"I did not want my tombstone to read..."

"...'She kept a really clean house.'


I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, 'She opened government to everyone'."


As you wish, Madam Governor.


Go with God.

"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"

The Twilight Zone episode Keith Olbermann mentioned in last night's Countdown -- you can see his entire commentary at the bottom of my most previous posting here -- is really worth examining in more detail as cogent and timely.

You can read the Wiki, but it's probably best if you go down to your local video store -- not Blockbuster -- and get a copy to watch.

First a nostalgic digression: two of the stars of this masterpiece were Claude Akins and Jack Weston, hard-working and known-to-you character actors from the Fifties through the Eighties.

Claude Akins had a nearly immortal television career as a bit player. With a face like a stop sign (that had been hit a few times with a baseball bat), Akins was a staple of my adolescent teevee diet. He actually made appearances in two of the greatest movies ever made prior to his cameo in a George Reeves-Superman episode two years before I was born. He was a Western regular as both Indian and white man and a beat cop often, a detective occasionally, and a bad guy frequently. He appeared three times each in "My Friend Flicka", "The Rifleman", and "Tales of Wells Fargo". The same year he filmed "Monsters", 1960, he played Rev. Jeremiah Brown in Inherit the Wind. He was in "The Untouchables", Laramie, Rawhide, Laredo, and "Gunsmoke." He made the rounds to "Love, American Style", "Mission: Impossible", Barnaby Jones, Marcus Welby MD, McCloud, Mannix, Cannon, "Streets of San Francisco" and "Police Story". But his starring role came in a spinoff from "BJ and the Bear" -- "The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo", in 1979. This review of the show is priceless:

...without a doubt the worst television series to be renewed for a second season. Critics said that Lobo must be short for lobotomy. To admit to have watched Sheriff Lobo is to admit that you watched way too much television back then. However, Sheriff Lobo had the clout to get Playboy's 25th Anniversary Playmate Candy Loving as guest star, but even she couldn't save it from cancellation.

I was in lust with Candy Loving back in the day (warning: not employer-safe).

Jack Weston played a host of neurotic characters, from "Perry Mason" to Please Don't Eat the Daisies to Bob Hope's Chrysler Theatre. I remember him best in Dirty Dancing as Catskills resort owner Max Kellerman, and in The Four Seasons as dentist Danny Zimmer, whose prized Mercedes falls through a frozen lake when his wife, played by Rita Moreno (completely imponderable), drives out on it to save him.

This was perhaps the beginning of the TV trend that saw fat balding jerks married to ultra-hotties (first wives, not trophy wives). Ever noticed?

And now back to George Bush's Twilight Zone.

If you haven't already deciphered the subtext of "Monsters", allow me to quote the aliens on the hill, who have manipulated the appliances on Maple Street and created the panic:

"Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines...throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it's themselves."

And the closing narration by Rod Serling:

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."

Yeah, Dick Cheney as Alfred Hitchcock. The real terrorists are in the White House.

Gitmo prisoner discovered at Disneyland

When we arrived last Wednesday in the Emerald City, we caught a limo to dinner at this place, which was renowned for the view but not so much the food. My halibut crowned with crabmeat (hold the bearnaise) was excellent however, as was Sue's alderwood-planked salmon. Some small asparagus spears sliced half-inch size mingled with the garlic-smashed potatoes underneath my fish, and that was scrumptious as well.

My reading on the plane was Greg Palast -- in the previous post I told his joke -- and here's a little more from Armed Madhouse:

I'm going to tell you something which is straight-up heresy: America is not under attack by terrorists. There is no war on terror because, except for one day five years ago, al-Qaeda has pretty much left us alone.

That's because Osama got what he wanted. There's no mystery about what al-Qaeda was after. Like everyone from the Girl Scouts to Bono, Osama put his wish on his website. He had a single demand: "Crusaders out of the land of the two Holy Places." To translate: get US troops out of Saudi Arabia.

And George Bush gave it to him. On April 29, 2003, two days before landing on the aircraft carrier Lincoln, our self-described "War President" quietly put out a notice that he was withdrawing our troops from Saudi soil. In other words, our cowering cowboy gave in whimpering to Osama's demand.

The press took no note. They were all wiggie over Bush's waddling around the carrier deck in a disco-aged jumpsuit announcing, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED." But it wasn't America’s mission that was accomplished, it was Osama's.

Am I saying there's no danger, no threat? Sure there is: 46 million Americans don't have health insurance. IBM is legally stealing from its employees’ pension plan and United Airlines has dumped its pensions altogether. Four million three hundred thousand Americans were injured, made sick or killed by their jobs last year. TXU Corporation is right now building four monster-sized power plants in Texas that will burn skuzzy gunk called "lignite." The filth it will pour into the sky will snuff a heck of a lot more Americans than some goofy group of fanatics with bottles of hydrogen peroxide.

But Americans don't ask for real protection from what's killing us. The War on Terror is the Weapon of Mass Distraction. Instead of demanding health insurance, we have 59 million of our fellow citizens pooping in their pants with fear of al-Qaeda, waddling to the polls crying, "Georgie save us!"

On Thursday we went to Mount Rainier, took a nice hike to see the glacier, had a salmon burger and drank a Moose Drool. Friday we bumped around at the Pike Place Market and watched the fellas sling the fresh catch, and Saturday we went to see the Rangers play the Mariners at Safeco Field. The game went extra innings but we had long gone to eat sushi, not having lost our appetites over the UT-OSU debacle.

That's it for our little anniversary trip.

Still wondering about the headline of this post? ABC/Disney really showed their ass. Go watch some Keith Olbermann telling the truth instead...