Corned Beef Sopranos

BuzzFlash

A Quick Look At The New Jersey Corruption Scandal
-- Verse-Case Scenario by Tony Peyser

If you want to cut this
All down to size, guys,
Syrian Sephardic Jews
Are the new wise guys.

A year or so ago, I read an excellent novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Sort of a parallel universe detective story. In it, WWII ended in 1948, Israel had been destroyed, and the Jews had been relocated in Sitka, Alaska. It won several Science Fiction awards.

The part that relates here is that in the novel the Hasidic Jews run organized crime. Heh. Oy, prescient the author was!

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

The title of the post comes from a cop I knew once. He had been a cop in St. Louis or Kansas City or somewhere like that and relocated out west because the Jewish gangsters there wanted him dead. He called them the 'Corned Beef Mafia'. So may have been The Purple Gang in Detroit.

Update:

Speaking of The Purple Gang, my Dad was a friend of this guy in the old days in Reno. I met him when I was about 10 years old. A nice old man.

Mert Wertheimer was the head of the Chesterfield syndicate, concentrating its activities in Macomb County Michigan, near Detroit. It was once politically powerful in Michigan. Mert Wertheimer was by many accounts part of the Purple Gang of Jewish gangsters, so one could assume that the Chesterfield Syndicate operated at least by permission of the Purple Gang.

Memories.

'Cash for clunkers' gets on the road

LATimes

Clunkermania officially begins today.

The federal government finally released the rules that dealers and their customers have to follow to participate in the much-discussed "cash for clunkers" program, which can provide consumers with up to $4,500 in cash when they trade in an older vehicle and buy a newer, more fuel-efficient model from a participating dealer.

Here are some questions and answers about the program.

Q: How do I know if my trade-in vehicle is eligible for the program?

A: It must have been manufactured in 1984 or later, and have a combined city/highway fuel economy rated at 18 miles per gallon or less. The program is advantageous only if the trade-in value is less than the minimum $3,500 offered by the government.

Q: Can the credit be applied to any new vehicle?

A: All imports and domestics with a list price under $45,000 are eligible, as long as they meet fuel economy standards of at least 22 mpg for cars or 18 mpgfor SUVs, small pick-ups and minivans, and 15 mpg. for large vans and trucks. The new vehicle must exceed the trade-in by at least 4 mpg for cars, 2 mpgfor SUVs and 1 mpg for large trucks to qualify for the $3,500 rebate. The full $4,500 rebate kicks in at an increase of 10 mpg, 5 mpg and 2 mpg, respectively.

Much more.

Neither of my old rigs qualify. My '76 Chevy Van is too old, and my '92 Dakota is worth too much money. Oh, well...

Huell Howser

If you live in California and get a PBS station, you know who Huell Howser is. I wish they'd show his stuff outside the state so people could see the many parts of my state that they wouldn't normally see. Shit, I've been all over this state in my 63 years, but ol' Huell has made a career out of it! He's been places no one but locals knew existed before he went there. I've watched literally hundreds of his shows and they're very good.

Nice article about him in today's LATimes:

I am a fan of Huell Howser, the roving reporter.

His thick, brush-cut hair; broad-shouldered, erect bearing; and pin-neat, pastel way of dressing -- combined with a boyish face and wide smile -- give him the aspect of a drill sergeant in an army whose mission is happiness. With his family-friendly exclamations -- "Wow!" and "Oh my gosh!" and "That's amazing!" addressed in a hearty Tennessee accent to what can seem the least amazing things -- he is easy to lampoon (a little long, but funny - G). So far beyond being a glass-half-full guy, I imagine him being handed an empty glass and crying, "Hey! I've got a glass!" And if he had no glass, he'd find out where they make glasses, and go down and do a piece on the place.

Adam Carolla mocked him regularly on his KLSX-FM morning radio show, but there is a lot of love where Howser is concerned. (I tried a Google experiment: The phrase "I love Huell Howser" received 4,340 hits; "I hate Huell Howser," four.) A ham and pineapple cheeseburger in Yermo, a double chili cheese dog at Pink's and a doughnut at Stan's in Westwood all bear his name. He was integrated into an episode of "Weeds" last year, and "The Simpsons" used him, as Howell Huser, in the 2005 episode "Something About Marrying." He found out about that only afterward from friends, and "so I called the head guy the next day, Matt Groening. I said, 'Matt, you should have told me I was on -- I'd have had a party!' He said, 'Well, if it's any consolation, I think we had the longest writers meeting ever because everybody around the table wanted to do their Huell Howser impression.' "

(Groening confirmed the story by e-mail: "Yes, everyone at 'The Simpsons' does a Huell Howser impression. We all love him. I have on my permanent do-not-delete TiVo Huell's visit to the Bunny Museum. I hear, but haven't seen, that Huell's climb up a wind turbine tower is a classic. At the show we all love HH so much that after first sending him up, we had HH play himself in an upcoming episode," a fact that Howser himself neglected to tell me.)

There is something of the friendly alien about him, the man from space for whom everything -- every flower, every doughnut, every doorknob -- is new and miraculous. He is famous for stating the obvious, but the obvious things are exactly those things that we forget how to see.

Here's a wacky example of the kinda stuff he does:

Thanks to gschales.

Many video clips here. Mostly straight ones but more spoofs than I ever would have imagined!

To swipe one of Huell's tag lines, he truly is part of California's gold. I hope your state has someone like him.

Marine v Ugandan Breakdance Challenge

A little Sunday afternoon terpsichorean interlude.

Cpl Jones lifts morale of the troops after arriving in Iraq by dancing with some Ugandans singing some cadence!

Watch it 'til the end. Cpl. Jones rises to the occasion with a big finish!

I think this did more for diplomatic relations than legions of Georgetown graduates in pinstripe suits.

Thanks to kyot96.

Note: For some good Jarhead cha-cha slidin', check out "Your Tax Dollars At Work" in the thumbnails.

Update:

The Air Force knows how ta get down too!

Fixer's gonna kill me for that one. I'll try to make up for it here.

And That’s Not the Way It Is

Daddy Frank on Cronkite, McNamara, Vietnam, Watergate, and the sorry state of journalism today. Links at site.

[...] The successive blows of Vietnam and Watergate during the Cronkite ’60s and ’70s shattered the nation’s faith in most of its institutions, public and private, and toppled many of the men who led them. Such was the dearth of trustworthy figures who survived that an unindicted official in a disgraced White House could make the cut.

What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.

To appreciate how special Cronkite’s achievements were, consider our recent past. As the Bush administration hyped Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D. and nonexistent link to 9/11, The Times and The Post too often enabled the fictions. But at least some reporters at these papers and others elsewhere were on to the hoax — even if their findings were buried in the back pages. At the networks, Cronkite’s heirs were not even practicing journalism. They invited administration propagandists to trumpet their tales of imminent mushroom clouds with impunity.

When McNamara died this month, many recalled his status as Exhibit A of what David Halberstam labeled “the best and the brightest,” the brilliant and arrogant Kennedy-Johnson team that blundered into a quagmire. Far less was said about how McNamara, at his height, wielded that image to spin a dazzled Washington press establishment on his misplaced optimism about the war. The Washington Post’s obituary, pointedly or not, included a photo of a smiling McNamara enjoying cocktails with a powerful syndicated Post columnist (and Vietnam apologist), Joseph Alsop. The obituary also noted that McNamara served on The Post’s board — a sinecure he was awarded after he had helped send some 50,000 Americans to pointless deaths.

Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank.

I have nothing to add. Please go read.

Just fuguin' around

Fixer got me in the mood for an instrumental with a fiddle in it!

Alison Krauss & Union Station ~ Choctaw Hayride

Thanks to zone003, Oz.

Quote of the Day

Scott:

...

While ordinary Americans responded to the [September 11th] attack by helping complete strangers find their friends and loved ones, standing in line for hours to give blood, and bringing food and water to rescue workers, our leaders met in the citadels of power, assessed the situation, and made the cool, calculated decision to panic.

...

Fugue state ...

Vanessa Mae and the Bratislava Radio Symphony Orchestra play Bach's Toccata & Fugue:

Vanessa Mae - Toccata & Fugue

Saturday Italian Celtic Fingerpicking Blogging

I never heard of this guy before today. I watched several of his videos and now I'm a fan.

Also, there's probably about twelve songs that came over with early Scots/Irish settlers that have come up through history to have had a major influence on the Old Time String Band, Folk, and Bluegrass music genres. I think this is one of them.

Franco Morone - Flowers Of Edinburgh

Thanks to progressivo2, Portugal.

Posse comitatus ...

Don't even get me started.

Update:

Heh ... Nucks:

... John Yoo must have been busy polishing [Cheney's] knob that day ...

Update Zwei:

Res Ipsa:

...

Dear Boalt Hall:

When are you going to revoke John Yoo's tenure? Aren't you ashamed to have him on your faculty? Surely there are some deserving wine law professors out there to whom you can award his coveted slot? Maybe they could discuss the finer points of the limits of presidential power over pinot grigio on your sunny deck? Finally, why isn't today's NYT story isn't on your Faculty in the News page?

...

Links aplenty over there.

Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests

Fresh from the Friday Document Dump, this gem from The NYTimes. Links at site:

Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

Add that to the short list of things he did right. I still have enough fingers left on that hand to pick my nose, and a whole 'nother hand to scratch my ass.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.

The Mayberry Mafia's consiglieri. The usual suspects.

Among those in opposition were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

That's a little surprising.

“Frankly, it was a bit of a turf war,” said one former senior administration official. “For a number of people, crossing the line of having intelligence or military activities inside the United States was not worth the risk.”

Yeah, the risk of getting caught putting the Constitution in the shredder again. Bastards.

Please read the rest. Grrrr...

Quote of the Day

From a comment on yesterday's post on the Gates incident:

"It's not that I hate the police, exactly. It's that all the big bellied bastards that I do hate love the police." - Brendan Behan

I couldn'ta said it better myself. Thanks, Shaun.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Don't forget the Gulf Coast.

Emmylou Harris & Dave Matthews ~ Gulf Coast Highway

Thanks to NZpakeha, UK.

Subliminal Fixer Music Blogging

Fixer says I make some of the stranger bells in his head clang from time to time. Well, turnabout is fair play and he does it to me too. The upside is that the music drowns out the little voices. For a while.

The really disturbing part is that there's about 9660 of these on YouTube.

Thanks to KakashiHatake55, Okie City(!).

The Henry Gates Incident

Dave Lindorff comes about as close to what really happened there as I've seen:

But whatever the real story is regarding the showing of identification information by Gates and the officer, police misconduct in this incident went further. Gates reportedly got understandably angry and frustrated at the officer for refusing to provide him with this identifying information and/or for refusing to accept his own identification documents, and at that point, the officer abused his power by arresting Gates and charging him with disorderly conduct.

There's nothing unusual about this, sadly. It is common practice for police in America to abuse their authority and to arrest people on a charge of "disorderly conduct" when those people simply exercise their free speech rights and object strenuously to how they are being treated by an officer. Try it out sometime. If you are given a ticket for going five miles an hour over the posted speed limit, tell the traffic officer he or she is a stupid moron, and see if you are left alone. My bet is that you will find yourself either ticketed on another more serious charge, or even arrested for "disorderly conduct." If you happen to be black or some other race than white, I'll even put money on that bet. (If you're stupid enough to go out and test this hypothesis, please don't expect me to post your bail!)

Mr. Lindorff goes on to say that we have devolved into a 'police state' where the cops have unfettered power to do with you what they will. I don't go quite that far, although it's true to some extent.

The police are the average citizen's 'point of contact' with government. The cops are at the sharp end of the establishment, ostensibly to protect society from criminals. Prevent crime? Hardly. React to crimes already committed is about the best they can do, given that this is not really a police state where they can pre-emptively bust you before you can commit a crime, although Bush tried to change that.

One definition of government is 'those who have a monopoly on violence'. That's how governments stay in power in the final analysis. The cops have the power of life and death over you, a power that is said to be granted by 'the people', but really granted by 'the state'. If you as 'the people' wish to rescind that power from them on your own out on the street, you had better be prepared with a lot of armed people ready to do serious violence. Most people won't and the cops know this. The cops have one basic motto: "Win or Die", and they are trained and armed and usually have reinforcements on call, particularly in large urban areas, and they will come down on any kind of uprising with all the force they can muster, and it's a lot.

After all, their basic job is to protect the political status quo, basically powerful rich white people, from the great unwashed, which is everybody else, and they have a lot of leeway in how they can do it, although, all things considered and thanks to the Constitution, they're pretty restrained in what they can do in most cases.

If a cop decides you need a little fuckin' with, they're more than happy to oblige. That's what I think happened with Mr. Gates. He was tired and cranky from his flight from China, frustrated by not being able to get into his house, and then the cops showed up on a tip from his neighbors, for God's sake, to put the fucking icing on the cake. That his neighbors didn't recognize him says more about that neighborhood than I want to go into here. I'm glad I don't live there. I recognize my neighbors for a block around even if I don't know them personally.

Gates lipped off to the cop, and from accounts went too far and brought the cop's mother into the conversation. He's lucky he didn't get his lights punched out, but the cop knew better than to do that. The cop decided to teach him a lesson and arrested him for 'disorderly conduct', but the real offense, which isn't in the penal code, was POPO - Pissin' Off a Police Officer. This happens all the time.

This wasn't about race. It was about Gates being a temporary asshole to the wrong cop. It cost him forty bucks in bail and the spurious charges were dropped. If he wasn't a prominent figure, the media wouldn't have turned it into yet another circus and the whole deal would be over with no harm done other than to Gates' pride.

Here's a little personal story about how the cops can fuck with you and be entirely within their rights to do so.

In my drinking days I used to get arrested all the time. Sober up in jail, walk a mile home, go to court, pay a fine. One time, I lipped off to the booking cop waaaay too much and she just said, "That's it! I've had enough abuse. You just earned a trip to the county jail.", and off to county I did go. She probably wouldn't have done that, but it was just my bad luck that there was a jail transport Suburban there at the time to haul some burglar or meth dealer away, so she could and did.

Our county jail, aka "Wayne's World", is 65 miles away, 25 miles on a rural Interstate, up and over and down from Donner Summit, and 40 miles down a state highway with nothing on it, no towns, no people. They just put me in a holding cell, let me sober up, and let me out at about 11PM. All they said was, "Turn left. See ya."

There's not much traffic on that state highway late at night. I waited a while for a car to come and stuck out my thumb and the guy, a local who knew what lay ahead, gave me a ride. Nice guy. His rig was an old Jap Jeep and when he wanted to see how fast he was going, he turned on his flashlight to check the speedo. Heh.

He took me halfway up the forty mile stretch to the Interstate, to the turnoff to the town he lived in. He said he felt bad about leaving me out there with the bears in the middle of nowhere in the dark. I thanked him for getting me that far.

So there I was, exactly halfway between nothing and nowhere on a road with no traffic. None. Zip-point-zilch. Did I mention it was dark? Did I mention it was starting to snow and all I was wearing was a flannel shirt? (Yes, I had on pants and shoes.)

I waited like what seemed forever for another car to stick my thumb out at. I could see the glow of its headlights for miles! It was a CalTrans pickup. The guy wasn't supposed to pick up hitchhikers, of course, but he wasn't about to leave another human being stuck out there, and gave me a ride to I-80. Thank you, sir.

Two cars total, two rides. So far, so good.

Now I was at about 6500' elevation and it was snowing. I-80 had lights, so I went and stood under one of them. Lotsa traffic. Trouble was, it was all big rigs gaining speed on a downhill run for an uphill run ahead, and they weren't about to stop.

Finally a car stopped for me and gave me a ride to town and I walked the rest of the way home and got home to a pretty icy reception from Mrs. G, as might be expected. Took me about 3 hours from the jailhouse door to mine, not too bad, considering.

Lesson learned: Don't mouth off to cops.

Hot Mama

Click to embiggen

That's our pal Lisa of Ranger Against War. She hit the big time. Click the link. Trust me.

Remember, don't sweat the petty stuff. Pet the sweaty stuff.

What it comes down to ...

The Republican Party is a party of, by, and for racists, period.

Pic stolen from here via Ol' Fez.

Trusted ...

Offered without comment:

...

Jon Stewart - 44%
Brian Williams - 29%
Charles Gibson - 19%
Katie Couric - 7%

...

Quote of the Day

Oliver Willis:

Harry Reid is a joke. A laughable, sick joke that is allowing Americans to have a substandard way of life.

...

We knew that...

...but it's good that one of 'em slipped up and said it out loud. Raw Story, with video:

Half the Republicans' opposition to a public health care option comes not from policy differences with the Democrats, or fundamental philosophical differences about the role of government, but purely from a desire to score political points against President Barack Obama, a senior Republican senator has admitted.

George Voinovich (R-OH) said on CNBC Wednesday that a desire to prevent the Democratic president from scoring a historical victory with a public health plan accounts for at least 50 percent of the GOP opposition to the plan.

It's probably more like 99 and 44/100ths%. Fuck health care for Americans that doesn't make the health 'insurance' industry richer, more money for less value, and don't forget to re-elect us, you fucking morons, for wanting this President and this country to fail.