And so, I will no longer blog here.

Check out http://blogs.southflorida.com/citylink_dansweeney/ for continued musings on life and stuff. That is all.

I've been holding off posting any blogs, because they keep threatening to give us blogs at work, and I wanted to save all my thoughts for that. But it's still in the works, and I'd be a fool to not get my thoughts down on the trials and tribulations of Ben Domenech, the newly disgraced conservative blogger for Washingtonpost.com, whose tenure lasted approximately 72 hours before he was exposed as the fraud that he is.

Call it raging jealousy if you like, but the thing I really didn't like about Domenech from the beginning -- other than the obvious fact that WaPo.com hired him to "provide balance" to a nonexistent liberal blogger -- was that the man was a couple years younger than me, and I'm not exactly an old man. How does a punk like that get a job with the WaPo?

Anyway, my final point is this. Domenech issued an apology on redstate.com in which he stated:
"I want to apologize to National Review Online, my friends and colleagues here at RedState, and to any others that have been affected over the past few days. I also want to apologize to my previous editors and writers whose work I used inappropriately and without attribution. There is no excuse for this - nor is there an excuse for any obfuscation in my earlier statement.
I hope that nothing I've done as a teenager or in my professional life will reflect badly on the movement and principles I believe in."

I just want to say that, Ben, I don't think what you've done reflects badly on the conservative movement or its principles. You stole, you lied about it, you covered it up and then you blamed everybody but yourself in a last, desperate attempt before finally being forced to come clean by people better than you. It sounds to me like you stood up for conservative principles just fine.

The linked NY Times story is mostly about Knight Ridder President P. Anthony Ridder's regret over the sale and eventually break-up of his company -- new owners McClatchy Company intend to sell off a dozen of the papers, including KR's two papers in the Philadelphia market, the Inquirer and the Daily News. But as is often the case with daily newspaper stories, the interesting part to me is the 8th-10th paragraphs of the story:

"In Philadelphia, for example, State Senator Vincent J. Fumo, a powerful Democrat from South Philadelphia, said that he was seriously considering buying The Daily News. He had half-joked with The Daily News about a purchase in November, but said yesterday that he was more serious and that he has lawyers and other investors looking into the possibility.

"If I were to become a major investor, I'd have to leave the Senate," Mr. Fumo said, "but I don't know if I'd play that major a role."

"It depends on the return on investment," but he said he believed the paper to have a profit margin of at least 12 percent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/business/media/15paper.html

Fumo is for public financing of political campaigns, against the death penalty and has spoken out strongly against Bush's domestic spying program, calling it a threat to freedom and, in a speech on the 300th Birthday of Benjamin Franklin, saying of Bush "He has trampled on Fourth Amendment rights. To the horror of many people, regardless of political party, he has engaged in domestic spying, wiretapping American citizens without a warrant.  He is King George II of Texas, instead of King George III of England." (all this per fumo.com)

Despite McClatchy company -- a reputable, decent journalistic corporation as these things go -- tossing aside papers in places like Philly because they don't represent the sort of growth McClatchy wants, it looks as though the Philly Daily News may have a bright future. It'd be nice if the country actually got a dose of this "liberal media" that the right-wing keeps screaming about.

According to the latest CBS poll, George W. Bush's approval rating now stands at 34 percent. I took the liberty of researching the polling numbers from the Nixon era, and that 34 percent puts George Bush on a par with Nixon in August 1973, just after the Watergate hearings, and a year before Nixon resigned in disgrace, when he polled at about 26 percent. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the president, and who knows what the hell the other 7 percent are up to? Whatever the case, it's pretty safe to say that they are not on our side.

Dick Cheney, meanwhile, is polling at 18 percent in the CBS poll, which surely puts him on a par with historical figures like Hitler, Caligula, and Osama Bin Laden. Impossible. How could the Vice President of the United States be as unpopular as the most hated men in the history of the world? It defies explanation to anyone who has never seen or heard the vice president. Of course, after hearing that growl come forth from that sneering face, it all makes sense.

Even FOX News, which has officially gone from conservative mouthpiece to Bush mouthpiece over the course of the Dubai ports scandal, couldn't put enough lipstick on this pig. In its most recent poll, bush came in at 39 percent.

It feels good to be on the winning side, but it should have come a lot sooner, and anyone who follows the polls lost faith in the American people a long time ago -- the majority of these people, after all, thought Saddam caused 9/11. And huge majorities thought he had weeapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms, directly before the Iraq War. That bullshit lie stunk so bad that Colin Powell's farcical speech before the UN made me laugh with embarrassment for the once-respected statesman. It would have been truly funny, were it not for the fact that the talking heads on all the cable news channels called the speech a powerful, convincing performance. Shit. My speech to my mom when I was 6 years old, claiming I had not cut my hair when I had scissors in my hand and hair all over the floor, was more convincing than Powell's speech before the UN.

But now that most of the American people have finally had enough of the lies, I have to wonder -- How Dumb does this administration think we are? How low can it go? Do they really believe we're this stupid, or do they just not give a damn anymore? The looting is nearly complete, and all that remains is for them to flee like thieves in the night. Hopefully, the 2006 elections will stop that from happening. These vicious bastards must pay for their crimes, or else we will be giving them tacit approval. And after that, every conman, pimp, and corporate whore in the whole of the nation will run for political office. There is a reason we have laws. If one can rape and pillage with impunity, what is to stop them from doing so?

Either way, the end result of the Bush administration will be a message to our leaders. We can tell them that they are our employees, that they report to us and that we will fire tham and fuck them if they hurt us. Or we can tell them that it's OK to destroy our lives, to commit scandal after scandal, crime after crime, and all we will do is bend over and say, "Yes, Mr. President. Please, take my wallet and shove that flagpole up my rear again. Because obviously, I haven't had enough."

The big word on the left right now -- and, hell, even on the much of the right, if Senate Majority Leader Bill First and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert are any indication -- is that Bush is selling out our ports to a bunch of crazed Arabs from the UAE. And while Bush has been roundly criticized and, predictably, has fought back like a trapped rat, threatening to veto every bill the House has ever passed, retroactively, if they don't get on board with the deal, none of the president's men have pointed out the brilliance of selling out to the UAE. The big problem with trying to capture guys like Bin Laden and Zarqawi is that they're almost impossible to find. Personally, I think both of them are long dead, but if we assume they're alive, we also have to understand the difficulty in finding them. Zarqawi hops from house to house like a door-to-door jihad salesman on speed, and Bin Laden has set up some sort of underground lair worthy of a James Bond villain, somewhere in the Hindu-Kush mountain range. But if we were to open our ports to a company owned by a country that has provable ties to the funding of the 9/11 terror attacks, just think of the obvious results! We'll know where to find these terrorists then -- right in New York Harbor! It's hard to sit around in your underground lair with a pile of Kalishnikovs and a thermonuclear warhead when said warhead could so easily be put to use in the Port of Miami. And then, once they head over here to do the deed, Bush himself will ride into the port on horseback, a sheriff's badge on his vest and a six-gun in his hand. After a terrible firefight in which Bush takes on a few hundred gunmen and lives, like some bad John Woo movie, he'll hogtie Bin Laden, tie the rope to his saddle, and drag the al Qaeda leader through the streets of Miami to Hialeah, where hardcore Republican Cubans will hack him to death with machetes. The problem with the left, and these critics on the right, is that they're not thinking five steps ahead, the way the president is. He ain't as dumb as he looks -- or talks or acts or waves or walks or rides a bike. Or maybe not. Off on a tangent, I read that Laura Bush has redesigned the Lincoln Bedroom in regal colors like purple and royal blue, and topped off the room's canopy bed with a giant gilded crown. This is true. I couldn't possibly make it up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48972-2004Sep24.html Apparently, the gilding of the crown has just been completed and the Lincoln Bedroom now sports its finished imperial makeover. At least the old article above, written in 2004, was helpful enough to point out: "Gilded crowns and royal colors strike an unusual note in a house carefully stage-managed to symbolize the democracy. Neither element would have been acceptable to George Washington, who was advised to surround himself only with things that were 'substantially good and majestically plain.' Eagles were fine in 'the President's House.' Allusions to monarchy would have been anathema." But of course, allusions to monarchy are what our current president is all about.

The last time I was down at Churchill's in Miami, I ran across a woman whose tale has been occasionally puking itself back into my conscious mind ever since. It's not often you get a peak at your own self 30 years down the road, but this lady, sitting at a bad punk rock show on some nameless, faceless weekday night in downtown Miami with nothing but beer and flirting with men young enough to be her son ahead of her, gave me something of an ugly turn. As I half listened to her yelling in my ear, screaming at me over the music about all the shows see saw back in the 1970s, like Fleetwood Mac and The Ramones, I couldn't help but wonder whether this could be a terrible shade of things to come. I pictured myself, the year 2035 or so, sitting at a sticky-floored bar, slurring to some hot little chick in a mini-dress and a faux vintage T-shirt that reads "New Coke" or "Budweiser Select." "I saw Weezer, you know. Three times!" She'd be suitably unimpressed, but nod just to maintain the basic societal requirements of propriety. "Oh, yeah. And Foo Fighters. ... I saw'em at the same time, one time." I'd order another beer, maybe an import or whatever new, flavored drink they'd be pushing on young adults then, but that really wind up getting bought by people either underage or so old that they want to look young. "Yes, bartender. Get me another of those Jameson Juices -- the Cool Mint flavor, please." ******** She said that she never shot up anything, but that she had tried crack once. I finally took the time to carefully stare at her, and I realized that she had been pretty once. Just another member of the Stupid Generation, which in turn gave birth to the Doomed Generation -- my generation -- which will no doubt fulfill the prophecy of Saint Reagan and live to see the end of the world.

Hunter S. Thompson shot himself a year ago today. In memoriam, I give you this essay, reprinted here from 2003's Kingdom of Fear: "Let's face it, the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do, says what he is told to say, poses the way he is told to pose. He is a fool. No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a Fool. Not at this moment in time, when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House. Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters, it is where the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and acts giddy about other people's lives, if he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder by definition, a loud and meaningless animal with no functional intelligence and no balls. To say this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon. Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a Liberal? The capacity of these vicious assholes we elected to be in charge of our lives for four years to commit terminal damage to our lives and our souls and our loved ones is far beyond Nixon's. Shit! Nixon was the creator of many of the once-proud historical landmarks that these dumb bastards are savagely destroying now: the Clean Air Act of 1970; Campaign Finance Reform; the endangered species act; a Real-Politik dialogue with China; and on and on. The prevailing quality of life in America -- by any accepted methods of measuring -- was inarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of our Lord 2002. The Boss was a certified monster who deserved to be impeached and banished. He was a truthless creature of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a foul human monument to corruption and depravity on a scale that dwarfs any other public official in American history. But Nixon was at least smart enough to understand why so many honorable patriotic U.S. citizens despised him. He was a Liar. The truth was not in him. Nixon believed, as he said many times, that if the president of the United States does it, it can't be illegal. But Nixon never understood the much higher and meaner truth of Bob Dylan's warning that "To live outside the law you must be honest." The difference between an outlaw and a war criminal is the difference between a pedophile and a Pederast: The pedophile is a person who thinks about sexual behavior with children, and the Pederast does these things. He lays hands on innocent children, he penetrates them and changes their lives forever. Being the object of a pedophile's warped affections is a Routine feature of growing up in America, and being a victim of a Pederast's crazed "love" is part of dying. Innocence is no longer an option. Once penetrated, the child becomes a Queer in his own mind, and that is not much different than murder. Richard Nixon crossed the line when he began murdering foreigners in the name of "family values"-- and George Bush crossed it when he sneaked into office and began killing brown skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people. When Muhammad Ali declined to be drafted and forced to kill "gooks" in Vietnam he said, "I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Cong. No Cong ever called me Nigger." I agreed with him, according to my own personal ethics and values. He was right. If we all had a dash of Muhammad Ali's eloquent courage, this country and the world would be a better place today because of it. Okay. That's it for now. Read it and weep....See you tomorrow, folks. You haven't heard the last of me. I am the one who speaks for the spirit of freedom and decency in you. Shit. Somebody has to do it. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world -- a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us... No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today- and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill "gooks." They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are racists and hate mongers among us-they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them." Funny how they don't make journalists like that anymore.

I think he was drunk, and is therefore guilty of reckless endangerment (negligent homicide if -- God forbid -- Whittington doesn't make it) . I can't prove this assertion, of course, and I hate to down a guy just for getting his booze on. But I do have three factors going for me: First, to those who say they can't imagine Cheney getting wasted and going hunting, this is a man with two DUIs under his belt who has never publicly stated that he has stopped drinking. Second, the inebriated state would explain the long delay in informing authorities. It gave Cheney time to sober up. And finally, it explains why this bombshell quote by Katherine Armstrong, owner of the ranch where the shooting took place, has been scrubbed from the MSNBC story that covered the shooting (msnbc/msn/com/id/11349649): "Armstrong also told NBC News that she does not believe alcohol was involved in the accident. She says she believes no one that day was drinking, although she says there may have been beer available during a picnic lunch that preceded the incident. 'There may be a beer or two in there,' she said. 'but remember not everyone in the party was shooting.' " You will no longer find that quote in the story at the Web site listed above. But thanks to alert Internet media watcher HsiKang, you can see a screenshot of the original story -- with the scrubbed quote -- here: http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e195/junkdrawer88/Cheney.gif?CLICK Basically, Armstrong is throwing out the same excuse that has failed drunken drivers time and again when pulled over by the cops (myself included): "But it was only a beer or two." As to why NBC has yanked the quote from the story, I leave that to bigger guns with far more access than I. But at this point, the media is as much of a story as the shooting itself.

Yeah, yeah. I know it's been reported as an "accident." In fact, the AP has even had the nerve to report it as though it was the victim's fault, stating that Henry Whittington, a long-time GOP Svengali in Texas, "stepped into Cheney's line of fire." Other media were more bemused, with the Sydney Morning Herald's headline reading "Cheney Hunts Quail, Everyone Else Ducks." And syndicated columnist Roy Sekoff sticking it to Aerosmith with "Cheney's Got a Gun." But when I heard that Cheney had shotgunned a fellow hunter in the face during a quail-hunting trip this past weekend, I saw through all the bullshit. It was obvious what happened. Whittington, in his dotage, had outlived his usefulness, and so Cheney and his shadowy cohorts had decided to give him a day's head start and then "hunt the ultimate game," as one of those on Cheney's hunting trip put it in a telephone call after being pressed on the point. "OK, maybe not the ultimate game," he then admitted. "I mean, the guy is 80. But still -- it was pretty cool." It was a crisp, winter day. Cheney loaded up his 28-gauge shotgun, then checked it carefully before racking it and growling in that gravelly way he has, "All right, boys. Let's do this." He crept carefully along, two Secret Servicemen creeping even-more-carefully in his wake. Until, parting some bushes and peering into a clearing, he spied his prey. Whittington had been given a full day to run. But, being 80 years old and without food or water, he hadn't gotten far. "Whittington!" Cheney called as he raised his shotgun to his shoulder. "Here's buckshot in your eye!" But even Wittington was too fast for Cheney. He managed to dodge to the side, and was only wounded. Upon hearing the blast, the owner of the ranch where Cheney was supposedly hunting quail arrived and, seeing what happened, let out a cry. The cover story had been previously agreed upon. All players said the same thing. And Wittington, given a new lease on life, is sticking to the story. But give it a while. Murder will out.

The only question now is when. National Journal has reported that Lewis "Scooter" Libby has testified that Cheney told him to leak classified information, including a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate. He hasn't said yet whether Cheney gave him the go-ahead to out Valerie Plame, but that, too shall come to pass. (see: http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0209nj1.htm..) Once the dust settles, Cheney will have to go. And the dust will most certainly settle before 2008, when these rats will be leaving office anyway. If things can be hurried along, Cheney may resign within six months. But I doubt the likelihood of that outcome. Libby's lawyers will stall for time, waiting until after the 2006 election. At that point, Cheney will resign for "health reasons." The question then becomes, who will replace him, and what good will it do? Ordinarily, one would think that the Bush branch of the GOP (as opposed to the McCain folks and other would-be presidential contenders for '08) would install its pick for a Bush successor. But that could be a bad idea -- the slime of the VP's office may rub off on the new No. 2, miring him or her in a morass of inescapable, unelectable greed and stupidity. If the Bush folks anticipate this, they will bring in one of their sometime allies but longterm rivals, like Bill Frist or John McCain, to take the VP slot in what they will term a "healing, reach-across-the-aisle" sort of move. But if the Bush boys think that the new VP can escape the shadows of the former, they'll install their likely successor. But who? The GOP in '08 doesn't look as if it will bend toward the neocon side. The likely candidates -- Bill Frist, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Sam Brownback -- have all had their problems with this administration. Given past precedent, and also given the few friends it now has in Congress, I expect the Bush White House to promote from within. Maybe Condoleeza Rice. That'll set the stage for her to run in '08. But, of course, she'll get hammered in the GOP primary. The party is full of racists and misogynists, and running a black woman is not the smartest thing they could do. But for Bush and his cronies, Rice may be the only option. The Taint Is Too Big. Besides, naming Rice as VP serves another function. It gets Cheney out of the press. Sure, the Vice President of the United States just resigned for bullshit health reasons. Sure, he REALLY resigned for a sheer landslide of law-breaking committed with the sort of fuck-you-I-don't-give-a-damn-what-anyone-thinks mentality that we haven't seen in a politician since Caligula. But all of that will leave the papers as journalists across CNN, Fox News and all the major newspapers all scream: IS THE COUNTRY READY FOR A BLACK FEMALE VICE PRESIDENT??!!!!!?!?! While talk over the new VP reaches a fever pitch, Dick will reach some agreement with the prosecutor and retire to a life of duck hunting, ranching, and bathing in the blood of nubile virgins. Final Prediction: Cheney resigns in Dec. '06, after the election, but before the newly elected come to power. Filled with their own hubris, and also wanting to cover Cheney's ass, Bush Co. will install Rice as the new VP.