Get the hip boots and clothespins -- it's kinda deep in here

Today's Omaha World-Herald

“Nebraska is a pro-life state, and the state’s budget should reflect those values.”

Says the state's Republican governor in the latest Orwellian smoke signal he's trying to blow up our collective butts.

It's just bullshit. Bullshit so fragrant it could have come from America's bullshitter-in-chief, Donald J. Trump.

The state's budget under Gov. Pete Ricketts and his predecessor NEVER has reflected pro-life values, from wasting $50 grand in a botched attempt to illegally acquire execution drugs to cutting services for the disabled to (for a time) banning government-funded prenatal care for undocumented women (which actually increased both abortions and birth defects).

A pro-life state doesn't waste money on maintaining the death penalty, money that could go toward caring for "the least of these." A pro-life state doesn't have cops so ignorant of how to deal with unarmed but unruly mentally ill people that they end up tasing and beating them to death.

A pro-life state doesn't elevate to the governorship a rich-boy Dr. Evil impersonator who has no clue about governing apart from throwing his fortune behind initiatives repealing the unicameral's abolition of the death penalty and electing GOP legislators in his own misanthropic image.

SO DON'T HAND ME this hoary old horse hockey about "pro-life values" just because the dominant political party merely is foursquare for getting infants out of the womb just so it can find ways to abort the poorest ones by other means at a future date.

Omaha World-Herald, May 2017

"Pro-life" is not some political zero-sum proposition. Pro-life is affirming that somebody doesn't have to die for somebody else to flourish. A pro-life state isn't just against abortion, but also is for helping women through hard times and bad situations in a way that affirms the life of both mother and child.

A "PRO-LIFE STATE"  fights hammer-and-tongs against poverty, and it guarantees every resident adequate health care. And a pro-life state doesn't skimp on funding for education at any level.

A pro-life state -- the kind the governor is talking about -- is all about the ironic air quotes, and it elects right-wing bullshit artists like Pete Ricketts to spout self-serving, self-righteous bromides as he kicks the poor and the inconvenient to the curb. To be aborted postnatally when nobody is looking.

No, you can't say Nebraska is pro-life. You sure as hell can say that Pete Ricketts is pro-death.

This isn't brain surgery (which I'm sure Ricketts wouldn't want state money going for, either). Don't pay for abortions . . . and don't use abortion as an excuse to cut health-care funding while simultaneously scoring cheap political points with the booboisie.

What a tool is our Gov. Evil.

Elections have consequences

Great.

Wack and Wacker are having a d***-measuring contest with thermonuclear weapons. Who knew that voting for a bat-shit crazy fascist might result in nuclear war?

One must wonder whether life, death and posterity still matter to Americans -- particularly those who voted in favor of Götterdämmerung in November 2016. If you are among those in this accursed land who still value life, love your children and hold out hope for posterity, this tweet is what it's all about.

God help us, every one.

3 Chords & the Truth: A Very 3C&T Christmas

I'll be home for Christmas
You can plan on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light gleams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams

I'll be home for Christmas
You can plan on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree 

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light gleams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams
If only in my dreams

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

And Merry Christmas.

3 Chords & the Truth: Show of the floating stars

Twas the week before Christmas, when all thru the show . . .

Musicians heads were floating, their bodies no mo'
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that some torsos soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
What? You think we want them to see disembodied heads?

And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my tuque,
Had just settled in and were ready to juke —‌
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the hi-fi to see what was the matter.
Away to the window, like a bat out of hell,
I grabbed my shotgun and a handful of shells.
The streetlight shown on the rain-slicked blacktop,
Revealing Jackie Gleason's head falling like a raindrop.

AND NOT just his, but Sinatra's, too,
Join Lena Horne's in a floating boogaloo.
Bodyless Webb Pierce yelled 
"3 Chords & the Truth!"
And I ran to the hi-fi -- it didn't take a sleuth.
I'd forgotten it was time for the Big Show,
And the famed floating heads were ready to go!

"Now! Frankie, now! Lena, now! Simon and Garfunkel,
"On! Frankie, on! Jackie, mind your carbuncle!
"To the top of the charts! Eschew all your clinkers!
"And we need a band -- disembodied heads got no fingers!"

This may seem strange for a Yuletide regalement,
I guess you can blame that nail-gun impalement.
Be that as it may, tell 'em from Dover to Doha,
It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

How sweet it is, the holiday of the disembodied head

Oh, holiday of the
disembodied head, how we love thy floating '50s splendor!

Thy strings are lush   . . . and so are we, for the Christmas parties are upon us.

How we adore thy understated album covers -- oh, how mine soul is made warm by the crackles of the record which spinneth upon phonograph platter!

Thy martini, thy orchestra, they comfort me! And, lo! Thy floating head on the back of thy LP cover, it doth not creep me out!

Album cover of the disembodied head. It's a '50s thing.

Instead, it giveth me the comfort of sepia memories of a time long past, when verily the heads without torso spread across record albums and advertising like grains of sand upon the ocean shore.

May thy Christmas album be flippeth unto Side B, and may the joyful, soothing sounds of mine youth sound unto the people forever more!

My cup of egg nog runneth over. Surely music and jocularity will follow me all the days of December, and the soundtrack shall evermore float upon the aether . . . like Jackie Gleason's head.

3 Chords & the Truth: The nog is strong with this one

We're all amped up here on the Big Show as we come out of the big Thanksgiving turn and floor it down the straightaway all the way to Christmas.

That is, if we make it through December. These days. . . .

You know?

Having dispensed with the preface here, allow me to attempt a summation of this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth in but a single sentence. It may be a run-on, of course, but still. . . .

Here we go.

IT'S NOT GOOD out there as we hurtle toward what promises to be a strange Yuletide, more or less, but we're celebrating anyway because we might pull through despite everything, just so long as we can keep anyone in Washington from getting his hands on a Les Paulverizer, because that assuredly would result in the end of life on Earth as we know it.

IF THIS confuses you -- and we're sure it does -- your only recourse is to listen to the Big Show forthwith, which should allay your concerns.

I just used the word "allay." Yay, Favog!

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

Chief Sh*t for Brains strikes again

With a couple of intensive years in charm school, Il Douche (pronounced "DOO-shay") could possess enough tact and social graces to join the Ku Klux Klan.

This, America, is what we have elected president -- a deeply cruel, stupid, bigoted, tactless and mentally unstable fascist man-child. This is who represents the United States to the world . . . and who the United States comes to more closely resemble with each passing day he sullies the American presidency.

Donald Trump is a vile man and a worse president. If this is not what we are as a people -- yet -- it apparently is what the Mortal Minority would have us become.

From Politico:

President Donald Trump mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren at an event Monday honoring Native American veterans, invoking his “Pocahontas” nickname for the Massachusetts Democrat as he talked about how long Native Americans have been in America.

Trump hosted Navajo code talkers, who were recruited into the U.S. Marine Corps to communicate in the Pacific region during World War II, at the White House.

“I just want to thank you because you’re very, very special people,” Trump said to the group. “You were here long before any of us were here — although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas. But you know what? I like you. Because you are special.”

Trump — who spoke in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the former president who signed the Indian Removal Act — did not mention Warren by name. But he frequently mocks her by calling her “Pocahontas,” a nickname he created during his 2016 presidential campaign. The derisive sobriquet pokes fun at Warren’s claim of Native American heritage when she was a law professor, which became a campaign issue during her 2012 Senate run.

REPENT, America. The end of us is nigh.

Dem tings happen. And they usually come out.

Before

BOOM!!!!

After

A Face in the Crowd is such a powerful movie because it's so very human.

Last year, people said it predicted the rise of Donald Trump. That's correct. On the other hand, any number of students of sociology -- students of human nature and the fallenness of mankind -- saw Trump coming.

Now, we seem to be in a season of  “There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known." No grope that will not be revealed, no powerful lecher that will not be known.

Charlie Rose

ONE DAY you're Harvey Weinstein.

Or Roy Moore.

Or Mark Halperin.

Or Glenn Thrush.

Or Kevin Spacey.

Or John Besh.

Or Jeffrey Tambor.

Or Louis C.K.

Or Michael Oreskes.

Or Al Franken.

Or Charlie Rose.

The next, after the concealed has been revealed -- and how -- you're "(Fill in the blank) who?"<sup>*

C'est la vie . . . which no one ever thinks will happen to him. Especially when he's behaving badly with women.




* -- May not apply to Alabama evangelicals. They're deviant that way.</sup>

3 Chords & the Truth: Drawing the line

There's a squiggly green line separating you from a world where you'd never know there once was a San Fransisco band called The Great Society, fronted by Grace Slick before . . . you know.

Before big things happened.

And you'd never know, on the other side of the squiggly green line, that the big Jefferson Airplane hit "Somebody to Love" once was "Someone to Love," the B-side of The Great Society's first (and only) single back in 1966.

No, you'd never know that on the far side of the squiggly green line. The squiggly green line is what 3 Chords & the Truth looks like before it gets to your ears -- and into your head.

It's a good thing to be on the right side of the squiggly green line.

It's a good thing to have the Big Show in your head. In your ears, too.

Who knows what surprises and what musical edification lies on the good side of the squiggly green line? Well, there's only one way to find out.

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