a kick while you’re down

Here in the Golden State, we awoke to more grim job reports this morning: unemployment continues to stretch toward 13% here.  

Two days ago, President Obama addressed the nation to justify a further troop buildup in Afghanistan, nearly 30,000 more soldiers at an estimated cost of $500,000 per troop per year.  

But lo, the profits of the bailed-out banks continue to rise.  Everyday we hear reports of CEOs collecting their bonuses, unmoored from any concern for the fiscal state of the average American household.  

Companies around the country continue to shed jobs, laying off at a record pace, which in turn allows them to balance their books, thus boosting stock prices.  So the market’s recovering, but it’s shaping up to be a jobless recovery, as feared.

And now, in the midst of all this, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke appears today before the Senate Banking Committee to address the exploding deficit.  In lengthy question-and-answer, he and committee members establish that in order to reduce the long-term deficit, we have to either slash spending or hike income, likely through higher taxes.  

At last, when pressed, Bernanke finally rolls out with some real candor.

What’s his solution to solving the deficit?  

Why, slash Medicare and Social Security, of course.

The government’s heedlessly printing cash, dumping it into the coffers of unregulated banks, lining the pockets of corporate CEOs, and he wants to take away your Grandma’s Social Security check, hike the out-of-pocket cost of her medications.  He wants to chisel away at New Deal entitlements that have grown the middle class throughout the 20th century.

Astonishing…

You stay classy, Mr. Chairman.

surging backward

Over the long Thanksgiving holiday, in addition to pardoning turkeys and installing his first White House Christmas tree, President Obama finally made some decisions about Afghanistan.  As long predicted now, and after supposed close consultation with numerous advisers (most of them military warriors), he’s opted to surge an anticipated 30,000 troops into our occupation effort in Afghanistan.

As I’ve pointed out often on this blog, our campaign there has long-since ceased to be a war.  We invaded in the wake of 9/11 with the goal of unseating the Taliban and routing Al-Qaeda.  We accomplished both tasks.  At present, new incarnations of each are taking root in Pakistan, out of American reach, where their host government makes only the smallest pretense of stopping them.

And so the US military – unparalleled when given a clear objective – is left to order what most historians consider a perennially disordered land.  We’re stuck providing fodder for extremist propaganda in the Mid-East, and refereeing the never-ending regional rivalries between Pakistan and India, Iran and Israel, the Kurds and Shia, et cetera, et cetera…

Mr. President, you were elected to end these wars.  You were given a Nobel Prize for Peace.  The vast majority of Americans no longer supports this effort.  Most experts consider the situation intractable.  When did you become more Johnson than Kennedy?

According to the White House, Obama will address the public tomorrow night from the Oval Office in an effort to “sell his plan to the American people,” which leaves a nagging question: why are American presidents always having to sell their plans to the people, rather than just exercising our will?

cloak and swagger

Still laboring over what to get Dad or Gramps this holiday season?  Well, if they’re history nuts – with a heavy splash of nut – why not gift them the just-published 1950’s CIA field guide to undercover magic and sleight-of-hand, The Official Manual of Trickery and Deception.

You might wonder, why would the CIA require a sleight-of-hand manual?  Or what master magician crafted such an objet d’curio?  Oh, so many potent questions!

According to CIA and military historians, The Official Manual of Trickery and Deception was developed by MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s uber-secret mind-control and chemical interrogation unit.  Needing a manual for easy use by Bond-style operatives during those headiest of Cold War years, the MK-ULTRA brass turned to the era’s most popular stage magician, John Mulholland. 

In 1953, when he began work on the project, Mulholland was already a known cultural quantity and a highly successful entertainer.  He’d performed in over forty countries around the world, authored nearly a dozen books on magic, and personally entertained at FDR’s White House numerous times.  He was also a devout patriot, perfect for such an operation.

And just what did he produce, you reasonably inquire?  A fairly quaint guide to such tricks as surreptitiously dosing an enemy’s food or drink with knockout drugs, or stealing a document off a table, folding and pocketing it (one-handed, no less!) without attracting notice.  The manual also details how to send and receive covert hand signals unnoticed in public, or how to – in a feat of Get Smart-style dash - tie your shoelaces in patterns so as to communicate messages.

Believed long destroyed alongside other MK-ULTRA documentation back in the 1970’s, the manual has at last been rediscovered and found fit for public consumption.  So bop over to Amazon and add a little rabbit-out-of-the-hat to your cloak and dagger.

semanticals: killing it once

“You killed the animal once.  You don’t want to kill it twice.”

       -Chef Dominique Crenn on the careful cooking of a Thanksgiving turkey.

devourer of worlds

And so, dear friends, it begins.  The End of Days?  The destruction of space-time as we know it?  None call tell.  At least not so far.  What we do know is this: today the European Organization for Nuclear Research, AKA CERN, AKA Bad News for the Human Race, finally launched its $9 gazillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful atom-smasher on earth. 

Designed to blast beams of subatomic protons through miles of tunnel underneath Switzerland and France, the collider will reputedly emulate conditions in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.  After months of delays and technical glitches, it’s finally up and running, raising heck and smashing protons.  But this is just warmup.  Come early December, CERN will really show us the business when they kick off the main event: some boffo proton collisions. 

And that, of course, is when physicists and experts fear the LHC might potentially unleash heretofore unknown havoc on our plane of existence.  Here’s a primer of what to expect in the coming months:

• The opening of a gargantuan black hole which will swallow the earth and all of its inhabitants.  This is the most popular and/or likely outcome.
•   A tear in the fabric of space-time, resulting in the unleashing of strange, macabre nether-creatures from one or more alternate dimensions.  Monsters will likely include, but are not limited to: A) giant primeval insects, B) dinosaurs and other ancient beasts, C) molemen and squid-people, D) vast and omnipotent Lovecraftian Elder Gods, who may or may not smite our fragile civilization and enslave the human race. 
• In a probable worst-case scenario, the LHC might collapse together two or more parallel dimensions within the “multiverse” predicted by quantum physics and string theory, likely introducing into our world alternate “shadow-self” versions of every man, woman and child on earth, resulting in either: A) mass confusion as regards who is who (how do we know WE’RE not really the shadow-selves in THEIR dimension???); B) a bizarro civil war, pitting regular-verse people against our mirror-image shadow-selves; C) large-scale identity crisis between you and your extra-dimensional doppelgänger, leading to widespread moral digression and existential paralysis (i.e. if you mess around with the other-dimensional version of your girlfriend, does that still count as cheating?)
• Did I mention dinosaurs?  What about squid-people?  In all probability, there will also be squid-people who’ve evolved to ride on dinosaurs.  But you think those dinosaurs are going to let YOU ride on their back?  Think again, fella!

In the interest of good science, we should reassure you that these outcomes, though likely, remain “theoretical.”  At least that’s what our legal department makes us say.  Personally, we think this shit’s a lock.

by the hair of their chinny-chin-chin

Last night the Senate cleared a major procedural hurdle by winning a cloture vote to begin debate on the hotly controversial healthcare reform bill.  The bad news?  As expected, they barely scraped past – by the hair of their chinny-chin-chins, in fact, just narrowly clearing a 60-vote bar with the full support of the Democratic caucus (58 Dems, and 2 Independents, Sanders of Vermont and Lieberman of Connecticut).

In short, there wasn’t a single vote to spare.  Not one. 

This is nerve-fraying but welcome news, and a large heap of the credit rightfully belongs to Majority Leader Harry Reid, the leader of this Democratic Senate, who bucked notable party members and centrist Republicans in crafting a piece of legislation with a public option, albeit an opt-out compromise version.  Despite reports to the contrary, the public option enjoys widespread support from the public in poll after poll after poll.  You have to applaud Reid for resisting temptations to start the Senate  debate and the impending slugfest of Republican lies and half-truths with a thoroughly watered-down healthcare bill.  More powerfully, he did it all with the looming thunder-cloud of a brutal re-election fight hanging over his head in 2010.  Nevada is a purple state, often more red than blue, depending on what stats you believe.  Reid’s support of healthcare reform, and his defense of the public option, may very well cost him his political career. 

Now the true test of this reform begins as the Senate starts what’s anticipated to be weeks of debate on the bill.  The vote last night signified only the willingness to open debate on the subject.  In the coming weeks, the two ladies of Maine, Snowe and Collins, will have a variety of Democrat and White House suitors knocking on their doors, blushing and blustering for their vote. 

Attracting the spotlight too will be Senator Nelson of Nebraska and that perennial neocon-in-sheep’s-clothing, Joe Lieberman, both of whom insist they will support a GOP filibuster should the final Senate bill maintain Reid’s public option in its final form.  Adding fuel to this particular fire, we have the more liberal adherents of the package, notably Bernie Sanders of Vermont (God love ya, Vermonters) who today unveiled a counter-threat of his own: the promise to vote against any bill without a public option.

So the coming weeks will require all the vim and persuasion of our ambitious president and his leaders in Congress.  Neither the Senate nor the House bills are perfect, and merging them will be perfectly nightmarish.  But there is much to support in these bills, and at this juncture, with Democrats gaining more ground in this skirmish than any other time in the long lifespan of the issue, we can’t afford to turn back now.  Like civil rights and Social Security, true healthcare reform will require a series of legislative building blocks.  It’s a long road ahead.

First, though, Obama and his dream super-majority must accomplish this landmark first step.  For that to happen, liberals and centrists alike will have to learn to live with imperfection.  The stark choice they face, after all, isn’t between this flawed but valuable bill and a perfect one; it’s between this flawed bill or nothing at all.

antic ewoks

Oh, live television, how do I love thee?  What’s not to enjoy of the goofs and gaffes of real-time telecasts.  And this one’s a You Tube doozy.  And I don’t say that lightly, believe me. 

In honor of Halloween, the hosts of NBC’s The Today Show donned Star Wars costumes for a cooking segment on holiday treats and cocktails.  Someone in the Today Show brain trust apparently also ran out and hired a couple of Central Casting midgets and threw ‘em in Ewok suits to add a little intergalactic color.  At some point before ol’ Matt and Meredith tossed to Al and the gang, those very same costumed midgetwoks tossed back some drinks… and then wrecked havoc on the set.  According to industry blogs, the midgets were legitimately wasted, unbeknownst to crew and hosts. 

Yes, friends, you heard that right – drunk ewoks run amok.  I couldn’t bring you Ann Curry in slave Leia get-up, so here’s the next best thing.  And after viewing it MANY times, I can’t decide on my favorite part.  Watching an Ewok moonwalk?  Watching two of them start to brawl?  Or is it just the visual of Al Roker decked out like Han Solo?  You decide for yourself.   

last meals

On Tuesday evening, John Allen Muhammad, the infamous Washington DC sniper, was executed by the Virginia Department of Corrections.  Per custom, he was granted his choice of a last meal, though in accordance with Muhammad’s wishes, the details of the meal were not released to the press.

How does that whole death row last supper work, you ask?  In and of itself, it seems like almost a quaint notion.  Surely if a prisoner asked for a twelve-course French dinner, the request wouldn’t be granted.  So how are the decisions made?

Well, now Slate’s Christopher Beam supplies some answers over at their “Explainer” column.

According to Beam, the least meal policy differs from state to state, and sometimes from prison to prison.  In many states, the last meal must consist of foods easily prepared in the facility’s own kitchen, often by the head cook, another prisoner, or readily procured from a nearby eatery at reasonable cost.  Without question, the most oft-requested is McDonald’s, or similar fast food.

As for the specific items themselves, the list includes lots of cheeseburger, fried chicken, chicken-fried steaks, ice cream and cake requests, served alongside plenty of Coke, Dr. Pepper and sugary fruit juices. 

In fact, for further specifics, you can scope out the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s website, which until 2004 made a practice of listing last meal requests of its death row inmates.  There’s plenty of them, too, as you might guess, given Texas’ reputation for lethality.

Allen Janecka, for instance, executed in 2003, asked for “chicken fried steak, French fries, ketchup, salad, blue cheese dressing, iced tea with lemon, two sodas, rolls and butter.”  Convicted murderer Bruce Jacobs asked for “a whole fried chicken, twelve buttered bread slices, fried onion rings and okra, six RC colas, one large bag of Fritos, two tomatoes, salt and pepper,” while another inmate, James Powell, asked for only “one pot of coffee.” 

Among the annals of more infamous criminals, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, requested two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.  John Wayne Gacy, the well-known clown-faced serial killer, requested shrimp, fried chicken, French fries, and a pound of strawberries. 

And as Beam points out, convicted Arkansas murderer Ricky Ray Rector, who in 1992 shot himself in the head in a botched suicide attempt before capture, suffering brain damage in the process, ate a meal of steak, fried chicken and Kool-Aid, but before getting marched off on his final walk insisted on saving his pecan pie dessert “for later.”

emperor mike

Yikes, Emperor Mike, that was a close call!  New York’s (sort of) beloved Mayor Bloomberg barely eked out a victory in yesterday’s elections there.  Sort of an embarrassing turn of events, considering the polls showed him winning by sound double-digits.  In exit polls, New Yorkers thankfully verified that they were more than a little yucked-out by Bloom’s meek grasp of democratic principles. 

As previously noted on this blog, America’s favorite power-hankering Independent not only had the city’s popular mayoral term-limit law overturned to afford himself a third stab at Giuliani-like heraldry, but even creepier, he funneled into his campaign’s coffers an estimated $90 million of his own scratch, more than any other candidate in human history.  Congrats on your tenuous reelection, Mister Emperor-Mayor.  You’ve proven campaigns in America can still be jiggered and bought, just not as quietly as they used to.