As seen on Usenet

The following political commentary was lifted from a newsgroup on Usenet. Feel free to create your own additions.


DEMOCRAT
You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for hours to get it. It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have down sized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. You go to lunch and drink wine. Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are. While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman. You break for lunch. Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You have some vodka. You count them and learn you have five cows. You have some more vodka. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two. You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts. Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows. They go into hiding. They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls. Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow. Everyone votes for the best-looking one. Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one. Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither. Some people can't figure out how to vote at all. Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIAN
You have a cow and a bull. The bull is depressed. It has spent its life living a lie. It goes away for two weeks. It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation. You now have two cows. One makes milk; the other doesn't. You try to sell the transgendered cow. Its lawyer sues you for discrimination. You lose in court. You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages. You now have one rich, transgendered, non-milk-producing cow. You change your business to beef. PETA pickets your farm. Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your driveway. Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help "working cows". Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm "for the children". Gray Davis signs a law giving your farm to Mexico. The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you groped their teats. You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations. The cow starves to death. The NY Times analysis shows your business failure is Bush's fault.

This Is Things Getting Better?

In the face of polls showing President Decider with an approval rating approaching Nixon’s just prior to his resignation to avoid impeachment, the Bush Administration has been spinning that the improving situation in Iraq will help those numbers to rise by the time the 2006 Congressional elections kick off after Labor Day.

The poll comes six months before Election Day and well before Labor Day, when Congressional campaigns will be fully engaged. Mr. Bush has shaken up his staff in an effort to improve his political fortunes, and White House aides said they were confident that events in Iraq were improving....

The truth is, however, that uncontrolled civil violence has become so bad, and so routine, in Baghdad that neighborhood watch patrols have formed to protect Sunnis and Shiites from each other, as well as moderates of both stripes from murderous radicals. The NYT reports,

Three years after the American invasion, the war has settled here, in the quiet of neighborhoods, streets and Iraqis' backyards. Dozens of bodies surface daily. People are taken from their homes and executed. Assassinations are routine. But instead of looking to the government for protection, ordinary Sunni Arabs are taking up arms against it, perhaps the most vivid illustration of the depth of Sunni mistrust of the American backed, Shiite-led security forces. "There is no bridge of confidence between the government and the Iraqi people," said Tarik al-Hashimy, a vice president of Iraq who is a Sunni Arab.

The vice president of the country has stated that, after three years of American military occupation and training and spending hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars in the effort to bring freedom, security, and democracy to Iraq, its citizens have no confidence that their government can protect them from harm.

Is it any wonder that only 29% of the American people approve of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq? This administration invaded Iraq without a plan of how to rebuild the country it was intentionally going to break, has failed to develop one beyond throwing wads of money around like drunken sailors on shore leave, and continues to spin the obvious lie that, after three years at it, things are getting better. Given the track record of all the other operations our CEO president ran into the ground, are these results really any surprise?

Sign Of The Year

It's the sign of the year.

Somebody’s Gotta Go

The Chicago Cubs lost yet again last night, their seventh straight and ninth of their last ten. Thankfully, because of their fast start, including a home opening weekend sweep of STL, they’re only three games under .500 and 6.5 in back of CIN.

But this is a team that is, once again, in disarray. Their fundamentals are horrid. They don’t hit the cutoff man. They make stupid base running mistakes. The hitters swing at anything and everything they see. The pitchers give out free passes like the promoter of a Yoko Ono show. It’s simply bad baseball.

It may not be fair, but a manager’s primary responsibility is to get his team to perform well and to win. When the team fails to do that, it’s the manager who must shoulder the blame for the failure. After all, that’s a manager’s raison d’etre.

Dusty Baker was brought to Chicago to deliver a World Series Championship to the north side. In his first year, the Cubs came within five outs of playing in the fall classic for the first time since 1945. But ever since the infamous Bartman play, it’s been a downward spiral of gaffs, petty fights with the media, injuries, and a lack of accountability.

Baker’s supposed unique skill is to get the most from his players. His inability to tactically manage a game was, and still is, well known. His lineups often leave fans, if not his own players, scratching their heads. His penchant for the double-switch and lefty-righty matchups often ignores actual previous performances as well as their effects on team defense and later offensive options. But all these liabilities were supposed to be offset by his gift to make mediocre players good, and good players great.

Well, that simply hasn’t happened. Baker’s Cubs teams have consistently trailed the league in number of pitches per at-bat, meaning hitters are encouraged to go up hacking at anything they see. As a result, the Cubs have a poor team on-base percentage (the single most important indicator of offense success after runs scored), they don’t draw many walks, and they let the opposing pitcher work into the late innings of games instead of forcing the opponent to use its bullpen.

Baker also brought with him a reputation for abusing his pitchers, riding his starters hard with high pitch counts. That hasn’t changed, and the 2006 season finds both Kerry Wood and Mark Prior still on the DL. While Wood is expected back soon, no one has any idea when Prior is going pitch a major league game again. For a team built around quality pitching rather than offense, poor management of the staff is a disaster.

Baker’s had his chance to make the Cubs a winner. Instead, they’ve finished worse in the division every year he’s been in Chicago, and may well lose 90 games this season. Since beating the Brewers 6-2 on April 28th, they’ve been outscored 12-62, including getting shut out four times. In the past ten games, they haven’t scored more than three runs in any of them.

It’s time the Chicago Cubs recognize that the club will never be a champion with Dusty Baker at the helm. He’s a terrible game tactician, he either can’t or won’t coach his players properly, he misuses the players he’s given, and he’s done nothing to demonstrate that his team’s performance is unacceptable. He’s also struggled for roster control with his boss, Jim Hendry, the person who must now do what’s best for the Cubs and cut his ties with his field manager.

The fans of the Chicago Cubs deserve a winner. They are among the most loyal in all of baseball, packing Wrigley Field rain or shine, loss or win. They’ve waited almost 100 years for a World Series Champion, only to be faced with waiting until next year, over and over and over again.

No, it won’t solve all the problems the Cubs face as a team and as a franchise, but it will be the first step toward stopping the free fall they’re currently in.

Please, Jim Hendry - Fire Dusty Baker.

It's Gotta Be The Genes!

It's the wee hours of the morning in our nation's capitol. Do you know where your Kennedy is?

Somehow, Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), scion of Chappaquiddick star Teddy, decided he needed to be out for a drive at 2:45 AM Thursday morning. Without his lights on. And after nearly colliding with a Capitol Hill police car, he planted his Ford Mustang convertible into a concrete barrier.

Emerging from the wreck staggering and appearing intoxicated, he still retained the presence of mind to declare his Constitutional right to go vote in Congress unimpeded. Of course, there isn't much going on in the chambers at that hour.

So, were the Capitol Hill police he almost demolished allowed to give him a breathalyzer? Nope. Instead, the watch commander ordered the patrol units to leave the scene and then had officers drive Rep. Kennedy home. Now that's having friends in high places.

Now that it's too late to do any testing (ring any bells, Dick Cheney?), Kennedy claims his troubles were the result of mixing two prescription medications, one of which was Ambien, a sleeping aid. He also is adamant that he didn't have anything to drink. An ABC News post confirms that Ambien is turning up in the systems of people involved in car accidents. This post from the L.A. Times covers Kennedy's explanation, as well as some other reactions from the blogosphere.

But the Boston Herald tells a different story, and one that's far more believable.

WASHINGTON -U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy insisted yesterday that he had consumed “no alcohol” before he slammed his Mustang convertible into a concrete barrier near his office, but a hostess at a popular Capitol Hill watering hole told the Herald she saw him drinking in the hours before the crash.

“He was drinking a little bit,” said the woman, who works at the Hawk & Dove and would not give her name.

Leaving his office late last night, Kennedy refused to say whether he’d been to the Hawk & Dove the night before.

Of course, this still doesn't explain what Kennedy is doing out and about at three in the morning. And so far, he has yet to explain why he would go home in the evening, take Ambien, and then go back out cocktailing. Shouldn't someone who has taken Ambien be asleep at three in the morning? And if not, shouldn't he get his money back? Or maybe, now that he's had time to sober up and consult with his handlers, he's figured out what to say. That is, after all, the Kennedy way.

I guess we should look on the bright side, though. No pregnant mistress wound up under water, and he didn't have to swim the Potomac to get home.

Here's some other Patrick Kennedy links. Wonkette's got it covered, of course, along with his statement from his crash three weeks ago. The Boston Herald recounts other various travails here. And the ever-reliable Wikipedia info is here.

Afghanistan gets ready to fall

Remember the country that harbored the terrorist organization that attacked the United States? The one run by a far-rightwing religious sect that refused to turn over the mastermind of that attack? The one that had no targets worth attacking, and deserved a committment of only 10,000 troops for our "War on Terror" so we don't have to fight them over here instead?

Well, thanks to the Bush Administration's refusal to focus on the source of the problem and to no sane person's surprise, the Taliban is posed to make a huge comeback in Afghanistan this year. The NYT reports that the Taliban have already taken over the south. And with American control over the military presence in the country being turned over to NATO peacekeepers, who have already said they aren't going to fight terrorists, it's only a matter of time (and a short one at that) before the situation in the home of bin Laden is back to what it was before 9/11.

TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan, April 27 — Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.

"The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice."

The fact that American troops are pulling out of southern Afghanistan in the coming months, and handing matters over to NATO peacekeepers, who have repeatedly stated that they are not going to fight terrorists, has given a lift to the insurgents, and increased the fears of Afghans.

Nice job on that War on Terrorism and smoking them out, W. I wonder just how big of an attack the United States must endure before our current President begins to take these fanatics seriously.

The Bar S

Having just returned from the Montana State Bowling Tournament in Great Falls, I'm compelled to report on a fantastic place for dinner should a dear reader find himself within the locale.

After spending the better part of the afternoon tooling along the bikepaths of the Great Falls park system on an absolutely perfect spring day, I found myself enjoying a cigar and beer while chatting with a couple of regulars in Club Cigar, an old-school bar of darkness and wood and mementoes of an earlier age. Bob turned out to be a former pitcher for the Yankees minor league system who enjoyed a September call-up to The Show in the early 70's. Jerry turned out to be a lifetime Cubs fan. They both agreed that the best place for dinner would be the Bar S.

The Bar S Supper Club and Lounge is located about eight miles east of Great Falls in a rather small and very nondescript building no one would stumble into by accident. Like most things in Montana, it's near nothing; anyone going there for dinner does so on purpose.

And come for dinner they do, especially on Saturday night. I arrived at 6:30, but without a reservation, my options were to either wait until after 8:30 or eat at the bar. I chose the bar. There were more than a few who came in after me looking for a seat and left unfulfilled. Thursdays and Saturdays are prime rib nights, and as I was to discover, there's a simple reason one has to call ahead to get a seat.

I ordered a regular-sized cut of prime rib, along with a shrimp cocktail in lieu of a salad, and a baked potato; all-inclusive. For those in need of eating a small steer, they offer a 32 oz. portion. Luck was on my side. As I prefer my beef medium-well, I was also offered an end cut, which is almost always the best part of a prime rib.

The shrimp cocktail was delicious - three large, fresh, chilled shrimp served with a cocktail sauce that included little pieces of celery in it. A dinner loaf of delicious, warm, soft bread also was presented. A great way to start the meal. And then the prime rib was served.

I'm always a bit nervous when I first cut into a piece of meat, especially when there are high expectations. One kitchen's idea of medium-well can still leave the center bloody (as some chefs refuse to cook fine meat fully) while another's idea is to create dry leather. My knife sliced through the generous, thick prime rib and found it absolutely perfectly done - just a hint of pink at the very center, quite warm, and still very juicy, so much so, that the au jus presented with it was superfluous.

I looked up at the hostess and remarked, "This is absolutely perfect! Whoever cooked this should be given a medal." One of the kitchen staff had come out to get something to drink from the bar, and the hostess replied, "Don't say that. We still have to get him out the door at the end of the night." The cook was proud that he had delivered, and he should have been. He'd hit the bullseye.

Every piece was a treat to savor. At first, the cut seemed large enough that I thought I'd be taking some along with me. At the end, I understood why people order an even larger cut than this. And why the Bar S enjoys a devoted following that returns every Saturday, and, according to the hostess, orders the same thing week after week. They love their beef in Montana, and when it's prepared as well as this, there's no going elsewhere.

Did I have room for desert? Why, of course. What better way to finish such a fine dinner than with a vanilla ice cream sundae? And a little people-watching before heading back to the hotel and some poker.

Life in Montana is unpretentious, which is one of many reasons I love it here. It's a land of farms and ranches and honest, simple living under a big sky. One gentleman who came in with a friend - clearly regulars with standing reservations - had taken the time to dress up for his Saturday evening at the supper club. In addition to his ballcap, he wore a pressed, collared long-sleeve dress shirt - and a pair of sparkling clean, almost new, blue-jean overalls.

So - do yourself a major favor and get to the Bar S Supper Club and Lounge near Great Falls. They're on route 89, a few miles east of MAFB and a few miles west of Belt. And be sure to call ahead (406-761-9550) for reservations.

Laws? We don't need no stinking laws!

The Boston Globe reported on April 30th that The Decider has decided he may simply ignore more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

So what then, exactly, is the point of either Congress or the Supreme Court? Since when does one person get to decide what the Constitution means, what laws he's to be bound by, and what laws may be enforced or simply ignored?

More importantly, is there anyone left in government with sufficient spine to stand up to such an egregious grab of power? Or is everyone in Washington content to let Bush become the Putin of the West?

First blog post

The Digital Gazette has moved to the blogosphere!

This will enable not only more timely postings on the happenings of the day, but will also provide readers with the ability to comment.