Thursday, June 15, 2023
Impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, facing multiple investigations, already indicted, sued civilly, slavishly doing whatever Putin tells him to do, has his own jet plane, and he’s not a flight risk? Let me ask whomever thinks that and didn’t at least take away his passport, “Are you out of your friggin’ mind?”
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Well, what a week we’ve had. Republican candidates are flocking to Iowa. It’s the same shallow bench we’ve seen before, but … but … well it doesn’t get any better than Mike Pence riding a Harley! Nothing like a whimpy past middle age flabby white guy riding a big bike looking like a doofus to kick off the season! Last time it was Scott Walker. Put him up there with Mike Dukakis in an army tank to look like an out of place staged photo op.
It really doesn’t matter which one you pick they all come from the same cloth, just in different shades. Cut taxes, run up debts, screw people in need and the middle class, blame others, do nothing to help people or the economy. Ignore reality, cling to fantasies and conspiracies that are provably untrue. Who cares? Kind of wave the flag, claim to have done things which you had nothing to do with or control. Bill Clinton said it best when talking about the Republicans – their biggest complaint is that the Dems don’t clean up their mess fast enough.
Let’s dig into some specifics. Immigrants are coming to our borders bringing crime – the fact is that immigrants commit crimes 50% LESS than all American citizens.
Transgender kids competing as girls is unfair. Yeah. Okay. How many people are we talking about here? Nationwide – less than 100 people. One Hundred People! You want to make a national priority over 100 people?
On the right wing financial advice there is a guy named Porter Stansbury. He repeatedly writes that Biden has done nothing. Not just as President, but his whole time in the Senate. Old Porter has claimed that this winter the whole northeast of the United States will be thrown into the equivalent of a nuclear winter because we’ve sold liquified natural gas to Europe. Hey wait, who sold that gas? Biden? Well, doesn’t matter, it’s Biden’s fault. Fortunately, Porter knows how you can profit. Watch a long boring slide show for ten minutes, upgrade to his super duper special group and he’ll tell you. Funny thing the other day the news reported that oil had dropped to seventy dollars a barrel and this has averted all fears of a energy shortage in the U.S. What’s Porter got to say? Well, time to switch to the Fed has screwed things up by whatever interest rate they are charging, which will lead to a catastrophic global meltdown – but if you just listen to this video and buy into …
Meanwhile the unemployment rate has shot up .4% to under four percent, coming off the previous amount, which is the lowest in fifty years. But Biden isn’t doing anything. Oh, and the Fed may increase rates again because try as they might, they can’t seem to stop our economy. But Biden isn’t doing anything. Keep doing nothing Joe.
But Mike is in Iowa riding a Harley. Andy Borowitz has asked, “Does Mike have anything thing to offer besides raw male sexuality?” I think Mike has more to offer. Yes sir. I expect to see him in the next Fast and Furious movie. Maybe, as a gnat flying around buzzing Vin Diesel and the Rock. Kind of a Tinkerbell, Puck like character that gets swatted away near the end of the movie, just like he will in the primaries by the more macho Chris Christie, or will it be Ron? So hard to know. for sure.
Saturday, June 3, 2023
We’ve been watching “Gaslit,” an eight part series on the Watergate break in as experienced and seen from Martha Mitchell’s eyes.
There are several points to make before we get into the real reason for writing this piece.
1. Julia Roberts who plays Martha Mitchell is the executive producer of the series.
2. Sean Penn is in the series but until you read the credits you’ll have no idea what part he plays.
3. This is a dramatization of what happened, but if it is anywhere close to the reality of what went on – oh boy.
To point number three above, if this series in anyway depicts what really went on it is an amazing tale of bumbling morons, lying to themselves fanatics and power hungry sycophants. I’m being kind here. It’s really worse than that. As to the fanaticism, it’s religious, political, and cultural. It’s prejudicial: racial, anti-immigrant, sexual, … It’s hard to figure out what underlying prejudice is worse. I’ll leave it at that for the moment.
Liddy is portrayed as an over the edge, crazed person who has some sort of weird belief system, which he foists on others via violent fits of physicality and odd quotes. The quotes sound like they are biblical or from some forgotten Roman writer. He’s just weird, over the top secretive, lots of mumbo-jumbo CIA-ish talk.
Magruder comes off as an out of shape middle manager.
John Mitchell seems like a guy who loves his wife, but ultimately bows to the needs of power and abandons her time and again when he feels it is necessary.
The whole Watergate caper comes off as a bumbling mess of moronic proportions, totally unnecessary.
What I still don’t know for sure was, “Did Nixon know ahead of time? Did he okay it?” It doesn’t seem he did. It seems to have been Mitchell’s idea. Not the details, that was Liddy. No one told Liddy to stand down so it went ahead.
The person who comes off really badly is John Dean. Rather than being the cool calm attorney at the Watergate hearings, he appears to be a guy who never met the President until after the break-in, but used the association to seem like they were best buds. Later, when things broke open, he was asked in.
I remember when Nixon needed an errand run, one of the political and nefarious sort, they called on a fresh faced eager to please George Bush to carry out the dirty deed.
Remember while all this was going on Spiro Agnew was having envelopes of money delivered to him in the White House. I’ve never understood what he was doing with all that cash. It has been alluded that he had a secret life of fancy: cars, watches, and women, but did he? How depraved did it get? I don’t know.
Many of the people come off as paper pushing, don’t want to get in trouble, semi-sychophants. There’s a group of underlings who just need a job and want to keep their job so they can fed themselves and maybe their families. They keep their heads down and say nothing.
I’ve had the two lines from the song “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia” running through my head:
“That’s the night the lights went out in Georgia,
That’s the night they hung an innocent man”
and
“Don’t trust a backstreet southern lawyer…”
What seems to have changed in our country is that the crazed thinking of the Liddys of the world and others. Those things have metastasized, and are being feed by powerful interests who want to make money and keep power. This has led to a lot more unethical, mean spirited, unconscionable idiots and morons disrupting the fabric of our nation. They were always out there lurking, but now they are out in the open. They state their ideas and goals quite plainly. Some politicians still try to use fancy words and phrases to cover up their motives and actions. They are either clueless or callous when it comes to understanding the effect of their actions.
I get a text message every other day attacking a moderate Republican by a much more extreme one. The moderate is bashed as being liberal and woke. The call is for me to stand up for gun rights, pro-life, and school choice. I reply “so you are for our children being killed by AR-15s in our schools, women being forced to carry to term dead fetuses, and funneling public school funds into religious schools.” So far, I haven’t gotten a reply.
The thing about Gaslit that I think about is the big picture and the long road of prejudice, deceit, treachery, and religious zeal and hatred that have been a hallmark of this country since its founding. Alex De Tocqueville called it the two tracks our nation was on: one of vitality and the other of rottenness. He saw it as a race.
This goes back throughout history and the results aren’t very good. The strongmen win most of the time, imposing their will through violence and intimidation. Eventually, they die and someone else takes their place. The only reason our nation has survived and avoided that fate has been the checks and balances built into our government and a shared understanding of our belief in that. All this is under question today.
When I watched the movie “Shoah” about the holocaust, there’s a point in the film where a Jewish scholar points out that what the Nazis did was nothing new. The hatred of Jews and the killing of them had been around for centuries. The same reasons were always given, (and are still given today.) “The one thing they (the Nazis) did that was different (or new) was the idea of “the final solution.” But that idea stood on an undercurrent, a through line, of hatred and “well, you know”ism that had been around a long long time.
Our aid to Jewish people in WWII was hindered by laws passed when Coolidge was president. I was struck by a piece in my university magazine about one of the famous professors of the school. They printed a letter of recommendation in the mag. It was just before WWII and it basically said, “Even though he’s a Jew, please consider him…”
I do have problems with the actions and sensibilities of Jewish people on the one hand asking for sympathy for actions taken against them and on the other being deaf to the pleas of others. It’s like a lawyer I knew who chased down tax cheats who saw nothing wrong with buying fake Rolex watches.
Throughout our history we have been a nation espousing freedom and on the other muttering about how unfair it is and it’s someone’s fault. That someone is always weaker and unknown to us. The nature of prejudice is that you can hate a group of people but make exceptions for the one or two you know personally from that group because they are different.
How many politicians who want to take actions against people whose sexual being or orientation is not of the two-sex-spectrum do they know? Probably none. Or if they do that person falls into the “they’re different than the pack” or, in the case of a family member, “it’s a private matter.”
Then there are the Christian conservatives that hate gays or want to convert them that are caught as being gay.
The immigrant problem? The solution is to change the political climate in the countries they are coming from. This is not a new idea, Kissinger was the one who pointed it out to Nixon. We haven’t dealt with it, or figured out how to.
The transgender sports thing? Yeah, we haven’t figured that out either. Billie Jean King expressed it best, as far as she went. “They should be allowed to compete.” How that should happen is the problem. Yes, we can point to cases of it being unfair to them or to others. There is no real solution that I see – yet. However, ostracizing someone isn’t a solution either.
Friday, June 2, 2023
Brian Shul died. You may not know the name, but you know the stories. He flew the SR-71 Blackbird. He’s the guy that outran the missiles over Libya. You can catch his talk on YouTube. Phenomenal stuff. Yes, the stuff of legend.
I remember when Jimmy Carter revealed we had such a plane. it crossed the continental U.S. in two hours, flew to Europe, overshot its landing and turned around over five countries.
I heard two stories about the Blackbird that weren’t Brian’s. They were told to me by a person whom I’m not sure I can believe the veracity of anything they say, but wow – if true. One was the Chicago tower being asked for permission to pass through their air space at 50,000 feet. O’Hare said it was all theirs at that height. One blip and they were gone. That’s the time it took. The radar made one 360 rotation and picked up the plane once. The other story was when Denver airport got a request for immediate landing from a Blackbird. The plane had a double flame out and was gliding into Denver. They got permission but the tower said they didn’t see them on their scopes and asked the plane’s current location.
“Alaska.” On a glide path to Denver.
Brian’s stories were just as good. The time he buzzed a commercial airport tower. The time his navigator called in for an airspeed and altitude check because a bunch of Air Force jocks were calling into the tower to show off their speed. There was silence on the air after that.
The time he had the radars pop up off Russia and the tracking radar locked on. “Too bad they didn’t shoot,” said his boss. “We would gotten some really good data.”
Ah the stuff of legend and myth. Brian has a book of pictures of the SR-71. It goes for about $300. It would normally be a book you could pick up at the discount rack at Barnes and Noble for $9.98, but you can’t. The pictures are terrific. The one of the plane in the air with fuel running off its wings – wow. If you’ve seen pictures of the Blackbird they are probably Brian’s. Not many photos exist. It was forbidden to take photos most of the time.
We don’t have many heroes these days. Brian was one of them.
Ground Speed Check: (5 minutes)
Buzzing the tower: (5 minutes)
The whole talk: (1 hour)
Note: The price of the book is now $900.00
Thursday, June 1, 2023
I really don’t know what the title means but it’s uplifting, and I got part way through making a stunt on the movie of a similar name and had nothing, but here we are.
I had three comments about yesterday’s post, all of which said similar things, being sick and tired of the behavior of people in one party. I had a positive thought of what to do. Here goes:
Let’s have some good old American justice. Let’s send two cops over and arrest him, or maybe send a swat team with a battering ram. You know, knock once break down the door even though it’s unlocked. Point guns at everyone, make them lie face down on the floor, the driveway, wherever, then wander around doing nothing for 45 minutes or an hour while talking on radios. What’s the charge? Oh yeah, volume 2 of The Mueller Report. And just for fun let’s get the evidence the Italians gave Durham and Barr when they were on their field trip to Italy. And let’s throw in sedition, obstruction of justice, obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, and littering (remember the tissue stuck to his foot?), and rape, adultery, sexual assault, battery, embezzlement, tax fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and insurance fraud. I don’t want to go overboard here so I just want to stick to the stuff that is obvious and provable, like conspiracy to commit election fraud and all its variants.
By the way, this should be done the way cops handle everyday American crime. I’m talking kneeling on the neck, bumping the head on the squad car door jamb, eating fried chicken at your kitchen table with feet up on it while telling you they are going to make your life a living hell and laughing at you.
I want him to have the full experience.
Meanwhile in other news silicon wonderkid black turtleneck lady goes to jail for eleven years. They waited to do this why? She’s a woman! (so unfair). Oh and she was pregnant. Talk about getting f*cked. That means her kid will be getting ready to enter the pre-teen years before she sees them once free. Wow. The whole case is/was strange. What was she thinking? Did she ever have anything? Was it a case of fake it til you make it, or was it a scam all along? I think it wobbled between the two.
But, I’ve seen this all before. The sales team that says, “We can do that!” and hands it off to the techs who say, “No, we can’t” and figure something out.this leads to the “We have good news and bad news” scenario where the bad solution wins (ie “We have a solution! (good news) Unfortunately, the wrong solution was picked (bad news)” then the mop up operation begins. That’s where anyone who stood up for truth gets fired, demoted, or ostracized; and the folks who screwed the pooch get promoted and rewarded. Thus the Peter Principle gets injected with steroids on acid.
Okay now for movie and show reviews. Today I review “Air” and “Ciao House,” which they keep saying “Chow House,” which I always though had more of an emphasis on the vowels with no “H” injected, more like “Cia-ow” with an Italian accent. What do I know?
The show is a food cooking show in Italy. People compete wither together or as teams and get eliminated. There’s a weird vibe (I hate the term “vibe” btw) to it. It’s like “I want you to enjoy the beautiful Tuscan sun, the herbs, and the flavors of Italy. Cook a beautiful meal.” then “What the hell is this? You didn’t get it.”
My favorite contestant is the really cute blond woman who says making pasta is her forte. Unfortunately, every time she makes pasta it’s not very good, causing her team to lose. Somehow she mad it to the finals before getting eliminated. Because they eliminated people in two person teams, they typically had a strong cook and a weak one on a team; both got eliminated. This ended up with two so-so chefs in the final and the really strong cooks eliminated. What to do? Bring everyone back to cook again and pick one to go against the two finalists.Then the judges couldn’t decide between two contestants so they have to cook again. It seemed to me that they realized they needed another episode. Strange show.
“Air” the story of how Nike signed Michael Jordan is fabulous. It shows how Nike went from almost being eliminated in the basketball shoe business to positioning itself to dominate it in a way on company had ever done. Did I talk about that yesterday? I did. Who played Michael’s mom? Viola Davis. She’s the Tom Hnaks of that kind of role.
And lastly, I have a boffo idea. Why can’t someone submit a form asking for Ron DeSantis’ book to be banned? Reason? (You need a reason?) Pornography, offensive, stoopid, deranged – how about that for reasons? I’d misspell his name, give it more of an immigrant twist. Call it too wookie as well. (That’s a play on “Woke” get it? Get it?)
This makes me wonder about something – who was the last Republican president that was really smart? Abe Lincoln? Teddy Roosevelt? Those are the only two that come to mind.
Meanwhile, the list of Democratic presidents that were smart – wow: Obama, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy to name the most recent ones. (Okay, you argue Carter in terms of being effective, but he was smart. Johnson was effective but maybe not as smart as the others, but compared to the Republican opponents? Come on.)
I gotta go.
Be smart. Be effective. Dream big.