Author: Patrick O'Grady

After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

Fox in the video henhouse

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Abbey Normal Road, from Matt Groening.
Abbey Normal Road, from Matt Groening.

Bwah ha ha ha ha, as those crazy kids say today. In an Associated Press article noting that revenue from commercials is falling short of keeping TV moguls in private jets, Botoxed girlfriends and Tuscan villas, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch warns that the viewing audience should expect to pay more for satellite and cable service.

“Good programming is expensive,” bleats Murdoch.

How the hell would he know? Looking for “good programming” on TV in general, and Fox in particular, is like looking for virgins in a Nevada brothel. One may turn up now and then, but she won’t last long.

And yes, “The Simpsons” is the exception that proves the rule.

Murdoch and his News Corporation are frantically hunting new revenue streams, dreaming of the day when Fox News, the Times of London and The New York Post can join The Wall Street Journal in walling off all or part of their content, reserving it for paying customers only.

Yeah, good luck with that. While people may be willing to pony up for entertainment, news is another breed of dog altogether. Notes Alan B. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger, in a New York Times story: “One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

Moe, Larry, Curly, Pete, Jim and Michele

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
You call this a December morning in Colorado? I've seen more color at a Klan rally.
You call this a December morning in Colorado? I've seen more color at a Klan rally.

Feh. Another in our apparently interminable series of gray days. It’s too early in winter to see all this dirty snow and ice piled up all over the place, thanks to a stretch of subfreezing temperatures. It reminds me of Weirdcliffe, only with more horses’ asses than horses.

Speaking of which, it’s fine to see the Repuglitards continuing their craven buffoonery, slavish toadying to corporations and shameless pissing in the political sandbox. If a guy has to be stuck inside, it’s nice to have some entertainment. There are more than three stooges on the national stage as 2009 limps to a close, to be sure. Just check out Kevin Drum’s capsule look at the past two weeks in politics, and don’t miss Mother Jones‘ list of “Capitol Hill’s Most Unhinged Republicans.”

The unfunny part is, of course, that some of our fellow Americans think this lot should be running the country.

Dingbats over Detroit

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

OK, one shit-for-brains Nigerian setting his underwear alight aboard an airliner bound from Amsterdam to Detroit doesn’t warrant any snark from me, though I notice the usual clot of Repuglitards just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to piss on Preznit Obama’s wingtips.

But when another one turns up — this time locked into the crapper of an Amsterdam-Motor City flight — a guy can’t help but wonder: Are the Nigerian spam merchants are finally having to lay a few of the dumber folks off?

Merry catsmas

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
Norman Rockwell it ain't, but it's all ours.

OK, so this started out as a family holiday photo, but the cats proved reluctant to accept direction.

“What’s my motivation for this scene?” inquired Turkish, raking my left hand with his claws as I set the camera’s self-timer with my right.

“No paparazzi!” screeched Mia. “I’m in the witness protection program!”

“Why do we have all these cats?” wondered Herself.

“I suppose I can always dick around with this lame-o shot in Photoshop,” I mused. And so I could.

Happy holidays from the O’Gradys: Herself (left); Turkish (a.k.a. Turkenstein, The Turkinator, Mighty Whitey the Blue-eyed Bully of Bibleburg, Big Pussy, et al.); Miss Mia Sopaipilla; and Your Humble Narrator (the fat old bald dude at right).

A sickening health-care bill?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

I forgot to add AlterNet to my bookmarks when I shifted operations to the new iMac, and so only stumbled across this post today. It’s a Dec. 21 transcript of a “Bill Moyers Journal” show featuring Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi and The American Prospect‘s Robert Kuttner discussing health-care reform and President Obama’s role in same.

Both Taibbi and Kuttner are deeply critical of Obama’s performance in the passage of what Kuttner calls “a very feeble bill.” Yet Kuttner would vote for it, if only to bitch-slap the GOP and pray that the win helps the prez grow a pair. Taibbi would not. And Kuttner warns that Obama had better start acting like the champion of the people against the special interests if he wants to catch the social-movement tsunami he sees on the horizon:

“One way or another, there is going to be a social movement. Because so many people are hurting, and so many people are feeling correctly that Wall Street is getting too much and Main Street is getting too little. And if it’s not a progressive social movement that articulates the frustration and the reform program, you know that the right wing is going to do it. And that, I think, is what ought to be scaring us silly.”

• Extra Credit Reading: Kevin Drum and Paul Krugman beg to differ.