Maggie's Farm

Steven Spielberg had a stolen Norman Rockwell painting in his collection. What a bizarre story.

"Russian Schoolroom," a Rockwell painting stolen from a gallery in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, Mo., more than three decades ago, was found in Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg's art collection, the FBI announced Friday.

Spielberg purchased the painting in 1989 from a legitimate dealer and didn't know it was stolen until his staff spotted its image last week on an FBI Web site listing stolen works of art, the bureau said in a statement.

The painting was commissioned by Look Magazine in 1967.

Spielberg is a longtime collector of Rockwell paintings, and helped to found the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Good for him.

Norman Rockwell was an artist and illustrator of great intuitive insight, famous for painting scenes from everyday life that encapsulate great themes.

In 1967, the Soviet Union was still a going concern. Leonid Brezhnev was advancing Marxist insurgencies in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America. The point of the Soviet bayonet was prodding the United States through a proxy war in Vietnam. Being a closed society, the Soviet Union was able to sow the seeds of confusion about its aims and its depredations on the lives of its own people in the open western press. 

In a stunning turnaround, The Right Reverend Al Gore announced today that he has abandoned his "Crusade to End Exhalation and Bovine Flatulence," and has turned his attention to a more pressing concern: The apostrophe.

"I was jetting all over the world, Davos, Vail, Rhiyad to pick up my check, and I got a good long look at all the people who have been masturbating furiously in the front row of An Inconvenient Truth and screaming at evil republicans on my beloved invention, the internet. It hit me like a metric tonne of greenhouse gases, I'm telling you. I saw my one, true calling. We must ration apostrophes! The use of apostrophe's ... oh, damn... See? They've got me doing it now. We're going to run out of apostrophes if we don't act globally now!"

"I'd read my supporter's...that one belongs there, right? That's possessive, isn't it? Or does it go on the end? Damn, I've lost track...at any rate, I've read their fevered comments on the usual Republitards webpages, and weep for the clear-cutting of the apostrophe forests necessary to form just one paragraph. I mean, it's like I'm reading Klingon or Arabic or something. Can't they just photoshop a Hitler moustache on a previously photoshopped picture of Bush eating a kitten, like normal people do, instead of this unsustainable use of precious apostrophe's... Damn! See? I did it again."

"Look at this," Reverend Al ushered me over to the hand cranked laptop he had installed in his indoor riding ring/jetpark, to lower his carbon footprint. "Look at this! Look at this and weep for the coming world. A world without apostrophes!"

We've got an exclusive peek at Al Gore's next infotainment triumph. Al's taking his tent meeting onto the groaning floorboards of Broadway with his gospels according to, well... himself, I guess: Gorespell!

Sing along with Al:

-Day by day
-Day by day
-Oh Dear Al
-Three things I pray
-To see thee more clearly (You’re getting global looking yourself)
-Love thee more dearly (Dear Leader of our cult)
-Follow thee more nearly (In a private jet all the way, baby)
-Day by day

-Day by day
-Day by day
-Oh Dear Al
-Three things I pray
-To discount the temperature variation trend inferred from ?¹⁸O of peat cellulose in a peat core from Hongyuan (eastern Qinghai–Tibet plateau, southwestern China) more clearly
-Love thee by offsetting  your carbon emissions by paying someone else to plant on a tree on your behalf every time you breathe or drive your car more dearly
-Ignore the effect of diurnal correction on satellite-derived lower tropospheric temperature more completely    -Day by day

-Day by day
-Day by day
-Oh Dear Al
-Three things I pray
-To misinterpret the burial of the soils, triggered by environmental–climatic variations, that took place in several phases and overlook  the last 3000 yr chronological correlation that can be drawn between phases of glacial advance, scree and alluvial sedimentation and development of periglacial features more weirdly
-Love to view the northern Antarctic Peninsula warming and Weddell polynya as local anomalies in the generally cooling Antarctic and find impetuous claims of association (and often causation) more dearly
-To bask in the glow of  Cuba’s Union of Young Communist's newspaper report of acting Cuban President Raul Castro  who recognized the effort of the former vice president to denounce" global warming during a two-hour meeting with youth leaders on Friday more nearly
-Day by day ...

Um... There's 154 more verses. I'll put them in a PowerPoint presentation and e-mail them to you.

... Okinawa, if the lens caps are off.

I love the smell of miso in the morning. Smells like...

Victory!

ABC and Betty Ford are pleased to announce Britney "Uncle Fester" Spears has been added to the cast of the hit TV series "The Rehab Family."

The show was in danger of being cancelled, but four or five understudies for each character have been signed to long-term, multi-year contracts; and reports are that many of them are breeding! This assures us of years of family entertainment to come!

Tune in, any time, any place, to any medium, and see a new episode 24/7.

Pelosi give the Koskids a pound of saggy flesh.

Friends of Maggie's Farm have given us exclusive inside photos of the exhaustive -- and we daresay, exhausting--interview process that the son of the south uses when trying to find people from one America ready, willing, and able to savagely attack the other America without them noticing. Our old pal Iowahawk has the resume of one of the last sterling candidates for the job. You can read it here, if you're not faint of heart when hearing strong Anglo-Saxon words.

So Mookie's decided to boogie all the way to Iran.

Apparently the real Surgin' General is named Petraeus.

Via WFMJ NewsNow: "An ex-girlfriend snitched on...[editor's note: name garbled in transmission]...who is now accused of pilfering high-end lingerie worth nearly 15-thousand dollars."

In other news, here's a picture of Tom Brady.

We were going through the cut-out record bin this weekend and found this oldie but goodie. It makes great listening while reading Pajamas Media's roundup of reax to the John Edwards decision to be faithful to those that malign the faithful while maligning the malignant maligning they faithfully malign with. Or something.

Maggie's Farm, always on the cutting edge of environmental matters, brings you exclusive coverage of California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine announcing he would propose a bill to ban the use of incandescent bulbs in his state. The dim, milky, expensive ones filled with exotic, dangerous gases that require recycling are just as good, and sometimes even come on and emit light-like waves before I crack my shin on the coffee table or before I'm done in the bathroom -- if it's Number 2.

Lloyd is undoubtedly a tireless steward of the environment, and Maggie's Farm is sanguine that he's used the magical powers bestowed upon all state legislators, by virtue of getting several thousand government union workers and extended family members to pull a lever for them every once in a while, to foresee all the various ramifications of outlawing an item that...let's face it... no one much uses any more anyway. 

I think that's Lloyd on the right there. No, that's a potted plant. My bad.

I'm sorry, is that your foot? 

You know, if I was the dumbest person in the world, I'd offer a service where all the people in the world who have some sort of effect on the opinions of others can broadcast their thoughts and feelings all over this great globe of ours, and then I'd piss those people off as profoundly as possible by wrecking their webpages and holing up behind a help page with no contact information, and no help on the page.

The two smartest people in the world are that dumb. Think how dumb dumb people are.

From Today's Boston Globe:

Senator John F. Kerry plans to announce today that he will not run in the 2008 presidential race, and will instead remain in Congress and seek reelection to his Senate seat next year, according to senior Democratic officials.

Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, plans to say he will remain in the Senate to recommit himself to efforts to extricate the United States from the war in Iraq.

I have no steak... um...stake in the offering, but if there's more fun to be had rating bovine beasts on the internet, I haven't seen it. Unless of course you get the Playboy channel, but that costs money. This is free!

Ruminant...um...ruminate on each lovely entrant, and read the comments offered by sons of the sod and daughters of the dairy for each one.

Um... watch where you're standin'.

RateMyCow.com

The picture is "Bigglesworth." Very nicely turned out.

This is a golden oldie, but apparently Body Flex still exists. Greer Childers has lost the Bride Of Blonde Frankenstein/I Live Under The Power Lines perm, but she's still suckin' wind. And it's never good when you're mentioned in one of these.

But without question, this is the most entertaining exercise video in the history of ...well...

You blow, girl.

Body Flex (YouTube video)

When a snake-oil salesman has the crowd going good, the last thing he needs is someone in the crowd getting wise and breaking the mood. That's why they always have a shill in the audience, trying to keep the vibe going. Well, Bill Clinton had the mood going the way he wanted, but a crummy made for TV movie is mucking up his act. The shills are muffing it for him, and he knows it.

Now, Bill Clinton was two presidents, really; he spent his first term as a the most orthodox of liberals, trying to nationalize the healthcare industry like some Arkansan Peron. The voters slapped his nose, hard, with Newt Gingrich, and Bill Clinton 2.0 signed the the conservative's Welfare Reform bill and NAFTA, then settled in to his second term as a sort of Democrat version of Warren G. Harding.

He spent a lot of time trying to cobble together some narrative that would serve as his legacy, but his legacy was both defined and degraded by his shameful behavior and the lengths he would go to avoid facing up to the essential infantilism of his tenure.

And it's hard to get around it: Bill Clinton had nothing to offer on the central problem of the post Soviet Union age: Islamic totalitarianism. Neither he nor any of his acolytes identified the danger that would sweep into the vacuum left by the collapse of the CCCP, and they slashed the Defense budget, cheated at golf and just plain cheated, and waited around for Monica to bring him a pizza. But hindsight for his followers is not 20/20, it's blind; how many people even remember the World Trade Center was bombed the first time while he was president? Clinton's Whitehouse just worked overtime to make sure that the intelligence agencies never talked to each other, and never told him anything he didn't want to hear.

But almost by mistake, the idea that Clinton slept while Osama Bin Laden worked late was broached, and Clinton desperately wants to get that toothpaste back in the tube.

The president is never really "on vacation," They all go places remote from the WhiteHouse, but the duties, responsibilities, the staff -- all of the machinery of government -- never sleep. But there is a limited amount of attention any chief executive can pay to their duties, and Clinton seemed then, as we are being reminded now, to be preoccupied with all sorts of pointless and self-serving folderol to the detriment of the United States, and in its turn, the whole wide world.

Clinton doesn't like that idea to be out in the ether, because the image he's trying to cultivate of his time in office pops like a bubble under close inspection. He was doing pretty good for a while, considering how many things that belonged to America got blown up while he was in office. But Sandy Berger can't stuff everything down his pants, after all. And Clinton's taken to shouting at everybody that will listen to him, going back into his old playbook for the only thing that has ever worked for him: pretending to be the poor victim of an unfair attack, while viciously attacking his opponents.

So I leave you, dear reader, with visual evidence, intentionally made to make Bill Clinton seem like what he was not, which was charming; and unintentionally showing you exactly what he was, and is: a shameless pandering slacker, always on the make for attention, never paying attention when it matters:

What President Clinton was doing while Osama bin Laden planned the second World Trade Center attack.

We were fishing through the cut-out bin at the used record store and came across this gem. If Punxsutawney Chavez comes out of his hole and sees the shadow of El Diablo Bush, do we get six more weeks of $2.25 per gallon gasoline?

We were going through the cut out bin at the used vinyl store and came across this one. Oldie but Goodie. I only vaguely remember their smash hit, but I'm told it's a real toe-tapper. I wonder if it will climb the charts again as a re-release?

I have my doubts.

I love those old sword and sandal movies. They show huge swaths of the majestic deserts of the Middle East, and take in huge swaths of the media and the public. Look on the bright side; perhaps Fitzgerald will become the spokesman for the NRA someday. Armitage? I'm afraid he's gone and got himself thrown under the chariot.

DEMOCRATS SETTLE ON OPINION ON THE CRIMEAN WAR THEY'VE ALWAYS HAD.

Announce plans to weigh in with exquisitely nuanced position on World War One that they had all along next week.

In a blistering attack on the Bush Administration, the Democratic National Committee outlined their position on the Crimean War this week.

"President Bush and his Administration have no credibility left when it comes to the war in the Crimea, yet they continue to engage in partisan attacks, misleading the American, Russian, French, British and Sardinian people about the real state of affairs in The Danubian Principalities. The disclosure of this latest report outlining growing chaos and violence in Sebastopol undermines the President's deceptive proclamations that things are going smoothly in The Crimea. The Bush Administration should release this report so that the American people can have an accurate assessment of the facts on the ground, not more White House propaganda. While The Holy Land continues to slip into civil war and hamper our ability to fight the war on Czarists, with Prince Menshikov still on the loose, even if he is dead, and the Sultan Abu-ul-Majiid  gaining ground in the Bosporus, and the Mahdi has set up shop in The Ottoman Empire. That's all bad, we think; and if it's not, then we don't. BushCo. refuses to offer any leadership on the issue."

"A majority of Americans now believe that this immoral and illegal war for BushCo's ancestor's Big (Olive) Oil buddies in Sardinia was a mistake and agree with Democrat's call to begin responsible redeployment of our troops to Gibraltar so that we can fight and win the war on Barbary Pirates, if the topic comes up again. Republicans in Congress have rubber-stamped the President's failed policy 150 years retroactively and refused to hold him accountable for this commitment to a failed strategy in the Dardanelles. But, in November, the American people will hold Republicans responsible for their inept leadership and continued support for Bush's bad policies."

Senator Kerry, stumping for votes among the little people from the deck of his yacht, announced he would hurl his Crimean War Medal bearing the likeness of his great-aunt and cousin Queen Victoria, the two clasps for the battles of Alma and Inkermann,  the clasp for the battle of Balaklava, the clasp for the fall of Sebastopol, the clasp awarded to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines for actions in the Sea of Azoff, over the big black fence outside Buckingham Palace. Two weeks later, he pledges to throw the same medals over the White House fence. They will be on display after that in his Senate office, inspiring him to greater heights of fury as he works on the latest version of the opinion he's always had on the Charge of the Light Brigade.