Michael Bloomberg’s gamble with opprobrium

Michael Bloomberg's 6,000-or-so square foot beach shack in Bermuda.
He escapes there frequently via private jet, usually to play golf. Sound familiar?

In quite a few ways, Michael Bloomberg is simply Donald Trump Lite.

Trump has Mar e Lago. Bloomberg has a waterfront estate called Stokes Bay, in Bermuda.

Trump, when he’s not tweeting obsessively, plays golf obsessively. Ditto Bloomberg when he’s in Bermuda. In fact, “obsessively” is just the word the New York Times used to describe Bloomberg’s golfing behavior there.

Perhaps more pertinently, neither man has demonstrated much respect for established law. With Trump I wouldn’t know where to begin. With Bloomberg, I know where it all might end. After New York City’s voters approved mayoral term limits by referendum, Bloomberg overrode the referendum by a tricky political maneuver. He essentially bribed New York City Council members by granting them an extra term as well. 

Bloomberg's excuse for flipping his own city's inhabitants the bird was that he needed a third term to fix the city's financial crisis. He alone could do it! Does that sound familiar? 

The 120-year-old President?

So much for the will of the people, and possibly for presidential term limits. If Bloomberg, now 77 years old, lives to be 120, we could have a 120-year-old President of the United States.

Would Bloomberg be a better president than Trump? Absolutely yes, for the same reason that getting bitten on the ankle by a rabid pig would be better than getting crushed to death and then swallowed by a boa constrictor. 

Bloomberg has already placed “at least” $37 million worth of advertising, CNN reported recently. Even billionaires don’t throw that kind of money around just to hear the sound of money bags knocking network advertising sales managers off their feet.

That’s also why, just for starters, Los Angelinos who watch the local news on NBC in the afternoon or evening could be seeing nine ads for Michael Bloomberg every day, according a tweet from Shane Goldmacher, a New York Times political reporter.

Moreover, Bloomberg’s sudden apology to the African-American community, for 12 years of stop-and-frisking black people for the offense of being outdoors while black, rang loud with almost the same total lack of sincerity that marks Donald Trump when he reads a prepared speech written by some political consultant.

An apology of convenience

“I see now that I was wrong,” Bloomberg said to a black church congregation that he had chosen for his mea culpa. 

How come now rather than a dozen weeks ago, or when you were mayor for twelve years and could do something about it, Mike? You didn’t notice all the lives needlessly ruined, all the jobs lost, all the loss of civic comity created by needlessly harassing African-Americans for twelve years? Of course you didn't. Or perhaps you just didn't care.

For Mr. Bloomberg’s sake, if God forbid he wins the Democratic primary, I sincerely hope he also wins the Presidential election.  Because if he jumps in and spoils it for strong Democratic candidates, and then the election goes to Trump, the cloud of opprobrium that follows Bloomberg for the rest of his life will be so thick you’ll be able to cut it with a crowd of waving pitchforks. And my guess is, he'll want to spend even rainy weekends in Bermuda. Not to mention midweeks.

If he gains the Democratic nomination, Bloomberg will either make himself President … or the Democratic Party’s biggest pariah in history.

Crazy Joe Gallo and the White House that couldn’t shoot straight

Crazy Joe the Blond

Crazy Don the Orange

Back in the 1960s, a small potatoes Brooklyn thug who had two street names, “Joey the Blond” and “Crazy Joe Gallo” got a crew together and tried to shoot his way into the big time Mafia.

Owing to his gang’s formidable level of incompetence, he didn’t last, although stunts like keeping a pet lion in his basement, and various murder attempts (and at least one notoriously successful one) drew a lot of press attention. This included attention from the late newspaper feature writer and columnist Jimmy Breslin, who dined off Gallo for years.

Breslin wrote a book about the Gallo gang, that became a movie, called “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” 

While watching the House hearings on the Ukraine mess today, it finally occurred to me that history is rhyming again. A new gang that can’t shoot straight is in the White House, and instead of Crazy Joe building a career for Jimmy Breslin, Donald Trump is building ratings for Stephen Colbert. (And yes, Gallo was even called to Washington to testify, although it was at a Senate investigation, rather than a House investigation.)

Joey the Blond/Crazy Joe did prison time and was eventually done in by a rival gang at Umberto's Clam House in New York's Little Italy.

Take two minutes to watch the trailer for The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, below. Of course, there are marked differences between Crazy Don and his gang, and Crazy Joe and his gang. But there’s also something that really does rhyme with the White House Capers. 

Who will win the Presidential election? (Predictions straight from Mme. Galzogorist’s crystal ball.) Plus: foie-not-so-gras and a law to save that wascally wabbit.

Mme. Galzogorist sees all, hears all, knows all, tells all, dings all

It’s been three years since I’ve gone to see Madame Galzogorist, the political fortune-telling seer of the garment district with the partially blown out neon sign.

The last time I spoke with her, Donald Trump has just won an election, and I asked her to predict what his first week in the White House would be like. Her predictions, although incorrect as to most specifics, had a certain qualitative accuracy, especially as they pertained to Rudy Giuliani. 

Also qualitatively, one might argue that Mme. Galzogorist’s Day Six predictions about stinging jellyfish transported to the Rio Grande to deter immigrant swimmers is not so far from The Trumpster’s recent proposal to deter immigration by digging a moat at the border and filling it with alligators and poisonous snakes.

And the next President is.....?

This time I asked Mme. Galzogorist to predict who would run for President on both the Republican and Democratic tickets, and who would win. I should note for the record that Mme. Galzogorist vehemently denies that her name is an anagram of the names of the Gallup, Zogby and Marist polls. 

On the contrary, "Galzogorist is the ancient and revered name of a long and noble familial line of distinguished cutpurses and con artists,” Mme Galzogorist insisted. "We consider ourselves to be the Trumps of the futurism profession."

Whatever. 

Anyway, here’s how the interview went:

CRANK: So first of all, who will the Democratic nominee be?

MME. GALZOGORIST: Elizabeth Warren will be the nominee, with Senator Cory Booker as her Vice-Presidential candidate. You heard it straight from my crystal ball, via my lips.

CRANK: I take it Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate? Even if he’s impeached?

MME. GALZOGORIST: He’ll be running even if he has to do it from behind the walls of Leavenworth Prison. And if he gets thrown into the slammer, don’t stand too close to the walls outside. Once they take away his cell phone, he’ll be tweeting by throwing messages in bottles over the wall.

CRANK: What will Trump do if he’s elected?

 MME. GALZOGORIST: If elected, he will not serve, at least not when it interferes with golf or sitting on his bed in the middle of the night and tweeting. Same as in his first term when he was elected.  

CRANK: And if he’s not elected?

MME: GALZOGORIST: If not elected, he will have such a meltdown you’re not going to believe it.

CRANK: Will he be elected or not?

MME. GALZOGORIST: Situation is murky. Ask again later.

CRANK: Hey, that sounds like what one of those novelty shop crystal ball toys would say.

MME GALZOGORIST: Where do you think I get my information?

New York, we have a

goose liver problem

Since all politics is local, I take you now to New York City where City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, despite the growing problem of homelessness, hopelessly gridlocked streets, high piles of garbage awaiting pickup that all but block some sidewalks on certain days, the underfunded transportation system, and the growing desertification of some shopping streets as more and more retail shops are forced to close thanks to changing lifestyles and high rents….despite all that, Johnson is focused on what really matters.

First and foremost, I’m talking about the plight of rural geese, many of them in France. These geese are force-fed to give them fatty livers so that they’ll yield richer fois gras. Now a proposed New York City local law, Number 1378-A, “prohibits retail food establishments or food service establishments from storing, maintaining, selling, or offering to sell force-fed products or food containing a force-fed product. The bill creates a rebuttable presumption that any item with a label or listed on the menu as ‘foie gras’ is the product of force-feeding. Violators will be subject to a civil penalty between $500 and $2,000 per offense."

I’m guessing that to avoid the problem, the vast International Goose Liver Conspiracy will have to drop “fois gras” from its labels and call its stuff “chopped liver.” 

Or they may have to stop selling goose liver entirely and instead sell pork paté. Nobody force feeds pigs. The poor critters just lead miserable lives, crammed together in foul conditions, until they’re taken to the slaughterhouse where they get beaten or stabbed or stunned to death. 

There! I’m so glad we’ve solved the humanity problem.

Arf arf! Meow! What's up doc?

While we’re on the subject of New York animals, let’s talk about puppies. There are several pet stores in New York that sell them. But a resolution before the City Council, Number 798, would call upon the governor to amend a state law so that it would, among other things, prohibit the sale of dogs, cats, or rabbits by retail pet stores. However, the law would allow the pet stores to “showcase” rescue dogs, cats and rabbits that are up for adoption. 

Questions waiting to be answered:

• How the pet shops will stay in business if they can't sell the pets? 

• A quick perusal of local New York City adoption websites revealed that among the rescue dogs, there is a preponderance of pit bulls and a significant shortage of purebreds and custom-breds. If everybody in New York has to get a pit bull, what happens to the Poodles, Labradoodles, Cockerdoodles, Goldendoodles, and  oodles of other more cuddly and hypoallergenic varieties of dog? In a city where people are living in close quarters and in small spaces where tempers flare, are we sure we want pit bulls to be the predominant pooch?

• Rabbits? Since when has New York City had a rabbit rescue problem? I suspect that somebody on the City Council has been watching too many old Bugs Bunny movies. Gwab that wascally wabbit, but do it vewy, vewy quietly. Ssh! It’s a wescue wabbit! 

News designed to make you puke: Food porn maker goes for sex porn. Lindsay Graham invents the Stupidity Defense. Joe Biden forgets to batten down his Internet hatches. And an iguana sleeps with cats.

Having looked into the future and seen the Era of Trump,
a Renaissance Man tosses his cookies

So  Kraft Heinz, in addition to selling pickles and ketchup and Velveeta, has been hankering to become a leading manufacturer of frozen foods. 

Again. 

Why "again?" It's complicated.

In the past, a now-defunct corporate entity called General Foods, one of the companies that Kraft Heinz merged with, owned the Birds Eye frozen foods brand. But Birds Eye (if I’ve got all this straight) got spun off, or spit out, or shunted over to a company called Pinnacle Foods. So did Swanson, the company that introduced America to TV dinners and that in some other incarnation was owned by the Campbell Soup company. 

Anyway, having sold off their frozen food operation, Kraft Heinz decided that it needed a frozen food operation. Because why should the processed food business be any less disorganized and irrational than, say, the White House?

Who's Devour for?

Hungry pervs?

So Kraft Heinz came up with a new line of frozen foods called Devour. And where did the geniuses at Kraft Heinz decide to advertise it?

Why, on an XXX-rated site called Pornhub, to which I shall not supply a link, since it’s not only NSFW, but might, for all I know, get me tossed off Blogger. Why chance it? 

Pornhub is the kind of website that has been known to depict sex with minors, threesomes, or for that matter, thirty-five-or-moresomes, not to mention other horny-porny-raunchy stuff. (Okay, I confess. I peeked. Strictly for the sake of fact checking, of course.)

What was Kraft Heinz thinking?

Well, the Devour frozen food ad campaign was smirky-jokey advertising about “food porn.” So advertising on a porn site was, I assume, supposed to be a joke on top of a joke that would surely entice people who were thinking real hard about sex to stop watching porn and run out to buy frozen food instead, because umm, well, umm, on account of, umm...never mind.

I assume that by now that some marketing officers and ad agency people are getting their resumés into circulation as rapidly as they possibly can. Fortunately, a Kraft Heinz spokesflack has reassured us that “Kraft Heinz has pledged not to advertise or promote any of  its brands on this site or other similar sites.”  She forgot to use the word “again,” but even so, I feel better already.

Or I did, until I realized that Unilever’s Dollar Shave club also got caught with its pants down, advertising on Pornhub.

See, and you thought all the stupid stuff was only happening in politics.

Speaking of stupid stuff…

We now have the Stupidity Defense

I’ve heard of people accused of terrible crimes pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. But by reason of stupidity?

Lindsay Graham’s latest defense of Donald Trump and the White House in regard to the Ukraine, quid pro quo and all of that, is that they’re all “too incoherent” to be guilty of selling America’s reputation and allies down the river. I think "incoherent" is used as a synonym for stupid in this case.

Sorry Lindsay. You too, Trumpster. Stupidity is not a legal defense against any crime or misdemeanor, high, low, or in-between.

However, if Donald Trump should ever go out and actually shoot somebody, he should be advised to skip Fifth Avenue and instead commit his murder on his estate in Bedminster, New Jersey. 

In New Jersey, The Trumpster will be happy to learn, mental retardation is a valid defense against imposition of the death penalty. So he can seek immunity from lethal injection on the grounds that even though he’s a very stable genius, he’s actually a very stable retarded genius.  

Oh no! Oh woe!

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

New topic again: In an attempt to reach voters in the Latino community, the Biden campaign created a web domain called TodosConBiden.com. Cool. But then they forgot to renew the domain name. When perhaps the only hip person in the entire Trump universe realized this deficiency, the Trump campaign bought the domain.

So now, when a Hispanic voter clicks on TodosConBiden.com, what comes up is a photograph of a dejected looking Joe, standing all alone on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and headlines that tell you in both English and Spanish, “Oops, Joe forgot about Latinos. Joe is all talk.” There are two buttons you can click. Both will take you to a website called Latinos for Trump.

A cat-humping iguana. You can't
make this stuff up.

Look, I’m older than Joe Biden. So I don’t hold his age against him. Rather, it’s the endless stream of his gaffes. And make no mistake, in the age of the Internet, failing to hire a web team that knows enough to secure your own domain is a gaffe. True, I’d would rather have Joe Biden in the White House than Donald Trump. For that matter, I would rather have a cat-humping iguana in the White House than Trump.

But I’d still most rather have Elizabeth Warren.

Department store. Dressing room. Trump. Rape. Plus: why your undies may be causing forest fires and what to do about it. (But you won’t like hearing it.)

"When the dike breaks, fingers are of no use."
(Quotation from the sayings of Hope Loewenstein."

Good for you, E. Jean Carroll, for suing Donald Trump for rape.

But lotsa luck collecting.

According to the New York Times, Carroll — a journalist who these days writes for Elle Magazine — me-tooed The Trumpster this past June, saying that over 20 years ago, he raped her. 

The deed, she says, happened in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a posh department store within spitting distance of the Trump Tower where The Trumpster lives. Pardon, where he used to live, now that he claims he has given up his New York residency. (But note, he hasn’t given up the apartment.)

If you want all the alleged sordid details, suggesting that if you’re a woman alone in a department store and you see Donald Trump, you want to run like hell in the opposite direction, just go here. I’ll only quote one paragraph to you. (The “she” referred to is E. Jean Carroll.)

The sex scene in Bergdorf’s

He suddenly lunged at her, pushed her against a wall and kissed her, she said in the lawsuit. She pushed him away and he then pinned her against the wall, pulled down her tights and raped her. The attack she said lasted up to three minutes. 

Sounds consistent with the now-famous “Grab ‘em by the pussy tape,” but what do I know? More interesting to me is that the entire act lasted “up to three minutes.” Which brings to mind the old joke involving the ditched boyfriend’s furious complaint:

“She said I was a lousy lover. How could she possibly know after only three minutes?”

I will not linger on this matter long enough to speculate on Melania Trump’s sex life with The Trumpster. So let’s wrap up this matter in the next paragraph.

I sorely, deeply, passionately hope that Ms. Carroll prevails in court, but I suspect the same dabblers in legal alchemy who insist that the President of the United States cannot be arrested for a crime will claim he also cannot be sued for a civil offense. (The criminally-prosecutable part of the alleged offense has passed into the Never-Never Land of the Statute of Limitations.) And now on to the terribly depressing fashion news.

If you ain’t always nekkid,

you’re polluting the atmosphere

Hey, that’s not my opinion. This comes from an author named Elizabeth L. Cline, writing in the Op-Ed Section of the Times. “Making, washing and tossing apparel has a big environmental cost,” said says the subhead over Cline’s article, summing up her thesis. 

Alas, when you think about it for a bit, it’s pretty hard to disagree. Are you wearing wool? All those sheep that grow it for you are farting tons of methane. And then there’s the energy you need to burn when you truck the wool, and card the wool, and clean the wool, and weave the wool, and sew the wool, and truck it off to the store, and keep the store’s lights on so that Donald Trump has less of a chance of grabbing you in the dressing room, and…well, you get the idea.

Nylon? Rayon? Sooner or later when you throw it out, or you give it away to somebody, who gives it away to somebody else, who then throws it out…Plastic in the ocean! And before that, says the Times piece, some of those synthetic fibers were trees in the Amazon. 

Cotton? You know how much water it takes to grow a T-shirt? Thousands of gallons, Cline reports. So much for organic clothing.

And when you wash your stuff — well, there’s the electricity for the washing machine. The water drained from the water table. And then the polluting detergents put back in the water table or a common waterway, and…well, it's all just too depressing.

So what’s a person to do? Winter’s coming. You can’t walk around in the raw, even if the cops would let you. And summer? The sun would turn your skin to cancerous crepe paper.

Here’s where I come out on that. 

All we have to do is

get rid of people

None of this would be a problem of any significance if the human population of the planet were, say, 10 million. We, and our cows, and our sheep, could fart our heads off and nature would cover for us. We could drive gas guzzlers that get 15 miles to the gallon, and the trees in the no-longer raped Amazon would suck up and sink the carbon. We could pee in our local streams, smoke up the skies, and warm ourselves around roaring fires, and the Arctic ice shelf wouldn’t give a diddley-damn. Not if there were only 10 million people.

So all we have to do is reduce the human population of the planet by, oh, 90 percent or so, by lowering the birth rate. But of course, we won’t. So how can the problem be solved?

Trust Mother Nature. She’ll either unleash a massive plague, the Mother of All Ebolas, the Bubonic of all Bubonics, so rapidly, so unexpectedly, and so horribly murderous that we’ll all dissolve into a great mass of suppurating protoplasm before we can ask, “Which way to the disinfectant hose?"

Or she’ll keep unleashing Donald Trumps on us until half the Trumpsters fire nuclear weapons at the other half, and then vice-versa, resulting in the rapid depopulation of humanity.

It’s coming, because we humans can’t help doing what we do. And I’m not saying this just because the latest polls indicated that, even with declining support, The Trumpster could still win the Electoral College. 

In fact, Donald Trump may be nature’s plan to destroy humanity. Just sayin.'

Sperm bikes. Un-sexy Millennials. The Circleville Pumpkin Show. Plus other stuff the cat dragged in.

This is either a weird solution for low sperm motility or a really
stupid bicycle. I have nothing more to say about this.

Is it possible that Republicans have ruined everybody’s sex life? Or at least the sex life of millennials? Turns out that America is suffering from a sexual recession.  Millennials, who by virtue of their age ought to be the most randy among us, just don’t feel like it tonight, honey. And if you trace the problem to its root cause, it’s economic insecurity, brought about by numerous factors.

These might include the mortgage meltdown of 2009, which was the offspring of Republican-cheered deregulation. Or it might be because of student loans that will never get paid off, and that Republicans oppose letting the government pay off because, you know, socialism. Or, who knows, maybe, the story continues, it’s social media.

In any case, a lower birth rate portends bad news for businesses ranging from the real estate business, to the clothing business, to the condom business. But understanding that would force Republicans, who support Donald Trump, to equate two conceptually different things — sex and the impact of its absence on the economy. So forget about it.

And speaking of birth rates….

Murdered by Mickey Mouse

Lemmings, say it ain’t so! I grew up believing that lemmings committed mass suicide, as part of that species’ compulsion to prevent overpopulation. Somebody just had to go and ruin that for me. Worse, it turns out that the image we all have of lemmings jumping by the thousands off a cliff into the ocean is a Disney concoction. The little rodents suffered a horrible death for the sake of a movie, but hey, that’s show biz. I’ve never seen the movie, which dates back to the 1950s, but I’m pretty sure that it didn’t contain a disclaimer saying, “No rodents were harmed during the making of this film.” 

My Cranky Vlad the Impaler Award, given at irregular intervals, starting now, to the person who makes the most money doing the most damage goes to…Adam Neumann, who tanked his company, WeWork, and got paid $1.7 billion — that’s billion — dollars for the effort. Why could I never get fired like that?

When I became too old to be employable (in the ad biz, that's 50-something) I rented a cubicle for my one-person free lance writing operation in New York’s garment district. My rent included the cubicle space, occasional use of a conference room, a phone number, a lockable file cabinet, a receptionist, a business mailing address, and a high speed Internet connection for $350 a month. When they raised my rent, without warning, to $475, I went snooping around for new space and stumbled into a WeWork suite. But I stumbled out of it again very quickly.

At the time, if I remember correctly, WeWork accommodations started at $500. For that you got no phone (“Just use your cell phone, Crank”) no file cabinet ("Paper is so yesterday") not even a cubicle. Instead, for five hundred bucks every month, you could sit at a kind of refectory table where other renters of table space could look over your shoulder, watch what you were typing on your laptop, overhear your cell phone conversations, and create all manner of distractions. 

“There’s no privacy here,” I complained.

“But it’s so collaborative!” the manager parried. “You don’t want to be a lone wolf, do you?”

Yes I do.  I’m a free lance writer. Like the guys on Wall Street, I only get to eat what I kill, and have no intention of sharing it with a pack of strange predators who might have an unnatural thirst either for plagiarism or client poaching.

Meanwhile Adam Neumann reportedly also hopes to live “forever” and to become the world’s first trillionaire. Because what’s the point of having more money than you can ever spend, if somebody else has even more than that?

Pumpkins, pumpkins, Tumpkins, Trumpkins! For the 62^nd consecutive year I missed the Circleville (Ohio) Pumpkin Show, which I visited only one time in my life, when I was a college student, back in 1957. Once again this year, there were two beauty contests. One was for high school students, with the winner getting declared Miss Pumpkin Show. The other was for, I suspect, kindergarteners, vying for the title of Little Miss Pumpkin. (It gives me the chills to think that Little Miss Pumpkin of 1957 is likely somebody’s grandmother today. ) 

This year's winning 1,421-lb. pumpkin

Every year there’s also a prize for the biggest pumpkin, which this year weighed in at 1,421 pounds. Do you think Donald Trump could be entered as a pumpkin next year? His skin tone is more orange than this year’s winner. And I suspect he already weighs enough.

Elizabeth, Bernie, even more lemmings. As of when I’m writing this (Monday night) Elizabeth Warren has still not released her promised Medicare for All Plan. Hey, I am, or was, a Warren booster. I even sent her a campaign contribution. But having a plan for everything, and then not releasing a plan for Medicare, is more suicidal than a Disney portrayal of a legendary lemming population control campaign. 

On the other hand, Bernie Sanders has released a legalize marijuana plan. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s crazy to imprison people for 30 years, or even 30 days, for smoking, or maybe even for selling a little boo. On the other hand, Bernie may be handing the right-wing crazies even more ammo to discourage conservative-but-wavering swing voters. 

It’s one thing to say, “My plan will help to keep you healthy.” It’s another to run for president singing One Toke Over The Line. 

Pumpkin-cannabis pie, anyone?

Winners of the October 2019 Crank Awards: given on highly sporadic occasions, during perilous times, to people who do or say something that’s either good, or bad, for whatever messes we’re all in at the moment

Best retro photograph of some advertising  guys pretending to rob a
Seattle bank (circa 1966)

Best putdown of Rudolph Giuliani by a newspaper columnist goes to Carl Hiaasen of the Miami Herald for this: “By his own actions, Giuliani has made himself the most visible stooge in the Donald Trump impeachment comedy. Rudy’s worse than a loose cannon. He’s a meandering cluster bomb.”

The Sneaky-Creepy Political Thuggery Award given only to the incredibly rich guy who most ham-handedly tries to interfere in an election: This time it goes to Mark Zuckerberg. The Zuck evidently managed to get his lips close enough to Pete Buttigieg’s ear, via an intermediary, to whisper sweet nothings about potential campaign hires. This act helped insert into the Buttigieg power structure two people likely to help prevent any harm to the Facebook Misinformation Empire, should Buttigieg somehow manage to become president.

The Cheap Piker Guhzillionaire Award. I almost surprised myself by not giving it to Donald Trump, despite his now-abandoned attempt to locate the G7 conference at one of his own failing resorts “at cost.” "At cost" means whatever you want it to mean. In a failing resort, it means, at the very least, some cash flow instead of no cash flow. The offer later got revised to “free” after it became clear to Trump he couldn’t get away with it. I'm guessing Trump figured that if he couldn't win the game he'd at least inflate the lie.
     However, after lengthy and agonized consideration, the Cheap Piker Guhzillionaire Award Committee, which consists of myself, has given the prize to Jeff Bezos. Bezos gets the award for offering Amazon users a $10 coupon to allow him to track those customers all around the web and sell the information for millions to the likes of McDonald’s GM, Danone, and Staples. And if you'll sell your tracking rights to Bezos for a $10 coupon, I'll give you three bucks for your house.

The WTF?! Award to Hillary Clinton, for claiming to be outing Tulsi Gabbard as a “Russian Asset.” Gimme a break! What Gabbard is, quite clearly, is a second-string presidential wannabe, who served honorably in the military but who had zero chance of winning the nomination. She still has no chance, but thanks to Hillary, she now might prove to be the kind of wedge issue that will help to divide Democrats and grease the skids for a second Trump term. And Hillary herself isn’t quite denying that she might — well, maybe, sorta, perhaps — throw her own hat back into the ring. Because she hasn’t done enough damage to the Democratic party. Yet.

The award for best and most grisly human self-immolation in front of the press and news cameras so far this year:

That’s all for today, folks. Come back for more in the near future — assuming there is a near future.

News about dogs, Donald Trump, more dogs, and some other stuff

Arf?

Dogs: So there was this guy in Oregon, Jeremy Taylor, and his dog Ally  a few Sundays ago. Alas, his SUV gets stuck in the snow on a woodsy road somewhere in the vicinity of Wake Butte, wherever the hell that is. 

He stays stuck there for five days.

Finally along comes a snowmobiler who saves poor Taylor, who’d been living on five — count ‘em five — packages of taco sauce.

I’ve got a good mind to fire my source, Time Magazine, for doing a fifth-rate job of reporting. Among the questions that, back in the day, any city editor worth his salt would have told a young reporter to "go the hell back there and ask" are:

• Did he share the taco sauce with Ally the dog?
• If not, did the dog eat any thing out there in the woods? Maybe he caught a squirrel or something?
• What kind of a dog is Ally? Big? Little? Poodle? Retriever? Another damn Labradoodle or Cockerpoo? There's a picture in the Time web story that shows a dog from the rear that might (or might not) be a collie. Is that Ally?
• Wasn’t Jeremy carrying a cell phone?
• What's with his SUV? Don't most of those things have four-wheel drive that's supposed to drive you out of snowbanks? If so, how come it was stuck?
• If Jeremy had all those packets of taco sauce in his car, what happened to the tacos? Or did he live on the tacos and forget to talk about that because he’d sound less heroic? 

I can keep going, but why bother?

Donald Trump: Remember the mortgage meltdown of 2009? Remember when the Senate and House slapped regulations on the banking industry so it wouldn’t happen again? Remember when Donald Trump's administration relaxed the banking regulations because, umm, Barak Obama?

Well, here we go again.

Reuters is now reporting that the trading of U.S. Government-backed mortgage securities increased five fold in the first half of 2019, making it, according to “industry sources,” “the fastest growing revenue source in investment banking.”

Reuters goes on

The shift this year to a more dovish interest rate policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve has sparked a surge in investor demand for packaged-up home loans issued by mortgage agencies Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac. 

Banks that trade these securities, known as agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), have profited both from increased commissions on trading them as well as holding them on their books as they appreciated in value. 

The boom in trading comes just over a decade after the global financial crisis, caused in part by the collapse in value of much riskier bonds linked to U.S. home loans that banks packaged up and sold to unwitting investors.

How long do you want to give it before those “much riskier bonds linked to U.S. home loans” start getting packaged again, too? And after that, before the entire economy turns into a hot liquid slurry of molten wealth that dribbles out into Donald Trump's toilet? After which, Trump will fire Larry Kudlow but blame the economic crash on the Fed?

Personally, I give it another six minutes. Wall Streeters, don your crash helmets! (Just sayin’.)

More dogs (Kink department.) So here’s some West Hollywood dude who has shed his real name in favor of the handle “Sexy Vegan.”  He’s had his new name tattooed on his forehead and chest (a handy means of identification in case he ever gets decapitated without his wallet in his pants pocket). 

Does eating Vegan mess with your mind? 

I ask this question because, Sexy Vegan was recently reported by News of the Weird to be living rent free in an LA hoosegow after he was arrested for….here comes the dog….sexual abuse of his dog. How did the cops find out about it? Why, quite naturally, because Sexy posted it on social media. 

Evidently, he’s also been on Dr. Phil, where he revealed that “I do get judged a lot for being different.” Maybe The Trumpster can use that line if Russia ever releases the alleged pee tapes.

Other Stuff: I have nothing against Carly Simon, but I’m not a huge fan of hers, either, largely because I can only think of one really catchy song that I know for sure she wrote. And I don’t even know the title of that one, although I do remember the opening stanza, largely because it’s a near-tautology:

You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.

Which of course it is, because she directly addresses him (or her) in the song, and it's all about what he or she (probably) thinks. 

I also know that Carly is the daughter of a book publisher (as in Simon & Schuster)  and that she is one of three sisters, another of whom was a gorgeous opera star who once had a thing going with a TV newscaster of considerable fame, the third a Broadway show song writer. I felt pretty smug knowing that much. Hey, you know, inside New York  stuff.

Now Carly is evidently working on memoir articles instead of, or in addition to music. The current New Yorker has a memoir article revealing that she was a movie buddy of Jackie Kennedy's,                and that to avoid notice in movie theaters, Jackie would hide in the ladies room until it was time for the movies to start.

Makes sense to me. Who could blame her? On a trip to a racy X-rated movie with half-sister Lee Radzivil back in 1960-something (I’ll take a wild stab at ’67), Jackie and Lee were confronted by a paparazzo, one Ron Galella. The film, by the way, was a pornographic Scandinavian import named “I am curious (Yellow)” Legal porn was still a novelty in those days.

Anyway, Jackie decked Galella, which not only made the gossip pages, but also prompted the following entry in a New York Magazine jingle-writing contest in which the first line always had to be "Higgledy Piggledy." (I remember the jingle by heart because I wrote it, and because the bastards only gave me an honorable mention for it. I shoulda won first prize):

Hiddledy Piggledy

Jacqueline Kennedy

Flipped a photographer

Over her head

Changing his countenance

Melodramatically

Curious (Yellow)

To furious (Red).

That’s it until Donald Trump, or some dog, or paparazzo, or exceptional lunatic, inspires me to get off my duff and post again.