So long (I hope for only a little while) Soledad O’Brien. And please, please don’t stop doing what you were doing.

I was shaving this morning when, from the next room, I heard Soledad O’Brien say farewell on her morning CNN show. Her gig there is over.

You barely needed a pulse to be aware, for several weeks, that it was coming. It had been all over the news. But for just a minute I turned off my electric razor to listen. The emotional sensation was something like squeezing the hand of an old friend who is about to be wheeled into a room down the corridor for neurosurgery. Will she survive?  Will what makes Soledad uniquely Soledad survive? Will she resume what she was doing somewhere else?

As you might gather from this, I like her, although to tell you the truth, I grew to like her slowly, and perhaps even a bit grudgingly.

She had been less than a major player at NBC, where I’d occasionally catch her and surf past her. When she showed up on CNN, sometime back in 2005, I was underwhelmed.

Her voice sounded squeaky to me. Perhaps something sexist still lingered in my own verge-of-dotage view of the world. But what I thought is, “They can’t be serious. She’s a minor player who sounds like Minnie Mouse.”

Minnie Mouse indeed! As she proved, interview after interview, she was the mouse that roared. No, I take that back. She was truth’s tiger. Just take a look at this interview (below) with John Sununu, in the role of a Romney Campaign propagandist, during the last election

Among all the people who conduct interviews on television, O’Brien is the only one I can think of who regularly pushed back against the baloney and unabashed falsehoods that political spinmeisters too often get away with. Others made an effort to do this on CNN and other networks, too, but particularly against seasoned pros who lie for a living, the efforts have been mostly puny.

On the other hand, trying to get a lie past Soledad O’Brien must be like trying to throw a pork chop past a starving hyena.

She clearly did her homework before each interview. And when the politicians threw out their fastball lies, she caught them and threw them right back at the politicians. Sometimes they’d ignore her contradictions and try to talk over her. She wouldn’t put up with it. She kept at the liars, confronting them with what the real facts were.

That’s just the opposite of what most news interviewers appear to be doing these days, letting the lies sail into the camera and also into the public consciousness. Too many interviewers, either under-briefed or under-aggressive, simply move on to the next question somebody has listed for them to ask.

O'Brien's morning competition couldn’t, or didn’t stop their interview subjects from lying. Matt Lauer, for example, doesn't seem to know a straight-shooter from a curveball pitcher. At least, not that I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I've asked myself, 'Where in the world is Matt Lauer?" not when he was doing one of his travel features, but when he was doing studio interviews. Even some of the “serious” Sunday morning interviewers like Bob Schieffer have either let the lies fly by like floating creampuffs, or offered such agreeably gentle questioning of what his guests said that you could easily miss that there was reason to be dubious..

Evidently, Jeff Zucker, the infotainment executive who was behind the Today Show for many years before moving to CNN, has something else in mind for CNN. I am not pleased, although not ready to beat Soledad’s replacement into the mud before she even starts, as at least one blogger has. Let’s at least give Kate Bolduan a chance before we kick and stomp her.

That said, I suspect Soledad will be hard to replace. The truth needs to be respected, and Soledad is among the few broadcast news interviewers who unequivocally know how to respect truth with tenacity.

“The bankers have rioted again, Joeren. We must punish the poor to make a horrible example."

Never trust a Dutchman named Jeroen, Or even a Dutchman who uses the alternative spelling of Joran. Hans? He’s fine. Ditto Joop, Jan, Bastien, Laurens and Maartin.

But when you get to a Jeoren or Joran, watch your back! Not to mention your neck. And your pocketbook.

First there was Joran van der Sluit, who in all probability murdered Natalie Halloway on the Caribbean Dutch island of Aruba. And even if he didn’t, according to an interview he gave (and later retracted) with Greta Van Susteren, he sold Halloway into sexual slavery.

Van der Sluit may have gotten away with that one, but before you know it he was arrested, tried and convicted in Peru on charges of robbing and killing another young women.

Now we have Jeroen Dijsselbloem, a Dutch financial type who heads up the Eurozone finance ministers. Kindly Mr. Dijsselbloem suggeseted, according to an article in Reuters, that when European banks begin to fail, “euro zone officials would turn to the bank's shareholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors to contribute to its recapitalization.”

He didn't say a word about clawing back a nickel from the money launderers (in the case of Cypress) or their co-conspirators, the bankers, who helped create the problem. In other words, we must punish the innocent and the poor by confiscating their money to atone for the sins of the rich.

Please understand that, at least the way I plough my way through the news reports, most of the depositors weren’t necessarily guilty of anything more malfeasant than putting their paychecks into their checking accounts so they cold pay their rent and grocery bills. Ditto most of the shareholders and bondholders, I must assume, were simply making investments. Although some segments of each category might be complicit in a bank failure (for example, there might be foreign money launderers who are also depositors, or shareholders who elected directors who chose the CEO) the really bad guys are the bankers and money launderers who participated in these fiascos, most recently the fiacso in Cypress.

You'd think you’d want to punish those guys. Oh wait a second! You say they’re very rich and powerful and you don’t want to mess with them? Nevermind then. Decapitate the wretched poor! If you don't, they'll probably only reproduce anyway.

POP QUIZ ON THUGGERY

One of these guys is Jeroen, the other is Joran. One of them assaults young women, sometimes kills them, and may have sold one into sexual slavary. The other assaults bank depositors to confiscate part of their savings, which helps to kill national economies and stock market gains, ruining everyone's retirement dreams while punishing the innocent. For ten points of extra credit, determine which is which and write an essay explaining how you arrived at your decision. 

WARNING: The order in which these photographs was placed may constitute a trick question. 

Or maybe not.

Sociopaths, vandals, break-in artists and The Atlantic Wire

 

The Atlantic Wire, the online publication of a magazine I once venerated, has leaped to the defense of Matthew Keys, 26 years old, who has been fired from his editorial job at Reuters in New York after an indictment. The indictment charges that Keys hacked the Los Angeles Times website with help from the infamous hacking group Anonymous.

And there was a bit more to it than that, according to a Reuters story:

The indictment charged Keys with three criminal counts, including conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer. The indictment said that he promised to give hackers access to Tribune Co websites and that a story on the Tribune's Los Angeles Times website was later altered by one of them. 

 A gush of sympathy for the malicious

Remarkably, this act, which was malicious vandalism at the very least, has created an outpouring of sympathy for the perpetrator “You can’t help but feel bad for Adam Keys,” began an article by Adam Clark Estes in The Atlantic Wire.

Estes complains, “Here’s a media enthusiast who suddenly finds himself potentially unemployed and facing up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines for a few keystrokes.”

Wow, if the degree of a crime’s gravity (or depravity) depends on how many times you manipulate a finger or two stroking some keys, maybe we should let off mass murderers who only finger the trigger of their semi-automatic weapons ten or twenty times.

Moreover, it turns out that Keys may have been motivated by wanting revenge for his dismissal from the Los Angeles Times. Even hacker sympathizer Estes admits, “It was probably a bad idea to tell Anonymous hackers to ‘go fuck some shit up’ after giving them login credentials for the Tribune Company.”

That’s malicious intent, if you ask me. It's not terribly far from a disgruntled corporate or postal employee who gets fired and returns to his workplace with a weapon, also to wiggle his finger a few times and "fuck some shit up."

Count on Congress to do the wrong thing

Remarkably, even right wing Repubican California Congressman Daryl Issa, usually a law-and-order fanatic, has jumped in to launch an “investigation” relating to the suicide of another criminally-charged hacker, Aaron Swartz, in January.

Similarly, Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, is pumping for an “Aaron’s Law” that would keep prosecutors from being mean to these poor babies who hack into other peoples’ property.

How serious is hacking?

Forget, for a moment, that one of the greatest threats this nation faces is from cyberatttack. Forget that, just as the United States set back Iran’s nuclear development by hacking into their nuclear labs and destroying centrifuges, some hacker can do something similar to the United States’ capacity for defense, manufacturing, banking, the financial markets, air traffic control and the power grid. Or to steal industrial secrets, as China evidently has been doing.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter whether the hacker happens to be an economic rival, a mortal enemy of this nation, or just an arrogant twenty-something trying out “a few keystrokes” to see what will happen. The damage to property, income an reputation is the same, regardless of intent.

Sociopaths, vandals and break-in artists

However, I’ll go beyond that, and suggest that these hacker vandals are little more than sociopaths, unsympathetic to the plight of individuals, small businesses, or the public at large, which can be harmed in a variety of ways by their “innocent” games. You may feel sympathetic now to a hacker facing a long sentence for messing with a newspaper. But what if the next hacker gets into your stock brokerage account and bankrupts you just for the hell of it? Or removes all the cash from your bank account? Or puts statements on, say, your Facebook page, allegedly written by you, that make you look like a sexist, or a racist, or a rapist?

I speak out against hacking from personal experience. I maintain a website for my freelance writing business under my own name, which I don’t openly advertise on this blog for what I hope are obviously valid reasons. In February, my website was hacked, and began sending out, I gather, thousands of spam e-mails under my name. That certainly couldn’t have helped either my reputation or my income.

I learned about this when my web hosting company contacted me, informed me that as my own webmaster I was responsible for the spam, and that I’d better disinfect my website, or else. Their time-consuming over-the-phone tech support, for an hour or more at a time, proved unequal to the problem. After many hours of trying to remove malicious code on my own, I had to hire a consultant to fix the problem.

A personal toll of money and misery

Well, it took the consultant, a large website design company, about a week to get the mess cleaned up. That set me back $1,900. If the money had been taken directly from my wallet by a thief, instead of indirectly by the actions of a hacker, the act would have been grand larceny.

Meanwhile, backing-and-forthing among the consultant, me and the web host contributed to destroying a vacation I happened to be in the midst of when this happened.

Who hacked me and why? I don’t know. Nor do I know how what the hacker did was any different than someone who smashes a window of your home to let himself in, deliberately turns up the stereo full blast to annoy your neighbors, and then spray paints grafitti on your walls and defecates on your pillow.

Sure, nobody gets “hurt,” in the physical sense of the word. But the break-in artist (or hacker) has done serious emotional and financial damage to you for no reason at all. If you came home one night, and found someone in the process of doing what I’ve just described, I suspect you’d be legally justified in shooting the intruder dead.

So why shouldn’t hacking be considered a serious crime worthy of a long stay in prison? It’s the wanton act of a sociopath, and sociopaths need to be locked up early, before they do increasingly greater damage to society.

Matthew Key and his ilk get no sympathy from me. And shame on The Atlantic for letting its web creature, The Atlantic Wire, support blatantly antisocial behavior.

Here's another example of how the United States of America has become a corruptocracy, while permitting big business to rob you (and this nation) blind

The following is lifted from a proxy statement, received this week from AT&T. A stockholder is seeking to make the company report to stockholders the details of all political contributions. AT&T recommends voting against the proposal.

(Full disclosure: I’m a small stockholder in AT&T, which is how I became aware of this stuff in the first place.) Says AT&T:

Political contributions, where permitted, are an important part of the regulatory and legislative process. AT&T is in a highly regulated industry, and the Company’s operations are significantly affected by the actions of elected officials at the local, state and national levels, including rates it can charge customers, its profitability, and even how it must provide services to competitors. It is important that your Company actively participate in the electoral and legislative processes in order to protect your interests as stockholders.

After reading that, can you possibly wonder why the majority of Congressmen, Senators and even state and local legislators could be mistaken in broad daylight for whores? Or why many, Republican and Democrat alike, are so crooked they could hind behind corkscrews? Or even why you phone bills are so high, with politicians bribed with "contributions" to let AT&T charges you whatever it thinks it can get away with before you bleed to death?

Blame much of it on Citizens United

Corrupt influence in politics has always been bad, but the U.S. Supreme Court decision that money is speech in the Citizens United Cases sealed the doom of democracy in the United States of America. Because now there's no limit to how much and who AT&T and other companies can pay off to make the law go just the way they want it.

And if you’re an AT&T stockholder and think AT&T’s political contributions are good for your investment, have another think. The political influence of the corporation’s top executives allows them to rip you and me off (as well as their employees) for many tens of million of dollars, which they use to line their own pockets.

Executive toys to go with the money

For example, according to the same proxy statement, the CEO of ATT alone receives a total annual compensation package of $19,000,000.00. (If you're getting dizzy from all the zeros, that's nineteen million bucks. A year.) That doesn't include compensation for his chief operations officer, chief financial officer, and other "C-suite" greed-a-holics. And with all that dough, they’re trying to up their compensation. Moreover, that’s only the cash part. The CEO and his fellow senior executive ripoff artists also receive playthings and cash for playthings…

…including an automobile allowance and maintenance, which is an important recruiting and retention tool; club memberships (we allow Company- owned memberships, but do not pay country club fees and dues for executive officers), which afford our executives the opportunity to conduct business in a more informal environment; home security for the safety and security of our executives; tax preparation, estate planning, and financial counseling, which allow our executives to focus more on business responsibilities; and executive disability benefits. The financial counseling benefit provides financial counselors to executives, which helps the Company by ensuring that our executives understand and comply with plan requirements. We provide our executives communications, broadband/TV and related products and services, which are offered by AT&T at little or no incremental cost. We permit our executives to use Company aircraft for personal reasons, which allows for the efficient use of their time and for them to privately conduct Company business at any time. However, beginning in 2013, the CEO will be required to reimburse the incremental Company cost of all such personal usage. Other Executive Officers are also required to reimburse the incremental cost of their personal usage unless the CEO decides otherwise on a case-by-case basis.

Poor babies ! Ninteen million bucks a year and they can’t even afford their own cars and burglar alarms. Or tax lawyers. And it's so-ooo hard to retain these guys.

It's not just a disease. It's an epidemic.

I wish I could tell you this is an exceptional case, but I read lots of proxy statement and I gotta tell you, it’s commonplace.

So bend over, America, and enjoy getting raped.

Ahem, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, I’d like to recommend a new roommate for you

I’ll get to Lindsay Graham in a few paragraphs, and to why I can’t seem to stop wishing somebody would punch him in the face. But first, let me explain why New York City has such a big stake in seeing Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth, put on trial not in Guantanamo, but blocks from Ground Zero.

New York’s stake in

Abu Ghayth’s fate

It seems like every New Yorker knew someone, or at least knew someone who knew someone, who died in the 9-11 attack. And even if you were simply passing through, at the time, you’d have to be devoid of any of your senses not to be aware of the attack’s impact on the lives of New Yorkers.

The walls of many subway station stairwells were papered with scores of heartbreaking home-made handbills, run off on computer printers, showing faces of missing loved ones and pleas to help find them. The handbills would give desperate descriptions: the missing man or woman’s name, age, weight, the company they worked for, the tower they worked in. The photographs alone could make a strong man weep. You’d see a daddy playing with his two little girls. A young couple, close together, clearly in love. A young woman holding her cat. A grandmother. A father. A son. A daughter. 

And after a while you knew they were dead, all dead. Some were lucky enough to die almost instantly. Others were roasted to death in the debris. Or crushed to death. Or burned to death. They were our friends. Our family. Our colleagues. Our neighbors.

Downtown, at the Ground Zero site, firemen, and rescue workers, and ironworkers picking through the debris would find pieces of those people. A severed foot still inside a smoldering shoe. A grotesquely wounded human head, separated from a still-missing body. An arm.  It got so bad for the guys lifting concrete and girders by hand to get to body parts, that in the St. Paul's church where they fitfully napped between shifts on lower Broadway, these big, hardhat working guys had to be given teddy bears to hug as they lay weeping on cots or pews trying to shut the images out of their minds and sleep.

What would a “New York Jury” do?

This week, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth was captured. And transported in chains to New York. And arraigned in a Federal Court to a charge of conspiring to kill Americans – Americans who, in this particular case, were mostly New Yorkers.

New Yorkers deserve the right to listen to the evidence, then declare a verdict, and hand that verdict over to a New York judge who will toss Sulaiman Abu Ghayth into some dark hellhole of a maximum security prison where he can spend the rest of his miserable life rotting in the chilly gloom.

We earned the right to do this. We earned it by losing friends. By losing relatives. By losing colleagues. By living with the horror, and the grief, and the loneliness, and the rage that followed 9-11. And by stepping out of our front doors, for months after 9-11, and smelling the awful odor that was something like burning rubber or melting insulation, coming from the World Trade Center site whenever the wind was blowing in the right direction.

We earned the right to have our proxies on the jury stare narrow-eyed at Abu Gayth, and come back from the jury room, the air reeking this time not of melting insulation but of sangfroid and vengeance served cold.

Senator Graham, butt out

But leave it to the Republicans, not atypically led by the simpering Senator Graham, to complain about trying the accused criminal where the crime was done. Although he and other Republicans fumble for a rationale to lock the guy away in Guantanamo, where he will be perceived by many as a victim of a lawless state, the Republicans’ real reason is simply to make propaganda against the President. Which is remarkably similar to what Abu Gayth did for Bin Laden.

"We believe the administration's decision here to bring this person to New York City, if that's what's happened, without letting Congress know is a very bad precedent to set," Graham sniveled the other day during a press conference with one of his co-snivelers, Republican Senator Kelly Ayote of New Hampshire.

Ayote added, “the last thing in the world we want to do, in my opinion, is put them in civilian court. This man should be in Guantanamo Bay.”

Right. Where he can be either forgotten or perceived as a martyr to a lawless government. Where the world’s press cannot conveniently cover his trial and conviction and help spread word to those who would do us harm that if you choose to destroy us, we will either kill you as we did Bin Laden, or throw you in a hole for the rest of what only a very few would thereafter call a life.

Trust New Yorkers. We will see to it, if America leaves it up to us, thatAbu Gayth will find his hole. It’s just too bad we can’t throw Lindsay Graham in there with him.

These two kooks are each holding a violent and lethal weapon, capable of mowing down school children and teachers. (Just ask Baltimore school officials)

Look, I’m about as in favor of gun control as anybody can get. I think there are too many nuts supporting the free flow of weapons intended to kill – and often used that way against innocent people, by accident or deliberately.

But sometimes I worry more about the nuts on my own team that I do about the people armed to the teeth because they expect imminent invasion by The Forces Of Evil.

A case in point: In Baltimore, school officials expelled a seven year old kid because he had a breakfast pastry. Not only that, but he had chewed it into the shape of a gun!

Well, sort of a gun. Evidently he was trying to chew it into a mountain, but his toothy pastry sculpture skills aren’t quite up to Leonardo da Vinci. Or even Lenny the sculpture chewer. You can’t make this stuff up.

I mean, holy crap! Is that terrifying or not? Remember, inside these pastries is a tasty goo. It might be or cherry, or apple, or strawberroo. Uh, I mean strawberry. By pointing a breakfast pastry at, say, a teacher and repeating the words “bang bang” you might blow a hole the size of a strawberry through her heart with the sticky jam.

The reason I believe the NRA exhortation to stop banning guns and just arrest the nuts is crazy is, the nuts are so plentiful we’d have to arrest every third American. Most especially everybody running our nation’s school systems. In the Mount Carmel Area School District of Northumberland, PA,  they’ve even expelled a sweet little girl for "terrorism" when she talked about shooting herself and a classmate with bubbles from a pink “bubble gun.” 

A royal razz to officials of the Park Elementary School in Baltimore, who now seem to have reduced the charges against their seven-year-old pastry-chewing terrorist to "using food to make an inappropriate gesture." A grave juvenile crime if ever there was one.

And a double royal razz to school officials in the Mount Carmel Area School District in Pennsylvania. They're evidently so terrified by bubbles, they not only socked a girl who’s nearly a baby with a violence charge that can go on her lifetime record – and threatened her with prison (speak of terrorism!) – but also, once their bullying of a little child was disclosed, they hid like cowards behind the skirts of their own version of an official secrets act by declaring they are not permitted to discuss “disciplinary actions.”

Photograph by Bruce Silverman, circa 1970-something.

Attention McCormick spice company. Didn’t anyone ever tell you? The only smell that interests investors is the smell of money.

The following is lifted from a press release issued by PR Newswire:

SPARKS, Md., Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- McCormick & Company, Incorporated (MKC) , a global leader in flavor, announced the publication of its blackberry and clove scented 2012 annual report.

Over the years, investors have been led to McCormick (MKC)'s annual report by following the aroma of nutmeg, cardamom and cinnamon, among others.  McCormick (MKC) produces the only scented annual report and has been doing so for more than 30 years.  The new report is entitled "Flavored for Global Growth."

Blackberry and clove come from the company's newest global Flavor Forecast^®.  The rich fruitiness of the blackberry balances pleasantly with the sweet aroma of cloves – a delightful paring of fruit and spice.  Since 2000, McCormick (MKC) has been at the forefront of identifying emerging trends with a focus on flavor through the Flavor Forecast.

As of 10:13 the morning this was posted, despite a generally upward stock market trend, McCormick was down $7 a share.

Meanwhile, the company's most recent proxy statement revealed that the Board of Directors had increased the total compensation of Alan D. Wilson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, from $7.76 millionin 2011 to $9.5 million in 2012.

Whaddya wanna bet the money he crammed into his bank account smelled like money, not a rich fruity blackberry balanced with the sweet aroma of cloves?

Imprison the Pistorius magistrate – for nearly inflicting death-by-boredom on the entire planet

So here’s the deal. I was getting dressed for work this morning.  The TV was on, as it always is on weekdays, tuned to CNN. I was hoping to hear some news. Instead, I got a South African magistrate named Desmond Nair making a superhuman effort to turn his courtroom into the dreariest law classroom in the entire history jurisprudential pedantry. 

He succeeded. 

Moreover, his effort to bore everybodfy to tears during his 15 minutes of fame (which ran far longer than 15 minutes) were plainly superhuman, considering what has been reported about the case:

A beautiful woman had been shot to death by her lover, a legless sports hero. His story of how it happened seems to challenge credibility. But a police detective had been yanked off the case because he himself is charged with murder in a different case. And if Pistorius’ own testimony as to what had happened was weird, so was the investigator’s.

The world was watching because the story had sex, violence, abuse, murder, a blonde beauty, sports heroics, high-tech prostheses, adversity overcome ­– virtually everything that draws attention to a story save for whipped cream covered chocolate mousse, a dominatrix wearing a tight patent leather bustier – and parked outside, a truckload of gold bars.

So with the planet watching, what did Magistrate Nair do? He droned. And droned. And droned endlessly on, with references to “Paragraph Capital A” and “Paragraph small (a)” of this document and that document. He schlepped in a stultifying lecture on English common law,  Roman law, South African law, and more ifs, buts and maybes than a 20-part legal contract among 50 competing parties for the division of labor in a project for clearing machined screws from medium-sized dustbins.

Sheesh! CNN cut to the courtroom around 8 a.m. Eastern time this morning, and by five to nine I decided, the hell with it, I don’t need to know whether Pistorius gots bail or not. I turned off the TV, and went to work late.

What’s Nair’s motivation for holding all of us prisoner instead of simply telling us (I learned the end via the Internet at noon today) that he had decided there wasn’t enough evidence to hold Pistorius prisoner? Beats me. The inflated ego of a very boring man, perhaps. Or perhaps Nair is more clever than we think and he is simply tricking us into going away and ignoring the case.

If so, he has a point. Each month, hundreds of lovers shoot their wives or girlfriends, accidentally or otherwise, right here in the United States. Gorgeous blondes? We got buckets of ‘em in the good old US of A. Sports heroes? Those, too. Prostheses? Maybe we ought to be making heros out of the American military vets who go through life with them after sacrificing their limbs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Viet Nam and elsewhere, rather than idolizing a South African sports hero with what appears to be a very short fuse.

As for Magistrate Nair, he deserves to be beaten over the head with a titanium shin until he pleads to be dispatched more quickly with a heavy law book.

Shoot the watchdog – and other political stuff that will either make your head explode or tickle your fancy

So you’ll noticed that I haven’t posted for about a week. Sorry. I open the newspaper, or turn on the TV news, and it’s the same-old same-old.

Until this morning that is. Suddenly I found a number of items ­­– well, three of them anyway – that may not merit a full post on this blog, but that are certainly worth calling to your attention.

Let’s start with shooting the watchdog

Suppose there’s a great government agency. Or suppose, if you don’t believe in such things as great government agencies, that there’s one highly exceptional government agency that miraculously is doing its job. And that job has been helping millions of Americans. How?

It has saved thousands of home buyers from predatory lenders. It has sued and won in a settlement $85 million from a credit card company that would rather fork over the $85 million than go to court over its discriminatory marketing and billing practices.

It has also launched an investigation into the way banks, in collusion with some colleges and universities, rip off college students and get vulnerable kids skewered on a financial hook for a lifetime, or at least a few decades, of unnecessary debt.

In other words, you’ve got a government watch dog that not only barks, but also bites the bad guys. What would you do with this dog?

Well, many of the political prostitutes who call themselves Republican senators and congressman are trying to shoot the dog, of course, before it ruins the political corruption business. Further details here.

To the left march! With laughter

Like most progressive bloggers, when I read the news for more than ten minutes at a time, my head starts to explode with rage. But every so often, a blogger comes along who can get you, well, to use the language of text-a-holics, ROTF!

Such a blogger is Tom Degan. I have no idea why I never came across him the blogosphere before. But I can tell you, I’ll be reading him from now on. And I've posted a link to  his hilarious rage on my own blog.

Just to give you a sample, here’s what Deegan says about himself in his biographical notes:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: TOM DEGAN is a traitor to this beautiful and bountiful nation of ours. Not only that, he is a disgrace to the flag that all real Americans honor and revere. It is a sad thing to realize that he walks among us, with the same rights granted to decent people everywhere. Here is how utterly contemptible he is - He wrote what you are now reading. He is trying to make you believe that it is being written by a third party. How cruel! He is just being a smug, elitist liberal! Tom Degan has no shame. I take back what I said. "Contemptible" is too kind a word for me - I MEAN "HIM". 

Run over here and read him.

“I don’t know much about science

but I know what I like”

Introducing the case of another ignorant school teacher, (by law that ought to be an oxymoron) this particular school teacher in Indiana, Her name is Diana Medley, and Ms. Medley wants to ban gay kids from the high school prom because she, er, doesn’t “agree” with homosexuality.”Agree?”

Reports the Crooks and Liars blog: 

"I don't believe they were born that way," she opined. "I think life circumstances made them choose that. I think God made everybody equal...  

Wait a second, lady. Just wait a second. This isn’t a matter of opinion. It doesn’t matter what you think, or what I think. This is a matter of science and the interplay between endocrinology and genetics. I know this is hard, lady, but let me simplify this for you. The latest science is that gay kids were wired that way by a combination of the hormones in their mothers’ wombs and genetics that they didn’t ask for. They were just handed the dang things and told by nature to go be gay and have a life. 

On the other hand, Ms. Midley, one might come to the conclusion that you were wired for airhead – unless, of course, you chose airhead.

Gay “issue” puts Boy Scouts between a rock and a hard… Oh, nevermind.

A full and very lengthy disclosure first: I may be the only American male alive who flunked out of the Boy Scouts. Well, maybe “flunked out” isn’t quite the appropriate term. Let’s put it this way: I couldn’t pass the entrance exam.

No it had nothing to do with sexuality. My wiring determined I would be born and remain straight.  I had to do with different wiring ­­– the same attention deficit that kept me a borderline student from second grade through college. When I was 10 — or was it 11 or 12?—  well anyway, somewhere in that range, I went down to the neighborhood Boy Scout troop to join up.

“Do you know the Boy Scout Oath?” the local scoutmaster asked me.

“No, I don’t,” I confessed.

“What about the Scout Law?”

“What’s that?”

I’m really, really fuzzy on the next part. But I think I came home with something called The Boy Scout Handbook. And I have the vague impression that the scoutmaster sold it to me, although I wouldn’t swear to it on a stack of Bibles.

“Memorize the oath and the Law and come back next week.”

Well, I overcame my attention deficit enough to memorize, at least for the moment, the oath. It’s the one that begins “On my honor I will do my best…"

But the Law, essentially a string of a dozen adjectives, (“A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind,….” etcetera, etcetera) eluded me. No matter how many times I read it aloud and repeated it to myself, I couldn’t remember all the adjectives, and even when I thought I had them all down, it would turn out I had them in the wrong order.

Gross insubordination

The scoutmaster listened, his frown extremely grave, and then said, “No no, you haven’t memorized them. Come back next week.” I came back for three weeks in a row, flunking  Boy Scout Law each time. Finally I said “Screw you!”and walked out.  It was an act of  gross insubordination that would have gotten me thrown out of the Scouts in a millisecond, had I ever gotten in.

To hell with it. I was never that interested in tying knots anyway. If anything, I needed help untying knots, particularly the ones in my shoes. To this day, I don’t know a square knot from a clove hitch from a lariat loop. (Although, during a very boring junior high school science class, I do remember figuring out, all on my own and without diagrams, how to tie a hangman’s noose.)

Maybe because I was never involved in scouting, I really never saw the value in it. If you ask me, it’s often just an organized way of frittering away time that ought to be spent on homework. Who the hell cares if you can tie and know the names of fifty different knots or if you won a merit badge in backpacking, bugling, or bird study? 

Yes, I know there are merit badges for considerably more advanced subjects, such as the Nuclear Science Merit Badge. Its requirements encourage kids get close to “a radioactive source,” which sounds dangerous, or build a model reactor, which I’m certain Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would heartily applaud. Even so, “nuclear reactor” isn’t the first thing that generally comes to mind when you think about the Boy Scouts, right?

On top of that, the Boy Scouts are pushing a kind of ecumenical religiosity, with scouts encouraged to earn merit badges in their own religions, from Baptist to Meher Baba. (Yes, traditionally discriminated-against religions, from Judaism to "Islamic" to Hinduism, to Zoroastrianism are also covered, although I can't find Scientology on the list.)

With that in mind, the current dustup over whether the Boy Scouts should/should not/should be required to admit homosexuals leaves them in a no-win situation.

Situation Impossible

Opt in favor of allowing gays to join, and the Scouts will be in deep doo doo with lots of the churches that donate the use of their basements to Scout meetings. And they’ll be pariahs in certain religious communities. Opt against gays and the Scouts mark themselves as discriminatory, uptight, and out-of-step. 

Either way they go, somebody will declare them in violation of their self-declared mission to “prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.” Ditto if they make the admission of gays a local option.

So I watch inflammatory bigots like this guy with more than annoyance. He’s a worthless boob, trying to ban people who God wired for gay, for reasons so specious and ridiculous that they’d be laughable if not for the fact that the entire concept of Boy Scouts is starting to feel laughable. Maybe the Boy Scouts made sense in the days of Norman Rockwell, who drew idealized America as Americans once ideally imagined ourselves.

These days, though, the Boy Scouts are just a bunch mostly well-meaning but silly people in silly uniforms, tormented by equally silly people with self-righteously bigoted opinions.

Just when you think things can't get any stupider, they get....well, you know

I really have to get busier. I’ve spent far too much time wallowing in the mud with idiots today, and some of the idiocy I've been fending off is going to come out right on this post about stupid news.

For example, if you think I’m having a slow day, think of all the people whose jockey shorts are in a twist because of a TV advertising spot showing a brain surgeon (actor) manipulating the brain of a patient (actor) to punch a surgical nurse (actor) and make travel reservations on Kayak.

An English newspaper called The Mirror reports:

Of the 441 complaints received by the Advertising Standards Authority, "a number" found it offensive, 25 were concerned that it could be distressing to children and 16 believed it was insulting to surgeons and the medical profession in general.

Oh please!

But then there’s graver stuff. Over at Time Magazine, heads are about to roll. 500 of them, to be precise, says a story in Ad Age. It’s all the usual grief over falling circulation, falling advertising revenues, and failing business models. But what got my attention is that the people are getting axed not because revenues are falling (although Time is still profitable) but that the recommendations about axing jobs came following a “top to bottom” review from…wait for it…

You guessed it.

Mitt Romney’s firm, Bain Capital. In other words, more job lost after an analysis from the very bowels of Mr. Job Creator himself. Aintcha glad he didn’t get elected President?

Interestingly, although management came to a decisive conclusion about axing human beings after the Bain review, Time just can’t seem to make up its mind about its very valuable real estate holdings in New York according to an exclusive story from Reuters.

Should they sell the Time-Warner building and move? Sell it and lease it back? Move more employees into it from other office locations around town and give up those locations?

Oh, never mind. That stuff’s too hard. Just fire 500 people and give yourself a bonus.

Fat opera singer wears tight chastity belt to Le Grand Vefour and L’Atelier Joel Robechon! (This is a shamelessly self-interested post.)

The first part of the headline is a fake but wait, wait!! Don't go away. I did it to prove a point. Well, also, if the truth be known, to hype my score of visits to this blog.

See, for seven years now, I’ve been writing here mostly on political subjects, occasionally veering off on a short tangential ride into the arts, food and travel. All this while, I’ve been tracking your visits here. And what are the most-frequently visited posts I’ve put up?

Something about George Bush being a nincompoop? Nope, those rate in the dozens of visits. Something about gun control? Something about taxes? Something about the falling national living standard? Something about Republican skullduggery?

Naah!

The three all-time killer posts, with visits that by now must be in the multiple thousands, were….

• One about fat opera singers

• One poking fun at Rick Santorum by saying he had been endorsed by the “Chastity Belt Manufacturers Association.” This one has attracted vaguely pervy visits from every corner of the globe. People from China, to Cleveland, to Chad. And no, they don’t have the slightest interest in Rick Santorum. They were looking for salacious pictures of chastity belts. (You guys know who you are, Meinherr, Monsieur, Senor, Pal, M’Lord, Chief, O Great Sheik.)

• One comparing two high-priced Parisian restaurants, L’Atelier Joel Robechon and Le Grand Vefour. (I thought Le Grand Vefour was better in comparison.) Wars, storms, financial crises and tragedies come and go, but the rich will always need someplace wonderful to eat.

So, you want to know why the world is going down the sewer? It’s because people care more about stuffing their faces with high priced food, and looking at fat opera singers and chastity belts, than they do about paying attention to the politics that determine their own fate.

While I’m here, you cognoscenti of the fine arts might want to know that the chastity belt-related image in this post hangs in my New York apartment and is a signed original etching, number 16 of 100, circa 1962, by Guillermo Silva (1929-2007). It’s essentially a precursor to the manifestation of male pro-feminism in the arts, depicting the ladies of the cave sexually “locked up” while the hotshot knight sallies forth in search of adventure and – well the late Guillermo and I leave the rest to your imagination.

Is it for sale? No it is not. But if you enjoy articles the food, art and other tastes reflected in this blog, and if $3.99 is burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to whip out your credit card, go here, and buy (and then read) a really terrific and slightly quirky e-book.

From those wonderful Republicans who hate class action law suits: a vulture class action suit against Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong was a dead cyclist pedaling since the moment he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and confessed to doping, bullying, and other unsportsmanlike behavior.

I don’t much like the guy. I think his behavior was reprehensible. But I don’t think we live in a society where a guy caught lying deserves to be torn apart by scavengers while his heart is still beating.

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.

A humanoid vulture named Rob Stutzman, who is a Republican political operative, has joined with  chef  you never heard of to bring a class action lawsuit demanding Armstrong return what members of the class paid for Lance’s books,  “It’s Not About the Bike,” and “Every Second Counts.”

Their whining call for justice will be, I suppose, that they never would have become better. more fit and inspired bicyclists as a consequence of Armstrong’s books if they had only known Armstrong doped before he improved their rides and their skills.

There’s no way that Stutzman and the nobody chef can earn the price of a cheap lunch on a book refund. But the lawsuit, if successful, can help to break Armstrong and his publishers because they'll be forced to pay many thousands of buyers. Why are Stutzman and Chef Nobody attacking when they suffered no significant loss and have practically nothing to gain except bragging rights? That’s why they call ‘em vandals.

What’s so ironic about a Republican operative becoming lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit is that the Republican party purports to hate, hate, hate class action lawsuits. So much so that back in 2005, the Bush Administration sought to legally curtail them.

Of course, those would be lawsuits against huge corporations and individuals that do real bodily harm and property damage, such as medical equipment manufacturers that make faulty hip implants that cripple and poison people, or energy companies that foul and poison drinking water.

Republicans still want to put a stop to that kind of legal action, you can bet. But when it comes to picking the financial bones of a pathetic living corpse like Armstrong, they’re as greedy and rapacious as any thug you’re likely to meet in a dark alley.

Will the new rallying cry of New York’s power brokers become, “Let them eat seasonal berries?”

Is eight bucks too much to pay for a cup of coffee? How about toast with butter and jam, with (this time) Starbucks coffee or tea for a piffling $29?

What’s that, Dude? You say you’re on a healthy diet, and that includes breakfast? Not to worry. 

How about a plate of seasonal berries for $23, coffee not included? And if you’re bringing along your pal, the starving lumberjack, he can have a three-egg omelet with bacon and blueberry pancakes. But he may have to chop down a few extra trees to pay the bill. His chit, not including coffee (or tip in any of these cases) will come to $52.

By now, I guess you’ve figured out that I’m not talking about breakfast at Denny’s. Au contraire, mon ami.

An act of charity for the super-powerful

What I have in mind is an eatery called Park Avenue Winter, which out of the kindness of its management’s heart has let leak the news that it will take in orphaned politicians and other power brokers while their favorite power breakfast hangout, the Loew’s Regency Hotel a bit further down Park Avenue, undergoes extensive renovations.

I have to thank Joanna Fantozzi, writing for a Manhattan weekly called Our Town, for digging up the heartwarming news about a temporary new power broker pit stop. The story appeared the paper’s January 17^th edition. Sorry, no links, because Our Town/East Side may be the last publication on the planet that doesn’t have a web edition.

[Post Publication Note: I got it wrong. Our Town does have a website, and as Joanna informs you in the first comment below, you can get to it here.]

But no matter. Ms. Fantozzi was intrepid enough to dig up the fact that Joe Lhota is a breakfast VIP there. At this point, I can hear the sound of eyebrows arching here in New York, and of heads scratching everywhere else on the planet.

Joe Who?

Joe Lhota is outgoing Chairman of the New York Transit Authority, the organization that runs the subways and busses while it cries poor and raises fares with the regularity that a jackrabbit in a bunny hutch umm, well, you know what I mean.

Over 300 grand a year? You might still be

too poor to pay out of your own pocket.

Joe has been getting paid $332,000 which is so not outrageous in overpriced New York that I wonder how he can afford regular breakfasts in the Power Broker Mess Hall unless he – dare I say it? – unless he expenses his morning meals there. I mean, heaven forbid he should have a power conference in the MTA conference room, or even over the phone.

Joe, although appointed to the MTA by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, is a product of the Giuliani administration, which was home to coddlers of the rich and superrich in its day. Not surprising that those folks would also want to coddle themselves.

A surprising exception to the eight dollar coffee crowd is Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who despite his billions tends to take his breakfasts – and other power meals – at a run-of-the-mill diner called Viand on Madison and 78^th, around the corner from the Bloomberg Mansion. (The New York Post claims he has "wined and dined" Janet Napolitano and former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer there, although I do wonder about the wine part.) 

A good sized breakfast at Viand will set you back not a whole heck of a lot more than a cup of coffee at Winter. I base this statement on personal experience. I used to live up that way and ate at Viand on a few occasions. Interesting that when the money comes straight from their own pockets, even the richest politicians go cheap.

Ssh! The booths have ears.

Admittedly, there are some drawbacks to taking power meals at Viand. The booths are set so close together that an ordinary unconnected citizen might overhear your conversation. And then there was the little matter of a health code violation a couple of years back. But since Viand had a sign in the window, at least when I lived up that way, announcing that it celebrated “Greeks for Bloomberg,” I imagine they made their mice problem go away quickly.

Now there’s talk in town that, come the next election, Joe Lhota may decide to run for mayor here in New York. Just think of it! This is a financially stressed city. (Yeah I know, you're gonna ask me to name ten that aren’t.) Teacher and other municipal employees’ pay, promotion, and retirements are under pressure. There’s a threat that eliminating so-called tax rebates on co-op and condo apartments will effectively cause taxes on home ownership here to rise – with the money going toward municipal operations. Infrastructure is crumbling.

In the midst of this fiscal starvation, do we need people who make major decisions away from the office, over what might be a $29 plate of eggs? Just asking.