Caption Contest

And then, sometimes they just write themselves.

Tito is Finito

Baseball, moreso than any other sport, is predicated on, and ruled by, superstition. One of the stubbornest and most hallowed of all traditions is the firing of managers and coaches for the failed execution of coddled, spoiled and usually overrated and overpaid ballplayers.

Terry "Tito" Francona, the greatest manager in Red Sox history, was just shitcanned minutes ago by the Red Sox front office. Of course, the official line was that Francona wasn't shitcanned but that his options for the 2012 and 2013 seasons simply will not be picked up. But that's a distinction about as meaningful as refusing to throw a life-preserver to a drowning man versus throwing him an anchor. The John Henry Group, which hardly has a better track record than the Yawkey trust before it, simply housed the anchor and refused to throw Francona, a guy who brought home two pennants, two World Series and a division title to New England, a life preserver. No doubt, it came as a shock to Francona, who less than a week ago, publicly said he wasn't worried about his job status. Instead of nearly nine million in salary, Tito will get a check for just $750,000 and a hard pat on the back through the doorway.

Like Grady Little before him, Francona was essentially fired for one bad inning that capped off a month full of heartbreaking innings. But, unlike Little, who was obviously fired by the Henry Group for his disastrous decision to stick with his starter Pedro Martinez in the 2003 ALCS against the Yankees, Francona was fired for going with his usually trusted closer, Jonathan Papelbon, a decision that even a high school coach would make in a one run game with the postseason on the line. If your closer is available, you use him.

The Great Baseball Gods are still out on whether Little deserved to be fired the minute Jorge Posada hit that game-tying bloop double. But Francona's own so-called transgression, a decision that is logical according to conventional baseball wisdom, earned him a soft kick in the ass that can immediately be cited as a travesty of that selfsame wisdom.

The numbers speak for themselves: In his eight years at the helm of the Red Sox, Francona got us into five postseasons. In those five years, we won two World Series, going 8-0 in WS play. About the only thing Francona didn't do was win back-to-back World Series, a claim to which only Bill "Rough" Carrigan can lay claim (1915-1916 and Carrigan had to be talked out of retirement prior to the 1916 season). No other Red Sox manager ever won two and most never even got us into the postseason.

But we'd also finished in 3rd place in back-to-back years. And that, especially in a title-hungry town like Boston, doesn't get many contract extensions. But how much of that can be blamed on Francona?

As recently as August 22nd, after being in first place for roughly half the year, the Sox were just a half a game behind the Yankees and 7.5 up on Tampa Bay, their Rays logo looking like a guppy in our rear view mirror. By September 3rd, their lead stretched to 9 over Tampa Bay. Was that a pollywog in the rear view?

By the 29th, the Red Sox pitching staff had posted an ERA of 5.69 for the month while the team (led by Ellsbury, Scutaro and Pedroia), amazingly, maintained in September their season team average of .280, second-best in the league.

True, there was a lack of clutch hitting in the late innings. Yet considering that the Red Sox were blown out quite a few times this month, that points to a failure of the Red Sox rotation and bullpen. Papelbon became a circus act in the last week and his setup man, Daniel Bard, was a nightmare most of the month. Lester, Lackey and Beckett, the three Big Men of the rotation, became three of the worst starters in MLB. Tim Wakefield, after seven tries, barely got his 200th career win thanks to an 18 run blowout in which he still gave up five runs on six hits. Buchholz hadn't thrown in a game since June 19th and Tommy John candidate Dice-K was a lost cause right out of Fort Meyers.

Plainly, with a team still scoring 5.4 runs a game this month, a full run higher than the league average, it was the pitching. It was always the pitching.

You can be forgiven for casting an hostile sidelong glance at Curt Young, rookie pitching coach at Four Yawkey Way but that, too, involves a slippery slope. With what was essentially the same rotation as last year, one that also landed us in the 3 hole in the division standings, Curt Young certainly didn't do any worse than his predecessor, Toronto manager John Farrell.

But it makes Francona's ouster even more mysterious and certainly doesn't pass the smell test. Short of cloning or resurrecting Bill Carrigan or kidnapping Joe Torre out of the Commissioner's Office, who else that's available does the John Henry Group think can do a better job managing this team than a guy who'd brought home two World Series trophies in four years and got us into the postseason five of eight times?

This will just prove to be the latest in a series of dynasty-destroying disasters that will prove more costly than not signing Pudge Fisk after 1980 (who responded by slugging 214 of his 376 home runs for the White Sox), trading Bill Lee to Montreal for Stan Papi during the 78-79 offseason (Lee responded by winning 16 games for the Expos that year, posting a 3.04 ERA), releasing Roger Clemens (who responded by winning back to back Cy Youngs for the other Canadian team, the Blue Jays), letting Wade Boggs go (who responded with the first of four consecutive .300+ seasons for the hated Yankees) and, of course, selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees.

And don't even get me started on Theo Epstein trading two time batting champ Nomar Garciaparra, while he was hitting .321, for three nonentities who were gone when Edgar Renteria got thrown out by Keith Foulk in Game 4 of the '04 World Series. And don't you even dare mention in my presence Boston's shameful history of racism-by-exclusion (they were not only the last MLB team to integrate in 1959 but the Bruins even beat them to it in 1958).

Francona's numbers speak for themselves. He's the only manager in this and the previous decade to win two World Series titles. In his eight years as skipper, the Red Sox had won 744 games and lost 552 for a winning percentage of .574. Maybe not an eye-popping stat in and of itself but you can't ignore those two World Series trophies.

And the inarticulate and non-charismatic executives of the John Henry Group, which essentially destroyed the Marlins franchise right after they won their first World Series in 1997, think they have bigger and better options out there. They think in their executive wisdom that firing a manager who was a former player and had the loyalty, devotion and, yes, even the love of his guys is going to somehow stabilize a clubhouse already roiled by the most heart-breaking collapse in 34 seasons.

Good luck with that, John Henry. And good luck trying to extend that sellout streak next year when the Red Sox continue to loiter in the middle of the division pack. You've lost my loyalty.

Top Ten Advances in Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia

This past week King Abdullah, the leader of Saudi Arabia, allowed women to vote in municipal elections starting in 2015 and recently overturned a court's ruling to lash a Saudi woman ten times for driving. But these advances in women's rights in the oil-rich nation weren't the only ones that had occurred. What other victories have Saudi Arabian women won of late?

10) A Saudi woman can now walk freely without a male relative provided they are with Tony Shaloub.

9) Wives now protected from domestic abuse under animal cruelty laws.

8) Women can now run for Advisory Council positions with the provision that every time the council convenes they must sit on the face of at least one male member of the Royal Family.

7) Black tweed and wool burqas can now be replaced in the summer months with charcoal gray cotton burqas.

6) No longer mandatory that Saudi female infants be born with hijabs.

5) No longer mandatory that Saudi women be immediately immolated with a blowtorch for speaking Gloria Steinem's name but it is still optional.

4) Saudi rape victims can no longer be whipped or executed for being victimized but they must promise to never again arouse the male libido with suggestive burqas.

3) Saudi women to be issued driver's licenses in 2014 but are restricted to bumper cars.

2) Wives and daughters no longer forced to eat with female camels in the barn.

1) Women now allowed to menstruate 12 times a year instead of five.

I, Asshole

If NJ Governor Chris Christie ever decides to stop the Sarah Palin political cock-teasing and throw his Mickey Mouse cap in the ring, I have the perfect idea for his campaign song: Denis Leary's, "I'm an Asshole."

Christie's speech a couple of nights ago at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, reverently covered by Roger Ailes' propaganda arm for the GOP Fox News, set the Twitterverse in flames or convulsed it in laughter, depending on your political stripe. It was full of sound and subdued fury, signifying nothing but this message: "I am not running." Oh, that and Reagan smashing PATCO was a good thing.

It's real easy to think of Chris Christie as an unfunny version of Ralph Kramden with Tourette Syndrome. He's become, in the perennially-fixed Republican hub of the political universe, this general election cycle's Fred Thompson. Thompson, you may remember, made people like Chris Matthews swoon just imagining the smell of Aqua Velva wafting from his neck wattles. Thompson provided a wrinkled but glittering Hollywood backdrop to a field of Republican pretenders who were hardly more palatable then than they are now. He was like some still virile, grandfatherly type who lived next door, the Clint Eastwood character in Gran Torino that the bored, desperate housewives on the block wanted but couldn't have.

Then Fred finally lurched into their bedrooms and fell asleep during the act of love and the fantasy was over.

But it may be too much of an oversimplification to look at Christie as 2012's answer to Fred Thompson, a man who nearly pulled Lunesta from every pharmacy the night he announced his candidacy on the Jay Leno show. Christie, in a literally and figuratively larger than life way, is more dynamic to Republicans than Thompson ever was on or off the silver screen.

Christie, for some as yet maddeningly elusive reason, has the ability or talent to basically tell people to go fuck themselves and to then brag about it by having his staffers post the results on Youtube. For most politicians (and yes, I'm looking in your direction, George Allen), these videos would be deal-breakers. But Christie is the Teflon Governor and no insult that he deals to public schoolteachers, their union or anyone else that gives him attitude ever sticks to him.

Maybe it's his James Gandolfini arrogance, his ability to warm the cockles of the Republican heart everyone who wistfully thinks of Tony Soprano, America's most beloved mass murderer. Perhaps they live vicariously through Christie's ability to tell his critics to go to hell when they challenge his most absurd pronouncements.

Short of comedians, the world's other class of people who get paid handsomely to be laughed at, no one likes to be laughed at while they're speaking. Christie views it as a sign of disrespect but what seems to elude him is that perhaps his critics laugh at him while he's speaking because they simply can't help themselves.

After all, this is the same guy who took a helicopter to his son's baseball game then drove in a limousine for the 100 yards between the chopper and the diamond. This is a guy who hobnobbed with Mickey and Minnie while his state was buried in snow. This is a guy who called teacher's unions "thugs".

And Christie's very hypothetical appeal to the Republican base, if anything, underscores the dissatisfaction that Republican voters feel with the current crop of psychopaths, some of them holdovers from the last crop of psychopaths (Romney, Santorum, Paul).

And, to anyone with even semi-functional synapses, Republicans swooning over Christie while daydreaming that he may be a plus-sized Reagan is itself worth guffawing over.

I Know Dick

Behold a real closer.

That's the late Dick Radatz, the first great closer in MLB, the kind of guy you'd feel comfortable putting into a bases loaded, no out situation against the Yankees with Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris on deck. The kind of guy who was so cocksure of himself he'd say to the starter on the mound, "Pop open a cold one for me. I'll be right back."

Then he'd do it. And if you needed him to pitch three or more innings for a rulebook save, you'd get it. Radatz would routinely pitch anywhere from 120-160 innings a year and would rack up more strikeouts than most starters nowadays get in 32-36 starts. And "the Monster" didn't demand through his agent $12,000,000 a year to do it, either.

There was no choking as with the pretender on the mound in Baltimore last night, one who reminded us that sometimes curses aren't broken, after all, but just temporarily diverted.


You know, this John Lithgow-looking loser who time and again toward crunch time couldn't keep a lead against some of the worst teams the major leagues had to offer.

And, thanks largely to Jonathan Papelbon, it was just like old times again and Pap joined the ghosts of Denny Galehouse, Jim Burton, Mike Torrez, Bob Stanley, Calvin Schiraldi, Tim Wakefield, and, yes, even the great Pedro Martinez.

They couldn't just let us walk away and write them off when they began the most titanic September slide since the '64 Phillies or the '78 Red Sox. No, they had to lead us on just long enough by barely coaxing out an 8-7 win the night before from a roster creaking with injuries, incipient old age and inexperience. It was a teaser of a team so close to falling apart, our little center fielder and leadoff hitter had to come to the rescue again and our backstop was a guy who'd never had a major league start at that position because our everyday and backup catchers were sidelined with injuries.

Papelbon almost blew that save, as well, but managed to keep the tying run from scoring and the romance was alive for another day, a pathological wallflower bereft of all social graces trying to crash the hall to become the belle of the ball.

And then, the inevitable happened. The champagne was ordered, we began filling out our dance cards and the Boston City Police Department was eagerly loading their guns in the interests of crowd control.

To add more of a Three Penny Opera dimension to this spectacle, the Red Sox depended on the division champion New York Yankees, who had zero incentive to win their last game of the year and essentially fielded a team made up almost entirely of Trenton and Columbus minor leaguers who couldn't even hit Karen Carpenter's weight let alone their own, to get us into the postseason.

A Mark Texeira grand slam in the early innings at the Trop made it 5-0 Yankees and when the lead went to 7-0 with the Sox ahead 3-2 against a last place team playing for naught but some misplaced pride, it looked as if we wouldn't have to go to Tampa Bay, after all. Either Michigan or Texas it was. Either way, no way would we be going home. We were going on a postseason-long honeymoon.

And then Papelbon happened and, suddenly, after being in first place half the year, we finished third.

Just his third blown save of the year, it couldn't've come at a worse time. And this past September, Papelbon and much of the pitching staff pitched as if they hated their fans and took sadistic enjoyment out of tormenting us as had their forbears in seasons past. Even Pap's reliable setup guy, Dan Bard, began training his 101 mph flamethrower on the Red Sox dugout. Maybe someone should call the DC police to see if his best friend disappeared again.

As the old saying goes, "The sons of bitches killed our fathers, now they're coming after us." Go buy a poster of Dick Radatz in between basilisk stares and Irish jigs, Johnny boy, hang it up in a prominent place in your home, study it long and hard, try to derive some inspiration from looking at a real closer who did the job when it counted the most.

Kaption Kontest

Rush Limbaugh says that Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll because he's "pedal to the metal conservative all the time." Rush went on to say Cain would be the first black president and that he wanted to rub his head to give him good luck.

A Tale of Two Countries

The expression on the faces of these guests was illuminating. Varying from smug smiles, to fearful stares at the ground to unbridled anger mixed with fear. Mostly smug. Some amused. These are very rich people whose lives have been built on stepping on people. - Michaela, Let Freedom Rain

As I said in yesterday's post about the Vancouver Club, a swanky place for wealthy child molesters at which Dick Cheney spoke last night, I've been researching and drafting a novel about a global child abduction ring and a former Soviet/NYPD detective's attempts to take them down. I thought that, in this middle installment of this trilogy, I'd created some pretty horrible bad guys and set up a chilling scenario only based on historical fact.

But what I've been digging up on the Vancouver Club and the scumbags who protect them, including the highest levels of the Canadian government and judiciary, makes me feel as if I don't know anything, as if I'm relearning how to walk, speak and spell. Once again, imagination is trumped by real life. I have to rethink and reappraise everything I've come to expect from a world that creates such monsters. As cynical as I've been in my middle age, I now have to acknowledge that the world, especially Vancouver BC, is a much, much more evil place than we'd suspected. It's also more open about it.

If you want to know what I know, you can do worse than start with this nearly 5 year-old article in Canadian Dimension. It gives you the abstracts of the nightmare endured by Jack Cram and Renate Andres-Auger. Cram, you may remember from yesterday's article, is essentially Canada's answer to Susan Lindauer. Cram was once a respected barrister in the Vancouver area until he was dragged out of a courtroom while trying to present a case about the Vancouver Club and the complicity of the Vancouver Courts and Police Department. Cram was put in handcuffs, dragged down to the dungeon beneath the judge's bench and was prevented from presenting his case.

Also like Lindauer, Cram was jumped after giving a radio interview by ten Vancouver cops, repeatedly injected in a van with mind-distorting drugs and committed to the psychiatric ward of Vancouver General Hospital. That in itself immediately undermined Cram's once-sterling credibility. Later, Cram was disbarred for a year by the astoundingly and shockingly corrupt Law Society and could qualify for reinstatement only if he agreed to psychiatric counseling for that year. Renate Andres-Auger, the Cree attorney who'd hired Cram when her law practice was essentially destroyed by the Powers That Be in Vancouver, had faced similar treatment. Andres-Auger, obviously close to the indigenous population and knowing all too well about the abduction of native children, was the first Canadian attorney who'd first made the allegations regarding the connection between Vancouver's thriving child trafficking industry (they'd poach children from surrounding Indian schools) and the Vancouver Club.

To paraphrase Canadian Dimension, what Andres-Auger and Cram knew and were prepared to do obviously was going to hurt a lot of powerful people and they had to be stopped.

To those of you who think that Canada is some nice, bland, genteel country not given to violence, you're only partially right. Yesterday's protest at 915 Hastings Street featuring a surprisingly tiny police presence calmly looking at peaceful protesters without incident (in contrast to the travesty of law enforcement at the Occupy Wall Street encampment) would seem to bear that out.

But keep in mind this is also the very same Vancouver Police Department that engages to a shocking degree in something called "the hooker game." According to deposed witness Annie Parker, who called the police looking for protection from her abusive ex husband and wound up instead being victimized by that same VPD, one quarter of the city's police as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is in on "the hooker game" and the other 75% know about it yet do nothing. That number also includes the Mayor and the Chief of Police.

The first phase of "the hooker game", to them, is relatively harmless: It involves the abduction of women who are then injected with mind-altering drugs and hypnotic barbituates such as Scopalimine that incapacitate them and they're then raped and videotaped before being released. This brings to mind the footage filmed by Orwell's secret police in 1984 which is then recycled to the proles. What's most surprising is where these videos of rape and torture are filmed:

Soon after the assault of the witness by MICHAELSON in the spring of 2000, she was taken by MICHAELSON to one of the locations of the "hooker game": a "clubhouse" for policemen in either the penthouse of the Century Plaza Hotel or in the basement of the Hotel Georgia in downtown Vancouver. Witness claims that this clubhouse hosts a "pornographic film studio where woman are raped and tortured on film". MICHAELSON is described by the witness as "a pimp and drug dealer for all the Vancouver cops and their friends ... a lot of the dealing goes on at the clubhouse."

I haven't even gotten to phase two, which allegedly involves snuff films and body disposal sites. Two of the RCMP cops named in this second phase of "the hooker game" are or were members of a Missing Women's Task Force, thereby in a position to "investigate" the disappearances of the women they abduct.

If this sounds like hazy, drugged-fueled conspiracy theories, I ask you to judge for yourself whether or not the specificity is consistent with that of an unreliable witness:

12. Witness claims that both DAVE and STEVEN are also associated with BOUDRAIS and have raped and murdered women with him, including Brianne VOTH, age 19, who was abducted, raped and drowned in 2004 in Coquitlam by BOUDRAIS and STEVEN, in association with a prostitute named Stella MALLOWAY.

13. Witness was told by MICHAELSON that either DAVE or STEVEN own a cabin that serves as a body dumping site for women killed by them, BOUDRAIS and others. The cabin is located ten minutes' drive west of Horseshoe Bay on the Sea to Sky Highway, in a hunting camp off a dirt road. Bodies are dumped in a metal cistern at this site.

Aside from an exact address, this is about as specific as you can get.

If that sounds horrible, imagine being a small aboriginal child abducted from your safe, warm bed in your school in the middle of the night by men you don't know, smuggled through the back of a building (such as the Vancouver Club) in the dark where you're then molested by wealthy men.

Imagine never seeing your friends and loved ones ever again once you've served your usefulness.

Now imagine being a well-respected attorney who devotes his or her life to helping the downtrodden such as the indigenous native population victimized by crooked attorneys, land grabs by the Crown and children who are regularly poached in the middle of the night for the sexual gratification of the wealthy. Imagine trying to present your case through proper and legal channels, being ignored then abruptly handcuffed, thrown in a cell then kidnapped, tortured, drugged and committed, your career in tatters.

That is what openly goes on Canada, particularly Vancouver, British Columbia and all with the enormous resources of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Vancouver Police Department, the Law Society of Vancouver, the mayor, the chief and many other wealthy and powerful purveyors and defenders of violent porn and murder.

And now, Dick Cheney has already pimped his new book in the middle of all this, a man who in that very same book freely admitted to torturing people. I don't know about you folks but since last night, I've never been prouder to be an American.

Occupy Wall Street, Day 9

I don't know why we civilians don't wake up to the fact and realize that we vastly outnumber them.

By "them", of course, I'm referring to the donut-munching, fat fucks of the fascist NYPD who are doing a creditable impression of the basiji in the wake of the Iranian election of June 2009. And, while I understand the necessity of remaining peaceful, that tactic didn't exactly work for the Dodo bird and the NYPD counts on that.

Of course, it still doesn't stop them from making up the usual lies ("resisting arrest", "assaulting an officer", etc) when making arrests by the score. They're so desperate to justify arrests they've even begun citing an obscure 166 year-old law that, get this, bans masks in New York City, as if that's actually enforced on Halloween and New Year's Eve.

The fascist NYPD has even learned a thing or two from Goebbels and have started their own propaganda campaign in claiming the Occupy Wall Street protesters edited out their own illegal actions just prior to the now-infamous pepper-spraying of two woman. Well, here's video shot from a reverse angle and judge for yourself:


So much for that story.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are not occupying Wall Street any more than the rats and roaches on the streets of New York. If publicity was their aim, they've failed miserably. They were naive enough to think the corporately-driven mainstream media, which have lawyers tell it what it can and can't cover, would give them more than scant attention. The fat, pasty racists of the Tea Party are a sexier lead any day than a bunch of smelly hippies, don'cha know?

Often, when anyone deigns to cover the 9 day-old "occupation", they do so sneeringly, such as this Wall Street whore Julia La Roche, who prefers to focus more on the smell from some of the protesters and a couple of bare boobies rather than the actual reason for the protests (my comment got kicked to "the Bleachers" on Business Insider's worthless website but that's OK: I reproduced it in full on my Facebook page where it'll stay up forever).

So there's a lot of shame and blame to go around: The corporate mainstream media whose nightly telecasts are good only as night lights during fornication. The protesters, who are looking more and more like the defenseless airheads who got their brains smashed by other fascist cops in the 60's for protesting the Vietnam war. You're not occupying anything and no one is listening to you. Go to the Nexus Phase. Anonymous, you listening? Gentlemen, start your hacking.

And the cops?

Well, the cop mentality is timeless, eternal and is completely predicated on fascist paranoia and the scary knowledge that they are outnumbered. The cop mentality is also necessarily a low one because if they had any appreciable cranial capacity, they'd be Republicans on Capitol Hill. Cops are essentially so bereft of brains that they're insensible to the irony that the Wall Street they're protecting by macing innocent women has also looted their pension fund. Even Madison, Wisconsin police were smarter than their counterparts in the NYPD and stood with the protesters last winter even when their own collective bargaining rights weren't under threat (yet) from Scott Walker.

Nonviolence has its time and place but then sometimes it doesn't. We can all agree that John Brown was right and that blood and iron were what was called for to end slavery when he took over Harper's Ferry in 1859. Sometimes you have to get out and actually fight when you know you're dealing with an intractable enemy that would rather die than budge an inch and bring one more job to America, to fork over a extra ha'penny in taxes.

And I think it's time we finally justify that police paranoia.

Big Dick Goes to Canadian Pedophile Central

(Many tips o' the tinfoil hat to Michael Collins.)

It's true. No need to blink or rub your eyes at that headline. At 5:30 this afternoon, Dick Cheney is going to 915 West Hastings St., the address of the Vancouver Club to pimp his new book, Yeah, I Waterboarded Innocent Brown People and If You Don't Like it, You Can Suck My Big, Withered Dick.

Now, to my Yank readers, Vancouver's just a clean, civilized city that's the home to the hapless but lovable losers who went down in flames in Game 7 of the last Stanley Cup and the place where loves blooms on the streets amid chaos (or maybe not). And you'd be partially right.

And Cheney is going to be speaking today at an alleged hotbed that features to its most discreet members kidnapping, pedophilia, torture and possibly murder. It may surprise you (or maybe not) that our big Dick Cheney is going to be squarely in the middle of all that in the interests of book sales. And it may even be that Cheney himself is blissfully unaware of the Vancouver Club's sordid history and that delivering a speech at this house of depravity and torture is yet another in a string of coincidences that follows Republicans like Pigpen's dust cloud.

Or it could be that Cheney doesn't give a rat's ass where and how he makes his money.

Canadian attorney Gail Davidson has issued a plea (.pdf file) to the highest levels of the Canadian government asking that Dick Cheney be barred from the country on the basis of having committed, by her reckoning, 269 war crimes, some of which Cheney freely admits to in his book. Cheney's appearance in Vancouver BC even has its own Facebook page that calls for his arrest.

The story, typically, has been strenuously ignored by the worthless American corporate MSM but even many of the bloggers who've written about Cheney's upcoming speech failed to connect this to the other big dot, which is that the Vancouver Club has been the subject of the liveliest interest of attorneys, former police officials and journalists for quite a long time, 17 years, to be more precise.


Their website, naturally, doesn't give the slightest hint of its sordid history that includes two Canadian Supreme Court judges, police officials, church lawyers, businessmen and politicians. In fact, the index page looks like the gay edition of a Brooks Brothers catalog featuring the kind of smarmy, yuppie up-and-comers modeling its American Psycho line that only John Aravosis would love. Funny how it fails to mention the aboriginal children they keep in the dungeons below.

Yeah, there's that, eh?

It all began with another Canadian attorney named Jack Cram who'd entered a lawsuit in April of 1994 naming two Supreme Court judges for their alleged complicity in this pedophile ring that operates openly right in the middle of squeaky clean downtown Vancouver. Despite two of the judges being disbarred, Cram was "arrested, drugged and jailed", while the evidence (including incriminating photographs) against the Vancouver Club and the jurists was stolen. In other words, they gave him the Susan Lindauer treatment.

Amazingly, despite these two child-molesting judges having been disbarred, they threatened a lawsuit against two papers that attempted their own investigations.

More recently, Kevin Annett, an investigator with the IHRAAM, was and still is allegedly made the focus of a COINTELPRO smear campaign carried out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and even aboriginal agents obviously to discourage him from further investigation.

Hm. There's that aboriginal connection again. What's with the aborigines?

2. Aboriginal children have been a prime target of the Vancouver Club pedophile ring, which involves senior judges, church lawyers, businessmen and politicians. To quote Jack Cram's statement in the BC Supreme Court on April 26, 1994, "Indian children go into the Vancouver Club and are never seen again." As recently as the summer of 2009, aboriginal children have been observed being taken against their will into the rear entrance of the Vancouver Club at 915 West Hastings street from the Squamish Indian reserve in North Vancouver, during the hours of 1 and 3 am.

Then there's this, from the United Nations:

4. A United Nations conference on child trafficking, held in Vancouver in September, 1999, confirmed in its summary report that Vancouver is one of three cities in the world where "organized child prostitution and trafficking operates with unofficial police and judicial protection ... including at the elite Vancouver Club."

Yeah, that must've gone over well considering that conference took place in their city.

The website given to me by Michael Collins and for which I've provided a link is just the tippy tip of the iceberg. If you want more background on the Vancouver Club, their child molesting ring and the people with whom they're figuratively in bed, read these horrific accounts provided through videotaped depositions.

When you see what's been going on in Vancouver, BC for the last half century and longer, you'll naturally bridge that gap and form the same conclusions I have. I won't name names, of course, but the initials are MKULTRA.

By coincidence, I'm furiously engaged in drafting out a novel about this very same thing. In fact, I'd shown a chapter to Michael Collins and Susan Lindauer and Collins thought the link to Exopolitics would interest me. Yeah, you could say that. And what I've been reading since last night puts even my potent imagination to shame. Educate yourself. Follow the links I've provided. Find more on your own. No time? Make it. This is some heavy duty shit. Rich fucks, buddies and supporters of Dick Cheney, are kidnapping, molesting, torturing, brainwashing and possibly even murdering children with the complicity and protection of NORAD, the RCMP, the Vancouver PD, the highest judiciaries, Canadian MPs and others.

Now, doesn't it just make you wanna bust your buttons knowing that our big Dick is going to be swaying in the middle of that moral cesspool?

(More on this. Much, much more.)

We Need a Guilt Project

The last GOP presidential debate, the chemical lynching of Troy Davis and frequent references to Barry Schechter's Innocence Project gave me a great idea that I don't believe anyone's ever considered, certainly nobody in the Justice Department:

What we need is a Guilt Project.

Schechter's ongoing Innocence Project, which has gotten over 100 convictions overturned and literally dozens released from Death Row, is certainly a necessary counterbalance to what has to be the worst, most capricious, money-driven and corrupt criminal justice system in the history of the galaxy.

But why stop there? Why not continue that train of thought on the other side of the legal spectrum and start going after the guilty? That's a novel concept, one that I believe will catch on if enough thought is paid to it.

That way, the wealthy will no longer be insulated from comeuppance at the hands of We the People as We the People are expected to when we break the law on much smaller scales. We would need to rethink our entire concept of jurisprudence, I'm sure. We would need to actually investigate the world-devouring crimes that happen Monday-Friday on Wall Street and Capitol Hill, use people called "attorneys" to file something we can call, I don't know, "lawsuits".

Here's an even more radical concept: Making the punishment fit the crime, although, given the sheer scope and scale of the crimes that occur on Wall Street and Washington, DC, such penalties would require the sadistic imaginations of the Marquis de Sade, Tourqemada and Lucifer combined.

This Guilt Project would require at some point the reluctant but necessary participation of the Eric Holder Justice Department that has inexplicably dropped more investigations and lawsuits than bars of soap in a Greenwich Village bathhouse.

That way, when we put these Republican cocksuckers on notice, we will not see so much of:

Presidential and Senate elections getting brazenly stolen every four years through voter intimidation, vote-caging, electronic ballot-stuffing and the like.

Illegal wars being waged against countries that were no threat to us and had no complicity in 9/11.

Hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars being siphoned from the Treasury to stuff into the bottomless pockets of war profiteers such as the VPOTUS's former employer through cost plus, no-bid contracts funneled through the same VPOTUS's office.


Hundreds of billions more taxpayer dollars being siphoned from the Treasury to stuff into the bottomless pockets of Wall Street sociopaths who spit in Congress's eye when asked tepid questions about why and how they cost millions of honest, hardworking Americans their jobs, pensions, 401(k) plans and homes.

Professional Republican Senate candidates who live off campaign contributions then get million dollar book deals for whiny pieces of shit they didn't even write at the expense of real writers who lead honest lives.

War crimes punishable by death, including the mass murder of hundreds of thousands, the torture of countless thousands more, detention and displacement of said indigenous people and not caring enough about the collateral damage to "do body counts."

The open bribery between lobbyists and lawmakers that's currently going unprosecuted because we've changed the word from "bribery" and "kickbacks" to "campaign contributions."

The all but official creation of the fourth branch of government or third chamber of Congress called K Street.

Think of the possibilities if we but actually start enforcing the law through this Guilt Project. Of course, once word got around that we as a nation started getting serious about enforcing the rule of law again, every scumbag that's ever committed a crime will flee to their billion dollar private ocean liners and seeking refuge on Peter Thiel's little Dr. No getaway. That would create a collapse in an economy and political infrastructure that's based completely on the rickety legs of fraud and grand larceny.

But, really, isn't knocking down the current system worth a period of anarchy in order to see some justice served to the most deserving of it? As the lady once said, "Sometimes, the best remedy is to break everything."

Caption Contest

DRIVING MISS DAISY MEETS THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

I know, it's not one of my best caps but that's about all I can manage now. I'm getting ready to meet with my state senator later today but just to let ya'll know I got my laptop back, fixed the problem by myself for nothing with a little help from Lenovo's tech support and will be back with a liberal vengeance as soon as I get a few things straightened out.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

You'd think that, with the Pope, a former President of the United States and ex Director of the FBI taking up your cause, enough serious doubt would've been raised to at least stay the execution last night of Troy Davis. But then again, I'm speaking of a nation that doesn't exist, one guided and ruled by rational thought, one in which authorities would rather err on the side of life.

But Georgia did what Georgia does and took the heat off Texas, Utah, Kansas, Arizona, South Carolina, Wisconsin and other states that have embarrassed us before the world. After issuing a brief reprieve that bought Troy Davis four hours and eight minutes of life, the SCOTUS allowed the execution to proceed without dissent and the machine had its way and executed an innocent man.

If even the Willingham case didn't qualify as the Holy Grail for which death penalty opponents have been searching, the case of Troy Davis, a man convicted and executed on purely circumstantial evidence, will surely prove to be it. The Supreme Court set the bar absurdly high: Davis's attorneys were required to prove beyond a doubt that he was innocent whereas the state court had to prove guilt beyond a doubt.

Obviously, the prosecution didn't do that but the 12 amateurs in the jury box saw things differently. Now three of them had come forward to say, "If I knew then what I know now..." Seven of the nine witnesses who claimed they saw Davis shoot Officer MacPhail three times had since recanted. And a man admitted while drunk at a party two years ago that he was the shooter.

The police authorities, so desperate to convict Davis and tie him to the scene of the crime, falsified ballistics evidence and claimed the shell casings at the murder scene were fired from the same gun in another crime for which Davis had already been convicted.

Yes, in the United States of America, men and women can and have paid the ultimate price for racism, political zealotry and just plain stupidity, arrogance and a pathological dread of admitting that a tragic mistake had been made. People get convicted all the time on circumstantial evidence, which is really just a fancy legal phrase for elevated coincidence (and sometimes just plain coincidence).

I wasn't this ashamed to be an American even right after we'd invaded Iraq and, before that, Afghanistan. Yet the always backward state of Georgia managed to make me feel more ashamed to be an American, and reluctant to admit that it's part of our nation. I have Georgia on my Mind, namely fantasizing about replacing it with Guam or Puerto Rico or maybe a barren sandbar imported from Dubai.

Anything, God, but a state in which the Board of Paroles and Pardons is as stupid as the one in Texas and is unmoved by curiosity in light of all the troubling questions and reversals regarding Davis's case. Anything but a state in which the Governor, a Tea Bagger psychopath named Nathan Deal, is trying to ram through a proposal whereby a person can be sentenced to death by a mere majority of jurors instead of a unanimous vote.

When a man gets three stays of execution and a reprieve after spending 20 years on Death Row, obviously the machine isn't running smoothly. And despite Davis getting off the hook almost as many times as Dick Cheney, despite the recantations and reversals, the plainly falsified evidence, Georgia is a deep southern state in which a black man was nonetheless executed for killing a white man. Try though they might, there's no way the Georgia penal authorities will ever wipe away the picture that that paints: That of a chemical lynching.

Troy Davis paid the ultimate price for living in a state and in a country where the system takes the place of human thought, mercy and compassion, a system in which the unstoppable machine grinds to its bloody conclusion when even the Governor and the President of the United States don't even qualify as fail safe measures.

Troy Davis' execution at 11:08 last night is now being looked at as the greatest blow to anti capital punishment factions in years but in time, when Davis's innocence is finally established beyond a reasonable doubt, when they catch the real guy and have to execute him, too, for MacPhail's murder, it'll prove to be a very potent weapon

"Can I Haz Notebook to Sweep on?"

Posting will be light to nonexistent for the foreseeable future until I get my brand new computer out of the shop, which will probably involve more money than I can afford. And, no, I didn't get another virus. This is an outdated C++/HP printer software downloading issue for which I am not responsible. This should be a warranty issue for which I shouldn't have to pay. But experience these past two years has taught me that computer repairmen are among the least trustworthy people on earth.

In the meantime, please accept this substitute for actual blogging, a picture taken today of Popeye, the Passive/Aggressive Enemy of Literacy, lounging on my notebook in the spot where my Lenovo laptop used to be.

Top Ten Ways Americans Will Observe the 10th Anniversary of 9/11

Today is the tenth anniversary of the most horrific attack on American soil. On September 11th, 2001, four planes crashed into both towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, PA. A recent poll asked thousands of Americans how they will observe the 10th anniversary of a series of attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3000 people. What are the top 10 answers?

10) Hoping for some 9/11 nookie by crying in front of girls at somber candlelit ceremony.

9) Distending our waistlines with dead, barbecued animals as long as beer cans are clinked together at least once to remember the victims.

8) Being extra hypervigilant of anyone wearing cloth on their heads, including that black guy down the street with the 'do rag.

7) Watching bands, choirs, military honor guards and giant flags before baseball games and players chewing gum, spitting and scratching their crotches.

6) Shouting at the television, "Fuck you, bin Laden!"

5) Listening to Alex Jones podcasts about how the Pentagon wasn't struck by a hijacked plane but the Bilderberg Group in the name of the New World Order.

4) Planning on voting for the Republican presidential candidate who looks the least guilty over 9/11.

3) Nothing. Saddam's dead. We've defeated terrorism. Can't we just move on and pretend like nothing's changed?

2) Watching news file footage of the planes hitting the north and south towers and hoping that, for once, they'll miss.

1) Thanking God, Bush and Cheney that we're still the land of the free and the home of the brave between terror alerts and having our privacy invaded by stadium security, Homeland Security, the TSA, NSA and local, state and federal law enforcement.

Vaporlock Nation

Did anyone notice on Thursday during the President's speech that Michelle Obama was not standing in her usual spot in the First Lady's box? Who was standing there? Tax cheat and GE CEO Jeffrey Immeldt, Obama's job czar. And, to his left, three other corporate leaders. That is a very telling visual and sums up just about everything that is wrong with this pro-corporate administration.

Think of the American economy this way: It's like a car with a dead battery and vapor lock in the fuel line. You can flush out the fuel line, sure, but the dead battery still prevents the starter motor from turning over the engine. Both problems have to be fixed before internal combustion can take place. Yet it seems the only people who have a serious clue how to break out of this stasis is Joe Lunchpail.

Understandably, business executives are skeptical of the President's nearly $450 billion plan for job creation. One pharmaceutical company in Lexington, Massachusetts said that even if the president's corporate tax rollback put $150,000 in their pockets, it still wouldn't be enough to make them consider hiring even one employee. What they're essentially saying is, "Like the bailout, we'd be glad to pay less taxes, Mr. President. But we're still not hiring no matter how much you put in our pockets."

And for progressives like me, the Obama jobs plan is nothing more than a thinly-veiled corporate bailout on a smaller scale that would cram money in the pockets of multi million and billion dollar corporations like Dollar Tree, Starbucks and McDonald's. Executives of companies such as these are saying, ludicrously, that the economy's to blame for their not hiring workers and they're sitting on their fat asses waiting for a deux a machina.

Gee, whatever happened to the "jobless recovery" or does that apply only to Wall Street?

The reason for the hiring freeze in this country has nothing to do with the economy. Even rapacious sociopaths like corporate executives know damned good and well that you cannot raise consumer confidence and demand for goods and services until people start working again. We could have 100,000 Warren Buffetts each pumping $5 billion into Bank of America and other banks and corporations but it would still not create a single job.

No, folks, the real reason why companies and corporations aren't hiring is obvious: When the job market started drying up in late 2008, they realized how wonderful it was to have 50 people to do the job of 75 or 100.

And with unemployment permanently at the 9% mark or higher, who's going to complain about having to do extra for the same rate of pay?

Maddeningly, small businesses got left out in the Obama plan because small businesses only account for nearly two thirds of all new jobs created over the last 15 years and account for nearly half the American payroll. The corporate tax rollback proposed by Obama would result in middling savings for the average small business owner and would, understandably, not be enough of an incentive to induce them to hire over the long term.

Corporations such as McDonald's, on the other hand, because they have a much larger and wider tax base, would see the biggest tax savings but if you were to ask their executive board if the extra millions a year in tax cuts would spur them to create any additional minimum wage jobs at minimal to no benefits, they'd probably laugh in your face.

If Congress adopts Obama's job plan, the half trillion would disappear just as fast as the bailout money had. It would be, to use former Labor Secretary Robert Reich's metaphor about contractor money in war zones, exactly like pouring thousands of gallons of water onto the desert sand. It would vanish, leaving not the slightest trace of that half trillion.

$50 billion, or less than 1/9 of that money, would be used to create jobs through infrastructure rebuilding, which is great if you have construction experience and happen to live in a state where the work is taking place. But, as with that pharmaceutical company in Lexington, a lot of private contractors who'd get that $50 billion would tell you with a straight face that $50 billion just doesn't create all that many jobs, any more.

I'm not being brilliantly insightful here. Many other minds, better and more pragmatic minds than mine, have been saying for years that the only real way out of this mess is for employers to actually start hiring again. People can only spend money they have.

We're vapor-locked and greed through job consolidation and an orgy of outsourcing, openly championed by the US Chamber of Commerce, are the reasons why so many people are unemployed. The Obama administration and Congress could completely empty out the Treasury and the Fed and pour the rest into Wall Street and it still will not result in a single job being created. Executives keep playing chicken with the economy as if disaster will suddenly flinch at the last moment and they'll keep driving us to that cliff's edge.

And the goose that laid the golden egg, the poor and middle class, will eventually have the final say when they can no longer buy goods and services and begin rioting in the streets.

Christine Sez, "Apologize t' the Baby Jebus!"

Dear Danny boy:

Only cynics would accuse Christine O'Donnell, who will one day surely ride the short bus to heaven and will no longer have to wear a football helmet, of trying to wring the last second of her long-expired 15 minutes of fame by demanding MSNBC's Chris Matthews to apologize for calling Bible Belters people of low IQ's.

Obviously, Crissie used to be a party girl who four long years ago would crash parties in a pre-enebriated state, pass out in strange men's beds after getting naked and teasing their cocks by then informing them that she was a virgin and intended to stay that way. But, the Lord be praised! Cougar Crissie has since seen the error of her ways.

Indeed, why should other Bible Belters be slapped with "Tweety's" wide "low IQ" brush just because your client O'Donnell was passed over when God was apportioning brains and common sense on his never-ending assembly line of humanity? It's certainly a stretch and a leap of, well, faith to claim stupidity and ignorance on a group of people who believe, as do many of us, that the earth is only 6,000 years old, evolution is a myth, dinosaurs and men coexisted and Charles Darwin was the homosexual father of Commie Karl Marx?


Alas, Christine, possibly because of her gutsy cut-and-run tactics during book-promoting interviews, is running out of venues and, like Sarah Palin before her, is now reduced to making balcony pronouncements on her Facebook and Twitter accounts. What promisingly started out as a flurry of morbid interest as that shown by wary circus-goers at a listless, half-baked sideshow was soon extinguished 24 hours later. Sort of like a dog shit fire that's starved of oxygen or shit to burn. Cowardly talk show hosts, fearful that O'Donnell will bump their Nielsen ratings by storming out at the mention of gay rights, are to blame for this and Christine must make do with what she has.

Hence her demand that Matthews apologize to the Christian soldiers of the Baby Jebus. Being a powerful, self-made woman who, in between wearing ladybug costumes and waging a one-woman jihad on clit-fingering, O'Donnell is certainly in a position to demand satisfaction especially of those who do not respect her well-meaning medievalism. She did it during her concession speech on election night last November when she made demands of victor Chris Coons even while his shoe was on her neck.

It was inspiring to watch the woman's moxie as she made such audacious demands of those much higher up in the intellectual food chain than she, even on a night when she got crushed by 17 points and should have in no way, shape or form ever been considered for a million dollar book deal and reinserted back into the public eye like a recently extracted sharp stick.

And then you showed up out of the blue, Danny boy, like a guardian angel in a gabardine armed with nothing but an agreement of representation for an unwritten book and a gold pen. And if that incredible act of wingnut welfare, which O'Donnell would no doubt call manna, doesn't bespeak of this woman's godliness and moral authority over apostates such as Matthews, then nothing does.

Hallelujah!

Your humble and reverential servant,

JP

What the GOP Would Love to do to Obama

Yep, they'd love to give him the corporate Vanger treatment but they'll settle for boycotting Obama's speech on jobs before a joint session of Congress tonight so Vitter can watch his football game wearing his Saints Huggies and Joe Walsh can spend more time with the family he refuses to support.

I just hope that no one plays drinking games that involve taking a swig every time Obama calls on actual participation from the GOP that's been strenuously ignoring the unemployment problem the minute they took their cloven hooves off their Bibles. Otherwise, a lot of people will be dead by tomorrow of alcohol poisoning.

Kingdom of the Stupid

As Atrios is fond of saying, "The stupid, it buuuurrrns!"

You may or may not have heard of the current meme circulating around Wingnuttia and led by the waddling figure of Andrew Breitbart at its vanguard. Yesterday at a rally, Teamsters head James Hoffa, Jr. said, "Everybody here's got to vote. If we go back & keep the eye on the prize, let's take these sons of bitches out."

Yet on a Fox "News" report, there was no video of the speech for Breitbart to creatively edit but Ed Henry quoted only the second sentence out of context: "If we go back & keep the eye on the prize, let's take these sons of bitches out." Without saying it, Fox, putting the "lied" in "implied", implied that Hoffa was advocating violence against right wingers. Obviously, Hoffa was talking about Election Day, voting out the aforementioned sons of bitches.

In a rare spirit of fairness, Ed Henry, who's no liberal bastion of journalism, went on his Twitter account 20 minutes after the broadcast and provided people with the full quote:


Later, Henry was bewildered that his viewership that was whipped into a frenzy by his employer would take him to task for fairly and accurately quoting Hoffa in full when he said,


Since Henry wasn't actually inside the building when Hoffa made those remarks in Detroit, it's quite possible, knowing Fox, that they deliberately didn't give him context and when he found out what Hoffa had said, he felt obliged to set the record straight on his far less-followed Twitter account.

So enter yours truly, anxious to get his toes wet and dying to once more take on my old Twitter sparring partner Andrew Breitbart and his new sidekick, Dana Loesch.

Well, within no time flat, my less-than-respectful tweets got retweeted by seemingly every right wing mouth-breathing Tea Bagger and Breitbart apologist, which were immediately supplanted by all sorts of vicious and ignorant insults. One guy started stalking me and threatened to publish my address and phone number (Note to my dedicated but incompetent stalker: There's no 910 area code in Massachusetts). It didn't matter that the President wasn't even in the building when Hoffa put his fictional fatwa out on Republicans, it didn't matter that Hoffa's remarks were relayed second and third hand completely out of context and it certainly didn't even matter to them that Henry soon set the record straight by giving us the exact content of Hoffa's sentence.

They were so whipped up into a frenzy (and they wanted to lynch the President alive for not refudiating comments that weren't even made) that the truth, even when it was staring them in the face, no longer mattered. To these peckerheaded knuckledraggers, Fox said Hoffa said it, they believed it and that settled it. In no time flat, it became a steaming mudpit of ad hominems and insults on Media Matters and resurrected Anthony Weiner jokes...

...because someone allegedly threatened Congressional Republicans.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear Mr. Hoffa over the echo of Tom Coburn wishing he could bring guns to the floor of the Senate. My ears were still ringing over Sharron Angle calling for "2nd Amendment remedies" and I was also blinded by Sarah Palin's crosshairs over those 20 Democratic districts, including Gabrielle Giffords'.

I was also too busy reading with Schadenfreude Hal Turner's conviction for threatening the lives of three federal judges and Glenn Beck openly wondering if he could murder Michael Moore.

When these racist asswipes lost their minds when a black guy got elected to run the country, their sense of irony was also lost. Hypocrisy may be the political crime for which there's no punishment but why should we allow the same level of impunity when these people, supposedly sentient, carbon-based life forms, persist and insist on remaining ignorant of the facts so they can keep chewing their hind legs off?

"I Had a Dream..."

In his recent memoir, Murdering and Torturing Brown People For Fun and Profit, Dick Cheney recounted a dream that he'd had in a weeks-long coma following open heart surgery. Said Cheney in the epilogue,

I had a prolonged dream more vivid than any I’ve ever had, about a beautiful place in Italy.

The NY Times went on to say "that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers."

Obviously, it hasn't occurred to Big Dick that his dreams are eerily similar to mobster Tony Soprano's dreams. Tony Soprano's dreams often looked as if they were penned by David Lynch. In one, he was briefly an Italian laborer showing up at a villa looking for a stonemason's job.

Cardiologists will sometimes say that during heart surgery and after, patients will have vivid dreams that often place them in situations quite removed from their real lives and they tend to be peaceful. In this respect, Cheney's dream was pretty typical. Furthering the mobster angle is the fact that, in real life, after murdering or ordering to have murdered countless people, this is exactly how many mobsters retire: Walking their little dogs, buying fruit from greengrocers, living the peaceful life, sometimes even going back to the Old Country.

Cheney's dream, if it's to be taken at face value, also shows what an incurable monster he truly is.

Cheney, while Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, overcharged the American taxpayer by capriciously doubling fuel distribution costs and was forced to pay back the government. He repeatedly went to Langley and twisted the dicks of junior intelligence analysts until he heard only what he wanted to hear about Iraq's weapons infrastructure program to legitimize going to war with them.

We wound up killing or having killed through the Flypaper Effect over one million Iraqis.

As "Vice President", he ordered whatever limited electricity to be had in Katrina's wake to be rerouted to the refineries in the Gulf Coast instead of hospitals. He advocated and still does the torture of hundreds if not thousands of innocents.

He got drunk and shot his best friend in the face then covered it up.

Any normal human being, toward the close of their life, would be bothered by their conscience in unguarded moments, especially during a post-operative coma. But not Cheney. Oh no. Cheney wasn't tortured by the six people at Gitmo who'd committed suicide or the countless others who'd been murdered or left to die through neglect while in American custody.

Cheney wasn't haunted by dreams of the million or more charred and dismembered Iraqis who'd died largely through his initiatives, he didn't have nightmares of hooded prisoners floating toward him in midair ready to electrocute him in a shocking embrace. He wasn't harangued by the five men who had to take his place in the draft because of his pathological dread of actually experiencing war.

No, what did he dream about?

Pacing on a stone path warmed by the sun while birds chirped and low-hanging fruit perfumed the air so he could get a coffee and a newspaper just like any normal human being. Cheney not only is untroubled by his conscience, he'd probably shotgunned it in the face, waterboarded it and put it out of its misery.

"Published Author"

What follows is an amazingly brainless series of tweets from Christine O'Donnell's cell phone. She's trying to tell the story of how she got invited, then disinvited, then reinvited and re-disinvited from the Tea Bagger rally in Indianola, Iowa when the Palin camp kept threatening to pull out if O'Donnell's invitation wasn't rescinded. She starts out with a semblance of literacy by tweeting...


From here on in, it all goes downhill when Christine just simply can't distinguish or acknowledge the different formats and purposes between Twitter and Facebook. And you'd think, with some of her book signings only attracting five people or less, she'd have more time to proof-read her tweets before sending them out to her nearly 16,000 followers. But if you thought that, you'd be misinformed.





True to Republican form. it didn't take her very long to start blaming the liberal media for a vast left wing conspiracy of obsfucation and division...


Then...

Riiight. Because we know the shy, humble and retiring Sarah Palin would never upstage a fellow Republican and make unreasonable demands despite the fact that the Tea Party confirmed they'd heard several times from the Palin camp that'd refused to confirm their place until it was announced that O'Donnell, now the Typhoid Mary of politics, was out for good.



And then...

Obviously, she's completely forgotten about her Facebook account by now and insists on getting out ASAP the word about this vast left wing conspiracy and so-called Tea Bagger unity.



Then, seconds later...


Then, this...


...followed by...


...then finally, to the brilliant peroration...

Lord only knows how she got "oxen" by default considering what she eventually went with. But it's pretty typical for O'Donnell to blame her cell phone and not the idiot holding it.

Why am I getting the suspicion that she'd written her book entirely on her cell phone?