An excellent opinion piece was in the Sunday Sacramento Bee today, reprinted from the Nation by their Washington correspondent, John Nichols. It's a well pointed assertion that the Bush administration, as well as our State Department, made virtually no attempt to diplomatically pressure Musharraf and the government of Pakistan to protect Benazir Bhutto's safety which could have helped to prevent her assassination. In the final lines of the article (which, oddly, were paragraphed differently in the Bee reprint) Mr. Nichols states:

This is a time for mourning. But it is, as well, a time for somber reflection on the utterly failed and fully dysfunctional foreign policies of the Bush-Cheney administration.

The world is a more dangerous place today.

The failure of George Bush and those around him to premise their relationship with Pervez Musharraf on the absolute demand that Benazir Bhutto be kept safe and alive made it so.

Now, the question is whether members of Congress -- Republicans and Democrats -- will step forward to say that the relationship that George Bush has established and maintained with Pervez Musharraf is no longer morally or practically tenable.

I have an answer for that question.

And the answer is- no! Those pussies won't do a thing since they're just as voluntarily brainwashed as Dubya into believing that this fatigue-wearing poseur Musharraf is going to help flush out Osama Bin Laden and help make the world safe for democracy again. Well, maybe Ron Paul would support cutting aid to Pakistan but he'd only do so because it would save tax dollars.

Read the full Nation piece: Click Here, Pilgrim

For more work by Jimmy Margulies, whose cartoon I stole to illustrate this blog entry, Click Here, Pilgrim

Hey Losers,

Islam forbids attacks on women.

Dear Midtown Neighbors,

Hey, you probably go to Safeway for your grocery shopping, don't you?

After all, there's not one but TWO of 'em within spittin' distance of us here.

You know how the ground beef prices are all jacked up nowadays? You know how Safeway ALSO packs their ground beef in packs of 1 and a half plus pounds minimum? There's a lot of single folks like myself living around here and I don't know about you, but if I was eating that size burgers all the time in one sitting I'd morph into Fat Elvis pretty damn quick!

Anyway, if I can't find a less than one pound package, as nice as the workers behind the counter around here are, I usually shop when they're busy or not open to wrap a custom order for me, so I usually just pass and opt for cube steak or something.

BUT I know that many of you fine people like to purchase that shit in bulk, especially when it's on sale, and store it in your freezer for weeks on end.

SO, if you did that with Safeway ground beef purchased between September 19 and November 5 of this year...

Throw that shit away.

Because salmonella is a bitch.

See? Sometimes you can read this blog and find something useful.

Here's the story of the beef recall: Click Here,Pilgrim

Hey, do me a favor, will ya?

Go to this website:

http://www.last.fm/

and type in

Michael Psycho

(And if they don't play me right away, you should be able to hear a bunch of classic shit from other bands and all that.)

Thanks, Pilgrim.

Whew. At least Barry Bonds doesn’t have to feel so lonely anymore.

What really surprises me about this here Mitchell Report: no mention of Mark McGwire except as an introduction and explicitly pointing out that the "andro" was considered legal at the time? Huh? Okay, having Jose Canseco on the list wasn’t exactly a shock. I am a little thrown off that Roger Clemens made the list, however. He always struck me as the All-American baseball template. But then again, there’s always been something All-American about using unscrupulous tactics to get ahead and win at life.

But then again, is the type of behavior that these guys are being accused of even worth getting all worked up over in the first place? I mean, look at Jimi Hendrix, for example. Jimi used performance-enhancing substances to improve his abilities, and he’s in a Hall of Fame. I’ve never heard Ian MacKaye or Jonathan Richman whining about how Hendrix shouldn’t have been allowed to have a recording contract because HE was juiced! Nobody’s trying to take away all those number one singles from the Stones just because they were stoned or loaded off their ass when they wrote most of those songs! And the Eagles were flying with a walking fuckin’ pharmacy named Joe Walsh when they composed and recorded much of Their Greatest Hits Vol. 1. Nobody’s putting an asterisk next to THAT album’s record of 28 million sales! And don’t try to tell me that there’s a difference: so-called professional music is WAY more competitive and brutally cutthroat than all of the North American major league sports combined!

In reality, this report isn’t going to do shit when it comes to cleaning up baseball. I doubt if the Mitchell findings will be shaking things up into any kind of noticeable results or changes. What the Hell, let’s just make the use of performance enhancing substances a requirement as opposed to a taboo for all professional athletes. Then things would get really interesting. Then again, the 100 homer seasons and 12 inning perfect games would start to get pretty boring after a while.

Dear Comcast,

It's official. You. Suck. Shit.

I could not fuckin' BELIEVE the treatment I received from your call center reps this morning. All I wanted to know was if there was a service problem with the High Speed Internet in my area.

After a semi-comical exchange of:

"Well, if the light's on you're connected."

"Yeah, but my homepage isn't loading, it's not connecting to your NETWORK."

"Well, if the light's on you're connected."

"Yeah, but I ping for Comcast.net and it says it can't find the network."

"Well, if the light's on you're connected."

I then asked to speak to a supervisor, at which point the bitch HUNG UP ON ME.

On the second call, I mentioned the hang up to the second rep, who replied with, "Oh, ha ha ha I hate when that happens..." and then put me on hold for fifteen minutes to "get" a supervisor. She even came back with the usual crap of "Now I didn't hang up on you, so don't hang up on me, 'kay? (chuckle)"

Giving up, I tried one more call where I got the excuse of how there's only one manager talking to a bunch of (presumably pissed off) people. Fuck that. That's not my problem. I pay over ONE HUNDRED BUCKS A MONTH for combined Cable TV and Internet and that's on the lower pricing tier. PLUS Comcast is raising the rates (again!) in January. If they're too money grubbing to hire enough people to take gripes about their shitty service, tough shit.

Of course, I never did have enough time to hold for a supervisor due to having to leave for work eventually and sure enough, my service was magically restored later in the day. But now I've learned a hard lesson about what happens when one company gains a practical monopoly on the cable service in one's local area. Absolute disrespect for the customer with no real recourse.

I am now seriously considering, no fuck that, I'm actually planning a switch to another service, probably from AT & T (just to burn Comcast's ass.) It's a Hell of a lot cheaper for not much lesser speed, and besides, Comcast lies out the ass about how fast they are. More often than not, I have a creaky slow connection depending on how many folks are on broadband in the vicinity of my modem. And I'd rather try to decipher a rep in Bangalore than get bullshit attitude from some dumbass in this country who thinks that they'll get through college and get a "real" job before they ever get fired.

In researching my latest blog rant (and searching for the Comcast VP to drop a courtesy call on- apparently that gentleman's name is Rick Germano and he's the Senior VP of Customer Operations,) I found a fascinating lil' blog appropriately entitled "Comcast Must Die." In the latest post, there is a reference to a recent American Customer Satisfaction Index report that Comcast has a rating of 56. Their customer satisfaction dropped 7% while their profits increased 12%! So if you'd like to read about this finding (and other disgruntled customers in the same boat I am, named the S.S. Corporate Swill Barge) Click Here, Pilgrim