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.

Post-birth abortion

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

I know, I know — I should be babbling on about this, that and the other, but frankly, a few days of spectating at the health-care rumble has left me numb. These overfed, undereducated lice infesting the body politic make soccer hooligans look like Buddhist monks.

Adolf Obama is gonna put these yahoos’ grannies to sleep? Puh-leeze. He’s not a dummy like the last guy to hold the Big Gig. He knows those dried-up, toothless old crones planted their bumper crop of asshats long ago, and that gaggle of fucktards likewise inflicted this latest battalion of jabbering feebs upon us in a nanosecond of meth-addled ardor, with the best bits having clearly dribbled down momma’s leg. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse’s ass is long gone.

No, if we’re gonna put anyone down for the good of the Republic, it has to be these bellowing, pistol-packing pinheads themselves, along with their crotch-droppings, if only to pry them off Uncle Sammy’s three big floppy red communist titties — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which they nurse from so regularly and understand so poorly. Bitch-slaps with Hellboy’s big red mitt for their pastors, teachers and parole officers.

The shmuck stops here.

Velo-vandals bullying Boston

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

From our We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us Dept. comes this story from The Boston Globe about scofflaw cyclists. Multiple reporters spent a week watching cyclists violate traffic laws, from running red lights to riding against traffic to cycling on sidewalks.

It’s an interesting deployment of resources for a struggling newspaper, in that this can’t exactly be considered a major story — renegade cyclists flouting traffic laws hardly qualifies as news, period — but the story already had 367 comments by the time I saw it Saturday morning, so it certainly qualifies as a revenue-generator. Ask the wizards at VeloNews.com, where the least newsworthy Radio Shackstrong story draws eyeballs like a dead hog draws flies.

This isn’t the first of these “investigative reports” I’ve seen, and I expect it won’t be the last. So let’s be careful out there, eh? People are watching.

Unhealthy debate

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Joe Galloway takes on the brownshirts who’ve been turning town halls on health-care reform into Know-Nothing revivals. Writes Galloway:

The only outfits in America that have the right to refuse you treatment for an illness or deny you an organ transplant are the health care corporations, if you’re unlucky enough to have to depend on that wonderful private insurance the right wingnuts are so loudly praising and defending.

This is the same wonderful health coverage that’s driven hundreds of thousands of American families into bankruptcy because their private insurers refused to pay for urgently needed surgery or cancer treatment, or simply cancelled their coverage.

Speaking of which, somebody who is in urgent need of medical care — psychiatric treatment, to be precise — is Sarah Palin, who once again has unhinged her snakelike jaws to give us all a good whiff of the rotting brain behind the designer eyewear.

Her contribution to the “debate,” says Political Animal’s Steve Benen, “might be the stupidest thing ever written about health care policy. Just two weeks after she implored journalists to “quit making things up,” Palin has manufactured the idea of a “death panel” out of thin air.”

Remember when batshit-whacko rants like this came mostly from smelly street people arguing with the voices in their head? I’m thinking I’d be in favor of a death panel, if it came equipped with a time machine. Then we could put a few folks’ parents to sleep before they procreate.

Dummy of the Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

That would be Heather Blish, who spoke during a town-hall meeting on health care called by Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wisc.). According to The Huffington Post, she described herself as a concerned citizen, “just a mom from a few blocks away” and “not affiliated with any political party.”

In reality, she was vice-chairman of the Keewaunee County GOP until 2008, worked for Kagen’s opponent in the last election, and has been a member of the Republican National Committee and the state party, serving as an adviser to the IT committee.

At present, according to her LinkedIn profile, which documents a Sarah Palinesque inability to hold a job for more than a couple of years, she is a “marketing consultant”  who helps “small to mid-sized businesses … coordinate their marketing and PR efforts, ensuring an effective and successful campaign.” Hm. “Small to mid-sized” — that would just about describe today’s GOP. But “effective and successful?” That remains to be seen.

As Steve Benen at Political Animal notes in Friday’s mini-report: “If you’re going to appear on camera to attack health-care reform, and you’re going to insist that you are “just a mom from a few blocks away” and “not affiliated with any political party,” it’s best to clean up your online profile — which identifies your extensive work with the Republican Party.”

Ghetto Buddha

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Waits calls this one "just a big pile of songs" that took some doing to organize.
Waits calls this one "just a big pile of songs" that took some doing to organize.

Thank God the wizards got that Twitter problem sorted out. Between bouts of bicycle comedy I and a bunch of people I’ve never met have been trading tweets that consist entirely of Tom Waits lyrics. And that’s important, because without Tom Waits, the terrorists win.

So now of course I’m listening to “Bawlers” from “Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards,” right after reading an interesting Q&A with the man himself. To say I’m easily distracted is an understatement on a par with calling Rush Limbaugh a bloated, dope-addled fartsack with the intellect of a crab louse and the morals of a hyena on a gutpile.

The Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux mob saw Waits a couple or three times in his jazzy, bluesy days, when he was cutting albums like “Nighthawks at the Diner,” “Small Change” and “Foreign Affairs.”

The first time was at a most unlikely venue — the Red Rocks Amphitheater, where he filled in for an ailing Dan Fogelberg as the opening act for his Asylum labelmates the Eagles, who had covered his “Ol’ ’55,” from Waits’ first album, “Closing Time.” Waits was on his second or third song before most of the country-hippie stoners in the audience figured out that he wasn’t just another roadie tuning the piano for Glenn Frey.

Another time was at a much smaller venue in the Denver clusterplex, and several of us dressed in our best Waits style, which is to say battered tweed jackets and newsboy caps. I believe we were also wearing shirts, pants and shoes, but I can’t swear to it.

Waits was using a massive, old-style brass cash register as a percussion device during “Step Right Up,” and gin-soaked legend has it that at one point he caught a glimpse of us and muttered, “Who are those guys?”

• Extra Special Bonus Tom Waits: An appearance on “Fishing with John,” as in John Lurie, one of his co-stars in the Jim Jarmusch film “Down By Law.” Several fish were harmed in the making of this episode. And at least one pair of pants.