Hammer Mill Days

Is that all we have to eat around here? Jesus Christ on a tricycle. I thought there was some more of that plastic cheese sitting around. Never mind. Just give me another slice of plastic bread. Sigh. Oh, hi. Yep, it's that time of year again. The ba-roke period, as our dear departed friend Tim Walsh used to say. Fighting the cat for scraps, except that we would never do that. In times of want, we have occasionally resorted to eating doll house food. Dibs on the plastic baloney! (Hey, don't scoff ... it's actually not that much worse than tofu baloney.) So, why exactly is Big Green wearing a cardboard belt this month? Why, you may ask, would a band with more than 300 songs under copyright need to scratch the floor for discarded fragments of past meals? It's starving artist syndrome, my friends, pure and simple. Yes, we suffer for our art. Just the other day, I got my leg caught in a banjo string. Hurt like hell, dragging that banjo around behind me. Got a lot of dirt...

Lopsided bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress have approved the President's crackpot plan to arm the non-existent "moderate" opposition in Syria; in the Senate the tally of 78 to 22 was identical to the one that body delivered in support if Bush's Iraq invasion. So much for the value of bipartisanship, as Chris Hayes has pointed out many times. By virtue of this blinkered legislation, we will be providing military training and equipment to many of the same people we profess to despise. (The simple fact that McCain and Graham are in favor of such funding should be enough for any sentient creature to surmise that it's a bad call. McCain wouldn't know a member of ISIS if he were inches away.) The response to ISIS is another instance of decision-making driven by decades of bad policy. We are, in essence, seeking to deal with a mess of our own making, to put it charitably, and in so doing making an investment in future crises while bankrupting ourselv...