Kalgoorlie's War Memorial by Bob Patterson
Kalgoorlie's War Memorial
Obama's efforts to wean the Democratic Party onto Bush Administration policies, which gave members of the Democratic rank and file fits of apoplexy during the Bush reign, seemed completed this week as Democrats and Republicans in both the Congress and the Senate shrugged off reports of government access to citizens' phone records with an extremely blaze attitude. Paranoia is patriotic and privacy is passà ©.
Could any of the politicians, who are à ¼berenthusiastic about the prospect of fighting terrorism by inspecting phone records, be vulnerable to manipulation (i.e. blackmail)? Wouldn't veteran married politicians, who had (hypothetically) placed multiple phone calls to single young attractive people at odd and non-business hours, be able to act (a key word) enthusiastic about such snooping?
The transition from a Bush Administration promoting invasions, drones, wiretaps, torture, and Guantanamo to a Democratic Administration that continues those policies as if they were venerable American traditions came to completion this week and thereby eliminated any tarnishing on the concept of a Bush Dynasty as an American version of the British Royal family and thus eliminated the largest negative factor from the prospect of JEB Bush's participation in the 2016 Presidential Primary contest.
For the lefties who find that idea repugnant there were other topic during the first week of June for them to use to vent their outrage, such as the prospect of learning a new list of names involved in the baseball steroid scandal and a new installment of soap opera journalism as a beloved celebrity tries to lick throat cancer.
The Getty and Armstrong radio program, earlier this week, intrigued their listeners with the possibility that California voters had been victimized by a fraud that would result in a need for taxpayers to subsidize the costs of a bullet train. We jumped online and learned that a court case, which is underway in Sacramento to consider the future of the costly venture, is a complex and confusing topic and any attempts to simplify the Gordian Knot of issues involved would only produce a tsunami of WFC (Who ******* Cares?) reactions in the Facebook mentality atmosphere of the current American Pop Culture scene.
Anyone who wants a tsunami of Facebook "likes" would be better off collecting celebrity gossip items, rather than trying to becoming the pundit other pundits read first.
Back in the Sixties, a series of photos graphically showed a distinctive style of cobwebs produced by spiders who had ingested LSD. Earlier in the history of the Internets, the topic of kittens who had been taught to paint caused a stir. Would it behoove the "like" level of the World's Laziest Journalists' efforts to go viral with punditry on Facebook if we subsidized the costs of investigating the artistic efforts of feline Rembrandts who had been dosed with LSD?
Marc Eliot in his book "Steve McQueen," on page 68, describes a tense confrontation between Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra on the set of the film "Never So Few." Finally Sinatra laughed. They became friends for life.
Once upon a time, the judge in Malibu (according to a reliable source) was outraged when her housemaid was bitten by the neighbor's dog. The judge, who was a woman, was determined to "read the riot act" to the owner of the offending canine. On the day following the scheduled confrontation her staff breathlessly awaited the judge's report. She told them: "Mel Gibson has the bluest eyes I've ever seen!"
Speaking of blue eyes, why doesn't someone rebroadcast the TV special that was used to welcome Elvis back to America after serving his hitch in the Army in Germany?
Our efforts to e-duplicate (metaphorically speaking) Genghis Kahn's slog to go visit the Pope in the Vatican via going viral on Facebook produced the fact that recently Australia's Tourist Bureau brought several lucky individuals to their happiest country in the world (according to a recent Wall Street Journal story [who owns that newspaper?]) to become gainfully employed doing their dream job. (Like Kerouac in "The Dharma Bums"?) That, in turn, made us wonder why the Fox Media Empire doesn't provide Good Morning Australia (GMA) to various cable companies in the USA.
If after a hectic morning Americans could tune in to an early morning TV show that exemplified the old folks adage "the world's can't end today because it's already tomorrow in Sydney," wouldn't that in itself be therapeutic and inspiring? The chance to deliver to Americans some feature stories would help boost tourism wouldn't it? If Sydney has a statue of Ivan, Queen Victoria's dog, what would be the American equivalent of such a canine tribute?
"MarijuanAmerica: One man's quest to understand America's dysfunctional love affair with weed," written by Alfred Ryan Nerz (Abrams Image New York - 2013) caught our attention in the Berkeley Public Library's main branch's new books section and since we are a pushover for a new variation on the drive around America subgenre of literature and since columns that address the topic of the devil weed always get extra readers, we checked it out and will read it for a review in a future column.
Speaking of driving all around the USA, we wonder why some of the cynical, ever vigilant political pundits on TV haven't questioned the curious fact that a lame duck President is doing an extensive amount of traveling to attending partisan fund raising events. Should we start wearing our Wendell Willkie era "No Third Term" button again
In an era of austerity budget cuts some cities in the San Francisco Bay Area were uncomfortable with the concept of paying local police for providing extra security for a lame duck President raising funds for candidates spouting the liberal philosophy.
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