perfidy

That's right, walking punchline and Dave Chapelle catchphrase (not to mention missing link between disco, funk, and skeezy sex parties) Rick James is dead at 56, and I am proud to be the FIRST of thousands of like-minded bloggers to use such an unoriginal and tired-before-its-time headline to announce the fact.

Breaking from my usual modus operandi, I don't have very much to offer in the way of reverential encomia to a dead rock star. It's all just too sad to jeer at, and his music doesn't exactly lend itself to dewy-eyed reverence. Instead, I will only note two fun facts: Rick James is the only disco star most people can name who knew how to play an instrument, and did you know he's Canadian? So I'm told! His first band, Mynah Birds, also featured a youthful, pre-Buffalo Springfield Neil Young on guitar, it's true!

See, right there I was able to give all you James-mourners a fun fact that's not only entertaining, but far more uplifting than a rote recounting of the pathetic mess his life had become: the cocaine-fueled assaults of women, the prison time, the rehab, the failed comeback, the stroke, the hip replacement surgery (!), and all the other sad details of a man who only wanted to fire up a party and have a toke.

If you don't own "Bustin' Out," Rick's best funk tune and featuring a FAT bassline, do the estate of Rick James a favor and pick it up. May he rest in peace. (um..... bitch!)

[wik] Not that I expected Rick James, of all people, to die of natural causes. I was expecting something more. . . colorful.

Minister Geeklethal has helpfully reminded me that the "legitimate press" has been having a field day with Kerry's Nixonian assertion last Sunday to George "Chunk" Stephanapolous that he has a plan-- a secret plan, a plan so cunning you could brush your teeth with it-- to end the war and bring the troops home. Naturally, however, he can't speak of this plan until after the election and he is safely in office. If history is any judge, the plan will probably involve the massive firebombing of the Tigris river valley followed by hamfisted counterinsurgency campaigns that will be mistaken by some units as license to level towns, accompanied at home by the savage repression of student dissent and the employment of the FBI and a secret White House office in the strategic blackmailing of key political opponents.

We at the Ministry were, through bribery, cunning and strategic legbreakery, able to confirm identity of the high-level Kerry advisor who has put together this grand strategy to be executed after the candidate takes office. Picture below the cut.

Thanks to Norbizness (and Google Image Search) for the image, and for Minister Buckethead for the title of this post.

When he's right, he's right*. Christopher Hichens on "safety" in the name of Islamic terrorism:

Meanwhile, the administration is giving a gigantic hostage to fortune in claiming that its policies at home and abroad are "making America safer." It will take only one atrocity to make that boast seem worse than hollow, and this in turn will tempt many liberals and Democrats into demagogy. ("They couldn't make you safer, but I can. … It's time to bring our boys home.") It's difficult to imagine a state of greater vulnerability, both physically and morally, and both at home and overseas. We can bring "our" boys home, but "their" soldiers are already here, and in place, and training, and waiting. There will be further outrages and slaughters, all across this country and Europe, as there already are in the countries of Islamic civilization, and the crucial thing will be how we respond, not how we "predict" what is already certain or rehearse our whinings and complaints for when the blow falls.

[wik] Of course, when he's wrong he's a shallow, pretentious, dishonest, name-dropping gin-drunken fat old hack with a mean streak he routinely mistakes for charming contrariness.

[alsø wik] In a refreshing turnabout from the usual platitudinous pap proffered to the populace, people in pursuit of a bit of bracing honesty can take heart from the President's remarks of yesterday: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Mmmm.... honesty tastes like bile in my mouth... or is that just fear?

[alsø alsø wik] As usual, I have a song lyric to suit every occasion, in this case a very on-point lyric about how scary brown people are in their own country, and how nice it is to have a gate at the top of the road.

The Clash / Safe European Home

Well, i just got back an' i wish i never leave now
Who dat martian arrival at the airport?
How many local dollars for a local anaesthetic?
The johnny on the corner was a very sympathetic

I went to the place where every white face is an
Invitation to robbery
An' sitting here in my safe european home
I don't wanna go back there again

Wasn't i lucky n' wouldn't it be loverly?
Send us all cards, an' have a laying in on a sunday
I was there for two weeks, so how come i never tell
That natty dread drinks at the sheraton hotel?

Now they got the sun, an' they got the palm trees
They got the weed, an' they got the taxis
Whoa, the harder they come, n' the home of ol' bluebeat
Yes i'd stay an' be a tourist but i can't take the gunplay

Thanks to the Rev. Moon's largesse, North Korea is now said to be in possession of a dozen Soviet-surplus nuclear missile submarines in fine working order. Remember, this is the same Rev. Moon who was crowned emperor a few months ago by members of the US Congress.

If I were Tom Clancy and I were writing this shit into a novel, I would throw it out. It's crazy and nobody would believe it.

Please excuse me; I'm writing this under the gun. In two days I turn thirty, and I need to get this review article cranked out before they come to take all my punk away. It's what happened to all my friends: a white van screeches to a stop in front of your house at 7 AM on the first Sunday after your 30th birthday, and a team of masked men swarm into your house, replacing your favorite cds with copies of Jim Nabors' Greatest Hits and Josh Groban Sings Songs of God, Country, and Neckties. I'm a little unclear as to whether this will happen before or after I'm injected with the microchip that makes me vote Republican, but I guess I can just wait and see on that point.

You see, I was recently blessed with a visitation from the long lost and legendary punk band Rocket From The Tombs. I spent a lot of years reading about this half-apocryphal group in Greil Marcus' punk rock history Lipstick Traces and countless 'zines, wondering if any band making punk music in the days before punk was even a word, much less spirit made flesh, could possibly live up to the breathless hype they've been accorded in the back pages of fanboys-only treatises. Well, guess what: yes it can. Unfortunately, I don't have very much time to spend with the band before I lose them forever, so I will make this as brief as I can [about 1200 words, as it turns out].

Rocket From The Tombs was a short-lived band that came together in Cleveland in 1974 when a local music writer named Dave Thomas took the alias Crocus Behemoth and recruited some friends to make music inspired by The Stooges and the Velvet Underground. The band's classic lineup took shape with the addition of local singer, guitarist and Lou Reed fanatic Peter Laughner, bassist Craig Bell, guitarist Gene O'Connor (better known as Cheetah Chrome) and drummer Johnny Madansky (later "Johnny Blitz"). Just eight months after this lineup came together, Rocket From The Tombs would disintegrate thanks to squabbling over artistic direction, the artier camp championed by Laughner and Thomas taking flight in the legendary Pere Ubu, and the hard-rocking wing comprising O'Connor, Madansky, and sometime Tombs singer Steve "Stiv" Bators later founding CBGB mainstays The Dead Boys. For a band whose entire recorded output amounts to a few one-mic radio tapes and a handful of live shows, Rocket From The Tombs' status as one of the first bands to capture the dirty magic of punk has grown over the years out of all proportion with the number of people who have actually heard their music (funny how that happens). In 2002, Smog Veil Records released a set of rehearsal tapes and live demos in 2002 as The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs, the first time that the bulk of RFTT's output appeared on CD anywhere. Improbably, Rocket From The Tombs would reform in 2003 for a series of live dates, teaming Thomas, Chrome, and original bassist David Bell with Television guitarist Richard Lloyd and Pere Ubu drummer Steve Melman and producing a live album, Rocket Redux.

So how does it all sound, after thirty years of waiting?

On one hand, it sounds just as you would expect. The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs is essentially the sound of some desperate kids in a dying city translating the Rosetta Stone with a Cap'n Crunch Decoder Ring and a copy of Kick Out The Jams, and just like most first drafts of later greatness, it can be hard to see what's valuable underneath the muck (I feel the same way about The Replacements' debut Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash! and The Flaming Lips' first EP as well, among many others). Since most of the tracks were recorded on one mic the quality is muddy, and the playing is at times ludicrously sloppy. On the other hand, however, all the murkiness and fumbling in the world can't obfuscate the fact that Rocket From The Tombs had incredible songs, great energy, and a stunningly original idea of what rock should be. Fueled by equal parts Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and the MC5, the band combined swagger, angst, and plain freaky weirdness into a sound far greater than the sum of its garage-band parts. The songs that don't fall apart into messes spill over into feedback, Crocus Behemoth simply can't sing, and the brilliant, funny lyrics are buried under layers of guitar fuzz and drum fills. The same tension between "make art" and "kick ass" that eventually drove the group apart makes The Day The Earth Met... a brilliantly original artifact of punk before its time.

The bulk of the songs on The Day The Earth Met... appear in finished form on Pere Ubu and Dead Boys albums. Particularly interesting to punk completists are early versions of Pere Ubu's strange and chilling "30 Seconds over Tokyo" and "Final Solution" and The Dead Boys' "Down In Flames," "Sonic Reducer" and "Ain't It Fun" (later massacred cruelly by Guns 'n Roses), but the lesser known songs are where the fascination lies. The RFTT originals "Amphetamine," "Never Gonna Kill Myself Again," and "So Cold" are musically tight, hypnotic, and excellent on a par with the songs later made famous. In particular, Peter Laughner's sardonic lyrics deserve a place in the all-time songwriters' hall of fame. Moreover, though the sound quality is rough, the guitar greatness of Laughner and Cheetah Chrome-- one of the only great lead guitarists of the punk era-- shines through loud and clear. If you are a hardcore punk fan, it is hard to deem this collection as anything but essential.

Fast forward to 2003, when Rocket From The Tombs regroup to answer the unasked question, "what would Sonic Reducer sound like if played by a bunch of fifty-year-olds who haven't seen each other in years?" Bizarrely enough, the answer is a wholly unexpected and completely welcome "fantastic." With Richard Lloyd of Television on board providing guitar support, and with decades of experience behind them, Rocket Redux pulls the haze of tape hiss, methamphetamine shakes, and teenage mania aside to reveal a group of men with more energy than a schoolful of teenagers playing a set of songs which uniformly deserve to be all time classics. Everything works, especially the way that the dual Richard Lloyd-Cheetah Chrome guitar attack and Dave Thomas' strained growling vocals turn decades-old demos into modern-day monsters. The drug hangover of "Ain't It Fun," the adrenaline-fueled punch of "Sonic Reducer RFTT" and the surging "Frustration" alone are worth the price of admission, but every one of the twelve tracks on Rocket Redux proves that Rocket From The Tombs deserve every last word of their legend.

Please excuse me. I need to go enjoy these records while they last, because in less than forty-eight hours, they're coming to give me a minivan, a haircut, and a backache.

Catch Rocket From The Tombs/Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome on tour with Terri Texas Bomb:
8/6, St. Louis MO, The Creepy Crawl
8/7, Columbus OH, Club 202
8/8, Akron OH, The Lime Spider
8/9, Richmond VA, Nancy Raygun
8/10, Baltimore MD, Side Bar
8/11, Passaic NJ, Connections
8/12, New York NY, The Continental

Also posted to blogcritics.org.

John Kerry needs help.

To get his Ohio rallies up and rolling, Kerry used a set of jokes to open his events. In Bowling Green, his shtick went something like this:

"If you elect me and my running mate, John Edwards, we are going to give you the courageous leadership you need. We'll take the tough positions, the courageous positions, the tough stands. But there's one tough position I will not take: I am not going to choose between the Falcons and the Rockets" -- this is a local reference to the well-known rivalry between Bowling Green University and the University of Toledo.

"I will say this," he added. "There is nothing better than Buckeye football, period!"

Kerry used this set piece several times in Ohio, to great effect, never mind the waffling with the generality of "Buckeye" football. Was he talking Ohio State University specifically? Or just football in the state in general? Only Kerry knows.

But then Kerry dug a huge hole for himself. On Sunday and into Monday, Kerry hit Michigan, where he attempted to use the same Ohio jokes. Clearly, the sports humor has to be taken out of his hands before he really embarrasses himself.

"I just came here from Bowling Green," Kerry told the crowd to subdued applause. "I was smart enough not to pick a choice between the Falcons and the, well, you know, all those other teams out there. I just go for Buckeye football, that's where I'm coming from."

At that point, before all the boos began raining down upon him, Kerry seemed to realize his error. In an attempt to silent the angry crowd of University of Michigan supporters, Kerry said, "But that was while I was in Ohio. I know I'm in the state of Michigan and you got a great big M and a powerhouse of a team." Then his face, presumably, the Botox permitting, turned Big Blue.

Wow. Just wow. Homework, John. Do your homework. And please, please, please make sure you don't give the "hook 'em horns!" when you roll through College Station, Texas. Or, if you wish, by all means do! And follow it up with a good old cry of "Roll, Tide" at a campaign stop in Auburn! And, don'tcha know, potential voters in Philadelphia just love the New York Jets, ya dumbass.

The USA men's Olympic basketball team continued their proud march to the gold yesterday, defeating Germany 80-77 in a buzzer-beater. Before you let your organs of pride swell in victory, you should know this: the German team they beat didn't even qualify for Athens.

Next stop: the unstoppable powerhouse of Serbia-Montenegro.

Ken Layne:

After getting through the insane security at CitiBank Headquarters -- caused by four-year-old Evidence of Terror Plans released Sunday to scare the bejesus out of you -- you get to say "Hi" to Laura Bush in the lobby! That's neat.

It's neat when schedules work out that way.

Oh, and the Immediate Alert Scary-Ville terror info? Now they're saying it actually refers to an attack planned for Sept. 2. You know, the last day of the Republican Convention in New York, when Bush gives his big speech?

[snip]

If you launch a Big Scare on Sunday -- when the big political news for the coming week is the just-finished Democratic convention -- and don't tell us the info you're holding is four years old and that it doesn't refer to any immediate attacks, and then the newspapers come out with that information, and then you change your story and say that the Attack Plans actually refer to Sept. 2 in New York, when the incumbent president will give his big campaign speech, you do not sound like a person would ever treat the Dept. of Homeland Security as anything but a campaign office.

So am I to understand that NYC will be under lockdown for the next month, and the whole world watches as the Terrorized City awaits that Sept. 2 deadline with terrible fear, and we get there without an attack (I hope), and a grateful nation watches the Bush speech, and then the barricades & body armor go away with the GOP convention? Is that the schedule?

Although this is a resoundingly cynical way to look at matters, it's also a fair question. As Michael Totten notes in his link to Layne,

I'm not about to romp off to moonbat land, but this doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Who is the bright bulb behind this stunt, anyway?

Do I think the Bush Administration made up a bogus terror alert to get a jump start on the convention? No. Keep your Kool Aid. But they sure are trying to score points off it, aren't they? Say hello to Laura Bush in the target building's lobby. Please.

Kerry got no bounce - no bounce - from his own convention. If I were advising either Kerry or Bush I'd tell both of them to be quiet and stay away from the cameras. Quit bugging the bejeezus out of everybody. People aren't voting for in this election, they're voting against.

Precisely. Come November, I see two choices for myself: to vote for Kerry, or against Bush. These are not congruent conclusions, and whether I decide to vote for Kerry or to throw my vote away writing in "Turd Ferguson" or "Kodos" hinges in part on how often the Kerry campaign and the Bush goverment succeed in not causing me go fetal every time they make a move.

As for the lack of a convention bounce, I think that is less the result of an unsuccessful convention than an indication of just how many people have made up their minds already. Thank goodness I live in Massachusetts (where John Kerry could literally eat a live baby outside Faneuil Hall and still carry the state) rather than Ohio, where my parent's can't turn on a television or radio without enduring some excruciating pitch for Bush or Kerry. This is going to be an ugly one, and close.

But there is one in "Biyatch!"

The US Olympic men's basketball team, consisting of NBA players including Tim Duncan and Lamar Odom, got their asses handed to them by fricking Italy in an exhibition game yesterday. The final score was 95-78.

Sez Odom, "We need more time together. These teams play together for years and we have to put it together in a couple of weeks. . . . Our defense wasn't up to par. This was a lesson for us." Duncan echoed the defensive woes, also adding "It doesn't hurt at all. It's great preparation."

Or, gentlemen, perhaps the problem is that the rest of the world still spends time on crazy timewasters like shooting, ball-handling, team play, and defense, while American basketball players prefer to dunk! dunk! dunk! and work on their foul-drawing pratfalls. Woo! Lookit me! I'm dunking! Hey ref! That guy hacked me! Ow, ow, ow! Now, where's my Escalade!

The NBA is a pit of crappy play and lax refereeing, and the league's entire culture rewards criminal behavior, total irresponsibility, and utter selfishness.

Check out this bit from the end of the article: "LeBron James delivered [the pyrotechnics] late in the third quarter, breaking away on a turnover and throwing in an emphatic dunk. The crowd booed loudly when the basket was negated by a traveling call." When is the last time you saw and NBA player called for travelling on a three-step dunk?

Italy, man.

[wik] Of course, part of the issue is that these days the biggest players don't want to risk blowing out a knee in some stupid non-paying glory gig. Just check out the roster from the original 1992 dream team: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler, John Stockton, and Christian Laettner.

Now, let's compare it to this year's version of Team USA: Carmelo Anthony, Carlos Boozer, Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Richard Jefferson, Stephon Marbury, Shawn Marion, Lamar Odom, Emeka Okafor, Amare Stoudemire, and Dwyane Wade.

Who?

Here's an interesting article in the WaPo about efforts by the Telemundo network to train all its in-house actors and personalities to speak Mexican Spanish, which the network considers to be the equivalent of American Newscaster English.

There's some interesting stuff in there, particularly about Colombia's sensitivity to the changes ( it turns out that Colombia thinks they speak standard Spanish and resent their native actors going Mexican) and about the need for Telemundo to take any advantage they can in competing with Univision, a network more than three times Telemundo's size.

In all, it's both gratifying to see that Spanish language entertainment is becoming truly internationalized on a large scale, and a little bittersweet that I might no longer have the pleasure of wrinkling my brow in consternation as I try to follow the harsh fricatives and clipped speech of an Argentinian soap actor speaking his native accent. Accent standardization is a sign that the Spanish entertainment industry is mature and expecting great future growth.

(Thanks to Casper at blogcritics.)

[wik] As for Colombian being standard Spanish, that's simply crazy talk. My brother in law is Colombian, and I have more trouble understanding his family's clipped, fast conversation than I do understanding my Madrid-born boss, the Mexicans and Dominicans at the local bodega, or the excited ranting of Mexican soccer announcers (of course, "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!! is universal).

The Ministry welcomes BlackFive's daughter, Grace, to this material plane. Although Grace will be missed on the Astral Plane, we are confident of her success and happiness on Earth. Congratulations to the Paratrooper of Love and his family for the addition to their clan.

As a present for Grace, the Ministry is considering Baby's First Fuzzy Wuzzy HALO Rig (which I believe is a Fisher Price product). Other suggestions are welcome. Indeed, expected.

End transmission

Hey, kids! Unky Johno has two bits of fun for you kids today!

First up, thanks to Phil Dennison, is a blog which currently-- and for not much longer-- has a recording of The Chipmunks' Christmas Song slowed down to the speed at which they recorded the vocals. Did you know that Theodore is actually a baritone, Alvin a tenor (and possibly a child molester, by the sound of his voice), and that Tom Waits wrote the music? Must be heard to be believed.

(BRDGT (blogrolled to your left) is moving away from Boston soon to become a doctor (of history), and you better believe this'll be on the Super Special Driving Mix I slip them before they go. On there about six times, i might add. A joke is funnier if it's not funny anymore.)

Next is this gem of a beaut of a wonderful thing, thanks to Will Collier of vodkapundit who apparently has not sufficiently disciplined his inner ten-year-old.

My name is Johno and I approved this message.

Being that I am from Northeastern Ohio I retain a certain pride in the region, especially when it comes to the music scene. Consequently, when co-blogcritic person Craig Lyndall offered me an album by Lovedrug, a new Canton band who, according to him, put on a beautiful live show, I jumped at the chance. What's new in Canton?

Lovedrug are a four-piece group in the young tradition of Radiohead and Coldplay who have a few big things going for them-- a tight sound, a good producer, and a phenomenal singer among them. Unfortunately, their debut, "Pretend You're Alive" lacks memorable songwriting and strong lyrics, leaving the impression of a band who has a lot left to prove.

A few tracks impress. The shiny surfaces of the opening "In Red," the disturbing and violent lyrics of "Blackout," and the Coldplayesque arrangment on "Candy" all hint at good things to come, but over the course of the album's 13 tracks ear fatigue sets in and the high points get smeared into a samey haze.

As with most albums I review, I put "Pretend You're Alive" on autorepeat and waited to get sick of it. After five or so straight times through, I wasn't ready to chuck it in the bin (good news) but also hadn't noticed a single transition between tracks apart from the album starting over (bad news). A few more listens and I still wasn't able to tell the songs apart. Although not boring, there's just nothing here that works too hard at being interesting. Although Lovedrug sound great (especially if you really, really like Coldplay) they play like a Saturday Night Live movie of the rock world -- a really good four-minute sketch stretched very thin.

Recent conversations with co-workers have turned to etiquette, manners, and other socially constructed behavioral governance. We swapped some stories about rude people, rude places, and entirely rude populations. I riffed a bit on the difference between being crotchety which, as a native Yankee I certainly am, and being rude, which I rarely am on purpose.

Anyway manners are on my mind. Who are the rudest people you've ever met as a group, ie Mets fans, cab drivers, retired accountants, French speakers, fat bastard Belgians...? Where is the rudest place you've ever been? That is, not necessarily the least developed, but where the population at large seemed universally ambivalent to your continued existence?

Michael Totten is back from Tunisia and posting up a storm. Go read! Make sure you catch all his travelogue posts especially, as he has a real knack for lyrical and evocative descriptive writing.

Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy (recently back from a long hiatus while he clerked in Federal Court) discusses the new hotness in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: anticipatory warrants.

In a nutshell, if the police think you might have broken the law in the past, and may soon break it again, the 9th Circuit Court has decided that they may get a search warrant that they may exercise only after they think a crime has occurred. As Kerr notes,

the whole point of a warrant requirement is to have a neutral magistrate decide when probable cause exists. The decision to authorize the search is up to the judge, not the police officer. The addition of a condition precedent delegates that decisionmaking authority to the law enforcement officer, at least in part. Because the officer decides when the triggering event has occurred, the probable cause determination is no longer made entirely by the neutral magistrate.

Speaking as a layperson, that sounds right to me. The police and judiciary are two separate things, or so the opening credits to "Law & Order" tell me, and the lines between them are there for very good reasons. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the authority to decide when probable cause exists resides even partly with the police, then the police are the final arbiters of order and law, and the courts risk becoming a rump, weakened in their ability to constrain police power. Eww.

Various news sources are reporting today that President Bush is planning to accept two of the main recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, namely the creation of a national head of intelligence and the establishment of a counterterrorism center to track specifically terrorist threats.

Great ideas! Several years too late, but great ideas. As a small-government liberal walking oxymoron, I tend to distrust the creation of cabinet-level positions (can we axe HUD, Labor, and Homeland Security tomorrow?), since the immediate problems they are meant to cope usually subside within a couple decades leaving the attendant bureaucracy hanging around like a very expensive third nipple. The Department of Labor, for example, was probably years too late in coming when it was established in 1913, since widespread labor unrest, internal labor-force migration issues, and worker-safety problems were decades-old bugbears at that time. But nearly a hundred years later, with its major work done, couldn't the office be retired and its important continuing operations (such as labor standards and worker safety or government contract administration) be folded into Interior or HHS?

By this same token, although the creation of a cabinet-level internal intelligence position made sense in the dark days of 2001, it is ultimately a bureaucrat's solution to the problem. Who but a bureaucrat could decide that the best way to cut down on bureacratic inefficency is to create a whole new, bigger org chart? Nothing against Tom Ridge, who has done as good a job as anyone probably could in a terribly difficult job, but everything the public sees about the Department of Homeland Security from the very name of the thing down to the street-level antics of the TSA and the constant gestures toward total surveillance is, so far, a crass and unfunny joke.

In my humble and fully-informed-by-hindsight opinion, what's being done now should have been done in the first place, leaving faintly ridiculous discussions of "Homeland" out of it. (side note: homeland. My "homeland," technically speaking, of NE Ohio, is already perfectly well defended by the tens of thousands of private gun owners. My "homeland" of Massachusetts is equally so. We're not all peace-loving Kucinich voters here.)

Of course, this brings up a question. Last night I saw on the news that the President doesn't want to make the "Intelligence Tsar" a cabinet post, because the office will need to remain independent from White House influence. Great idea, and good on W for taking that step. However, being the good tinfoil hatter I am, I would also like to see some concrete and simply worded language blocking this new office from becoming an American NKVD. (n.b. I didn't say Gestapo on purpose.) Many Americans distrust government authority when it shows up on their Main Street, and the last thing we need is another reason to keep that up.

Tom Ridge shows us how high Orange actually is on the deep-shit-o-meter. Given that all I've seen from Homeland Security so far is a) flailing 2) absurd and incompetent behavior from gubmint-hired security goons, iii) expensive turf warz between warring bureaucrats, and IV) the arrest of Cheech Marin for threatening a nation of millions with a hollow glass objet d'art, I guess I've gone a little funny in the head. When I look at this photo, I see a man inspired to bust a wack rhyme.

911 is a joke we don't want 'em
I call a cab 'cause a cab will come quicker
The doctors huddle up and call a flea flicker
The reason that I say that 'cause they
Flick you off like fleas
They be laughin' at ya while you're crawlin' on your knees
And to the strength so go the length
Thinkin' you are first when you really are tenth
You better wake up and smell the real flavor
Cause 911 is a fake life saver

So get up, get, get get down
911 is a joke in yo town
Get up, get, get, get down
Late 911 wears the late crown

[wik-wik-wack] Patton reminds me that it was Tommy Chong who got busted for glassblowing, not erstwhile partner Cheech Marin. Must be the Robitussin talking.

As a stopgap before I resume regular posting, peep this item, found via Norbizness. Gov. Jeb ("X") Bush has assured Florida voters that Diebold, maker of Florida's new paperless touchscreen voting machines, is a wonderful corporation fully deserving of Florida voters' complete and utter trust. Funny thing, the Florida Republican party recently sent out a huge mailing to its list arguing the following: "the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount. . . . Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today."

Yes, Governer X. It's safe. Safe as houses. So safe, in fact, you should insist that your supporters only use Diebold's Lean Mean Knock Out The Chads Voting Machine when casting their votes for you and the big brother who used to score you your blow. Accept no substitutes.

My name is Johno, and I approved this message.