LA, tar pits and all

We're back from LA after dashing down there over the weekend. I knew we were going just not when. Lee needed to pick up the bass but he wanted to get a room through Priceline. In the summer the hotels are inclined to wait until the last minute to make them available. Anyway, we made a trip out of it and had a great time. We walked the beach for miles, visited tar pits filled with fossils from the last Ice Age, hiked in the mountains, caught a street filming of a movie, ate dinner in an Indian grocery store, saw some really interesting work by artist Tim Hawkinson, and a few floor sweepings by Rembrandt all without ever leaving the city limits. I took lots of photos (naturally) but it's 1 am so that will have to wait until later.

Photofile update, Mexico journal

I just added a third page to my Mexico file. These are all photos I took on our travels there last year. So far I've only posted three pages but you might find them interesting. I'm in the rears with this project so more to come. In fact, I have to get busy. We're planning to go back there this fall then I'll really be behind. It starts here.

New Salad Fingers episode

On the bright side, there's a new episode of Salad Fingers by David Firth. I find him very refreshing. He's one of my favorite artists. However, if you've never seen an episode, it might be best to start at the beginning. As ol Pastry Pete says himself, he's not for everybody wha-ha-ha-ha-ha.....

Treasongate in Mordor

I know it's silly comparing the White House to Mordor. Melodramatic. Childish. Evil empires are always the other guys, right? And anyway, we're a democracy, aren't we? Apparently some think otherwise. According to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind, the Bush people consider themselves rulers of an empire. Add "evil" to that, and I'll go along in part. Treasongate is a peek at just how dirty they're willing to be for power. It's inconceivable but they outed a CIA undercover agent for personal political advantage. If it weren't so serious, I'd almost find it amusing how the conservative press and politicians are at fever pitch trying to discredit the story. It reminds me of the movie "Wag the Dog". Remember that one? Hollywood's comic attempt to portray the dark side of capitalist politics. The idea was people will believe anything if you sell them the idea long enough and with enough aplomb...as though the tail can wag the dog. Treasongate is the product of Karl Rove's regime and his signature game plan, shock and awe. It's like poop wagging the dog.

Merikans going along with it are like the Germans who went along with Hitler and his war. Looking back, it's inconceivable but now the same thing is happening in the US. Bush supporters are completely in denial about how evil this administration is. There's no excuse. Denial is voluntary ignorance. They're like people sitting in a burning house with paper bags over their heads. Too bad. Things will probably have to get even worse before they think about getting out and fighting the fire. In the mean time, the task falls to the rest of us.

Merikan's are responding to Treasongate with things like "Kerry lost. Get over it". Talk about stale rhetoric! These guys must be huffing glue. Pathetic doesn't begin to describe them. The Republican Party, the corporate media whores and their stooge followers are morally, spiritually and ethically bankrupt. Naturally they're all doing everything they can to shore Rove up. He is their ace in the asshole. For the moment Bush & Co. rule from the Land of Shadow. So be it. They are too dense and arrogant to consider the notion of karma i.e. the law of cause and effect. But it's simple. Even they are subject to consequences. They have really fucked up and at some point, some Smeagol will destroy their magic ring. Like they say, it's not a question of if, it's only a question of when.

FIRE ROVE, mister president

They laughed at Bushie Boy. They called him a dilettante, a wastrel, a trust fund baby, but Bush had dreams and the money to buy them. That's where mercenary Karl Rove, aka Turd Blossom, comes in.



Like any disease, Rove is most effective out of sight, but given an inch, he stole the horizon. Over the years Turd Blossom has metastasized, transforming the Republican Party into a modern day Mafia. People who are a threat are either embarrassed and contained, like Senator John McCain,
or simply squeezed out and left behind. Ethics, fair play, even the truth seem powerless before Rove's assault. He is not hampered by morals.

The lesson for the kiddies? Crime pays. Today Turd Blossom, as Bush calls him, is the co-president of the United States of America. Karl is the brains. He has the power. He is the Commander-of-the-Chief of the United States military and puppet master and moral conscience of the Republican Party and its evangelical foot soldiers. Everyone is on the payroll. Not bad for a leech. Put simply, Karl Rove is a sociopath and we are all fucked.

Or is there a slim, slight, nearly impossible chance that Treasongate, Rove's outing of undercover Valerie Plame, might have...oh dare I say it... consequences? Like Nixon's Watergate, it could bring down their house of jokers.

excerpt from:
Rove: out of White House, into jail?
by Tim Wheeler

WASHINGTON —

“Bush’s Brain,” a political biography of Rove by Dallas Morning News reporters James Moore and Wayne Slater, reveals that Rove’s political skullduggery dates back to 1970 and was an important factor in the ultra-right’s rise to power in the U.S.

Rove was a Young Americans for Freedom operative working for the GOP in Illinois that year. Posing as a Democrat, he infiltrated Alan Dixon’s campaign headquarters in Chicago a few days before its official opening. Dixon was a Democratic candidate for state treasurer who later served in the U.S. Senate.

Rove stole campaign letterhead and made up a fake invitation to the Dixon opening with promises of “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing.” He distributed 1,000 copies at soup kitchens. Hundreds showed up. Richard Nixon’s chief dirty trickster, Donald Segretti, went to jail for similar acts in the Watergate scandal.

In 1972, Rove was executive director of College Republicans. He and an accomplice, Bernie Robinson, organized 15 conferences to train youth how to campaign for Nixon’s re-election. Moore and Slater write that Rove “could not resist instructing his young audiences on dirty tricks — pranks, he called them.”

At an August 1972 seminar in Lexington, Ky., Rove, “with considerable delight talked about campaign espionage, about digging through an opponent’s garbage,” Moore and Slater write. “This was the summer of the Watergate break-in, with the first revelations of a scandal that unraveled the Nixon presidency.” Rove and Robinson “even specifically mentioned the Watergate break-in in their seminars, not as a reason to avoid campaign espionage, but as a caution to keep it secret.”

Decades later, Rove, chief strategist of George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, destroyed Bush’s main Republican challenger, Arizona Sen. John McCain, by leaking a racist falsehood that McCain had fathered an “illegitimate Black child.”

When Bush and Cheney saw their lead disappearing in Florida in the post-election battle, Rove recruited 250 goons to terrorize election officials to halt the vote count.

“Documents released to the IRS 19 months after the election show that the Bush team spent over a million dollars to fly operatives into Florida and another million to pay their hotel bills. The effort also relied on a fleet of corporate jets owned by people like Enron chairman Kenneth Lay … and Halliburton, where Vice President Dick Cheney had served as CEO. … Karl Rove, working with James A. Baker III, put it all together.”

But marching outside the White House last week were demonstrators with signs reading, “Bush, keep your promise: Fire Karl Rove.”

Tonopah, NV

I pass through Tonopah on a regular basis and have photographed it a lot. Here's a few pictures I took on my most recent visit.



Tonopah is in the center of the drain. I happen to enjoy the place but then I like lost worlds.



Strange and sad as they may be, they have interesting stories to tell.