Government by flim-flammery

When a hurricane comes, you need to watch out for the snakes after it goes.

They'll be all over, displaced by the storm and by rising water. Usually, folks are careful around tarps or piles of debris, because you never know when you're going to grab hold of a cottonmouth, copperhead or water moccasin -- or, more accurately, when one's going to grab hold of you.

After Hurricane Katrina, at least one Army three-star added the Louisiana capitol to his list of reptilian hiding places.

One day in late September 2005, Lt. Gen Russel Honoré rang up Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The plan was to tell her his men had restored New Orleans' Charity Hospital to working order.

THE PLAN was to get the city's biggest hospital back serving a city where precious little of anything still worked.

What Honoré didn't plan on was falling into a pit of vipers with a plan of its own -- to shake down the federal taxpayer for every possible penny. And now Honoré, retired a year and a half, has a plan of his own -- he's spilling his guts and yelling "rat" . . . uh, "snakes" to The Associated Press:

"'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report ... if you want to use it,'" Honore recalled telling Blanco. "Her reply to me: 'Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'"

Honore's revelation raises questions of whether state officials used Katrina as an excuse to leverage federal financing for a new public hospital.

It comes as state and federal officials continue squabbling over how badly the hospital was really damaged and how much federal recovery funding should be allocated to it.

The state wants $492 million for a new hospital to replace the Depression-era building as part of a proposed $1.2 billion medical complex. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered $150 million for repairs. The dispute is on appeal at FEMA headquarters.

Blanco said she could not remember the conversation with Honore. She said she didn't know the military had scrubbed Charity until she was contacted by the AP.

But she said Honore's comments struck her as out of context. "I would not have made that statement because I would not have the first idea of having other plans for Charity at that moment," Blanco said.

Honore suggested that money, not medical judgment, was at the heart of the decision.

"This is about business, man," Honore said. "This is about rich people making more money. This is not about providing health care."

AND WHILE LOUISIANA shuttered a perfectly functional teaching hospital and world-class trauma center, FEMA and doctors were stuck trying to turn an abandoned downtown shopping mall into an emergency room. Private hospitals were stuck with a tidal wave of sick, uninsured, poor people.

A city is stuck to this day with a critcal lack of health-care facilities.

One "reform" governor later, Louisianians are stuck -- still -- with the same ol' same ol', complete with all the pathologies and deprivations stemming from that deviant status quo.

And President Obama is stuck dealing with his own private Chechnya . . . a thinly veiled criminal enterprise on his southern flank masquerading as a governmental subdivision. Obama to Putin in Moscow last week: "So, Vlad, how did you squash the bastards again?"

HONORÉ, however, isn't the Army's only star-studded squealer. Gen. William Caldwell of the 82nd Airborne Division had something to tell the AP, too:

About 150 soldiers and a team of medical professionals worked to get the hospital running, Caldwell said.

Meanwhile, a German military team's pumps sucked water out of the basement. Air sampling found no contamination — a concern, considering the flooding and bodies in the flooded morgue, Caldwell said.

Caldwell recalled telling Honore the hospital was nearly ready to receive patients. "We were actually thinking of having a ribbon-cutting ceremony, give a thumbs up and turn it over to the health care professionals," Caldwell said.

But then, Caldwell said a decision came to stop the cleanup.

Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room doctor who helped clean the hospital after Katrina, said Charity was made usable, and the medical staff was eager to see it back in use.

Moises said state officials used Katrina as an excuse to close Charity and ask FEMA for the money to build a new medical complex. Moises said: "It was their orchestrated plan. It was, 'How can we manipulate the disaster for institutional gains?'"

DAT'S LOOSIANA for you! Some of us were loathe to believe that our home state's pols, apparatchiks and business leaders could be that crooked in the wake of its greatest disaster ever.

Stupidly, we thought Charity really had been ruined, and that reopening it wasn't an option.

Naively, we thought that even Louisiana could resist using unspeakable tragedy as just another excuse for a shakedown -- an opportunity to trick unsuspecting American taxpayers into building geegaws to adorn its politicians' résumés.

We thought it was only right that the federal government rebuild what its flood-control negligence destroyed. And, indeed, the Army fixed Charity Hospital within a month.

It was good to go.

But that wasn't good enough for some in the Gret Stet. And officials were perfectly willing to let hapless New Orleanians die rather than go back what they had no problem using previously.

AND NOW Louisiana's new reform governor, Bobby Jindal, is happy to flim-flam the feds in the same manner as the unreformed Blanco.

In the face of state pols and hospital officials so vile -- a state so corrupted that it sacrifices its poor upon the altar of Greed as it seeks to pocket money from the collection plate -- the question suddenly isn't "How much do we pay Louisiana over Charity Hospital?"

Instead, the question Barack Obama and FEMA ought to be asking themselves is "What would Putin do?"

Dammit, the doctor told me to cuss!

F***ing-A! You damn well know this MSNBC report hits the son-of-a-b****ing nail on the f***ing head!

Peggy Loper doesn’t know why, but she’s sure that the rapid hissed repetition of her favorite expletive somehow dulls the pain when she’s hammered her thumb rather than the nail she’d aimed for.

“Generally I start swearing even before the pain actually registers,” says the 48-year-old student from Salem, N.J. “And usually, the ouch-ouch dance, where I’m hopping from foot to foot, goes along with it. People have told me that I should try deep breathing, but I personally prefer to swear.” The F-bomb is her curse word of choice; that hard consonant at the end is particularly satisfying, she explains.

As it turns out, Loper may be right. British scientists have shown that swear words can have a powerful pain-killing effect, according to a new study published in the journal NeuroReport.

The researchers originally thought that swearing would make pain worse by focusing a person’s attention on the injury and its implications. To prove their hypothesis, they set up an experiment with 67 college students.

The students were asked to plunge their hands into frigid 41-degree Fahrenheit water for as long as they could stand the pain. Half were told to repeat their favorite curse word while their hands were submerged. The other half were asked to repeat a neutral word describing a table, such as solid or brown, while keeping their hands under water. Then the whole experiment was repeated with the two groups switching types of word. (Favorite swear words were, as you might guess, the ones starting with "F" and "S." But since the subjects were British, the researchers also got an earful of "bollocks.")

SO, THERE. Honey, I'm not a white-trashy, vulgar, low-class person. I am just withstanding pain -- of both the physical and mental varieties -- in a rational, systematic and medically appropriate manner.

If you don't like what you hear when I've stubbed my toe (or have just gotten off the phone with my mother), remember that I'm just doing what needs to be done. So back the @#!$ off!

GOP gets its John Wilkes Booth on

Richard Nixon should have known his "Southern strategy" would come to this.

Four decades ago, cynical men put the "party of Lincoln" in the bigoted hands of the old Confederacy for the sake of electoral success, and now the South has had its revenge against the Great Emancipator yet again. First John Wilkes Booth, Confederate sympathizer from Maryland, and now Audra Sigler Shay, Arkansas-born moonbat from Louisiana.

In 1865, Booth put a bullet in Abraham Lincoln's brain. In 2009, Shay put one in Abraham Lincoln's party.

In the latter case, it was a mercy killing.

Nevertheless, there is something deeply weird about Saturday's election of Shay as chairman of the Young Republicans, and I'm not referring to her age -- 38. It's that someone as openly callous toward the aspirations and humanity of a people once seen as glorified farm animals has risen to a leadership position of a party whose icon took a nation to war against itself to stop slavery's spread and then -- in 1863 -- began to dismantle slavery itself.

THAT WAS the party of Lincoln then.

The party of Lincoln now -- at least as envisioned by a Louisiana paranoiac and race-baiter -- busies itself laughing at rants against "the mad coons," musing about lynching effigies of black presidential candidates and asserting that the president of the United States is some sort of pinko commie who hates the nation he leads.

From an updated Friday blog post by John Avlon on The Daily Beast:

Now, The Daily Beast has obtained more troubling details about her online musings—despite clear attempts by Shay to scrub her social-networking pages clean. Specifically:

* In October 2008, in the wake of news that an effigy of Sarah Palin was being hung outside an affluent Hollywood home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shay replied, returning to the “LOL” style that she employed after the “coons” comment: “What no ‘Obama in a noose? Come on now, its just freedome [sic] of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol.”

She picked up the thread again the next morning with a clarification and a new insight. “Apparently I could not spell last night. I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.”

* Posting and endorsing a conspiracy-theory video that attempts to prove that Obama believes he can only “ensure his own salvation” and “fate” if he helps African Americans above whites, complete with Barnum-esque captions (“LISTEN AS HE ATTACKS WHITE PEOPLE”).

* Numerous posts in which Shay says that President Obama is “anti-American” and has “disdain of this country.”

Collectively her comments are products of an increasingly common GOP mind-set I call Obama Derangement Syndrome, the right-wingers’ version of a virulent strain of obsessive presidential hatred that many liberals exhibited during the Bush years. Symptoms include comparing the president to Hitler and ascribing to him every evil and unconstitutional intention imaginable. It is accompanied by the belief that such a partisan fever is patriotic.

AH . . . the trivial pursuits of small minds. Like that of the Young Republican chairwoman from New Orleans.

And locals thought a city councilwoman from the Crescent City, Stacy Head, was off her nut when, in an old E-mail of hers, she ranted "EVERY F****** THING IS ABOUT RACE IN THIS S***HOLE OF A CITY!"

Could be that Councilwoman Head was crazy like Jeremiah. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, either.

Be that as it may, it does appear that every f****** thing is about race with this s***head of a Republican official who, by the way, got her new gig with the backing of the Republican governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. That Jindal, an Indian-American, didn't throw the apparatchik with the diarrheic keyboard under the streetcar says much about the cynicism of the GOP's erstwhile Boy Wonder -- it was Kathleen Blanco's playing to racial fears about the dark-skinned Jindal that likely sank his first bid for governor in 2003.

Then again, if you're from Louisiana, what's the fun in deviance if you can't take it viral? Here's Avlon once again, this time from a Sunday TDB post:

Perhaps less remarkable than the outcome–new Young Republicans Chairman Audra Shay bragged on her Facebook page that she had pledges from the majority of delegate going in–was how the vote played out. Yesterday’s election was closed to members of the press, but The Daily Beast has pulled together an account of the vote, and the runup to it, and the details are shocking. Some highlights:

* Shay’s opponent, Rachel Hoff, was the subject of an ugly sexual innuendo whisper campaign that questioned her reasons for supporting civil unions.

* Shay’s electoral slate, dubbed Team Renewal, battled desperately–some likened it to intimidation–and, ultimately, successfully to block a motion that would have allowed delegates to cast their votes by secret ballot, for fear they’d lose.

* Near-fistfights on the floor, and finally something of a boycott, as some of Hoff’s slate of candidates lower on the ticket chose to remove their names from the ballot after her defeat.

“They just took a vote that may have set the party back 30 years,” said the co-founder of HipHopRepublican.com, Lenny McAllister, speaking from the floor of the Hyatt convention hall. “They just voted for a candidate who has a demonstrated tolerance for racial intolerance. She has joked about lynching and then claimed to be a victim. As a black man, I still don’t see what’s funny about that.”

The Daily Beast’s revelations about the 38-year-old Shay over the past week–most notably, her positive response eight minutes after a friend likened the Obama administration to “a bunch of coons”–hovered over the convention, according to participants. "The convention was chaos because of the controversy," said one delegate. Her younger opponent, Rachel Hoff, became the reform alternative to Shay’s candidacy, but as Hoff got traction, an ugly online whisper campaign against her began. An anonymously built temporary Web site mentions Hoff’s alleged involvement in improperly notarized absentee ballots for South Dakota Senator John Thune, but quickly stoops lower. Hoff’s support for same-sex civil unions seems to be the real scandal, expressed in lil’ Lee Atwater tones:

Unfortunately, it doesn't end there with Hoff: As one of only a very few Young Republicans nationwide in favor of Civil Unions, Rachel Hoff attempted to convince the YRNF in 2007 to adopt a stance IN FAVOR OF CIVIL UNIONS. Although Rachel was not wearing a dress like her female counterparts, but her typical suite (sic), her attempt was met with ridicule and frustration. It was overwhelmingly shot down and left the idea in many delegates minds of: Why would Rachel Hoff support Civil Unions?

Note the all-caps for her stand IN FAVOR OF CIVIL UNIONS, a brave stance entirely consistent with the party’s stated belief in individual freedom (and well short of conservative icon Dick Cheney’s support for gay marriage). And then there’s the weird 1920’s-era anti-feminist dig at her for “not wearing a dress like her female counterparts.” And the last sentence, with all the subtlety of a Tom DeLay sledgehammer. It’s an exceptionally ugly piece of insinuation and propaganda.

WHEN IT COMES to politics, irony picks up where logic and positional consistency leave off. Gee, if only Shay's people could have portrayed Hoff as a lib'rul, dyke Negress, maybe their gal coulda scored a landslide.

Sometime around 1972, Nixon and the bosses of the GOP decided Honest Abe was for suckers, and they laid the party down with Bull Connor's police dogs to turn the "Solid South" from Democrat to Republican. It worked for a while.

But the fleas it picked up in Louisiana are going to be a killer.

Time to cut out our national cancer

Newsweek says Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration's torture regime.

Praise God.

Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

(snip)

Holder began to review those policies in April. As he pored over reports and listened to briefings, he became increasingly troubled. There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Justice Department, which were themselves controversial. He told one intimate that what he saw "turned my stomach."

It was soon clear to Holder that he might have to launch an investigation to determine whether crimes were committed under the Bush administration and prosecutions warranted. The obstacles were obvious. For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented. After having been deeply involved in the decision to authorize Ken Starr to investigate Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, Holder well knew how politicized things could get. He worried about the impact on the CIA, whose operatives would be at the center of any probe. And he could clearly read the signals coming out of the White House. President Obama had already deflected the left wing of his party and human-rights organizations by saying, "We should be looking forward and not backwards" when it came to Bush-era abuses.

Still, Holder couldn't shake what he had learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA's "black sites." If the public knew the details, he and his aides figured, there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe. He raised with his staff the possibility of appointing a prosecutor. According to three sources familiar with the process, they discussed several potential choices and the criteria for such a sensitive investigation. Holder was looking for someone with "gravitas and grit," according to one of these sources, all of whom declined to be named. At one point, an aide joked that Holder might need to clone Patrick Fitzgerald, the hard-charging, independent-minded U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair. In the end, Holder asked for a list of 10 candidates, five from within the Justice Department and five from outside.

OF COURSE, if Holder, a former District of Columbia trial judge, goes forward with this, President Obama likely will not be pleased . . . and the Republicans are going to go absolutely nuts.

They will go from merely unhinged to insurrectionary. So be it. The continuing, imperfect sanctification of America -- if such a term may be used in the context of the political and social -- has nothing to do with going along to get along.

Usually, it has come about through the blood of martyrs.

America's original sin -- chattel slavery -- finally was expunged at the cost of a bloodbath, a four-year-long civil war. Even so, we still suffer from the legacy of that original sin unto this present day -- and it required the blood of untold modern-day martyrs to beat back Jim Crow, Satan's counteroffensive against the equality of man and the American ideal.

The Bush Administration's torture regime in the wake of 9/11 has been scarcely less destructive of American ideals, notion of human dignity and the rule of law. It is a cancer upon constitutional rule and the American soul, and it will require the kind of hard medicine eradicating most cancer requires.

It's time to take our medicine or die. If the Republicans choose to cast their philosophical lot with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Mao and Pol Pot, it will be their funeral.

Or, perhaps, ours.

3 Chords & the Truth: As seen on MP3

Remember back when you were young and you used to sit in your room and listen to the stereo, shutting the world out with your music blasting through your headphones?

Those days are back! That's right, you can hear those same wonderful songs you loved as a teen-ager . . . or a young adult . . . or love right now . . . all in pristine digital quality!

We call it the 3 Chords & the Truth collection, and it all can be yours for the price of a free download over the Internet. You've never had it so good -- at least not since you were 17 and borrowing your dad's car to take your honey to the malt shop, where you danced all night to your favorite hits on the Rock-Ola jukebox.

HI, I'm the Mighty Favog, and we at the Big Show know what that music means to you. Why? Because we know what it means to us.

And it's all right here -- yours for the listening -- on the 3 Chords & the Truth collection. For three easy payments of not a single dime, you can relive those halcyon days when music was music and your pimples were starting to clear up.

A little.

It will seem like it was just yesterday when you spent all night "Hanging on the Telephone," where you "Heard It Through the Grapevine" straight from your best friend, who heard it from a cousin, who heard it from a neighbor, who got it from somebody who saw it all happen. Honest to God!

And when you tune into the Big Show, yesterday will be today . . . and you're skating on thin ice, Mister! Because your old man saw you hanging out in that hippie coffeehouse, listening to that commie Miles Davis be-bop crap and snapping your fingers like some damn mental deficient!

Cut your damn hair! You look like some kind of a bum . . . or a girl! A girl bum!

What are you anyway, some kind of dope fiend?

I'M TELLING YOU, buddy boy . . . you'd better give your heart to "Jesus of Suburbia," because your ass is gonna be mine!

That's right, the 3 Chords & the Truth collection will make it seem like you're 17 once more and have had it up to f-ing here with that square old bastard.

Or, as one of our favorite bands said:

This is the day
Of the expanding man
That shape is my shade
There where I used to stand
It seems like only yesterday I
gazed through the glass
At ramblers
Wild gamblers
That's all in the past

AH . . . but it doesn't have to be "all in the past." Not with this fine collection of your favorite music, available exclusively through the Big Show! Listen to your old Mighty Favog . . . it can be yesterday once more.

After all, they call Alabama the Crimson Tide . . . call me Deacon Blues.

That made absolutely no sense, did it?

Well, neither did being 17. Back when you were drinking scotch whiskey all night long and trying not to die behind the wheel.

If you download right now, not only will you get the wonderful 3 Chords & the Truth collection, you'll also receive -- absolutely free -- the illusion of recovered youth and eternal coolness.

BUT WAIT! There's more!

As a token of our appreciation for listening to the Big Show, we'll also send along a three-month supply of Stridex and a crapload of raging insecurity. And it won't cost you a penny!

So what are you waiting for? Download now . . . it'll be righteous! Maaaaaan.

I'm the Mighty Favog, and we'll be seeing you on the Internet.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

The party of waterboarding and wingnuts

It takes a simple screenshot from Townhall.com to sum up what's wrong with the Republicans.

Here you have a story about the battle, culminating this weekend, for leadership of the Young Republican National Federation -- the group that supplies the GOP with much of its "up-and-coming" talent (for lack of a better word).

It describes the race pitting Rachel Hoff, a 26-year-old with a voter-fraud conviction on her rap sheet, against Audra Sigler Shay, a 38-year-old Louisiana GOP moonbat who's a current YR vice-chairman and has been known to cheer on racist commenters on her (now-deleted) Facebook page.

The story by Jillian Bandes, however, doesn't mention anything about voter fraud or racist outburts -- but there is a nice ad next to it for a T-shirt that says "I'd Rather Be Waterboarding."

Fraud, racism and torture -- pretty much everything the Republican Party has come to stand for. And party Whigs, er, bigs wonder why voters have run screaming into the night.

They know nothing. Know-Nothing at all.

ACCORDING TO John Avlon at The Daily Beast, this is what happened July 1:

Shay—a 38-year-old Army veteran, mother, and event planner from Louisiana who has been endorsed by her governor, Bobby Jindal—was holding court on her Facebook page, initiating a political conversation by posting that “WalMart just signed a death warrant” by “endorsing Obama’s healthcare plan.” At 1:52, a friend named listed as Eric S. Piker, but whose personal page says his actual name is Eric Pike, wrote “It’s the government making us commies… can’t even smoke in my damn car… whats next they going to issue toilet paper once a month… tell us how to wipe our asses…”

Two minutes later, Piker posted again saying “Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals.”

Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker’s comments: “You tell em Eric! lol.”

Shay now claims that she was only responding to Piker’s first comments, not having noticed the second. The eight-minute gap between the second post and her response strains the credibility of this defense.

It didn’t take long for other posters on Shay’s page to do the math. First, Derek Moss wrote “What’s disheartening is the use of the word 'coon' in 2009. Wow… I’m usually outnumbered about 500-to-1 on Audra’s threads so go ahead, lemme have it, I deserve it.” He apparently expected to be criticized as among this crowd for calling out the racist comment.

Cassie Wallender, a national committeewoman from the Washington Young Republican Federation, then wrote: “Someone please help a naïve Seattle girl out, is Eric’s comment a racist slur?” She answered her own question one minute later: “Okay, why is this okay? I just looked it up. ‘It comes from a term baracoons (a cage) where they used to place Africans who were waiting to be sent to America to be slaves.’ THIS IS NOT OKAY AND IT’S NOT FUNNY.”

AND THEN . . . more fireworks on Shay's Facebook page from the subliterate George Wallace wannabe some nine hours after his "coon" comment -- and 8 1/2 hours after Shay's "You tell 'em" response. Again, from Avlon on TDB:

Shay was silent on this exchange, but soon word started spreading throughout the Young Republican circuit, open to GOP members under 40. Significantly, Shay then “de-friended” Wallender and Conner—in the world of Facebook, that means cutting off relations—after calling her out, but kept Piker as a “friend” (subsequently, it appears their profiles are no longer linked).

“If Audra really did find these remarks to be 'outright disgusting,' then why was her response to immediately de-friend those who made statements against Eric's blatant racism?” Wallender wrote yesterday in a letter to the Young Republican National Committee. “I was blocked for stating that Eric's racist comment was "NOT OKAY. And it is not funny." Please take a moment look at the entire screenshot linked above, and ask yourself: which comment would lead you to de-friend someone, mine, or Eric's?”

In the face of the “coons” comment, Shay’s main concern seems to have been damage control. She deleted the controversial exchanges from her page (but not before screenshots were taken) and tried to tamp down the fire internally. Almost eight hours after Piker’s comments, and Shay’s ensuing “LOL”, Shay posted a Facebook status update stating that neither she—nor her Young Republican political slate—“condones the use of racial slurs on my wall…. It is not right to nor appropriate to talk that way and will not be accepted!”

At 10:31 p.m., a friend named Dale Lawson raised the P.C. defense, writing “the over reaction to it was a little amusing.” Then her friend Piker came roaring back: “I agree with dale… this is still America… freedom of speech and thought is still allowed… for now any ways… and the last time i checked I was a good ole southern boy… and if yur ass is black don’t let the sun set on it in a southern town…”

SHAY, SADLY, is pretty par for the course when it comes to the stripped gears and unbalanced cogs that comprise the Louisiana Republican machine.

In the 1980s, it specialized in trying to get blacks purged from parish voter rolls. Now, it's pretty much reduced to snickering at morons' rants and playing in the tar pits of racial paranoia and political resentment.

Of course, in Louisiana, this kind of thing can draw an approving audience -- note the conspicuous silence about his gal's Facebook faux pas from the head of the state GOP, the Indian-American Jindal. Is he LOL at the "coon" cracks, while trying to make sure the "sun don't set" on black asses in the Southern towns under his jurisdiction?

Obviously, decency and decorum are outmoded concepts in the Louisiana Republican Party. So much so that the party's head -- and governor of Louisiana -- can't be bothered to denounce what was -- at a minimum -- tolerance by one of his cadre of the worse sort of racist rantings.

And not only that, but tolerance by a campaign aide who had stuck her keyboard in her mouth before, as noted by Marc Ambinder on The Atlantic's politics blog:

Subsequent to that, it's discovered that candidate "A" commented beneath a picture of a Halloween festival, "What, no Obama in a noose?" and then wondered whether liberals would get mad if Republicans posted a picture of "homosexuals in a noose," as a counterweight to a picture she'd seen of Sarah Palin in a noose.

Here's why Republicans should take this seriously. A double standard exists in American politics. Republicans have much less of a margin for error when it comes to making racially insensitive remarks. That may be fair, given the party's recent history (not its most recent history, but its Southern strategy history), or it may not be, but it exists, and it's a given, and Republicans who feel they ought not be judged by a different standard might as well move to a different country.

The Young Republican National Federation is little known outside the Republican world, but it is a fertile source of activists for the party; with the absence of young and dynamic party voices, YRNF officials go on to bigger and better things; the organization, while much attenuated (and scandal-plagued) in recent years, is the largest collection of professional young Republicans in the country. The RNC needs younger voices; the YRNF provides them.

WHEN I TOLD my wife about all these goings-on today, she was speechless. Literally.

Did I mention she's a Republican?

It seems to me that when you have Republicans engaging in behavior -- and displaying attitudes -- that leave even other Republicans at a loss for words . . . out of sheer horror . . . you have a party well on the way to having absolutely nothing to add to the national conversation.

Absolutely nothing.

You have a party trying to rebuild itself upon a rotten foundation. You have a party -- or at least a good half of a party -- conflating bigotry, hatred and abject paranoia with "principles."

And if that's how the Republicans decide they're going to roll, they will have earned their soon-to-come place alongside the Whigs and the Know-Nothings in American history's trash heap. Tune in Saturday in Indianapolis to see whether the Young Republicans elect the Beltway election cheat or the racially insensitive Louisiana moonbat.

I'm not a Republican, but I think I can give the YR delegates a bit of advice from once upon a time down on the bayou.

Vote for the crook. It's important.

Feed the press

HAT TIP: The Media Is Dying.

If guns were illegal, only Iowa cops could accidentally shoot each other

If Carter Lake, Iowa, didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it.

Oh, wait. . . .

ACCORDING to the Omaha World-Herald, Barney Fife not only lives, somebody put him in charge:

A Carter Lake police sergeant was wounded Wednesday by his chief.

Authorities are investigating how, as a city press release explained, Police Chief Shawn Kannedy fired a weapon inside the Police Department offices that hit Sgt. Dan Driver.

Kannedy, Driver and a third officer had been discussing firearms when the chief accidentally discharged one, according to the city release.

Pottawattamie County Sheriff Jeff Danker, whose office is investigating, said the sergeant appeared to have been shot accidentally in the lower torso, beneath his bulletproof vest.

Danker said that the gun may have malfunctioned, but many details about the shooting remain unclear.

Reached by telephone late Wednesday, Kannedy declined to comment about what happened.

UPON FURTHER REVIEW, I take back what I said about Carter Lake. The Iowa town ain't like the fictional Mayberry, N.C., a-tall.

Mayberry didn't have a big strip club on the main drag. And Barney Fife never chased a speeding car into Mount Pilot, then got himself charged with assault for tasing and beating the crap out of one of the occupants in a Kwik-E Mart.

And, finally, ol' Barn's gun never went off when it was actually pointed at someone. Because even he knew that "you never, never, never point a gun at anything if you don't intend to shoot."

Holy crap!

Live from New York . . . Saturday Night has been canceled.

There's no more point, network executives say, when the late-night comedy staple's writing staff no longer can make this s*** up. What comedic ground is left for writers -- or a 34-year-old TV show -- to plow when you have Lee Majors hawking "bionic" hearing aids, and it's not a joke?

Comedy is dead. It has been replaced by real life.

The dark side of snark

Well, this was ugly. I do not refer here to Michael Jackson's memorial service.

Yes, too much of Jackson's service was too over the top. And the wife and I cut it off when congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee -- on behalf of the U.S. House, the Congressional Black Caucus and, no doubt, self-aggrandizing camera hogs everywhere -- stepped up to the dais and started throwing pipe wrenches into memorial gearboxes.

Personally, I think it would have been a fine and touching tribute to a great but tortured artist if the service had begun with Brooke Shields' touching and personal eulogy, brought down the house with Jermaine Jackson's touching version of Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece "Smile" -- Michael's favorite song -- and then ended with "We Are the World" and the family's goodbyes. But we live in a society that's just too "too," and you get what you get, considering.

SOMETIMES, you just have to take your Maya Angelou poetry and your Sheila Jackson Lee with your Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Jermaine Jackson and Mariah Carey's dress.

Over at Crunchy Con, however, the inclusion of a special poem by Angelou was reason enough for Rod Dreher to discard any public pretense of Christian charity and treat the whole thing as if it were the grandest, most craptastic Jerry Springer Show episode in TV history.

In other words, a man's death -- and the resulting memorial -- has become reason enough, secure in one's cultural superiority and aesthetic development, to glue oneself to the flat screen and yell "Look at the freaks! Look at the freaks!"

I turned it on long enough to hear Queen Latifah speak of the dead as the Alpha and the Omega of human existence, and then to recite a poem typed emoted discharged composed by Maya Angelou, the Thomas Kinkade of American popular poetry, for the occasion. It was so purplishly, hathotically grotesque it would have made a Vogon blush. Naturally, it made me want to shout with glee at the Prytania screen, "Now I know why the caged bird upchucks!"

AND MANY of his commenters were far worse.

Please, Someone. Please give some lucky soul the opportunity to demonstrate that Richard Gatling did not live in vain.

Please, O Great and Powerful Someone.....give some fortunate creature of Yours the chance to demonstrate that Hiram Maxim's invention can be socially useful.

Please, please, PLEASE, O Most High Someone. Bestow upon us Your gift of Steady Hands, No Wind and Good Aim, and let us advance the cause of the Improvement of the Human breed in quick, rapid, 500-round-per-minute bursts.

CLASSY, eh?

Not touched on by Mr. Dreher is how turning on the TV to laugh at the "freaks" and the sublime awfulness of it all still pays tribute (and buys into) to what he considers a disfigured and destructive culture. Tuning in to laugh at the weirdos, it must be noted, is a far worse sin than actually being a weirdo.

And musing wistfully about mass murder of "weirdo" mourners, as did the above commenter, is just plain evil.

The relative merit of popular poetry -- the philosophical and cultural deficiencies of a public sendoff -- is no good reason to touch off an Internet orgasm of self-righteous vitriol. Show the respect you chide others for lacking.

Whatever his dysfunction, Michael Jackson was damned talented and broke down damned stubborn racial barriers in entertainment. However damaged his psyche and his soul, Michael Jackson was a child of God. Everyone who was at the Staples Center today is a child of God.

And to the only One who counts, that's the only thing that matters.

And to a heartbroken child, losing her daddy is the only thing that matters. Lord have mercy.

Speaking of harebrained schemes. . . .

You may or may not have heard of the guano storm surrounding The Washington Post's now-abandoned plan to -- for a price -- put together "informal salons" where lawmakers, bureaucrats and Post editors and reporters would discuss the issues of the day.

"Sponsors" of these informal salons -- according to a leaked "precursor" document to a Post flier that went out last week -- could find it advantageous to:

* Participate in an issues-based discussion as an equal at the table with key policy-makers

* Interact with core players in an off-the-record format

* Build key relationships in an informal setting

* Discuss critical topics of interest to you and your organization in a neutral environment with Washington Post news executives

* [Have an] Acknowledgement in formal printed invitations and at the dinner of your underwriting role

WELL, I GUESS the bigwigs at The Washington Post at least should get credit for creativity in the quest for new "revenue streams." After all, influence peddling as a "revenue enhancer" is definitely thinking "outside the box."

From Michael Calderone's blog on the Politico website:

But as far as materials go in preparing for the July 21 event, there was more than just a hastily-prepared,one-page flier. POLITICO has obtained a detailed, word document, sent out more than two weeks ago, which goes into greater specifics about what potential sponsors could have received.

And now that the Post is undergoing an internal review into what went wrong, it's worth looking at all the materials sent out by the business side, and how there could have been such mis-communication with the newsroom over the parameters of this an event.

The Washington Post salons, according to this solicitation to potential underwriters, would "provide an intimate and informal dinner and discussion setting where leading policy makers and business leaders discuss issues, options and solutions relating to major international, national, local and cultural affairs with top Washington Post editors, columnists and journalists."

In addition to Weymouth and Brauchli, the dinner on the week of July 20 would include "other Washington Post health care editorial and reporting staff." (As I reported Thursday, Brauchli said he was attending, but didnt know other guests invited. Reporter Ceci Connolly also told POLITICO she would be invited).

Other invited guests, according to this offer, would include the following: "Congressional leaders at the forefront of building health care legislative initiatives," "administration and agency officials involved in creating health care policy,"leading researchers from key think-tanks and academic institutions, "hospital and medical group trade association representatives (may be an underwriter), "health care insurance trade association representatives (may be an underwriter), "patient advocate group representatives," and "corporate leaders in health care delivery, health care IT, and / or insurance (may be an underwriter)."

The salons, to be held up to 11 times annually (except in August), were slated to be two-and-a-half hour. off-the-record dinner discussions with no more than 20 participants. As for editorial involvement, the offer mentions the "executive editor, key section editor, beat reporter (optional)."

REALLY, I DON'T KNOW how a reasonable person looks at this mad Post scheme as anything but influence peddling as part of the newspaper's business model. Put less charitably, the paper's management was perfectly willing to profit by pimping out its journalists and playing matchmaker for pols and those willing to "service" them (in a manner of speaking).

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the late "D.C. Madam," would be so amused.

For a century now, newspapers have been quick to dust off the old line about how they "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." The phrase's originator, Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne, didn't have public relations in mind when he coined it.

Instead, he was worried about the potential for newspapers to abuse their power, just as any ingrained institution might:

"Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward".

ANYMORE, the newspaper doesn't do so much for us. But, unfortunately, it seems papers like The Washington Post are determined to use what pull they still possess to comfort the comfortable. For whatever profit they can milk out of the deal.

And if that just happens to heap more affliction upon the afflicted . . . well, the afflicted aren't in newspapers' target demographic.

But then again, if The Daily Blab is run by the same sort what runs The Washington Post, who'd want to be? Obviously, fewer every day.

While you're at it, get a DeLorean time machine

The San Francisco Chronicle trotted out a snazzy, retooled anachronism Monday morning. Now all the editors need is Doc Brown's super-pimped DeLorean to take them back to 1955:

One hundred forty-four years after two teenage brothers in San Francisco founded The Chronicle with a $20 gold piece borrowed from their landlord, The Voice of the West is about to embark on a bold new era that could provide a model for how daily newspapers can thrive in today's market.

Beginning today, the newspaper will be printed using full-color presses and acquire some of the characteristics of a daily magazine - a showcase for the dramatic use of sharp, crisp photographs, graphics and advertisements. The new presses will have the capability to run color images on most every page, including section fronts.

"This will be eye opening for a lot of people," said publisher Frank J. Vega. "It's going to give us a lot more vibrancy and flexibility in what we do. We're calling it high-definition newspaper. It's going to be much more visually pleasing."

The Chronicle, which has run its own presses since the 1800s, has long been plagued by poor color reproduction and annoying creases. Its current presses are more than 50 years old. Its photographers and artists carp about the paper's muddy appearance.

With state-of-the-art presses and a vivid page design, the newspaper's top editors say they are committed to producing a paper that can compete effectively against the imagery of the Internet, glossy magazines and television - or anything else that impinges on a potential reader's valuable time.

AT LEAST the dinosaurs had an asteroid strike to blame for their demise. Today's newspaper editors would like you to think the Internet is their asteroid . . . as they try to convince themselves that one harebrained scheme or another might yet turn away their date with doom.

Alas, there's no asteroid for publishers and editors to hide behind. This extinction is totally self-inflicted -- mainly due to the arrogance of an industry that thought time would wait for these men . . . and women.

This die-off is due to the stupidity of an industry that saw the handwriting on the wall a generation ago but thought that living in abject denial can make things not be so, thus making difficult change unnecessary.

There's one more area where the Daily T Rex departs from its reptilian ancestors: Today's dinosaurs, as exemplified so perfectly by the Chronicle, didn't even wait to die before turning into a bunch of fossils.


HAT TIP: The Media Is Dying.

Feed the world firefighters

For Steve LeClair, the world's smallest violin just got smaller. And it's still playing "My Heart Bleeds for You."

Can he hear it?

I didn't think so. I'll bet years of sirens and fire alarms haven't helped his tin ear any.

TIN EAR may be an understatement. With Omaha facing an $11 million budget deficit and thousands of his fellow citizens already having their paychecks frozen, cut or eliminated altogether, the president of the city's firefighter union had the nerve. . . .

Wait, why should I soften the impact for you? I want you to come across LeClair's quote in the Omaha World-Herald just as I did -- cold. And I want you to get just as angry when you read it.

The notion of an extended wage freeze is a sore point for city employees who feel they've become the whipping boy for all of the city's budget woes. Too frequently, they say, their paychecks become an easy target when revenues slow down.

Employees say they deserve raises that let them keep pace with inflation.

“When you ask me to take zero percent in consecutive years, you're taking milk out of my baby's mouth and food off my table,” said Steve LeClair, president of the Omaha firefighters union.

In 2003, civilian workers in Local 251 accepted a virtual freeze. In 2004, police and firefighters had no raise.

The freezes helped avoid proposed layoffs, cuts in services and the closing of facilities. But the contracts also included raises in subsequent years and other costly provisions, some of which have contributed to the city's current $500 million shortfall in its police and fire pension fund.

Even considering those earlier freezes, the unions kept pace with inflation from 1997 to 2007. The cost of living rose an average 2.6 percent per year during that period, compared with average wage hikes of 2.6 percent for civilian workers, 2.8 percent for police and 3 percent for firefighters.

YEAH, THE MEAN, MEAN city fathers want to make Mr. Fire Union President take a pay freeze, thus making his widdle, biddy baby go hungry. So said the righteously indignant Mr. LeClair.

To a World-Herald reporter who recently took a 5-percent pay cut and watched dozens of his colleagues thrown into the unemployment line. I wonder how much milk got taken out of their babies' mouths . . . how much food off their tables?

But apart from the sheer offensiveness of LeClair's remarks to the newspaper, how incompetent can you get as a union president? How public-relations unsavvy?

Apparently, Jim Suttle is contagious. Somebody better quarantine city hall before the whole damn city comes down with a bad case of the stupids.

Dumb and dumber lease a car

This is so stupid, I don't know where to start.

Unless, of course, it's by just skipping writing anything and proceeding straight to banging my head against the wall.

OK, I'll start by saying this: Omaha, generally, is a city that can withstand idiot politicians without missing a beat. The Big O's new mayor, however, is going to put us to the test.

Sometime in the next four years -- if not the next four months -- I predict we'll not only cry uncle, we'll be crying "Walt Calinger." If not "Fred Conley."

HE HASN'T been in office a month, but Mayor Jim Suttle -- who, indeed, has been anything but subtle -- already has established a firm routine . . . a modus operandi, if you will. Whatever the issue, we can count on Suttle to do stupid things, then leave it to his flack, former Channel 42 weatherman Ron Gerard (think the "Weird" Al Yankovic movie UHF here), to say stupid things by way of explanation.

Which brings us to the continuing saga of the mayor's overpriced hybrid SUV.

This morning, the Omaha World-Herald is reporting the interest rate on the city's lease for the official land barge comes to a cool 24 percent:

Jim Suttle's aides ignored the first rule of car shopping when picking the new mayor's SUV: Check the fine print.

The result: The lease on Suttle's Dodge Durango hybrid carries an interest rate of 24 percent.

That's nearly triple the average leasing rate and the rate paid for former Mayor Mike Fahey's leased SUV, based on a World-Herald review of both contracts.

The World-Herald reported last month that the Durango's annual payments were $15,717. That amount was later lowered by altering the payment schedule to $13,745. Even then, dozens of readers were left scratching their heads at the cost.

Suttle's spokesman defended the high interest rate, saying the city paid more to be able to return the SUV at a moment's notice, if needed, with no penalties. That's one feature of what's called a municipal lease, spokesman Ron Gerard said.

“It was one of the few options available,” Gerard said.

Suttle's transition team, however, didn't shop for other lease terms. Several readers asked why the city didn't buy the vehicle outright.

“The city doesn't have the money to buy vehicles,” Gerard said in an interview. “The city has an $11 million shortfall.”

Under the lease agreement, Omaha taxpayers will pay $14,000 in total interest over the four-year lease.

A leasing expert with the auto buying Web site Edmunds.com called a 24 percent rate “outrageous.”

“Just simply looking at it from the market perspective, it looks like they paid too much for the premium,” said Jesse Toprak, a senior Edmunds analyst.

DUMB IS paying 24 percent interest for a mayoral land barge when the city's broke and cutting everything in sight. Dumber is explaining -- with a straight face . . . and perhaps a slack jaw -- that the reason the city's overpaying by thousands and thousands of dollars to lease a land barge is because it can't afford to buy one for $14,000 less.

Because, after all, “The city has an $11 million shortfall.”

Apparently, the city also has an IQ shortfall at city hall. Hang on folks, this is gonna be a rough ride.

P.S.: Damn, I almost forgot. Wanna know who was one of the geniuses negotiating the SUV lease for Suttle? This guy.

3 Chords & the Truth: Sounds like America

Today's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth is brought to you by the letter U, the letter S and the letter A.

Additional funding for the Internet's premier music program comes from the letters U and K, and the Corporation for Non-Corporate Webcasting.

ON TODAY'S EPISODE of the Big Show, we're chillin' for the July Fourth holiday. We're taking some leisure time, and so is our brain.

No grand message, no lofty theme -- as if -- just some cool music and a nod to the red, white and blue, Yankee Doodle, and kickin' back for the lazy days of summer.

So, your mission for this week's journey into the land of cool music is to grab some cool refreshment, settle into a comfy chair, kick back and enjoy. That's about it.

YOU BRING the illegal fireworks, we'll bring the music.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

To shoot or not to shoot . . . .

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I truly am unsure whether to be horrified or to say "Way to go, pops!"

Because somebody had to

Somehow, I think Leonard Bernstein would approve.


HAT TIP: Red Stick Rant.

AAAIIIIIIEEEEE!!!!!!

Who needs a sterilization bill? One picture on The Drudge Report is worth a thousand of 'em.

Ick. Surely, Revvum Al, there must be a less grotesque way to combat unplanned pregnancy in the Third World.

Oh, wait. . . .

SO THAT'S HOW it is at Al Sharpton's church. They must have fun wakes.

Well, at least so long as Rev. Al keeps his groove off.

The Drudge calling the Franken weird

Matt Drudge thinks Minnesotans have elected Stuart Smalley to the U.S. Senate. Or maybe Drudge thinks Al Franken is good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like him.

Or -- most likely -- the conservative Drudge just wants to make fun of the liberal Democrat who used to play Smalley on Saturday Night Live.

But the thing is . . . Stuart Smalley was a character played by a professional comedian, and we were supposed to laugh at him.


Matt Drudge, on the other hand, is a persona -- a really bad knockoff of Cary Grant in "The Front Page," actually -- trying to pass himself off as a journalist. I'm not sure, but I think he thinks we're not supposed to laugh at him.

Not that it's stopping us.