Whatever Floats Their Boat
One of the more startling images out of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast are those of hulking wrecks of casino boats strewn about the landscape. How about that amazing shot of a casino boat lying on top of a Mississippi museum building! These images beg the question of why the heck large structures on urban shores in a hurricane-prone area were built as tethered barges as opposed to storm-hardened buildings. The answer is straightforward but amazing in its own right – it’s the law. Who in their right mind would pass a law likely to result in huge barges careening through the state’s cities during any given hurricane season? The answer: the Right Mind! Casino boats are actually an excellent allegory for the Right Wing Mind as it relates to moral hypocrisy. The obvious illogical logic behind requiring casinos to be water-borne is the same as that behind what Neil Strauss, in his new book “The Game,” calls the Anti-Slut Defense. He considers it such a key term that he refers to it by its abbreviation. According to the author, a key to bedding a woman is recognizing her need to present an ASD, lest anyone correctly interpret her receptivity for sex as a sign of lewdness. The woman thus employs the ASD to enable her to surrender to her base instincts even while maintaining a pretense of modesty. In this context, the casino boat makes perfect sense. The GOP-dominated Mississippi legislature was clearly troubled by the moral implications of opening the door to casino gambling, but were even more troubled by the prospect of losing the enormous flood of money they were already receiving from super-lobbyists like DeLay’s pal Abramoff and the even larger flood of money they were due to receive from sin tax revenues. They thus came up with what we’ll call an “Anti-Decadence Defense” (ADD). By putting casinos on monster barges, they’re essentially inviting God to demonstrate His feelings about them. Up until Katrina, the verdict after each hurricane season was that He was OK with floating palaces of gambling, a happy outcome for all (except for the standard subset of rent-bettors). The big question now is whether the Mississippi GOP will want to stay with their ADD. If they do, they’ll be clearly showing the other kind of ADD!
10.01.05 @ 11:55 PM EDT [link]

Feature of the Week
The GOP is clearly as completely out of control as the deficit, as Alan Greenspan was recently reported to say. Here’s a visual representation: Hijack!
09.30.05 @ 10:45 PM EDT [link]

Farming Turkeys
The Bush Administration is faced with a conundrum. They need a place to put cronies on the payroll, but only a subset of any particular collection of cronies can be expected to be competent. It’s clear where the competent ones need to go - they need to head up Liberal programs so they can competently dismantle them. This means that the incompetent cronies end up heading the government programs for which the right wing is enthusiastic. (Note we didn’t say “unqualified” in addition to “incompetent,” since a crony is by definition unqualified, barring random statistical fluctuations that will, by blind chance, cause a crony’s job experience to match the position he is is rewarded with.) The problem with the incompetent cronies having a lock on the government programs loved by the right wing is that these programs involve life and death. Is it any surprise that a group obsessed with the issue of Life, and with an enthusiasm for dealing death to undesirables like criminals and non-Christian foreigners, would love the government organs that do just that? This is a problem because these are exactly the organs needed in times of national emergency, so having these operations run by turkeys means that the wrong people (or at least inconvenient people) end up dead. The solution is clear – we need to concentrate the incompetent turkeys where they can’t do any damage. This was the theory behind turning FEMA into a turkey farm, a dumping ground for political hacks not up for a priority administrative challenge like dismantling the welfare state. Admittedly, there are some tricky issues in creating a turkey farm large enough to encompass all the hack cronies in need of care and feeding even while keeping the operation enough below the radar to ensure no constraint to playing the valuable “waste, fraud, and abuse” card. With the national debt approaching ten trillion dollars, it’s important that the GOP remain able to claim that it could all go away if Republicans were just finally allowed to eliminate WF&A in government. Voters could well be mislead by nefarious elements into believing that a large-scale turkey farm is the quintessential definition of WF&A. And there are limits to how many cronies you can pack into the Commerce Department and Embassies. The solution is clear – they need to go into our intelligence agencies! All the needed elements are already in place, specifically big budgets and black budgets. There’s only one potential problem with this approach: considering that Bush Sr. was a former CIA chief, and terrorism was once considered a backwater, it might have already been tried!
09.29.05 @ 07:56 PM EDT [link]

Inside the Grand Jury Deliberation Chambers
Tom DeLay is claiming that his indictment by a Texas grand jury is politically motivated. Most people will assume that his statements represent his personal assessment of the situation as opposed to any specific knowledge of the grand jury’s deliberations, but it has come to our attention (by ESP, if you have to know) that DeLay has detailed knowledge of what happened during those supposedly secret proceedings. It turns out that Tom “Bug Man” DeLay, a former exterminator adept at all things insectivorous, arranged a “fly on the wall” to monitor the proceedings. Here’s a key segment of the back and forth he witnessed. Is it any wonder he feels he’s been set up?!
TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS
Foreman: See here, Mr. Earle, I know you’re the district attorney and all, but I’m sure I speak for all of us here in saying that what you’re trying to do to Representative DeLay is just reprehensible. He’s one of our most hardworking legislators, and his positive influence goes far beyond just his constituency, the good people of Sugar Land, and indeed beyond the citizens of the Lone Star State, and includes all the citizens of this great country. How can you demand of us that we take any action against him but total exoneration, considering the flimsiness of the facts you have presented?
Mr. Ronnie Earle: Listen up and listen good, people. I’ve been after DeLay for years. The party and I have put far too much into this to come up empty-handed yet again. So I’m playing hardball this time. You there, Jones. My friends over at the Texas Department of Internal Revenue had a little look-see at your returns over the last twenty years or so. Some odd things about 1989, you know what I mean?
Mr. John Jones: Look, I took a lot of heat in the family when I fired my brother-in-law as our tax accountant after I found out what he did with those deductions. By then it was too late, but I’ve been clean ever since. You gotta give us a break on this!
Earle: Well that’s up to you, isn’t it, Jack. And what about you, Wanda? How do you think your employer would feel about that shopping spree of yours back in ‘93?
Ms. Wanda Sykes: How did you know about that! Those records were sealed. I was a minor!
Earle: Well, the items you lifted from that store weren’t all that minor, were they, Wanda. So are how are you going to vote on the indictment?
Mr. Justin Gao: You’re not getting away with this, Earle. You don’t have anything on me! No way I’m standing by while a fine American like Tom DeLay takes a fall just because you can’t stand an effective Conservative voice for Texas!
Earle: That’s the beauty of it, jerkwad. You say I don’t have anything on you? I got anything I want on you anytime I want. You wanna try me out? Go ahead, make my day. Any of you other clowns have something to say, or are we getting this done?
Foreman: OK, Earle, you win. We all have lives and families to think about. At least we know that Representative DeLay will have his day in court.
Earle: Sure he will, but there’ll be a jury there too, won’t there, catch my drift?
09.28.05 @ 08:36 PM EDT [link]

Who’s on Frist?
Dr. Sen Frist is in the news again. This time it’s not for pandering to the religious right, as he did when railing against activist judges (i.e. jurists who would resist the right’s agenda to turn back the clock on interpretation of the Constitution by a century or so). He also didn’t do another video diagnosis. No, he’s been caught pandering to his desire to have his cake and eat it too. The cake in question (as in “let them eat cake”) is a blind trust that enables him to continue to be a legislative player in the multi-trillion dollar health care sector even while he’s able to achieve investor nirvana: buying low and selling high. Recusing one’s self due to conflict of interest is just so tiresome, and the blind trust is “just what the doctor ordered” to keep one in the game. And he is definitely in the game! It’s not in contention that he took action at a certain point to sell certain assets, and that shortly after the sale the assets dived in value. It also turns out that these were assets for which he had considerable inside knowledge. This is exactly the situation that got Martha Stewart the ankle bracelet that she considered even more annoying than incarceration. OK, not the exact situation, since Martha wasn’t constrained by a blind trust arrangement, She was free to day-trade to her heart’s content, as long as her trading wasn’t based on insider knowledge that gave her a leg up over the unaware schmucks who were buying the overpriced stocks she was selling. Maybe they were the same unaware schmucks that bought Frist’s overpriced shares! Considering that Frist was able to take action to unload his stock just before it tanked, it would appear that his “blind trust” wasn’t all that blind! Perhaps he’ll argue that “blind” is too harsh a word, that it would be much more politically correct to call it a “visually challenged” trust. Or, since he was able to lock in his gains by selling at the peak, an even better description might be “farsighted” trust!
09.27.05 @ 08:30 PM EDT [link]