CALLISTA COMES CLEAN

Honestly, I had misgivings when Newt suggested that we enter an open marriage. I mean, from the beginning, 1993, we already sort of had one, because of his conjugal obligations to his wife. But then he explained to me that men, and to a much, much, much lesser extent women, (given that females don’t desire raw sex so much as emotional bonding because in pre-history we women were too busy nursing infants to defend ourselves, so we needed men to fight off wild animals and share meat, two things men simply will not do without a strong emotional bond, which for some reason made our genes less interested in sex; I forget why)… Where was…?

Oh: Men, he said, are genetically designed to need a variety of partners in order to keep performing. (It’s called the Coolidge Effect. He made me Google it.) So, therefore, it would be in my interest both as his wife and as a champion of stable marriages to let him rack up a bunch of performance-enhancing encounters without my making too much of a fuss. If I’d agree, both to the open marriage and to endless hours of looking very sleek and First Ladyish, standing stock still beside him while he seeks Highest Office, he’d leave his fussy wife, marry me, and protect me from tigers.

I’ll be frank with you: if he had asked me to be a sister wife to Marianne, I’d have flat-out refused. M. didn’t have the looks or the drive to be a president’s helpmeet, and after he requested her permission to go on seeing me, she got too kind-of angry to be a campaign asset. She’s the sort of woman who hates any woman better looking, better put-together and eight years younger than she is. (A lot of women are like that, which is why I think only men should be priests.)

Luckily, though, Newt didn’t want to be any sort of bigamist Mormon. He just wanted to be able to offer me marital satisfaction, and since he’s twenty three years my senior, I figured that a bit of performance-enhancing couldn’t hurt. So: what I told him was, I’d accept his offer of an open marriage on condition that he convert to Catholicism.

Deal! When he went for indoctrination, the priest explained that our adultery condemns us to Hell, which is like a full-body bikini wax that lasts for all eternity. Once Newt is president, I’ll push him to make the Supreme Court appointment that overturns Roe v. Wade, thus saving hundreds of thousands of unwanted babies every year that good Christians can adopt, then raise and train to wage holy war against Islam. Maybe then God will let us into Heaven. I can’t help it: I have a strategic mind.

But you don’t decide to marry with your head; you decide with your heart. And you know what moved me to become Mrs. Gingrich? Newt’s lifelong fascination with dinosaurs! First of all, how adorable is that? Dinosaurs! And second, you know, sometimes I get insecure in bed and think I look a little, well, reptilian, but knowing that my husband can love that side of me sets me free. I think it might even give me the confidence I’d need to experience pleasure with someone as handsome as Mitt Romney.

So I guess it’s my destiny to be a little more sophisticated about marriage than I’d like, but nobody ever said that serving your country would be a church picnic. And if you want to know the truth…

Well, none of us do; not really, do we.

©Lynn Phillips 2012

Kyrgyzstan: Prisoners Sew Mouths Shut in Protest

“More than a thousand convicts have stitched their mouths closed to protest prison conditions, a prison official said Friday. The protest…escalates a two-week hunger strike involving most of the country’s 7,500 inmates. A prison service spokeswoman said that about 6,400 prisoners were on a hunger strike nationwide and 1,175 had sewn their mouths shut. . . “

…but their mouths are not as tightly shut as ours are about “The Caging of America.”

Please take the time to read this excellent survey piece of Adam Gopnik’s at the New Yorker.

I’ve read these horrendous facts about our prison system too many times, and they make me feel paralyzed with horror. Maybe the solution is to go on a diet?

Unfortunately, our millions of prison graduates are not in a position to represent themselves. For one thing, felons can’t vote, and for another, poor people, disproportionately don’t, on top of which many states are doing their best to disenfranchise those who do. Without a strong voting block in support of reform, it’s hard to make authorities understand that changing our law enforcement, judicial and correctional systems is in their interest. Besides, so many “innocent” people are hurting and in need of aid, legislative support, legal reform and media attention that the incarcerated is unlikely to be one of the majority’s priorities. I despair of finding a strategy to alter our penal system.

Maybe we can all pick a day to wear temporary “My mouth is stitched closed” tattoos. Ash Wednesday (February 22nd) would be good. A call for a system that distributes justice as well as law, and mercy as well as retribution. It’s also a good week to begin the bikini diet to get beach ready by June.

Wanting to clarify a past article written by Elena Kagan which called Supreme Court confirmation hearings “a hollow, vapid charade”, several senators went on the attack on the first day of her own hearings, gesticulating wildly, pulling on their ears, and pointing at their eyes as they desperately tried to convey their meaning.

Senator Orrin Hatch brought out a dusty old dictionary and laboriously gestured through the definitions of “hollow”, demanding to know which she meant: “having a cavity” (he cupped his hands)“having a depression” (looked very unhappy) “without worth” (pretended to have no job and inject drugs) “having an empty feeling” (pretended to disembowel himself – faint cheers from the gallery), or “a valley” (He never managed to convey this. Everyone agreed it was a very hard one)

Ms Kagan gestured back that she meant “without worth”, by mimicking the Senator’s shooting drugs move, which brought frowns to the faces of everyone in the room, both because she was saying the hearings were worthless, and because even faked drug use in the Capitol made people uneasy. When Ms. Kagan tried to convey that the comment had been taken out of context, no one quite got it despite her balletic contortions, though there were some who motioned that they thought people were being willfully ignorant.

Patrick Leahy then took the floor to demonstrate the meaning of “vapid” – “without liveliness or spirit” – and everyone got it before he made a move. Ms. Kagan signaled that this was indeed the meaning she meant to convey with the comment, bringing another round of exaggerated frowns to everyone in the room.

Joe Barton had considerable difficulty signaling the word “charade”, for which difficulty he mimed an expression of apology, but he was much helped by people already knowing the word charade was coming, though some made crazy, disdainful expressions that suggested that people were feigning not getting it for a while just to punish him for his excessive and somewhat gay affection for BP while everyone else wants to pointlessly vilify them.

Having confirmed what Ms Kagan meant by her comment – what she said – an intermission was called for by signaling eating chex mix and talking about their pets, their lawns, and their children who have handcuffed themselves to their beds to avoid looking for a job.

Scot Crawford

Senator Orrin Hatch has raised some controversy in Washington over his proposal to force people receiving unemployment to submit to drug tests, and if found positive, to withhold benefits and then put those people into treatment. Then, all that money saved from withholding money from those people could be used to pay the new people required to administer the tests. Mr. Hatch has gone himself one better and suggested that the states hire the people who fail the drug tests to administer the drug tests, adding an important element of job training to the formula, and tying the whole thing up in a neat bow, like a gift from the GOP.

The move is part of Mr. Hatch comprehensive plan to alleviate the unemployment problem the nation faces, which plan includes not extending benefits for those whose allotted time has run out, since they should have planned for the future and set some of those benefits aside for this moment. This will lower the unemployment rate because many of those people will simply kill themselves, and the rest can be hired to carry the corpses to a Potter’s ground. Some will sit down somewhere and get high until they’ve sold all they own, then recover with a bout of entreprenurial spirit arising from the power of soul shattering desperation.

He also has suggested reducing the amount of time people qualify for benefits to three days. Also, since the drug testing proposal does away with any search and seizure concerns, he has suggested subjecting them to waterboarding to determine if they have committed a crime, had thought about it, were a terrorist trying to finance an operation with the hard-earned money of American what-used-to-be workers, or if they had really spent every single day looking for a job for eight hours with a half hour lunch and two fifteen minute breaks in an economy where there are no jobs.

When some question the wisdom of taking the only source of income away from people who in theory have a drug problem, Mr. Hatch said; “I have been to those drug treatment centers, and I will tell you, there are none who are more true to the American ethos of rugged individualism than those broke and broken people sitting there in a cloud of despair. They will pick themselves up, beat the odds with God at their side, and be back in the saddle rustlin’ doggies before you can pull your pistol. Anyway, they don’t have to pay to sit in an AA meeting, unless you count those donations, but I think those are voluntary.”

Mr. Hatch also offered to submit to drug testing himself, to show solidarity with the unemployed and under the notion that the economy crashed on his watch, but the pharmaceutical industry objected, saying Mr. Hatch and all three tablespoons of his blood was proprietary and testing him would bring up intellectual property issues.

Mr. Hatch also noted that is important to always have the citizenry terrified that the tiny but wildly efficient government is going to show up at the door with needles looking for blood.  “Keeps ‘em on their knees…I mean toes…”

Scot Crawford

After Tony Hayward’s latest gaffe, in which he claimed the Gulf Coast brown pelicans weren’t bothered by the oil because they’re already brown, BP has offered huge incentives to anyone who will deal with the oil spill, including giving them Ireland.

No one immediately started clamoring for the job, but there are reports that the Israel Defense Forces have expressed interest.  Some have speculated that Israel wants Ireland as a potential first colony, thinking that the shared history of persecution would be fertile ground for a new infinite conflict.

Benjamin Netanyahu said that his elite forces were perhaps the only ones capable of stopping the oil, by rappelling into the pipe and overreacting as hard as they can out of irritatingly justifiable sanctimony and a rightful suspicion that the oil is anti-Semitic. That, plus the pressure of uncontrollably gushing international condemnation from anti-Semites with short memories and no taste for history could very well overwhelm the oil coming out at 5,000 psi, and blow it out the other side of the globe. There, Israel could then sequester the oil for its own uses, freeing it from the need to buy anti-Semitic oil from anyone and everyone who has any, including Hamas when one of their IDF tanks runs out of gas in Gaza.

BP is weighing it’s options, including appointing Helen Thomas new spokesperson.

Scot Crawford

BP, the energy giant responsible for the Gulf oil spill, has finally hit upon a clean-up and capping plan they claim is much more feasible than trying to fill the hole with golf balls, now that Tiger Woods has hurt himself.

Noting that Greece is in a financial bind these days and that the Greek people are famously hirsute, and that the hair socks sent to the Gulf from salons around the world have protected the Gulf wetlands like the levees protected New Orleans, BP has floated the following proposal to the Prime Minister of Greece: If Greece will send its citizens to swim in the Gulf for as long as it takes to soak up the oil, BP will pay down the beleaguered nation’s debt, promise not to drill for oil off Greek shores, and return some of the antiquities taken by the British over the years. The people will be squeegee’d off to collect the oil for refining, and the well will be allowed to gush until it runs dry on its own. This will mean that there will be no need for future drilling, the field being dry, and no risk of future oil spills.

Initial responses to the proposal were subdued, with the Greek Prime Minister noting frostily; “It is the Turks that are really hairy. Have the barbarians at BP never heard the phrase; ‘he has a body like a Greek god’? Does ‘The Discus Thrower’ have fur?”

The Turkish Ambassador said that he was surprised the Greeks said anything without hiding in a horse first.

BP is now considering withdrawing the proposal, not wanting a blood spill to get out of control in the Mediterranean before they have the technology to cap it.

                                                                                                                                            Scot Crawford

“The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” by Maggie Cutler ran as a biweekly (and later a monthly) column from November, 1999 through January, 2002 in the Web-based literary magazine (and subsequent dating service) nerve.com. The column’s premise was that Kitty, like the rest of America, could not pry sex and politics apart.

It was the height of the dot.com bubble. Kitty was spending her days trading online in the loft she shared with her documentary filmmaking husband, Max. At lunchtime, while cruising news and gossip sites, she would get so excited, she’d have to lie down on her red plush couch and fantasize graphically about being as close to power as a girl can be, which was usually closer than girls who have all their clothes on can ever get.

The column also ran in Nerve Magazine, nerve.com’s shortlived foray into print. When HBO made a documentary pilot about nerve.com, it included a two minute animated short starring Kitty as drawn by Ward Sutton, whose strip, Sutton Impact, is now widely syndicated. His version of Kitty appears in her logos. HBO’s pilot aired under the title, “Downloading Sex,” and was played frequently during the hours of the night when children and snakes are presumed to be asleep.

Kitty began her career at the height of Monicagate. Republican hypocrisy on the subject of fucking underlings was either hilarious or spikes-in-your-head-like, depending on your own personal way of handlng government duplicity.

Many people thought the column was simply pornographic, only I was never one of them. Kitty got me hot, but not in that way. All 40 some-odd of the Kitty columns were extensively researched via Nexis, and a surprising amount of the erotic content in them was extracted or extrapolated from the way media were framing events. The image of Dick Cheney as an octopus, for example, a fleshopod with slimy, over-active tentacles, came straight off of CNN. John Ashcroft’s ties were big and phallic enough to frighten horses without any help from me, and women who had any proximity to powerful men — whether as wives, daughters or appointees, were treated to endless speculation as to their sexual preferences. I saw sex being used by the mass media as a distraction from serious issues, and I was trying to turn that around.

Then, after 9-11, many people called a moratorium on humor. Kitty’s fantasy about Osama bin Laden, for example, was decreed “offensive” — and was published carrying a disclaimer by several editors at nerve. It didn’t seem to matter that Kitty fantasized capturing Osama after she had her way with him; to them she had stepped over the enemy line just by imagining him as human. Clearly, the terrorists had won.

For that, and various other reasons, the “fit” for Ms. Lyons at nerve.com was no longer juicy, and, (although all the columns are archived there, still accessible to members) she went into exile, surfacing only briefly in a theatrical review entitled “No Exit Strategy,” directed by Steve Williford at Makor in the pre-election fall of 2004, in which Cynthia Mace brought Kitty’s Ashcroft fantasy to a nightly pitch of ecstasy.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m bringing Kitty back at this particular moment. These are not sexy times, although sex seems to remain at the top of the political agenda, albeit in the topmost half of the missionary position. But I think it’s because Kitty is so clever at turning her pain and her helplessness into her pleasure — however momentarily or foolishly— that I still find her touching and germane.

I will gradually put selected columns from my archive up online in clumps of three or four. I’m grouping them by the type of her imaginary playmates rather than by chronology. The new episodes in Kitty’s life will appear irregularly in the main pages of the Shackle Report under the banner “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa.”

— M. C.

Click here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive index

Click here for the new column, “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa”

BOOKS — ADDICTION LIT — CDs and DVDs — SMART-WEAR

SHOP YOURSELF INTO SUBMISSION

Not all shackles are undesirable. Not the ones we sell here, anyway.

Connect to Amazon.com through our site, and we get a little kickback from whatever you buy during that session. So, please bookmark this page, and click one of the books below to enter Amazon. Thanks.

Oh, BTW, the gentleman pictured above was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of Bristol, a brilliant 19th Century engineer. He is posed beside his ship, the SS Great Britain, the first large ocean liner to use a screw propeller. His proud irrelevance reminds us of our own.

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Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite – Latest Generation

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Self-loathing for Beginners

by Lynn Phillips

(If you’re going to do it, do it right.)

Self-Loathing for Beginners is a wickedly funny guide to appreciating self-loathing properly done. Whatever your current level of self-loathing expertise, SL4B will help you to style your self-loathing to succeed in fashion, show business, interpersonal relationships and art. And that is great news, because maximizing your self-loathing is a trend you’ll hate yourself if you miss.

Now available in Britain via Aurum Press Ltd. as I Can Make You Loathe Yourself

The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side

Clive Stafford Smith’s strangely charming memoir of his days defending detainees at the Guantanamo Bay gulag meanders into a real-life critique of pro-torture theory. Without ever fully defusing the logic of the “ticking bomb” rationale for torture, Smith reminds us in a civil, almost bemused way that this argument has little relevance to the reality of the cases he has seen. In the safety vs. justice debate, Smith’s argument amounts to: “Our safety will be procured by torturing men who, if they ever had any useful information, have it no longer? You’ve got to be kidding.”

The Dark Side

With the cheerful perversity of a forensic entomologist, Jane Mayer dissects the Bush administration’s dark materials. You can get a taste of her journalistic thoroughness and glee from her July 14th Harper’s interview. The main thrust of her investigation is into the illegality as well as the inefficacy of “The Program” as the fasces of Cheney’s sadistic interrogation policies are known. Mayer kicks ass and names names. A staff reporter for teh New Yorker since 1995, she has been filing regular reports on the war on terror since ’03, and a number of her pieces can be found on their site.
The Search for Osama — The Dark Sites — Outsourcing Torture — and more.

>Get Your War On

Without an inside track or an investigator’s skills, Rees cuts to the war’s quick. He’s clear-eyed, profane and funny. His computer-graphic everybodies, like us, find themselves sinking in quicksand; we know better than to struggle; but that doesn’t mean that we can’t complain. David Rees rocks.

Life Without Shackles

Sexy, loose, boozy, rich and notorious. What’s not to like about Ava? Well, okay, maybe her ex-husbands Mickey Rooney, Howard Hughes and Artie Shaw, or her other ex-husband and sparring partner, Frank Sinatra. But she’s all yours, now, thanks to Lee Server’s Ava Gardner : “Love Is NothingӅ. If you’re still hungry for large-living, dead icons, Server can also offer you his equally amusing bio: Robert Mitchum : “Baby I Don’t Care””. Server can’t conjure up the tabloid soul of Hollywood like Nathanial West in Day of the Locust, Bruce Wagner in The Chrysanthemum Palace, or Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon, but he’ll do well enough on a cloudy day, when you’re tired of counting the number of people who think dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

Torture 101

How best to celebrate this blessed new day than by giving your nostalgic uncles, sadistic bosses and boyishly morbid nephews a book all about the vile things people of every religion and clime have contrived to do to each other throughout history? Author Daniel P. Mannix was a frequent contributer to “True: The Man’s Magazine.”, and his prose style has that jokey but lurid twang men in the Fifties, who are now in their fifties, so loved. Before you wrap it, you might want to dip into it a bit yourself. Reading about bloody, genocidal Aztec sacrifices might help you understand what scale of discomfort your government is referencing when it claims it isn’t torturing detainees.

Cosmos-politan

If you’ve ever wondered whether the human mind is a sort of shackle all on its own, this is the book you can’t finish that thought without. It is a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic (40’s) excursion into the joys and pitfalls of obsessive paranoid narrative, the nearly universal impulse to imagine that one thing leads to another. Droll, sexy and smarter than a slap, Witold has accomplished the impossible and made serious philosophy fun. A pleasure and a charming antidote to every conspiracy theory on your list. Buy two. You’ll want one to cuddle with on snowy nights.

Torture, Ow!

Here we have a book that is everything we hope not to be: Self-serious, depressing and certain. But someone’s got to do it, and who better to edit a compendium of essays on torch-ah than than Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, the group that goosed McCain into falling out of goose-step with the administration on this issue. This is the perfect gift for all those on your gift list who would like to save the world, but need to be tortured into doing it.

Contributors include — Michael Ignatieff on whether torture is ever justified, Juan Méndez on the victim’s perspective, David Rieff on why the human rights community is naive about torture, Jamie Felner on domestic torture within US prisons, Sir Nigel Rodley on negotiating with torturers, Julia Hall on rendition to torturing countries, Jim Ross on the history of torture. Stop! Enough! Just buy it and give it away to the deserving.

test

…………….

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From the Times:

C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones

The role of [Blackwater] in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater.

—Or we’ll resilient your fucking ass.

In interviews on Thursday, current and former government officials provided new details about Blackwater’s association with the assassination program, which began in 2004 not long after Porter J. Goss took over at the C.I.A. The officials said that the spy agency did not dispatch the Blackwater executives with a “license to kill.” Instead, it ordered the contractors to begin collecting information on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s leaders, carry out surveillance and train for possible missions.

“The actual pulling of a trigger in some ways is the easiest part, and the part that requires the least expertise,” said one government official familiar with the canceled C.I.A. program. “It’s everything that leads up to it that’s the meat of the issue.”

—”I mean, we’re not gonna have the pathetic government drones with the great health care benefits and pension plans do the hard stuff. They’re not incentivized. They don’t have the fire in the belly. Anyway, the more the government gets involved with anything the worse it gets. You’ll have people waiting in lines, getting euthanized by beaurocrats sitting at computers… FREEEEEEDOOOOOM!”

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.

—Except to say; “What if Blackwater provides information on my whereabouts to a Predator?”

A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not respond to a request for comment.

—Because she doesn’t work for Blackwater. She works for Xe.

Blackwater employees assigned to the Predator bases receive training at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to learn how to load Hellfire missiles and laser-guided smart bombs on the drones, according to current and former employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting the company.

—I’m running out of things to say myself.

The role of contractors in intelligence work expanded after the Sept. 11 attacks, as spy agencies were forced to fill gaps created when their work forces were reduced during the 1990s, after the end of the cold war.

—Fucking Clinton. That fucking guy’s legacy just seems to have no end. Ten years after he leaves office and we’re still suffering his sickening pacifism.

More than a quarter of the intelligence community’s current work force is made up of contractors, carrying out missions like intelligence collection and analysis and, until recently, interrogation of terrorist suspects.

“There are skills we don’t have in government that we may have an immediate requirement for,” Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who ran the C.I.A. from 2006 until early this year, said during a panel discussion on Thursday on the privatization of intelligence.

—”Pulling triggers, that’s what we do. We practice on our fingers.”

General Hayden, who succeeded Mr. Goss at the agency, acknowledged that the C.I.A. program continued under his watch, though it was not a priority. He said the program was never prominent during his time at the C.I.A., which was one reason he did not believe that he had to notify Congress.

—”I mean, c’mon people it’s no big deal. It’s not like we were hiring mercenaries we pay many times what we pay our own agents to torture people and provide us with the intelligence we need to drop bombs on people. Just because mercenaries work for whoever pays them best is no reason to get all worried. We’ll just always outbid everyone. Relax.”

Some background…or blackground…or backwash…

[Blackwater] announced on February 13, 2009, that it would operate under the new name “Xe”. In a memo sent to employees, President Gary Jackson wrote that the new name “reflects the change in company focus away from the business of providing private security.” A spokesman for the company stated that it feels the Blackwater name is too closely associated with the company’s work in Iraq.[9] Spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said there was no meaning in the new name, which the company spent over a year to arrive at in an internal search.[10]

—They’re nihilists, and it took a year of internal searching to figure that out.