This is truly the age of the pirate. I don’t mean those Somali teenagers in speedboats – I mean the kind you find trawling the rich waters of Wall Street, J-Street, and 
Pennsylvania Avenue. And if there were any justice in this world, they wouldn’t have a peg leg to stand on. So short of any proper court proceeding, lets look at who wins the Jolly Roger award this week.
Hedge Fund Managers. Well, here’s a class of individuals that’s been cut a rather serious break over the past year or so. Our massive bailout of the financial industry, A.I.G., etc., has been a godsend to hedge fund managers – albeit not the sort that might put the fear of any god into them. The “trickle-down” theory of economics is so ingrained in our system that we keep using it even when it utterly implodes. Thus the hedge funds and other manipulative sectors of our economy are given unlimited underwriting courtesy of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve in hopes that this will grease the wheels for the “real” economy that actually employs working people.
And yet, when Chrysler (employer of working stiffs) went through the process of restructuring, it managed to gain concessions from workers, suppliers, everyone but their creditors…. hedge funds! So thousands will be at least temporarily laid off as the company goes into a controlled bankruptcy spiral. What the fuck – if we can pour billions into these massive speculative funds, why the hell can’t we divert some of that money into something that actually creates jobs… particularly when the class of companies that received the most bailout money are cutting manufacturing off at the knees? Justice, please.
Good ship Cheney. Just to return briefly to the detainee abuse / torture issue. Does anyone think 
for a moment that the Bush Administration wasn’t trying to elicit false confessions out of people? Am I the only one who remembers the fact that Cheney was constantly running over to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq war, pressing them to come up with that “smoking gun”? A New York Times reporter I heard on the radio this week dismissed the notion that they were trying to drum up incriminating – if false – evidence about Saddam Hussein’s government; his point was, in essence, why wouldn’t they just make it up themselves? Answer – it doesn’t matter. They obviously felt they needed some evidence to ratchet up the fear factor and build support for the war. That’s why they relied on a drunk like “Curve Ball” and a shyster like Chalabi. That’s the central principle of terrorism, as the name suggests – scare the be-jeebus out of them so that they’ll do what you say.
So… when are we going to stop letting these fuckers off the hook?
luv u,
jp
Add a little cilantro. Mmmm…. probably not THAT much. Jesus christmas, Mitch – you’re kind of extravagant with the spicing, aren’t you. Now, don’t get offended, I…. uh, Mitch….?
What’s happened over the last week or so? Oh, you know… the usual stuff for a virtual rock band. Practice. Recording. Personal appearances. Listening for that fateful knock on the door from the codes department. (Shhhhh…. Don’t tell them we’re here!) Scraping up loose change wherever we can find it. How is the vacationland scheme going? Ah, we let that one drop. Pretty typical for us, really. Get an idea first, then think about it and realize how stupid it is. (Story of our lives.) The only one of us that was truly into doing it was the man-sized tuber. He had polished up all of his customer service skills and was ready to man that front desk. It took a while to break it to him, frankly. I certainly didn’t have the heart for it, and we didn’t want to delegate it to someone outside of the band proper (particularly since that might end up being anti-Lincoln, who would take delight in tubey’s misery). In the end, it was Matt who handed him the clue. (Scribbled on the back of an empty book of matches, as it happened.)
(Luckily, John lent me his banjo… though I had to blacken in a few teeth before hitting the record button.) Matt tried his hand at mandolin and washboard, and we both tracked a jug-band accompaniment. What’s the song? Let’s just say it’s a little number about some friends of ours. No, it won’t be stuffed with inside jokes… just a little topical humor (i.e. only to be taken externally). There are a few others in the works, and we’re following the usual production schedule, so don’t pop the earbuds in just yet (unless you’ve got other things to listen to). In the meantime, we’ve been trying our hand at developing recipes for something we plan on calling the “Big Green Cookbook”. Hence the extra cilantro. (An atypical ingredient for blueberry muffins, I will admit.) Another little money-making scheme that’s sure to….
the effectiveness of waterboarding. The writer – whose anonymous user name suggests he/she is a veteran – makes the claim that waterboarding produced the intelligence that foiled the plot to fly a jetliner into the library tower in Los Angeles. Of course, the claim falls apart on the most superficial level. The Bush administration took credit for foiling the plot in February of 2002; the torture (“enhanced interrogation”) program went into effect in August of that year. I can understand the writer’s confusion, though. There has been so much garbled noise around this issue in the past few weeks, much of it stirred up by that bloated ex-Vice President of ours, whom Gore Vidal once likened to “300 pounds of condemned veal in a gray suit.” Yes, Dick Cheney, evident war criminal, wants more memos released – the ones that show how effective his war crimes truly were in producing actionable intelligence. I say, tell it to the jury.
become so used to the idea, both through the actions of their government and via television shows like “24,” that they consider the “smoking gun” scenarios constantly referred to in the media as plausible. This is a bit like the phenomenon of judges – actual trial judges – deciding cases partly on the basis of science used in shows like “CSI”. It’s as if NASA started basing everything they do on the scientific principles embodied by “Lost in Space.” That’s kind of scary… almost as scary as the torture itself. If we’re getting that detached from reality when we set policy or even just consider its effects, we are in “deep doo-doo,” as Bush’s father used to say. Just the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded more than 180 times over the course of a single month should indicate that, as a “smoking gun” remedy, this does not work.