How do say good night to
An answering machine?


Benjamin Jones, Isolating, 2003, Mixed media

* Office of Special Council has Karl Rove in its sights. excerpt:

"The Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

"The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

"First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

"'We will take the evidence where it leads us,' Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. 'We will not leave any stone unturned.'"
...
"The decision by Bloch's office is the latest evidence that Rove's once-vaunted operations inside the government, which helped the GOP hold the White House and Congress for six years, now threaten to mire the administration in investigations.

"The question of improper political influence over government decision-making is at the heart of the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and the ongoing congressional investigation of the special e-mail system installed in the White House and other government offices by the Republican National Committee.

"All administrations are political, but this White House has systematically brought electoral concerns to Cabinet agencies in a way unseen previously.

"For example, Rove and his top aides met each year with presidential appointees throughout the government, using PowerPoint presentations to review polling data and describe high-priority congressional and other campaigns around the country."

* Bukowski video: dinosauria, we.

* From a Paris Review interview of Hunter S. Thompson:

Interviewer: Almost without exception writers we’ve interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs—or at the least what they’ve done has to be rewritten in the cool of the day. What’s your comment about this?

HST: They lie. Or maybe you’ve been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It’s like saying, 'Almost without exception women we’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy'—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?