You can't even get drunk anymore without lubricating a Bush.

Found at CounterSpin.

{ 10:37 AM }

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It's all about the oil. Not Iraq's oil. The world's oil. Nor is it about 'cheap oil.' It's about control. Once you own a resource, you don't want its price minimized. Emphasis mine, but the words belong to MaxSpeak.

{ 10:26 AM }

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My favorite blog of the last 48 hours is TBOGG, who manages to skewer Peggy Noonan, the Pope and the church, along with at least a dozen tangential targets, in a single post.

{ 10:07 AM }

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Last night I had the luck to hear an outstanding reading by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the most celebrated poets of the Beat generation, at an event hosted by the Poetry Center of Chicago. Spry, articulate, and still very much an active bard at the age of 83, he read with vitality and even supplemented some of his poems with sight gags. It was a real event � the audience of 500 (a guess) thronged and admired him like a rock star, albeit a fragile one. As far as I could tell, the Chicago media was nowhere in attendance, clueless bastards that they are whenever something real and unsensational or unfunded by their advertisers occurs.

Ferlinghetti read poems about Allen Ginsburg dying, about dogs and bag ladies, about fireflies. One poem was written yesterday morning. Everything he read was infused with the poet's special talent for the deepest forms of humanism, and never mawkish, even when versifying about September 11. Then he signed the audience's books, some more than fifty years old, until there were no more takers. An enchanting and inspiring evening.

If you want to know more, here's his google.

{ 9:52 AM }

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Glad to see some people are resisting the gravitational pull of Casual Friday.

{ 9:50 AM }

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Noelle Bush gets ten days. I want to point to her as an obvious symbol of her elders' hypocrisy, but I actually feel bad for this poor girl who even more obviously needs help.

{ 12:57 PM }

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It's still the economy, stupid is just one of several designs intended to stimulate a bit of dialog before November 5.

It's already too cold for T-shirts in Chicago. Guess I'll have to get a sweatshirt.

(From the Democratic Underground.)

{ 9:50 AM }

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85,000 people lost their jobs so Lay and Skilling (and Junior) can stay out of the spotlight. Yahoo/Reuters reports that Arthur Andersen gets five years of probation and a half-million dollar fine for its role in obstructing justice during the Enron probe. Too late, though � the company's already all but dead.

A bunch of greedy idiots play around with off-balance sheet assets and finance the political campaigns of yet another idiot, and thousands of Enron shareholders have their pockets emptied while employees lose their life savings. A handful of idiots in a Texas office of Arthur Andersen misbehave, and more than 80,000 people lose their jobs.

An idiotic dictator plays around with Kuwait in 1990, and ordinary Iraqi citizens get a rain of bombs on their heads. An idiotic president does a half-ass job of proving to himself he's not a wimp, and leaves it to his idiot son and his idiotic advisers a decade later to screw Junior's "Crusade" up to the point where words like Armageddon become part of the basic vocabulary.

There are plenty of other examples too: Worldcom, Tyco, Ashcroft, Falwell, Robertson, bin Laden, the Vatican...

They're all variations on the same theme: so-called business, government and religious "leaders" who are undeserving of the word, let alone the position.

{ 4:02 PM }

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Information wheels are no-tech calculators, a highly specialized form of design curiosity described in a book that I will have to get because information wheels have low-tech street cred and, besides, they are so cool. The book, Reinventing the Wheel, was brought to my attention by Everything Burns.

Though they are unrelated to information wheels, make sure you click on Everything Burns's tensegrity structures. Also cool.

{ 12:03 PM }

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An Enron primer. My ongoing obsession with Enron and how it influenced energy policy in an all-oil White House, as well as its possible interests in the energy of Central Asia, the scapegoating and indictment of the entire firm of Arthur Andersen, not to mention financial interests in Junior's campaigns for governor of Texas and president of the Christian States of America, may not make sense if you're tuning in late.

Former CEOs Lay and Skilling, the mouths behind that sucking sound that made billions of dollars vanish into thin air, are still unindicted and at large. If you want a reminder of what happened, the Washington Post has published a primer here.

{ 9:28 AM }

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ImClone's Waksal pleads guilty but what about Enron's Lay and Skilling? Right, their case doesn't involve celebrity Democrat Martha Stewart. Enron only involves Junior's gubernatorial and presidential campaigns and crypto-policymaker Cheney. The more we focus on Martha's 4,000 shares of ImClone, the less we'll remember Tom White's dozens of calls to Enron.

Junior is not taking the two weeks leading up to November 5 to raise funds for Enron's rank-and-file 401(k) participants, who lost everything when they were lied to by their management and government. They genuinely need Junior's help, but he's too busy spending his time sewing up Congress (and creating a sniper-friendly environment in Washington).

A parade of corporate criminals, war on the citizenry, fraudulent linkages, mind-chilling stupidity, outright lies, and a basic disrespect for human beings � it's all part of Junior's White House.

{ 5:42 PM }

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Junior puts the NRA ahead of life itself. Yahoo reports Junior's latest move opposing ballistic fingerprinting. This is a citizen-unfriendly, sniper-friendly nod to the NRA, who has an "alliance" with the Bush Dynasty:

Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., are among those in Congress trying to pass legislation to create a national system [of ballistic fingerprinting]. The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights lobbyists oppose such a system, fearing it is one step down a path to a national database of gun owners.

How about a database of van owners? Oh, we already have that. Vans don't kill people, van drivers with unidentifiable guns kill people.

Bush, too, is resistant [to ballistic fingerprinting] as long as he has questions, Fleischer said.

As long as he has questions? I picture the inside of Junior's brain as a soup of bobbing question marks. Ballistic fingerprinting answers more questions than he could ever construct.

Meanwhile, while we wait for Junior to clear up his questions, nearly one person per day is dying....

{ 5:09 PM }

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White House staffers gather for "voluntary" Bible study. So says USA Today. Can't you just see the nods, winks and finger-quotes whenever a junior staffer is "invited" to a "voluntary" meeting for "Bible study"? I wonder if this is how the "Taliban" did it.

So much of this article makes me choke. Excerpt: "Bush starts every day on his knees in prayer. He reads the Bible each morning and studies a Bible lesson daily." I'm not sure which is worse � that it might be true, in which case he's another "Republican" theocrat, or that it most likely is a total fabrication, in which case naked cynicism and an obscene manipulation of Americans' spiritual instincts is taking place. My vote: the latter. Oh, that's right, I forgot � we don't need to vote any more.

Either way, it's a lose-lose situation.

{ 3:28 PM }

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Happy Columbus Day? I'm no fan of New York Mayor Bloomberg, but I'm on his side when it comes to his inviting two of the Sopranos actors to the Manhattan Columbus Day Parade. He snubbed the parade and its organizers when they snubbed his companions, according to The New York Times. There was the usual blather about role models. The organizers even went to court to block the appearance of the actors.

There's that word again. Actors. They're not real Mafiosi. In fact, you could make a very good argument that it's not even really a Mafia show. The Sopranos may be just an excuse for good writing, interesting character development, a satirical undertone, and typical but well-done soap opera plotting. The lifestyle and setting were perhaps sensationalized to get it on the air. In many ways it reminds me of The West Wing in its examination of the constant jockeying for power and advantage.

Italian-Americans who get upset with Italian-American artists, at least in this case, forget that the real culprits are not David Chase and his Sopranos or the Scorceses or the Coppollas � they are the Gottis and the Castellanos and the Gambinos. As far as I know, Bloomberg invited none of them.

And there's also that annoying pest, the First Amendment, which manages to get in the way whenever anyone doesn�t want to hear or see something that pinches their misguided ethnic pride. The Sopranos is not hate speech, it's simply a nicely produced entertainment show. I like it. I don't love it. If you can't perceive its artistry and tongue-in-cheek qualities, then you are welcome to whatever sitcom gruel the networks are dishing out. If the parade passes you by and fictional Dr. Melfi waves from a convertible � how unbelievably offensive! � please just close your gentle eyes for a few moments.

What I always say to Italian-American opponents of The Sopranos is this: if you don't like it, make a better show. You can choose from a gazillion Italian accomplishments and "positive" blah-blah-blah: the Renaissance, opera, da Vinci, Galileo, aqueducts, and, of course, the cuisine.

Even Shakespeare understood that sex and violence were time-tested ways to attract audiences long enough to enjoy the subtler aspects of his art. Though he's no Shakespeare, Sopranos creator David Chase understands this artistic axiom and so does his presenter, HBO.

Full disclosure: I am Italian-American. And I'm quite proud of it, too, but I really like the First Amendment.

Maybe even more.

{ 5:01 PM }

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Pardon me while I improve my 21st century hyperlinking technology. If the image above doesn't appear � and I'm very sorry if it doesn't � you can see it on my humble Geocities Image Page here.

Shortly we will announce the Grand Opening of our exciting new image hosting arrangement.

{ 11:35 AM }

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Bunker Boy says "Keep out." Vice president Dick Cheney doesn�t want anyone looking at what really happened during the events that led to the September 11, 2001, attacks, according to Newsweek, in a report filed by Michael Isikoff and Tamara Lipper.

Any reasonable citizen might ask himself: why would our vice president want to obscure the truth? Says the article:

Cheney strongly opposes the idea of any independent body�s poking into the White House�s conduct.

So? Millions of people opposed so-called independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr's poking into Monica Lewinsky's closet during a Whitewater investigation � as if it were even peripherally relevant. At least the 9/11 commission has a strict focus. (Or is political blowback the larger fear? Why, yes, Watson, I believe we're onto something!)

But White House officials say this would allow congressional Democrats�who will control half the appointees�to "politicize" the commission.

Politicization of the White House's own behavior in response to the terrorist attacks is precisely what is driving this movement toward an independent inquiry. The actions of the Bush administration � proposing Alaskan oil drilling in the week following 9/11/01 (odd timing), the secret 2001 Ken Lay/Enron energy policy meetings (odd timing), the Afghani pipeline connection, Cheney's own speech to the Cato Institute in 1998 depicting Central Asia as the fulcrum of American energy policy, the fraudulent linkage of 9/11 to Iraq � aroused the suspicions that only an independent investigation could allay.

FYI Dick: If you're guilty of some malfeasance or obfuscation or outright fraud (like so many of your Enron and Halliburton friends), then it's conceivable you would want to oppose such an investigation. On the other hand, an independent investigation would be the perfect way to demonstrate the purity and high-mindedness of your intentions as well as your innocence.

So� Let's roll! Investigate!

{ 9:06 AM }

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