Le Roi c'est Moi

5 April 2008

FOX

This oddment stuck to my desk.  I think it was a note sent by The Pessimist to Fox, the non-News television network, in apparent outrage over something one of their goons said:

You are, as all the world knows, the propagandist for the worst that we, as Americans, represent. Ironic that you should be led by a man who left his nation and his citizenship for pecuniary reasons. Not ironic at all, that the news organization has been built by a man who makes Rove look like a slightly soiled Gandhi. A man who did not die of brain cancer but inspired one who did, to be vicious. So be it. This piece, like many others of yours, is intellectually useless, is meant to coalesce the ignorant, who adore you. May you rot in hell. Thanks.

I think that's probably right.

daddy!!!

Nice Photo, Problematic Man

The Dalai Lama is not one of my favorite guys.  I am also not big on people starving while white cows walk around, either. Nor am I pleased that he has not tried to work something out with the Chinese to minimize conflict with his co-religionists. He may not have helped foment the recent unpleasantness but has not been enormously helpful.

While we are on the subject of theocracies and "spirituality", that reverence for the wisdom of the East stuff makes me dyspeptic.  Note that the ecstatic hikers and less vigorous travelers who return from Tibet, Nepal, or India singing the praises of the believers are not likely to be living on the same diet as the admirees, but are doing real well, thank you; some are  wearing Mephisto shoes at $350 a whack, to boot. (Terrible unintended word play.)  

Anyhow, back to the DL.  

When the last  DL died some monks had a dream that a reincarnation of the original guy was in a little village.  They went and found this little kid  and at some very early age he became the DL.  For more reliable information you might look here.

The monks and the DL historically lived off of the work of the peasants in Tibet.  Tibet was a feudal society when the Dalai Lama and the aristocracy were running the country.  This was not James Hilton's Lost Horizon.  It was more like the pre-Civil War American South, with the peasants playing the role of America's Negroes.  (See this for more.)

While nobody extols the virtues of police and army shooting civilians, which has happened in Tibet recently in response to unrest of some of the population, it must be made clear that, in general, the general quality of life and the physical well-being of the average Tibetan, is much greater under the Chinese reintegration  (for which there is strong and long historical justification) than under the DL.  

What's going on in Tibet is partly ethnic unrest as well as conflict over the more practiced entrepreneurs who saw opportunity and have been seen by the older Tibetan population as illegitimately successful.  

Change is hell but this will work out for the general good of Tibetans.  The DL could be more helpful to make that happen more quickly.

daddy!!!

Conservatism is Dying?

Maya sent this piece about the death of conservatism.  Interesting, she says.  You may agree with that.

daddy!!!

John McCain Sorry

You may have heard that John McCain has said he was wrong to have voted against recognizing Martin Luther King's greatness by declaring a holiday in his name.  

Do you just get the notion that he's sorry because he never thought he would need the good will of the dark folk?  Just maybe?

Here, once again, the famous miracle photo when John found his dad: 

19 March 2008

DAVID MAMET!!!! 

Just another guy who has made too much dough (Saul Bellowish? also a Chicago guy) Mamet has decided it is time to join the other circled wagons. 

Mamet's 12 years of education were wasted in terms of critical thinking.  He is....a schmuck with too much money and with a literary "style" that makes you want to run from the room.  But then there are less passionate views than mine.  Maybe he and Meg Witman can get together.  He's about due for a new wife.  The present one can not act.

daddy!!!

16 March 2008

MEG WHITMAN TO AUCTION ANTIQUE?

Heard there is going to be a big eBay auction of John McCain in the Antiques section.  Turns out I misunderstood.  Meg Whitman is going to co-chair his national effort to become president of the US.  If anyone knows how to sell stuff from the attic it is Meggy. 

You should also know that Meg is a devotee of Ayn Rand, a kind of Rasputin in drag, whose awful Atlas Shrugged has inspired people as no other book than Gone With The Wind has.  Though each in his or her own way.  Gone With...I don't give a damn,  to encourage a love of camp, I'll give a damn later camp,  Atlas... to the love  of money, the devil take the hindmost. Or the devil take the odd old prisoner of war who is more than just erratic in the congress and just a bit more than unsteady on the domestic side.  But then Hillary has been sort of steady, so where does that contrast leave us??

________________

daddy!!!

13 March 2008

Alan Dershowitz wrote a smart column for the 18th century paper of choice, the WSJ.  (If you gotta ask you'll never know, as the jazz player said.) 

He wrote of two matters:  One, that there could be some reason to believe that the enormous efforts, hours, and money spent on tracing Number Nine's few thousands of dollars in checks, recording of phone calls, and interception of emails related to hiring a hooker might have been political payback.  You think?

And Two, that the whole business of prosecuting Johns, as Number Nine and Numbers One through Numbers Several Million, are known, just might not be a reasonable thing to do in the first place. Victimless crimes, he said.

Now we have a guy who had some value to the society out in the cold, estranged from government and family.  His alliances with the latter will be repaired, as they seem like stand-up people as exhibited by his wife's behavior and his mother-in-law's words. Even though he is a schmuck The Pessimist wishes him well.

Yet Cheney is at large and on a peace mission.  Huh???!

12 March 2008

Okay, Let's Get Real ®

First, Geraldine Ferraro, the previously crazy vice-presidential candidate, is still crazy.  And doesn't know it.  Really, she doesn't know it.  But she did get fired from raising money (they call firing resigning, now) for having said the N word without quite saying it.  Even the dumbest among the press knew what she meant.  That's how blatant it was.  It was so obvious that even Hillary Clinton, not presently in therapy for borderline personality, knew it.  

Second, Hillary Clinton, the aggrieved wife who pretended not to know that Plow Boy Bill was getting oral presentations downstairs while Hill was upstairs practicing presidential poses, despite the fact he had plowed more women during their marriage than a Kansas  corn farmer plows acres, is Karl Rove in drag.  

She is a screamer, liar, vicious person.  She wants what she wants and she doesn't care how she gets it.  She is filled with entitllement and guile in equal parts.  And yet she is also an hysteric.  Interesting.  We talk about this next time, yah?

This is a picture of her about to put her fangs into the neck of a dark person, another one of those really lucky dark persons who would be nobody if she was not a dark person. (See Ferraro, The Luck Of The Dark People, NY 2008, Eugenics Press)  

Third, Eliot Spitzer did a lot of good. He was a good prosecutor who brought a lot of fat cats to justice. He bought his sex, thus adding to a slumping economy.  He did not use free interns.  

He embarrassed himself, his wife, everyone who committed to him.  He was a schmuck.  But the law he broke stinks, though he took credit for enforcing it.  Screwing for money is an old business.  As old as politics.  Making it illegal is silly.

19 February 2008

LET'S GET REAL®

Dear, dear, dear Hillary.  

That Let's Get Real line really should lead to someone's firing.  It embarrasses the listeners.  Drop it.    

Get real.

18 February 2008

Now For Something Completely Irrelevant

Nuts like Chris Matthews, and others, news pimps who have to fill up the chewing gum for the eye, AKA television, so they can cash their soiled checks, buy cufflinks and/or eyeliner, are spending a lot of time talking about a non story.  What's new about that?  Oh, just that it is, at the moment, a non story about a speech phrase or two that a governor has already talked about as one/ones he suggested that his friend, Barack Obama, should feel free to appropriate.  (Google Deval Patrick, Obama, palgiarism in the New York Times and you will find what I am talking about. This is from a Reuter's story:

The Obama and Clinton speech flap stemmed from a Democratic party dinner in Milwaukee on Saturday, when Obama refuted Clinton's criticism he is all words and no action. "Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama said.

"'I have a dream' -- just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words?"' Obama said at the dinner. The lines drawn from U.S. history were similar to a Patrick speech from his successful 2006 Massachusetts campaign for governor.

Obama, talking to reporters on a Monday morning trip to Ohio before returning to Wisconsin, said Patrick had suggested he use the lines and they frequently traded ideas.

"I was on the stump. He had suggested that we use these lines and I thought they were good lines," Obama said, adding he should have acknowledged Patrick as the author.

"I'm sure I should have -- didn't this time," he said. "I really don't think this is too big of a deal."

Obama's campaign released a list of quotes from Clinton using some of Obama's catchphrases, and Obama cited some to reporters.

"When Senator Clinton said it's time to 'turn the page' in one of her stump speeches, or said she's 'fired up and ready to go,' I don't think anybody suggests that somehow she's not focused on the issues she's focused on," he said, adding he doubted Ohio or Wisconsin voters cared about the controversy.

So, here's one of the people blabbing the nonsense on the tube, still at large, though there are many who think that institutionalization might be the most responsible thing for public safety.

And to think that this guy once worked with Tipp O'Neil.  On the other hand he has a Republican congressman brother, I am told. That Irish wise-guy altar boy pose makes me want to fwow up, said Dorothy Parker.  I can not think of any of the news hookers outside of the well-informed and earnest Tim Russett who is worthy of looking at on commercial channels.  Thank goodness for c-span and a warm not so bad for PBS.

Given the interest in bottom feeding, the Clinton people, the get of Billary, ought to be honorary Roveians.  

17 February 2008

Last Night In Wisconsin

Alright, I confess.  When the presidency... and thus our country's future ... is at stake, I put the tube on a lot.  MSNBC for those who are still on television and not serving "go to your room" time for incredible stupidity and crudeness.  (Why that one-time employee of Tip O'Neil is still working is beyond me.  I think a serious brain scan might be in order.  But I digress.) That network with Wolf somebody and a prematurely white haired guy, CNN, I think.  Pick your poison.  Then there's CSPAN.

CSPAN showed the Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner proceedings.  Wisconsin is a special place, a state that knows the meaning of progressive and has even flirted with the notion of  the S word (socialism) in its time.  It has sent fine people of strong humanist leanings to congress.  It values hard work and fair play.  In a curious way, I think it could be France but with less good cheese.

I tuned in as a woman I did not know introduced Hillary Clinton. (She may have been the second highest state or city official who has suported Mrs. Clinton. I have not queried the net.)  She did a good job with apparent enthusiasm for her subject.  Her subject came out in that blue pant suit.  She looked enthusiastic, rested, and fit and then went about giving a speech that was pretty poor and awkward.  She is not a great speaker.  I am not either.  Most people I know are not. Yet, when wanting to be president of the US these days it is a bloody requirment that you be photogenic, good at presentation, and/or singularly quirky enough to get a pass on the above and to intrigue.  (The latter gives McCain some little advantage on the "pass" side.)  Mrs. Clinton, alas has none of the above.  

Her vocal modulation is all wrong.  She does that thing that amateurs do to make a point ... go out of natural register and shout.  It hurts the hairs on the back of your neck and you involuntarily blush.  And so much of the talk was the me-too-ism of the also ran.  I do not gloat, I observe and report what I though I saw.  One phrase dominated and confused:  let's get real.  It sounded so forced and so retro that I thought that were I she I would immediately fire whichever bozo wrote that phrase down as soon as I exited stage left.  I assume it was not she.  "You know" was also used again and again.  As was change.  Spare change, anyone?

The audience seemed to be accepting and enthusiastic .  She was warmly received and exited to applause.

The Governor introduced Barack Obama.  He is a moderately good speaker... two fluffs in a short intro ... but was very enthusiastic for the candidate he he had endorsed.  

Obama got good applause and made a stump speech with local modifications.  I have heard most of it before (The interesting thing about Mrs. Clinton's speeches is that they are not the same stump speech all of the time.  The shifting sands beneath her feet require constant retooling so as to send the newest message the current heads of her operation think are necessary to get or keep people on board. Not the same but still forced and boring and sometimes a tad shrill.)  

Though you don't start paragraphs with "But" I would do so here, except I have avoided it by the word that proceed the main thought, which is, But he is so good at it that you must marvel at it and its rhythms and its relative accuracy and its fullness as this man seeks the presidency "of the United States .beat. of America.  

His polish is extraordinary, his message fits my needs, while knowing that the realities of power may nix much of the intent/goal,  That is what is known as politics.  Executive/Legislative/Judiciary and all that.  

The reception to what he said was strong and, according to what I read in today's Times' (NY and LA) bigger and louder and longer than herself's.  All we need is Ted Mack or Major Bow and it's The Original Amateur Hour all over again as the applause meters are evaluated.  Television is a lousy medium.  CSpan makes up for the editorial nonsense.  But reporting is, in general, pretty poor  The process is reviewed again and again but the substance takes the hindmost.  (Substance?  We missed that class at journalism school.)  

So now we wait...or most of us do, Hillary having split for Texas where she was going to dust off a cowgirl costume.  Cut and run to cutting the heifers from the herd.  

I don't know.  This whole thing makes me both anxious and grumpy.  I think she is a sham who thinks it is owed her.  I think the party is a shambles, what with this super-delegate crap and the hanging chad of Florida.. do we count em or not?  He is the great Beige Hope, a Kennedy-esque fellow of intellect and authority and with a message of that now dirty word, Hope, as in The Man From Hope.  (What was his name?  Is that a stuffed ballot box in his pocket or is he just happy to see me?)

Democracy is tough and the guy who figured out the demographics, as George Trow suggested a fairly long time ago, was some kind of evil monster who changed the culture in ways that disallow its retrieval.

What Do You Say About an ex-Prisoner of War without Sounding Callous???

17 February 2008

Meantime, little to say about McCain.  Dicey, seventy-two, will fill the Supreme Court with Imams, will stay in Iraq until he or we are dead.

16 February 2008

War, Or Standing By Anybody Is Hell

Interesting "Stand By Your Woman" site:  http://dakotawomen.blogspot.com/2008/02/hillary-clinton-again.html 

Proof that love is hell.  Like war, and war you voted for... but didn't really vote for. Sort of.  Kind of.  Explain this to them, Bill. You  lived with her in the White House for eight years. Help us.

Yesterday

Have a look:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/14/did-hillary-clinton-reall_n_86674.html

This is what drives people crazy about herself. Or one of the things. I know there are many for me, though goodness knows I tried to love her.  

She says, "I didn't really love NAFTA.  That was Bill's thing, and you know me, Tammy at heart."

Bullshit. 

Just like the war.

I didn't really vote for the war, only for a warning of possible, impending, dealer's choice war. Maybe this is different if you are good at nuance or hoop rolling.

Donnez-moi une pause!!!!

Ho Ho Huffington

There are ways of being dishonest and ways of being very dishonest.  Like what you really believe in, what you really care about, and working a day job that says the opposite.  (That assumes that this guys job with herself is a day job.)

The Huffington Post

Mark Penn Tied To Controversial Nuclear Firm

February 14, 2008 03:46 PM

Even as Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was blasting Sen. Barack Obama for his ties to the Exelon Corporation, the firm of Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the very same nuclear energy giant.

This past week, Burson Mars

.....read on.....

 

Yet

If anyone besides me and a few tens of thousands of white-shirt and tie boys with suppressed sexual impulses care, there is this, by a very nice man who has a Republican gene that has, sadly, not yet been bred out.  Attempting to explain Plastic Man, aka Mitt Romney, he says interesting if misguided things. David Mittell  is a columnist for the Providence Journal.  Providencce is in Rhode Island , which tiny New England state will have a largish impact when it votes on 4 March.

 

‘Just a Bad Wizard’ [Politicus #993]

I would like to think Mitt Romney is a better person than the campaign he ran. But fortunately for our political system, and unfortunately for him, his candidacy had to be judged by his campaign.

Mr. Romney’s first mistake was the basic strategy of trying to run to the right of Sen. John McCain. Except at the very end, when anti-McCain dead-enders embraced him in desperation, the strategy didn’t work because it wasn’t believable. Like his father before him, Mitt Romney as governor was a moderate man who knew how to work with Democrats, and thereby achieved things most people praise.

I tell friends that for 30 months he may have been the best governor of Massachusetts in my lifetime. Had he run on this record, conservatives in his party might not have taken to him immediately. But when they examined his views they would have found that on their issues he was pretty good. Without pandering to them as he did, he would have come across as a personally moderate (i.e., even-tempered), politically-effective governor of a northeastern Democratic state -- who was also a good Republican conservative.

With the Republican brand damaged by the Bush presidency, that honest political persona might have caught on. It would have been much easier to sell to the public and press than a conservative manikin, which flopped from start to finish. It flopped both because it was disingenuous and because the timing was wrong. People are fed up with the influence in national politics of what used to be called the Bible belt. That disaffection includes many Evangelicals and Southern Baptists, who have come to believe their leaders overreached and allowed themselves to be used when they started getting involved in political campaigns.

Many people are also sick of the combination of public praying, bad syntax and waging war they believe have characterized the Bush presidency. People – most of them -- of every ideology don’t want the 2008 election to turn on ideological purity. Mr. Romney ran on a platform whose time had come and gone.

Once he had made his presidential campaign plans obvious by mid 2005, he made things worse every time he opened his mouth. His jokes in South Carolina about his own state that summer bombed. I watched the speech -- it wasn’t that bad. But knocking the state he had the honor to lead was unseemly, and he should have stopped it immediately. But in his campaign of ideological purity he couldn’t resist automatic laugh lines.

To deliver these lines the then governor left the state he was responsible for 212 days in 2006. You and I wouldn’t respect a boss who spent 212 days a year on the golf course -- we’re not that stupid. Neither are the voters.

Mr. Romney’s well-documented flip to the pro-life side on abortion might have been taken as a sincere conversion (I would have) had he not flipped on so many other issues with obviously self-serving new nuances. His final “nuance” was to criticize John McCain for having been endorsed by The New York Times. It was a requiem for a lightweight.

At bottom a political campaign is an effort to inspire, and in that sense this campaign had been lost before any votes were cast -- when, on Dec. 22, 2007, The Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor published an editorial noting that Mitt Romney looked like a candidate from a kit. But, noting his pandering, the paper recommended voting for anyone but Mr. Romney. When he lost the Iowa caucuses I could see it was over in the eyes of his wife, who knew before he did.

No one was fooled by Mr. Romney except Mr. Romney. The other candidates were off-put by him, and the press (radio rabble aside) didn’t like him. Such a fate was fair in that political hypocrisy is a phosphorous that glows underwater and in the dark. It was unfair in that Mr. Romney’s verbal slips and flips came to be treated by reporters with the same indolent conformity of thought as President Gerald Ford’s reputation for falling on his face -- based only on his publicly losing his footing a couple of  times. The “boys in the bus” (now women more than men) can be cruel, and no reporter I know of looked, for example, into the candidate’s strategic vision – which is sophisticated and substantial. But it’s his fault, not the press’s, that he seemingly failed to inspire anyone other than former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld to do so.

The press in general also failed to condemn the anti-Mormon bigotry Mr. Romney faced, while – for example – putting a magnifying glass to any subliminal hint of misogyny smoke and mirrors could claim to afflict the Clinton campaign. (It is a tribute to the American people that as of this writing the only one who can fairly be accused of injecting race into the race is Bill Clinton himself.) It could be said that in courting Southern Baptists, old Goldwater girls and the like, Mr. Romney violated the late U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neil’s aphorism, “First, get your own!” But it was the candidate, not his Mormonism, who brought himself down.

As noted, I would like to think Mr. Romney is a better person than the campaign he ran, and I think he is. Here is some evidence: As a very rich man in politics he has taken what I regard as unseemly hits in his three campaigns (in 1994, 2002 and 2008). But as a rich man he has been extraordinarily generous in giving away his money -- 13 percent of his income, he reports -- including millions to Brigham Young University, his undergraduate alma mater, among other institutions.

By contrast, Wellesley College shows Hillary Rodham Clinton giving nothing in 2007, though she runs on its name (“I played with the girls then so I can play with the boys now…”) and though other members of her class (1969) gave $1.6 million in 2007. Barack Obama raised his charitable giving from to 1 percent of income, in 2002, to 4.7 percent, in 2005, on income that year of $1.65 million. (The national average is 2.2 percent of income.) I’ll report John McCain’s charity, if any, when I have it. This information isn’t easy to come by.

The point about Mitt Romney is that, as the Wizard of Oz said to Dorothy: “I’m not a bad man, just a bad wizard.” Wiser perhaps next time.

.                      David A. Mittell, Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board

Arianna Huffington on The Hundred Years War Candidate

14 February 2008

Trying Hard For Jesus, Night and Day

So I am talking to my Christian neighbor and asking ... how unlikely is this ... what would Jesus Do.  You know the old WWJD that seemed to be on every Utility Vehicle's bumper  a few years ago... and we have been talking about the vote.  He would ordinarily vote Wilkie, but I have only offered McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.  

Well, I like Obama, he says, but he is an unknown quantity.  (I am thinking but not saying that McCain is a nutcase who gave up the goods while a captive but who certainly suffered and certainly gives up the disconnected thoughts in his addled brain with little prompting. Plus he gets pissed-off crazy without any warning except his peculiar smile. Good choice.  Right.) Surrender is not an option... etcetera.  (I stifle the yawn. I know you did not serve, my man.)

After I awaken from the brunt of the ad-man's cliche, I say something profound, like, "that's bullshit, a cliche."  Then I turn to the howitzer du jour, the WSJ. Talking sacred ground here.  I tell him they have given Obama editorial space to talk to the unwashed in the blood of the lamb but immersed in the marketplace readers.  They have editorially liked him several times.  And Peggy Noonan, that odd woman who got high on Reagan instead of weed, seems to be getting an engorged clitoris over him, this on more than on one occasion.  Sure, it could just be Hillary hate, not difficult or unexplained, but the fact remains:  Peggy has a thing for possibility as personified by Barack Obama.  

Oh, yeh, he says, but... then he hesitates, hesitates long enough for me to say something without interrupting ...and I say, so you see, this non-Republican, black Christian with the suspect name is giving good vibes off to Peggy Noonan and the editorial board of my favorite 18th century newspaper!!! So think about it. Please.  And I reach across the divide despite myself

13 February 2008

Seems to me the derrick is wilting. A little Cialis, perhaps?

So here we are, a damned long time since the last entry, about four days before my great grandson's first birthday in 2007.  So I got lazy, depressed, whatever. 

It's a whole new world with the dragon slayer McCain about to get the candidacy of his party for president of the United States. 

You remember the United States.  The one with the dollar that everything else was measured by.  That United States is gone. 

The new one waits for the Chinese to decide to peg to something else, disinvest, do something that will make the people who didn't like China but got to love the country as it followed the United States in widening the gap between the one bowl of rice a day folks and the Gucci shoppers in Shanghai, make them hate China again, see them as the enemy, as China begins outsourcing to West Virginia the manufacture of Statue of Liberty key chains.   

The other folks in the United States election are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.                                  

Names alone tell a story, don't they. 

She's a Wellesley woman, white shoe law firm, paid a little dues as smart lawyers do, she for children.  That over, she became a hardball lawyer and a partner.  Married the really smart juvenile with an eye for wide-hipped women.  He, by the way became President of the United States.  Twice.  Impeached only once by a crew of rabid dogs hailing Christ and hanging out in men's rooms when not taking bribes: Republicans, for the most part.  Can't quite remember where the turncoat  Lieberman from Connecticut was during all of this, maybe sucking around McCain.  He is one of his biggest fans.   

Back to our President's Wife who would be President. Her husband asked her to figure out a health care program for America, best coverage for all.  No problem. 

She and Ira Magaziner went to the mountain top to consult with a few similarly enlightened folks and came down with the tablets (pun intended) that would cure the whole thing.  The uninvited...a big chunk of the power structure with a vested interest in the subject... became quite annoyed.  Bread and butter for them, you see.  So, liking their bread and butter and knowing how to pull the rug from under a hoop rolling lawyer with hubris, they beat the hell out of what might have been a very good thing for the majority of Americans who were not holding United Health Care stock.  And so for the foreseeable future she, in one fell swoop, screwed the subject.  And the subjects.

The other one is Barack Obama, a mixed race guy whose dad exited early on.  Went to Harvard law, ran the Review, did organizing in the streets of Illinois for people who needed organizing, got into the state's legislature, passed over 200 pieces of significant legislation, including covering health care for all of the children of Illinois, ran and won a United States Senate seat, made a moving speech at the 2004 Democratic Party Convention.  Wow.  Great speech, great delivery, great looking dark beige man.  Someone to watch for.  And so we did.

He decided that America might be ready for a fresh face, a darker face, an intelligent face that was good at talking to people with diverse notions.  He did that.  He worked in the U S Senate, played well with others to good purpose.  Helped write and helped pass important legislation.  Neat. 

He built an organization of immense power using himself as the spearhead and his message as the shaft and the hope of youth and even people as old as The Pessimist to make a real race for what the President's Wife had told us was her Wellesley, white shoe right. 

He made a lot of victories.  He gathered more delegates than she did.  And more money.  And bigger crowds.  And more enthusiasm.  And he lost not his cool, which he had in plentifulness., in the face of nasty barely veiled stuff that you might have heard at the soda bar in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1953.  Oh, my.

Next week, if the dark beige man of mixed heritage, with the funny name, and the bearer of hope, wins Wisconsin with a wide margin, the white shoe law firm wife of the president might just wish for another year when rolling a hoop on the green of Wellesley was a moment of her own hope. 

6 May 2007

Dear Land of Freedom Fries,

Please note:

85% of eligible voters voted today in the French Presidential Election. 

In the 2004 United States Presidential Election 55% of eligible voters bothered.

So, when looking for vital democracies where people participate in their democratic fate, just look for the Blue White and Red.

 

22 April 2007

Anyone sailing on the Suze Orman cruise, you throw her overboard, I'll cover for you.

She's still working while Imus is at the unemployment office.  How to figure.

..

If anyone knows anything good about Alberto Gonzales, besides gone, please write me immediately.    Thanks.

..

12 April 2007

Don Imus, a silly but actually decent human being, high on his own popularity and absurd pay has been dumped by MSNBC and now CBS Radio.  He was axed for the very same reason they loved him:  he said some stupid, contentious, rude things to get the audience talking. 

Here in the land of the booboisie, being that kind of guy in this kind of atmosphere, is good for business.  And as somebody said, what's good for business is good for America.  Or was it the business of America is business?  I don't know (I'll research later) but you get the drift.  The bottom line is the bottom line. 

But if you get the enmity of the booboisie up, you are in serious trouble.  The Boobs may think the N word but you better not say it, unless you are dark as the old kitchen stove.  You can say Kike if you are Jewish and are using it as a pejorative for someone you do not like, but without a Rabbinical Dispensation you are toast.  You can say those dumb Micks but you better be a part of the ethnic group referred to, one in good standing and kneeling and bead-saying. 

And so it goes on the day that we read the obits of a fine man who saw the absurdity of all of it and wrote it in a style that pissed off the New York Review of Books crowd and fans of Norman Mailbag, a little man in a goddam safari suit, mind you, who never wrote a book anyone really enjoyed reading, though he wanted so, so much to be a populist. Problem was the newly dead guy was fun to read; sin of major proportions.  But we digress.  (Note that The P. is cheeky enough to use the royal We.  My god, so to speak!!)  And so it goes, Mr. V.

Yet the currently jobless but hardly penurious longhaired guy with the mike and the smoker's voice did more good by pointing out that the VA and Walter Reed Medical Center where care was just above the level given at the American Prison facility in the sad but lovely little island of Cuba, sucked the hind tit,  while that asshole who invaded Iraq with our people and our money because "They tried to kill my father." (!!!) cut funds for the VA and now is sending totally fucked head cases back into combat. 

Good for you American Broadcasting.  Good for you American Booboisie.  May you all rot in a hell that, unfortunately, does not exist.  But then we will leave atheism arguments for another day.

--

5 April 2007

KOO KOOK A CHOO

In his never ceasing search for new and better pain ... haven't gotten my passport renewal back yet, so haven't been to Guantanomo... the Pessimist was reading the front page of the favorite 18th century journal, WSJ, as we cognoscenti call it. 

There, with one of those funny sort of steel engraving rip-offs of a photograph (I suspect it is a method used so that WSJ does not have to pay for photo rights but only the modest salaries of slaveys with quick pens in the art department, though I confess fully that this may be nothing but an invented notion to justify my hatred/bias for/toward WSJ and its University of Chicago, Hoover Institute (could you imagine someone you would less want to name an institute after then Hoobert Heever, as he was known in my family?) who contribute merde to the editorial opinion page and write more letters than  the guys who wrote the bible, was a piece about Lt. Colonel Jeff Peterson. 

Lt. Colonel Peterson, frustrated as all of us are with the insanity of the war and world created in the name of George "He Tried To Kill My Father" Bush (he objected because he saw that as his job, which is why the old man always declined when junior wanted to pack the birthday parachute) decided that the way to Nation Build (remember that one?) would be to take two sectarian square blocks at a time, and wall them off for each other.  That way, with a wall intervening, they can't shoot at each other and blow each other up with baby carriages of explosives, bread trucks, and bearded "ladies" in excessive smocks. 

Jesus, as we say at eastertime. 

Destroy the village to save it.  Wall each fervent partisan off from each other  fervent partisan.  Got it.  Nation building.

Benjamin, "I just want to say one word to you -- just one word -- 'cement."

25 March 2007

By the way, Hillary, Obama, et al:  Whoever among you thinks we need to keep the insurance pimps between patients and doctors ought to get a serious head examination, which examination, I trust, is covered by an unforgiving, mendacious insurer.  Let's talk after that.

Insurers, by their very satanic nature, are governed by numbers that insure profit and minimize risk.  That's what actuarial tables are all about; this is not ouija board time.  These suckers are only interested on how little they can do and get away with it, how long you can live to pay premiums balanced against how much you will cost to live with good medical care. 

So, Hillary, who almost totally screwed our chances for universal health care with a schmuck who had more hubris than anybody in the history of time, get smart.   Even if the genes that disallow "I'm sorry" predominate.  And Obama, you have the Pessimist's 2300 bucks if you don't make a deal with the Insurance Devil.

...

24 March 2007

I  may have been wrong about everything to date but I know I am right.  And I am sure the           3-thousand plus Americans and the countless Iraqis who are dead would agree.  So be patient.  It's  hard.  It's not easy.  But I know I am right.

...

One hopes that the coreligionists, Bush and Blair, don't start anything over the rather muddy naval confrontation  with Iran. 

Interesting to see how the story plays at BBC.  Yesterday it was the lead and today it is just another ongoing story.  Contrast this with any similar actions and how the press would play them in the U S.

--

11 January 2007

Great (if you will pardon the misuse of the language) Britain's favorite ferret, Tony (can't wait to convert to Catholicism with my whorish gangster befriending bride) Blair,

(Is this Tony Freebasing or doing W through a straw?)

 is cheering on the stunted shrub, aka W, while (or is that whilst?) cheering on the United States President in his latest foolishness of screwing with Iran, Syria, and the youth of America. 

Meantime, ferret (never caught a rat, by the way,) is on the timetable to withdraw his milky-faced lads to the home country to consume beer and football games, and to prepare for his holy communion in the one and true church.  Oh, to join the likes of Evelyn Waugh!!!...he thinks.  Even that bastard would not have the likes of him and his solicotor wife...no, not working the street...at least not recently. 

May their shagging, when he can rise to the occasion, be as unsatisfying as GB is sunny.

Yrs in Christ, The Pessimist

--

(this photo is of a man about to step into the merde he has created)

A worthless dirt bag called Bremer got paid to do an op-ed piece for the 18th century Wall Street Journal today.  We will be picketing their offices in absentia.  Phone us for the location. 

You may recall that the Medal of Freedom winner, Mr. Bremer, was the genius who fired the soldiers in Iraq after we declared war on that hapless place, killing bunches and bunches of civilians in the process.  He did this at the behest of the amazingly stupid former (?) drunk and born again Christian, GWH Bush, get of the one time president and the Attack Cow, Barbara. 

What a bollocks!!!

Only in America, as Harry Golden said. 

5 January 2007

Let me be among the last to wish you a happy new year.  The happy things about it so far are that a black man took the oath of office as governor in Massachusetts, in pretty nice winter weather on the steps of the state house designed by Bullfinch across the street from the bas relief memorial commemorating the:  "Civil War's Massachusetts 54th Regiment. This first black volunteer unit was led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who died in its first battle at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. In the same battle, Sergeant William Carney of New Bedford, though badly wounded, rescued the flag of the 54th and bore it safely back to the Union camp. For his valor, he became the first African-American to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. The monument itself was ordered for the State House, but the artist-sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens made it so large that it had to be placed outside." (http://www.sec.state.ma.us/cis/cismaf/mf3.htm)

And then there was Nancy Pelosi with The Gavel!

And then there was the Wall Street Journal, the new mini-sized paper from the 18th century, with a story, but not this picture:

but with the following words:

The new Iraq money would come on top of more than $20.9 billion that has already been spent on large-scale U.S-funded reconstruction projects in the country that have largely failed to restore the country's electricity output, water supply  or sewage capabilities to pre-war levels.

In the meantime, they hung the tyrant who kept the water running and the electricity on.  Expect an up-tick in the popularity of the hanged man, former favorite of the Bushes and their corporate connections, and the late Donald Rumsfeld, squash cheat.  Just to refresh your memory:

.

Oh happy day.

--

26 December 2006

In case anyone has not noticed, Somalia is Muslim and has a lot of coastline.  And Ethiopia is Christian and has no shoreline.  Sooooo,  guess who is attacking whom? 

Well, Jesus was a fisherman so maybe his followers miss the salt water???

The blanking hypocrisy of the newspapers reports which decline (in general) to identify what is a war for access to a port and a Christian (!) nation doing what Jesus would not.

Speaking of which, would Jesus deport a special needs kid because his parents, who have been paying taxes and who own a house, ticked the wrong box when they came here to make a culinary contribution to the land of white bread?  Even the g. d. Wall Street Journal, my favorite 18th century newspaper, is up in arms on this one!!  "Alright, I will raise you from the dead (return your sight, whatever) but first I must see your papers," Jesus said.

So much for Christian Nations. 

--

Screw You George Bush.  Send some more Americans to their deaths so you can reinforce your "certainty."

--

24 December 2006

The Pixilated Pope makes a speech about tolerance.  Muslim papers please copy.

Is this the same guy who had Crusade Amnesia while vilifying the Muslims for which he had to do a kissy-kissy visit in Turkey where he wowed the crowd and quieted the infidels?  Jesus, so to speak.

--

23 December 2006

Okay.  So the Security Council has taken sanctions against Iran who have talked about a nuclear program, have worked on it, have  proudly announced a test.  Will the sanction be like those that are against Israel who have never explicitly acknowledged having the bomb though all of the world know that have lots of nuclear missiles?

Am I missing something?  Probably.

--

Surge.

Very masculine.  Kind of like Thrust!  Neat.  Assertive.

Now...after arm twisting?...the guys with the braid and medals say, yes, we need a bunch more troops (20-30,000 is the suggested Surge number) for whom we have no plan, but yes we need them.  Generals are like that.  They are in the business of having troops.  The more troops the more general-lik they are.  The greater the Surge.  Thrust.  Oh, oh, oh...my god, I'm almost there...as they say in pornography films.

But hey, it's the eve of the eve of Christmas eve.  More fodder for the geneerals under the tree.

--

22 December 2006

It is that special time of the year again.  The star over Bethlehem, the little baby, the bringing of the message of peace.  World and religious leaders, like those before them, will speak of goodness, kindness, progress toward the heavenly city; and we will be implored to love one another. 

Fascinating thing, religious faith.  It ain't rocket science.  Rockets fly. 

Let's all look forward to a new year with its own new mayhem. 

--

22 November 2006

My goodness how time flies!

SOOOO long since we stole it all from the Indians, as we quaintly know them; well maybe not all, since we still have some uranium to get from under the land (the crap we thought they gave the...how could we know???)  In any case Happy Pre-Thanksgiving to you!

--

It's so good to see that Red China, as we quaintly called it, has finally caught up with us.  Wealth has grown fabulously, so that Shanghai is now a place that could inspire a thousand revolutions of the poor.  But they have come so far that they have a really large and very very wealthy class of rich people, a whole bunch of people who have gotten more prosperous, and a full 10% of the population that is doing worse than ever.  Now that is the free market at work.  If that ten-per-cent  deserved to do better, as Calvin said, they would!!  (That's not Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, by the way, but our own great religious progenitor.)

Way to go, China. 

--

Proving once again the perspicacity of King George, Mr. Putin, the Supreme Leader of the Former Soviet Union and poisoner extraordinaire, has yet another victim, hairless, at death's door, and part of the dreaded opposition to the continued rule of the old KGB head, now head of what we think of as Russia. 

As you may or may not recall, in a scene reminiscent of the famous photo of John F. Kennedy being veritably eaten by the look of a former Philadelphia Beauty, as they called her, Grace Kelly, Mr. Bush, aka King George (recently castrated by an unfortunate touch of Democracy?) declared the blue-eyed ruler a man of great soul. 

My goodness!  As Mae West, that great analyst of foreign policy, would have said, goodness had nothing to do with it.

--

20 November 2007

NEW YORK -- Fox News Corp. said that it's has canceled the publication of an O.J. Simpson book and a two-part television special in which Simpson discusses the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman.

 

"I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project," said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. "We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson."

Once upon a time there was an editor who was a "very good editor," or so the NYT said, and she was serious:  the real thing.  And so the agent was in touch with her and said, listen, I am interested in your house (was it Simon and Shyster at the time?) which knows how to get books to readers, and the agent tried to represent good books, and so maybe, the agent said, we can work together on some projects.  And she said, Oh, YES, I am serious about books, serious books, literary books.  I am an artist at base.  (Here the writer pauses to say that this is, the above, characterization.  It is not verbatim, it is not admissible in a court of law.  But it is the truth.) 

And so.... move to the present and read that the very serious Judith Regan is probably about to take the fall as the head of an imprint of the famed Fox/Murdoch Empire as even more vile than Murdoch, formerly of Australia, of the monkey glands and young wife, money loving "I'll show my dad" million-(billion?-)aire, for having birthed this smegma-book written by the unconvicted killer, Mr. Simpson. 

Why is it that Judith Regan went so far undiscovered?  Because her lust for "it" (money, fame, the key to commerce below the bootstraps?) was shared by people with the money to allow her lowest aspirations to take flight, flight so low that the wingtips often came up with excrement. 

And now, with the announcement that the faux-book by the faux-man, faux-husband, killer would not be published.  And the faux-interview by the faux-human being named Judith, would not be seen again. 

Who said that life is not just?  (T'was not I.) 

I hear there is a job at open at Cosmo, vetting the verity of the bosoms, okaying air brushings, turning sag into thrust.  I think familiarity with Photoshop is a must.  Break a leg, Judith.

--

17 November 2007

The Pessimist thought that before the last week was over Karl Rove, the propaganda chief of the BushBund, would be history.  The Pessimist apologizes for any inconvenience this mis-prediction may have caused. What shoulod happen next, and should is the operative word, is that former Latino and current attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, will be burned at the stake, an old Spanish and Catholic Tradition.  But he will not, ass the Eveil Empire with two years left of vetoes and executive orders, will persist at the sufferance of the universe. 

In case you need a visual clue as to what this Latino Lap Dog looks like:

In days of old there was a story by, of all people, Steve Allen, about a public event where the crowd assembled thought bad thoughts about the person gathered in the arena.  Let's imagine     This Man in that that arena, all of us concentrating on his essential badness.  POOF!!!

Bye Bye Mister former Latino.

--

15 November 2006

The Roman Catholic Church's Bishops in the United States have voted to extend a new welcome to homosexuals; limited but still a welcome.

The decision seems to be that a homosexual can take communion but not swallow.  Evangelicals please note. 

These are the same bishops who have among them members, including cardinals, (cardinal's members...hmmm) I would imagine, like the guy who runs Los Angeles, who shielded child abusers, most of whom were homosexual in bent.  Interesting. 

--

Oh, yes, the child molesting, helmet-headed, church-going, right wing pandering, greed loving members of the congress of the United States took a whuppin'.  My sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to the plundering classes.

--

5 November 2006

Hey, it's 8 o'clock Pacific Time, PM, and there are only two days to go before we vote.  Those of us who vote, that is.  Anyhow, I just want to say two things.

First, Bush finally said  "it's the oil, baby>"  We knew that a long time ago, though the word at the time was that it was not the oil. 

Second, Rove, if he really believes all of that god and me nonsense, is going to rot in hell for all of egternity.  He is "merde" frinds.  Excrement.  The end result of digesting a lot of very nad things, taking our the liquids and processing them and excreting the, making others into double and truple chins, and lead asses, and then filling our waste pipes with the rest that is of no real value except to fertilize a field of alfalfa.  That's the guy.  Rove.  Carl Rove.  Excrement.  Chief of the Republican Party.  The former majority in the house of representatives, as of Tuesday night

--

The Pessimist was in Japan, faaaar east.  So far east we had to go west to get there.

The Japanese are polite, civil, helpful.  Unfortunately, they recently elected a guy name Abe (not as in Lincoln, but as in A-BAY phonetically) who is a kind of rising sun nationalist type.  May be interested in doing nuclear stuff, may be interested in doing armaments in general, may be interested in bringing back "the glory of the past."  Sort of like "The South Will Rise Again" for local consumption. 

He probably will disavow this crapola in the light of the real world, unlike a certain dimwitted American who had not been out of the country except to get laid in Tijuana before being elected to the most important governmental leadership in the fricking world by the Great and Good, if occasionally stupid, American People. 

Abe has been around and there are enough people who remember the unspeakable death by fire and fast acting and long-term cancers resulting from the bomb attack perpetrated by us in a couple of their cities at the end of WW 2.  So eat your sushi without guilt.  But vote Republican at your own and my risk.

--

8 October 2006

This country is a joke.

The power is going east, boys and girls, and the mold and rot are setting in.

The chief Republican in the House of Representatives, Mr. Hastert, suits by Omar the Tentmaker, will not step down despite the fact that he knew three years ago that the great fighter against the internet as a trolling tool for perverts, was a pervert trolling for meat. 

The IRS goes after a church for having a guest speaker denounce the war in Iraq, that illegal action taken by Georgie the Dunce against a fool and monster who was the legitimate ruler of (and glue for) his collection of tribes and religious quacks (oh, I'm sorry, deeply religious believers) and kept them at relative peace.

The federal government lets the belief based social agencies, schools, whatevers, avoid compliance with law put in place to protect the rest of us from predatory practices and members of The House. 

Cali-frigging-fornia is last (after Guam, making it 51 on the ignoble list) in so many things that it is a wonder it does not have a rebellion of major proportions.  But then, it, like most Great and Good Americans, think taxes are the work of the devil, that much maligned fallen angel.

The excrement has already hit the fan, folks, and we are the fa

--

2 October 2006

Oh, by the way, that fat fuck who runs the House of Representatives, Dennis the Meancer, for the republicans (all lowest case)), is an unconscionable liar.  He knew that Foley, "I can't come to the phone, right now, I'm trolling for adolescents," was indeed trolling for pretty kids of his own gender who were subject to his authority. 

Hey, if you want your own gender for foreplay and afterplay, that's your business; I don't give a darn.  But leave the children alone.

If you are a party of righteousness and some of the guys are buggering their pages, or so fat and lazy that they can't get up for a roll call or to call the pervert in question, then I say, screw 'em all, as it were.  Which right and responsibility we have in November.

--

Could I please have a show of hands on this proposition?  (write: anyone@thepessimist.com) Woodward is a piece of shit.

Awaiting your feverish response, I go on, as if I would do anything else. 

This phony, who wedged out his partner in the Watergate thing, has been laying down (some say lying down; I don't) for the folks in power for years.  He sucked up to (some have suggested that is "off"; I don't) the folks in power so he could, as one of the slowest talking dishonest people in history of a land of Indian killers and thieves of Mexican territory, so he could write "inside" books (who is inside whom?) about the people with the power.

In the process he cut his deal with that inferior newspaper in The District Of Columbia, the one with a million mall ads and lousy writers, it's called The Post, I think, that allowed him to (PLEASE NOTE) withhold information from the public he was assumedly serving as a, pardon the misuse of the word, "journalist."  Thus this duller than dishwater talker withheld the fact that he knew who was the first guy to talk about Valerie Plame because he needed that for a book to be published by, I think, a Viacom subsidiary.  (Isn't that Simon and Shyster? {or is the Sheister?? terrible at spelling} Something like that.)

So the bottom line for the Post and Newsweek, which the nefarious "corporation" owns, was not the facts, ma'm, but the balance of the checkbook of  the slow talking turd, Woodward.  That is what "journalism" has become.  Cutting a deal with a dreck-meister. 

Now he has written, in the lame duck moments of the worst presidency ever, a book that "tells all.."

As a result, we now know that everybody sucks the hind-tit.  Now we know Bush is an idiot, Cheney is nuts, the fellow with the rimless glasses I call Macnamara by mistake, is worse.  Now we know that the demi-colored persons of the administration, old and new, are what we knew they were.  But the fact is, sorry for interjecting a fact, is that the people who read critically knew from the beginning and the turd who wrote the book from which he will make an unconscionable amount of money, perhaps enough money to repair the bodies, if not the souls, of the many many maimed  sent to war by the drunk (AKA The President) and the "I had other priorities", Vice President (emphasis on the first word,) and the rimless glassed bastard who has a notion that it works like this, but, :stuff happens," will walk away, still talking slowly, as the "hero" who broke the Watergate story. 

May his death be slow and long and unrelated to anything but normal biology.

--

25 September 2006

I sit here in Utter Awe (many miles from Dubuque) considering matters related to the Wall Street Journal, my favorite 18th century journal.  The mouth gaped at reading that inside would be a piece by John Kerry.  Awesome.  Unexpected. Shocking. Even important.

But then the really big thing hit in Marketplace, a kind of hard/soft section, made just slightly harder by the fact that a totally superfluous appendage, rather like an appendix in a human, was thrown in to the rag, called Personal, or some such.  It does not always appear, being replaced by some topic allowing the sales persons to go out and sell ads related to the specifics of the section.  But, to return to the point, Play Station.

Here we have an extended piece, the lead piece, devoted to a frigging toy that costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars.  The piece is not simple, for indeed it required a person in Japan and a person in Seattle to write this complex story about the frigging toy and its competitors, and its race to market to provide an entertainment, if you can consider it thus, as juvenile and cheap and less imaginative than a Marvel Comic, which at least requires reading!!!

This is what life is about, my friends and enemies and disinterested others: it is about who gets some stupid piece of hardware that people the society (societies) spent millions of dollars (yen) on to learn to make switches and chips and such that would make stuff happen (Hi Mr. Secretary of War!!) to "entertain" the best trained thumbs in the history of the world. 

What a shame.  What a loss.  What utter folly.

Stuff, indeed, does happen.

--

And while you are not at it:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/

--

I am reminded, alas, of a story by, I think, as unlikely as may be its authorship, Steve Allen, a kind of take on Shirley Jackson's The Lottery,  in which a crowd assembles in an arena for the occasion to see a miscreant brought to said arena's center, an enemy of society, who has acted against the broad social interest, where the accumulated anger and disapproval of the figure by the assembled becomes a power that destroys the miscreant before their eyes.  It is as if the combined anger and disapproval becomes an energy for destruction aimed at the soulless one before them.  Which brings me to our Secretary of Defense or War, or whatever they call that small failed wrestler, Rumsfeld.

It was written somewhere in the press today that this gnome goes into the bowels of the Pentagon to play a game with racquet and ball, and cheats at it.  Nothing about this portrait is a surprise.  He is vile, he seeks subterranean spaces, he plays a game of gentlemen, and he cheats at it. 

And my alleged mind turns to the thought that all opponents to whom he did not defer...in the game of squash it is a tradition to remove yourself from the course an opponent must traverse to stroke the ball...and concentrate on destroying the corporeal Rumsfeld by the sheer energy of their displeasure, if not hatred. 

I think that thought and I suspect I will sleep well.  I hope you sleep as well.  And that he is haunted to the end; which can not be too soon  for the safety of the nation.

--

But if I were you, I wouldn't worry about the next election.  The guy at the 7/11 will be running the election with a key from the mini-bar at the Holiday Inn in Seewash.:

The Big Gamble on Electronic Voting:
 

New York Times
 

HANGING chads made it difficult to read voter intentions in 2000. Hotel minibar keys may do the same for the elections in November.

The mechanics of voting have undergone a major change since the imbroglio that engulfed presidential balloting in 2000. Embarrassed by an election that had to be settled by the Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which provided funds to improve voting equipment.

From 2003 to 2005, some $3 billion flew out of the federal purse for equipment purchases. Nothing said state of the art like a paperless voting machine that electronically records and tallies votes with the tap of a touch screen. Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that specializes in redistricting, estimates that about 40 percent of registered voters will use an electronic machine in the coming elections.

One brand of machine leads in market share by a sizable margin: the AccuVote, made by Diebold Election Systems. Two weeks ago, however, Diebold suffered one of the worst kinds of public embarrassment for a company that began in 1859 by making safes and vaults.

Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, and his student collaborators conducted a demonstration with an AccuVote TS and noticed that the key to the machines memory card slot appeared to be similar to one that a staff member had at home.

When he brought the key into the office and tried it, the door protecting the AccuVotes memory card slot swung open obligingly. Upon examination, the key turned out to be a standard industrial part used in simple locks for office furniture, computer cases, jukeboxes and hotel minibars.

Once the memory card slot was accessible, how difficult would it be to introduce malicious software that could manipulate vote tallies? That is one of the questions that Professor Felten and two of his students, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Haldeman, have been investigating. In the face of Diebolds refusal to let scientists test the AccuVote, the Princeton team got its hands on a machine only with the help of a third party.

Even before the researchers had made the serendipitous discovery about the minibar key, they had released a devastating critique of the AccuVotes security. For computer scientists, they supplied a technical paper; for the general public, they prepared an accompanying video. Their short answer to the question of the practicality of vote theft with the AccuVote: easily accomplished.

The researchers demonstrated the machines vulnerability to an attack by means of code that can be introduced with a memory card. The program they devised does not tamper with the voting process. The machine records each vote as it should, and makes a backup copy, too.

Every 15 seconds or so, however, the rogue program checks the internal vote tallies, then adds and subtracts votes, as needed, to reach programmed targets; it also makes identical changes in the backup file. The alterations cannot be detected later because the total number of votes perfectly matches the total number of voters. At the end of the election day, the rogue program erases itself, leaving no trace.

On Sept. 13, when Princetons Center for Information Technology Policy posted its findings, Diebold issued a press release that shrugged off the demonstration and analysis. It said Princetons AccuVote machine was two generations old and not used anywhere in the country.

I spoke last week with Professor Felten, who said he could not imagine how a newer version of the AccuVotes software could protect itself against this kind of attack. But he also said he would welcome the opportunity to test it. I called Diebold to see if it would lend Princeton a machine.

Mark G. Radke, director for marketing at Diebold, said that the AccuVote machines were certified by state election officials and that no academic researcher would be permitted to test an AccuVote supplied by the company. This is analogous to launching a nuclear missile, he said enigmatically, adding that Diebold had to restrict access to the buttons.

I persisted. Suppose, I asked, that a test machine were placed in the custodial care of the United States Election Assistance Commission, a government agency. Mr. Radke demurred again, saying the companys critics were so focused on software that they have no appreciation of physical security that protects the machines from intrusion.

This same point was featured prominently in the companys press release that criticized the Princeton study, saying it all but ignores physical security and election procedures. It is a criticism that collides with the facts on Page 5 of the Princeton study, where the authors provide step-by-step details of how to install the malicious software in the AccuVote.

Even before the minibar lineage of the AccuVote key had been discovered, the researchers had learned that the lock was easily circumvented: one of them could consistently pick it in less than 10 seconds.

If skeptics cannot believe what they read about the ease of manipulating an election, they can watch the 10-minute online video: the AccuVote lock is picked, a memory card is inserted and the malicious software is loaded; the machine is rebooted, and within 60 seconds the machine is ready to throw the election in favor of any specified candidate.

Computer scientists with expertise in security issues have been sounding alarms for years. David L. Dill at Stanford and Douglas W. Jones at the University of Iowa were among the first to alert the public to potential problems. But the possibility of vote theft by electronic means remained nothing more than a hypothesis until the summer of 2003, when the code for the AccuVotes operating system was discovered on a Diebold server that was publicly accessible.

The code quickly made its way into researchers hands. Suspected vulnerabilities were confirmed, and never-contemplated sloppiness was added to the list of concerns. At a computer security conference, the AccuVotes anatomy was analyzed closely by a team: Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins; two junior associates, Tadayoshi Kohno and Adam Stubblefield; and Dan S. Wallach, an associate professor in computer science at Rice. They described how the AccuVote software design rendered the machine vulnerable to manipulation by smart cards. They found that the standard protections to prevent alteration of the internal code were missing; they characterized the system as far below even the most minimal security standards.

Professor Rubin has just published a nontechnical memoir, Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting (Morgan Road Books), that describes how his quiet life was upended after he and his colleagues published their paper. He recalls in his book that Diebolds lawyers sent each of the papers authors a letter threatening the possibility of legal action, warning them to exercise caution in interviews with the press lest they make a statement that would appear designed to improperly impair and impede Diebolds existing and future business. Johns Hopkins rallied to his side, however, and the universitys president, William R. Brody, commended him for being on the case.

Recently, there have been signs that states are having second thoughts about trusting their AccuVote equipment. Officials in California, Florida and Pennsylvania have been outspoken about their concerns. In Maryland earlier this year, the state House of Delegates voted 137 to 0 in favor of a bill to prohibit the use of its AccuVote machines because they were not equipped to generate a paper audit trail. (The state Senate did not take up the measure and it died.)

Professor Rubin favors the use of touch screens only for ballot marking capturing a voters intended choice then printing out a paper ballot with only the voters chosen candidates that the voter can visually check. Election officials can then use the slip to tally votes with an optical scanner made by a different manufacturer.

Manual audits of the tallies in at least 1 percent of all precincts, as is now required in California, would provide a transparent method of checking for integrity. Should a full recount be necessary, the paper ballots, containing only the selected names, provide unambiguous records of original intent.

Let computers do what they do best, Professor Rubin said, and let paper do what it does best.
 

http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060924/ZNYT01/609240535/1002/business

 

See, nothing hyo worry about
 

If you need further proof of the incredible progress we have made as a nation, there is little more to say except to point out these matters:

     1.  A dead Chief Operating Officer of a great American Corporation was granted options in his company after his death.  It that is not thoughtfulness I don't know what is.  Support our CEOs!    Please see:  http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/22/commentary/wastler/?postversion=2006092211  And this in a country so poor so as not to be able to provide the level of medical care to every citizen available in Cuba.  God Bless America!!!

   2.  Is this story below not what the fruits of freedom and a free market are meant for?  AM I WRONG???!!! I think not.

A Dog’s Life, Upgraded

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/yourmoney/24dogs.html?_r=1&oref=login

As my deeply religious cousin Ruth Ann says, we are so blessed.

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19 September 2006

There is in the October issue of Harper's, one of the last of the worthwhile magazines, an article by George McGovern about getting out of the hell-hole called Iraq, a country we invaded in the process of nation building.  Think about that phrase.  Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.

It was an invasion planned by nuts and a-historical characters with all of the best delusional  intentions and in the expectation of garlands.  (Sort of the neo-conversion young menof the thirties becoming communists to get laid?)  It has been a total failure. 

This is a country whose infrastructure we have decimated, whose people we have destroyed, whose hooligans and ethnic/religious factions we have strengthened, costs us TEN MILLION DOLLARS  per day to continue to screw over.  But as King George tells us, we are winning this war.  Jesus!  So to speak.

Anyhow, buy the magazine, read the piece by McGovern and co-author.  Be smarter than the King.  Doesn't take much.  Ask Brother Theodore.

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 15 September 2006

     Once upon a time, and a very bad time it was, there was a meanie with some technical skill who didn't like The Pessimist and what he stood for, so he hacked the server...and the backup server... where The Pessimist was and all of the ramblings of The Pessimist were lost.  So now The Pessimist begins again.  We'll see, for The Pessimist is a bit dispirited.  But happily, he remains pessimistic. 

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Hey, guys, I'm just misunderstood.  But infidels are infidels.

That's our man, former Nazi Youth...hey, they made me do it... Ben of Rome bringing messages or peace and stuff like that. 

Think I'll drop in on Turkey.  They might find me fun. 

Here's a picture from my scrapbook:  Yrs, Ben the Pope

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The Wall Street Journal, The Pessimist's favorite 18th century Journal, reports that 54% of the great and good American Public thinks (pardon the expression) that the Great and Good United States of America should obliterate Iran if necessary to stop that country from developing nuclear weapons.  Like us, for instance.  Or Israel, for instance, or Afghanistan, for instance, a crappy nation run by a smegma head whose big nuclear guy gave away the store and got house arrest. for it.

As the late great Brother Theodore said, "Most of us don't know what is beyond the beyond.  Some of us don't know what is behind the behind."
 

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