Trolling the fascists

We have come to this: Donald Trump is going to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

I don't have much to say about this, being near despair for my country because I think Trump actually could win, but I will say this.

What this means is that half of the political universe this country has known since 1856 has gone full-blown fascist.

That’s not just my opinion, it’s also Andrew Sullivan’s in a New York magazine piece which, by the way, probably is the best thing written thus far about this fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

THE IMPLICATIONS of that are as follows: We will be well on the way to becoming that which my father's generation fought against 70 years ago. There will be no fig leaf to cover the United States’ bare-assed moral bankruptcy.

It also puts the terrifying possibility (how large, I do not know) of civil war on the table as well.

If anyone is unsure as to who’ll be worse for what’s left of this nation, let me put it this way: Hillary Clinton would be bad — perhaps very bad. But the Donald would be the end of us, one way or another.

There will be election violence -- lethal election violence -- before November. Mark my words. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

For now, I'll just comfort myself by trolling Reince Priebus, the feckless head of the wicked GOP.

Bobby Jindal and the purity of essence

It's getting to be that time again.

The presidential election is a little more than a year and a half away, so that means it's time for us to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb-throwers.

In brief, we must take the following seriously. Here's the jist of the latest political news (and remember that you heard it here first):

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal can no longer sit back and allow Obama infiltration, Obama indoctrination, Obama subversion and the international Muslim conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

And, by God, he wants to do to the Islamic State terrorists what he's done to LSU.

Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his attacks on President Barack Obama, proclaiming just outside the White House Monday (Februrary 23) that Obama is "unfit to be commander in chief" based on his refusal to commit resources needed to defeat and kill radical Islamic terrorists.

"I take no joy in saying that," Jindal said after he and other governors met with the president for nearly 90 minutes. "I don't say so for partisan or ideological reasons."

But he said a president who cannot call the enemy "radical Islamic terrorists," or is willing to rule out ground troops, except for very limited missions, isn't leading the United States to victory over a brutal enemy that he says only can be stopped by killing them.

Jindal,who is expected to seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, had expressed the same sentiments in a column that appeared Monday on www.foxnews.com.

Wrote Jindal: "Let's review some of what these radical Islamic terrorists have done recently in broad daylight: beheaded American captives and filmed it; beheaded 21 Christians in Libya and filmed it; burned a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage and filmed it; and attacked a school in Pakistan, killing over a hundred children and teachers."

LOUISIANA'S gallivanting governor also outlined in the Fox opinion piece what he expected the president to do when dealing with Islamic terrorists:

Radical Islamic terrorists are cutting off people’s heads, killing children, crucifying people, and burning people alive, and we need to find jobs for them? An international jobs program is not a strategy to defeat terrorists.

Perhaps the most incredible statement yet from this administration came from our State Department, which said, “we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war.”

This is madness. Killing the enemy is exactly the way you win a war. More than any other statement, this one demonstrates in broad daylight that the president is not up to the job.

PERHAPS Obama should listen to Jindal, who knows a thing or two about killing -- killing his state's health-care system, killing his state's university system, killing his state's ethics-enforcement system. . . . 

Verily, LSU never knew what hit it. Neither did he rest of a state laid waste by its governor, who now stands ready to bomb the rubble.

ISIS militants, I suspect, are somewhat amused by the possibility Jindal might be president someday. American voters, meantime, ought to be underwear-soiling terrified by that same prospect.

Joy From Raleigh 2016

Three words: Mom for president.

Not my mother -- Oh, God, no! (It's a long story) -- their mother.

From The Washington Post:

Everybody knows that the best part about CSPAN is the unpredictable nature of the show’s call-in segments, where regular hosts and guests do an admirable job of fielding unusual questions with no advance warning. But brothers Brad and Dallas Woodhouse are now the champions of awkward CSPAN calls, after the politically divided brothers ended up taking a call from their mom.

“Oh God, it’s mom,” Dallas Woodhouse said as soon as “Joy” from North Carolina started to speak.

“You’re right, I’m from down south,” she said. “And I’m your MOTHER.”

She’d called to take issue with something her kids said on air: That the brothers’ political bickering — you see, one is liberal, and the other is conservative — is typical of most families. “I don’t know many families that are fighting at Thanksgiving,” she said. “I’m hoping you’ll have some of this out of your system when you come here for Christmas. I would really like a peaceful Christmas.”

Lee Terry picks up another endorsement

Congressdweeb Lee Terry picked up another crucial Omaha endorsement Wednesday, a nod pointing to the effectiveness of the Republicans' attack ad tying Democratic challenger Brad Ashford to serial killer Nikko Jenkins.

The endorsement was from Jenkins himself.

Jenkins issued the latest election pick in an unusual setting -- the only one available to him while locked in a cell 23 hours a day -- shouting his approval of the eight-term House member while being led to his seat in an Omaha courtroom for a progress report from psychiatrists on progress toward restoring his competence to face a death-penalty hearing after being convicted of four murders last year.

“Vote Lee Terry guys, greatest Republican ever.”

-- Nikko Jenkins

IT DIDN'T take long for news of the endorsement to reach the Washington newsroom of Roll Call:

Vulnerable Rep. Lee Terry received an emphatic endorsement Wednesday, but the Nebraska Republican is not likely to tout this show of support on the campaign trail any time soon.

KMTV in Omaha, Neb., reported that at a hearing to examine his competency, convicted murderer Nikko Jenkins shouted, “Vote Lee Terry guys, greatest Republican ever.”

The irony of Jenkins’ statement is that the National Republican Campaign Committee released an ad last week attempting to link Jenkins to the Democratic nominee, state Sen. Brad Ashford.

Jenkins killed four people after he was released from jail early, and the NRCC attempted to tie Ashford’s support of the so-called “good time law” to the murders. “Brad Ashford supported the good time law and still defends it, allowing criminals like Nikko Jenkins to be released early,” the ad’s narrator said.

STILL UNCLEAR is whether the court will consider the pitch for Terry by Jenkins -- who likes to kill people, has a face that looks like the inside of an ancient Egyptian tomb and is considered one of the most dangerous inmates in the Nebraska corrections system -- as evidence that his mental condition has declined drastically since his murder conviction earlier this year.

Lee Terry is the poster child for why politics sucks

Back when I was much younger and the world hadn't heard of "political correctness," Southern political aficionados had a colorful and offensive name for ads like the Republicans are running against the Democratic candidate in the Omaha-area congressional race.

I won't repeat that description here, though in its ugliness it gets a whole lot closer to the truth of what national Republicans are doing to bolster the electoral chances of Lee Terry, the underachieving congressman for Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District. "Race baiting" is just too sanitary a term, frankly.

Many terms today are too sanitary for what passes for "politics" and governance in the United States today.

The congressman's political sliminess is nonetheless undeterred by our lack of politically correct nomenclature to describe it. The other day, this campaign ad from the Terry campaign itself was waiting in our mailbox:

IN A BID for plausible deniability on the TV ad, no doubt, Terry will only stoop to sweeping "crook baiting" in the attacks against Brad Ashford that run under his own name. Not, of course, that he's unhappy about the National Republican Campaign Committee's television ad featuring serial killer Nikko Jenkins.

When asked about the racist NRCC hit job on Ashford, Terry's campaign manager said the congressman's camp had no intention of asking the national party to lay off the race baiting.

“It’s a factual ad, and it still raises the legitimate issue that Brad Ashford by both action and inaction in the Legislature endangers Nebraskans by not reforming the good time law,’’ Kent Grisham told the Omaha World-Herald.

What Team Terry won't tell us is that nothing can pass in the officially non-partisan Nebraska Legislature, including the "good time" law, without a fair number of GOP votes in this heavily Republican state. The World-Herald, in an editorial blasting the TV ad, pointed out what shouldn't need to be pointed out to any sentient being in the Cornhusker State:

Terry’s fellow Republicans are the majority in the officially nonpartisan Legislature and have been for a long time. Gov. Dave Heineman, who has held office for nearly 10 years, is a Republican. If the good-time law needed changing, why didn’t they act sooner? At best, this is a bipartisan failure.

 WELL freakin' duh!

Of course, Terry, veteran congresstroll that he is, has not only a Plan B -- crook baiting -- but a Plan C as well . . . terrorist baiting.


IF YOU WANT to know how stupid Americans are -- or at least how stupid Lee Terry thinks his constituents are -- here's your answer. At the end of the third quarter, it's Reality 49, Satire 3.

Our democracy is in a bad way, and I'm not feeling so good myself amid another bad joke of an election cycle.

Lee Atwater, architect of George H.W. Bush's dismantling of Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988 -- the campaign that gave us the infamous Willie Horton ad -- repented of what he had done and the mindset that made him do it before he died of cancer in 1991.

"In 1988," Mr. Atwater said, "fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not." Reputation as 'Ugly Campaigner'

Since being stricken last year, the 39-year-old Mr. Atwater has apologized on several occasions for many of the campaign tactics he once employed and for which he was criticized. But rarely has he spoken in such detail or with such candor as in the interview for the first-person Life article.

"In part because of our successful manipulation of his campaign themes, George Bush won handily," Mr. Atwater said. He conceded that throughout his political career "a reputation as a fierce and ugly campaigner has dogged me."

"While I didn't invent negative politics," he said, "I am one of its most ardent practitioners."

When the Republican National Committee meets in Washington on Jan. 25, it will ratify Mr. Bush's choice of Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter to become the new party chairman. Mr. Atwater will receive the title of general chairman.

The Life article is accompanied by photographs that show Mr. Atwater today, his face swollen by steroids and framed by dark, curly hair. They are a stark contrast to earlier pictures of him, lean, grinning and jogging with Mr. Bush. 'I Was Scared'

In the article, Mr. Atwater also talked about the moment last March 5 when he was speaking at a fund-raising breakfast for Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas.

"I felt my left foot start to shake uncontrollably," he said. "In seconds the twitch had moved into my leg and up the left side of my body. I was scared. I stopped speaking, grabbed at my side with one hand and clutched the podium with the other."

Mr. Atwater was rushed to the hospital and within days doctors determined that he was suffering from a tumor on the right side of his brain. His battle with cancer has continued unabated since that diagnosis.

Mr. Atwater also described the change in his relationship with Ronald H. Brown, the Democratic national chairman.

"After the election, when I would run into Ron Brown, I would say hello and then pass him off to one of my aides," he said. "I actually thought that talking to him would make me appear vulnerable.

"Since my illness, Ron has been enormously kind -- he sent a baby present to Sally T.," Mr. Atwater's third child, who was born only weeks after he was stricken. "He writes and calls regularly -- and I have learned a lesson: Politics and human relationships are separate. I may disagree with Ron Brown's message, but I can love him as a man."

THE PROSPECT of death made Lee Atwater a better man. In facing death, he found grace.

Some people, though, never learn. Twenty-three years later, the real prospect of political death has made Lee Terry into a loathsome little hack, one unworthy of the office he occupies and unworthy of Nebraskans' trust.

Repent, Lee. Your political end, God willing, is near.

Huh?

Well, this is something you don't see every day.

Wait, it gets better. 

The Spiro Agnew Room, in honor of the disgraced Richard Nixon's disgraced first vice president, is at the Omaha Press Club. Which, in 1972, named a private room in honor of Agnew, who famously called the nation's press "nattering nabobs of negativism."

APPARENTLY, the naming was done while the press club's board put its collective tongue firmly in its collective cheek, but it nevertheless honored the then-vice president by putting his face on the barroom floor -- a longtime honor at the club -- with Agnew himself attending the dedication.

"I don't get press rooms dedicated to me too often," he said at the June 10 event. "In some places, I'm not even allowed in."

A year and a half later, after Agnew was forced to resign right before pleading no contest to tax-evasion charges stemming from an alleged bribery scheme in 1967, when he was governor of Maryland. The press club, though, decided it would keep the room's name just as it was. According to Bob Considine's newspaper column of Nov. 11, 1973:

Pay for this. Why? None of your business

Planned Parenthood is absolutely right. Generally speaking, whether you're on The Pill or whatever is none of my business.

I really don't want to know.

If you're expecting me to pay for your contraception, however -- particularly if doing so causes me to bankroll what my religion defines as explicitly sinful -- that makes it my business, and the sex-obsessed cultural left cannot accept that it can't have it both ways. The Constitution may give you the right to ostensibly consequence-free screwing, but it doesn't give the state the right to put a gun to some others' heads and force them to violate their sacred conscience to bankroll what they believe is morally -- and mortally -- wrong.

When that freedom of conscience is eradicated, every other freedom we possess will go with it -- including, eventually, your freedom to have sex to your heart's desire, whether you want it to end in a child or not. If your enthusiasm for contraception isn't your boss' business, it's not the state's either. If you have the state making it your boss' business -- at least as far as funding it is concerned -- it has just become Big Brother's business in spades, and that violation of "privacy" won't end well for you or for anyone else,

HEALTH CARE in general is another matter. That's everyone's business, and society has a vested interest in not having people drop dead for lack of it. Thus, we try to provide maximum access to medical care while attempting to construct firewalls between the state and your human rights -- and dignity.

That is the morally correct, and practically smart, thing to do.

It's a trade-off that we fervently hope doesn't blow up in our liberty loving faces. On the other hand, forcing some individuals to violate their conscience to protect other individuals from the logical consequences of unfettered intercourse is neither fair nor sustainable from a human-rights perspective.

Again, you can't have it both ways. I'd suggest that Planned Parenthood declare victory and stop emoting patently illogical claptrap.

No one is going to croak because Hobby Lobby -- or the Catholic Church, for that matter -- doesn't pay for her birth-control pills. But if the perpetually alarmed folks at Planned Parenthood (or those folks who love them) want to provide that stuff for free, knock yourselves out.

It's a free country. For now.

And you thought Obamacare was dumb

Because "inefficiency."

Because "bloated state government."

Because budget.

Because privatization.

Because because because because all these things, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal -- who's so smart he wants to run your country . . . because he's done such a bang-up job in his state -- decided to strap the jet engine of free enterprise to a creaky charity hospital system and let "privatization" do that voodoo that it do for the benefit of his cronies of poor people and taxpayers alike.

Eight . . . seven . . . ignition sequence started . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . we have . . . uh . . . this story from The Associated Press.

Federal officials on Friday (May 2) rejected financing plans by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration on deals to privatize six state-run hospitals, a decision that threatens contracts that already have been used to turn over hospital management.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, notified the state health department that it refused to sign off on the plans. The agency said the agreements don't meet federal guidelines governing how Medicaid dollars can be spent.

"To maintain the fiscal integrity of the Medicaid program, CMS is unable to approve the state plan amendment request made by Louisiana," the federal agency said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to work with the state to ensure Louisianans receive high quality Medicaid coverage."

The decision was a significant blow to the Jindal administration and could create massive upheaval in the state's budget. The budget was balanced this year assuming that hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding would flow into the hospitals.

Jindal didn't wait for federal approval before he shifted management, so the hospitals are now operating under financing plans that have been rejected.

The rejections involved plans for LSU-run hospitals in New Orleans, Lafayette, Houma, Lake Charles, Shreveport and Monroe.

Privatization deals for the New Orleans, Lafayette and Houma hospitals took effect in June, and the Shreveport and Monroe facilities have been under outside management since October. The Lake Charles hospital was closed, its services shifted to a nearby private hospital.

It wasn't immediately clear how the Jindal administration would respond. CMS gave the state health department 60 days to file an appeal of its decision.

THE ABOVE dramatization of the 1995 Darwin Awards winner's crowing achievement, as it turns out, is a depiction of an urban legend from Arizona that fooled everybody, including the Darwin judges. That just will make it all the awesomer when Mike and Carol's bastard son "Bobby" finally does it, not with a '67 Impala, but with an entire freakin' STATE!

That crater in the side of Tejas is gonna be absoeffinlutely epic!

U.S. to Putin: Do as we say, not as we do

"What?" people across the Western world are asking today. "Is Putin nuts? Has Russia gone mad?"

Well, when you've been pushed to the breaking point, you usually don't act in a rational manner. This is just as true for nations and presidents as it is for Joe Schmoe.

But I remain to be convinced that Vladimir Putin is acting irrationally. It depends on how far he takes it in Ukraine.

The United States, NATO and the European Union have pushed Putin and Russia up against the wall -- not in East Germany or Poland, but right on its own border -- twice in recent years, first in Georgia and now in Ukraine. But Ukraine is no far-flung Georgia; you can drive from Kiev to Moscow (530 miles) in a day. That's hitting close to home.

Then there's this from a remarkable piece in The Nation by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University:

But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a US-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s “civilizational” proposal, for example, includes “security policy” provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.

Any doubts about the Obama administration’s real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the “leak” and on Nuland’s verbal “gaffe”—“Fuck the EU.” But the essential revelation was that high-level US officials were plotting to “midwife” a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president—that is, a coup.

WHO ARE the imperialists here again?

Under these circumstances, if I were Putin, I'd probably invade the historically Russian regions of Ukraine, too. Certainly, I'd forcibly repatriate the Crimea, which was "given" to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when. But is it really "forcibly" if the inhabitants are happy as hell you're there?

That's what we kept pointing out when we rolled into Baghdad, after all. In Iraq, they were happy . . . until they weren't, because we were both foreigners and "infidels." In eastern Ukraine, it's not the Russians who are foreigners, it's the folks in western Ukraine.

Ukraine not only isn't our fight, hell, I don't even think we're necessarily right or that Putin is necessarily wrong. Check that. I think we're absolutely wrong for meddling in a sovereign country on the border of another nuclear-armed sovereign country that has every reason to be paranoid about our meddling.

The United States' "because freedom" act has grown old over the decades, mainly because it's always been more "because market capitalism." We've always been, globally, sort of like that fella who first gets religion and makes everybody's life miserable with all the ham-handed proselytizing, just like the old Soviets were in trying to spread their communist ideology.

MORE AND MORE, though, we look less like the sincere, overeager Bible-thumper and more like Elmer Gantry. Don't think Putin doesn't see that much more clearly than we do -- being a saint often is a hindrance in spotting hypocrites and con artists.

Or as one Russian legislator aptly put it:

But the parliamentary session roundly dismissed western criticism in advance. Senator Nikolai Ryzhkov said Russia should be prepared for the west to "unleash their dogs on us". "They ruined Yugoslavia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, all in the name of western democracy. It's not even double standards, it's political cynicism."

ALLOW ME to paint the broad canvas of American hypocrisy with a historical brush: If the Russians had their own Monroe Doctrine, we'd all be soooooo H-bomb vaporized right now.

Really, it would all just be so much more honest if President Obama would call regular press conferences to threaten the Rogue Nation of the Day with annihilation if they, for whatever reason, fail to do as we say, not as we do.

Because Cuba 1898.

Because Dominican Republic 1965.

Because Vietnam.

Because Grenada 1983.

Because Panama 1989.

Because Iraq 2003.

Play realpolitik if you must -- though I really wish you wouldn't play it while drinking . . . or with John McCain on your team -- just dispense with the moralistic bullshit.

Cartoon of the year, Louisiana edition

Bobby Brady would have been grounded for life had he pulled such a stunt. Maybe Carol Brady needs to have a loooooooong talk with Louisiana Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, being that the gub'na loves him some Brady family and Mrs. Brady might be one of the few people he'd listen to.

Or maybe she should just ground him for life -- no TV until he learns to mind his manners, and no governoring, either. And you can just forget about running for president right now, young man!

At least Edwin Edwards acted like a grown-up. A horny, crooked grown-up, but a grown-up nevertheless.

I miss Edwin Edwards. Never thought I'd ever write those particular words, but the Gret Stet has found out the hard way that there are worse things than having a felonious horndog in the governor's mansion.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman occasionally acts like a 3-year-old, but never in front of the national press. Tender mercies have we cornhuskers when it comes to chief executives.

Sequester, bane of man's inspiring

You can look at this video of a glorious flash mob by the The United States Air Force Band a couple of ways.

First, the pop-up Christmas concert at the National Air and Space Museum was a glorious thing -- an unexpected musical encounter with beauty and joy. If this version of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" doesn't move your heart, you may not have one.

Second, The USAF Band has been reduced to staging flash mobs. Thank your local member of Congress for that. It's too bad ol' Johann Sebastian never wrote a little something called the "Sequester Blues."

Ironically, it's those same trolls who befoul the U.S. Capitol who are most likely to see a performance of this scale by a military band. In the federal universe, Washington, D.C., is the center of gravity -- or, if you like, the black hole that sucks everything toward itself.

Still, even in Washington, a military orchestra has to resort to a flash mob. The sequester forbids the armed services from spending any of its own money on promotional or "community-outreach" events. This means that if you're a fan of service bands, you're seriously out of luck out here in the provinces.

Last year's Heartland of America Band concert

IN OMAHA, the annual holiday concert by the Air Force's Heartland of America Band, based at Offutt Air Force Base here, used to be a glorious thing. For us and our friends, it was a Christmas tradition. In recent years, budget cuts shrank . . . and shrank . . . and shrank the band. This year, the sequester killed the Christmas concert.

A 26-year tradition of downtown Omaha holiday concerts by the Air Force's Heartland of America Band will end this year, a victim of federal budget cuts.

The Omaha World-Herald had sponsored the popular series each year since 1987, giving away free tickets to readers who sent in coupons clipped from the newspaper.

But the rules of the budget sequestration forbid the service branches from spending any money on promotional or community outreach events. It's the same rule that has grounded the Navy Blue Angels and Air Force Thunderbirds precision-flight teams and canceled a summer air show at Offutt Air Force Base.

“We're sad that this tradition is coming to an end. I think the Heartland of America Band is sad, too,” said Joel Long, The World-Herald's communications director. “But with the current state of the sequester and financial constraints, there was no other choice.”

In place of the downtown concerts — held since 2005 at the Holland Performing Arts Center — a much smaller band will play a series of community holiday concerts at local high schools, said Doug Roe, the band's director of operations. Suburban Newspapers Inc., a World-Herald subsidiary, will underwrite concerts Dec. 14 in Bellevue, Dec. 15 in Gretna, and Dec. 20 and 21 in Papillion. The Opinion-Tribune newspaper will sponsor a concert Dec. 8 in Glenwood, Iowa.

“These high school auditoriums aren't the Holland Performing Arts Center,” Roe said. “But through the medium of music, we're still going to entertain.”

Military bands in America date back to the colonial era, a time when commanders sometimes used music to guide troops in battle. Bands always have played at funerals, promotions, command changes and military balls.

In the modern era, their public concerts also are a public relations tool — and for many civilians, their only direct contact with the armed forces.

“For that hour and a half we're on stage, we ARE the Air Force, we ARE the military,” Roe said.

But budget cuts have battered military bands generally in recent years, and the Heartland of America Band in particular.

In 2011, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., persuaded her House colleagues to slash the Pentagon's music budget from $388 million to $200 million a year.

“Spending $388 million of the taxpayers' money on military music does not make our nation more secure,” McCollum said in a message posted last year on her House website. “It is excessive and a luxury the Pentagon can no longer afford.”

That prompted the Air Force to cut 103 band positions across the service, eliminating two of the 12 active-duty bands and sharply cutting two others, including the Heartland of America Band.

As recently as 2007, the Heartland Band featured 60 airmen. That was cut to 45 in an earlier round of budget cuts, and then to 16 in June. The eight-state region it used to cover — stretching from Montana to Iowa, and North Dakota to Kansas — was cut to a single state, Nebraska, plus a few nearby counties in Iowa.

WE INHABIT a nation whose leaders have plenty of money for financing foreign fights and entangling the American people in pointless wars of choice. We endure a government that can find a billion or three -- or 500 -- for Wall Street interests, yet the Heartland of America Band can't even field a decent flash mob anymore.

But because "government spends too much," we haven't a red cent for music. For joy. Or for lots of other things that build America and Americans up, as opposed to tearing some other country down.

I would imagine Bach -- not to mention Jesu, of joy of man's desiring fame -- might take a dim view of that, and of the barbarians we have become.

'Tell them about the dream, Martin'

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Also participating was New Orleans’ Mahalia Jackson, who played a key role in later inspiring King at the podium. 

With input from advisers, King’s speech had been composed the night before at Washington’s Willard Hotel. As King delivered the prepared text — the original copy of which belongs to former college basketball coach George Raveling, who was at King’s side during the speech — Jackson prompted King to veer into an unscripted passage she might’ve heard him deliver in earlier appearances. 

“He was just reading, and she just shouted to him, ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream,’” said Clarence Jones, an attorney and adviser to King who had contributed to King’s text. “I was standing about 50 feet behind him, to the right and to the rear, and I watched him — this is all happening in real time — just take the text of his speech and move it to the left side of the lectern, grab the lectern and look out. 

“One of the world’s greatest gospel singers shouting out to one of he world’s greatest Baptist preachers. She may have ignored the fact that there were almost 300,000 other people there, and she just shouted out to Martin, ‘Tell them about the dream.’ Anybody else who would yell at him, he probably would’ve ignored it. He didn’t ignore Mahalia Jackson. 

“I said to somebody standing next to me, ‘These people don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.’” The words “I have a dream” do not appear in the text Raveling owns.

AND THAT'S the way it was, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963 . . . 50 years ago today.

Why I'm not the next Jack Germond

The great political reporter -- he hated being called "journalist" -- and columnist Jack Germond has died at 85.

He'd been covering politicians and the messes they made from the 1950s until he retired in 2001, first with Gannett and then the Washington Star and later The Baltimore Sun. He was a fixture on The McLaughlin Group on public TV, got parodied on Saturday Night Live and wrote a bunch of books.

Not bad for a member of the Baton Rouge High Class of 1945.

I'm a member of the Baton Rouge High Class of 1979, but I am not now nor ever will be as accomplished as the late Mr. Germond. I do like martinis as much as he did, though.

THE REASON why I'll never be as accomplished at, well, anything as Jack Germond was at committing journalism . . . er, reporting is that I was committing smart-assed crap like the drawing above when I ought to have been studying or paying more attention in class. I found this, as I found all kinds of other stuff that has been or soon will be featured in this cyberspace, when cleaning out the home of my misspent youth in Baton Rouge.

The above drawing, however, may have been a little clue to my later avocation. In other words . . . get the net!

I suspect my mom never threw it out because she wanted evidence to back up "I told you so!"

Rest in peace, Jack. Your stellar legacy will face no competition from this fellow Bulldog alum.

Operator? Information. Get me Obama on the line.

A journalism professor of mine at Louisiana State used to tell us that every time he made an international call, he'd always close with "And greetings to the good people at the NSA!"

Because, of course, everybody knew the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on most, if not all, overseas telephone calls in search of Russkie spies, pinko security threats or whatnot. It was the Cold War, after all.

Today, things are different. After more than a decade of the endless -- and endlessly amorphous -- War on Terror, we need to be closing every phone call with "And greetings to the good people at the NSA, the FBI and whomever else in the U.S. government might be listening in!"

As a convenience to its land-line and cellular customers, maybe Verizon could just insert that friendly "Greetings to our federal overlords!" into the metadata for every call it handles. That's because the NSA, on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is collecting data on every call the phone company handles -- which would be yours, if you're a customer.

And, as a courtesy to my friendly, neighborhood G-man, that Verizon cell-phone call made to the Mighty Favog by Abu Missus last night at 8:51 p.m., was to see whether I needed anything else from CVS. No radioactive iodine or ammonium nitrate was involved, I swear.

But if you show up at the door, I'm gonna lawyer up like a son of a bitch before you can ship me off to Guantanamo.

ANYWAY, confirmation of our present political-freedom-cannot-withstand-a-never-ending-state-of-war moment has been brought to you by The Guardian, the left-wing British daily. Not, I note, by any American newspaper -- liberal, conservative or conflicted:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

I THINK we now understand exactly what all that "change" President Obama promised us in 2008 was all about.

It means that the New Boss is pretty much the same as the Old Boss, except that he's black, is from Chicago, plays basketball instead of riding a bicycle and is more better well-spoken. Frankly, it would take an extraordinary man to roll back the fascistic powers the modern American president has amassed since Dwight Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex back in 1960.

Barack Obama ain't that extraordinary. Like most of low-down, rotten humanity, the man craves power like a hog loves slop.

You might want to think about that before clamoring for yet another battle to fight on the global stage (Syria, anyone? Iran, perhaps?) -- yet another pretext to send more young Americans home in plastic bags, yet another pretext to turn you into a little bit more of a subject instead of a citizen.

And people were worried about "Obamacare."

Elvis has left the cellblock

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Spider Murphy's still playin' the tenor saxophone, and Little Joe's still blowin' on the slide trombone. 

Except now, the jailhouse is rockin' to an instrumental.

Elvis has left maximum security. Rather, a reasonable facsimile of the king of rock 'n' roll has been sprung from the Lafayette County Jail in Mississippi.

The lawyer for Paul Kevin Curtis says he was caught in a trap -- framed amid a slew of suspicious minds. But now he can walk out after the feds dropped charges against him, because there's no proof Curtis gave any poison-pen letters to the postman, or that he put them in his sack, says Reuters:

Prosecutors dropped charges on Tuesday against a Mississippi man accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama, a senator and a state judge, according to court documents.

The surprise decision came hours after Paul Kevin Curtis was released from a Mississippi jail on bond.

Prosecutors said the "ongoing investigation has revealed new information," but provided no additional details, according to the court order dismissing the charges.

Curtis told reporters he respected Obama. "I would never do anything to pose a threat to him or any other U.S. official," he said. "I love this country."

He said he had no idea what ricin was. "I thought they said 'rice,' I told them I don't eat rice," he said.

Curtis, who is 45 and known in Mississippi as an Elvis impersonator, had been released from jail on bond earlier on Tuesday after a judge indefinitely postponed a court hearing on his detention. The case was later dismissed "without prejudice," meaning the charges could be potentially reinstated if warranted.

Later on Tuesday federal law enforcement officials searched the house of a second Mississippi man, Everett Dutschke, Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson told Reuters.

It was not clear if the search was related to the ricin case.

A representative for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oxford, Mississippi, did not return calls for comment.

Dutschke is "cooperating fully" with the FBI, his attorney Lori Nail Basham told the Northeastern Mississippi Daily Journal. Dutschke has not been charged in the ricin case, she said.

(snip) 

Christi McCoy, Curtis's attorney, told CNN she believed her client had been framed.

"I do believe that someone who was familiar and is familiar with Kevin just simply took his personal information and did this to him," McCoy told CNN. "It is absolutely horrific that someone would do this."

Curtis was arrested on April 17 at his home in Corinth, Mississippi. He was charged with mailing letters to Obama, Republican U.S. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Sadie Holland containing a substance that preliminarily tested positive for ricin, a highly lethal poison made from castor beans.

BACK at the jailhouse, Nos. 47 and 3 couldn't be reached for comment on the Man Who Would Be the King's sudden release. According to fellow inmates Shifty Henry and Bugs, they were otherwise occupied.

The prophet was a soldier

‎"Men are blind and crazy, they think all the people of Ohio are trying to steal their slaves and incite them to rise up and kill their masters; I know this is a delusion—but when people believe a delusion they believe it harder than a real fact and these people in the South are going, for this delusion, to break up the government under which we live."

-- William Tecumseh Sherman, 1860

You knew William Tecumseh Sherman was a great Union general. You know what he did when he marched through Georgia, and you might even know that in the process, he invented modern "total" warfare.

But did you know that the general was also a prophet? That months before Louisiana's P.G.T. Beauregard set his Confederate batteries upon federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Sherman told his wife in Ohio and a secessionist Louisiana friend that there would be a war, why there would be a war, what would start the war and where it would start. Everything came to pass just as he said it would.

In December 1860, the founding superintendent of the fledgling Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, known today as Louisiana State University, sat down to pen a note to his little daughter Minnie back home in Lancaster. It begins with a papa telling his little one about their new house in Louisiana. It ends as a very grown-up lecture on the cold, hard facts of life.

Sherman writes another note to Mrs. Sherman, telling her his letter to Minnie drifted into something more appropriate for her, adding that she should just read what she saw fit to their little girl. Then, he added this:

There is an evident purpose, a dark design, not to allow time for thought and reflection. These southern leaders understand the character of their people and want action before the spirit subsides. Robert Anderson commands at Charleston, and there I look for the first actual collision. Old Fort Moultrie, every brick of which is as plain now in my memory as the sidewalk in Lancaster, will become historical. It is weak and I can scale any of its bastions. If secession, dissolution and Civil War do come South Carolina will drop far astern and the battle will be fought on the Mississippi. The Western States never should consent to a hostile people holding the mouth of the Mississippi.

But, oh, what he earlier wrote to Minnie!

Alexandria, La.,
Dec. 15, 1860

Dearest Minnie,

I have been intending to write you a good long letter, and now I wish I could send you all something for Christmas, but I thought all along that Mama and you and Lizzie, Willie, Tommy, and all would be here in our new house by New Year's day. The house is all done, only some little painting to be done. The stable is finished, but poor Clay has been sick. . . In the front yard are growing some small oak trees, to give shade in the hot summer days; now however it is raw and cold, the leaves are off and it looks like winter, though thus far we have had no snow. Maybe we will have some snow at Christmas. In the back yard I have prepared for a small garden, but the soil is poor and will not produce much, except early peas, lettuce and sweet potatoes. The house itself looks beautiful. Two front porches and one back, all the windows open to the floor, like doors, so that you can walk out on the porch either upstairs or downstairs. I know you would all like the house so much - but dear little Minnie, man proposes and God disposes - what I have been planning so long and patiently, and thought that we were all on the point of realizing, the dream and hope of my life, that we could all be together once more in a home of our own, with peace and quiet and plenty around us. All, I fear, is about to vanish, and again I fear I must be a wanderer, leaving you all to grow up at Lancaster without your Papa.

Men are blind and crazy, they think all the people of Ohio are trying to steal their slaves, and incite them to rise up and kill their masters. I know this is a delusion - but when people believe a delusion, they believe it harder than a real fact, and these people in the South are going, for this delusion, to break up the government under which we live. You cannot understand this but Mama will explain it to you. Our governor here has gone so far that he cannot change, and in a month maybe you will be living under one government and I another.

This cannot last long, and as I know it is best for you all to stay in Lancaster, I will not bring you down here at all, unless some very great change takes place. If this were only a plain college I could stay with propriety, but it is an arsenal with guns and powder and balls, and were I to stay here I might have to fight for Louisiana and against Ohio. That would hardly do; you would not like that I know, and yet I have been asked to do it. But I hope still this will yet pass away, and that our house and garden will yet see us all united here in Louisiana.

Your loving papa,

W. T. SHERMAN.

"WAR IS hell." Sherman told that to graduates of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, recounting "cities and homes in ashes" and "thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies." Though he certainly knew it from his Louisiana days, maybe it was unnecessary then to belabor the point that war also destroys the fondest dreams of even its eventual winners -- really, more like its lesser losers.

That's a lesson we never learn, and everybody's always spoiling for a fight. Especially in the South. Especially now -- it's all over Facebook . . . if you dare go on Facebook anymore amid the latest existential conflict (gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre) swirling about President Obama like leaves caught in an autumn whirlwind.

"Men are blind and crazy . . . when people believe a delusion, they believe it harder than a real fact." In other words, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." 

IT'S PROBABLY no historical accident that so much of This Present Nuttery has its genesis below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Having lived for a quarter century some 1,100 miles and a world away from the peculiar stew in which I was reared, I think I've gained a little perspective on my home state, Louisiana, and what we of a certain age were indoctrinated into as sons and daughters of the South. I have found that that perspective goes something like this: "Holy sh*t!"

In this angry day, during this troubled age, you could be forgiven for thinking nuttery has become the norm in America, and the vortex of the granola cyclone -- a perfect storm of nuts and flakes -- is moving slowly up the lower Mississippi River basin.

So, for all the secessionist, nullificationist, insurrectionist folks back home whose outrage has assaulted me at every cyber corner, I have just one more quote from LSU's founding father, W.T. Sherman. The then-superintendent of a little military academy delivered it, weeping, to his friend, Professor David F. Boyd:

You, you the people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceable secession. You don't know what you are doing. I know there can be no such thing. . . . If you will have it, the North must fight you for its own preservation. Yes, South Carolina has by this act [its secession --R21] precipitated war. . . . This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows how it will end. Perhaps the liberties of the entire country, of every section and every man will be destroyed, and yet you know that within the Union no man's liberty or property in all the South is endangered. . . .

Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. . . .

You people speak so lightly of war. You don't know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. I know you are a brave, fighting people, but for every day of actual fighting, there are months of marching, exposure and suffering. More men die in war of sickness than are killed in battle.At best war is a frightful loss of life and property, and worse still is the demoralization of the people. . . .

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight, too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. . . .

The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth -- right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

"WITH A bad cause to start with." You could almost forget we're talking about an anguished warning on Dec. 24, 1860, and think the future general was trying to talk some sense into today's laptop revolutionaries, heat-toting gun nuts, and the seceders, nullifiers, Obama-impeachers and insurrection-seekers who love them.

In a lot of ways, America today is as much a powder keg as it was in 1860. And just like 1860, there is no shortage of people, with hotheaded Southerners in the forefront, pitching lit matches in the arsenal door.

Eventually, someone will light the right match in the wrong spot, and something's gonna blow. And there will be blood.

Because some people never learn.