Hammer Mill Days

Mmmbbgh. fffmmmprphhh dblffffmmmbfff. mmfmnfb! Okay, okay... so I'll stop dictating. Awfully hard to make yourself understood with a sweaty bandana tied over your gob. Must... reach.... ENTER... key.... nnghh.... There ! New paragraph. Hello again, Big Green aficionados, and welcome to another installment of Hammer Mill Days, that mentally fractured, unspeakably pointless journal of our travels from nowhere to nowhere fast. As many of you may recall, we were in the process of hitchhiking our way across the placid countryside of upstate New York, towards our adopted homestead a.k.a. the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, when the lot of us were cruelly abducted, bound, gagged, and stuffed into the back of a panel van. That's the bad news. The good news is that I think we're traveling in the right direction... and we're making pretty good time. Now... that ENTER key again... nnnghh... (click!) Yes! As you can well imagine, this has been a bit of a morale-buster, what with ...

The ample-assed "brain" of Dubya, Karl Rove, announced his departure from the White House this week, and the air waves were thick with pundit-wisdom on this supposed genius of the modern political arena. How easily public figures earn such designations. I always think of Henry Kissinger, hailed in his time as a brilliant geostrategist and practitioner of cold war realpolitik, whose ham-fisted policy of stalemate in the middle east contributed very substantially to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (not to mention the continuing disaster in Israel/Palestine) and whose Nobel Prize-winning Paris Peace Accord was sabotaged by the man himself before the ink was dry. Rove's reputation is similarly inflated, and we often hear about his meticulous district-by-district, precinct-by-precinct analysis, his get out the vote strategies, etc., but honestly - what did the guy really accomplish? He basically lost the 2000 election against Gore, who was about as flat-footed a cand...