Random Musings on 2010 (5)

And some people said they couldn't ever replace Larry King! Say hello to Piers Morgan (see no. 2).

by Noah

1. Back in September, Fox’s Monica Crowley, former Nixon PR flak, subbing for Bill O’Lie-ley, interviewed Scooter Libby and called the investigation of his role in exposing Valerie Plame an outrageous “ordeal” and went on to say that Libby deserved a pardon and -- get this -- called him a class act! Hell, all he did was out a CIA agent and her network, many of whom are probably missing by now, at the least. Had Libby done what he did during World War II, he would have ended up swinging from a gallows in a penitentiary yard. Funny how it’s conservatives who yap about the degradation of our country’s “moral fiber” and things like that. I guess at Fox treason in the service of greed and politics is no vice.

2. CNN has announced, without a trace of shame, that British tabloid veteran and America’s Got Talent panelist Piers Morgan is the replacement for Bush Crime Family groupie Larry King, thus answering the question “Can it get any worse?” If they wanted to go the lowbrow, vulgar TMZ-paparazzi route, why didn’t they just get Jerry Springer? Personally, I’d rather see Simon Cowell interview today’s politicians and celebs. Or me. I’d make sure to always have a hatchet at the ready.

CNN might do better if it just ran Larry King’s reruns. In reality, watching CNN is like watching a spycam and waiting for something to happen. I gave up in 2004.

3. Would you like eggs with that? Prince Charles, “The Man Who Would Be Tampon” ("I want to be reincarnated as your tampon," he's been quoted as saying to his better half), and his Mrs. Prince went out for a night on the town in the Queen’s Jubilee Rolls. Here, take the keys! The Roller got splattered with paint and eggs. Some of the windows were broken, and Mrs. Prince got poked with a stick, while at least one rioter repeatedly yelled, “Off with their heads.” Didn’t Mummy warn them not to go downtown?

Naturally, the old folks and the upper crust got all in a tizzy about the incident. As a measure of how genteel and polite British youth are, there was a time in England when the Prince would have met a far worse fate.

I bet his dad didn’t even make him wash the car when he got home. Spoiled, I tell you! Spoiled brat!

4. The French government, under rightist Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to raise the retirement age in France two years. In France, you've been able to retire as early as age 60, with a real pension and real health care, if you earn enough work credits over, say, 40 years. Now it would be 62. This would also increase the number of people in the workforce. More people would be competing for what is only a finite number of jobs, which would, it almost goes without saying, lower individual wages. All part of the plan, lower wages and fewer pensions monies disbursed.

Next, due to wages being driven down, tax revenues coming into the French treasury go down. The result? Social services and benefits go out the window. You work all those years, and you’re left holding a bag that has a great big hole in it. You can almost hear the laughter. These government clowns and pranksters! “You’re old. Die now!” Not even a "please."

See if this all sounds familiar when President Obama, his Alan Simpson-led Catfood Commission, and the entire Republican Party talk about raising the retirement age in our country by not two but five years! Nice folks we have in Washington, eh? As I said, you can almost hear the laughter.

In France, they have general strikes. In England, students riot and throw eggs. Here in the U.S., everyone is too busy watching crap “reality shows” and things like American Idol while eating junk food and getting too damn obese to get up off the couch and out into the streets to throw some eggs, for starters.

5. Tiger Woods: The media always offers up as an excuse for the lack of investigative journalism that they don’t have the staff and money to look into what far more serious chicanery politicians and corporate types and bankers are up to, but when it comes to sports figures and celebrities, and their sex lives, the checkbook is wide open and we get assaulted with things like months of Tiger’s idiocy. If the media spent a third as much on uncovering and informing the public on what real ne’er-do-wells like those in Congress, Wall Street, and our corporate boardrooms are up to, we’d all be better off -- and many of them would be in prison for life.

6. Imagine Glenn Beck as a nutbag scoutmaster leading his troupers deeper and deeper into the dark woods, so deep that they’ll never be able to find their way out.

7. Republicans like to consider government services socialism. Their followers belch on about how they don’t want their taxpayer dollars benefiting anyone else. It’s all about the greed and selfishness. But they have no problem saying, “Hands off my Medicare," and they have no problem collecting Social Security. They also have no problem driving on interstate highways or calling the police or local fire department, all of which are funded by taxes somewhere along the line. So what happens when tax revenues go down so much that your local town asks you to pay a fee if you want fire department service? You have to pay the money one way or the other if you want the local FD to put out a fire in your house.


Recently in Tennessee a family and their local fire department watched their home burn to the ground because the additional charge had not been paid. This family lost their four pets and everything else in their house.

What happens when a whole block or town burns to the ground due to Republican greed and wealth redistribution? Where does the money go? Not for local education, that’s for sure. New York tried it this way back in the 1700s, a time the Repugs would like to take us back to. What happened then? The whole city burned and burned and burned. Such a policy may go into effect in your town, but it won’t be changed until that local mansion on the hill complete with its stolen art collection and all the Republican master’s closet full of high heels are reduced to ashes.

8. One of my favorite quotes of the year came from Stephanie Miller:

“Rich people pay Fox people to get middle class people to blame poor people.”

9. You can’t make this stuff up, but Fox does. The L.A. jetpacks for cops story was a case in point. Sourcing the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid, Fox ran all the way with a story about the city of Los Angeles buying $1 billion worth of jetpacks for its police, fire department, and emergency services people. Nothing seemed odd about this story to the brainectomy patients at Fox & Friends. Only when a couple of callers called in to tell them the story was a joke did they correct themselves. One has to wonder who hired these morons. Could they have even filled out applications?

It all reminds me of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell’s (a Fox favorite) claim that the government was making mice with “fully functioning human brains.” Apparently, though, someone is doing the opposite and making humans with fully functioning mouse brains, then giving them jobs at Fox.

Then there was the “Obama Is Cracking Up” story. This was a great example of the inmates in the asylum accusing the sane people of insanity. In this case, Fox didn’t make it up; they just borrowed someone else's made-up news because they thought it nicely fit their wackoid agenda. Fox Nation was running with a story from The Onion, the satirical paper-website, about President Obama cracking up and sending out a rambling 75,000-word e-mail to the entire nation. The article even included a bit about the e-mail being so large, at 27 megabytes, that it couldn’t fit in the mailboxes of millions of Americans. No matter to Fox. If you want to believe something, just believe it. And we wonder where Teabaggers learned their approach to life in these times.

Let’s not forget Fox’s annual “War on Christmas” insanity. This year even the NBA was an evildoing anti-Christmas enemy to those who live in Foxworld. Why? It seems the NBA had six games scheduled on Christmas Day. Never mind that they've had games on Christmas Day since the 1950s.

Are firefighters in Foxworld supposed to stay home too, or just say, “Call back tomorrow”? I didn’t see Fox go off the air on Christmas, so does that make them anti-Christmas too? Does all of this indicate that right-wing loons will soon start consuming themselves? Sooner or later your hate has to run out of targets, when you’ve gone after everybody and everything under the sun, doesn’t it? What’s left when you only have yourselves to hate?

I’m thinking of starting a “Guns for Fox” day. My organization will collect guns and deliver them to Fox so that they can be ready when they start accusing each other of being part of the “War on Christmas.” Hey, I’m just being compassionate.

10. What’s in a campaign promise? During the 2010 campaign, Repugs pledged to ban earmarks. In a prime case of Washington follow-through, the new compromise tax bill contains $8 billion in them. Check the link to see some of the fabulous earmarks. Hey, what’s $8 billion? Also, five of the ten points in the latest Republican “Pledge to America” are violated by provisions in the tax compromise bill.

11. Finally, there’s this thought on President Obama. He might as well join the Republican Party at this point. He clearly wants to do in Net Neutrality and Social Security, and it might be nice to see the Republicans so conflicted about having to do a 180 on their 24-hour hate speech, run a black dude for prez, etc. That’s why it would never happen, of course, but the idea of seeing assclowns like Limbaugh and Hannity et al. simply explode would warm my heart.

NOAH'S YEAR 2010 IN REVIEW

10 Random Musings (1)
2010, Looking Back: To Republicans, It Was So Much More Than Just a Speech to Kids
Random Musings on 2010 (2)
Random Musings on 2010 (3)
Random Musings on 2010 (4)

Republicans in Their Own Words --

Quotations of a Party on Crack, 2010 Version
Part 1, The Unemployed
Part 2, When Cousins Marry

And don't forget 2009's 12 Days of Christmas Scorn.

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Did Mike Pence Rat Out Boehner And His Mistress?

Clicking on this billboard is a nice shortcut

Blue America and the Americans for America PAC are making these ads all the time-- like 3 or 4 a week. A few make it up onto TV; most are for the Internet. I guarantee you this one won't be on TV. TV doesn't run ads like this-- not even cable. Not even when they're this poetic.

They’re golf partners...  But that’s not all they have in common...

Fans the world over love Tiger

Lobbyists throughout the business world love John Boehner!

Tiger has $100 million in career earnings and millions more in corporate sponsorships.

John has $32 million in career special interest contributions, and has taken hundreds of thousands more in corporate jet travel and special interest golf junkets!

Tiger is notorious for his indiscretions.

John is notorious for HIS indiscretions-- like handing out Big Tobacco checks to Republicans on the House floor!

Hey John, get a room!

On golf trips, Tiger brings along romantic interests.

On golf trips, John inappropriately brings along special interests-- like Jack Abramoff!

Tiger Woods is a three time champion of the British Open.

John Boehner is the tireless champion of British Petroleum, and said BP should be bailed out by US taxpayers for the Gulf spill.

Tiger is a billionaire.

John’s loves billionaires-- more than his own constituents!

Tiger skips lots of tournaments.

John skips out of work a lot and hits Capitol Hill bars with lobbyists.

But there’s one thing above all that Tiger Woods and John Boehner have in common:

Tiger, we were all shocked to learn, is a man ho.

John, we have all long known, is a corporate ho.

John Boehner and Tiger Woods.

HO HO HO!

It was... well, awkward when Chris Wallace interviewed John Boehner yesterday about his silly Pledge. The one-eyed aunt sitting atop the elephant in the room was Boehner's affair with what's-her-name... that K Street lobbyist. Wallace could have asked Boehner for another non-denial denial, but that would never happen on American TV... short of the Stephen Colbert Show (although then Steny Hoyer might get himself all puffed up and protest; ole Steny's only happy when he's bent over grabbing his ankles... and no one can find the lube.) Still, if it were a normal news program-- like in England maybe-- Wallace could have made it a more generic question about his long and sordid history with lobbyists without even bringing up the sexual part which, apparently only is allowed on TV after sunset.

Nor is Hoyer the only Congressional prig puffing and protesting. Last night Mike Pence, who wants to run for president, had his flack call me-- and late at night-- to demand I retract my assertion that it was Pence who leaked the story about Boehner and the lady lobbyist. The flack said it isn't true. I asked him how he knows. He said he was "100% certain." I said that that was impossible and that my informant was 100% certain it was true and that it was a firsthand account. He demanded to know who my informant was. I asked him to put Pence on the phone. He refused and said he would send me a written statement; he didn't.

So here's the newest in our series of ads. Enjoy it here; you won't see it anywhere else-- unless you're in Mike Pence's inner chamber and he's showing it to his cronies so they can all get a good chuckle. And if you'd like to chip in to our effort to help Justin Coussoule sweep out the barn in southwest Ohio, you can click on the graphic up top-- or you can donate here.

Gene Robinson has an excellent suggestion for all celebrities planning to have affairs, and a question for Tiger

Somehow Pooper Scooper Barbie seems the right doll for this job. I was damned if we were going to have a picture of Tiger Woods.

by Ken

This is what I mean when I talk about readers developing a relationship with a writer. No, not a Tiger-type relationship, or a Kathy Bates-in-Misery type. The kind that happens when we meet on the page or screen. Before this morning I would have doubted that anything could get me to read about our Tiger's, er, troubled affairs. You couldn't make me care about what goes on on the golf course; I certainly couldn't care less what he does off it. And then I see that the Washington Post's Gene Robinson has written a column about it, "Tiger's validation complex," and I'm thinking, what could he have to say about it? I've got enough respect for him that my curiosity finally overwhelmed me, and I read the damned column. And it turns out he has two rather interesting points to make.

The points are based on two characteristics he's observed that Tiger's lady friends have in common.

First, they all seem to know, or know how to find high-priced lawyer-gunslingers, which sets the stage for play-now, pay-later outcomes. Gene relates this to "a theory about philandering developed by my colleague Roxanne Roberts, who has spent years covering the capital's libidinous social scene for The Post."

Roberts postulates that famous, powerful men who stray would be smart to choose women who have just as much to lose if the liaison were exposed. Some ultra-rich tycoon's young trophy wife, say, would fit that criterion. Cocktail waitresses and nightclub hostesses, not so much.

In fact, Woods seems to have hooked up with the kind of women who save old voice mails and text messages -- giving their high-priced legal counsel something to work with.

The other characteristic Gene sees Tiger's playmates having in common is that they all seem to be the exact same physical type, which prompts his "real question":

What's with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story -- and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn't variety but some kind of validation.

I'm making a big assumption here that the attraction for Woods was mostly physical, but there's no evidence thus far that he had a lot of time for deep conversation. If adultery is really about the power and satisfaction of conquest, Woods's self-esteem was apparently only boosted by bedding the kind of woman he thought other men lusted after -- the "Playmate of the Month" type that Hugh Hefner turned into the American gold standard.

But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an "official" standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious -- a control freak even when he's committing "transgressions."

Which makes two much more interesting points than I would have thought could be extracted from the situation. Credit them to Mr. Robinson's account.

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Are ballads and epic poems written to celebrate renegades who stand defiantly outside the reach of a mandatory software upgrade?

No, this isn't my office computer -- and it won't
be after I'm mandatorily upgraded either.

by Anonymous
[see? they can't prove nuttin'!]

I thought you folks might enjoy this tale of life in My Company. It even comes with a surprise twist at the end!

Since our office move last fall into the belly of the New York Stock Exchange security-zone beast, we peons who don't have offices are just about completely exposed to everyone's view -- when you walk down the aisle between cubicle row, it's almost impossible not to look in everyone's cubicle as you pass. As a result, I have established that, unless I've missed somebody somewhere, I am the only person in the office still using a CRT monitor, as opposed to a flat panel screen. From which I conclude(rather proudly, I must say) that I have the privilege of having the oldest and crappiest computer still in use on the premises.

OK, "crappiest" is perhaps a bit judgmental. The fact is, it's perfectly adequate to my job needs, and I've learned to live with the limitation that I can't make any changes of any kind to the software on it, all of which would require a password known only to IT. And so, while the rest of the Mac world has marched on through the operating-system world of Tiger (OS 10.4) and on into the paradise of Leopard (OS 10.5), I'm still firmly grounded in yesteryear's Panther (the final version of it, OS 10.3.9). Which also means that I can't use most any current-release software, which increasingly requires OS 10.4 or later -- even if I could install such software, which I can't.

(True, I could ask for luxuries like a more recent version of Flash, to enable me to open Web pages that my old version won't. Yes, I could ask. Maybe the answer would be yes, maybe it would be no, but either way my permanent record would indicate that I was the troublemaker who asked. One of our highest-ranking officers is a gentleman whose principal, er, gift is remembering such things.)

Now, to the story. We began hearing awhile back that we were all going to be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008. This is actually not much of a deal for me, since I hardly ever use any of the components of whatever version of MS Office I've got. When the HR director circulates attached documents, they're usually in MS Word format -- that's about the extent of my excursions into Office.

Nevertheless, we soon began to hear about commencement of the "mandatory upgrade" to Office 2008 -- are there other companies where a software upgrade can be made to sound like a punishment? The memo drumbeat indicated that the upgrade was closing in on us. From our IT guy in, apparently, San Francisco (we have a SF office?) comes word of arrangements made with Microsoft for free online training courses!

Then came the memo from the IT guy in our Las Vegas office (now, I knew we had one of them!) who is apparently in charge of Mandatory Upgrades, asking us in the New York office please to leave our computers on when we left the next few nights, since it will be easier for him to perform the upgrades while we're out of the office. The procedure should take 20 minutes, Mr. Las Vegas says.

Of course, since the memo wasn't sent till 5:53pm our time, and as the clock ticks down to 6 I don't usually keep checking for e-mail, I didn't see the memo till the next morning. (It's true that I would know I had an e-mail waiting if I kept my "dock" permanently displayed, but unlike all my coworkers with their bigger monitors, I can't afford to give up that chunk of screen real estate, since I'm trying to display magazine pages in readable form.) But I figured I wasn't likely to be in the "chosen" group of First NY Upgradees.

And then it occurred to me: Can my computer even run the "mandatory upgrade" software? I figure there's no way it will run in poor old OS 10.3.9, and sure enough, Office 2008 is a member of the OS 10.4 or Later Club. (OS 10.3 is the now-antique Panther; OS 10.4, the already-aging Tiger; and OS 10.5, the still-current Leopard. Here comes Snow Leopard! And no, I'm not making that up.) And while my mind has detoured into wondering if my computer has enough RAM to handle an OS upgrade (the leaps in memory requirement for successive iterations of the Mac OS have been so enormous that I believe Apple is now measuring it in gazillionbytes), my eye, continuing to rummage through the system requirements for Office 2008, notices that if your computer processor happens to be of the heirloom G4 species, it has to be at least 500 MHz. I have no idea what mine is, but I check and discover that it is -- ta-da! -- a 450 MHz G4!

So now I know: My company has "mandated" a software upgrade that, as best I can tell, won't run on the computer it has mandated me, even if it's possible to run a more nearly current OS on it. I add this newly discovered info to the memo I have begun writing to Mr. Las Vegas pointing out that my computer is still running in OS 10.3.9, and I really can't afford to have it further slowed down by an OS upgrade if I'm to get any work done. I finish the memo by promising to leave my computer on as requested, apologizing for having shut it off the night before and explaining about not having seen the 5:53pm memo.

I don't know how many more nights I'm supposed to leave my computer on, but heck, I'm not the one paying the electric bill. I haven't heard anything more from anybody in IT, in Las Vegas or San Francisco or even New York. (Yes, yes, it has occurred to me that perhaps I should have brought this whole thing to the attention of our IT guy here, who's a good guy. But if he's not already in the loop on this, I'm afraid that dragging him into it may just result in my being ratted out to the Chief Punishment Officer in the head office in Florida.

I can't help wondering if the "mandatory upgrade" is turning out to be perhaps not absolutely, unmitigatedly mandatory.

NOW FOR THE SURPRISE TWIST!

The above was in fact written on Monday of this week -- that is to say, the 16th. I held off posting, or even thinking seriously about whether I really wanted to go ahead and post it, because later that day I got word from our NY IT guy -- who's both a good guy and utterly competent -- that the next day I and a colleague who does basically the same job (putting us pretty near the bottom of our food chain, it seems) would be upgraded to G5 computers. I have to guess that our great IT minds had collectively spotted this chink in the MS Office "mandatory upgrade" project.

There was some e-discussion of when our schedules would make it easiest for the NY IT guy to get at our computers. I explained that I don't really go out at any set time, but could almost surely work around his schedule, provided I knew when it was going to happen. A couple of hours' notice is what I was offered, and I responded that that should work.

So with developments developing on Monday, and theoretically scheduled to finish the process on Tuesday, I shelved the whole question of this post. After all, if and when the promised computer upgrade was to happen, there was still the question of what kind of equipment I would actually wind up with.

For one thing, I already knew that the equipment wasn't going to be new, and around here when we get a recycled computer, there's always the risk that it came from someone, like from the Art Dept., who had been upgraded because he/she had beaten the living daylights out of the old beast by performing the computer equivalent of mechanical-bull-riding.

I was once "upgraded" to one of these poor victim machines, which it turned out our IT folks at that time already suspected of being a victim of such abuse. Apparently it was easier to recycle and hope for the best than to actually check it out. That poor thing was swapped out for a hardier survivor, and presumably set aside for reassignment to some even sappier sucker. (Of course, at the moment the likeliest source of recycled equipment hereabouts would be stuff left behind by the fallen comrades from our January round of layoffs.)

Perhaps more important, while the software would undoubtedly be more up-to-date, there seemed no reason to assume that I would be equipped with stuff that enhances my actual computer use, at least not without asking, and having "troublemaker" notations added to my permanent record etc. etc.

These were all issues it seemed most prudent to deal with after I got my "new" computer. And who's to say that after being so gifted I might not feel churlish airing such unkind sentiments?

That was Monday, you'll recall. By my count this is Saturday. Monday's "tomorrow" has long since gone the way of the emu, leaving me still waiting for that famous couple of hours' notice. I guess I can suspend the wait for today and tomorrow. But starting Monday (again), it could happen at any time, with just those couple of hours' notice.

Meanwhile, I retain my "rogue" status in the face of the "mandatory upgrade" crusade. A rebel, or just a troublemaker?

POSTSCRIPT

Rode down in the elevator with the IT guy. He says Monday, only he can't tell exactly when. Says he'll give me an hour's notice. The old "couple of hours" window seems to have shrunk.

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