Another week, another dollar. I’m left jowl.
And I’m right jowl.
And this is World Roundup with Mark Shields’ Jowls. I’d like to apologize right off the bat for being a bit late with this post. Mark switched up his denture cream, and the smell in here, sweet living Christ the smell… Anyway, his doctor says it’s for the best or whatever but the fact remains: Fixodent finds a way to make an 81-year-old man’s mouth smell worse than it does in its normal state. And that’s gotta count as some kind of accomplishment, probably. Right jowl, I need a breather…
No worries, left jowl. Let’s start in Japan. Remember last week how we said Japan was totally and inevitably fucked? Well, we might have overstated our case, but only if you consider Chernobyl the standard by which we measure what is and is not “fucked.” And they did withstand a magnitude 6.6 aftershock, so if that doesn’t add a couple notches into the “Fucked” column, then I don’t know what does. Know what really sucks about all this? I don’t know if sushi is ever gonna feel the same again. Yes, whenever Mark looks down and sees little whitewall tires with toro inside and fumblingly, tremblingly raises them to his lips, using his chopsticks in a vain attempt to impress that night’s Asian prostitute, left jowl and I perk up. Mmmmm, sushi! Sushi-ah! Domo arigato, Mark Shields, domo arigato! That’s what we used to think. And now all we’ll think is, like, Murrrr, nuclear apocalypse… or, alternatively, Fuck, spicy mayo? Goddammit, Yelp said this place was authentic. Left jowl, you back in the saddle yet?
With my spurs on, right jowl, and it’s time to giddy-up. Baseball’s back baby! Woo! And while we know many of you are excited by the return of the boys of summer, we need to take a moment to talk about a serious matter. Baseball players put all kinds of crap in their bodies—steroids, amphetamines, anal beads in the case of Robby Alomar, I could go on. As pernicious as these drugs can be, none of them has done so much damage to jowls—including some jowls who were very close to us—as chewing tobacco. I would rather drown in a thousand gallons of Mark’s new Fixodent than withstand a single plug of chaw. So while you’re watching genetic freaks demonstrate their incredibly specialized skill-sets this summer, please, remember the cheeks and jowls cut down well before their time. If jowls had lacrimal glands, I’d shed a tear right now. Oh, the White Sox appear to be the team to beat this year, maybe. It’s probably too soon to tell. Left jowl?
Laurent Gbagbo’s sad saga has finally come to a close, but can we get a nice round of applause for whomever built the bunker below his residence? That bunker just did. not. quit. And neither did Laurent, until, of course, he did. Poor form, Laurent! That bunker gave you at least 110%, probably closer to 120%, which everyone knows is the maximum amount of effort anyone can ever give for anything, and you just came out with your hands up? I guess you just didn’t want it that bad. Word is Outtara is in talks with the bunker over a power sharing agreement. That’s what I heard, and no, you can’t ask where I heard it. Right jowl, help me out here.
Libya! When last we checked in on Libya, the conflict there appeared to be settling into a stalemate. Kinda. It’s tough to say! Misurata remains under siege, and reports from that city are sketchy at best. News outlets have noted the rapid ebb and flow of the opposing forces and tried to tell us that this is all happening shockingly quickly, which it is if you’re completely unfamiliar with desert warfare or the history of mechanized combat in this particular part of the world. “Whoa,” say the taut-cheeked anchorpeople, “I can’t believe how quickly the rebels advance and then fall back!” If I were the proud owner of Communications degree with a concentration in TV Studies from Arizona State, I’d have a tough time believing that too. But Mark’s read a book or two, and left jowl and I had to be there for every page, and I guess we picked up a thing or two about a thing or two. That’s probably my favorite part of today’s news media: everything is surprising and new because everyone seems incapable of checking whether anything like this has ever happened before. Hooray surprises! It’s newsworthy so long as it’s news to me! Anyway, what we do know is that these rebel people, the ones in the pickup trucks doing all the hooting and hollering? Holy shit these guys sound like trouble. At this point, it doesn’t appear that the West has backed the wrong horse, but rather, the West has backed some other, slower animal that’s racing against a horse for some reason. Left jowl?
Budgets: they’re not just boring things with numbers! Well, yes, actually, they are. That’s exactly what they are: boring things, with numbers. We averted a complete shutdown of the federal government last Friday when Tea Partiers were finally convinced that everyone thought they were very special…and now the actual numbers are starting to come out. The table in that link is both boring and chock full o’ numbers, so lemme break down some of the bigger ones for you, because doing so makes me feel smart and powerful and eeeeeeever so slightly better than you:
- An $860 million cut to innovation grants. This is how we win the future!
- An $855 million cut to the WIC program, which helps feed poor children under five and low-income women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Are there not workhouses?
- A $117 million cut to the CDC’s Fruits & Vegetables program. Corn chips still count as a vegetable, right?
- A $550 million cut to renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. As Enzo Ferrari once said, fuel efficiency is for people who can’t build oil derricks.
- A $584 million cut to “Defense Environmental Clean-Up.” Translation: thanks for taking another one for the team, Columbia River.
- A $340 million cut to TSA Aviation Security. Right jowl and I look forward to Republicans blaming Barack Obama for cutting funds to this agency if terrorists manage to hijack an airliner.
- An $816 million cut to FEMA first responders. What could possibly go wrong when FEMA is underfunded and poorly staffed?
- A $735 million cut to federal wildfire programs. Again, what could possibly go wrong when we mismanage federal forests’ fire risks? Nothing. Nothing could go wrong, and nothing ever has gone wrong.
- An $890 million cut to community health centers, which sound pretty communist if you ask me.
- A $590 million cut to LIHEAP. What’s LIHEAP? This is LIHEAP, and you probably make too much money to qualify for it unless you’re reading this at a public library terminal.
- A $1.85 billion cut to the Defense Department’s bilateral aid to allied militaries. What better way to ease America’s burden as international policeman than to cut the legs out from under the armies that might help carry the load? This is a sensible policy and doesn’t run contrary to the broader sweeps of American foreign policy AT ALL.
- A $1.4 billion cut to Amtrak’s Capital and Debt Service Grants. Fuck you, Joe Biden! Get a car, asshole! Really, this is a brilliant way for Republicans to predict the future: now they can say Amtrak’s bad at managing its money while, ha, not giving it money to manage and watching its credit rating plummet even further!
- Do you really want me to keep going? I don’t think you really want me to keep going.
Take a breather there, left jowl, I’ll take it from here. Did that budget breakdown, partial though it was, upset you? Awww, muffin! Don’t look so sad. Here, here’s some fluff. Blueberries are totally good for you. Thanks, LA Times! In three weeks time, Mark’s optometrist says he can take off these bandages after that blinding flash of the terribly obvious. And an Oklahoma pastor is now embracing the label “weird.” So now, you can say, “I think it’s totally weird that more than a billion people believe in a tripartite, omnipresent sky-god who judges people on standards he/she knows those people can never live up to,” and it won’t sound so bigoted!
Now if you’ll excuse us, Mark packed a candy apple for dessert today, and that means more Fixodent…always more Fixodent…
