Hammer Mill Days

Hey, Lincoln. No, not you , Anti-Lincoln - I mean your positively-charged doppelganger. Lincoln ... close that window, will you? It's freaking freezing in this barn. I don't care if you're practicing your big speech to an imaginary multitude in the courtyard. Do it in front of an imaginary open window! Yes, here we are ... Big Green is once more ensconced in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, where the Buffalo never roamed and where peregrine falcons coexist with Web cams (no lie!). We have re-occupied our decrepit squat house, wresting it back from the yahoos that took possession of it while we were out on our multi-planet tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . A triumphant return ... not . We've had better tours, to be sure. (And better interstellar tour buses. That recycled rocket was a real rattle trap from start to finish.) How did we convince the Cliven Bundy wanna-be's to lay down their weapons and let us back into...

Ladies and gentlemen, Cliven Bundy has spoken, and mainstream conservatives are now running for the exits. I use that term "conservative" in the very expansive sense that is in common usage now, descriptive of the type of "conservative" who appears to favor facing off against federal law enforcement officers with firearms. That's the kind of conservative we saw praising Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his militia-inspired neighbors as he took his somewhat bizarre and incoherent stand against the Bureau of Land Management. It was the classic reactionary fairy tale, and our friends at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, and Limbaugh central sucked it up with great relish and spewed it out over the airwaves so that everyone in America knew the name of this rambling, aged, white-hatted patriot. I'm no fan of extreme police tactics (like, for example, the violent dispersion of Occupy Wall Street), but pulling guns on federal agents is a serious matter, and I was flab...