broadcast licensee:

Shall, within a reasonable time and in no event later than 1 week after the attack, transmit to the person or group attacked (1) notification of the date, time and identification of the broadcast; (2) a script or tape (or an accurate summary if a script or tape is not available) of the attack; and (3) an offer of a reasonable opportunity to respond over the licensee's facilities.

If, during the 45 days before a primary or 60 days preceding a general or special election, the office-holder is broadcast on any programming classification other than news (sports, entertainment, instructional) the broadcaster would have to extend the exact amount of airtime as close to the exact time of the offending broadcast to every other candidate seeking that same office.
With Fairness eliminated, Reagan’s FCC thus started to reclassify non news programming like Donahue, Rush, Howard Stern and Sally Jesse Raphael as news and began to ignore the Equal Time provisions of the United States Code.
Without Fairness, personal attacks and political editorializing, precisely codified into the federal communications regulations after the Red Lion case in 1967, entered the marketplace in disguises as varied as the newly disguised newscasts, call-in shows and round-table discussion programs.
The return of Fairness to the broadcast and cable outlets of the large media conglomerates, the reasonable classification of programming content and real enforcement of the Equal Time Provisions would not eliminate personal attacks, hate speech and disinformation from our airwaves but would prevent these sophisticated political techniques from dominating the marketplace as they have since 1987 and as they do now.
Only a fool, a Wall Street Journal Deputy Editorial page Editor or a Robert’s court conservative jurist could claim to see diversity within today’s corporate media elite.
A restoration of the Fairness Doctrine within the newly expanding digital media marketplace will not silence speech but will ensure diversity and safeguard diverse speech from the last 20 years of far right manipulation and excess.
Compliance with Fairness was and will be, if restored, an expense for the license holding corporations.
The failure of Bush’s privatized Social Security, hurt corporate profitability.
The failure of the misnamed Immigration Reform has hurt the corporate bottom line of many a Bush Pioneer and wanna-be McSlaver.
Is it any wonder the corporatist Echo Chamber pales at the thought of pricy Fairness Doctrine compliance?

This blogger on Fairness from September 2003

Image: RKO Radio Pictures

2007-06-26T11:52:00.001-04:00

******The Vice President of the United States surrounded by iron filings

A notable quote from news items not related to the swaybacked and sprung Paris:

"It was like -- you know that experiment where you pass a magnet under the table and you see the iron filings on the top of the table move? You know there's a magnet there because of what you see happening, but you never see the magnet."

--The Washington Post reporting the words of David Frum

Modified Image: AP, NASA.gov

2007-06-20T18:38:00.000-04:00

Bloom On Black

Photo: sean

2007-06-19T14:39:00.000-04:00

Neigh, I say!

It takes something along the order of a newish Apocalyptic Horseman to lure me from the garden this summer right as my monstrous dwarfed curly sunflowers are beginning to bloom.
The Endtimes ballooning corporate media zeitgeist infused into one particular morning news morsel, this Tuesday, had me hotfooting it to my recently unloved ‘puter to the sonorous but catchy clop of demonic hooves accompanying haunted memories of various, old Eyewitness News themes.
The dizzyingly decadent Imperial celebrity fashion of highly publicized 3rd world adoption enters a new and surely more tasteless phase when, as I read the Washington Post via this morning’s always informative DCRTV.com, local TV news anchors now try for geographically themed babies with the photogenic verve they once attempted Emmys.
According to the Post’s latest attempt at gossip, The Reliable Source:

Tracey Neale is going to briefly disappear from the airwaves, and now we know why: WUSA's nightly anchor is adopting two children from Ethiopia…Neale went public with her plan Sunday night at the Rammys, the annual awards for local chefs and restaurants (check out the winners in tomorrow's Food section).

See what I mean about taste?
I mean right out of the starting gate, a local TV news personality takes crass to a level not even imagined by the likes of Madonna, Britany or Angelina!!
Announcing the adoption of children from a chronically starvation-prone people at a restaurant award ceremony has an almost AbFab-ian quality to it; the sort of brilliantly acid socially comic counterpoint we expect from Jennifer Saunders and the BBC much less a deadpan major market local TV also ran.
As Edina Monsoon used the threat and eventual adoption of Rumanian babies over her long-suffering daughter Saffron in 1993’s prescient 1st season episode Iso Tank, local TV anchors, rock and movie stars must, we all suspect, have some private ulterior motives lurking under those ever so public Pepsodent smiles.
As usual, local TV news ends today’s story with a tasteless tease:

Plans for maternity leave are up in the air, and she's still trying to decide if she'll bring a WUSA crew to Ethiopia when she picks up her kids. One thing she knows for sure. As a first-time mom, she's going to need an experienced nanny. "I'm already looking," she said.

Wondering if Tracey’s yet to enroll the Ethiopian babies in a Pilates class or Jack and Jill, I breathe air thick with the too tempting odor of a 5 part Sweeps series and highly questionable motivations.
Oxygen-starved thoughts rush back to the straightforward complications of gardening.
The innocent purity of new life, be it plant or animal and no matter how burdened, brings with it the God and life-affirming potential to triumph over any adversity.
Cornflowers, so beautiful and gentrified in my deck garden, often remind rural Americans of cattle pastures where each summer the tall flowers bloomed from the unsavory remnants of rotting cow dung.
In the Ethiopia of the TV anchor’s adoptive children, cow dung is too valuable a commodity to be allowed to rot in a field.

Note--In keeping with the infrequent journalistic practice of full disclosure, I must confess to having worked for the TV station that currently owns Ms Neale’s contract from 1981 through 1997 under entirely different management.

Image: DeepJiveInterests.com

2007-06-04T22:54:00.000-04:00

Rookwood XVII

Under a particulate-laden dome of near Industrial era Cincinnati air pollution, the 17th annual spring auction of Rookwood Pottery at Cincinnati Art Galleries this past Sunday clearly established the once humble faience tile firmly within the high 5 and 6 figure Rookwood Pottery pantheon.
Bidding on the 14 ¾” by nearly 8” tile bearing the cipher of lone female architectural designer Sallie Toohey started slowly with audience gasps at a dream and pre-sale estimate-crushing opening bid of $33,000.
The audible gasping continued from the standing room only crowd as the fast-paced bids settled into a battle between two anonymous phone bidders before hammering to an astonishing and, for Rookwood as well as all other American architectural tiles, a market-shaping record price of $85,000!
The Toohey faience tile becomes the 7th most expensive piece of Rookwood Pottery ever sold by the Cincinnati Art Galleries in the 16 years since the seminal sale of the famed Glover Collection in 1991.
Expect antique malls across the nation to begin subtly raising prices on these increasing rare and decorative items.
Among the high end and mid range vases, most managed to sell within their pre-sale estimates in sales that were generally strong and particularly so for anything signed by Edward Timothy Hurley or William Ernst Hentschel.
However, no bets, seller’s hopes or buyer’s dreams are safe when jaded, sometimes fickle art pottery connoisseurs assemble en masse.

One beautiful high end vase, a sensitive 9” Grace Young standard glaze portrait of an American Indian mother and child painted in 1900, sold disappointingly under its low end pre-sale estimate for $26,000 while another similarly-sized and Iris-glazed Carl Schmidt vase decorated with a dazzling peacock feather in 1904 soared $17,000 over it's high end pre-sale estimate to sell for $37,000.

The always entertaining Cincinnati art pottery event experienced what are becoming annual moments of absurd internet bidding when a lowly 9 ¼” production vase covered in a modestly interesting purple matte glaze opened to floor indifference and a web bid $225 over the pre-sale estimate high of $200 before hammering to another internet bidder for an unexpected $500.
Animal figurals, also, brought their annual moment of bid lunacy when a late period ivory-glazed 3” rabbit paperweight sold for $600 in spirited, if cringe-inducing, floor and web bidding.
Sunday’s sale started on a somber note with news that auctioneer and human lightening bolt J. Louis Karp’s legendary mother and matriarch of the historic Main Auction Galleries Phyllis Tennenbaum Karp had passed away Saturday morning.
I had the great pleasure of meeting this remarkable, sparkling woman a little more than a year ago.
I grieve for the Karp family’s loss.

Photos: Mark Mussio

2007-06-01T15:18:00.000-04:00

Brighter than a lucky penny, when she's near the wrinkles disappear...

No matter the rumors to the contrary, many nonphotogenic citizens were not born yesterday.
Take the whole Broderick Crawford, Judy Holliday situation…Er, rather the whole, still brewing Fred Thompson, Jeri Kehn sitcheumacation:

Harry Brock: What's a peninsula?
Billie Dawn: Shhhh.
Harry Brock: Don't gimme that "shush." You think you're so smart, huh - what's a peninsula?
Paul Verrall: It's a ...
Harry Brock: Not you, her.
Billie Dawn: It's that new medicine...

First rule of White House Wife Fight Club has always been:
Wrap the boobies up to the chin in lace, pearls or pastels.
Second rule:
Never tease more than the candidate.

PS-Doesn't the girl in the YouTube video look like younger Monica Lewinsky or Annette Funicello?
Photos: NYPost.com, YIMG.com, WDCPIX.com
Dialogue: Born Yesterday 1950 Columbia Pictures

2007-05-29T13:57:00.001-04:00

Rumpelstilskatie

“Now set to work and spin all night till early dawn, and if by that time you haven't spun the straw into gold you shall die."
--Folk Tale

The NY Post celebrity beat throbs with word that “ratings at top dog 'Today' have slid to a 13-year low” and that CBS executives are “looking for a loophole in Couric’s contract” that will land Katie’s long format cuddly warmth on the not very cuddly but format-friendly CBS Morning News.
As is pathetically typical while the edifice of American journalism crumbles, the manicured big media frat boys of the Episcopal east, as Page 6 appears to confirm, are in a flop sweat tizzy over logo redesign and power news bimbo horse racing.
Sadly, with TV news as it has been practiced since “electronic news gathering equipment” (or ENG) started to become commonplace in the early 70s, the problem isn’t the wrapper but the contents.
Concepts once so trendy as location live shots and “news” more instant than the hour or more it took for film to be processed, screened and edited, once seemed to offer endless possibilities but withered root bound in lazy, formulaic program styles that also originated in the early 70s success of the “eyewitness team” multi-anchor/specialist reporter format.
Aside from all the regulatory and business shenanigans of the 70s and 80s, the ENG and team news “friends” formula seemed relatively unaffected by 24/7 cable news which copied and endlessly repeated its themes in tidy 30, 15, 10 or 5 minutes chunks.
Executives and their out of house consulting services delighted in staging expensive news settings resembling the bridge of the Starship Enterprise for our bubbly in studio teleprompter slaves and paying huge royalties for theme music with successful market track records.
International, Business and Feature reporting beats eventually winnowed down to celebrity gossip reports, gynecologically focused medical stories and endless scare weather…
Cue the rainbow and butterflies ‘cause all seemed right with the world.
Then came the Internet and easy free web video hosting…Suddenly one of the team friends wishing “Bob” a warm thanks following an obviously taped report not only seems, to the post millennial video sophisticate, superfluous but comic and absurd.
Old media ratings plunged and show no signs of lessening…the game, kiddies, is over…Err, rather mutating.
Oh, I expect we’ll continue to hear the dinosaurs bellow from the distant Internet tar pit over the next few years along with blame-gaming and eventually, pitifully, government subsidies.

Image:WorldWideSchool.org

2007-05-17T14:23:00.000-04:00

In this ludicrously early presidential spring, top Democrats are blooming amid the soft dappled pigments of the leftward art community.
The feel is an easily digestible, however umbral, neo pop with more than a hint of tribute to the past’s heroes with the classical attitude of the charismatic subject matter.
"Hillary Clinton #2" (above, left) is by Zina Saunders and is merely one of many very interesting portraits displayed on her Art Talks webpage.
Senator Obama (above right) was painted by Dana Schutz for a New Republic cover and accompanies a brief Art Newspaper report on a few of the Illinois Senator’s more prominent art-minded backers.
An indirectly busy art week for Senator Obama had campaign staffers emulating John Ashcroft by tossing neutral drapes over several provocative exhibits prior to their candidate appearing before a 500-person rally held at the Plant Zero gallery in Richmond, VA last week.
Tastefully sheeted was a 6ft by 10ft canvas, titled "Snake Charmer " by Jamie Boling wherein an image of tarnished pop goddess Britney Spears (yawn!) is painted uncovering the remnants of her publicly tattered maidenhood.
Eyeball weary Obama staffers also found drapery for another of Mr. Boling’s seemingly edgy paintings entitled simply “Kill Lincoln”.
Memo to Obama staffers: Unlike pols, art isn’t necessarily all things to all people all the time and artists rarely take to scripting…Count your blessings because the art gallery event could have, with a surly artist and a slipped drape, been a Bush-sized fiasco.

Image: ArtNewspaper.com, Drawger.com, WackyPackages.org

2007-05-15T09:15:00.000-04:00

Old Press Hand on The Rio Grande

With non gardening and cooking time currently augmented with fascinating old texts, I thought it appropriate, in light of the journo-endtimes band competition between Tony Snow and Bob Schieffer as gleefully described by morning TV this AM, to consult my ancient 2nd Edition copy of The Complete Reporter by Julian Harriss and Stanley Johnson published by The MacMillian Company in 1965.
The book, a text for both high school and college classes attended by your humble blogger, is, sadly today, a time capsule of journalism as it was once practiced in these United States.
The book is still available.
Amazon.com has The Complete Reporter’s 7th Edition available for a stunning $87 (with free super saver shipping!!!!).
The 7th Edition, no doubt, explains to eager young students all the ethical elements that come into play when a major news player’s Western Swing band competes with the Presidential Press Secretary’s Honky Tonk band in a public space for $60 a pop.
My puny, pre-digital, 2nd Edition, however, does offer succinct advice:

The reporter cannot lose sight of the fact that the public welfare may be involved in much that he writes…the public is dependent directly upon him for its knowledge of affairs by means of which, individually and in the mass, it must solve its problems. Careless, slipshod, inaccurate or biased reporting is inexcusable under this responsibility.

And, from the famous journalism text’s proposed Ethical Code for an imaginary news operation, we have Item C:

The [news entity] should report news and not attempt to “make” news.
Exaggeration of a minor incident “to write a better story” is making news. So is the “publicity stunt” planned by the reporter or within the knowledge of the reporter.

Oh, Bob, first you knife poor innocent little Katie (blink, blink!) but now you are worshipping the pagan idol of publicity with a known hound.
Shame.

Modified Image: CBS, CNN, BuckleImpressions.ca

2007-05-04T15:03:00.000-04:00

This is Commander Guy to Ground Control,
I’ve fallen through the floor
And I’m floating on a most effluvial whey
And my legacy looks different today.

For where
But cutting brush on Texan hardpan
Far from DC,
Momma’s dress is blue
And there’s nuthin I want to do.

(apologies to Venture Bros. supervillain, David Bowie)

Modified Image: AP, Google

2007-05-01T22:20:00.000-04:00

I guess it’s about time I posted something.
I mean...we’re getting…um, concerned inquiries regarding my status…
Am I up/down, in/out or fossilized in front of the tube along with a months old glass of milk and a partially eaten pizza?
No.
Lacking the dramatic and scenically kitschy 50s mortality of TV tray mummification, I can honestly self-reflect and conclude that my feelings and present interest in pop media, as depicted by the White House and their pet corporate shills, withered as though anointed with the drying natron salts of ancient Egypt.
Call it spring fever and my semi-annual revulsion with omnipresent trash media…a sort of Bush/Imus/Mass Killer overload.
A healing, though exhausting, return to a gym routine after some health issues along with the therapeutic arrival of Season 2 of The Venture Bros, a few good books and the spring garden have succeeded in restoring some needed balance.
Forgive, dear reader.
I shall return.

Photo: GoneMovies.com

2007-04-12T16:05:00.000-04:00

SCREENSHOT
You’ve Got Incriminating Mail!

According to this morning's Los Angeles Times:

The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials.

According to a report issued this afternoon by CREW (Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington) and leaving the issue of email's perminant destructibility:

CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005.

Oops!
Those RNC servers handling the gwb43.com account among others must have accomodated huge bandwidth demands as illicit monies and official US Government information was e-slopped around Washington in exchange for winks, nods and the occasional prostitute.

FYI--Here's a 50 second YouTube video of Maria Bartiromo discussing "the Google" and the President's curious email behavior with a very chatty George W. Bush on October 29, 2006.
Here's the 5 minute interview at the WSJ site.

Modified Image: Google, Microsoft

2007-04-11T14:29:00.000-04:00

They have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto…
Exodus 32:8

Rational, thinking people, that collective and oft ignored American god, have grown increasingly befuddled with the tasteless slapstick that now defines our Constitutionally-vital public discourse as “guided” by the various large-headed, on-air Pontifices Maximi within the corporate media priesthood.
Like an elitist politician unfamiliar with the price of milk or bread, million dollar media stars ponder, scry and sublet their amplified thoughts at a far remove from our mortal, even web-enabled, realm.
But an icy remove and a fat purse have proven to be no guarantee of honesty, accuracy or, even, common sense in a manipulated environment of lurid and often dehumanizing stunts, photo ops and shilled “opinions” that comprise today’s deregulated information and entertainment environment.
The post Easter Passion of traumatized shock jock Don Imus following his verbal Holy Week crucifixition of the innocent Rutgers Scarlet Knights is, obviously, the most egregious current example of corporate media’s cruel post Fairness end times.
Is it merely coincidence or bizarre bushiness that allows Mr. Imus’ highly publicized suspension to end as the May sweeps begin?
Is a “punishment” that intentionally delivers increased ratings a punishment?
And, could someone explain to me how the phrase “nappy-headed hos” crosses a racial and sexual line not crossed hundreds if not thousands of times previously by Mr. Imus, his corporate media guests and his anal-fixated, misogynistic producer?
Is an ad lib remark by a shock jock more offensive than the tactics used by the Republican Party to defeat Harold Ford in Tennessee’s hotly contested Senate race last year?
Has the golden calf of deregulated media, as exemplified by the casual racist sexism of an elite insider, again proven itself a hollow sculpture of gilded base metal?
Yup.

UPDATE
Shortly after 6:30 PM Eastern, this evening, NBC News ended the Imus radio simulcast on MSNBC.
According to the New York Times:

NBC said...it made its decision to drop Mr. Imus’s program after a review and “many conversations with our own employees”.

Funny how even the most liberal TV voice never seems to connect today's poisoned media environment with the technical blurring of what exactly constituted a "news program" and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the blurred recollection of the Equal Time Provisions of the Federal Communications Code by the Reagan administration in the mid 1980s.
Technically, I'll wager, Imus was logged as a "news program" under the same broad intrepretation that has allowed corporations to classify, on their federally mandated broadcast log reports and used to justify liscense-holding, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael and Howard Stern as "news programs" and, classified as such, thus allowed the widest range of broadcastable expression exempted from the Equal Time Provisions, still technically in effect.

Modified Image: Scatt.Bilegrip.com, ThinkProgress.com

2007-04-08T11:59:00.000-04:00

A trashy, foil-wrapped marshmallow news nugget in our Easter morning basket from the morning's Washington Post:

The bald, mustachioed street cop appealed to Bush...A high school dropout and son of a prostitute apparently killed by her pimp, Kerik became an undercover narcotics detective with ponytail and diamond earrings.

Please note that George Chauncey's ground-breaking Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay World 1890-1940 (a facinating insight into modern male behavior that I would recommend to women in particular) defines "rough trade" as "hustlers, aggressively masculine in their self-presentation".

Modified & Unmodified Images: Bodybuilder-Photos.com,Perrspectives.com, PoliticalFriendster.com, Reuters

2007-04-06T15:22:00.000-04:00

She's a Lady...

Robin Givhan, the Washington Post staff writer who occasionally subjects the powerful to a bracing fashion critique, offers common sense and logic as balm for the latest rightwing mouth-foamer frenzy, Nancy Pelosi’s scarf.
According to Ms. Givhan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives followed the letter of Moslem tradition with the accessorized color of our own cultural spirit:

One hesitates to say that she accessorized her ensembles with the scarves…. They were more meaningful than that. They allowed her to be respectful of the day's hosts while maintaining her own public identity. She looked like herself and she maintained control of the visual message.

Another American walker of the world stage didn’t fare as well:

There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host's traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent.

The above photo shows President Bush looking fat and uncomfortable at the 2005 APEC Summit in Korea.

Photos: AP, Eric Draper-White House

2007-04-05T15:33:00.000-04:00

As our current nears his fate, I feel it’s worth noting that all 45 previous Vice Presidents of the United States have been interesting creatures.
None, however, have proved to be as unusual as our gun-toting 46th, Richard Bruce Cheney, the purported 2nd most powerful man in America observed lurking in off-stage shrubbery bordering Wednesday’s Rose Garden photo op.
This morning, wider swathes of the blogosphere than my humble little corner have noted Cheney’s unusual aboveground lurking and some eagle-eyed commenters are speculating on the lifeless appearance of the left Cheney arm.
Arms aside, most Presidents, including the failed Ivy League Beta heading this unprecedented Bush Interregnum, have only one Vice President.
By dint of death, scandal and renominating conventions, seven American leaders have been served by two different Veeps and one, alone, by three separate heirs to what has become our American throne.
Only two Vice Presidents in history have held office with two differing Presidents in separate though successive terms.
One held Cabinet rank in two different governments within the continental United States and only one has presided over a separate shadow government not specified in the Constitution and officially grandfathered the lesbian birth of a grandson.
While the co-joined fate of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney are still media-cleansed stories in progress, Wednesday’s telling visual metaphor of a shrubbery-lurking presidential shadow coupled with nearly seven years of wide-ranging Chaney lore makes it perfectly clear that our current veepish occupant will definitively reside in an unparalleled and hopefully lonely historic niche.
Blog and press speculations on the Vice President’s top secret health based upon a few seconds sighting of a limp left arm seem fair, however, my prurient, pajama-clad and trash cable-ready brain wants to know if Mr. Cheney’s no doubt pricy leather loafers lingered near or upon the exact spots where presidential pets Barney and Mrs. Beasley have exercised their, (ahem!), official outdoor pet duties…

Photos: AFP, Reuters

2007-04-04T11:53:00.000-04:00

Speaker Pelosi and Petulant Bush
The Vice Petulant in the Bushes

Photos: AFP, AP

2007-03-30T17:11:00.000-04:00

Flunky@gwb43.com

Abramoff/Rove aide Susan Ralston and a mock-up of her off-record crackberry

From TPM Muckraker:

Much to the chagrin of the White House, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants to hear from Susan Ralston.
Jack Abramoff's former personal assistant, Ralston became Karl Rove's assistant in 2001, where she was his "implant" at the White House...The hearing will also be a good opportunity for Waxman to press for more details about White House employees' use of outside email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee. Ralston used such outside accounts when corresponding with Abramoff, even writing to him once, “I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.”

Here is Waxman's letter in .pdf.

Modified Image: Blackberry8800.com, TPMmuckraker.com

2007-03-28T13:08:00.000-04:00

Click the image for a larger image...

The CODE

The KOS

The MEMO

Photo: Google

2007-03-27T17:27:00.000-04:00

Peek-Abu!

From the Chicago Sun-Times' Natasha Korecki:

Alberto Gonzales dashed out of a [scheduled 15 minute] Chicago news conference this afternoon in just two and a half minutes, ducking questions about how his office gave U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald a subpar rating...He sat next to Fitzgerald, whom his office had rated as undistinguished.

Mucho embarassante!
But, fast moving little feet cannot save the day.
This fascinating editorial by josephcannon on TrustMe.com provides several interesting e-possibilities that explain a great deal about "the Bushies".
Interested citizens have noted, over time, certain curious on the record statements by highly placed members of Team Bush denying the use of email in their work.
At various times, George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales have all denied using the world's most popular and efficient communications system, a system (.gov) officially provided to the President and his staff in keeping with the provisions of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
Talking Points Memo, credited with keeping this story alive while the Main Stream Media ignored it, has a great rundown.
Mucho interasante!

Modified Image: AP, KyCraft.com

2007-03-26T12:54:00.000-04:00

Fresh drippings from the Prince of Darkness:

"I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment." Republicans in Congress do not trust Bush...The overriding feeling in the Republican cloakroom is that the Justice Department and the White House could not have been more inept...Bush is alone.

Equally curious, after two weeks where Mr. Bush's solo Camp David return photos further fueled tabloid rumors of presidential marriage difficulties, the First Lady, yesterday, went through the very noticeable motions of returning from the Maryland mountains with her husband.
Following an unusual staged two shot, the First Couple, more curiously still, were photographed walking separately from Marine 1.
Here's the First Lady...
And, here's the President.

Modified Image: Photo.net, Reuters

2007-03-22T19:06:00.000-04:00

According to the Washington Post:

"Political interference is happening at Justice across the department...When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general's office, politics is the primary consideration. . .The rule of law goes out the window."

-- Sharon Y. Eubanks, retired Director, Tobacco Litigation Team, DOJ

Modified Image: Awazo.com, Google, Hitchcock.TV

2007-03-20T20:19:00.000-04:00

Modified Image: AP, CollegePublisher.com, CyberTelevision.com

2007-03-19T12:11:00.000-04:00

“The Real Problem”

As with all present day malfeasance, “perps”, the once faceless criminal in mass, still have not grasped the inevitable inescapability of evidence gathered within the soon to be sensor-rich and paperless digital judicial system that we all, more or less, share.
Watergate’s “follow the money” admonition has evolved 30+ years later into the less fungible and far more traceable “follow the email” and soon near un-photo-shopped exactitude with “follow the security and highway cameras” and personally embedded transmitting chips.
"Perps", not complete latecomers to modernity, have, amongst the more middle class and above, incorporated digitally pointless shredding and deleting into their traditional madcap escape attempts, according to occasional published stories in national and local press.
To this point, various online wags, over the last few months, have been chortling over the comings and goings of escrowed document shredding company trucks from the Vice President’s residence at the US Navel Observatory in Washington, DC.
Sans chortles and without online discussion, one is left to imagine the hundreds of “delete all” key strikes, hard-drive overwrites and large federal magnet deliveries also occurring within the exact timeframe of this more "sober and thoughtful" Vice Presidential version of the old West’s “getting’ outa Dodge”.
The Eastern shore’s stately, bayside and multi-million dollar Cheney manse, Ballintober, could indeed have seen its undoubtedly mall smart and uncountable throw pillows stuffed with a downy soft 1mm x 5mm “ultra secure” cut of “sensitive” documents in lieu of feathers or foam.
But, no matter the imaginary e-shenanigans amidst the whirlpool of overwhelming Bush corruption, today we are presented with the first acrid whiffs of actual crime leaking from the ultra dense nexus of what appears to be an actual and ongoing coup d’etat against our traditional electoral system of local, state, federal and judicial forms of government and traditional pre-corporate free market-based economy.
Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor of the superb McClatchy Newspapers, last evening, reported on specific evidence that’s sure to prompt interesting questions and under oath answers in the near future:

[Former San Diego US Attorney Carol] Lam notified the Justice Department on May 10, 2006, that she planned to serve search warrants on Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, who'd resigned two days earlier as the No. 3 official at the CIA.
On May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales' chief of staff, sent an e-mail to deputy White House counsel William Kelley, asking Kelley to call to discuss "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam"… The e-mail did not spell out what the "real problem" was… On the same day last year as the Sampson e-mail, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Cunningham probe was being expanded to look at the actions of another California Republican, then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis.

But, the media, as we have so bitterly learned, merely reports dots and only connects them when it hides or suits their corporate complicity or purpose or a profit-critical sweeps month.
Kyle Sampson, who in my mind will never live down The Daily Show’s “Kyle Sampson? His gay porn name was…Kyle Sampson”, may find himself so mercilessly grilled he might be shocked into an unbushian candor and the media into another connected dot.

Modified Image: Go.com

2007-03-14T15:53:00.000-04:00

Connoisseurs of American art pottery are often consumed with hunts for grand rarities of form, glaze and artistic execution.
New enthusiasts often hunt for any example at an affordable price.
Between these extremes, a lucky greenhorn or a jaundiced and equally lucky collector can sometimes, even in our postmillennial age, quite literally stumble across unknown rarities at shockingly affordable prices.
With a top drawer name like Cincinnati, Ohio’s Rookwood Pottery, one could imagine most “finds” previously discovered, but, thanks to the global reach of the internets, the still not completely plumbed depths of Midwestern family collections and, oddly, the accumulated grime of a century, unknown treasures are still almost literally falling into the eager hands of the sharp-eyed.

Starting with the most sublime, this grungy and new to the marketplace 1910 E. T. Hurley 8½ ” tall cylindrical floral vellum estimated between $800 to $1,200 quite reasonably sold for $990 in a November 2006 auction on the banks of the Ohio River.
With many people confusing under glaze and over glaze painting along with egg shell porcelain’s delicacy and pottery’s relative strength, many examples of Rookwood Pottery, known and unknown, are incorrectly imagined too delicate for cleaning and consequently come to the marketplace absolutely filthy.
With the investment of a little elbow grease, some Dawn dish soap, hot water and a soft plastic scrubbie, decades of yellowed cigarette smoke residue and generic grunge dissolved to reveal a far more valuable ceramic than, sadly for the seller, what the auctioneer sold.

Sometimes, as with this lidded, Wine Madder-glazed Dragon Box from 1955, even sharpies at an antique mall allow prime pieces to fly for a song.
The relatively delicate soft paste porcelain Dragon Box, bottom marked "RP", "LV" and "Rookwood Cinti.O.", flew for $150.
Certainly an uncommon lidded box shape, this antlered, three-toed and kanji-bearing (I’d appreciate translations of these kanji if any of you reading this posting know them…I think one may be “happiness”...and if a flaming pearl is in the design) Japanese dragon, is not pictured in any of the Cincinnati Art Galleries’ catalogs from 1980 to the present.
I was able to locate one other 1955 Ming Yellow-glazed example of this Dragon Box (Shape 7079) on page 170 of Anita Ellis’ seminal Rookwood Pottery The Glaze Lines and until this posting there were no images of this lovely 3 3/8” X 1 3/8” box on the web.

This unusual bit of infrequently seen late period (1948) Rookwood production, in the form of a huge coffee cup ( 4½ " cup diameter and, though unmarked, possibly a modified version of J. D. Wareham's Shape #2816) bearing the relief design of three Irish Setters, was found by your humble blogger in an Ebay auction for $70.
The Celadon-glazed vessel (it holds slightly more than 2 cups of liquid) is, also, not pictured in 27 years of CAG catalogues but is, like the Dragon Box, pictured (page 165) in Ellis’ Glaze Lines along with a companion ( 7½ " diameter) saucer not available in the Ebay sale.

Finally, this roughly 3½ ” square Wine Madder-glazed oddity (marked only with the Roman numerals for 1948 and the Rookwood "RP") discovered in an Indiana yard sale for $2.
Pictured nowhere but here, this inexplicable dogwood blossom shape bearing the relief design of a toy, string-pulled gyroscope is listed as Shape #6853 in Peck’s 2nd Book of Rookwood Pottery but without the gyroscope design.
It is, also, not listed among the group of Rookwood’s specially requested and shape number-less commercial orders presented in Peck’s second book.

Unbelievably, persistent and knowledgeable collectors can still, as this post shows, make valuable discoveries, large and small, in a collecting category as heavily explored and sought-after as Rookwood Pottery.
Happy hunting, pot heads!

Photos: sean

2007-03-13T12:51:00.000-04:00

Tonight on Cable Channel 487
The rope looms for our cranky, law-breaking closet cases in the final installments of what seems like TV's longest running miniseries.

Modified Image: AP, Google, NomadLife.com, Reuters

2007-03-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

Maya Way

The famous Mayan Calender stone reacts to a bad spirit

Kinich Ahau, the Mayan sun god, is displeased but Yum Cimil, Mayan God of death, has mixed feelings and according to the Associated Press:

That a person like (Bush)… is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday…On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.
Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace.

President number 44, Christian, Mormon or Mayan should take note.

Image: AFP, Roberto Flandes

2007-03-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

As Washington Insiders frantically baptize their clubby reputations in their own odd interpretations of the Libby verdict, we find additional amusement in our beloved MSM’s professed bafflement with the Vice President’s panic over the infamous Wilson Op Ed.
The equally infamous Chris Matthews yesterday on an MSNBC blog asked this:

What was all the “hullabaloo” when Joe Wilson wrote...that it was “the vice president’s office” that had raised the question with the CIA of a possible Saddam Hussein effort to buy uranium from Niger? Why did Cheney and Libby want everybody to think it wasn’t the vice president?”

Another usual suspect, Howard Fineman, yesterday afternoon, said this:

Why were Cheney and Libby so frantic to discredit the couple? Was there something more than mere political hardball being played in this matter? What land mine had Wilson stepped on? And, as my colleague Chris Matthews keeps asking, what happened to the report Joe Wilson filed? If Cheney is the one who asked for it in the first place, what did he do with it when he got it?

Sadly predictable, the Google-challenged corporate media’s informational Magoo act regarding Cheney’s Niger panic is typical when properly gathered facts have the potential to reveal larger and ever more criminal motivations and activities, such as we’ve recently observed regarding a true tally of Walter Reed and VA misfortunes.
To the web-savvy, as analog media likes to say, the black budget reasons for Cheney’s “frantic” behavior have, over time, become more commonly accepted on the internets than non-open source media’s current puzzlement indicates.
For example, a July 23, 2005 report in the Saturday edition of the London Guardian reports that in the UK:

A parallel investigation is under way into who forged the Niger documents…a source familiar with the inquiry said investigators were examining whether former US intelligence agents may have been involved.

According to the British paper The Independent some major Bush-orbiting personages have maintained a lengthy interest:

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken…As George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists [after 911], a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium…In December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP [Doug Feith’s infamous Office of Special Plans], one of whom was Larry Franklin…it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?

One rational explanation for Cheney’s panic could be American involvement with or even instigative planning for a black bag job inside the Niger Embassy in Rome, Italy.
Another, more panic inducing possibility could be the involvement of another foreign national in the planning or execution of this ultra secret operation…say, an Iranian.
Remember, material forged onto the stationary taken from the Niger Embassy became the “intelligence” supposedly “gathered” by all those different and respected foreign intelligence services.
The Niger documents are also, though not widely discussed as such, the “intelligence screw-up” that so severely “damaged” the CIA and helped create the Patriot Act “adjustments” to certain domestic freedoms, the giant bureaucracy of Homeland Security and freewheeling wiretappery.
Needless to say, countless Federal laws have, likely, been violated and thus would make perfect rational reasons for Cheney to panic, Scooter to lie and Bush to pardon.

Modified Image: AP, MovieCityNews.com, Panorama

2007-03-06T14:50:00.000-05:00

In light of today's verdict in the trial of former Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, allow me the pleasure of republishing a mild amusement first posted in this space on July 8, 2003:

Yellowcake, yellowcake
Cheney’s plan.
Fakes the bake like fast, man.
Poll it
And spin it
And fund raise it too
An state it in the Union
As a UK clue.

Modified Image: AP, Reuters

2007-03-02T23:30:00.000-05:00

Hoarse Vessel

“I was going to have a few comments on...John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I -- so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

--Ann Coulter, Speaking Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

Modified Image: FOX, Wikipedia

2007-03-01T11:54:00.000-05:00

From The Semi-Invisible News File:

Modified Image of Eglin Regional Hospital, Taylor and a male model

A highly interesting sort of sexual prequel (in that a case has been tried and a man convicted) to the current screaming headlines about shoddy care of wounded military and veterans has taken place near Eglin Air Force Base in warm, steamy Florida.
The convicted man, Devery L. Taylor, is a 38-year-old Air Force captain and former chief of patient administration at Eglin Regional Hospital.
According to Forbes.com:

Military prosecutors described Taylor as a serial rapist who met men in bars, spiked their drinks with the "date-rape drug" gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, and kidnapped them.

Captain Taylor, according to the International Herald Tribune, was convicted Tuesday and sentenced yesterday "to 50 years in prison for two counts of attempted sodomy, four counts of forcible sodomy, two counts of kidnapping and one count of unlawful entry":

Taylor's court-martial jury found him guilty of all charges against him for drugging and kidnapping servicemen and others he met in bars...Each of the six men testified during the nine-day court-martial and said they drank with Taylor at bars, later felt drugged and were assaulted by him. Two of the men are Air Force officers… Sheriff's deputies in August charged another man with helping Taylor rape one of the six victims on March 23.

It sounds as though Capt. Taylor had a rather busy social schedule...one that may have detracted from official duties as chief of patient administration with the 96th Medical Group which, according to an on line brochure at United-Publishers.com:

Provides comprehensive medical care to approximately 83,000 eligible beneficiaries (active-duty military members, retirees, and their families)… The 96th Medical Group provides a wide variety of outpatient services and presently supports one of the larger outpatient workloads in the Air Force.

Facts in the reporting of this case, per my morning Googling, are scattered hither and yon across a swath of media…Typical when the accumulated facts could form an even nastier picture.

Modified Image: Google, InternationalMale.com, Queerty.com, United-Publishers.com

2007-02-27T12:19:00.000-05:00

Unlike certain unnamed civilian public officials, I’ve personally engaged in a bit of tongue-tying restraint when it comes to blogging about things military over the entirety of this blog; open access publishing born in my personal frustration with US leadership, military and media at the start of this insane, politically-motivated Bush pre-emption.
But, within that restraint, I have hinted about the possibility of domestic political and war theater security breaches.
Clearly this morning’s “direct attack”, a Taleban winkle described as “rare” and “huge” by eye witnesses, on the main and “most heavily guarded” US Afghan base during an unannounced Vice Presidential visit suggests the odd Allied “secure” phone could actually be an alQaeda party line.
According to the BBC:

The Taleban said they carried out the attack and that the attacker was trying to get to Mr. Cheney, who was on an unannounced visit to the region.

If recent history is to be our guide, Team Bush’s next inexplicable push-me-pull-you response to the Cheney assassination attempt will be either another crack down on the already eroded domestic “freedoms” of ordinary American citizens or enhanced funding to alQaeda-related Iraqi insurgents.

Modified Image: AFP, Army.mil

2007-02-24T13:52:00.000-05:00

Former Shakers

Aussie salt with US pepper still makes for bland cottage cheese down under.

According to the AP in Sydney:

Cheney seemed comfortable knowing that not all Australians like him, telling The Australian that not all the gestures directed as he cruises around in his motorcade are friendly waves.
"Driving through Sydney is a lot like driving through New York City," Cheney said.

Modified Image: AP, BenettonTalk.com

2007-02-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

"While we have some issues here, this is not a horrific, catastrophic failure."
--Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, Army Surgeon General and Commander, U.S.A. Medical Command

Image: ToddlerTime.com, USMedicine.com

2007-02-21T18:21:00.000-05:00

Flat Darth

LA Times via Froomkin:

Months of bad news for the conservative wing of the Republican Party, have prompted speculation that the once-formidable vice president -- the most powerful in American history -- has become a spent force.

Modified Image: AFP, Google

2007-02-19T17:55:00.000-05:00

...Up until just a few minutes ago, had never told a white lie either.

Photo: Reuters

2007-02-17T12:25:00.000-05:00

From wholesome, if slanted, ABC News regarding Senate Iraq vote dodger and itinerant Pentecoslican preacher, simple John McStain:

The Arizona lawmaker is scheduled to speak Sunday night to about 1,500 middle and high school students about abstaining from premarital sex…“McCain has a long legislative record of supporting abstinence-based initiatives in his record in the U.S. Senate," said Trey Walker, McCain's South Carolina campaign director… The event is to follow McCain's appearance at a hot dog and ice cream social.

Golly…The Straight Talk Express seems to be turning into a 1912 Packard Gospel Car.
And who would have ever doubted that an ice cream social could lead to unhealthy premarital intercourse and being found dead in a hotel room from an overdose of prescription barbiturates?

Modified Image: BethelumChurch.org, MoonBattery.com, And some browser trap from a "group" connected to dishes

2007-02-14T14:17:00.000-05:00

Moody POTUS Returns To Limelight

Among other things, George Bush said this at his morning presidential press conference:

The problem with relying only on corn is that -- by the way, when the demand for corn stays high, the price tends to go up.

For 10 points and a shoddily manufactured pleantsean tote bag, accurately complete the following context for the presidential quote:

The President was discussing...

A - the quality of national security intelligence.

B - alternative energy.

Photos: Reuters

2007-02-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

Modified Image: CNN, SouthsideSox.com

2007-02-09T12:52:00.000-05:00

For Lost Souls & Reputations
2 from Langston Hughes

Funeral

Carried lonely up the aisle
In a box without a smile,
Resting near the altar where
Folks pass by and stare—

If I was alive
I’d say,
I don’t give a damn
Being this-a way!

But I would give a damn.

Bouquet

Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow.

Image: AP, MSNBC

2007-02-06T18:06:00.000-05:00

...Was said literally and figuratively today by two right wing bad boys.
The figurative way with, surprisingly, Rev. Ted Haggard and the literal way with Senator Arlen Specter.

Photos: StarBulletin.com, TPMmuckraker.com

2007-02-02T14:47:00.000-05:00

While it was certainly tempting to jump on the laugh-packed new media bandwagon careening recklessly downhill and away from the scene of near total Aqua Teen Hunger Force devastation, I chose, as I so often do with cartoons, to sit back and allow the animator to work his magic.
I just happened to catch one of CNN’s early breathless reports of “devices”.
CNN, I guess quoting police sources but who knows, fairly quickly associated “these devices” with the improvised weaponry of the Iraq Theater.
The devices, “as far as can be determined, are consistent” with IEDs.
CNN reported the consistencies as being “a circuit board and wiring connected to a battery”.
And then, an odder than usual look to Blitzer’s gimlet eye as all of Time-Warner seemed to coalesce into “a statement released by Turner Broadcasting that the devices are part of a marketing campaign and are ‘magnetic lights that pose no danger.’”
Why you could almost hear the vacuum seal Tupperware burp of memory hole as somebody within the Luce-founded food chain realized a synergized liability.
The new American shame of hauling dreadlocked, giggling and stupidly sarcastic college boys, called guerilla marketers, before the perverted and rapine bar of (and, I’d really like to have a sound-effect here of a whip crack) patriot justice came yesterday and is sure to catch on among the rebellious and cutting edge.
The broad umbrella of micro-manufactured crime, after all, is the new Draft for older adolescents who escape the temptations of industrial solvent drug addiction and need not exclude Boston’s cartoon advertising terrorists and a few lowly Time-Warner suits.
I’ve been waiting to see if someone at Cartoon Network or Turner had the presence of mind to apply for and get city permits for outdoor advertising in any or all of the ten cities in the campaign.
Boston city permits would crack this nut in short order except that I sense we are still in the “’wabbit season, duck season” opening portion of this particular cartoon.
As the head Mooninite would say:

Observe, Err, the coolest word in the dictionary, “butthole”.

I have no doubt we are sure to see a few no matter if briefs are filed or even worn.
But, as God is my witness, I know, having watched a few Aqua Teen Hunger Force episodes, that after all the wrangling it will be poor Carl’s suburban Jersey house vanishing into a smoking crater.

Images: AP, Bostonist.com, Quotidiano.it, Repubblica.it

2007-01-31T13:22:00.000-05:00

DUEL 2:
"Inner Boy” Tractor Maniac

Looks like a decision's been made by the Decider...

An interesting fact-blurring practice by the corporate media is usually argued as a simple difference of perception between people.
That difference of perception is, of course, one of degree.
But, for the sweating meat puppets of cable TV nooz and their sweatier print/radio counterparts, “degree” is a word banished to weather coverage.
A horrifying, or not, example can be found in the contrast between a Newsweek blogger’s perception of President Bush’s tractor ride, yesterday, in Peoria, ILL and that of the Los Angeles Times.
The blogger saw this:

"I would suggest moving back," Bush said as he climbed into the cab of a massive D-10 tractor. "I'm about to crank this sucker up." As the engine roared to life, White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for safety. “Get out of the way!" a news photographer yelled. "I think he might run us over!" said another. White House aides tried to herd the reporters the right way without getting run over themselves. Even the Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the tractor's window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the spot where most of the press corps had been positioned. The episode lasted about a minute, and Bush was still laughing when he pulled to a stop. He gave reporters a thumbs-up. "If you've never driven a D-10, it's the coolest experience," Bush said.

The LA Times reports:

He climbed aboard, telling reporters, "I would suggest moving back. I'm about to crank this sucker up."
With that, the machine came to life, moving forward on its yellow metal treads, until the president brought it to a halt about 20 feet down the line and started it on a backward turn. When Bush climbed down from the cab, the inner boy was shining through, and a broad, sheepish grin crossed his face.
"Oh, yeah," he said.
"If you've never driven a D10," he told the workers and managers a few minutes later, "it's a cool experience."

Yes, a simple difference of perception which itself can be subjected to further conveniently perceptive differences.
I guess, even, “some people” might consider these differences more philosophical than the concrete proofs demanded by reality-based whiners:

Is this a tractor, which I see before me,
the starter toward my hand?
Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
a tractor of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppress'd brain?
--MacBush

Modified and Unmodified Images: AFP, Reuters

2007-01-30T14:56:00.000-05:00

Fauxpasowitz!

No matter AskMen.com's posted Daily Fashion Checklist which says:

Make sure you're wearing suitable socks and underwear. You don't want to be caught off guard with holes in your socks or wearing your less-than-adequate underwear.

Former Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense and current World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz was photographed, Sunday in Edirne, Turkey, leaving the Selimiye mosque with holes in the toe of both his socks.
Can you imagine the looks, among dignitaries gathered in the Ottoman-era mosque, directed toward the American with the naked toes?
If Dick Cheney's consentration camp parka and Wolfowitz's sock holes weren't shame enough may I, as first noticed by a sharp-eyed online commenter from the great northwest, point out the stains on the left pant leg of dirty Wolfie's dirty suit?
Formerly famous for licking his comb in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 while grooming the remains of his hair, Mr. Wolfowitz now insures his grubby world stage infamy with a trail of sweaty toe prints.
Uck!
But, of course, it gets worse as Circumlocutor posted yesterday:

After the visit (and with his shoes, thankfully, on his feet), he attempted to buy two necklaces for his daughters in the shopping area next to the mosque. Realizing he did not have sufficient money ($275 YTL - about $196) to pay for the necklaces, he had to borrow it from his security detail.

America standing tall, not, with the open-toed chiseler.

Photos: AP

2007-01-26T14:15:00.000-05:00

9/11 Press for Truth

Yesterday, we here on the trusty Wurlitzer, posted about the routine manner in which the corporate press kinda mentions and kinda doesn't mention important elements in a given "news" story.
Some important people, in this film made available by Google Video, once popularized the practice as "connecting the dots".
I urge you to connect a few dots yourself and all for the cost of an hour and a half.
Watch this film, link to it and make at least one other person watch it.
A brilliant and compelling telling of the most important post September 11 story never told.
The use of a time line and material published around the world also illuminates the alQaeda escape from Tora Bora and the complicity of a mysterious global super power.

Video: 911PressForTruth.com, John Seagriff

2007-01-25T13:14:00.000-05:00

"12 Soldiers"

As a boy I was taught about sins of commission and omission.
According to vast swaths of the traditional media, the Blackhawk “crash” in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad last Saturday killed “12 soldiers”.
But the people taken out by this “crash”, according to the list published by Stars and Stripes were hardly ordinary soldiers.
Excluding the chopper pilot and two men from the Virgin Island national Guard of whom little is known at present, the casualties included a young Signal Corps Corporal, two Command Sergeants Major working out of Joint Forces Headquarters, a Major with a computer background and two noncoms assigned to the 185th Air Assault Regiment, one First Sergeant and two Colonels, one who served as chief of the aviation and safety division at the National Guard Bureau and a second who was the command surgeon for Multi-National Force-Iraq.
If this wasn’t a “crash” someone has compromised our intelligence at a very high level.
This is another significant reason against concentrating and increasing US troop strength within Baghdad.

Modified Image: AP

2007-01-24T13:55:00.000-05:00

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us - sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.
--Senator Jim Webb, D-VA, Democratic Response to the 6th Bush SOTU

Did Jim Webb, intentionally or not, declare his existential candidacy for president last evening?
I say this because the conclusion to Mr. Webb’s scene stealing speech made reference to President Theodore Roosevelt’s standoff with the robber barons in the years following 1900.
Webb said:

The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.
Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow Republicans that they must set themselves "as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other." And he did something about it.

Roosevelt came to the Presidency via an indirect path when William McKinley’s weak-hearted Veep, Garrett A. Hobart, died unexpectedly on November 21, 1899.
The former Assistant Secretary for the Navy, war hero and anti-corruption Governor of New York was then forced upon the seemingly imperial McKinley by Republican Party bosses and against the wishes of McKinley’s political and fund-raising Svengali Mark Hanna.
Hanna, the strategist, influence peddler and product of the political and business corruption growing out of the wealth produced by the industrial revolution, had guided McKinley’s first election in 1896 and wanted to insure a Republican majority for decades into the new 20th century.
Sound familiar?
Hanna’s plans were dashed when McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901 and died on September 14, 1901.
While the McKinley/Hanna and Bush/Rove parallels are, obviously, not a perfect fit those that come close still tantalize a flabby brain's brain and myself.
Now after all the dizzying time contortions and recasting I’m wondering if Senator Jim Webb of Virginia will ascend to the moderate but firm center and the role of President Roosevelt?
Stranger things have happened.

Images: Reuters, Wikipedia

2007-01-23T14:55:00.000-05:00

According to the New York Times' review of Scooter's operatic debut this morning at 333 Constitution Avenue, NW in Washington, DC:

“Scooter Libby was to be sacrificed,” Mr. Wells told the jury...to keep Mr. Rove out of trouble because, Mr. Wells said, he was the “lifeblood” of the president’s political operation and “was most responsible for seeing the Republican Party stayed in office. He had to be protected.”

No wonder he's called "Scooter".

Modified Image: AFP, SenecaFoods.com

2007-01-21T14:56:00.000-05:00

The Colbert Effect

In last year’s experiment, the direct voltage of Colbertian public humiliation was applied to the leg muscles of the seeming dead frog of critical Washington journalism.
Those previously motionless muscles, as everyone knows, then twitched causing a yearlong bitchy whine from the frog involving hypersensitive hurt media feelings and the cliché cable roundtable IED of character assassination...Oh, and the hiring of a safe, passé comic for this year’s Colbert-free Oscars for Ugly People, the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner.
According to a controversy roundup in this morning’s Washington Post, pasta-faced WHCA President and C-SPAN host Steve Scully said, among other things:

Do you want to invite someone to a party and make them into a political piñata? That's not the purpose of the dinner. It's for [journalists] and their sources and contacts to have an enjoyable evening.

Got that people?
We’re here to have an absolutely neutral evening.
Heaven forefend that a performer should suffer headlines, Mr. Scully!
The vicious remarks gassy punditry directed at the Comedy Channel’s ultra witty Stephen Colbert throughout 2006 could be one of the reasons the WHCA, according to the Post report, had a spot of trouble booking a comic this year.
The real news, I thought, in the Paul Farhi article, was word that Scully had “sought David Letterman, Jay Leno, Billy Crystal and Martin Short as performers for this year's dinner, but none was interested.”
Rich Little, aside from doing impressions of dead people...his Alben Barkley is spot on...is in the awkward performing position of being at least 5th choice.
Steve Scully, also, gets a checkmark in the “naughty” column for intentionally confusing the alleged WHCA tradition with the 125 year-old motto of The Gridiron Club.
While the Gridiron performance owes its heritage to the seemingly innocuous 1885 popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s sometimes pungent musical criticisms of the British Empire, Gridiron performances have an American pungency all their own no matter the rule that they be sung to the music of a known tune.
For example...
Unlike the WHCA, Gridiron performers, often including high ranked officials and their spouses as well as media, usually direct their sharpest barbs at themselves.
Nancy Reagan’s 1982 performance of Second Hand Rose springs readily to mind...
The rule in the boozy, late night Washington of old was to be, in no particular order, funny, witty and self-deprecating...Everything that isn’t a certain person and their normally tone deaf administration.

Modified Image: ExtremeMortman.com, PopZhao.com

2007-01-18T14:54:00.000-05:00

Let's get an update on the situation...

Modified Image: AFP, MyPetJawa.mu.nu

2007-01-14T08:30:00.000-05:00

Scream 43
A Psychopathic Leader Stalks A Group of Teens

Modified Image: Oswaldism.de, Reuters, SaunaLahti.fi

2007-01-11T10:38:00.000-05:00

Custer's Last Speech

Last evening the President nontraditionally concluded his 20 minutes of telecast Iraq escalation jibber without asking for God’s blessing upon the United States.
Mr. Bush, no fan of democratic traditionalism, ended his teleprompter read by saying this:

We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night.

Huh?
“Author of Liberty”?
Does our Misleader mean his regular gab partner, God?
According to the most seminal document in American history, The Declaration of Independence, Mr. Bush is, again, dangerously skirting the bounds of the commonly accepted.
The Declaration’s first sentence states that “one people” are by “the Laws” of Nature and God “entitled” to “separate and equal” consideration among the nation’s of the Earth.
The second sentence states the obvious nature of man’s free born equality within the blessings of God’s creation but goes on to say that these blessings are secured by man’s creation of government; a government that derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed”.
Could it be possible that our President’s elementary school reading comprehension has led him astray?
The “Author of Liberty” isn’t God but, rather, a free people joined to extract that freedom from its inherent existence within the very fabric of God’s free creation.
Thomas Jefferson was a Humanist and not a Fundamentalist.
As with Lewis and Clark, the Jeffersonian man freely confronted the vast snarling wall of created life and from it caused a made space wherein he attempts to study, emulate and refine the raw unbounded glory of nature.
Free, thinking man is, obviously and according to the unanimous agreement of the original 13 colonies, the most direct author of human liberty.
The President is either mistaken or nefariously attempting to blur the pre-eminence of “the people” and their traditional rights and institutions.
Mr. Bush is the Prodigal President.
He uses the concept of God to mask his sin and his fear of this portion of the Declaration’s fourth sentence:

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their [the people’s] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.

The Democrats might, indeed, fear another looming constitutional crisis.
Mr. Bush, however, seems to hope for one.
May God bless the authors of liberty…

Modified Image: CNN, Michelangelo

2007-01-10T08:38:00.000-05:00

A C-SPAN caller from Mississippi, this morning around 7:57 AM EST, presented his historic memory for national rumination before Mr. Bush's latest political attempt to save his doomed, lie-strewn presidency :

I do not believe that the President has a real good grasp of reality.
I don’t believe that he, uh, values the lives of enlisted men.
I served with him in the early 1970s.
I was in the Louisiana National Guard when he flew in from Texas.
He got drunk on a Fri--on a Saturday night.
He couldn’t fly out on Sunday morning.
And, from his treatment of me and other young people waiting for him to sober up on the Flight Line from 7 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon…It taught me that that man just didn’t respect enlisted people…That’s true.

Modified Image: AP

2007-01-09T20:37:00.000-05:00

Who says robots make awful news editors?

Image: YahooNews.com

2007-01-08T12:08:00.000-05:00

Noise, the silent and visual kind, was in analog days of yore a byproduct of an essentially mechanical process.
The current 9th edition (I gasped as the 3rd “waxed tablet” Edition was my text) of Zettl’s Television Production Handbook crisply defines “noise” as:

Unwanted interference in video…white or colored vibrating spots or color-distorting artifacts.

The West’s postmillennial technical transmogrification from greasy gears to digital ether blessed feculent noise and elevated the lowly mechanical hazard and artifact dimensionally upward and outward.
Noise today, wildly hazardous on entirely different levels and still a miniscule subset of the recording and playback process, is the very environment in which we live.
It sprouts from even innocent mouths and appears on soup cans…One need not purchase an expensive device to bask in its eternal dopplering falsity…It is ubiquitous and it is how we are mislead and blinded in the isolation of our vast producing and consuming herd.
Noise has become goad for the jaundiced intellectual apostate and thanks to increasingly ubiquitous digital media practically genre.
The evolving 21st century freethinking human, it appears, has a culturally thematic obligation to become the most intellectually honest and unpredictable “vibrating spot or color-distorting artifact” he or she can possibly be.
The classically unruly aggregate human…noisy, unmarketable and gloriously unpredictable…each and every one with the finest clipped toe nails and minty fresh breath our advanced civilization can muster.
To paraphrase the ancient Virgin of Guadalupe, this diversity buried within the free choice of our very souls is the proof, the sign and the assurance of free humanity’s eternal triumph over the equally eternal pestilence of petty lords and diversionary tales.

Image: Flickr.com

2007-01-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

According to LegalTimes.com:

A July 26, 1986, memo sent by then-FBI Director William Webster...advised agents that...Rehnquist had been taking Placidyl since before 1972...The FBI report ultimately concluded...that Rehnquist was already taking Placidyl in 1970, when he was given a physical at a government facility...For six or seven months before Rehnquist’s hospitalization in 1981...Rehnquist was re-filling three-month prescriptions for Placidyl every month — suggesting he was taking close to 1,500 milligrams daily instead of 500.

According to a 1971 release by Placidyl's manufacturer Abbot Laboratories via a terrific article on Slate.com:

PLACIDYL, LIKE OTHER SEDATIVE-HYPNOTIC DRUGS, HAS THE
POTENTIAL…FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL DEPENDENCE. INSTANCES OF SEVERE WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS, INCLUDING CONVULSIONS AND [DELIRIUM]...HAVE BEEN REPORTED IN PATIENTS TAKING REGULAR DOSES AS LOW AS 1000 MG. PER DAY OVER A PERIOD OF TIME WHEN THE DRUG WAS SUDDENLY DISCONTINUED. [Capitals in original.]

Curious.
While I'm guessing Placidyl Delirium (sounding like one of The 3 Tenors) will become the historical rationale for the silly gold stripes added to the Chief Justice's robes, the information resulting from LegalTimes.com's FOIA request more seriously suggests Rehnquist was ripe for the odd blackmailer or two...When he was awake and lucid, of course!

Modified Image: BioPsychiatry.com, CNN

2006-12-31T23:47:00.000-05:00

Image: Calvin.edu

2006-12-29T10:27:00.000-05:00

New, improved Surge laundry soap could, temporarily, whiten your dingy fiasco and brighten, momentarily, your faded PR glory while having no significant impact on the ground-in stains from the daily Iraq butcher's bill.
Consider Mother Goose:

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,
If turnips were swords I'd have one by my side.

Or, President Bush's slow striptease as reported by the Los Angeles Times:

Bush said today that he was making good progress toward redrawing his strategy...

So it's "good progress toward" a plan that hasn't jelled just yet.
A "plan" that could/might be another "success that hasn't occurred yet".

Image: sean

2006-12-22T15:12:00.000-05:00

Fin de siècle on 37th Street

Here, pinned like a wriggling specimen to this morning’s Austin Chronicle, lies an excellent if uncomfortable bit of reporting about the cynically artificial darkness shadowing our public and private American celebrations this Christmas.
Oh sure, there are still a few semi-traditional stalwarts (as I like to think of my bread and cookie-baking self) and your occasional mold-breaker type like 37th Street’s hysterical Cheney/Poe crèche creator, but we tend to be unappreciated in our own lifetimes…
Our communities, our extended families have vanished into the mists of my 1950-generation’s childhood.
We have become too busy, self-centered or perhaps too enamored by unattainable holiday marketing excesses to notice the absence of actual people at festive traditional gatherings.
Gone but hopefully not forgotten and, please, renewable.
I was born into a large extended family with traditions of absolutely enormous holiday celebrations…ancient decorations, hand-me-down recipes and the palpable sense of community renewed.
Plans were laid as summer ended with harvests, as game was hunted and as fruits and vegetables were preserved.
There was, once, a time and a season.
But we, as the Austin Chronicle so poignantly stated, “have all gradually moved away.”
The challenge and ultimate success of our vast and maturing technology will be its adaptation to humanity's more traditional demands rather than our recent historical adaptation to the heartless brutality of the machine's infantile needs.

Photo: Austin Chronicle

2006-12-20T19:04:00.000-05:00

FYI

I just happened to notice that our "fresh start" new SecDef is toodling about Iraq on the 437th Airlift Wing's Spirit of Strom Thurmond.
Let's hope Iraqis don't Google the phrase...
The US Air Force named its 100th C-17 cargo plane after the now deceased South Carolina Republican Senator and notorious racist before his death in ceremonies at Andrews Airforce Base outside Washington on December 12, 2002.

Image: AP

2006-12-13T11:59:00.000-05:00

As woeful Executive branch cowardice procrastinates and soldiers continue to die in the Iraqi abattoir, Christmas nears and duties other than blogging demand my limited attention.
Of course, there were several items that I wanted to write about.
H.W. Bush’s public and symbol-laden blubbering, a record auction price ($11,500) for a kitschy piece of McCoy Pottery and a fascinating new DVD set of Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person interviews from the 1950’s all fell by the wayside as holiday duties consumed nearly every waking moment.
On the bright side, I was able to come up with a relatively simple sugar cookie recipe amid the smoking wreckage of a failed Pine Nut cookie experiment and (kidding) the recommendations of a hastily assembled, butt-covering Cookie Study Group of former senior cookie advisors.
I hope you will attempt this easy slice and bake sugar cookie.
Its manufacture requires only a mixer, a very sharp knife, a baking sheet and a wary eye on the oven timer.

Refrigerator Sugar Cookie

1 ¾ Cup All-purpose Flour, sifted
2 Tbsp Baking Powder
1/8 Tsp Salt
1/2 Tsp Cinnamon
1/8 Tsp Allspice
1 stick Butter, softened
1 Tsp Vanilla Extract
1 Cup Granulated Sugar, with one Tbsp removed
1 Tbsp Dark Brown Sugar, firmly packed into the measure
1 Egg, extra large

Sift Flour, Baking Powder, Salt, Cinnamon and Allspice and set aside.
Beat butter, with an electric mixer to further soften.
Add Vanilla and Sugars and beat for a minute.
Add Egg and beat until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl.
On lowest mixer speed, add the sifted dry mixture gradually to the Butter and Egg mixture…you may need a spatula to incorporate the last remaining bits of flour.
Turn dough out onto a sheet of plastic wrap or waxed paper and form into a long cylinder of dough.
Carefully wrap the dough cylinder in plastic wrap or wax paper and refrigerate or freeze until dough is fairly solid.
For baking, move an oven rack to the top slot and pre-heat the oven to 400.
Remove dough from the fridge, unwrap and, with a very sharp large knife, cut 1/8” slices of cookie (really try for 1/4 to 1/8" slices as thicker cookies may be difficult to bite through...1/4 to 1/8" will be crispy) from the dough log.
Place the slices 1/2 to 1” apart on an ungreased cookie sheet or one covered with parchment paper.
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until cookies begin to brown on the edges…Cookie sheet might need to be turned around once to ensure even baking.
Once baked, cool the cookies on the sheet for 3 to 5 minutes before placing them on a cooling rack with a metal spatula....if you like chewy try them when they are warm to the touch otherwise they crisp rapidly and develop deeper flavor as they age...Store only when completely cool.

These cookies can be, except for the sharp knife part, a fun holiday project for adult supervised kiddies, an excellent gift and will fill your home with a wonderful seasonal smell and your tummy with a delicious seasonal taste.
Enjoy!

Photos: Amazon.com, AOL.com, GreenValleyAuctions.com

2006-12-09T10:19:00.000-05:00

"I talk to families who die."
--Guess Who?

As Mr. Bush's psychic abilities (three "Q"s down the page) manifest themselves, his poll numbers continue a most Nixonian decline.
A Zogby poll, released yesterday, shows President Bush's approval at 30%.
A whopping 68% "said they believe Bush is doing only a fair or poor job leading the nation."

Watch out John Edward...

Modified Image: AFP, pinker.harvard.edu

2006-12-07T13:04:00.000-05:00

To thee, whose cautious step, and specious air,
Deceive the world, who simulating good,
Drop'st from thine oily tongue the pitying pray'r,
T'avert the ills of man, and spare his blood.
'To thee I call, but with no friendly voice,'
I am no dupe to thine insidious art,
The vaunted mercy of thy traitor heart,
Nor in thy promises can I rejoice.
For well I know thee hypocrite!—I know
Thou art the fatal source of human woe,
Thine is the shield that bloodiest tyrants bear,
Foul harbinger of death, black herald of despair.

--Fragment, Ode to Moderation, A.C., 1795

Image: Reuters

2006-12-06T13:40:00.000-05:00

Ye Olde Photo Shoppe

Doro Bush Koch is shown autographing copies of her new book.

Modified Image: AP, Google, us.gov

2006-12-06T12:42:00.000-05:00

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Modified Image: AP

2006-12-04T12:22:00.000-05:00

In successful newsrooms of the past, print, radio and TV, there were mysterious, almost psychic, people with no specific employment portfolio related to their unique Delphic abilities to sniff out future paths of potential news based on their own personally vast four dimensional absorption and retention of news product.
Sometimes, in nurturing, pro idea environments, this whole brain trend spotter type might flourish and develop a lengthy career.
This type, to the benefit of savvy editors or producers, can have a nearly insane habitual personal interest in unique subcategories of general news product.
The most common news "sniffer" I encountered over many years was the major league baseball idiot savant.
These were often but not always low-key, introverted types, copy writers who could sometimes rise to an editorship, with an uncannily vivid store of baseball minutiae that acted as canvas for a vast and oftentimes random pointillism of remembered facts and story color from a broad spectrum of past reading.
This type of individual was invaluable to the daily production of an interesting news product.
More than one of these individuals in or around a newsroom created regular arguments, laughter and necessary refining illuminations to thousands of news items passing in the endless, ever evolving and expanding information stream.
While I’ve partially described one type, personally encountered regularly over 30 years, I have to say this oracular characteristic could and did bloom in any interested rank, typesetter to editor to secretary to passerby, within a nurturing creative environment.
Sadly, this creative and free-range thinking type hasn’t survived the corporatized hen house of the modern synergized and downsized newsroom.
In the bland politically correct cubical landscape of megacorp news, it is best, safest, not to say too much, read too much or, even, think too much.
This approach, and we as a nation have never been properly grateful, has brought us Bush II, 911, Florida sharks, Chandra Levi, runaway brides, Monica and, of course, OJ, OJ, OJ!
Without the tangy zip of a miraculously whipped fact freak, the corporate product, by and large lacks the former eggy richness of information not merely consumed freely but also assembled in the free-range manner preferred by info chef Benjamin Franklin as opposed to William Randolph Hearst.
At the reader-hungry Washington Post Co., where modern profit flows from an educational subdivision and not news product, their famed daily offers two stories, today, that illustrate the bankruptcy of two differing assembly line corporate approaches.
At executive-nephew-packed CBS, Team Katie seems torn between potentially unsuccessful Noh or Kabuki theater versions of info minimalism in their search for Number One Joe-ism:

We want to try new things and not look as if we're throwing things against the wall to see what sticks," Couric says.

Oh.
“Not look as if,” is it.
Great.
Meanwhile, the ravening corporate beast called Gannett, Co. Inc., utilizing high tech and a vast ever changing array of low-paid entry level employees, is throwing everything against their digital wall:

Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content -- regardless of its traditional news value -- is key to building online and newspaper readership.

Yet, in their self-described "’hyper-local,’ street-by-street news” focus, a Denver subunit of this news corporation was, months ago, literally handed on a silver platter the exclusive Reverend Haggard, Meth and prostitute story that made headlines right before the recent midterm election.
The Gannett subunit, KUSA-TV9, sat on the story for three months of numbing PC/legal group think before their peeved source called talk radio to break the story himself.
Real old-fashioned news gets lost and news budgets get diverted to PR in the cutie-pie mumbo-jumbo of marketing strategies with catch phrases like “hyper-local" so beloved by busy multi-tasking, cost-cutting executives.
Modern execs interested in successfully surfing the daily data tsunami need to remember Yoda’s advice to young Luke Skywalker:

A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

Will the media use the force or succumb to the dark side?
Stay tuned…I’m working on a 9-armed killer Katie droid!

Modified Image: Google, LucasFilm, Wikipedia.org

2006-11-29T21:30:00.000-05:00

Book Value

It has come to my recent attention that items other than art pottery are increasing in value among collectors.
If you had purchased the gorgeous but historically naughty book based on the Desire of Spring: Erotic Fantasies of the Edo Period exhibit at the Kunsthal Rotterdam when I recommended it on February 1, 2005 you would have paid 49.50 EUR or $65.07.
Amazingly, this book, titled Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagry of the Edo Period is now selling on Amazon.com for $101.25 new and $95.83 used.
Canny readers of this blog will have realized a $36.18 profit on their investment on a book that will likely continue increasing in value.

For some reason I also searched for a book on American Art Tiles and Pottery that was published in 1998 and has since seen a second edition printed.
Amazon.com is selling one copy of American Art Pottery Identification and Values by Dick Sigafoos, a book I purchased from the author when his collection sold at the Cincinnati Art galleries for $24.95.
The giant on line seller is asking an astonishing $250 for their one first edition copy of the Sigafoos book.

Images: Amazon.com