Whether spoken and unspoken, there was pretty much one subject everywhere today: Just how big of a “But this one will let the water out!” hole are Republicans going to blow in the bottom of their already-hull-shattered Garbage Scow Of Fools over the confirmation of judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court?
And however much some of the gutless and sotto voce Republicans who are holding onto the fragments of their party by their fingernails might wish otherwise, from the glimpses we get virtually every day into the mushy skull of Rush "GOP Maximum Leader For Life" Limbaugh and the charcoal heart of GOP wind-up hate puppet and leading 2012 presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich,
Is Ald. Isaac Carothers following his father's footsteps?
May 28, 2009
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
In the history of City Council corruption that has seen 30 aldermen convicted since 1972, there has never been a son who has followed his father to prison.
Ald. Isaac Carothers (29th) could be the first.
His father, former Ald. William Carothers (28th), went to prison in 1983 for extorting up to $32,500 in remodeling work for his ward office from the builders of Bethany Hospital.
Now, Ike Carothers stands accused of accepting $40,000 in home improvements, meals and sports tickets from a West Side developer in exchange for zoning changes that netted the developer millions.
...
Ike Carothers is an old-school politician who got his start in the Water Department and rose to become a deputy Streets and Sanitation commissioner before joining the City Council in 1999, where he emerged as Mayor Daley's most outspoken African-American supporter.
Ike Carothers coined the phrase "heavy-lifters" to describe aldermen with the guts to support Daley tax increases and used the phrase repeatedly to berate colleagues he viewed as political cowards.
The cheerleading speeches -- and Ike Carothers' role in running a West Side army of city workers who delivered the vote for the mayor's handpicked candidates -- endeared Carothers to Daley.
...
Four years ago, Ike Carothers' name surfaced in connection with the Hired Truck scandal. During the trial that culminated in the 2006 conviction of Daley's former patronage chief, Carothers' name also appeared on an notorious "clout list" as the sponsor of nearly 100 city job seekers.
...
In 1985, a federal judge ordered William Carothers to help pay $152,000 in damages for organizing from prison a campaign of physical violence and intimidation against a political opponent that involved Carothers' sons, who were both Cook County deputy sheriffs with access to guns.
At the time, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras said Issac Carothers appeared to be the ringleader and "organized their acts of intimidation" by force while the other son used his deputy's position to verbally threaten the plaintiffs. Isaac Carothers was ordered to pay $25,000 of the damages.
Sometimes mere prose just chokes and dies on the sheer behemothic, pan-generational bulk of the rot shot through Daley's Chicago.
And when that happens, we've got no choice but to sing, sing, sing.
And so, with apologies to Harry Chapin...
3...2..1...
Rat's In The Boodle
A child arrived just the other day, Not on the clout list, but dat's ok, But there were plans to hatch and bribes to pay, He learned to cheat while I was away He was scamming 'fore I knew it and as he grew He'd say "I'm going to be like you Dad, An Al-der-man just like you."
Chorus : Another rat's in the boodle, Just like Silver Shovel Nobody'd believe dis shit If you put it in a novel, "When you gonna run son?" "I don't know when." "We'll get together then, We'll get you on da clout list then."
My son turned ten just the other night Showed him how to rig a vote up good 'n tight. Will you teach me good and bad? I said, "Not today, I got thumbs to bend." He said, "Dat's OK." And he walked away, but his smile never dimmed Said, "I'm going to be like him, yeah. An Al-der-man just like him."
Chorus : Another rat's in the boodle, Just like Silver Shovel Nobody'd believe dis shit If you put it in a novel, "When you gonna run son?" "I don't know when." "We'll get together then, We'll get you on da clout list then."
He got into office just the other day, Another Daley-man, and I just had to say, "Son, I'm proud of you, now about my bail..." He shook his head (looks like I stay in jail) "What I'd really like, dad, is your sucker list. I'm in need of some ducats dat won't be missed."
Chorus : Another rat's in the boodle, Just like Silver Shovel Nobody'd believe dis shit If you put it in a novel, "When you gonna run son?" "I don't know when." "We'll get together then, We'll get you on da clout list then."
I've since made parole, but now my son's been popped I called him up to see how he copped "I'd like to see you, if you don't mind." He said, "Don't say nuthin weird 'cause they bugged this line. Let's just say my new "job's" a hassle and da "kids" have da "flu" But it's sure nice talking you Dad, it's been real nice talking to you." And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me He'd grown up just like me, An Al-der-man just like me.
Chorus : Another rat's in the boodle, Just like Silver Shovel Nobody'd believe dis shit If you put it in a novel, "When you gonna run son?" "I don't know when." "We'll get together then, We'll get you on da clout list then."
So this is post 2,000, which is a pretty big number. Big enough to be divisible by lots of other reputable numbers, including 1000, which I’m sure is somehow meaningful if you squint at it long enough.
It also means that I have done, on average, around 1.3 posts a day since I started, which explains why I feel like the morning after an alien probe: I’m tired, don’t know what day it is, and my ass hurts.
For the occasion I went back to The News Blog -- my old home place -- to do a little reconnoitering and see if I could find anything of my misspent, uh, youth.
Walking around the old site made sad, as it always does, to see the words hanging there still vibrant and true as they ever were, while at the same time knowing that no more midnights will ever toll when I can come past Steve Gilliard's site confident that he’ll have just laid out yet another freshly BBQed, blogosphere-agenda-setting haunch of Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Victor Davis Hanson, Rich Lowry or Michelle Malkin.
In the end I did find a little something to use today; a comment I left there and Gilly promoted to his front page from back in Thee Olden Days when Liberalism was flat on its back, Steve's powerful writing was keeping a lot of us together, focused and strong, and he was running his comment section 24/7 as the best kind of unabashedly raucous, Dirty Fucking Hippy troll smackin' (Hi, Bloomie!) road house.
All gone now -- June 2 will be the second anniversary of Gilly's death -- but never let it be said that we didn’t stomp upon the terra.
Because we did. We surely did.
Anyway, this is me, from March, 2005.
IMHO it’s as simple as: “Never jump into bed with someone who’s crazier than you are.”
For the Suburban Gated, the non-deranged gunnies and the Tax Cuts Uber Alles Republicans, it’s all jolly good fun having a romp with the Fundies…as long as they keep delivering the 20% margin the GOP must have to win anything and as long as they stay the fuck away from my house and family, its all just good kinky fun…
…until the sun comes up, and you realize that the Electoral Candy you were offered was just bait to get you into the Windowless Fundy Panel Truck.
Oops.
And now you’re waaaay out in the country somewhere you don’t recognize without your pants, and you start to figure our that all the Burning Crosses and Swastikas and Apocalyptic Paraphernalia that tricks out the inside of the van isn't tatted-up Goth Chick posturing.
And Randall Terry and Tom DeLay wave to you from the front seat and say, “Mornin’ shug! Get ready; we gonna burn us some ‘a them Christ Hatin’ Abortionists today.” Or Fags. Or Negroes. Or Liberals. Or Ay-rabs. Or Jews. Or, really, anybody.
And all of the slack-jawed yokels who were so eagerly helpful while you were passing you’re Lovely Tax Cuts are sitting around you giggling…and armed to their snaggled teeth.
And then you hear, “Bring Out The Gimp.” (Which, for my money, should be the Democrats’ Lead Media Message for the next four months.)
Oh. God. You mean these crazy fucks were serious? Like, really, really serious?!
No shit they’re serious, Suburban Weekend Bad-Ass -- and it's not exactly like you weren't given Ample Warning: Now they have your shriveled nuts in a razor-lined C-clamp, they want the very high interest vig on the Electoral Loan they made you to pay for your Optional War and Drunken Safety Net Shredding Good Times.
And now here we are, 2,000 essays later. And taking a very rough, back-of-the-envelope stab at guesstimating the length of a typical post while factoring out tags and code and clips from other sources, I figure that means I have stitched together somewhere between one and two million words (to be fair, they were mostly typos and variation on “fuck”) on this site since the day I hung out my shingle.
From the collapsing probability cloud of the Mouse Circus, there congealed this prototypically absurd exchange between Senator Dick Durbin (D-driftglass’ state) and Newt Gingrich on the damage the existence of Guantanamo Bay has done and continues to do to our international reputation.
Which of course sailed right on by the host of "Meet the Press".
Durbin: I just gave it to you: Major Matthew Alexander, who interrogated the al-Qaeda suspects in Iraq. And it was his conclusion that half of them had been recruited and were fighting, trying to kill Americans because of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. ...
Gingrich: Let me say, first of all, there were over 550,000 troops who served in Iraq. I'm sure you can find one to agree with you. The fact is the 3,100 Americans who were killed on 9/11 were killed before there was a Guantanamo. The recruits who were going into Iraq were going into Iraq long before Guantanamo was, was a serious factor. The people fighting today in Pakistan are fighting Pakistanis. The people--the Taliban who's fighting in Afghanistan, they're not running around using Guantanamo. They're running around using the existence of America. One of the terrorists in Guantanamo recently threw his television down and broke it because he had a picture of a woman with bare arms. I think we are kidding ourselves about who these terrorists are and we're kidding ourselves about the power of this. Guantanamo matters because in America and Europe the left has decided the matter. ...
You could spend a couple of hours closely fact-checking and parsing every way in which this single, oozy slab of trademark Gingrich treachery can be subdivided into individual blocks of mendacity.
From the dismissal of a genuine subject matter expert who directly contradicts Ginrich’s obscene assertions as somehow statistically irrelevant because a bunch of other troops have been to Iraq...
...to the idea that throwing a teevee down makes a person a hardened killer...
All the way to 1974, when Elvis finally got some mental satisfaction by nailing Goulet on TV. It occurred while Elvis was working at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. He was in his top-floor suite when he saw Goulet on TV. Elvis took out his gun, shot the TV, and (according to Allexperts.com) said, “Get that s**t outta my house!”
(SCTV and Chicago’s own “Image Union”
were terrorist training organizations.
(And Frank Zappa was some kind of Talibanish
hatespeechifying inciter of anti-teevee violence.)
...you could spin endless yards of comedy gold from all of the idiotic implications of Gingrich’s idiotic words without ever touching on the key point that whatever “facts” Gingrich didn’t just pull straight out of his ass, he got 180 degrees backwards wrong.
From Washington Monthly:
I had heard that as well, after writing my last post on the subject, and was waiting for confirmation before publishing it. Note not just that neither an objection to bare arms nor any other sort of Islamic fundamentalist anything had anything to do with it, but also that the detainee in question is presently living peaceably in Albania.
That means that even if you don't think, as I do, that it is perfectly understandable that someone who had been imprisoned unjustly for seven and a half years might throw a TV to the ground in frustration, and even if you overlook the many US citizens who have tossed the odd appliance around during (say) a bar fight without thereby showing themselves to be terrorists, there is no need to worry about any TV-throwing Uighurs being released into the US. The only Uighurs still in Guantanamo have never thrown any TVs at all.
Of course Gingrich isn't talking to you or me. He is dog-whistling to the Republican Base; telling them that something as trivial as bashing the idiot box is actually an Ominous Harbinger of the Apocalypse, when brown people and furriners with weird names do it.
Tirelessly preaching is the same tired sermon of xenophobia and racism he has been bleating out for 20 years.
Because Gingrich never intends his “arguments” to be taken seriously. It is not merely that Newt Gingrich is a degenerate liar; rather, as he showed with implacable ferocity back in his wingnut backbench bomb-thrower days, Newt doesn’t give a shit about the truth or falsity of anything at all.
To Gingrich, words are nothing more than the linguistic equivalents of virtual particles:
Virtual particles are subatomic particles that form out of "nothing" (vacuum fields conceptually analogous to lines of force between magnetic poles) for extremely short periods of time and then disappear again. …Virtual particles are real and have measurable effects, but the same uncertainty principle that allows them to come into existence dictates that they cannot be directly observed.
From ordering Republicans to call Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity as a means to create tactical political advantage (and then weeping over how terribly partisan politics has become), to pontificating as a Family Values leader while cheating on his second wife with his third mistress, to ordering a brand new wife and his brand new religion calibrated for optimal electoral value straight out of the GOP “Bride, Faith and Beyond” 2012 campaign catalog…words are nothing to Newt but abstract phonemes to be strung together to make the Pig People dance or shout or vote.
Which, over in the Better Universe, would lead me to be much more optimistically inclined in the direction the incomparable Digby points out here:
One of Newt's biggest problems as a politician is all the stupid things he's said in his career. He makes Biden look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That's why I hope he runs for president.
However we don’t live in the Better Universe. Over here, in the reality we have, Newt is a card-carrying MSM Village insider with a blank check to inexhaustibly churn his hateful, fact-free bullshit out the Mouse Circus C-130 like a thousand cubic yards of radar-reflecting chaff. One week he is peddling his venom as a George Stephanopoulos “panelist” on one network, and the next week his has slithered across the hall to appear a “guest” of NBC’s resident“Meet the Press” Jughead whose silk-gloved handjobbing of pustules like Gingrich makes the eyebrow-arching “Hmmm”-a-thons of the late Tim Russert look positively impaling.
Which winds me back to what Chris Matthews had to say during Matthews’ wide-ranging deep-muscle ego massage at the big, tender hands of Chuckles Rose on his eponymous show Monday (h/t Blue Gal)
Matthews: Some of the bloggers jumped on me an this is what I think explains what some people think of me. When we first went into Iraq...
Rose: What do you think they think about you?
Matthews: The don’t quite get me. First of all, I’m a grown up and they resent that. And secondly, also, I have a job – they don’t like that either. Hehehe. That’s really gonna fester them in anger.
And later…
Matthews: I’m not a Lefty because I’d rather be wrong about something that’s fundamental and have it good for my country. I wanted to be wrong [about Iraq]. That’s why I’m different than these bloggers and these people that are so cocksure about themselves. I’d rather have my country succeed than be right.
Looking back over the last four-plus years, I find that I have now done between 150 and 170 (depending on how you keep score) of these Sunday Morning after-action, bomb damage assessments. And from the very start, SCMD was never going to be a transcriptional analysis because the Mouse Circus is kabuki theater, and merely transcribing that which has already come right out of the can thoroughly pre-scripted seemed a waste of time and pixels.
No, the Mouse Circus deserves to be treated as what it is: is a weekly Member’s Only puppet show where trail balloons are launched, Approved Talking Point rations are doled out, and impotent millionaires feign passion for one side of fake controversy or another and rub their wizened political genitalia all over each other in stilted orgies of mock public discourse.
The entire news business is dominated by financial considerations. In fact it’s probably more accurate to say that the business is dominated by financial desperation. TV networks routinely run blatant advertorials about new “miracle cures” or product launches (new movie releases are a classic example). Moreover they routinely ignore important news stories if they don’t offer an angle that sells. The whole industry, I mean the entire news industry, missed the financial crisis, and do you know why? I know why. Because there wasn’t a single news organization in the country that could afford to put boring mortgages on the front page.
The game was well and truly lost when Fox proved it could carve out the first new network in 40 years and steal market share from the Big Three by vertically integrating soft core porn, raunchy cartoons and Archie Bunker News. It was lost when the Big Three –- panicked by the hemorrhaging loss of Low Information/High Bigotry viewers and their billions of dollars in buying power -– began openly pandering to the opinions of demagogues and degenerates under the fig leaf of “objective” journalism.
You know Chris, of all the tawdry, narcissistic little lies you and your craven brethren tell each other about why you botched your professional responsibilities so catastrophically during the Age of Bush, the most disgraceful is that you somehow failed because of an excessive love of country. That your massive, throbbing patriotism compensates for your massive, throbbing fuck-ups and your superiority to the childlike, jobless Lefties of your shallow imagination somehow exists in direct proportion to the immense scale of your dereliction “because [you’d] rather be wrong about something that’s fundamental and have it good for [you’re] country.”
Chris, I don’t know a single angry Lefty blogger who wouldn’t dearly love to have been wrong about the last eight years, precisely because we saw what a disaster was waiting for us at the bottom of the abyss into which the Cheny Torture Administration was plunging rhe nation. We saw the car being driven off a cliff by a drunk and tried every way we knew how to warn everyone who would listen.
Mostly we got called traitors and were told to shut up.
You, on the other hand, sold your professional soul to a smirking chimp because he looked like a flight suit.
Chief among the cheerleaders was MSNBC's Chris Matthews. On the May 1, 2003, edition of Hardball, Matthews was joined in his effusive praise of Bush by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter and "Democrat" Pat Caddell. Former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-CA) also appeared on the program.:
MATTHEWS: What's the importance of the president's amazing display of leadership tonight?
[...]
MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?
[...]
MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.
[...]
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?
[...]
MATTHEWS: Ann Coulter, you're the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president's performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan -- what do you think?
COULTER: It's stunning. It's amazing. I think it's huge. I mean, he's landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It's tremendous. It's hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn't matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It's stunning, and it speaks for itself.
MATTHEWS: Pat Caddell, the president's performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?
CADDELL: Well, first of all, Chris, the -- I think that -- you know, I was -- when I first heard about it, I was kind of annoyed. It sounded like the kind of PR stunt that Bill Clinton would pull. But and then I saw it. And you know, there's a real -- there's a real affection between him and the troops.
[...]
MATTHEWS: The president there -- look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown --
CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.
MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.
CADDELL: Yes. It's a -- I don't know. You know, it's an internal thing. I don't know if you can put it into words. [...] You can see it with him and the troops, the ease with which he talks to them. I was amazed by that, frankly, because as I said, I was originally appalled, particularly when I heard he was going in an F-18. But -- on there -- but the -- but you know, that was --
MATTHEWS: Look at this guy!
CADDELL: -- was hard not to be moved by their reaction to him and his reaction to them and --
MATTHEWS: You know, Ann --
CADDELL: -- you know, they -- it's a quality. It's an innate quality. It's a real quality.
MATTHEWS: I know. I think you're right.
Later that day, on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Matthews said:
MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.
No, Chris, you failed because you were a chump. You and your colleagues failed because you refused to commit the considerable resources at your disposal to do the very job for which you are so massively overcompensated: the job of digging and digging and digging. Of asking really hard questions of powerful people when it is unpopular to do so.
What I don’t have -- what no bloggers have, Chris -- is NBC or ABC paying me a small fortune every week to put on a fucking puppet show. I don’t have staff. Research assistants. Interns. Any of that. What I have are several jobs which, when splinted together, keep me from falling into the maw of unemployment and poverty slightly more slowly than would otherwise be the case.
What I do have is a constant and rising sense of rage and tragedy at how deeply and brutally our media has failed us. How, time and again, the men and women in the shiny hair, $1,000 suits and seven-figure salaries have abandoned us. Have taken their 30 pieces of silver to sell our democracy into the hands of its loudest and most malignant internal enemies.
What I don’t have is access to Newt Gingrich...or David Gregory…or Chris Matthews. Or anyone who knows them. Or anyone who knows anyone who knows them. So what I cannot do is get a straight answer to the very simple question: Why in the fuck are depraved ambulatory snafus and serial liars like Newt Gingrich given a major media platform week after week after week? And why doesn’t anyone anywhere have the balls to actually ask the sonofabitch anything remotely resembling a real question?
The bloggers I know, Chris, are all grownups. They are moms and mechanics. Teachers and tradesmen. Students and singers. Writers and waiters. Comedians. Techies. Cube rats and counselors. Lawyers and secretaries. Anything and everything you can think of.
The bloggers I know are the kind of good, hard-working Americans who live every day one cracked axle or broken arm away from penury, and what they have in abundance is stress, shrinking wages and mounting bills.
What they do not have are lavishly-funded front organizations like Gingrich’s “American Solutions for Winning the Future” into which wealthy patrons can dump tens of millions of dollars to underwrite their political agendas such as (Source: the essential IRS Political Organization Filing and Disclosure site. All amounts represent aggregate year-to-date contributions for the third and fourth quarters of 2008)...
A tiny sampling from year-to-date September 2008 reporting:
International Speedway Corp (In a flurry of $4,600 and $8,200 third quarter contributions) -- $ 57,200
Bernie Marcus -- The Marcus Foundation $ 250,000
Mr. Frank Hanna -- World Wide Assets, Inc. $ 80,000
Sheldon Adelson -- Las Vegas Sands Corp. $ 2,933,660 ...
A tiny sampling from year-to-date December 2008 reporting:
Charles Schwab -- Charles Schwab & Company $ 50,000
Mr. John M. Templeton Jr. -- John Templeton Foundation $ 11,200
Seeme Hasan $ 10,000
...
The bloggers I know have nothing remotely like that financial artillery at their command.
They also do not have the most important thing that money can buy: Time.
And yet what they do, Chris, virtually every fucking day of their lives is the one thing that your peers in the Villager somehow cannot bestir themselves to bother with; steal a few minutes out of each day -- maybe in the morning before the kids are up and absorbing every erg they’ve got, or at the end of another long day laboring in the deepening shadow of bankruptcy -- to perform that most basic and sacred rite of citizenship.
Staying informed.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
They take what little time and energy they have left from their depleted reserves and try to make sense of the world around them.
Try to rapidly read and listen and to mine a little bit of truth from a media that traffics in deception and distraction. Usually exhausted and often deeply frightened by a world we see falling to rags and rubble around us, we learned the hard lesson of the last 16 years of progressively more pathetic and shamelessly corporate media.
That we are on our own.
That if we want to glean some facts and context from the feculent tsunami of spin and bullshit and “America Idol” and runaway cancer kids that is the Big Dollar media, the self-important, process-addicted, status-quo defending, penis-obsessed-but-torture-ignoring, wildly overpaid children of the Village are the very last people on Earth we can trust.
So instead of giving up we push back. We set out alone or in little groups -- usually with few resources beyond the money in our pockets and the shirts on our backs -- across a vast and hostile cultural landscape where we are constantly harassed and belittled by an entire menagerie of malefactors of great wealth whose power depends entirely on creating and maintaining toxic levels of public ignorance and fear.
We make this lonely, exhausted pilgrimage because we are desperate to figure out what to make of the world in which we live, and to share what we learn as best we can with our friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.
Because -- as we learned from our mothers and fathers and elementary school teachers long ago -- that is what good Americans do.
It is just about as pure and Capraeqsue an act of citizenship as I can think of, Chris.
Which is probably why it seems so angry and alien to you.
If you’re not from around here you may not know that the City of Chicago recently sold off its parking meter franchise to private contractors for a billion dollars and change. The deal was cut secretly, hurriedly (almost frantically) and for a fraction of what the meters are worth. And instead of allowing a decent, figleafing interval to pass to allow Da Mare to get all red-faced and pretend that He Din't Know Nuttin! the parking company instead jacked rates through the roof before the ink on their sweetheart contract had even dried, thus thoroughly fucking over the very citizens on whose behalf the deal had allegedly been rammed through, and stranding City Hall without a plausible alibi.
Which, for anyone who has not grown up under the pervasive, ethically smothering pall of the Chicago Machine, would raise some obvious questions. Like, f’rinstance, where in the Hell did an elected official ever get the balls to think he could hock public assets for a quick buck in the first place?
Because that is all this is: boosting something that you and I already paid for and fencing it like a hot car.
Outsourcing public services makes a ruthless kind of sense only when those services can be provided to the citizenry more efficiently and at lower cost. But a parking meter isn’t some high-end web design project or complex social program. It is a pure revenue-generator already; an iron box that exists solely to move money from your pocket into the City’s coffers. And without a coherent ethical framework or theory of government, the prudent outsourcing of a few services quickly becomes a mindless, piecemeal fire sale of every damned thing in a desperate rush to raise quick cash (and occasionally kneecapping a local union).
Fail Part II: One Billion Dollars.New evidence suggests Chicago leased out its parking meters for a fraction of what they’re worth.
In April the Reader documented how the Daley administration hid its process for privatizing the city’s parking meters from the public and the City Council. Now, three months into the deal, the city still won’t explain how it determined what the deal was worth—and new evidence suggests the taxpayers were hosed out of billions of dollars.
By Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke
When Daley administration officials announced in December that they were leasing out the city’s parking meters for nearly $1.16 billion over 75 years to a consortium of investors headed by Morgan Stanley, they assured the media and anyone else who asked that this was a great deal for taxpayers in economic hard times.
... On February 8, 2008, the city announced that it was looking for qualified firms interested in leasing the meters. In words that would come back to haunt him, Paul Volpe, Daley’s chief financial officer at the time, said a private company would do a better job of running the meter system. He said the lease would probably last 50 years.
DePaul professor H. Woods Bowman, an expert in public finance who in the early 90s served as chief financial officer of Cook County, says the idea didn’t make much sense to him. “The argument in favor of selling public assets is that a lot of the assets aren’t tied to the core functions of the government, or that there are cost inefficiencies associated with them,” he says. “Parking [policy] ought to be a core function of the city, and there are no appreciable operating efficiencies to be gained here. It only costs the city a couple of million dollars a year to run the system.”
... By their own admission, most of the aldermen at the meeting had not seen the proposed contract, but it probably wouldn’t have clarified matters—the formula it offers for determining what the city would lose in these circumstances is based on a complicated set of calculations involving “the then current Metered Parking Fee, Period of Operation, Period of Stay, Rate to Fine Multiple Factor and Expected Utilization Rate.”
Even without this information, the city council voted 40-5 to approve the deal, and within weeks Chicago Parking Meters as much as quadrupled hourly rates at meters all over town, igniting outrage among motorists. …
By using mathematical theories, the American scholar Jonathan Bendor proves the great value of independent thinking and the limitations of decision makers. When leaders are too busily occupied with myriad state affairs, institutional methods can be used to ease their cognitive constraints, by seeking wise solutions from among the people and encouraging independent thinking in government officials. But in a totalitarian country, such institutional methods do not and cannot exist.
Most power-holders in such countries are fond of dictatorship. Each of them puts forward his “ideas” and “theories” when it is his turn to rule the country, hoping to see his thought adopted as the “guideline” to unify the thinking of the whole nation. Acting in this way, they deprive themselves of the kind of wisdom and talent that are needed to solve the thorny problems facing the country. As a bunch of dumbbells, they can not help becoming an object of ridicule among the people. ...
Of course, as is the case with calculatedly opaque monarchies, none but the Leader’s courtiers can say for sure how this particular dodgy and bone-headed decision transpired.
However, knowing for certain that decisions of great importance are often made in a hurry, with pencils on the backs of envelopes in meetings on the 5th floor of City Hall at which no minutes are ever kept, we can have some fun with an occasional new feature I’m calling The Dramatization of Events Unknown.
Our dramatis personæ today are Da Mare
And Mr. Paul Volpe, hizzoner’s current chief of staff, former budget warlock, and the grim enforcer of the Boss’ will.
City Hall. Night. Phone rings. It’s the boss.
Hello boss.
Hey Volpe.
Uh….what can I do for you?
So da thig is, I need a billion dollars. For da people. Ah Chicago.
Volpe (forcing a weak laugh): What happened to the last billion I gave you? I told you not to spend it all in one place.
Long silence.
You tryin’ to be funny, Volpe?
The chief stays quiet. If they don’t want to be dispatched to the Great Limbo of city college administration for eternity, this is a skill chiefs of staff for Da Great City Ah Chicago learn very quickly.
‘Cause you ain’t funny, Volpe. You never been funny.
Yes boss.
So what about dis billion which your Mare needs for da people ah Chicago.
Well boss, we’re broke. I mean, we told everybody we’re broke. We fired people. We’re going to fire more people. I don’t see how we can keep crying poormouth one day and then pulling money out of thin air the next?
I read the fucking papers, Volpe, and none a dat’s your problem. You problem is getting’ me my billion dollars. For da people. Ah Chicago.
But I’m not the budget guy, boss.
Really?
No.
Well who is?
I don’t know.
How do you not know dat!?
I…I don’t know why I don’t know.
Ain’t it dat Johnson guy?
He quit. Last year.
Oh yeah. Da shower ting. Look, Volpe, it don’t matter whedder I call you chief ah staff or da King ah Monkey Island. You’re my money guy. Unless you got an itch to maybe run a dog grooming programming over at Malcolm X?
No boss.
Ever’body loves dogs.
No thanks boss.
An I hear a guy can make some good money givin’ dog haircuts. ‘Specially dose big dogs. What’re dey called?
I dunno boss.
Guess.
(sigh) Afghan?
Nah.
Kuvasz?
Nah.
Giant Schnauzer?
Nah.
Komondor?
Nah.
Anatolian Shepherd Dog?
Nah.
Bouvier des Flandres?
Nah.
Burkina Flopping Hound?
Dat ain't a real dog.
Leonberger?
Nah.
Bullmastiff?
Nah.
I give up boss.
But how do you not know dis information if you’re gonna give dog haircuts? Unless now you’re tellin’ me now you don’t wanna give dogs haircuts?
That’s right boss.
An’ what’s your title again?
King of Monkey Island.
So when am I gonna get my billion? For da people. Ah Chicago.
I can have a proposal on your desk in, uh, three days.
You got five minutes.
(There ensues a four-minute pause.)
We could sell something.
Whad’ya got left on da list?
Buildings?
Nah.
Beaches?
Nah.
Ad space on police cars?
We're savin’ dat one for da Olympics.
“Win a Date With a Committee Chair”?
Who you got?
Mell or…Beavers.
Oh for da love ah God.
So…no?
No.
Median strips.
Nah.
Parking?
Well….if you really think so.
Sure. I mean, uh, definitively. Definitely.
So are you tellin' me you recommend we sell da meters? For da people. Ah Chicago.
I do. Absolutely. Of course we’re gonna need the Council on this. You think that’ll be a problem?
(Four minutes of uninterrupted laughter)
I don’t care what udder people say about you, Volpe. You’re a funny guy.
Boehner Raises Alarm Over Gitmo Detainees Katie Connolly
House Majority Leader John Boeher penned an op-ed that appeared this morning in USA Today urging Americans to support the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act". This legislation aims to prevent the transfer of detainees from Gitmo to the United States. It would require the President to seek approval from a state's Governor and legislature before transferring any Gitmo prisoner to a U.S. facility. Obama would also have to demonstrate to Congress that prisoners don't represent a security threat. The Act is an attempt to undermine the President's pledge to close Gitmo within the first year of his presidency. And the op-ed is an exercise in fear-mongering. Boehner writes:
Unless the president reverses course, more than 200 of the world's most dangerous terrorists soon will be released or transferred from the Guantanamo Bay prison. Where they will end up is anyone's guess; even the administration won't say. Nonetheless, it's possible that some may be imported into America, the country they have dedicated their lives to destroying.
That's alarming to an overwhelming majority of Americans, a growing consensus in Congress, and even Democratic Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, who opposed it as Kansas governor. That's why House Republicans are building support for the Keep Terrorists Out of America Act.
These are not common criminals. Not when you consider that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), suspected mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, who allegedly trained the hijackers, are detained at Guantanamo. Simply put, importing them would be a strategic mistake and an incredible risk — one that Americans have every right to be concerned about, which is why more and more states and communities are speaking out against it.
...
It must make the hundreds of thousands of public servants who work their asses off every day in the dangerous professions of law enforcement and corrections so very proud to know that Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner believes they are a bunch of bungling rubes, so casual about their duties that this
is the best the citizens of the United State should expect from them by way of protection from human predators.
Except, of course,
on pick-along night.
The criminal justice system kept mass murderer John Gacy safely contained for the 14 years between the date of his conviction and the date of his execution, and the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin kept the public perfectly safe from serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer until the day he was clubbed to death inside the prison.
A partial list of Florence’s current and former residents includes;
Ramzi Yousef: 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirator, convicted and serving a life term.
Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski: Domestic terrorist, serving life.
Omar Abdel-Rahman: "The Blind Sheik" involved in 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now prisoner #34892-054.
Mahmud Abouhalima: Prisoner #28064-054. 1993 World Trade Center bombing implication. Serving 240 years in prison with no possibility of parole.
Eric Rudolph: cop-killer, domestic terrorist and anti-gay/anti-abortion Wingnut Hero First Class, now serving two consecutive life terms without parole (murdering a police officer) and three consecutive life terms (Atlanta bombings). Prisoner #18282-058.
Mohammad Salameh: 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Matthew Hale: White supremacist leader, convicted of soliciting the murder of a federal judge. The World Church of the Creator’s Reichfuhrer is now know as 15177-424.
Ahmad Ajaj: 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Serving a 115-year sentence.
Timothy McVeigh: America’s top domestic terrorist was #12076-064 and kept safe and sound in a deep, dark hole at Florence until he was executed on June 11, 2001.
Wadih el-Hage: 1998 United States embassy bombings now serving life without parole.
David Lane: Another home-grown wingnut Neo-Nazi hero who was involved in the murder of Alan Berg and was inmate l12873-057 until the day he died.
Zacarias Moussaoui: 9/11 hijacking plotter and prisoner #51427-054.
Terry Nichols: Oklahoma City bombing conspirator and mass-murderer now inmate #08157-031. Doing 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Richard Reid: Thought he could blow up a plane with a shoe, and will now rot in prison until the end of his life.
So enough with the infantile lies and fearmongering bullshit.
The United States has been routinely keeping honest-to-God, “I live to kill Americans” terrorists -- both domestic and imported -- walled up as tight as Fortunato for decades, and no one on the Right said “boo” about it. Only after The Evil Socialist Black Guy threatened to start shutting down their extra-judicial playpen did Conservative war criminals like Cheney and Conservative sock-puppets like Boehner suddenly decide that Federal Bureau of Prisons was too fucking inept to do the very job for which it was created.
Which makes Boehner’s knowledge of the criminal justice system second only to his
File under: Bill Kristol’s work product is related to “journalism” as a child’s drawing of a termite taking a dump is related to “tree”.
From the day in 2006 when Time magazine hired Bill Kristol to phone in an occasional, feeble, flaccid column, to the day the New York Times hired Bill Kristol to get his intern to phone in an even more blindingly insipid caricature of what a Kristol column would look like if Kristol could write, you could see where this extended performance art experiment in telling the Second Longest Journalism Joke in history was going.
Yesterday -- with the column the “What Did Rahm Know?” in which Bloody Billy tries to expand the circumference of the GOP-distract-o-matic non-troversy of Nancy Pelosi to include Rahm Emanuel (“[Leon Panetta] surely at least ran the letter by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to get clearance. It’s also possible that Panetta was encouraged to send the letter by Emanuel.”) – the punch line arrived.
Empty the paper chip pan from of any library circulation desk three-hole-punch into a sheet to gluey newsprint and you will get a more coherent and readable product.
Get a cord of lumber piss-drunk and let it stagger around on a page and you’ll end up with prose more supple and wise.
Clearly Kristol’s intern has at last turned the job of phoning it in over to some cousin’s girlfriend’s bored kid brother who assembles it from charcoal rubbings from various of men’s rooms where Kristol may or may not have once drunkenly scribbled down something raunchy.
And yet, week after week, as hundreds of talented journalists are jettisoned into professional oblivion, the Bloody Billy parody column continues to find a place of honor in one of America's premier daily newspapers.
Way to commit to the gag, WaPo!
I salute you.
Of course this is something the uptight quality control goons at the New York Times would never permit.
So in addition to being the petulant, foot-dragging martinet who “impaired administration performance on a host of matters extending well beyond Iraq” from blocking time-critical assistance from being sent into the Katrina disaster zone to refusing to play nice with our allies...one of Rummy’s other enduring legacies was tarting up Dubya’s daily briefings on our ongoing and decisive victory over Eurasia in Iraq with festive Bible-verse cover pages.
... At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—“would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages. ...
And so, in the interest of explaining to the Decider in language he can understand why he and the rest of the Cheney Torture Administrations will go down in history as the worst Presidency ever:
This...
And this...
And, of course, this...
(Click each pic for larger)
Because apparently the only two things capable of crossing the Decider’s blood/brain barrier are Jack Daniels and the Book of Revelations.
Even though the official Drag Queen Name Generator of the 2012 Olympics gives his proper nom de hey-now as "Sofonda Cox", today when Dick Cheney strapped a funny blond wig to his head and went abroad among the living on “This Week”, he used the lady-with-man-junk name of "Liz". Either way, he fooled no one.
Republican Chris Wallace and Republican Mitch McConnell threw a Fair and Balanced hen-party on Republican “Fox News Sunday” about whether or not Nancy Pelosi is a big, stinky poo-headed poopy pooington!
Turns out they think she is.
The acid-blow "Our Lady of the Dolphins" -- Peggy Noonan -- used part of her time on “Meet the Press” to opine that "Dazed and confused is a bad way for a speaker of the House to look. ." Later she said something like "...I, I think as regular Americans who don't obsess on politics sort of walk by the teevee screen and pick things up here...you’ve got Cool Hand Luke...there’s so much stuff...spaghetti against the wall...it’s head-spinning...a sense of flurry...not do the flurry, and worry about the cost, the cost, the cost."
Then she stared at the lines on her hands for four hours, remarked how much skin looked like interlocking crystals when you really, really just, y'know, LOOK at it, suddenly screamed "Diamonds! We're all made of diamonds!", ran out of the studio and into traffic where she was hit by a dolphin driving a gelato wagon playing "Kashmir"
at 120 decibels.
Or so I am told.
In his signature, aging-hustler-desperately-peddling-gold-painted-turds-in-a-downpour kind of way, Mikey Steele somehow managed to used his time on “Meet the Press”to bash his way ever deeper into that thicket of double-talking Republican failure and hypocrisy out of which he was supposed to be clawing his Party. Because, yes kiddies, he really did cite Christie Todd Whitman -- who bailed out of the Bush GOP six years ago over Dick Cheney's pig-headed anti-environmentalism and then wrote a book about it two years later -- as evidence of how tolerant and broad-minded Republicans are.
Of course this big, fat, slow pitch of an opportunity for Real Journalism sailed right past David Gregory, presumably because no one had written in Big Letters on his index cards before the show.
Predicting 100 percent Steele component failure in 3...2...1...
300 million Americans and these waxwork dummies are the best we can do.
A trillion dollar media industry and this is the best we can buy.
You could search the whole teevee wasteland and not find a more visually perfect metaphor for why we need a Truth and Retribution Committee to open a whole separate suite of hearings on why our media is so toxically top-heavy with swine: the one guy who has the facts -- David Waldman -- outnumbered, shunted off to a CNN webcast, and literally girded on three sides by the three sock puppets bleating the three eternally favorite flavors of wingnut denialism:
1. Fake outrage over some trivial aspect of a horrendous story (whining like a titty baby over the fucking choice of metaphor.)
2. You hateses the troopses you Liberal troop hater!
3. You are some fringe nut, out of step with Real Murricans (Our slanted polls show that no one cares!)
Waldman does a terrific job, but it underscores just how much of a train wreck our media has become that when faced with the job of comprehending and analyzing what is potentially the most important new information about the Iraq War in years, the best they can manage is stuff it into a webcast of bobble-head Hollywood Squares.
In Dick Cheney's America the real world does not exist. Facts are irrelevant: Two plus two equals Jebus and gravity is optional if one of Dubya's signing statements says it is, which is why the inhumane ideology of Neo-Conservatism married up so perfectly with the inhumane theology of Christopatic Conservatism: because both groups are violently delusional in exactly the same way, and both groups hate the guardians of fact and reason with equal frenzy.
In Dick Cheney's America, the real world is simply an infinitely malleable, three-dimensional projection of whatever the latest ideologically incarnation of "Team B"
And because Dick Cheney's ideology is oligarchy, he and his co-conspirators picked the oil-richest target available; one already crippled by embargo, pre-demonized and fattened up for the kill.
Bush 'plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN plane'
By Andy McSmith
Friday, 3 February 2006
George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.
The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though privately they were convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
And when the Cheney Torture Administration couldn't head-fake Saddam Hussein into attacking us?
Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.
By Joe Conason
May. 14, 2009
The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.
Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney’s direction, "enhanced interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence -- the aims that he constantly emphasizes -- but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.
In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida’s operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam’s Baath Party and Osama bin Laden’s jihadists). Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA's black sites in Thailand and elsewhere. ...
Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions -- and in particular the questionable assertions by al-Libi -- were highlighted by administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in Colin Powell’s crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, the eve of the war. ...
Face it, if Turner-Diary-Conservative-Fantasy-League-Hero Tim McVeigh had waited until the Age of Bush to murder 168 Americans, within 24 hours of being caught he, his entire family, and everyone he'd ever had lunch with would have been whisked off to windowless rooms and blowtorched until one of them "confessed" that, yes, they were in fact all part of an Iraqi sleeper cell operating under the direct control of Uday Hussein.
-- As had everything else leading up to that point, the invasion and occupation would have been planned by rabid NeoCon zealots using an ideological checklist rather that by prudent realists using sound military doctrine.
-- As events spiraled out of control, the Cheney Torture Administration would again and again use the power of the office of Commander-in-Chief and it's paid liars in the media to keep the fear of the America people cranked up to unbearable levels.
You and I live in a country where the same people who lost their fucking minds when one President lied about a blowjob now smirk and shuck and shrug off the fact that their Dear Leader tortured people into giving him a "We've always been at war with Eastasia" predicate for a war which he subsequently clusterfucked up so irredeemably that you and I will be paying the price for it for the next 20 years.
Every day it becomes ever clearer that we and they cannot coexist, because after 30 years of close observation we can no longer afford the Liberal luxury of pretending the Right is simply stubborn or misguided. Whatever they might have been long ago, 30 winnowing years of relentless propaganda and fear-mongering has eliminated anyone with a conscience from their ranks, leaving behind a very loud and literally single-minded legion of moral automatons, obediently following their leaders' incitements to build fortresses out of fanaticism and cathedrals out of cruelty.
They are the ticking time-bombs strapped to the central pillars of our democracy.
And the one currently ticking the loudest is named Richard Bruce Cheney.
IRS slaps Todd Stroger with lien Cook County president urged to come clean about back-tax issue
By Hal Dardick
Tribune reporter
May 14, 2009
Cook County Board President Todd Stroger's political problems with taxes hit closer to home Wednesday when a potential primary challenger called on him to stop stonewalling about his failure to pay nearly $12,000 in federal income taxes.
In March, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien on Stroger's South Side home with the county recorder of deeds for $11,668.10 in taxes Stroger and his wife, Jeanine, apparently failed to pay in 2007.
Stroger spokesman Eugene Mullins issued a statement saying "arrangements were made by the Stroger family to settle the debt." It went on to say Stroger would make no further comment, although another spokesman later said Stroger might address it Thursday.
The unpaid-taxes issue surfaced just days after Stroger blocked county commissioners' attempt to repeal a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax hike Stroger pushed through last year. With the Democratic primary less than nine months away, one potential Stroger foe called for an explanation.
...
Stroger drew a county salary of $170,000 in 2007, his first full year on the job. Jeanine Stroger, who works 24 hours a week as deputy personnel director in charge of equal employment opportunity for the secretary of state, received $57,146.40 the same year.
Bwahahahaha!
If you want to know why every single fucking nickel of Obama Administration stimulus and recovery money coming to Illinois is going to arrive under guard and will be policed by phalanxes of auditors carrying four-blade high speed steel anal-probes with the optional taser attachments...it is shit like this.
Because we in Illinois are apparently congenitally unable to stop ourselves from handing power over two-bit clowns, and then, when those clowns outsource their mortal coil and head to dat great Manny's Deli in da sky, we hand that power off to their kids.
Which, when times are good and the cotton is high, gets laughed off as funny in the same way "Night of the Lepus" is funny.
As some sort of cult, camp, hi-larious regional political humor that you have to be from here to really "get".
That's when times are good.
But times are no longer good. They are, in fact, very bad. The city, county and state are all broke and yet they are all being run by goofs.
And billions in Obama Money is on the way.
And every savvy political mind in the White House has got to know that if any of that dough -- borrowed very reluctantly from our children to save the nation in its hour of gravest need -- appears to be getting pissed down our usual pay-to-play, pal-and-patronage ratholes, then every failed Republican 2008 campaign rant about Chicago Machine politics will come roaring back at 120 decibels, and the President from Illinois will suddenly find himself facing an angry, hungry, turbo-crazy GOP into whose hands the cronies, charlatans and cut-purses of the Illinois Political Combine will have placed a very real and potent weapon.
As much as I might wish they had simply perished under the sheer weight of their own depravity, one cannot cannot underestimated the deleterious effect on earlier bigot coalitions of looking really bad on teevee. The camera does not love pasty, sneering, bloated, tick-riddled rednecks, which is why the post-Nixon GOP has always kept an eye out for Teh Compliant Stupid sporting good tits and fuck-me hair.
For some reason, I was getting transmissions from the Bizarro Universe again Sunday.
I blame my off-brand digital teevee antenna.
(Consumer advisory: Never buy tech out of the back of this guy’s truck:
His dimensional disaggregators never work as advertised, his return policy is terrible, and the dozen different kinds of Imperial entanglements you let yourself in for are not worth what you save.)
Over in the Bizarro Universe, instead of Mother’s Day, apparently May 10th is “Take Your Disgraced Autocrat To Work” Day.
But first, on the local Pre-Fox, I heard what had to be, pound for pound, the biggest whopper of the morning.
However it does requires a little lead up.
You see, once upon a time there was a family named Daley…
And the House of Daley wanted to rule a city called Chicago, but to do that they had to find a way to tamp down/co-opt African-American voters.
Enter John Stroger, a Democratic Machine lieutenant who parlayed a willingness to be the Daley's African American electoral flotation device into a series of sweet gigs, starting as Ward Committeeman, then Cook County Board Commissioner, finally culminating in his election as Maximum President for Life of the Cook County Board.
All of which also meant County employment for life for the roughly 7,200 members of the Stroger family, inner circle, outer circle, way, way outer circle (more of an acquaintance exurb, really) as well as assorted chums, buds, well-wishers, high school pals, ex-girlfriend’s cousins and co-conspirators...as well as insuring that Cook would take home the prize for Most Flagrantly Corrupt, Crony-Riddled, Wasteful National Embarrassment of a County Government year after year after year.
So we’ve got that going for us.
Then time passed, as it will, and Old Man Daley died and, as is the charmingly monarchical custom here in Illinois, after being loaned out to various alarmingly non-Daley-type personages, Da Mare’s office was finally handed over to the Heir Presumptive – Richie Daley –
along with various other properties and entitlements including the deed to John Stroger.
Then time passed, as it will, and Old Man Stroger died and, as is the charmingly monarchical custom here in Illinois, Da Commissioner’s office was handed over to the Heir Presumptive – Little Todd Stroger.
And it all would have worked out soooo very well were it not for two facts:
1. Years of flaccid and comically incompetent management had left Cook County both dead-assed broke and wildly overstocked with Stroger-appointed meatsicles , and
2. Little Todd Stroger’s unfortunate and uncanny resemblance to a weasel in every significant detail, except in the areas of thrift and candor where, well, let’s just say, “Weasel 2: Stroger 0”.
Which means that, for the House of Daley, their Stroger Electoral Flotation Device had become the Stroger 1,000 Pound Radioactive Albatross.
A Tribune reader has asked today if Chicago is a monarchy and Mayor Daley its ruler. The answer is uncertain, but what is certain is that the Mayor has thrown one of his jesters under the bus. Or at least that's how Todd Stroger likely sees it, despite the Mayor's assertions to the contrary. …
And so, the biggest whopper told by anyone this Sunday?
“The Daley's don't determine who gets elected.”
Spoken aloud and with a perfectly straight face by John Daley -- the affable Billy Baldwin of the Daley Clan -- who is also the 11th Ward Democratic Committeeman, a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, the Chair of the Cook County Board Audit and Finance Committee, defender of the faith, son of Richard the First, and brother to Mayor For Life Richard J. Daley, and Bill Daley, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, former President, Chair and/or Board Member of a dozen America’s the most powerful banks and corporations, and the sixth Earl of Cloutington.
And that is as normal as Sunday got, because right after came the mysterious broadcasts from the Bizarro Universe.
On Bizarro “Face the Nation” the guest was Dick Cheney: Maverick Truth-Shouter.
On Bizarro “This Week”George Stephanopoulos traded bon mots with John McSame: Sober-Minded Elder Statesman.
On Bizarro “Meet the Press” Hamid Karzai, is not a failed American puppet living under siege as the de facto Mayor of Kabul, but the wildly popular President of Afghanistan, while Asif Ali Zardari is large and in-charge in Pakistan, and not some delusional stick-figure who has succumbed so thoroughly to AIG-flu that he has to be regularly bribed with whopping big wads of US taxpayer dollars into defending his own country from armed madmen who are eating it alive from within.
On Permanently Bizarro “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace created a soothing, metronomic atmosphere by treating us all to his world-famous Drinking Bird imitation
while Double-Sooper-Maverick Anti-Partisanship Crusader Newt Gingrich alerted us all to the fact that the Obama White House is the Worst!Partisan!Bunch! since the McCarthy Era.
…“protect terrorists” and “make Americans less safe”. …give terrorists welfare. …give terrorists lawyers! For free! …let terrorists be citizens after a year. …let terrorists fuck your sister!
Which -- while I appreciate Newt’s calm and timely words of caution -- was weirdly dissonant, considering that over in the Bizarro Universe, there obviously is no Obama Administration.
Based on population sampling take at the Mouse Circus, over in the Bizarro Universe, Republican policies are apparently still very popular.
In the Bizarro Universe, Democrats did not whip Republicans in two back-to-back elections.
In the Bizarro Universe, Conservative policies were not proven to be abject failures.
In the Bizarro Universe, Conservative leaders were not shown to be liars, useless human botchworks or outright traitors by years of serial, terrifying avalanches of unstoppable reality.
Instead they occupy every chair on every show and fill the air with their stern, reassuring, 13th Century wisdom.
