Teabaggers today

Something tells me the tea-party types have another kind of party in mind these days.

A necktie party.

The next time some tea-party type tries to tell you his movement is on the side of God and country, tell him his compatriots on Capitol Hill today have outed him as not only a liar, but as a damn liar.

SEE WHETHER you can get through this account from The Associated Press without throwing up, putting your fist through your computer monitor . . . or both:

Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., told a reporter that as he left the Cannon House Office Building with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of the civil rights era, some among the crowd chanted "the N-word, the N-word, 15 times." Both Carson and Lewis are black, and Lewis spokeswoman Brenda Jones also said that it occurred.

"It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis," said Carson, a large former police officer who said he wasn't frightened but worried about the 70-year-old Lewis, who is twice his age. "He said it reminded him of another time."

Kristie Greco, spokeswoman for Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said a protester spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is black.

Clyburn, who led fellow black students in integrating South Carolina's public facilities a half century ago, called the behavior "absolutely shocking."

"I heard people saying things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus," Clyburn told reporters.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who is gay, said protesters shouted "abusive things" to him as he walked from the Longworth building to the Rayburn building. "It's a mob mentality that doesn't work politically," he said.

On Twitter today

Click on screenshots to see at full size.

As the health-care reform bill nears an up-or-down vote in the U.S. House, the right-wing moonbats have come out in full force.

And some of them are threatening . . . force.


Below is a close up of the tweet-madness afoot in the land. I think federal law may have been broken here.

3 Chords & the Truth: Wanna be a Big Star

I wanna be a Big Star.

Trouble is, no matter how good you are, it's still easier to remain relatively anonymous. Stardom has many considerations, and "good at what you do" is only a minor one.

Well, we at 3 Chords & the Truth always can dream, can't we?

Take the late Alex Chilton, for example. Great talent. Had a couple of stellar groups -- the Box Tops and, later, Big Star.

Big Star broke new ground in rock. Big Star turned out to be massively influential in shaping what rock music would become -- if you've heard REM, or Wilco, or even the Bangles, you've heard bits of Big Star.

Back in the 1970s, though, Chilton and the other members of Big Star weren't. Big stars, that is.

AND NOW poor Alex Chilton is dead of an apparent heart attack at 59 -- a hero to musicians and serious music fans, and a big "Huh?" to the world. Maybe stardom isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Maybe, when you get right down to it, the theme of this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth is the basic unfairness of art, which is just mirroring life.

Still, we're giving Chilton -- and the Box Tops, and Big Star -- their due on the Big Show, even if proper "props" rarely were forthcoming from the music industry . . . or the American consumer. Because in our heart, 3 Chords & the Truth is a national music and media powerhouse unfortunately confined to a little studio in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

We can sympathize, as it were.

And I'll bet you can, too.

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

March 19 on the Plains

Yesterday, it was 65 degrees in Omaha.

Today, this.

Tomorrow, the first day of spring. Don't trust a thing until the middle of May, though.

Such is life on the Great Plains.

Everybody has a talent

Everybody is good at something.

This is the particular talent of my little buddy Scout. He is my dog; I am his deity. He got the worse deal.

Anyway, Scout is an excellent sleeper, and he does more than a passable job at snoring, too.

Just thought you ought to know.

Bad couple of days

It's been a rough couple of days.

Alex Chilton is dead. Now, so is Fess Parker -- TV's Davy Crockett to the first half of my generation and Daniel Boone to mine.

Damn.

It doesn't help that I caught whatever crud that knocked Mrs. Favog flat last week. Only orneriness is keeping me at the computer.

So I can chronicle the week's suckage thus far.

Sigh.

HERE'S WHAT the Los Angeles Times has to say about the former leader of the Box Tops and Big Star:

Alex Chilton, the mercurial leader of the Box Tops and Big Star who burst from the Memphis music scene in 1967 singing "The Letter" in the smoke-gravel voice of a grizzled soul man even though he was just 16 at the time, has died. He was 59.

Chilton was pronounced dead in the emergency room of a New Orleans hospital Wednesday after complaining of shortness of breath and chest pains, longtime friend Pat Rainer said Thursday. The cause of death has not been determined, but Rainer said Chilton's wife, Laura Kerstin, said he appeared to have suffered a heart attack.

Chilton died just as many of his musical disciples in the alternative-rock world that Big Star's relentlessly tuneful and uncompromising guitar rock helped inspire were gathering in Austin, Texas, for the annual South By Southwest Music Conference.

Big Star was scheduled to play a reunion performance Saturday. John Fry, owner of the Ardent Studio in Memphis where Chilton recorded with the Box Tops and Big Star, said Thursday that the other band members had decided to proceed with the show as a tribute to Chilton.

"You can't throw a rock at South By Southwest," Fry said, "without hitting someone who was influenced by Big Star."

The conference's creative director, Brent Grulke, said in a statement, "Alex Chilton always messed with your head, charming and amazing you while doing so. His gift for melody was second to none, yet he frequently seemed in disdain of that gift. He seemed as troubled by neglect as he did by fame. . . .

"It was impossible to know what he was thinking," Grulke's statement continued. "But it was always worth pondering, because that's what a truly great artist makes us do. And make no mistake: Alex Chilton was an artist of the very highest caliber."

HERE'S HOW I remember Fess Parker:

Taking it on the chin

I wonder whether NBC's latest stupid human tricks will end up on Headlines?

Jay Leno ain't doing so good, Chief. And he doesn't even have himself to blame for screwing up the lead in.

IT'S ALL in The Hollywood Reporter:

Another key for the industry to perceive that NBC made the correct choice by keeping Leno is for the “Tonight” host to stay above O’Brien’s ratings during his tenure as "Tonight" host.

Yet for the past couple weeks, Leno has barely topped O'Brien's average -- 1.2 to O’Brien’s 1.1 -- despite O'Brien having endured an inferior lead-in during the 10 p.m. hour (Jay Leno himself, with his short-lived primetime effort). This gap between hosts is a bit bigger, however, if one uses O'Brien's fourth-quarter rating of 1.0, before his impending exit caused his numbers to climb.

NBC wants to avoid ending up with a "Tonight Show" that has about the same rating as O'Brien despite a better lead-in -- and with a decade-older audience.

THAT LAUGHTER that you hear echoing across the land. . . .

Kill a baby for the Red, White and Blue!

Bienvenidos a América, where poor lives are cheap, poor Mexican lives are cheaper . . . and abortion is cheaper still.

That's certainly the case in Nebraska, where if you're Gov. Dave Heineman or one of the Legislature's immigration hawks, the cold political reality is that it pays to be "pro-life, but. . . ."

And while Gov. Snow White and the Way More Than Seven Dwarfs stand in the "anti" room of the legislative chamber and congratulate themselves on all the things they're against -- government spending, illegal immigration, abortion -- comes the news from all over Nebraska.

NEWS TODAY from the Omaha World-Herald:

A Schuyler, Neb., doctor voiced frustration Wednesday as he described the fallout he has already seen from the loss of government-funded prenatal care for some low-income women.

One pregnant woman opted for an abortion three weeks ago because she felt she couldn't afford to pay for prenatal care, said Dr. John Jackson of Memorial Hospital in Schuyler.

A second patient is seriously considering terminating her pregnancy, although he is trying to talk her out of it, Jackson said.

Several pregnant women among his mostly Hispanic patients in the meatpacking town have quit coming for prenatal visits because of the out-of-pocket costs, he said, and one asked if he would come to her house to deliver her baby.

Jackson said the women are doing the math: With incomes of as little as $150 every two weeks, it's hard to pay for $50 diabetes tests or the $750 to $1,000 cost of prenatal care. By comparison, an abortion at a Lincoln clinic costs $500 to $550.

“If you actually want to solve the immigration problem, solve that,” the family physician said.

“Why am I putting a baby's life at risk? That's not right.”

Jackson spoke Wednesday, shortly after a bill was killed in the Nebraska Legislature that would have restored government-funded, prenatal care for low-income pregnant women, including many who are illegal immigrants.

Fremont Sen. Charlie Janssen, who opposed the measure, said that while the abortion was sad, it was most likely unrelated to the end of prenatal care coverage.

“The illegal immigrants we're talking about, I believe, are still going to get their prenatal care from a different source than the Nebraska taxpayers, who are already strapped,” Janssen said.

Gov. Dave Heineman had opposed the bill, saying taxpayer-funded benefits should not be afforded to women who are living in the United States illegally.

Heineman on Tuesday rejected a proposed compromise that would have extended the prenatal aid only to those women who were already pregnant.

His decision led Lincoln Sen. Kathy Campbell, the sponsor of Legislative Bill 1110, to pull the measure from Wednesday's agenda, killing it. Not enough senators supported the bill to overcome an expected veto from the governor, she said.

Heineman declined to comment on the reported abortion.

NEWS FROM The Associated Press:

Some opponents said it came down to the proposal's nearly $7 million estimated price tag.

"More so than the illegal immigrant issue, it was the fiscal impact," said Sen. Greg Adams of York, who originally supported Campbell's bill but was undecided when the bill was pulled.

With the funding now gone, there are signs that the emotional and financial strains on women and families could lead to more abortions, said Dr. Kristine McVea, a pediatrician and medical director of OneWorld Community Health centers, which caters to low-income families at 26 facilities statewide, including many Hispanics.

"This population is very family oriented and really loves children, so I can count on one hand the women I've come in contact with over the last five years that have chosen to have an abortion," McVea said in an interview. "Since all this came about, two women have said they're going to get abortions. We haven't been able to talk them out of it."

SO THE NEXT TIME you see a Republican law-and-order fiscal hawk who goes on and on and on about how "pro-life" he is, ask yourself a couple of questions.

Like, "Is this guy pro-life, or just anti-abortion . . . but only when it doesn't get in the way of not spending taxpayer dollars or accidentally helping an illegal alien or three?" And like, "Am I REALLY casting a vote to make society more 'pro-life,' or am I just voting for some phony who just might do more for the Nebraska abortion industry than a roomful of Leroy Carharts?"

Dear pro-life movement: You've just been "pwned."

Dear Diary: Of Irishmen and their car bombs

EDITOR'S NOTE: Revolution 21's Blog for the People continues an occasional series of dispatches recorded some years ago in the trenches of Catholic radio. The names aren't real, nor are the places, but the stories are -- and it's a snapshot picture of what happens when "Their zeal consumes them" meets "Sinners sacrifice for the institution, not vice versa."

In other words, there has to be a better way.

This look back at my dysfunctional life at Pope FM requires a little stage setting.

In other words, it's all Josefina Loza's fault, what with her mentioning in the Omaha World-Herald that, indeed, there is such a drink as an "Irish Car Bomb," and that people, you know . . . drink them.

This caused howls of protest from some members of the local Irish-American community, and a persistent mau-mauing campaign on the part of some local outfit, the Irish American Cultural Institute.

HERE'S PART of the story in today's World-Herald:

Today, when you're wearing your green, crawling through pubs and downing an Irish Car Bomb cocktail or two, here's something to keep in mind:

That drink will make some heads explode. And probably not yours.

The 31-year-old concoction made up of Guinness stout, Bailey's Irish Cream and Irish whiskey makes many traditional Irish-Americans crazy. They hate all it stands for: The name makes light of serious historical and current events, and the potent cocktail glorifies drinking on a holiday they say has somber significance.

St. Patrick's Day drinks described as Irish Car Bombs are “tasteless” and “culturally insensitive,” said Chuck Real of the Irish American Cultural Institute in Omaha. He was shocked that such a cocktail existed in Irish-American pubs. He also isn't happy that people make Irish Car Bomb cupcakes and cakes such as those featured on today's Living cover.

To Real, the name conjures up memories of unrest in Northern Ireland. Car bombs sometimes were the weapon of choice, and many believe that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was responsible. Bombings still occasionally happen Real cited three bomb threats in the past five years. They aren't funny, he said. They're lethal.

“St. Patrick's Day to the older generations and to those in Ireland has always been a day of obligation,” Real said.

(snip)

After last week's reference to the drink, Real received a handful of calls and e-mails from members of his group. Kathleen McEvoy became so upset and short of breath that she had to use her oxygen tank to finish her conversation, he said.

“Don't you know that this could hurt people's feelings,” McEvoy, 80, later told The World-Herald. “It makes it seem that all Irish people were terrorists.”

What if cocktails were called “The 9-11” or “Afghan bomber,” she asked. “How would people feel then?”

I'LL TELL YOU how I feel now. I feel like I've just waded through one of the biggest piles of bulls*** I've ever encountered, what with all these Irish eyes a-cryin'.

No, a comparable argument here would be that al-Qaida or the Taliban would be upset if we named a drink for their proudest accomplishment. So long as the drink were a Shirley Temple, they'd probably be elated.

Basically, here, local Irishmen are playing the victim card because their long-lost cousins back in Ulster became so notorious for being al-Qaida before al-Qaida was al-Qaida that some enterprising Connecticut barkeep, back in 1979, named a concoction of Guinness, Irish cream and Irish whiskey after the Irish Republican Army's marquee weapon.

Remind me to shed a tear as I play the world's smallest violin in honor of bruised Irish sensibilities.

ANYWAY, that's the inspiration for this latest installment from my, er . . . interesting radio past at Pope FM, a time and place that seems like an alternate universe far, far away.

You won't believe it, but I swear to God it's true. The names, etc., have been changed . . . to protect the guilty.



MONDAY, FEB. 24, 2003


Dear Diary,

About a month or so ago, our program director, "Manic" Don Lawlor (note the last name), cold-cocked me by dumping a phone call on me to schedule an interview taping. The call was from Mike O'Malley, local contact for the Irish Northern Aid Committee, which was sponsoring a fund-raiser for the Sacred Heart Girls Primary School in North Belfast.

"What is it about that group?" I recall thinking at the time, "It rings a bell." Anyway, Father Seamus Boyle, Passionist pastor of the parish, was going to be in Kansas City to receive an award from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and "the Irish Northern Aid Committee" was bringing him up here to raise money for his school, which you may remember was the focus of violent protests by Protestants, who were trying to keep the children from accessing the school through a Protestant neighborhood.

I smelled a rat somewhere, so I told the guy I'd tentatively pencil them in for today at 1 and refer the matter back to the program director.

So after I got off the phone, I did a Google search for the "Irish Northern Aid Committee" and came up with its more well-known moniker, Noraid. And various news items, etc., indicating that Noraid had been forced in the mid-'80s by the U.S. government to register as an American agent for the . . . IRA.

And that Noraid has been accused widely of funneling money and weapons directly to IRA terrorists. Etcetera, etcetera and so on and so on.

So, I dutifully printed all this stuff out, plus some background articles about the protests and told the program director, Manic Don, that Noraid stank to high heaven, was an IRA front, and that while Father Boyle and his school certainly were of interest, under no circumstances should there be an uncritical, PR puff-piece interview. I said that it might even be useful to include a Protestant churchman knowledgeable about Northern Ireland in the interview and turn it into a challenging dialog.

But under no circumstances, I said, should we be turned into an uncritical PR conduit for terrorist sympathizers and the ethnic and spiritual poison that breeds them.

Predictably, my idiot program director shoved all the cautionary material into a drawer and blew me off.

Fast forward to Friday. The Noraid flack shows up at the station unannounced and asks Manic Don whether the interview is still on. He says yes, and O'Malley, the Noraid flack, gives him a Noraid flier for the fundraising event, which Manic throws on my desk.

I come in to work a few minutes later, find this on my desk and very nearly blow a gasket. I write IRA on it in black magic marker and give it back to him, once again advising that we not allow IRA sympathizers uncritical PR on Pope FM, even though they've found a useful idiot to legitimize them in this beleaguered priest.

So, when I came into work today, I pretty much knew what I would have to do.

So, about 1:30, in comes the Noraid guy with Father Boyle in tow. I recognized him from TV and the Internet stories. Manic Don Lawlor and our development and public-relations director give them the nickel tour and go in to talk about the interview.

I hear Manic Don telling them that we "don't want to ruffle any feathers" and "don't want to get into politics."

So, after a while, Lawlor comes into my production room and starts setting up for the interview, trying to smooth things over with me by saying that they weren't going to get into politics but wanted to do the interview so as not to "insult the priest." He also said we might interview the Noraid guy to be polite, but that it "won't see the light of day." (Like I was about to believe this guy???)

I said the fact that Noraid was sponsoring the priest's visit couldn't be ignored, and asked what kind of "peace prize" was going to go to a priest who'd associated himself with reputed IRA gunrunners. I asked him whether the Hibernians would give Father a "peace prize" if he'd been protecting little Protestant girls from a Catholic mob, of which there were just as many in Ulster.

Finally, I told him that, in conscience, I could not and would not engineer for the interview, and that I already had enough to answer for before the Judgment Seat and didn't want to add that to the list. I also told him that, as a convert with Scots-Irish ancestors on my father's side by the name of McShane, IRA thugs probably had killed at least a few of my distant kin.

I then walked off, leaving Manic to engineer the interview (which would be conducted by our development guy) himself. So, I spent 30 or 45 minutes in the lobby talking to our contractor's foreman and our secretary, who seemed genuinely troubled when I told her the score. I added that if I were in Northern Ireland, I'd likely be dead meat if I crossed the Tiber (converted) in one direction or the other.

Later, Manic Don and our development guy complained to the GM about my refusal to engineer the interview. So the GM, Ken, tried to smooth things over and said the station might use the interview on our soon-to-be-resurrected talk show Living in Grace, but that they'd have one of our Irish diocesan priests on to talk about the situation in Northern Ireland.

I told him the same thing I'd told the program director, adding that as a convert, I thought I had a different and valuable take on the subject and that, in the wake of 9/11, we should keep 10,000 miles away from any group that had any ties to terrorists past or present.

He then moved on to trying to allay some other concerns I'd had about our underwriting practices.

But then -- damn! -- he just had to go. So I caught him before he walked out the door and told him that by wanting to run that interview, we were in the political and moral quicksand now, and that any airing of that had to be as part of an honest, critical, hard-news look at the situation or I wasn't going to be having anything to do with that particular Living in Grace, either.

He said he had to run, but that he'd "have a talk" with me about it.

I'll just bet.

Barely legal no more in Iowa

Well, that does it for the first high-school production of Oh, Calcutta! being staged in the great state of Iowa.

Not only that, with a stroke of a gubernatorial pen, that odd place to the east of us is going to become a hell of a lot less cultured, as the Kit-Kat Theatre of Contemporary Exotic Dance reverts to being just another damn titty bar.

YOU ALMOST can make out the pert . . . visage of Iowa's collective IQ sinking beneath the undulating, shimmying . . . fields of corn as you read between the lines of this Des Moines Register item:

A loophole in Iowa law that allows minors to perform nude dancing has been closed.

The bill, Senate File 2197, largely deals with clarifying laws around criminals who provide false identification. The Senate, however, added an amendment to end an artistic or theatrical exception to nude dancing.

Iowa became the center of discussion last month with pundits such as Bill O’Reilly from Fox News pointed to a case of a 17-year-old girl who stripped on stage in a club in the southwestern Iowa town of Hamburg in 2007.

It’s against Iowa law for anyone under 18 to perform in a live act intended to cause sexual arousal, but the law doesn’t apply to artistic or theatrical performances.

A judge in Fremont County ruled in 2008 the nude dance didn’t violate the public indecent exposure law because prosecutors failed to prove the club wasn’t a theater.

The Iowa Court of Appeals dismissed the state’s request last month for a review of the issue.

Prosecutors would no longer have to prove that the theater exemption doesn’t apply when it comes to minors dancing naked or in other ways that are lewd or intended to elicit desire, under the amendment.

I UNDERSTAND violations of the revised law are punishable by being whacked with a toilet-tank lid.

Pro-death sins of omission

There's a difference between anti-abortion and pro-life. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman is the former, not the latter.

And as such, he does not deserve the support of any Nebraskan who calls himself -- or herself -- the latter. In a story today, the Omaha World-Herald succinctly outlines the difference between anti-abortion and pro-life:

Gov. Dave Heineman has rejected a proposed compromise to the controversial resumption of government-paid prenatal care for low income women, including hundreds here illegally.

That was the word Tuesday afternoon from State Sen. Kathy Campbell, who had attempted to seek a middle ground to the political storm that had pitted pro-life and medical organizations against anti-immigration groups and Gov. Heineman.

"I'm disheartened," said Campbell, of Lincoln.

The future of her proposal, Legislative Bill 1110, is unclear.

As originally drafted, it would have restored government-funded prenatal care in response to a federal directive that, as of March 1, ended such services for about 1,500 pregnant women, including about 800 illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Campbell had floated a compromise that would allow women that are currently pregnant, or those who signed up for services by April 17, to continue to receive prenatal services until their deliveries.

It was viewed as a fairer end to the services.

NO ONE even in the neighborhood of "mainstream" condones illegal immigration -- except, of course, for unethical, criminal "businessmen" who exploit undocumented workers for financial gain.

That said, however, because one stands in favor of the law, it does not follow that one must stand against basic human decency. Against basic human dignity. Against the humanity of people without proper papers and named, for example, Martinez, as opposed to Svendsen.

Because illegal immigration is bad, it does not make it good for a state -- or its political leadership -- to treat illegal immigrants as less than human, less than deserving of basic medical care. In fact, it's abominable.

The Declaration of Independence -- a favorite of the "patriots" to whom Heineman is trying to suck up -- wasn't referring to just Americans, though the unborn children of undocumented women here most certainly will be United States citizens upon birth.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

CALL ME A commie, but it seems to me that the unalienable right to life is considerably more expansive than the right not to be aborted. It seems to me there is precious little difference between eradicating a helpless human being in the womb and letting that life be lost or compromised due to willful neglect -- all in a land of unimaginable wealth.

When you consider that all the data show it costs the state far, far less money to provide poor women -- legal and illegal -- prenatal care than to deal with the medical consequences lack of care often leads to, that willful neglect becomes abjectly sinister.

And now the battered pro-life movement reels amid the realization that wasting its time and treasure on electing anti-abortion politicians has gotten it no closer to building a pro-life culture. The siren song of sinister pols like Dave Heineman has led good people to the abyss they sought so desperately to avoid.

The right side of the Grand Canyon is no less deadly to leap into than the left.

What's so tragic is that pro-lifers who put an anti-abortion death dealer like Heineman into office never figured that out until they were halfway to becoming a grease spot on the dust.

Everything's a critic

It's a bad thing when even your keyboard begins to rebel against what you type on it.

I made this unfortunate discovery last night, when I happened to look down upon the aforementioned keyboard -- the one on the studio computer -- then noticed exactly what it thinks of me. Or of my blog posts, at least.

Just when you think you're on a bit of a roll . . . just when you think something you've written may, just may, have made a little sense, comes a rebuke from an inanimate object?

THE RIGHT shift key worn just so that "shift" is turned into crude and blunt commentary on he who shifts? Really?

What gives a cheap Dell keyboard the right?

LISTEN, YOU SON OF A BITCH! TELLING ME WHAT I DO IS S*** WAS MY OLD MAN'S JOB!

And he's dead.

No, that's mighty big talk for a half-worn, dirty keyboard. Mighty big talk.

Perhaps someone with more keyboard credibility than myself would like to inform Dell-boy that the Douglas County landfill is chockablock with his kind.

Punk.

There's something about Iowa

Make up your own Iowegian toilet joke here:

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .

HERE'S The Associated Press' attempt:

Iowa City police have arrested a woman who allegedly attacked her sister with the lid of a toilet tank.

Nitasha Johnson, of Iowa City, was arrested early Sunday. She's charged with domestic abuse assault causing injury and interference with official acts.

OH . . . that video atop this post? Any old excuse for British toilet humour, wot?

It takes a schmuck

I'm not sure, but I think this sort of thing in Judah led directly to the Babylonian captivity.

It's really kinda appropriate that "schmuck" and "dreck" are Yiddish vulgarisms. As in, "It takes a real schmuck to foist dreck like this on an unsuspecting public."

It's no surprise this thing has gotten all furcockt, has netted Israel less than bupkis in PR value and, frankly, has a bunch of people about ready to plotz. If I were Joe Biden, I'd be soliciting contributions from Hamas to run this ad on American network TV.

That'd teach those Israeli nudniks a thing or two. Oy veh.

Baton Rouge '81: Rollin' on the river

Left a good job in the city
Workin' for the Man every night and day
But I never lost a minute of sleepin'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might've been

Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis
Pumped a lot of tane down in New Orleans
But I never saw the good side of a city
'Til I hitched a ride on the riverboat queen

Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

If you come down to the River
Bet you're gonna find some people who live
You don't have to worry,
'cause you have no money
People on the river are happy to give

Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

. . . rollin' on the river

-- John Fogarty, 1968

Pope Catholic. Pols unpopular. Everybody poops.

A new report finds that people don't want to pay for news online, says an Associated Press story.

This is what I could get of it. I think it was entitled something like "No S***, Sherlock," but don't quote me on that. I ran out of nickels to plug the meter on the Internets "tubes".

ANYWAY. . . this is what I could steal, er . . . excerpt for "educational use" with the change I had on me :

Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons," a new consumer survey suggests.

That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.

The project's report contained an extensive look at habits of the estimated six in 10 Americans who say they get at least some news online during a typical day. On average, each person spends three minutes and four seconds per visit to a news site.

About 35 percent of online news consumers said they have a favorite site that they check each day. The others are essentially free agents, the project said. Even among those who have their favorites, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online - including those who already do.

There's little brand loyalty: 82 percent of people with preferred news sites said they'd look elsewhere if their favorites start demanding payment.

"If we move to some pay system, that shift is going to have to surmount significant consumer resistance," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, part of the Pew Research Center.

Last year, online advertising saw its first decline since 2002, according to the research firm eMarketer. Four of five Americans surveyed told the project that they never or hardly ever click on ads.

Despite a lot of choices, traffic on news sites tends to be concentrated on the biggest - Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, AOL and The New York Times.

"There was this view that we're retreating into our own world of niche sites and that's not true," Rosenstiel said.

America's next great bad reputation

Click on pictures for documents

What is it that people say about never having a second chance to make a good first impression?

Yeah, Baton Rouge never heard that one. Or much about the Constitution of the United States.


AND JUST from a pure public-relations perspective -- forget basic issues of police practice, justice, race relations or jurisprudence -- what I'm sure has happened in the case of Baton Rouge officials' "Wyatt Earp meets David Duke" fetish is that New Mexico and Michigan state troopers who witnessed this stuff told some people.

Who told some people.

Who told some people.

Who told some people.

Who told some people about what redneck mongoloids the people were in Baton Rouge, La. And what abject racists. And how you don't want to go there.

Especially if you're of the Not White persuasion. Or the Not From Around Here persuasion.

And then the newspaper in Baton Rouge finally got a hold of the Michigan and New Mexico troopers official reports . . . which Baton Rouge police officials found myriad reasons not to do much about.

And then -- especially in the wake of the FBI getting to the bottom of the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge massacre perpetrated by New Orleans cops -- some national news outlet (or outlets) are going to pick up on the Baton Rouge incidents as a nice sidebar to the main atrocity in the Big Easy.

And they're going to tell their readers and viewers.

Who are going to tell some people.

Who are going to tell some people.

Let me know how that's going to be working out for America's Next Great City (TM).

America's next great banana republic

Was it embarrassment over their ugly cop cars?

Were Baton Rouge's finest just having a bad hurricane-hair day?

Or are basic tenets of U.S. constitutional law just foreign concepts in America's next great banana republic?

Whatever it was that caused Baton Rouge cops to get so out of line in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that more than a few out-of-state counterparts recoiled in horror as they rode shotgun with the locals, apparently none of it was so horrible that official Baton Rouge couldn't offer up embarrassingly lame excuses. As only officials in banana republics can.

TAKE THESE incidents uncovered by The Advocate newspaper after a four-year legal battle to obtain reports filed with the Baton Rouge Police Department by officers from New Mexico and Michigan. Here's what police from New Mexico alleged:

New Mexico state police Agent Nathan Lucero said he saw “subjects being stopped for no reason, searches being performed with no probable cause and people’s civil rights being violated.”

Lucero said he also “witnessed officers referring to African Americans as animals and that they needed to be beaten down.”

Lucero said one officer told him that after the hurricane, police had gone into black neighborhoods and “beaten them down.”

That officer, Lucero said, would point a spotlight in black people’s faces during the patrols and say: “What are you doing standing in the road? Are you stupid? Get out of the road.”

“The black civilians were on the sidewalks and were not bothering anyone,” Lucero added.

Lucero said police working in Tigerland near LSU, an area he described as “white and wealthy,” were much more congenial. The officers would say things like “Hello and how are you” or “Have a good night and be careful,” he said.

Lucero did not name any of the officers.

New Mexico state police Agent Patrick Oakley said Baton Rouge Police Officer Tim Browning used the term “heathens” to describe a group of black men they encountered.

“Officer Browning made contact with these subjects with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause, performed pat downs and extracted items from the pockets of these individuals,” Oakley said.

New Mexico state police Officer Gregory Hall said he rode with Baton Rouge Police Officer Chad King on two occasions.

“King is a good officer but seems to handle black people differently than he would a pretty Caucasian woman,” Hall wrote. “Each time Officer King would make contact with a Caucasian person he would be friendly and pleasant. But when he spoke to a black person he was very loud, rude and demeaning.”

Hall said that while he believes most of the Baton Rouge officers are good, he perceived a racial bias among many.

“I do feel that most of the night officers that I had contact with had some type of comment or attitude towards black people in general,” he said.

OR PERHAPS you could take a look at these eyewitness reports by police from Michigan on Katrina duty in Louisiana's capital city:

Michigan State Trooper Jeffrey Werda said officers offered to let him beat a prisoner as a thank you for helping out with relief efforts.

“I was told that I could go ahead and beat someone down or bitch slap them and they would do the report,” Werda said. “I was told this was my gift from them for helping with the hurricane relief efforts.”

Werda reported seeing several incidents of excessive force.

One man walking down a street ran into his house after seeing a patrol unit, Werda said. The Baton Rouge officer chased the man into the house and arrested him, then forced him onto the hood of the patrol unit, the trooper said.

“The officer then began telling him that the next time he runs from the police, he will get beat down,” Werda said.

The man complained his wrist was hurting, Werda said. Another Baton Rouge officer bent the man’s wrist and threatened to break it if he didn’t shut his mouth, Werda wrote.

Werda said he asked the man why he ran if he was not doing anything wrong, and the reply was that “he did not want to get his ass kicked by the police, as this has occurred to him before.”

In another incident, Werda said, police were called to a bar near LSU because of a fight. He said the fight was over and everything was calm when an officer approached a man and “suddenly hit the subject in the side of the head with his forearm and took him to the ground in a head lock. “

“I observed this subject the entire time and at no time did he pose as a threat or mouth off at the officers,” Werda said. “In fact, he was so intoxicated he could barely stand up on his own.”

Werda did not name the officers involved in any of the incidents he reported.

AND YOU THOUGHT stuff like this only happened in the movies. Or in Juarez.

What in the world could the police chief say about his department in the wake of such allegations from sworn officers from two other states? Well, this:

Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff defends his department’s performance after Katrina, noting that the city was full of evacuees and rife with stories of looting and shooting in New Orleans.

“We had a charge to hold the line and balance this city and keep it from being overrun and looted and fired upon,” he said.

He denied giving orders to run evacuees out of town, noting he had family members staying in his own home.

Asked why law enforcement officers from other states would lie about what they saw Baton Rouge police doing, LeDuff said he suspects the troopers wanted to be where the action was.

“Everybody who came here wanted to be in New Orleans where all of this was going on, to rescue, to stop the looting, to stop the people from shooting at helicopters,” he said. “I don’t think people wanted to come to Baton Rouge. We weren’t the story.”

NO, I WOULDN'T believe this s*** either if I weren't from there. But really . . . believe it.

Officialdom in Baton Rouge not only believes you, the rest of America, will buy the load they're trying to sell, but -- on some warped level --they actually believe it themselves. And except for the unfortunates who got their faces slammed into the hood of one of Baton Rouge's ugly-ass cop cars for no good reason, Louisianians will believe it, too.

After all, a state doesn't work its way to the top of all the bad lists and the bottom of all the good ones without being able to believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Take Mayor-President Kip Holden, for example. Every morning, he gets up and tells himself that his stagnant, middling Southern capital is "America's next great city." This amid a crumbling school system, an astronomical murder rate, endemic poverty, crumbling infrastructure and an ongoing brain drain.

Then, after he tells himself that, he tells The Advocate this:

East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden denied ordering police to run people out of town, though he acknowledged wanting them to be aggressive.

“I was not going to let Baton Rouge be overrun by some people from New Orleans who were hell-bent on committing crimes,” he said in an interview last week.

He said his message to those “thugs who are robbing, raping and looting in New Orleans” was that he would provide them shelter, but “it will not be at the Red Cross — it’s going to be in jail.”

“If there’s a blame to be placed on aggressive enforcement, blame it on me,” he added.

YEAH, YOU RIGHT, CAP. It's the s***s when da slums a Noo Orluns escape, well . . . da slums a Noo Orluns.

If Holden had been any more proactive, he would have directed all the New Orleans-to-Baton Rouge vehicle traffic to facilities where the evacuees could take "showers."

But the bottom line you, the rest of America, need to remember is this: Both the mayor-president and the police chief are African-Americans. And when a city's black folk can be just as big a bunch of rednecks as your average Bubba. . . .

3 Chords & the Truth: Turn down the lights

Turn down the lights.

This episode of 3 Chords & the Truth is best listened to with the lights low. Curled up somewhere. In something comfortable.

Sipping on your favorite beverage.

And preferably in the still of the night.

That's because, at heart, your Mighty Favog is just your all-night DJ, spinning some midnight music in the semidarkness of a radio studio . . . after hours. The overnight man spins his records, and he brings the microphone real close. Like this.

He speaks softly . . . over the airwaves, in the predawn darkness, a friendly voice in the night. It's the Big Show. And you're along for the ride.

Can you dig it? I knew that you could.

SOMETIMES, your pilot of the airwaves (Charlie Dore, 1979 . . . but that's not important now) gets in a mood, as opposed to a toot. This trip on the 3 Chords & the Truth-go-round represents one of those times.

I'm in a mood. A night music mood.

You don't know where it's going; you just know that it will be unique. You know that it'll be good.

You know that it's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Baton Rouge 1981: Getting around

In the summer of '81, in downtown Baton Rouge . . .


. . . this is pretty much what it looked like . . .


. . . as folks sat or stood around . . . in the afternoon heat . . .


. . . as they patiently waited . . . because these things took their own sweet time . . .


. . . for the bus. Which eventually arrived.