This is the most disgusting recipe I’ve read in a very long time, worse even than that vile, vile wingnut pizza monstrosity Sadly, No featured a while ago.
I sooooo have to serve these prize-winning tidbits at Chez Observer’s next cocktail party:
SPAM Taco wontons
Makes 36 to 48 wontons.
From Lynda Decker, winner of the Great American SPAM Championship.
• 1 (6-oz.) pkg. cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 c. sour cream
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp. sweet Vandalia onion, minced
• 2 tbsp. taco seasoning
• 1 (12-oz.) can SPAM with real Hormel Bacon, diced
• 1/2 c. Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
• 2 tbsp. Parmesan cheese, shredded
• 1 (16-oz.) pkg. wonton wrappers
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine all ingredients but wonton wrappers in a medium mixing bowl. Separate wonton wrappers and arrange one in each cup of a mini muffin tin. Scoop one tablespoon of SPAM mixture into formed cups. Dip fingers in water and run wet fingers along the edges of the wonton. Pinch sides together and twist top to form a sealed package. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 10 minutes and serve as an appetizer.
Yummo! (Although it’s not entirely clear if the recipe won the prize or was developed by someone who won the prize in the past and is simply coasting on past glory in the Spam contest universe.)
I’ve always wondered about these back of the packet recipe contests - does anyone actually ever make the recipes, or is it just a paper exercise for both contestants and judges? I do hope so: I’ become quite nauseous when I imagine what hellish concoctions must’ve been discarded before Ms. Decker hit on the final version of that recipe.
I onder if Ms. decker is Lutheran? It’s been said that the worst recipes of all come from the Lutherans:
While the Catholic Church seeks to expand the size of its flock through unrestrained population growth, the Lutherans have chosen the strategy of expanding the size of individual churchgoers. Why put in one sort of cheese, when you could put in four? That seems to be the theory. This in addition to a block of butter and a good spray of Cheese Whiz.
Here, for example, is a recipe submitted by Edra Uecker of the Bigfork Lutheran Church in Bigfork, Minnesota, in which a quarter pound of Velveeta cheese is layered over a whole chicken, with “grated American cheese topping” then layered on top of the Velveeta. Cheese on cheese. They don’t call it Bigfork for nothing.
The same recipe, just in case you’re considering it for tonight’s dinner, also requires one can of cream of mushroom soup, one can of cream of celery soup, and one can of cream of chicken soup. Plus some milk and what is described as “1 small onion”.
That’ll be the vegetable course, then.
But even Lutherans, however devout or midwestern, would be hard-pressed to beat some of the sheer digustingnesses that the food companies come up with themselves. (Quick note: Braunschweiger is a type of spreadable liverwurst. Made of liver. Mostly.) This abomination comes from Kraft’s very own website, via Mrs Gypsy:
Braunschweiger Bagel Topper
4 oz. (1/2 of 8-oz. pkg.) OSCAR MAYER Braunschweiger
1/4 cup MIRACLE WHIP Dressing
1/4 cup TACO BELL HOME ORIGINALS Thick ‘N Chunky Salsa
1 tsp. GREY POUPON Dijon Mustard
3 cinnamon-raisin bagels (3 inch), halved, toasted
2 medium Gala apples, sliced
MIX braunschweiger, dressing, salsa and mustard until well blended.
SPREAD bagel halves evenly with the braunschweiger mixture.
TOP with the apple slices.
“…until well-blended”. Um.
Close your eyes. and just imagine, if you will, what that might look like. I’m seeing vomit, I’m seeing flecks of liver, I’m seeing little bits of carrots in a pinkish sludge…
By Lester Haines
Published Monday 20th August 2007 11:59 GMT
Staff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh battled for an hour to disconnect the penis of Captain Dan The Demon Dwarf from a hoover after the diminutive Fringe performer inadvertantly superglued it to the vacuum cleaner’s “attachment”.
According to the Evening Standard, the hoover forms part of Captain Dan’s Circus Of Horrors act, in which he inexplicably pulls the device across the stage with his todger. On this occasion, however, “the attachment came loose before a performance so he tried to glue it back on”.
The 42-year-old misread the superglue instructions and, having allowed the adhesive a mere 20 seconds to dry rather than the required 20 minutes, duly found himself semi-permanently docked after attempting a premature test.
Of his hospital ordeal, a shaken Captain Dan recounted: “It was the most embarrassing moment of my life. When I got wheeled into a packed A&E on a wheelchair with a hoover attached to my willie, I just wished the ground could swallow me up.” ®
BBC radio panel shows are where standup comedians go to die…. well, OK, maybe that is a little harsh, but there is a grain of truth in it. Look how many ‘alternative’ comedians of the seventies, eighties and even earlier are now Radio 4 panel game stalwarts. Graeme Garden is one such and has been behind (and in front of) some of the most acclaimed comedy of the past thirty years or so.
I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is the Rolls-Royce of radio comedy panel games, stacked with experienced comics. Humphrey Lyttleton’s urbane voice and advancing age makes his increasingly louche double entendres even more shocking to gentle suburban listeners: here’s Humph in a rare video clip of the radio recording taken from the South Bank Show, in which he traduces poor invisible lovely Samantha’s virtue yet again:
Oh all right, those two had barely a few seconds of Graeme Garden in, but any excuse to run an ISIHAC clip. We fans are notoriously obsessive, expecially when it comes to the game called Mornington Crescent. How obsessed are they? Belle & Sebastian even wiote a song about it Some fans even make movies.
But back to Graeme Garden. Here’s A selection of clips from his long career in UK comedy, set to the tune of ‘Stuff that Gibbon’.
Bonus clips:
The Goodies did some groundbreaking things with film and video: here’s a series of clips from The Goodies and The Inbetweenies to demonstrate, set to “Filthy Gorgeous’.
Their ’singing dogs’ clip was made entirely the old-fashioned way, by cutting and splicing actual, physical film together, rather than just doing a bit of jiggery-pokery with software.
Compare and contrast with the modern version - cute, but lacking a certain something.
(Of course the cats had to get on the act too, they always do.)
Bonus bonus clip:
While we’re on the subject of small mammals - make haste! For the badger parade is in but thirty seconds!
I can’t be the only one who went all “Zeinab Badawi!”. last week on seeing Savlon in the news. - long familiar to British viewers but maybe not so much to Americans, here to take you away from whatever it is you’re currently stressing about is the indescribable Harry Hill, with part one of his standup show, ‘Hooves’.
Today’s comes from an understandably anomymous correspondent via the Independent’s letters section and is aimed at all those who’d punish today’s parents for the actions of their children:
The plight of parents when teenagers get out of control
Sir: Much has been made of poor parenting (letters, 18 August). No doubt there are parents who do not care, but it is a complicated situation. You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. My daughters were brought up to respect us and the law, work hard and invest in their own futures.
At the age of 12, both became foul-mouthed, aggressive strangers, who swore at us, refused to divulge their whereabouts or come home to agreed deadlines. Our 13-year-old often stayed out all night. We had no idea where she was or who she was with, and she refused to tell us anything. There is no lawful tool for parents to deal with this; good behaviour depends on mutual trust and respect. When this disappears, parents are backed into a corner where they have used all sanctions as punishment, and the teenager has no incentive to behave well.
The suggestion that such children be taken into care is not the answer. Our younger daughter has been in care for most of the past 12 months, but far from helping her, she lost the security of a loving home, gained a criminal record, was seriously sexually assaulted and, despite much work from the staff in her present children’s home, has absconded 22 times in three months. So parental influence, or lack of it, cannot be the whole story.
I was forced to attend patenting classes (because of a crime my daughter committed in care). These were an abusive, humiliating experience which did nothing to help our situation and much to exacerbate it. Any remaining tatters of confidence I had as a parent were destroyed.
Our older daughter is now 17, stable, personable, working hard towards a university place, taking part-time jobs and living happily with us. She cringes at her earlier behaviour (and is highly critical of her sister). In fact, her past mistakes spur her on to make a success of her life and make us proud of her.
The past couple of years have put an intolerable strain on our health, our marriage, our careers and our lives. If we could have avoided or shortened our nightmare we would obviously have done so.
Name and address supplied
I know that’s a true story because I’ve been there - as have thousands of other parents whom the Daily Mail would make homeless, bang up or fine, whether they’re lone or partnered, rich, poor or middling, black or white; though it’s undeniable that to be poor and/or a visible monrity is to have more chance of it happening to your family.
We appear to have come to a point in our developed and developing cultures where the governments that we’ve elected are entirely focused on compelling every single member of society to be a financially productive unit, regardless of all else. This means that a generation is bringing itself up alone and indeed a generation that has already brought itself up alone is now producing another to do the same.
Consistent parenting and boundary setting for adolescents has become a luxury: when one parent is trying to do two jobs, or two parents are working back-to-back shifts for minimum wage, who has time to do much else than a pile of laundry, a quick vacuum and a scan of homework schedules? Short of electronic tagging (and even that’s evadable) what’s a parent to do whan a child is determined to go entirely off the rails?
Unfortunately ‘going off the rails’ nowadays doesn’t just mean making a couple of stupid mistakes: when even the smallest of infractions leads to criminal sanctions, a criminal record and your DNA added to the database. If you’re already an outlaw why not be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb?
All that our offspring see and hear teaches that they are living on a dying planet anyway, so what the fuck. It teaches that greed is good, that everyone’s a hypocrite and no-one, least of all politicians, can be trusted, especially not about drugs, money or sex, since so many are using themselves or creaming off a few quid or getting some on the side, whilst condemning those very activities in the young.
If our children learn nothing else from globalisation and 24 hr media access it’s that they are tiny and a it’s a big cruel world that they’re powerless to do anything about. They also learn that their parents, instead of being the rocks of authority and strength they should be, are shown every day to be as utterly powerless as anyone else. Imagine what that does to fragile adolescent confidence and a fatalistic nihilism seems a totally understandable response.
When our children can see with their own eyes that even supposedly fair and democratic governments can kill, torture, steal and lie with impunity and nothing will happen, or that the police can shoot a man in the head seven times for no good reason then walk away and nothing will happen, it tells them that these days you can just about do anything and nothing will happen. But since to be young is to be prejudged criminal anyay, like the ad says, why not just do it?
What can your Mum and Dad do, lock you up?
The magnet for rebelling adolescents is of course their peer group and as in the wider world local hierarchies are built on money and force. It’s just ‘doing business’, other children have little choice but to go along and the police are largely an irrelevance. No-one grasses, not if they want to have a life. Pull your hood up, keep your head down, safe.
How has this come about? After Thatcher’s welfare reforms of the mid-eighties to mid-nineties, state support for unemployed parents and lone parents was sharply reduced. In a time of rising unemployment, benefit cuts and high taxes the underground economy boomed - with no jobs to be had the only way of making a little school uniform or Christmas money was and still is selling goods cheap, no questions asked, or looking after or selling a bit of dope - just ‘doing a bit of business’. But of course like any developing economy ‘a bit of business’ has grown and diversified and become a criminal way of life that has turned some areas of our towns and cities into virtual tribal fiefdoms.
The thug life is now a generational klifestyle and is pimped as the cool lifestyle of choice to the young by boomer ad execs and trendmakers who should know better.
The surroundings may be suburban and prosaic or urban and hellish but in their head everybody’s a Soprano or 50cent, even if only pimp-rolling their merry way along the street in say, Budleigh Salterton. To them even a boardedup post offifce is turf to be defended and marked: stomping on the head of a complaining neighbour - perfect! Instant, underground fame. A drive-by? Even better.
Disaffected adolescents used to dream of when they were King of Acacia Avenue - now, with the culture of impunity and the easy availability of guns. they actually can be. This makes us scared of them and they know that. That gives them power over us that adolescents should not have. But then again, with 2, even 3 greedy generations ahead of them determined to keep a tight grip on power and the world’s wealth while it still lasts, how else are they ever to get any power except by force?
It seems as though our children are taken from us by the world at earlier and earlier ages, to be returned to us refashioned, in an image we dont recognise. This I suppose has been the refrain of every parent ever and it may be it’s something that has to happen in order for our children to lean the skills to cope in the future world.
What’s different now is that it’s uncertain whether there will be a world to have a future in and thus iit may well be that callousness, greed and brutality are the skills they’lll need to learn to survive.
What to do? I don’t know what the answer is, I wish to God I did; I’m still working on it myself.
I found this excellent photo diary of a day in the life of Amsterdam bike culture as compared to that of San Francisco, as seen from what appears to be a Nieuwmarkt cafe table, and one of the things the American diarist seems most perturbed by is bikes with multiple passengers.
Here in typical Dutch fashion are some average people doing dangerous and probably illegal things as a police vehicle stand by unconcerned. Of course they’re unconcerned; everybody does it, even the cops.
With all this negligence about and with open canals and chaotc traffic and the like, there could be fertile ground here for an unscrupulous personal injury lawyer, were it not for the fact that despite occasional nasty accidents people seem quite unbothered. Life goes on its merry way despite the many and multifarious dangers and hardly anyone ever sues.
One of the things that never fails to astonish about the Netherlands and Amsterdam is the completely lackadaisical attitude to health and safety: if a British health and safety officer were let loose in the city you’d hear the sharp intake of breath from here to Swindon. The place would be festooned with dire warnings and swathed in orange safety tape within minutes.
This‘ll be good news for my Dutch brother and sister in law, whose combined BMI (Body Mass Index, a measure of obesity) must be about 5, if that. When you look at the processed, deepfried crap that even Dutch vegetarians consume it’s odd they’re all so thin at all. It must be all the cheese.
[...]
The United States has the heaviest body mass index population over 30 on the planet, with 30.6%. With statistics like these, why is it that in America, vegetarians are not given a break when it comes to health insurance?
Uh…. because that would make the insurers less money? But do carry on.
The Netherlands, which has 10% of BMI over 30, is the first country where vegetarians get discount health insurance. This policy, VegePolis, has the motto that people who choose not to eat meat live a healthier lifestyle. The Netherlands is considering health insurance policies for nonsmokers and people who don’t smoke or drink. Niko Koffeman, an animal-rights activist and entrepreneur, believes that people with healthier lifestyles should be able to reap the financial benefits of it. This policy was introduced by Agis Zorgverzekeringen and Stichting PreventiePolis. Besides advantages in health insurance, members get 10% discounts on vegetarian dinners at restaurants affiliated with the Netherland’s vegetarian union. A portion of insurance revenues goes to animal welfare groups. With the healthcare issues in America along with health issues, it looks like Americans need to take note from the Netherlands. Although I’m not fond of the idea of spending 80% of the speaking time of all parties in parliament being dominated by the theme of animal rights to be copied in America, which has a world of other issues, I do believe that this should be a more popular topic, specifically in states like Michigan that find hunting season to be the joy of the year, yet another reason why I hated Marquette, Michigan so much during my undergraduate years.
In the light of significantly higher prices for meat being expected as a result of the damage to fodder crops from the terrible summer weather and the fact that it’s to the point that I’m now on a no fat, no dairy, low wheat, low fibre, low protein, high salt, low potassium diiet and a rise in health insurance premiums is predicted, again, it may be time to look at vegetables in a new light. Plain bread, lean ham sandwiches, boiled sweets and bananas begin to pall after a while anyway. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a giant steak and a buttered baked potato full of sour cream or a big cheese laden pizza, followed by several chocolate eclairs or even a whole croquembouche or sachertorte.
Can you make sachertorte from tofu?
[By the way I see that this report comes via Associated Content, a syndication service that purports to pay bloggers for content (which Associated Content then owns rights to). The way they use aspiring writers as an ad revenue farm is a story in itself.]
Dunno what it is, but ever since I’ve came back from holiday I’m finding it hard to raise any enthusiasm at all for blogging.
Of course as is absolutely bloody typical the moment I walked away from the keyboard, thinking “It’s the silly season, nothing will happen” then bam bam bam - Rove, Gonzales and John “Please can I go to your ranch?” Prescott resigned, to plot in private, spend more time with family prosecutors and perv some noble melons in the House of Lords, respectively.
I missed all the fun, dammit: everything that can be said’s already been said and I really haven’t got the energy to try and squeeze out the last drops of snark. Suffice it to say that here is that new improved White House leadership team in full:
I suppose I should be exultant that three more of the enablers of this godawful illegal war and of all the criminality, chaos and cruelty that has resulted have bitten the bullet, so to speak, but in the case of Rove and Gonzales I have to wonder what the hell it is they’re actually up to.
Do we really think they’re not still doing Bushco’s bidding? Rove didn’t sign his letter “I will always be by your side” for nothing.
Oh and what’s Cheney up to lately? He seems conspicuous by his absence from the news at the moment. Hmm, interesting.
Oooh, maybe my will to blog hasn’t gone and it’s still there after all: maybe it just needs feeding. More coffee and outrage, please! Give me enough coffee and a few days feretting around the interwebs and we’ll soon have that mojo working again.
The police say they know nothing and have launched an internal investigation and that the police officer was given the rock by a protester. Ho hum.
It’s good to see the bastards shown up for what they are for once but this sort of thing makes me begin to seriously doubt the efficacy of set-piece protests. The Heathrow Climate Camp, for instance, may have generated lots of publicity and I’m sure it was invaluable for networking and movement building - but I bet it was also one of the best intelligence-gathering events that Special Branch (or whatever the latest euphemism is) has had in a long time.
Protests are now like dissident window shopping for the police; anyone who protests in public these days is permanently recorded as having done so - do it more than once and you’re a potential terrorist. “I’ve got a little list…”
On the other hand protest is useful agitprop: they do security theatre, we do protest theatre. It’s all circus and gets media attention, provided there are no missing white girls to occupy their airtime.
But circus was most useful in the nineties when it was a new tactic-we’re now in the time of the ‘war on terror’ and as this incident and those at the recent G8 in Germany show even sleepy provincial PC plods now ape the tactics of their US peers and treat even peaceful, legitimate protesters as terrorists.
Daily Mail hysteria notwithstanding, protest isn’t a cushy option for hippy middle-class gap year students stick-on dreads or benefit scroungers with piercings, tatoos and mysterious habits; these days it takes guts to protest. But terrorists?
When you protest publicly, however legitimate your grievance, you are automically presumed to be a criminal. You’ll have a record, although you’re a perfectly law-abiding person. For speaking your mind in public you’ll be followed, CCTV’d, videoed and/or arrested, so that as much info about you as possible can go into an intelligence dossier (spooks have performance targets too). Subsequent to this you may well find your own communications and that of your colleagues, associates and friends monitored. You may even find yourself banned from all UK airports and environs merely for having a subscription to a conservation charity.
That’s quite a lot to ask of people, however noble and peaceful the cause, particularly in times when anyone can be arrested and held incognito and without charge for months on end, without anyone knowing where you are or what happened.
The left arned that the ‘war on terror’ would be used to label protest as terrorism. That the police and intelligence services act as agents provocateurs is nothing new: these suspiciously well-dressed ‘anarchists’ (those bandannas still have shop-bought creases) turn up at every antiglobalisation event, bent on disruption and aggression, the general idea being to get a spurious “attack” on police onto news footage, so that legitimate protest can then be described as violent riot and protestors as terrorists, so peaceful protesters can be attacked with impunity by armed riot police.
Protest isn’t all pink tutus, dogs on strings and rainbow flags: it can be fatal. Remember Carlo Giuliani, shot in the face, his head split like a melon by the wheel of a police landrover at Genoa? That’s what our democratic police are capable of when governments and elected representatives won’t listen and citizens feel forced to take to the streets to exercise their right to protest. The Canadian cops in the video above were particularly inept, but it still took a lot of courage for Dave Coles to face them down.
As I’ve said before, I’m becoming more and more enamoured of entryism as a practical political tactic as time goes on and state repression against all forms of democratic expression other than those officially approved by the state gets even heavier. “Is discretion the better part of political valour? Discuss.”
Nevertheless, despite the increase of international surveillance and repression of peaceful dissidence the fact that political change is happening is undeniable; political positions that we anticapitalists took and were derided for holding only five years ago are now so ingrained in the public conciousness as to be thought common wisdom - fast food bad, Bush BAD, sustainability good, slavery bad, climate change BAD… we’ve always thought that way haven’t we?
A NY state Republican political thug ‘consultant’, Roger J. Stone Jr., is alleged to have been harassing the 83 year old father of the Democratic attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, with threatening late night phone calls - traceable directly back to aforesaid thug “consultant”.
True to GOP form, Stone is denying everything despite a lot of alleged proof against him. As is his right, of course.
But Stone’s not satisfied with barely-believable, tissue-thin denials, oh no - he’s doing the classic Republican projection thing and accusing Democrats of setting him up by invading his apartment and using his phone:
Mr. Stone, a seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics who worked for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and for George W. Bush in the 2000 recount battle, adamantly denied the allegation in an interview, calling it “the ultimate dirty trick.” He asserted that allies of Governor Spitzer may have gained access to a phone in his Manhattan apartment to make the threatening call.
The message, left at Bernard Spitzer’s Manhattan office just before 10 p.m. on Aug. 6, says that Mr. Spitzer, 83, a wealthy real estate developer, would be “compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms” to testify about “shady campaign loans” he made to his son during Eliot Spitzer’s unsuccessful campaign for attorney general in 1994.
Mr. Winner’s committee has been holding hearings into a scheme by some of Governor Spitzer’s top aides to use the State Police to embarrass the Senate Republican leader, Joseph L. Bruno. Senate Republicans have said they were considering reviewing Bernard Spitzer’s 1994 loans to his son.
“If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany,” the message says, according to a transcript. The message also calls Governor Spitzer a “phony” and a “psycho.”
Bernard Spitzer’s lawyers hired Kroll Associates, the private investigative firm, to trace the message, and their report was included with the letter to Mr. Winner. The firm traced the number that appeared on Mr. Spitzer’s caller identification system, linking it to listings under the name of Mr. Stone’s wife, Nydia.
“The review of publicly available records,” the report says, “strongly suggests that the number is controlled by Roger Stone.”
“Nice family you got there, shame if anything happened to it…”
Roger J. Stone, Jr. is a long-time Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000. He was also a campaign strategist during the presidential campaigns of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. He is the chairman of the Fort Hill Group, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs firm.
Stone was also a strategist for the 1981 and 1985 campaigns for governor of New Jersey by Thomas H. Kean, who was later appointed by President Bush to chair the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission). [1]
During the 2004 presidential primary, Stone served as a behind-the-scenes consultant to black firebrand Al Sharpton’s campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination, prompting speculation that Sharpton’s campaign was actually a stealth operation to weaken the party’s chances of winning in the general election. Writing in the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett noted that Stone was “financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton. … Sharpton has a little-noticed history of Republican machinations inconsistent with his fiery rhetoric. … [A]ny Sharpton-connected outrage against the party could either lower black turnout in several key close states, or move votes to Bush.” [2]
The New York Times has also reported on the strange-bedfellows relationship between Stone and Sharpton, noting that Stone was behind several of Sharpton’s most visible campaign tactics, including scrutiny of primary candidate Howard Dean’s record of minority appointees when he was governor of Vermont. [3]
In September 2004, rumors circulated that Stone was the original source of apparently forged documents related to the National Guard service of U.S. President George W. Bush. Stone denied the charge. “I have nothing whatsoever to do with this,” he said. “I’m a firm believer in political hardball, but I draw the line at forged documents.”
I have no idea what the rights and wrongs, if any, of Spitzer’s campaign funding troubles are, although I expect the late Steve Gillliard could’ve demystified it in a few short pithy sentences.
Even though the Democrats are hardly clean themselves it hardly matters in the face of such blatant and unrepentant bullying of a family member to put pressure on a politician.
What’s next? The kidnap and ransom of small children? Ears in boxes? The language is violent enough.
In the message, the caller says, referring to a potential subpoena: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”
It’s common in Europe to portray New York city and state poliitics as a real world analogue of a tv drama with an operatic title (see how delicately I tiptoe around the potential libel of a whole population, some of them Italian and touchy with it), crossed with a particularly lurid episode of Law & Order. But after a 70-odd year diet of movies glorifying gangsterism and violence as the the epitome of the free market in action, can you blame us?
But our recieved wisdom is out of date in certain respects.These days the mob aren’t wiseguys in slightly-too-loud-suits with vulgar accents: no, they wear Brooks Brothers suits and Hermes ties and are attached to political lobbying firms and go to church and the country club on Sunday. They’re respectable consultants - but although the faces and the brand image may have changed, the criminal methods are just the same - lie, cheat, steal, blackmail, and when all else fails threaten violence. Dirty tricks and ratfuckery are the regular MO of the NYGOP.
Take former Westchester County DA, Jeannine Pirro, who hired Judith Regan’s corrupt former lover (remember them screwing in the apartment for the resting 9/11 firefighters as the ruins still smouldered), Giuliani blue-eyed boy and former candidate for Homeland security chief Bernie Kerik to bug her allegedly adulterous husband’s boat so she could divorce him and run for governor.
This is the woman that the Republicans put up for NY state attorney general against Spitzer, the guy whose father their goons are now harassing:
Jeanine Pirro was desperate to prove her husband was cheating on her.
She came under the scrutiny of six different law enforcement agencies, including the New York Police Department, the city’s Department of Investigation and prosecutors in the Bronx and Westchester.
According to documents now in the hands of several defense attorneys, Pirro and the former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik were apparently talking about planting a hidden device aboard her husband’s boat. Her possible motive may have been to see if he was having an affair.
Sources told NewsChannel 4 that in one conversation, Pirro complained that one of Kerik’s employees was reluctant to board Albert Pirro’s boat.
Jeanine Pirro suggests, “We can just simply say, if there is an issue, that I am redecorating it for our anniversary.” She complains that Kerik’s man is, “uncomfortable with that.”
Kerik responded by saying, “But Jeanine, I’m having the same f——g problem with everybody. Everybody is panic stricken because it’s you. I’ve gone out on a limb. I had two other people looking at this. It’s a problem.”
Pirro said, “What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f–k her every night? What am I supposed to do? I can go on the boat. I’ll put the f—–g thing on myself.”
Minutes later, sources said Kerik called a contact at Giuliani Partners, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s consulting firm, asking him to find a recording device.
Sources said the FBI and Justice Department have been asked to look into whether Pirro and Kerik also might have violated federal laws.
In the wiretapped conversations, Pirro appeared to discuss how her husband’s alleged indiscretions hurt her politically.
Without her husband, sources said she told Kerik, “I move into the governor’s mansion.”
Republican politicians are now the acceptable face of organised crime. Mob loyalty runs right through the GOP from the top to the bottom, like the lettering in a stick of rock.
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