The Day That...

Dumb fat racist fuck Joey Vento dies from an overdue heart attack; decent people everywhere rejoice

Once in a great while Earth gets better by subtracting a human.  Racist Joey-come-lately (to Pat's corner) is one such waste of perfectly good carbon.

What can one say about a man who claimed to love America and yet hung the Confederate "Stars and Bars" battle flag in his shop, a flag representing a violent, racist attempt to destroy the federal government... and a deliberate provocation to what few black customers he had.  What can one say about a man who claimed to want everyone to speak English, yet had extreme difficulty stringing together a sentence in that or any other language, and whose T-shirts and bumper stickers "promoting" English managed to misuse simple punctuation.  What can one say about a man who served food that Mexicans have the good taste to skip and yet posted signs to discourage their business.  What can one say about a man who claimed to love Philadelphia but chose not to live here, and in fact couldn't bring himself to reside in Pennsylvania.  What can one say about a man who used someone else's name for his business and didn't even spell it correctly.  What can one say about a man who made money from tourists from all over the world and yet complained that he had trouble taking their orders.  What can one say about a dickhead who loudly decried the immigration which saved the street his business is located upon from becoming an empty, scary ghetto.

Here's what one can say:

Joey "Dumb Fuck" Vento fetishized power as only a bootlicking fascist can.  The mind reels at the brutal upbringing that produces such a twisted and limited mind.  Joey had a form of necrophilia for dead soldiers and cops which - thanks to a far right wing marketing plan (if we would like to credit this low level of thinking with that title) and the grand surplus of American consumer stupidity - translated itself into more money whenever an American in uniform caught a bullet with their face.  I've often said through the years that every time a Philadelphia cop died, Joey's sweatpants became a little tighter and more moist.

Asshole that he was, stupid Joey polluted the local airwaves with his racist tirades in the form of hate ads bought on local right wing talk and affiliated sports talk radio.  These semi-literate ramblings were so extreme that one local sports talk host wondered aloud on the air after hearing one how his employers could allow such a thing to be broadcast.  (I called WIP a number of times in all seriousness to inquire about how much countering ads would run, and the weasel bastards in the advertising department couldn't be bothered to return any of my phone calls.)  Weekends bring regular invasions of wannabe tough guy asswipes on motorcycles from their nests in the white flight suburbs to heed the siren song of these racist ads.

There's something about the motorcycles and the military shit and the flags and badges adorning Joey's shithole and plastered on his local customers which screams "I am a small man frightened of a large world, and need to feel that I am larger and louder than a world I struggle to comprehend.  I can't hack it alone, and I need to feel that powers larger than me are providing protection."  In their fear and ignorance America's right names this "freedom."

As a long-term resident of South Philadelphia and a lifetime Philadelphian I am embarrassed in the extreme by this piece of shit and fat, illiterate racist fucks who make money from his glorified food cart.  May his possessions and heirs fall upon hard times and may his name be scrubbed from history.

My history struggling against Vento's racist bullshit includes kicking the living fuck out of a Vento supporter in a quizzo grudge match to raise money for the Nationalities Service Center, a non-profit at which I volunteered to teach English to immigrants.  Vento's supporters are not very bright, and in this case I more than doubled the score of my opponent to win the day.  Additionally I wrote directly to Vento via his website to ask if he would be willing to donate either money or food to NSC as we were working with limited resources to, y'know, teach people who wanted to learn English how to order in fucking English.

This is all you need to know about Vento's supposed "generosity" (always loudly given as a means of cheap advertising, not the charity of a gentleman): not only did Vento and his shop not donate a penny, but they could not be bothered to return either email or phone calls with the simple decency of a direct "no."  NSC never reported to me that they received one penny from Vento nor from Geno's.  Is there anyone out there who still thinks that Vento had any genuine concern about the linguistic proclivities of Philadelphians?

And y'know what else?  Joey's cheesesteaks fucking suck.  SUCK.  If you want some good food on that block I heartily recommend the authentic Pueblan fare of La Lupe.  It's far better food at a far better price and the restaurant - which has a fucking bathroom, try adding one of those Geno's - wasn't decorated by Leni Riefenstahl.  (I am always amused that because Geno's lacks a bathroom and sufficient table space that Joey's fucktard customers regularly cross into the territory of La Lupe to use both without any particular right to be there.  Oh the irony!)

Joey's gone but his bathroomless eyesore of a crap-slinging business is still haunting our city.  Decent Philadelphians everywhere should be working to shut the place down by, to coin a phrase, any means necessary.  It's divisive and embarrassing.  Note that the tool in the upper righthand corner of this site can be used to translate this piece into whatever language you'd like to fucking read it in, which is your right to do and my honor to provide.

William Safire stands corrected

Heer reed him obitiary. Him give Nixon, Reagan oral for a livving.

Jim Carroll died (DIED!)

Jim Carroll is now a person who died (DIED!). RIP.

Ted's dead, baby... Ted's dead

Ted Kennedy's been circling the drain for months, but I was still surprised at the level of fawning coverage which is accompanying the fourth-most-favored Kennedy brother to the Great Gated Community in the Sky. So a guy with a head the size of a Buick gets a brain tumor - quel appropos.

Update: Since banging this out, I saw these articles (one, two) which lay out plainly that Kennedy was a bigger enemy of labor than I had previously thought.

The proximal impetus for this rant was the nauseating suggestion made repeatedly by national media in mid-verbal fellatio that health care was the "cause of [Ted's] life." Let's make one thing sparkling clear - the cause of Ted's life was emptying the next Scotch bottle, preferably with a working class girl from the office pool who won't go blabbing perched upon what passed for his Jabba "lap."

Something is severely wrong with a country that sends a bloated, soused clown like this to the Senate for 47 years, interrupted only by the Grim Reaper. How do you get re-elected to office six times after drowning a woman and not reporting it for several hours?!

I keep reading about how much "liberals" loved this guy. I'm a liberal and the vast majority of my friends are liberals and I have never heard a single one of them make any statement whatever about him, even in passing. Certainly nothing positive. I think here we mean the mass media Beltway "liberal," which is to say a registered Democrat millionaire who thinks that condoms should be legal and isn't entirely opposed to rock'n'roll. Anything left of that apparently doesn't exist.

I hope this is a nail in the coffin of the whole Kennedy klan bullshit, in which Catholics in general and Irish Catholics especially traded the rights and advantages of working people in every other industrialized country for pseudo-representation by and vicarious worship of a billionaire family of playboy fuck-ups. Who needs a minimally functional political party that sees to it that your kids are well educated and grandma can get the operation when you can hang framed pitchures of the Kennedy boys next to that other fraud with a hand in your pocket, the Pope, and vicariously thrill to the thought that this time it's a papist knockin' back a $100 booze bottle on a speedboat while rapin' the maid and gettin' away with it? "Take that, Dan Quayle!"


The Kennedys did for Irish-American image what Flavor Flav does for Black History Month. One would hope that the most famous Irish family in the US wouldn't be a bunch of 1840s cartoon bogdwelling alcoholic misogynist apemen who seem to prove in incident after incident that the big houses with the nice dinner forks should be reserved for WASPs. But that's what we got.


After some questionable financial gains by their two elder generations, the Kennedy brothers were installed in government positions that could have been occupied by honest citizens through shady, corrupt backroom deals because they could apparently keep the corporate profits flowing while looking the part of youthful reformers (this should sound familiar to 2008 voters...) John Kennedy was elected to office (well, probably not elected; read up on Illinois 1960) based in the lie that the US had fewer planet-killing missiles than the Soviets. He spent the next three years chucking Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex in the toilet, drastically increasing the weapons budget at the expense of everything else, pushing the planet to the brink of nuclear war, ramping up the Vietnam war, invading Cuba to reinstall our business-friendly dictator, and kicking the civil rights movement to the curb.


When you look at what LBJ did on most of those issues (Vietnam aside), the "tragedy" becomes that Lee Harvey Oswald dragged his feet getting to the Texas Schoolbook Depository.


Teddy got Johnny's seat because he needed a job and we live in a plutocracy. Likewise talk was that glassy-eyed debutante Caroline Kennedy was somehow owed a position in government by dint of her surname, which is 180 degrees in opposition to the ideals of the American revolution.

Quoting The Buffalo Beast, which last year named her one of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America:

"Charges: A limp, lifeless, murmuring slouch whose dearth of vivacity makes
John Kerry look like Richard Simmons, Kennedy has the apparent focus and charm
of a shock therapy victim on Haldol. If the Kennedy name (and fundraising pull)
can carry this passive princess into the Senate, it could get a bottle of fish
sauce elected. At least fish sauce doesn’t say “y’know” every three seconds.

Exhibit A: “I’ve spent a lifetime growing up around public policy
issues.” Her dad died when she was 5.

Sentence: Badly injured in a car crash, Kennedy is rushed to the
hospital, where she is attended to by a guy whose dad was an excellent
doctor."

We are instructed to weep for our billionaires. Poor Teddy, poor Lady Di. Life was so hard on them. You and I, on the other hand, are expected to stoically receive the thousand cuts and indignities of workaday life without so much as a whimper.

Teddy was in the Senate since 1962 and in that time pretty much every social and economic indicator for America's poor and middle classes got worse. This fat fucking fraud never, not in 47 years, attempted any Mr. Smith Goes to Washington neck-sticking-out for the poor or even middle class, provided you can claim that the remote chance of losing a job and salary he never needed in the next election cycle of a six-year term would be "sticking your neck out" in any meaningful sense of the term.

My "favorite" fraud of his, and of the Democrats broadly, would be that in non-election years only, stretching back to when minimum wage was less than $4/hour, Teddy would trot out a stillborn bill to raise it a bit, and then claim that when his other fat millionaire pigs in the Senate killed it that that was the best he could do. Then he'd take his four-month government job vacation on his 6,000 foot yacht and all would be forgotten until the next charade 23 months later. Meanwhile people working 40+ hours/week got evicted, went bankrupt from doctor bills and ate ramen far too many times to be healthy.

More stunning: in the 17 years leading up to his 2004 race for president, fellow demi-billionaire Massachusetts senator John Kerry voted against the Kennedy minimum wage bill 8 of 9 times, the ninth being the one right before the election. In Europe these people would be burned in effigy, if not in fact. Let them eat ramen.

Just a reminder: Ted Kennedy drowned a woman in a DUI and lied about it, then years later an apparently pants-optional Teddy covered for his degenerate Kennedy klansman when he raped a woman. This is the guy I'm supposed to feel sorry for, because I'm a liberal!

Come to think of it, leaving you in the car to drown while he swims to safety is about the best metaphor for the Kennedys' economics record possible.

I'm also a bit tired of hearing about the "Kennedy wit" or the "Kennedy charm." For the life of me I can't recall any of these people saying or doing anything remotely amusing. Maybe they toss you a few bons mots while buggering you..?

The final word is from my favorite Kennedy of any variety, Jello. Because there's always room for Jello.

Robert McNamara takes his seat at the right hand of Satan

You might have heard that arch-evil war criminal fuck Robert McNamara finally kicked it at the ripe old age of 93, peacefully slipping away in his bed, not kicking wildly while crapping himself at the end of a long drop via a short rope. What few will say in clear terms is that the man was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths and maimings of tens of millions.

Robert S. McNamara, architect of and advocate for the ruinous war in Vietnam, died in his sleep--in sharp contrast to the 60,000 Americans who died horribly fighting a futile war the nation never needed to wage. Many thousands more suffered serious injuries and a larger number of Vietnam vets died as suicides. Estimates are that 4,000,000 Vietnamese died during the war. Our bombing and related actions spilled into Cambodia and Laos, killing millions there as well, and swelling the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. From a New York Times article:

Mr. McNamara was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense secretary’s role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of troops to enforce civil rights in the South.In other words, he was responsible for making the military industrial complex a reality.

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.He could have worked to end the war, sparing the lives of perhaps thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Vietnamese. He did not. Decades passed before he revealed the truth about himself and the war.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial, written by the page’s editor at the time, Howell Raines. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

And he wasn't just haunted by Vietnam. In interviews with filmmaker Errol Morris for the Fog of War, McNamara echoed doubts about US actions against the Japanese at the end of World War II.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.” ... “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked.

McNamara was part of the Kennedy-era "best and brightest," the Harvard (and it's always Harvard, isn't it?)-trained assholes who think their shit doesn't stink and send wave after wave of innocents to their doom by the million. This is the same sort of "best and brightest" of the Obama Administration who have the country sleepwalking into the same damn situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Somehow these people get the label "liberal." How about war criminal?

Astoundingly, McNamara also played a large role in the cover-up of Israel's 1967 USS Liberty attack on American naval personnel.

After years of abject failure writ huge by any reasonable standard in Southeast Asia, the lunatic American ruling class, always mindful of protecting their own, made this man the head of the fucking World Bank, in which post he assisted in the killing of millions more people through failed attempts at forcing our bad economic policies on the world, more even than he did forcing bad military policies on the world. This came with massive subsidies to thousands of failed dictators' and military juntas' absurdist economic projects which caused massive ecological and societal harm. (Having learned nothing, decades later Paul Wolfowitz, of "let's invade Iraq, easy as pie" fame, has also been installed as World Bank chief fuck-up. I wouldn't give the man keys to a golf cart.)

Our elites, having served the few at the greatest expense of the many, will always be promoted no matter how much blood is on their hands. See also as a more recent cognate Larry Summers, who wrecked Russia's economy (no small feat!) and led to the premature deaths of millions in the process, resigned from Harvard's presidency in disgrace having insulted most women, resigned from an international banking position after suggesting that toxic waste be pushed upon Africa, only to end up with a high position to steer America's economy under Obama... where he falls the fuck asleep in meetings. Apparently Obama couldn't figure out a way to get Charles Manson in the cabinet, so Larry had to do.

Henry Kissinger - please die soon, OK? It's well past time.

Jesse Helms takes July 4th to heart for once, improves America by dying

Racist, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic and hypocritical, multiple-time Senator Jesse Helms was a poster boy for the Reagan era Congress. He died today at the age of 86 (meaning he wasn't a Confederate vet as widely believed), improving America just a wee bit. "Happy birthday, USA!"

Helms was one of the more visible and in some ways honest of the gaggle of politicians who have kept the US mired in the 19th century. Highlights of his career would include advocating for South Africa's apartheid regime, voting against every civil rights bill to come before him for 29 consecutive years, opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (King was an "agitator"), running racially-charged TV ads and gay-baiting politicians who disagreed with him.

Helms also voted against domestic programs and our piddling foreign aid ("rat holes" was his literal term for most of the rest of the planet) while supporting every above-board and covert, illegal military budget he could find. It's still jaw dropping that when confronted with retro bigots and simplistic mental midgets such as this, the Democratic Party remained completely flummoxed.

Helms' damage will be with us for decades, but at least the man himself is gone, and, as I'm not a rapture believer like Helms, I'm glad to say he's gone for good. Have a burger and a beer, America just became a slightly better place.

R.I.P. United States of America, b. 1776 - d. 2008

So, you mean, like... now?

Speaking ill of the dead Part III: William F. Buckley, Jr.

And another one bites the dust.

Arch-prig, "conservative" (somewhat to the right of Himmler) commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. just bit the proverbial big one at the age of 82. Buckley was born into multi-generational wealth and made millions more attacking poor people and "socialism" - on public television, no less - for their sloth and related failures. His smug, corpulent frame was perched upon overburdened swivel chairs for decades, a heaving caricature of what America thought the landed gentry looked like, and, as it turns out, does. Buckley would spit vile invective at anyone struggling to upset Mammon's apple cart through the ridiculously clenched jaw aping the Boston Brahmin bully, a perpetual smirk on his increasingly puffy face generated by the knowledge that he was born into a position where one could ridicule the plight of the weak and get away with it, always.

Buckley enjoyed yachting and made even more money writing books about it. Why, I imagine he wondered, don't poor folks have the gumption to write their own yachting memoirs and pull themselves up by their wingtip-straps?

As a TV commentator Buckley in some ways pioneered the Bill O'Reilly school of claiming to have debate with intellectual superiors, and "winning" these debates by cutting off responses, refusing to answer questions, insisting on answers to loaded questions. As a "gentleman" he wouldn't yell at guests, although in one memorable event he did threaten to punch Gore Vidal, his intellectual and moral superior, a man born into wealth who noticed the struggle of the weak and has earnestly tried to help them. Yes, Vidal is a "queer"... he's also a World War II vet, a decorated pilot.


If you can stomach it, witness Buckley dodge substantive debate with the far brighter Noam Chomsky by repeatedly changing the subject, and setting up a series of strawman arguments. One can almost see the mouse on the little wheel in his head whispering things about how awful it is to have a filthy Jew on the set.


Buckley served for a year in the CIA, attempting to destabilize Mexico. Very little is known about how. Vidal also claimed that Buckley and relatives vandalized a Protestant church (despite appearances, he was a loyal Catholic and a book could likely be written on the resultant psychologically driven attempts to out-WASP the WASPs) because the pastor's wife sold some property to a Jewish family. These two events sum his life nicely I think.

William F. Buckley, Jr.'s dead and we're not. Enjoy that. The only regret is the amount of time it took to get there.

Mama Weer All Ded Now: Quiet Riot vocalist dies as first original creative act

Quiet Riot vocalist Kevin DuBrow died today at the age of 52. Somehow the article is CNN quoting TMZ, which tells us some disturbing things about the way news is now gathered and prioritized.

While many will recall the band as perhaps the first metal act to score a #1 charted album in the US, I remember the band as "the guys who copied Slade... twice."

Thus most unfortunately the first thing I had to do when I heard about the death was to see if the Slade (at left) vocalists are still alive, which they apparently are. At last, some original work from Quiet Riot!

Fuck you, Jerry Falwell!

The NNDB had his number pretty well.

I'm participating in Googlebombing the bastard to help his name live in infamy:

Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell

He was an intolerant, racist, anti-working class, apartheid-supporting piece of shit and his death made me happy. Yes, happy. Sometimes the world adds by subtracting. Through high school I had some solace in the realization that one day Reagan, Falwell and Robertson would be dead and I'd still be here. Two down from that group, anxiously awaiting the cosmic hat trick.

Let's not forget the parody ad in Hustler (larger version within the HTML link, scroll down some) that pitted Larry Flynt and the First Amendment against Falwell and the forces of darkness. Darkness lost for a change. Mind you they didn't lose much, we simply maintained a right to do a certain type of parody of people otherwise in control of an obscene proportion of the planet.

Screw you, Jerry! You're dead! I'm not! HA!

UPDATE: In case you missed it, Christopher Hitchens destroyed Falwell in the funniest manner possible on CNN.