Savage, relentless artistry demonstrated by a horn line of kids mostly under the age of 16 and mostly female.

I make no excuses for the drum line but fuckin’ A these little kids ripped your heart out, ate it, burped and then ran back to do their chores.

Holy Fuck!

If you’re not ripping your clothes off during Malaguena, you have no pulse.

Title: “Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II’s Most Audacious General”

Authors: Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard

Rank: 3

Blurb: “General George S. Patton, Jr. died under mysterious circumstances in the months following the end of World War II. For almost seventy years, there has been suspicion that his death was not an accident — and may very well have been an act of assassination.”

Review From Somebody Who Could Use a Good Slap: “They surmise that the General’s outspokenness about his controversial views on postwar security, particularly his animosity toward the Soviets, our erstwhile allies, might have made him a target for assassination. They cast a suspicious eye toward various potential culprits from Josef Stalin to wartime espionage czar ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan and a colorful OSS operative, Douglas Bazata, who claimed later in life to have murdered Patton.” —John McCain

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Title: “Power Grab: Obama’s Dangerous Plan for a One Party Nation”

Authors: Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Rank: 95

Blurb: “President Obama’s style of leadership is proof that he is willing to use desperate measures. In Power Grab, Morris and McGann assert that Obama has embarked on an outrageous and sweeping scheme to decisively — and illegally — grab power away from Congress, the Courts, and the States to appropriate it to himself. Ultimately, under the guise of practicality, the President of the United States has become utterly intolerant and unquestionably dictatorial. He rules on his own by executive fiat and few, if any, in Congress protest.”

Review We Have a Difficult Time Believing: “I am a liberal democrat but am seriously rethinking my whole ideology after this revelation.”

Customers Also Bought: “The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off” by Alex Jones

Footnote: The best Dick can manage is some fauxtrage over executive actions implementing Obamacare, but hey, folks, we’re six years in, and this is the last chance to peddle that stale swill before everybody shifts back to Hillarymongering.

Power Grab [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel”

Author: David Limbaugh

Rank: 8

Blurb: “Limbaugh, a practicing attorney and former professor of law, approaches the canonical gospels with the same level of scrutiny he would apply to any legal document and asks all the necessary questions about the story of Jesus told through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

Review: “If I were a cross-examining trial lawyer, it wouldn’t take me but a couple of expert scholar witnesses to shred Limbaugh’s primary basis-in-fact by illustrating that: 1) Peter didn’t write the books of Peter, 2) John didn’t write the Gospel of John, and 3) numerous pastoral letters of the Pauline epistles are pseudepigrapha (a fancy way for Christian scholars to refer to forgeries within the Bible). With all of this forgery going on within Limbaugh’s primary source of fact, one of his primary ‘witnesses’ has now been reduced to a shambles.”

Customers Also Bought: “Duck Commander Faith and Family Bible”

Footnote: We’ll give you Jesus if you give us the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus on Trial [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “World Order”

Author: Henry Kissinger

Rank: 17

Blurb: “Henry Kissinger has traveled the world, advised presidents, and been a close observer and participant in the central foreign policy events of our era. Now he offers his analysis of the twenty first century’s ultimate challenge: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historic perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.”

Review: “Hillary Clinton wrote a very favorable review in the Washington Post.”

Customers Also Bought: “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives” by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Footnote: This is what happens when you let the Bastards get away with it.

World Order [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

For years I resisted the idea of pugs, thinking them fat and smelly. When I was finally shamed into relenting I found myself unexpectedly charmed by a delightful puppy who was nothing like what I’d been expecting. Just as when I was in San Francisco the ringing of the cables under the streets came as a complete surprise, so did the pug puppy’s companionable stream of snuffles, wheezes, and chunterings.

The other day I came across an interview, translated from the French, with Stephen Breyer, ex-Supreme. I don’t know about you but to me he was only ever a function. So the interview charmed me in the same way as did the pug’s unexpected snores. He describes reading À la recherche as a young man living in Paris and teaching himself to read and speak French in the process. One infers from it a period of loneliness – he read the damn thing twice – and a warm and ardent approach to literature that public figures seldom admit to these days, at least in print. Well worth a read. He exemplifies the ideal of a liberal arts education, the aristocracy of a republic earned by reading, and how literature opens windows on the world.

Full disclosure: one is not a fan of the endless recycling around characters who smack one in the face with their endlessly hateful lives. I feel about it as if Perez Hilton wrote a multi-volume novel about the Kardashians and their world.  I understand – and apologize in advance – for the extreme ignorance of this POV. Does it help that I found a gaping hole in the plot when Elstir appeared? Perhaps if I read French I’d understand the need for quite so many subordinate clauses in a sentence but you know what? I read Tolstoy and his people come miraculously alive. True of Nabokov. Etc. But… I’m touched by the ex-jurist and hope he found a gay bartabac.

Title: “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life”

Author: William Deresiewicz

Rank: 38

Blurb: “Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to ‘practical’ subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path.”

Review: “Although a liberal arts education, as he advocates, may provide tools for developing a ‘meaningful life’ so will reading, work experience, marriage, parenting, travel, volunteering in one’s community, and other significant life experiences. Personal traits such as curiosity, confidence, honesty, determination, and open-mindedness — if nurtured in childhood and maintained through life — are at least as important as knowledge and skills.”

Customers Also Bought: “SpongeBath Food Safe Biodegradable Antimicrobial Sponge Cleaner”

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