The Daily Grill

Going Gonzy

Lies come in many different flavors. White lies. Crazy lies. Dangerous lies. And then there are wild, over-the-top, spinning out of control lies. Like the kind spun by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales around critical matters such as our government spying on its citizens and the shotgun firing of federal prosecutors. While many lies are more easily dismissed and moved on from, we’re talking about the kind of dissembling that refuses to go away and gets bigger as time goes on.

We now have a style of obfuscation and fabrication that goes so far beyond belief as to run the risk of throwing doubt on the entire business of government credibility, accountability and justice. Let’s call it "Gonzy".

Be it Gonzy politics, Gonzy testimony or Gonzy recollection, you can be sure if you've gone Gonzy you're about as far from the truth as you're likely ever to be.

The Last Drop

Battles rage on in Iraq. Children are starving in Darfur. Honey bees are being devastated by a mysterious blight in countries around the world. War. Famine. Pestilence. Three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are upon us. And now the fourth Horseman mounts up: the price for coffee at Starbucks is going up as of tomorrow. As little as 9¢ or as much as 15¢, nobody can say for sure. Do we boycott? I'm so confused. Here we are in the 21st century -- you'd think someone would have come up with a caffeine alternative by now. Maybe Al Gore should make a movie about it: "An Inconvenient Brew"...with room for cream, of course.

Worst Party Guests World Record

It's amazing to me how no one except White House Resident Bush, America's Dick Cheney and the military-industrialist complex (aka The Legion of Doom) seems to want us to be in Iraq. Latest case in point is a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which found, of over 2700 reconstruction and new projects built by US forces and costing almost $6 billion, the Iraqi national government only accepted 435 of them. So we've crashed the party, started a fight, broke a lot of stuff, got a bunch of people killed and now the host doesn't even like our house warming presents. NOW can we go? Or at least let most of the US soldiers go wait in the car?

The Greatest Scape

Looks like Alberto ("Sgt. Schultz"*) Gonzales is throwing his hat in the ring to be the Next Great American Scapegoat. Yesterday FBI Director Robert Mueller kicked the slats out of Berto's version of what happened when our top intelligence officials found out about plans to wiretap Americans (most of them wanted to resign), and then the Democranks in the Senate are demanding the appointment of a special counsel to investigate when Gonzy perjured himself when testifying Tuesday about the spy program. Couple that with attempts to get White House Resident Bush's aides Josh Bolten and Harriett Miers to pipe up about what they know the Federal Prosecutor firings, along with new ploys to subpoena creepy mastermind Karl Rove about the aforementioned spying scandal, and suddenly we've got a goat race to see who gets to take the fall next.

*"I know nothing!"

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Success Breeds Failure

Race officials popped Kazakh cyclist Alexander Vinokourov, a favorite to win to the Tour de France, after he tested positive for having foreign blood cells in his system. So Alex and his entire team dropped out. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, called for an overhaul of how riders are tested, angrily declaring. “The system doesn’t work.” A lot of racers didn't make it to the Tour this year, a number of them already caught up in doping scandals. I think the solution is simple. Enhanced athletes are so prevalent now, in pretty much every sport except curling, that they should just add a special adjunct league to accommodate these freaks. Baseball already has a minor and major league -- why not add a steroid league? Same with football, basketball, cycling...just let these drug-enhanced monstrosities face off against each other and suddenly the playing field is level again!

Flushed With Success

Ain't it cool? The first debate involving US presidential candidates -- eight Democrapic partiers, including Hillary and Barack -- answering only questions submitted online by the public went off last night, telewebcast by CNN and YouTube. After responding to questions that spanned the War In Iraq to same-sex marriage, the unofficial overall winner was  Gizmo the cat, who's been seen flushing a toilet over two and a half million times.

Slippery Characters

According to a story in the NYTimes, the main reason currently being offered by the oil companies for their continual pricejacking is that a third of the nation's refineries are on the fritz. This isn't news. They've been slowly going offline for years with no sign of being repaired or replaced, which is bad for us but good for business -- I'm sure Big Oil will have their most profitable year yet. Rather than boycotting gas stations -- which won't work until there's a real alternative to the petrojuice -- what we need is a kind of "reverse terrorism": rogue repairmen who storm the damaged refineries under cover of darkness and get them running again.

Together At Last

Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq (Man, there's a job that must be fun!), told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday: "If there is one word I would use to sum up the atmosphere in Iraq — on the streets, in the countryside, in the neighborhoods and at the national level — that word would be fear." Hey -- just like us! We have more in common than I thought...

Like A Million Bucks

I never thought a bank could send me anything that would brighten my day but, lo and behold, good ol Bank of America has come through! I recently got a business account set up for my consultancy, Simmer Branding Studio, with which was included an ATM/Check card. The card arrived in the mail today and, in a fantastic stroke of brand irony, I discovered that the BofA apparently can only spare 20 characters for their business name line. Now, whenever I buy a client lunch, they'll know that they've been treated by Marc Hershon, Simmer Branding Stud.

Voat Of Confidence

Although the next shuttle launch isn't slated until August 7th, NASA moved the Endeavour into place on the launchpad today. As well as a banner that read "Go Endeavor!" It took someone at Mission Control awhile to remember that the shuttle's name is spelled Brit-style (Endeavour), in honor of the first ship that James Cook, famed English explorer, skippered in the 18th century. 90 minutes after it appeared, the banner was taken down and replaced with a corrected version. Do you think, just before they strap themselves in, the astronauts worry much about NASA's penmanship?