I see this guy at a bus-stop wearing a t-shirt that says “Don’t Pan-handle Me.”  Shrugging, I walk up to him and ask “Spare a Quarter?”  He asks, “What did you say?”  I repeat, “Spare a Quarter?”  He shrugs, digs in his pocket, and hands out a quarter, as I shake my head and walk away in disgust — leaving him with his goddamned quarter.

…………………….

Okay.  That never happened.  But I contemplated it happening when I saw that shirt, which made me want to walk up and annoy him by asking for a quarter.
…………………………….

Now accepting applications for “War Czar”.

I actually like Lionel.  But it’s a very peculiar and very strange selection for Air America Radio.  Once upon a time, he tended to praise George W Bush, and I recall a promo for his show, oddly enough on 620 AM two and a half formats ago, which went roughly: “I listen to what the conservatives have to say.  Then I listen to what the liberals have to say.  Then I say, BOMB SAUDI ARABIA!”  He was for a time hawkish and very much a supporter for the Iraq War.  He’s come against it as new information has come in and the war obviously doesn’t look particularly good anymore, but understand here too something about Lionel:  when the Democrats won the midterm elections, he made it clear that this was GREAT because of the sole reason that it was a referendum on the war and on the neoconservatives — and here he could care less about other issues.  Also understand that he had the unfortunate tendency to say “we” as to the conversion of his position in a manner that suggested how absurd being against the war looked in 2003.
I’m tapping my fingers at the Air America honchos, pondering the cancellation of the only particularly innovative program they aired — that which evolved into Appointment Radio, Morning Sedition.  They canned the hyper-kinetic Mike Malloy, who is a riot.  And they have now canned Sam Seder — who isn’t quite up to par with the others and truth be told his flaws glare out (notice his tendency to not be able to digest some news items, which forces him to read entire articles instead of summarizing them)– but on a network that is… a little dry at times, as it advocates and advocates… he was consistent.  So, Air America has three strikes against them here.  Rachel Maddow is a definite plus, but KPOJ forced her to the midnight slot so what good is that?
I noticed a while ago that KPAM picked Lionel up, sort of just barely.  But they seem to have replaced him, even as I note that his strange spot on Saturday morning was still there last weekend.  I don’t know if KPOJ is going to slide him right into the slot they have for Sam Sedar right now, or what they plan on doing.  (Hey!  Rebroadcast Thom Hartmann!  Because, you know, I might have missed that 6 hour block of Thom Hartmann they started airing!)  Ah well.  I’ve heard an advertisement from a Bankruptcy Attorney on KPOJ, which considering the network is pretty darned hilarious.

For the record, the Rutgers women’s basketball team ended the season with a 12-4 Big East conference record, enough to give them a second seed in the Big East Tournament.  There, they rolled through three Conference tournament victories to win the Conference Title against UCONN — which earned them a 4-seed in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, which included a thrilling edge-on-the-seat one point victory against top seeded Duke in the regional semi-finals.  They lost to Tennessee,  putting up a valiant effort that showed there was no quit in them by pulling back into the game in the second half before running out of steam.

Do I care?  Not particularly.  If I cared a bit more I’d dredge up the personal stories of the players, who deserve a better than the focus of attention that, in one manner or other, was deflected onto them by Don Imus’s Archie-Bunkerisms.

I was pondering how to eulogize Johnny Hart, cartoonist behind the fundamentalist Christian caveman comic strip “BC”.  It is a bit of a cliche to say that the comic strip, after Johnny Hart found Jesus, did not make any goddamned sense by its very goddamned name “BC” — or “Before Christ” (later altered to the more ecumenical “Before the Common Era), but perhaps that is the very idea: Christ is everywhere, even in a mythical time — I guess roughly 6,000 years ago? — before he was conceived.

That was the final Easter edition of BC that Johnny Hart churned out.  Pound your head and just move on to “Pearls Before Swine” and “Get Fuzzy”.  If we need something as heavy-handed, than we can go to Doonsebury’s latest jab at Bush, which even if you’re a rock-ribbed Republican has the advantage of not falling into strange esoterica.  (Is this BC strip in the same genre as the Da Vinci Code?)
In previous years, his Easter strip has gone into the territory of offering up what was viewed as anti-semitic garbage theology.  Which is more interesting and scrutible than this one.  I suppose we will never know what Johnny Hart would have churned out next year, as he delved deeper and deeper into his biblical studies, into his own mind-field of Christian cavemen and parochial education for Ants.

I find myself pondering the meaning of the Mitt Romney Gun controversy.  In case you missed it, Mitt Romney pandered before some voters in New Hampshire and… well…

This week in Keene, N.H., Romney told a man in an NRA hat that he had “been a hunter pretty much all of my life,” the Associated Press reported. The Romney campaign later acknowledged that Romney, 60, hunted one summer as a teenager and once in his late 50s. Earlier this year, Romney said, “I have a gun of my own.” It turned out his son owns guns, not Romney. After boasting about his membership in the National Rifle Association, Romney later admitted he joined the group less than a year ago.

To the degree that one can hate a politician with no discernable influence on one’s life, I hate this guy.  The number of times that the phrase “flip flopper” was tossed at John Kerry needs to be amplified to the nth degree and tossed at Mitt Romney.  He is the Republican front-runner in terms of funds raised, though the constant Flipper costumes that heckled him at the ConservativePAC Convention exemplifies the troubles that that advantage is going to have to overcome for the Republican primary voter to get to the point where the general election voter will be forced to stare at… perhaps some other man running around trailing him in a Dolphin costume.  (Reminscent of the Chicken-costume that heckled George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992.)

I had always assumed that Mitt Romney had served two terms as governor of Massachusetts.  Looking at his record, though, I see that he had one term.  So, he moved in during the 2002 Republican tide, and at the end of his term the state turned back from its recent history of electing Republican governors and flipped to the Democratic candidate.  Understand, on his way out — with an eye for the Republican nomination, Romney started talking before Republican audiences on what a loony place he is governing.

Such a lunative state that it believes in fairly stringent gun control laws, for instance.  A state not particularly impressed by its candidates’ NRA credentials.  Mind you, other states are and demand you bend to the line– Montana’s famed governor doubled over backward to assure the state that he loves and uses guns.  I think Massachusetts might elect an NRA – member as governor, but only if he (or she) doesn’t run around and use it as a central placard.  Hence, Mitt Romney’s gun faux pas.

He should have picked a different state to run for governor to launch a Republican presidential bid.

Darrell Issa.  Frank Wolf.  Nancy Pelosi.  Tom Lantos.

Issa I remember as the man who bankrolled the California Recall Drive, was going to throw his name into the gubernatorial race, but withdrew when Schwarzenager sucked all available oxygen out of the race.

Tom Lantos is the hawkish Democrat who is a Holocaust Survivor and a friend of Israel in the AIPAC sense.  (from Wikipedia: Born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, Lantos was part of an anti-Nazi resistance movement during the German occupation of that country and sought refuge in a safe house established by Raoul Wallenberg. In 1981 Lantos sponsored a bill making Wallenberg an Honorary Citizen of the United States.)

Frank Wolf is the man who initiated the Iraq Study Group (shh!), a group organized to give Bush some political cover to alter his Iraq policy.

I think it was the neoconservative journal (journal as aside from magazine because the cover serves as a table of contents and is devoid of pictures — but it sits there in the periodical section nonetheless alongside The Nation and National Review which are mere magazines) The American Interest where I saw an article written by some name I recognize that blurs together with the roster of signators to PNAC.  “The Complete Irrelevance of the Iraq Study Report.”

Looking at its preface, the article promised to explain how something so touted (look at the news magazine articles of the time, including the cover blurb “Why Bush Will Listen”) proved so meaningless in forming our movement forward in Iraq.  The tact, I suppose, was that it was a flimsy document created by weakling politics – minded realists.

Its establishment consensus attempt was both its strength and weakness: we are rooting for James Baker and Edward Meese because that’s all we’ve got!  (But go ahead and grab some porn and in the bathroom in defiance of the momentary alliance with Meese and.)

But unless the article cast about to the fact that its irrelevance was the product of Bush’s obstinance and refusal to slide together a meal off this weird Chinese Restaurant menu that was the Iraq Study Report, the article was meaningless.  Irrelevance determined by the powers that be.  Smug retorts of “now to surge!” notwithstanding.

So this past week Nancy Pelosi travelled to Israel.  And then to Syria.  As did Issa, Wolf, and Lantos.  The implicit, and occassionaly explicit, purpose was an end-around around the tedious Bush Administration to pull out some exigencies of the Iraq Study Report.  Syria has an interest in the non-complete disintegration of bordering Iraq.  As Representative Wolf said, “I don’t care what the administration says on this.  I want us to be successful in Iraq.  I want us to clamp down on Hezbollah.”  (For some crazy reason, Wolf thinks conversing with Syria might help on these accords.)

Likely a message was relayed to Syria from Israel that America’s posture with Iran are not a precusor of any plan Israel has with Syria.  So please no pre-emptive strike on the Golan Heights.  The newspaper op-eds suggest that Pelosi mis-stepped with a bolder statement than was there about Israel’s desire for peace talks with Syria, something that seems a little bloated only in that however weakly and whatever boldness or fist in the air the Israeli government wants to put on this communication, this trip served as a point in that general direction.
Contemplating the state of affairs, I suddenly realize that George W Bush couldn’t have done anything like this trip even if he weren’t ideologically opposed to it.  Rocks are tossed in his direction whereever he goes in the world.  So it’s just as well Pelosi gets to be charged with carrying on the spirit of Neville Chamberlain.  Somebody has to at this juncture.

The articles floating to the top of the “Watching America” website have shifted from flub-ubs over the movie ‘300’ to editorials which posit Nancy Pelosi with rock-star status.  I suppose to Bush accolydes this proves their point.  Ah well.  Only Nixon can go to China.

Syria, incidentally, isn’t particularly isolated.  It’s only through our America-centric lense that Syria is isolated — we don’t deal with Syria, but everyone else does.  The Bush strategy to “isolate” Syria is thus a hoax and a sham.  It’s just as well that we isolate Bush, though now we need to figure out how to isolate his finger from hovering around the proverbial button.

Only Bill Richardson can go to North Korea.

U.S. presidential candidate Bill Richardson arrived Sunday in North Korea for a rare visit to the isolated country by a prominent American official.

“It could be the signal of an improved relationship,” he said of the discussions to secure U.S. remains. “The North Koreans always consider protocol very important. They like to be considered a major power in the region.”

A bit curious to see how this is being played in North Korea’s state run propaganda mill, I can’t quite find anything about Richardson, but I do see such items as:

A carrot approach being taken by the imperialists serves as a lever to carry out their appeasement strategy. This is a very crafty and wicked plot to create illusion about them by appeasing and deceiving their opponents in a bid to benumb their anti-imperialist spirit and completely disarm them ideologically and morally.

AND

It is clear to everybody who will benefit from the final agreement reached between the U.S. and the south Korean authorities and who will suffer from it. The world knows no such brigandish and shameless aggressors as the U.S. imperialists who imposed upon the south Koreans the heavy burden of covering the funds for the upkeep of their forces in south Korea and the transfer of their base for a war of aggression, while perpetrating all sorts of moves for aggression and plunder in south Korea for more than 60 years.
    The U.S. imperialists had better quit south Korea at once, instead of transferring the base of the aggressor forces and relocating it.

We await to see more, I suppose.