Is Bin-Laden Really Dead?

Or did he duck out of the Wedding and join The Princess and Princess on the honeymoon, with President Obama providing a little distraction for everyone? Just asking... although the proof seems evident to everyone.

Yes, it's Royal Wedding fever! Doesn't it make you wish WE had a monarchy to make fun of?

Axl and Mike are less than respectful of Frankie's precious collectible Royal Wedding souvenir cup. (We saw the companion collectible Royal Wedding souvenir plate last night.)

(DAD) MIKE HECK: Frankie, I got some bad news for you. We're not British.
AXL (OLDEST HECK OFFSPRING): Yeah, we won the Civil War, so we don't have to care.
MIKE: Look, I barely cared about our wedding. Tell me why this is such a big deal. What'd this girl ever do?
(MOM) FRANKIE HECK [dumbfounded]: Hello! She landed a prince! That means she's the fairest in the land. [MIKE scoffs.] She's arriving in a car as a commoner, but she leaves in a carriage as a princess!
AXL: Princess of what? Seriously, is she even allowed to behead people?

-- Frankie encountering Heck family resistance to her
preparations for the Royal Wedding, on The Middle

by Ken

Oops! I seem to have jumped the gun last night. As I wrote in an update, this may reflect just how close attention I've been paying to the whole thing. Somehow I didn't seem to know when the damned thing is happening, and caring ever so slightly less, I persuaded myself that the big night is tonight, when in fact it's next Friday. It did seem kind of sooner than I was expecting, but certainly no sooner than I was hoping.

By way of corrective, I think we will all want to harken unto his grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury. (I'm just guessing about "his grace" for the archbishop. I could look it up, if I cared more. By the bye, am I the only one who finds the music used for this clip a bit, shall we say, unexpected for a British royal wedding?)



Anyway, here I was thinking how brilliantly ABC had planned this, running its "Royal Wedding" episode of The Middle (a show for which I have repeated declared my affection -- here, for example), depicting the week's run-up to the great event from the vantage point of Orson, Indiana, in the very week it's happening. Talk about reality TV!

Well, no. Actually, a measure of ABC's interest in the Royal Wedding may be that of the two clips from the episode that are posted on the show's webpage, a total of zero have any connection to the main plot. You know, Frankie's obsession with the Royal Wedding. (There's the clips I've pllunked below, and one that involves Sue's preparation, with Brick's unwilling, er, help for her audition for the school's TV club, the Shuckers.)

Yes, Mike, Frankie knows the family isn't British, but apparently she hasn't registered the part about winning the Civil War, Axl. Wishing she were British is kind of the point. As she says when she discovers that Mike has eaten the scones she bought for the great event, and he claims to have done her a favor because they were stale and dry: "They're supposed to be stale and dry. They're British." Eventually even Frankie admits that the Royal Wedding is of no historical significance, but it is, she says, "a pretty thing."

WHY WE SHOULD HAVE A ROYAL FAMILY,
AND HOW WE COULD SWING THE DEAL

Is that it, the appeal of British royalty to some non-Brits on this side of the pond? A pretty thing?

Maybe I should have been braver about asking my mother what the deal was with her passion for royalty, and the British royals in particular. In her later years, when I was dealing with her financial matters, one of my obligations was keeping up her subscription to Royalty magazine. Yes, there really is such a thing, or at least there was The poor dears were going through some rough times in the time I was watching over my mother's subscription.

And let me say, she was shrewd about taking advantage of the magazine, of which she took to passing issues she was finished with on to the British-expat social director of the senior residence she moved into, piling up the kind of brownie points mere money couldn't buy. (Well, I suppose a lot of money could have. But even then there would have been the taint of commerce.)

And her royalmania wouldn't have passed muster -- in fact, didn't -- with the authentic native version. I'm sure I've told this story before, but it's a family favorite. A long, long time age, probably several decades now, my mother and stepfather were visiting the English cousins, something they loved to do, because the cousins are truly splendid people. In fact, it was one of her bitter disappointments when she had to go to England alone for the wedding of a daughter they had watched grow up, into a lawyer like her father. They were supposed to go together, of course, and had been eagerly planning the trip. But by then my stepfather's Alzheimer's was too advanced. He wanted her to go, though, and with great difficulty she asked me to come to Florida to stay with him.

Anyway, on the earlier and happier visit in question, as my mother reported the event to me afterward, they were gathered around the TV when some sort of report on Prince Charles came on. He was much younger then, of course (but then, who wasn't?), but he was still . . . well, what he was, only a younger version. And my mother spoke up: "You'd think with all their money they could do something about his ears." Now these are sensible, well-educated people, the cousins, and according to my mother's telling, which I had and have no reason to doubt, they were struck mute with shock and horror.

SPEAKING OF PRINCE CHAS, I WAS GOING TO TELL
YOU WHY WE SHOULD HAVE A ROYAL FAMILY

Isn't it obvious? Is there anything better to make fun of than a royal family? And you can make fun of them to your heart's content, and that's totally separate from the government. And then you can make fun of the government separately! It's win-win!

Now you may think it's too late, that ever since old George Washington turned down all those entreaties to crown himself king, so we would have our very own King George to replace that other one we'd fought so hard to get rid of, there's no way we can get ourselves a royal family of our own.

I believe I've got that solved too. Remember Prince Charles? You now, we were just talking about him. The Prince of Wales, next in line for the throne if his mum ever gets off it? (Aside: I keep forgetting that Prince William isn't going to be Prince of Wales, at least not until his dear old dad gets out of the way by becoming king or dying or just, well, getting out of the way. I'm sure they've rigged up one hellacious title for Prince Will and his new princess. If there's one thing the Brits know how to do, it's rig up hellacious titles.)

We keep hearing that fewer and fewer Brits expect that poor Charles will ever be king, that especially since he married what's-her-name, the one Graham Norton always says looks like a horse, Camilla, that ever since he married her, he's no longer suitable king material, and he should be discreetly removed from the line of succession for whenever there is a succession. And we know that with all their money there still will be a succession.

So here's the deal: We bring Charles over to be our new king. (And I guess the horsewoman with her to be our queen?) And then let the merriment begin! We'll be rolllicking from morn till midnight! Oh happy day!

Now I wouldn't expect the Brits to surrender their heir apparent without a fight, or at least due compensation. For starters we can send them some routine compensation in the form of maybe 50 or 100 of our most cracked-brain Teabaggers and assorted other far-right-wingers. Plus, and here's the part I'm really proud of, We send them Trump!!!

That's right, The Donald becomes the replacement Prince of Wales. He can't ever become king, of course, unless Parliament goes completely nuts, so the designated king-groomers can go on grooming William for all those onerous duties, and Kate's every move will be watched in anticipation of her eventual queenification. But as hilarious as Charles has been all these years in the Prince of Wales job, they ain't seen nothin' yet!

Who knows? Maybe he'll try to fire that no-account prime minister. Or even the queen herself!


You wouldn't know it, but this clip really is from the "Royal Wedding" episode of The Middle.

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Good news from Wisconsin -- but the battle is still just beginning

by Ken

I don't know about you, but these days I'm finding most of the political-related news so grim that when my clock radio turns on in the morning, tuned to NPR's Morning Edition and timed to an on-the-hour news summary, my first waking impulse is to shut the damned thing off. Here, however, is some good news.

Probably most of you also received this e-mail today from Jim Dean of Democracy for America. But the message is too important to ignore. So here it is again if you've already seen it, and if you haven't, well, here it is. Howie reported earlier today that the recall movement has spread to Michigan. There's been an important development in the first state using the recall device to try to restore political sanity. Take it away, Jim.

Today, we made history in Wisconsin.

WI Democrats -- supported by over 2,600 DFA volunteers on the ground -- submitted over 150% of the signatures needed to demand the recall election of the 5th Republican State Senator: Alberta Darling.

This is unprecedented. In the history of Wisconsin there have been only 4 recall elections ever. Now, in just the last two months, we've legally required 5.

Republicans from Madison to Washington D.C. are watching every single step of this fight and we're not going to let up until we win. With signature gathering continuing for the 3 Republicans left who are eligible for recall, it's vital we keep covering TV with our hard-hitting real people ad. If we hit $600,000 by Friday night, we'll be able to stay on the air in target districts through the end of next week. Please contribute now to make it happen.


Our TV ad, which we created with our friends at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, features life-long Republican voter Mike Crump.

"As a Republican my entire life I'm appalled at what Scott Walker and the Republicans did. This hurts my family. It's about my kids in school."

Mike is one of the many reasons MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Cenk Uygur have all praised our Wisconsin ads. It's also why local activists in Wisconsin have asked us to keep it on TV.

Please watch the ad and contribute now.

Thanks to the support we've had so far from DFA members nationwide, we're closer than ever to flipping the WI Senate and stopping Governor Walker's anti-families agenda.

Working together with our members on the ground, we won't stop until we win. Thank you for everything you do.

-Jim

Jim Dean, Chair
Democracy for America

I should note that I've reduced Jim's fund-raising links to just the one, on the theory that DownWithTyranny readers don't need quite that hammering to know whether or not this is something you want to participate in. Nor do DWT readers need any further priming on the importance of the Wisconsin Senate recall effort, all the more so in the wake of that, er, strange Supreme Court election that was just rigged held, encouraging the state's Stalinist governor, Scott Walker that nothing stands between him and his goal of turning Wisconsin into a subsidiary of Koch Industries.


UPDATE FROM WISCONSIN:

REPUBLICANS WILL BE REPUBLICANS!

Thanks to commenter Southern Beale for calling my attention to Amanda Terkel's HuffPost post, "Wisconsin Recall Fight Heats Up As Democrats Complain Of 'Shots For Signatures' Deals," with a report that Republicans seeking to recall Democratic senators who left the state to deprive the rubber-stamp Senate Republicans of a quorum are using a novel technique: offering shots to petition signers, who may or may not know what it is they're being liquored up to sign. (A spokesman for the state's Government Accountability Board, Reid Magney, said, "Our attorneys have been unable to find anything in state law that would prohibit offering drinks or anything for signing a petition," but said they "strongly encourage people not to do so because it taints the process."

The Wisconsin Democratic Party is planning to file a complaint to the state Government Accountability Board alleging that a Republican signature-gatherer offered alcoholic beverages to a group of women to get them to sign a recall petition against a Democratic state senator.

Although that's not illegal in Wisconsin, it is strongly discouraged and, Democrats argue, evidence that Republicans don't really have enough grassroots support for their recall campaigns.

Republicans have until early next week to file recall petitions against eight Democratic state senators, more than half of the caucus that left the state in February to protest and delay the GOP's budget repair bill, which included a provision stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. So far, the state Republican Party has not filed any recall petitions, although they are reportedly planning to file two -- against state Sens. Dave Hansen and Jim Holperin -- on Thursday.

A bartender at John's Main Event in Burlington was audio-recorded offering shots for signatures, and an update passes on a screen shot supplied by a HuffPost reader in Burlington of Scott the bartender's Facebook page, where he makes fun of protesters who challenged his petition-gathering.


REMINDER: YOU ONLY HAVE A DAY LEFT TO PREPARE
FOR THE GREAT ALL-NIGHT ROYAL WEDDING VIGIL

Yes, Frankie Heck's got Royal Wedding fever,
and she's got it bad.

"We won the Civil War, so we don't have to care."

-- eldest Heck offspring Axl, responding to his mother's frenzied anticipation of the Royal Wedding

I was going to write about this tonight, with reference to last night's episode of The Middle, in which we saw Frankie experiencing the great event as one of just a tad larger than life-or-death importance. The nice thing is that even if you haven't finished your preparations yet, you still have a fair amount of time when you get home from work tomorrow -- especially if you live in one of the western time zones (and especially if you have access to 24-hour shopping).

So we'll put off to tomorrow Frankie's response to Mike's bewildering lack of enthusiasm: "Look, I barely cared about our wedding. Tell me why this is such a big deal. What'd this girl ever do?"

UPDATE: YOU MAY THINK I'VE JUMPED THE DATE . . .

. . . and you could be right, This may possibly reflect just how much attention I've been paying. Anyway, I'll still have my more or less final words on the subject this Friday night -- along with why I think we should have a monarchy, plus how I think we could swing it.

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Ohmygosh, it's a "rebirth for Britain"! (In which DWT takes official note of the historic Royal Development)

Caution before clicking: Do you really want to look at Prince William? (Gosh, he used to be so beautiful, before he started looking more and more like his father. Now he makes his depressing brother Harry look almost human. Hmm, I suppose these are just the sorts of comment that would horrify my English relations, as explained below.) On the plus side (work with me here -- I'm scrounging), if you click through, you get to watch a free commercial!

"Prince William's engagement a rebirth for Britain"

-- a headline today on washingtonpost.com

by Ken

A rebirth of Britain, eh? So the slash-and-burn "austerity" crusade is already showing results?

Oh, no, it's apparently not that kind of rebirth. It's more along the lines of what the British government can do for its subjects without actually doing anything for them -- unless you count sucking generous quantities of pounds out of the treasury for this great public event.

NOW, FOR THE RECORD --

What follows about the Royal Announcement was written before I set eyes on the above washingtonpost.com headline, which I encountered only when I went searching for visual adornment for this post. In other words, at a time when I could have been writing about, say, Elizabeth Kolbert's incredibly depressing "Comment" piece in the new (Nov. 22) New Yorker, "Uncomfortable Climate," about the criminally ignorant "F*@k Science" mentality of the Teabagger-blessed band of can-do sociopaths who'll be in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives come January, I undertook to write about the feather-light subject of the Royal Engagement, in full awareness that it's about as shamelessly trivial a story as I could be taking on. Apparently I was wrong!

At this point I'm afraid all I can do is wonder what my mother would have made of Princess-to-be (and, presumably, Queen-to-be) What's-Her-Name. Oh, I'll learn her name eventually, but you know who I mean. The New Diana.

Come to think of it, I don't rightly know what my mother made of the old Diana. It's not something we talked about much, and I never really understood the thing she had for British royalty.

The closest I can figure is that we do have English cousins. My stepfather's Austrian family mostly dispersed in the first several decades of the 20th century to various points outside the German-speaking world. (The undispersed became, of course, the disappeared.) The English branch, if I remember right, found its way to London by way of Ireland.

And to illustrate the, er, unconventionality of my mother's royalism, I offer this story, which I don't doubt I've offered before. I think you'll see why it's one of my favorite stories.

My folks were visiting the cousins, which they loved to do. In fact, when my stepfather's Alzheimer's was still in its milder stages, they were planning a trip to London for an especially joyous event: the wedding of the daughter of the house they'd watched growing up. (Time took care of that plan. By the time of the wedding it was no longer possible for him to travel. My mother, sadly, made the trip alone, having with some difficulty asked if I would come down to Florida to stay with my stepfather. It was an educational experience -- horrible, but educational. I got a small glimpse of what her life was like in the years of his decline.)

Now the cousins, you should understand, are not just lovely people, but sensitive and well-educated ones too. (Both father and daughter were lawyers.) So, anyway, my folks were watching the telly in the cousins' house, and there on-screen was (a much younger) Prince Charles. My mother ventured, as she recounted it, "Wouldn't you think, with all their money, they could do something about his ears?" She did a pretty good job of conveying the shock and horror with which this innocent question was greeted.

Among the clutch of magazine subscriptions I had to tend to when I relieved my mother of the burden of dealing with her own finances was one to a magazine I had never heard of called Royalty. It was, and perhaps still is, a magazine devoted solely to chronicling the British royal family. [This is apparently incorrect. See the PPPS below.] My mother was possibly more devoted to it than it was to its readers; I recall some hiatusing owing to straitened finances during the years I watched over that subscription.

I have to say, the magazine came in handy. In the senior residence to which my mother moved, living on the modest proceeds from the sale of her apartment when, at 83, after living on her own for a decade (six-plus of those years following a cerebral hemorrhage) and deciding she'd cooked enough meals, the social director was an ex-pat Brit. She turned her copies of Royalty over to him when she was done with them, which scored her big-time points.

Wait, Catherine! That's here name, isn't it? The New Diana? I remember because I read . . . Oh goodness, I have to admit that I actually clicked through to the link on AOL yesterday and skimmed a piece on the subject. Anyway, I remember reading that, assuming the royal succession eventually eventuates the way it's mapped out (and it's always dangerous to assume; after all, Prince Charles didn't expect to spend all these decades cooling his heels waiting for his accession), she will/would be Queen Catherine, which gave me a jolt, because I realized I'd never actually registered her name. Kate, I guess it is. (Judging by her résumé since leaving school, I'm thinking she may have gone for career counseling and been counseled that off her work experience to date, she might be best suited to snagging the heir apparent to something or other.)

All seriousness aside, I wish the happy couple the best of luck. Given the bridegroom's family's track record in matters of the, er, heart, they'll need all the luck they can garner.


PS: THERE'S COMMON, AND THEN THERE'S COMMON

A key point in the buzzy rebirth of Britain is that our Kate, as a commoner, is an unprecedented match for Young Will. I suppose it's just the way my mind works, but as some of you are aware, I recently completed a grand tour through all eight of Armistead Maupin's sublime Tales of the City books, and so inevitably I'm flashing back to the opening of the fourth book, Babycakes, where the author imagines some of the private life of Prince William's grammy on the occasion of her 1984 royal visit to San Francisco, which is enmeshed in the plot with the author's customary impudence and ingenuity. And, allowing for the outsize aura of entitlement that I supposes comes with, you know, the title, people don't come much commoner than the queen portrayed there.


PPS: ONLINE "ASK THE AUTHOR LIVE" CHAT 
ON "REPUBLICANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT"

Just because, as noted above, I wasn't up to writing about Elizabeth Kolbert's depressing New Yorker "Comment" piece on the marauding anti-science mentality of the new Republican House majority doesn't mean you couldn't read it if you want to. (Here's the link again.) Note that there's an online "Ask the Author Live" chat with Kolbert scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 18, at 3pm ET.


PPPS: ROYALTY LIVES!

And apparently I'm wrong in thinking that its subject matter is limited to British royalty. Crown Princess Victoria (born 1977), after all, is Swedish. I guess the admirers of royalty can't afford to cast their net so narrowly. I apologize for the erroneous information above. Pretty much the extent of my involvement with the magazine was mailing in the renewal forms with the checks.

Victoria's royal wedding, I see, took place in June. I seem to have missed the event entirely. I suppose I should at least have sent a card.

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