Here we come a'wassailing

Well, Thanksgiving is over. And as the Christmas season starts to spark into full, capitalist-driven life, let's consider some of the older traditions that accompany it.

Wassail, for example.

Now, the average American, for a number of good reasons, has no idea what "wassail" might be. The closest they might come to it is the old carol from which this post takes its name, Here We Come A'Wassailing.

Now, traditionally, "wassailing" was based in the Anglo-Saxon habit where a group of peasants went to the lord's manor and sang badly until they were given something, usually food or drink, just to make them shut up. We can see this reflected in the lyrics to We Wish You a Merry Christmas, where they end up begging for "figgy pudding." (Somehow, I doubt that a box of Fig Newtons would cover it for them, but what do I know?)

Etymologically, "wassail" apparently traces back to the Anglo-Saxon phrase wæs þu hæl ("be thou hale," or "be in good health"). This was shortened at some point to Wæs hal! ("Be healthy!"), and thus to "wassail." And wassail was the liquid equivalent of the figgy pudding, a drink that the master could keep on hand for the servants to ladle out to whoever came around singing.

If you look around, you'll find an abundance of recipes claiming to be wassail. Some of them are fruit punches, some are based on tea, but none of them are likely to be accurate - many are based on various formulations of mulled cider.

Now, Alton Brown (our cooking lord and savior, blessed be his name) did a little research, and came up with a recipe for wassail that may be entirely accurate.

Alton Brown's Wassail Recipe

6 small Fuji apples, cored
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
72 ounces ale
750 ml Madeira
10 whole cloves
10 whole allspice berries
1 cinnamon stick, 2-inches long
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
6 large eggs, separated

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Put the apples into an 8 by 8-inch glass baking dish. Spoon the brown sugar into the center of each apple, dividing the sugar evenly among them. Pour the water into the bottom of the dish and bake until tender, about 45 minutes.

Pour the ale and Madeira into a large slow cooker. Put the cloves, allspice, and cinnamon into a small muslin bag or cheesecloth, tied with kitchen twine, and add to the slow cooker along with the ginger and nutmeg. Set the slow cooker to medium heat and bring the mixture to at least 120 degrees F. Do not boil.

Add the egg whites to a medium bowl and using a hand mixer, beat until stiff peaks form. Put the egg yolks into a separate bowl and beat until lightened in color and frothy, approximately 2 minutes. Add the egg whites to the yolks and using the hand mixer, beat, just until combined. Slowly add 4 to 6 ounces of the alcohol mixture from the slow cooker to the egg mixture, beating with the hand mixer on low speed. Return this mixture to the slow cooker and whisk to combine.

Add the apples and the liquid from the baking dish to the wassail and stir to combine. Ladle into cups and serve.

The only really unusual ingredient there is Madeira, which is basically a fortified wine - historically, the vintner would just stop the fermentation of a batch of wine by adding enough distilled alcohol (usually brandy) to kill off the yeast before it ate up all the sugar. Madeira, Marsala, port, sherry, vermouth - they're all considered "fortified wines." They tend to be more alcoholic than most wines, but less than most liquors.

We made a batch of Alton Brown's wassail tonight, just in support of that whole Christmas tradition, and while I have to admit that it isn't the most disgusting thing I've ever put in my mouth... oh, lord, it isn't good.

You know how some things are greater than the sum of the parts? Yeah, this isn't one of them. If anything, this takes some of the less appealing parts of the ingredients and amplifies them: the slight bitterness of the ale doesn't really match well with the sugar in the baked apple and the sweet bite of the Madeira wine. (And, incidentally, if you don't temper the eggs well before adding them in, you end up with some slightly boiled scrambled eggs on top, which isn't what a normal person might consider good eats...)

If you don't believe me and want to make it for yourself, let me help you out a little: here's the cut-down version of the recipe. Try it and see for yourself.

1 small Fuji apple, cored
2 2/3 teaspoons brown sugar
Enough water to give you about 1 cm on the top of your smallest baking dish
A 12 ounce bottle of ale
1/2 cup Madeira
2 whole cloves
2 whole allspice berries
Half of a cinnamon stick
Dash ground ginger
Dash ground nutmeg
1 large egg, separated

Treat them as above. But don't say I didn't warn you.

We've used a crockpot recipe for years, involving apple cider, cranberry juice, brown sugar, a cloved orange, some spices and time to heat. (Personally, I think it works best with a shot of rum added - that's just me.)

I think we'll stick with that one.

Colbert Conservatism

by David Sirota (Creator's Syndicate)

Pop quiz -- name the political leader who said the following:

"We must be willing to pull the plug before sinking more dollars into weapons that do not provide what our warriors need."

Now name the leader who said this:

"(W)e cannot track $2.3 trillion in (Pentagon spending) ... We maintain 20 to 25 percent more base infrastructure than we need to support our forces, at an annual waste to taxpayers of some $3 billion to $4 billion ... There are those who will oppose every effort to save taxpayers' money ... Well, fine, if there's to be a struggle, so be it."

I'm willing to bet many self-described "conservatives" guessed Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich. I would make that wager based on the enraged response to my recent column about government data showing that our waste-ridden, $600-billion-a-year defense budget will cost about seven times more than the health care legislation currently before Congress.

In e-mails, letters and Web site comments, right-wingers didn't vent anger at Pentagon profligacy, but at the criticism of Pentagon profligacy -- as if brazenly throwing away billions on outdated weapons systems and obsolete military programs is now a "conservative" value. Notably, the vitriol didn't include contrary numbers disproving the figures I referenced (none exists) -- the responses just used Fox News-ish slogans like the cost of freedom to deride all criticism of Pentagon spending as unpatriotic ultraliberalism.

Of course, if that's true, then Stephen Colbert's refrain that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" is now less a laugh line than a devastatingly accurate commentary on the deranged terms of America's political discourse. I say that because here are some objective, nonpartisan, non-ideological facts:

-- The 2010 Pentagon budget means "every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year," reports the Cato Institute. "By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China's per capita spending is less than $100."

-- "(The Pentagon budget) dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike," reports Hearst Newspapers.

-- "President (Obama) is on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II," reports National Journal's Government Executive magazine.

-- In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal health care for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal health care plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Obviously -- obviously! -- these points are no cause for alarm and certainly no cause for defense spending reductions, right? All they must prove is that the archconservative Cato Institute, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, National Journal employees and Pentagon officials are secretly America-hating liberals. And -- obviously! -- so are two of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks ever to hold government office, Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they're the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they're actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

Really, how could anyone other than traitorous communists see the data and then consider backing the mildest Pentagon spending cuts? I mean, come on -- in a country whose paranoid conservative movement now makes a dead-serious ideology out of Stephen Colbert wisecracks, how dare any red-blooded American even think of pondering basic budgetary facts?

Demonization of "the Other"

It's a sad day when I godwin up a post, so I'll let Nicole Belle do it, in a piece exerpted from Crooks and Liars.

David Neiwert has written about this institutionalized fear of the other, and if I may be so lazy as to co-opt his (and Orcinus blogging partner Sara Robinson's) breakdown of the construct to make some group the feared "Other". Read and see how familiar this sounds:

1. Untrustworthy, unethical with money, prone to cheat in business dealings;

2. Clannish and unwilling to assimilate into the larger culture;

3. No respect at all for the rule of law. The only way to control them is through brute force;

4. Dim-witted, lazy, fit only for physical labor -- but you have to threaten them to get off their butts, because they won't work otherwise;

5. Constitutionally weaker than members of the dominant culture;

6. Complete lack of moral self-control;

7. Bent on world domination. These plans always involve secret conspiracies and special skills known only to the clan;

8. Despite their minority status, they are thought to have far more power than their numbers, and an inordinate influence over the running of the country;

9. Heirs to an inhumanly bloody history that cannot be forgiven, and which they have never moved past (they're "bloodthirsty savages" with no redeeming qualities); and which never created anything meaningful in the way of art, music, science, or architecture (writing them out of history);

10. Congenitally to understand the subtleties of the "superior" race they live among, and thus forever brutish and inferior;

11. Inadequate personal and domestic hygiene (they smell, and their houses and businesses aren't clean). Carriers of strange diseases that threaten the dominant culture;

12. "Breeding like flies" and attendant fears that they're going to out-breed the dominant culture (this one will be tossed around regardless of actual comparative birth rates);

13. The men are out-of-control sex fiends who will sexually terrorize the dominant culture's women if not firmly restrained;

14. The women are appropriate targets for sexual abuse by men of the dominant culture. They probably even enjoy the chance to finally experience a "real man."

Take a look at any one of the right wing sites and you'll see variations on these themes over and over. I'm happy that Charles Johnson has started to speak out over the blind hatred and eliminationist rhetoric, although he too is not above wading in those waters when it comes to Muslims.

The Abject Failure of the Obama Administration. Or not.

You know, as I wander around this series of tubes, occasionally heckling some poor deluded right-winger (and by "heckling," I mean "pointing out facts to someone with a limited grasp on reality"), I find myself frequently called by some variation on the term "Obamabot."

The reason for this is fairly simple (as are many of the people who use terms like that) - the Far Right tends to view the entire world in black and white terms. Every Muslim is an extremist and a terrorist. All atheists are violently opposed to all religion, everywhere. All gays are sexual deviants, and will cheerfully perform any other sexual deviance, whether it's beastiality, pedophilia, prostitution or incest.

It's the foundation of their entire world-view: America - love it or leave it. (Unless a Democrat is in charge, of course.) You're either with us, or with the terrorists.

The Bush/Cheney White House exploited this simplistic outlook to push their neocon agenda as far as they could. Fox "News" is still eating from the rotting carcass of that mentally (and often morally) bankrupt philosophy.

Black and white. No shades of grey. And so, following this simplistic and twisted "logic," if I don't immediately condemn everything that Barack Obama does or says, I must therefore support every action taken by the president. I must worship at his feet and call him the Messiah. And I must have a shrine in my living room with a bronze statue of Obama gazing off into the socialist future that the Right likes to imagine he sees.

No middle ground. Black and white.

But let's be real: there is fuck-all in this world that isn't actually some shade of grey. In the end, there are very few saints and only marginally more sociopaths: most people are simply self-centered, venal creatures with lusts they barely control and damned few positive traits. The trick is that some of us hide these traits in ourselves better than some others can manage.

So, do I believe that Barack Obama is the Chosen One, who brings the dead to life and craps gold bars? To be honest, not so much. I do, however, compare him to the previous tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and find him to be superior in pretty much every measurement.

Do I agree with everything Obama has done, though? Hell, no.

While I believe that Dick Cheney is dithering about that craniorectal surgery he's been putting off, I don't see Obama's measured approach to a complex situation in Afghanistan to be a problem. I would prefer if American troops were pulled out of what has historically proven to be an amazingly truculent piece of real estate, especially since my son (the Marine) has just deployed to that ugly, nasty, and excessively frigid country.

On the other hand, I can't figure out why we still have troops in Iraq. Every measurable mission that's been given our military in Iraq has been fulfilled. We didn't go into that hellhole for any particularly good reason, and I don't believe we need to stay.

And moving in from the bigger, strategic picture, I don't like all of the tactical decisions that have been made. For example, we have a program using unmanned predator drones targeting potential terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I support the fact that it keeps our troops out of harm's way. But if we had "actual" people (as opposed to "virtual" people) doing that job, they would be referred to as "hit squads." And Obama has approved this program. I do not like the fact that the White House has endorsed a program of assassination by proxy.

Since the GOP has shown that their definition of "bipartisan" is "we get our way on everything," I think that Obama is wasting his time trying to appease the Right. Just ram your agenda through Congress and move on. For example, America needs a real, robust public option, and I'm disappointed that Obama isn't pushing harder for it.

I have problems with some of his choices for advisors and cabinet positions. I think one of the best examples would have to be Islam Siddiqui, a former pesticide lobbyist, as chief agricultural negotiator in the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The potential bias implicit in that choice makes my balls itch.

There's plenty of other things I disagree with. But that's the difference. I see the president as a talented man in a difficult situation, and I understand the bigger picture: nobody does everything exactly right. I have no problem with that.

Do I think Obama is the Messiah? No. But then again, I also believe that anyone who wants to see the president fail must love their politics more than they love their country. Because if the president fails, so does the United States.

Those on the right see America's first black president, and a Democratic president at that, and actively search for any tiny mistake (or anything that they can twist and suggest might be a mistake), because they can't stand the thought of him succeeding. This became most obvious when, six months into Obama's presidency, the Right was already calling this administration a failure.

They have an instantaneous, knee-jerk response to anything that Barack Obama does: they oppose it, and it doesn't matter whether this hypothetical "something" is what would be best for the country. They're stuck in a feedback loop: if they see anything done or said by Barack Obama, they immediately search for the worst possible interpretation, despite all evidence supplied by reality.

It's a simple, mindless reaction process, performed almost automatically. They receive input labeled "Obama" and they respond to it. They will then continue in that direction, even if they end up running into a wall. And if the path that their minimalist programming lays out for them runs them off a cliff? Then they'll heedlessly march over the edge and keep right on marching until physics abruptly brings to an end what logic couldn't change.

Obviously, what we need is a better definition of "Obamabot."

"Climategate" - Is the Sky Really Falling?

So, several thousand emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia, dumped on some other server elsewhere in the world, and are now being trumpeted as "proof" that climate change is a hoax. And thousands of global warming conspiracy theorists are now pouring over all these illegally-obtained emails trying to find anything they can spin into evidence of a global conspiracy.

Does that summarize the situation pretty well?

Personally, I think that the best take on the situation comes from Aaron Wiener on the Washington Independent:

Is 'Climategate' Really the Game-Changer Skeptics Say It Is?

On Friday, the news broke that hackers had obtained and released thousands of email exchanges between climate scientists at England’s University of East Anglia. Climate change skeptics pounced on the leak, dubbing it "Climategate" and proclaiming that the questionable communications between the scientists proved that global warming was based on cooked data.

"Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?" asked one headline. Another piece called the scandal "one of the greatest in modern science." Today, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) called for an investigation.

So what exactly in these emails is causing such celebration among the deniers? The Daily Telegraph compiled "the most contentious quotes," and while they’re certainly embarrassing for their authors, they don’t come close to undermining the very basis of climate science. Here are three of the six they list:

From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004
“Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the [global warming-denying] idiots in the near future.”

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome [global warming-denying] editor.”

From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
“I can’t see either of these [global warming-denying] papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

These emails demonstrate a deep disdain for global warming skepticism that does not befit scientists in objective pursuit of the truth. But disdain is a far cry from intentional falsification, which is what they’re being accused of. These scientists could — and maybe should — suffer consequences for presenting their findings, and those of their colleagues, in a way that jibes with their broader agenda. But to say that this leak threatens to undermine next month’s climate negotiations in Copenhagen strikes me as more than a bit excessive.

As Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA put it, "Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works."

Or, from Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight:

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmist year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

More to the point, from Brad Johnson on Think Progress:

Evidently due to this e-mail conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire, the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world's glaciers are disappearing. Oh yeah, and it’s the hottest decade in history.

Oh, and Inhofe's calling for an investigation. Into a UN committee. Because he thinks we have jurisdiction there? And, just so I'm clear, this is the same James Inhofe whose biggest campaign contributor is the oil and gas lobby?

Yeah, I thought so.

Scatologically Speaking (a brief essay)

Here's a fun thing to do.

Go into your grandmother's bathroom sometime while she's snoring on the sofa, in a mild coma brought on by alternating doses of Celebrex, Lotensin, Paxil, Prilosec and cheap bourbon. If you look under the sink in there, odds are good that you'll find a product called Epsom Salts.

Now, the most commonly-discussed use of Epsom Salts, or magnesium sulfate (named for Epsom, England, if anybody really cares) is to soak tired or aching muscles. Of course, the "alternative medicine" folks will further try to sell you on its benefits to clean out your liver, stop your epileptic fits, regrow lost limbs and cure acne. But we'll ignore all that, and suggest that you take two tablespoons in a glass of lukewarm water, stir well, and drink all at once.

Now the trick here is the phrase "all at once." The stuff tastes roughly like watered-down bile, and it has a sharp chemical edge to the flavor that will make you strongly consider weeping about halfway through the glass-full. And if you stop drinking, you probably aren't going to be able to make yourself start again. So chug it down.

Now that you've finished, it would probably be the wrong time to tell you that you needed to stock up on Gatorade and baby wipes; if you haven't done it already, you're screwed. Because you have just very literally kicked your own ass. About twenty minutes, maybe half an hour from now, you're going to experience a gurgling in your lower intestine, the first sign of what we sometimes euphemistically call "gastric distress." Don't try to ignore it and finish up whatever you're doing. You need to rush to the toilet right now. Because if you don't, you will crap yourself.

If you're cooking, don't leave anything on the heat. If you're stupid enough to be operating heavy machinery, leave it idling and let somebody else power it down - you don't have that kind of time.

It's too late now if you haven't installed seatbelts on your toilet, but you might want to consider that in the future. Remember those little plastic rockets you used to fill with water and pump up until it would shoot up into the sky trailing a stream of pressurized water behind it? And you'd stand there at the age of seven, giggling like Rush Limbaugh with a fresh supply of Oxycontin and Dominican male prostitutes.

Yeah, your ass is that rocket. And it's going to keep firing off every hour or so for the rest of the day.

It's not like the bowel-clearing ability of this product is a closely-guarded secret - in fact, most brands of Epsom Salts have the word "laxative" somewhere on the package. But the rectum-reaming effectiveness of this product is astounding to the average American, raised for generations on "gentle laxatives" and "soothing, overnight relief." There's nothing "soothing" about Epsom Salts - at some point during the next twelve-to-sixteen hours, as your sphincter begins to be digested by the steady stream of stomach-acid and e. Coli racing through it, you'll curse me for not having mentioned the baby wipes earlier.

In the larger sense, I find this to be a metaphor for both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

Going Rogue

You know, I was going to drop $9 on a copy of this drek and give you a review, but over at Gin and Tacos, they beat me to it. So:

GOING ROGUE

(To answer your question in advance, I owe early access to the text to blind luck, persistence, and a helpful friend in the industry who demands anonymity. Cross-posted at the Putz.)

Following American politics for the last two decades (and teaching about it for the last six years), I often feel like our political spectacles have taken on the air of an elaborate Dadaist performance piece, with each "Tea Party," Fox News segment, and Republican Savior more egregiously blurring the lines between reality, farce, and surrealism. We watch each Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal speech fully expecting Ashton Kutcher to appear and let us in on the joke, informing America that it has in fact been punk'd and laughing uproariously at our gullibility. Our collective capacity for credulity has been strained to breaking.

Now we are faced with the daunting task of wrapping our minds around the Palin memoir Going Rogue, appearing atop a bestseller list near you. Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can't write, intended for an audience that doesn't read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn't think. God is dead.

If you are in a hurry, here is the succinct version of this review: Going Rogue is shit. It is groundbreaking in its banality and disregard for facts. If you are sentient, it will pain you to read it. Imagine watching your parents 69 one another while John Madden sits behind you and bellows out color commentary and you will have some idea of how excruciating and profoundly scarring it is to plow through each page of this wholly fictional monument to self-aggrandized mediocrity. Going Rogue is to the art of writing what the Holocaust is to the concept of a just God - the piece of disconfirming evidence so overwhelming that we are left questioning whether it can exist at all.

Going Rogue is not without merit. It certainly delivers what its intended audience wants. Readers who already like Palin will love it, much as America's pedophiles will find the latest Jonas Brothers DVD to their liking. The authors' talent for communicating the ex-Governor's unique rhetorical style in print is remarkable - the Sesame Street cadence of her delivery and the intermittent Tourette's-like winks leap off the page. The book, recession priced at just $9, is also an ideal gift for the Aunt or Uncle who assaults your email inbox with a dozen weekly communique's on the President's Kenyan birth and the constitutionality of income taxes.

Unfortunately that is an exhaustive list of its strengths.

The book is less a biography than an elaborate press release. Its 432 pages (with sixteen pages of pictures and no index) barely feign interest in describing Palin's life in detail. It moves as quickly as possible to its real raison d'etre - a methodical re-imagining of her entire political career replete with more excuses than a Cleveland Browns post-game press conference. Palin has never done anything wrong. The public have merely been led to believe that she is a dangerously stupid, erratic narcissist. Going Rogue is all about setting that record straight, offering a wildly implausible excuse for every crash and bang in her train wreck of a political career.

The theme that permeates the book - and with all the subtlety of an Oliver Stone film - is Palin's overwhelming magnanimity. The book itself was written solely for our benefit, to set straight all of our misconceptions. Her Hindenburg interview with Katie Couric was done only because Palin pitied the struggling journalist (no mention of how her personal generosity forced her to answer simple questions like a lobotomized rube who had never ventured beyond Wasilla). Her hillbilly-wins-the-Lotto shopping sprees and misuse of Alaska taxpayers' funds to take her daughters on vacations in $3000 per night hotels either never happened (er, she usually eschewed lavish accommodations for simple ones) or were forced upon her by others; McCain aides practically held a gun to her head and made her buy a new wardrobe. She resigned the governorship halfway through her only term for the benefit of the people of Alaska (admittedly, she may be onto something there). Her enormous legal bills stem from frivolous ethics complaints by her enemies, and she has borne these costs for you, out of the kindness of her heart. Buying her book and electing her to the presidency is the least you can do in return, ingrate.

A serious question arises from her narrative. Is she a sociopath with a messiah complex - i.e. she actually believes the version of events she relates here - or is she simply a shameless liar? Does she honestly fail to realize that the McCain team was bending over backwards to protect her from her own stupidity when she rails on about how they abused, demeaned, and stifled her? Does she honestly believe it when she describes herself as someone who wouldn't stand for a conflict of interest from a public servant, or does she consciously sit down at the keyboard and say, "I think I'm gonna make some shit up here!" with the intention of burnishing her image?

It is not coincidental that everyone - and we can use that term without hyperbole - involved with the McCain campaign and not named "Sarah Palin" has already lambasted this book as, variously, "pure fabrication," "other worldly," "blatantly and absolutely inaccurate," "total fiction," and "a serious mixing of truth and imagination." These charges would be predictable from liberal opponents, but they come from fellow Republicans. That is the shocking and crass aspect of this book. It is petty, vindictive, and reads like Palin was checking names off of her Nixonian enemies list one by one as she wrote, and the targets of her limitless bile are almost exclusively other Republicans. Barely a word is uttered of President Obama or his campaign aside from some factually errant potshots at his policies - including the "bailout" legislation signed by George W. Bush, underscoring Palin's slavish attention to detail. Nary an insult is leveled at Obama, Biden, or other Democrats on a personal level, something that cannot be said for Steve Schmidt and the rest of the McCain team. Schmidt may have seemed to the rest of us like a salty, dumpy campaign pro desperately trying to maintain order in a campaign that, thanks to Palin, skirted the line between chaos and comedy – half Ringling Brothers circus, half Triangle Shirtwaist fire. But Palin once again sets straight the record, depicting Schmidt throughout as a profane, hysterical misogynist hell-bent on destroying her and, she bizarrely claims, forcing her to abandon the Atkins Diet.

Going Rogue is many things, but it is not a good biography. It is a fantastic work of fiction and therefore not totally undeserving of commercial success. Every autobiography - be it from a political aspirant or the latest WWE superstar - massages the truth to some degree. Abraham Lincoln once called "tact" the art of describing others as they see themselves. This book proves that there is not enough tact in the world for a person with even the most tenuous grip on reality to describe Sarah Palin as she sees herself. If this is her attempt at positive spin, it is cynical and petty. If, on the other hand, she believes a single word of this, she is psychologically unfit to run for dog catcher, let alone President of the United States.

In short, the book provides ample proof that Sarah Palin's version of her own life is like the Turkish government's version of the Armenian Genocide - and approximately as trustworthy. Going Rogue is an irritatingly vernacular, fantastical, and cloying autobiography of a malignant narcissist, every bit as thunderingly stupid throughout as the person behind it. In what world is it either necessary or desirable to spend $9 and four hours to figure that much out about Sarah Palin?

GOP ≠ Balls

Why are Republicans such pussies?

I mean, they talk a good fight – they like to pretend that they’re brave, stalwart defenders of all things good and noble (or in many cases, all things small and petty), but it’s classic bully behavior. The minute anything even slightly out of the ordinary happens, their bladders immediately go into Pants-Wetting Overdrive.

Around the country, the militia movement is gaining strength, fueled by white guys scared to death of losing racial primacy, and conspiracy theorists frightened to the point of heart attack that Obama is going to take away their guns.

Across the right side of the political spectrum, idiots are ramping up artificial outrage over Obama bowing to the Japanese emperor, frightened that America will lose whatever standing we have left in the world if we’re polite to the leaders of other countries.

Early this month, you had one lone, well-armed lunatic in Fort Hood, and what happened? The GOP stood there in a slowly-spreading yellow puddle shrieking about how this is the end of the world! Jihad! The terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad Muslims are coming!

Even their religion is based on fear: yeah, Jesus may love you, but you mess around and God's gonna fuck you up.

When the Twin Towers fell, the Republican-controlled Congress began eagerly shredding the Constitution, on the theory that if we lost all our rights, the terrorists wouldn’t be so scary.

And now that those same terrorists are about to be hauled into court, the GOP is soiling themselves at the thought that a terrorist might actually get a fair trial.

And then we get Rudy ("a noun, a verb and 9/11") Giuliani on Fox News, apparently believing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would tear through his chains, escape, and destroy New York with his bare hands, telling us that we needed to ignore what he said three years ago, after he testified in the trial of terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui:

"At the same time, I was in awe of our system," the former mayor continued. "It does demonstrate that we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law... I think he's going to be a symbol of American justice."

Apparently, that "awe of our system" has changed to "openly sobbing in fear."

His explanation was basically "9/11 changed everything." Which is the same excuse he uses for everything from "I left the milk on the counter overnight" to "My pick for police commissioner is now an admitted criminal."

Have I mentioned that Rudy Giuliani's judgement is questionable? Of course, when your entire career, along with your job skills, are built around the phrase "I was in charge when things started blowing up," sometimes you have to use a bigger shovel to move all the bullshit.

Why does the GOP push for harsher punishments for criminals if they don't believe that the system works? And how many prisoners actually escape from a supermax prison? (Here's a hint - the word "never" is involved in the answer.)

Let's be clear on this. Either you support the American justice system, or you oppose it. America is, in fact, built on a system of laws, and now we're getting back to them. We punish criminals. Live with it.

And stop being such a pussy.

Sgt Pfeffer taught the band to play

It's been twenty years, apparently, since the Berlin Wall, fell. I have to admit, I missed that particular holiday. I mean, admittedly, it was the most obvious sign that the largest communist empire in history was collapsing, but in the larger sense, the failure to enforce the integration of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1969 and 1971 was probably the item that led to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union, but really, since that's far too deep a consideration of history for the average Republican, we should probably just ignore any deeper truths and go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall (of course, to be entirely truthful, the Soviet Union was never communist, but don't try to explain that to a Republican - their brains will explode).

So, um... woo-hoo.

(Did I mention how big a fan I am of the run-on sentence?)

Anyway, it was November 9, 1989. Roughly two years and five months earlier, Reagan had made his famous "Mister Gorbachev! Tear down this wall!" speech. Which, in the end, had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Union, as any reasonable person could figure out. (But, again, don't try to tell a Republican that.)

Shortly after David Hasselhoff celebrated the fall of the Wall, I came back to the Fatherland. I was stationed in Spangdahlem, Germany from 1990 through 1997.

When we arrived in-country, the bloom was seriously fading from the rose. People had reunited with family they'd (for the most part) never met, David Hasselhoff was still putting out bad albums (although mostly without wearing his multicolored electric coat), and life, as it tends to do, was continuing on, regardless of the life or death of a political ideal.

The biggest job faced by the German people was most obviously demonstrated by driving west-to-east (with a slight northern tilt) across the country. Beautiful countryside, charming villages, grass, trees, well-maintained roads... fading gradually to yellowish-green grass, dying trees (if any at all), open-pit mines (mostly for soft coal), roads in disrepair, towns of blocky concrete buildings.

People were leaving the former East Germany for anything resembling a job, anywhere else in the country. The most obvious symbol of the ex-Communist country's industry, aside from the staggering pollution they left in their wake, was a blocky little car called the Trabant. Powered by a two-cylinder chainsaw engine, the former East Germans would drive them as far as they could, and then sell the vehicle for whatever they could get (frequently, the damned little toy cars would break down by the side of the road... sorry, by the side of the autobahn, and the owner would abandon them where they fell and continue on).

American troops in Frankfurt and Munich, looking for a cheap car (or "beater") would frequently buy two Trabants: since they could be had for as low as $50, you'd buy the second one for spare parts. (Occasionally, you ended up only able to assemble one functioning model from the two cars anyway, so it worked out pretty well for the new owner...)

One of the main disadvantages of the Trabant would have to be the way you'd refuel it — open the hood, add gas and 2-stroke oil to the 6-gallon engine, and swish it around to mix it.

A lot of people got in the habit of keeping a gas can of pre-mixed fuel in their trunk, because if you drove a Trabant, the chance of bursting into flame was only one of many things you had to worry about.

There weren't actually a lot of those in Spangdahlem, though, since we were just about as far from the former East Germany as you could get. Few of them survived to make it that far.

I'm vaguely curious how much of the shredded DDR they've managed to recover. Not curious enough to actually look it up. But those are my memories of the time.

An Immoderate Proposal

Reprinted from Hullabaloo

I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don't think there's even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that.)

Many of the men who are prescribed this medication are on Medicare, so I think it should be stripped out of that coverage as well. And unlike the payments for abortion, which actually lower overall medical costs (pregnancy obviously costs much, much more) banning tax dollars from covering any kind of Viagra would result in a substantial savings:

The price of Pfizer’s Viagra has doubled since it was launched, according to a list of wholesale acquisition costs paid by pharmacies, obtained by BNET. In May 1999, a 100-count bottle of the blue diamonds cost $700. Today, that same bottle costs $1,457.61, a 108 percent increase...

The blog of online pharmacy AccessRx notes that Pfizer has also been extracting more frequent price rises in addition to higher price rises:

… we’re not sure if you’ve been tracking price increases recently, but Pfizer began to raise the cost of Viagra twice a year instead of once a year in 2007. Including the last six price increases since Jan. 1, 2007, the price of Viagra has gone up 45.5%.

The WAC list indicates that while Pfizer was initially content to take price increases of 3 percent per year, in 2003 it doubled that increase. In January 2009, Pfizer bumped it up to 11 percent. Then in August it took another 5 percent.

It’s an astonishing example of pricing power, given that Viagra is in direct competition with Eli Lilly’s Cialis and Bayer’s Levitra. The heat from Cialis is particularly severe: Cialis sales in the U.S. were up 16 percent to $149.4 million in Q2; Pfizer’s Viagra was up only 4 percent at $207 million.

I don't want my tax dollars touching even one milimeter of that overly engorged expense.

I realize that many people disagree with my moral objections to men getting erections which God clearly doesn't want them to get, but my principles on this are more important to me than theirs are to them. So too bad. If you want a boner, pay for it yourself.

And I think those noxious advertisements for the drugs should be banned as well, if only for aesthetic reasons. Having to watch my baby boomer fellows wail "Viva Viagra" is offensive to anyone who has any taste in music.

Editor's note: It's brilliant, but it won't work, of course. Not as long as Congress is controlled by old white men.

Commenting changes

Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize, but the comment section now requires that you be a registered user. The many people signing off as "Pat Riot" have been making homophobic remarks for far too long, but now they've resorted to racist "coon" and "porch monkey" comments.

The time is past. I believe in free speech, but I also believe in taking responsibility for your actions. Anonymous comments don't get to happen any more. This won't stop the problem, but it will at least cut it back for now.

This isn't stormfront.org, kids, nor is it freerepublic.com. You don't get to make your ignorantly racist statements, and now you have to take some credit for your words.

(You know, the racism and some of those last comments lead me to believe that at least one of the "Pat Riots" was a guy calling himself Rodger on this blog - fascinating how he "proved" his points so poorly that at least one other of his own contributors were making fun of him, and he ended by throwing up a wall of illogical conspiracy theorist garbage, and then blocking any response I made - OK, I only tried twice. I'm stubborn, but I can take a hint.)
_____________

Update: So, based on limited comments from the remarks section, and conversations with two friends over in meatspace (yes, I do have friends, hard though that may be for some of you to believe - very forgiving friends, but friends nonetheless), it would appear that I have to take responsibility here (much though that pains me) and start moderating the comments. (On the other hand, this will allow me to drop the requirement to sign in, so there's a bonus...)

(Yeah, it's depressing - I'm approaching a half-century of life, and they've finally managed to make me take responsibility for something...)

We might be tweaking things for a day or two (take that however you want), but we'll see how it works.
______________

Update: Wow. This is actually kind of hard. I so want to respond to this moron. It's been three days, and I've deleted five posts from him. It's like he's some weird stalker who can't help himself. He's claimed (despite all evidence from his own site) that he "proved" that I was lying about my military record (I showed that what he thought was reality was false, but he didn't feel like accepting that), he claims that I can't go a day without saying "homophobic" or "racist" (I'm not the one that shouted "coon" or "porch monkey," nor am I the one with the frequent "you must be gay lovers with Diogenes" references).

And the fact that I'm reporting all this here means I'm probably in for another two additional weeks of ignoring him. Wow. It's like having a stalker who can't do anything to you - you aren't scared, you just wonder how long this has to go on....

Mid-term Elections, 2009

I've spent the last three days looking at analysis of the mid-term election just past, and I've come to one firm conclusion: the far-right wing of the Repuglican party has no self-awareness, no understanding of history, and no critical thinking skills. (OK, admittedly, I came to this conclusion a long time ago, but this election has certainly reinforced that point.)

A small minority of people (you know, it would be cool if we could call them by a vaguely demeaning name that they started out calling themselves - you know, like "teabaggers") has, or is willing to pretend to have, strong feelings on the subject, and an even smaller minority of those people is capable of spelling their name consistently. That particular subset of vaguely-literate mouthbreathers want to tell you all about the world-shaking significance of November 1, but that just means that you're getting fed a big steaming heap of double-distilled crazy.

Half of them want to paint this as a giant victory for the forces of conservatism, and the sad part is, some Democrats believe them. When really, this is just the regular ebb and flow of the electoral process.

Look at the bigger picture for a second. Really, until you get down in the trenches, what happened was that the Democrats gained two new House members, while the Republicans picked up two governors.

But with that in mind, there's two things to remember.

One, when the economy is down, the incumbent tends to take a hit.

And two, off-season elections tend to go to the party out of power. Because these elections are sparsely-attended, and only the "true believers" are guaranteed to go. The party in power tends to sit back and relax, sometimes to their detriment.

But despite that, in the elections that "count" (if any of them can be said to actually matter), the two parties came out even. Or possibly tilted toward the Democratic side, since governors are state-level, while congresscritters are national.

You really want partisan analysis? Sweeping generalizations from too small a dataset? OK, try this one.

Hoffman was a disaster for the Raving Loony wing of the GOP. A man with less personality than John Kerry, he was pushed onto the national stage armed only with the ability to parrot talking points fed to him by Dick Armey. He was lauded by salivating, clueless lunatics like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin and Sarah Palin. But as a consequence of the distasteful nature of his stated beliefs, the voters of a traditionally-Republican district backed slowly away from him, and into the loving, nurturing arms of the Democratic candidate.

Or look at it this way: in New Jersey, where Republican Christie won with 49% of the vote, 57% of voters in exit polls say they approve of the job Barack Obama is doing. In Virginia, where Republican Bob McDonnell won with 59% of the vote, Obama had a 52% approval rating. That means that, at the very least, a good number of independent voters who voted for a Republican, approve of Obama.

Hell, in the two states where the forces of teabaggery managed to get anti-tax initiatives onto the ballot, both were roundly defeated.

And the lesson to be learned from all this? The teabaggers aren't nearly the force they want to claim that they are. They're just a bunch of sad, disaffected, easily-led lemmings. They aren't a majority, they're just the loudest minority.

Is it a feud when it's entirely one-sided?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Eric Graff continues his stalkerish man-crush on me and Diogenes.

For those of you who haven't been hanging out with us as long as you should have, Eric (or "Eman," as he styles himself) is a chubby unimaginative chucklehead who I ran into last June, never imagining that he would fixate on me like this. You'll see his name in the comments every so often, where he'll poke his head in, scream incoherently, and run off sobbing. After two or three repetitions of this, with his breath stinking of sacramental wine, he'll shout drunkenly that he's never coming back again, and he lurches off down the street, proud of himself for having braved the heathen hordes.

And a month or two later, he comes wandering back to repeat the cycle.

(To be entirely honest, incidentally, "chubby" might not be accurate - that's just the impression I get from his profile picture, which might have been taken at a bad angle. But I'll stick with it anyway, because it will really piss him off if and when he reads this.)

In last week's entry, for instance, he kept babbling about how unfair I was to suggest that Joe the Plumber might be anything but a fine, upstanding and (most importantly) heterosexual person. I think it also made him a little bit unhappy that I'm not particularly polite to him any more.

With Eric's fascinating concatenation of personality quirks grinding against each other and creating friction, I was almost willing to bet money that it would boil over into his blog. And it did.

You remember back in high school, when you were in biology class and you'd run a few volts into a dead frog and the legs would twitch? And every time you did it, they'd always twitch the same way? But you still had to zap it a couple of more times, just to make the little frog-zombie jump again?

Yes, that's right. Eric Graff is a zombie frog.

His blog entry is a roller-coaster journey through the depths of his twisted little mind. I'm not clear whether he hates Diogenes or me more, but I think that I was the only one he suggested should be tortured and then beheaded. (It's hard to tell with Eric.)

Apparently, I love gays, Obama, muslims and socialism (interesting that he makes a distinction between them, considering the narrow pathways his mind runs on), and I hate conservatives, Republicans, christians and America (and at least he sees that there is a difference between conservatives and Republicans). Oh, and he, in no uncertain terms, supports the killing and torture of all muslims. Everywhere, as far as I can tell; he makes no obvious distinctions.

But I'm a bad person because I curse.

He sticks with Times New Roman all the way through, but the last fifth or so is a random collection of changing font sizes and bold-facing, ending in his usual all-cappy shrieking - you can practically see the cheeto-orange spittle aerosoling out from the screen as he Glenn-Becks into frequencies only dogs can hear.

I couldn’t help myself. Reproduced below is my response to that post. You’ll never see it there, of course, because he continues to "ban" me.

So much anger, Eman. Sad, very sad.

I'll ignore your ridiculous mischaracterizations. (I mean, you were the one who doesn't understand "libel.") But let's see.

19 people working for a small-time Saudi thug named Osama bin Laden ran planes into the World Trade Center, killing 2,993 people (including themselves).

Now, because 15 Saudis, one Lebanese, one Egyptian and two guys from the UAE commit a terrorist act, we attacked Iraq? How does that even make sense?

Now, what would you do if, unprovoked, the Chinese invaded America, killing millions of our people and destroying our infrastructure? Would you just sit back and take it, or would you fight back? Think about the actions of the Iraqi people in that light for a minute.

Meanwhile, looking at that last half of your post, I just have to say that you must be a great Christian, since you so obviously live by the teachings of Christ. Wasn't it Matthew 5:39 where we are exhorted, when attacked, to slap the other cheek?

Am I getting that quote right?

Thank you for the laughs, Eric. We love you. Get some help.
__________

Update (11/25/09): Well, three weeks later, I couldn't help myself. Like a child picking at a scab, I knew I should stop, but was hypnotized by the strings of goo dripping off the bottom of the crusty bit of congealed gore.

(Wow. That metaphor even disturbed me a little...)

Having gotten comments from both Dio and Real that Eric seems to have not just gone of the deep end, but crossed his legs and planted himself obstinately at the bottom of the pool, I thought I'd take a look.

FIrst of all, he seems to have decided to become, almost exclusively, a hate site for Dio and me. Almost exclusively. It looks like he's specifically shrieking at the two of us in every other post, by name. He centers entire posts around one or both of us.

Keep in mind that this is somebody I haven't had contact with in months. Essentially the internet equivalent of waving from across the street: a single sentence in response to a question he was asking rhetorically (but making fun of somebody he thought was Dio for trying to answer), and the hundred words or so above.

(Admittedly Dio has been there - not, apparently, as often as the voices in Eric's head say he has, but still...)

His latest post is about family troubles (not going to go there - no doubt he would, but I got class), but the one right before it made me pause for just a second. It looked for a second like he was answering my post of last night. Which might have pinged a little on the creepy-meter.

A quick check on the dates, and he beat me by about 24 hours. (So hey, at least he's prompt...) But again, he's specifically calling out Dio and me?

So I skimmed his comments, and found two points that I thought were interesting.

One was that he completely misrepresents our little debates - you know, the ones he requested - as if I did nothing but insult him. (Hey, I'm sorry that the truth has a liberal bias, but still...)

And two, having been voted off the island here, our racist friend Slam/Pat/Rodger is now posting there, and probably feeding Eric's weird delusions.

(There's even a string of comments where Eric is trying to pretend - or, sadly, might actually believe - that Dio is emailing him sobbing and asking to be allowed to post, and to please not report him to Blogger again or Dio will be banned. That's odd, since twenty seconds of research will tell you that's not how Blogger operates.)

Things just get uglier and uglier in that sad little corner of the world. I mean, wow. It was like a quick tour of post-Katrina New Orleans - that's 45 minutes of my life I'm never getting back.

Just take it like a man

If there's one issue that shows most clearly how completely twisted the American value system is, that issue would probably be homosexuality. Well, OK, homosexuality and race relations. Oh, and the weird fixation on pro football.

(OK, the pro football thing ties in with homosexuality. I mean, really: sweaty guys in tight pants running up and down a field? It doesn't take Sigmund Freud. And then they put on weird padding to look even more buff, and start hugging each other if they do something right, and start prancing around the end zone like a Rockette tweaking on crystal meth. And when it's all over, they go and take showers together. Any random NFL player probably handles more pipe than Joe the Plumber ever did.)

(Speaking of Joe the Plumber - a body-obsessed, head-shaving drama queen fixated on ensuring that he's the center of attention? Was he trying out for the Village People too? This guy's so far into the closet he's probably found those red strappy pumps that look so good with that sequined off-the-shoulder number he got for that trip to Fire Island...)

The wide availability of home video has had an impact on society (wow - was that a non sequiter or what? I think I'm suffering from whiplash...): the Rodney King affair highlighted the problem of police brutality in the LAPD, but also was the direct cause of the 1992 Los Angeles riots where more than 50 people lost their lives. And remember Derrion Albert getting beaten up last month? Suddenly, everybody got concerned over the violence in our schools.

Of course, the flipside to that is that when some white kid gets pounded on by a couple of black bullies up on a bus, cowardly drugged-out sacks of vomit like Rush Limbaugh tried to insist that, because we had a black president, the beating was Obama's fault.

But you have to forgive Rush - logic doesn't really apply to a man who calls for harsher penalties on drug abusers when he's popping oxycontin like Tic-tacs.

(The humor, of course, is found in the fact that it had already been shown that the attack wasn't racially motivated. But why pay attention to "facts"? In Rush's tiny little pilonoidal cyst of a brain, this whole incident was obviously a resurgence of the Mau Mau rebellion.)

However, the videotaped assault on Jack Price, a gay man from Queens, has one possible upside (aside from the fact that, with their faces and names prominently in the local media, the two wads of fuck who attacked him - Daniel Aleman and Daniel Rodriguez - will be spending the next several years getting traded for cigarettes throughout the New York penal system).

This particular assault is evidence that homosexuality is still a boil on the backside of America, and even in the opening decade of the 21st century, we haven't found the right way to lance it.

There is no reason that any American should be discriminated against due to their sexual orientation. This seems like a simple rule, but for some reason, it still causes controversy. The most commonly given reason for homophobia is religion, and most of that is due to misreadings, mistranslations and selective misuse of bible verses. Of course, even when you make an effort to show them why they're wrong, you're not going to change their tiny little minds.

Once in a while, you'll find somebody trying to claim that homosexuality is "unnatural." This, of course, ignores the wide range of homosexual behavior on view in the wild. ("A homosexual species would wipe itself out in one generation!" Well, there's still bonobos around, right? And trust me, they'll fuck anything.)

And with the rest of these losers, they gain their homophobia the old-fashioned way: they were raised to hate gays, much in the way that many people in the South have been raised to hate blacks, Jews, Yankees, and generally anybody who isn't a close relative (of course, with the inbreeding, that's a fairly large pool of people, at least in their neighborhood); these are people who hate gays because they're savage, knuckle-dragging homophobic subhumans who should be hauled out into the alley and beaten with 13-inch dildos until they bleed out their ears.

One of the weirdest quirks of the gay-haters is the fact that they can't seem to stop themselves from conflating consenting sexual practices between two adults, with forced intercourse with a non-consenting partner: bestiality (where Rick Santorum famously prefers german shepherds, John Cornyn apparently gets all hot and sweaty thinking about box turtles), pedophilia, necrophilia. Your average right-wing hater refuses to see a difference (probably because they tend to have suffered brain damage due to the genetic incompatibility of closely-related parents).

And when this rampant homophobia gets to attach itself to the already-present hatred of our first black president, you get a steaming cauldron of odiferous stupidity, just waiting for a chance to pour out all over everybody. For example, in the outcry over Obama hiring an openly homosexual man as head of the Education Department's Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, people like Rep Steve King continues to try to link Jennings to NAMBLA, even though this claim has been so thoroughly debunked that even Fox "News" was forced to admit it. (And you know that had to cause Rupert Murdoch's bowels to clench up like a vise.)

The more recent news that Obama is revisiting "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is causing conservative brains to explode like a Palestinian at the Wailing Wall. And the GOP survivors are really hating the fact that they're going to have to keep that homo-rage bottled up - the new hate crimes bill is about to become law.

Trust me, folks, homosexuality is normal. Some people are into it, and some people aren't. You can try to suppress it, but it will still be around; and the harder you try, the more it will burst out in unexpected places (you know, like in airport bathrooms).

Another day, another death threat

Hmmm...

Airport guard accused of threatening Obama

NEWARK, N.J., Oct. 22 (UPI) -- A 55-year-old private security guard at a New Jersey airport was arrested for allegedly threatening to shoot U.S. President Barack Obama, officials said.

The New York Post said Thursday John Brek, a security guard at Newark Liberty International Airport, is accused of telling an airport employee he was planning on shooting Obama when the president arrived at the New Jersey airport this week.

Unidentified law enforcement sources said Brek was arrested on Tuesday, one day before Obama arrived at Newark Airport. The president was visiting New Jersey to help campaign for Gov. Jon Corzine.

So, just another murderous right-winger (at least this one doesn't seem like a racist murderous right-winger, but the full investigation isn't in yet).

But, of course, the unhinged right immediately lose their fucking minds: "Demand the death of Bush? You’re safe. Threaten Obama? YOU ARE GOING TO JAIL!... THIS IS CALLED A POLICE STATE BTW" (Vincent dePaul likes his caps lock key - it makes him feel all loud and shouty).

Funny how the Obama-haters have a seriously selective memory, isn't it?

Richard Humphrey went off his medication and made some comment in a bar about a burning bush and was arrested and convicted of threatening the president. Lawrence Ward of Bainbridge, NY, was the subject of a nationwide manhunt after threats he made. And Wilbur Leroy Brown was arrested for a letter threatening the President.

People have been investigated and arrested for threatening the president since the Secret Service started (usually, like in Brek's case, they're arrested by local authorities, though). The difference is that the threat has to be considered credible - the message board entries that Vincent dePaul uses as "proof" obviously weren't (assuming that the Secret Service even saw them - the internet is a big place, and the Bush White House didn't like all this science stuff that much...) See, now this guy, on the other hand, was considered a valid threat.

Of course, not all the threats were valid under Bush. Dan Tilli was questioned for a letter to the editor of his local newspaper, where he mentioned the death of Saddam Hussein and ended with "I still believe they hanged the wrong man." The Secret Service questioned Jesse Ethredge for writing that Bush was a "two-faced murderer" on the back window of his pickup.

Hell, with Dick Cheney, all you had to do was calmly say to him "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," and the Secret Service would have you arrested.

And yesterday in New Jersey, we had a brain-damaged guy with a cubic buttload of firearms, who said to a guy in line for coffee that he had already cut holes in a fence in order to shoot Obama. Yeah, I think the Secret Service should probably take a look at him.

And Mr dePaul should probably try getting his facts straight.
________

Update (10/23/09): Well, we had our little exchange of views, and we have established one thing. VdP is a dishonest wad of fuck. Rather than the usual failure to post dissenting opinions so prevalent in the right-hand side of the blogosphere, he prefers to change them. Many of those words you'll see at his post are mine. The last 2 paragraphs are not.

For the record, what I actually wrote was:

Huh. Well, look at that. You found a couple of sites where Bush' life was threatened. Aren't you something?

Now, just off the top of my head, I'll say that, first, you have no idea whether those people were actually approached by the Secret Service, now, do you? And, even if they weren't, you probably don't have a clue whether their little threats were considered "credible." That's just a theory of mine. Tell me if I'm right...

Oh, yeah. You don't "argue economics with emotional junkies and I don't argue politics with short-sighted moralists." Because you don't have an answer.

Or because you're a cock.

Which was, I admit, a little dickish. But at least it was honest. Whereas our boy with the saint's name... well, as the Rude Pundit likes to put it, if there's one thing we know about motherfuckers, it's that they fuck their mothers.

Music Feeds the Muse: When Two Worlds Collide

reprinted from Mildly Creative

I‘ve always found it sad when people say things like, "I only read the classics," or "I only read mysteries."

What a shame.

Every classic entered the world as just another book, and every story contains its own elements of mystery. It’s perfectly fine to have your favorite genre, but being so exclusive is like reading with blinders on, and you’ll miss a lot of great stuff along the way.

But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this kind of snobbery as often as I do when I hear people talk about music. Music is a powerful and emotional art form that people identify with, sometimes so much that they latch onto a genre and won’t listen to anything else.

They talk about what they’re into.

“I’m into two kinds of music,” some say, “Country and Western.” Others will have nothing to do with “either”. I hear it all the time. I’m into Southern Rock. I’m into Opera. I’m into Death Metal. And they scoff at anything outside their CD collection.

A Joyous Collision

But music, like all art, grows and evolves through the joyous collision of different worlds.

A musical style like jazz has its roots in earlier forms developed around the world in Europe and Africa and America, and continues to be influenced by everything it can get its hands on. To me, to love music, to love anything really, is to love it enough to let it expand and evolve.

And that’s why I particularly love the following video, a recording of two icons from different musical backgrounds, Luciano Pavarotti, the world famous opera singer, and James Brown, the godfather of soul, allowing their two worlds to collide.

Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain

It appears that Oklahoma doesn't believe that South Carolina should take the top spot in my heart. So they decided to pass the stupidest, most partisan piece of legislature that they could come up with.

What they've decided to do is to pass a law stating that any woman getting an abortion in Oklahoma will have her personal information posted on line. (The earliest reports were that this website was going to be named ShameOnYouWhore.com - that name has since been abandoned.) The Center for Reproductive Rights has already mounted the first legal challenge.

This law will go into effect on the first of November - ironically, on the same date as the founding of the first medical school for women in America.

Now, the people of Oklahoma have proven themselves to either be idiots or inhuman already; they've reelected business spokesweasel James Inhofe to one branch of Congress or another in every election since 1987.

This is a man who supports the torture of prisoners: he was only one of nine Senators to vote against the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and when talking about prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, he famously said that he was "more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment."

He is, of course, opposed to the concept of climate change, and likes to refer to environmentalists as the Gestapo (because the GOP is almost entirely devoid of imagination, and so they have to refer to anybody who disagrees with them as Nazis - they can't help themselves). He also seems to believe that global warming is a conspiracy started by the Weather Channel to gain viewers. (After all, they're such a powerful force in the media...)

Fascinatingly enough, Inhofe is on record saying that the EPA should just be an outlet for the president's environmental beliefs:

It is my view that, regardless of Administration, the President acting through the entire executive branch is fully entitled to express his policy judgments to the EPA Administrator, and to expect his subordinate to carry out the judgment of what the law requires and permits. It can be argued that the "unitary Executive concept" promotes more effective rulemaking by bringing a broader perspective to bear on important regulatory decisions...

Therefore, I consider this debate over censorship within the Administration to be a nonissue.

Unless, of course, that president happens to be a Democrat, in which case the EPA's "process of determining endangerment appears to be marred by bias and, to some extent, political manipulation." (To be fair, it is always possible that the Senator is more upset about the President of the United States being black than he is about Obama's political leanings - it's hard to tell with Inhofe.)

This is the man who's been the face of Oklahoma politics for the past 30 years.

This latest assault on a woman's right to privacy, coming just two months after a state court struck down their last attempt to limit abortions, will cost $281,285 to put into place, and $256,285 each subsequent year, plus, of course, the cost of enforcing of the law. Certainly an excellent use of Oklahoma's money in a recession.

Among other information that will be posted on the internet, the first eight questions that are required by Oklahoma law to be disclosed are:

1. The date of the abortion
2. The county in which the abortion was performed
3. The age of the mother
4. Her marital status (married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. The race of mother
6. How much education she's had ("specify highest year completed")
7. The state or "foreign country of residence" of the mother
8. The total number of previous pregnancies (including live births, miscarriages and other abortions)

Now, the average city or town in Oklahoma has less than 4,500 victims residents. However, a quarter of the population of Oklahoma (838 thousand people out of 3.5 million Oakies) live in rural areas or unincorporated communities which usually have a population of a hundred or less. So this law doesn't make it particularly difficult to narrow down the whore in question, does it?

On the other hand, maybe this law is just another type of economic stimulus program. After all, the first time a woman gets identified because of the information on the website, she'll be able to sue the state for millions of dollars in damages.

Then again, it's a strange use of state funds, because if she's smart, she'll use the money to move the hell out of Oklahoma.

Why Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize

by Joan Walsh (Salon.com)

I was as stunned as anyone when I heard President Obama had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize Friday morning. Of course it felt oddly premature. It's enough to send Obama lovers and haters back to the jokes about his being the Messiah; so much seems to come easy to the man. Sometimes Obama makes me think of the old saying: "To whom much is given, much is...given." Yeah, he turns that old proverb on its head.

A few hours of reflection, and reading what the committee said about the award, and I could see its point and purpose. In recent years the Nobel Peace Prize has more often honored promise and encouraged progress than it marked concrete, permanent achievements in the realm of world peace. So the prize went to President Carter's ultimately unsuccessful 1978 Middle East peace drive; and to the same still uncompleted effort by Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in her jail cell, but the point was to support democracy in Burma (and 18 years later, she is still under house arrest).Thinking about the Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant "Peace Mothers" who won the award in 1976, years before real peace accords, I suddenly saw Obama's win as strangely humble, and personal: One man trying to reverse the bloody tide of recent American history.

Obama's prize is a measure of how far the Bush administration pushed the United States, and the world, away from peace. So far that Obama's small but fervent efforts in the opposite direction -- new diplomacy on Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia and North Korea; slow but steady withdrawal from Iraq and now a painful reappraisal of the increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan; a pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons; new initiatives to the Muslim world -- could win him this prize. But let's take that measure. Let's take in what that said about the way our country had become a source of aggression, belligerence and hostility, and never peace, in the last eight years. And in the midst of all of our partisan squabbling about health care and cap and trade and everything else -- and even as we acknowledge disappointment with Obama on state secrets, torture, Iraq and Afghanistan -- this should be a moment to reflect.

Of course all of Obama's encouraging moves are pledges and initiatives and discussions and promises, truly. We are right to press for more. But they are pledges and initiative and discussions and all kinds of slow but necessary efforts that weren't taking place at all for eight years under the Bush-Cheney regime. So about mid-day on Friday I abandoned my head-shaking, and instead held my head high. I was impressed by Obama's own humble speech, in which he said flatly he didn't "deserve" the award, by the standards most of us hold for this crucial prize:

"Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

"But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build -- a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action -- a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century."

The right-wing's idiocy about Obama's Nobel win is no longer even interesting. So Rush Limbaugh sides with the Taliban now. Good. Both Glenn Beck and Mark Halperin suggested Obama should decline the award; now we know where Halperin stands, that's good too. The country will move on without them. I loved what French President Nicholas Sarkozy (not always an Obama fan) said about why the U.S. president really got the Nobel Peace Prize: "The award marks America's return to the heart of the people of the world." That deserves a prize.

Is That You, Honey?

Several years ago, my wife decided that I needed a hobby, and I ended up with a wine making kit. I did manage to pull off some decent fruit wines (never really got into the whole grape thing - no press, y'know), but percentage-wise, my efforts at the oenophilic arts have not been a complete success.

To put it another way, I've probably ruined a truckload or two of fruit trying to drink it. And there's very little that's good about 5 gallons of battery acid. (Although, come to think of it, the one attempt that really qualified being called "battery acid" would have been that attempt at orange wine, but I only made a one gallon batch of that.)

We have discovered, though, that I can make a mean mead. And as a fairly direct result of that discovery, I've got about 5 gallons of honey bubbling away in a corner of my kitchen right now.

OK, technically, only about 16 pounds of it is honey. And another one ounce is made up of yeast. In a couple of weeks, it gets racked into a secondary fermenter, and a couple of weeks after that, it gets bottled and put away for at least a year. Maybe longer. (This is a long-term hobby; there's not a lot of instant gratification going on here.)

Honey is a fascinating product. Evidence shows that humans have been cultivating it for around 10,000 years - roughly 4000 years longer than some people believe that the world has been around. So it's literally a Stone Age skill, if you still use that pop-culture, ethnocentrically-biased term, anyway. (I do, but I'm shallow.)

As Alton Brown will tell you, honey is the only food produced for us, by animals. What about milk, you ask? Well, you actually have to work to get the milk out of the cow - now, if the cows milked themselves, and stored the milk in little bladders, and then stored the bladders in giant cow-hives, it would be an equivalent situation. (Of course, then you'd have to shoo off the angry hordes of cows before you could harvest the milk, and that would probably take bulldozers and massive, pitchfork-shaped cattle prods. So overall, it's probably best that bees are small.)

Honey has been used in medicine for centuries, and for good reason. It's hygroscopic, antimicrobial, and even antioxidant. If you get a cut, you could easily smear honey on it (like they did for centuries), and the antibacterial qualities could keep it from getting infected, the hygroscopic qualities would keep the wound moist and cut down on scarring, and all you'd be left with is figuring out how to deal with all the ant bites.

If you really insist on it, you can get all mystical about the stuff. On a bookshelf in the kitchen (next to The Joy of Home Wine Making), I've got a copy of Mad About Mead. I suppose that the subtitle should have warned me - "Nectar of the Gods." It's about 150 pages long, and the first 40 are taken up with mysticism, ancient religious beliefs and questionable history. I suppose it must be useful to somebody (even if you build your own religion from scratch, you've got to get building materials from somewhere). But I was definitely not the target audience.

The second two thirds of the book contain some decent tips, although I take many of them with a grain of salt, as well. For example, I don't support the idea of the "open fermenter" method: when the mead is in its initial, most active phase (where the yeast is bubbling away like mad), the author believes that an open drum covered with a sheet is the perfect container. I don't agree - although I can laugh at the idea of pulling an angry cat wrapped in a honey-soaked sheet out of a large trash can, I'm pretty sure that the reality would be much less entertaining.

On a related note, even though he barely touches on mead-making, I strongly recommend The Joy of Home Wine Making, which was written by Terry A. Garey; he also has a website, joyofwine.net, which is an equally important resource. Mr Garey's book is the bible of wine-making (only more readable, and more useful, than the actual Bible). Everything you need to know about making alcohol from various forms of sugar is in that book.

Mead is relatively bulletproof (which is probably why I can do it without screwing up too badly). At its core, mead is really just honey, water and yeast; in fact, if you make it this way, the result used to be called a "show mead," and it was the only type eligible to be entered into competition in the UK.

There are other varieties of mead, too. For example, if you use herbs and spices to flavor it, you have "metheglin," and if you use fruit, you end up with "melomel." (Don't blame me - that's what they're called.)

Almost every culture has their own version of honey-wine. This is probably because honey often has strains of "wild" yeast in it, and will sometimes, if mixed with water, ferment itself. This isn't recommended - the yeast won't be very good at making alcohol, and might screw up the flavor to the point where you can't drink it.

The first step to making mead is to boil the water and honey, to kill off the "wild yeast" and break up the proteins. Most people also add acid (to make the yeast more comfortable), yeast nutrient (sometimes called "yeast energizer," to round out the yeast's diet a little), and tannin (to help the flavor). While it's boiling, a lot of proteins will break and rise to the surface as foam, which you skim off.

Then you pour it into a primary fermenter (in my case, an airtight jug fitted with a pressure-release valve called a "bubbler"), along with enough water and ice to make 5 gallons. (You need to reduce the temperature to around 70-75 degrees, or you kill the yeast; if it's too cold, you put it to sleep. So you have to be careful with the ice.)

And then you sit back and let the yeast do its thing.

"Its thing," if you're taking notes, is to eat sugar, belch carbon dioxide, and crap alcohol. (Yes, I could have said "excrete alcohol," but let's be real here, OK?) The yeast dies when the alcohol content is too high; this used to be around 10-13 percent, but some of the more modern wine yeast can produce around 18 percent alcohol.

You get some sludge settling at the bottom of the container as it ferments, so, as the first stage of fermentation starts to settle down, you siphon it into a secondary fermenter (most people use a big jug called a carboy), leaving the sediment (or lees) behind. You can "rack" it (which just means siphon it out, basically) a couple of times to clear more sludge; some people recommend it, some people say anything more than once is too much. I figure it's all waste, and cleaning the toilet is a good thing.

Once the bubbling is pretty much done, you bottle it and store it in a cool dark place for a while; in the case of mead, like I said, the absolute minimum is a year. I've never had it last long enough to tell you what the top end is, but I'm told that seven to ten year old meads are incredible.

(Quick disclaimer - that was less than you needed to know to make the stuff. There's all kinds of chemistry you can do - which I mostly fake - and other steps you need to know about. This was the 5-minute overview for the layman.)

On this batch, I'm experimenting on a couple of steps. First, I didn't boil it. I've been reading that boiling destroys a lot of the "nose" (smell) of the mead, and you only need to heat it to 152 degrees to kill off the wild yeasts. I admittedly went closer to 160 degrees, but I never let it boil.

Secondly, I went semi-natural. Instead of a powdered acid, I used the juice and zest (peel, with as little pith - the white stuff inside the peel - as possible) of two lemons and three oranges. And instead of powdered tannin, I brewed strong black tea and added that.

However, I did add yeast nutrient (hence, semi-natural). I could have added raisins, but that isn't the flavor I wanted. And the other top choices I found were bee pollen (didn't have any), and crushed bee larvae (umm... ick). And besides, I had yeast nutrient, so I'm pretty happy with my choices here.

This might be the first batch I've made that turns out badly. I won't know for a year. But as I write this, on day 2, it's over there popping like a tenor drum about once every three seconds. So it seems like I've done something right.

Only time will tell.

Rep. Alan Grayson May Just Fuck Your Shit Up

reprinted from the Rude Pundit

It's too soon to tell, but there's a good chance that Representative Alan Grayson, he of the "Die Quickly" Republican health care plan, will end up fucking your shit up. Too rich to be bought off, Grayson's been fucking with the powerful for a few years now. As an attorney, he represented whistleblowers, going after the hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud committed by contractors and others in Iraq. He told CNN in April 2006, "The development fund of Iraq was looted by war profiteers and war whores." Check out the huge ass article on him in Vanity Fair from 2007 (and check out that goatee). He went after Halliburton and KBR; he fucked with Dick Cheney. You think a man whose name is a homophone with "boner" is gonna trouble him?

Look, let's be clear: Grayson of Orlando, Florida, is something of a drama queen. Defeating an incumbent Republican in a previously solidly Republican district as part of the Obama wave in 2008, he's an attack dog straight out of old school progressive politics. Here he is in January on President Obama's stimulus plan: "It shelters the homeless, and it heals the sick. It helps us to look forward to a day when we beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks, and when a nation does not lift up a sword against nation anymore." It's a bit over the top, like his Holocaust remark yesterday and his demand that AIG's CEO "name names" of those who received bonuses.

But sometimes those kinds of dramatics can be absolutely energizing, like the second shot of cheap tequila, as when Grayson said, "Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we'd all need pain killers."

And this dude knows how to apologize to right-wingers. Pushed by Michael Steele to beg forgiveness from Limbaugh like so many Republicans did, Grayson offered, "I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being."

Grayson was the member of Congress who authored the grandly symbolic bill attacking executive compensation in the financial firms now owned by all of us, also known as the "Pay for Performance Act," currently somewhere on hold in the Senate after passing the House in April. This would be back when "populist anger" was actually about people against corporations, which, of course, meant conservatives thought it was wrong. Grayson said, "You should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure... This bill will show which Republicans are so much on the take from the financial services industry that they're willing to actually bless compensation that has no bearing on performance and is excessive and unreasonable. We'll find out who are the people who understand that the public's money needs to be protected, and who are the people who simply want to suck up to their patrons on Wall Street."

The bill caused Fox "news" host Neil Cavuto to lose his shit on the air with Grayson, to the point where Grayson said that Cavuto was conjuring a "paranoid fantasy" about the implications of the bill. Cavuto cursed and spat while Grayson looked like he was wondering if he was going to have to grab Cavuto's jaws to keep him from biting.

Since Grayson said that the Republican plan for health care is "Don't get sick" and "Die quickly," Grayson has become this week's punching bag for conservative wads of fuck who want to equate his words with Rep. Joe "Insert Banjo Music" Wilson's loud "Don't lie" fart during the President's health care speech. Beyond the hypocrisy of the death panel people saying someone's being too mean, it should also be pointed out that Grayson didn't just bray out of nowhere like he was getting fucked by a donkey. He was recognized and speaking in turn. Robert's Rules of Order don't say anything about whether or not a speaker can drip with savage sarcasm.

Yesterday, on The Situation Room with Wolf "Bow Down Before the Sartorial Magnificence of My Beard" Blitzer, the gathered CNN superfriends couldn't comprehend Grayson, as if anger and honesty coming from a Democrat is some unknown species of rhetoric. "They should apologize to America," Grayson said of Republicans calling for him to beg forgiveness. He may as well have said, "Suck my balls."

The best part was when designated Republican Alex "Douche 'Stache" Castellanos asked Grayson which people does the Congressman think he wants to die. Grayson went right back at him, calling Republican ideas "amorphous nonsense," and "Do you really think that tort reform is going to take care of 47 million people?" By the point that Grayson said Republicans were just using the "usual cliches," Castellanos had the look of a straight man who was just shown the cock that was going to fuck him.

It was truly something beautiful because Grayson walked into Wolf Blitzer's house, drank his whiskey, and took a giant shit on CNN's floor. The pundits from Carville to Castellanos to Borger didn't know what the fuck to do with this guy who wasn't going to play by the usual rules of suck up and pander and call for bipartisanship like other Democrats. The closest they've gotten is the occasional Barney Frank appearance, but Grayson is something different, a Democrat who not only has his own balls, but is ripping the nuts off others. "They've been dragging their feet. These -- these are foot dragging, knuckle dragging Neanderthals who think they can dictate policy to America by being stubborn. And I think it's -- the time is over. We had an election. That's it. Now we have to move ahead in just the way the president wants us to," Grayson said, and, oh, the sputtering that happened.

James Carville asked Grayson at the end if he was ready for how his life was going to change. What ought to be happening is that Democrats should be using Grayson as their point person, sending him out to take a wrecking ball to the stick houses of arguments Republicans keep constructing. Republicans have never known how to deal with it when someone fights back with the same brutality they use. Grayson just pointed out that motherfuckers fuck their mothers. It's that simple.

Something could be finer...

One of my three regular readers recently asked what evidence I have that South Carolina is a particularly inbred state. And it's a fair question.

First, to be entirely honest, there's no real way to tell. The government really doesn't track that kind of thing, and even if they did, their data would probably be inaccurate, as this particular problem is widely under-reported, according to most experts (and we won't even touch on the problem of false memory syndrome and how it might skew the results).

The argument can still be made, of course. There are a number of fascinating medical anomalies in South Carolina, any or all of which could be genetic, and thus reinforced by inbreeding: South Carolina leads the country in stroke deaths, and has the third highest rate of infant mortality in the United States; epilepsy, which affects between 0.4% and 1% of the rest of the country (lifetime prevalence rate), affects 2.2% of South Carolinians.

Interestingly, they also have one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the country, but that probably isn't related. (Not directly related, anyway...)

Having said that, though, we are still left with one question: what the hell is wrong with South Carolina?

South Carolina has a long history of racism - they were so in love with their plantations and ability to chain up fellow human beings that they were the first state to secede from the Union; and Edmund Ruffin was the South Carolinian (technically, a transplated Virginian) who claimed to have fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, kicking that whole mess off. (Also, upon hearing that General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, Ruffin penned a letter stating his hatred for "the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race," and shot himself in the head, which many say gave him the dubious honor of firing both the first shot and the last shot of the Civil War.)

South Carolinian John C. Calhoun (7th Vice President of the United States) even gave a speech on the Senate floor where he explained that slavery was a "positive good" - he also spearheaded a gag rule that automatically tabled any discussion of slavery in the Senate.

"But, oh, Nameless One," you're probably saying, "that's the past. What about the present?" But is it truly the past? I'm not so sure, because when Mike Huckabee, while talking about the Confederate "stars and bars", can say to a group of South Carolinians, "You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," the audience just cheers, and nobody feels constrained to say, "Uh, Mike, that isn't our flag any more."

Regardless of that, though, South Carolina is well known for having more than their share of citizens who are frequently described as "colorful" - Sheriff Leon Lott, who purchased an armored personnel carrier for his police force, and famously broke down a door based on a picture of gold-medalist Michael Phelps holding a bong; Mayor Sallie Peake, who banned the police from chasing suspects on foot in Wellford, SC; noted hunter Nathan Dickson; Joshua Glidewell, a Fred Phelps wannabe who's suing the city of Greenville for not allowing him to harass passersby.

They're the only state in the nation who elects their National Guard adjutant; one candidate for that office, Republican Dean Allen, recently raffled off an AK-47 at a fundraiser. (You'd think that one of his opponents would point out that Mr Allen not only couldn't even be counted on to buy American, but felt it was appropriate to raffle off a weapon from the former Soviet Union.)

South Carolina also has a long-standing militia movement - people deluded enough to believe that a hundred hillbillies with hunting rifles can overthrow the entire US government.

You should probably also remember Caitlin Upton, the Miss Teen USA contestant from South Carolina, who gave this fascinatingly incoherent response when asked why 20% of Americans can't locate the US on a world map:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our (children).

And she was an honor student in high school. (Admittedly, a South Carolina high school, so the bar is pretty low.)

And their politicians are notoriously unstable. As far back as 1856, Representative Preston Brooks used his walking stick to beat another congressman, Charles Sumner, so badly that Sumner couldn't return to his congressional duties for three years. (Brooks actually had a long history of violent behavior - he never finished law school because he was expelled for threatening the police with a gun. However, his violent impulses apparently only extended to attacking without provocation - after being denounced for his actions by a third Congressman, Anson Burlingame, he challenged Burlingame to a duel, but chickened out when Burlingame accepted.)

Strom Thurmond was an evil old racist from South Carolina, who kept his Senate seat for 49 years following 2 years as governor. One of his many notable remarks was that "there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." And he still holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history; he talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1957. (Of course, this didn't prevent him from having a daughter out of wedlock with his black maid. Go figure.)

More recently, we had South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, who felt that shouting "You lie!" at the President of the United States was an appropriate way to uphold the dignity of his office. (Wilson was also a strong supporter of Strom Thurmond, and an advocate for the aforementioned Confederate flag, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that it's a symbol of slavery and repression.)

And lest we forget, Governor Mark Sanford, recently in the news for his habit of taking publically-funded junkets to chase Argentinian tail to meet his soul mate.

All of which brings us back to our original question: What the hell is wrong with South Carolina?

I can't answer that question, but until I'm given evidence to the contrary, I will continue to believe it's inbreeding.

The Catholic Church, Private Insurance and Abortion

Reprinted from Pruning Shears

On Monday I sent the following email to Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Colorado:

The recent letter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] opposing a House health care plan on the grounds that its prohibition of abortion funding was a "legal fiction" raised a question to me. I first learned of you because of your statement that voting for John Kerry in 2004 was cooperating in evil due to his position on abortion, so I know how seriously you take the issue. My question is, has the American church, the Conference or any other official Catholic body or agency taken a position on Catholics’ purchasing insurance from companies that provide abortion services? All of the major ones - Aetna, Blue Cross, Cigna, United Healthcare and so on - provide abortion services in their policies. Doesn’t anyone who pays premiums to these insurers help to fund abortion, and wouldn’t that also amount to cooperating in evil?

It seems the Catholic Church has focused all of its energy and activism on government’s role but left the private sector off scot-free. I am not aware of any visibility on this from the church, and that appears to be a glaring omission. Has it been addressed, and if so has it been addressed as forcefully? On the face of it, it seems to me that anything contributing to abortions, public or private, would be equally objectionable.

Thanks in advance for any time and attention you are able to provide.

Archbishop Chaput declined to provide an on the record response. He is obviously not obligated to, but the opposition to the House bill raises what I believe is a legitimate question: Why has the church not targeted private insurers for the last thirty years? They are indispensable players in providing abortion services, yet as far as I know they have not been highlighted the way pro-choice politicians have. The Democratic nominee for president is singled out for his position. Why not the CEO of Aetna?

How is it that the USCCB can object to increased health care coverage that will "subsidize the operating budget and provider networks that expand access to abortions" while having never said a word about the provider networks themselves? Why oppose raising the quality of life of millions of people through insurance reform if the objection is to the health care infrastructure? Or conversely, if you object to adding new people to the system then why not also work to get current enrollees out of it? Don’t employers who provide health care plans subsidize provider networks? Why aren’t they being targeted for doing so? Why is the system as it exists now and has existed for decades so studiously ignored if putting new people into it is so problematic?

The disparity between the easy treatment of private insurers and the objection to a public one could create a philosophical tipping point. Since Roe v. Wade the church has been visible and energetic in its opposition to abortion while giving comparatively short shrift to other life issues such as capital punishment and war. The fact that such emphasis lined up nicely with conservative ideology is presumably coincidence. The church’s recommended political course for addressing abortion is to support pro-life candidates on the theory that they will appoint pro-life judges who will eventually overturn Roe. That too benefits the GOP, coincidentally I am sure. In a few years this strategy will conclude its second full generation as an exercise in futility. Meaning, in practice it boils down to perpetual straight ticket voting for the party in pursuit of a goal forever just out of reach. As year after fruitless year passes, claims of nonpartisanship begin to strain credulity.

Any religion worth its salt will periodically cause great discomfort at points across the political spectrum, and opposing Democratic health care reform because it expands coverage may be a coincidence too far. It makes the leadership’s position look more political than moral - abortions paid for by the private sector are acceptable, abortions paid for by the public sector are not. The long running alignment between the church’s antiabortion activism and the right wing has been plausible as just circumstance, but we may now be entering an area where the American Catholic Church risks looking like nothing so much as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party.

Norse (by Norsewest)

It seems that some Norwegian metal guitarist named Varg Vikernes has been making stuff up ridiculous stories. Like this creation myth.

Our world was created in co-operation between these three proto-forces. Between Múspellheimr (the stars) and Niflheimr (the frozen matter in space) there was Gínungagap (the void). The universe was resting. It was inactive. It was in a state of complete balance.

The universe woke after this rest of Freyr. Óðinn's force threw the mass out in all directions again. The stars began to melt the frozen matter in space when they met each other, out there in Gínungagap; in the void.

In Múspellheimr, there was the divine bosom, the explosion which gives new life to the universe. In Niflheimr, there was the resting divine thought, frozen. The ice melted and it became active again.

In Ragnarök, the opposite forces cancel each other out until only one force is left standing. Since the gravitational pull is constant, while the explosion only works over a limited time, gravity will always win. It will always, after a period of time, force the mass of universe together again.

Everyone knows that Ginnungagap was the boundary between Niflheim (the land of frost) and Muspelheim (the land of fire), where the great icecow Audhumla, who belonged to the giant Ymir, licked Buri out of the ice. And Buri was the father of Borr, who mated with Bestla (a frost giant), to beget the Æsir: Odin, Vili and Ve.

Then the Aesir killed Ymir (whose blood poured forth and destroyed all but two of the jotunn), and used his flesh to make the earth, his bones to make the mountains, and his teeth and bone fragments became stones; and they used his skull to become the arch of the sky.

(See? They recycled.)

Is Varg just insane? The Allfather will destroy him for this heresy! And I can go on at length about how Odin is a metaphor for death, not some stupid proto-force of expansion/explosion.

(That whole question of Varg's sanity is actually a valid concern. I mean, he did do 16 years for murder and arson. On the other hand, he's descended from the Vikings, so burning down churches and slaughtering innocents might just be a genetic imperative for him.)

The whole skycow story makes as much sense as "God was bored, and took a week to make the earth, but we don't know how or what he built it out of," if you think about it.

I wonder if the story of Ymir's blood is where we get these profane bastardizations like "the Great Flood"?