Trickledown Incompetence

I was in Santa Monica, CA on business a few weeks ago. I took a stroll along Ocean Avenue, a pretty boulevard with upmarket hotels and shops overlooking the Pacific. All you had to do to consider it idyllic was ignore the hundreds of homeless people who camp under the palm trees each sunset in an adjacent park.

But more about that later.

Right now I want to talk about a national malady called Trickledown Incompetence.

All this is old news, but worth repeating:

The Bush administration incompetently started a war, managed by incompetents who couldn’t think ahead five seconds to what they’d do once they blew up half of Iraq. And those incompetent dum-dums never imagined that enraged Iraqis, instead of scattering rose petals at our soldiers’ feet, would be blowing up our guys up with IEDs.

The Bush administration based its decision to go to war in Iraq on incompetent interpretations of incompetent intelligence. It was provided by an incompetent CIA director. Well, it’s true he had to act incompetently or he’d get fired. But you’d figure a competent guy in that position would resign in a huff. He didn’t.

For in-your-face incompetence, there was nothing – and still is nothing two years later – like the “You’re doing a helluva job, Brownie” management of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

The past couple of days, we’ve been hearing about the deliberate hiring of incompetents in the Justice Department. Monica Goodling, graduate of a fourth or maybe seventh rate religious law school, was in charge of deciding who would or would not be a good local U.S. Attorney. Monica worked for Alberto Gonzales. She’s an – let’s call her what she really is, either a nearly brainless bimbo or a clever but poorly educated liar and career assassin. Well, let’s be kindly and charitable and assume she’s merely a brainless bimbo and not a corrupt and lying thug.

Goodling, that brainless incompetent bimbo, has been testifying before Congress that she, uh, “went over the line” by violating Federal law in her hiring practices. That’s called “lawbreaking” where I come from, folks. But gee, she’s so cute and sweet sounding and blonde, the Republicans on the Senate committee that was taking here testimony tried to give her a pass.

The trouble with incompetence is that it’s like water. It follows the law of gravity. You get an incompetent president and the next thing you know you get an incompetent Secretary of Defense and an incompetent Attorney General below the President.

From them you get incompetent generals and Monica Goodling. Next thing you know, you’re in a restaurant on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, CA, suffering through completely incompetent table service.

To get back to where I started, incompetent table service is what happened a few weeks ago. I walked into this nice-looking Italian restaurant on Ocean Avenue. I ordered two courses: a salad and a braised lamb shank.

I stuck a fork into my salad and poof! A sub-waiter who looked as if he came out of a casting call for Fawlty Towers holds a steaming lamb shank literally inches under my nose and says, “Are you ready yet?”

“No," I said politely. "As you can see, I just started my salad.”

The wait-captain ran up to my table and apologized. “I’m sorry sir. He’s new here. I’ll have him take that lamb shank back and bring you a new one when you’re ready.”

I thanked him. I took two more forkfuls of salad. And poof! There was the same sub-waiter again, with the same lamb shank, a little less steamy this time.

“Ready yet, sir?” He asked.

“No no no. I’m still eating my sald. Look. See that stuff on my plate? It’s salad!”

The wait-captain reappeared, at least making an attempt to seem horrified. “I’m sorry,” he said, “some people just don’t listen.”

He hustled the sub-waiter away again and I went back to my salad. Two forkfuls later – you guessed it!

This time I felt myself rising to my feet. I felt my arms waiving wildly in the air. I was about to explode. The only reason I didn’t was, I was afraid I might kill somebody on the waitstaff and then have to get defended by an incompetent lawyer.

The fourth time the lamb shank came (by now a genuinely different one, and steaming again) there was only a little bit of salad left on my plate. I figured, the hell with it. It was either start eating the damn lamb shank or start throwing dishes. I ate the lamb shank before I finished my salad.

Unlike money, which under the Bush Administration trickles up from the poor and middle class to the filthy rich, incompetence always seeks its own level. As the old Italian saying goes, “The fish rots from the head.”

So I blame George Bush for everything. I blame him for the war. I blame him for the nearly incomprehensible size of the national debt. I blame him for the huge economic pressure on the poor and middle class in a time of plenty. I blame him for a still-devastated New Orleans. I blame him for the Justice Department scandal. I blame him for blonde bimbos. I blame him for the hordes of homeless people sleeping in what ought to be one of the most beautiful little parks in California. I blame him for a U.S. Supreme Court that’s starting to make Neanderthal inroads into years of established constitutional law. I blame George Bush for mindless water torturers in secret prisons. I blame him for our failing healthcare system.

And most of all, I blame him for an idiot waiter in a Santa Monica restaurant, shoving a lamb shank in my face, over and over again.

It’s time Congress stiffed Bush with an act of impeachment.

Learn how to get rich quick in real estate. Join your teacher in Bankruptcy Court. Or prison.

I'm indebted to "Investment U," a newsletter of a stock advisory service called The Oxford Club, from which I've stolen the following:

Of course, these “no money down” gigs have been going on for decades. And the results are generally not what anyone would call enviable.

Forget about the outcome for the students. Take a look at what’s happened to the authors who sold the books and promoted the seminars. According to author John T. Reed:

Albert Lowry, author of “How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1987.

Craig Hall, author of “Craig Hall’s Book of Real Estate Investing,” declared bankruptcy in 1992.

Bill “Tycoon” Greene, author of “Two Years for Freedom,” was convicted, fined and sentenced to prison. (He later escaped from a minimum security prison and is believed to be living in England.)

Tony Hoffman, author of “How to Negotiate Successfully in Real Estate,” filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for his company in 1986.

Wade Cook, author of “How to Build a Real Estate Money Machine,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1987 and 2003.

Dave Glubeitch, author of “The Money Game,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1987.

Dave Del Dotto, author of “Cash Flow System,” was charged by the FTC with misrepresenting products in 1993. He filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1995.

Charles Givens, author of “Wealth Without Risk,” was successfully sued by a former customer for giving bad financial advice. He filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1995. He died pending trial.

Sonny Block, author of “Inside Real Estate,” was indicted in May 1995 by a federal grand jury for fraud and fled to the Dominican Republic to avoid prosecution. He was eventually deported to the U.S., but died pending trial.

Ed Beckley, author of “Million Dollar Secrets,” declared bankruptcy in 1987 and was sentenced to federal prison for wire fraud.

Robert Allen, the author of “Nothing Down” and “Creating Wealth,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in May 1996.

"Deaf Photog and Blind Editor Overcome the Odds Together”

That was the headline of a recent story in the magazine Editor and Publisher.

What I want to know is, what’s so newsworthy about the story?

Any celeb who ever said to a photographer, “Hey, please stop stalking me,” knows all news photographers all deaf.

And any reporter or writer who ever submitted a memo for a story idea and never heard back from his editor may have suspected the oaf is blind.

Or maybe the editor was too busy sending a reporter out to the remotest wilds of East New York at 2 AM to wake up a couple, tell them their kid just got killed and a car crash, and ask, “What kind of a boy was he?”

In my big city newspaper reporting days, more decades ago than I care to mention, my night city editor did that to me. I was new at the game and did as I was told, making my way through remote slums in the wee hours.

When I came back to the city room (they didn’t have “newsrooms” in those days) of my evil night city editor’s henchpeople said, “Hey kid, you did pretty well. Those are all accurate quotes.” Sure they were. But how was he so sure, I asked.

“Because we’ve been calling the parents. We could have done the story on the phone. We just wanted to see if you had the guts.”

Don’t even get me started on copy editors, literary agents, or graphic designers who come back with complaints like, “Hey your story is too long to wrap around the picture I have in mind for it. Cut 300 words.”

Anyway, if you feel you must read the full Editor & Publisher story about deaf and blind news coverage, you’ll find it here:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003585581

A bum gets burned on a bum rap. And then burns himself passing the buck. It’s his usual sleazy behavior.

I don’t like Rudolph Giuliani, the former Republican Mayor of New York who’s now a potential Republican Presidential candidate.

Yes, he put on a great and admirable display of leadership immediately after the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster. He actually came off – at least for a few days – as sympathetic and likeable. And yes, under his administration the crime rate began to fall, policing got better, quality of life crimes lessened significantly, and prosperity grew here in New York grew. All good things.

But generally, Giuliani’s behavior was sometimes irascible, sometimes sleazy, occasionally in defiance of law, and largely focused around what was good for Rudy Giuliani. More about that later. First, an issue for which Giuliani is taking a rap he doesn’t deserve – and then reverting to his weasely form in dealing with the issue.

THE CASE OF THE MISPLACED
"WAR ROOM." OR WAS IT?

This has to do with the location of the mayor’s Emergency Operations Center – a radiation protected, supposedly blast-resistant, communications equipment-bristling, semi-secret “war room.” It was here that Mayor Giuliani was supposed to have been able to take charge of New York in case of atomic blast, citywide rioting, unprecedented flooding, or invasion by – I dunno, Martians, maybe.

As it happens, it was located at 7 World Trade Center, one of the neighboring buildings that were flattened and burned out by the falling debris from the 1 and 2 World Trade Center twin towers.

Hey, it’s easy to Monday morning quarterback this decision. On the negative side, it’s true as critics point out, that the World Trade Center had already been the target of an Al Quaida attack – a truck bomb that went off in a garage under one of the two towers. So maybe the Command Center should have been someplace else.

Brooklyn has been mentioned as a rejected location for a command center in the "he said/she said/they said/you said” accusations that have been flying around.

But there were also valid reasons for using 7 World Trade Center. It was close to City Hall and other municipal offices such as the Police and Fire Departments – a very quick drive or relatively short jog away. 7 World Trade Center itself was home to the New York offices of various Federal law enforcement agencies – you know, the ones that as it turned out weren’t speaking to one another, enabling the 9/11 plot to hatch, free from Federal interference.

Also, 7 World Trade Center was not one of the twin towers. To rule it out you’d have to posit that A) Al Quaida would try all over again to bring the towers down by a different means B) the Federal Government under George Bush would be completely asleep at the switch C) that this time they’d hijack a bunch of planes and fly them into the towers D) these “fireproof” buildings would then collapse, their structures virtually melted by the flames and E) that falling debris from the first two structures would completely destroy neighboring structures.

GIULIANI SAYS SOME HAPLESS
SCHNOOK MADE HIM DO IT.

If you could posit A, B, C,D and E, you’d be the world’s greatest seer and medium. That’s really all Rudy Giuliani had to say in his defense of the choice of 7 World Trade Center. But no.

Instead, he whines that in effect, an underling working for him sort of, well, uh – made him do it. That was the recommendation, and how was he supposed to know better, Giuliani snivels.

Baloney, says the former underling, Jerome Hauer, who was Giuliani’s first director of emergency management. Others are weighing in on one side or another.

You’ll find URLs referring you to some of the details of finger-pointing at the end of this article. What’s important to note here is that finger pointing – passing the blame for bad things that happened on his watch to somebody else – is a hallmark of the Giuliani modus operandi. And for that matter, getting rid of underlings who are getting too much praise for doing good work is also part of his style.

“EVERYBODY SAYS YOU’RE DOING
A GREAT JOB. SO YOU’RE FIRED!”

Take the case of William Bratton, the first police commissioner under Giuliani (now chief honcho of the LAPD.) It was Bratton, recruited here from Boston, who dreamed up a new style of policing, patrolling and arresting quality-of-life criminals. That's one of the things that helped bring on a quick and wonderful reduction of the crime rate.

Almost everybody liked Bratton. Almost everyone praised him. And that really got Giuliani’s goat. Clearly Rudy wanted all the praise for himself.

Poof! Bratton was fired. Pretty soon, top NYPD administration was peopled with a number of hacks, one of them, Bernie Kerik, said to have Mafia ties and certainly problems with corruption and his own income taxes.

Hey, no matter. By following Bratton patrol policies, the cops were able to keep the crime rate down, and now Rudy Giuliani could get all the credit.

COMMISSIONERS WHO’D BETTER
“TAKE A BULLET” FOR THE MAYOR

Giuliani wanted to make sure that nothing bad got blamed on him. The word was going around that interviews for various senior appointive jobs in his administration began with the question, “Would you take a bullet for the mayor?”

The meaning of that question was, “If something gets screwed up in your department, even if it happens because the mayor ordered it to happen, will you take all the blame and not mention you were doing this on the Mayor's orders?”

Rudy’s philosophy of life (“It’s all about me”) even extended to his own family. During Rudy’s inaugural, his seven year old son – remember, only seven years old – stole the show by mimicking his father’s gestures. Guess what? Rudy deported his own son. Well, only to a boarding school, but that was it. The poor kid was never seen in public again until his adulthood, when he proclaimed a rift with his father. Gee, no kidding.

The message was clear. Don't poke fun at Rudy Giuliani. Even if you're a little kid. Even if you're his own little kid.

ATTEMPTED MUNICIPAL
COUP D’ETAT

There was also the little matter of trying to overthrow the city constitution. We have term limits here. At the end of his second term, Rudy suddenly went looking for a way to stay on as mayor after his elected term ended. In effect, he was feeling out the reaction to what might have been a municipal coup d’etat.

Imagine if the President of the United States did that. If it ever happens, this country stops being a democratically-elected republic and becomes a dictatorship.

So I’m horrified by Rudy Giuliani’s attempt at candidacy for President. He’s a potential dictator. He deserves to remain in private life with his third wife, enjoying icy relations with his kids.

But he doesn’t deserve flak on his choice of an emergency command post. As some wag said about the behavior of prosecutors and police during the OJ Simpson trial, “They’re trying to frame a guilty man.”




More on the potential national and international disaster that is Rudy Giuliani here:

On the World Trade Center command post flap:
http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/giuliani-911-and-the-emergency-command-center-continued/#more-1999

On Giuliani’s mayoral temperament
http://www.cercles.com/review/r27/siegel5.htm

Why lots of New York cops hate Giuliani
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/nyregion/14giuliani.html?ref=nyregion

On Giuliani trying to feel out a municipal coup d’etat
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/terror/aftermath/1062396.html

Picture of Giuliani’s 7 year old son upstaging his dad, for which he was deported to boarding school:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/us/politics/03rudy.html?ex=1179460800&en=42ddb6d7cf8e2100&ei=5070

Fly me to the moon, George. In other words, I love your syntax.

Wasn't it Frank Sinatra who sang a song called "Fly Me To the Moon?" And wasn't the key refrain, "In other words, hold my hand. In other words, I love you?"

The phrase "in other words" is now popping up with alarming frequency in other words -- the words of President George Bush. In fact, it's popping up so many times in a short speech that I'm ready to fly to the moon, provided I can take his Iraq policy with me and leave it there.

In other words, his speech patterns are getting weirder and weirder.

I'm grateful to New York journalist and advertising writer Richard Rosenthal, who sent me the following "other" words:

>>This is your president speaking: the utterances of George W. Bush either April 9 or 10, 2007 as reported in the Congressional Quaterly, taken from a transcript of his talk at an American Legion post in Fairfax, VA


>>"This is a -- this is an unusual era in which we live, defined on

September the 11th, 2001. See, that's a date that reminding us the

world has changed significantly from what we thought the world

was ... My attitude about the world changed, and I know the attitude

about the world from a lot of folks here in America's attitude

changed ...



>>"I vowed that day that we would go on the offense against an enemy,

that the best way to defeat this enemy is to find them overseas and

bring them to justice so they will not hurt the folks here at home.

In other words, we don't have the luxury of hoping for the best, of

sitting back and being passive in the face of this threat. In the

past, we would say oceans would protect us and, therefore, what

happened overseas may not matter here at home.



>>"That's what changed on September the 11th. What happens overseas

affects the security of the United States ...



>>"I vowed that, 'If you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty

as the terrorist.' That's a doctrine.



>>"In order for this country to be credible, when the president says

something, he must mean it. I meant it. And the Taliban found out

that we meant what we said. And therefore, we ended al-Qaida's safe

haven in a failed state.



>>"The two points I want to make is, doctrine matters; and secondly, a

failed state can lead to severe consequences for the American people ...



>>"In other words, there was reprisal ...



>>"In other words, the lack of security would have created an

opportunity for extremists to move in ...



>>"In other words, in sending troops in, it is -- I recognize that this

is more than a military mission ...


>>"In other words, this operation is just getting started ...


>>"In other words, part of the effort is not only to provide security

to neighborhoods, but we're constantly training Iraqis so that they

can do this job ...


>>"So, in other words, it's a combination of providing security in

neighborhoods through these joint security stations, and training ...


>>"I'm always amazed at the men and women who wear our uniform. Last

week, before I went down to Crawford -- for a snowy Easter, I might

add -- I was in California at Fort Irwin. And I had a chance to visit

with some who had just come back from Iraq and some who were going

over to Iraq. And it just amazes me that these young men and women

know the stakes. They understand what we're doing. And they have

volunteered to serve.


>>"We're really a remarkable country and a remarkable military. And

therefore we owe it to the families and to those who wear the uniform

to make sure that this remarkable group of men and women are strongly

supported -- strongly supported, by the way, during their time in

uniform and then after their time in uniform through the Veterans

Administration.


>>"I tried to put this war into a historical context for them. In other

words, I told them that they're laying the foundation of peace. In

other words, the work we're doing today really will yield peace for a

generation to come."<<

Results of Bush free trade policies and laxness on food purity: First your cat dies. Then your dog. Next? Maybe you.

One of the problems with laissez-faire capitalism is that it fails to account sufficiently for the bottomless pit of evil that is home to men with dollar signs in their eyes.

It doesn’t matter if they’re American or Chinese. If they can make a buck and you die from their efforts, tough luck for you, pal.

A case in point is the melamine-infested “wheat gluten” and “rice gluten" that have been making their ways into the food chain via producers in China.

Melamine is essentially a high nitrogen chemical useful as a fire retardant and a pesticide. The latter use ought to be enough to raise government radar antennas in Washington to full mast, but hey, sleeping at the switch is a Bush administration specialty.

At any rate, some Chinese producers have been mixing melamine into wheat gluten and rice gluten because it tends to “fool” some lab tests into thinking it’s protein. The formula seems to be “less protein + more melamine = more profit.”

The Chinese producers are thrilled, because they’re making bigger bucks. The importers are thrilled, because they can buy and sell a bit cheaper, increasing demand for their services. The food processors are thrilled, because cheaper product in means higher profits out.

Or at least they were until the scandal broke.

The U.S. Government Departments of Commerce, Argiculture, Homeland Security? Well, as usual, they were too busy hiring good little Republican aparatchiks to take notice.

Sometimes I wonder if they weren’t also thrilled because some Republican and Bush campaign contributors were making bigger profits. I can’t prove that, although I wish some enterprising journalist would. The pattern certainly seems to fit.

Then the dogs and cats started dying. I dunno about you, but I got scared right away. I was leaving town to do some traveling, abandoning my blog for a while, but in my notice that The New York Crank would be on hold for a while I wrote, “…if poisoned wheat gluten could kill cats and dogs, it might be killing people, too? I mean, do you know where the wheat gluten in your bread comes from?” You’ll find it here:
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2007/04/announcing-short-and-cranky-damn-hiatus.html

While it depresses me to tell you so, hey dude, I told you so. Since then, guess what?

It’s been discovered that melamine is making its way into hogfeed and chicken feed. And now fish feed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_he_me/food_contamination

And moreover, it now turns out melamine is working its way into plain old wheat.

Which means just about everything you might enjoy eating is poisoned. Every-damned-thing.

That, of course, has awakened our Republican administration. Somebody’s eyelids fluttered open long enough to say, according to an Associated Press story:

“The level of contamination is expected to be too low to pose any danger to human health, said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection.”

Yeah, just the assurances you know you can trust from those wonderful folks who gave you A Helluva Job Brownie, Mission Accomplished, WMD in Iraq and other tributes to forked tongue politics.

Hey, wasn’t America once the breadbasket of the world? Aren’t we still subsidizing farmers not to grow stuff? Why do we have to buy wheat and rice from China in the first place?

Laissez-faire free trade is the answer. The doctrinaire belief is that the market always speaks to the benefit of the consumer. A bunch of corporate sleazebags let poison creep into the food chain? Hey, no problem because the free market will take care of it. People who learn the stuff is poisonous will stop buying it.

Sure, after we’re all dead.

Here’s what we need:

1. America needs a five year ban on food or food ingredient imports – whether animal or human food – from any country that lets poison creep into the stuff living things ingest here. China, that means you too, you greedy poisoning bastards!

2. America needs food testing on all agricultural products. Al Quaida doesn’t need a bomb, it turns out. All it needs is a bag of fish food to start wiping out Americans.

3. America needs rigid, rigid, rigid FDA enforcement. You don’t “work with” people who poison you. You pop them in the pokey and feed them their own glutenized bread and water. That rule most certainly should extend to American citizens. People who import, distribute, or mix poison into the food supply are serial killers. No pun intended. (But hey, what really is in your corn flakes?)

4. America needs clear source labeling law that affects all food – every damn morsel – that Americans eat. This includes most especially beef, poultry, chicken and fish. But it also extends things like bread and breakfast cereals, all of which contain grains and glutens. The label should clearly and readably state the source of all ingredients. “Wheat gluten” is not enough. Is it Chinese wheat gluten, “wheat gluten of unknown origin” or “American wheat gluten?” The difference could mean life or death for you.

5. Support for the American family farmer. Not the agri-business combines. I'm talking about individually owned farms with net income of $200,000 or less. There are fewer and fewer of those every year. But we need more and more. If we ever get into a hassle with China and we start relying on some mega-manipulative argri-business trading company to import all our food, we’re royally screwed. You think energy dependence is a problem? Try food dependence.

We don’t need less government. We need more government, protecting what we put in our mouths.

But from the Bush Administration? Don’t hold your breath.

More Psychic Ding Awards: for a nutty judge, a witchy broadcaster and bringers of frivolous law suits

Hey, first principles first. This Cranky blog strongly favors class action liability law suits. The New York Crank is firmly convinced that law suits are often the best protection we have against some of society’s biggest and scummiest thugs – corporate America.

But even before we get to corporations, consider medical malpractice insurance rates. President Bush would have had you believe, when he was railing against high insurance rates for medical malpractice, that the cost of your medical care is through the roof because sleazy lawyers are suing doctors left right and center.

There are a few little holes – say, the size of an Iraqi car bomb crater – in that argument. First of all, the primary cause of increased medical malpractice insurance rates, when they happen, is bad investing of premium dollars by insurance companies.

The truth is, the number of malpractice suits has remained pretty stable while the cost insurance has risen. The reason: when insurance companies don’t make enough money from their investments, they keep their profits up by raising their rates. Check some of the story out here:
www.centerjd.org/air/StableLosses.pdf

The good news about medical malpractice suits is that hospitals and doctors are on notice that if they screw up – through carelessness or plain incompetence – the malpractice lawyers will sue them from here to hell. And that awareness helps protect you from sloppy or unethical medicine whenever you step into a doctor’s office or a hospital.

Moreover, even if malpractice rates were up because of an increase in successful law suits against doctors (which I repeat, is not, not, not at all the case) the government ought to be going after improper peer review and licensing procedures for physicians, not the consumer’s right to seek redress. And doctors aren’t the only example.

Think of all those cars that used to explode when rear-ended – until auto makers got sued into building safer cars. Think of the poisonous pharmaceuticals – Thalidomide’s history of deforming fetuses comes to mind – and of manufacturers who’d gladly dispose of chemical waste by letting it leach into your drinking water, if a whole bunch of us couldn’t get together and sue them into kingdom come.

Okay, all that said, there’s an old principle of English common law that says something like this: “Even the lowliest whore in the Strand may sue a prince or an earl.” Meaning that anyone can sue anyone else for anything in the world. You may lose your lawsuit, but you can’t be stopped from suing.

For example, a judge who belongs in a nuthouse may cheerfully and frivolously sue a hapless drycleaner. Such appears to be the case of a Washington D.C. judge, Roy Pearson, who is suing his neighborhood dry cleaner over a pair of pants. He’s demanding for his “lost” pants – which the dry cleaner claims were returned to him – a mere $65 million. Yup, you read that right. Sixty-five million bucks. For a pair of pants.

This would be a huge joke, if not for the fact that the husband-wife-and-son dry cleaners, Jin Nam Chung, Ki Chung and their son, Soo Chung, have had to pay lawyers every step of the way to stave off financial ruin. They’re just about ruined anyway, even though their last offer to settle the suit – just to get rid of the madly suing judge and his insane flap over a pair of pants – was $12,000.

You want to address inequities in the legal system here? It has nothing to do with your right to seek a class action suit against a deep-pocketed corporate malefactor. It has a lot to do with the right of a malefactor to keep forcing you to pay for legal expenses to defend yourself until he destroys you financially regardless of the facts, or who’s right or wrong. Blame the lowly-whore-in-the-Strand principle of law. Incidentally, for Judge Pearson, there appears to have been no significant out-of-pocket costs. This particular denizen of the Strand is representing himself.

The solution has already been invented – in England, the same country that invented the whore-in-the-Strand principle. Losers pay all legal costs. To which I might ad, the same jury that tries the case ought to be able to assign punitive damages to victims like the Chung family. That would discourage Pearson’s kind of venomous frivolity fast.

As it is, I do hope the local bar associations in the area will demand that the judge step down from his bench – and that they disbar him, rip his robes off his back, and roundly boo him as he runs down the street in his shorts.

He also gets a psychic ding from the fortune teller on the block where The New York Crank’s offices are located. Specifically: May he have recurring nightmares that the entire planet is pointing fingers at him and jeering. And when he exits from his home each day, may he see his nightmares coming true. And may many of the jeering populace show up at his disbarment proceedings. Ding!

For more about this horror story paste this in your browser and bristle at it:
http://my.earthlink.net/article/str?guid=20070503/46395e40_3421_133452007050377044224

Incidentally, the propensity to sue people for telling the truth seems to extend not only to lowly whores in the Strand but to wealthy divorcees in Santa Barbara who buy newspaper companies with their divorce settlement checks. Check out this nasty story (You may have to register first):
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-mccaw19dec19,1,7280559.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Finally, there’s, Nancy Grace. If you don’t know who she is, print out her photograph, below, and take it back to Mars with you.



The scowl you see is every bit as nasty as the TV manner of this former prosecutor manqué. How manqué? Well, consider this entry from Wikipedia:

"In a 2005 opinion, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of appeals said Grace 'played fast and loose' with her ethical duties and failed to 'fulfill her responsibilities' as a prosecutor in the 1990 triple murder trial of Herbert Connell Stephens. She failed to turn over evidence that pointed to other suspects to his defense. The court noted that it was 'difficult to conclude that Grace did not knowingly' elicit false testimony from a police investigator that there were no other suspects despite strong evidence to the contrary."

Why she didn’t end up on trial for obstruction of justice and malicious prosecution beats me, in light of the above. Nancy’s modus operandi seems to be, find them guilty first, hang them second, determine the facts third – or now that they’re hanged, why the hell bother?

Alas, although the Georgia jurisdiction where she once practiced evidently sleazy law on behalf of the people has said good riddance to her, she has been welcomed into the open arms of CNN.

For a while I thought I was the only one who happened to notice she had a habit of trying cases on-air, without benefit of a defense attorney, or a judge, or a jury. But finally, some of the press has picked up on her, by virtue of a suicide by a woman named Melissa Duckett.

Grace, according press reports, lured Duckett, the mother of a missing child, onto TV with considerably less than fully truthful promises about the purpose of the interview. Then Grace badgered Duckett if Grace were – well, describing Grace as prosecutorial would be on the mild side. She acted more like the waterboarding supervisor at Abu Garib.

Result: Duckett, who was never charged with anything, tried for anything, found guilty of anything, or had any compelling evidence against her regarding her daughter’s death that I know of, committed suicide at her grandparents’ home. Next day, Grace aired the interview anyway. A real sweetheart, this Nancy Grace. She’s all eye of newt and toe of frog, if you ask me.

Anyway, you’ll find some of the horrifying details, as reported by the Associated Press, here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/21/america/NA_GEN_US_Missing_Boy.php

And even more if it, here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/15/MNGSAL67FH1.DTL

My local midtown fortune teller, who has been spending some of her evenings sitting on a bridge chair outside of her place of business now that the weather has turned warmer, agreed to a superduper psychic ding for Nancy Grace.

“May the estate of Melinda Duckett, which has filed a law suit against Grace, trounce her so badly and make her such a liability to her own and other networks, that she’ll have to open a dry cleaning store to survive.

"And may she then get sued by a nutty judge."

Poetry that bears witness to horror

If I learned one valuable thing as a college literature major almost a half century ago, it was that I don’t have a clue what makes for great poetry – or for mediocre poetry. Nor for that matter, can I distinguish between great and mediocre literature or even good and bad literary criticism.

The “New Criticism” school of structural analysis that was still popular in my distant undergraduate days was no help at all. The New Criticism methodology seemed akin to explaining the beauty of a tulip by ripping off its leaves and measuring its pistils and stamens.

You ended up with quantifiable but completely unhelpful information, and you pretty much ruined your enjoyment of the tulip.

I find the current “lit crit” wave of “deconstructionism” (or at least it was “current” last I was trying to pay attention) even more useless. Decontructionism speaks in tongues. Its mad prophets pull apart the tulip, chew and swallow its parts and then vomit up an ugly mess of impenetrable babble. Some years ago a deconstructionist literary journal published a send-up of itself after a peer review panel failed to detect that the densely written jargon they approved for publication was a leg-pulling hoax.

So all I am left with is an all-too-familiar “theory” of literary aesthetics. Alas, I could have arrived at it without my struggling father having flushed a considerable fortune (at least for him) down an intellectual toilet on my behalf. Specifically:

I don’t know much about literature but I know what I like.

And furthermore, very occasionally, I even know why I like it.

With that lengthy know-nothing’s caveat in mind, I want to call your attention to a small and in some respects curious volume of poems call “Wall Street Sonnets du 11 Septembre,” by Eugene Schlanger. (Photograph of the book above.)

No, the title is not an act of franglais pretentiousness. It’s the consequence of a curious publishing method at a company called Underbahn that I’ve been told prints its books in French in the United States and then transports the books for sale in Paris. Schlanger writes in English. Each poem in the book appears in both English and its French translation.

AND SO?

Well, for openers, my best guess after reading the poetry inspired by 9/11 is that some of it is pretty good. Let me offer you a few small tastes from the English pages.

From the poem “Porters and Promotors,” comes an observation I will mention again later:

“This death was an egalitarian act,
Uniting porters and promoters, the rich
And the illiterate, cops and fire chiefs
In a wealthy smoldering tangled mass…”

Or from another poem called “Afternoon Interlude at Trinity Church”:

“…I knew a man who was vaporized
And one day I may meet Audrey
His widow, in Brooklyn, and sigh.

“In this Episcopal church, a decade ago,
Desmond Tutu railed against Apartheid
From the lectern; Gallatin is buried in
The North yard; but these obese tourists
Do not remove their FDNY caps, somber,

“Yet peacefully (or painfully) unaware of
American commerce and art and history…”

It’s all sometimes wry, sometimes touching and sometimes irate stuff, as properly it ought to be.

True, it lacks the emotional thrust of a question reportedly asked by a child, as she stood with her mother on a promenade across the East River in Brooklyn about a mile away, watching the 9/11 horror show. According to this story (I haven’t been able to track down its origin) mother and daughter saw several people in the distance, their clothes on fire, leaping to their death from 92nd story windows of one of the towers. And the little girl asked curiously:

“Mommy, why are the birds on fire?”

In the end, it is the naïve soul, not the poets, who unwittingly craft the most powerful lines. Which brings to mind…

DYBBUKS, A NOVEL
AND ANNE FRANK

I’m currently reading a bitter but nevertheless brilliantly funny novel from the 1960s, “The Dance of Genghis Cohn,” by Romain Gary. It’s narrated by the ghost of an extermined Jewish comedian, now a dybbuk who inhabits and manipulates the mind and the body of the Nazi war criminal who shot him to death.

Yes, it’s an emotional experience that simultaneously makes you feel rage, relish the dybbuk’s revenge, and rail at the futility of both. But nothing that I know in Holocaust literature fuels emotions more than the sweetly-written “Diary of Anne Frank.” And even that pales by comparison with filmed footage of what the Allies found when they liberated the concentration camps.

So now to the question, often implied but rarely stated bluntly in book reviews: Why should you buy this book?

For the answer I have to refer to my own recollections of Schlanger’s obese tourists near the Ground Zero site.

Shortly after 9/11, New York was flooded with tourists who wanted to see Ground Zero. I know this first-hand because I occasionally volunteer as a tour guide for a non-profit organizations that boosts New York City tourism, and I led several visitors to the wreckage. Inevitably, as the visitors pointed their cameras toward the rubble and twisted steel I saw them get stopped by policemen, who would say something like, “Have some respect. They’re pulling body parts out of there.”

The tourists deferred to authority. They had no choice. The people stopping them were armed cops who for justifiable reasons were not in a good mood. All the same, I’m not sure the best way to respect the victims of 9/11 was to avoid recording what the terrorists had done to them.

We live in an era where denial and revisionist lies are standard operating procedure for propagandists of all stripes. Holocaust denial has grown from a cottage industry to an international enterprise, currently funded and cordially hosted by Iran. All you have to do to retch at the twisting of truth is to examine some holocaust denial websites. (And no, I most definitely will not aid their cause by providing any links) One such website helpfully explains that the gas chambers were not for exterminating people, but rooms where mattresses were disinfected for the benefit of the Jewish guests at Buchenwald.

Fortunately, the WWII Allies captured and in some cases recorded film footage, as well as paper records and grisly artifacts such as human skin lampshades – tangible evidence that belies the holocaust deniers. All you have to do to understand the reality of the Holocaust is watch ten seconds of documentary footage showing bulldozers pushing a mountain of corpses into a ditch for mass burial. (Screen “Judgment at Nuremberg” some time.)

AT SOME POINT, DELIBERATE DENIAL
OF THE OVERT TRUTH
ITSELF BECOMES A WAR CRIME

Had it been up to me, there would have been an army of volunteers not only leading tourists with camera to the horrors of Ground Zero, but insisting – insisting! – that they take photographs. I want records! Graphic, irrefutable records. And I want them in every attic trunk, every shoebox, every library, every computer and personal electronic archive on the planet. Just as there are Holocaust deniers today, there will be attempts at 9/11 denial half a century from today. In fact, they have already begun, spawned from the ashes of 9/11 and hatched by hate-filled opportunists.

The denials began only days after the twin towers fell. LeRoi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, started putting out viciously libelous propaganda in a poem called “Somebody Blew Up America,” virtually claiming – on the basis of self-invented evidence – that Israel was behind the day’s events.

To fire him, the Governor of New Jersey had to eliminate the post Jones/Baraka occupied as the state’s Poet Laureate.

Similarly, Ward Chuchill, a University of Colorado professor, declared the incinerated victims of 9/11 to be “little Eichmanns.” His complaint seems to be that they deserved their awful deaths because their jobs generated profits, which helped support capitalism, which in turn supports the U.S. economy, which in turn generated tax money, which in turn enabled George Bush to fund his war in Iraq.

Never mind the true sequence of events (The Iraq invasion happened after 9/11). Never mind the lengthy and improbable nexus that Churchill creates, or the fact that some of those “little Eichmanns” were there to cook meals, bus tables, or (horror of horrors!) to administer pension funds. Schlanger has put his finger on it. They were truly the “porters and promoters,” and anything but an army of Nazi apparatchiks.

Churchill’s mean-spirited hate speech (an appropriate redundancy if ever there was one) resulted in getting him fired from a state university by the Colorado governor, but he gained the support of 199 of his fellow faculty members. They all ought to be be chained to their chairs and forced to watch, with their eyes taped open, an endless loop of 9/11 nightmares, most especially footage made by a French documentary group which was at the World Trade Center on 9/11 by coincidence. The horrifying sound track of bodies crashing to the concrete from above is all you need in order to infer the responsibilities and limits of academic freedom.

I wish the 9/11 holocaust deniers – Leroy Jones, Ward Churchill and his supporters and perhaps many not yet born – could be confronted at every turn by photographs of the dismembered body parts of the victims who were roasted and smashed to death thanks to Bin Ladin’s scheme from hell. Let the deniers’ progeny demand of those little Ward Churchills and Leroi Joneses, “Daddy, why was this a good thing? Will I some day have to fly out of a building with my dress on fire?”

In the meantime, Eugene Schlanger bears witness in his own way. He gives us an imperfect but still nicely crafted poetic cudgel to reinforce humanity’s defenses against those who would deny 9/11.

So I encourage you to buy his book. Here and there you’ll find little tributes to his politically conservative economic outlook that I do not much care for. I encourage you to buy the book anyway. Save it, preserve it and give it to your children. (There’s a URL below where you can order.)

The future will cry out for the voices of witnesses. Schlanger’s is one of them. Would that we had more.



You might want to check out these URLs. Just copy and paste them into your browser:

To Order “Wall Street Sonnets”-

http://www.opinionjournalbookstore.com/cgi-bin/Shopper.exe?preadd=action&key=0977422445


On Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiri_Baraka

On Ward Churchill and his college faculty supporters:

http://home.comcast.net/~jackott2/a_house_of_cards.htm

Churchill on “Little Eichmanns”:

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/mn/sept112001/somepeoplepushback.html

Announcing a short and cranky damn hiatus. Expect me back early to mid-May.

It sucks, man. I just have too much to do. I’m in the (usually) enviable position of having business clients coming out of my ears, nose and briefcase. And they all need something now, right away, pronto – not next month.

Where were they all back last November and December, when I had nothing to do but sit around and think about how much the Bush administration gets my effin’ goat? To say nothing of the New York Bloomberg administration.

Why can't I find time to sound a warning that if poisoned wheat gluten could kill cats and dogs, it might be killing people, too? I mean, do you know where the wheat gluten in your bread comes from?

But no. I have to sit here writing advertsing for my demanding clients.

And will they still be around to pay the bills at the speed they demand work once the work is done?

Don’t bet on it, Bunky.

Well, it's a good time to take a break. I was going to do a number on Rudolph Giuliani, but before I got to it, Giuliani did a wonderfully self-destructive number on himself. He practically appointed his wife Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare before he even got a quarter of the way to the Republican nomination, much less the White House. Then he took it all back, nearly saying he didn't say it.

George Bush just got slammed by the U.S. Supreme Court on the environment. Even timid Democrats are raking him across the coals on Iraq.

I mean, just for now the world will survive without me taking potshots at the right, and besides, I'm too accursedly busy!

So for now, this blog is taking a rest. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Probably in a couple of weeks. Probably still feeling as irritated as a pit bill with his nose Krazy Glued into a pepper pot.

Until then, watch out for yourself, pal. Under the accursed Republicans, no one else will.

Crankily yours,
The New York Crank

It this what New York Mayor Bloomberg’s cops are planning to do to peaceful protestors and people who expose cops violating the law?

According to a blog called The Real Estate Observer, connected to The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper, New York’s “finest” may be planning to beat the crap out of some people the cops don’t like.

The story is entitled, "Cop-Blog Ranters Vow Vengeance Against 'Radical' Bicyclists." You'll find it at this address: http://therealestate.observer.com/2007/03/copblog-ranters-vow-vengeance-against-radical-bicyclists.html


How all this came about is a bit involved, so please bear with me. It starts with another website, Uncivil Servants.org. Uncivil servants is related to a group called Transportation Alternatives. The Uncivil Servants website is dedicated to exposing illegal and dangerous parking by all kinds of city employees – not just cops – on the sidewalks, in front of fire hydrants, in bus stops and other locations.
http://nyc.uncivilservants.org/

The site posts photographs and videos of illegally parked cars and forged parking permits, and highlights a general "to-hell-with-the-law-or-public-safety" attitude of some of the city’s employees who use their cars for personal commuting and then park wherever they feel like parking.

This exposure has led to considerable rage among New York Police Department officers. They've expressed their feelings on their own blog, NYPD Rant. You’ll find it at:
http://p066.ezboard.com/NYPD-RANT/bnypdrant64609

It’s not easy to access everything on that’s posted on NYPD Rant. Full use requires registration. Quite frankly, The New York Crank didn’t bother trying. But I saw enough to confirm the Real Estate Observer’s story. Specifically:

“Commenters have posted pictures of Paul White and Matthew Roth, two honchos at Transportation Alternatives, who are supposedly going to be riding in… [another group’s protest ride].

"’These lawbreaking cycle pirates must be stopped!!" writes Blue Trumpet on NYPD Rant.

“Gimmelosttime adds: 'Someone please hammer these 2 turds this weekend.’"

The site is difficult to navigate, but also refers to quotas – presumably arrest or ticket quotas – which the NYPD officially insist do not exist. Surf around the website for a while and you'll also find a picture a police badge with the number covered by masking tape - what cops have been known to do to avoid identification when they engage in illegal behavior in uniform.

And there are other encitements to bad cop behavior, including what I sincerely hope is an out-of-context quote from Mayor Bloomberg that "you can't fire someone for things they do outside the office." It's not hard to translate what that one means in its cop rant context: "If you're not on duty and you find one of those Transportation Alternatives people, give him a thorough tuneup."

So what is Mayor Bloomberg doing about physical threats of violence against civilians who have committed no crime? Or about investigating “nonexistent” police quotas that encourage cops to improperly ticket other peoples' cars and make improper arrests?

Why, exactly what he appears to have done about documented (sometimes with license plates photographs) illegal parking by city employees.

Nothing.

P.S. I haven’t been to the news stands yet, but someone called to say that this week’s issue of New York Magazine evidently diss-es one of the two New York Mayors Who Would Be President (the other is Rudy You-Know-Who) by calling attention to Bloomberg inadequacy in managing his job.

More on this topic after the article makes it to the web next week, so you can refer to it yourself. Also to come one of these weeks: What most of America doesn’t know about Giuliani.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lawyers move to stop a “fixated press” from reporting on Bloomberg police state shenanigans. Oh, the poor baby!

Astoundingly, I keep hearing via the rumor mill that New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg still harbors presidential ambitions.

Mike, Mike, in today's political atmosphere you can’t run your town like a police state and still expect people to turn out for you.

This cranky corner of the Internet has reported on Bloomberg’s neo-Hitlerian behavior before. (See “Heil Bloomberg” here): http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
(You'll have to scroll down to the story.)

But now that Bloomberg’s chickens are coming home to roost, the city’s lawyers are pleading with the courts to stop the chickens.

Okay, okay, that metaphor is a trifle overcooked. So let’s get down to hobnail boots. This morning’s New York Times reports:

“Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will ‘fixate upon and sensationalize them,’ hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

“In papers filed in federal court last week, the city’s lawyers also say that the documents could be ‘misinterpreted’ because they were not intended for the public.”

Translation from Mike’s Lawyerese into plain New Yorkese:

“Hey, in da foist place, if da press sees what’s in the records, it’ll show dat we’ve been spying on just about any organization dat don't love Mike Bloomberg or George Bush.

"It'll also show we've inserting cops into their meetings, reading their mail, surreptitiously taking their photographs, finding ways to disrupt them and stifle their freedom of speech, illegally confiscating their property and stuff like dat. Da press is gonna report all dis here stuff, which will make us look bad. No fair! Whaa whaa whaa!

“Oh, and second of all, da public is too dumb to understand police reports written by our brilliant detectives.”

Are these the same kind of brilliant detectives who fired 50 shots into a van filled with unarmed and innocent partygoers – one of the brilliant dicks stopping to reload before plugging them again, and again, and again? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061127/ap_on_re_us/police_shooting

Also in the news: Bloomberg's rocket scientist cops have discovered that one of the greatest threats to the security of our nation is a group of satirists called Billionaires for Bush (link in our links column) who poke fun of Republicans. Oh, the horror of it all!

A police report that did get uncovered revealed the shocking news that, “Billionaires for Bush is an activist group forged as a mockery of the current president and political policies. Preliminary intelligence indicates that this group is raising funds for expansion and support of anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

In other words, “Dem guys is poiposely making fun of da President and his policies and they’re raising dis here money to promote a point of view dat Mayor Mike don’t like.”

Horrors! No wonder Bloomberg doesn’t want more details of his Keystone Kops police state behavior revealed.

God knows whether the cops are also spying on The New York Crank. We recently received a request for our mailing address from someone who said he wanted to send us a book of poetry. That could be a new variation an old cop technique. The cops write to skells, telling them they’ve won a lot of money. The letter says they can claim the cash by coming to a party, at a certain time, at a certain address. When they show up, they all get busted.

On the other hand, it could be a legitimate request from a guy who simply wants The New York Crank to look at his poetry, perhaps in the hope the Crank will say something nice about it and lead others to buy the book.

At any rate, despite the chilling pall that Bloomberg, his lawyers and his cops are trying to throw over free speech, we sent the poet – or perhaps the cop posing as a poet – our address.

Hey! Yo, cops! If youse guys want to spy on The Crank, youse is welcome. There's nothing youse guys will discover that you can't find out right here – except maybe about my cranky fondness for French cuisine and pricey steak restaurants. And now youse have loined that here, too.

As the comedian used to say: But seriously, folks – it’s time for Michael Bloomberg, and his police Commissioner, Michael Kelly, to finish their terms and retire.

Or maybe it's also time for them to get busted for violating the civil rights of New Yorkers and do a little bit of prison time. Civil rights violations were a Federal crime, last time I looked.

P.S. Don’t go away without checking out the Billionaires for Bush website. Their members now have the temerity to make fun not only of the Bush administration, but also of the Bloomberg administration and the cops who work for it. Sample comment on the discovery that New York detectives were spying on Billionaires for Bush:

"We suspect they were looking for stock tips."

Peking Thought Police fail to intimidate The New York Crank

Hey, Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People’s Republic of China: You cannot scare The New York Crank. Nor can the Crank be intimated. I know what you are. You are a crypto-capitalist-neo-communist-totalitarian. Or something like that. And nya nya nya to you!

Anyway, the Crank paid a visit to the far right expats at the No-Pasaran blog the other day (link in the links column at right) to see what they were up to.

They were up to celebrating (more or less) the fact that they had been banned in China. (You’ll have to scroll down a lot. They put up multiple posts almost every day.)

Seems there’s a website called The Great Firewall of China. http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test/
You type in any website and watch a map of the world as your URL bounces around between servers in Europe and Asia until it comes up with an answer. Banned. Or not banned. If you’re banned, nobody in China can read your stuff.

Yeah, so big deal. How could this apply to The New York Crank? I don’t even remember mentioning China here in this Crankyspace, much less saying something hostile about them, although maybe I forget some passing mention.

Then, today, the rebellious high school kids at the Tattoo Blog (link also at right) headlined the fact that THEY have been banned by Peking, too.

This got me curious. So I crankily tested my URL several times and whaddya know? Yup. The New York Crank is banned in China as well.

I began playing around some. I typed in the URL of Antioch College in Ohio, a small liberal arts college known for its leftsy rebelliousness. You'd think that'd be just the kind of place Peking might like. No such luck. Banned.

Then I typed in the URL of Earlham College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, not known at all for being left wing. Not banned.

Wikipedia? Banned. My pal Buce at Underbelly (URL at right) the poetry-reading, literature-quoting bankruptcy lawyer? Not banned.

C’mon, Buce, get with it man. Get off that literature kick and say something political, so you can join the Legion of the Banned. It’s getting to the point where if you’re not banned in China, people may think you’re not all that interesting.

In the course of trying to figure out why The New York Crank is persona non grata in Peking, several thoughts occurred to me:

1. Capitalism is not a cure for totalitarianism. In fact, as we’re seeing in China and other Marxist nations that have changed to semi-capitalist entrepreneurship (viz. Russia) capitalism can be a concomitant to totalitarian rule. Oh my gosh, that may be true of the current occupants of the White House, too!

2. Democracy does not necessarily bring on Conservative-style, laissez faire capitalism, although that currently seems to be the case in this country. But the Scandinavian nations, to pick an example or three, seem to accommodate the popular will and many aspects of welfare state-ism.

3. The surest measure of whether a nation will go totalitarian long-term is the national character. Russia had secret police carrying out assassinations when the Czars were in power. They’re still doing it today. China was totalitarian, chaotic, often brutal and more-or-less capitalistic under the pre-Mao emperors and maybe even the late Chiang Kai-Shek. It still is today. Cuba is always a strongman-ruled basket case no matter who was in power. I think you get the idea.

4. Finally, I still wonder: How did I put a bug up Wen Jiabao’s ass? I mean, how did I put it there prior to this particular post? Well, I’ve got a conspiracy theory for you. I keep knocking W and the Bush Administration on this blog. I point out their flaws. I poke fun at them. I get irate at them. So I ask you – if China is getting upset with me, might not that mean that somebody in the Bush Administration is a secret Chinese Communist agent, and China doesn’t want us anti-Bushniks calling attention to what they’re up to?

Nah! Of course not.

On the other hand…

Bears, chopsticks and baseball. Alas, the nut cases with these concerns are mostly MY side's lunatics. Quick, somebody call a psychiatrist!

So they call me left-leaning. I sometimes call myself left-leaning. But the truth is, I’m a 1959 Centrist, leaning the way I’ve always leaned. It’s just that a lot of American sentiment has shifted, mostly to the right, and in my opinion mostly to the detriment of the nation.

I'm going to get to the bears and the chopsticks shortly, but first stay with me while I make my politics clear.

I define my political tilt with opinions like these:
• We don’t belong in Iraq at this time and no Americans should be dying there
• Social Security and Medicare ought to be preserved, and universal healthcare should be a government priority
• For the general good, America ought to have a more steeply graduated income tax with much higher max tax rates for the formidably rich
• Every American citizen ought to give a year or two of universal national service, whether in the military, the Peace Corps or some other useful service
• America’s citizens need the power of government to control the greedy excesses of big business and agribusiness.
• But small businesses and small farmers deserve government help
• America should be moving faster to rein in major sources of atmospheric pollution.

But sheesh!

Now, because the right wing politicians have gobbled up so much of the center and excreted it off to the right, I find myself allied with lunatics of the left. Look who I find I have to side with in order to call myself a liberal.

ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS CAMPAIGNING
FOR POLAR BEAR CUB “MERCY KILLINGS”

Polar bears are an endangered species. They’re losing habitat. I suspect they’re rapidly losing their gene pool. So over in Germany, what happens?

“BERLIN - Berlin Zoo's abandoned polar bear cub Knut looks cute, cuddly and has become a front-page media darling, but an animal rights activist insisted Monday he would have been better off dead than raised by humans…

“’Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws,’ animal rights activist Frank Albrecht was quoted as saying by the mass-circulation Bild daily, which has featured regular photo spreads tracking fuzzy Knut's frolicking.

"’The zoo must kill the bear.’"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070321/ap_on_sc/germany_polar_bear;
_ylt=AkD13qCc46PDjSJUn7f6UoLMWM0F

Yeah, thanks a lot Frank. With friends like you, animals don’t need rights. They need bigger teeth and sharper claws. And maybe a good lawyer and a battery of howitzers.

FOOD NAZIS PROMOTE
CULINARY FASCISM

“WASHINGTON - The typical Chinese restaurant menu is a sea of nutritional no-nos, a consumer group has found…

"’I don't want to put all the blame on Chinese food,’ said Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which did a report released Tuesday.

"’Across the board, American restaurants need to cut back on calories and salt, and in the meantime, people should think of each meal as not one, but two, and bring home half for tomorrow,’ Liebman said.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070321/ap_on_he_me/diet_chinese_food;
_ylt=Ajn6RhymjKQN8bNjwbFH3lvMWM0F


Listen Bonnie, you might want to watch your use of that word “need.” Restaurants don’t “need” to do anything except serve sanitary food that people like to eat so that the restaurant can make a profit and stay in business.

Chinese food has been around for – I’m going to take a wild guess here – 4,000 years. It does well in this country because it tastes delicious, people enjoy eating it, and it’s usually inexpensive.

Suddenly there are too many calories in it? Well maybe. But then SUGGEST that I eat less of it. Don’t tell me “people should think of each meal…etc.” Say, “I believe people ought to CONSIDER thinking of each meal…etc.”

I mean, who appointed you chief food Nazi of the United States? Give you an inch and the next thing I know you’ll be hiding under my kitchen table to bust me for that second helping of Chunky Monkey or Rocky Road. Maybe even for the first helping.

Or you’ll be lurking under my bed with a video camera, the better to determine if my sex life is up to your high sanitary standards.

Here, Bonnie, let me give you a taste of your own imperial attitude: What you need to do is shut up and let people lead their own lives.

POLITICIANS SUDDENLY GO
BATS OVER BASEBALL

Look, I’m as much for safety as the next guy. I don’t want to see kids hurt playing what ought to be a joyful game.

But New York City has just gotten slightly batty over the subject. The City Council here has outlawed aluminum bats from school games, in the face of often-contradictory and always-anecdotal evidence that baseballs fly off aluminum bats faster than balls hit by wooden bats. There is no hard evidence one way or the other.

(Out of fairness to my liberal friends, I have to point out that the Council bill was introduced by a Republican. Or, to be true to my political sentiments, another damned idiot Republican.)

The New York Times reports:

“But while supporters use …anecdotal examples, industry officials say there have been no reliable studies showing that metal bats provide greater risk of injury than wooden bats.

“A number of coaches, leagues and athletic organizations, including Little League International and the New York High Schools Athletic Association, opposed the bill.

“Part of the opposition rests on the cost of replacing wooden bats, which frequently break. According to the City Council, it would cost the city’s public high schools $253,500 to replace 5,070 metal or metal-composite bats used by 169 baseball teams with wood bats, and $67,600 a year thereafter to replace broken wood bats.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/nyregion/14cnd-bats.html?ex=1331524800&en=b5dd7cf6f5cd85f4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Listen, dudes. If aluminum bats really hurt and kill kids, they ought to be banned from the game and used only by underworld enforcers who collect debts by breaking legs. But banning aluminum alone is nuts. A wooden bat could hit a baseball hard enough to kill a kid, too. For that matter, so could a carelessly-pitched bean ball.

If the City Council really wants to stop deaths on the baseball diamond, it could switch from baseballs to a bigger and slower-moving softballs. Or the Council could outlaw baseball, period. While they're at it, they might want to outlaw football, another high school sport that sometimes baldy injures kids. That would cut sports injuries to near zero.

Fat chance of it happening?

Yeah, my point exactly.

Recalling the Big Muddy syndrome: Did these two guys share a Vulcan Brain Meld? Don’t answer until you read this.

In the earliest incarnation of the Star Trek TV series, Spock and his Vulcan friends could download the complete contents of other Vulcans' brains into their own brains. It was called the Vulcan Brain Meld. Hold that ridiculous thought for a minute.

As I write this, George Bush has just finished addressing the nation about Iraq, loading us up with essentially the same bull we heard during Viet Nam – that we're on our way to winning this thing and all we need is the right number of troops and – after four years – some more time.

I wish somebody would revive the Viet Nam war song about the – Was it a sergeant? A captain? – who led his troops into a swamp on a training exercise at a southern military base, going deeper, deeper, deeper into the swamp, until most of them drowned. The song was based on an actual event that became the perfect pop metaphor for what was going on in Washington then. And now.

This is all from memory, mind you, but here’s the way I remember it. Lyndon Johnson – yes, a Democrat, but not one of My Democrats – was President at the time. He suffered from the same vision problems that the current occupant of the White House has inflicted on himself vis-à-vis a war going from bad, to worse, to still worse, ad infinitum. He refused to acknowledge, or see, what was happening. All we needed were more troops and more time and all our problems would be solved. The word escalation seemed to have been made for Viet Nam, as it now does for Iraq.

So as long as it's "deja vu all over again," maybe it's time to revive the Big Muddy song.

One refrain to the song warned, “Now we’re knee deep in Big Muddy, and the big fool says move on.”

And then it was waist deep. And then later, “Now we’re neck deep in Big Muddy, and the big fool says move on.”

Got the idea?

Which brings me back to the first thought: I wonder whether Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush somehow, years ago, did a Vulcan Brain Meld.

Of course, I’m only kidding.

But also, I’m not kidding.

NEXT DAY'S ADDENDUM

With a bit of extra time on my hands today, I was able to locate complete text of the original song and a bit about the attempt to keep it off the air.

But memory plays funny tricks. The song was about a WWII captain and now I have no way of telling whether the songwriter, folks guitarist and lyricist Pete Seeger, invented the incident or based his ballad on something that actually happened.

At any rate, you'll find the whole shebang at the URL below. As you'll see, the song relevantly stands up, even today. Read the words and think George Bush.

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/snd/waistdeep.html

Annoyed, irked, furious that some stockbroker, brokerage “financial planner,” or shill led you down the garden path? Here’s what they think of you.

Years ago, in the course of interviewing some commodity salesmen at a major brokerage house, Yours Crankily discovered the word that financial salespeople use for customers who complain that they’ve taken their advisors' advice and lost money.

“Crybabies.”

Yeah, they can afford to put you down. After all, it wasn’t their money that got lost. It was yours.

Not to say that the buyer shouldn’t always beware just on general principals. Anybody who says he knows where a stock is going a week down the road ought either to have his head examined or get arrested for fraud or insider trading. A childhood friend of mine, who was a Senior Vice President at a couple of well-known banks once told me, “I made my entire career and a lot of money pretending I knew what the market would do. The truth is, I didn’t know s**t.”

All the same, people come to brokers, bankers, advisors and publications because they know they need to invest and they’re not sure what to do. They figure the “expert” knows more than they do. And these experts are more than happy to sell advice to them, and sometimes securities and wealth management plans as well.

So people who sell their expertise want you to believe that indeed, they are God.

Visit the web testimonials page of The Oxford Club, an organization that sells subscriptions to newsletters containing investment advice. The first testimonial you encounter says this, “"Alex Green is the one of the most creative investment advisors I have ever encountered. I've known him for over 25 years, and have been continually impressed by his thorough diligence and skillful timing on investments. Alex has a broad view of investment opportunities, from domestic to foreign." http://www.oxfordclub.com/Visitors/Testimonials.html

Oxford mail and e-mail promotion pieces talk not only about beating the Dow or the S&P 500, but also about doubling and tripling your money in short amounts of time. No wonder some naïve investors look on these people as God. And no wonder they cry like Job when the market drowns their hopes, and sucks away their savings. But at least God restored Job to his former state when Job cut out his praise-the-Lord stuff and turned crybaby. Don't expect that from the Oxford Club, or anyone having anything to do with Wall Street.

Listen, I happen to like the Oxford Club. Green has made recommendations that have made money for me in recent times. All the more reason why I get nervous when Green sends me an e-mail praising, of all people, the author Ayn Rand, and carrying on about John Gault, a fictional Rand character. Worse, he uses Rand's colossally ridiculous fiction as the basis for his latest round of investment advice.

Do I mean the same fiction that praises ruthlessly predatory capitalists? Yup. And that scares me. Green writes:

“First, take responsibility for your own trades. Whether you make money or lose money, you should relish the fruits of your labors when your stocks go up, and not blame others when your investments decline.

“Granted, you may have learned of an investment idea from a stockbroker, newsletter writer or TV personality, but only you can be blamed if the stock goes south. Ultimately, it was YOU who decided to use that broker, subscribe to that newsletter writer, or watch that favorite financial program. Wise investors use several sources and then make their own investment decisions.”

Wait a second, Alex! Wait just one damn second! Why didn’t you tell me this when The Oxford Club was selling your skills as a stock guru?

In fact, why is Oxford telling me, in a box full of lusciously purple prose about blue water, inserted right into the text of Green's e-mail about John Gault, “The 2007 Breakout Commodity Report: Make Up to 689% in the Next Few Months from ‘The BLUE Revolution’

“A torrent of water is about to let loose on thirsty Nevada, from rivers of water that lay 200 feet to 2,000 feet below the surface of some of the most barren-looking land in the world. And a single company owns the right to that water - more than a million acres of proven reserves - that will generate approximately 11.4 billion gallons per year!

“Investors who know about this secret network of underground rivers stand to almost quadruple their money (on this investment alone) when the water begins flowing in just months.

“And that’s just one of four water-related opportunities you’ll learn about in The Oxford Club’s new report: Profit From The Blue Revolution: Pocket 689% Gains Or More From The One Commodity More Precious Than Oil, Uranium And Natural Gas.”

Got that, folks? Six hundred and eighty-nine percent, Green's "club" says. “In the next few months” at that.

Holy cow! That’s what I call a bold attempt to grab me through my computer screen and massage my greed gland to financial orgasm.

Just remember that on the same page, Green is excusing himself from any liability if the Oxford prediction of almost septupling your money in a few months turns out to be as phony as a $3 bill.

What scares me even more is that people who sell advice – even the generally good advice the Oxford Club has been selling me – are beginning to get off specifics and into John Gault and Ayn Rand morality. Consider that a giant “uh oh.” What do they know about the state of the market that they don’t want me to know until I part with my subscription dollars?

Or do they really know anything at all?

FLASH! This just in from the Better-Late-Than-Never Department

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military planners have begun work on a fallback strategy in case the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq fails, including a gradual pullout of U.S. forces and more emphasis on training and advising Iraqi forces, the Los Angeles Times reported in Monday's editions.

George, George, yo George, listen up, willyuh George? Could we please have just one damn incompetence-instigated catastrophe at a time?

I mean…

•Iraq invasion

•People who once loved us now despise the USA

•Returning power of the Taliban in Afghanistan

•The unresolved Katrina mess

•Truckloads of paper money “vanished” in Iraq

•“Recycled” soldiers on their third tour of duty

•Wounded America vets at Walter Reed, treated like garbage

•Private contractors do shoddy work and make out like bandits – leading one to think they really are bandits

•Staggering national debt

•A handful of multi-millionaires becoming billionaires while the middle class grows poorer

•Americans without health insurance

•Banks are legally permitted to charge credit card interest on money we’ve already paid them

•Dick Cheney with a hunting rifle

•Exposing our own CIA operatives for partisan political advantage

•Libby Libby Libby in a prison prison prison

•Good U.S. Attorneys fired, evidently for not kowtowing to the party line

•Hack U.S. Attorneys retained

•The current composition of the U.S. Supreme Court

• Mission Accomplished – we’ve won the war in Iraq. Well, actually we didn’t win, but the fact that our guys are getting killed wholesale proves the enemy is desperate. Well, maybe they’re not desperate, but we’re winning anyway. Well, maybe we weren’t winning anyway, but now we’ve got a plan to win. Well, the plan isn’t working yet but it’ll work if we surge the troops for a few months. Well, maybe not for just a few months, maybe until 2008, Well…

•Iraq has WMD. No, actually Iraq doesn’t have WMD but North Korea has the bomb. No, maybe North Korea doesn’t have the bomb. Iran has the…oh, nevermind!

•Plus many, many more. But I have a headache.

Attention all PR flacks: Are you having trouble attracting press attention? Try taking off your clothes.

"HETEREN, Netherlands -- A dozen middle-age and elderly men were game enough for a Dutch gym's invitation to work out nude. But they were vastly outnumbered by the dozens of journalists watching them lift, row and cycle in the buff...."

You'll find alll the sweaty, flabby, swinging and droopy details here:

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070305/NATION/703050342/1020/NATION

Quick, what’s the difference between these two things?

The baseball mitt is smarter than Mitt Romney.

Case in point: Romney gets up the other day and introduces Ann Coulter. He says, "I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!"

Then Ann Coulter gets up and does some nasty gay bashing. She says, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards."

Defenders of the Clueless Mitthead insist, “he didn’t know what she was going to say.” Read it in this National Journal article that recounts the event: http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/03/ann_coulter_sla.html

Oh, that poor baby! And on what was Mitt (the candidate, not the baseball glove) basing his happiness that the audience would hear from Ann after hearing from him?

Perhaps it was her kindly, thoughtful and oh-so-incisive comment about the widows of 9-11 victims, “I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." She called the grieving widows “harpies.”

Did I mention that she has also favored poisoning a United States Supreme Court justice? And bombing the New York Times?

A real sweetheart, this gal!

The National Journal, usually a fortress of reasonably thoughtful conservatism, was excoriated to shreds by its own readers when it tried to defend Romney for introducing her. Go to the URL above and scroll down to the reader postings to see what I mean.

Despite the outrage of Conservatives as well as anti-Conservatives to her unapologetic and in-character utterances, I’m glad she makes them. That’s because her behavior allows a tit-for-tat response, without any apologies required of this cranky commentator.

I mean, if the Mitthead has any kind brain at all, even a vestigial one, he must have figured that he’d get something in return for saying nice things about this five-star witch. Maybe he thought he’d get into her pants.

Mitt, pal, don’t ever go there. I have an uncomfortable premonition that if Ann Coulter ever spreads her legs for you, a huge swarm of flies, worms, gnats, millipedes and bedbugs will come streaming out.

No no, don’t blame me for that last statement. I really didn’t know what I was going to write.

Blame for the mess at Walter Reed? Lay it directly at the door of the Privatizer In Chief, who doesn’t seem to care how much shattered vets suffer.

The scandal of outpatient “care” at Walter Reed Army Hospital (and perhaps at others, yet to be discovered) is a national disgrace directly created by George W. Bush’s drive to privatize virtually anything the government does.

Sure, President Bush talks a good game about “supporting the troops” when it comes to putting them in harm’s way and getting them killed and maimed. But when it comes to actually supporting those who survived – minus one or both legs, minus one or both arms, minus their eyesight or hearing, minus their sanity or full mental functioning – forget it.

There ought to be a lot more play given to a story in the Army Times that begins with the revelation that the Army for some reason initially refused to allow Major General George W. Weightman to testify before a legislative committee looking into the appalling mess at Walter Reed. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/03/Weightmansubpoena/

ARMY VETS GET PUNISHED BY THE
EVIL HAND OF A HALLIBURTON VET

The Army Times story went on to reveal that the downward slide began after “Walter Reed… awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.” Essentially, it was a contract to take outpatient care out of the hands of the military and put it in the hands of businessmen friends of the Bush Administration.

Once again the White House got its priorities twisted. In the insanely doctrinaire rush to privatize every government function it can think of, George Bush & Company handed over management of this facility to a company where the first priority was to make a buck.

Right. Make a buck. Off the backs of our wounded soldiers whom the President tells us we’re not supporting if we urge him to end the war that got them maimed in the first place.

According to the Army Times, another discovery is that “more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed had drooped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with only 50 private workers.”

BENEFITS? FIGHTING THE ARMY
IS WORSE THAN FIGHTING THE WAR

You’d think that if George Bush really wants to support the troops, he might make it easy for destitute and near-destitute families of wounded soldiers and marines to quickly get their benefits. Fat chance!

Actually, “the Army fights them on benefits. As one soldier, who was ripped apart by an IED that ruptured his spleen, ripped out his colon, broke his leg and tore ligaments from his knee put it: ‘The Army is trying to give you the lowest amount of money possible.’”
http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=10987

THE “WHAT ME WORRY” PRESIDENT

Moreover, George Bush knew of the atrocious conditions well before the scandal in the press – and chose to do nothing.

You can see “What me worry?” George’s press secretary Tony Snow admit the truth . Just go here:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/20/bush-walter-reed

So what are we to make of Defense Secretary Gates’ statement, ““I am concerned that some do not properly understand the need to communicate to the wounded and their families that we have no higher priority than their care and that addressing their concerns about the quality of their outpatient experience is critically important. Our wounded soldiers and their families have sacrificed much and they deserve the best we can offer."

Take it for what it is – sheer coverup hypocrisy – the very same hypocrisy that gets people who want to stop the war accused of “not supporting the troops.” The best support we can give them is to bring them home safely, now.

As for those pious statements of concern from the Bush Administration, which would rather screw up veteran care by privatizing it than actually give our shattered veterans any reasonable amount of care and assistance, the bitter truth is reflected in a song parody dating from about 1959. Here's what the Bush administration is really doing. Sing it to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

When Johnny comes hobbling home again
Hurrah, Hurrah!
When Johnny comes hobbling home again
Hurrah, Hurrah!
Stumbling and tripping on his wooden leg
Give him a cup and let him beg
And we’ll all wave a big flag
When Johnny comes hobbling home.