Let’s get this out of the way upfront. With respect to Tsar Donaldo Vladimirovitch’s first supreme court appointee, I will not ask if the fruit can fall far from the tree. “If you want to attack Anne Gorsuch Burford, the first woman appointed as the head of the EPA, now deceased, and impute her alleged sins to her son, a distinguished jurist of impeccable reputation, then … [Read more...]
Smoot, Smut and Stash
Buy gold and silver. Stash with cash in coffee cans. Bury same in your backyard. Such was the advice people from the old country gave their American-born offspring as the Great Depression metastasized. There’s a bad moon on the rise. The moonhowlers are back from the dead and ready to party. Smoot and Hawley ride the Kondratieff Wave once again. SMITING SMOOT AND … [Read more...]
Patient Zero Plagues
“Patient Zero: the person identified as the first carrier of a communicable disease in an outbreak of related cases.” It’s sometimes helpful to identify origins of poxes upon the body politic. Here are four personal pox picks to click. 1. RONALD WILSON REAGAN. To keep a campaign promise, he needed a token female to appoint to the US Supreme Court. Alas, conservative babes … [Read more...]
Democrats in Margaritaville
“Some people claim there’s a woman to blame, but I know it’s my own damn fault.” Jimmy Buffett sang those words four decades ago and nothing better describes today’s Donkeykong Party collectively crying in its beer. Desperate liberals are now begging for street demonstrations. A Hollywood outfit called RefuseFascism.org paid for a Jan. 4 full page in The New York Times … [Read more...]
Regressions, Transitions and Predictions
ADIOS, GAY ELLIKER. My dear friends the Ellikers have suffered inordinate loss over the past two years. Patriarch Shirl passed away 23 months ago. (“Nevada loses an honorable man,” Barbwire 2-27-2014). He was followed in August 2014 by his beautiful ballerina grand-daughter Callie Hutson, 24. Shirl and Gay’s son, Jim, 50, died as a passenger in a light plane crash near … [Read more...]
Year-End or End of Times?
“Save the planet? We can’t even save ourselves. The earth has been around four-and-a-half billion years. The earth isn’t going anywhere. We are!” Wise man George Carlin theorized that perhaps God forgot to create plastic and put us here to correct the oversight. Having served our purpose, we can just fade away. The way petroleum-based predations have proliferated, … [Read more...]
First We Take Manhattan, then We take Berlin
“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, of trying to change the system from within. I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” So sang the late great American lyric poet Leonard Cohen in 1988. Vladimir Putin must be among Cohen’s fans, notwithstanding that he was both a Buddhist and a Jew. Putin took Manhattan on Nov. 8 … [Read more...]
We Don’t Need No Education
Have you noticed how vehicle traffic has reached almost suffocating volumes in these parts? We just won’t learn. People have been drawn here just like the casino boom of the late 1970s when gambling employees camped on the banks of the mucky Truckee because housing was tighter than Ebenezer Scrooge at Christmastime. This week came the troubling but not surprising news of … [Read more...]