In politics, to quote Yogi Berra: You don’t know nothin’—and that goes double for the Know Nothing Party.
The Grand Old Party, formerly known as “Republican,” has now officially adopted the “Just Say No” mantra in a way that not even Nancy Reagan could be proud of.
Continue Reading Add comment February 9th, 2010
I once met a bigshot from Google who had decided, as bigshots so often do, that the rules of decorum no longer applied to his kind. In this case that meant Mr. Big decided that he no longer need to bother with capital letters in his emails.
Why? For the obvious reason: creating a capital letter requires an extra step, the ultimately unhip pressing of the shift key.
It struck me at the time as a seismic shift. If the bigshot at Google was no longer capitalizing “google,” could the end of civilization be that far behind? Like everyone else I have watched as texting on cell phones became its own language: wtf, where r u ? is not a bad starting point for this discussion, but to see the means of communications changing was not to know what it all meant.
Continue Reading Add comment February 4th, 2010
The charade pertaining to gays in the military—I love you, man!—is all but over, but in the meantime military apologists on the right and the left need never ask nor tell about the elephantiasis of untouchable defense spending.
Continue Reading 17 comments February 3rd, 2010
As a talk show host, I am immensely gratified by the political career path yapping portends. I could become a talking points talking head like Mike Pence, the Congressman from Indiana who cut his bleep filling radio frequencies in his home state. I could wallow in the footsteps of J.D. Hayworth, the conservative former Congressman now ready to spank John McCain because the former Republican Presidential nominee is not nearly conservative enough. Or, if folks get scared enough about whatever, I could fold up my tent like Lou Dobbs of CNN and migrate toward the Presidential race in 2012, mumbling all the way about the way things are s’posed to be.
Were I conservative, I would have much to run on, but the beauty of my campaign is I would never have to revert to the facts. Were I to run I would take my lead from Karl Rove: the architect himself chided those sadly limited to “fact-based” stratagems. Facts are stubborn thing, for sure, but only if you care about them. Once you leggo things that actually happened, you can run happily as a conservative until the internet gives way to the outernet—about the time being “weak on climate change” becomes a right-wing talking point in 2050.
As a talk show host, I am immensely gratified by the political career path yapping portends. I could become a talking points talking head like Mike Pence, the Congressman from Indiana who cut his bleep filling radio frequencies in his home state. I could wallow in the footsteps of J.D. Hayworth, the conservative former Congressman now ready to spank John McCain because the former Republican Presidential nominee is not nearly conservative enough. Or, if folks get scared enough about whatever, I could fold up my tent like Lou Dobbs of CNN and migrate toward the Presidential race in 2012, mumbling all the way about the way things are s’posed to be.
Were I conservative, I would have much to run on, but the beauty of my campaign is I would never have to revert to the facts. Were I to run I would take my lead from Karl Rove: the architect himself chided those sadly limited to “fact-based” stratagems. Facts are stubborn thing, for sure, but only if you care about them. Once you leggo things that actually happened, you can run happily as a conservative until the internet gives way to the outernet—about the time being “weak on climate change” becomes a right-wing talking point in 2050.
Continue Reading 2 comments February 2nd, 2010
The mutually orgasmic chortle of the cognoscenti missed the point about the announcement of the Apple iPad by a citified mile because a preponderance of yappers were obsessed with where said tablet fell in the pluperfect Apple pantheon of digital inamorata.
Was it cellphone or laptop? Would it set the Kindle aflame? Would it render all that had come before pale paleocentric imitations of what was meant to be?
Or is it just a beloved billing mechanism that newspapers, magazines, and movie-makers have been looking for since Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail?
In the rush to slobber over one’s self, the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions.
Continue Reading Add comment January 31st, 2010
Within one hour of skiing Powderhorn in Grand Mesa, Colorado, my wife said: “I love this place.”
This revelation is no small thing in our little world because my new bride—we married in May 2009—had lost her mojo when it came to skiing and I’m the one to blame. She had learned in Ohio before skiing Vermont, and she used to love it, and do it better than well, but as I grew slightly better and much more aggressive I would take her through ungroomed terrain that became the height of her misery and perhaps even a metaphor for our marriage.
After a year or two in Colorado, she stopped getting a pass and literally stopped skiing, with me shouldering plenty of blame for same.
Continue Reading Add comment January 30th, 2010
By January people where asking the obvious question, the question they've asked before under different circumstances: where in the world is Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis?
One source in local law enforcement said he was in Europe. Another said he'd been gone since Thanksgiving. But as per usual in the Sheriff's tenure, no one seemed exactly sure, and no one in the press seemed willing to ask.
Now we know and the news is not good. The Sheriff was indeed in Europe with his girlfriend, but upon his return he was hospitalized, in serious-enough condition to be put in intensive care in a Denver hospital.
Continue Reading Add comment January 25th, 2010
In the summer of 2007 I reported from the Aspen Institute upon the “Death Of Newspapers Greatly Exaggerated” as put forth by William Dean Singleton, the chief bottle-washer at MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury, and multiple other newspapers across the country.
Now comes the news of the bankruptcy filing of Affiliated Media Inc., the MediaNews holding company, in a Chapter 11 shuffle that means, according to Singleton’s official statement, that “current shareholders will be losing the value of their holdings.” That’s right: if you owned stock, you just got wiped out faster than you can say “ShamWow.”
Continue Reading Add comment January 18th, 2010
I decided over five years ago I was going to leave Andrew Kole alone, mainly because I thought he was harmless, small-minded, and insignificant. Unfortunately, though small-minded and insignificant, he is not harmless: the time has come to say that virtually everyone in Aspen agrees that Andrew Kole is an annoyance, a pest, and (much worse) a back-stabber. The number of people who can’t stand him could him an Aspen election twice over.
Totally by coincidence, twice in the past week two people came up to me in Parallel 15 and started to rant about him, with both whistling the same old tune: he acts nice to your face and then he stabs you in the back and then he acts like he can’t understand why you don’t like him.
Continue Reading 5 comments January 8th, 2010
A friend of mine was saying she had time listening to my putatively liberal radio talk show “Con Games” (KNFO 106.1 FM in Aspen, 95.5 in Vail) because I had changed my tone over the last year and was now ranting and raving at Republicans rather than strumming kumbaya around the campfire.
Her main complaint was that when I rage against the Republican machine, I am no longer talking about her, but about those spindle-fold-and-mutilate whack jobs who have built a shrine to Rush Limbaugh and other nattering nabobs of negativism. Ergo: she feels I am lumping her together with the lunatic fringe.
Funny how people think. Yes—I have actually changed my tone, but only since September 2009, little more than four months ago, after more than five years on the air. More to the point—and this was my point to her—I actually am blaming about her and other Republicans who consider themselves somehow “moderate.” One should feel uncomfortable when one’s feet are roasting on the barbie.
Continue Reading 1 comment January 6th, 2010
