ON THE SUNDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING (EAT THE RICH, YUM)
I keep telling myself I watch too much TV, and especially TV with commercials, and especially TV with commercials during what’s laughingly called the holiday season, because any sense of introspection will be subverted into to an unconscious guilt that I am not out buying stuff, or furiously earning, by any means necessary, the cash to buy said stuff. I am unfortunately very bad at taking my own advice and thus found myself slumped in front of a TV which was all red and white and holly jolly, and cars with bows on the roof, and about the only person I could identify with was the barbarian pillager in the credit card commercial (What’s in your wallet?) who shoots the plastic lawn reindeer with a crossbow and grins. And then, wholly unwanted, an old Lonnie Donegan songs invades my head, complete with imaginary mournful harmonica....
Times are getting hard boys
Money’s getting scarce
If times don’t much better boys
Sure that they’ll get worse
At which point I should have reached for the remote, but I hesitated long enough to catch Sixty Minutes where I learn about all the shit that’s going on over Plan B, the morning-after contraceptive, that only serves as yet another reminder of how a theocratic embryo police state is sliming its way through the land with aid of Wal Mart and all these Bush appointments of fanatics, incompetents, crooks, and imbeciles to key posts federal agencies. And then the next segment takes me on a tour of these hideously ugly, tasteless fucking mansions the rich are having built for them, these 13 thousand square feet, Republican starter-castles, paid for by the sweat of minimum wage, burning energy and leaking heat, that make Graceland look like Frank Lloyd Wright, and I can only pray they all die horrible Stephen King deaths because the developer laid the golf course over the old Indian burial ground.

The secret word is Rise

LINK
I’ve always been a big reader of newspapers from somewhere other than the US. Always, though, a pretty random effort, but now MrMR sends me a site that has foreign press all packaged and one-stop.
http://www.watchingamerica.com/index.shtml