Senator John Grindl: stand the devil side by side with The President and the Devil comes across as a class act

Seantor John Grindl (D - East Dakota)

Reacting to President Chavez of Venezuela's United Nations denunciation of President Bush as "the devil," Democratic U.S. Senator John Grindl (D - East Dakota) concurred with Chavez's assessment. "In fact," the Senator said in a press conference, "President Bush is even more heinous than The Great Deceiver himself." A reporter asked how that was so, and he replied "Let's face it, the Devil tempts people to do evil, whereas Bush actually performs evil. Senator Pelosi and Congressman Rangel have leapt to The President's defense, and it is strictly political expediency. The Devil is known to lure people into evil ways. The President actually performs evil acts under the mantle of his office. He performs them in our name. I can't even recall the last time the Devil was blamed for the state of the world. You can't say that about President Bush."

"The bottom line: stand the Devil side by side with The President and the Devil comes off as a class act."

Asked by an Associated Press correspondent why he bucked his party, the Senator responded "Pelosi and Rangel know the score. They know Bush is evil incarnate. But being party regulars, the last thing they want to do is to offend the centrists by denouncing 'POTUS.' They know Bush is a worthless piece of s***. But as loyal partisans, they are muzzled. You may hear them speak the truth after the mid-terms, but I wouldn't hold out much hope."


click to enlarge photograph of President Hugo Chavez

Following his inflammatory remarks, the Senator's conservative East Dakota constituents reacted predictably with demands for his resignation, and talk of a recall. Reached later in the day by a reporter from All This Is That, the Senator told her that "this is all predictable. There's a reason I am the Senator and my constituents are not. Have you ever been to East Dakota? It's not exactly the Berkeley of The Plains. Sure, they're pissed today, but this will blow over and I will be vindicated. Or not. Maybe they'll elect some cracker knucklehead to curtsy to the President, but that's not me. The bottom line: stand the devil side by side with The President and the Devil comes off as a class act."

Democrats reacted predictably as well, by denouncing Grindl as a rogue and a loose canon. "He no more speaks for the Democratic Party," said Senator Patty Murray (D - Washington) "than President Chavez does." Democratic insiders on The Hill told All This Is That that Senator Grindl would be immediately and brutally taken to the woodshed.

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Painting: The first drawer of my cabinet

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Painting: Del Brummet

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Painting: Cyclopea

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Poem: Changes 16/Enthusiasm, or, the king begins to falter

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1.
It is progress
To install spooks and minions
And set armies marching.

2.
Thunder booms from the earth:
The image of Enthusiasm.
The old kings made music

To honor triumphs and merit,
And offered it free
To the world,

Up to and including
The Scoutmaster
Of all Scoutmasters.

3.
The music rises to the troposphere
And drifts into near space
And the ancient ancestors.

4.
You gather your friends
Around you
Like a shock of wheat,

Like a bulwark
Or a last ditch bivouac
In the cold rain and snow.
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Lyrics to Bob Dylan's I Want You

Before I heard this song, I liked Bob Dylan. After hearing this song, I was a life-long fan. The protest songs, and the early Woody-derived tunes, were good, but in this song he took the poetry of popular music to the next level. I don't really think anyone has come close since.

I have purchased Modern Times, his highly acclaimed new album. Who would have thought that at 65 years of age, he would put out a disk that is Right Up There with his best work?

In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Dylan said "This is the best band I've ever been in, I've ever had, man for man." This is a stunning statement from a guy who was backed by Mike Bloomfield and the best session players of the sixties, not to mention the The Grateful Dead, The Heartbreakers, and The Band.


I Want You

The guilty undertaker sighs,
The lonesome organ grinder cries,
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn,
But it's not that way,
I wasn't born to lose you.
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.

The drunken politician leaps
Upon the street where mothers weep
And the saviors who are fast asleep,
They wait for you.
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin' from my broken cup
And ask me to
Open up the gate for you.
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.

Now all my fathers, they've gone down
True love they've been without it.
But all their daughters put me down
'Cause I don't think about it.

Well, I return to the Queen of Spades
And talk with my chambermaid.
She knows that I'm not afraid
To look at her.
She is good to me
And there's nothing she doesn't see.
She knows where I'd like to be
But it doesn't matter.
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.

Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit,
He spoke to me, I took his flute.
No, I wasn't very cute to him,
Was I?
But I did it, though, because he lied
Because he took you for a ride
And because time was on his side
And because I . . .
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.
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painting: four shades of Keith

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Carson Van Osten's artist kit on Mark Kennedy's blog

Mark Kennedy has just published Carson Van Osten's (a famous Disney comic book artist) "Comic Strip Artist's Kit." Van Osten said artist "I wrote and drew those sketches around 1975 and I'm so tickled to know that people still find them helpful today."

Check out the link above to Kennedy's post and the JPGs Kennedy produced from the originals. Also, in the comments, I see that someone created an optimized PDF file of all the images...these look great.

/jack
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Keelin Curran Turns 50!

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I welcome my best friend, attorney, and wife to the silverback club. . .as Neil Young wrote:

Weve been through some things together

With trunks of memories still to come

We found things to do in stormy weather

Long may you run.

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Internet sex act lands a Florida woman in The Clink

A 39-year-old Dunedin, Florida woman has been arrested and jailed for attempting to cash counterfeit checks. Kathleen Hall says the checks were payment for her custom web cam sex performance.

Hall was arrested in Largo, Florida where, where police say, she attempted to cash two $850 checks.

Hall told police that she met someone online from Nigeria and agreed to perform a sex act on her web cam in return for a payment. The checks arrived in an envelope with a Nigerian post mark. Police say they are counterfeit and Kathleen Hall is in the Pinellas County jail on $15,000 bond.
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Poem: The cover-up

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When a story is told
Over and over,
It takes on a patina of truth.

Investigations, inquiries,
And blue-ribbon commissions
Burnish the story's verisimilitude.

Denials and refutations
Polish the tale to a fine gloss.
The more vehement the denunciation,

The more likely the story becomes
Because we want to believe.
The stronger the case

Against becomes,
The more heinous
The cover-up appears.

The logical beauty
Of cover-up theories
Is they can never

Actually be refuted,
But snowball
With every new telling.

The absence of facts
Further inflames
The conspiracy theory:

The lack of facts itself
Points to the utter and diabolical
Efficacy of the cover-up.

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The Clink

Did you ever wonder about the phrase "the clink?" It's an interesting word we sometimes use for jail, prisons, the hoosegow, the big house, the reformatory, and penitentaries. Somehow it feels a little less fraught with the dark implications of prisons. In fact, The Clink was a notoriously dark and brutal prison.

The Clink was a hellhole in Southwark, England from the 12th century until around 1780. I don't know if Shakespeare ever referred to The Clink or not. I'm too lazy to check. Ok, that's a lie. I just did. And this is a little spooky: "In this light Shakespeare emerges surely as a much more interesting and ambiguous figure, for whom concealment was not only part of his art but part, perhaps, of a deliberate pattern in his life too. It is intriguing, for example, that during 25 years of lodging in London, with as many as eight addresses indicated in our sources, he is never picked up in the church attendance lists, even in places where it was compulsory such as the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark where he lived in 1599 and maybe later. " He may not have writtten about it, but he lived there!

The name may have come from a local manor, the Clink Liberty. Or the Clink Liberty may have been named after the prison. Both manor and prison were owned by the various Bishops of Winchester and was sited right next door to the Bishop's residence.

The Clink was originally used to detain Catholic and Protestant heretics. The Clink was burned down during the Gordon Riots of 1780 and was never rebuilt.

No one is sure where the name originally came from. Or how it was handed down as a synonym for prison. More than one person has suggested that its name is an example of onomatopoeia, referring to the sound made by closing the jail cell's doors. The Clink Prison Museum stands on the original site in Clink Street, in Southwark.
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