Cranky & Bizzy

Last Friday I was "informed" that from now on I am responsible for making sure that one of the associates I work for enters his time in our bookkeeping system on a more timely basis than a) once a month and b) whenever he feels like it.

I hate being the babysitter to somebody who makes 3 times what I make who won't do what he's supposed to do.

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To make Friday even worse I was told that starting this week I would have to work on a SEC document that needs to be created and filed on behalf of one of our clients.

SEC documents are formatting nightmares. To make matters "easier" the powers that be decided to a) use a form for the document which is Edgarized on the internet at the SEC website (don't ask and I won't tell). Then they decided to divvy up the document amongst six different secretaries to tidy it up. The only problem with that being that six secretaries have six different ways of tidying up.

On Monday morning all six pieces were forwarded to me for assembly.

What a friggin' mess. I might as well have typed the entire document myself, from scratch.

I've spent the remainder of this week getting it (it now tops out at over 100 pages) into some semblance of readable shape.
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But enough grousing.

Let's talk about General Westmoreland Petraeus. I understand that he testified before somebody yesterday or the other day. Things are just swell. We should "stay the course." Or some bullshit like that. I guess he's jockeying for the job of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs someday. Trust me, though. He won't get it.

Is it just my imagination or are we in VietNam all over again?

Ya know, sometimes I like to speculate on exactly what we could've bought with that Trillion Dollars we've thrown away trying to subjugate a bunch of hotheaded religious nuts in a country that brings exactly nothing to our strategic party. Perhaps we could've found the cure's for cancer, AIDS, ALS, multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy? Or provided free education for every American under the age of 25 up to and including college? Or ... well, I'm sure you have some good ideas, too. Let's hear 'em!

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There are some shining spots in this week, though. Today is pay day and tomorrow is Friday!

And that makes life worth living.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Boyfriend

Here is a photo of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swapping spit with a devoted voter and/or boytoy. Note the demurely closed eyes of both gentlemen. That's because they're both imagining that the other is one of the virgin's they hope to deflower in paradise.

As I pointed out yesterday, though, the mullah's get to deflower their virgins here and now. It's good to be the mullah!

Anyway, I wish the camera had pulled back a little for a "full shot" of the gents. I'd like to see if either of them has one leg "cocked-back" in the full "lost in his arms" position.

I wonder how they would look dressed as a nurse and a soldier, in Times Square, on VJ-Day?

Frankly, though, I've seen better porn in a William Higgins video (and that ain't saying much -- Wm. Higgins always specialized in dumber than shit SoCal Bimboys who never did a thing for me). But enough LA-bashing. Back to the Iranians.

We are being whipped into a frenzy of hatred towards them, just as surely as we were whipped into a frenzy of Iraqi-hating a couple of years back.

But that's a subject for another post at another time.

For the time being, know this. Gays are dying out there for no other reason than that they refuse to kowtow to religious fundamentalism.

Here. There. Everywhere.

Defend yourselves. Learn to shoot a gun if necessary. Don't put up with anybody's shit ever again.

You have just as much right to your place in the sun as anyone else does.

Denial is just a River in Iran!

"My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short." Armistead Maupin

They string gays up in Iran. Unless they're mullahs. In which case they get "the pick of the litter", and, apparently, they get to exercise something which used to be called "droit de signeur" (the "right of the lord"[of the manor]... to deflower a virgin [on her wedding night]).

When I was a kid I was definitely into "daddies" but I'm not sure I wanted some antiquated priest slipping me the tongue in front of all my classmates.

Mostly, though, what I think is happening out there in the world is that there's a social disconnect between people who engage in male-male sex as a matter of preference yet who are married husbands and fathers and identify themselves as "straight", and those who reject any trappings of heterosexuality and who identify themselves as "gay."

There's the famous story of the handsome Iraqi soldier who expressed his sexual desire for an equally handsome American soldier and didn't understand the American's outrage since, according to Arab tradition, "girls are for babies and boys are for fun."

It's not just overseas, of course. Larry Craig is another example of someone who, apparently, likes to "get a little" on the down-low while passing through airports, but who is horrified at the thought of being characterized as gay. How could he be gay? He doesn't live in a loving relationship with another male. He doesn't decorate the shit out of his fireplace mantle every Christmas. Gay guys do that. He's not gay.

And since the vast majority of human beings are not exclusively gay or straight (in fact it's only about 8% of the total population, 4% hardcore gay, 4% hardcore straight), and everyone else falls somewhere along a sliding scale in the middle, no wonder most people don't like to be pigeonholed into having a label stuck on them that, in most cases, makes them feel uncomfortable.

I "got it" pretty early that there was no sliding scale for me, and that there never would be.

I can be very understanding in that regard. Too bad that the 92% of the population out there who get to pick and choose won't cut me the same slack that they give themselves. No matter where they are.

Nowadays.

Well of course it is. Homo Sex is a threat to national security, naturally. Or unnaturally. Probably just as big a threat as Osama. Or Milk Duds. Or something.

And Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.

Is it just me or are the crazies out in force these days? George W. Bush's Iraq War now appears poised to last until I'm dead. Hillary's trying to flog yet another healthcare plan that doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Some student in Florida got tased by the cops (and don't think for one minute that I believe HE's as pure as the driven snow, either... I smell a great big, publicity driven rat behind that story). And tased? Puhleeze. In my day the National Guard invaded your campus and shot four of your classmates dead for shit like expressing your opinions regarding war. Tasing is for pussies. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young will NOT write a memorable song about some publicity-hound getting tased.

Meanwhile, President George W. Shitforbrains forces generals and ambassadors to kiss Congress's ass on his behalf.

Greenspan finally starts spilling the beans. So does Rummy.

Over half the people under 30 think that the US and Germany were ALLIES against Russia in WWII (what the fuck planet have they been living on?)

Some dumbbell on The View thinks the world is FLAT.

The Senator from Idaho may like to suck some cock or get butt-fucked on the DL now and then, but he is MOST EMPHATICALLY NOT GAY!

And denial, apparently, really is just a river in Egypt.

Sometimes I wonder when Jeebus is finally gonna come and get me out of this madhouse?

Pissing Off the Commuter Gods!

The commuter Gods are obviously pissed off that I took two weeks vacation. Since I've returned there have been numerous delays of every sort just about every day this week.

Last night my bus broke down on the Turnpike and it was over an hour before a replacement came out to rescue us. I got home at 8:30. Just in time for bed. At least there were only 45 of us who were thoroughly inconvenienced.

Unlike yesterday morning and this morning.

Yesterday there was an "incident" involving a burned-out (well, it was burned out by the time we got there) old wreck in the southbound lanes which everyone in the northbound lanes had to slow down and look at, thus adding 20 minutes to the commute. 20 minutes times 75,000 people equals 1,500,000 minutes, or 25,000 people-hours in lost productivity.

This morning was even worse. I knew it was going to be bad when the bubble-headed bleach-blonde traffic report lady on WCBS-TV (in "HD!") at 5:00 a.m. blathered on about "a bad accident in the southbound lanes near Exit 14, so you might want to take Routes 1 and 9 around the airport (Newark/Liberty) instead."

She wasn't lying. It was bad. There was an overturned and gutted tractor-trailer, a demolished divider between the bus and auto lanes AND the burned out wreck of an expensive looking sports car. Apparently there was death, and possibly several, involved. There were multiple state police cruisers all over the southbound side.

Again, it was important for everyone in the northbound lanes to slow down and gawk. Another 25,000 person-hours down the crapper. Probably more because the southbound traffic, mostly tractor trailers, were backup up northbound on the western spur all the way to the George Washington Bridge. It was going to be a very bad day for an awful lot of people.

I have written e-mails to the Turnpike Authority after previous incidents like this, suggesting strongly that they install "anti-rubbernecking" barriers the full length of the Turnpike but apparently the State Police don't like the idea because it would hinder the ability of patrol troopers to monitor conditions both northbound AND southbound while driving along in the opposite lanes.

But it seems to me that there comes a time, and that time has long since past, when the needs of tens of thousands of commuters outstrip the needs of the police to "check out" what's going on in the other lanes.

Maybe it's just time to hire more troopers and to buy them more cruisers.

I'm sure it'd be a helluva lot cheaper than the 10's of millions of dollars which go up in smoke from the exhaust pipes of thousands of vehicles stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike every year; burning up oil which the youth of America is currently, and pointlessly, dying trying to protect.

I wish the New Jersey Turnpike Authority would tell me again why it's so goddamned important for the State Police to be able to look over the barriers, "just in case"?

Memorial Day - 2007

You probably all know that today, Memorial Day, started out life as Decoration Day, a day on which the widows and children of our glorious Civil War dead would traipse out to graveyards to clean the places up and to place some flowers on the countless tombs therein.

I know that there are times when I seem like a knee-jerk anti-war leftwing queer. And, for the most part, I am. But I also know the necessity of fighting the good fight when necessary. And I'm the first to say that we should, immediately, reinstate National Service for all able-bodied youths for a year or two.

But no less a personage than General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1939 to 1945 and architect of the postwar Marshall Plan, had personal serious doubts about the American public's willingness to support WWII, if it were to continue on into 1946. That was why he was such a forceful proponent of the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. He did not believe that a democracy would support all out war for longer than 4 years. Neither, frankly, do I.

When I'm being rational (arguably, rarely) I know that public mood is a fickle mistress and probably a piss-poor way to try to plan long-term public policy. The day after September 11, 2001, most of us would've (probably) happily handed a blank check to any warmonger who promised us retribution on a grand scale.

Unfortunately for us, and our armed forces, that warmonger turned out to be George W. Bush, probably the most incompetent, pig-headed, fool we could've found for the job, even if we'd deliberately set out to find one.

Six years later, and still no sign of Osama bin Laden (remember him?), but we have managed to thoroughly trash Iraq and, worse, probably the entire balance of power in the Middle East... and NOT to our advantage, either.

I suspect that there might be a few men and women in our national cemetaries who, if asked today, if Viet Nam or Iraq had been worth dying for, would have serious doubts that their lives had been sacrificed "for a worthy cause."

Nevertheless, today is not about calling into question the value of their missions but, rather, the mere fact that they were willing to perform them simply because they had been asked. That speaks volumes about their valour and patriotism.

And it is that valour and patriotism that we remember today, and their's are the souls whom we should remember in our prayers tonight.

It's the Foreign Policy, Stupid

Okay, I'm only going to say this once.

All of our woes, foreign and domestic, can be traced back to one thing and one thing only.

It is the fault of a foreign policy that, for centuries, has emphasized American hegemony overseas. A policy that said that WE ARE ENTITLED to export whatever we define as democracy, at the point of a gun if necessary. A foreign policy that has drained the national treasury time and again to pay for our interventionist excursions, often to the point of starving the poorest of our poor and throwing away their children in the process.

A foreign policy that has enabled us to install and prop up dictators from Central and South America to the Caribbean and the Middle East.

WE owned the Shah of Iran. He was "our boy." WE owned (and we can't run away from this one) Francisco Franco in fascist Spain. WE owned the overthrow of the King of Greece and the installation of a military junta there and President Allende of Chile, (we were very big on supporting military juntas and tossing out Presidents we don't like... we did it in VietNam, too).

The fact is that we rarely, if ever, supported "real" democracy in countries that we "liberated."

What we really supported were people who would look out for OUR strategic interests in THEIR countries.

The Soviet Union may have been OUR evil empire but rest assured, we were theirs.

So when you see some neocon congressman crying his eyes out on tv, he isn't crying because American kids are dying. He's crying because we're not shoving it up the asses of the rest of the world with as much vigor as he'd like us to have.

That's what he's really crying about. His pet theories are being shot to hell, along with a lot of totally innocent Americans and Iraqis.

WE created this fucking mess. Generations of policy wonks in Washington and in so-called think tanks all around the US have, on our behalf and with our permission, cooked all this shit up.

And it is time for all of us who care about these things to pick up the phones or log into our e-mail systems, and to let our elected reps in DC know that this situation is no longer tolerable.

I don't know about you, but I'm becoming extremely libertarian in my views. The "job" of the government in Washington is to:

DEFEND THE FUCKING BORDERS

and

DELIVER THE FUCKING MAIL

and with all that leftover money that we no longer waste on foreign wars and propping up dictators and destabilizing others, we should:

Cure Diseases
Offer Universal Healthcare
Hand out Free Education (and not just colleges, trade schools too for those so inclined)

And Elizabitch Hasselhoff, or whatever the hell her name is, can suck me off, and so can the House Minority leader, Bill Kristol, Doug Feith, AG Gonzalez, Dick Cheney (and that self-loathing dyke daughter of his), Rummy, the entire Bush Family and every employee of Halliburton above the rank of peon.

May they ALL rot in hell for what they've done. Or thought about doing.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone. I'm off to the wilds of NYC to spend some quality time with another recovering drunk. Hopefully I'll be able to log in tomorrow!

Peace.

News of the Day

Congress Passes “Sacrifice The Troops” Bill

$120bb Supplemental Funding Passes Both Houses

Minority Leader Boehner Boo-Hoos the Killing of More American Kids (but approves it anyway)

Read about it here.

Meanwhile

God Rains Shit Upon GWB

Read about it here.

This Memorial Day weekend, when we revere the nation’s war dead, let us not forget all the living men and women who, every day, march, sail or fly into “harm’s way” to defend us from our enemies.

And let us also remember just who it is that is currently ordering them into “harm’s way”, "The Commander Guy" aka "ShitForBrains."

And then let us all resolve to do something about it. Okay?

Meanwhile, have a look at how supportive Mitt Romney is of all his gay friends:

Read about it here.

But above all, do yourselves one little favor... try to find some time this weekend to loosen up a little and to not take yourselves so damn seriously (which I know I'm guilty of).

After all, God doesn't take any of this seriously at all.

Duplicity in the Press

"Scrap the Constitution" Copyright © Austin Cline.

Bill Moyers, whose babies I would have, was back on PBS last night, doing what PBS and Bill Moyers do best, telling people the truth.

I didn't get to watch all of it because of the time constraints, but I did see the first 45 minutes and believe me, it was pretty devastating.

Basically, he showed how the American press, led by the New York Times (and especially Judith Miller, who actually did time for failing to name her sources about the Valerie Plame thingie, which she never did an article about anyway), CBS, ABC, NBC, Dan Rather, the Washington Post, CNN and a host of other mainstream media (it goes without saying that Fox was in on it, too) rolled over, played dead, got in bed with, lubricated themselves freely and took it straight up the ass from the Bush Administration in terms of buying into and, worse, convincing the American public to buy into, the war in Iraq.

He was unrelenting, merciless and didn't gloss over anything. He followed the trails. The only "heroes" he could dig up were

Bob Simon of 60 minutes

and

Knight Ridder News

Apparently nobody at Knight Ridder was buying all the "WMDs" and "aluminum tubes" crap from the get-go and Bob Simon was able to easily find and call up CIA colonels to find out that Hamabi, who led the so-called Iraqi National Front, was basically a high-paid CIA fraud, telling lies to anybody who would listen, in order to get a check from the US government in the amount of $350,000 a MONTH.

The neocons got raked over the coals.

According to a piece by Greg Mitchell, dated April 21st, on the website EditorandPublisher.com, at the close of the show Moyers mentioned some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for the program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

That same piece went on to say:

"Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that 'so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media.' He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, 'We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.'

Then he explains: 'The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.' He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."

God help the United States of America.