ITMFA

Both of 'em. Now.

Olaf's Workshop...and I'm Going Mad, I Fear

Let me get this straight--the Bush administration is funding Sunni and al Qaeda elements to reduce Shiite influence? Al Qaeda? If Seymour Hersh is right, this is the equivalent of the Iran-Contra affair combined with Watergate, only worse. Funneling money to the group responsible for 9/11? Jesus H. Christ--even I haven't been accused of anything that sick.

What the fuck is going on? And now Condi "Maximum Incompetence" Rice thinks Saddam was the equal of Hitler and that this fiasco in Iraq bears any resemblance to World War II?

Why isn't there a march on Washington?

Oh, the picture is of my bunker cum workshop where I hunker in the fetal position most days, glancing only briefly at my monitor to prevent head explosions. Just thought you'd like to picture me in my underground lair. I relocated here trying to cheer myself up after Chimpie's reelection, but it didn't do any good. He and his limitlessly incompetent and evil minions are still there. Maybe I'll go back to lining my cap with aluminum foil.

The vise and grinder are more useful than you can imagine. I've also got electrodes with nipple clamps, a bandsaw, a pre-1962 deep-fat fryer, and over two hundred pounds of reconstitutable chicken fat. Next project--periscope. If you've got any info on a WWII-vintage U-boat type, drop me a line. I'm also trying to get a good deal on bulk latex.

Not Worth the Mud Clogged in Harry's Boots

Unlike one "head of state" and his deranged veep who weasled their way through their military obligations when other young men and women were dying in the jungles of Vietnam in their stead, young Prince Harry understands the meaning of duty, comradeship, and leadership. Even as the British are winding down their involvement in this fiasco, this royal son will not shirk the service that no one would blame him for avoiding at this point. And one thing is for sure--Harry won't be stuffing socks into his crotch while playing dress-up warrior.

My hat's off to you son. Stay safe. Our "commander in chief" isn't fit to carry your dirty socks.

Why Politicians and Talking Heads in D.C. Are Very Nervous

I'll confess to an admittedly neurotic fear of clowns, which is not an uncommon malady. But south of the border, someone with an acute and more aggressive form of the same affliction has decided to do something about it. Since this story broke, many TV talking heads and a large number of politicos are strapping on body armor and cutting back on the makeup lest they be mistaken for Chucko, Bozo, or Slappy. Of course, every time one of them opens his or her mouth, the difference will still be hard to make clear to the gun-toting clown haters out there.

Definition of Idiocy

I have nothing to add to this Q & A at today's White House daily briefing with Tony Snowjob.

Q But this estimate was monumentally wrong. So would the President, knowing what he knows today, still have decided to go into Iraq?

MR. SNOW: Yes. The President believes that we did the right thing in going into Iraq.
...

Q Is the President being equally unrealistic about his current assessments of Iraq and Afghanistan?

MR. SNOW: No.

You can read the rest here. Delusions, madness, disaster. And still the Dems fear to act to stop this idiot and his criminal gang. I want to puke on the whole sorry lot of bastards in Washington.

White House Shocker!

It's true. Jenna digs Olaf. And her pappy is not happy. No, not because of what Olaf writes (do you honestly think Bush can navigate the web?). It's because he has one of "them furrin' names."

Who could blame her though? Olaf in a dinner jacket? Even Daniel Craig has to take a back seat to such a fine model dressed to the nines.

Of course, it could be the hat.

Olaf the Trendsetter

My god, I hope this isn't true, but it does point up that your pal Olaf knows where the next big cool is going to be. Brangelina may be moving to Berlin. As you know, Berlin is my favorite city on earth, and in my renewed lover affair with the place, I was especially pleased that it never seemed to show up on people's vacation or must-move-to list. My escape plans include several for the formerly divided city, particularly because it's relatively cheap to live there but mainly because I feel more at home there than almost any other urban setting, despite coming off as a rather stupid person when speaking my limited German. And stupidity, as Paul Westerberg sang, I call it freedom. There is something transcendentally liberating about being a foreigner.

But if this is indeed true, and Brad and Angelina are setting up house in Mitte, then once again I've loved and lost by failing to act on the attraction, much like all those lovely women whom I have loved but denied such knowledge to. Yes, I'm just a giant breaking heart, and now my beloved Berlin may be compromised by the attentions of these pretenders with the dough to buy giant flats in the heart of my city..

But I know something they don't--one Berlin winter and they'll be quits. Only the most depressed survive those, and I made it through four of them standing on my head. These days, I could survive a nuclear winter.

Recentering...

"The Only Band that Matters"

I've been listening a lot to these guys. I'd like to be in a tribute band to them, y'know? Even at my advanced age, I still like to crank it up and blow it out, and there is nothing like this when PLAYED LOUD!

So, dear friends, can you name the band? (It's right before your eyes, really.)

It's Not the Money That Bothers Me Most...

It's all those small brown paper bags it was handed out in. No wonder I had to start carrying my sandwich in my briefcase.

But seriously, what's a mere $12 billion bucks mislaid here or there when we're spending over $2.25 billion a week just to destroy our own country's reputation, economy, and moral authority? All you green eyeshade-types need to pry your fingers loose from your adding machines at look at the positive side of this: Chimpie's taking the money from those lousy poor and elderly. What better way to use it than to spend it blowing shit up and repealing the Bill of Rights?

There. Don't you feel better now?

Not Seventy-two Virgins, and not Eternal Cloud Lounging...

But it wouldn't be bad if heaven turned out like this.

He's Lucky Nobody Punched Him in the Face

This didn't make me laugh because it took over 3000 American lives to reach the middle of America, but Bush ought to be getting a good feel for what "his people" think of him and his incompetent, corrupt regime. Never mind the rest of us. Of a Bush "surprise" visit to a diner in Illinois this week, we have the following:

In Peoria this week, many patrons found their pancakes more interesting. Except for the click of news cameras and the clang of a dish from the kitchen, the quiet was deafening.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” Bush said to a group of women, who were sitting in a booth with their young kids. “How’s the service?” As Bush signed a few autographs and shook hands, a man sitting at the counter lit a cigarette and asked for more coffee. Another woman, eyeing Bush and his entourage, sighed heavily and went back to her paper. She was reading the obituaries. “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” a White House aide told her. “No problem,” she huffed, in a not-so-friendly way. “Life goes on, I guess.”

What if the cameras and secret service hadn't been around? Do you think anything has penetrated that thick skull yet? Maybe impeachment isn't so far away after all, if even in Peoria--Peoria!--it's all anyone can do to simply feign politeness.

Toast, toastie, toasted.

Please, Somebody, Save Me from Myself!

I've always had a touch of madness, but none so worrisome as my fetish for certain things French, and the main one among them (gasp!) is the Citroen DS automobile model made in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Last summer in Berlin I came face-to-face with a few, and to say that my heart nearly burst for the beauty and absolute unattainability of these gorgeous beasts is an understatement. I did indeed grow faint at one point and had to sit on a kerb simply drinking in the incredible lines of the sheet metal arcing like a haughty Gaelic sneer from bumper to bumper.

Then I saw one on my home streets last week. And now I find that there are some real Citroen nuts not so far away in California, and a whole subculture of Citroen freaks.

What am I to do? Please, please, please help me!

Measuring Madness by the Calendar

This picture was taken by Olaf on Saturday, January 23, 2003, in San Francisco, at the protest against war in Iraq before the invasion. That was now over four years ago.

And how long has it taken the naysayers, Dems and Repubs alike, to even begin to come around to see that we were right? How many dollars wasted? How many lives destroyed? Yet still they hesitate lest their political ambitions be thwarted.

The people must lead, or they will be cast into the cauldron by those who have the arrogance to take their lead from them through ignorance, fear, and suppression of reason.

Immortal Olaf? Well, Probably Not.

Oh, if only this were a fact of the landscape. Think how quickly the regime would shape up if confronted with thousands of these images in every city in the nation. One cannot help but wonder, what is the power of Olaf?

I hope someone sees the self-referential irony in this graffito-neato. Ain't I postmodern?

This Is How the Finger Actually Works

This individual happens to be protesting the ongoing ban on imports from Cuba, chiefly those lovely Cohiba cigars. Note that he holds icons representing the embargo in the frame with his squinty-eyed visage: the cigar burns slowly and deliciously and the ring is held pinched between his fingers asserting the origin and authenticity of the smoke. His right hand forms a proper "finger" in which the knuckles should frame the finger much like the carriage frames the barrel of a cannon. I'm really quite taken with the compositional balance of this photograph. It forms two triangles, yet puts the essential elements all along a single horizontal. The wristwatch pulls the eye across the action of the picture and the perfect head-on angle to a less-than-perfect face gives it a certain almost Gaellic disdain, despite that the model has not a drop of French blood running through him.

Oh, and if the customs people are thinking about pursuing this guy, the cigar was purchased and consumed legally in another country. And every puff was like a big "fuck you" to the Bush-Cheney cabal...or at least it felt that way. Please compare the weak method used by El Presidente (below) compared to the muscular mode of giving the finger employed by our cigar lover.

Ah, the small pleasures are what makes life worth living.

The Man with his Finger on the Button

Hey, American people! Fuck you! Ah'm goin' into Iran.

Veep Cheney may be still controlling the language and the policy of this deranged regime, but Junior still controls the magic finger, and that finger (No. That finger.) is only one secret service agent away from nuking his enemies, among whom a lot of us are now counted by virtue of our failure to worship his divinity. But Cheney's madness is articulate enough to continue to fool the 30 percent out there who still think Georgie is a terrific president. Here's an example:

Obviously, there was flawed intelligence prior to the war ... but we should not let the fact of past problems in that area lead us to ignore the threat we face today and in the future.

This sounds like a good argument, right? Of course, it's completely false reasoning, because NO ONE is suggesting we ignore the threats we face. I believe the rhetoricians call this the "straw man" fallacy. Note also that he's still blaming the intelligence--"there was flawed intelligence"--without acknowledging the filtering role he and his minions played in assuring that no contrary evidence to their predetermined plans to invade Iraq got traction in the White House. And let's not forget the unrelenting incompetence of their performance of the invasion, whether supported or not by intelligenge: no plan for occupation, no plan for establishment of civil authority, and no desire to think about anything except Chimpie in a crotch-enhanced flight suit in his ultimate dress-up fetish moment.

We've now reached the point where polls reveal that 58 percent of Americans just wish that the Bush regime was over. Well, wishing doesn't make it so. The criminality this cabal has committed is sufficient material to impeach, remove from office, indict, try, convict, and imprison them for the rest of their natural lives, after which time they will be handed over to Satan to be roasted and boiled alive throughout all eternity, but that is beyond the court's jurisdiction. I'll settle for impeachment and removal from power. Let the historians take care of the rest, or the court at the Hague.

This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Freud.

I love the smell of anxiety in the morning! Smells like...victory!

Media Crash

Ha! Big surprise--this administration considers Tim Russert as their boy, which was pretty obvious every time he had one of their number of his NBC-based "Press the Meat" television ass-kissing venue. Under the guise of "hard-hitting" journalist, I can concede Russert asks tough questions. But he falls down in the follow-up nearly every time, as if incapable of anticipating a lie and then challenging effectively. So he has Dick Cheney on, for example, poses what seems a pointed, grilling question, and then, when Cheney out-and-out lies, Russert simply goes on to the next topic rather than saying, "Say what, motherfucker? Don't bullshit me, bald man."

Liberal media, my ass. One of the reasons we're in such a state with regard to Iraq, not to mention just about every other arena, is that the press did not do their job. They should always be challenging the statements of people in power, forcing them to produce the evidence and the reasoning they are using upon it. Instead of being a counterweight to power, they acted as a megaphone for it, and had we not had the alternative media power of the Internet, I shudder to think of how much worse it might have been.

To give the mainstream media their due, it is true that their resources and skills uncover most of the news. They have the means, the money, the expertise, and there are some damned good journalists out there, but the media as a whole has become so beholden to economic interests on the one hand, and the "inside the beltway" press has become so interwoven with the power brokers on the other, that they are now of the same class, with the same interests, and with the same disregard for the general citizenry.

And I wish they would lay off Lindsay Lohan, for chrissakes. Jeez--let the young woman get her shit together. I think she's wonderfully talented. Yes, I do have a weakness for redheads. Is that a crime?

Um, ahem. Sorry. What I mean is that all this obsession for celebrity misdoings just sucks the energy away from stuff that really matters to people's actual lives. Who gives a fuck if two obnoxious media whores like Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are having a bitch-slapping contest? Actually, that piece by Andy Borowitz is pretty damned funny.

The ongoing feud between Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump could have deadly consequences for the world if either obtained nuclear weapons, a group of leading nuclear scientists announced today.

The Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 as a publication by nuclear physicists worried about the possibility of nuclear war, expressed their concern about the Rosie-Trump brouhaha by moving the Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes to midnight.

It's Friday. What can I tell you?

YOU Will Live Blog SoTU!

I'm going to the movies with our neighbor (Children of Men, with movie popcorn for dinner). I sat through Chimpie's "surge" speech on Iraq, and if you expect me to remain even marginally civil, I can't do it again so soon. Have a little mercy, for heaven's sake.

So here's my proposal--you all live blog through the comments function on this post and get me up to date when I get back from the movie.

Otherwise, the next post after this photo will be of MY head exploding.

Not that that would have a deleterious effect on my thinking, of course.

Oh, and if you need a warm-up or a replacement SoTU, watch this. It will make your head explode, it's so goddamned funny. And the Dems response is even funnier.

Two of These Are Not Olaf

Can you figure out who's who? Vote now! You could be the big winner and get to watch the SoTU with one of these dudes!