"Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one."

Chronicle of a journey from youthful
know-it-all to old-fart astonishment.

For much of my now-getting-to-be long life I thought Sax Man Gerry Mulligan [right] originated the title above. He may well have but Bartlett's Quotations and all Google's assembled corollaries have no such reference. So while I try sticking to what I know to be true, it turns out maybe I misled myself and others. NOT "misspeak" as sundry Pols and other bullshit artists fashionably say these days. What I'm writing here is Yeah, I really WILL vote for Barack Obama this November! What pushed me over this particular edge was The Nation Magazine's Open Letter To Barack Obama on his FISA Court vote and Political Principles in general. "Well now," as SNL's Church Lady used to say, "isn't THAT special!" And, if I may add (In the imitation Bronx-Irish brogue of my 35-year buddy Mary Margaret Hogan) "Holy Jaysus Joomping Fooking Chroyst!!" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080818/open_letter

On one hand I loathe Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the Crazed Lady (above, Left) with the heat of 10,000 Suns. Given my druthers, Russ Feingold would be Dem Nominee. He's not. Luckily neither is Nixon in a Pants-Suit. Her loyalists are
now threatening to sit out '08 or worse because Princess Bird-Wing's Investiture was derailed by.....by (GASP!) A MAN!

Question: How the eff many times do y'all need a bitch-slapping by Drool-Buckets like Reagan through BSers like Hillo's Spine through a Casino Toad like Sheldon Adelson?

Way back when I shrunk the occasional head, my Shrinkees were generally women who'd had the Living Shi'ite slapped outta them repeatedly by guys who, somehow, were EVEN WORSE FATHERS than they were either husbands or boyfriends. Their excuses and rationalizations were endless, even brilliant, and I wasn't much good to any of the women. Then I asked: "Why are you teaching your kids and the kids they know that slapping around is just swell by you?" After that was game set and match and not a moment too soon. Never was that kinda Shrink. Mostly they left the Sumbitch for good. A few said "Maybe" and I referred em to good Shrinks ASAP. Never was the type. Hand-holding was/is for my Sweet Bride and for my kids. It's nice and all that but just not my style. Anything over five-minutes for any client and boredom kicks in like Colt-45 Malt Liquor aftertaste. Do right, get their check, say "Thanks," show 'em the and cash that damn check fast.

Obama hasn't shown me any more than he's shown you or anyone who isn't Tony Reszko - which is how Big-Boy Politics is played everywhere eapecially in the USA. His early campaign slogan "We Are The People We Have Been Waiting For!" sounded like the deliberately vacuous "We Are The People!" in Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver. So yes, I hate giving the nation's worst Prez and, likely, first ever White House criminal enterprise One More Live Body or Five-Cents More than they've already looted from Proles-Like-Us. And please let's NOT FORGET Pelosi, Ried and the Loyal Enabling Opposition. But before 86ing THESE two Simps and their Blue-Dog Dem turd-sniffers, first things first! DON'T WITHHOLD YOUR VOTE BECAUSE THESE ASS-WIPES WITHHELD THEIRS! It's ALL YOU HAVE LEFT! Now that Karl Rove has $250-Million in petty cash to plant Dog Poo on your front door http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPOdtvy9GxY&feature=related courtesy of Casino Weasel Sheldon Adelson Your vote still might not be enough! In case my point eludes any One-Issue sensibilities, this is not the time for Angst und weltschmertz whether Barack Obama did or didn't vote "correctly" on the FISA Courts. I happen to think Obama voted the way he voted to Insulate the Democratic Party's ass against the usual "Soft-on-Stalin-Khruschev-Mao-Gorby-Osama-Willie-Horton-Speedy-Gonzalez" jive the GOP trots out every four years after Labor Day. That's because Barack's a Grown-Up. Feel me? Now go read about Sheldon: ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Adelson

Don't believe an Red-Diaper nearly-never-was like Dr. Bawb? Try Samantha Power http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21670 who Obama 86ed for calling Hillary a "monster." Besides, why in THE HELL is Gore Vidal signing that Nation Magazine petition for when that very jackball BRAGS THAT HE HASN'T VOTED FOR YEARS! Swell Gore. You dissed my dad's friend decades ago who asked you a perfectly reasonable question at a Santa Monica Book-Signing. I shut down your shit bad manners then and got cussed out for it by my dad all the way home. He's long-gone and maybe you're not the flaming asshole you were that night. If you are, remember: We BOTH go regularly to Cedars-Sinai Hospital and I ain't lost one damn step.

"SPAZ AT WORK!!!!!!" Dr. Bawb's Blawg Undergoes Facedown...uh, FaceLIFT!!!! B-B-B-Back Soon.

Chronicle of a Shrink's journey from youthful
know-it-all to inevitable old-fart astonishment.

Why Doctor Bawb Avoids Reading Most Stuff He Already Agrees With.

Chronicle of a journey from youthful
know-it-all to old-fart astonishment.

Reading, hearing or looking at stuff that Dr. Bawb already agrees with is, mostly, boring. Kinda like the picture on the right shows. This is no "Eureka!" discovery to anyone over Age Three who ever went to school, sat in some House of Worship or got married more than three times. We know what's coming and what's coming good or bad, is the Same Old Crap: Long Division and "Whaddaya mean 'Inappropriate?'"

So even while Doctor Bawb's dad was Left and Doctor Bawb remains Left [a reliable sign of having liked one's dad according to one long-time buddy] poring over William F. Buckley's God And Man At Yale brought only "Why are you wasting time reading that crap?" onto my pizza-faced, teenaged head. Mommie Dearest's chiming in with the observation that Buckley and Adolf Hitler combed their hair alike cut little ice. Especially followed up by "I bet HIS mother didn't have to remind HIM to tuck in HIS shirt 50-times a day!" Yes the future Doctor Bawb nearly asked: "Buckley or Adolf?" But dad had serious-ass rules about back-talking. A few years before, during a stupefyingly dull Sunday ride into long-ago-semi rural LA County, Mommie Dearest mused aloud about her sulking, Cerebral-Palsied son stowed in the back seat: "You know, one day maybe he'll become a Farmer." Dad nearly drove off the road. A father-son procedural question was clarified forever that afternoon. Which brings Dr. Bawb's Lefto bad taste to TNR and Jon Chait's

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b smackdown of Naomi Klein's equally Lefto Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Chait beat me to this new "Axis of Evil" beat-down by three or four days. Today Time and the LA Times are whaling the hell outta Naomi for her over-simplified idea of everything like she was Dick Nixon or George W. Bush.

As this screed's title reads, Dr. Bawb stays away from books, especially long books, he's pretty sure he'll mostly agree with if not completely. Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism was a slog but worth it since Pointy-Head Intellectuals generally agreed Hannah's book was pretty definitive on how and why Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Robert Mugabe all got to the same positions. Dick Cheney gamed the system. Hillary always was Nixon in a Pantsuit. so, at least for the present, the US hasn't had a real heart and soul "presidential timber" Fascist since Charles A. Lindbergh in 1940.

TThat's Hermann Goering [far right] presenting Lindy with a Nazi medal on behalf of der Fuhrer during one of Lucky's "fact-finding" trips abroad. When FDR refused to reinstate Lindy's Air Force Commission for our National Hero. This was called "petty jealousy" by the GOP in some book Doctor Bawb was thumbing through at UCLA's Powell Library during his $1.50/hr. "Shelving Years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh
Nor was Lindy big on the Jews as his SRO address at Madison Square Garden before America First! "If it isn't one thing, it's another," as the late and much-missed Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna would say. Or "THINGS CHANGE!" as today's wildly pro-NeoConservative GOP and Crazy John Hagee-loving AIPAC assuredly will say ad nauseum. So let's go back to Naomi Klein - who along with Gilda and FDR is probably a better all-around human being than any of the aforementioned loons ever thought
about being. See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21470 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Israel_Public_Affairs_Committee and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee.

First, given Doctor Bawb's premise of avoiding books he probably agrees with anyway, cut the girl some slack. She's just 38, good looking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein especially for a Public Intellectual [that term's a problem for Shrinks like or unlike Dr. Bawb]. But even on whatever in hell a "World Public Intellectual" ranking is, Naomi's #11 and top female, too.

Before Dr. Bawb bores y'all hopelessly by rehashing a wasted education and career testing at-risk South-Central LA kids and adults, let's spin the USC Grad School "Way-Back" Machine. This bring up a basic Test Measurement variable called The Hawthorne Effect. Put simply, what in THE HELL are we measuring and why bother? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect. To go didactic ever so briefly on y'all, here's what it means: An experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with outcomes measured.[6]

Put simply, when Author/Psychologist James Dobson referred to Dr. Joe Nicolosi as "America's leading authority on PRE-GAY [my caps] toddler behavior" Dr. Bawb wondered just how the fuck much USC Grad School has the far-more illustrious Dr. Dobson forgotten? The fact that PRE still means "BEFORE" or "HASN'T EVER HAPPENED" was thrown out as being too complex for Dr. Bawb's mind to grasp. Same thing with Naomi Klein's 11th-Ranked World Public Intellectual: All that means is Ten People got more votes than Naomi from 20,000 readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. Impressive, huh! Here's the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2005_Global_Intellectuals_Poll. [Dr. Bawb welcomes explanations as to how Tom Friedman made #16 on any MTA subway car much less the New York Times or the world].

Naomi Klein SHOULDN'T be getting "piled on" during this or any other week. She's just written a more detailed account of what Willaim Greider wrote in One World, Ready or Not and The Soul of Capitalism.
Or Benjamin Barber's Jihad Versus McWorld. Naomi's even gone and built on Fernand Braudel's magisterial three-volume History of Capitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel.
And for this, Jonathan Chait, Time Mag and every other Wanna-Be-On-A-Dumbass-100-Intellectuals-List jumps Naomi's bones.

Sexism? Too easy. If FoxNews can put it on Five-by-Eight Cards and sticks to easy-to-say words, Sean Hannity will handle that. Dr. Bawb's best guess [remember, he AVOIDS 571-page books he agrees with - It's an OLD-AGE thang, see?] is Naomi overlooked Dr. Freud's "Overdetermination" principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdetermination. Economic systems, like Dreams, are determined by any number of factors and NOT just one. Forget Milton Friedman or Leo Strauss or even Neo-Conservatism - the latter of which is desiccating as this is written. You're young, you have your act together and some Jonathan Chait-wannabe is gonna be there to get Andy Warhol's Fifteen-Minutes of Fame. It goes with the territory as Dr. Bawb's own Sweet Bride had to remind him over and over.

"Truth Is My Bitch!"

Chronicle of a Shrink's journey from youthful know-it-all to old-fart astonishment.

Real life sometimes exceeds even
the disgusting, warped, tasteless mockery of an aged class-clown like Dr. Bawb who wallows in swill without audience or attentive
classmates to speak of. The other day a Wall Street Journal review of several books on the follies of psychiatry, once Dr. Bawb's profession, seemed a big, wet enough spitball to sling and, potentially, piss-off certain Giants of the Shrink Industry like the makers of Zoloft. A brief description of Desperate Cures and the US Lobotomy fad of the 1950s prompted finding a 6000-year old Peruvian Indian lobotomy. above, seemed plenty to show even this was nothing new: "Lobotomies later went into mass production when American psychiatrist, Walter Freeman, began to travel across the country to treat patients using nothing more than a glorified ice pick that he pushed through the soft bones in the roof of their eye sockets to sever their frontal brain regions. and how the media promoted it (after Egas Moniz, neuro-surgeon and self-promoter, received the Nobel Prize in 1949), and how patients with chronic anxiety, depression and schizophrenia http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121461316011612643.html
were transformed into quiet mental invalids." Winging polysyllabic spitballs or even an Uzi that shot 15 hot barf-cartridges per second wouldn't work for Dr. Bawb today ["UZI" left, is well-mannered and remains well above any of this]. Earlier today John "Goddam" Conyers
deigned to allow Rep. Dennis Kucinich to lay out his case for impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. "We're discussing...but we're not doing impeachment," said Conyers. Real 'White' of you, John. A lifetime of Stiller Fandom, towering contempt for anything http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3622221Cleveland - especially the Brownzos - and their Congressguy's all that's between democracy, Dr. Bawb and any stove still too hot for Bush, Cheney et al to steal. John: go get Nancy and please have the Congressional Comity not to SHTUP "Madame Speaker" while the CSPAN camera's on.

But this wasn't the worst thing: Forget Ben Bernanke telling congress Freddie Kruger needs bailing out and the LAPD "monitoring" the since-5am-PDT lines of panicky Encino CA depositors http://ktla.trb.com/business/ and http://www.latimes.com/news/local/valley/la-fi-indymac16-2008jul16,0,4988921.storywith OVER $100K deposited at the bank - mostly telling those people to "go home and don't worry." It was this:

" Lancaster: mother killed
Lucy Preciado, 26, a Latina woman, was stabbed to death during a domestic dispute in the 4100 block of West Avenue L in Lancaster about 2 a.m. Saturday, July 12. Paramedics pronounced Preciado dead at the scene. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said Preciado was found dead inside her home. She was stabbed by a large sword, possibly in front of her four children, who were inside the house when deputies arrived. Detectives from the Sheriff's homicide bureau sought the public's help in locating Preciado's 28-year-old Latino boyfriend, Jesus Humberto Canales, at right. Authorities said Canales is wanted for questioning in the alleged stabbing of Preciado. Authorities said Canales is driving a 2002 bronze GMC Safari van with a California license plate 6CBY663. Authorities said Canales is considered to be armed and dangerous. Anyone with information is asked to contact Sheriff's homicide bureau detectives at (323) 890-5500. Jesus Humberto Canales, is 28 years of age, according to a news report.

Tomorrow's a new day like always.