The Evanston Everyman 4/21/09
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
Making light of the boot is a bootable offense.
On the all-time sucky thing list, getting a parking ticket for your disabled vehicle has to rank fairly high. Not over having a bird shit on you (still hot at No. 1( and something that has happened to me personally three times, THREE- really, what are the odds of that?)), but well above stepping in dog poop (a common occurrence in dog rich-owner poor Evanston). I walked out to my car an hour ago to move it because I believed the street cleaning days were Wednesday-Thursday. Alas, no. So now I have two parking tickets and not even one working car. Maybe I should take a hint and give away the busted car? Yes, I should. It’s on the list, people. It’s a real list. On a chalkboard. Next to the front door.
Sphere: Related ContentChe Chairs Douchebag Benefit, Won’t Give Back Bonus (UPDATED)
Che shirt and Western suit coat? You, my friend, have the fashion sense of a troll.
The man at the right in this photo is Gary Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who now runs AIG Financial Products. That division is the prodigal arm of the insurer which guaranteed the credits swap that unraveled the global economy. Gary and his cronies will now receive millions in bonuses, even though you and I now own AIG. Yes, the politicians should be outraged. Yes, these corporate douchebags should feel such shame that thoughts of suicide are not foreign. But, America, this is a smokescreen! The bonuses are just a small slice of the hundreds of billions of wasted dollars you, me, everybody spent in the mad dash to prop up Wall Street greedheads.
Don’t let the witch hunt to catch these bonus boneheads and Bernie Madoff distract you from the real scandal. The people who got us into this mess are running the show! Timothy Geithner ran the New York branch of the Federal Reserve which signed off on these poisonous assets!
Sphere: Related ContentPolitics, Embryos, and the N.I.H.
This Tuesday, President Obama reversed the intransigence of the Bush administration and signed legislation which allows federal funding for embryo-derived stem-cell research. Obama heralded the signing as step toward the removal of politics from science. Unless, of course, you want to score political points with those who wished to see this reversal and paint those opponents of this research as religious zealots. And that is the case with this reversal.
Sphere: Related ContentBest Network Nitwit Interview
CNBC interviewed Nouriel Roubini, RGE Monitor, and Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan author. You need to watch this! These two are rightly famous because they both predicted the economic mess we are in more than a year ago. The reason we are in such a mess? Our banks were too big and too highly leveraged. Both of them state that we need to look at a completely new way of doing business, and we must start by ridding Wall Street of those who made the mistakes in the first place. This is the exact position we at Shambollocks! have taken since this crisis began.
Sphere: Related ContentStimulate This!
If you thought that the decades long Great American Leaders Search had ended with the inauguration of President Obama, well, you’re wrong. Six months into the New Depression most Americans don’t know how we got here, what we can do to get through this, and, most importantly, what we can do to avoid a mess like this ever developing again. We are clueless and ignorant, watching a debate over a stimulus package nobody really likes and nobody knows for sure will work.
I’m not going to lie to you. It sucks to be American right now.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Last Call 1/21/09
You need to get back on the mic. Suckas on to your title.
Today, everybody wants to talk about the Inaugral Address. What did you think of it? Did it embolden you to risk a path less taken? Did it leave you wanting more? I don’t believe any of those questions touch at the heart of the matter. Yesterday was profound not for what we heard but what we saw. A black president taking the oath of office. A black commander-in-chief receiving salutes when in the midst of our military. A regal black woman from our segregated urban ‘ghettoes’ dancing with her husband as America watched. That is what made yesterday profound. Those images, broadcast all over the world, will remain in our memories in a way that words never will.
The best words spoken during the inauguration ceremony came from Rev. Joseph Lowery. Their power emanated from the ancient rhythm of black spoken word. Begun in the call-and-response of field calls, strengthened in the epic services of black Churches, mastered by oral wizards as disparate as Dr. King and Malcolm X, black speech propels the listener. It defeats monotony by attracting our musical ear. We want to hear more because it sounds good. President Obama’s speech yesterday did not equal some of the rousing triumphs he has given us. But it was in no way a failure. A president should be measured by deeds, not words. From this day forth, we will perceive the true measure of our new leader.
President Obama will find himself held responsible for his brothers’ keep to a degree no politician has ever known. The condition of the American black male is woeful. Whether impoverished, incarcerated, or uneducated, too many black males fail to make positive contributions to society. If you listen to hip-hop, you’ll hear lots of fear, lots of anger. But you won’t hear many solutions. Nine years ago, Mos Def released his first solo album, Black On Both Sides. The album, and the track ‘Mathematics’ in particular, work as a State of the Black Male address which could easily help President Obama know those for which he is now responsible. And Obama’s on the hook for a lot.
Rock your hardhat black cause you in the Terrordome
full of hard niggaz, large niggaz, dice tumblers
Young teens and prison greens facin life numbers
Crack mothers, crack babies and AIDS patients
Young bloods can’t spell but they could rock you in PlayStation
This new math is whippin motherfuckers ass
You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add
It’s mathematics
DJ Premier provides the old-school scratching. Mos Def’s early work as an MC has equals, but no betters. In college, when most hip-hop was either too violent or too pop-sheen, his flow doubled as a hip-hop primer.The albums Black Star and Black On Both Sides blew me away. They were proud but not preachy, fun but not fake or forced. They made you think- think about what we do for others, how we always take care of ourselves. Mos Def, like all great MCs, understands black oral tradition. He knows it is not only the word that has power, but the pause before the word as well, to paraphrase Miles Davis’ definition of jazz. And sure, this joint is nine years old, but ain’t nothing listed in this track that hasn’t gotten worse under Bush.
Young soldiers tryin to earn they next stripe
When the average minimum wage is $5.15
You best believe you gotta find a new ground to get cream
The white unemployment rate, is nearly more than triple for black
so frontliners got they gun in your back
Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
and end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still livin
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it – it’s all mathematics
It may not be fair to lay this all on Obama. But others’ expectations are infrequently fair. What he can do is continue the dialogue we all started during his campaign-what does it mean to be Americans? What do we owe our fellow citizens? Honest answers to those questions may present solutions the majority of us can find palatable. Maybe they will begin to address the staggering figures surrounding the black males’ condition. But one thing is certain. We will always need words on which we can reflect. And we will all get behind a leader whose work we can respect. Amen. 
The Onion Predicted The Future
Sometimes we need a fake newspaper to tell us the truth. In January of 2001, The Onion wrote an aricle entitled ‘Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’. The article predicted much of what was to come, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek.
Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”
On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.
Wall Street responded strongly to the Bush speech, with the Dow Jones industrial fluctuating wildly before closing at an 18-month low. The NASDAQ composite index, rattled by a gloomy outlook for tech stocks in 2001, also fell sharply, losing 4.4 percent of its total value between 3 p.m. and the closing bell.
So true. It hurts a bit to read this today. What the above signifies more than anything else to me is the true death of our mainstream press. Where was the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post through so much of the humiliating shenanigans perpetrated by Bush? They failed, each and every one, until much too late into Bush’s second term for any of their investigations and criticism to matter. The predicament that most newspapers find themselves in now is self-inflicted. The civic bond that tied resident to paper was irrevocably harmed when they failed to question so many Bush policies.
What it also signifies to me is how incredibly we Americans were duped. I too voted for George Bush once. I take responsibility for that vote. I was wrong. Point blank. Nobody’s fault but mine. But I have worked since then to do everything in my power to negate that silly, ill-advised vote. And it is the mission of this humble web site to continue this struggle every day, against all powers-that-be that wish to disenfranchise all of us. Do not think that our enemies have left the stage. In many early instances already they appear to be just as intertwined with this infant administration as they were with the last. Check back here each day as we at Shambollocks! cover the news that is left unspoken.
The Bush administration has finally ended. Hallelelujah! But let us not shirk our civic duties as soon as our celebratory hangovers fade. President Obama must now earn all the work many of us put in for him. We will be watching. And reading. And writing.
Stonecutters Celebrate Annual Circle Jerk
![I [Heart] Secret Societies](http://www.shambollocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/kappa-beta-phi.jpg "kappa-beta-phi")
I [Heart] Secret Societies
While we in Chicago froze our asses off and pushed around our busted vehicles, the Douchebags of the Universe who make up Kappa Betta Phi held their annual secret handshake convention at the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue in the NYC last week. Their HS newspaper, the Wall Street Journal was there. Surely, with all the extra peripheral damage that Wall Street has wrought of late, there would be a little more solemnity accompanying the “Thank you sirs, may I have another”, right?
“I feel like the mayor of New Orleans after Katrina,” quipped Alfred E. Smith IV, the group’s leader, or “Grand Swipe,” at the opening of its annual black-tie dinner last week. “Today, the FBI put out a warning that Al Qaeda was planning an attack to cripple the U.S. economy,” inductee Martin Gruss joked later in the evening. “I’ve got news for them, Congress has already done that.”
Um, no. Difference between you and Mayor Nagin, shitbag? Mayor Nagin was thrust into a NATURAL disaster for which he got very little assistance. You, you unctous waste of carbon, CAUSED the disaster and received TONS of federal assistance. What you should feel is the tightening of a noose around your neck. Al-Qaeda would slap themselves over the top of their heads in luck if they could even do a tenth of the amount of damage you yes-men did by just not knowing what the the f#ck you were doing. And Marty, yeah, let’s blame Congress for that. Just like you blamed the girl for the rape and the black kid for not getting into that grad program, right?
My God, they’re so full of themselves they invite the press to come and watch the show! This is America, people. Front and center. These are the people who are the problem. Bill Murray was right in Rushmore. “Keep the rich kids in your sights, and take them down.”
And all of you, all of you high on change- guess who didn’t attend? BO’s nominee for the SEC, Mary Shapiro. This is who BO assigned to watch the hen house, a member of this secret fraternity of financial sociopaths. BO, we said earlier, nobody involved with this mess gets to clean it up. President-elect Obama, cut them off. We wish to no longer be taken advantage of by these arrogant, greedy bastards.
They ended the night with a rendition of ‘American Pie’. It included the line- ‘Bye, bye, my slice of the pie’.
Shut down that stove, BO. Let’s make sure the next time they want dessert, they foot the bill themselves.
Barack and Michelle ‘96
Do not call us the Huxtables!
The New Yorker has a delightful Barack and Michelle profile from 1996. The two were interviewed by Mariana Cook for ‘a photography project on couples in America’. The interview reminds you of how reflective the young Obama appeared, and gives us a hint of the worries Michelle had as Barack began his political career.
There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
Get ready for it to get much, much worse, Michelle. We wish both of you and your family all the best during your tenure at 1600. You’ll need all the warm wishes you can foster.
The Dudes Behind MyBO
What really transformed Obama’s electoral chances as ‘08 progressed was how many people decided to get active with his campaign. Obama’s campaign benefitted from an explosion of grass-roots organizing not seen in a presidential election since the ’60s. Most of these brand-spanking new organizers connected through MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO. Yesterday’s Boston Globe profiled the people behind Blue State Digital, the firm behind MyBO. I myself had a MyBO account, and was fascinated as the campaign developed how powerful this social networking application became. There is no doubt in my mind that Obama’s online organizing won him the election. If you want to know who the people behind the curtin were, this is a must-read.
O'Hare Arpt., IL
