Bad Cops!

 Cops come in all colors. Bad cops come in all colors.The "Talk" given to black children by black parents does not specify the race of the cop. All cops are blue. They stick together like melted gummy bears, good or bad. The thin blue line is real. A good cop covering for a bad cop is just as bad. The barrel of apples is rotted out by the good apples covering up the bad apples at the bottom.

I am no fan of Police Departments. Having lived in a city whose police department has been suspect at best my entire life, they have given me no reason to support them. I am white, and still was subjected to an Omaha police office putting a gun to my head when I was 16. What did I do to get this treatment? I delivered a newspaper at 5 AM. I sat in a parking lot just a bit too long for the local police and the bored cops decided to have some fun? Fuck if I know. My point is I am white, this happened to me and I can only imagine what happens to black folks.This would be everyday treatment. 

Tyre Nichols was pulled over by Memphis cops for "reckless driving" one night and he ended up in the hospital. Pictures of him reeked of Emmit Till and then he died. Beaten to death for "reckless driving". Five cops were fired, and five cops were indicted under murder charges for beating him to death. 

Dont get me wrong here. Those 5 asswipes deserve whatever is comin to them. The fact that they are all black, were fired immediately, charged with murder soon after makes one wonder if these five bastards were white cops, would the police union be screaming about "wokeism" and defending them to the end of time? Would white politicians be yapping about "Back the Blue"? Would there be disinformation released about Tyre Nichols justifying his beating? Sadly, I believe the answer is yes.

But they arent white. They are still cops, with a sense of bullying power they think is their goddamned right. Whatever bad shit happened to them as kids, stuffed in lockers, ignored by girls, bullied by scumbags, beat up for nothing has manifested itself in cops heads . Whatever they do is right. Whatever you do is wrong.They are the law, they are the judge, jury and murderer executioner. Nowadays they have technology not only working for them, but in some cases against them. There is body cam footage of five bullies beating a man to death for "reckless driving". That footage is being released today.

There is fear of riots and lootings because we all know that white people think black people cannot control themselves . As soon as the 3 minute footage (twice as long as Rodney King) is released tonight white politicians and conservative pundits will gear up to divert attention from a murder by cops to whatever bullshit they can come up with. I'm sure Tucker Carlson's show is already written to scare Papa and Meemaw into polishing their guns. It is as clear as day that this will become divisive. A 29 year old black man is beaten to death by five Memphis cops for a traffic violation. That's all we need to know right? Wrong.

Republican politicians have been scaring people for years about MS13 and cartels and Crips and Bloods. What they have never done is scare you about one of the most violent gangs in America since about 1850 or so when they were hunting down runaway slaves. 

The Police.

DeSantis!

 I spent years in school, I mean I really did, 12 years of Catholic indoctrination which I spent 10 of it fighting the obvious bullshit, and 4 years of "liberal indoctrination" in college (in Nebraska liberal right?) . Now this guy, a Florida wannabe mob boss pointing out how many rats he wants whacked today wants to do what all mob bosses wanna do. Complete loyalty to the family.

The family is him, basically. Appealing to that same Florida base of Villages ancients with STD's and 1950s views (except for the banging each other part), Ron DeSantis is putting the kibosh on any sort of AP Black History courses as not being history. White history, often referred to as "History", ya know the type of whitewashed bullshit most of us learned for 12 years.

1) Columbus discovered America

2) The colonists and Indians were great buddies one day in November

3) The Revolution where the Founding Fathers took orders from an almighty gawd and wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

4) George Washington never lied

5) Abe Lincoln freed the slaves

6) The Civil War was really about states rights

7)  Custer was massacred by savages

8) Gunfight at the OK Corral took hours

9) We won World War I you're welcome France

10) The Depression was bad but everybody was happy

11) World War II you're welcome again France and the Japanese were savages

12) 1950s were the greatest time of American history when gays were still in closet and blacks knew their place

13) 1960s were a time of riots and looting by black criminals and long haired whites but MLK was ok I guess

14) Ronald Reagan was a saint

15) Barack Obama was elected twice so racism is over

16) Make America Great Again cuz all this "woke" shit is out of control. 1950's! 1950's!

That's Ron DeSantis' Florida by law. By law that's also what Ron Desantis' America will look like.

Look, a thug like DeSantis on a national level is iffy at best. He's an asshole. He comes across as a robot invented in some asshole lab somewhere, probably the same lab that created Elon Musk. He's wooden, dark, frowning, iron fisted, surrounded by sycophants at all times, with a wife that dresses like she's performing in Frozen later that night. He rants at his opponents, fights with the press any time he gets a question he doesn't like, he curls his lip like a bad Elvis impersonator and constantly says "woke" like a code word to unleash the crazed badgers at the Villages.

DeSantis is a Luddite. He is a 40 something year old man going on 90. He doesnt want to hear anything that makes him think. He doesnt want to hear about Rosewood, Florida and the lynchings of black folk in 1923. That's fine if a hear no evil primate like DeSantis and the Villages fossils don't want to learn anything but the bad part is he wants NOBODY to hear about it. He doesn't want anybody to know about Tulsa (amazing most white people heard about that from a superhero series on HBO). NObody be teaching about 1917 Houston as history in Florida neither.  Not EVEN in a Black history course cuz we all know, to Ron DeSantis, black history is "woke" history and "woke" history tears the whitewashed wall paper off the walls to reveal the real America and Ron DeSantis and his clan of "real Americans" cannot be brainwashed into believing anything other than lies that make even the poorest white American scream U S A U S A!

Ron DeSantis is not only a wannabe strongman, he's also a liar. Maybe even more so than his most famous constituent , the lying Orange toxic waste he may just have to go to war with.

I cannot wait!

David Crosby!

 It was 1970. I was a mere lad, barely a teen, but I had to have the Woodstock movie soundtrack ($9.99 at Walgreens). I wasn't old enough to see the movie as they said fuck and there were blurry naked people in ponds and shit and it was rated R. But I heard the music on late night FM radio. I bought the double album because I needed to hear Hendrix play the anthem and The Airplane play Volunteers and The Who play See Me Feel Me. But what I heard on that album changed my musical life. It was a band of 4 dudes I'd never heard of. And the first rap "3 days man" and "49 65 Hike" and then came the opening chords of Suite Judy Blue Eyes and then the banter "this is only the 2nd time we've played in front of people man"  and "We're scared shitless".The harmonies that blew my mind. I was freakin hooked forever. The sweet sweet harmonies have never been matched and now never will be heard again except on vinyl and in my memories.

David Crosby died way beyond his years yesterday. He made it to 81 despite the drugs and the booze and the paranoia and the prison time which he took like a stand up guy. But  David Crosby , though true to himself, never realized how to be true to others. He was a cantankerous old man even at age  25. His way or the highway and most of the time it was the highway. Others couldn't stomach his ego and his disdain for how others chose to live. Crosby was about the music and that's about it. Relating to others was not in his wheelhouse and he didnt even try to change. His band mates, Stills, Nash, Young hated him. His other band mates in the Byrds hated him. Most of the time that is. But when they buried the hatchet, the music flowed and it was wonderful.

I heard Crosby on a local radio show once, in town with his son to play a local venue and he was not a nice man. He condescended to the host so badly I couldn't bring myself to go though he was one of my heroes. 

Later during a time of reconciliation, I did manage to see CS&N in Lincoln with Max. He knew how much I loved them and how happy I was during that concert. We left to beat traffic and Max almost insisted we go back in because Teach Your Children was being played. We stopped and listened to the whole thing in the parking lot. 

Look these people keep fucking dying on us. They live forever on records and streaming but it's not the same. I want them alive even if they can't sing. CS&N could always sing and I will miss David sorely. His sweet voice and his unique look. His Almost Cut My Hair let the freak flag fly. Keep flying David.

(PS speaking of that Woodstock album, I once came home and found my mother listening to it and being "disgusted" by the Hendrix anthem. LOL...it made me love it even more!)

Drag Queens Named Kitara!

I have nothing against drag queens. Some of my best friends are drag queens. Well full disclosure I knew of 3 back in the 90s and they were fine folks I worked with. Drag queens are fun. Drag Queens are a hoot. Drag Queens are Mrs Doubtfire and The Birdcage and Some Like It Hot and Priscilla and Hedwig etc... Hell they filmed a movie here at the New Tower (hoo boy that place in Omaha history) with macho men like Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo and it was a scream. 

But the Republican Party has declared war on drag queens with their bullshit about "groomers" and Pizza Gate and all that crap while gladly accepting cash from real "groomers" like the NRA, the Catholic Church or the Evangelical churches. Real groomers who teach children to carry guns like a real man, to shut the fuck up when Father Handsy diddles you or youth pastor Clay decides to take you into the woods for some real outdoorsy shit like camping and nighttime rape. But to the GOP, the mere thought of a guy dressed as an exaggerated woman with a HUGE personality and the ability to read to your illiterate children is somehow "grooming" them to become sexual victims at a later date says more about what the GOP has stirring around in that porridge in their head than it does about anything to do with just plain fun. How DARE you stir up feelings inside of me I don't like to have!!!

Well anyway, serial liar and dog killer George Santos Devolder Kitara Zabrovsky and GOP congressman apparently has one of those pasts. Kitara Ravache may or may not have been George Santos' drag name but nonetheless, if it was, that may be the most honest and fun thing this lump of soiled underwear has even done. Santos lied about 9/11 and lied about the Holocaust and scammed people out of money allegedly meant to save sick dogs and those are just the tip of the iceberg. But the spinless coward Kevin McCarthy needed to vote and did nothing about it, in fact justified it and seated this liar on committees. But this thing, if true, the whole Kitara Ravache drag queen deal is a bridge too far for these bigots in DC who run the Republican Party. George Santos is.....ta dahhhh......a "groomer".

The despicable lies and scams and other shit, not enough for the GOP to care about as long as they had his vote, may not matter to them. But drag queens? Oh the horror!

Meanwhile here in the heartland we have a state senator named Dave Murman. He is from some dying county of farm folks and genetic Republicans and he has stepped right into protecting Nebraska's children, most of whom will flee this backward ass state as soon as they reach the age of reason. Murman has introduced a bill to forbid people under 19 from attending drag shows. He also got up to say he cannot understand how anyone would be against his "common sense" bill. Well, Dave, common sense got nuthin to do with you because you also introduced a bill to give parents control over what their little darlings are taught in public schools, which by the way they already do. But Murman is a clown and clown gotta clown . 

Meanwhile State Senator and Pete Ricketts puppet, Kathleen Kauth, has introduced the GOP mandatory bills outlawing gender altering surgery for those  under 19 and the even more mandatory forbidding trans gender males from competing against their poor girls in sports. Now here there are a grand total of ZERO trans males competing in girls sports and NO CASES of gender altering surgery in folks under 19 but Kauth doesnt care about reality. She's another hateful bigot that claims well since there are no cases, why not just pass my bills , its just "common sense".

Yeah its gotten so bad here with the crazies crawling out from under the Nebraska Nice rocks they've lived under for years that State Senator Danielle Conrad, a former head of the ACLU (yeah we have that here) stood up and called for adjournment SINE DIE, which means adjourn the whole goddamned legislative session forever. Yeah it lost but it got 7 votes from equally pissed off members. This nonsense has been mostly avoided here over the last few years.

How about adjourning the whole GOP, SINE DIE.

15th Time Is Just What We Wanted!

 Watching C Span on a Friday night shows how old I am (actually I've done that at age 30 because I'm a huge loser nerd). The McCarthy chronicles had gone on for 4 days. Time after time a band of fascists had thwarted this spineless weasel's life mission to become Speaker. I mean this guy wanted to stand there with a giant prop gavel since he was a younger invertebrate cheating on his wife.

The Monday thru Thursday drama was good enough but Friday was primo. Time after time I waited for that moment when Reps Cloud and Clyde would stick a fork in the hopes and dreams of an insane man who never got sick of being humiliated. The nominating speeches were not so much hey this guy McCarthy is one righteous dude but more of a gang of unknown star fuckers trying to make name for themselves as Tracy Flick  Elise Stefanik sat there marking down the vote with her #2 pencil and Big Chief tablet. Once we got into the 8s 9s 10s of nominating speeches it was getting thin and we were getting the likes of Arkansas nobody French Hill (real name) yapping about how the last time the Speakers vote went this long it turned out really hot dawg because the 1923 GOP finally got together to further the wonderful supply side policies of Calvin Coolidge, the architect of the Great Depression. Hill is a bad historian, a bad congressman and probably a bad christian.

On Friday you could see the cracks in the Crazy Caucus starting. Vote 12 was the first time the kooks lost a few holdouts who were promised something, probably the permission to attend cockfights or something. Steve Kornacki starts hopping around anticipating excitement (Kornacki earlier had said of the holdouts listed on his board "look at these fuh....guys here ! No Steve ...fuckers was right)

Vote 13 began after Rep James Comer of Kentucky, accused woman beater and abortion funder, nominated I think McCarthy by ranting about Fauci and Hunter Biden for 5 minutes and after the Jeffries nomination nobody stood up to nominate the Unabomber or somebody. Uh oh, this is it. But still Kevin "Harold Stassen" McCarthy somehow lost yet again.

Adjournment till 9pm CST when I will turn it back from whatever other nerd show I'm watching. Vote 14 begins and news networks are geeking out that McCarthy has made deals with Colorado cooze Lauren Boebert and Florida teen enthusiast Matt Gaetz and this will be the 14th time is a charm moment. But they screw him one last time. McCarthy gets all butthurt and scrambles up the aisle to confront the two mean kids from recess who turned out to be "white guy givers" and lied. 

McCarthy points his finger a lot and expresses his concern that it might be a shame if Gaetz's venmo became public or if Boeberts client list was accidentally released (pure speculation) at which point McCarthy turns and leaves the rest of the threat to Alabama Mob Enforcer Mike Rogers who lunges at Gaetz almost losing that thing on his head and is pulled back by the designated peacemaker. At this point Gaetz folds like the pussy he is and somehow on the 15th vote Kevin McCarthy wins the chair and brand changer Marjorie Taylor Greene rushes down for a selfie making it even creepier.

What the promises made were made are unknown at this time but whatever they were are not good for people, pets, seniors, Ukrainians, children, Jews, minorities, women, Canadians, gays,sick people, voters, vets, or mankind. 

It will be good for Pharma, defense contractors, covid,  viruses we don't know about, Russians, Brazilian fascists, American fascists, thugs, bigots, haters, diabetes, mass murderers, militias, dumb white men, and Armageddon.

Buckle up. 

Damar Hamlin & The NFL!!

 I did not see it live as since the invention of Red Zone I cannot watch an entire NFL football game. I was watching Kindred(so good).When I turned it over and saw the ambulance on the field, the players on their haunches praying, the fans silent, the announcers acting as if someone had died and Damar Hamlin being taken to the hospital I couldn't stop watching. This was literally hours after a college bowl game where two helmets collided and I said out loud "Football has become too fucking dangerous" and suggested the old leather helmet solution. As I age, I hate the game more and more.

Damar Hamlin is by all accounts one helluva man at age 24. I hope he gets well, so well he plays again if that's what he wants. I also hope his annual Toy Drive to get poor children new toys for Christmas gets even bigger with its 6 Million dollars in pledges. That night should have been all about the player who had suffered cardiac arrest and almost died on a field but lets face it. This is America and all that matters to the NFL is business. Money.

The NFL played games in 1963 two days after the assassination of John Kennedy because "he would have wanted it that way" . And Monday night, even though the NFL now denies it, the announcers stated the NFL would give the players 5 minutes to warm up and the the game would resume because there's money to be made. If the NFL did not say that, well then ESPN announcers and Joe Buck are lying? Of course they said that, why else would it be a thing?

But then something happened I never thought I'd see. Instead of meekly complying and saying yes sir as is the trend has been for oh 100 years. Zac Taylor, the Bengal coach, waved his hands and ran across the field to speak with Bills coach Sean McDermott  where I assume the conversation went something along the lines of we aren't fucking playing are you fucking playing? To which I assume McDermott said fuck no we aren't playing. And at that point something happened that had never happened before. The players had the upper hand and they used it. The game was suspended by the league. I cannot say for sure or not if the NFL asked fans with football experience to scab in and play the rest of the game. Player power can only get better from here right?

The NFL is truly a monster out of control fed by millions of people who love it because its played on Sunday or once a week or it's easy to gamble on. I like it a lot also, I admit it. Red Zone changed my life for the better. I am not a slave to the networks who force me to watch the game between the Eagles and the Washingtons because the Packers or the Bears suck. But there's not a doubt in my mind that if it had been up to the NFL, Damar Hamlin would have been dragged off the field like a fallen gladiator and the game would have immediately resumed with a replacement gladiator. Yes that's how much I hate the NFL while at the same time feed it more and more money. Yeah we are all hypocrites. Life is that way most of the time. 

Get well Damar Hamilton. The world is better off with you in it, football or not.

PS---to the thousands of sub human trash that used this near tragedy to push forward your insane anti vax horseshit....Go fuck yourselves with a gigantic needle full of feces. 

Six!

Hey look I love the seasons of Girls 5 Eva as they were funny, relevant and the tunes were poppy. Did I mention funny? The touring musical Six came to town this week intent on making every teen aged girls week. After years of Tik Tok videos of virtually every song in this show being lip synced by teenagers, the show is here. And the Orpheum Theater was full of teens and their Moms and me...a sixty something year old man. This is not going to go well for me.

Six is a musical about the six wives of Henry VIII....."herstory"...divorced.. beheaded.. died.. divorced.. beheaded...survived starts it all off. You can tell from the get go that this is energized for a young audience, an audience who loves Ariana Grande, Beyonce, Sia, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez and the rest of the auto tuned wonders of the present day. The lights, the all female band, more lights, and lots of dancing. It rouses the crowd from the outset sending the teens into a frenzy. The screeching and loud reactions to the most mundane of events is cool to see from a distance, it's kind of like observing a strange society you are not a part of any longer. Hey look I'm an old guy and the dance techno songs with indecipherable lyrics were just not getting to me at all. 

And then "Jane Seymour", wife 3,  does what we used to call a power ballad. And she soars. And I am back in. But then it goes back to the energetic enthusiasm met by more screeches and sending me back into old man land.

Hey look, I've put up with a lot of shit I didn't want to go to over the years to please the kid. And the Moms who took their daughters to this Tik Tok flavored musical deserve credit. The kids loved it, I'm sure many of the Moms did also.

I didn't hate it. It was what it was. Not geared to me. But there's no denying there's lots of talent on that stage. Say who picked up Girls 5 Eva anyway?

The House Shitshow!

 I sat there all day watching this spineless worm, Kevin McCarthy, get kicked in the nuts 3 times which was 2 times too many. The Speaker of the House vote was scheduled for today. Kevin McCarthy, a "leader" who called Trump out for attempting to kill him with his unleashed trash back on Jan 6th, 2021 and then jetted to Mar A Lago to apologize to the Thug in Chief, is "popular" with about 90% of House Republicans. By popular I mean he doesn't make them throw up at the sight of him ,but there is a good portion, perhaps 10% of the House Repelicans who hate the guy. Hate the sight of him.Think he's the epitome of what they call the swamp. And though for 4 years the very swamp the crazy fuckers who make up the "Freedom Caucus" pretend to hate was made even swampier by the Reptile in Chief, these nutty nitwits continue to live in a deluded state of madness.

This whole Speaker thing is just so convoluted. While the wacky Democrats are united behind a guy who can't win, Hakeem Jeffries, the Republicans are all over the board. Instead of just doing what Republicans normally do and fall in line, they cannot give up the Old Man. The guy who almost brought a nation down with a coup attempt helped along by this bunch of babbling bums endorsed the establishment guy McCarthy. The Representative from Mars, MTG, endorsed McCarthy because being the gutless scum he is, he probably promised her she could investigate Jewish space lasers or some such shit. But despite the crazy endorsements of Trump and Greene, the Boeberts and Gaetz's and the Roys and the Biggs' and the Gosars, HEY WAIT thats 5 defections. Without those 5 plus as it turned out 15 more McCarthy was rebuffed. He didnt even get as many votes as Jeffries. Yet getting racked seemed to be appealing to the invertebrate McCarthy and he just turned around and inexplicably did it 3 times. 

Goddamned right it was entertaining. Even after Jim Jordan stood there and said STOP voting for me they continued to do so. Hilarious.

And the back stabbing Elise Stefanik stood there with  resting sad face while smoldering inside that her path to power was being cleared and her dreams of going from Harvard educated moderate to full on MAGA warrior Speaker of the House were in sight. She aint sleeping tonite folks, she's plotting.