Or not, who knows, I don't care. It's an enlisted man's pun, you wouldn't understand. I just want to see if I can get the Senate of the United States of America to debate Wetmachine and maybe pass a resolution denouncing us. I'm sure that would be good for traffic, which is what it's all about, ain't it? Net capitalism, dude. It's what's for dinner.

But I don't know why I bother, because Comcast or AT&T, the new Cellular, will edit this en route to your eyballs, and you'll never even know I wrote it. It will be like the memory hole, only more high tech. And the bits will seal up around the absense of my message just like the metal man in Terminator Two, Judgement Day. (Remember, in Soviet Russia, Internet censors YOU!)

Hey, don't taze me, bro. I'm just say'n what it is.

You may now go back to reading the triumphal return post, below, from our long-lost Web 3.0 boy, Howard Stearns.

I just got a phone call. It was Fox News calling to tell me “shocking news about Hillary Clinton.”

I wonder who they had to pay to get around the fact that I’m on state and federal “do not call” lists.

And these guys just bought the Wall Street Journal.

Bush is a liar and a coward and a presumptive monarch; Cheney is a traitor who gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States of America. And Libby is their soldier, a made man, a capo de regime with a sharp knife.

I have nothing original to say on this subject, but do want to go on the record.

Another day with traitors at the helm of the ship of state and too many of my compatriots cool with that. Oh well. Maybe the congress will step up and do what they're there for; act as if they're worthy of the countless “last full measures of devotion” that preserved the institution they now inhabit.

But I'm not going to bet on it.

By the grace of God I don't get TV in my house, and, modulo the occasional exception of a cable intermezzo of a few months' duration here and there, haven't for nearly twenty years. But I'm not a Puritan, and so, when I'm on a business trip as I am now, I sometimes put on the tube, and if there's no baseball to be found I check out what's up with hoi polloi. So it was that tonight I saw for the first time, on TV, the legendary salonista Sally Ann Quinn.

She was pretty hot, I'll admit; younger and better looking than I had imagined. After all, she was already a doyenne at the time of Bill Clinton's first inaugural-- a priestess in the cult of High Broderism. It was she who famously pronounced Slick Willy too plebeian, too common, to inhabit the place which we rubes across the land had thought belonged to us, viz, the White House, until Sally Ann Quinn set us straight. So you can forgive my imagining her an old hag.

As an habitual, nay, addicted reader of political blogs I had of course read about her shot across “Fourthbranch” Dick Cheney's bow in today's WAPO, in which she said that “some Republicans” were looking for an excuse, presumably medical, to ditch Cheney and replace him with the sweet-smelling dreamboat Fred Thompson. So when I got back to the hotel room tonight after a hard day in the Silicon Valley salt mines and began my futile search for non-Giants baseball and saw her name under the crylon “The Plot against Cheney,” I had to stop and look, as at the proverbial car wreck-- this one with a decapitation. [Read More!]

All hail Digby.


If you're not familiar with Digby, by all means, do yourself and the cause of democracy a favor and get familiar.

Those of you who are among Digby's regular readers know that until recently very few people knew whether Digby was a man or a woman, and still today, even after Digby's speech, only her close friends know her name or what she “does for a living.” All I know about her are (as of a few days ago), (a) what she looks and sounds like, and (b) that she is and for some while has been the best writer writing about current events in the USA. She is passionate, informed, funny, angry, brilliant, and a magnificent prose stylist.

This is the first, but it will certainly not be the last of time that John of Wetmachine joins the exponentially growing phenomenon of bloggers putting up posts entitled “What Digby said.” (Meaning, of course, “I hereby emphatically endorse what Digby said.”) Digby, the Tom Paine of our era.

That is all.

By way of Smirking Chimp I come across this fascinating (and utterly depressing) account of how Karl Rove “reached out” to (Saint) Jack Welch, A.K.A “the buzz saw”, Chairman of General Electric, the parent company of NBC, and how together they put in place the right wing noise machine that masquerades as our nation's electronic news media.

More cavalry appearing on the horizon. Go there now and see how you can help.

I went to my first rock concert in years last night. Wife and I took our oldest daughter to see Snow Patrol.

The base player for opening opener Silversun Pickups had an amp with a GREEN LIGHT on it instead of a RED one. What's up with that? Kids these days...

Seriously, it wasn't very different from years ago. OK Go (the middle band) had a a screen behind them with their music videos playing. The music was pretty much like early U2 with a maybe a little Iggy Pop thrown into the first two.

One thing that was kind of weird: no lighters in the air. There was enough cigarette smoking to make my hair stink, but not very much. No pot. Instead of lighters, people held up their cell phones!

Some of that was for taking pictures. It's kind of interesting that where they used to ban recording devices (they may still do so, officially), there's no freakin' way that they can effectively stop that now. (The drummer for one of the bands actually whipped out a little camera to take pictures of his bandmates on stage taking their bows. From behind. Probably included a lot of the audience.) I wonder why they don't have a live Web site on the screen to which the audience can upload their pictures while the show is in progress. More participatory and all...

Anyway, seeing all those cell phones being held up in the air was pretty weird. It was like some sort of bizarre Verizon ad.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons that we are all so accepting of government abuse is that we came of age going to concerts where we would be searched for alcohol (and recording devices), and then be served alcohol on the premises. There's no flipping principle of safety or law at work there — it's simply the exercise of commercial power. We accept it when it's convenient enough to do so, and don't accept it when it irks us enough. For example, we're not going to throw away our cell phones during the entry search. And the “them” accept that, and only try to enforce the abuse of power that they can get away with. So as long as the government keeps the planes running without TOO much delay, and doesn't send us personally to Iraq, we acquiesce.

It seems that the RIAA going around scaring children again.
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