Category: Deep political thought

Last call

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments

What’s more appalling — the clown-college contest for the GOP pestilential nomination or the U.S. House of Representatives, which represents … what, exactly? What the authors of the Constitution intended to be “the popular branch of the national government, directly responsible to the people*,” today seems directly responsible to no one, not even its own speaker.

Punkinhead Boehner keeps striving for street cred’ by saying his old man used to run a bar. I’d like to see him try to run one. He’s certainly incapable of running the House. A freshman Tea Bagger with his snoot up a Koch brother’s tailpipe shouts “Shit!” and the speaker instantly replies, “What color, sir?”

This guy? Speaker of the fuckin’ House? He couldn’t carry Tip O’Neill’s jock. Hell, he couldn’t even pick it up.

* “American Government: Theory, Structure and Process,” by Dye, Greene and Parthemos.

One war ends, another continues

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

The war in Iraq officially “ended” today, for those of you who believe in beginnings and endings.

But the war on civil liberties continues. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act contains provisions that the American Civil Liberties Union says could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison, indefinitely and without charge, civilians — including U.S. citizens — anywhere on the planet, including right here in the good old US of A.

Glenn Greenwald views this development with alarm over at Salon, charging President Obama with being more concerned with executive power than civil liberties.

At The Nation, Patricia J. Williams argues that under this law, “if the Defense Department thinks you’re a terrorist, there would be no presumption of innocence; you would be presumed a detainee of the military unless the executive decides otherwise.”

Her colleague Robert Scheer declared that this “assault on the Constitution’s requirement of due process represents a direct threat to the freedom of the American people every bit as menacing as any we face from foreign enemies.”

Andrew Cohen is less alarmist at The Atlantic, saying we’re still “much closer to the beginning than to the end of this dirty business.”

I don’t know whether to be reassured or terrified by that.

Trouble every day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Hey, whaddaya know, it’s Dec. 12, which means … something. I dunno what. I got nothin’ here.

Oh, yeah — this was the day back in 2000 that the Supremes pulled the plug on Al Gore’s campaign, which had been on life support for the better part of quite some time.

Well, as “Odd Bodkins” cartoonist Dan O’Neill was fond of saying, “Reality is a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court.”

We now return you to the reality-based community, which is already in progress.

Nuts, si; balls, no

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
From "An Informal Gathering" by Pat Oliphant.

There’s a snowflake. There’s another. This keeps up, we might have enough to make a snowball by the time President Bachmann closes our embassy in Tehran.

Jesus. When did all the brains leak out of the GOP? I remember when we thought Gerald Ford was a dummy — Pat Oliphant used to caricature him with a Band-Aid on his forehead. But this lot makes Jerry look like James Madison.

The Repugs are a little light in the testicles department, too. Mitt “Who Am I Today?” Romney can’t even field a few slow pitches from Fox News, and then snivels about the questions being “overly aggressive” and “uncalled for.”

Nuts the GOP has a-plenty. Balls, not so much.

• Meanwhile, back at the Mustang Ranch: I propose that if one of the GOP’s serial adulterers makes it all the way to the White House that we rename his workplace the Oval Orifice.

Food for thought

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
1, 2, 3, 4. ...
Whose peppers? OUR peppers!

There may be an upside to working five days a week, in addition to the obvious (a heftier paycheck): I spend more time reading cycling news and less time reading real news.

That’s got to be good for the blood pressure.

For example, today I got up at 7, grabbed a cup of Joe, assumed the position before the iMac and began the process of rerouting the contents of my in-box toward the sprawling server farm in Spaminacanistan that hosts the VeloNews.com website. This took the better part of quite some time but upon reflection seems very little like working for a living when compared to covering the interminable GOP “debates.”

The day’s chores included rewriting a press release; editing, augmenting and posting a few Agence France Presse wire-service stories; uploading a couple tech pieces; editing and posting a half-dozen bits from staffers and contributors; finding art to illustrate all of this; changing the marquee pic; and putting the finishing touches on a weekly e-mail newsletter The Company sends out.

I also managed to communicate electronically with distant colleagues in San Diego, Boulder, Laguna Hills, Brussels and Leon, Spain, without once using the word “fuck,” which may be a first.

So I didn’t get around to noticing that our friends at Fox News had decreed pepper spray to be “a food product, essentially,” until pretty late in the day, as I was self-administering a mild sedative that the French supply in liquid form without a prescription.

Pepper spray. A “food product.”

Well, shit. Don’t tell her momma, but it appears that I stealth-sprayed Herself last night. Slipped four dried red New Mexican chile pods into the posole I whipped up for dinner.

She never knew what hit her, the little commie.