BABE HUGGETT: One of the most astute and witty political and cultural journalists of our time, Mark Steyn, recently mocked President Obama as a “modern major generalist” in reference to Obama’s over-arching, bloodless speeches, pedantic dependence on failed political theory and tanking presidency. Steyn so enjoyed his pun that he used it again in a different article and who can blame him? It’s a brilliant observation but how many readers are even familiar with Gilbert & Sullivan’s song, I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General, in particular and it’s operetta in general, The Pirates of Penzance?
Now, I am not going to go into the history, Victorian politics or plot of the The Pirates of Penzance or the artistic tensions and musical rivalries between Gilbert & Sullivan here. That is for the curious to find out for themselves. So my apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan but what I am going to do is, in my own way, bring their satiric observation of Peter Principle leaders up-to-date: Read more…
BABE HUGGETT: For the malleable young, nothing beats having a role model to look up to and emulate. That’s why sports figures, rock musicians and celebrities need to be so circumspect in their lives. They’re not, of course, because it’s in their commercial interest to keep the current toxic popular culture churning away for their risk adverse, corporate masters. Scandals help to hide the lack of talent amongst the unoriginal, cookie-cutter star set while generating you-can’t-pay-for-this-type-of-publicity headlines sure to push off real news in favor of the mental cotton candy floss so beloved by commercial interests.
However, this type of decadent, inartistic slovenliness gets repetitiously boring after a while and a teen’s radar is exquisitely tuned to winnowing out the bogus from the merely banal. So what’s a poor teen looking for someone to pattern themselves after supposed to do? Our past heroes and heroines are either excoriated for not being politically correct, if they are even mentioned at all, or are considered so out-of-date as to be irrelevant. In fact, what with all this eco-greenie Gaia worship going on in our public schools, humans themselves are not only not held up as something worth while but actively despised for their respective and collective carbon footprints. Even that current socialist secular living saint, President Obama, is proving to have feet of clay for them because BP oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico soiling US beaches, destroying Louisiana tide water ecosystems and killing untold numbers of marine and animal life all while he goes on yet another vacation and/or tees off at the nearest golf course. Read more…
BABE HUGGETT: As we celebrate Easter 2010, does anyone ever stop to wonder why the combined forces of secular atheism, socialism and Islam roar and screech in their assault against Christianity? If you are a Christian conservative, you’ll be thinking at this point, “It’s because the risen Christ brought us the message of Salvation and our nation is still nominally Christian. Our freedoms are individual based and God given with therefore unalienable rights.”
If you’re a liberal/socialist, you’ll be sneering, “Easter? That’s just a pagan holiday commandeered by Rome! Look at the goddess Ēostre’s symbols of rabbits and eggs! Hey! Who ate the ears off my chocolate bunny?”
If you’re an atheist, you’re grumbling about there, “…being no God, hence no meaning to Jesus – if he ever existed in the first place – and why the heck isn’t this a four day weekend like Winter Festival?”
If you’re a Muslim, well, you’re smirking along the lines of, “I can’t wait for Mohammed’s slave, Isa, to come back and destroy the Christians!”
In the spirit of religious diversity, I suppose it’s expected of me to go on to the other great religions and what their followers think of Easter but time, space and their lack of tyrannical political drive precludes me from saying anything other than while they think their religions are the true ones, everybody eats marshmallow peeps this time of year so why not have some fun? Read more…
BABE HUGGETT: Now we know what it must have been like in 1933 for decent Germans during the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. Ever since the unconstitutional communist coup of Obamacare passed earlier in the week, the full anger and fury of US socialists has turned on the last of the free-thinking, conservative holdouts, a.k.a. patriotic Americans. I am old enough to have seen this phenomenon in every country where post WWII socialism, in its various guises, took over.
In 2001 I wrote an editorial on what the socialists of the Labour Party in the UK would ultimately face if they continually accused concerned British citizens of parochialism, racism and bigotry when they spoke out against Labour’s gross mismanagement and malfeasance coupled with its obscene immigration policies encouraging massive and uncontrolled immigration into the UK from hostile, aggressive, alien Third World countries. I predicted that as Labour continually smeared people of good will, these same people would not only vote Labour out of office but would gravitate away from main political parties to ones that would offer them acceptance.
Unfortunately, the Tories, like our own GOP failing to forcefully defend the TEA Party patriots, are currently echoing elitist and racist accusations as defined by Labour, so the only political parties left for concerned, patriotic Brits is either the lackluster United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) or the truculent British National Party (BNP), which is campaigning on British national pride and stopping/reversing immigration especially from Islamic nations. Read more…
BABE HUGGETT: In celebration of the National Association of Education’s yearly “Read Across America” project, which started Tuesday, March 2, First Lady Michelle Obama appeared at the Library of Congress and read to a select group of youngsters Dr. Seuss’ classic children’s story, The Cat In the Hat. Her choice was appropriate enough considering that Tuesday also marked the good doctor’s birthday, who would have been 106 if still alive.
The Cat In the Hat was written by Dr. Seuss, (pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel), in 1957 as a response to a challenge by the Life magazine writer, John Hershey, who specifically mentioned Geisel as an ideal illustrator for modern children’s books in a May 25, 1954 article titled “Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading”. Geisel’s publisher, Random House, asked him to write a new style of engaging children’s literature using a limited vocabulary of only 400 words, which the publisher’s estimated school children were learning at the time. Geisel cut the suggested list down to 223 and added 16 of his own.
Using the pseudonym of “Dr. Seuss”, Geisel’s The Cat In the Hat proved an instant hit and the story of the two rainy day bored young children first enjoying then panicking over the crazy, chaotic antics of a floppy red-and-white stripped hat wearing tuxedo Cat accompanied by his eagerly undisciplined partners-in-crime, Thing One and Thing Two still resonates with young readers 53 years later. Read more…
BABE HUGGETT: On Thursday morning, February 18th, with one minute left of his popular San Francisco Bay Area early morning talk show on KSFO 560-AM, veteran radio host and dedicated conservative, Lee Rodgers, received his pink slip without warning for refusing to. “…say nice things about Muslims.”
Rodgers, a 25 year veteran of ABC Radio and a 15 year veteran at KSFO with his highly rated and profitable Lee Rodgers Show, was in the normal process of renegotiating his contract for renewal in July when he was fired last week. In a clear violation of his contract, Rodgers said that his leaving, “…was forced upon me, with no notice.”
Talk Show Host Lee Rodgers
ABC Radio is owned by Citadel Corporation and is in bankruptcy. Its move to terminate one of its highest rated and profitable hosts in a major metropolitan market seems counter-productive but is not unusual under Citadel’s current management. Earlier in the month Chicago sister station, WLS-AM 890 fired in mid-week the abrasive but entertaining libertarian, Mancow Muller, and his co-host, Pat Cassidy, for, as Muller put it, “no rhyme or reason.”
In an email sent to his fans, Rodgers wrote, “The top management of Citadel, led by a CEO named Farid Suleiman–widely regarded as the most incompetent executive in broadcasting–decided that I was making too much money after 25 years with ABC and fifteen as morning host on KSFO, taking no note of the fact that I’ve generated large sums of money for the company.”
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BABE HUGGETT: It may be hard to hear the drum of War beating over the hip-humping bleating of Lady Gaga but Britain just got a shot across its territorial bow once again by Argentina asserting control of all shipping between the contested Falklands and the Argentina coast. Argentina President Cristina Kirchner’s declaration of shipping lane control on Tuesday, February 16 constitutes the first steps towards a naval blockade of the Falklands referred to as “Las Malvinas” by Argentina.
Coming just 28 years after the first Falkland War, when an expansionist Argentina invaded the sleepy, sheep farming islands only to have its head royally handed back to it by British forces, Tuesday’s move by President Kirchner is this time not seen as a demand for the islands so much as a grab for the oil beds that are within Falklands territorial waters and said to be potentially greater than the output of the 40 billion barrel North Seas oil fields. The arbitrary declaration demands that all ships wishing to operate within the waters between the Falklands and Argentina may do so only after getting a new Argentinean permit, effectively stopped the next-day delivery and start of the year-long construction of the Ocean Guardian oil rig to the Falklands offshore oil beds.
The Director of the Falkland Islands Company, Roger Spink, tried to make light of the confrontation by saying, “There has been an economic blockade of the Falklands from Argentina for many years. It’s something we’ve come to expect.”
Anticipating the controversy, Cabinet chief, Aníbal Fernández, commented, “Any boat that wants to travel between ports on the Argentine mainland to the Islas Malvinas, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. . . must first ask for permission from the Argentine Government.” Read more…
