Before I break for my winter hibernation, I am pleased to present you with the exciting, all-new 2005 edition. Please feel free to sing along:
Fade up on the TV studio set of a snowy Washington DC: twinkling lights, a festively decorated Christmas tree, an all-Caucasian nativity scene, Laura Bush with a tumbler of vodka — the White House.
The back wall of the studio is a blue cyclorama of a repeated pattern that says: "Christmas under attack."
CEOs of the US defense and oil industries (not under oath) enter.
God Rest Ye Merry Neocons
Sung by the US defense and oil industries to the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"
God rest ye merry, neocons, Let nothing you dismay. Remember Ahmed Chalabi Has yet his hell to pay For setting up America Which Cheney led astray. O tax cuts of comfort and joy, Comfort and joy, O tax cuts of comfort and joy.
Enter Bush Senior and Scowcroft.
What Son Is This?
Sung by George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft to the tune of "What Child Is This?"
What son is this, Who laid to rest On Cheney’s lap is sleeping? And who conspires With anthems sweet while Halliburton’s reaping?
This, this the New York Times That justifies the White House crimes. Waste, waste the blood of men For Bush, the son of Nixon.
Enter readers of the New York Times.
New York Times
Sung by readers of the The New York Times to the tune of "We Three Kings"
New York Times, this lady is gray, Acting in the Pentagon’s play. Cheney’s minting Lies they’re printing. What will you print today?
Oh, Judy Miller lied to me. Told us of the W-M-D. Such misleading Lies you’re feeding, Guide us to your Chalabi.
Enter Seymour Hersh carrying a copy of The New Yorker.
O Abu Ghraib
A solo sung by Seymour Hersh to the tune of "O Tannenbaum" (i.e., "O Christmas Tree" for those who speak only Amurcan)
O Abu Ghraib, O Abu Ghraib, How Christian are your tortures? O Abu Ghraib, O Abu Ghraib, How Christian are your tortures?
The sight of broken detainees Reveals a neocon disease. O Abu Ghraib, O Abu Ghraib, How Christian are your tortures?
Enter Harriet Miers with a big box of Kleenex.
Harriet Miers
Tearfully sung by Harriet Miers to the tune of "Silent Night"
Harriet Miers, Harriet Miers, Lost among Louts and liars. Such a kissass sycophant, So unqualified, wingnuts did rant. Sleep forgotten in peace, Sleep forgotten in peace.
Enter Jenna Bush with a vodka tonic and an enormous bong.
I’ll Be High in Crawford
Sung by Jenna Bush to the tune of "I’ll Be Home for Christmas"
I’ll be high in Crawford, You can count on me. Things to smoke And lines of coke For our whole family.
Christmas Eve will find me Drinking quarts of wine. I’ll be high in Crawford Until 2009!
Enter American television viewers.
Pundits We Have Heard on High
Sung by American television viewers to the tune of "Angels We Have Heard on High"
Pundits we have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er the air. Cable poohbahs wonder why Pat Fitzgerald’s waiting there.
Mo - o - o - o - o - re of these Indictments are coming. Mo - o - o - o - o - re of these Indictments are coming.
Enter a glaze-eyed Skimble, holding a television remote control.
O’Reilly Night
Sung by Skimble on the sofa to the tune of "O Holy Night"
O’Reilly night, His lips are brightly lying. These are the lies that will lose minds and hearts. Can’t find the truth In spin and error frying, So we rely on falafel and farts.
That background noise is whining wingnut voices, A Yellow Terror threat is on the crawl…
Find your remotes! Oh, hear O’Reilly lying! Oh, Fox, it bites. Oh, night when I was bored. Oh, Fox, it bites. Oh, Fox, Oh, Fox, it bites.
Enter the brightly attired Secular Humanism Christmas Holiday Chorale.
Joy to the World: Evolution Edition
Sung by the Secular Humanism Christmas Holiday Chorale to the tune of "Joy to the World"
Joy to the world, This duck is lame. Let Darwin do his thing! Let every state Know where to place the blame, And heav’n and nature sing, And heav’n and nature sing, And heav’n and nature sing!
Joy to the world, The madness wanes. Let Reason cheer as well! While fields and floods, Rocks, hills and plains Let Kansas go to hell, Let Kansas go to hell, Let Kansas go to hell!
Ken Lay declared his innocence, demonized his accusers and asked ex-employee "truth sayers" to rally around him for his trial, in a Tuesday speech.
Just a month before his Jan. 17 federal trial on seven conspiracy and fraud charges, the former Enron chairman drew polite applause with his luncheon address titled "Guilty, until proven innocent," in part a call to arms to Enron employees to defend the honor of the company and Lay himself.
Lay quoted Winston Churchill, saying, "Truth is the great rock," and in his case, prosecutors have submerged it in a "wave of terror."
Is there no end to the whining and pretentious self-pity of Republicans in positions of power?
...the bottom 80 percent of households would receive 15.8 percent of the House tax cuts' benefit. The top 20 percent would receive 84.2 percent of the benefit. Households earning more than $1 million a year would get 40 percent of the tax cuts, or an average reduction of nearly $51,000.
Think of the Treasury as a piggy bank for the very rich. The mathematics involved are actually fairly simple, but they require a generous use of negative numbers: Subtract hundreds of billions in war costs while subtracting hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Pretty soon there are no pennies left in the piggy bank for healthcare or levees or pensions or roads or schools.
The question must be asked: Is our representatives learning?
Cheney arrived at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe on Monday [December 8, 2003] to do some hunting at the Rolling Rock Club and Game Preserve -- a private club with farm-raised pheasants; but some say it was no hunt -- it was a slaughter.
"Your average hunter may shoot more than three pheasants a day; Vice President Cheney shot more than 70 -- and an untold number of mallards... We're appalled that so many animals were killed for target practice essentially."-- Wayne Pacelle, V.P.- Humane Society of the US
Five-hundred pheasants were released in front of Cheney and his men; and the ten-man hunting party killed 417 of the birds. Vice President Cheney alone shot over 70 pheasants.
The birds were then plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight back to Washington, DC.
This is entirely consistent behavior for a hawk who had "other priorities" during Vietnam and who sanctions torture now — that is to say, a craven coward.
Art, Truth and Politics. Harold Pinter's outstanding Nobel lecture: "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."
The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines' reliability.
Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills.
These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.
[...]
In North Carolina, more stringent requirements -- which include placing the machines' software code in escrow for examination in case of a problem -- have led one supplier, Diebold Inc., to say it will withdraw from the state, where about 20 counties use Diebold voting machines.
A different type of showdown is brewing in California, where Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says he might force makers of the machines to prove their systems can withstand attacks from a hacker. One such test on a Diebold system -- Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a 2004 California primary -- is planned.
The state has been negotiating details with Harri Hursti, a security expert from Finland who uncovered severe flaws in a Diebold system used in Leon County, Fla. (He demonstrated how vote results could be changed, then made screens flash "Are we having fun yet?")
The simple fact that Diebold withdraws from a state that wants to place its code in escrow reveal its total unreliability. And the simple fact of our high tolerance for voting unreliability exposes American democracy as a sham. And, finally, given the evidently flimsy foundation of American democracy, all the White House rhetoric about spreading democracy around the world amounts to nothing but a lethal pack of lies.
Thanks to Cryptome, we can see the property, the realtor's listing, and all kind of other interesting information, such as the permanently restricted airspace that newly surrounds the tree-lined estate where will he soon write his Kissingeresque war-criminal memoirs.
So here's the new Cheney crib, just down the road from another brand new war-criminal neighbor, Secretary of Offense Donald Rumsfeld:
Nine acres, very private. Tree lined drive off private road. Separate 3-bay garage with office. New 150 foot dock. Extensive gardens and ornamental pools. Fantastic waterfront property.
In an era when Disney engineers an explicitly Christian marketing campaign for a movie as covertly and religiously coded as any Bush speech, it's important to let sellers understand that post-Enlightenment buyers will not always roll over and play dead.
Let your everyday purchases do your fighting for you — check out BuyBlue.org.
Jan. 12: The New York Stock Exchange fines Morgan Stanley $19 million for failing to supervise two rogue brokers and deliver stock prospectuses to 141,000 clients.
Jan. 25: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each agree to pay $40 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that they artificially stimulated demand for certain high-tech initial public offerings in the aftermarket.
FEBRUARY
Feb. 14: The NYSE fines JPMorgan Securities $2.1 million for failing to retain e-mails arising out of the research-analyst conflict case.
Feb. 14: AIG says the New York Attorney General and the SEC have served it with subpoenas pertaining to the accounting of certain reinsurance policies.
MARCH
March 2: Citigroup reaches settlement in Global Crossing class action litigation. It settles the suit for $75 million.
March 3: Bank of America settles WorldCom suit and agrees to pay $460 million in restitution in the securities fraud class action.
March 4: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., Credit Suisse First Boston and UBS agree to pay a combined $100 million to settle with former shareholders and bondholders of WorldCom. The four firms led a May 2000 bond offering by the telecom company.
March 7: AIG reveals that its chairman, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, has received a subpoena from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
March 8: The NYSE fines Merrill Lynch $13.5 million for failing to supervise a group of brokers at its Fort Lee, N.J., branch. They allegedly engaged in improper market timing of mutual funds.
March 15: Former WorldCom CEO Bernard J. Ebbers is convicted of conspiracy and securities fraud that resulted in investor losses of $2 billion and the bankruptcy of the company.
March 21: Time Warner agrees to pay a $300 million penalty for overstating online advertising revenue and the number of its Internet subscribers, and for failing to consolidate the financial results of AOL Europe in its financial statements.
APRIL
April 12: The SEC charges the NYSE with failing to police specialists who allegedly engaged in unlawful proprietary trading on the floor. In a related move, the NYSE also charges 17 former specialists with securities fraud for trading ahead of customer orders.
April 25: Cable operator Adelphia Communications will pay $715 million and set up a victim compensation fund for the accounting fraud. Founder John J. Rigas later gets 15 years in prison and his family agrees to forfeit 95% of its holdings in the company.
April 27: The NASD fines Raymond James $750,000 for fee-based account violations. The firm is also required to pay $138,000 in restitution to customers.
MAY
May 31: Citigroup agrees to pay about $208 million to settle the SEC's accusations about improper arrangements among certain Smith Barney mutual funds, an affiliated transfer agent and an unaffiliated sub-transfer agent.
JUNE
June 2: President Bush nominates Christopher Cox to replace Donaldson as chairman. The nomination of Cox, a conservative former congressman, is seen as slowing the pace of regulatory moves.
June 10: Citigroup and JPMorgan agree to settle claims of Enron-related damages for a combined $4.2 billion.
JULY
July 13: Former WorldCom CEO Bernard J. Ebbers is sentenced by a federal judge in New York to a 25-year prison term for the $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom.
AUGUST
Aug. 2: The NASD orders Morgan Stanley to pay more than $6.1 million for fee-based account violations. Of that amount, $1.5 million is fines and $4.6 million is restitution for more than 3,500 customers.
Aug. 2: Toronto-based Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce agrees to pay $2.4 billion to shareholders of Enron as part of a legal settlement. It becomes the third major bank to settle claims involving the former energy-trading company.
Aug. 15: The NYSE fines Merrill Lynch $10 million for failing to deliver customer prospectuses and other supervisory and operational failures.
SEPTEMBER
Sept. 14: Northwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines both file for bankruptcy protection as the airline industry continues to suffer.
Sept. 15: An SEC judge hits Raymond James with a $6.9 million fine for failing to supervise broker Dennis Herula.
Sept. 19: Former Tyco International CEO and founder Dennis Kozlowski and ex-CFO Mark Swartz receive prison terms of eight to 25 years for looting more than $150 million from the company. Kozlowski is also ordered to pay $167 million in fines and Swartz $70 million.
OCTOBER
Oct. 10: The NASD hits eight firms with directed brokerage violations and imposes fines of more than $7.75 million. Hit with the heaviest fines were INVEST Financial Corp. ($1.52 million), Commonwealth Financial Network ($1.4 million), National Planning Corp. ($1.3 million), Mutual Service Corp. ($1.3 million) and Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp. ($950,000).
Oct. 12: Phillip Bennett, CEO of commodities trading firm Refco, is arrested and charged with a $430 million accounting fraud approximately two months after the firm went public in August.
Oct. 17: In the largest bankruptcy so far for the year, Refco files for Chapter 11 protection to reorganize $48.6 billion in liabilities. Refco's filing, in the wake of Bennett's arrest, wipes out $924 million in market value. One day later, the company is delisted by the NYSE.
CSI: Wall Street is one of the most boring shows around but, man, is it expensive to produce. If I got fined for the way I park my car the way Wall Street gets fined for its indiscretions, my car would be booted pronto.
Although Bush won't serve this time, his Democratic rival in the 2004 election served on a Massachusetts jury last month. Kerry not only served, but was elected foreman of the Suffolk Superior Court jury, which rejected a claim by two men who sued the city of Boston for injuries suffered in a car accident involving a school principal.
I wish this were funnier or more ironic, but there you go.
You'd think from all the noise that self-appointed religiously oppressed Republicans make that Christmas doesn't exist in secular Blue State cities like Chicago. Not so. Let's take a look at selections from the December calendar at the Chicago Cultural Center, a municipal institution that is funded with my approval by my secular humanist, atheistic, exorbitant property taxes:
Protégé Philharmonic Sunday, December 11, 3pm Preston Bradley Hall The Protégé Philharmonic present a Christmas Holiday Concert with classical orchestra, popular Christmas selections and a Christmas carol sing-a-long.
The Rose Ensemble: Celebremos el Niño: A Mexican Baroque Christmas Thursday, December 15, 6:30pm Preston Bradley Hall Join this engaging group of singers for an evening of joyful Mexican music - a celebration featuring over two centuries of festive Christmas dances, ballads and villancicos. Accompanied by viola da gamba, vihuela da mano and several percussion instruments (including African drums), solos and choruses burst forth in this holiday program that's anything but predictable.
Ohm series: Holiday Xmix Party Thursday, December 15, 7pm Randolph Cafe This digital holiday celebration features local DJs and laptop artists performing original remixes of classic holiday tunes. Snowbot (aka Brobot) gives a special live performance leading audience members brave enough to join the robotic karaoke sing-along to digital versions of seasonal songs. The evening also showcases the release of Christmas Remixed 2 from Six Degrees Records, which features top-notch producers, DJs, turntablists and remix artists in a second vibrant collection of joyfully twisted takes on holiday tunes.
500 Clown (sings) Christmas Carol(s) November 16, 2005 - January 7, 2006 Storefront Theater Thursdays - Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 3pm Additional Christmas performances: December 19 - 21 at 7:30pm No shows on November 24, December 24, 25, 31 and January 1 Tickets: $15, $10 for students and seniors with valid ID This raucous Christmas celebration features three clowns as Dickensian rock stars, performing A Christmas Carol-based songs by John Fournier. Think Dickens plus a live band plus 500 Clown's signature blend of circus arts, improvisation, and action-based performance. We'll have even the tiniest Tim dancing in the aisles. For tickets, visit www.storefronttheater.org or call 312-742-TIXS.
But please note: "The Chicago Cultural Center will be closed in observance of Christmas Day."
Liberals aren't scared of Christianity, but Republican Christians are scared to death of pluralism. They are social agoraphobics who can't bear the sight of anyone who doesn't look and behave exactly like them — narrow-minded, fearful, greedy, and provincially Caucasian at heart.
