National Lampoon Documentary Captures Its Perverse Pleasures

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DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF NATIONAL LAMPOOM (2015)

Directed by Douglas Tirola

4^th Row Films/Magnolia Pictures, 98 minutes, R (nudity, drugs, language)

* * * *

Welcome to a rarity: a National Lampoon product that bombed. This documentary on the inner workings of the Lampoon empire raked in less than $65k at the box office, a flop on par with the magazine’s disastrous 1978 TV venture Disco Beavers in Outer Space. You should not mistake the two—the film is hysterical and superbly crafted.

It must be said that, like Lampoon editors and writers, I am dismissive of the squeamish PC crowd that cries, “That’s not funny; it’s mean.” If it’s not transgressive, it’s not comedy—there is always a butt, or there is no joke. Sometimes we try to hide comedy’s ‘meanness’ by universalizing, generalizing, or personalizing, but this is subterfuge, not substance. The brilliance of National Lampoon was that it never played nice. Hand writers such as Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, Michael O’Donoghue, or Tony Hendra a sacred cow and they’d give you back bestiality, religion, and poop jokes—probably with a blood-covered, bare-breasted butcher serving beef barbecue to unsuspecting Hindus. Looking for boundaries? Don’t. Like Lenny Bruce a generation before, the Lampoon staff told black jokes to call attention to racism, used hate speech to stick issues in your face, and pretty much made fun of every oppressed group you can imagine: gays, disabled, Jews, Latinos, the mentally challenged (Remember Stork from Animal House?)….  Was it “mean” to pick on such targets, or was it a reminder that these folks were amidst us? No one—and I mean no one—took it on the chin as badly as the Establishment; National Lampoon was a raised middle finger to those who yearned for propriety and decorum.

Does this make you uncomfortable? Get over yourself. As Doug Triola’s amazing film reminds, National Lampoon redefined American comedy—even visually. Think of iconic images such as Rick Meyerowitz’s Mona Gorilla cover, or Ed Bluestone’s high concept cover with a gun, a distressed pooch, and the tag line, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll shoot this dog.” What is more standard in American comedy than the parody of mass culture? NatLamp perfected that form; in fact, it morphed from the Harvard Lampoon to a national mag in 1970 when it was—get this!—asked by Cosmopolitan to do a send-up of that publication. For five insane years, National Lampoon was the world’s best-selling humor magazine, and it was fueled by sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The crew that gathered around magazine heads Kenney, Beard, and Rob Hoffman were as transgressive as their material in those early days, yet the suits lined up to throw money at them, which is the ultimate irony of Lampoon: every criticism aimed at it is an indirect slam against advanced capitalism. The magazine lasted until 1998, but it became (and still is) a marketing juggernaut. In addition to the monthly, NatLamp spawned 14 books, 4 theater productions, 12 comedy albums, 30 anthologies, 7 tie-in films (including the entire Vacation oeuvre), and myriad imitators. It also produced two enormously popular radio shows that anticipated satellite radio, and cranked out writers that created, among others: Caddyshack, The Simpsons, Ghostbusters, Second City TV, and Saturday Night Live. Especially SNL, which poached O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts from NatLamp and then signed a cast that producer Matt Simmons neglected to put on retainer: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, and the brilliant John Belushi. The footage of Belushi alone makes this doc must-see viewing! And let’s round out Lampoon’s influence with a short list of those whose careers it helped launch: all of the aforementioned plus Judd Aptow, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Beverly D’Angelo, John Goodman, Christopher Guest, Tim Matheson, Billy Bob Thornton, and directors John Hughes and John Landis.

That Tirola can sum such a complex story in an hour and a half is its own testimony to the film’s quality, but also check out the superb editing of Joseph Hrings and G. Jesse Martinez. The cuts between still images is amazing and they take place to a rock soundtrack. I couldn’t help but think that Ken Burns and the producers of MTV ought to apprentice themselves to Hrings and Martinez to learn how you can make stills leap off the screen.

Can we be critical of this film? Sure. I can’t fathom why the saccharine Ivan Reitman is on camera so much. More substantively, although Tirola never portrays his subjects as saints and highlights their pettiness as well as their intellect, there are three glaring things he soft peddles: drugs, politics, and sexism. There is a tendency to view the first as a sort of extended college party scene, which is true to a point, but drugs probably played a role in Doug Kenney’s death in 1980 (and may have exacerbated clinical depression) and they certainly killed Belushi two years later. Re: politics, we know that writer/editor P. J. O’Rourke is (very) conservative, which is never mentioned. Maybe that’s fine, but one can’t help but ponder the heartfelt views of those who supped at anti-authority tables. Moreover, the under representation of clothed women at NatLamp suggests a young boys’ network not willing to confront its own gender privilege. Call these reviewer observations, though. This is a truly magnificent documentary. It might make you cringe, but if it doesn’t make you laugh, you simply don’t get comedy.

–Rob Weir   

The Ragbirds Score Big with New Release

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THE RAGBIRDS

The Threshold and the Hearth

Rock Ridge Music

* * * *

It’s hardly late-breaking news that musical genres are collapsing at the speed of a North Korean housing development. It’s musical succotash these days, though far too many musicians mash things simply because they can, and in ways as aurally bland as lima beans and canned corn. Thank goodness there are bands like The Ragbirds that add tasty ingredients. This Ann Arbor-based quintet is an indie pop/folk rock/world music hybrid and its fifth album, The Threshold and the Hearth, is its best yet.

Evocations of Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel spring to mind, though its anchor is the dulcet-toned Erin Zindle, who wields fiddles, mandolins, and accordions to provide fiery contrast to her calming voice. The Ragbirds are unusual in that they are percussion heavy. Erin’s brother, T. J. Zindle, provides acoustic and electric guitar but her husband, Randall Moore, lays down doumbek, tabla, and other percussion; Jon Brown adds a conventional drum kit, and Dan Jones is on bass—whenever he too isn’t playing some sort of drum. Songs such as “Cosmos,” “The Bottomless Heart,” and “TheCurse of Finger Pointing” have definite West African influences—both in their sunny, exuberant feel and in Zindle’s fingerstyling. (Many West African rhythms now played on guitar are derived from the kora.)

Optimism reigns on this album, no matter what musical traditions The Ragbirds mine. And they mine many. The aforementioned “Cosmos,” for example, also sports some Zindle fiddle work that is both jazzy and quasi-Celtic. She switches to the squeeze box for “Good Time to be Born,” in which her goes-down-easy voice moves us from bleakness—“There’s a stranger with a cart full of useless stuff”—to universal themes of shared humanity: “My own shopping cart is full of compromise/There is always peace, there is always war/But beauty’s always being born.” Considered arrangement of material also keeps us on our toes and in touch with our better angels. Check out the way the last eight tracks roll. In “Sometimes Honestly,” Zindle admits that constant honesty is its own burden and intones, “Luck is just a choice you make.” This is followed by the harder edged “Alleyway Saints” in which T.J.’s electric guitar is fluid but edgy; then it’s introspective piano for “Strange Weather,” Erin’s slow, personal exploration of how a couple negotiates everyday life, with changeable weather the central metaphor. “Tough Love” is a natural follow up with its splashes of energetic mando, its clipped pacing, and a soulful chorus.

That emotional/musical pattern is followed again for the next four songs, my favorites of which were “We Carry This Place,” which felt like a contemplative update of themes Joni Mitchell explored in “Circle Game;” and “Little Ties,” which is folky, vaguely Appalachian, has a sing-along feel, and a fiddle part that’s what you’d get if you put some hand jive to strings. Most of the album’s songs are about renewal and I felt refreshed from listening. They call themselves The Ragbirds, but there’s nothing shabby about them. –Rob Weir

A Man Called Ove a Brilliant Debut

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A MAN CALLED OVE  (2014/15)

By Fredrik Backman

Washington Square Press, 368 pp.

* * * * *

Is there a more clichéd line in the history of reviewing than: “I laughed, I cried?” I don’t care how hackneyed it sounds; my experience of reading A Man Called Ove was exactly that. It would be woefully inadequate to say I liked this book; I LOVED this book.

Swedish blogger Fredrik Backman’s debut novel introduces us to Ove, the greatest crank/eccentric since Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. Ove is a brooding man of few words, until it comes to the principles that are at the core of his being. He’s out place in a world of computers, but he has opinions about them. You certainly don’t want to get him started on what he thinks of the kind of person who doesn’t know how to bleed a radiator, hang a proper hook, fix a bicycle, back up a van, or—horror of horrors—would drive a Volvo instead of a Saab. Things that have no purpose have no place in Ove’s world and he’s had it up to his eyeteeth in the “stupidity” that assaults him daily. And there is the special contempt he holds for the “white shirts,” their petty regulations, their impracticality, their big schemes, their haughty demeanor, and their amoral ways. If you have to ask Ove if he’s honest, you’re exactly the sort of person with whom it’s a waste of time to converse.

We meet Ove as he’s on his daily and highly regimented rounds around the neighborhood. He’s 59 and has recently been forcibly retired by a group of white shirts who think they’ve acted in his best interest. Harrumph! As if they’d know what a man like Ove needs! I found myself bursting into laughter at Ove’s ever-growing list of what’s wrong with the world that he assembles from his morning perambulations. If a bicycle chained to a sign sets him off, imagine what happens when someone takes a vehicle into an unauthorized area. In Backman’s lithe prose, we can easily conjure neck veins on the verge of bursting. Ove ponders the question of who needs to be part of such an idiotic world and concludes that he certainly doesn’t.

Backman chooses an unusual comedy of errors setup for his novel. Each time Ove vows that today will be his last, some “annoyance” occurs that interrupts his suicide plans. Among them: a man named Patrik (“the lanky one”) who backs over the non-flowers in Ove’s non-flower bed; Patrik's pregnant wife Parvaneh, an Iranian immigrant who already has two bothersome young daughters; a heavyset neighbor named Jimmy; a teenager who wants to fix a bike; an outlaw mailman named Adrian; a man who falls on the railway tracks; a nosy reporter; a dementia-suffering neighbor named Rune who is both Ove’s best friend and someone to whom he sometimes didn’t speak for years; and a mangy half-frozen moggy Ove calls Cat Annoyance.

Ove’s rants are first-rate comedy, but I reserve my own outburst for “idiots” (an Ove word) who’ve reviewed this book and said they didn’t like it because Ove was “unlikable.” What stupidity! (Another Ove word.) About the time you think Ove is like Ignatius J. Reilly; that is, a mildly demented misanthrope, small parts of his life are slowly unspooled and these will tear out your heart and stomp it into the Swedish snows. There’s a moment in the book where Ove breaks character to punch a man who has blamed Ove for his own misdeeds. It’s against his principles to fight, but Ove reasons, “A time like this comes for all men, when they choose what sort of man they want to be.” That line is, in many ways, the theme of the book and you should not assume that Ove is that man. What if he had become the man he wanted to be, but that life was taken from him? How would you cope if the things that gave your life “purpose” (yes—another Ove word), joy, and sense were wrenched from you? We glibly use phrases such as “time to move on,” but do we ask, “Why?” Or “How?”

This book is sometimes compared to another small gem, The Unlikely Voyage of Harold Fry, which is apt in sentiment, though A Man Named Ove is much funnier. Read it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.  Rob Weir 

Little Girl Blue a Balanced Portrait of Janis Joplin

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JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE (2015)

Written and directed by Amy Berg

FilmRise, 105 minutes, Not-Rated (nudity, drug use, language)

* * * *

Depending upon where you live, your local PBS affiliate will or will not be airing this Janis Joplin bio-doc. Joplin has been dead for 45 years, but she's on the fringe of so many sex, drugs, and rock and roll-fueled culture war issues that she's still such a hot-button topic that not every public television station is willing to take the heat. Don't look for a Hollywood treatment any time soon, as two planned Joplin films have suffered epic delays. Amy Berg's documentary is your best bet for a while and is, by far, the best treatment to date of the mercurial Ms. Joplin. Rent it if it isn't aired.

If you wonder why Joplin continues to generate such passion, Berg's film offers some clues. Janis Joplin (1943-1970) was never the poster girl for anyone, and she confounds more expectations than she realizes. Most people know the story of Joplin's troubled ugly duckling childhood and her 1962 middle-finger-raised flight from Port Arthur, Texas and its racist, sexist jerks. Except that's only part of the story. She remained devoted to her family and wrote frequent letters home, often filled with regret for whatever disappointments she may have caused. As the conventional narrative goes, she landed in San Francisco, fell in with the counterculture, and developed the booze-and-drug habit that eventually killed her. Convenient story, but Joplin was a user in the early 60s before she left Texas. And, as it turns out, she loved the counterculture lifestyle, but saw it as more of a means to a very non-countercultural end: material and commercial success. In fact, Joplin was never a very good spokesperson for anything other than her music. She had scores of lovers, a short list including: Peter de Blanc, Peggy Caserta, Dick Cavett, Eric Clapton, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Ian, Kris Kristofferson, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Joe Namath, and Jae Whitaker. Berg's film has been criticized by the left for doing a drive-by on Joplin's bisexuality, and by the right for glossing her promiscuity. Actually, Berg gives it exactly the right touch; Joplin simply indulged her desires of the moment and was neither an advocate of LGBTQ rights nor for the sexual revolution. Like most things in her life, sex was highly personal. The one exception was that Joplin had no time for racists—a good reason to get the hell out of Texas back then. Her unique sound was built upon a foundation of Billie Holliday, Odetta, and Big Mama Thornton; she never hid her profound admiration for Otis Redding and she aspired to be like Aretha Franklin.

Berg's film telescopes Joplin's early days, takes us to her breakout moment at Monterrey Pop in 1967, and lets us experience her time on top, but she doesn't sugarcoat her use of meth, booze, and heroin. What we get instead is the portrait of an artist only truly herself when on stage and wracked by guilt, doubt, loneliness, and ennui when not performing. We hear from former bandmates in Big Brother and the Holding Company (1966-1968) and the Kozmic Blues Band (1969-70), and intimates such as Cavett, Kristofferson, Whittaker, Bob Weir, filmmaker D. A. Pennebacker, and surviving family members. Beck also draws upon rich archival and concert footage, including harrowing clips from Woodstock that presage her demise. The overarching portrait that emerges is one of pride for her success, but deep insecurity.

The film's arc and vibe are very reminiscent of Amy, the Amy Winehouse bio that many readers will recall I disliked. What's different? First of all, Joplin appears as both architect and victim of her fate, not merely a tragic figure. Second, Berg isn't afraid to show Joplin at both the apex and the nadir of her craft. I'll elaborate below, but Berg's film casts doubt on Joplin's place in the musical pantheon. Third, she does a far better job of placing Joplin within the context of her time and culture. Finally, Berg's Joplin is simply a more complex person than was Ms. Winehouse, which provides material for a richer script. Asif Kapadia's Amy is slicker and has prettier surfaces, but Berg's film has more depth. 

#janisjoplin

Rob Weir

Postscript: Joplin's Place in Rock History

Like many Baby Boomers, I was gob smacked by Joplin when I first heard her. Is there a "greatest" list anywhere that does not list her at or near the top of the heap? Rolling Stone lists her as the 28^th best vocalist of all time (Aretha Franklin is #1) and the 48^th greatest performer. That's as low as any rating I've seen. Billboard ranks her # 5 and Popcorn # 1.

Amy Berg's film made me wonder if we need to rethink how highly Joplin is regarded. There is, after all, a world of difference of being able to sing and knowing how to sing. It was only toward the very end of Joplin's life that she seemed to grasp that difference; before then she often used shouts and screams to mask the fact that she was improvising on the spot because she didn't really know where she wanted to take her songs. (Check out her incredibly sensitive take of "Me and Bobbie McGee" as she first sang it on a train full of musicians hurtling across Western Canada—a moment of insight rather than raw power.)

All rankings systems are arbitrary, subjective, and highly debatable. Janis, like Aretha, had a voice only Mother Nature could have created, but I'd reverse the Rolling Stone formula and rate her among the greatest performers of all time. But would I say she was a better singer than some of those the magazine ranked below her–Mavis Staples, Grace Slick, Gladys Knight, Patsy Cline, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell? Nope. Add names such as Stevie Nicks, Patti Smith, Bjork, and Christina Aguilera, and you see the problem. Berg's subtitle, Little Girl Blue infers her assertion that Janis was "Queen of the Blues." Ummm…. "no" on that as well. (Koko Taylor? Dinah Washington? And Bessie Smith will always be the "Empress" of the blues.)

I don't mean to infer that Joplin doesn't deserve to be exalted as among the great, but all performed music is a combination of talent, formula, and hype. Joplin had so much chutzpah that sometimes she blinded us to the fact that a lot of what she was doing was as gaudy and overdone as the brightly colored boas in her hair.  But there's not a thing wrong with being considered among the greats!    

Beth Gadbaw Debut: Irish Song via Colorado

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BETH GADBAW

The Greenfields and the Mountains High

www.bethgadbaw.com

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The Irish skylark is known for both the loveliness of its song and for its distinctive warble. Call Beth Gadbaw a Rocky Mountain version of the skylark. The Boulder, Colorado-based Gadbaw has released a 12-track debut album of Irish songs, nine of which are traditional. The best known of these are "The Journeyman Tailor" and "The Road to Clady." The second is nicely covered–Gadbaw's high soprano dueling with Jessie Burns' deliberately raw fiddle. (Do I detect a touch of tinker styling in it? Yes—I think I do!) The remaining three songs are a W. B. Yeats poem set to music ("Innisfree') and two Gadbaw originals. Her "Grania," honors Grace O'Malley—also known as Granuaile–a female pirate who was thorn in the backside of England's Queen Elizabeth I. On a more personal note, Gadbaw's "Thomas Watson" mine letters sent from Montana to Ireland by her grandmother's great uncle, who fled the Famine.  Appropriately, Gadbaw gives this song a robust treatment, though it's just her voice and heavily accented bodhran raising the ruckus. A personal favorite is "Last Night Being Windy," a jauntily paced traditional that takes full advantage of the instrumentalists that joined her in the studio.     

Gadbaw has a very clear and very high soprano voice with the aforementioned warble. It invites the adjective "sweet" as do most of this album's arrangements. It's also decidedly female in shape—all of the backing voices are female, and women also play most of the instruments. This makes for an intimate album, though one that occasionally cries out for more contrasting bottom to the vocals. (Maybe a few altos?) Still, it's a very nice effort for a debut, so let's not nitpick.  Rob Weir   

Noah Hawley's Before the Fall a Harrowing Page-Turner

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BEFORE THE FALL (May 2016 release)

By Noah Hawley

Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Group

400 pages

* * * ½  

How's this for a big opening: eleven people, a doomed flight, two survivors, and an all-night swim. That’s the setup for Noah Hawley’s most recent novel, his fifth.

A private jet sits on a foggy Nantucket runway and impatient David Bateman is about to order the pilot to takeoff as he’s tired of waiting for a late-arriving passenger: Scott Burroughs, an island painter that Bateman’s wife impulsively invited to share their puddle-jump flight to Long Island. Bateman’s not used to waiting; he’s the chief executive of an influential cable news network rather clearly modeled on Fox News. Nor is he accustomed to rubbing elbows with the likes of the shabby Burroughs. In addition to the three-member crew, the only other passengers are Bateman’s wife, his two children, his security guard, and Wall Street high-flyer Ben Kipling and his wife. Burroughs barely makes the flight, but that’s not a good thing—just sixteen minutes later, the plane plunges into Long Island Sound and only Scott and the Bateman’s 4-year-old son J. J. survive; that is if Scott, who is pretty sure his shoulder is broken, can read the fog, guess the right direction to land, avoid sharks, and make the longest swim of his life with J.J. clinging to his back. Okay, this got my attention!

Scott and J.J. do survive, of course, or this book is over in a few pages. What ensues is a nightmare that parallels the crash itself. Burroughs is initially proclaimed a hero, a status he neither feels nor welcomes, but being left alone to contemplate one's fate is not an option in today’s 24-hour thrill parade masquerading as “news.” The more Scott tries to avoid PR, the more slime balls at Bateman’s station grow convinced he’s a phony and that the crash was no accident. That frenzy is whipped to fever pitch by Bill Cunningham, a bloviating shock-jock/mashup of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Cunningham uses innuendo and character assassination to infer that Burroughs might be the reason the plane crashed, either for twisted personal reasons or because he was in cahoots with enemies of the network.

As it happens, though, the National Transportation Safety Board has questions of its own. Is there a link between the crash and the fact that Kipling was under investigation for stock fraud? Why was there a last-minute switch in co-pilots to Charlie Busch, a ne’er-do-well sheltered by powerful family connections? Was it mere coincidence that shake-ups were on board at the TV network? Why can’t Burroughs recall more about the accident? And, of course, there is the small problem of locating the wreckage, bodies, and flight recorder. What ensues is a beat-the-clock search for the truth with human obstacles in the path.

Before the Fall is a page-turner that will make summer beach reader hearts flutter each time a plane flies overhead. Hawley is best known as the creator of TV’s Fargo and if one is honest, this novel often reads like a screenplay treatment. To add fuel to this, it doesn’t even release until the end of May, yet it’s already been optioned to Sony! A careful reader can see a lot of things long before they are revealed and, as I suggested, many of the characters are more mimetic than fully realized—as if Hawley slapped names onto familiar problem personalities: failed artist reexamining his life, former frat brat trying to rekindle lost popularity, self-serving egoist seeking more glory, socialite pursuing cultural capital, jerks further corrupted by money, women making foolish choices…. At times Hawley is way too obvious. Think the co-pilot’s last name is random?

I suspect none of this will matter for most readers. Hawley may not be a literary stylist, but he knows how to tell a compelling story and how to build suspense. This novel grabs you early and doesn’t release its grip. Readers will be like Burroughs in the midst of his swim: too caught up in the moment to consider what is probable and what isn’t.

 –Rob Weir

@noahhawley.com 

    

End of April Political Potpourri

The spring semester has ended and it's time to air some ideas that have been rattling in my brain for a while.

Those who read these pages know I've found Barack Obama to be a maddeningly uneven and indecisive leader. Sometimes I wonder if he has the makeup to take on Republicans. I will say, however, that Jeffrey Goldberg's piece in the April edition of The Atlantic induced newfound respect for the president's foreign policy. The president at the very least has the cojones to take on fellow Democrats. Goldberg details Obama's grand plan, one summed up by the phrase: "Don't do stupid shit." The phrase is trite, but the president's rationale for what he has chosen to do and not do is among the more reasoned articulations of foreign policy I've heard in quite a while. It will also give pause to those who trumpet Hillary Clinton's foreign policy expertise. You should read this piece, but among the highlights are:

·      Obama recognizes that Saudi Arabia is a problematic ally and has taken steps to break the cozy relations it has had with previous administrations.

·      Obama has, on several occasions, shut down warhawks in his administration, chief among them Susan Rice, Leon Panneta, and Hillary Clinton. This applies also to a lesser degree to John Kerry as well, whom he took to the woodshed for forgetting the lesson he learned in Vietnam.

·      Obama has told all who encourage him to launch new ventures that it would be a good idea to end the foolish wars Bush undertook before starting new ones!

·       Obama considers Pakistan a failed state. (And who can debate that?)

·      A big revelation: Obama thinks that we are on the cusp of a post-oil world, that the Middle East of diminishing importance to America, and that we ought to be shifting American priorities toward Asia.

·      That Syria is of little significance to America, ISIS poses no direct threat to us, and there is little about Syria that would justify US intervention.

·      That he wants the United States to stop fighting proxy wars for Europe and Japan.

There is much more. Read this piece.

My students some times ask me if George W. Bush was the "worst' president in American history. I used to say "no" and cite a few I thought were much worse: James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, maybe Nixon…. After reading Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush By Robert, Sam, and Nat Perry, I need to reevaluate. I'll stick with Buchanan as worst, but I'm ready to move Dubya into the 2 or 3 slot. The Parrys offer compelling evidence that the Bush family has systematically sold America down a Saudi river, that they kowtowed at every step to oil companies, that the 2000 election was blatantly stolen, that the Iraq war was a fraud, that Bush and his team rewrote evidence to suit their needs, that they slandered John Kerry in 2004, and that they were driven by an evangelical apocalyptic agenda that placed the United States in grave danger. Other revelations:

·      Colin Powell was no hero, rather an ambitious flunky willing to spout lines he knew to be false for the sake of personal promotion.

·      That the media cravenly favored Bush over Gore and Kerry and traded objectivity for "access" to the White House.

·      That there was systematic program to isolate and marginalize any voice that dared disagreed with predetermined security conclusions.

·      That Bush was willing to put Valerie Plame in physical danger to punish her husband, whose investigation into an alleged Saddam Hussein dirty weapon scheme determined it wasn't true.

·      That Bush was a climate change denier.

·      That Bush had plenty of advance warning about 9/11 but he and  his team lacked the skill to interpret the data.

·      That ideology, not fact, drove most White House decisions.

·      That the U.S. Constitution was little more than a minor inconvenience in the ruthless pursuit of a national security state.

If Sweet Tree prevails, this will...

There's a brouhaha boiling in the maple syrup vats of Vermont. A conglomerate, Sweet Tree Holdings, has jumped into syrup production and moving it toward a mass-production business model. It assures small producers that it will be good for all producers and is no threat—soon we'll have new products (like maple-flavored water), hybrid syrups, and new overseas markets. This comes from a firm that's a holding company spin-off of an insurance firm. Sure—pull the other one; it's got bells on it. If there is a bigger fraud ever perpetuated on American workers than free trade, I wouldn't know what it would be. I heard the same BS when I was a kid and saw Hershey buy or impose its corporate discipline on virtually every dairy in south-central PA. Now a family dairy farm is as rare as US steel mill. Governor Shumlin and Vermont state regulators need to put the kibosh to this disaster-in-making for Vermont's iconic product. Don't bet on it. He's a Democrat, after all–the world's first spineless mammal.  

...give way to this.