I guess my erratic behavior deserves some kind of explanation. (On the other hand, maybe it doesn't.) Here goes: I still mean every word of my self-proclaimed demise. I hate what's happening to America. But there are a lot of hours in the day. I can work, I can save money, I can prepare to expatriate, and there is still a little time left over to bitch and moan, to wave my cyberfist at the self-inflicted tragedy that is GOP America.
It's an addiction, this thing we call blog. The odd reality is that at some point over the past three years the habit took hold of me and acts like it doesn't want to let go. Throughout these last eight weeks that followed my pompous announcement of retirement I have been jonesing to return. I come upon a fact about Ken Lay that deserves repetition and I know it will go ignored not only by the mainstream media but most of the blogosphere as well. So I post it anyway. God help me, I cannot control myself.
So fuck it, I'm back. At least partially. Maybe not as often as before or as prolific as the Greater Bloggers Among Us, but not exactly dead, either.
It was a fun funeral but a nerve-wracking burial. I'll return all your flowers and gifts as soon as I can, I swear.
(Please also help me in re-welcoming the recently resurrected No More Mister Nice Blog to the re-blogosphere.)
I just had an email from some folks who have been away and don't know how this all got started. For those who are playing catch-up on the news, I am providing a link to my column about "The Question", Touching American Journalism's Third Rail.
Tom Bevan has an [sic] great piece at Real Clear Politics, PLAYING HARDBALL WITH MAUREEN DOWD, in which he makes some good points about this gal who probably needs a bit of the old Jeff Gannon to relieve some of that pent up whatever.(1) He also describes the media bubble that protected John Kerry from pesky questions like those about releasing his entire military record until after the election.(2) This is the same bubble that keeps Sen. Hillary Clinton from having to reconcile her statements about the economy and Social Security that I so elegantly framed in "The Question."(3)
12:54pm
(1) The old Jeff Gannon was known to have relieved some of that "pent up whatever" except he didn't do it on behalf of female clients, or is Jeff confessing here to something we didn't know about before? That there was a little AC in DC too?
(2) Jeff Gannon is perhaps the last person on earth with credibility to talk about media bubbles, having been outed as a (barely) functioning part of the worst one yet.
(3) Jeff Gannon, whose maiden name was James Guckert, and whose piss was digitally shared with thousands of potential clients, is unqualified to refer to anything he ever did as "elegant."
Sorry, Jeff. You're looking increasingly desperate. Turn the tables on them and tell us all the details of how you managed to get into the White House briefing room to shill for a party that will let you do its dirtiest work — in public and in private — but never accept you as a human being.
A former high school teacher faces the possibility of up to 20 years in prison after a jury determined Monday she had sex with an underage special-education student.
Jurors found Adrianne Hockett, 26, guilty of one count of sexual assault of a child, agreeing with prosecutors that she had sex with a student, then 15, in the summer and fall of 2003 while she was a teacher at Hastings High School in the Alief school district. Hockett had been charged with three counts.
Hockett acknowledged giving her student special attention but has denied having sex with the teen, who prosecutors say reads at a first-grade level.
[...]
The teen testified during the trial he told his mother he was going to Hockett's southwest Houston apartment for tutoring to help with his reading skills. But he said he and Hockett had sex, drank beer and smoked marijuana.
Reads at first-grade level? Had sex? Drank beer? Smoked marijuana?
What stellar qualifications! America loves a fallen man. Once he publicly renounces the beer and pot, he should become a viable candidate for governor of Texas. No, let's think bigger — make that president of the United States.
