Hold My Dick

March 2, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Having turned himself into the LAPD, former NFL star and TV analyst Darren Sharper faces multiple charges of rape in both California and New Orleans. And despite additional accusations of sexual assault in Arizona, Nevada and Florida, Sharper’s attorney unflinchingly averred, “It was all consensual contact with women who wanted to be in his company.” I’m no Clarence Darrow, but perhaps a more exculpatory strategy would be to modify the Twinkie defense and argue diminished capacity as a result of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The effects of brain trauma on NFL players have already been well established: U.S. District Judge Anita Brody recently denied preliminary approval of the league’s $765 million settlement of a concussion lawsuit due to concerns the compensation package may prove insufficient. Yet to this observer, whether Sharper’s partners were, in the final moment, acting under their own volition seems wholly beside the point. The bottom line is this: while athletes and entertainers get copious amounts of pussy, the rest of us shlubs have to jerk off to Internet porn or, if we’re really lucky, a whiff of the housekeeper’s panties we fished out of the hamper.

As Charlie Sheen is getting engaged to a porn star, most Average Joes are reduced to debasing themselves. To wit: Timothy Margis, Concordia University’s director of public safety, was fired after a female employee told police he masturbated in her office and ejaculated into one of her shoes. River Forest Police Department Deputy Chief James O’Shea said Margis, who was charged with public indecency and disorderly conduct, admitted to the act after learning witnesses observed him exiting her office while buttoning his pants and fastening his belt. Another exemplar is 34-year-old Vincent J. Wade of Pennsauken, N.J. Wade held visions of fondling some breasts and burying his face between succulent thighs when he crashed his 2007 Toyota Camry into a Philadelphia area Crown Fried Chicken restaurant. Video captured at the scene shows Wade subsequently exited the vehicle, tore off all his clothes and began choking his own chicken in front of onlookers. The shift manager reported that damage to the building was minimal and that, unlike the prep-sink-as-urinal Pizza Hut in Kermit, W. Va., his franchise would remain open for business.

Inexplicably, the vast majority of American men seem satisfied by this arrangement. But sadly there are deranged predators who seek pleasure at the expense of innocent children. Just check the FBI’s sex offender database and you’ll probably discover several right in your neighborhood. Take for example Curtis Anton Beseda, caught on surveillance cameras groping an 11-year-old girl in a Snohomish, Washington grocery store. It turns out that Beseda was a hero of the Christian Right, having served 12 years for fire-bombing abortion clinics in the ‘80s. Beseda, to my mind, was driven far more by self-interest than God’s will. Simple logic dictates that fewer abortion clinics mean fewer abortions. Fewer abortions equal more children and, well, you can figure out the rest.

On the precipice of the Oscars, Woody Allen is newsworthy for predation, rather than artistry. His adoptive daughter, Dylan, has rehashed, twenty years later, allegations of molestation. Woody’s published response in the New York Times was both trenchant and highly persuasive, and served to reinforce the widely held notion that Mia Farrow is, if nothing else, a complete loon. Nonetheless, Mr. Allen must recognize that his public persona was forever soiled when he married another of Ms. Farrow’s adopted daughters, Soon-Yi. The benefit of hindsight aside, if he had wanted a young Asian bride, he could have easily ordered one from Singapore or the Philippines. At the end of the day, it would cost but a fraction of Mr. Sharper’s legal bills.

Bada Bing!

February 13, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Last week, T. Borris Avdeyev, the technician responsible for the Olympic ring miscue, was stabbed to death in his Sochi hotel room. Well, not really, but the quote ascribed to a complicit police investigator that Avdeyev “tripped and fell onto a set of knives” comports neatly with our perception of Russian brutality and callousness. It recalls the apocryphal reports of Soviet commandoes butchering family members of Iranian hostage takers in 1979. Understandably, given President Carter’s feckless response to the seizure of our embassy in Tehran, we were ripe, over that shameful year-and-a-half, to embrace the notion that somebody had the balls to kick ass. What is not fiction, however, is George H. W. Bush’s secret flight to Paris weeks before the presidential election where he offered Hashemi Rafsanjani $40 million to delay the release of hostages. As such, Mr. Bush all but secured Reagan’s victory and, at the same time, established the very back channels that would become instrumental in the conduct of Iran-Contra.

These events solidified America’s reputation as a weasel, operating in the shadows, in contrast to the brazenness of the Russian bear. Moscow has a long history of atrociousness, from the pogroms to Stalin’s army of rapists. So it came as no surprise in 1985 that when Hezbollah abducted four staffers from the Russian Embassy in Beirut, the KGB kidnapped and castrated a close relative of the militant group’s leader, delivering the severed organs along with their ultimatum.

Imagine, then, my shame over the accusations leveled against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. When Fort Lee’s Democratic Mayor Mark Sokolich refused to endorse the governor’s re-election, his Doughiness allegedly sealed off several lanes of the George Washington Bridge. Are you serious: a traffic snarl as payback? In Jersey? I can almost hear the indignation – “He’s garbage!” – among patrons at Satriale’s butcher shop: Better that retribution was meted out by Tony Soprano, who would have thrown Sokolich and his entire family off the fuckin’ bridge.

The larger narrative has Christie trying to secure endorsements from Democratic mayors and legislators in order to broaden his support for an anticipated 2016 run at the White House. It certainly didn’t help that one woman actually died after EMS crews were delayed by the GWB lane closures. And while Christie aides may argue the victim was 91 and would have croaked soon enough anyways, they can’t explain away the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into claims made by mayor Dawn Zimmer (D-Hoboken) that Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno personally cautioned her that any post-Sandy relief funding would be contingent upon approval (as yet unforthcoming) of a development deal proposed by the Rockefeller Group, a real estate company with several ties to the governor. Though Zimmer requested $127 million in compensation (the vast majority of Hoboken was literally underwater after Sandy hit), she received only a niggling $342,000.

By way of contrast, compliant Democrats were showered in a surfeit of state funds. The Port Authority doled out $250 million to mayor Raymond McDonough of Harrison for a new transit station (the largesse was overt to the point of causing a fatal heart attack), and another $3 million to mayor Brian Stack of Union City even though the PA has no operations there. Over in Essex County, executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo, Jr. received $7 million more from the Port Authority for a “park” and an additional $4 million in state aid for a vocational school. We all know that dipping into the public till for political purposes is strictly prohibited and with any luck we’ll soon see Mr. Christie in federal court. I only hope we can look forward to a process without the prototypical American lies and obfuscations (see: Watergate, Lewinsky). I for one would be far more likely to vote Christie for president if queries as to whether he ordered the bribes wrought the Jessup-like exclamation, “YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!!”

Pre-Existing Condition

February 7, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

In his State of the Union address, the President cautioned that even though nine million Americans have signed up for Obamacare, the final judgment is still in the offing. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), on the other hand, would prefer to keep the focus sharply on the launch point, an abject failure the scale of which recalls the Spanish Armada. “The only way,” Bohner sniped eight-and-a-half million subscribers ago, “to fully protect the American people is to scrap this law once and for all. There is no way to fix this… I think everybody understands I’m not happy the rollout has been wrought with a whole range of problems.” Really? It appeared to me that the Speaker embraced each and every misstep with the moist giddiness of an eleven-year-old girl at a One Direction concert. Either way, the birthing pains are squarely behind us now and, perhaps most importantly, there have been, according to Patti Unruh, a spokeswoman for the Medicare agency, “no successful security attacks on HealthCare.gov, and no person or group has maliciously accessed personally identifiable information.”

Which is no small accomplishment these days. To wit: In the last month, hackers posted the cell phone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat users, while a couple million other accountholders were being compromised over at Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Meanwhile, Target, Inc. executives groveled in front of a Senate committee, trying unsuccessfully to explain how it was that 40 million credit card records were swiped under their very noses. And despite the exile of Edward Snowden, an intercepted telephone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nulandand and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, spawned an international uproar. In that conversation, which had been posted on YouTube, Ms. Nulandand is heard to have said, “fuck the EU” in the wake of mass anti-government protests against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to re-establish the country as a Soviet satellite.

It is conceivable, then, that in the current zeitgeist, Richard Nixon would hardly have been given a traffic ticket. It is widely accepted that the Patriot Act has expurgated the Bill of Rights; there is no longer any legally accepted notion of personal privacy. Even technological privacy is but a chimera at a time when encrypted messages can be decoded merely by listening to a computer’s hum. Nonetheless, there is always, in our fair land, a trial lawyer willing to sue, to bet against the odds. So it is that a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook, alleging that the social media behemoth “has systematically violated consumers’ privacy by reading its users’ personal, private Facebook messages without their consent.” While the company defends its actions as a prophylactic against viruses and spam, they are more likely engaged in data mining, the results of which are sold to advertisers and marketers who themselves utilize spamming, albeit in a more refined and targeted way. Facebook is also the named defendant in a case surrounding unauthorized “Likes”, which seems rather esoteric if not patently trivial, and therefore merits no further mention. What I will say, however, is that the arc of invasiveness has quizzically matched that of the decriminalization of marijuana. These shifts, while recent, resonate with the timeless theme of inward retreat in response to the loss of liberty. Consider the crowdfunding campaign for Imagination is the Only Escape, a video game that sees a young boy flee the horror of the Holocaust through fantasy. So we would do well, in this environment, to remember the words of Sun Tzu: “To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.” Or better yet, those of Christopher Wallace: “B.I.G., P-O, P-P-A / No info, for the, DEA / Federal agents mad cause I’m flagrant / Tap my cell, and the phone in the basement.” True dat.

I Have a Dream

January 20, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, to crib from Andy Williams, is “the most wonderful time of the year.” With our tree trundling down the street in the back of a dump truck and the ornament shards surgically removed from my feet, I can finally exhale and give thanks that this season, despite the very real prospect of a satanic monument looming over the Oklahoma City Capitol, Fox News eschewed Bill O’Reilly’s timeworn and quixotic defense of Christmas and instead ran with Megyn Kelly’s assertion that both Santa and Jesus are white. But wait, doesn’t the Mormon Church’s (and by extension the Romney family’s) recent inclusion of blacks mean we can no longer rely on such traditional stereotypes? Possibly, but given that Santa works only one day a year, odds are he’s colored. So it’s all the more confusing that an African-American ninth-grader was rebuked for wearing a Santa costume to a school holiday party. When his teacher queried, “Don’t you know Santa is white?” he was really asking why the commonweal’s preeminent roles — whether real or imaginary — are no longer the exclusive bastion of Caucasians. The NASCAR crowd, apparently, can’t cotton to the fact that the highest office in the land is currently occupied by a Negro.

“I think it is a kick in the face,” grumbled Red McCombs after the University of Texas hired the unmistakably chocolate Charlie Strong as its new football coach. The co-founder of Clear Channel Communications and former owner of the Minnesota Vikings characterized the situation as “wrong”, noting that a more appropriate role for Strong would be “position coach, coordinator or locker room attendant.”

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry, wounded by such overt racism, longs for a more just and inclusive world; one where Santa is a penguin, where the Miami Dolphins sing Kumbaya, and where the word “nigger” is supplanted by “Obamacare”. Perry called it a derogatory term, “meant to shame… and demean.” And in the context of The Affordable Care Act’s contentious and spastic nascency, it does neatly weave together the concepts of entitlement, ignorance and ineptitude. I do wonder, however, whether rappers — far and away the heaviest users of the “n-word” — will embrace the switch: “I’m up in da club with all my Obamacares” is admittedly less lyrical than, well, just about every damn song on the radio today.

Despite its status as the President’s signature piece of legislation, the ACA was nearly stillborn on arrival; due to massive hardware and software glitches, only 26,000 consumers were able to successfully navigate healthcare.gov during its first month online. Shortly thereafter, millions of Americans were informed of health insurance cancellations, contrary to Mr. Obama’s solemn promise that, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” Though the vast majority of extant schemes failed to provide the ten minimum care standards outlined in the Act (e.g. mental health treatment and pediatric dental care), the bulk were supposed to be “grandfathered” in. It is almost sinister, then, that HHS was, behind the scenes, tightening the regulations to exclude, for example, any plan that raised its co-pay after March 23, 2010. Yet the greatest embarrassment came in the form of Jessica Sanford, a single mother touted as an Obamacare triumph. In a Rose Garden address, a preening President read from her letter: “Now we finally get to have coverage… for $169 a month. I was crying the other night when I signed up.” Unfortunately, the Washington state health exchange had incorrectly calculated Sanford’s subsidy; the actual premium found her squarely “priced out” of the market. Adding insult to injury, imposition of the uninsured penalty (in her case approximately $390) left her, as she posted on Facebook, feeling “screwed”. It’s as if Dr. King somehow foresaw Obamacare when he said, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”

Blowing Smoke

November 18, 2013 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

probe Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia currently permit the use of medical marijuana, though Colorado and Washington no longer go through the charade of requiring sham prescriptions from graduates of Caribbean medical schools. So while it’s the chronic all around in the Mountain West, the middle of the country – especially the Bible Belt – remains zealously conservative. (In the main, the same states that prohibit medicinal cannabis also forbid same-sex unions.) Quizzically, law enforcement’s anti-drug crusade is hitting a fever pitch in the same red states where penurious Republican legislatures are reducing prison sentences for low-level drug possessions. To wit: In two separate incidents, female drivers were pulled over by Texas troopers for routine traffic violations and given full cavity searches on the side of the road, ostensibly in a quest for illegal drugs. But the facts simply don’t add up: “They didn’t even search my socks or my shoes,” recounted one exasperated victim. “I just couldn’t fathom how you could search someone’s butt and their vagina, and not search their socks or shoes.” Well, perhaps those cops just aren’t into that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, a thirty-one-year-old New Mexico man was pulled over and forced to strip from the waist down in public and then, in a hunt for non-existent contraband, submit his body to an X-ray and anal penetration at a nearby hospital. Timothy Young was finally discharged from the Gila Medical Center at 4:30 a.m. with soiled underwear and a bill for $600. But Young has no business complaining to David Eckert who was stopped by the same officers in a Walmart parking lot just a few months later. Over the course of 12 grueling hours, Eckert was forced to endure to an X-ray, CT scan, digital rectal exam, three enemas and a colonoscopy (thankfully) under anesthesia. Predictably, no drugs were recovered during the $6,000 saturnalia.

As news reports and court documents reveal an increasing number of cases with more or less similar details, one has to wonder if the sheer extent of the President’s domestic spying program has consecrated this kind of prosecutorial overreach. While it goes without question that each and every victim of such unwarranted violation deserves our sympathy, no one has been sodomized more vigorously by the government than Jamie Dimon.

JP Morgan Chase’s CEO has been bent over by the feds who are gloving up to extract $13 billion to settle civil charges that the bank sold securities comprised of unqualified mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the run up to 2008’s financial meltdown. The fine is separate from the four-and-a-half large the firm has agreed to pay to private investors, but in both instances, the vast majority of shoddy loans were originated or packaged by Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual, two failing financial institutions that both the Treasury and Federal Reserve had implored Dimon to rescue during the crisis. But it gets worse: not only was Morgan’s request for criminal immunity soundly rejected, but dozens of organizations, including a cabal of five Democratic senators, are petitioning the Justice Department to preclude the bank from writing off costs (up to $4 billion could be claimed as a tax deduction) related to the settlement. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Americans for Tax Fairness and 72 other advocacy groups collected 160,000 signatures and sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder: “As your enforcement actions unfold, it is important that the American people —already victimized once by Wall Street’s malfeasance — not be forced to pick up more of the tab.” Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) echoed the sentiment when he proclaimed, “Taxpayers should not be subsidizing more than $3 billion of JPMorgan’s penalties at a time when federal priorities like education, clean energy, infrastructure and other job creating investments are facing budget cuts.” Given that Dimon can’t turn to shareholders – they’re suing him, too – I guess he could use a bong hit right about now.