Anger Management and George Tenant, Kansas Tornado Warns of More Katrinas, Stewart, Colbert, Matthews, and The Threat-Down!!

I don't have an anger management problem, and for the most part I am not an especially angry person, except for a few hormonal days per month when I suddenly become acutely aware of my desire to rip off the head of whoever is standing in front of me...But I don't act on it and I'm pretty balanced about those feelings...feelings pass, you know? (Just ask William how much I yell at him...Ha!)
The thing is that I was watching Tenant on hardball the other evening after receiving calls saying to be sure to catch the 7 PM rerun because Chris Matthews takes Tenant apart and how I shouldn't miss it...and I usually tune in while I putter around anyway, so....I found myself getting more and more angry at Tenant's seeming inability to reflect on his part in the deaths of so many, many people. All I see is explanation upon explanation, too little too late, and dead bodies.
Of course I'm somehow endlessly fascinated in the inside glimpse into the loony bin that was and is the Bush White House, but how could any human being have the knowledge that this guy had, or even the dawning realization of something being amiss, and not immediately stand up and yell about it?
So many people have said to me that, of course he would keep quiet because he has kids and a family, and back then the atmosphere was so tense that no one could stand up. My answer to that is that usually no one stands up until SOMEONE DOES! And that person is usually a person who is courageous and who sets themselves and their interests aside in the interest of something greater than the self. Last I heard, humans still had the ability to reason, and that we were still trying to overcome our basest instinct of complete self interest, especially when so much is on the line.
If this guy, a supposed expert, can't project ahead from a historical standpoint, maybe he could've at least worried about his grandkids...his own seed going forward...? Or was it all just immediate self interest?
I know that hes not the first or last American who has kept his mouth shut on this, but I find it completely reprehensible that, not only has he has made this book deal and profited greatly from the deaths of so many people, but that he so vehemently hangs onto his medal of freedom, which he views as an award for fighting terrorism in general as opposed to the mess in Iraq. I would say that its not deserved for fighting terrorism OR for the Iraq debacle!...and I would also say that not only does he not deserve it but that as a human being he shouldn't want it.
The one thing that these clowns have managed to do is to make sure that no one trusts the government...not to protect sensitive information unless it benefits someone in there personally or to protect us...and forget trusting the government to stand by their side of any deal such as enlistment papers that usually are laden with small print beyond what most kids can understand...If the point was to serve the higher power of the sensitivity of covert agents and actions and secret information, then Tenant is a huge failure because he is picking and choosing what was and is important to HIM in a situation where an agent was outed and...well, worse...much worse...and he stood by taking notes for a book!

So, the democrats and republicans apparently have found themselves united on one thing: we all hate Tenant...and its only leading to more book sales, better shows for everyone from Matthews to Stewart, and soldiers, civilians, and children are still dying and being horribly injured.
I haven't read the book, and I doubt I will unless I come across it in the cutout bin, because from what I can tell, its not an honest assessment of anyone who is able to admit to personal fault in any of this.... I just think that in matters that are this important on every level, at some point he should have walked away.
To say that, you know, of course he has a family and he was worried about what would become of him if he spoke up...or who knows if the information would even have been received, is the same as saying that the people who bravely powered the civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, and everyone in the world who hid a Jew during the holocaust should have just kept quiet and done nothing...at times when the stakes were certainly higher considering that people were getting shot and lynched ...actually killed.
Its not like Tenant was in the Jack Bauer world where upon his first dissent he would be dealt a quick, clean bullet to the head, (or a torn out jugular, torn by teeth!...pick your poison.)

The strange thing about this Tenant thing is that he is an extremely odd bird who seems to jovially take the flagellation and somehow remain grounded in his own certainty. People like that make me nervous. If everyone attacked me like that I would be dead just from the stress hormones alone!

Tenant, on Jon Stewart's show last night, stated his reason for writing this book now as being a "historical obligation" towards young people; that he had to tell what we got right and what we got wrong...Jon Stewart asked if Tenant might not be suffering from accessibility, in that he is the only person that we can yell at (chuckle.) The Thing about Tenant is that he doesn't answer alot. He sort of chuckles in answer and moves on to what we need to do now.
Tenant said that he feels that we may have been wrong on WMD but is right on post-war Iraq and terrorism in general (hang on to that medal George, it may be all you have left!)
He goes on and on about the fact that he doesn't make policy, and that his analysts never changed their stances, but he seemingly feels that it was RIGHT to stay in his job back then and to just offer his point of view...or so he says...and his attitude is so flippant about the whole thing that...there is almost a disconnect in his affect and what is going on. Like, doesn't he feel BAD in the least.
hell, I had nothing to do with any of it besides my little corner of the universe here with bumper stickers, signs and calls to my representatives, and I feel so bad that I didn't do more...
So, Tenant is reflecting...supposedly telling the truth (chuckle,) but I'm thinking that the real truth must be SO MUCH WORSE THAN THIS...and he seems really disingenuous about the whole thing (chuckle...)
Y'know, I'm not gonna go off on cognitive dissonance again, but I really think that this guy has a major screw loose and that if he feels like NOW is the time to sit back and muse on all of this, then...Jesus!...share it with us? Do I want to be part of this guy's mental illness? I think he is full of shit, and I also think that in throwing us a bone that seems all so bad about the inside workings of the government, he is covering up what is going ot be alot worse than we can imagine!
Ultimately, I'm really surprised that Jon Stewart, of all people, didn't stand up and say, "What the fuck is the matter with you?" Maybe that would have ended the interview...but it seems like even Jay Leno would have dropped a "what the hell were you thinking?" sort of line....and if its press that Stewart is looking for, I don't think a Fresca is gonna do it.




So, who did Oprah endorse for president? What a no-brainer!...and especially for Jill the Brilliant Threat # 1 according to Steven Colbert...Its KNUT!! Here is The Threat-down....a little levity in an otherwise grim situation:










Back in the angry reality about where our resources are concentrated these days, I wonder what would happen if the press besides Huffpo and limited small bits here and there, actually picked up on the story of the Kansas tornadoes and whats happened there, or not happened there as the case may be. This should be a front page screaming story because its a WARNING that Katrina lives and is coming our way!
How many people died under the rubble because all of the area's resources are in Iraq and the nearest help was 2 days away? (floaty and drownie, indeed!)
This is just the beginning, folks....and we have to wait till after the summer to even revisit the SURGE! What has to happen for people to look at this?
Our infrastructure is crumbling, people are dying, and Joe Scarborough is actually OK in Imus' place on MSNBC mornings...These are signs of the end times!

On the home front, Ive apparently got 6 eggs in the nest! The birds so seldom come out that its really hard to check them, hence my ongoing counting. The other night I got a good look and feel and from what I can tell, there are 6 and they are warm and...hopefully alive! Day 25 for egg#1 is on Friday, so I will be closely watching and I will have to start officially checking soon to make sure that no one is stuck in an egg...though it can take a chick 2 days to get out of an egg and during the hatching process they absorb the rest of the yolk, so its important not to panic and "help" them too soon....passing the time, meantime, watching movies that I missed this year and...
my new Midnight Special DVDs arrived, and the frequency with which Olivia Newton John shows up on these things reminds me of the depth of my alienation when I was a teen. I often watch these and send them back but Ive kept a few...and these may be keepers...but then, probably not...Hall and Oates-Kiss On My List...nah...Olivia N-J-Magic...ick....Syreeta & Billy Preston-With you I'm Born Again...that's it...the thing goes back.
No amount of America's Sister Golden Hair or Willie Nelson's Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain can make up for any of this...back they go!
Remember kids, this was the late night show that broke through the nothingness after the late shows and the ultimate loneliness of the anthem playing over a waving flag and then...snow....
But there was something good about the fact that TV went off at a point. It didn't run our lives back then...it was finite. Yes its true...and we only had 3 or 4 channels...and some of us even had only black and white till we were teens! For the longest time, we actually had one little TV for sound and one for b&w picture...and then the one for picture would only work on its back so we would stand above it and look down to watch it. Ah, the simple old days....what was left back then except to read a book...smoke pot...wander the neighborhood aimlessly.... waiting to grow up.

The Rapture of the Bees...Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?...

Sorry to disappoint any fundamentalists out there, but its about as likely that God has raptured the bees to heaven to pollinate his heavenly crops as it is that hes gonna be rapturing you anytime soon! The NY Times Science Times this week had another piece on the mysterious and alarming disappearance of whole colonies of bees, called "colony collapse disorder." As their name implies, the most likely reasonable and scientific explanations are fungus, virus, or pesticides. But the snippet about the theories that abound on the internet and that bee rapture is one of them, are just great....As Marc Maron says in his current live show (appearing tonight and for the next few nights in LA with Janeane Garafolo and Henry Rollins...its a great show...check it out if you're out west!,) how fun a day will the rapture be for those of us who are unbelievers?...How great to see those "good" rapturous Christians go shooting off into the air like fireworks!
I had read somewhere, on some blog which I cant remember (but if anyone knows please let me know so I can give credit,) that also, of course we get their stuff. They wont need it in heaven anyway where they will have halos wings and apparently ...bees! They can also take the mosquitoes, mayflies, and houseflies too...oh, and the huge wasp that is stuck in the bathroom light upstairs...ok?...are we not all God's creatures?

In all seriousness, we have to get to the bottom of this bee thing or we are going to be looking at a huge and quick change in the foods available on this planet. Earth day always does this to me...Its the day before my birthday and I remember that even when I was a little kid that my Mom would take me to fairs in Brooklyn where we would buy ladybug and praying mantis eggs to put in the garden (not our garden, but Mom kept a line of pots and bulbs planted along the fence and constantly threw things like lady bug eggs onto the cocktail parties going on over there...don't even ask about the eggs hatching in the house because she forgot they were on the windowsill over the kitchen sink!....) I grew up with this strong feeling instilled in me of the earth as a fragile thing that was, back then, in danger...Ah, the 70's, when we were so innocent. The worst thing was the gas lines or that Jimmy Carter's rescue plans went bad...
I always get more environmental around my birthday, what with the spring coming and the growing urgency of what is going on, between what we have learned from Al Gore's movie and the press that problems like this bee problem are getting.

In much, much less serious matters, Maureen Dowd has weighed in this week twice on non-issues that are probably not worth the 0's and 1's used here to transmit this into the internet tubes. And no, I'm not going to waste anyone's time by posting them because they are...um...as vapid as she has been since her little vacation, and probably alot before that too...not even snarkily clever or cute...just stupid. You can always do a Google search for where they're posted if you haven't got Times Select, but if I were a paid Times Select reader (rather than a NY Times hard copy subscriber who gets Select in the package,) I would think twice about what I'm paying for. Dowd is quickly making herself irrelevant as she consistently focuses on what she, herself, in some previous incarnation, might point out to be be the silly girly pink story.
There are so many important stories being reported and/or not reported at all, and I cant believe that Edward's hair bills and Michelle Obama's chiding her husband are the most important things that she is thinking about. I guess that its a good sign that I'm not hanging on to her solely because she has been one of the few semi-reasonable voices in the press during the desperate times over the past 6+ years. Its a good sign that so many reporters have found their voices out there and that Americans are opening up to the truth and that its being reported more regularly.
So, do we need Dowd? In my mind, she is unimportant to the current discourse, and unless she finds something that grabs her attention that isn't about sitcom marital squabbles or a candidates hair, I'm not interested.
This is the thing: It serves a certain portion of our society to keep the majority in the dark about how the monied minority lives. In a capitalist society any of us can become rich enough to go to a salon that is going to charge more or less for a haircut, as long as it doesn't hurt or inconvenience anyone else. If that person spends $400 on a haircut and never gives to charity or has an attitude that the resources are god given rather than the product of hard work and the luck of the system, then maybe we can talk about it a bit and what it means in the bigger picture to be driving a Hummer with a Bush-Cheney sticker on it.
If the poor of this country are going to be caught up in how much a haircut costs, or that Al Franken got 2 million dollars from Air America, or any of these little facts that are presented in a vacuum, as if people aren't spending billions of dollars on every little thing that you or I can get cheaper with a coupon (not to mention the war, which has no real purpose, and has served to funnel more money into the pockets of those same rich folks, and I'd like to see the production bills on that spin machine!,) then they are not focusing on the real issues. The majority of this country is supposed to be surprised that things in New York City cost what they do, and rather than ask why those people are getting a tax cut, go out and buy a lottery ticket and hope against hope that they will be the one in 10 million who can join those ranks. To focus on what you cold buy with that $400 is not the point, but its what people like Dowd seem to want you to look at. Its almost like Michelle Malkin sneering "Dont you just wonder sometimes if maybe he didn't shoot himself in the leg just to garner sympathy?"....I say, what is it that I am not looking at because I'm being told to look over there at that shiny thing!?


John Edwards is rich; get used to it. Unlike the Bushies though, he has made his money by representing cases that, if you get past the "ambulance chaser" label, were actually class actions having to do with big business knowingly cutting corners and hurting people like you and me. Those people were also compensated in as large a sense as their lawyer was. He is not a guy who has stood outside of hospitals looking for someone who just got in a fender bender ( I've known some of those and they are not John Edwards...at least they are not spending any time running the Southern Poverty Law Center or the like.) If a lawyer who takes a large class action case does so for a portion of the proceeds, and the award is huge, (as they are usually set by the jury, which is also supposedly a sampling of people just like you or me,) then why would anyone in this capitalist society deny him the fruits of that labor? Isnt it a double standard to pin that label on Edwards before looking at his record in these things? Does he really belong in the same catagory as 1-800-LAW-YERS? And isn't our anger at lawyers in this society misdirected anyway? Who hasnt sat across from a lawyer and looked at the clock counting the hundreds of dollars slippign away? Who hasnt shot the shit on the telephone with their lawyer only to see that the shit shooting time is included in the bill? It seems to me that that there are bad ones and good ones. Maybe they are overpaid in some areas, and maybe the structure of some of these all or nothing class actions is wrong...but, I think that we might not see many of those cases if the class cant be empowered by a lawyer who is willing to risk his or her time in an all or none gamble...and surely, large corporations like tobacco compaanies have not been lining up historically to release information on the detrimental and deadly dangers of their products.

So then, as a public person, in a society that is almost completely based on looks, he is criticized for having a stylist and for getting a haircut....? Dowd thinks that Edwards should go to the barber on Capital Hill, just like her dad did when it cost 25 cents to get a haircut...huh? Is that what she does before making public appearances? The guy is and was running for President of the United States....and if this is such an issue, I think that its time for us to demand the stylist bills from all of the candidates. If Edwards is going to be vilified for his cuteness, then I think we need to see all of the evidence...because, I would expect that the bills for all the rest of them are probably just as high. The difference is who holds up an entire airport by blocking a runway while waiting for a haircut, and who only spends time at spas and does nothing charitable in the world? Or, more to the point, at Dick and Lynn Cheney's totally solar powered compound in Wyoming, does the salon just come to them in a dark sedan? I expect that we are paying for it no matter if its called the Pink Sparkle Diamond Girl's Club or Joe's Head polishing and Bullet removal Service I just don't think that you can compare the life of a John Edwards, running from place to place and making public appearances, to ...me or you. And the truth is that the stylists who style TV and print are different in that they know about how color looks on screen and how to correct what would be a deathly white look under certain lights. They are also union workers in many cases and I don't know how reasonable it is to use a local barber to prepare for television appearances or if you wouldnt end up crossing a picket line at a film studio somewhere, depending on what the preparation was for. In the YouTube world, I would consider that a pretty reasonable cost. If he went to a local salon with a stupid name for highlights because he was reading washed out on camera, or his campaign wants to position him as sun washed, what is it to Dowd? Hell, 50 or 60 years ago when Dowd was a little girl, times were different in Washington...but, I would venture to say that she is part of the machine that stands poised to tear a John Edwards down for a bad haircut or unmatched foundation, so he is doing the right thing in making sure that he stays blow dried and streaked, and it is a campaign cost, just as surely as the clothes that he wears for appearances are.
I'd be interested in knowing how many consultants and stylists were paid to reconfigure Hillary's frumpiness or Rudy's hair (that must have taken an army!)...I could go on, buts lets not....
I'm not gonna link to it, so again, you'll have to go find it, but today Dowd insults her readers by questioning the relationship between Barak and Michelle Obama and if it plays well that she jokes around with him about the god on the campaign trail vs. the man at home who cant pick up after himself.
If Hillary can knowingly wink at her audience about what its like to live with a philandering egotistical man...any man...then so can Michelle. Dowd feigns concern that it might come off as too motherly and as if Barak is a young child answering to his mommy...did she actually say the word emasculating? She then goes on to say that if Michelle knows so much about how Barak should act then why didnt she know about X,Y, or Z business mistakes in the past?...huh? Is that it Maureen? Is that all you've got?




Michelle and Barak Obama might be according to Dowd, the George and Weezy Jefferson of this campaign, and though I am not supporting him for #1 I find him interesting for the future, (and of course I will support whoever the Dems ultimately come out with,)is it not sort of degrading to choose the jeffersons over the Cosbys? W
hat is Dowd exactly saying here? That young black people, or just any black people regardless of age, have to be careful not to present themselves as real people with real dialogue besides that hip hop rap or extremely silly Dyn-o-mite! image that we are supposed to have of them. If Dowd's advice is to try to not be who you are, then I would probably suggest running quickly in the other direction. It seems to me that most candidates who have tried to reshape their image or change their message as part of who they are, have failed.
Its been my feeling for years that if any of these Dems were to actually drop the artifice and just say what they think without the consultants hanging all over them, that maybe they would end their careers in one way it might begin it in another. Like Howard Dean lost everything, though it was arguably ended for him by whoever decided to turn down the crowd and release the track of just his howling voice, he was hardly ever not himself and he spoke truth to power. Most of these politicians would prefer to get into office, sacrificing some of their beliefs, however possible, in order to make a bigger change. But, many of them find that once you've begun to change things up in what you really believe in, it a slippery slope. I would prefer to see some of these people go down in a blazing glory, and have gotten something into the record for future generations, than to have pandered to the powers, cultural and otherwise, in order to shape an image that is really just part of so many sheep...
So, stop wasting my time, and your space in the NY Times, which is a pretty big platform, talking about bullshit. I understand, as Mom says, that Dowd has been out for some vacation, and it does sound like she is phoning it in while writing a book or whatever it is that these people do in their spare time. But, there are so many things going on right now, that it seems pretty damned counterproductive to tell the whole country what you probably should just be telling your friends over lunch.



2-3 eggs in the nest box so far, people....We are now 8 days into the cycle for egg #1, and if they're fertile, 23-25 days in I might hear a little peep peep. I have been ordered by my friends in the bird world to NOT look in the box...they told me quite dramatically, that the eggs would DIE a horrible death if I looked (and they know me well enough to know that that is probably the only thing that would stop me from hanging round the box making little birdy sounds to try to get the Mom out so I can peek!)....This is not easy for me....So I have to confess to shining a little flashlight into the hole on the nestbox to some pretty angry and squinting little eyes ruffling up and trying to adjust so that I CAN'T SEE!!!

And one more

thing: Ive got a great tool of the day, week, year for any of you who use eBay. This is a machine that gives you common typos for the names of things...which is how you find the best stuff on eBay. Sellers who make typos tend ot get lower prices because the search engines are not smart like...say, google, which will suggest different spellings.
Check this out: TypoSnipe

All is fair in love and eBay!