You’ve Got Mail

October 20, 2015 by Adam Cherry 2 Comments

The 17^th century proverb construing one man’s meat as another’s poison staunchly applies to modern life well beyond the obvious case of dumpster lasagna. Take for example the €3B of 5-year 4.95% Greek bonds issued a year and a half ago. Though the offering was eight times oversubscribed, Athens’ ensuing, and abundantly predictable, fiscal and political befoulment has made investors poorer by half. Depending on whom you listen to, ObamaCare and the Iranian nuclear accord will either lead to our salvation or cement our collective demise. And what about women as leaders of contemporary society: blessing or sin?

In other words, could Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir rise to power today? Not if left to some of the most powerful men on the planet. To wit: When asked if the next (15^th) incarnation could be a woman, the Dalai Lama observed, “If female Dalai Lama come, then that female must be very attractive, otherwise not much use.” Donald Trump’s assessment of rival Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina was harsher still: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”

And yet Hillary Clinton, marshmallow countenance, cankles and all, still garners tremendous support across the land and likewise remains the greatest nightmare of the GOP. After Benghazi sputtered as a political torpedo, Republicans refashioned the inquiry into the crimination of Mrs. Clinton’s email protocol. (In fact, a year after Hillary stepped down as Secretary of State, they pushed through a law requiring the transfer of personal emails to government servers.) Repurposing a Congressional investigation is nothing new (recall the torturous arc from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky’s cum-stained dress) and neither is the intent. As House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy boasted, “We put together a… special committee. [Hillary’s] numbers are dropping. We fought and made that happen.”

Corroboration comes in the form of Maj. Bradley Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve who is suing the committee over his termination as an investigator after he opposed the singular focus on Clinton and her emails. Lest you question Podliska’s motives, he has unequivocally declared, “I do not support Hillary Clinton for president. I am going to vote for the Republican nominee in 2016.” He went on to say, “I’m scared. I’m going up against powerful people in Washington. [In the end] the victims’ families are not going to get the truth and that’s the most unfortunate thing about this.”

A Salem witch-hunt indeed, but were her transgressions truly wicked? Remember, the Right is claiming Clinton’s laxity endangered our security even though the State Department email server they insist she should have used was hacked by the Russians. As were the systems at the White House and the Pentagon. At the same time, the Chinese infiltrated several other government computer networks thereby compiling detailed dossiers on over four million federal employees. Even the personal emails of the CIA Director and Homeland Security Secretary have been compromised. It is not conceivable, then, that the private server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y. house was the least vulnerable option of all?

As for her accusers, their digital safekeeping was hardly beyond reproach. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush harbored secret emails for seven years despite the requirement he relinquish all electronic correspondence immediately upon leaving office. To his credit, he did make public hundreds of thousands of emails on time. Unfortunately, many of those contained confidential (Social Security numbers, medical records, employee performance reports) or classified (Mid-East troop deployments, nuclear reactor security provisions) information. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, then a Milwaukee County executive up for re-election, directed public employees to illegally conduct campaign business via a secret email system. His chief-of-staff plead guilty to federal charges while another staffer was convicted of using the system to entice minors into sexual acts. But President George W. Bush may have been the greatest transgressor. A Congressional investigation into W’s 2007 wholesale removal of federal prosecutors was stymied because the administration destroyed 22 million emails that had been illegally routed through computers at Republican National Committee headquarters.

Never mind the evidence, the Republicans will bristle. What she did was far more egregious… and patently unlawful. Yet precedent says otherwise. The Department of Justice has ruled that the Freedom of Information Act “creates no obligation for an agency to search for and produce records that it does not possess and control.” When former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sought to restrict public access to his notes and tapes by ditching them at the Library of Congress as opposed archiving them with the State Department, the seminal FOIA case rose to the Supreme Court. In the majority opinion, conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, “We hold today that, even if a document requested under the FOIA is wrongfully in the possession of a party not an ‘agency’… the federal courts have no authority to order the production of such records.”

Perhaps, as Bernie Sanders lamented, we’ve spent too much time on this arcane subject. I would hazard it matters precious little to those college students who will face a lifetime of debt – assuming, of course, they survive the mass shooting in the quad. Or to the thousands of employees shit-canned at Hewlett Packard and Morgan Stanley. The bottom line is this: in politics, nothing worthwhile comes without a pricetag. If you need to swallow something truly rancid to get to the plum pudding, so be it. Just make sure to cinch up your adult diaper real tight.

Forever Unclean

August 28, 2015 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Trumped up: The ongoing war between the Republican frontrunner and Fox anchor Megyn Kelly seems suspiciously contrived, playing out with less spontaneity than a scripted “reality” show. When pressed as to whether he had spoken to (read: conspired with) Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, the Donald sidestepped the question as deftly as a hobo sashaying around a crusty tampon on skid row. As was widely reported, the fracas began during the first televised debate when Kelly unabashedly labeled Trump a misogynist. “You could see that there was blood coming out of her eyes,” he subsequently responded, “Blood coming out of her wherever.” Trump to this day maintains that he was not referring to menstruation and that anyone who claims otherwise is “deviant.” I for one thought the bitch was on the rag.

One label Trump irrefutably deserves is that of serial monogamist. Were it not for the habit of jettisoning wives as they approach middle age, Mr. Trump would by now understand that time does inexorably stanch the red tide. But it doesn’t happen overnight. Or even in four hours, 49 minutes and 11 seconds, exactly the time it took Kiran Ghandi to complete the London marathon with a free-flowing period. “If there’s one way to transcend oppression,” she blogged in a post titled Feminism, “it’s to run a marathon in whatever way you want.” It is also, she later conceded, a nifty way to transmit AIDS or Hepatitis C.

Catamenia, as it stands, is the least of Caitlyn Jenner’s worries. Well, especially since she still has her balls. But the ex-Olympian nonetheless remains under the sword of Damocles: The Los Angeles County District Attorney is weighing manslaughter charges against Jenner for his (at the time) role in a fatal car accident in Malibu. The potential for incarceration thus lends mensurable value to a change of sex. To wit: Subway’s Jared Fogle is going away for at least five years for distributing kiddie porn and having sex with minors while ex-Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck merely received weekend work detention for the rape of a 15-year-old boy. And gender bias extends to the prey as well: 14 of Fogle’s victims will divvy up $1.4mm while Shattuck’s quarry will garner little more than a few high fives and cheers of “Stifler’s Mom” in the high school cafeteria.

Talk of a glass ceiling aside, the distaff sex is far less disadvantaged than ever before. Women currently run 23 Fortune 500 companies, from General Motors to Pepsi to Yahoo! Their numbers fill Senate corridors as commonly as they do the Supreme Court. And for the first time in military history, females have earned the distinction of Army Ranger. These days, it seems the only place you can’t actually find them is on the Ashley Madison dating site. Along with your email address, the hacker group Team Impact revealed the vast majority of gynic profiles were fabricated. In a database of some 37 million people, perhaps 12,000 belonged to sentient women willing to have sex. Not surprisingly, these odds roughly parallel those found in off-line society and explain such phenomena as bar fights hair restoration clinics. But don’t despair because the pharmaceutical industry has come to the rescue. After twice being rejected, flibanserin (trade name Addyi) was approved by the FDA as a female libido enhancer. As the drug targets neurotransmitters in the brain, it unfortunately comes with a warning: the impact on serotonin receptors 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A can result in patients getting dizzy and passing out. The good news, however, is that if the drug fails to deliver via its primary (and imprecisely understood) mechanism, it is a workable substitute for Rohypnol. Nonetheless, it remains that “Addyi” is a clunky and disjunctive mouthful. Perhaps sales would benefit from something with a correlative lilt, like, say Cosby or Rose.

The Lord is Dead

August 1, 2015 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Two years ago, a joint study by professors at U. C. Berkeley and Duke University revealed that since WWII, the ratio of Americans devoid of religious affiliation or practice has quadrupled to one in five. While the massive decades-long influx of Latin American Catholics was already imbedded in the numbers, more recent immigration flows are not. Still, an hour of casual observation at LAX or any college campus would do little to alter the results: Chinese hegemonists seem to outweigh Muslim terrorists by roughly four to one.

It cannot be of surprise, then, that the secular world has come to replace the church in terms of providing answers to profound questions of ethics and cosmology. Nowadays we do our confessing on a therapist’s couch and find comfort by comparing ourselves to the truly repugnant fringe element of our diaper fetish Internet group. And while priests still comprise the vanguard of child molestation, it should be noted that Congress is proving a worthy challenger. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was indicted for lying to the FBI in regards to large sums of money he paid to a former student to quash revelations that Hastert, then a high school teacher and wrestling coach, had sexually abused the boy. What makes matters worse, in this post-Ray Rice epoch, is that a video has recently surfaced corroborating the victim’s account. The good news for Hastert (and former Republican compatriots Larry Craig, Mark Foley and Aaron Schock) is that overt homosexuality no longer precludes induction as a Boy Scout Troop Leader. Who wants a merit badge for Water Sports or Leatherwork?

While Catilyn Jenner is but the latest, if not the most, high profile person to change its sex, I can’t recall, before Ruby Rose, any celebrity that identified as “gender fluid.” And certainly Rachel Dolezal is the first transracial I’ve ever heard of. (Memo to Madonna and Angelina Jolie: adopted black kids can actually rub off on your own offspring.) Right wing Christians take all this chaos and impermanence as evidence that the end of days is nigh. Ted Cruz is frantically herding American Jews back to Israel, where Mike Huckabee is feverishly stoking the ovens. Meanwhile, James Patterson’s new television series, “Zoo”, in which the animal kingdom rises against the humans, has become a modern day “War of the Worlds”; people have begun to interpret the recent spate of shark attacks (including one during the live broadcast of a world surfing competition) and wildlife maulings as a coordinated effort to wipe us out.

Enter Minnesota Dentist Walter Palmer, who is singlehandedly attempting to reestablish the balance of power. On a recent trip to Africa, Palmer illegally shot and killed Zimbabwe’s famed Cecil the Lion. Cecil not only generated hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars, he was a subject of an ongoing Oxford University study. No matter, Palmer and his henchmen lured the noble beast out of his refuge, executed him, removed his GPS tracking collar, and then, in a move worthy of ISIS, beheaded him. If God wants to recapture that wayward twenty percent of the polity, herein lays a golden opportunity; Palmer’s bloody and twisted corpse discovered in Central Park, with evidence suggesting he had been date raped by Bill Cosby only hours before being taken down by a pack of rabid squirrels. Amen to that.

The Manchurian Candidate

December 20, 2014 by Adam Cherry 1 Comment

Oh the irony. Sony Pictures’ production of “The Interview”, a Seth Rogan (aka: Dirty Randy) post-stoner buddy film about a pair of journalists recruited to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, has itself been extirpated by Pyongyang’s cyber attack on the Hollywood studio. The latest twist has the dudes in the bad haircuts and impossibly large military hats disavowing the hacking of Amy Pascal’s email and offering to spearhead a joint investigation in an effort to identify the real culprit (recall: Orenthal James Simpson).

While the rapprochement may at first seem disingenuous, – if not a thinly veiled attempt to discern the capabilities of our counter-intelligence apparatus – consider the recently appended video showing Ray Rice’s then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, snuggling in for a kiss shortly after he knocked her ass out in a hotel elevator. Conceivably, what convinced Former U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones to vitiate Rice’s NFL suspension was not Commissioner Goodell’s “arbitrary abuse of discretion,” but the supposition that Rice’s left cross was merely a sadomasochistic act of foreplay. In that light, the Koreans’ Internet assault may have been nothing more than their version of intercontinental fluffing.

Paradoxically, left-wing artistes in Tinseltown are all clamoring to be Sony’s preeminent critic; Judd Apatow described the cancellation as “An un-American act of cowardice,” while Rob Lowe lamented, “Everyone caved.” Even President Obama got into the act, opining, “I think they made a mistake.” ” We cannot,” he further bloviated, “have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” Well, unless they serve on the Jefferson County school board.

Newt Gingrich’s alarmist missive aside, the greatest threat to the commonweal is not the prospect of all-encompassing cyber warfare, but rather the potentiality of another Bush presidency. Though the economy is adding a quarter million jobs per month, Fed Chairwoman Yellen conceded that the system remains fragile; the last thing we need, then, is one more Bible thumping screw-up telling us not to fret because Jesus will fix it in the end.

Nonetheless, we do have much to be grateful this holiday season. Ebola contagion is again less likely than a mumps outbreak at a hockey game, gas prices are regressing to 2005 levels and the stock market is ascending as rapidly as Michael Phelps sinks (think: pot, DUI, Chicks with Dicks).

I do have one regret, though. Having spent countless years in mind-numbing lines taking the kids to sit on Santa’s lap, I was looking forward to the new Wal Mart “Kill a Darkie” Holiday Ritual. Sadly, a selfish and frivolous lawsuit brought by the family of John Crawford means that white folks can no longer gun down people of color in Wal Marts even if we come upon them clutching BB guns that were stocked on open shelves or witness them grabbing the last Skylanders Trap Team Starter Pack in existence. I guess I’ll have to content myself, then, by making sugar cookies and watching a Chinese black market DVD of “The Interview”.

The Wayback Machine

July 27, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

When Stalin was cautioned, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, that the Yalta Agreement contravened plans for the Soviet annexation Central Europe, he famously rejoined, “Never mind. We’ll do it our own way later.” So it is today for Vladimir Putin. Having resorbed Crimea with nothing more than a gaggle of pipe-wielding thugs, Vlad thought his quest to procure the rest of Ukraine would be best served by shooting down a commercial jetliner. The United States and European Union swiftly condemned the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17, while Taiwan, in an act of solidarity with Ukraine, crashed one of their own passenger aircraft. President Ma Ying-jeou told reporters his nation “well knows the fear and anxiety of being gobbled up by one’s hegemonic neighbor.”

In the grand timeline of history, it wasn’t long after Judge Greene broke up AT&T, that the TelCo giant began clawing back some of her severed parts. So while it may be understandable that Putin is trying to put the band back together, one is left to wonder, now that Russia’s westward creep is sharing the stage with the off-Broadway revival of the 1948 Palestine (Arab-Israeli) War, whether Mr. Peabody has set the Wayback Machine to the Truman Administration.

David Plouffe, President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, thinks so. Plouffe called the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby that employers who claim a religious objection are exempt from providing contraceptive coverage to employees “A 1950 decision in an America of 2014.” “The notion,” he expanded, ”that five older men will say that some business can dictate health choices… for millions of women… can be a huge issue.”

An issue more profound, however, is that the Court has firmly established itself as a purely political organization (I would concede to those that cite Bush v Gore – a ruling that erased its own precedent by virtue of being “limited to the present circumstances” – as the moment of conception), a body which comes to a conclusion based on pure ideology and then strains to defend itself by cobbling together incongruent case law fastened by flawed logic. The Hobby decision hinged on the notion that a private company’s religious beliefs were satisfactorily preserved when the government used the “least restrictive alternative” – e.g. the use of Form 700 by religious nonprofits to pass contraceptive coverage to insurance companies or third party administrators – to implement the law. Yet only days later, the court granted an emergency injunction to Wheaton College, allowing the evangelical school to refuse complying with the very Obamacare “workaround” used to support Hobby.

Wheaton contended that the mere affirmation of religious objection was anathema because it precipitated outside coverage of birth control. That’s like saying orthodox Jews can simply ignore don’t walk signs on the way to Sabbath services. While the wanton hypocrisy so blatantly displayed by the majority might be de rigueur in Congress, it didn’t sit well with the dissenters. Justice Sotomayor: “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today. After expressly relying on the availability of the religious-nonprofit accommodation to hold that the contraceptive coverage requirement violates [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] as applied to closely held for-profit corporations, the Court now, as the dissent in Hobby Lobby feared it might, retreats from that position.” Never mind all that high-minded verbiage; the logical extension of the Court’s dictum means investment banks controlled by Muslims could refuse to pay for porcine heart valves, entertainment companies run by Scientologists needn’t pay for anti-depressants, and bookstores owned by Christian Scientists would be excused from providing any medical coverage whatsoever. What is most disturbing is that life-long appointees are imposing their ideology with impunity, and that the rule of law is no longer sacrosanct. In effect, then, Messrs. Putin and Stalin have already extended their reach.