Keeper of the Clown Bell

In the history of US political scandals my favorite is the "Whiskey Ring Scandal" for the name alone because there's something very romantic and menacing in the idea of a whiskey ring (whatever that is) which makes a reader put down his coffee cup and pick up the paper. Others, like the Iran-Contra Affair or "Crédit Mobilier Scandal" sound salacious, mysterious and foreign to the average news consumer who doesn't know what an Iranian Contra is and is suspicious of any word with a glyph in it. It must be said that the most appropriately named scandal of this, or any other, time is Watergate because a watergate is a sluice or floodgate that regulates (i.e. controls) the amount of water that flows from one place (like a swamp) into another (like a river or ocean). It is true that Watergate is also the name of a hideous piece of architecture housing apartments and professional offices on the banks of the Potomac River. The Democrats had a campaign HQ there in

50 years of daily progress The one year anniversary of the Charlottesville white riot came and went with very little to report except some observations on " Those Scary People Dressed in Black " who comprised the Antifa parade that essentially shut down the town for 48 hours. If "progress" requires the citizens of this sleepy college town to live in a police state for one weekend a year then so be it because social justice has a price - and that price is the sacrifice of personal liberty. All because of a Deep State Black PSYOP that bused in White Supremacists from a J Crew catalog shoot , handed them tiki torches and had them parade around Thomas Jefferson's rotunda so that photojournalists could capture the moment and blast it out around the nation through #FakeNews outlets to scare the shit out of people and smear the Trump administration as "green lighters" of this racists uprising. White nationalist and fascist groups, neo-Nazis, the KKK, and

I can't explain why one news show is more popular than another and neither can you. It's a mystery and believe me, if THEY could figure it out they would because there's a lot of money in having people watch your product. #FakeNews organizations spend a fortune promoting talent (talking heads) and doing focus group analysis to find a winner and attract and eyeballs to their programming.  They do the same thing for their Web Properties and since the advertising is more targeted on web sites a corporation can, in theory, charge a higher multiple for the viewer - especially if it's a demo that spends green backs. Finding a way to get 15 Million people a month to visit your web site is pretty hard to do and when you get them to do it something needs to be sold aside from whatever boilerplate bullshit you're feeding them as "news" or #FakeNews as the case may be. On Cable news one of the biggest advertisers is Otezla among many other Big Pharma sponsors.

#FakeNews For most people who watch (which is almost everyone) the world of TV appears to be an exciting and glamorous profession where attractive people perform for the entertainment of the great unwashed AND the rich n' famous by acting in comedy/drama [crying, screaming, blowing shit up, singing songs, shooting people, pleading for their lives, kissing and cracking jokes for the laugh-track] or capturing "reality" [documentary shows, game shows, reality TV, talk shows and late night comedy] or the strange hybrid of the two called #FakeNews . I felt that way myself until I worked for a major television network in the mid 90's and tried my hand at making the machine run more efficiently and promote the corporations product. One morning, a few month on the job, I walked into the company elevator and surveyed the pasty, haggard suite clad executives headed to the upper floors sharing my ride and thought to myself, "you know what, I could be working at an ins