Commentary « BartBlog

January 31, 2012

Press passes? Press passes? We don’t gotta show you no stinkin’ press passes.

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Doug Brew, Press Passes, Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapers, Time magazine — Bob Patterson @ 9:33 pm

In the late Seventies, after a PSA jet crashed in the San Diego area, Time magazine sent a writer from their Los Angeles bureau, Doug Brew, down to San Diego to cover that news event. When he approached the wreck area, there was a police perimeter line and he was stopped and challenged. He showed the officer a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office Press Pass saying he was a reporter for the Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapers in Santa Monica and the officer said “You’re OK, boy, you can go on through.”

The fellow had dual citizenship in the world of Journalism. He was the editor of the weekly Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapers and simultaneously functioned as a reporter for Time Magazine’s Los Angeles bureau on a “stringer” basis. Without a Press Pass he would have been in a difficult dilemma but with it, he had no problems about getting the story for Time Magazine. Good thing he had the Press Pass.

Initially Doug Brew had been reluctant to do all the bureaucratic work necessary to get Press Passes for the news staff at the weekly Independent Journal Newspapers in Santa Monica, but one day, after being challenged by a Santa Monica Police Department officer, while riding his bicycle to the IJ office, he relented and agreed it might be good to have the Press Passes “just in case.” The other fellow on the news department staff had been very enthusiastic about getting the Press Passes and made the suggestion about getting them.

After the PSA incident, Brew was glad that he had been convinced to make the effort to secure the Press Passes and verbally expressed that sentiment to a co-worker. Little did he know that would provide the led for a column on the Internets about 35 years later.

“♫Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end . . . ♫”

The process included being fingerprinted and photographed and having the editor’s application submitted by the Publisher.

In 1973, there were three young men who worked for the IJ newspapers. One went on to become one of the people listed toward the top of the Playboy masthead; Brew went on to become Time Magazine’s White House correspondent during the Reagan administration. The third one went on to International Fame as the World’s Laziest Journalist.

According to Gavin Aronsen’s first hand account of the events (for the Mother Jones website[Click this link: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/journalists-arrested-occupy-oakland) that occurred in Oakland on Saturday night, a woman reporter with a Press Pass issued by the San Francisco Police Department was detained by Oakland Police Department. The OPD pointed out that she was in Oakland not Frisco before arresting her.

Initial reports state that there were six reporters who were taken to various jail facilities in the Alameda County area as part of the mass arrests in Oakland.

Subsequently the reporters were released.

Apparently the principle of “Interline Courtesy” among various Police agencies has changed since the Seventies.

Has Oakland Police Department unilaterally adopted the Las Vegas philosophy of “What Happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” or is there something else more ominous and disturbing going on all across the USA, that could form the basis for a trend-spotting story?

If William L. Shirer, who wrote “Berlin Diary,” were still alive this writer would try to contact him and see if he could provide any insights or make any comparisons to events he witnessed years ago to the events that happened Saturday night, but we can’t do that. He is dead and so we will let it go at that.

The reader is invited to formulate whatever “jump to conclusions” analysis he (or she) wants to accompany this report.

Won’t Uncle Rushbo, and other talk show hosts of that ilk, try to whip up a hysterical level of schadenfreude concerning the trials and tribulations of the reporters and then goad the rubes into voting for a Conservative?

To be continued . . .

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January 30, 2012

God Bless Republican Swingers?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Hugh Hefner, JFK, Larry Flynt, Newt Gingrich — Bob Patterson @ 9:30 pm

Some recent tidbits of information which have landed in the World’s Laziest Journalist’s inbox indicate that it may be time to write a column about the possibility that Republican Party may soon need to redefine their stand on the Sanctity of Marriage.

Item no. one is the fact that after admitting that he had asked his wife for an open marriage, Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Primary.

Item no. two: Playboy magazine is about to begin marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Playboy Philosophy series.

Item no. three: A caller to the Norm Goldman radio talk show pointed out that the Republicans discredited Herman Kane because of clandestine love affairs, but the Republicans are giving Newt the old “See no evil” response for his request for an open marriage. The caller automatically accused the Republicans of being racist in their diverse reactions. It never occurred to that caller that the difference is the transparency of the need for diversity. Kane relied on deceit. Newt prefers the philosophy of openness and Swinging.

Item no. four: We found our paperback copy of Gay Talese’s book “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.”

Since a large portion of journalism in America these days is based on celebrity gossip wouldn’t a Swinging couple in the White House be a godsend to the Political desks in newsrooms all across the USA? Can you just imagine how enthusiastic the coverage of a visit by a Swinging first family to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s home would be?

Newt could elicit (not to be confused with the word illicit) comparisons to JFK by quipping to the press: “I’m the man who is accompanying Callista to Paris.”

Didn’t the wife of a Canadian Prime Minister generate extensive gossip and criticism of her husband by being a fan of the Rolling Stones band, a few years back?

Reality TV is very popular on cable these days. Perhaps it’s time for an adventuresome production company to make a deal with a swingers group? How about a series titled “Return to the A-Frame”?

If you think that despising the boss is a universal manifestation of a natural workers’ tendency then you have never talked with writers who have gotten a check from Larry Flynt Publications. Some Conservative Compassionate Christians may not (openly) agree with Flynt’s liberal attitude toward sex, but isn’t it remarkable when all of a fellow’s employees speak well of the boss?

Do people who get a chance to visit the Playboy Mansion brag about the experience or do they treat it as if it were a shameful incident which must quickly be forgotten? Who doesn’t want an invitation to visit there? Would Bishop Sheen have turned down such an opportunity?

Are Hugh Hefner’s employees inundated with requests for a chance to see their boss’ home? Is this year’s Playboy Mansion Halloween Party already booked to capacity?
Remind us to ask a former co-worker at the Independent Journal that question the next time we visit Santa Monica.

On page 220 of the Dell Book paperback edition of “Thy Neighbors Wife,” Gay Talese wrote: “The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1965, which forged its slogan from the initials of a four-letter word (“Freedom Under Clark Kerr”), as well as civil rights protests in the South, and the subsequent anti-war demonstrations and marches on Washington – the sit-ins, the teach-ins, the love-ins – all were manifestations of a new generation that was less sexually repressed than its ancestors and also less willing to respect political authority and social tradition, color barriers and draft boards, deans and priests.”

Wouldn’t the people who graduated in the Class of 1965, just now be getting to be Presidential Candidate age? What college did Newt attend? Could it be that the flower power generation is just now getting its chance to do what they said LBJ and Nixon couldn’t or wouldn’t do?

Is Newt just now getting ready to bring the party that once included George Romney, into the era of the Playboy Philosophy . . . or has Newt been “brainwashed”?

While we are on the subject, aren’t all the top Republicans encouraging the current field of candidates to tear each other apart? Crocodile tears? Where are the candidates spending their campaign funds? On ads, right? Who owns the newspapers and TV stations around the USA? Usually it’s conservative Republicans, eh? If the top Republicans are raking in the ad revenue stirred up by the continuing series of Primary cage matches and if the same media moguls plan to pull a fast one and substitute someone else as the candidate, then, metaphorically speaking, aren’t a lot of donors to the various Republican candidates “getting their ashes hauled” by the “three card Monte” style subterfuge?

We thought that all the boys in the One Percent Club had mutual non-aggression pacts with each other and the idea was to be relentless in squeezing every last dollar from every last bank account of the Ninty Nine Percenters.

If (hypothetically alert!) there is some kind of nefarious plan to put someone other than the fab four at the top of the ticket, then aren’t some members of the One Percent Club committing a fraud that will relieve some of their fellow club members of some serious amounts of money? Why donate to a fellow who is predestined not to get the nomination? Why should a candidate who is being cheated out of any fair chance to be nominated spend ad dollars to try to get spurious (if you don’t know what that word means ask a Fox News fan) votes?

It’s OK for the Republicans to fool Democrats into thinking that the Presidential elections (2000 and 2004 for instance) are not rigged, but wouldn’t it be dishonest for someone to rig the Republican Primary Election process? Isn’t there a secret “honor among thieves” clause in the Republican Party secret handbook that precludes such a fiendish double-cross?

On Monday, January 30, 2012, the New York Times featured a story on page one (above the fold), written by Jeff Zeleny, that drew attention to the curious fact that Jeb Bush, has remained curiously silent (above the fray?) about endorsing any candidate to help draw votes in Tuesday’s Florida Primary. Isn’t it intriguing that such an influential Republican who served as that state’s governor isn’t making an endorsement?

Is this an example of the B’rer Rabbit’s “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch” philosophy being applied to politics?

Haven’t Romney and Gingrich destroyed each other’s ability to represent the entire Party membership? Doesn’t that indicate that a spectator on the sidelines who didn’t get into the mudslinging free-for-all would be much better qualified to use the word “we” when giving an acceptance speech to the 2012 Republican National Convention?

Meanwhile returning to this column’s topic: Did Gingrich see and enjoy the heist flick “Bandits”? A trio of bank robbers had an unconventional love relationship. It sounds like just the kind of action adventure movie that would appeal to open-minded folks. What does Mitt think about that flick? We’d love to hear his review of “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.”

The other most likely person to get the Republican nomination is a fellow who belongs to a religion that permits polygamy. Either way, it seems that the Republican Party has to realize that if their candidate wins the Presidential race, the Grand Old Party is going to have to reconfigure its policy on the Sanctity of Marriage .

This column’s closing quote was provided by someone who shall be called “an anonymous source,” and was heard as it was uttered by the World’s Laziest Journalist. “When I saw a picture of my wife in her underwear, sitting on Mick Jagger’s lap, I knew my marriage was over.” (Wasn’t the Stones’ best selling single, “Angie,” written about David Bowie’s wife?)

Now the disk jockey will play Jimmy Buffet’s song “Let’s get drunk and screw,” the Beatles’ song “Let’s do it in the road,” and Francis Albert Sinatra’s album “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.” We have to get back to reading a fabulous book titled “Velvet Underground.” As the leader of the rat pack would say: “Have a ring-ding-ding” week.

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January 23, 2012

Rebels, Outlaws, and Occupy Protesters vs. Republicans?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Bill Clinton, FDR, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Rolling Stones — Bob Patterson @ 9:21 pm

Is it worth the effort to write a column that ties together the W. C. Fields slogan “Never Give a Sucker an even Break,” Ross Thomas’ book title “The Fools in Town Are on our Side,” and the old locker room adage “my wife’s married; but I’m not” and present something that will amuse the hardcore Fox Views audience who believe that they are people with inquiring minds who won’t get fooled again?

So which of the Republicans are the Foxkrieg troops going to embrace this year? Will it be the Rich guy who made millions liquidating American businesses while trying to palm himself off as a Woody Guthrie-ish man of the streets? (Why didn’t he just say “I’m the Wall Street guy”?) Will it be the studly family values = open marriage guy? Will it be Rick “say hello to my little friend” Santorum?

Aren’t contemporary efforts to assess the Republican scramble to select a 2012 Presidential Candidate similar to trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle while participating in the stampede to depart from a sinking ship that has sounded the abandon ship alarm? It is an impossible task so the pundits should embrace the insanity.

Is America ready to do a mind melt with Rupert Murdoch and select soccer as the official American pastime? If anyone can turn soccer hooliganism into a display of American patriotism, surely it will be the Fox analysts, eh? Isn’t Superbowl Sunday going to start with a Manchester United match? Wow! Will all the Tottenham Hotspurs fans tune in to see the Manchester boys get their noses bloodied (figuratively speaking, of course!)?

Have any of the news organizations done an update on the brain cancer victim who was sent to the hospital for daring to root for an out-of-town team at a Hockey match recently?

Don’t sports fans believe in “One sport – One Team – One star player”?

Can’t we all get along and subscribe to a philosophy that asserts “One CEO!” as a (metaphorically speaking) way of supporting whoever gets elected President in November? The Republicans all agree that the Democrats should think that way.

Don’t the skeptics who get so upset with the Occupy Movement urge the protesters to get a job because work will set them free? BFH! (Isn’t that the Brit-texting way of saying Bloody Far-out Hell!”?)

Only Democrats see a contradiction in continuing the foreclosure trend and then telling the homeless families that they can’t sleep in tents in public parks and they can’t stay in abandoned office buildings either. Duh! Ya can’t create jobs in office buildings that have become de facto slum tenements. They have to be ready to house new businesses when the Republicans use the electronic voting machines (with unverifiable results) to replace the incumbent President.

If a Republican is elected President won’t he, like George W. Bush did previously, take military spending off the national budget’s balance sheet and then “abracadabra!” quick as a flash, there will be no deficit and the road to recovery will be smooth sailing for the rest of his term.

To hear the Democrats tell it, if George W. Romney gets elected, he will liquidate the New Deal as fast as possible. Duh, again! If the Republicans scrap the Social Security Program, there won’t be any need to tax the rich, eh?

The Democrats worship Obama to an uncomfortable degree. Isn’t it time to send Willard up there to replace him in the White House? BFH! Are Obama’s methods unsound? Ask some Republicans and they (and their subservient old ladies) will tell you: “I don’t see any method at all!”

What’s the difference between a punk, a rebel (with or without a cause), an outlaw, a rocker, a soccer hooligan, and an Occupy protester?

If there is no difference why don’t some punk rockers, rebels and outlaws hold a benefit concert to raise funds to buy foreclosed buildings to house the tent cities protesters? Do they think that if they raise the money, the banks won’t sell them the abandoned unused office buildings?

A lot of musicians have made a considerable amount of money posing as punks, rebels, and outlaws. If they are going to talk the talk, shouldn’t they be willing to walk the walk?

The Rolling Stones band once made headlines in Great Britain by proclaiming: “We’re the Rolling Stones; we piss anywhere.” Was that a sneak preview of the Occupy Movement? All they gotta do is play one benefit concert, one time and then the Occupy Posse will have enough money to buy foreclosed office buildings in (guessing) twenty five strategic cities?

Have the boys from Altamont suddenly become The Rolling Stones Inc.?

When the Rolling Stones got into some legal troubles (over a closed men’s room?) in Great Britain, the Who went into a studio and cut a cover of a Rolling Stones song as a show of solidarity. (We’ve seen a copy of the record in Dr. Demento’s private collection.)

Back in the day, the Stones had a legal obligation to deliver an album and so they did. Unfortunately, the material they delivered was unsuitable to their corporate masters and so the project was shelved. The name of the album can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Try a Google search for the “Rolling Stones” and “contractual obligation album,” if you want to find the name the band suggested.

Jerry Lee Lewis had one song with a line that asked “How much would you pay to hear a living legend sing?”

Is it true that Guns ‘n’ Roses, who opened for the Rolling Stones during the Steel Wheels tour, will be inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame this year? Who recorded the song “Time slips away”? Or was it titled “Where Does the Time go?”?

How much money could a benefit concert raise if the lineup featured (hypothetically speaking) Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Who, the Kinks, and Furthur (the band formerly known as The Grateful Dead)? This columnist paid $8 plus change for a ticket to see the Rolling Stones in Anaheim in 1978 (or so); concert tickets would probably cost more these days. (Just guessing.)

[Note: the World’s Laziest Journalist assumes that if a band didn’t play a gig before January 1, 1970, it is too new and untried to merit serious consideration – although the guys with the band called “U2” are showing some promise.]

Good conservative musicians don’t seem to hesitate when Sean Hannity puts out an invitation to play an annual benefit concert to help the Marines. What up with all the rock musicians who make sizable fortunes singing about the salt of the earth and working man’s blues? Can they get their accountants to grant them permission to play just one Occupy Aid type concert gratis?

The Republican debates are getting the Republican viewpoint out to the public. Why aren’t the Democrats having debates during the primary season? Are they subscribing to the “No dissention” among the ranks philosophy these days?

No concert. No debates. No hoopla? How do they expect to win in November?

President Nixon, President Reagan, and President George W. Bush all seemed to intuitively know the wisdom of W. C. Fields’ advice about a second term: “If a thing’s worth having; it’s worth cheating for.” The last two Democratic Presidents elected to two full terms in office were Bill Clinton and FDR.

Now the disk jockey will play the Cowsills’ “We Can Fly,” Them’s “Here Comes the Night,” and the Zombies’ “Is This the Dream?” We have to go see what’s happening with Occupy Oakland. Have a “Feeling Groovy” type week.

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January 19, 2012

Campaign Trail Mixology: Is This the Season of the Mitt?

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2012 Election, 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates, RS Janes, Rumors, satire, South Carolina Primary — RS Janes @ 6:27 am

Tumorous rumors and loose talk from unnamed sources speaking anonymously. (If it’s good enough for the NY Times and Washington Post, it’s good enough for me.) Candidates and poll numbers listed in the order of the Jan. 17, 2012 CNN/Time/ORC South Carolina poll:

33 percent: Mitt Romney. The only clueless Mormon left in the GOP race, and the candidate our Corporately-Owned Media has determined will be most accommodating to their demands of lower taxes on the 1 Percent and multi-national corporations and less regulation on the Kleptocracy for which they stand, the Mittster is so oblivious he continues to wear expensive $3K watches and pricey hand-tailored suits on the campaign trail, unlike the more savvy wealthy Republican ‘populists’ who sport a cheap Timex and a presidential-wannabe trousseau of off-the-rack wear when in campaign mode. (Presumably, a pair of Sansabelt slacks and a JC Penney sports shirt would induce a rash if in direct contact with Mitt’s pampered flesh.) Of course, Romney’s stiff Disney World animatronic awkwardness when interacting with members of the human race is the stuff of legend, but he’s also a walking compendium of Talking Points and as bad as the Bush Boy at the quick ad lib when he’s thrown off stride. As with Junior, such attempts at spontaneity inevitably end in disaster with inappropriate laughter and bizarre facial expressions. Weirder, though, is Romney’s odd notions of what constitutes an endearing anecdote, sure to elicit an indulgent chuckle and mist the eye. In this he reminds me of the rural farmer who told the sheriff that he shot one of his five sons in the ass with a .22 rifle to teach all of his kids to ‘lissen to their daddy’ when he told them daddy gets to read the morning newspaper first. Farmer Ding-Dong just couldn’t understand why the sheriff then arrested him instead of sharing a fatherly chortle over those ‘dang young ‘uns.’ He was even heard to shout in protest as he was being taken away, “Sheet, it were only a flesh wound!” This is Mitt Romney: he can’t comprehend that ‘funny’ family stories about tying his crated dog to the top of his car for a 10-hour trip that resulted in the frightened pet’s diarrhea running down the back of the station wagon aren’t warmly amusing to other people; he can’t see that his ‘adorable’ personal memories are hatched out of The Addams Family rather than the Swiss Family Robinson. While I’ll give him a thumb’s-up for being entertainingly strange, this tin-eared weirdo can’t be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office — imagine a President Romney greeting the Afghan ambassador with a goat to ride around Washington because he knows that’s what those Afghanis like or, perhaps, tying some low-level White House staffer to the top of the presidential limo. “He loves it up there! He got up there all by himself!”

23 Percent: Newt Gingrich. A couple of tidbits: first, the MSM has generally missed reporting on the helmet-haired blonde woman with the fixed, insincere smile and intense pinball eyes that is Callista Gingrich, Newtie’s mistress when he was married to No. 2 and eventual third and current wife. The former Washington lobbyist (what a match made in heaven…or wherever) is not just ‘Stepford Wives’ creepy; she’s all the way to ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’ creepy with her ghostly skin, deep red lipstick and hawkish, slightly mad gaze, and ‘Mr. Speaker’ doesn’t use the toilet without her permission. Staff defections from the Gingrich campaign can be traced directly to Callista’s iron-fisted control and she’s the one addicted to Tiffany bling to the extent that’d she’d put hubby in deep, embarrassing debt to feed her 1950s ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ lust for overpriced jewelry. She’s also the source for some of Newt’s crankier and more crackpot opinions, the same ones that may ultimately sabotage any chance he has of nabbing the GOP presidential nomination. Second, word is Callista’s taking a page from Elvis’ Col. Parker by stuffing debate audiences with ‘paid groovers’ who will applaud Newt’s wacky ‘dump child labor laws’ and ‘blacks should get a job instead of food stamps’ memes. Back in the early days of Presley’s career, ‘The Colonel’ used to hire young ladies to scream and cry at Elvis performances, noticing that other young women would do likewise if prompted by the hirelings; similarly, Callista revs up debate audiences — she knows most Republicans are born followers — by having her pay-to-play band start the applause and shouts of approval making it seem, to the viewing audience and more gullible members of the media, as if Newt’s insane ideas have actually attracted some adherents among the GOP base. This way, Newt doesn’t have to issue any apologies or clarifications — ‘hey, look at that applause, my ideas are popular’ — and the catcalls and booing help intimidate into silence anyone who might dare ask a follow-up question. However, The Ging-Thing Who Would Be King has a problem that must give him night-sweats; the follow-up questions that have yet to be asked, but will be one day, if he’s the nominee: “Sure, Speaker Gingrich, but that janitor you just put out of work and replaced with a low-paid child; what about his family and where does he find work to support them?” or “You have accused President Obama of being the ‘food stamp president’ saying he would rather give poor black people food stamps than jobs, yet your party in the Senate filibusters every job-creating bill that Obama and the Democrats submit to them. Tell me, would you support Obama’s jobs bill and, if not, then where exactly are these poor black folks supposed to find work?” or “So, as president, you would cut off food stamps to the poor and middle-class and, if they couldn’t find a job in your economy, then you’d just let them starve?” Newtie’s crass ‘big ideas’ can’t stand up to a feather duster of logic and he relies on the craven MSM aversion to asking the hard questions to keep his leaky campaign raft afloat but, with the kooky, creepy Callista at the helm (she should have sci-fi Theremin tones accompanying her everywhere she goes), it’s only a matter of time until it crashes up against the not-from-Tiffany rocks and disappears from view.

16 Percent: Rick Santorum. Reactionary Rick’s record is one of head-twisting inconsistencies and soft-shoe corruption: as a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum condemned Iran as an Islamo-fascist terrorist state while refusing to support laws that would ban corporations like Halliburton from doing business with them; he billed a cash-strapped Pennsylvania school district over $70,000 to pay for educating his children who were living in Virginia at the time; he took campaign contributions from AccuWeather, a PA-based private weather tracking company and supported legislation that would prevent the National Weather Service from issuing free weather reports if a private for-profit weather report was available; and he supports Gitmo, indefinite detentions, and Cheney’s torture policies. His perverse and ugly Dark Ages Catholic religious views opposing abortion, gay marriage, birth control, feminists and the theory of evolution are well known, as is his hilariously dumb ‘man-on-dog sex’ speech, his belief that Americans have no right to privacy, and his absurdly blaming Boston liberals for the Catholic Church’s pedophile scandal in a 2002 article, for which he has yet to apologize. No wonder he set a record in the 2006 senatorial election for the largest losing margin by a Republican incumbent in history. There is really no reason to probe for back-alley ‘dirt’ on Santorum — it’s all public. He’s the whole ball of crappy Christopublican conservatism that’s been pushed on the nation for the past 40 years but, this time around, the religiosity blew up in his face. Seems the fundamentalist Christians who just endorsed St. Santorum as a ‘unity’ candidate to beat Romney in South Carolina don’t have the clout they once had; hence, Gingrich is leading Rick in the polls with only days to go until the SC vote. Unless there’s a last minute transfusion from his Christopublican friends, Santorum’s out of money and will soon discover he must quit the race to spend more time at home annoying the wife and kiddies.

(more…)

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January 13, 2012

Do Republican Candidates have Vertigo?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Dirty Harry, Lt. Frank Bullitt, Sam Spade, San Francisco CA — Bob Patterson @ 1:30 pm

falcon-facing-right
Is the Republican Presidential nomination “the stuff dreams are made of”?

Has the Democratic process in the USA become a zombie sham that will remind mystery fans of the plot for the classic film “D. O. A.”? Thanks to the magnificent voting machines that leave no paper trail, Democracy seems to be alive and well just as Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) did at the beginning of the classic noir movie. A closer look reveals that he has been poisoned and his days among the living are numbered. Is voting in the USA also an example of “dead man walking”?

The lofty goal of gaining the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination seems to be scaring some away from the selection process. Should the Republican attempt a cure of this curious example of political Vertigo by hiring someone who will remind them of the glory days of the past and the achievements of the Bush Dynasty? Would JEB Bush fit the bill?

Perhaps the Republicans should, as Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) did in the Maltese Falcon (1941 version directed by John Houston), and seek the help of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and hire him to solve the case of the missing acceptable frontrunner?

All of these potential column themes presented themselves in disguise as the art exhibition at the Bancroft Library on the University of California Berkeley campus, which marks the beginning of that library’s centennial anniversary. We went to see the exhibition, which will continue into February, as a way of doing some fact finding in preparation for the Noir City Film Festival which will begin with showings (separate admission required) of “Dark Passage” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” on the evening of Friday January 20, 2011 at the Castro Theater.

Part of the Bancroft exhibition is a DVD presentation of a cinematic fugue of highlights of noir films shot across the bay in San Francisco.

How many times can a columnist get away with being the only pundit predicting that JEB will be the guy who not only gets the nomination but will see the win check mark by his name on Election night later this year? In all the excitement about the turmoil of the primary season, we’ve lost track of all our attempts to do with political commentary what Hans Brinker did with loud shouts. Have we posted five warning columns, or was it six?

How many times can a mystery fan/car buff be thrilled by the spectacle of a Mustang going airborne in the streets of San Francisco? Especially if the green machine is being driven by Steve McQueen? Particularly if the columnist lived in the Pacific Heights area of that city at approximately the same time that movie (reportedly the first Hollywood feature to be filmed entirely on location [San Francisco]) was being shot. Furthermore, what if the writer had been a passenger riding around that city, in his high school and college buddy’s car which was an identical twin to the one seen in Bullitt?

The Noir City Film Festival is presenting this columnist with an existentialistic budget crisis. Should we buy a series pass and see all the movies (some of which we have seen before)? Should we buy a pass and see enough of the films to make it an economically feasible choice? Should we carefully asses the series schedule and only see the crème de la crème of the selection and wind up spending less than the pass would cost?

Recently, choosing a column topic has caused us another existentialistic panic attack. If we write a column featuring some aspects of the contemporary political scene, such as pointing out how the American media seems to be singing a very coordinated chorus questioning Mitt Romney’s lack of universal appeal within the Republican Party, will we lose our audience for not running with the wolf pack of jackals who apparently want to help do to Romney what was done to Howard Dean in the 2004 primary season?

Howard Dean became an inconvenient frontrunner and so the press was ordered (“and ask ‘How high?’ on the way up”) to declare the man for whom the Republicans had made extensive preparations (like the legal paperwork for the swiftboat groups?) to defeat the new “frontrunner.” The press responded in “your slightest word is my command” fashion.

Could America’s diverse and independent voices of political commentary, in the corporate owned realm of mass media, be coached on what they can and cannot say in America’s Free Press? We seem to be the only one saying: “You bet your sweet, weekly paycheck that can happen!”

If, however, we write a column about contemporary culture that features some new information about a celebrity (such as some possible Banksy [or Blek le rat?] murals spotted recently in Berkeley CA) then in the one venue we get perceptibly more hits.

If we write a column with a unique bit of political opinion and/or information, that gets more hits which type of column suits us best?

What if, among the anemic hits the digital auditors notice that it got some log-ons from the New York Times computer? Well then maybe the site management can overlook some anemic total hits numbers and give the columnist the amount of tolerance for eccentricity that Dirty Harry got? Does it impress the site M. E. if a writer scoops the great gray lady?

In the solipsistic world of content providers, who knows?

We recently talked to a well informed political activist who predicted that not only is fascism and martial law coming to the United States, but, she warned, it will start with some newsworthy events in Oakland CA. The way she sees it, things will spiral out of control there and the authorities will (like Watts in 1964?) be forced to call in troops to restore order. The crisis will be prolonged and the troops will stay in place with little or no voices of alarm coming from the (allegedly) pro-Liberal media.

If a writer is the first to mention a prediction that comes true, does that count as a scoop?

What if a columnist peppered his work with obscure cultural references that meant that (hypothetically) half of the Google searches that landed new readers on the site were a result of his idiosyncratic “Google bait”? What’s not to like about luring fresh eyes into the tent?

According to an urban legend in the photojournalism community, LIFE magazine offered to pay $100 per roll for undeveloped film shot in Watts during the civil unrest of 1964. Young and daring photographers had the opportunity to use that dangerous photo op to make good money and firmly establish the foundation for a lifetime career in photojournalism.

Young photographers have the attitude: “We can run over to the scene of the action and shoot a few pictures and make some money!” Older photographers tend to employ the philosophy that “we can walk around San Francisco on a warm winter day and get some good feature shots and if Jalopnik doesn’t use them, so what, we will have had the fun of being there and taking the pictures.”

Scoops, predictions, commentary, feature photos, and news pictures all fall under the classification of content. Have “hed counts” become as extinct as the American Buffalo?

The citizen-journalist fad means that some content providers will function as a one-person news organizations and thus have the chance to fulfill the early Intenets hopes for the development of unique voices.

The obsession with finding items that will go viral tends to indicate that the trend is toward a digital popularity contest and the likelihood of a thought provoking column from a unique voice, getting a massive amount of hits is considerably diminished. “Go viral or die!”

Speaking of “going viral,” did we miss an online video that purported to show banksters urinating on some mortgage loan adjustment modification applications?

In the time that it took to write this column and take some photos for possible use as accompanying illustrations, we could have cranked out an alternative column that lamented the pathetic possibility that a hand full of voters in two small states have put the Republican Party’s seal of approval on someone who is perceived by some cynics as being “a member of a cult.” Instead, we choose to go searching in San Francisco for something that could (metaphorically speaking) be considered as the columnists’ McGuffin of accompanying column illustrations.

We would like to thank John’s Grill for their permission to take a photo of “the Black Bird.”

We’ll post a few links for those readers who might like to do the work to find some additional facts and information about the month of noir events in the Bay Area.
(There is a reason we are called “The World’s Laziest Journalist.”)

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/hawks

http://www.noircity.com/

http://mwanorcal.org/2011/09/bullets-across-the-bay-at-uc-berkeley/

Since none of the Republicans attacking Mitt Romney have said “Mr. Romney, you are a card, sir,” we will have to resort to a closing quote from Auric “the ultimate 1 percenter” Goldfinger: “Mr. Bond, you are a card, sir!”

Now the disk jockey will play the Vertigo soundtrack album, the Birdman of Alcatraz soundtrack album (if it exists) and the Jefferson Airplane album “Surrealistic Pillow.” We have to go see if we can find Bill Cosby’s recording about driving around in San Francisco. Have a “stuff dreams are made of” type week.

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January 10, 2012

Exploiting sports fans for fun and profit

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Explotating the sports fans, Fortyniners fans, SBL, Team owners = 1%, The way to San Jose — Bob Patterson @ 1:39 pm

op-ed-one1
Misfits with a championship ring?
grateful-giants-fan-op-ed-two
Is this a grateful Giants fan?
sox-shot-op-ed-three
Are there that many fans in California?

In order to frame the topic of the exploitation of sports fans let’s outline an impossible hypothetical situation: Would citizens of California agree to use their tax dollars to subsidize the building of a new stadium in Perth, in Western Australia, for the West Coast Eagles? NFW! No way, Jose!

Would tax payers in San Diego and Los Angeles agree to let the state subsidize a new football stadium in San Jose? Not bloody well likely, eh?

Would football fans in Los Angles agree to let Los Angeles city and county subsidize a stadium to lure a major football team to their city? It seems that is a distinct possibility.

If the politicians in Los Angeles ignore the naysayers can the wealthy team owners count on the wealthy news media owners to forbid their word slaves from stirring up any opposition to such a deal? If the politicians fork over massive amounts of tax payers dollars for such a hypothetical project can they then (perhaps?) expect some generous re-election campaign donations from the team owners? (Ask the Marina (del Rey) Tenants Association about that.)

Has any team owner been shameless in the exploitation of eminent domain in the pursuit of personal wealth? Is there any example of a humble rancher or homeowner being Bushwhacked by such a move?

If low-income housing is being defunded at the same time that sports owners are counting on getting government subsidies and tax breaks can that be used by the OWS protesters as an example of their contention that the one percenters are insatiable in their hunger for profits via the trickle up principle?

While we were traveling in Western Australia (AKA the WA), we noticed that some license plates signified that the owner was a West Coast Eagles fan.

We can not say the name of the Football team in Fremantle Western Australia because that team has been embargoed from using the word by a pants manufacturer company in the USA.

How much revenue could be raised in California if football fans could pay extra for a license plate with their favorite pro-football team’s logo on it? Would there be any similar additional “found money” funds available if a similar option was offered to baseball fans? To basketball fans? How feasible would that option be for fans of college football teams?

Are regional license plates in a huge diverse state such as California a good idea?

Obviously there would be some folks in Berkeley CA who would be willing to pay extra to have a Cal logo on their license plate but would there be enough to make it an economically feasible option?

According to an urban legend, years ago when one California town was given the three letter combination of “CBS,” broadcasting personnel from all over the state flocked to that city to buy a new car which would get one of the prized letter prefixes.
While traveling in the WA, we were told that the “KBC” letters combination indicated that the car’s owner was a resident of the Kalgoorlie Boulder City area.

Recently there was a news story in Northern California about a woman hockey fan who gave a whack in the head to a person in the row in front of her. Unfortunately the victim was a young girl recovering from recent brain surgery for cancer. The victim had to be rushed to the hospital. Did that story get much play from news media in (for example) Concordia Kansas?

Do sports team owners use regional factionalism to keep fans from organizing in much the same way that Republicans use a multitude of wedge issues to keep the squabbling Democrats from forming a consensus on a party platform? How hard would sports team owner work to discourage a national union for fans? Would they bring in the Oakland Police Department to break up any rallies urging the formation of such a group?

Recently while visiting the Westwood section of Los Angeles, we noted that there were no bookstores selling new books other than the student book store at UCLA. Westwood used to have a delightful assortment of bookstores including the Bruin Book Company (BBC) which operated on a 24/7 basis.

Would publishers be able to getaway with it if they could convince the politicians in Los Angeles to use tax funds to build a store where the publishers could then “do their thing”?
Would fights between people wearing Strand Books T-shirts and City Lights Bookstore T-shirts ever make the national news?

We heard a report on KCBS news radio Monday about the conditions being imposed on 49ers fans who want to buy season tickets when (not if) the team moves to San Jose. They mumbled something about an additional “$20,000 builders fee” to be extorted from the fans. Would soccer fans in Great Britain put up with that kind of exploitation of their wallets? Would Manchester United, Arsenal, and Tottenham Hotspurs fans put aside their rivalries and say: “Not by the hair on our chinny-chin chins!” and cause a fuss or would they meekly fork over the blackmail fees? We read both San Francisco papers on Tuesday morning but couldn’t find any stories about the possible exploitation of the faithful fans. Perhaps readers can do a Google news search for more about the “builders fee” nonsense called “the Stadium Builders’ License” (SBL).

Is it an oxymoron for nudist camps to sell souvenir T-shirts?

When the San Francisco 49ers play in Oakland, that city usually approves extra police officers to be assigned to be on duty and monitor the game. Do they think that somebody will try to steal home plate?

Are sports fans part of the one percent or part of the 99%?

Will regional rivalry inspire Occupy San Francisco protesters to taunt the people from Occupy Oakland with cries of: “Our cops can beat the snot outta the Oakland PD!”? Or “The bankers in San Francisco are meaner and more ruthless that the folks doing the foreclosures in Oakland!”?

Is it true that in Los Angeles two rival documentary film crews got into a fight over access to a foreclosure eviction proceedings event at a movie star’s mansion?

If there is going to be an unused football stadium in San Francisco, how likely is it that some concert promoter will convince some altruistic rock musicians to do a benefit concert there to help the Occupy San Francisco protesters bail fund? Folks could urge support from the SF City Council by singing: “All we are sa-a-a-ying is give Rock a chance!” It would be a No Nukes Muse type concert for the “No Crooks” cause of those folks who have been exploited all the way out of their foreclosed homes.

Did Yankee fans meekly surrender “the House that Ruth built” and get an inferior replacement? Are they paying more for tickets to the new venue?

Didn’t Oakland have to provide the Raiders’ owner with all kinds of perks to get him to move his team from Los Angeles back to Oakland? Didn’t he get all sorts of breaks to go down to L.A.? Are tax breaks like sex and drugs in that “you can never have enough!”?

Is it time for sports fans to Occupy the empty football stadium and join together for their own good and form a union or are they afraid of being labeled “socialists” by Uncle Rushbo. (Doesn’t he usually get to sit in the owner’s suite when he goes to a sporting event?)

Leo Durocher, the manager of the New York Giants provided a T-shirt suggestion for the one percenters when he said: “Nice guys finish last.”

Now the disk jockey will play Teresa Brewer’s “I Love Mickey” (featuring Mickey Mantle), which is not to be confused with “Gimme Mick,” “Do you know the way to San Jose,” and the Stones’ “Street Fightin’ Man.” We gotta go dig out our “No Nukes” T-shirt. Have a “Go Hotspurs!” type week.

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January 6, 2012

Fear and Loafing on the road to the 2012 Election

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Jack Kerouac, Mitt Romney, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, The 7 cees bus — Bob Patterson @ 1:34 pm

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This is not a candidate’s campaign bus!
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Riding a few miles in Jack Kerouac’s moccasins?
op-ed-three
The 7 cees bus is visiting beatnik territory

Beatniks, Republicans, and Commies may sound like a list of ingredients for a surefire recipe for an Eisenhower era example of political analysis but an evaluation of this week’s news stories, from the 2012 Presidential Election process, at the World’s Laziest Journalist home office produced a similar roster of potential topics for use in the first weekend wrap-up column of the new year.

Glenn Beck has replaced Stephanie Miller on the (formerly?) progressive radio station in the San Francisco Bay area, so when we turned on the radio at the beginning of the week, we decided to sidestep the issue of lodging a complaint about the abrupt change in the station’s tone and just listen and see if the Beckster would give us a gift rapped easy column item.

He casually noted that the Communists were making a concerted effort to enroll (enlist?) recently discharged members of the American military and that sent us scrambling for our copy of “Lenin for Beginners” (Pantheon Books) to see if we could make a viable prediction that the Republicans would be framing the Occupy movement as a new version of the battle of Patriotic Americans to protect young citizens from being seduced by the Communist Party’s tendency to wage class warfare in the clever disguise of worker exploitation by the rich and greedy bastards at the top of society.

Will Beck suggest a Congressional Investigation into this new trend?

The fact that the possibility that the Occupy Movement echoes past labor struggles indicates that the Republicans might be tempted to save some voters the extensive effort necessary to read up on some very complex issues by oversimplifying the debate by resorting to some clever bumper sticker slogans. That strategy has worked very well for them in the past.

Some German guy advised: “All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.”

That worked well for the Germans, the Russians and the Republicans. The Democrats, however, still think that a scientist can do a better job of explaining the treat of global warming and so they tend to fail in their attempts to draw attention to a long beautifully written article in some academic journal.

If the Republicans, on the other hand, wanted to use the Global Warming issue to win elections they would just quietly state their case by directing the attention of the “limited intelligence” voters to the current spate of news coverage of the barren ski areas that are desperately trying to cope with a lack of snow and skiers.

The so called Liberal media (that is usually owned and operated by a conservative billionaire) may not run too many stories about the desperate ski areas as a sort of “interline courtesy” gesture among the wealthy who are unanimous Global Warming deniers.

The pundits assessment of the results of the Iowa Caucuses made us wonder if the people, who are rumored to be preparing a new roster of actors for a fresh installment of the Three Stooges comedy franchise, could possibly pay for a weekly (or daily?) half hour of cable TV political commentary featuring their new trio of sincere but bumbling fellows.

They would be able to approach the Republican Primary Elections with a credible “we could do that” voice. Perhaps they could inject some sound effects and “nyuck, nyuck” laught track bytes? Can’t you just imagine a Stooge voice saying “Listen, numbskulls . . .” before they play a sound byte of the Newtster denigrating his opponents?

That, in turn, caused us to wonder why a diabolically clever Republican candidate did not hire the writer Tom Wolfe to come along on the campaign bus in Iowa and portray (for example) Mitt Romney as the modern, lovable incarnation of someone channeling the rebellious “man of he people” spirit of Neal Cassidy?

Wouldn’t a modernized road trip through Iowa with a Republican President wannabe be a very slick way to present the older business man as a palatable choice to the young voters who have made Jack Kerouac a member of the Rebel’s Holy Trinity (along with Elvis and James Dean)?

Wolfe could portray the Republican as the embodiment of the spirit of America’s restless young voters of today just as he catapulted a bus full of beatniks to fame back when he wrote about riding along on the bus going from San Francisco to the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

It could be an insider’s look at the boys on the bus on the road convincing Iowa voters that Global Warming was just a frat-boy prank to fool them. Maybe they could call a book about that hypothetical journey “The Eclectic Kool Aid Global Warming Test,” eh?
Thus they would be equating the Democratic Party voters who swallow the scientists’ ghost story of Global Warming as being “cool-aid-drinking-dopes” with bumper stickers asking: “Are you experienced enough to doubt scientists?”?

We were still wondering about the feasibility of such a literary project on Thursday, while on a walkabout in Berkeley CA. Do young folks these days still hold the same philosophy as the wandering beatniks in the past did?

Would kids grok to the idea that if he were still alive today, Jack Kerouac might (hypothetical example alert!) be assigned by “Sixty Minutes” to take a film crew and go on the Road in Mitt Romney’s campaign bus traveling in New Hampshire? Kerouac (or Hunter S. Thompson?) could compare and contrast Romney’s anti-establishment philosophy with his own in the Fifties when he was gathering material for his literary “Fear and Loathing in Bourgeoisie America” project.

Do young folks still go on the road these days like the Beatniks and Republican Presidential Candidates?

Our question was answered when we met the artists from Madison Wisconsin who are traveling around the USA in a bus called 7 cees After finding them parked on a side street in Berkeley CA, they invited the World’s Laziest Journalist aboard the modern phenomenon for an inspection tour. We were glad to see that the Kerouac Quest is still a viable option for young people.

It turned out that while we were doing our fact checking with the 7 cees bus crew (their clearance is 13’3” and they had contended with a 13’6” challenge that very day), some of the Protesters for Occupy Oakland were trying to restate their case inside the Oakland City Hall. Should we have been down in Oakland covering that Occupy Movement update?

The threat of subversive Communist activity in the Fifties was a “game changer” for the Republicans. Perhaps, if the Occupy Movement were portrayed as the new Communist threat, the Republicans can use it to their advantage in the November elections?

One of this week’s online stories that we noted was one that said that on the Martin Luther King Holiday, some people will promote the “Occupy the Dream” concept as a new phase of the Occupy Movement.

Will Glenn Beck be fair and balanced if he covers the “Occupy the Dream” phase of the continuing history of the Occupy Movement or will he be content to ignore that and just see the Occupiers as a chance to challenge and repulse the latest attack by the god-less Commies?

Will the Beckster use obscure and forgotten facets of history (such as the story of Grover Cleveland Redding) to frighten and intimidate the Archie Bunker faction of the Republican voter base?

To see just how Beck will portray that part of this year’s unfolding history, all we will have to do is turn on the radio, tune in to the formerly all progressive station, and drop out of the time consuming task of thinking about how things were better back in the good old beatnik days, and we will have a new constant supply of potential column topics all fresh and ready for analysis.

Then again, maybe for the sake of quality control for future columns, it would be better to break into the piggy bank and do some Making of the President 2012 reports from on the road?

Are the Occupy Protesters using new ways to rephrase old ideas? Noam Chomsky used Rousseau’s words when he said: “It is contrary to the law of nature that ‘a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.’”

Now the disk jockey will play “Skip a Rope,” the Grateful Dead’s “Please Don’t Murder Me!,” and (we hear that the announcement of a new tour is imminent) The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” We have to go check the roster of Republican candidates being listed on the Florida Primary Election ballot. Have a “hella flower power” type week.

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Ye Olde Scribe and NamrakComics Present: Our Republican Candidates Through History!

Filed under: Commentary — Ye Olde Scribe @ 8:28 am

First… two songs to “celebrate” the upcoming primaries!

They’ll be comin round the racetrack when they come!
They’ll be coming round the racetrack when they come!
If you vote for them HEY!
We’ll be goin the wrong way,
Now they’re comin round the racetrack when they come…

-Public Domain but soon to be taken over by WalMart, because…

People
Corporations are people
They’re the luckiest people
In Neo Con world!
Just one mega corporation
Is a very special corporation
Tho they have no soul
No more regulations we’re told
The rest of us are cursed
Cause they can steal, murder and worse
Cause corporations are people
People who can get away with destroying other people
They’re the worst kind of “people”
In the world!

(Kudos to Keith Obermann for that last line.)

Now now, YOS Productions and NamrakComics present…

Our Republican Candidates Through History!

(more…)

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January 3, 2012

Politics as Religion, the Ayn Rand Way

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion,Quote — Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Ellis Weiner, Libertarians, politics, religion, Republican Scam — RS Janes @ 7:25 pm

aynandfrankenstein And vice-versa. The primary thing in politics is to maintain your skepticism and pragmatism. The current version of the Republican Party have abandoned both, when they are being fed what they want to hear, and cling to ideas both woefully archaic and provably tattered with failure. Presently, they seem to believe that if they build a high enough pile of manure, a pony will magically appear. That kind of thinking inevitably leads to defeat and extinction. Ironically, many Republicans who call hemselves Christians eagerly embrace the philosophy of Ayn Rand, an avowed atheist. Of course, the GOP Elite are not Christians, they are well-heeled grifters picking the pockets of the sheep and hewing to Randian ‘principled selfishness’ as a self-serving convenience to make themselves wealthier.

“Still, the mystery of Atlas Shrugged isn’t why is it so bad? Many books are this bad and some are even worse. No, the mystery is, why does anyone who made it out of eighth grade take it seriously?

“Yet, obviously, people do. Individuals capable of dressing themselves apparently love this, one of the most turgid, contrived, pompous, and comically over-written books ever published in English. Why?

“Because they believe. For Randroids, ‘glibertarians,’ ‘conservatives’ (whatever that means at this point) and Republicans in general, politics has become a matter of faith.” […]

“Faith not only requires you to ignore what happens in the world, it praises you for it. The more unsubstantiated, untenable, or preposterous the belief, the more virtuous the believer. So [The Wall Street Journal’s] Stephen Moore’s solution to global recession is to wave around one of the most unreadable books ever written as though it were holy writ. For him, and for the right, politics is now religion.

“And, as with any mythology, believers want to emulate their heroes. Cable traffic on the wing-nut sites after the last election featured many writers and commenters musing about ‘going John Galt,’ withdrawing their genius and talents from the rest of us and leaving us to our own moocherly devices. To which all one can reply is, Please do. Knock yourselves out. And take this hideous book with you.”
– Ellis Weiner, “On ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as a Guide to our Times,” Huffington Post, Jan. 12, 2009

Comments (4)

December 30, 2011

“Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Aunite Mame, Back to the Future, Occupy, Optimism — Bob Patterson @ 1:46 pm

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Eat, Sleep, Occupy
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Who will go to jail? The war criminals or the protesters?
deuce-coup-with-flames
Summer Nats will be held next week in Canberra

Disciples of Existentialism are eagerly anticipating the New Year convinced that 2012 will be a remarkable year to be savored like a fine wine regardless of what happens in the Straits of Hormuz. Others of a more cynical nature might see next year as a binary choice: People can let the Republican Party plunge them into the “Kidnapped” plot or they can adopt the bootstrap philosophy and go searching for “Treasure Island.” Fans of Robert Louis Stevenson (AKA RLS) conveniently forget about one of his more obscure works titled “The Dynamiter,” which promulgated the concept that people should accept without hesitation the next invitation to adventure that is offered to them. If 2012 isn’t an invitation to adventure, then what is?

It’s hard to deal with pirates and mutiny if a person is being driven mad by hunger. In the book “Hunger” (by Knute Hansen) the writer notes that his pencils are organic and wonders if he should eat his pencils now and thereby destroy the potential of earning some future funds with his trade, or if he should persevere and continue to offer the world his take on things.

For readers on the brink of desperation, the World’s Laziest Journalist will offer a few disparate (not desperate) items of pragmatic information for those who due to dire circumstances can not fully appreciate our usual smorgasbord of arcane and esoteric facts and obscure cultural references.

The Awesome Foundation offers money for cash strapped entrepreneurs who feel that with a few dollars more, they could achieve greatness during hard times.

http://awesomefoundation.org/

The man who wrote the Samuel Addams beer “start from scratch” story is developing a program to help other would-be self made business success stories happen.
You can start by logging in to their home page.

http://www.samueladams.com/age-gate.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fbtad%2fhow-it-works.aspx

Maybe you could get a government grant? Start looking by clicking this link

http://www.gofreegovernmentmoney.com/

For those who lament that the Sixties are over and they don’t have the option of running away to join a hippie commune, we suggest that they click these links:

http://directory.ic.org/records/communes.php

http://wwoof.org/

If the prospect of writing the great American novel, if only the artist can find a remote and inaccessible work area, appeals to this column’s readers, then perhaps they might want more information about becoming a volunteer lighthouse keeper.

http://www.uslhs.org/resources_be_a_keeper.php

In the materialistic realm of a country that is the world capital for capitalism, the constant addiction to getting more money may seem vital to happiness. If money does buy happiness, then greed seems reasonable and logical, but if it does not . . . .

Once upon a time, there was a young boy who wanted to travel to distant lands, meet fascinating people, and see the marvelous splendors that the world beyond what the Dunder Mifflin hometown’s borders offered.

He had been told that all things are possible through prayer, so when he informed an Auntie Mame type figure that he would pray to win a large sum of money (to subsidize his dream quest), it was pointed out to him that many others would also be praying to the lotto god for a winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes (lotteries inside the USA lay in the future at that point in history) and since there might be more people praying than there would be winning tickets, the boy might have to wait a long, long time for his prayers to be answered.

In Hollywood parlance, he cut to the chase and said prayers asking for a swashbuckling life that would make Earl Flynn jealous.

It’s been more than thirty years since we have seen Francis Ford Copula collect his Oscar™ and so the World’s Laziest Journalist is thinking maybe it’s time to apply for a press pass to see if the annual ceremony has changed noticeably in the intervening years.

If we are going to self-subsidize a fact finding trip to Hemingway Days in Key West, perhaps we should go all out and apply for a journalist’s visa from the State Department for permission to travel to Cuba and see Finca Vega and the Floridadita bar?

Has anyone ever written a “Guidebook to the World’s Best Dive Bars”? The Banana bar in Amsterdam reminds us of a line from a song sung by Jim Morrison: “I wonder what goes on in there.”

In “Back to the Future” did the clock on the tower always say 12:30? Where was that tower? Did someone write a song about that long before the movie was made?

Maybe we should budget some time next week to stand by because the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory is operating on Condition Red. The counting of the Iowa caucuses will be done at a remote, secure, secret location (Dick Cheney’s home?). If the results of the Republican Caucuses in Iowa don’t reflect the pre elections polls then they will release a new theory the very next day.

That, in turn, will immediately be denounced and discredited by the Corporate owned media with the usual “round up the usual clichés about crazies shooting off their mouths prematurely” explanations. Ironically the conservative propagandists will be on the air as the results are announced making convoluted explanations of what Americans were thinking when folks in Iowa cast their votes.

Speaking of counting votes, next year maybe we will squeeze in a political punditry column that asks the question, can Republicans use the ranked voting process to cast three votes for their candidate? For example, if a stubborn, obstinate Republican (is there any other kind?) thinks there is no other choice could he list his guy as the first, second, and third choice for the office? Wouldn’t that mean casting three votes for the candidate he thinks is the only viable choice?

Does the New Hampshire primary really count? Didn’t President Obama loose in New Hampshire? Didn’t George W. Bush loose there in 2000? Didn’t Ronald Reagan loose there in his 1980 Presidential campaign? Isn’t trying to remember who won there a lot like trying to name the US’s first ten VP’s?

In one of Waylon Jennings’ songs he offered an optimistic take on failure: “at least you got the makings of a song.” If life hands you lemons, then write a Country and Western song about the experience. Do you wanna hear a song about a despondent cowboy who goes to Paris to get a job because he thought a photo of the Eiffel Tower depicted an European style oil rig?

In preparing to write about the question “What ever happened to the TV series ‘Long John Silver’?” we learned that Robert Newton also made a film titled “Long John Silver.” Got a new addition to the “Bucket List” over here boss! Are those two items available on tape or DVD?

Wherever the World’s Laziest Journalist goes, he will try to have his trusty Coolpix camera at the ready because it’s easier to take and post “photographer errant” images to go along with the columns than to do all the clerk work necessary to get permission to use someone else’s photos.

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote (in “Zorba the Greek”): “All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.”

Auntie Mame said: “Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

RLS wrote:
“Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.”

However, as far as an insurance prayer to the lotto god is concerned; Robert Louis Stevenson (in “The Merry Men”) also wrote: “ . . . generous prayer is never presented n vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.”

We say: Bring on the New Year! We intend on having a wild and bawdy year on a very limited budget and we will try our best to scratch a few more items off our Bucket List in the process. Which isn’t to say that we won’t buy a few lotto tickets and say some appropriate prayers to the lotto god.

Now the disk jockey will play both versions of the only song recorded by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “Money (that’s what I want).” He will also play Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and the Eagles’ song with the line about living your life locked up in chains only to find in your last moments, that the key was always right there in your hand. We have to go say a prayer to the lotto god. Have a “Eureka!” type Happy New Year.

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December 27, 2011

Will the Thane of Cawdor win the Iowa caucuses?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Ferrari, Jeb Bush, Occupy San Francisco, Thane of Cawdor — Bob Patterson @ 2:04 pm

dscn9149_14790xmasdaysf1225-11
Christmas at Occupy San Francisco
dscn9077_14718xmasdaysf1225-11
Is that the local or the express?

Wanna race?

Political pundits will fill their annual New Year’s columns and broadcasts with grandiose pronouncements about the importance of the choices that voters will make during the Presidential election process in the USA in 2012. When JEB Bush gets the Republican Party nomination in Tampa Beach next summer, the upper echelon of the political punditry world will then be invited into the boss’ office and be given a choice of their next assignment. They can either be a part of the national dialogue that sheepishly concedes “Wow! Nobody saw that coming!” and write columns asserting that American voters have absolved the Bush family of any misdeeds, and will (like the return of the prodigal son) welcome them back to the White House, or they can clean out their desks and prepare themselves emotionally to do the necessary gonzo-journalism style research for a book titled “Living among the homeless of America.”

What reporter’s family wouldn’t become very emotional about the chance for the head of the house hold’s opportunity to become a word-slinger’s version of Dorothea Lang or Walker Evans who did epic pioneering photojournalism during the Great Depression?

Most will choose the former rather than the latter. (Didn’t Waylon Jennings sing a song with a line about climbing a ladder that leads to a hole in the ground?)

Any cynic will be quick to point out that there are always exceptions to the rule. Was George Orwell married when he did the “been there done that” aspect of the fact gathering process for his book “Down and Out in London and Paris”? Was Kerouac married when he went on the road with Neal Cassidy?

For any obscure blogger who just happened to start making predictions in 2010 about JEB Bush being the President-elect at Christmas time in 2012, the choices to be faced in 2013 will be different.

No! It won’t be which lucrative offer from the mainstream media to accept. Such an oracle will have to decide how to handle a tsunami of indifference. Obviously a year of “I-tried-to-warn-you” columns would be a major audience turn-off. Feigning surprise at something that the World’s Laziest Journalist has been predicting for two year would be more of a stretch than his lamentable acting ability could cover.

Obviously if the JEB prediction is spot-on, we’ll have earned the right to indulge in fun feature assignments; if we are wrong, a few dozen regular readers will be annoyed with our misplaced confidence in our predicting abilities. Either way there won’t be much of an effect on the stock market or the reader’s retirement funds.

So what sort of columns should a cynical pundit write during the last year on the Mayan Calendar?

The columnist’s quandary was brought into sharp focus during the recent holiday weekend because of several serendipity walkabouts in San Francisco. We discovered some marvelous feature material and also stumbled upon some noteworthy facets of the contemporary political maze.

On Friday, December 23, 2011, we chanced upon the Tenderloin National Park. On Christmas we took photos of a spaceport in San Francisco. A visit to the art installation titled “Defenestration” would produce some eye-catching images.

Obviously, we could weave some political commentary to accompany the photos of those noticeable urban visuals but at this point it seems redundant to dabble in clichés about the tumultuous scramble to become the Republican Party’s Presidential Nominee.

We could race around the country and try to document the effects of the economic slowdown on the average citizen because it seems that the cash strapped Government isn’t going to subsidize a new version of the work done in the Thirties by Dorthea Lang or Walker Evans.

We could just do fact checking on feature topics and know that the amusement and entertainment provided by the process will be our only reward.

How likely is it that some liberal publication with “deep pockets” will step in and subsidize a brutally frank examination of contemporary American culture during these hard times? Will Rolling Stone magazine find a young firebrand like Hunter S. Thompson and send him (or her?) out on the road with a generous attitude about the writer’s expense account?

What ever happened to the old expectation that “edgy” would be the norm on the Internets? Have conservative corporate websites imposed stodgy and timid limits on their contributing writers? If so, how will they expect to attract the young audience that wants (like the hippies in the Sixties) to embrace audacity, artistic innovation, and uniqueness?

After having an Italian style snack in the City Lights Bookstore’s neighborhood, during Christmas Eve afternoon, we chanced upon an urban tableau which might help us land a car-spotting report on the Jalopnik website. We took about two dozen photos of a parked Ferrari that rightly belongs in a major car museum.

The next day while proceeding from the Landmark’s Embarcadero Cinema Center to the Transbay Bus Terminal, we noticed that the Occupy San Francisco folks were having Christmas Dinner in front of the Treasury building. One of the few journalists there was a woman reporter for a newspaper in Chechnya.

Later, we realized that our brief attempt to explain to her why, during a period of extreme dire economic decisions, it was absolute(ly) [Vodka pun alert] necessary to spend money to pay a large contingent of police officers to stand by and make sure no member of the Occupy Wall Street political movement gained access to a public park, could be the basis for a new political punditry column.

Apparently in the old Soviet Socialist Republics it was of utmost importance for the people to have access to public parks.

The reporter from Chechnya noted that since converting over to capitalism the quality of life had deteriorated noticeably in her home country. For her, seeing the homeless being fed while bankers raked in this year’s round of bonuses was a distressing talisman of what the future held for her home county under the capitalist system.

The decision about how to play the material we had gathered on the Christmas weekend will be emblematic of the same choice to be made for all of 2012.

Should the World’s Laziest Journalist go off to Iowa, spend precious funds from the bank account to run around like a puppy chasing his own tail, and be shut out from access to knowledgeable sources, and maybe even apply for credentials to cover the Republican National Convention?

It’s a bit annoying to deal with the Republicans who say that they will let the general assembly in Tampa Bay next summer decided what the platform will be and that no one speaks on behalf of their group because they all will have a say in the denouement for the quest for a candidate.

Isn’t equivocating and sidestepping questions rather tedious and boring if you are not the media superstar being paid to have an orgasm over a non-denial denial?

If the Mayan Calendar is correct and the world is going to end next year, why bother worrying about an audience? Why not (to use another phrase from another Waylon Jennings song) be like the people in Texas and go out and live for all it’s worth?

The odd thing about 2012 already is that none of the highly paid mainstream media journalists seem to really care about who will get the Republican nomination. The use of highly accurate exit polls has been abandoned in the USA. They still use them in Europe. Have you seen any polls of top ranking influential Republicans about the most likely pick?

They all seem more concerned with portraying the selection process as being up for grabs. What happened to the old “confidential sources tell us” style of heads-up journalism? If the stage is set for a dramatic “no one saw it coming” development as the climax of the Republican convention, what’s not to love about a JEB Bush nomination?

Bernard DeVoto, in the first chapter of his book “The Year of Decision 1846,” (on page 4) wrote: “A moment of time holds in solution ingredients which might combine in any of several or many ways, and then another moment precipitates out of the possible the at last determined thing. The limb of a tree grows to a foreordained shape in response to forces determined by nature’s equilibriums, but the affairs of nations are shaped by the actions of men, and sometimes, looking back, we can understand which actions were decisive.”

Now, the disk jockey will play “Just Keep Walkin,’” and Duane Eddy’s “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” and then do what Rev. Dan can’t do and play Elvis’s “Old Shep.” We have to go find a scoop. Have a “hail thane of Cawdor” type week.

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December 23, 2011

More Political Good, Bad and Ugly

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Bachmann, Boehner, Cain, Fox News, FreedomWorks, Gingrich, Gretchen Carlson, James O’Keefe, Jerry Sandusky, Paul, Paul Ryan, Perry, PolitiFact, Romney, RS Janes, Rush Limbaugh, Santorum — RS Janes @ 5:42 pm

More Political Good, Bad and Ugly

Good: Your husband has decided to get more involved in politics.
Bad: He’s running for president as a conservative Republican.
Ugly: He’s Rick Santorum.

Good: Your wife is a nationally-known political figure.
Bad: She’s Michele Bachmann.
Ugly: After thirty-three years of marriage, she still doesn’t know you’re gay.

Good: Your husband landed an important job in a presidential campaign.
Bad: He’s an advance man in Iowa to the hard-core Christian Right.
Ugly: He’s working for Newt Gingrich.

Good: Your wife has a new job that pays well.
Bad: Working for Mitt Romney.
Ugly: It has something to do with inserting a crank in his back in the mornings.

Good: Your daughter just got a new job.
Bad: She’s working for Ron Paul.
Ugly: Editing his newsletter.

Good: Your son’s new book is about to be published.
Bad: It’s a biography of Rick Perry.
Ugly: He’s started talking like him.

Good: Your wife just got a good-paying job.
Bad: With the Herman Cain campaign.
Ugly: He invited her to his hotel room for a private conference.

Good: Your son just got a new job.
Bad: He’s working for FreedomWorks.
Ugly: He admits he’s doing ‘coke’ but not the drug.

Good: Your daughter just landed a job working for PolitiFact.
Bad: She’s been instructed to make sure her ‘facts’ are ‘fair and balanced’ between Republicans and Democrats, even if the facts show that the Republicans lie far more often than the Dems.
Ugly: She has to come up with misleading headlines that don’t match the facts in the story.

Good: Your son was just employed as a top staffer to an important politician.
Bad: It’s House Speaker John Boehner.
Ugly: He’s tasked with making liquor store runs and applying tanning lotion.

Good: Your daughter has decided to devote herself to working with the OWS Movement.
Bad: She’s working undercover for a right-wing website owned by James O’Keefe.
Ugly: Jimmy has invited her to his parents’ house for the weekend.

Good: Your son has just received a full four-year scholarship to attend college.
Bad: The college is Penn State.
Ugly: His tuition is being paid by the Jerry Sandusky Boys’ Foundation.

Good: Your son was just hired to work for a national celebrity.
Bad: It’s Rush Limbaugh.
Ugly: His job is to oil Rush every morning and then screw his clothes on.

Good: The ideas of Thomas Jefferson are being discussed on TV.
Bad: By Gretchen Carlson on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”
Ugly: Carlson insists the liberal Deist Jefferson would be a conservative Christian if he were alive today and join her in condemning those who say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’

Good: You’re not feeling well and your friend says he will find you a good doctor.
Bad: You’re flat broke and have no job or health insurance.
Ugly: Your friend is Paul Ryan.

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Can the homeless spend America back to prosperity?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Banksy, Blek le Rat, Sophie, Wolfman Jack — Bob Patterson @ 1:42 pm

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Sophie in San Francisco

There is a statue in San Francisco named “Sophie” (in front of the hotel at Geary and Mason) and we have always thought that it should have been named “statue of a weary Christmas shopper.” We made an effort to get another photo of it to use with a Yuletide column that will be the columnist’s equivalent of a bunch of “stocking stuffers” because going and taking a new photograph was easier than trying to sort through a massive amount of digital files trying to find an existing image file of that statue.

As Christmas day approached we learned that the San Francisco radio station that presents liberal talk radio was about to change its lineup and format. It will go for a balanced format that will diminish the effectiveness of the few liberal radio programs available and help the conservative majority of radio gain even more air time. Glen Beck will become their 6 – 9 a.m. morning drive time show. Stephanie Miller will be moved from that time slot to an evening tape-delayed rebroadcast time of 7 to 10 p.m.

Mike Malloy will be moved from being a live feed from 6 to 9 p.m. on the West Coast to being a taped delayed version at 1 – 3 a.m. We have thought about doing a column comparing Malloy to other legendary radio personalities from the past. If you haven’t heard his show you are missing a contemporary American culture phenomenon.

We have also dabbled, many moons ago, in conjecture about the possibility that liberal radio might eventually be relegated to the “underground press” mode of existence and become a clandestine pleasure/source of real news. We imagined that in America’s drift towards fascism, true journalism might be forced to revert to the use of a high power signal originating from a transmitter in Mexico.

It would be as if the concepts of Combat newspaper (of French resistance fame) and the Wolfman Jack radio program were combined to provide Americans with news that can’t be heard in a country that is world famous for its free press.

That, in turn, made us wonder if the concept of Liberal political punditry has become extinct. If that is true, then it seems expedient that the World’s Laziest Journalist should concentrate on mundane matters and expand the scope of the columns to include topics such as speculation about the Oscars™ (look for a heavyweight championship bout between Spielberg and Scorsese this year), automobiles, travel, and feature photography.

Recently we raised a concern that the Occupy protesters might receive a much more harsh treatment than usual and wind up occupying some of the privatized prisons cells. We were assured that such concern was unwarranted alarmism. Now we see where some of the folks from Occupy Los Angeles are making an appeal to get financial help with their bail. They have to come up with several thousand dollars each. Is bail for trespassing usually that high? For more information on the topic of how to contribute, click this link:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2011/12/250116.php

Did the news coverage of the “tax cut” issue leave you feeling like you had been played in a manner that brings to mind the song Pinball Wizard? Were you alarmed by the fact that the (Murdoch owned) Wall Street Journal and Karl Rove brought the teabag congressmen in line very quickly?

If our concerns two years ago that JEB would be the Republican nominee in 2012 are summarily dismissed as the work of a conspiracy theory nut-job, then perhaps the few regular readers will be quick to encourage this columnist to apply for the press credentials needed to cover the annual 24 hour endurance race at Le Mans in the middle of next year.

If we are going to deemphasize political predictions and focus on feature stories, perhaps we could get a column out of a visit to the 941 Art Gallery in San Francisco (Geary St. at Larkin) and do a story on Blek le Rat, the artist who is credited with being a major influence for the British artist named Banksy.

(If Blek le Rat was in San Francisco preparing the exhibition that ends January 7, 2012, then perhaps he did the recent works in Berkeley that we have noticed and assumed to be from the Banksy school of contemporary art. Whatever happened to the old tradition of signing a signature on an artists’ work? If Broke does that, why can’t Banksy and Blek le Rat also provide that help for their fans?)

Would the time that it takes to write a column that contains some spot-on political predictions for a few dozen readers, be better spent by reading Hans Falada’s novel “Everyman dies Alone”?

If this columnist predicts that the Yankees will play in the World Series next fall, will friends or foes accuse him of being out of line? Do they use the electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail to select the participants in the annual baseball competition? How is the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame done?

Speaking of Christmas gifts, we are wondering if it is time to do a trend-spotting column about a new candidate for addition to the list of winter solstice holidays. It seems that the Native American culture is now promoting the Winter Pow-wow. It will celebrate peace and the brotherhood of all tribes (i.e. humanity). Native Americans have always been strong supporters of non-pollution. You can find the “Iron Eyes Cody” PSA on Youtube. The Apaches were anti-consumerism and believed that if a possession couldn’t travel with you on your horse, then you didn’t really need it.

In 2011, we missed our chance recently to do a column about Herman Cain, Citizen Kane and the fellow in the Columnists’ Hall of Fame named Herb Caen.

If it is a far, far better thing to drop political punditry, then perhaps we should do a column comparing and contrasting Los Angeles and San Francisco and use a headline referencing “Tale of Two Cities.”

Were more people killed during the riots at the 1968 Republican convention or the 1968 Democratic convention? Our fact checking department says that two people were killed during the Florida convention and none during the fracas in Chicago.

We thought that next year’s Republican Convention (as it was in 1968) would be held again in Miami, but upon further fact checking, we learned that it will be held in a Florida city where the Police Department has acquired a vast amount of military style equipment (just in case?).

Australians celebrate Christmas in their bathing suits at the beach. Do the Kiwis in New Zealand follow the same tradition? Not bloody well likely since New Zealand has just had two new earthquakes and will be busy with cleanup.

If, as we have been predicting, JEB Bush wins next year’s Presidential Election, we don’t intend on being the political punditry version of Hans Brinker. We will (like the tea bagger congressmen) accept Karl Rove’s decisions and focus our columns on feature topics and not kvetching about the restoration chapter in the continuing saga of the Bush Dynasty.

We note with great sadness that George Whitman of the famed Paris bookstore “Shakespeare and Co.” died recently. If, as we have been urging, the Existentialist Philosophers of Paris ever make up their minds to start work on the Nihilists’ Hall of Fame, there should be a plaque with this bit of the philosophy of life from Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Oh laugh, Curtin, old boy. It’s a great joke played on us by the Lord, or fate, or nature, whatever you prefer. But whoever or whatever played it certainly had a sense of humor! Ha! The gold has gone back to where we found it!… This is worth ten months of suffering and labor – this joke is!”

Now the disk jockey (who dabbles in Existentialism himself) will play Duane Eddy’s version of “Ghost Riders,” the Rolling Stones’ “contractual obligation album,” and Edith Piaf’s “Le vie en rose.” We have to go buy a ticket for “The Wizard of Oz,” which will be playing in Oakland next Friday. Have an “It’s a wonderful life” type week.

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December 18, 2011

Capricious and arbitrary journalism decisions

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Merle Haggard, Michael Moore, Rupert Murdoch, The Beat Museum — Bob Patterson @ 4:43 pm

dscn8718_14359beatcarsf1213-11-new-beat-exhibition
New exhibit at Beat Museum
dscn5342_10983oo-moore10-28-11-mm-horizontal-best-cu
Michael Moore speaks to Occupy Oakland

Calling the new exhibit at the Beat Museum as our top selection for the top ten news stories of the year may seem to be an arbitrary and capricious example of poor journalism, but the same people who would get very upset at such a choice by a blogger on some liberal web sites, don’t seem to mind that Rupert Murdoch runs his journalism endeavors with a similar dysfunctional level of personal involvement in the editorial decision making.

How likely is it that any of Murdoch’s lackeys will say that one of the top ten news stories of 2011 is the fact that the integrity of America’s much vaunted Free Press has been compromised and that the Murdoch hacking scandal is Exhibit A on the list of evidence?

Time Magazine named “the Protester” as the Newsmaker of the Year. Will Murdoch concur or will he direct his subservient surfs to ignore reality and spin it with the absurd interpretation that: “It’s about time the liberal media acknowledged the achievements of the tea baggers!”?

During 2011, we heard one reporter on CBS radio news state that JEB Bush has his campaign headquarters in a hotel in Miami (where by a big co-inky-dink the Republicans will hold their Nominating convention). If that fact hasn’t been reported on Fox, is the withholding of that news evidence of an arbitrary and capricious example of poor journalism, or is it indicative of something more ominous?

At one point during 2011, this columnist/photographer was stopped dead in his tracks by a tableau in the lobby of the Shattuck Hotel in downtown Berkeley CA. There were three young men having breakfast together and that wasn’t remarkable in a town that provides a worthy rival for the UCLA baseball, basketball, and football teams. What was astounding was the visual of thee young guys ignoring each other and peering intently at their own laptop computers. We took a photograph of the scene that illustrates the paradoxical aspect of contemporary society whereby friends ostensibly feel more connected to the world by being isolated from each other.

The fact that the image is somewhere in among a vast number of digital files of frames taken with our Nikon Coolpix brings up the fact that now with computerized photography we can shoot the equivalent of several 36 exposure rolls of 35mm color film and not freak-out over the price of the material and subsequent development costs. The down side of the freedom to do an extensive amount of shooting at a news event is that there is a massive amount of boring clerk work for a photo librarian to be done.

The fact that a California housewife won a Pulitzer Prize in Photography for taking a photo of a highway accident, can be used to segue into another story from 2011 that will be ignored by Murdoch’s marauders: Citizen journalists will not (based on preliminary legal precedents being set in 2011) be accorded the same legal safeguards that are available to professional journalists carrying a Press Pass.

That, in turn, brings up another development in the journalism world that will be ignored by Murdoch’s wage-slaves: the increasing number of times when legitimate members of the press are treated like the protesters being rounded up.

That brings up yet another important but unlikely candidate for inclusion on the top ten stories lists: If, as we have been assured, protesters, who are arrested for trespassing, have committed a routine misdemeanor and will not have to worry about anything but a minor fine; why then are people now collecting funds to be used by arrested protesters facing expensive court proceedings?

Will Murdoch’s propagandists include stories about abuses by the privatized prison industry on their list of the year’s top news stories?

Will horrific prison conditions, as revealed by the events at Attica about forty years ago, become one of this year’s top ten stories or will the Project Censored group be the only ones drawing attention to obscure stories such as the one the Los Angeles Weekly ran recently denouncing the conditions in the L. A. County Jail for prisoners with handicaps?

Is the “Island of Trash,” caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Northern Japan, which is slowly drifting towards the USA’s West Coast, going to have any radio active trash when it arrives? Why was fighting the recently ended War in Iraq during 2011 more important than spending money on efforts to minimize the “Island of Trash” threat?

Will any of Murdoch’s practitioners of “fair and balanced” journalism castigate the Jubba the Hut legislative style of Republican Politicians during 2011 or will they ignore the conservatives’ sit down strike and pretend that it’s all President Obama’s fault?

Recently storms on the West Coast have caused some trees in Sequoia National Park to fall down. Is it true that some well known conservative executive with ties to the lumber industry has paid to acquire the fallen timber and will use it to make gavels for various conservative judges around the USA?

Will the Oscar competition for the Best Picture of 2011 produce a heavy weight championship battle between Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg?

Will “No taxes; no mercy” (i.e. no taxes for the rich; no mercy for the poor) be the bumper sticker summary of future historians for the year 2011?

If we had gone to Occupy Oakland, Occupy San Francisco, and Occupy Cal events and taken some photos which would be appropriate for use with a Year-in-Review column, that would tend to indicate that our news value judgment was in synchronization with the editors of Time magazine and that we were only being facetious when we went to San Francisco on Friday December 16, 2011, to take a photo of their new exhibit to use as an illustration for our top ten news stories of the year column.

Wouldn’t that be a bit overboard even for a guy with an Irish-Apache heritage (and most likely related to Che Guevara) or would that be spot on?

Will the quote of the year be: “This is what a police state looks like!”?

The disk jockey should probably pick a song by Amy Winehouse or Lady Gaga as the one tune that will always evoke memories of 2011, but since he is a bit of an old foggy who is blissfully unaware that the Sixties are over, he will play us out with the Stones, “Satisfaction,” Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” (because they conjure up vivid memories of better years). We have to go see if we can get tickets for a revival of “Hair.” Have a “Beggar’s Banquet” type week.

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December 12, 2011

December 12th: Mourning Yet Another End Our Representative Republic Day

Filed under: Commentary,Quote — Ye Olde Scribe @ 12:42 pm

“The political processes of the country had worked, admittedly in a rather unusual way, to avoid a serious crisis,” Rehnquist said.

If one takes Rehnquist’s “good-for-the-country” rationale seriously, that means the U.S. Supreme Court was ready to award the presidency to the side most willing to use violence and other anti-democratic means to overturn the will of the voters.
-Robert Parry

Least we forget.

Today was THAT day: eleven years ago the Fascistic Supreme 5 decided to end our representative form of government and crown Junior for 8 years. Wearing black is very appropriate. Free speech bought and therefore owned by corporatists; letting the Reich Wing and their Goebbels propaganda machine-media hold us hostage is not.

And inside the Bush aides, after crossing state lines to intimidate those involved in counting the votes, were rioting, pounding on the walls, assaulting people: kicking, punching and otherwise harassing them verbally. They were rewarded for this riot by the Fascistic Supreme 5 and those who agreed to stop the count.

PROMISE US, MR.O. NO MORE COMPROMISING WITH TRAITORS AND THEIR PROGENY, OR ENABLING THEIR RETURN TO POWER.

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December 11, 2011

Will Dems be “sucker-punched”?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Bolsheviks, Damon Runyon, Dirty Harry, Political Ambush? — Bob Patterson @ 10:41 pm

In his column in the Los Angeles Times for Sunday December 11, 2011, (on page A34) Doyle McManus said that President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie Kansas indicates that the President wants “to frame the 2012 election as a clear choice between two philosophies.” In this corner we have the group of one percenters and in the other the massive number of the ninetyniners. It will be a bout to the finish. Both sides will bet everything. Will it be a fair fight?

The Bolsheviks were a minority group that caught the majority Mensheviks off guard and took control of Russia via a clever trick. The word Bolshevik means a member of a minority group.

The Nazis were a minority party that gained control of Germany in the early Thirties. Think that the majority voted to give the minority party control of that country or did that party’s leaders use some kind of slight of hand (Burn the Reichstag building and initiate Gleichschaltung?) to gain control?

In many Muslim countries a minority of Shiites have control over their bitter religious rivals the Sunnis. Did they win the advantage fairly or use some kind of subterfuge to get the upper hand?

If Obama frames the 2012 election as a death match between the rich and the rest of Americans, will the wealthy hesitate to use trickery to rake in the pot with all the chips?

If you think that (somehow) the results of the 2000 and the 2004 Presidential elections were rigged, what makes you think that with everything they want riding on the next election; they wouldn’t want to cheat again to win it all?

If gangsters run a gambling casino, the law of averages says they will make enormous profits. Why would they want to cheat and get more money?

If you have been reading Brad Friedman’s reporting on the unreliability of the unverifiable results from the electronic voting machines, you might want to try to make a side-bet on (dishonest?) results that will favor the one percenters.

Imagine that the election is about (as Doyle McManus put it) enlarging (Obama’s campaign focus) “to everyone who agrees with the Occupy Wall Street movement that the current economy is inequitable.”

See how that will frame it so that if the Republicans win, the One Percent will say “you knew this was a “for keepsies” bet. Then they can be completely ruthless in insuring that the paid minions of the mass media interpret a Republican win as a “mandate” to eliminate as many taxes for the rich as is possible and to balance the budget with even more sever cuts to government spending.

When the 2004 election results were posted, winner George W. Bush then announced that in retrospect it was a referendum on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

If the media (and a compliant Obama) make the 2012 all about Occupy the voting booths and if the electronic voting machines deliver a mandate to coddle the rich even more, then the winners will be able to be very blunt in assessing the results.

“In all the election results tumult, we have lost track of just how big the new Republican majority in both branches of the legislature are. Now, as we start voting on new Constitutional Amendments, you Democratic losers have to ask yourself a question: “Do I feel lucky? . . . Well do ya punk?” Or words to that effect.

The media will start a massive counter-spin pre-emptive strike (on orders from Murdoch or Charles Foster Kane?) labeling any objections to a Mandate to Coddle the Billionaires as being delusional babbling from conspiracy theory crazies, at that point the only pundit able to respond by saying: “I tried to warn ya” will be the World’s Laziest Journalist and a lot of good that’s gonna do.

This columnist got kicked off a leading liberal blogging aggregate website quite awhile ago for predicting that the 2012 election results would be questionable (especially if the winner is JEB Bush) and so if the Press starts framing the 2012 as a referendum on the Occupy Wall Street agenda, then don’t send me any e-mails with conspiracy theory lamentations if the one percenters hijack the election agenda and the results.

What odds are the British bookies giving on a JEB win? If Mitt Romney doesn’t get the nomination will he be a high roller and make a $10,000 bet on a Republican upset no matter who the nominee is? Would the British bookies permit him to make such a bet on himself if he does get the nomination?

Think about it. If the stakes are going to be that high, wouldn’t the one percenters be nuts not to cheat if they could?

Damon Runyon has said: “The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, buat that’s the way to bet.”

Now, the disk jockey will play “Stagger Lee,” “The Gambler,” and (it is sortta appropriate if you think about it) Waylon Jennings song about “If I’dda killed her when we first met, I’d be outta jail by now.” We have to go check and see when the racing season will start at Santa Anita. Have a “winner take all” type week.

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