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Wednesday, July 30, 2008 – This particular affront to public decency kicks off with a scan of the news horizon on the nation’s 232nd birthday. We note—how could we ignore it?—that Dick “Dick” Cheney marked the occasion by tramping the decks of the U.S.S. Constitution, while his gunsel George W. Bush was censoring Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Eventually we get to Vincent Bugliosi’s argument that Bush, at least, should be charged with, and tried for, murder—but not before taking a detour, so as to interfere with Jesse Helms’ efforts to rest in peace. There’s more, but we’ll let the reader discover the rest on his …

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Friday, July 11, 2008 – Because that’s what we do here. Stay tuned for a witty description of the contents, to follow. Update, July 30: Well, this update is a little bit late. OK, it’s 19 days late. We have been “dealing with issues,” as people say these days when they want to wrap themselves in a convenient, non-specific excuse and get on with life. This issue of the Olde Rag contains an intemperate rant inspired by the Republican fervor for filling the continental shelf with oil rigs. It paints top figures in the Executive Branch as incompetents rejected by the oil industry, and useful …

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Friday, June 13, 2008 – Ever alert for ways to improve our service, we have taken the advice of a friend and modified our procedures slightly. Our downloadable pdf files should henceforth be somewhat less of a strain on our visitors’ personal intertubes. Herewith, our Volume 252, No. 19, dated June 13, 2008. It takes up just 3.4 MB, 41 percent less than excruciatingly high-resolution version we sent to our printer. In this issue we look into what’s behind the alarming rise in oil prices. Along the way we manage to drag in genealogy, The Rapture, and Alexander VI, our favorite Pope. To put some …

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Friday, June 13, 2008 –Yes, it even frightens us, to see the online end of this operation begin to function in a predictable, coordinated manner. And we say this, even without having completed a few devious renovations which we plan to spring on an unsuspecting world as early as next week! In this, our May 30 issue, we take note of the now-quaint price of gas – just $3.97 a gallon. How innocent we were then! We also take issue with the work product of George W. “Chickenhawk” Bush’s Memorial Day speech writer, and supply the missing phrases for his address to the Knesset. The …

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Friday, May 30, 2008 – In this issue (May 16, 2008), the Democratic nomination process reminds the editor of a story he was told years ago by an old swamp yankee; Nelson Mandela and Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles are compared and contrasted; some little-known facts about Republican primary candidate for the First District, John Stephen are weighed; we take a look at GOP State Chair Fergus Cullen’s sense of humor; an update is included on the recent Congressional hearings about the 2002 GOP phone-jamming scandal; a press release for a New Hampshire time-share resort is deconstructed, and we consider the curb appeal of the …

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Friday, May 16, 2008 – Here it is, like clockwork. Assuming the clock in question only ticks once every 336 hours, give or take a few. “Whatever you do will be insignificant,” Gandhi said, “but it is very important that you do it.” To whatever extent it may be important, we’ve just injected another 44,000 pages of information and attitude into the infosphere, where it may be picked up, for free, by whoever happens to see it, at one of our 160 or so distribution points. In this issue, we reveal the Democrats’ secret weapon for blowing the next election, we kick around John McCain’s …

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