Wednesday, September 14, 2011

'I want a brave man, I want a cave man. . . .'


Gee, this certainly looks familiar.

And -- imagine the coincidence! -- the Baton Rouge cops have the same excuse as Omaha cops did recently for their adventures in police brutality. She (he) hit us first.

Well, that certainly makes all the difference in the world, doesn't it? I'll bet the attorneys for suspended LSU quarterback Jordan Jefferson are shaking their heads right now.

Or something.

I predict tomorrow's Post



I'm not much of a psychic friend, but I think I can predict the cover of tomorrow's New York Post, given the National Enquirer's spilling of the beans about the racy stuff inside Joe McGinniss' new tell-all biography on bodacious tea-party babe Sarah Palin.

Here's what the Miami Herald has come up with thus far:

A new book about tea party darling Sarah Palin has a salacious revelation about her sex life involving a well-known Miami sports star.

According to The National Enquirer, which obtained an advance copy of a book about Palin by investigative writer Joe McGinniss — Palin and former Miami Heat player Glen Rice had a one-night tryst back in 1987.

At the time, the former Alaska governor, now 47, was single, just out of college and working as a sports reporter at Anchorage TV station KTUU.

Rice, 44, who lives in Coral Gables, was a promising junior basketball player at the University of Michigan.

Their encounter occurred while Rice was in Anchorage attending a basketball tournament and Palin apparently covered the event. Months later, in 1988, Palin eloped with her high school sweetheart Todd Palin. The two are still married.

Quoting from the book, the tabloid said that at the time, the 23-year-old Palin had a “fetish” about black men.

WHO THE HELL needs to pay for The Playboy Channel when we have saucy, smokin' hot right-wing firebrands and a lifetime of Blazing Saddles jokes floating around our heads?

Film at 11. Then again, maybe not.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Michele Bachmann goes viral. No, really.


If government injections are bad, does that mean private viruses are good?

Vaccinating young women against human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer, is somehow a violation of their "innocence," as Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann suggests in the above video from the CNN/Whack Job Tea Party Express debate for the GOP presidential field?

I know the social-conservative politics here -- the theory is that we're "slutproofing" teens, taking away a powerful disincentive to premarital sex and promiscuity. They believe that f***ing not only shouldn't be an entitlement, it also, in some form of Messing with Divine Wrath sense, shouldn't occur without the possibility of consequences.

Here's the transcript of the whole nutty exchange:

BLITZER: Gov. Perry, as you well know, you signed an executive order requiring little girls 11 and 12-year-old girls to get a vaccine to deal with a sexually transmitted disease that could lead to cervical cancer. Was that a mistake?

PERRY: It was. And indeed, if I had it to do over again, I would have done it differently. I would have gone to the legislature, worked with them. But what was driving me was, obviously, making a difference about young people's lives.

Cervical cancer is a horrible way to die. And I happen to think that what we were trying to do was to clearly send a message that we're going to give moms and dads the opportunity to make that decision with parental opt-out.

Parental rights are very important in state of Texas. We do it on a long list of vaccines that are made, but on that particular issue, I will tell you that I made a mistake by not going to the legislature first.

Let me address Ron Paul just a minute by saying I will use an executive order to get rid of as much of Obamacare as I can on day one.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Congresswoman Bachmann, do you have anything to say about what Governor Perry just said? You're a mom.

BACHMANN: I'm a mom. And I'm a mom of three children. And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong. That should never be done. It's a violation of a liberty interest.

That's -- little girls who have a negative reaction to this potentially dangerous drug don't get a mulligan. They don't get a do-over. The parents don't get a do-over. That's why I fought so hard in Washington, D.C., against President Obama and Obamacare.

President Obama in a stunning, shocking level of power now just recently told all private insurance companies, you must offer the morning-after abortion pill, because I said so. And it must be free of charge. That same level coming through executive orders and through government dictates is wrong. And that's why again we have to have someone who is absolutely committed to the repeal of Obamacare and I am. I won't rest until it's appealed.

BLITZER: Let's let Gov. Perry respond. Was what you signed into law, that vaccine for 11 and 12-year-old girls, was that, as some of your critics have suggested, a mandate?

PERRY: No, sir it wasn't. It was very clear. It had an opt-out. And at the end of the day, this was about trying to stop a cancer and giving the parental option to opt out of that. And at the end of the day, you may criticize me about the way that I went about it, but at the end of the day, I am always going to err on the side of life. And that's what this was really all about for me.

BLITZER: Sen. Santorum -- go ahead.

BACHMANN: Can I add to that, Wolf? Can I add to that?

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Hold on a second. First Congresswoman Bachmann, then Sen. Santorum.

BACHMANN: I just wanted to add that we cannot forget that in the midst of this executive order there is a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate. We can't deny that...

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: What are you suggesting?

BACHMANN: What I'm saying is that it's wrong for a drug company, because the governor's former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company. The drug company gave thousands of dollars in political donations to the governor, and this is just flat-out wrong. The question is, is it about life, or was it about millions of dollars and potentially billions for a drug company?

BLITZER: All right. I'll let Sen. Santorum hold off for a second.

You've got to respond to that.

PERRY: Yes, sir. The company was Merck, and it was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them. I raise about $30 million. And if you're saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended.

(APPLAUSE)

BACHMANN: Well, I'm offended for all the little girls and the parents that didn't have a choice. That's what I'm offended for.

(APPLAUSE)

SANTORUM: I think we need to hear what Gov. Perry's saying. He's saying that his policy was right. He believes that what he did was right. He thinks he went about it the wrong way.

I believe your policy is wrong. Why -- ladies and gentlemen, why do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools? Because we're afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people at school, we have vaccinations to protect those children.

Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government. This is big government run amok. It is bad policy, and it should not have been done.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: I'm going to move on, Gov. Perry, unless you want to say anything else.

PERRY: Look, I think we made decisions in Texas. We put a $3 billion effort in to find the cure for cancer. There are a lot of different cancers out there. Texas, I think, day in and day out, is a place that protects life.

I passed parental notification piece of legislation. I've been the most pro-life governor in the state of Texas. And what we were all about was trying to save young people's lives in Texas.

SANTORUM: Then give the parents the opt-in, as opposed to -- teach them, let them opt in, but do not force them to have this inoculation.
THERE ARE still plenty enough serious consequences to teen sex, if you ask me, without insisting upon a horrible death from cancer being among the "deterrents." At some point, you're not standing up for virtue and divine morality so much as you are being as mean as the devil.

Republicans like Bachmann and the equally loony yet somehow less entertaining Rick Santorum clearly have crossed that line.

Jesus God, I'm defending Rick Perry here! This is just one more ominous sign of the total insanity -- and unseriousness -- of a major political movement and of an entire political party.

I DON'T THINK "depraved" would be too strong a word for such a political culture.

If only someone could mandate inoculations against bat-s*** crazy, that might go a long way to fixing what's wrong with American politics.

Death: Love it. Live it. Cheer it.


The prospect of President Rick Perry scares me. The prospect of President Ron Paul, however faint, scares me more.

And the fact that, presumably, universal suffrage applies to a loud -- and monstrous -- contingent at Monday night's CNN/Tea Party Republican debate scares me most of all.

Let me be clear: If crowd reactions are any clue to what the tea-party movement really stands for (and I think they do, given the weirdness of America's present "tea" totalism), then this present darkness, this "constitutionalist" mass insanity not only threatens the American republic but also, if left unchecked, mortally threatens civilization itself.

It represents, in the ironic name of God and country, a mass restating of Cain's guilty query of the Lord:
"Am I my brother's keeper?" For Cain had just slain his brother, Abel.

Or let him die because he didn't buy health insurance. One or the other.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


YOU KNOW
your political base is a bunch of hateful lunatics when the man who had been pandering to them so effectively admits to NBC News that he was horrified by the tea-bag rabble's heartless reaction.

The morning after a sometimes-rocky appearance in front of a Tea Party debate audience, Gov. Rick Perry said he was "taken aback" by cheers from some crowd members on a hypothetical question of whether a young man who decides not to buy health insurance should be refused care if he develops a life-threatening illness and be left to die.

"I was a bit taken aback by that myself," Perry told NBC News and the Miami Herald after appearing at a breakfast fundraiser in Tampa.

"We're the party of life. We ought to be coming up with ways to save lives."

Perry distinguished from that the issue of "justice," reiterating his strong support and "respect" for the death penalty on a state-by-state basis. "But the Republican party ought to be about life and protecting, particularly, innocent life," he added.

PERRY'S GOT it all wrong. His is not the party of life -- it is the Party of Greed. The Party of Self-Righteousness. The Party of Endless War. The Party of American Hubris. The Party of Demagoguery. The Party of Willful Ignorance. (How 'bout them drought- and heatwave-fueled Tejas wildfires, Governor? No climate change to see here . . . move along.)

And the Democrats are just as bad. Just different -- right-wing extremists cheer for letting the uninsured die of dread diseases, left-wing ones cheer for killing babies in the womb.

Our age has become one where shell-shocked Jeremiahs spend much time invoking, and desperately defending, moral propositions once so obvious they required little discussion and almost no debate. What are tea-party Republicans going to rethink next? The 13th Amendment?

What are "progressive" Democrats going to try to enshrine as a "right" next? Incest?

Don't answer that. Just allow me the small comfort of feeling vaguely foolish for having felt the need to write this flippin' post at all . . . for all the good it'll do.

Such is the state of the nation in this land far, far right (and left) of Eden.

Simply '70s: Lady Gaga, meinen Arsch


How sad is American culture today?

Let's take a look at the score sheet: Marxist East Germany (1974) gives us Nina Hagen und Automobil. Capitalist America (2008) gives us a pale imitation, Lady Gaga und blecch.

Advantage, communism.


OF COURSE, the totalitarian state had its limits. Thus, the First Fraulein of Punk (der punken?) was not perfected until she fled the dictatorship of the proletariat for West Germany, and then spent time in pre-Thatcherite England amid the emergence of The Clash and the Sex Pistols.

Advantage, democratic socialism.

Above, we see Hagen during a 1979 TV appearance.


CALL ME when Lady Gaga has the guts to do this one.

Of course, back when I worked in Catholic radio, the sight of Nina Hagen singing a punk version of "Ave Maria" would have been cause for an epidemic of the vapors. Trust me, the good God-fearin' folk would be going all Rick Perry on the sacrilegious Kraut faster than Mother Angelica could say
“Remember to keep us between your gas and electric bill.”

This is why I'm glad the good Lord got me out of there before I lost the rest of my faith. Trust me, it was close.
(As always, your mileage may vary.)

But then you take a look at the translation of the German lyrics Hagen put to Franz Schubert's famous melody:
Ave Maria, Maria of whom I sing
We are asking you for mercy
For people who have already been waiting so long
Totally without hope
Totally without hope

See there, their unhappy lives
It hungers deep, from fear of death
Millions live here on the earth
Still yet, in greatest need

Ave Maria
Ave Maria, Saint Maria
Hear my prayers Maria
Where much suffering has already occurred
Why always does more hurt follow more hurt
Let the people have faith again
Let them understand and forgive
Then all peoples could become friends
And all the races could be brothers
Ave Maria
LIKE I SAID, let's see Gaga have the gu-guts to go onstage and belt out that one.

Monday, September 12, 2011

The last refuge of scoundrels

"After reading Krugman's repugnant piece on 9/11, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times this AM."

That's the reaction on Twitter today from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to "The Years of Shame" blog post published Sunday by New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman.

-- NPR's The Two-Way blog


Donald Rumsfeld is such a wuss. Among other things.

There are hundreds of millions of us who weren't so petulant as to renounce our U.S. citizenship over his repugnant performance as defense secretary. Even after Abu Ghraib.

If Rick Perry is elected the next president, however, all bets are off. I hear Montreal is lovely this time of year.

And, for what it's worth, Paul Krugman was a lot more right than wrong.

All that heaven will allow

It is now 9/12. After all the 9/11 hype, after all the ceremonies, after all the memories and all the tears and all the politicians' words that already have been forgotten, all the 9/11 tribute that was needed was all that heaven would allow.

Thousands have spent millions trying to memorialize that which befell us a decade ago -- those lives taken from us, the death of what we were and the difficult birth of what we now are -- and have fallen short. Still, we seem somehow out of tune.

After everything, amid all the unending promotion
(and, indeed, way too much unseemly wallowing and sad pandering) we basically had nothing. Or at least not nearly enough amid much too much.

But it was a year ago last night that a Spanish musician, photographer and Twitterer who mightily loves New York looked up. He took the shot. And John de Guzmán thus captured what all the politicians' speeches and all the media's stories could not. In the blink of an eye -- the click of a camera's shutter.

They needn't have bothered. What was needed was already done.

The photo, unsurprisingly, has gone viral. I just thought the man behind it deserved a little credit for capturing what all the rest of us could not -- or would not.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Whack-a-mole in the name of 9/11


In blessed memory of the thousands killed Sept. 11, 2001, the United States government cooks up an award-winning recipe for war without end, forever and ever, amen.

I have become used to the memory of that horrible day being profaned in the name of twisted agendas, but this one stands out for its inanity.

"Some back home have asked why we are still here," U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said at a 9/11 memorial at the embassy in Kabul. "It's been a long fight and people are tired. The reason is simple. Al-Qaida is not here in Afghanistan, and that is because we are. "

"We're here so that there is never again another 9/11 coming from Afghan soil. We, with our Afghan partners, figured out that the best way to ensure that is to work together and with the international community for a stable, secure, democratic Afghanistan."

BY THE twisted Crockerian logic on display in Sunday's MSNBC.com story, we ought to invade the whole of the Middle East and southwest Asia . . . starting with Pakistan, moving on to Yemen and Somalia, and then on and on and on . . . whacking wherever the mole leads us, then staying forever.

By Crockerian logic, which is the logic of American geopolitical orthodoxy, al-Qaida is no longer in Iraq
(so we'd love to believe) because we are. Even though al-Qaida only went to Iraq after the United States invaded in 2003.

By Crockerian logic, we ultimately should "clear and hold" the whole of the earth -- expending what's left of the tattered American empire's human and financial treasure.

By real logic, we know this, of course, will not happen. We will have bled out -- both in metaphor and in fact -- long before that. We're bleeding out now.

And the "moles" laugh. And kill.

Friday, September 09, 2011

3 Chords & the Truth: 10 long years


Ten years.

You know what I'm talking about. It's been 10 long years, and the media has kicked into overdrive obsessing about it. How much they're actually
reflecting about it -- that awful Sept. 11 and what has transpired because of it -- remains to be seen.

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, we're going to take a stab at reflection. For a bit. We're also going to take a stab at not overdoing it.

Now
that's countercultural. One thing we've not become over the past decade is more circumspect. Or less prone to excess.

AS YOU will discover on this edition of the Big Show, I have some thoughts on 9/11 and the last 10 years of fear, division and endless war. I'll save that for the program . . . give it a listen, will you?

But what I will share with you now is this: We've made our bed in our response to that terrible day, and now we have to lie in it. Part of that is each one of us trying to make the best of a suboptimal situation.

And part of that is trying to be better people tomorrow than we were yesterday -- making this land of endless war and domestic troubles less of one than it has been.

Find joy where you are. Find God in those around you -- even if they're different than yourself. (Hint: So is God.)

Take joy in the simple things, like music. Maybe even in the Big Show . . . it would make my week if you did.

NOW, if you will excuse me, I'm going to take a bit of my own advice. I'm going out for coffee with my beautiful wife on a fall-like Friday night.

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

Thursday, September 08, 2011

A metaphorical 'Holy s***!'


Millersville (Pa.) University meteorology students shot captivating amateur video of a metaphor for the United States smashing into terrifying symbolism today.

This caused the Dow stock index to fall 119 points hours before President Obama pretended to give an important address on jobs and the economy to a joint session of Congress pretending to listen.

Protesting in the key of Z


I am unsure what is the bigger offense -- New Orleans talk-show host Garland Robinette running down his landfill-owning pal's landfill enemies on the radio and then accepting a $250,000 no-interest loan from the dumpmeister . . . or some outraged, off-key "Yat" making a protest-parody to the tune of Barry Manilow's "Mandy."

"Mandy"? And this guy gets paid to do this? On the radio?

If New Orleanians were as good at enacting cultural and political change as they are bad at topical parody vids, the Crescent City might be getting somewhere. But they ain't, and it's not.

I have an idea. Lock Robinette in a room. Make him listen to this damn thing, over and over and over again. Then take pity on the man and just waterboard him instead.


And please . . . make sure that room is soundproof, OK?

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Powdery with a 100% chance of death


Sooooooey! You just can't make this stuff up.

I guess this just isn't a good stretch for broadcast personalities. Or, for that matter, their "friends," as we learn from all manner of Little Rock, Ark., media. Well, not so much from weatherman Brett Cummins' employer, KARK television, but from pretty much everybody else.

Like Arkansas Business, for example:

Authorities have interviewed Brett Cummins of Little Rock television station KARK-TV, Channel 4, multiple times since he was found asleep in a hot tub Monday morning with a dead man next to him, Maumelle Police told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Police have also spoken to Christopher Barbour, who owns the home where the body was found.

No charges have been filed against Cummins or Barbour, and police told The AP they are not treating the case as a criminal investigation.

Maumelle Police spokesman Lt. Jim Hansard says police have received preliminary results of an autopsy of 24-year-old Dexter Williams, who was found dead. He declined to release those findings, citing the ongoing investigation. A full autopsy report could be released later.
BUT WHY WOULD the cops want to interview the weather guesser "multiple times," you ask?

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has the criminological data for Monday, Sept. 5:

According to a police report, officers responded to 16 Village Way around 8 a.m. Monday and found the naked body of 24-year-old Dexter Williams lying on the floor of what was described as a Jacuzzi hot tub. Williams reportedly had what appeared to be a dog collar around his neck. It was connected to a silver chain.

The homeowner, identified as 36-year-old Christopher Barbour, told police Cummins had come over the night before with Williams. He said Cummins and Williams then began drinking and using illegal drugs, the report said.

Barbour reportedly told investigators all three men went into the hot tub, but that he left around 11 p.m. The next morning, Barbour heard Cummins snoring and then saw both he and Williams were still in the tub, which had no water in it, according to the report.

"After Brett awoke they discovered that Dexter was unconscious and his face was a different color," police wrote in the report. "He then explained that Brett screamed and became ill and left the bathroom and vomited on the carpet in the living room."

Cummins was not at the home when police arrived Monday morning, but he later returned and provided a statement, police said.

The station did cover the incident on its website and on its newscast, noting that Cummins was in the house, that no charges had been filed and that police were investigating whether drugs and alcohol played a role in the death.

(snip)

"Our Meteorologist Brett Cummins was at the home at the time of the death and we felt we should share this with our viewers," a posting on the station's website, arkansasmatters.com, said. "Brett will not be on the air as he is mourning the loss of his friend."

KARK anchor Bob Clausen read a similar report on the station's 5 p.m. newscast.

"Our thoughts naturally are with Brett and with the family and friends of Dexter Williams," he said.

I'LL JUST bet they are. So are the thoughts, at least, of newspapers around the world.

Because . . . one more time . . . you just can't make this stuff up.



P.S.: The most relieved town in America this week is Baton Rouge, La. Channel 33 there -- the city's longtime Island of Misfit Broadcasters -- was Cummins' last professional layover before making his way back to Little Rock and those lucky, lucky no-commenters at KARK.

That worked out well, don't you think?


There is no governmental program so complex, no public-policy wicket so sticky that a Republican administration can't fix it with two magic words:

"Privatize it!"

That is because gummint is evil. Gummint employees are the devil. Private firms are always more competent -- and cheaper. Because the free market was ordained by God Almighty Himself. It's in the Bible.

Somewhere in the back.

It's also in The Conscience of a Conservative. Somewhere in the front.

UNFORTUNATELY for the magical thinkers on the right -- especially here in the Cornhusker State -- the Omaha World-Herald has this little report on a reality based audit of Gov. Dave Heineman's child-welfare privatization initiative:

Nebraska's child welfare costs have increased by about 27 percent after the state undertook a controversial privatization initiative, according to a state audit released Wednesday.

State Auditor Mike Foley unveiled the audit at a hearing before the Legislature's Health and Human Services Committee, which is investigating the privatization effort.

"This audit points to a critical lack of accountability," Foley said. "The consequence to the Nebraska taxpayers has been dramatic, including tens of millions of dollars in increased costs for child welfare services and a conspicuous lack of financial accountability that effectively frustrates any hope of transparency with regard to the expenditure of related public funds."

(snip)

An analysis by the Omaha World-Herald in July found that the state paid contractors 50 percent more than planned and overspent its budget by $30.5 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30.

HHS made three unplanned infusions of money and repeatedly front-loaded payments to contractors, a practice that optimistically anticipates costs going down as the months go by, the analysis found.

State Sen. Amanda McGill said: "That report was scathing. The tough part is figuring out what to do about it. "

I DON'T KNOW about you, but I smell a socialistic, liberal smear job in all this. There was a plant, I tells ya!

Commerniss infiltrators in the Department of Health and Human Services purposely messed up Governor Dave's brilliant free-market, solutions-based solution to make a right-thinking conservative look bad. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Is Alger Hiss still dead? Just checking.

Never fear. There is a free-market fix for the free-market fix -- of that, I am confident. Perhaps the Heineman Administration can take some free-market lessons from history and, in the process, turn a public burden into a profitable venture.

I humbly submit one idea that has survived the currents and eddies of long history, and with private-sector business acumen could save Nebraska taxpayers a pretty penny while radically reducing the drain on society from the parasitic poor and the chronically incorrigible. Here's a succulent excerpt from the proposal:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

I COULD BE WRONG, but I think the Republicans will eat it up.

If everybody's crooked, is wrong all right?

Garland Robinette, in most every way, has been the face -- or, more precisely, the voice -- of post-Katrina New Orleans.

And for being too representative in one important way, the WWL radio host -- who before that was a TV-news fixture in the Crescent City from the time I was in elementary school to well past when I married and moved away from Louisiana -- ought to be fired.

No matter who you are or how good you are at what you do, sometimes you do something for which there's no excuse -- or at least no good excuse. And for Robinette, who's been around the block more than once as a journalist, covering Louisiana scoundrels grand and petty, there's just no excuse for not knowing a massive conflict of interest when it presented itself.

Indeed, there's just no way a longtime radio and TV reporter and anchor could not have known what he was doing was, shall we say, both ethically challenged and fatally toxic to both his and his employer's credibility. There's just no way.


WHAT did he do? Here's what the Times-Picayune says he did:
WWL talk radio host Garland Robinette received $250,000 from the owner of the River Birch Landfill in October 2007, after Robinette routinely used his show to criticize the reopening of the rival Old Gentilly Landfill to dispose of Hurricane Katrina debris, his attorney confirmed. Federal authorities investigating River Birch flagged the monetary transfer and interviewed Robinette several times late last year, said Robinette's attorney Dane Ciolino, who said the money was a loan.

"They asked him a lot of questions, and he has cooperated fully," Ciolino said Friday. "He has been told that he is not a subject or target of the investigation."

Embattled River Birch owner Fred Heebe loaned Robinette the money through a company Heebe owns, Ciolino said.

"Fred Heebe is a personal friend of Garland's" he said, "and it was a personal loan."

Ciolino said the loan was to be repaid once Robinette and his wife sold a vacant lot they own in St. Tammany Parish. He said he believed Robinette, an avid painter, used the money to build an art studio.

Ciolino said he did not know whether Robinette has repaid the loan or whether he has been paying interest.

The disclosure involving one of New Orleans' most prominent media figures is the latest development in the 20-month investigation of River Birch, which allegedly paid $460,000 in bribes to a former state official to lobby for closing Old Gentilly.

The loan was made during the post-Katrina landfill wars as Heebe and his associates sought to shutter the Old Gentilly Landfill and the new Chef Menteur Landfill to increase River Birch's share of more than $175 million in disposal fees for at least 38 million cubic yards of hurricane debris.

From mid-2006 through mid-2007, Robinette frequently raised environmental concerns about disposing of debris at Old Gentilly and the new Chef Menteur Landfill in eastern New Orleans on his "Think Tank" talk show.

THIS WEEK, Robinette took to the WWL airwaves to defend himself:

"I can look my wife and my daughter in the eye and tell you the public I have done absolutely nothing wrong," Robinette said.

Entercom Corp., WWL's Pennsylvania-based owner, backed Robinette, saying

company officials "do not expect this matter to affect Garland's status with WWL."

From 2006 until at least May 2007, Robinette frequently raised environmental concerns on his show about disposing of hurricane debris at Old Gentilly, a former city dump in eastern New Orleans that reopened two months after Katrina.

The payment to Robinette, first reported Saturday in The Times-Picayune, came as Heebe and his associates were trying to shut down the Old Gentilly Landfill and the Chef Menteur Landfill -- both of which were opened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to deal with the huge volume of trash.

Robinette said his coverage of the landfill issue was not influenced by the money from Heebe.

"My opinions are not and have not ever been for sale. I would never dishonor your trust nor my family's," he said.

HE CAN LOOK his wife and daughter in the eye and tell us he's "done nothing wrong"? No joke?

If Robinette believes that --
really believes that in his heart and mind -- he obviously operates within the context of a depraved worldview, likely formed by the corrosive forces of an depraved civic culture, one with a completely deviant view of such concepts as "right," "wrong" and "normal." (This also applies to Robinette's corporate boss, Entercom, which is blind -- as American corporations are wont to be -- to everything but the bottom line.)

Dat's Loosiana for you!

That's a place where "on the make" and "on the take" are such a part of "normal" civic life as to be unexceptional -- and unprosecuted if not for the U.S. Justice Department. There you have a society where businessmen are giving, officials are taking and -- now -- at least one prominent figure in the mass media is "borrowing."

While talking up his friend and creditor's shady interests by running down the "competition."

THIS is what passes for "absolutely nothing wrong" in the mind of a man who emerged as one of New Orleans' preeminent post-Katrina crusaders for what he'd have us believe was "truth, justice and the American Way." Now he's a man making himself into a different, yet much more familiar, face of "the Big Easy" -- the ethically pockmarked face of an American banana republic.

Answer me this: In the Gret Stet, what institution can the public really trust?


That Garland Robinette now has added to the long, deafening silence that accompanies that question is reason enough to "kill his mic" . . . and his long broadcasting career with it.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Realignment, as seen on Twitter

Click on picture for higher resolution

Wow! The inside dope on college athletics you can find on the Internets!

Friday, September 02, 2011

3 Chords & the Truth: Workin' for a livin'


Everybody likes the day off, but nobody cares about why we have one.

That's the American approach to holidays -- and long weekends -- and its rise corresponds with our decline as a nation.

Boy, that just puts you in a cheery mood to listen to 3 Chords & the Truth, doesn't it? Sorry about that, Chief.

But it's true.

Let's go down the line, shall we? Christmas . . . uh, it's about a manger and wise men and Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer in the little town of Bethlehem, right? Now where's my presents?


EASTER . . . uh, bunnies laying eggs . . . ham for Sunday dinner . . . and, uh . . . bonnets?

Memorial Day . . . uh, baseball. Start of summer. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Labor Day . . . uh, the Jerry Lewis Telethon? Wait . . . Jerry's not doing it anymore. Oh! The end of summer! What else? We got nothin'.

That. my friends, is why the Big Show is here -- to clue you in on stuff. Well, that and play lots of great music.

This is Labor Day weekend. That would mean we're celebrating something having to do with . . . wait for it . . . labor? Not, not hours and hours of excruciating childbirth -- labor as in "workin' hard for the money."

Labor as in "labor union." Back when politicians and greedmeisters hadn't made "union" a dirty word yet. Back when people thought there was a certain dignity to labor, and that the dignity of workingmen (and women) ought to be protected.

Back when it was considered a good thing that an Average Joe could make enough money to take care of his family. Maybe even put the kids through college . . . upward mobility and all that stuff.

WE STILL believe in all that quaint stuff here at 3 Chords & the Truth, and this week, we're saluting labor for Labor Day. Our "work" set is tasty, indeed. Why not give it a listen, huh?

In other words, you don't have to check your brain -- or your conscience -- at the door to be well and properly entertained on the Big Show.

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

The rich man's burden: Poor folks voting


Over the past couple of years, writers at The American Thinker have had trouble keeping their demagoguery straight.

Basically, they can't decide whether President Obama is a mortal threat to the republic because he's too Nazilike or because he's not Hitlerian enough. If you ask me, it'd be a trip to sit in on their editorial meetings.

For his part, Washington "investigative journalist" Matthew Vadum comes down squarely on the side of "more Hitler, dammit!" The least the government could be doing, he writes this week, is to keep the parasites away from the voting booth.


You don't say.

ACTUALLY, I took liberties in describing his position. Vadum didn't actually call the poor "parasites." He just referred to "nonproductive segments" and how the poor "burden society."

And said that "empowering" them is "antisocial" and "un-American."
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

(snip)

Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

In an infamous 1966 Nation magazine article, the radical university professors urged that the welfare apparatus be used to destroy the American system. Borrowing a phrase the ultra-leftist Leon Tro
tsky used in one of his many anti-Stalin tracts, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), they titled their blueprint for radical change "The Weight of the Poor."

By "weight," Cloward, Piven, and Trotsky meant power or influence. All three wanted to use the poor as a battering ram against the systems they sought to overthrow.

Trotsky thought too many bureaucrats and middle-class people were involved in the Soviet Communist Party and that it was moving too slowly in its efforts to change that society. He wanted more poor people in the party in order to overthrow Stalin's obstructionist bureaucracy and clear the way for "true" communism.

Stateside, Cloward and Piven wanted to use the "weight" of the poor to bring down American capitalism and democracy.
IT IS but a small leap one makes from lebensunwerten das Wahlrecht to lebensunwerten Lebens -- "life unworthy of the right to vote" to "life unworthy of life." This is especially true when one uses rhetorical trampolines such as "antisocial," "un-American," "nonproductive segments" and "burden to society."

Vadum's paranoid vision is that of a Marxist Obama destroying society with all manner of collectivist insanity made possible by registering parasitic hordes of poor Americans and making sure they vote early . . . and often.

A couple of years earlier, though, Cliff Thier fretted over the president's nascent "Obamacare" plan for polar-opposite reasons -- that a Naziesque Obama would deny medical care to old folks because
they no longer were productive. From The American Thinker of Aug. 24, 2009:
Under ObamaCare, the older you get, the more likely it will be that you will not be permitted to have an operation, or to receive the optimal medicines. The reason is that you likely will be taking more out of society than you will be contributing in taxes. Which leaves us with a simple question: Who in his right mind would dare to retire?

[An aside. In Nazi Germany, the mentally ill and physically disabled were labeled as "unproductive members" of society. As were, of course, the Jews. Euthanasia was the inevitable and logical result of such thinking then. It is also the inevitable and logical result of such thinking today.

The prophet Ezekiel was supposed to have resurrected the dead. That it is an Ezekiel authoring the Obama Administration's "Robert's Rules of Death" must be God's little joke.

That it's an Israeli doctor who is advocating this system of rating the values of different human lives must be Dr. Mengele's little joke. ]

You and I will have no choice but to continue to work into our 80s (God willing) and beyond. We will have to do everything we can to convince the government that we put more into society than we take out.

If, however, you are younger than 15, older than 40, you've got a problem. If you're younger than 2, or over 65, or mentally ill, or physically disabled, you've got an even bigger problem.

If you love someone who is over 65 or physically disabled and they contribute something important to your life, that won't count. Only if they pay taxes will their lives be rated as worthy.

Good luck to you.
AND GOOD LUCK to The American Thinker and its contributors as they wrestle over whether they want to fight phantom Nazis or, instead, become real ones.