Category Archives: sarcasm

Oh, This is So Not Good

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Just so we get this perfectly clear, the active, serving military will go on earning their pay over the period of the shut down of the federal government . . . they just won’t be getting any actual paychecks, or automatic deposit of it into their bank accounts. In a time where there are kinetic military events going on – what we used to call hostilities – in three different countries. No matter what you call ‘em, it means that the families of troops serving in an active war zone are not going to be happy. Especially the families of those junior troops who are already living close to the bone anyway; there were years when I finished out the last day or so before a payday with $1 in my bank account and a handful of change in my handbag. And I’ve lost track of how many times I floated a check for groceries at the Commissary, a day or two before payday.

Just to throw some gasoline on the fire, it seems that just that very week that the paychecks won’t be arriving, the First Lady and Mrs. Biden are launching a big push to support military families. Nice timing, ladies – because they certainly will be needing support by then. Seriously, though, I would reconsider rescheduling any events involving actual military members’ families during this period, as you’re liable to get an earful of how they really feel and I don’t think the protocol officers are gonna be able to cope.

Heck of a job, Barry. Heck of a job.

The Duck of Death Quacking Up at Last?

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Yeah, I know – juvenile humor at best, but somehow that’s about the only reasonable response you can make to a walking, talking comic-opera cartoon villain like Moammar Khadaffy. Or Quadaffi, or what the hell – Khadaffy-Duck. I mean, the clothes, the sprocket-hung uniforms, the transparent megalomania, the fembot body-guards, the rip-off of Mao’s Little Red Book . . . and was he the inspiration for the villain in Jewel of the Nile? And then you remember the serious stuff: the airplanes and discos bombed, the terrorists like the IRA generously funded – the politicians and intellectuals paid to be his respectable front, the plight of those foreign doctors and nurses who were accused of deliberately infecting patients with AIDS, the death of a British policewoman in front of the Libyan embassy in London (who was shot from within the embassy), and the brutalization of his own people . . . no, Quadaffy-Duck was every bit as malevolent as Saddam Hussein; his pretensions and dress-sense was just a little more risible. Otherwise, just a matter of degree, and frankly, I can’t think of a nicer person to have a J-DAM coming down the chimney with his name on it, no matter how the heck you spell it. I did so hope that he would wind up like Mussolini (his corpse hanging from a gas-station – which would be ironic in the extreme) or stood up in front of a wall like Ceausescu; the thing being that it would be Libyans themselves performing the necessary chore of taking out the flamboyantly-clad trash. Ah, well; however the job gets done.

Anyway – as you can guess, I’ll be breaking out the popcorn and celebrating the immanent demise of the Duck of Death; it’s been long overdue, no matter who or what is responsible for seeing that he achieves room temperature. However . . . the infamous however, well-freighted with irony . . . I do have a few small concerns, chief among them being – who and what are the anti-Khadaffy Libyans, exactly? When all the dust settles, and someone who is not the Duck of Death or of his ilk and kin is in charge . . . who will that person be, and will they be an improvement?

Secondly; what next? Are we just clearing out the Duck’s flyable assets so that a no-fly zone may be installed? How long will the no-fly zone be in effect – as long as the no-fly zone over Iraq, which protected the Kurds? Months, weeks, days? Of the allied nations assisting in this, who will have the resources to continue that long? Should it be necessary to put boots on the ground . . . whose boots will they be, and what exactly will be the assigned duties of those boots?

And the irony of Obama doing just about what Bush was damned up one side and down the other for doing, with regard to another middle-eastern oil-rich nation ruled by a brutally iron-fisted autocrat with a penchant for seeing his own face everywhere? Rich, I tell you – as in two scoops of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Watching half of Obama’s backers turn themselves into pretzels trying to explain how one of these things is so not like the other, and the other half going into gibbering hysterics realizing that it is . . . it’s turning out to be quite a giggle for me. Enough reason for anther round of popcorn, anyway.

And finally – you know, they told me if I voted for McCain/Palin, that there would never-ending war in the Middle East – and damn if it doesn’t look like it.

Memo: With a Bang and Not a Whimper

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To: AIG
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Things Happening Almost Too Fast to Keep Track

1. So, it looks like the End is Nigh for Moammar Ghadaffy, or however the heck his name is spelled. I swear, over the last thirty years, it’s different every time he swims back up from the cesspool and back into public consciousness again. There is probably some rule governing this; something to do with whether there is an “r” in the month, or if the aurora borealis is showing . . . anyway, I suspect that when a dictator gets to the point of hiring masses of obviously foreign mercenaries because he can’t trust anybody but his immediate family – not his military, or his secret police, or his own body-guard – and orders those troops who do obey him to drop bombs on their own people . . . game over. There hasn’t been an equal to him as megalomaniacal, totally erratic, terrorist-enabling, crazier-than-a-shit-house-rat brutal dictator since Idi Amin shuffled off the international scene. Is anyone setting up a pool on when Ghaddaffy Duck gets the Mussolini-stone-dead-and-hanging-from-an-urban-gas-station-canopy? Can I get in for Friday?

2. Contemplating current unrest in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran and Lebanon, it looks like a good time to get out that old record of Barry McGuire, singing “Eve of Destruction.” Just saying.

3. It looks like the Koch Brothers are selected as this month’s Emmanuel Goldstein for the progressive-lefty media. Not bad for two guys who hadn’t been heard of until two or three months ago, out outside of libertarian and big-charity donor circles. Note: they really aren’t that big as donors go – the Tides Foundation and George Soros probably spend as much on coffee and crullers as the Koch Brothers donated to libertarian-oriented politicians. It seems to be that the Koch Brothers have committed the solecism of not doing things properly. Donations from billionaires ought to go to the proper causes and people. You know, the causes and people that that all socially conscientious and proper-thinking people endorse – because otherwise it would just wreck everything.

4. Madison, Wisconsin as the epicenter of the political s**tstorm-du-jour, American-style . . . whoever would have thought it, eh? Good old progressive, earnest mid-west Wisconsin, who elected a governor (by the same margin as the current resident of the White House was elected to his current office) who said what he meant, meant what he said, and then went out and did it. Wow – and now we are seeing the public employee unions and their sympathizers having a major meltdown. I somehow think that this will not end as the proper progressive people expect it to end; those who believe with the force of holy writ that a 21st century workplace is just exactly the same as a 20th century factory floor or a 19th century sweatshop. Allow me to break it to you gently, people: All the good things that unions did, they did a good while ago, and yes, it’s OK to be sentimental as all get-out about that and to honor the organizers – well, many of them anyway – who fought for all that. But that was then, this is now. The Man is just not slavering to put all working-class people back in the company town, working for a pittance and persecuted by the Pinkertons any more. (Maybe in China they are, or in Burma, though.) Now, a lot of ordinary, working-class and middle-class Americans do not have a good opinion of union labor as practiced in their own working lifetimes – because they have had experiences with it that were less than salutary. Rotten teachers in public schools to can’t be fired, surly and unhelpful DMV clerks, closed shops with enforced union membership, the antics of the SEIU –also known as the Purple People Beaters, unions who seem to benefit the union management rather than the rank and file, assorted criminal goonery, union demands which essentially wrecked various manufacturing companies, and insupportable levels of pay and benefits charged to taxpayers, politicians in the pocket of public employee unions . . . a word to the wise, oh union bretheren and sisteren – our affection and respect for unions has been worn to a thin shred. Don’t presume upon it. And the noisy antics of your union members and allies in public spaces everywhere in the last year or so is neither winning friends or influencing ordinary people – and voters – in a positive way. Especially when y’all don’t pick up the trash afterward.

5. Finally, how long was that plea for civility in the civic arena honored? A whole six weeks, eight weeks, tops? Ah, well – pleasant while it lasted.

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

Tea Leaves

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Ok, so I can’t stop snickering at all those poor lefty-progressives at Open Salon, now that they have stopped whimpering and sucking their thumbs. Gosh, I wouldn’t be so cruel as to begin deriding them openly, for I have made a solemn vow not to be to terribly candid about my Tea Party sympathies over there. For several reasons – one being that OS is to promote my mad writing skilz, a second being that the Tea Party is a state of mind about fiscal responsibility-strict Constitutionalism-free markets, and thirdly, that the old axiom about teaching a pig to sing grand opera applies when trying to teach lefty-progs about the Tea Party. In that it’s a waste of your time and only annoys the pig. Intelligent people will eventually figure it out on their own, or when reality applies the clue-bat on a regular basis.

Hey, the radical libertarians are taking over . . . and they’re going to leave everyone alone!

It is refreshing though – that the frequency and use of the word “tea****er” seems to have fallen off markedly, though, although there are some interesting hissy fits going on over at Daily Kos. (Notably with this lefty-progg screamer – I’m posting the link as an example of the genre, but all you really have to know is that his screed is called An Open Letter To The White Right On the Occasion Of Your Recent Successful Temper Tantrum). I can only suppose that those most prone to brandish the “Raaaacist” stick at the Tea Party have only got around to noticing that candidates like Nikki Haley, Allen West and Quico Canseco were carried to victory on the shoulders of extensive Tea Party interest. Ah, yes – the reality clue-bat – fair and impartial.

Can’t help wondering if the various traditional news orgs haven’t been taking notice and pulling up their socks: OMG, those Tea Party people are successful! And coming close to being a majority! And perhaps we might rethink constantly denigrating them, ‘cause our ratings are tanking worse than the post-iceberg Titanic and selective appeal doesn’t sell the advertising. I’m amused as heck that Keith Olbermann has been given the sack from MSNBC – you suppose he and Juan Williams are going to get together for a drink?

See, it’s not the beginning of the end – it’s more the end of the beginning. What got overlooked perhaps, in the national election-night coverage, was how many state legislatures have turned from Dem to GOP, and how many of those GOP legislators are now more aligned with Tea Party sympathies, and how many local GOP caucuses have been also taken over by those with a taste for Tea and a new enthusiasm for political involvement. No more the go-along-to-get along career RINO squishes; they’re almost as disconcerted as the traditional mainstream media. That’s another part of the real story – and it wasn’t any big secret, it’s just that no one was looking. No wonder the senior GOP leadership cadre and strategists like Karl Rove look – and are acting – just like they have just discovered half a dead cockroach in their breakfast taco.

Just wait until 2012, people. It’s gonna be fun!

What is Best in Life: Post-election Thoughts

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To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!

And the lamentations of their media creatures and commentators … although most of them over at Open Salon just seem to be sniveling and cringing in the corners. Life is good this morning. I think I’ll have another cuppa Tea. Tea Party tea, that is.

So, not a full sweep – Harry Reid still embedded in Nevada, and Our Witch didn’t make it far off the ground in Delaware. But Colonel West is in, and a good many other citizen-legislators, and it seems like the House is ours, and San Fran Nan will just have to climb onto her broomstick now, when she wants to fly back to California. A nice day’s work, being that the turnover at the state level was huge. That is where it counts; since hopefully, the states will be the counter-weight to the federal establishment in coming years.

Yeppers, thinking long-term, people. Long-term. And first on the agenda will be to remind all these newly elected legislators not to get cocky and thinking what a nice office they have and wouldn’t it be shiny to stay there forever’n'ever, amen. Not a chance. To paraphrase Bill Cosby “We put you there and we can take you out again.”

Not the beginning of the end – but maybe the end of the beginning.

Memo for NPR

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(Shamelessly quoted entire, from commenter FordPrefect 1969, on this story at Big Journalism. Enjoy the delicious sarcasm, and thank you, Ford Prefect!!)

To: all NPR Staff

It has become exceedingly obvious that we are about to be forced to justify our existence to a group of people who to whom we have shown nothing but condescension and contempt for our entire careers here at NPR. I’m going to go ahead and continue to work on the assumption that they will be Buckleyesque whipping boys who will treat our apologies and sudden willingness to have a conversation with reciprocal honesty and forthrightness as sincere, rather than simply pulling the goddamned flush lever on us like someone with basic self-respect would. It is quite possible with influx of the Tea Party caucus that that will not work out, but since our lavish paychecks, benefits, and vacation time have always been dependent on revenue confiscated from the aforementioned group, and we have, frankly, been dicks to them 100% of the time, and have very much enjoyed the process of lecturing from a tax-funded ivory tower that they were forced to finance. It has that Orwellian tang to it that really makes it an authentic experience.

So, at any rate, you are, from here on out, to pretend that you think people who are not within the Progressive fold have the same rights good people like us have. Under no circumstances will you communicate to our new bosses that you would put a boot on their necks and make slaves out of them if only you could switch sides of the desk, which, frankly, is what we were really expecting after Dear Leader was installed. Now, it appears, we may all meet our Fryolators of Destiny.

Hopeychange Uber Alles,

Some Fascist Parasite

Monday Miscellany

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So, a scattershot essay with a number of different topics that have come bubbling up to the top of my admittedly scattered attention this last week:

The Neighbors from Hell, part –I-don’t-know-how-many, there are just too many to count. See, there are bad neighbors who commit sins of omission, such as not mowing their lawn, keeping up with house maintenance, or just have an aesthetic sense that does not jibe with the others in the ‘hood. Every neighborhood seems to have a couple of those; people who are just fricking clueless. Think of them as small lumps in the happy oatmeal of life. Sometimes you can work with them, bring them around to the right way of doing things, but generally it’s not worth the effort. Just look away from them as much as you can, and call city Code Compliance only when absolutely necessary, because they just might turn into Neighbors from Hell – the other kind of bad neighbor; the aggressive, sins-of-commission kind. The ones who deliberately court offense, who declare open war upon another neighbor, and generally do their best to create Suburban Hell; I’d guess that this piece o’work is that kind of neighbor. Frankly, I’m glad she’s not ours, and extend my heartfelt sympathy to the people who are.

Life on the border, Falcon Lake edition: kinda hard to say at this point exactly has been going on there . . . save to say that the just-south-o’the-border lawless’n’drug-gang situation has been heading to the proverbial nether regions in the proverbial wicker-work carrying container for quite some time now. Seriously, it’s getting really, really bad. Blondie was freaking out this spring when my SO and his snowbird friends and I went to Progresso, Mexico for a day jaunt. How bad is it going to get in the next five months? The odds on some horrific cross-border affray which might actually make the Mainstream f*****g Media sit up and pay attention due to the penetration distance within the US, the number of innocent lives messily lost and the presence of YouTube video detailing every splatter are pretty high. Just my semi-educated guess, people. Just my guess.

Kind of nice, how everybody wants to be a Tea Partier now, isn’t it? Or at least, not be an incumbent. (November is coming – I can see it from my house!) Seriously, everyone is pretty well wise to the method of getting expensive federal government crap for your district, and expecting to get votes in response? They are bribing us with our own money, people. It’s a local and parochial benefit, at the expense of the long-term national good. Personally, I don’t think any federal or state installation should be named after a local politician still living, but that’s just me.

Which brings me to Jerry Brown getting the NOW endorsement not twenty-four hours after being inadvertently recorded as calling Meg Whitman a whore . . . Guess she isn’t the right kind of feminist. Funny, that. Reminds me of why I no longer subscribe to Ms. Magazine. Or identify myself as a capital F feminist . . . It seems as if only the properly credentialed can apply. Screw that, and identity politics generally.

All this, and the Great VFW Endorsement disaster, which I think must be close kin to the AARP ObamaCare endorsement disaster. Way to go, people . . . umm, or way to go those at the tippy-top of such national organizations who have decided it is nicer to go along to get along than pay attention to the real interests and needs of those who have joined your association voluntarily. Shoot yourself in the foot, much?

Well, that should get you off to a good Monday start. No need to thank me, I live to serve.

Sgt. Mom

PS – Apparently someone winged a book at the Mighty O-man last night at a speech – and missed by a narrow margin, but no one knows the title of the book! My guess is a copy of the Constitution, or maybe the Federalist Papers. Blondie ventures: “Maybe a copy of that craptacular autobiography and they wanted a refund!”

Standards, Double, Society, for the Use Of

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So, now in the multitudinous fall-out from the Ground Zero Mosque, or Cordoba House or Park51, or whatever the heck it’s being termed – is a threat by a Florida whack-job minister to burn Korans as a public demonstration of something or other on Saturday. Cheesncrackers, people, just when I thought this whole issue couldn’t get any more demented. Is there someone I have to sleep with, in order to live on a planet with sane people, preferably ones with a sense of proportion and humor, not to mention toleration for those who don’t agree with them in every aspect of existence?

Frankly, I’d like to set the good Iman Rauf and the good Reverend Jones down on the other side of my official Sgt. Mom desk for a nice discussion of principles. And those would be principles which would apply to both of them, and yes, I expect to be the one doing the talking.

Yes, there is nothing in this supposedly free country which would prevent the Reverend Jones from incinerating copies of the Koran, as a demonstration of his lack of appreciation for Islam and his ingratitude for the many blessings that the strict practice of Salafist Islam brings to the modern cultural table. And yes, there is also nothing which would legally prevent a mosque/community/cultural center from being established adjacent to that place where there were 5,000 people (give or take) crushed or incinerated when a pair of hijacked airplanes were deliberately crashed into two tall and shining skyscrapers nine years ago to the day by representatives of the Religion of Peace.

So, established – they each can do this thing which they want to do, for whatever reasons. And Andres Serrano can take pictures of a crucifix in a vial of his own pee, and Chris O-whatever can adorn a painting of the Virgin with mounds of elephant dung, and Danish cartoonists can do cartoons about how fear of drawing a picture of Mohammad leads to self-censorship, and Salman Rushdie can joke around with Satanic Versifying and all of that is perfectly OK in a free country, or it ought to be.

But where is the line to be drawn, then? And if you are offended by one or the other, than what is the acceptable response? Letter to the editor, an angry post on a blog, a boycott? Threatening violence? Should the fear of violence lead one to self-censor? What about a fear of offending people? Why is it OK to offend one particular class of people by your actions in support of religion or art, but tip-toe around giving offense to the other? Exactly what is the standard at work here, and who decides to apply it? And hey, isn’t the poor old bourgeois getting a little tired of being constantly epatered?

Just as a final aside – the copies of the Koran that Reverend Jones is planning to flambé – are they English translations of the Koran, in which case it doesn’t really count as a Koran, per se, because the only Koran that counts as a Koran is the one in Arabic. Revelations straight from The Big Guy to Mohammad has been my understanding. Everything else is just a translation, and so it really isn’t the Koran, except for when it is. And I think Pastor Jones looks amazingly like the historic John Brown, of Pottawatomie, who tried to kick-start a slave insurrection, pre-Civil War. If The Reverent Jones really wants to cover his posterior for this little venture into protest, he ought to announce the Koran-B-Que as a piece of performance art and apply for a NEA grant. Your mileage may vary. Discuss.

News Blogging, Linky-Love and Righthaven

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I find three definitions of the term ‘barratry’ when I look it up – two of them are obscure, but the third is relevant, and if stretched a bit, can apply to the current blogosphere kerfuffle-du-jour – the Righthaven violation of copyright lawsuits. Well, that’s the politer term; a quick internet search on ‘righthaven’ also turned up qualifiers such as ‘trolling’, ‘extortion,’ ‘bottom-feeders’ and ‘barratrious a**holes.’ A more thorough search would, I am certain, turn up more pungent terms of abuse and a fair collection of lawyer jokes. (Sample – what’s brown and black and looks good on a lawyer? Answer – a Doberman.) Suffice to say, I went through five or six pages of google-search results before finding a single link to a post which made a feeble attempt at defending Righthaven’s practices – of searching out instances of copyright infringement on the part of bloggers and news aggregators and without warning, or demanding credit and a link to the original story – suing the bee-jezzus out of the proprietor – usually small enthusiast bloggers without deep pockets or institutional support. Adding fresh insult, Righthaven LLC also demands that the domain name of the offending website or blog be turned over to them, as well as fairly substantial payments. Yes, copying someone elses’ work off a website or blog and posting it on your own and taking credit for it. Quel tacky, and plagiaristic, and someone doing it probably richly deserves being served with a complaint, a cease-and-desist order, or just hunted down, smeared with honey and staked out over a fire-ant nest.
However: is posting the story with a link to the original source, with a plainly posted credit – is that plagiarism as well? What about a paragraph excerpt, or the ‘three line’ fair-use standard, with a link, a credit and a recommendation such as “Read this!” A discussion group, with members posting excerpts, and links and talking about it? Is that a violation of copyright also? What about just a link . . . urm, through those little news feed dinguses at the bottom of the page. A Facebook recommendation? News aggregate sites consist of constantly updated pages of all these variants, with links to the new, the weird, the newsworthy or just plain interesting, from a variety of sources, large, small, official, unofficial, regular media or whatever. Even blogs like my main blog which focuses on original writing – I’ve occasionally posted interesting links. Linking, promoting, tweeting and favoriting interesting stories has been the lifeblood of the blogosphere as I have known it for yea these many years; advantageous linkage is beneficial to bloggers and websites alike, guaranteeing a larger and wider audience than the unlinked story or post might have had. But the way that L’affiare Righthaven is shaping up, it appears that all of the above may open up liability among news aggregate and commentary blogs for legal action from the ‘barratrious a**holes.’
The Righthaven law firm has entered into a professional alliance with an enterprise called Stephens Media Group, which owns a number of local newspapers across the southern and western states. One of their publications is based in Las Vegas, a city large enough to generate a fair amount of national-interest news – and it appears that bloggers who excerpted or linked to stories from that particular newspaper over the last few years are now providing a rich harvest of copyright lawsuits brought by Righthaven. Righthaven’s method of operation appears to be either to search out those posted and linked stories, and obtain the copyright for the story from Stephens Media, or to have had the copyright in their sweaty little hand all along before filing suit. Give them credit – Righthaven has figured out how to monetize the blogosphere, and Stephens Media has figured out how to extract a few more bucks from their newspaper holdings. For now, at least – until bloggers and news aggregate sites begin acting on the principle that any content in any Stephens Media newspapers is about as toxic as radioactive sewer sludge. While a fair number of bloggers and websites have paid up just to make it all go away, others are fighting back by either ‘Righthaven-proofing’ their sites, or blacklisting Stephens Media through their site-posting rules. There are even Firefox and Chrome plug-ins to automatically exclude Stephens Media from your internet browser. Righthaven and Stephens Media may perhaps gain in the short run, but prospects for long-term gain seem pretty iffy.

Rantburg, my own favorite one-stop website for all things sarky and WOT-related, is one of those sites being sued. They are taking donations. A blog which lists the websites being sued is here.

The Shape of Things to Come and Go

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You know, out of all of the things that I was afraid might happen, after the presidential coronation of Obama, the Fresh Prince of Chicago . . . I never considered that race relations might be one of those things which would worsen. Hey – lots of fairly thoughtful and well-intentioned people of pallor voted for him, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, or at least in some expectation of him being a fairly well adjusted and centrist politician, or at least a fast learner. Wasn’t that what all the top pundits, and the mainstream media were insisting, all during the 2008 campaign . . . well, once they got up from their knees and wiped the drool off their chins.

And when he won the election by a respectable although not an overwhelming margin – hardly a crushing mandate – I am sure there were other bloggers thinking as I did, and looking on the bright side; hey, can we finally get past this “AmeriKKA is the most racist nation evah!” crap. Here I was hoping – even as I knew full well that the man had spent twenty years sitting in the Reverend Jeremiah’s mega-church. I could tell myself that maybe he went to that church for street cred and connections within the black community – no, Obama couldn’t possibly give credence to the sewage-spew of racial hatred that the good Reverend spouted like a fountain, every Sunday, to tumultuous applause from the pews – no, not when he moved on from grubby Chicago politics, and was running to be the president of this country – a country in which the race that Obama identified with is only 13-15% of the population. No, better to think (assume, pray!) that his membership there was a grubby political square-filling, in the Chicago political machine.

If I have known anything at all in my life, I know that a politician who is a minority hoping to get elected to any office get anywhere at all with a racially or sexually diverse electorate had best not be identified strictly as representing only that minority, to the exclusion of all others. In plain words, a seeker for an elected office, being a racial minority, or female had a better chance of success in downplaying their minority-hood, generally, in being seen to represent larger values than just their membership in a relatively small segment of the electorate. This was plain to me, as I grew up in Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The mayor – Tom Bradley, who seemed to have been mayor for ever, demonstrated exactly that: he was black, but black with a small ‘b’ – in that he had the year-round dark tan, but actually seemed to be more motivated in being an effective mayor for the good of the entire community – rather than just catering to the racial special interests. Tom Bradley got elected, over and over again, without any particular fuss that I recall, in a racially diverse and wealthy city in which the color of his skin mattered less – much less – than the content of his character or his ability to administer to the interests of all of his constituents.

I had so hoped – against any evidence produced by the mainstream media and bloggers alike during that campaign season – that Obama would prove to be more of the Tom Bradley-variety of politician/administrator. That he would live up to the generous advance billing provided by the press . . . but alas. False hope, that. As if it weren’t annoying enough that any criticism of his policies is dismissed with a swipe of the race card through the electronic dispenser o’ sweet creamy diversity pablum, now it looks like justice is to be administered – not in a color-blind fashion, but according to the color of the skin of the person accused. It is perfectly acceptable to the current top administrators of the Department of Justice to have representatives of the New Black Panther Party, swaggering up and down at a polling place, intimidating voters. Nice. So, what are we to expect out of this new, post-racial, Obama Administration? Not having a pundit-approved crystal ball at my disposal, I couldn’t begin to guess – but I will venture one small prophecy: that the Icecapades will be hosted in Hell before another small-time, relatively obscure and totally inexperienced – yet somehow charismatic minor pol, spat up from the unsavory bowels of a big-city political combine will be elected to such a high office. Not all the efforts of all the media punditocracy will be able to make that happen again . . . and we’d better do more than pray it doesn’t. We can probably endure another two and half years of the Won, but I don’t think we could survive another of his ilk, or the rank stupidity of those who put him there in the first place.