L’Atelier Joel Robuchon vs. Le Grand Véfour—a meditation on why the hell anybody would pay $150 or so for lunch in Paris

Top: Robuchon. Below: Véfour.

I can't believe—well, of course I do believe it, but not really—that I'm writing a blog piece comparing two of the most expensive restaurants in Paris.

I mean, there was a time when simply reading the prices on the menus would have given me a severe case of the vapors. Those were the days, half a century ago, when my bible for European travel was called Europe on $5 a Day, and five bucks really was my outer limit.

Well, a buck in the year 2010 isn’t what it used to be, but you really could get by, and comfortably at that, on $5 a head before 1961, provided there were two of you sharing a hotel room.

Of course, at the time Joel Robuchon was a pre-adolescent, not a restaurateur. Le Grand Véfour on the other hand had been around since they were decapitating royalty at Place de la Concorde. But it was the two buck meals on the Boulevard St. Michele, (with some scuzzy wine) and not haute cuisine that was on my radar back in my threadbare youth.

Cash, conflict and Paris: leftist or rightist it’s always nice to have money

Okay, so now it’s different. Conflicted leftist that I am, I arrived in Paris last week with the Crank’s beautiful girlfriend and a wallet stuffed with credit cards and Euros, still firmly possessed of the belief that Congress and Obama ought to tax the rich until they bleed green ink. But you wouldn’t have known it to watch me. The Boulevard St. Germain branch of Sonia Rykiel was all but flying banners out front that said, “Welcome Back, Crank’s Beautiful Girlfriend. Oh, and you, too, Crank.”

A day and several thousand bucks worth of frocks later—frocks that will make the Crank’s beautiful girlfriend look even more spectacularly beautiful—we were seated in Robuchon’s workshop.

Workshop—the dictionary definition of the French word atelier—is exactly what the place is. Most of the customers sit lunch counter style around various kitchen stations, their dishes in front of them on place mats, watching Robuchon’s kitchen elves do their magic.

I say most because if you have the temerity to reserve less than a month in advance you may find yourself in Robuchonian Siberia, seated at a shelf up against a plate glass window, as if you were sipping coffee from a paper cup in Starbucks. Instead of watching kitchen elves, you will find yourself staring out on Rue Montelambert, where not much seems to be going on for a street in Paris.

“Don’t talk. Shut up and observe how damn clever I am.”

This is not the kind of place where you would simultaneously bring your spouse, your boss, your boss’s spouse and a couple of clients to dinner. Conversation, save with the two persons at your elbows, is virtually impossible. The focus is on the food and even more so on its preparation, unless of course you are at the shelf in Siberia. observing taxis slowing down to check for potential passengers at the hotel next door.

There is something supremely egotistical about the place. Yes, the food is very good. (I had a high cholesterol triple-header: a cold country paté, followed by a sautéed duck liver with a crusted exterior, followed by a kind of steak au poivre and a glass of I-forget-what wine.) Yes, the service is unobtrusive and flawless.

But somehow, it’s all about Joel and his behind-the-counter acolytes. One is left with a lingering impression that the food and staff are there simply there to help you appreciate the brilliance of Joel Robuchon, who tends to build his creations vertically, like a clever child cantilevering pieces from his lego set. (See the top photograph)

A restaurant to enjoy, with company

Le Grand Véfour, on the other hand, believes in starched white tablecloths, attentive waiters who clearly specialize in some aspect of the meal (sommelier, cheese waiter, captain, and so on) and who seemed to have a passion for their specialty.

They design plates too, but the design sensibility is different. Imagine a zen master working hand-in-glove with Pablo Picasso. (See the lower photograph.) And good conversation here is expected to be part of the meal, rather than hushed awe. Pleasant chats were going on at all the tables around us. (For the record, Guy Martin is the brilliant chef, but I had to go hunting on the Internet to find his name.)

We chose the 80-something Euro prix fix e menu which declared that there would be four courses. Whatever else you do in life, for the love of God do not teach those folks at Le Grand Vefour how to count.

First there was an amuse bouche, a cool and creamy soup. Then a paté so rich and tasty that I am still daydreaming about it, almost a week later. It arrived on a plate with a typically zen-like arrangement of complimentary vegetable elements, which I gather is designed to put one’s mind and stomach at peace, before devouring every last morsel.

Next I had cod as I had never tasted (or seen) cod before. The Crank’s Beautiful Girlfriend had a chicken breast that was not like any chicken breast she had ever eaten before. Then a cheese plate arrived with a choice of wonderfully exotic cheeses, from the firm and intensely pungent to the impressively runny and wildly stinky. I chose three and then stopped myself, but the cheese waiter seemed perfectly willing to keep going if I wanted to. Nor were the portions—pardon the pun that comes to mind—cheesy, in the nouvelle cuisine manner. These were good-size hunks, not miniscule slivers.

After that came dessert (which was really two different desserts on one plate.) And finally, a long thin dish for each of us, with another zen-like arrangement, this one of different shaped bonbons.

As at Robuchon, we ordered wine by the glass, but in this case a sommelier with a powerful sense of the gravity of his calling stood by to offer his recommendations.

We sat down for lunch at 1 PM and left after 3, deliriously happy and convinced we would not need to eat again for the next 72 hours (although we did).

And here’s the point of it all

Why would anyone in his right mind pay (after wine and currency translation) about $150 per head for lunch? I might as well ask you why you might pay $150 per ticket to see people dancing around and singing songs on a stage on Broadway when you can see the same thing free right outside the door in the looney bin that’s Times Square.

It’s a memory. It’s a pleasurable experience. It’s a postcard home. It’s a conversation for the next day and perhaps for days afterward. It’s a blog piece. It’s something to remember with all the fondness you might also have for a $20 elevator ride to the top of the empire state building so you could look out with the rest of the crowd up there and enjoy the view for a few minutes—after standing in line for an hour.

There’s one big difference, of course. Gastro tourism comes with seductive aromas, and textures and flavors and arrangements and—yes—calories.

How many times will you go back to the top of the Empire State Building after you’ve been there once? For me the answer is, not again if I can help it. Once was a memorable and positive experience, but it gave me as much of a memory as I need. I might say the same about Joel Robuchon’s ego-marinated atelier in Paris.

But le Grand Véfour? If I can remember where I buried those gold ingots, I’ll definitely sell a few and go again.

Oh no, not again! Yes, again! The Crank temporarily closes his blog and goes back to Paris for a week.

What can I say? The Crank's beautiful girlfriend is a Paris junky. So back to the 6ieme, (or is it the 7ieme?) we go, to figure out something new to do in the same place as usual.

We'll be back after the Memorial Day weekend. Crank you then.

The Broomstick Principle—how Americans are getting ripped off by powerful interests, a few coins or dollars at a time

A story first: years ago I met a well-to-do man who told me how his struggling immigrant family put him through college.

“Mom and Dad owned little New York corner deli. Mom hung a kitchen broom next to the cash register. As each customer checked her stuff out, Mom would add in the price of the broom.

"If a customer balked, Mom would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought that was your broom,’ and she’d give the money back, but customers didn’t catch her often. Well let me tell you something, that broom sent me and my brothers to college.”

It’s easier to get away with stealing nickels and dimes and a few dollars over a long time than it is to steal millions at one time. People don’t notice it, or figure it’s not worth the hassle to put up an argument over a few dimes, or these days a few dollars, filched from their pockets. Let's call that The Broomstick Principle.

Major bank thefts—only
you're the bank and the bank
is the thief

The Broomstick Principle is the same system that banks are using to shake the loose change out of your pockets.

You want to carry last night's restaurant bill for a month? No problem, it’ll cost you a mere nine bucks. Nevermind that the nine bucks represents 28 percent interest a month on your debt, while the banks are borrowing the money they lend you from the taxpayers for next to zero percent.

The Mafia never had it so good

In the days when America had usury laws, even the local Mafia loan shark didn’t earn those kinds of profit margins. And unlike the corner mafioso, the banks are stealing from millions of Americans every day.

Keeping the greedy banks from feeling free to pick your pockets a few bucks at a time is why the consumer protection law now before Congress is so important, and why the majority of Republicans as well as some Democrats deserved to be slammed for watering it down.

Now The Broomstick Principle
returns to the supermarket line

While I’m doing the slamming, I feel I ought to mention the “good works” of the D’Agostino supermarket chain in New York. It’s virtually impossible to go through their checkout lines without having the checkout clerk demand that you contribute money to one of D’Agostino’s favorite charities.

“Would you like to contribute your change to…?” Or simply, “Do you want to contribute to…?” on the checkout line forces the customer to say, in effect, either no I won’t, or no I don't want to, or no I can’t afford to, or no I’m a grouch. Rather than put up with that kind of hassle, many customers open their wallets.

It can be only a buck or two, or a few nickels and dimes at a time, but it adds up. Suppose I want to contribute to my own favorite charity, not to one of the charities the D’Agostinos want to give money to? Do I have to plead my case on the checkout line? No wonder those lines are so slow.

Yes, the charities are all good causes, so far as I know. And besides how much could it cost each customer?

It might be a money grab
in the multi-million dollar class

Well, cumulatively, it might run into the hundreds of thousands, or millions, pressured from our pockets, one checkout customer at a time for the sake of D’Agostino causes.

One also wonders if these contributions aren’t another form of “I thought it was your broom.” Is one hundred percent of what’s collected forwarded to the charities? Is D’Agostino taking a tax deduction that belongs to its customers? Is there even an honest auditor who is tracking and publishing the record?

I don’t have the answers. I do know that because we only get relieved of a little bit of their money at a time, Americans aren’t mad enough about it, whether it happens in the supermarket, at the bank, or online. Not nearly mad enough.

"Drill baby, drill!" Eh Senator McCain?

It's hard to calculate all the damage done by the latest oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But at the very least:

•50,000 gallons a day of raw petroleum are gushing, so far unstoppably, not into America's energy stream but into the Gulf of Mexico where the toxic goo is...

• Killing fish and birds

• Destroying the fishing industry

• Threatening the economy of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and the Texas Gulf Coast.

• Creating a future public health disaster.The odds are that 20 to 40 years from now there will be an epidemic of cancer among those who deliberately or by chance eat the carcinogen-laden products of the gulf. Like shrimp? Forget about it now, pal.

Shame on you, Senator McCain. Shame on you Sarah Palin. Shame on you every Republican who either chanted "Drill baby drill," or sympathized with those who did, or took campaign contributions from the petroleum industry.

Nature is a hanging judge. And she is hanging the future of the American Gulf Coast states. You're doing a helluva job, Senator.

Now, watch the video:

And now an important contribution to American culture and youthful aspirations from Diesel Jeans

I don't know about you, but the first time I saw this I wanted to vomit. In the past Diesel's advertising has gone bottom feeding for attention with near-pornographic images that included S&M scenes, complete with topless female dominatrixes holding bullwhips.

But this isn't merely pornographic. This is sociopathic. It discourages exactly what America needs, and encourages what we don't need. And it's serious stuff. What'll they be telling kids next? "It's cool to be a fool, so drop out of school?"

Diesel's outrageous pandering in search of attention is nauseating. And it doesn't just stop with this headline. More copy from the campaign: "Smart may have the brains but stupid has the balls." If you get deep enough into the advertising, you'll eventually discover that it purports to be encouraging out-of-the-box thinking. But hardly anybody, most especially kids, is going to go digging for Diesel's own textual analysis.

Sounds to me like an invitation to hold up a convenience store and gun down everybody who happens to be there.

If Diesel has nothing better to say, it has nothing America wants. Don't buy Diesel Jeans.

Gun “rights” advocate tells point-blank lies to panic his constituents. The loser? United States security. Is this subversive?

The gun lobbies really ought to be more careful whom they put on their mailing lists. It would lessen the likelihood that responsible citizens like me would call them out.

Case in point: I very recently received an e-mail from Dudley Brown, Executive Director of the National Association for Gun Rights. That's his picture at right.

Gun-crazy organzation unwittingly

sends the crank an e-letter

“Dear NAGR supporter,” Dudley Brown’s e-letter began.

Me an NAGR supporter? If he believed that, he had to be smoking something highly illegal. But I read on.

“Please forgive my bluntness, but the United States Government thinks you’re a terrorist,” he informed me.

Well, now I knew he was pulling my chain. But I figured I’d read along with the gag.

Dudley’s next statement was, “And now they’re trying to pass a bill allowing gun-grabbing Attorney General Eric Holder to revoke all your Second Amendment rights at will if he has ‘a reasonable belief’ you could pose a threat.’”

Personally, I think that if the AG really did had a reasonable belief that I’m a threat, he ought to make sure I don’t have a gun. Hey, you wouldn’t want me to shoot up a subway car full of innocent commuters, or blow away anybody’s kids at some high school. So what’s Dudley complaining about?

Goons, gun owners and

“little old church ladies”

Dudley goes on to tell me that the “goons” at the Department of Homeland Security has targeted “gun owners, honorably discharged veterans and little old church ladies as threats to the security and stability of the United States of America.”

Really? Well, not only that, says Dudley, but…

“Even a gesture as simple as placing a pro-gun bumper sticker on your car, or supporting a pro-gun candidate makes you a potential “domestic terrorist” in the eyes of the thugs running our government.”

Holy cow! Wow! Yeow! That really does sound scary. It’s even scarier than that when Dudley declares, “and to add insult to injury, Barack Obama’s Surveillance Czar Janet Napolitano sees no difference between law-abiding gun owners like you and violent racists who murder and vandalize.”

What in the world is

Dudley talking about?

That’s absolutely nightmare-making—all those loaded words like “murder” and “violent racists” until you find out what the hell it is that Dudley is talking about:

“I’m talking about H.R. 2159,the shockingly misnamed ’Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009.’” Dudley’s walk on the wild side of the Big Lie even applies to Republicans like Peter King who generally supports a pretty wide open interpretation of the Second Amendment.

“These anti-gun Republicans-in-Name-Only want to disarm you because they fear your pro-liberty views,” says Dudley, and in addition…

“In fact, your love of freedom frightens them so much that they’re now going to great lengths to label you a domestic terrorist.”

Boy, that had me so scared that I went and looked up the actual bill, “The Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009.”

The truth about HR 2159

And guess what?

Not a word in the bill about bumper stickers, little old ladies, or honorably discharged veterans. It’s all about people who are “known (or appropriately suspected) to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism, or providing material support thereof, and the Attorney General has a reasonable belief that the prospective transferee may use a firearm in connection with terrorism.”

It also applies to people who “may use explosives in connection with terrorism.”

Nowhere does the bill single out you, me, the little old lady next door or war vets—unless you happen to be planning to blow up an airplane full of innocent passengers, or a government building full of American citizens, or you happen to be planning to shoot up a U.S. Army base. Acts of terrorism or treason, all.

Telling lies for fun

(and your money)

So either Dudley is lying through his teeth to freak out people who simply happen to own guns so they’ll send him money, or he has a constituency of traitors and enemy agents—which of course would imply his National Association for Gun Rights is a subversive organization.

Problem is, if Dudley and the National Association for Gun Rights get their way, it’ll be all that much easier for a terrorist to launch the next 9/11 or Oklahoma City. Or simply to walk into a crowded room full of innocent people somewhere and open fire with his personal AK47, bought and paid for at some gun show somewhere.

Can any patriotic citizen seriously be for that?

When the going gets tough, the mavericks turn into jackasses

Looks like maverick John McCain is about to become ex-maverick John McCain in an effort to keep on being Senator John McCain.

Turning his back on some of the key things he stood for only a year or so ago, he's now bending with the wind on, for starters, immigration reform.

This is the guy who once put up with abuse as a POW? His spine seems to have turned to jelly.

The New York Times lets a committee of camels write an Op-Ed piece about “Internet transparency.” Or something like that I, uh, think.

I saw an article called “How To Regulate the Internet Tap” on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times this morning. A little voice started screaming frantic warnings in my head.

“Don’t bust your brain or your eyeballs reading this,” warned the voice.

The article is relatively short (I've just counted 525 words). It had six authors. This means that if they all contributed equally, each one wrote 85 and 8/10ths words. And the most ominous sign of all was, they were all academics. And what the hell is an “Internet tap?”

This article was clearly a prime example of a committee effort. And it instantly reconfirmed the wisdom of the old saw, “A camel is a horse created by a committee.”

To give the prose its due, I confess that I actually find it less impenetrable than Fort Knox. But not much less. Or perhaps a more suitable description of the text would refer to the flow of extra-heavy molasses along a one-degree incline, or watching paint dry.

At any rate, those six professors from various departments and centers at Georgetown, Stanford, NYU and UC Berkeley somehow put their heads together (Were there travel expenses involved? Is that why tuition costs at those universities are so high?) and came up with this stirring penultimate thought:

As American policymakers decide what should be done about net neutrality, they would do well to consider the precedents set by Europe’s new framework. The goal should be to develop — through a deliberative process involving regulators, the public and affected companies — industry-wide disclosure requirements that provide consumers with easy-to-interpret information on company-based limitations on access, use of services or applications.

If you read that to yourself slowly a few times, you should get it, more or less. I love the part about “easy-to-interpret information” best of all.

Finally there’s this rousing conclusion:

When it comes to the Internet and net neutrality, ensuring transparency promises to enhance the evolution of this dynamic market. Imposing heavy-handed rules about how providers can operate will only hinder it.

Speaking of heavy hands, who on the copy desk let this clunker in? I mean, I know you feel sorry for professors so desperate to avoid perishing that they gang up in groups of six to publish 500 words that come down to encouraging more or less everybody not to regulate the Internet with a heavy hand so we can have "transparency." Who except Joe Stalin and Adolph Hitler could be against that?

But journalists are in much deeper economic peril than tenured professors. It ought to be the other way around. Professors ought to invite journalists—while there are still any competent journalists left—to present original ideas in plain English at universities.

Oh sorry, I forgot. If you present original ideas in simple language, you might make the whole faculty look bad.

The Scottsboro Boys—an uncomfortable reminder and a dramatic mindbender

It’s out of keeping with my cranky and mostly-political persona to do favorable theater reviews, but I’m making an exception in this case.

The Scottsboro Boys is an unlikely musical comedy about an American tragedy. It's playing off-Broadway. It deserves to be on Broadway.

In March of 1931, there was a fracas on a freight train between young groups of white and black “hobos” who were using what was then a popular means of travel among those hordes of broke and unemployed Americans. The free-for-all led to the arrest of nine teen-aged black youths on charges of rape, based on the dubious accusations (and later on, the highly incredible testimony) of two young white women who were also hobos on the same train.

The nine "Scottsboro boys" were initially sentenced to death. Their kangaroo court trial and conviction became a cause celebre, taken up by northerners, initially including the American Communist Party.

There were appeals, reversals, retrials, more reversals, and a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case—and on and on. In the end, the Scottsboro Boys escaped the death penalty, but justice was nevertheless denied and the system did not work.

All this hardly sounds like the stuff for singing, dancing and comedy. But the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the music and lyrics, and David Thompson who wrote the book, pulled it off, just as Kander and Ebb did with similarly tragic and ironic material in the musical Chicago.

To be sure, the play has its historical (or at least interpretive) flaws. Not least among them is that it paints Samuel Leibowitz, the New York lawyer who defended the Scottsboro boys after the first trial, as something of a legal hack who advised Haywood Patterson to plead guilty in exchange for immediate parole. Patterson had such formidable strength of character that he refused, choosing instead to finish his life in prison.

But Liebowitz, having seen the intractability of the racist legal system in Alabama at the time, was probably doing the best anyone could under the circumstances. He was acting as much as a hostage negotiator as a lawyer. He got as many of the Scottsboro boys out of prison as he could and saved the rest from the electric chair, no mean achievement for that place and time. In fact, one accounting describes his cross-examination of one of the obviously fabricating rape victims as “merciless.”

But this is a musical comedy after all, and a mind-blowing one at that. An anti-racist spectacle, it uses as its primary conceit an ancient racist convention—the minstrel show. In further twists, blacks play not only blacks but also whites and white women. and, in an end-of-show number, the black cast plays whites who are playing blacks. Many in the cast have multiple roles.

It all comes off as a challenge not only to force us to remember America’s long history of racial injustice, but also as a nervous-making kind of Cuisinart chopper-dicer-blender of our own racial assumptions, good, bad or otherwise.

I was particularly impressed by the performances of Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon, each of whom played a variety of roles, and Julius Thomas III who played Roy Wright, the 12 year old facing the electric chair, with such utter conviction that one could see the terror in his eyes from several rows back.

Which is not to say that the performances of any member of the cast was anything less than impressive. For example, Brandon Victor Dixon gave the character of Haywood Patterson, the prisoner who refused to plead guilty and walk free, with a completely convincing mixture of rage and dignity. Christian Dante White and Sean Bradford several times made the transition from terrified black youths to lying white tramps and back again, and had me believing it. Sharon Washington, the only woman in the cast, provided a haunting presence as "A Lady." John Cullum, the only white actor, (you may remember him from the TV series Northern Exposure) pulled off his own multiple rules with perfection.

I take it as a good omen that Cullum was in this off-Broadway show. His last off-Broadway appearance was in Urintetown, a musical that deservedly made it to Broadway.

If you live in new York or you're planning to visit New York any time soon, you can order tickets online here.

We interrupt this blog to bring you some important messages from America’s militant morons

What is it with the teabagger movement? Isn't it enough to clearly demonstrate you're an all-around nincompoop? Or do you also have to flunk a spelling test to join?

At any rate, it seems that anybody with a camera can capture a moment of teabagger idiocy. For oodles more of this unintentionally funny stuff, just go to about.com (from which I, umm, "borrored" these photographs

Enraged conservatives: “Stop saying that spanking causes violent behavior or I’ll beat the crap out of you.”

There's a whole slew of stories this morning revealing yet more evidence that, “children who are spanked have lower IQ scores and that frequent spanking has been linked to anxiety and behavior problems and higher risk of violent or criminal behavior, depression and excessive alcohol use.”

Nothing earth-shakingly new there. It’s just a confirmation of earlier studies. But as might be expected, there has been fierce blowback all day from the Conservative side of the pre-Cambrian layer.

Conservatives seem to like spanking. So any science that confirms that spanking can harm children arouses fury—most especially the fury of those who grew up getting spanked.

Most of it can be paraphrased this way: “I was spanked frequently as a child and it didn’t do me any harm. Today I’m a grown up, contributing citizen and you can bet I spank my own kids.”

Well actually, here’s one argument verbatim from the Wise Conservatism blog that says, "Spanking isn’t abuse; it’s a method of discipline that children need to become productive, responsible adults."

Science? Science must be wrong, just the same as it is on global warming, and evolution, and vaccination and all that stuff that Conservatives refuse to "agree" with.

What this style of thinking boils down to is, “Facts are just another word for opinions, and I’ve got my own. If I think 2+2=7, that's my opinion and it's just as good as yours. Or maybe this anti-spanking thing is another one of those left wing, pinko, commie, pointy-headed egghead liberal, socialist conspiracies.”

Or as one pro-spanking spanker implies, this is one step closer to taking all our kids away and putting them in brainwashing camps:

“How dare you call a spanking abuse? Should we take children away from parents who spank their children? Give me a break. There are too many children in foster care for foster parents to go around now. And yet, you want to take children away from loving parents who just want their children to grow up to be good and caring adults.”

Well m'am, I completely agree with you. Who says a good and well-bred child shouldn't grow into a caring adult who gets into bar fights, drives drunk, and beats his wife and kids black and blue?

Beat the crap out of our kids! It’s the only way to preserve America's freedom (aside from repealing healthcare) right?

8 Things worth knowing about tea parties and the Tea Party "Movement"

1. While the “Boston Tea Party” happened earlier, the story of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland has sold more copies than any book concerning the Boston Tea Party ever did. That’s why so many people associate tea parties with lunatics and quaintly out-of-it characters.

2. The Mad Hatter’s tea party was attended by a trembling lunatic who made hats, a process that in those days involved licking a great deal of mercury-infused felt, which made him “mad as a hatter.” Another attendee was a nutty rabbit who was “mad as a March hare.” (They're mad because they're horny.) A third party-goer was a soused dormouse. Finally there was a lost, bewildered and terrified child. Draw parallels where you will.

3. The story of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party was written by a latent pervert. Although he never married or became a parent, he photographed little girls in the nude and carried pins in his pocket to pin up the dresses of little girls so they could wade across streams with him without getting their frocks wet. Draw parallels where you will.

4. In the 1960s, a “tea party” was one at which marijuana smoke was inhaled, after which a lot of crazy stuff went on. Where does your own Tea Party stand on this?

5. While many Republican Tea Party-ites favor waterboarding, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare tried to drown the dormouse in a teapot. Draw parallels where you will.
6. 

6. There is a poem in the tea party from Alice in Wonderland. It begins, “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat/how I wonder where you’re at.” The parallel to this nonsense poem is so obvious that I have to resort to the tired phrase, "You can’t make this stuff up."
7. 
   

Many young children are secretly frightened by Alice In Wonderland. It depicts a little girl stuck in a strange and distorted world she can’t get out of, and symbols of adult authority who are violent and insane. ("Off with her head," threatens one Queen.) Draw parallels where you will.

8. If the Tea Party whackos and their Republican manipulators ever get to repeal Health Care reform, most of these Tea Party whackos and crackpots will be unable to receive psychiatric care for the rest of their lives. Either look before you leap, or pass the milk and sugar.

Yeah, and while we're at it, fellow Republicans, let's not ruin democracy by letting the majority rule

Now Republican crazies include the attorneys general of Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina…list continues below

Reuters reports today that having lied and lost on the health care bill, Republicans are trying again.

This time, they’re trying to find that health care is “unconstitutional for, ah, uh…well for some reason or other. They’re a little fuzzy in their reasoning.

They seem to be saying that regulating commerce can’t include people who don’t have health insurance, because if they don’t have health insurance they’re not engaged in commerce.

That’s about as circular as reasoning—or a firing squad—can get.

They’re now going to go to court to stop Congress from passing laws. In addition to the states listed in the headline, add South Dakota, Texas (of course!), Utah and Washington.

Of course, they don’t just want to give their own states the power to opt out. If that happened, the hurried exodus of citizens and small businesses would sound like the last of a lot of soapy water going down the bathroom drain. They might as well each pull out a pistol and shoot their own toes off.

Instead, they want to get the law nullified for everybody. The truth is, it makes them crazy to think your healthcare insurance would work, even if you’re sick. And that for once you could afford to have it.

Remember who your Republican officials are. And next election, be sure to go to the voting booth and tell them to take a hike.

America already has death panels. They're called health insurance companies.

As we press closer to passing or destroying health care reform this week, there is news that special interests are pressuring members of congress to kill the bill.

Part of that pressure is the lie that health care reform will create "death panels" to "kill granny."

That's bull. First of all, Granny's covered under Medicare. Second of all, there are no Medicare "death panels" nor are there any proposals for death panels in the healthcare reform bill.

But make no mistake: we already do have death panels. In fact, as you read this, one of those death panels may be considering whether you should live or not. And if they haven't yet, they will—unless we get health care reform.

If an insurance company shuts you out for a pre-existing condition, that's a death sentence if you need ongoing medical care. Death panel.

If an insurance company declares you've maxed out your benefits so you're no longer covered, that's a death panel. No insurance? Too bad. You die.

If an insurance company rejects you for cancer treatment because you failed to mention in your application that you had acne at the age of 14, you die. Death panel.

If an insurance company raises its rates so sky-high that you can't afford to pay and have to drop out, and if you get sick, you die. Death panel.

Health insurance reform will stop insurance companies from doing those things. The only thing health insurance reform means death to is insurance company death panels.

That's why the insurance companies are plowing so much money into intimidating Congressman into voting no.

Tell your own Congressman and Senators to grow a spine and tell the insurance companies to go to hell.

Otherwise, that's exactly what the insurance companies will be telling you.

Thank the good Lord that Texas and its textbooks are helping to make all of us dumber

I see in the New York Times this morning that Texas educators are trying to get the textbooks changed. I mean, the dang things are written by teachers and they keep putting in stuff that no self-respecting Texas dentist would put up with. To quote the Times:

Conservatives argue that the proposed curriculum, written by a panel of teachers, emphasizes the accomplishments of liberal politicians — like the New Deal and the Great Society — and gives less importance to efforts by conservatives like President Ronald Reagan to limit the size of government.

“There is a bias,” said Don McLeroy, a dentist from College Station who heads up the board’s conservative faction. “I think the left has a real problem seeing their own bias.”

Yeah, they’re biased. The textbooks don’t say that this here is a Christian nation. Of course, a good many of the founding fathers were deists, not Christians, and a sprinkling of them were Quakers and even Jews.

That’s one reason the Declaration of Independence said that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unaliable rights.” Not by God. By their Creator, which may or may not have had divine properties, depending on your belief. It’s a perfect deist statement, inserted into the Declaration of Independence so that the many non-Christian American revolutionaries wouldn’t be offended.

Oh, and those “biased” schoolteachers—pardon me, teachurs—who wrote the textbooks also didn’t pay no mind to Ronald Reagan. Of course, if they also paid mind to how his policies enlarged the national debt and in the case of Iran Contra sold arms to the Iranians who are now building an atomic bomb to threaten us with, the Eddycational Dentists of Texas would be having still another cow.

All this matters because the wimp publishers who print the textbooks kowtow to Texas, a huge purchaser of textbooks. If Texas gets the changes it wants, the rest of the nation’s kids get the same changes. So if Texas gets dumber, so do your own kids.

Look, I firmly believe that all Texans have been endowed by their creator with an unalianable right to be as dumb as they want.

They can believe that Ronald Reagan made government smaller, even though he made it bigger.

They can believe all government deficits are bad, even though Reagan gave us a lollapalooza.

They can believe that lack of regulation isn’t what caused the bankers to good hog wild and nearly bankrupt nearly everybody else.

They can believe that dinosaurs walked the earth until 42 years ago and simply stayed out of sight of human beings. I’m sorry, hooman beans.

They can have their own spelling, their own math, their own history, their own religion and their own ignorance.

But first Texas ought to secede from the union. And this time we ought to let them.

Well, Hallelujah! The President finally fights back.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Sometimes I wonder if someone in the Whitehouse is actually reading The New York Crank.

It was only the last post, three days ago, that I crankily wrote:

President Obama needs to take a leaf from the Indiana Jones script. Enough already with the debating, the arguing, and worst of all the compromising with posturing Republicans (and a few Democrats) who refuse to compromise. That’s all bullwhip.

Instead, the President needs to pull out the Presidential equivalent of his pistol—the public accusatory confrontation—and start plugging Republicans right between the eyes.

And I'll be hornswaggled if that isn't pretty much what President Obama did in his stemwinding speech to Congress today. I especially liked this passage:

But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it. (Applause.) I won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out. (Applause.) And I will not -- and I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.

If you missed it, take 55 minutes to click on the video at the top of this post and watch it.

Take particular note of Republicans like Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor wriggling uncomfortably and hanging their heads like bad bullies caught beating up the kindergarten girls.

Now, if Mr. Obama keeps it up, history could actually end up listing him among our greatest presidents.. And we could get a reasonably good healthare bill. And, in time, a much stronger economy.

Go Barack go!

What President Obama needs to do—right now!

Okay, so we’re a nation of idiots. So Americans need to understand Washington in terms an imbecile could grasp. So maybe I need to explain in comic book and fantasy action movie terms what it is President Obama needs to do.

Remember “Raiders of the Lost Ark?” Remember Indiana Jones, his whip always at the ready, vanquishing foe after foe with his bullwhip—knocking them down, knocking the weapons out of their hands, yadda yadda until it all becomes a bit tiresome?

And then suddenly Indy gets approached by a another posturing thug, a turbaned bozo who not only waves a sword, but does sword tricks with it. But our hero has had enough of this posturing horsecrap. He shrugs, whips out his pistol, and plugs the posturing jerk right between the eyes. In the theater where I watched this, the audience stood up and cheered!

President Obama needs to take a leaf from the Indiana Jones script. Enough already with the debating, the arguing, and worst of all the compromising with posturing Republicans (and a few Democrats) who refuse to compromise. That’s all bullwhip.

Instead, the President needs to pull out the Presidential equivalent of his pistol—the public accusatory confrontation—and start plugging Republicans right between the eyes.

For example, there’s a Republican Senator named Jim Bunning, who has forced the furlough of Federal transportation workers—putting a stop to construction projects that are desperately needed to keep our infrastructure maintained and Americans working. He’s also strangling desperate Americans by choking off their unemployment benefits.

It’s time for President Obama to call a televised press conference and declare:

“If a terrorist tried to starve millions of Americans, render them homeless, and bomb the US economy, we’d have every right to declare him a war criminal, arrest him, and try him for war crimes.

“Senator Jim Bunning, you are the moral equivalent of a war criminal. You are sabotaging the business of the people of the United States. By putting a chokehold on the extension of unemployment benefits and other critical expenditures you are causing hunger. You are causing people to lose their homes. You are exacerbating a severe economic situation, damaging every American, every citizen, every taxpayer. I’m calling you out, Senator Bunning, as the the closest thing there is to a traitor who deserves to be turned out of office and run out of town on a rail.

“Now let me talk about another moral equivalent of treason—the actions of that smug, smirking Senator Mitch McConnell, who is creating Tokyo Rose-type propaganda to demoralize and mislead Americans who simply want affordable healthcare….”

There’s ample precedent for the President to publicly call out the troublemakers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it—and achieved the New Deal—by sneering at a trio of bloviating enemies of America, the infamous “Martin, Barton and Fish.”

Would there be howls of dismay from the right? You betcha! There were howls of dismay and worse under Roosevelt.

Would the obstreperous senators who’ve currently afflicted the Congress and the American people with legislative sclerosis tremble in their shoes, even as they pretend to outraged? Sure they would. But in short order they’d also buckle, particularly if the next step is public torchlight demonstrations in front of their homes, angry throngs calling for their heads in Washington and demands for investigations of their financing and their intentions.

So enough with the bullwhip, Mr. President. Pull out the pistol that was installed in your bully pulpit by virtue of the overwhelming majority of people who voted for change and now want to see you either change things or at the very least make an all out effort that will leave the obstreperous Republicans with something a bit messier than egg on their faces.

Parse THIS. Or, what is Michael Calderone smoking?

Michael Calderone's space on the Politico blog claims his job is "reporting and analysis of political media."

Fair enough. But Calderone—that's him on the right—appears to have stepped in it today when he took on lifestyle reporting in the Washington Post. I think he was trying to explain why Sally Quinn had been relieved of her column. But then I found my eyes crossing over this paragraph:

In the column, Quinn wrote about her "dysfunctional family" while addressing a report of "dueling weddings." Quinn wrote not only about the nuptials of her son with former Post editor Ben Bradlee, but also the daughter of Ben Bradlee Jr. -- his son from a previous marriage -- and ex-wife Martha Raddatz, an ABC News correspondent.

If you go really, really slowly, you can make out that Quinn had a son with Ben Bradlee and Quinn wrote about her son's wedding. And also that Bradlee had a daughter via a previous marriage to Martha Raddatz...no, that must be a son from a previous marriage who was married to Martha Raddatz. No...

Oh, just pass me that funny cigarette, Michael, and let's be done with it.

Yoicks! It’s not only you and me getting shafted by our banks. J.P.Morgan to its corporate customers: "Bleep you and your trade secrets."

A United States Federal judge has accused J.P. Morgan—the investment side of J.P. Morgan/Chase bank—of acting “in bad faith,” essentially giving away two clients' corporate secrets to one of their competitors.

When a bank does it, it’s merely “bad faith.” If you and I tried the same thing, it would be a felony—theft of trade secrets.

Side issue: The New York Times so far isn’t covering this scandal, because Morgan’s alleged dirty dealings were on behalf of a major Times stockholder.

To see why banks of all kinds need to be regulated up the whazoo—and one example of how outrageous concentrations of wealth inevitably lead to outrageous abuses of power, check out the story in The Big Money.