Misspake

With so many unemployed and with so many politicians misspeaking these days, it's time that we considered the creation of a new national career-path: Misspeak Translators.

"What the slobbering, orally defecating ostensible senator from Mississippi meant to say was that he loves chiaroscuro, but won't be voting to save the marshlands or helping the homeless, so go die suckers," would perhaps be some of the words emanating under law from the lips of these "truth-employees" who could steer our very weak officeholders towards--well, the truth--and to serve this great nation's interests in a way that's traditionally been reserved for ten-year-olds and wise asses like me.

Finally, a paycheck! What a country (don't start)!

The lay of the land: Middle East, 01/12/2011

Ed.--From a source in the Middle East (not native to it) working in private security. Breaks and corrections have been added for readability.

=========================

ALERTS: USEUCOM & 6THFLEET///USCENTCOM & 5TH FLEET///NATO///U.N.

=========================

Enterprise Carrier Strike Group on location (Mediterranean Sea off coast of Lebanon)

________ Expeditionary Strike Group (classified)

Israeli Defense Forces pre-staging movement

NATO France naval fleet arrivals (Lebanon former French Colony)

Hezbollah has more SCUD & M600 short range ballistic missiles than most nations (capable of hitting all of Israel)

M600 faster set-up & launch version of SCUD

(((USEUCOM-Israel///USCENTCOM-Lebanon)))

2006 ISRAEL/LEBANON WAR

+/- 200 Israeli civilian & military KIA

+/- 1,000 Lebanon civilian & military KIA

USCENTCOM:

http://www.centcom.mil/en/lebanon/

Lebanese [SIC] Hezbollah continues to undermine security throughout the Levant by undermining the authority of the Lebanese government, threatening Israel, and providing training and support to extremist groups outside Lebanon. Syria and Iran continue to violate UN Security Council resolutions and provide support to Hezbollah - support which allowed Hezbollah to instigate and wage a war against Israel in 2006 and reconstitute its armaments afterward.

"Assassinated" Arizona congressional Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is UNDEAD

She has become Ligeia, every simultaneously living and dead character straight out of Poe's short stories. The press disagrees all over the place: She's alive, she's dead, she's in critical condition--no, no, wait, she's dead, really, we mean it this time, really.

Welcome to the (mis)information age. One story has it that she's alive one moment, the next, that she is dead. No one needs to be told to jump to conclusions when the press has already done it for them in this era of instant gratification.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted--under copyright law. Welcome to the 19th century, it's back, and everyone's an expert on anything you can name, regardless of whether they have any credentials or not.

Breaking News: Gabrielle Giffords is undead, undead, undead, undead...

http://news.google.com/news/story?hl=en&q=Arizona+congresswoman+dead&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dyWPwW5FGhNgspMMUxFOa5u4-U5_M&ei=vMkoTZ6OOISq8AahufT8AQ&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQqgIwAA

Dan Zukovic's Dark Arc (2005) review

If anything is obvious about Dan Zukovic it's that he's a cultural enigma and that a violent personal sense of boredom with modern life pervades his work. Why would someone want to piss off their audience? Why not if it's art with a purpose? The man loves to provoke his audience, to piss them off, and to make them laugh again and think, which in turn makes them even more pissed off, a neat trick.

I can relate. In the embarrassing days of “grunge” he fronted the incident-provoking Northwestern Canadian band “the Gargoyles” whose recorded works must be somewhere next to impossible to find and could be described as incredibly obnoxious. Good luck in your search of his music outside of his films, he's shooting for obscurity on purpose.

Since that time, the raconteur’s been writing and playing his inimitable style of underground rock, writing and directing plays, and so far, one film each decade. His career in theater seems to stretch back to the late 1980s. Zukovic, then, has a solid background in stage, television (he was seen in two episodes of the X-Files) and screen and is mainly known for creating one of the great satiric cult hits of the 1990s: The Last Big Thing, which featured the then-unknown Mark Ruffalo (Shutter Island) in one of his first film performances. Call it myopic, but I have to love someone this determined in making their vision a reality, then hiding it under a bush for the thoughtful.

Zukovic dipped his own toes into the mainstream culture during that lame-ass decade of the 1990s and is found in a memorable character performance in the sci-fiction horror film, Disturbing Behavior; but that's about all he's done for the most part of over a decade as a freelance actor. At one point in the early 1990s he was making appearances in "Matlock" and several in "Days of Our Lives." He's a very elusive man. Just try finding much information on him, anywhere. Even in the age of the Internet, he's managed to remain mostly an enigma. Is he hiding from the “suits”? These are some of the other people he's interested in within his works, those people who took that other path he mostly rejected, the careerist. From what I took from both of his comedies he both admires and loathes them.

He saves some special hatred for corporate suits, but if the suit fits... ”Admires”? Yes, Zukovic admires them, though he sports a cravat more often than a conventional tie so the blood-flow to his brain is intact.

"Admires?" Yes, I wrote admire, so shut the fuck up already. First: he admires them for their nihilist discipline and even some of their accomplishments, but he also fears and hates them since they're probably some of the very same people he has to deal with in order to get a film financed and distributed, and his films are extremely low-budget as it is, he has to go begging for money. The fear is always going to be there that you're dealing with a flaky, ineffectual desk-bound asswipe with an ego (and bank account) big enough to poison your vision and kill the movie with the swipe of a pen, potentially ruining years of work and preparation. In other words, an executive producer—or worse—some asshole that they sent to represent their interests, a shill, a glorified gofer with an MBA and no imagination.

If your luck's really bad the shill will also secretly hate creative people, not simply the director, but anyone with a creative bone in their body working on the production and go after them.

There are other problems: you still need a competent and motivated crew--however small--and that's even before the costs of post-production editing and dubbing, the finishing of a movie, and promotion. This is the curse and the bane of all artists who have to work in expensive mediums like film, a century-old battle between art and commerce. I believe Zukovic keeps things small so that his chances of ever brushing-up against redundant bureaucratic asswipes is going to be a statistical error. I'd imagine that he witnessed his share of these kinds turds and their malignant influence working on the "X-Files" and its spin-off, "Millennium," as well as in his walk-on parts in other Hollywood fare. That's probably some of the key to his self-accusations, that he felt he'd sold-out at some point as an artist and was making-amends for being a hypocrite and a pretentious ass in public to average, naïve people who sincerely just wanted to have fun when they all collided some two decades ago.

Yes, it was artistic “frisson” at play to screw with ordinary people, and yes, he's clearly learned from his mistakes. That still doesn't stop him from pointing the finger at his audience and needling them, which he does expertly. His movies, then, can be seen as a form of penance and Zukovic should himself be admired for it. This is something that takes incredible courage--to put yourself out there like that. ridiculing oneself. The “war”--if there is one between the writer/director and the money people—often seeps into the narrative of his stories, and that's where some of the self-accusation comes into play. Many motion pictures, and even plays, have this “hidden” subtext in them (like later Peckinpah), but Dan just lets it all hang out, all over the place, so it's not so hard to understand why it takes a special group of backers to be attracted to his work. Like the suits, nothing stops this guy from doing his thing.

They say that the tough get tougher and the weird just get weirder, but who wants to hire a Private Detective just to experience someone's art? In the modern world, the weird is becoming commonplace and it's not necessarily entertaining, though art and entertainment are two different things. What's left when everything is the same urban sprawl? Don't people start to hallucinate in solitary confinement after awhile? Yes. The mind is eventually going to wander, create, and entertain itself when everything becomes the same empty routine. But when is something adapting to life through humor and when is it someone going nuts? When is it all of the above? Raging against an ocean of indifference and a vast cultural wasteland that was always there in some form or another has an implicit comic humor to it, but also all of the elements of profound tragedy.

Zukovic is so divinely twisted that he's capable of finding humor in a yawning spiritual abyss, an impressive feat for any artist. I've known about Dark Arc for over five years wondering how I was going to be able to see it outside of some stodgy, remote film festival. There's some implied strategy here, like that of his protagonists. Leave them wanting more, and so he does, a good rule of thumb for anyone wanting to make an impact and to preserve the power of their images.

Even being able to find a trailer or a clip of the The Last Big Thing online--until very recently--has been practically impossible and any biographical information on its author is scant at best. Does this guy ever do interviews? I'd imagine promotional appearances are a rarity for Zukovic and I can't blame him. The availability of his films still begs the question: “Does he attempt to promote his films at all?” Yes, apparently so, since they've made the rounds of various international film festivals without much luck in getting the attention and the interest of distributors--or at least ones who were willing to cut him and his investors a square deal (for readers who don't understand traditional movie distribution, just recall all the horror stories from the music industry and it should make sense).

Zukovic doesn't seem to be interested in some kind of hollow fame or anything beyond his ability to keep producing plays and his quirky comedies, which is enough effort in itself.

What's most interesting is that he's had more luck finding American investors for his low-budget comedies than native Canadian ones, but that's also a matter of the Great White North's legendary tax credit laws and his projects come cheap to foreign backers. Americans always love a deal. Being a fan of this guy's work is a daunting task, but I think like all great finds, the hunting was worth the effort. No matter: The Last Big Thing was picked up for cable in the late 1990s. It's been shown at film festivals and on IFC and Cinemax over the years and received the inevitable bootlegging treatment—my own copy was taped off of broadcast TV over a decade ago.

Cultural obsessives of the obscure will be happy to know that a DVD of it is slated for release for sometime in 2011, just shy of twenty years after its obscure initial release. Does the mainstream media shun this guy? Does he shun them? Both? It's a hard call in an era that demands answers to everything, and be fast about it, will ya? Zukovic's having none of that and I'd wager that had he wanted stardom he would've achieved it around the same time that Ruffalo did, within the last fifteen years. Did he ever want that fame? I believe he did, but rejected it and its trappings.

He's a strange bird--to put it mildly--and he has a screen presence that's unforgettable, looking like an emaciated John Saxon-on-Sartre with an obsession for high culture street fighting. There must have been some intellectual crisis for Zukovic by the mid-1990s since high culture and its failings was the main theme of his first film. Logically, he's also obsessed with criticizing cultural snobbery, namely his own, and opening oneself up like this can only be art; the humor of it all is obvious without being preachy. Like all of the greats of comedy, he understands comic timing and rarely ever misses a beat. To make great comedy takes incredible effort in such jaded and cynical times, but he manages to pierce the layers of defense in a way that's timeless, a rare gift in a world that doesn't care that it doesn't care.

The key to some humor is in being annoying which Zukovic excels at, right down to his hilarious fuzz-guitar stings which always come at the right emotional moment. To be sure, he's a good example of a Renaissance man working on several levels at once. You could literally ignore the high culture jargon in his two films and have no difficulty understanding what he's saying about the characters--just listen to and observe the comic interactions between them and it all makes natural comedic sense. There's also a great love/hate/ambivalence for the everyman at play, the “average fuck,” the “basic fucker,” in the Zukovic universe, a love of people who are simply unassuming and sincere in their basic ignorance. If you've ever been in a scene or an artistic milieu, these gasps for “normal” air can be refreshing.

There's a point where you have to admit to yourself that you wouldn't want to be, for example, in the same room as Picasso or Rimbaud, and certainly not with Jackson Pollock on a drunken tear. This love of ordinary people is something to be treasured and the director's finest moments are when his snobbish stand-ins for himself are confronted with their jaded assholism by people who aren't nearly as stupid and ignorant as they assumed. Too often, the life of the self-described Bohemian has been a refuge for emotional retards too afraid to embrace people and life, running to elitism, a manufactured classism that obscures their lowly-roots and what most of them really are: cowards.

Zukovic is no coward. Both of his films have some magic turning-points where these confrontations with "normals" happen, though I'm not going to give those moments away to the reader, they'll know them when they see them. The truth is, if we don't change and grow in this life, we ultimately die.

With its obvious use of theme-named characters Dark Arc could be a satirical story by Terry Southern. Zukovic casts himself once again as the protagonist of the tale, a Viscount Laris, a walking cultural anachronism out of Cervante's Don Quixote searching for...searching for what? Does he even know? Laris is the quintessential wannabe artiste since they have such an ill-defined place in a modern technological world, an almost soulless human society that has no appreciation of the divine, of the symbols or of art itself, only viewing it as a commodity to be sold. It's a world that devours meaning and that's ultimately what the characters of Zukovic's stories so desperately want in their colorless lives; their feeble attempts at finding that meaning is often their first mistake since they should stick with making it honestly and for the right reasons. Instead, most of them use it as an indirect form of communication that's bound to fail.

This is a lot like the dialogue of the equally damaged characters in Steven Soderbergh's very personal Schizopolis (1996) which not-so-ironically contained actual sentences taken directly from the incomprehensible notes of movie producers to the director from his early days navigating the completely batshit Hollywood system. Do they ever connect with each other? In Zukovic's universe, they do, and the writer/director offers a sense of redemption for his tortured creatures, albeit an utterly bizarre one in the case of Dark Arc. Zukovic offers us a very peculiar love triangle, because...well, just because, folks. Boy-meet-girl still packs-'em-in.

Without giving too much away, Laris takes his recently acquired aristocratic title to its logical conclusion in a way that would do Aaron Burr proud. Laris is looking for love, yes, but also the ultimate experience in a mind-deadening present, that great image he's been looking to recapture from his childhood, an ineffable archetype to heal something that's missing, something that's broken inside. Serendipity brings Lamia his way, but is it a good thing? It's tragicomic, but Zukovic is being very serious while at the same time prodding us into laughter; oftentimes, he makes both possible, as though he were some Peckinpah of art house cinema, making us confront ourselves for a laughter that he's coaxed us into, a mercurial touch. What's funniest is when his well drawn characters have their social masks fall--or are ripped-off violently--and the gloves are truly off.

Once the quasi-aristocratic facade slips, the North American working-class origins start coming out in full-bloom like a drunken sailor out on a mission for a prime piece of ass, and expressed in roughly the same terms.

Laris meets “Juxta/Lamia” (a role which is nailed to the floor by Sarah Strange who also appeared on the X-Files), his muse, a woman straight out of an image he first encountered in his childhood: a vintage photograph of a woman lying on a couch in a Berlin opium den, circa 1923. That's pretty specific, isn't it? The dryness of it all reminds me of the best of Bunuel, that sardonic laugh at the absurdity of the human condition and all of the pointless machinations people descend to on the Pilgrim's road to getting laid. To make things more absurd, Zukovic throws in a geeky, aged graphic designer (played subtly by Kurt Max Runte) with a dead-end life who suddenly comes to the attentions of Laris and Juxta. Laris has it in mind to cultivate the “basic fuck” through repeated exposure to “charged imagery,” frequently in the form of his muse, festooned as a “slash of pink.”

The sexual tension is everywhere in the storyline to the point that I felt compelled at one point to utter aloud, “For fuck's sake, just tell him to fuck you, goddamn it.” I was watching it alone, at home on my laptop. That's good filmmaking and a natural storytelling ability.

Dark Arc's obsessions are similar to the Last Big Thing's, but where writer/director Zukovic and company diverge is the greater focus--and I mean this literally--on imagery and the power of the image on people, so it has a greater visual beauty than his first feature. Intriguingly, there's an examination of both the male and female gaze, a visual-pun that the director handles well, if darkly. For fans of his first film, yes, Edvard Munch's “The Scream” makes a comic return more than once. The beauty of all this is that you don't have to know about the great artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the last two hundred years to get the humor of this very dry film. For all of its high flown language and imagery, the focus is still on what it always has to be in drama: people and their problems.

These are extremely weird ones, mind you, but people all the same. Suffice it to say that Zukovic is most obsessed with people who are unable to relate to or to communicate with each other conventionally anymore, which is the great tragedy of our time. These are people who are--to put it politely--profoundly neurotic, dysfunctional, and terminally middle-class. There's always a deep sadness about our eternal consumerist present underpinning all of this—that over-thought and desaturated bleakness of modern life, the unfulfilled promises of rock, religion, politics, art, philosophy and literature. The hipster sense of elitist solitude that was always a part of North America's counterculture is his clay to fashion as he will and damned if he isn't angry about it, and at himself, for once being that snobby social creature.

There's a lot to be angry about when unfulfilled promise is the rule of the day. This sense of an end of culture is echoed in the brilliant comebacks Zukovic nails a vapid scenester with in the third act of the story; it's a brilliant compression of the life-cycle of a hipster scene, going from superficial fun that in-turn almost as rapidly disintegrates into conformism and paranoid cliquishness, alienation and acrimony. You have to hand it to an artist who's accusing himself for laughs while kicking his own milieu squarely up the ass.

When everyone's a hipster and in on the joke, the ultimate irony of this era, what's left? A film like this is a rare event indeed, even in an age when most are going to view it for the first time on their laptops or in the privacy of their own homes. What's left after every conceivable form of cultural rebellion has been assimilated and drained of its power and purpose (originally intended to subvert a death loving dominant culture)? What's left? The individual. That's who made Dark Arc, for the rest of us sitting out there in the darkness, often alone, in a room full of people.

CNN reports dumb-assed Al Qaeda salad bar/buffet plot after GOP stalls Food Safety Act for months

Is there not a better sign of the end of an Empire and a nation in serious trouble? Just don't tell the Obama-holdouts, they might get upset. Who on God's gray earth would believe this horseshit but a Republican or a Libertarian, all of them with serious emotional and intellectual issues regarding reality? "Al-Qaeda plot threatens America's salad bars and buffets." You gotta be kidding, right?

It beggars the imagination that someone without the ability to imagine would believe something a ten year old could see through or do a better job of concocting.

Just as they did under Bush II, being a venerable asset of Empire and the GOP, CNN is selling a very lame-assed scare story to boost another war criminal's sagging popularity ratings as well as providing some cover for corrupt food growers and processors who wanted the Food Modernization Act. Apparently, high school never ended and life has now become Facebook. How is this different from all the times that George W. Bush cried "WOLF!" (not CNN's Blitzer, or even Donner) with the terror alert warnings to save his own ass, for political ends? It's not at all and it's not the only example, Obama's just less obvious about it than the last clown.

Seriously: President Barack Obama is the same as George W. Bush, wake up assholes, pull your heads out of your collective-ass and stop having this.

CNN's talking-neck was barely able to read the salad bar/buffet headline it was so stupid, so nebbish, so moronic and transparently unimportant pap that was probably lifted from a surveillance log of someone simply toying with the idea of joining a terror cell...after a few bong-hits or a lift from some meth. Get real, quit insulting our intelligence with your counterintelligence, your disinformation predicated on scaring the dummies that over-populate every nation so that we hand over even more of our rights to a predatorial establishment.

Great, someone was going to "poison" salad bars and buffets across America...and somehow they weren't American food growers and producers who routinely employ illegal immigrants, who then lobby the GOP all of the time for fewer regulations on food safety. Yes, it was a smart timing to run the bogus Al-Qaeda story just hours after the GOP had stalled the Food Safety Act for months, very wise, well-timed. How long did they stall its passage? Since March of this year, nine whole months, which is roundly un-American.

Besides the GOP's tail-dragging on to poison the public, or not to poison it, these were some of the major opponents of the very reasonable bill--unless some of us prefer a little e-coli with our spinach, watermelons and potatoes (take that Dan Quayle!), and TEA:

Freedomworks

Competitive Enterprise Institute

American Mushroom Institute

National Potato Council

National Watermelon Association

Produce Marketing Association

United Fresh Produce Association

The John Birch Society

National Cattleman's Beef Association

Western Growers

American Academy of Microbiology

Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund
(http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-510)

Any familiar names here? It passed the Senate on November 30th of this year anyway, but there was more stalling from the GOP.

And you Democratic incumbents: You can stop with the good cop, bad cop act. We're on to you. We know this is all just political theater and we're about to call bullshit on this whole clown show. We're not having it anymore, you're done. For a moment, I thought they were saying that Jimmy Buffett was being targeted by terrorists, which makes just as much sense and is just as credible...

Wikileaks mirror: http://213.251.145.96/

WWW--Hit it, I am.

There are daily updates on the State Dept. cables at this point. This is much bigger than the Pentagon Papers. Regardless of what happens, no matter what foolhardy legislation gets passed to ban this whistle-blowing, Pandora's box has been opened and the lid cannot be closed, ever again.

For those of you out there who don't get how the dissemination of technology works--too bad--you cannot stop this, it's a done deal. The negative response from the mainstream media was to be expected. A healthy democracy requires that the public not be deceived. We have to know the machinations of power to remain free. Sad and pathetic then that so many Americans are knee-jerking right now on this and insisting as is their wont to remain ignorant, to remain in the dark about what their government is doing in the name of corporations.

That's how a slave that's been beaten into submission thinks...if you want to call it thinking. Seeing yet another Populist-opening, Ron Paul (in his role of "good cop" to his son Rand's dueling banjo "bad cop") has been advocating for such leaks and saying there need to be more groups like them. This is interesting since he must be anticipating the next round of leaks--if they actually make it out the gate--coming from Bank of America, and possibly even Goldman Sachs and other major corrupt financial players on Wall Street. I'm skeptical of his sincerity and view most of what he says and does publicly as political theater. Let's not make it a tragedy, shall we? In Paul's hands, it's likely to be tragicomic.

Paul can say such things because he knows he'll never have to follow through on them. Like Democratic representatives who constantly crow over sundry social-ills--knowing full well thhat the political context is wrong to expedite it and that they're not going to do anything about them of any substance--he's just sounding off as he usually does. Great, have fun with that one, but what about fixing our nation? That's called rhetoric, folks, demagoguery, and it makes one wonder where all the adults went.

Recall that Paul's not so far removed from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman in his wackiness. Today he's talking about taking down the Federal Reserve with a parallel system of backing currency with gold when everyone should know there's not enough in the entire world to do it. As usual, he's trying to create a false impression. The reality is, he's no Robert M. Lafollette, one of the very few genuine progressive Republicans that ever was, the legendary Senator from Wisconsin.

If the GOP ever had a soul, it lost it when Lafollette died in 1925, giving into corporate interests over the role of government in American life, the very forces the senator at that time railed strenuously against. In case you didn't notice, he lost to people like Paul and the rest of them now occupying our government via the GOP's corporate-political nexus. Does that sound like a friendly crowd to you? Paul isn't exactly a friend of the working man and woman at all and doesn't believe in a social safety net, but neither do most Democrats these days since they report to the same bosses.

Where does the Wikileaks release of State Department cables covering 1966-2010 fit into to all of this? The warnings of Mark Twain, of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler that imperialism will be the ruination of the United States.

The State Department figures highly in all of this since they lobby relentlessly for American corporate interests overseas all of the time. It's their primary job besides formulating the policies to expedite this overall agenda and--this is key here--selling it to an American public that they do their best to keep in the dark. They have every reason to since most of us would reject that agenda outright if we were to know of it in real time. Yelling "national security" gets results and keeps the locals at bay. This abuse of secrecy is what makes the "sell" easier and why at least half of the public goes along with the dumbshow that's going to take the rest of us over the cliff.

Wikileaks is doing the work of an impaired corporate-owned press, and now the real scrambling begins. The battle for your mind has truly begun, to keep it ignorant so that their agenda can continue, one that's a direct threat to you and everyone you know. It began this summer when the State Department realized their post-9/11 sharing of information with military analysts had backfired, coming in the form of the whistle-blower PFC. Bradley Manning.

Make no mistake: Manning is a hero, this is a turning-point, an opening, and we had better start taking it. Read the cables and decide for yourself whether the State Department is acting in your best interests and why you don't want to know the facts contained within them.

Give them hell.

The deafening silence of the Tea Party demographic over yet another unfunded mandate

Where's all the outrage over the extension of Bush II tax-cuts for the rich? OK, we all saw this coming since Libertarians and the other red-headed stepchildren on the right ditched rational thought and a sense of social responsibility ages ago, but where is it? Where's that traditional conservative force and principle?

The fact is, the tax-cuts are one of the most massive unfunded mandates in our history. Cue the sound of crickets until another African-American makes it to the White House...

They shouldn't worry so much about this president, but being what they are, they're going to keep begging the question since they cannot cope emotionally since we have a Black one, and one I don't even like, trust, or support. Let me be crystal clear: I didn't vote for this asshole. I understand that the lawn jockey was recently stolen from the Bush dynasty's compounds, but no worries--the current president should be attending their next family reunion, so it's good, it's doss.

Meanwhile--back at the ranch--white closet racists will have to cling to what's left of their puerile fantasy while little has changed for the good in America, and that their irrational support for an empty-suit was just one more case of the mirror being held-up to them.

Once again, they failed the test. How are they so different from the Tea Baggers?

Happy holidays Bill Ayers!

On the Wikileaks State Dept. cable controversy

WWW--Make no mistake: The leaking of the State Department cables is--far-and-away--bigger than the release of the Pentagon Papers. Even that scandal's whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg, is giving this one a thumb's-up, and so am I and millions. Could we be wrong? I don't think so at all.

I wholeheartedly support their release because crimes are routinely committed in the name of the American public. This is about institutionalized corruption being hidden from the public and the world; the victims of American foreign policy are the first to know, the American public, the last, and for good reason. That's a systematic abuse of power and calls for things like this release to happen just as systematically if we wish to live in a free and open society. Such releases are the best defense we can possibly have since these clowns are risking our lives every single day in the service of anarchic and unregulated power.

These people in the State Department and the national security state are going to get us all killed if we're not careful; they're the great terrorists of our common era.

This last week has brought numerous attacks on Wikileaks, and coming from all kinds of nefarious corners, across the globe. It's coming from an international, criminal power structure that's bent on total domination of the rest of us, the salt of the earth, the average man and woman, everyone outside of the corridors of power. This is, in the words and observations of many of us on the true left in America, the first major information war, a war with incredible stakes: The survival of human civilization and possibly the species itself, not merely the freedom of the average man and woman.

Make no mistake that the mask is off and that this is a global phenomena. It's not just America's mask being ripped-off. Predictably, the shills and lackeys are coming out of the woodwork and exposing themselves to patch things and instate damage control. Amazon.com, Ebay/Paypal, Time Magazine, CBS, CNN, and much of the rest of the American mainstream media as well as corporations are running into the fray. The walls of their Castle system are quaking right now and it's time to take notes on who's part of the problem. It's now obvious who they are.

A national security issue? It is, just not the way it's being presented. We, the people of the world, have a right to know these things--we must know them for our own safety and the preservation of human rights and democracy itself, now under incredible and sustained attack. The stakes couldn't be any higher. Many Internet providers like Amazon are cutting the lines that feed Wikileaks into the United States.

This is mainly to keep the American public where it's usually at: In the dark, the last to know what is being done in their name, and what is being done is systematic crime, make no mistake about it. This is crucial for unaccountable power to succeed, which could mean the end of us all.

Links to Wikileaks mirrors and foreign-subsidiaries: http://czardonic.wordpress.com/

Movie star Mark Ruffalo is being harassed for his antiwar and progressive acts

Where's that change? I'm not seeing any with President Obama, just a continuation of the Bush II agenda, which means that of the super-rich. In May of this year, Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Last Big Thing, Shutter Island, etc.) and about 1,800 other prominent American liberals (including linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky) singed a petition that was published as a full-page ad in a very visible New York magazine accusing the new president of war crimes.

In some respects this is worse than Bush. First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of ‘terrorism,’ merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly.

They're not only factually correct in their assertion, they have a constitutionally protected right to express it without recourse. The new president--like his predecessor--doesn't appear to believe this. Odd for a constitutional scholar.

Ruffalo is generally known as an "indie" actor, but his star has been in ascendancy over the last decade, and along with that, he's been vocal in recent years about his concerns that America is rapidly moving away from its most cherished ideals, away from democracy. With endless capitulations to the corporate sector by both major political parties, endless and pointless wars, very open political corruption, and a host of misdeeds that don't need to be recalled here since we don't have all day to recount simply the ones committed under the Bush II administration, (the one that the new president's resembles more all of the time), it's definitely time to speak your peace.

Indeed, Ruffalo has been doing just that: There was the aforementioned petition, but he's been on the path of several causes, and they're valid ones. His most recent has gotten him on a terror watch list via the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security, part of the DHS, a decidedly corrupt institution for a war on a pronoun, so you know it's a joke on the public, and one they approved of initially.

With the ending of the "terror alert" color-coded system that everyone began ignoring after it was abused for openly political reasons, they have good reason to be concerned when a likable guy like Ruffalo starts going around accusing the president and corporations of corruption, of criminal behavior. People are already all ears, and after the BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, it's even money that they're pissed-off. Into this latter fray enters Mr. Ruffalo who has been inviting members of the public to screenings of GasLand, a documentary that covers incredibly dangerous oil-drilling practices such as "fracking" that contaminate drinking water in the areas it's done in, one of them being Pennsylvania.

This was enough for the PDHS to place Ruffalo--a movie star actor--on a terror watch list. Ruffalo thinks "[it's] pretty fuckin' funny," and to some extent it is, but it also isn't. He was brushing-up against Big Oil, maybe even firms like Halliburton. What I want to know is who made the decision here. Were his other progressive activities taken into account? Was the White House a part of any of these decisions? What recourse would an average citizen have had in this case?

Hold-outs: He's not what you think he is. Actions speak louder than words.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/dailydish/detail?entry_id=77671

Information on the May 2010 petition accusing President Obama of war crimes: http://weaselzippers.us/2010/05/15/2000-us-actors-prominent-liberals-accuse-obama-of-war-crimes-says-hes-worse-than-bush-for-authorizing-assassination-of-anwar-al-awlaki/

14 down, 36 to go in the push towards legalization of marijuana

But what does this all mean? What does it mean when we're rapidly heading towards a surveillance state, let alone a police state? Will we be able to smoke pot in a police state? Consider that. What does this mean? I have no idea, it just boggles the mind, but you have to realize that many states of existence and social trends can live alongside one another simultaneously. Some things can be true and false all at once.

Is this all Huxley' warning, the phantom of "soma," and a populace that could find itself under some serious illusions of personal freedom while simultaneously narcotizing themselves, and not merely by television and the Internet (the unimaginative misuse of the latter)? I don't know, but it sure looks like it. There are many illusions and conceits in the counterculture and the outlying one these days, too many myths, too little reality.

California nearly passed Proposition 19 this election cycle, which would have all but decriminalized marijuana with a mere fine for up to the personal possession of one ounce of marijuana, similar to Ontario's experiment with decriminalization beginning about (or "aboot") a decade ago thanks to the ruling of an Ontario Superior Court of Justice (like our own higher Federal District circuits). But the fun didn't last long in Ontario and later rulings have pushed back the right to personal possession of marijuana. Tell 'em that in Toronto's Kensington Market, or even parts of Los Angeles and Oakland and the neighborhoods around the University of Toronto.

Local custom often trumps the law, which in the case of marijuana, is fine since it's not someone being lynched. That's what the drug laws are for.

As a criminology professor in college told me, "We never learn in America, because we don't want to." The truth has been plain for ages: Prohibition just empowers cartels and gangs, it doesn't make society a better place to live, and in fact is one of the sources of social disintegration. But it serves narrow interests, some who are in-collusion with drug lords. Without prohibition, there would be almost no potential for bribery and similar forms of corruption, especially with a decentralized model granting private citizens the right to grow set amounts for personal use, never mind medical marijuana dispensaries.

Meanwhile, the executive branch is enjoying the ability to conduct unrestrained surveillance of everyone under the rubic of the war on terror and the war on drugs. The states are moving one way, while the federal government is moving another. There could be no greater example of counter-trends of the democratic versus anti-democratic other than the newfound freedom and ease of communication created by the Internet, but the legalization movement is surely another one when juxtaposed with the ever-widening surveillance state. This isn't simply a states' rights battle, though there is certainly a fear of opening that door. It underscores that there are natural tendencies towards the democratic and anti-democratic in all nation states.

What if we do witness the virtual legalization of marijuana for personal use in the United States? Will it be a blow against anti-democratic trends? That would be a major affirmative. American drug laws were first formulated as race laws and the statistics of who gets sentenced to the most time are implicitly clear: Minorities suffer the most for the same amounts as their Caucasian counterparts, and class is also an issue, the ability to pay adequately for one's own defense at trial. So, yes indeed, this will be a step forward for civil rights across the board for Americans if we can end prohibition of marijuana since it will lead to and end in the case of the other substances to interdiction and the punishment model.

"But who's going to sell it?" is the usual question. In the case of marijuana, it should be nobody. Again, it's a hardy and easily grown plant. Yes, there will still be a market for the "best," there always will be, but any good law decriminalizing the plant will have to include the right of private citizens to grow their own. The other substances? The government should be dispensing them for tracking and statistical purposes, just like Canada does with "The Beer Store," albeit I have no answers as to manufacture, though my preference would be by the government. The money made from these sales could just as easily go to addiction treatment programs.

Would we want corporations to manufacture heroin as a commodity? I don't think so, and believe that that would be the true road to Huxley's Brave New World. Corporations are only capable of being held-accountable through the power of government because nothing else is powerful enough to. Before we knew it, we could all truly be addicts were they to have complete control over the process. But a part of me wonders: Where is this all headed? Will legalizing marijuana make a big difference? I believe that it can, and likely will, offer a "third-path" model, but Americans are going to have a big fight on their hands with--no surprise here--corporations, and the people who service, defend, and have an abiding interest in them.

Will we be smoking pot in a police state? Stay tuned...

An important update on the upcoming DC Madam account...

Late last week, just a few days ago in fact, I had a major breakthrough in my research and analysis in this case, and one that could change everything. I'm not going to spill the beans--you're going to have to be patient on this one--but it has to do with the context of Jeane's suicide. No, there has been no concrete information forthcoming that the DC Madam was murdered, and your weird desire that it was so says more about you than it does about this case or this historical moment we're inhabiting together.

One giveaway, the only one anyone's getting before the publication of the account: I've written about it before, and it has to do with her being suicidal. There is actually someone specific who may be to blame for Palfrey's untimely death, and it has to do with official negligence.

My hope? That I'm right about this recent observation of the primary material, that others look into it further, and that, ultimately, it reopens the case in the form of a congressional investigation, an internal one. That's it. That's all you're getting.

Why Alex Jones will live forever

Why do you think? Nobody's ever going to assassinate this worthless piece-of-shit except maybe one of his followers, one of his audience, like George Lincoln Rockwell. Yes, there are people stupider than him: the morons that listen to his radio show and watch his clips, buy the merchandise, and frequent his opportunist advertisers.

Let's be crystal clear about this: these people are sick as well as semi-literate.

Malcolm X was real. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was real. Patrick Henry was real. All the Civil Rights workers and union organizers who were murdered by goons and corrupt cops were real. As nuts as he was, the radical Abolitionist John Brown was real. The murdered Illinois Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton was real. Even Bobby Kennedy was more real that this clown and his pack of retards, and he shares the same honor as the rest: he died for what was right. In fact, it's pretty obvious that they were so real that it was almost inevitable that they were going to die.

Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, Kurt Nimmo, Alex Constantine, and the rest of the conspiracy-mongers are not real, they're frauds, and they're selling an anti-government agenda, literally, to paranoid idiots. When people like this won't listen to you and go running to the irrational like some screaming Mullah, you know you're seeing a religion, a cult, and that makes them vaguely dangerous to the general public, but not the citadels of power. Were they a genuine threat, they would would at least be seeing some of the harassment we saw during the 1960s-70s that was unleashed on the antiwar movement generally, as well as all the other social justice groups and movements of that time. None of that is happening to Jones and company, contrary to their claims.

The whack-jobs will point to someone like Hal Turner, stupidly, being their lot in life, yet Turner unmasked himself as an FBI informant who was likely goading the same kinds of idiots into lawless action, a provocateur.

Who is Alex Jones? Really. At best, he's a craven liar and a demagogue, making money off of the whipping-up of fear and paranoia in a historical moment where it's literally yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. I will go as far as to say that much of what he says and writes is not protected speech and that his time is coming before long. It will be belated, but he's got to be taken down, and very, very hard. Quit going to his site. Quit allowing people to post links to those sites. Ignore him. Let him dry-up and blow away like he should have over a decade ago.

It's working with a certain GOP pundit with an enlarged Adam's apple...

By the way. Fucking grow-up.

BREAKING NEWS ON THE UPCOMING BLAGOJEVICH RETRIAL

DATELINE CHICAGO: Sources have it that former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's spiffy pate has secured legal representation. The former governor's pate wasn't available for comment, but his attorneys (hey, it's a man's hair, pffft!) have stated unequivicolly that the hair isn't sentient, and therefore, not responsible for the governor's untoward actions in office, if there even were any.

On the approaching tenth anniversary of 9/11: Time for a commemorative orgy

What should we all be doing on that day? What should we be thinking? Many will continue to be afraid, very afraid, of their own shadows and shadow-sides that are the terrorists, really an archetype of our own collective crimes. Let me be clear on this: Nobody who died in the attacks on September 11th, 2001 deserved to die.

It was a heinous crime against humanity since there were people from all over the world who were killed by a coterie of madmen who were being bankrolled by wealthy sources in Gulf State nations, nations such as Saudi Arbia, Kuwait, Pakistan-and-Ollie (yes, not a "Gulf State, thank you. I hope your ego's been mollified...look up "mollified."), and the rest of the Middle Eastern Lollipop Guild, the usual suspects who are supposed to be our "friends," "friends" of America.

Of course, those regimes aren't ours or anyone's friends, they're theocratic criminals.

Here's the real problem: Being our own worst enemy, we're our own worst enema. We've sold many of our basic rights for...for...for...no idea whatsoever, some weird-assed contention that 9/11 was more catastrophic than it really was. It was not. It was horrible, an underhanded crime committed by Gulf State nations, using proxies, and then we started blowing our own balls off, even before the Nigerian bourgie who unsuccessfully attempted the same on a flight to Detroit not so long ago. This is the threat? Gimme a fuckin' break...

Nonetheless, the Children of Fear are running around, jerking themselves off every year September 11th rolls around. Do they really care about the victims? Nah. People even have commemorative picnics, which has to be the most retarded bullshit I've ever heard of in my natural life. Next year, I'm having one for the sinking of the Lusitania (look it up, Class of 2014, ya' fuckin' morons...) and the Civil War ironclad, the Monitor. I gotta say--and I had a classmate who died in the WTC and know people who witnessed the event firsthand--that with all the co-opting and misuse of the memories of the dead, I'm beginning not to care anymore, and that's not my fault, but the fault of the scumbags who have tried to "own" 9/11 to use for political gain. The worst offenders are the former Bush II administration and the GOP, but once again, the Democrats are doing likewise, only with more cunning and guile. We would have no war on terror otherwise.

So, no, I'm not having a picnic on these days. Instead, I'm not going to "observe" it at all. We need to move on emotionally from this event and bury the dead. We need to stop blowing our own toes off in the name of concentrated wealth, because they've used 9/11 to protect the core of the most evil form of economy on earth, namely American-style capitalism. It can end in peace, or it can end in slaughter, and likely, the collapse of human civilization, but the world cannot take the war on terror in its current form for much longer. Let's quit pretending that 9/11 was the most important event in our history, we've blown its significance entirely out of proportion and handed over too many of our rights.

An unwanted Facebook solicitation...from Art Brown

Who's Art Brown? Don't ask the Class of 2014, they don't know shit from shine-ola. This guy is an idiot, he's an anarchronism, and he was being dishonest in the missive I got below from him in my Facebook private mail (meaning that I didn't ask for it, but accepting a friend request on there is often like playing Russian roulette...). Apparently, he wrote a book I heard about--Everything I Know, I Learned From Comic Books, or some such ephemeral shit.

He's also a businessman, so he's worn the alligator on his tit and the faux-cock around his neck, choking the oxygen-supply to his already addled-brain. I can't withhold this from you any longer, but here goes, what he wrote (minus the dumb Youtube clip whose link I'm not disseminating).

[F]Art wrote:

"Friends - it's time I "came out." My whole liberal viewpoint has been wrong. I see the light. Won't you kindly share this thoughtful and enlightening video with your friends as well? Thank you. You're welcome."

I didn't ask, and you're not welcome, Art. In an historic moment when--were we paying attention at all--it was obvious that the GOP and Reaganism put us where we are today, this oaf thinks he's got some magical conclusion: Liberalism was to blame. Wow, what a stretch that must have been, caving-into decades of pressure, then finally, finally letting that distended gut hang all the way out. That's great, you have fun with that, Art. At least you won't live forever.

I responded to the mass-mail I never asked for with:

Me too Art.

For years I thought, "They want to drive the nation to revolution, they're insane!" In fact, I was both right and wrong, and left, and in-the-middle: We in fact need a revolution, and by gum, the GOP is poised to take us over the cliff, once again, as they did during the 1920s and 1930s! History? Who needs that stuff! Inconvenient facts, coming from no less than Nobel Prize winning economists that the same road will mean collapse--communist lies!

And--you know--you'll get a free Bissel brush if you vote for them. And hey, how about those stolen elections and the crushing of dissent, disenfranchisement of minorities...

hugs, Matt Janovic
PS: I know, I hallucinated all those open crimes committed by Republicans over the last eight years, I was wrong!!

Will I read his response? Sadly, yes, I get amusement out of the flailings of the ignorant. However, he votes, and I'd dissuade him and anyone who ever has the urge to vote Republican to never vote again, for the rest of their natural lives. Yes, this isn't exactly "Liberal," but I'm more practical than Art or the rest of the Lollipop Guild, along with the More-Liberal-Than-Thou Crew (not to be confused with CREW, and not really Liberals at all).

What would I have done without Art? I wouldn't have been able to write this piece about a very, very misguided little man, a great example of why we're probably doomed.

"I am not a witch" is added to the political lexicon

Did people react like this during the Great Depression? Did they vote for dimwits like Christine O'Donnell? Sadly, they nearly did, there being no real "good old days" in the real world. As a matter of fact, people acted about as crazy as they are now, albeit with better results. True, the New Deal didn't go far enough--thanks to the business sector--but at least they voted for FDR.

Americans are a pretty nutty bunch, and O'Donnell just reminds us of this fact. Being "nutty" is alright at parties, but not likely to get good results as a congressional representative, especially a Senator. Yet, nutty is what we tend to elect. O'Donnell is another kind of nutty altogether, however, not that she's hateful.

Fine, lots of young women screw around with the Occult during their teen years, sit on a Satanic altar on their first date...they don't? Really? Whoopsie! Hey, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Remember 1999? Me either! What were you having for lunch on June 21st of that year? Me either! Remember the impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton? Remember unlimited credit disguising the fact that Americans were making shit wages, even then? What a time! But it had to end, like all false Edens.

O'Donnell said this on her 1999 Bill Maher appearance (apparently, she blew the entire production staff, starting with Maher): "One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she says. "We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar." As nutty as it sounds, I know of a woman from college who did this! "A little blood"?! OK, we don't want to start throwing the blood libel around here. Would this be tolerated from a Democratic candidate or anyone on the Left? Of course not.

Let's be clear: this isn't "normal" behavior, even to someone like myself who doesn't even believe in the Christian cosmology and certainly doesn't believe in the Devil, Belial, Cheeseburglar, and all shim's other supposed guises. Interestingly, we've gone from denying that we're actually the Devil (Nixon, during the Watergate hearings in 1973) in our politics to denying that we're a holder (witch) of the franchise license (O'Donnell), like a local businessperson who owns a Howard Johnson's (who?). OK, fine, you're not a Republican, just nuts...

So, here were are, 37 years later from the Watergate hearings, and somehow, some way, the GOP is still around. We've gone from "I am not a crook," to the obvious detached insanity of "I am not a witch." If that's not a warning sign with the bodies of dead canaries littered all around it, I don't know what is. What a fuckin' bimbo in our political stasis and limbo. We probably deserve her winning the election. Now dance, bitch...er, witch.

"Where's Waldo?" and an important announcement

I've been busy, very busy revising and editing my DC Madam account and caring for a family member after a surgery. Life gets in the way: The book on my experiences with the Palfrey scandal--as I call it--should be finished and available in 2011 and should clock in at around 400 pages, including an index.

Why so little writing on the blog? Why do so few people blog these days? Because it's not sustainable, like everything else these days. Additionally, I'm finding less and less reason to write and post at this site just one philosophical and dialectical grounds. I've come to the conclusion that less-is-more with the Internet, a word to the wise. There's also a point where all you're doing is reacting. That in itself isn't a problem, but too often we all fall into this rut. But, before long, unless there's some burning reason someone can come up with, I'll be moving on to other mediums. I won't be gone 100%, but don't expect more than a handful of posts each month. This takes us to a related subject...

I'm going to do working on a book with "Party Monster" Michael Alig's mother, primarily about his period of addiction leading to his downfall and the killing of Angel Melendez. We're going to have a simple Youtube clip soon with what should be an brief description of the project, possibly some contact information, and probably lots of spastic jerks and thwaggling around since that gets the most hits (we're all doomed, I know...).

Expect something good with the clip. Needless to say, a link will be posted here too.

The Tower of Babel: An exegesis in less than 1,000 words

Almost everyone living within the suffocating confines of Western civilization (and beyond, except the American Class of 2014) knows this tale, coming from a blurb in the Book of Genesis and other books: after the Flood, the survivors, sharing one language, decided to build a great tower to impress God. There was a unity of the people, really called "Shinar" in the Old Testament version. But God wasn't pleased with their work, and "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." (King James Version)

Once the tower ended, so too did the city of Shinar, it was over, and the people dispersed. There was no more society, just brigands, raiders, chaos. This is about the fall of a civilization. But why would "God" do this? There doesn't seem to be any logical reason. "God" just wanted to show who was boss. What this is, is allegory, once again.

The Priests and Sovereign of Babylon would do these things, more specifically to the captive tribal Jews, but could also be expected to have done the same to anyone under their sway. The Tower of Babel is about human hierarchy and how people tend more towards unity naturally, but that hierarchy is also natural and that it has a tendency to divide. The Priests were usually the only ones who could read and write, therefore, they controlled language, and they knew how to corrupt its use through religion to render communication between ordinary people almost useless.

That's where we're at right now as a society, a civilization. The Priests--the economists, the rich, the managerial class, the media, rotten lawyers, the military officers, the pundits, and so on--have corrupted language to the point that things are unraveling, society itself is coming-apart. A great deal of it is owed to this manipulation of language. Hierarchy might be inevitable, but its dysfunction can be controlled, my take. I'm sure this isn't the first time someone has "found" this interpretation, I make no high claims.

Once again: on the non-existent "Tea Party"

I'm not understanding what so-called liberals, Democrats, and the rest of us on the left and throughout the public aren't getting about these people: they're not a real political party or a movement, they're really just Republicans with no sense of irony or satire.

What don't you people get? They're still Republicans, they haven't changed at all, and no, it's not all about the fact that they cannot emotionally cope with a Black American president. It's not the entire picture with these clowns. Yes, I agree with the logic of the question, "Well, where were they when Bush was wrecking the country?" Where indeed?

I'll tell you where: they were yelling that they were part of his camp, crowing "WE'RE driving the bus NOW!" and making general asses of themselves as is their wont to do. They can't help it. This is why they're continuing on their Children's Crusade over a cliff, and once again, parading their insufficiency as functional, reasoning human beings. We already know that many of them are small businessmen over 40. When you look at the composition of their rallies, it's not inclusive. The majority of the faces are white, male, and middle-aged. What it comes off as is a last, dying gasp of the worst elements of the Baby Boomer generation, a generation fixated on their own entitlement, but not especially atypical in such regards.

None of this flailing, posing, and of course, yelling, is going to fix America anytime soon, but that's why billionaire far right extremists like the Koch dynasty are bankrolling many of these fake populist gatherings. They know that these are the inevitable deficits of humanity that one finds in all modern societies, the eternally lost, the naive, the stupid. None of this is truly real. Yes, some of these people began at the urging of the small-minded Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, but this was never a spontaneous rising of the public.

An admittedly compacted and generalized schematic is in order:

1. A segment of fiscal and socially conservative Republicans feel burned by the Bush II administration at its endpoint. They got even more government under his term, and Roe v. Wade is still standing. They begin denying in public that they're Republicans, and frequently misquote the Constitution for no apparent reason.

2. Barack Obama is elected the first African-American President of the United States because he is not George W. Bush or a Republican.

3. Shit hits the proverbial fan and freaks like Ron Paul and Dick Armey begin the push to stimulate what has been mislabelled ever since (by the very people within it and backing it) as a "movement." It is not a movement, more a controlled rabble. The fragmentary "group"is really just a demographic of mostly petty bourgeois held together by one thing: they don't like that the Democrats won the election (some even hinting at insurrection, no less), but that they really don't like Barack Obama. Oh yes, and they don't like paying taxes...at all. Many of them also have a weird emotional attachment to the rich and perversely fight for that group's right not to pay any taxes.

4. No need for a replay of the health care debate.

5. Meanwhile--back at the ranch--all these "Tea Baggers" are denying that they're Republicans.

6. The 2010 midterms loom, and people denying they're Republicans vote once again for Republican candidates, most-of-whom are chosen by the RNC to run, to serve the interests of Wall Street and the rest of the Lollipop Guild.

Now, exactly why are they any different and what are they doing that's any different, ultimately? This is truly impossible to satirize. There is no Tea Party. It's not a party. It's not a real group. It's a Shibboleth, put out there as a distraction. Mission accomplished.

Irrational demands...

...must be met with irrational answers. Be reasonable, respond with the improbable.