Nameless Cynic

I gave that bitch some rights - bitches love rights

2012-01-19T23:08:00.010-07:00

Well, two days ago, a random douchenozzle put a comment on a post I wrote six months ago, about the internet's reaction to Rebecca Watson admitting that she felt uncomfortable in an elevator, and explaining why.

What he wrote, in part, was a fairly standard male-privilege response.

This whole blog is an equivocation fallacy... If we were to take that seriously, then I suppose I should never talk to a woman anywhere, because rape DOES happen anywhere.

What some people seem to want is for a special exception to be made for women, because they view women as inferior. The people who feel this way are radical-feminists, pretending to be feminists.

This guy was undoubtedly just some random troll (his nickname was probably created seconds before he posted), but nonetheless, I responded to him.

Maybe I was a little rude (because I'm normally such a calm, generous, diplomatic person), but to be honest, my only regret is that I left off a question mark and used the phrase "you're an idiot" twice. Because I can do so much better than that.

My only excuse is that cheap boxed Merlot is a harsh mistress.

As far as I'm concerned, any male who uses the phrase "radical feminist" is almost automatically an inbred mouth-breather with limited capacity for reasonable thought. There are only two types of people: feminists, and morons.

(Quick disclaimer: sure, if you look hard enough, you can find a couple of lesbian separatists out there who want to live without ever seeing a man, or occasionally dominate men, reversing the status quo and sticking women on top of the bigotry heap. But they're a really tiny minority - the exception, not the rule - and it's rampant, overblown stupidity to equate the one with the other.)

You could argue that I'm setting up a strawman to make an argument, but this idiot male attitude is all too common. When you start with the two largest religions in the world openly stating that women are inferior to men, and somebody suggests that maybe the two should be equal, it leads you down a path where drug-abusing sociopaths make up words like "feminazi."

And you end up with men who think all women who don't fall into their stereotypes of "Madonna" or "Whore" must be ball-busting lesbian bitches.

And sometimes, you even end up with people trying to claim that the Costa Concordia disaster was made worse because of feminism.

Apparently, in their minds, there is only a limited supply of rights, and in order for somebody else to get any, they have to lose some. Sorry, guys, that's not how it works: we aren't about to reach "Peak Rights."

Anyone who has wives or daughters (I have one of each) and doesn't want to see them succeed is a subhuman asshat who never evolved past masturbating in public and flinging their own feces.

Because it's a basic fact of life - men do get all the breaks: society contains a built-in bias that allows men to succeed more easily than women. Hate to be the one to break it to you, children, but if you're too microcephalic to figure it out, I'm not going to help you at all. Instead, I'm going to give you math. Because I'm cruel.

Women make up roughly 50% of the US population, but only run about 1% of the Fortune 500 companies.

The average woman earns less than the average man (about 75%, give or take - admittedly, better than it was in the 60s).

"Ah," says the voice of Male Privilege, "could that be because men are smarter?"

No, sorry. About the same - although men tend to think that they are.

(Interesting side-note: because the concentration of money is in the hands of white males, white women earn, on average, 45% less than the salary of white men - a greater disparity than among any other race.)

And those numbers only get worse if you keep digging. According to the Department of Justice, one out of every six US women have been victims of a completed or attempted rape. The male stat? One in thirty-three. (And let's not even get into the concept of sexual slavery.)

But you aren't supposed to bring up these pesky little facts, and a young woman shouldn't talk about how she didn't appreciate getting hit on in an enclosed space. Because pinheaded morons start blathering on about "radical feminism."

Really? It's radical to think that women should be treated the same as men? And at the same time, it's radical to pay attention to the fact that some people feel uncomfortable in certain situations, and you should respect that?

Fuck you. Fuck every bloated, self-involved whiny little boy who uses the word "feminist" when deep down, they're screaming "cooties!"

Newton pulls out all the stops

2012-01-14T12:37:00.007-07:00

If you're like me (and to be honest, I'm pretty sure that you aren't - but I digress), you have to have a certain fondness for Newton Leroy Mephistopheles Gingrich. I mean, he may be an evil, bloated troll and a complete abject failure as a human being, but he, more than anybody else in America except Mitt Romney himself, is working hard to help ensure the reelection of Barack Obama.

It's true that we liberals, progressives and real Americans can't afford to be complacent as we approach the election, but sweet flaming Baby Jesus on a popsicle stick! How can you not giggle like a schoolgirl watching the GOP flail away at each other like some kind of morally bankrupt Rock'em Sock'em Republicans?

Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican candidate: that's all but a mathematical certainty. But Newton (who is apparently blind to the open oozing wound where his soul might once have been) is charging in like a screaming toddler in the candy aisle, demanding to have his way, by golly! Dragging his animated wax replica of a wife behind him, he's going to keep stabbing away at Mitten's exposed back, trying to bring the Mechanical Mormon down.

Newton's faltering campaign is freshly energized by an influx of gambling money from a stereotypical mob boss straight out of Central Casting: Sheldon Adelson, who occasionally introduces himself as "the richest Jew in the world."

With all these stacks of fresh, clean money piling up in the back room, Newton's SuperPAC (which Newton has no connection to, except that he set it up and put former staffers in charge) put out a short film and website bashing away at Romney's record as a "job creator."

And things are just going to get better.

"This is going to be Armageddon – they are going to come in here with everything they've got, every surrogate, every ad, every negative attack," Gingrich said. "At the same time we'll be drawing a sharp contrast between a Georgia Reagan conservative and a Massachusetts moderate who's pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-tax increase, pro-liberal judge, and the voters of South Carolina will have to look and decide."

And just because the Three Stooges have to have their Larry, the craziest of the evangelicals got together this weekend to decide on their favorite flavor of not-Romney, and it turned out to be Santorum Crunch. So we can look for waves of fun coming from that quarter, too.

All I have to say is, the Obama campaign should see if they can borrow some of these ads later on.

If you aren't part of the solution...

2012-01-12T06:28:00.005-07:00

The right wing is completely losing their shit over Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.

With Senate Republicans vowing to block any labor board nominees, the five-member board would have been paralyzed this year because it has only two sitting members. The Supreme Court has ruled the board needs at least three members to operate.

So, here's John Stewart to put it into perspective for you.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The problem is that we have a Congress which has done less than any Congress in recent memory, because so many seats have been filled with small-minded small-government idiots, who ran on a platform of "Congress doesn't work. Elect me, and I'll prove it!"

The majority of them don't have any interest in fixing the economy or helping Americans. Instead, they've embraced Mitch McConnell's strategy, which, as he explained it, was very simple: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

So they obstruct, delay and obfuscate; they prevent anything from happening, and then they try to claim that Obama is a "failed president" because he couldn't fight his way past the obstruction.

Well, guess what? He just did, and it's completely thrown them for a loop.

How can you claim that the Senate is "in session" when the entire sesson consists of gaveling in, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and gaveling out? That's nothing but a sham, and the Senate has been completely open about it.

Steven Bradbury and John Elwood, two former legal advisors for President Bush, pointed out that the nature of a "recess" is still open for interpretation, and Obama is fully within his rights to make these appointments.

In a 1905 report that the Senate still considers authoritative, the Senate Judiciary Committee recognized that a "Recess of the Senate" occurs whenever the Senate is not sitting for the discharge of its functions and when it cannot "participate as a body in making appointments." The committee cautioned that a "recess" means "something actual, not something fictitious." The executive branch has long taken the same common-sense view...

The Senate, of course, does not meet as a body during a pro forma session. By the terms of the recess order, no business can be conducted, and the Senate is not capable of acting on the president's nominations. That means the Senate remains in "recess" for purposes of the recess appointment power, despite the empty formalities of the individual senators who wield the gavel in pro forma sessions.

But you can still hear the sobbing from the poor, thwarted motherfuckers. Ironically, one of the motherfuckers in question, Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) managed to step on her metaphorical dick in her public pearl-clutching.

"These appointments are an affront to the Constitution. No matter how you look at this, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I hope the House considers my resolution as soon as we return to Washington so we can send a message to President Obama."

The problem is, the Constitution doesn't specify a minimum length of time the Senate has to be in recess before the president can enact a recess appointment. And since this Congress has effectively been in recess since 2010, it's time for them to shut up and admit that he played the game better than they did.

John McCain's knee jerks again

2012-01-09T09:37:00.001-07:00

You have to feel sorry for John McCain. When you're the privileged son of an admiral, and you're in your 30s when ~~those negroes got all uppity~~ the Civil Rights movement took place, it's understandable that you might have a certain amount of "white man's privilege" that it's hard to let go of.

So it probably stung when he got his ass so throroughly spanked by a black man in 2010.

And since he had to sit out most of Vietnam sitting in a bamboo cage, maybe little Johnny just wants to get his war on. I suppose that could be it.

But come on, John!

Arizona Senator John McCain on Sunday warned that the situation in Iraq is "unraveling" due to recent U.S. foreign policy actions there - and that a "very chaotic situation" could give way to a rise in Iranian influence in the region.

McCain, speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS' "Face the Nation," argued that the recent U.S. military drawdown from Iraq is creating a dire situation in that country.

"It's unraveling because we didn't keep residual force there, because the President of the United States pledged to get out of Iraq," McCain said. "We could have kept a residual force there and kept some stability. And instead it's unraveling, and Iran's influence is increasing and there's every possibility you could see a very chaotic situation there."

See, Johnny, it's probably best that you didn't specifically name which president it was that "pledged to get out of Iraq," since Obama simply lived up to the timetable that was set up by the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, signed by George W. Bush.

That frothy mix

2012-01-02T17:13:00.013-07:00

I have to assume that Rick Santorum is still in the race to be the GOP nominee because he hopes that some simultaneous outbreak of monkey pox will wipe out the rest of the field. That, or, as a good Catholic, he enjoys a little flagellation every so often - it's good for the soul.

He is probably the thirteenth or fourteenth least-electable candidate in the history of humanity, but we can't seem to get him to just shut the hell up and go away.

Even before the primary, Santorum was surging in Iowa (eeewww!) at 15%, but he still can't seem to consistently break 5% nationally. Not that he isn't optimistic (or possibly sadistic): he put it a few weeks ago, "I'm counting on the people of Iowa to catch fire for me." (Which seems unnecessarily cruel, but what do I know?)

The problem is that Santorum is just the latest flavor of not-Romney to hit the shelves. It's his turn to be touted nationally for the next few weeks, until somebody remembers that we're electing a president, not a pope.

Santorum has two major disabilities that are going to prevent his election: his sanctimonious, unpleasant nature, and his aggressively ignorant and regressive social policies. His entire platform, as far as I can tell, seems to be abortion and gay marriage - everything else is secondary. If he were, by some miracle, to be elected president, we'd have an uninterrupted 4-year fiesta of fag-punching.

We know that Santorum is so homophobic that he'll only eat a corndog with a knife and fork, but is he also racist? Well, that one's a little trickier. He has, for a long time, been consistently in favor of the full GOP stand on immigration: no amnesty for illegal immigrants, and likewise no benefits for them; deport criminals, strengthen border security, and even the somewhat trickier "English as the official language" stance. And while that has overtones of "scary brown people," it's the Republican party line. So no points there.

On the other hand, it's somewhat telling when you stand in front of a group of white people from Iowa (a redundant statement, but let's move on) and explained that "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

His first explanation was that he didn't remember making the comment. Faced with the video, he huddled with his campaign, but the best they could come up with was that he "mumbled it... I was starting to say one word and I sort of came up with a different word and then moved on."

What he couldn't seem to explain was what that "one word" was. "Blaa" is a pretty unique sound. Who does he not want to help? Bloggers? Bluefin tuna? Blink 182?

Blacks?

But let's move beyond that. What would a Rick Santorum presidency do for America? Well, let's consider his belief system for just a moment. What does Rick Santorum believe in?

His career should have been over after he tried to make political points leading the charge in the Terry Schiavo case, exploiting the pain of the family of a provably brain-dead woman. But he weathered that (presumably, the $250 thousand he earned in campaign contributions from the Schiavo debacle helped a lot).

Rick Santorum believes that birth control is directly responsible for the moral decline of America, saying "the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

He wrote an article in 2002 blaming pedophilia in Catholic priests on "moral relativism" and "cultural liberalism."

This is a man who said that John McCain, who was tortured while a POW in Vietnam, "doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."

He tried to require the "No Child Left Behind" law to ensure that creationism was taught in schools.

In 2007, the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named him one of the twenty most corrupt members of Congress.

Will Bunch, the senior writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News has covered politics in Pennsylvania since shortly after Rick Santorum was elected for the first time. He wrote a fascinating article from a Philadelphian's point of view entitled "The Rick Santorum That America Doesn't Know." Take a few minutes and read it - it's worth your time.

But the worst thing I know about Rick Santorum is what happened when his wife Karen was 20 weeks pregnant. Her non-viable fetus was not expected to survive, and the mother developed an infection. And Rick Santorum, who is opposed to abortion for any reason, allowed the doctors to give his wife pitocin to speed the birth. And while that may have been wildly hypocritical, what followed was completely insane.

After spending the night with the dead fetus on the bed between them, they took the body home with them, and forced their children to cuddle with it and sing songs to it. Ms Santorum even proudly wrote a book about it.

Where the hell was Child Protective Services when this was going on? Where was the Health Department?

The worst thing that could possibly happen to America would be a Rick Santorum presidency: I wonder how long it would take him to appoint a Grand Inquisitor?

And yet, he is suddenly one of the two front-runners in the GOP field. Is the Republican Party so desperate to find an alternative, any alternative, to the robotic hair-helmet that is Mitt Romney that they're willing to embrace anyone at all?

Growing up Bachmann?

2011-12-28T06:36:00.012-07:00

Michelle Bachmann released her official ~~holiday~~ Christmas greeting the other day, and I realized something. She never bothered to learn the names of her own kids.

To be honest, it's understandable: she and Marcus have five children of their own, and they've taken in 23 foster children, all girls. (They had to be girls: Marcus only has so much self-control, after all...)

However, this sounds like it leads to an interesting opportunity. If you're a homeless girl between the ages of 15 and 25, and you have the misfortune to live in Michigan, just go down to the Bachmann ranch. Slip in when nobody's looking, keep your head down and try to assimilate. How could anybody notice?

(If you're a homeless male, of course, your only choice is to join the endless stream of closed-mouthed rentboys going in the back door - so to speak - of Bachmann's clinic.)

Try to imagine growing up in Michelle Bachmann's house. If you're like me, you imagine it's all pillowfights and long, lingering hot showers; the reality, of course, would probably be more like those women's prison movies that became so popular in the 60s and 70s.

Except, of course, that as it turns out, the true reality isn't quite as it seems, either.

See, for most of us, "foster children" indicates a long-term commitment: yeah, maybe you get them in their teens, but you raise them. This myth spread by the Bachmann camp tells us what a wonderful, sharing person Michele is, opening her home so many times, to so many troubled girls. She said, in interviews, that she "raised" 23 foster children.

The truth is, Bachmann and her husband got a license to counsel girls with eating disorders. They lived in her house: some for a week, some for a year or so.

Bachmann often says she has "raised" 23 foster children. That may be a bit of a stretch. According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Bachmann's license, which she had for 7 1/2 years, allowed her to care for up to three children at a time. According to Kris Harvieux, a former senior social worker in the foster care system in Bachmann's county, some placements were almost certainly short term. "Some of them you have for a week. Some of them you have for three years, some you have for six months," says Harvieux, who also served as a foster parent herself. "She makes it sound like she got them at birth and raised them to adulthood, but that's not true."

Yet Bachmann clearly had some of her foster children long enough to enroll them in local schools, and it was through them that she got involved in school politics. While she taught her own children at home before sending them to private Christian schools, state law required foster kids to go to public school. Seeing their curriculum, she became convinced that "politically correct attitudes, values, and beliefs" had supplanted objective education. She helped found a charter school but soon left the board amid allegations that she was trying to inject Christianity into the curriculum. Then, in 1999, she decided to run for the local school board.

But she keeps saying that she's "raised" 23 kids. And that's because Bachmann isn't afraid to lie to make a point.

That's what you have to keep in mind about Michele Bachmann. If she feels that she has a narrative that's important to make her point, she's more than happy to pretend that the story at the core of the narrative is true. Whether it is or not; it just has to conform to her agenda.

Like a few months ago, when, attempting to attack Rick Perry (September's GOP Flavor of the Month for the 2012 ~~Goat Rodeo~~ Republican Primary) for one of the only good things he ever did.

Bachmann first raised the issue during a Republican presidential debate on Monday as a swipe at Republican rival and Texas Governor Rick Perry, who issued an executive order in 2007 mandating girls get the HPV vaccine as part of a school immunization requirement. The order was later overturned.

In that forum, she questioned the state's authority to force "innocent little 12-year-old girls" to have a "government injection" that was "potentially dangerous."

Of course, when she was later pressed for details as to how a vaccine which protected girls against the single most common cause of cervical cancer might be dangerous, she said that she met a woman who said her daughter became "mentally retarded" after getting the Gardasil vaccine.

This is a standard defense for the habitual liar: when called out for an unsupported spew of easily-debunked bullshit, they'll claim that somebody told them - it isn't their fault if somebody else is mistaken, is it?

(It's also interesting that this argument was over a vaccine that is specifically controversial among right-wing fundamentalists. Like Michele Bachman. Remember what I said earlier about lies which conform to her agenda?)

This is standard practice for Ms Bachmann. The more gentle among us might say that she "has a history of making inflammatory statements." But that isn't what's going on. The woman is a liar. Need more examples? She went on the Dennis Miller radio program and claimed things about the "Obamacare" bill that were just complete and utter crap.

"On the 16th page, it says whatever health care you have now, it’s going to be gone within five years. So your current health care plan, you’re not going to have in five years. What you’re going to have is a government plan and a federal bureau is going to decide what you get or if you get anything at all."

In case anyone is curious, page 16 covered people whose healthcare plans would be grandfathered in - i.e., they'd get to keep it, not lose it.

She also claimed that 17 million illegal immigrants would start to get free healthcare under the bill. Ignoring the part that said "Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States."

(Factcheck.org has volumes of material on this woman.)

Michele Bachmann is never afraid to lie in support of what she considers a "higher truth." Because that's how her mind works.

Tim Minchin: Woody Allen Jesus

2011-12-24T01:36:00.002-07:00

Tim Minchin was supposed to be on the Jonathan Ross Show this week, and got cut by the network.

I see the reason he got cut: despite the myth of the "Liberal Media," networks are not run by liberal/conservative ideas, but by ratings (exception: parts of MSNBC and all of Fox "News") But that's a story for another show. And in the simple, uncomplicated-by-agenda media, you can't do something that will endanger those all-important ratings.

Nonetheless, I liked the song.

And if you care, Tim Minchin's reaction to getting cut from the Jonathan Ross Show is here. (And by the way, the Bonus Material after the video is actually way better than anything that came before it...)

So, you know, Merry Christmas and stuff.

Don't Ask redeux

2011-12-21T22:39:00.003-07:00

You know, unlike any of these elitist, protected rich boys running for office, I spent essentially a lifetime in the military: 21 years as an enlisted man. (Ron Paul did 2 years as a flight surgeon and 3 years in the National Guard; Rick Perry flew cargo planes - god, I hated C-130s - for 4 years.)

In that time, I know, for a fact, that I served with gays. They were forced to hide it, but most of us knew, and nobody really cared. (Most of the people who would have cared were too damned stupid to figure things out anyway.)

Now, during Clinton's era, he passed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) as an idiotic compromise. (The fact that the GOP hated it at the time, and were, more recently, rabidly trying to protect it, isn't the slightest bit funny. Not at all...)

Now, with DADT repealed, we have brain-dead idiots in Brokeback Mountain jackets telling us how sad it is that gays can serve openly in the military.

But, you know something odd? DADT was repealed, and the military didn't collapse.

It was only last year that the Marine Corps Commandant, Gen James Amos, said that the repeal of DADT would be a "risk." Now, three months after it was shot down, he's singing a different show tune.

Marines across the globe have adapted smoothly and embraced the change, says their top officer, Gen. James F. Amos, who previously had argued against repealing the ban during wartime.

"I'm very pleased with how it has gone," Amos said in an Associated Press interview

It really isn't an issue. You want proof?

Two women share first kiss at US Navy ship's return

A Navy tradition caught up with the repeal of the U.S. military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" rule on Wednesday when two women sailors became the first to share the coveted "first kiss" on the pier after one of them returned from 80 days at sea.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta of Placerville, Calif., descended from the USS Oak Hill amphibious landing ship and shared a quick kiss in the rain with her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell of Los Angeles. Gaeta, 23, wore her Navy dress uniform while Snell, 22, wore a black leather jacket, scarf and blue jeans. The crowd screamed and waved flags around them.

"It’s something new, that’s for sure," Gaeta told reporters after the kiss. "It’s nice to be able to be myself. It’s been a long time coming..."

Sailors and their loved ones bought $1 raffle tickets for the opportunity. Gaeta said she bought $50 of tickets, a figure that she said pales in comparison to amounts that some other sailors and their loved ones had bought. The money was used to host a Christmas party for the children of sailors.

And, amazingly enough, the world didn't end. Society kept on going. It's weird. It's like it hardly even mattered, in the big picture.

Because, guess what? It makes no real difference to the military. Despite what some morons want you to believe.

But... I just... No!

2011-12-21T09:07:00.005-07:00

Sometimes, even though the entire story is in the headline, you just need to have more details. You can't look away.

Man eats cocaine in brother's butt, dies

A South Carolina man's brother died after police said he was forced to eat cocaine hidden in his brother's backside.

Both brothers were taken into custody on allegations they had drugs in their car.

But police told Charleston, S.C., TV station WCIV there were additional drugs hidden in 23-year-old Deangelo Mitchell's backside.

Officers said Deangelo Mitchell convinced his brother, 20-year-old Wayne Mitchell, to swallow the ounce of cocaine to hide the evidence. He died soon afterward.

That must be one convincing motherfucker. If he could have gone to law school, he would have been amazing.

Remember, kids. Crack kills.

Thoughts on food

2011-12-19T21:49:00.003-07:00

Two things.

1. This is something I never thought of, but if you happen to have a big chunk of dark chocolate, and think that a little grated chocolate on top of ice cream might be a good thing, you just go to town with a grater, right?

Well, as it turns out, grated chocolate seems to have a slight static electricity problem. It clings to the grater, to the plastic container you're grating into, and it jumps around and doesn't want to go where you think it should go.

I had never known this up until now. But there it is.

2. Last night, the Trophy Wife made her usual killer homemade chicken pot pie. Now, you have to understand, this is not the Swanson Pot Pie of my childhood (a product that many of us loved, if you happen to be of a certain age), this is an actual homemade pie. Only the filling, instead of being composed of apples or whatever, is chicken and vegetables. (And about 2 cups of homemade chicken stock, spices, and some flour to thicken it, if you're curious.)

This is the Giant Wookie Son's favorite dish in the world. And last night, he made the crust (mixed the ingredients, cut it into two portions, and stuck it in the fridge to think about what it had done), I did the filling, the Trophy Wife rolled out the crust and put the filling in the pie, and I stuck it in the oven. So, a little bit of teamwork and everybody wins.

One final note: Alton Brown, usually a genius, suffered a huge brain cramp when he came up with his idea of what a chicken pot pie should be. It's not a goddamned stew with biscuits floating on top: that's just stupid. The bottom crust is there to soak in all the meaty-flavored juiciness from the filling, and might well be the best part of the pie.

It ain't broke. Let's fix it.

2011-12-17T11:02:00.004-07:00

Sometimes you have to ask "are people actually this stupid?" And then, of course, the obvious answer comes back - "yes. Yes, they are."

Paul Ryan's plan to scrap Medicare has proven to be just massively unpopular with the average American (especially among those who don't watch Fox "News," or who actually use Medicare themselves). So now, of course, they need to get the focus back to Medicare "reform."

One of the chief problems with Medicare, from the industry's view, is that the government can just set prices and the industry has to go along with it (as opposed to raising prices just because they can). That is, in fact, the primary complaint in most anti-Medicare rants (at least the ones that don't devolve into "death panels"): "the game is rigged against private insurers!"

So, somebody went out and found themselves a "Democratic" Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, and convinced him to co-sponsor a new plan to "reform" Medicare (where "reform" is defined as "gut and destroy").

Let's see how quickly you can spot the landmines built into this plan:

Under the proposal, known as premium support, Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government.

Congress would establish an insurance exchange for Medicare beneficiaries. Private plans would compete with the traditional Medicare program and would have to provide benefits of the same or greater value. The federal contribution in each region would be based on the cost of the second-cheapest option, whether that was a private plan or traditional Medicare.

In addition, the growth of Medicare would be capped. In general, spending would not be allowed to increase more than the growth of the economy, plus one percentage point — a slower rate of increase than Medicare has historically experienced.

To stay under the limit, Congress could cut payments to providers and suppliers responsible for the overspending and could increase Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries, the lawmakers said.

You got that? The problem is that Medicare is usually the cheapest plan around. So, first off, you make it so that it has to be, by law, the second cheapest plan around. That's step one.

Then, you force the government to funnel some of the Medicare money to the private insurers (a business that is traditionally astonishingly lucrative for the people who run it), leaving less money available for the Medicare program itself.

Then, you put spending caps on Medicare and increase some of the Medicare premiums, making the program less flexible, less able to respond to market pressures, and (just by the way) less popular among the people whose premiums just went up.

And those are just the obvious problems: this plan basically says "well, the game is rigged toward the government. The only way to fix that is to rig it in the other direction."

Now, just for fun, let's put our tinfoil hats on for just a second. Can you see any way that this system could be manipulated by the healthcare industry? Is there, maybe, a simple backdoor that somebody could sneak through to kill off Medicare entirely? (You know, pretty much what Big Pharma and the GOP have been trying to do for decades?)

Try this idea on for size. A couple of the health insurance companies (not working together! Oh, no!) set up some brand-new private insurance plans to "compete" with Medicare. And one of them is obviously cheaper than the rest.

(Can these plans lose money in the long run? Of course they can! In order to be a growth industry, you don't just look at short-term losses - you have to figure out long-term gains!)

And if you advertise that new plan like mad, people will change over to it. Meaning that there are, by definition, less people in Medicare. And less money coming in.

Remember, all the big insurance companies are already getting Medicare money directly from government subsidies under the new plan. And the government is still paying for the remaining Medicare patients.

So the money is still going out under the current plan, and damned little is coming in. And the industry can just quietly poke Congress in the ribs and say "Look! We can do it just as cheaply. And save the government money in the process. What do you think we should do about this? Oh, and would you like more Cabernet?"

But that's just paranoia, right there. Right? There's no way that could ever happen.

Is there?

Poking at the Mouse

2011-12-16T09:25:00.012-07:00

Somehow I missed this a few years ago (maybe because I don't download pirated movies). But this probably made Mickey a little cranky.

> [email]tracker-40-aa-5f-03-412675c8@prq.to
>
> Re: Unauthorized Use of DreamWorks SKG
> Properties
> http://www.thepiratebay.org
>
> To Whom It May Concern:
>
> This letter is being written to you on
> behalf of our client, DreamWorks SKG
> (hereinafter ^ÓDreamWorks^Ô). DreamWorks
> is the exclusive owner of all copyright,
> trademark and other intellectual property
> rights in and to the ^ÓShrek 2^Ô motion
> picture. No one is authorized to copy,
> reproduce, distribute, or otherwise use
> the ^ÓShrek 2^Ô motion picture without
> the express written permission of
> DreamWorks.
[...]
> As you may be aware, Internet Service
> Providers can be held liable if they do
> not respond to claims of infringement
> pursuant to the requirements of the
> Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
> In accordance with the DMCA, we request
> your assistance in the removal of
> infringements of the ^ÓShrek 2^Ô motion
> picture from this web site and any other
> sites for which you act as an Internet
> Service Provider. We further declare
> under penalty of perjury that we are
> authorized to act on behalf of
> DreamWorks and that the information in
> this letter is accurate. Please contact
> me immediately to discuss this matter
> further.

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ....... morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go fuck yourself.

Polite as usual,
anakata

Gee, now they can't thaw out Walt Disney's head: it would burst into flame as soon as he hit room temperature.

Image stolen from here

Today in Rock History: The Clash

2011-12-14T22:14:00.005-07:00

Thirty two years ago today (that's 1979, for you home-schoolers), The Clash released London Calling. There's a reason why that matters, and if we're all very lucky, I might get to it.

I was a dilettante punk fan in high school. I'll admit it: I was never a true punk, but I supported the idea.

Of course, as I grew older, I realized that "punk" was pretty much a metaphorical term for any band who really didn't know how to play their instruments, and were just screaming as loud and as fast as they could.

I owned a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks; I loved the Ramones (although I didn't see Rock'n'Roll High School until a midnight showing in 1984, and I knew it sucked before I went in - I basically just saw it out of solidarity or some shit...); I never really liked Black Flag (before or after Henry Rollins - but I knew enough people who lived for that crap that I knew the difference). And I continue to worship every note played by Joe Jackson, despite his switch to pop/classical musical sensibilities.

Basically, I liked the idea of punk, but I also liked the ideas of rhythm, chord changes, harmony, playing in the same key, and all those other musical concepts that punk music disdained.

And that was why I liked the Clash.

Their first two albums, as far as I was concerned, were basic punk, and crap. But London Calling was done after they fired their manager (or, you know, disagreed with him for three years until they brought him back), and instead of continuing as another crap punk band, they started using socially relevant lyrics, they embraced ska, rockabilly and playing in the same key, and generally they became a rock band instead of an icon for a movement.

Personally, as albums go, I preferred Combat Rock over London Calling, but this was their seminal album (as in "for the first time, they shot spunk instead of blanks").

Their album cover, widely accepted as one of the most iconic covers of all times, was basically a riff on Elvis' first album. (It was also a double album, but sold at the price of a single album, which was important to those of us buying records - yes, vinyl - off of our toy-store stocker paychecks...)

One of the hits off the album, "Train in Vain," was considered a "secret track" because they hadn't intended to include it on the album. Their first song to crack the American Top 40, they recorded it in one day, a few hours after they wrote it, and intended it as a free giveaway with the British rock magazine New Musical Express. But when that deal fell through, they stuck it on the album. Unfortunately, the album cover had already been printed and didn't list this song. Go figure.

My personal favorite from the album is the title song, a mid-tempo number in a minor key, with staccato guitar chords playing against Joe Strummer's harsh, almost apocalyptic lyrics referencing drugs, Three Mile Island, police brutality and the sad state of modern music.

So, when the dust settled, why was this album important?

Because it made punk accessible to the common man. It showed that even punk bands had talent. And it informed the world that the age of Phil Spector and Pat Boone was over, and the rowdy kids had moved in.

Tasha

2011-12-12T18:04:00.006-07:00

It was late 1997, and we'd just come back from Germany. The Air Force, in her infinite wisdom, decided that Cheyenne, Wyoming was the right place for me and my family.

While waiting for base housing to come available, we rented a cheap little house in a relatively decent neighborhood. And after seven years of apartment life in Germany, it was time to get a dog. (Plus, it gave the Trophy Wife and the Horde something to concentrate on other than what a miserable wanna-be-Wild-West shithole we'd been planted in - hey, any state that spawned Dick Cheney must at least be a suburb of Hades, right?)

We went to the animal shelter (because that's how we roll - of course, when I was a kid, we called it "the pound"), and we found Tasha. Just shy of a year old, pure black Labrador/German Shepherd mix. Even as a young bitch, she had distinct wolf-like cast to her, which only became more pronounced as she got older.

She was one of the gentlest, most even-tempered dogs in the world. She also turned out to be the smartest dog I have ever had: we've never been much for tricks, but the few we tried to teach her, she would catch on to it right away.

And she was built for speed: you'd throw a tennis ball for her, she'd be there to grab it almost before it hit the ground. And as impressive as that was to watch, the show wasn't even half over. Because once she had the ball, she'd turn around, lower her head into her ruff so that it was even with her spine, and come charging straight back toward you like a freight train.

It was an impressive sight: somehow, even though she was bringing back a tennis ball, you had a rough idea what a deer might have seen moments before it turned into dinner.

Except that was where the metaphor broke down. Because that was only her second favorite game. F.E. Warren AFB may have been a cesspool, but they had more nature than they knew what to do with, to include a herd of deer running wild on the base. And once, we'd gotten home with Tasha in the car, and the deer came trotting out between two buildings. Unknowingly, we opened the door to put the leash on her, and suddenly there was a black stripe leading from the car and down the street, with the sound of claws on blacktop dopplering past.

The deer on F.E. Warren are a protected species, so it's probably good that Tasha only wanted to play. Because there would have been nothing but a red spot and a pair of horns left if she'd been serious about it. She put them through their paces, accompanied by the sound of us, somewhere in the distance, shouting "Tasha! Come!"

That was the only thing we ever told her that she just ignored: she was having entirely too much fun.

We never figured out why she was skittish around water at first, but once we taught her to swim, she loved it. She may have looked like a pure-black Shepherd, but she had a Labrador undercoat: basically, she was a seal in a bearskin coat. We'd take her down to the various ponds on base, and she wouldn't care if she had to break through a layer of ice - by god, she was swimming out there to fetch that stick.

Our house on base didn't have a fence, so we tried a dog run for a while. But another bit of the wildlife on base caught up with us - a pack of feral dogs decided to fuck with her before the Trophy Wife could get out there and run them off.

That didn't make her skittish, though: just made her hate all other dogs. She decided she didn't have time for her own kind any more. She would usually ignore them, but god help the mutt who looked crosseyed at her or her humans.

I've always known that a dog was the only perfect burglar alarm, and Tasha was the poster child for that theory: she was always hyper-aware of her environment, and knew exactly what was going on around her. As soon as she knew that we approved of someone, she was the friendliest dog in the world.

But she could transform into the Spectre of Death in the blink of an eye, anytime anybody in her family felt threatened. Very protective, but also smart enough to shift gears in a heartbeat. Nobody ever got hurt by Tasha: a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses got a vision of hell, though.

She accepted a lot from us, and never complained. Then again, she had to, with three rowdy kids and... well, and me, with my somewhat off-kilter sense of humor.

We tried to socialize her to other dogs - we broke down a few years ago and got a puppy, Boris. Who turned out to be, in fact, literally brain-damaged: head trauma as a pup, that kept him a mental pup in a sixty-pound body. But Tasha loved him.

German Shepherds are prone to hip dysplasia, and as she got older, it turned out that she'd definitely inherited that problem. In recent years, it became harder and harder to walk; one of her hind legs just stopped doing what her brain told it to. But she never complained, never whined: she stolidly accepted everything that life threw at her. She moved slower, but she never stopped moving. Her hearing started failing, but she still perked up when you called her name. Usually. Cataracts started to cloud her eyes, but she could always see me.

It happened very suddenly. Or maybe it built up over the last several years, and I was just too damned stupid to notice.

Last week, I started noticing that she wasn't eating much. Then, Saturday morning, she went out to the backyard, but didn't come back. I found her lying in the snow. She looked up at me, almost embarrassed: she couldn't stand up, and she'd messed herself a little. She was always a very clean dog.

I coaxed her up. She limped slowly inside, and we got her cleaned up. We got her a blanket, and she lay down on it, and refused to move for the rest of the day. She barely drank anything, and ate nothing until I went out and bought some "easy to digest" cans of dog food.

We didn't think it would be long, but then she rallied. I got up at about two in the morning, and she'd walked to the other end of the house, and laid down in front of my door. She was better! She'd just been sick!

Annette had managed to get to a fitful sleep, so I didn't wake her. I woke up first on Sunday, and Tasha was fine. She limped out to the backyard again. And then, for the second day in a row, she didn't come back.

I found her under a bush, where she'd set up a burrow. I tried to get her to come inside, and she actually snapped at me - the gentlest dog in the world, and if I hadn't pulled my hand back fast enough, she'd have bitten me.

Her instincts were telling her what I didn't want to hear.

I came back a little later, and her teeth were chattering; this time, she let me lever her out of the hole and limped slowly inside. She collapsed on the blanket again, shivering, and we covered her with a blanket and stayed with her. She hardly moved for the rest of the day.

Last night, she lost all control of her bladder and bowels. I got her cleaned up as best I could before I went to work. My daughter and my wife were with her all day.

We took her to the animal clinic this evening. The vet confirmed that it was time. She said that the shot was a massive dose of barbiturates, and Tasha wouldn't feel anything. "Sometimes, there's some vocalization, or a little twitching."

I was there as the light went out of her slightly clouded eyes; as she relaxed, there was a high-pitched keening sound. And I realized it was coming from me.

Tonight, I killed my dog.

It was the right thing to do. She's been in pain for a long time, and now her organs were beginning to fail. But I can't get to sleep, and I can't get drunk enough to make it feel like it was right.

If Tasha were here, she'd shove her nose under my hand. She'd quietly but forcefully insinuate her head into my lap and force me to pet her. Until I paid attention to her, instead of whatever was bothering me.

But she can't do that any more.

Requiem for a candidate

2011-12-06T22:21:00.007-07:00

Wow. It looks like the Cain Train left the rails, hit the siding, and slid about a hundred feet into a bus full of nuns and orphans.

And it really only took a couple of weeks.

I mean, the man declared himself a candidate back in May. And since then, it isn't like he's been hiding in the bushes. They wouldn't let him; having a black candidate in the lead proved that Republicans weren't all inbred bigots; they were willing to allow the man to do just about anything he wanted. Within reason.

Did he look completely ignorant on foreign policy? Who cares? Hell, there are still people who want Sarah Palin to enter the race!

Did he want to say openly insane shit? That's not a problem! After all, Michele Bachmann has made a whole career out of being the craziest bitch in the kennel! The self-important, elitist millionaire Newt Gingrich is currently the front runner, and he recently said that child labor laws were "truly stupid"!

(As it turns out, sanity is actually a detriment in today's Republican party - just ask Jon Huntsman.)

So, what does it take to hurt the Cain? A little sugar.

Now, this is the 21st Century. The GOP tried to be open-minded about things. At first.

A couple of women came forward and made unsubstantiated allegations about Herman Cain. So what? The man's famous! People say shit about celebrities all the time, right?

Then more women came forward. And more. But still, no proof.

Then came Ginger White.

She claimed to have had a thirteen-year affair with Cain. But, once again, there was no proof: circumstantial evidence, but no proof. Cain might have weathered this bump in the road, too.

Until he admitted that he gave her money.

He tried to claim that he'd just given her "financial assistance," but nobody believed him. Nobody who's seen Cain strut and fret his hour upon the stage really had a doubt about his motives: to Herman Cain, "charity" is a carefully-calculated amount determined by his accountant, to be paid at the end of the year. Nobody was willing to believe that the Black Walnut just wanted to help this poor girl in her decade-and-a-half of need.

So Herman Cain crashed and burned. A victim of his own arrogance. But here's the thing.

I have willingly taken on the moniker of "Cynic," because I am aware of an unpleasant tendency in my makeup: I think the worst of people. Thanks to a certain amount of self-awareness, I can admit that I sometimes take this too far; I see evil, even as the light of good begins to shine. I know this about myself.

So, given that I know that my judgement is almost surely clouded in this case, I understand that my interpretation of events must be incorrect. I know this.

But there's still this tiny, niggling doubt in the back of my mind.

Why is it that the GOP was willing to turn a blind eye to whatever Cain did, until it became apparent that the black candidate had gone to bed with a white woman?

Occupy the Constitution! (updated)

2011-11-30T09:57:00.004-07:00

First off, I'd like to take a moment of silence for the Occupy Wall Street movement. They've gone disco.

Meanwhile, though, let’s consider a fascinating legal issue that has come up with the Occupy movement.

See, the problem with the 99% bringing the problem of economic disparity to light, is that, by the nature of the election process, in order to be a politician, you are all but required to be a member of the 1%.

This is the reason that it’s so difficult to get a tax increase for the rich through Congress: they are the rich!

This also means that many of them are predisposed to oppose discussion of income disparity or the economic realities of life in America today. Nobody likes talking about their own sins, when it’s easier to point at other people and scream “Heretic!” So, for example, Mayor Bloomberg of New York (net worth: $18.1 billion) isn’t particularly interested in stopping police brutality against protestors. (If anything, he’s enabling it.)

In Texas, they’ve decided that there is only a limited amount of free speech available in Austin at any one time.

Now, consider that for a minute. If one protest group starts yelling, and leaves after 2 hours and 55 minutes, and another group, unrelated to them and with no knowledge of the previous group, spontaneously showed up in the same neighborhood, they would not be allowed to speak without breaking the law.

It seems to me that this case would be a slam-dunk for any civil rights lawyer. Just take a video camera and show someone showing up after the time limit has expired and not being allowed to speak. Admittedly, the Texas Supreme Court would uphold the police actions, because that’s how Texas works; but it would continue up through the US Supreme Court, and nobody claiming to be a Constitutional scholar could let this pass.

(In a fascinating twist, the Trophy Wife, usually far more optimistic than I've ever been, is feeling more cynical than I do on the subject, and thinks that the Roberts Supreme Court – combined average net worth $47,272,584 – might not be interested in supporting free speech in this case.)

Funny how this issue never came up for the Tea Party protests...
_______________

(Update, 12/3/11)
And in a story broken yesterday by my second least-favorite news source, the Huffington Post (and wildly underreported by other news sources as I write this), the UN has noticed many of the same things:

The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

"I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights."
...
In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said -- but that's a mistake.

"Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension," he said.

Personally, I didn't know that "Frank" was a popular Guatemalan name, but considering Guatemala during the 80s and 90s (and for that matter, the previous decades, when they helped develop the term "banana republic"), they know something about the suppression of human rights.

Of course, who approves of the way the American police are dealing with protesters? Mostly tyrants with their own economic protesters, like Mubarak.

Proud of yourself yet, Washington?

Making friends on Facebook

2011-11-27T15:42:00.001-07:00

Hmmm... I don't know if this is a good sign. I mucked with one idiot, and it's like Lays potato chips.

Somebody break it to me gently. Am I in danger of becoming a Facebook troll?

(Click to embiggen.)

The Idiots of England

2011-11-26T12:09:00.008-07:00

George Bernard Shaw is famously quoted as saying "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." (Similar quotes were made by Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell and Dylan Thomas, but probably not Winston Churchill.)

Fortunately for international relations, though, the two countries do share a common bond: stupidity.

Yes, there is abject idiocy in the country of Shaw, Russell, Wilde, Thomas, Churchill, and even William Shakespeare (who wrote his own plays, no matter what they tell in the movies) and Francis Bacon (who did not write Shakepeare's plays, regardless).

I suppose it should have been obvious: after all, Rupert Murdoch is from Australia, and David Duke was born in Oklahoma. And both countries were settled by the British, so we have to get it from somewhere, right?

(Understand that, in Australia's case, I'm using a loose definition of "settled" which includes "being sent in chains." You know, the same way that Africans "settled" America...)

The latest bit of idiocy that I've come across was, in fact, on Facebook. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my purpose for Facebook isn't so much as social network, as it is refrigerator magnet - I stick random pictures and videos up there, just because it gives me some place to store them that costs me nothing.

(I understand that there are people who use specialized sites like Pinterest for these purposes, but not me. I'm a maverick like that.)

Which means that if it isn't at the top of my home page, it isn't likely that I'll see most people's posts. So this has probably been around for a while, and I just haven't seen it. But now I have.

(Don't squint - transcription below.)

(Technically, I didn't need to block out her picture, because it wasn't a picture of her. But it was a copyrighted Disney image, so it's probably safest.)

What that said was (block pasted, to preserve the fascinating capitalization, spelling and punctuation):

racist to sing ba ba black sheep so now its ba ba rainbow sheep, racist to wear a poppy so even the england football team didnt wear them, racist to say christmas so now its happy holidays yet its not racist to celebrate eid, not racist to burn the st georges cross and not racist to take over our country. this is ENGLAND, dont like it? manchester airport, terminal 2... toodle fucking pip! Putt this as your status if you believe in true english rights

I, of course, had to reply - I can be an ass sometimes. But since it isn't my country, I had to actually research some of the issues.

A lot of it is just basic rhetoric: "true english rights," "take over our country," the Happy Holidays vs Merry Christmas crap (that's not "racist," it's just being polite to the 31% non-Christian Brits).

I thought the "yet its not racist to celebrate eid" was cute. Not only is it fundamentally wrong (it isn't racist to celebrate Xmas, either major Eid festival, or Chanukah - it's just rude to jam your religion in other people's face), but it also has overtones of "Scary Brown People!" So it's stupid twice.

Quick note: for those of you who don't know, "Eid" is the Arabic word for "festival," and is most commonly used in the West to refer to Eid ul-Fitr ("Festival of Breaking the Fast"), held at the end of Ramadan, or Eid al-Adha ("Festival of the Sacrifice," or Greater Eid), celebrating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to God (essentially the same story from the Old Testament, in Genesis 22).

But really, there are three major points.

1. racist to sing ba ba black sheep so now its ba ba rainbow sheep

This is an urban legend that crops up every so often, which is traditionally overblown by the right-wing press (even today). It's also inevitably shown to be complete bollocks (the publication of which is, after all, a Murdoch tradition).

2. racist to wear a poppy so even the england football team didnt wear them

On November 11, (Remembrance Day, once called Armistice Day), it's traditional in Britain to memorialize the fallen of WWI by wearing a poppy (it dates back to the John McCrae poem "In Flanders Fields - "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row"); a lot of veteran's groups use it as a fund-raising theme.

This year, the British teams were going to wear embroidered poppies on their uniforms for a Remembrance Day match against Spain, and the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) intervened. As they have approval over uniform design, they felt it "would open the door to similar initiatives from all over the world, jeopardizing the neutrality of football."

It had nothing to do with racism. Quite the opposite - it was all about keeping everybody as one big happy international family.

Of course, the really funny thing is that the whole "england football team didnt wear them" complaint didn't happen. FIFA agreed to allow black armbands, with poppies.

3. not racist to burn the st georges cross

Well, no, it isn't. Just rude and an overreaction.

You can find a lot of stories about Muslims burning the St George's cross (many of them badly sourced, oddly enough) in response to British actions they object to. And some of the stories might even be true. Doesn't make it racist.

See, the St George's cross (which, some of you might be aware, isn't the flag of England) is viewed in the Muslim world as a symbol of the Crusades. And, gee, who can fault them for that? That period seems much closer to the people of the modern Middle East than it used to, thanks to the actions of George II (or as many of us called him, Dubya).

So, it's good to know that it isn't just America which stands in danger of spiraling down the drain of ignorance and hatred. The Brits have these issues, too. I guess I'm relieved.

Or maybe not.

This week's santorum stain

2011-11-23T16:51:00.005-07:00

Apparently, Rick Santorum has lost all sense of irony. (Some of us already knew that, but Frothy likes to go and prove it again every so often.)

Remember, Google fans - always use that first link there, whenever you talk about the former senator. It's only the right thing to do...

Right Wing Watch notes that Frothy made the following distinction between sharia law and the way he would run the country.

Now, unlike Islam where the higher law and civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law.

Our civil laws have to ... and that's why, with the issue of abortion, as long as abortion is "legal" - at least according to the Supreme Court, "legal" in this country - we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God's law which says that all life has value, all life is created by [God,] I knew you in the womb.

And as long as there is a discordance between the two, there will be agitation.

Aside from him making the same tired anti-choice arguments yet again, let's contemplate what he just said about sacred and secular laws.

(And yes, I'm going to ignore the fact that he just called Islam a "higher law." I'm too classy a guy to go for the cheap joke like that, bitches...)

com·port /kəmˈpôrt/ v
1. Conduct oneself; behave.
2. Accord with; agree with.

See, in Islamic countries, the church and the state are the same. But in Frothyland, the state just has to do what the church wants...

...no, wait. That can't be it...

...in Frothyland, the state just has to agree with the church in every... no, wait a minute...

Ok, OK, I got it.

In Islamic countries, the church and the state are the same. In Frothy's fevered imaginings, the state merely has to look like the church! See? It's simple!

All that lube, and Frothy still can't pull his head out of his ass.

Expecting something?

2011-11-21T22:50:00.011-07:00

I have some big news. Apparently, I'm pregnant. I don't know how this happened, but I can't deny it any longer.

OK, when I say "I don't know how this happened," I don't mean that I don't know how babies are made. I just don't understand how it could have happened to me. But one thing I do know. I'm going to keep my baby.

Little bastard is going to make me rich.

I'm a little confused. I've always taken precautions. I mean, I used a condom every single time I had sex, back before I got the vasectomy. And it's been about twenty years, and there hasn't even been a scare since then. But suddenly, I seem to be pregnant.

I have to admit. It came out of nowhere.

About three months ago, I got my first copy of American Baby magazine. I didn't ask for it. I didn't sign up for it, or even join a website that might have started it up for me. It just showed up in the mail. And I picked it up, noticed it was my name on the label, and said "huh. Weird."

And I dropped it off in the waiting room of the hospital, figuring "What the hell. We get mothers through here." It was odd, but I didn't really think anything of it. Figured it was a promotional copy, and I'd ended up on somebody's mailing list.

Thirty days later, my second copy arrived. Addressed to me. It didn't say "Free copy" or "if you'd like to keep receiving this fine magazine..." or anything else.

It was just... mine.

And last month, a few days after my third copy of American Baby arrived, I received a free case of baby formula.

It couldn't fit in the mailbox. The postal carrier had to bring it to the door.

It was addressed to me. Specifically. My name. My address. I have to say, I was a little confused.

I just thought I was putting on weight because I haven't had time to work out lately. I haven't even had morning sickness yet. It's been a really easy pregnancy.

And today, when I came home from work, I opened the mailbox, and Vistaprint, in Lexington, MA, has given me twenty free birth announcements. With, of course, the option to buy more at only a slight extra charge.

But free shipping and handling! You can't beat that!

I can't deny the evidence. I must be pregnant.

How am I going to tell my wife?

The Republican War on Thanksgiving

2011-11-20T12:48:00.006-07:00

In 1621, after the difficult, unrelenting labor of starting a colony, the Pilgrims, using planting techniques taught to them by the native Wampanoag tribe, celebrated their first successful harvest with a feast, which they shared with their native American neighbors (who we later almost wiped out, there being only about 400 survivors sixty years later, following King Philip's War).

This is the most important, most truly American holiday (the Canadians have a similar observance, but they're just our little northern clones anyway, right?). It's a day of forgiveness, a day when families travel from across the country to get together, eat our traditional meal, celebrate our mutual heritage, and nestle securely in the bosom of warmth and family.

Except, perhaps, for this year.

Because of the Republican insistence on "Free Market" capitalism and a winner-take-all mentality, now, with record unemployment around the country, the cost of the Thanksgiving meal is rising faster than inflation.

With the current annual inflation rate of 3.5%, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner has risen 13%, and the cost of getting together with family and friends has increased even more than that.

The average airfare for travel to the top 10 most popular destinations in the U.S. for Nov. 23 to Nov. 27 has jumped 11% over last year, according to an analysis by Orbitz, one of the nation’s busiest travel websites. That means the average round-trip ticket for Thanksgiving rose to $373 from about $340.

Flights to New York for the holiday will rise the most, jumping 20% over last year, with an average round-trip price of $342, according to Orbitz. Round-trip flights to Los Angeles will increase 12% to $429, according to the travel website...

You won’t escape the higher prices by driving: Gas prices reached the highest levels ever in the week prior to Thanksgiving, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California. The average price of self-serve regular gasoline in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was $3.82 a gallon last week, 66 cents higher than the same time last year.

With one in three Americans living at or below the poverty line, the GOP is trying to ensure that they cannot celebrate their own heritage. The Republican Party is trying to ensure that an Ayn Rand dystopia, with the richest living in luxury off the sweat of the working poor, is the model for American society.

The Republicans are trying to destroy Thanksgiving! And they're doing it in subtle ways, as well! The Christmas decorations, celebrating their dreams of commerce and overindulgence, come out earlier every year; the Christmas carols are already playing in all the stores; and the conservative-controlled media beats the drum, insisting that shopkeepers must say "Merry Christmas" instead of the more open, accepting "Happy Holidays," as if Thanksgiving didn't matter in the slightest!

This Republican War on Thanksgiving must be stopped! We must stride into the stores and demand that the carols be cancelled! "Turn off that crap! It's not even Thanksgiving!"

Websites are springing up devoted to bringing back our national holiday from the brink of extinction. We must support them; we must also support retailers like Nordstrom, who insist on celebrating each holiday in turn, and not skipping over the ones that can't be exploited by the greedy, and venal, and unamerican!

We must ask where the Thanksgiving displays are, and why they are overshadowed by some obese Germanic troll in a red suit! We must write letters to store owners, corporations, and our Congressfolk, demanding the return of our national holiday!

Radical conservatives must be stopped from destoying our heritage!

Please note: this is intended for satirical purposes only, and if you're stupid enough to take it seriously, you probably fall for that "War on Christmas" crap too, don't you?

Pérák, the two Jiří's and the Nazis

2011-11-19T12:17:00.009-07:00

No politics today. It isn't always about politics.

I was randomly hopping around the internet this morning, just following links as I ate breakfast, and happened across a blog (Monkey Muck - I'm not even clear what led me to it, but somebody out there linked to him), where he'd dug up a little piece of animation history.

It was May, 1945. The Germans, who hadn't run a particularly peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia to begin with, had gotten their noses bloody in the Prague Uprising, which ended in a stalemate, and both sides declared a ceasefire that lasted all of a day before the Soviet troops rolled through the country two days after "Victory in Europe Day," expelling the last of the Nazi troops.

(Yes, that's a simplified look at a long, bloody struggle. There was also no way that the people of Czechoslovakia could know about the ensuing weirdness of the next almost-half-a-century. That's just the least you need to know for perspective.)

Very few people in the West have heard of Jiří Brdečka, but he was a writer and illustrator (you might have heard of Limonádový Joe ("Lemonade Joe"), a series of short stories (occasionally gathered into book form and later adapted as a play), which was made into a movie in 1964, a parody of old-time westerns which reputedly numbered Henry Fonda among its fans and was considered something of a cult classic among Czechs for many years.

(Proponents of the run-on sentence regard me as a master of the craft.)

I'm not sure when they first met, but after the war ended, Brdečka got together with Jiří Trnka (an illustrator and puppeteer), and they would later set up Studio Bratři v triku, the leading producer of Czech animation for decades. The studio logo shows three boys, possibly a reference to the two Jiří's and Eduard Hofman, a writer/director they worked with.

(Bratři v triku is commonly translated as "Brothers in T-shirts," possibly because of the logo. But technically, it's "Brothers in Tricks," and "tricks" (or "trick films") was also a term used to refer to animation at the time. God, I love trivia.)

Of the two Jiří's, I think Jiří Trnka is the more interesting. Considered the founding father of Czech animation, he had worked as a illustrator for Melantrich, a Czech-language publishing house in Prague (named after yet a third Jiří, a Czech Renaissance printer named Jiří Melantrich of Aventino).

As a child, Trnka had carved and sculpted puppets out of wood, to stage shows for his friends. Later, around the same time that he was hired by Melantrich, he started a puppet theater, which closed down with the start of WWII. And later in life, when he found himself uncomfortable with traditional animation, Trnka changed his focus to the medium which gained him some measure of world-wide fame, animated puppetry, mostly stop-motion.

He's been called the "Walt Disney Of The East, although where Disney made films for children and families, Trnka aimed his work at an adult audience.

But this work is before all that. The war had ended, the country was trying to rebuild, and the two Jiří's had gotten together to fill a niche that few other people were considering: animation.

Without a studio, without much backing, they produced a handful of short films together as an experiment, and one of them was Pérák a SS (alternately translated as "Perak and the SS," "The Springman and the SS," and occasionally "The Chimney Sweep").

Pérák the Spring Man was an folktale in WWII Prague, a man who could... well, he could jump. Over trains, walls and small buildings. Much like Victorian England's Spring-Heel Jack (only without the varying descriptions making him into a monster, with burning red eyes, fangs, wings, or whatever). Pérák was just a man. Who jumped.

Czech media would later often retcon him into a superhero, but he started out as just an urban legend of a bouncy guy, who sprang out of alleys and startled people. (It was a simpler time.)

The cartoon was easily on a par with other animated shorts of the period (it was 15 years after Steamboat Willie, and it didn't have a lush feel of Max Fleischer's later work, but aside from the black and white nature of Pérák, compare it even to the current output on Cartoon Network, or any of the 700 Disney channels). And it managed to combine the resentment of a conquered people to their oppressors, with the light-hearted, somewhat fantastical world of the animated Everyman.

(Yes, I can do "pedantic" when I want to. I just don't feel like it too often.)

All in all, it's a cute piece of history that definitely deserves a wider audience.

It's Saturday. November 12.

2011-11-12T12:58:00.001-07:00

Well, Veteran's Day is over. We go back to ignoring them again, right?

Veterans account for a troubling 20 percent of our nation’s suicides, according to national figures. This means that every day in the United States, an average of 18 veterans take their own lives – or about one every 80 minutes.

About 27 percent of Oregon’s suicides are veterans.

From 2005 to 2010, active service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours...

Post Traumatic Stress may occur in those who experience or witness intense violence, serious accidents, or life-threatening events. It can make people feel angry, hopeless, fearful, horrified, and overwhelmed. Post Traumatic Stress is treatable.

Many veterans and active military balk at seeking help through traditional channels due to fear of negative career impact, the stigma of perceived weakness among their peers and frustration with red tape. Left untreated, the challenges can intensify as they feel more isolated.

What the Hell is this?

2011-10-30T13:02:00.007-06:00

It's Sunday, the day before Halloween, so it seems like the appropriate time to consider the concept of hell. The fundies like to bring it up all the time: "you don't agree with us, you're going to burn," usually leaving the postscript, "...and I'm going to enjoy it," unstated.

Now, the Hebrews (you know, the guys with the Old Testament) didn't go in for the idea of hell much. In Daniel 12:2, you get something vaguely similar to the traditional Christian idea, but not quite.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

So, not a lot of torment, but there's guilt (an emotion some might call the foundation of Judaism).

If the ancient Jews talked about it at all, they usually referred to Sheol, which is the place where all the dead, good and bad, hung out.

However, they did give us one other word: Gehenna, which is derived from the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, or "the Valley of Hinnom." It was a garbage dump outside Jerusalem. There was always a fire there, because you burned your garbage, and it was also referred to a few times (2 Chron. 28:3, for instance) as a place where some various pagan types sacrificed children.

If you go to the original Greek, the New Testament describes Hell with three words:

Hades (taken from the Greek god of the same name), which was pretty much like the Jewish idea of Sheol

Gehenna, in Jerusalem, was sometimes used as a place to toss the bodies who "died in sin" for a quick cremation. So the term Gehenna in the New Testament became a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after they died (or, more technically, after the Resurrection of Jesus, which they've been promising for 2 millenia now).

Tartarus is used once, in II Peter 2:4 - Pete stole the idea from the Greeks, where it was the place where their gods put the titans after they rebelled. So Pete grabbed that idea and ran with it.
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment

In 1999, Pope John Paul II tried to go back to the friendlier idea of the ancient Hebrews, and said that "more than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy."

Unfortunately for the pope's attempt to make Christianity all warm and fuzzy, the New Testament is littered with descriptions of the dead being toasted: the potentially drug-induced Revelations, for example, gives us this.

...and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books... And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelations 20:12-15)

John the Revelator also gave us the most boring version of an afterlife ever - following Jesus around to sing about how great he is. Apparently, Jesus is too lazy to stick his own affirmations everywhere on Post-it notes like normal people.

(And incidentally, that description of heaven, found in Revelations 14:1-5, is where the Jehovah's Witnesses get the idea that only 144,000 people are going to Heaven. In case you were wondering.)

Christianity needs Hell, despite how counterintuitive the idea is with a religion that claims to have a loving god. Because, when you can't actually torture and kill people who don't believe in your personal flavor of religion (although god knows they've tried that, too), you need to have some kind of punishment to hold over their heads. And the fear of a place where no witnesses have ever returned is an easy fix for them.

(OK, admittedly there are some people who claim to have been to have been there, but they never seem to visit the gift shop and bring back souvenirs.)

The Ferrets of Sierra Madre

2011-10-30T12:04:00.002-06:00

So, what's changed between now and then?

2011-10-24T10:02:00.004-06:00

So, here's how the GOP works.

(April 22, 2004)
(Peter G. Peterson, chairman, Council on Foreign Relations): Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it's a hypothetical, but it's at least possible.

(Sen. John) McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because— if it was an elected government of Iraq— and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.

Seems pretty clear, right?

OK, so let's scoot forward to last year.

(December 28, 2010)
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: "The withdrawal of forces agreement expires on Dec. 31, 2011. The last American soldier will leave Iraq."

(Technically, that's actually a "Status of Forces Agreement," but it's not like English is his first language, right?)

So, obviously, McCain knows what should happen next, right?

(Oct 21, 2011)
"Today marks a harmful and sad setback for the United States in the world," McCain said in a statement Friday afternoon. "I respectfully disagree with the President: this decision will be viewed as a strategic victory for our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime, which has worked relentlessly to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq."

McCain said the decision is "a consequential failure of both the Obama Administration - which has been more focused on withdrawing from Iraq than succeeding in Iraq since it came into office - as well as the Iraqi government."

Funny how that works, isn't it?

"Support the troops"? What's that mean?

2011-10-23T11:17:00.009-06:00

In 1983, I joined the Air Force because of the educational benefits (and, yeah, because I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time); I'd only planned to stay in for one tour. By the time that tour was up, though, I had a wife and two kids, and having a good health plan seemed like the way to go. So I reenlisted.

My second tour ended and I still had the wife, but now I had three kids. Staying in seemed like a much better idea. And by the time that enlistment ended, I had been in the military twelve years - over halfway to retirement.

The military pays the troops less than they would get doing the same job in the civilian world. If it hadn't been for the benefits, there isn't a chance in hell that I would have stayed in, and my attitude wasn't unique. It's almost universal among the enlisted members. (There are some rare exceptions, of course, and officers may be a different story - they're paid significantly more money than the grunts.) If you cut the benefits, your all-volunteer military is going to collapse.

So, what the hell is going on here?

Republicans and Democrats alike are signaling a willingness — unheard of at the height of two post-Sept. 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — to make military retirees pay more for coverage. It's a reflection of Washington's newfound embrace of fiscal austerity and the Pentagon's push to cut health care costs that have skyrocketed from $19 billion in 2001 to $53 billion.

The numbers are daunting for a military focused on building and arming an all-volunteer force for war. The Pentagon is providing health care coverage for 3.3 million active duty personnel and their dependents and 5.5 million retirees, eligible dependents and surviving spouses. Retirees outnumber the active duty, 2.3 million to 1.4 million.

And some changes are already happening.

We pay a little more to get the Trophy Wife's prescriptions from Walgreens. They'd be free if I got them from the base hospital, but my wife works with Opera Unlimited, travelling across New Mexico to help music programs in elementary schools. If she is 500 miles away, and runs out of, say, Zetia (a heart medication) or Losartin/HCTZ (for blood pressure), Walgreens will get her an emergency supply to hold her over until she gets back to Albuquerque: their database clearly shows what she's taking and how often, and every Walgreens in the country can pull that information up.

But that's apparently going to change in January, because Walgreens and Express Scripts are locked in a contract dispute which may prevent Walgreens from handling prescriptions for Tricare, the Defense Department plan managed by Express Scripts.

But that's just an inconvenience. Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, we're getting more injured veterans pouring into the system than we have since Vietnam. And despite the challenges of readjusting to civilian life, they haven't been getting the help they need for years.

Plus, thanks to advances in both military and medical technology, more soldiers are surviving worse wounds than ever before. So, not only do they need more medical care, but their needs are only going to get worse as they get older.

The Pentagon estimates that as many as one in five soldiers are coming home from war zones with traumatic brain injuries, and current studies show that studies show that even a slight trauma to the brain doubles your chance of developing dementia later in life, meaning that many will need around-the-clock care.

Assuming that they can get any help at all.

Marine Cpl. James Dixon was wounded twice in Iraq -- by a roadside bomb and a land mine. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, a concussion, a dislocated hip and hearing loss. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Army Sgt. Lori Meshell shattered a hip and crushed her back and knees while diving for cover during a mortar attack in Iraq. She has undergone a hip replacement and knee reconstruction and needs at least three more surgeries.

In each case, the Pentagon ruled that their disabilities were not combat-related.

In a little-noticed regulation change in March, the military's definition of combat-related disabilities was narrowed, costing some injured veterans thousands of dollars in lost benefits -- and triggering outrage from veterans' advocacy groups.

But we have to cut expenses, right? We have to decrease spending somewhere, and defense spending is one of the larger chunks of the federal budget.

Well, funny you should mention that.

The 2012 military budget includes 134 billion dollars for equipment, but also includes almost 81 billion dollars in research for new weapons systems. You know, I think we kill people well enough already; ask the Iraqi people. (You know, the ones who are left...)

But how much good is that 81 billion dollars doing us, anyway?

Despite improvements, more than half of the Pentagon’s big weapons systems still cost more than they should, with management failures adding at least $70 billion to the projected costs over the last two years, government auditors said Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog, said the biggest program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, accounted for $28 billion of that increase. Other systems also had significant cost overruns, the agency said, adding that the increases could force the Pentagon to cut the number of ships and planes it buys.

The auditors said many of the problems occurred because the Pentagon began building the systems before the designs were fully tested.

In August of this year, Congress finished a comprehensive look at spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In its final report to Congress, the Commission on Wartime Contracting said the figure could grow as U.S. support for reconstruction projects and programs wanes, leaving both countries to bear the long-term costs of sustaining the schools, medical clinics, barracks, roads and power plants already built with American tax dollars.

Much of the waste and fraud could have been avoided with better planning and more aggressive oversight, the commission said. To avoid repeating the mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan, government agencies should overhaul the way they award and manage contracts in war zones, the commission recommended.
[...]
The commission said calculating the exact amount lost through waste and fraud is difficult because there is no commonly accepted methodology for doing so. But using information it has gathered over the past three years, the commission said at least $31 billion has been lost and the total could be as high as $60 billion. The commission called the estimate "conservative."

But that's OK. That's only the money we've lost in foreign countries.

How often does the Pentagon award contracts to defense companies that have already been proven to be defrauding taxpayers? A report the Department of Defense did at the request of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) reveals an answer that should make Washington very uncomfortable.

The report, released today, showed that hundreds of defense contractors found guilty of civil fraud received more than $1.1 trillion in defense contracts since 2001. The study took into account only companies that were found to have defrauded taxpayers of more than $1 million dollars.

More than $573 billion went directly to companies that were guilty of defrauding taxpayers, and when you factor in the awards that went to the parent companies of those contractors, the total is $1.1 trillion. Of that $573 billion, more than two-thirds—$398 billion—went to companies after they had been found guilty of fraud.

So maybe there's a few places out there where we can save money.

But as to the veterans, it's simple morality.

We have an all-volunteer military, but it goes both ways. When they sign on, they put, not just their lives, but their bodies, in harm's way. And if these brave men and women get hurt fighting for their country, we have an obligation to take care of them. For the rest of their lives, if necessary.

If you don't want to pay for wounded veterans, there's only one answer: stop making them. Stop sending soldiers to distant countries, where they risk their lives for some political agenda.

You don't get a choice on this. If you're going to play, you've got to pay; if you don't like it, get out of the game.

Staying on my coworker's good side

2011-10-19T21:45:00.003-06:00

So, I'm sitting at work, and Jan, one of the women in our department, reads one of her emails and groans. Just to make conversation, I ask what's up, and she tells me "I'm mad at my husband now."

He'd just sent her one of those idiot jokes that make the email rounds. She wouldn't read it out loud, but was willing to forward it.

Renault and Ford have joined forces to create the perfect small car for women.

Mixing the Renault 'Clio' and the Ford 'Taurus' they have designed the 'Clitaurus'. It comes in pink, and the average male car thief won't be able to find it — let alone turn it on – even if someone tells him where it is and how to do it.

Rumor has it though, that it leaks transmission fluid once a month and can be a real bitch to start in the morning!

New models are initially fun to own, but very expensive to maintain and horribly expensive to get rid of. Used models may initially have curb appeal (low price) but eventually have an increased appetite for fuel and the curb weight typically increases with age.

Not expected to reach collector status… best to lease one and replace each year.

Working in an office full of women, I'm in touch with my feminine side. (Sometimes I touch it inappropriately.) So I made some modifications and sent it back.

(It actually took me two tries - my initial efforts turned to be a little more pornographic than I felt comfortable emailing...)

She cheerfully forwarded it to her husband.

Renault and Ford have joined forces to create the perfect small car for women.

Mixing the Renault 'Clio' and the Ford 'Taurus' they have designed the 'Clitaurus'. It comes in pink, and the average male car thief won't be able to find it — let alone turn it on – even if someone tells him where it is. Usually, this is because his key is too small.

One groundbreaking piece of technology in this model is the Driver Interlock Vehicle Option Response Control Evaluator (DIVORCE), which integrates GPS, social media, and technology similar to the Alcohol Interlock, allowing the vehicle to assess the capabilities of the driver, and if he is, in fact, unable to handle the vehicle properly, it will prevent him from getting behind the wheel, and will even leave him to find a better driver.

A little good news

2011-10-16T16:15:00.003-06:00

We got the news today from an Associated Press report that the Pentagon has decided not to keep troops in Iraq after a New Year's Eve deadline. All troops will be removed except for 160 soldiers left to guard the US embassy in Baghdad.

Now, there are some people who aren't going to trust this. "Obama promises a lot. We've heard this before."

Well, technically, what we heard before was a troop reduction, not a complete pullout. And Obama lived up to that.

But some people, ignoring the evidence, have always refused to believe that Obama is acting in good faith in Iraq, and I suspect that they will continue to ignore reality.

Well, I don't know if this will help, but here's a little reality for you.

When I was in Iraq (in the first relief group, replacing the actual invasion forces), the Army had taken over Al-Faw palace, one of the last of Saddam's overly ornate structures left standing.

The Army named it and the area around it Camp Victory. It became the HQ for the US Army, and was referred to by the Army as the Victory Base Complex, also encompassing Camp Liberty, Camp Striker, our Air Force unit in Camp Sather, and a number of other encampments from all branches of the military, and even forces from other countries - we had a British unit right next door, for example.

And how do you know that the military is actually going to pull out by January?

They have closed the main PX in Camp Victory.

You can trust in one thing over all others. You have a buttload of generals in one place, you're going to have someplace for them to stock up on clean underwear, chocolate and cigarettes. And the little black-market supply of Jack Daniels and porn coming in aboard the military aircraft isn't going to be able to expand enough to keep them supplied with all the amenities available. (There are other ways to keep supplied with contraband, but I bought mine straight from the aircrews, and I wasn't in charge of anything...)

They can't shop in Baghdad (OK, they could, but there's rules to keep the military out of town, because of those pesky bullets that keep flying toward them), and they don't want to go all the way to the Green Zone after a long day at the office.

An argument can be made about the lower-ranking troops needing some place to get razors and shampoo, but in the end, the needs of the brass override anything else.

Victoria Falls

2011-10-15T12:18:00.003-06:00

I think I'm starting to figure something out.

I’m coming to realize that Victoria Jackson is either a whip-smart satirist in the style of Steven Colbert, or she is so criminally, bone-chillingly vapid and clueless that it’s miraculous that she can navigate her way out of bed in the morning.

I never thought that she was even slightly humorous when she was on SNL: she was, in fact, one of the stupidest members of a particularly unfunny era for the Not Ready for Primetime Players (the only true bright spots being A. Whitney Brown and the early Dennis Miller – as opposed to the current, self-important, pandering Dennis Miller).

But now I think I understand. I suspect she’s actually a world-class performance artist, who’s been pulling off this ditzy blond act for almost thirty years now. Not because she is, herself, a vacuous, inane bundle of stupid wrapped in a little-girl voice, but as a potent weapon to skewer the ignorant and ego-driven. She has been making fun of various groups of unthinking zombies for decades, and has been doing it with such a straight face that nobody has caught on.

In her early career, I think she was concentrating on the female airhead: the woman willing to suppress her own personality and her own needs to fall in line with the 1950's cheerleader/Playboy image, where youth is prized and women have limited options. But she took that image to an extreme, and used as her archetype not the post-pubescent, sexually-charged girl, but the prepubescent, playful child: her original act consisted of reciting bad poetry while doing clumsy handstands and somersaults, while "accidentally" revealing her white cotton children's panties.

She stuck with that parody for most of her career, but now, perhaps noting that she's grown a little too old to pull off her infantile act any more, she's recast herself into a bad stereotype of a Teabagger. She mouths irrational philosophies, and tunes out any application of logic that might refute her poorly-conceived arguments.

That's the only explanation that I can come up with, to explain why Victoria Jackson proudly posted this video. She takes a cab into New York to meet up with members of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, and although she shows a couple of people just out to have a good time, and one extremist toward the end (essentially correct, but still an extremist), she spends most of the video talking to one man, who calmly and patiently destroys every argument she makes.

Her response? To repeat those same arguments, as if their bloodied shreds weren't piled around her feet. She completely ignores everything said by this quiet, good-tempered person, and goes back to her original, idiotic allegations, completely ignoring the past 15 minutes of her life.

And then she posts it on Youtube, as if it was a victory for her side of the debate. She even seems proud of it.

She can't possibly be that eyeball-meltingly ignorant. This has to be an act. A satirical persona that she uses to lampoon the Teabaggers. No person who can manage to navigate a fork into their mouth without impaling themselves in the forehead can be this galactically obtuse, can they?

Is the GOP Abel to raise Cain?

2011-10-10T22:41:00.006-06:00

Herman Cain's attempt to position himself as an "outsider" is a key plank of his presidential campaign: unlike the rest of them, he wants you to know that he is not a professional polician, and that's part of why he should be elected.

Perhaps that's the entire problem. Maybe his inexperience is the reason for the abject stupidity of his ideas, and has nothing to do with him being a brainless twatwaffle.

On the other hand, maybe it's both.

One of Hermie's earliest ideas, that as president, he would never sign a bill longer than three pages, was widely derided by anyone who understood that there are, in fact, complex problems that might take a little longer merely to explain, much less fix.

Hermie's response? He explained that anybody who actually listened to him or took him at his word was stupid.

Some of these idiotic reporters thought I was serious. The joke’s on them. The message was short bills. Understandable bills. No it’s not literally going to be three pages. The executive summary will be three pages.

Of course, reporters aren't the only stupid people in Cain's tiny little world - basically anybody who questions him must automatically be stupid, right? In his latest book, This is Herman Cain, Hermie explained how Ron Paul's stupid followers were conducting a systematic conspiracy to make him look bad.

"I get the same stupid question at almost every one of these events," Cain writes. "I know it’s a deliberate strategy. How can a person randomly show up at a hundred events and ask the same stupid question to try to nail me on the Federal Reserve?"

(Apparently, Hermie isn't used to people with more than 5 followers.)

Actually, "stupid" is his favorite word. He loves to describe people that way: he gave a whole speech at CPAC around the theme that stupid people are ruining America. Which is odd. Because, despite having risen from a humble beginning to CEO of a crappy pizza chain, Herman Cain just doesn't come across as the brightest motherfucker on the planet.

Admittedly, his business model didn't take a genius to develop: pay people eight dollars an hour to deliver pizzas that cost less than a dollar to make, and charge twelve to eighteen dollars apiece for them. It's not like it's an original idea or anything. Hermie just put one interesting spin on the idea: if you use cheaper ingredients, they cost less. But then, instead of improving on the pizza, you give it an exciting, all-crime ad campaign. (As in, "I'm stealing from you by charging you money for this crappy pizza.")

Cain is more than willing to spew the most ignorant talking points with great authority, and totally without shame. It's not just that you're stupid if you disagree with him, you're lazy if you don't have a job. Oh, and by the way, this whole "Occupy Wall Street" movement? In Hermie's world, that's not just lazy people (OK, that's mostly what it is), that's lazy people being manipulated by the White House.

Because conspiracy theories go across real well with the modern Republican party.

Cain can't even get his birther talking points right:

"Barack Obama is more of an international," Cain said. "I think he’s out of the mainstream and always has been. Look, he was raised in Kenya..."

(Look, moron, Obama lived in Indonesia, and only for four years - ages six to ten. Were all your ideas set in stone when you were in second grade?)

He can't even spew the standard GOP rhetoric correctly. In the middle of accusing the left of being (once again) stupid, this time for not reading the Constitution, he tries to make his point by quoting... wait for it... the Declaration of Independence.

"...when you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don’t stop reading! Keep reading!"

Gonna be reading a long time there, big fella.

And his current big campaign promise is the 9-9-9 tax plan (9% income tax, 9% business tax, 9% sales tax). A plan which is basically hated by everybody, Democrat or Republican, except Herman Cain.

Bruce Bartlett, an adviser in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, says that 9-9-9 is unfair to working taxpayers. "It's the most upside-down tax plan that’s been put forward to tax the poor and the middle class," he says...

Daniel Shaviro, a New York University law professor who specializes in taxation, calls the plan "not viable." For rich people—defined as those who work for themselves and don’t have to take a salary—it essentially becomes an 18 percent total tax on all money. But for poor people collecting a paycheck, Shaviro says, it amounts to a 27 percent tax.

This plan was developed, not by an economist, but an investment banker with ties to the Koch brothers (unless it was stolen from SimCity). And basically, the rich get taxed less, the poor and middle class get taxed more, and the government gets less money.

This is the kind of "leadership" we can expect from Herman Cain? It doesn't take a lot of logic to rip his ideas to shreds.

If he does, by some miracle, win the primaries, Herman Cain may actually make history, though. He will be the first black man to get another black man reelected.

Missed

2011-10-10T08:14:00.003-06:00

From PvPOnline:

Three idiots, balanced by a genius.

2011-10-07T17:31:00.007-06:00

Mitt Romney is going to speak before the Values Voters Summit, which is another gathering of God-botherers that happens every year, this one put on by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and other evangelical groups.

Now, Bryan Fischer (of the American Family Association) said just last month that the First Amendment doesn't apply to Mormons. So the New York Times asked the Romney's people to comment on that, but the campaign didn't reply.

Why is anyone surprised about that? It's Romney's people! How could they reply? They don't have the right!

Ought to be a short speech, though.

But this move of Romney's is only... interesting (you know - the polite way to say "pandering"). Other people are just outright stupid.

On ABC’s Top Line today, Rep. Paul Broun, a tea party Republican from Georgia, said the ("Occupy Wall Street") protests amount to an “attack upon freedom” — one that he said is now being hijacked by labor unions in attempt to reelect President Obama.

“They don’t know why they’re there. They’re just mad,” Broun told us. “This attack upon business, attack upon industry, attack upon freedom – and I think that’s what this is all about.”

“Attack upon freedom”? Exercising your right to peaceful assembly is now an “attack upon freedom”?

Congressman, please define what you consider “freedom.” And for that matter, define “attack.”

Especially ironic that, having gotten everything bass-ackwards like that, he went on to say that the president’s policies were “ignorant and incompetent”...

Meanwhile, Eric Cantor tried to whip up anger against those same protesters that broke Rep. Broun's brain.

"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country," he said.

And then, completely straight-faced, he found the perfect follow-up comment.

"Believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans."

You mean, like trying to pit Americans against working-class Americans who might be protesting economic injustice?

But, just because there are useless policians out there, that doesn't mean we have to pay attention to them all time, does it?

Instead, join me in wishing a happy birthday, on this late hour of October 7, to the brilliant Tim Minchin.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~~ Aesop.

2011-10-02T14:03:00.017-06:00

Well, Chris Christie announced that he would not run for president, probably because he didn't want to spend a year taking hits from the right (saying he was a leftist elitist, and probably a closet Muslim), and the left (pointing out things like the fact that he was a known bully who, when he was working as a lobbyist for Bernie Madoff, got securities fraud exempted from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act).

And, really, who wants to hear the phrase "morbidly obese" every day?

Sarah Palin, seeing someone else in the limelight, tried to upstage him, saying that she wasn't running either, but since only a handful of drooling nose-pickers still thought she might, she didn't garner nearly as much press as she felt she deserved. So, what does that leave us?

I have never seen a more stubbornly ignorant collection of elitist, pandering fuckknuckles than the current crop of GOP candidates; they’re a glittering panoply of thieves, liars, theocrats and delusional morons.

I mean, let’s take a quick look at these mean-spirited, misanthropic gasbags who believe, somewhere at the root of their overwhelmingly swollen egos, that they could lead this country to greatness by following the noble example of George W. Bush.

And, to be fair about it (because I’m the epitome of fairness, after all), let’s go alphabetically.

Michele Bachmann: This is a woman who is either certifiably insane, or she is openly trying to attract the paranoid constituency to her state, because she believes that there are enough of them to elect her to office.

(Technically, this idea isn't quite as idiotic as it sounds: after all, there are enough mouthbreathers in Minnesota’s 6th congressional district to get her reelected twice. This could, of course, easily be attributed to a genetic aberration. Minnesota's winters are hard; and sometimes you just can't get to town for your twenty-dollar whore, but your sister is right there in the next room.)

Her torch has dimmed a bit, because she has been saying openly ignorant and insane things for far too long. The American populace is beginning to notice that it isn’t a playful glint in her eyes, but the cold hard gleam of madness.

Herman Cain: You can’t say that Herman Cain is a complete idiot, but he is somewhat deluded about his personal magnetism. An idiot couldn't have come from the streets of Memphis, Tennessee (the son of a chauffeur and a cleaning woman) and become the CEO of a national pizza chain, with a personal net worth just south of five million dollars. So I'll cheerfully admit that the man has business acumen.

Americans have a tendency to canonize self-made millionaires, but this odd strain of hero-worship doesn't extend quite far enough to push Herman Cain into the White House. Cain has failed to notice the deep-seated racism in certain parts of the Republican Party, which makes him an unlikely choice to become Commander-in-Chief. There are too many members of the GOP who just cannot force themselves to vote for a black man, even if they’re offered a free order of Cheesy Bread to go with it.

I would suggest that Cain suffered brain damage from a very small stroke, which is not only manifesting as this gaping blind spot, but in the form of some significant tone-deafness. The man actually went on CNN’s The Situation Room and said:

Many African American voters “have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view... I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. It’s just brainwashing and people not being open-minded, pure and simple.”

“Hey, black people! You’re gullible and easily led! So vote for me!”

That’s why Hermie is trying to push the “Rick Perry hates black people!” meme. He’s got nothing else. He’s a one-trick pony, just like Michael Steele: “Look at me! I’m a black republican!” (You know, Herm, Steele got fired for being too black... it’s an ugly road you’re travelling, dude. Good luck with that.)

Newt Gingrich: Good old Newtie. Why does this man think he can be elected? (Oh, right. He thinks he’s the center of the stinking universe. Don't mess with Gingrich: he shut down the entire government once because they asked him to move to the back of Air Force One.)

The man's entire campaign staff deserted this sinking ship - you'd think he'd take the hint. (Hell, half of Bachmann's ran away, too, but you expect her not to notice...)

I’ve dealt with this fucker before. Do I need to bother with him again?

Jon Huntsman: Huntsman is quite possibly the most sane of all the possible Republican candidates. Which makes him the odds-on favorite to be unemployed on January 21, 2013: for the same reason that a few scattered racists make Herman Cain less electable, Huntsman is going to have a problem with the Republican base. They can't accept those pesky sciencey things like global warming and evolution, and the fact that he does? Well, that just makes him a little suspicious, doesn't it?

Of course, as it turns out, Huntsman's status as the only candidate who isn’t actively trying to get his head wedged up Donald Trump’s ass might actually turn out to be a better idea than you’d think: it seems that Trump's endorsement actually harms a politician in the polls.

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson: (Felt I should throw the his former job in there for two reasons. First, even if you’d ever heard of the man, it’s likely that you’ve forgotten. And two, I live in that particular state.)

The thing that's most likely to sink him is going to be that pro-gay marriage/pro-abortion stance of his. Johnson and Ron Paul will split the legalize-marijuana crowd (or possibly just pass them back and forth), but Johnson’s plan to "reform" (read "gut") Social Security and repeal healthcare reform will keep him from attracting too many independent voters who might be attracted to his vaguely human qualities.

Ron Paul: I’d say he’s huge, but, to be honest, he’s tiny. Apparently 5’9” tall (and potentially bulletproof). Most of the world admits that the man is unelectable, but Ron Paul isn't the kind of guy to back down from a challenge!

We call that a "Napoleon complex."

His biggest (heh) problem is that his followers are rabid, but there really aren't enough of them to get him into a higher office than the one he currently possesses. (Which is sad, because he might actually get my son out of Afghanistan, but there it is...)

Ron Paul seems to be a smart man - one of the few signs that there might actually be a glimmer of intelligence that hasn’t been extinguished in the Lone Star state. Which isn’t to say that he wouldn’t totally destroy the economy with his libertarian idiocy: I’m just trying to be objective, here.

Because that's me: fair, balanced, unbiased.

Rick Perry: Little Ricky is a crazed redneck weasel on meth; he's George W. Bush to the fourth power. The gleam of insanity deep in his eyes doesn't seem as bright as Bachmann's, but that's only because it gets dimmed by the clouds of abject stupidity swirling around in that great hollow area.

There is nothing good about Rick Perry - the more you learn about him, the less you like. He's a vicious theocrat with a tendency toward cronyism

And potentially a sex addict.

Mitt Romney: I've got to say, Mittens is nothing if not predictable. The man is whatever you want him to be. What is electable tomorrow? Vegetation? Then he's a cucumber. Porn stars? He'll rock that Viagra until it screams. He is what you want. No matter what you want.

No, really, it doesn't matter what you want. He doesn't care. Do you want a pro-choice pedophile? He'll yank the fetus out with his bare hands and start fucking it right in front of the camera if he thinks that'll play well in Hoboken.

Mittens literally doesn't care. He has no position that doesn't have a 20-page report from a focus group telling him that people like it. If White Supremacy began testing well with target audiences, he'd grab his pillowcases and start cutting eye-holes before the test results were out of the printer.

Mittens doesn't care that Mormonism is considered a cult by many of the Christian groups. Hell, if the focus groups tell him that Catholicism is on the rise, he'll be sucking off the pope by morning.

Rick "Frothy" Santorum: (speaking of sucking off the pope) It's hard to tell which is the bigger train wreck: Rick Santorum's campaign, or the simpering, shambling shell of a man himself. As one Salon editor put it, he is "the only one of the candidates to participate in all of the GOP debates and still not show any life. He’s at 2 percent in the ABC/Washington Post survey, almost exactly where he was last month and the month before that."

All Obama has to do between now and the election is improve his unemployment statistics, and he won’t even need to campaign. That’s why the congressional GOP is doing everything they can to kick the snot out of the American Jobs Plan.

The president needs to put away his “Let’s Compromise” checklist, and pick up the “You’re Destroying America” stick. Because the only way he’s not going to keep his job, is if the Republican Party can keep more people from getting one.

To the Wayback Machine!

2011-10-02T12:29:00.003-06:00

Maybe this is how we should teach history.

Today's recommendation

2011-09-25T14:20:00.003-06:00

Go here. Read this guy (it's completely apolitical, for a change).

You'll thank me.

Cooking Comically

A quick thought on economics

2011-09-23T06:21:00.002-06:00

Conservatives keep trying to claim that we can't increase taxes on rich people, because Obama shouldn't tax "job creators."

Can we have a moratorium on the use of the term "job creators" for rich people? Because, at the moment, they are verifiably not creating any fucking jobs. That's like calling somebody a "stamp collector" when they don't buy, sell, or keep any stamps. It's just stupid.

In fact, I'll go one step further. I'll support a tax cut for anybody who creates new jobs, in America, which are held by American citizens. Now, this has to be a net jobs increase - if you fire fifty thousand people, and then hire forty thousand, you don't get congratulated for creating forty thousand jobs - you get yelled at for losing ten thousand.

(Also, any jobs you ship overseas? Yeah, that counts as a job loss.)

And by the way, that whole idea that "lower taxes equal more jobs"? It's stupid. Reagan experienced job growth while he was in office. But only after he raised taxes. Three times.

So, can we have a little honesty up in this bitch? For once?

Guess who's back?

2011-09-22T00:13:00.010-06:00

Well, Eric crawled out of his hole again. (Slightly updated Dungeon entry here.) Last time he came back, the reason was relatively easy to figure out.

Not quite as easy this time. I'm guessing that the fact that his Teabagger governor is appearing to be a latter day Boss Tweed is a problem. (And the probe is widening...)

It's sad when your heart breaks like that, isn't it, Eric?

(Ah, sweet, sweet boxed wine. Please, save me from a total dick...)

His latest trick is posting the same message ten or twenty times; he's apparently not smart enough to have noticed the Select All button on the Comments page.

Anyway, he doesn't seem like the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I'm not clear why he thinks I would pay attention to him. Not quick enough to understand the concept of delete all, anyway.

On the other hand, his last comment was short enough that I actually read it. He seems to object to the use of the word "Teabagger."

Huh. Imagine that. I really can't imagine where we might have gotten the idea that they gave themselves that name.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He also seems to be delighted by the fact that my son, at one point, said that I can be an asshole. (Well, it's true. I can.) But that's the kind of relationship I have with my son. We're friends, we insult each other, we make sophomoric jokes.

Whereas Eric's son is probably just the target of his drunken rage. Poor little bastard - that's a gene pool he's never going to recover from.

So, now, I'm in for a few more weeks of "Yup, ten comments, all from Eric."

* Select all *

* Delete *

That's how things are going around here: inbred psychopaths ranting incoherently from 1300 miles away. Comments you'll never have to see.

About DADT Damned Time

2011-09-20T19:30:00.003-06:00

Well, now he's gone and done it. Obama's just lost the vote of the Religious Right.

(Yeah, I make myself laugh sometimes...)

Starting at midnight Tuesday, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been officially repealed, and homosexuals can now serve openly in the military. We were the last industrialized nation that didn't allow gays to serve openly, until just last night.

I'd like to make a prediction. Approximately one year from today, civilization will not crumble, and the military will be just as good as it is now.

Better, even. The gays in the military (and I knew several) won't have to hide it, won't have to keep lying about what they are (here are some of their stories now). Kevin and Kim's daughter Cat can dance openly in the Officer's Club with her girlfriend. And maybe, for the first time since we went into Iraq, we'll be able to keep some Arabic translators, instead of paying civilian contracting companies millions of dollars every year.

Funny thing about DADT: it was implemented in 1993 as a compromise measure, when Congress (to prevent Clinton from doing what Obama just did) added a requirement to the National Defense Authorization Act which forced commanders to enforce homophobic regulations which stated that homosexuality was incompatible with military service.

At the time, Republicans and other homophobes hated DADT. Odd how they switched to defending it in recent years, huh?

(It's harder to find a copy of that video that you can embed than you'd think...)

I'm going to let my president have the last words here.

Today, the discriminatory law known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is finally and formally repealed. As of today, patriotic Americans in uniform will no longer have to lie about who they are in order to serve the country they love. As of today, our armed forces will no longer lose the extraordinary skills and combat experience of so many gay and lesbian service members. And today, as Commander in Chief, I want those who were discharged under this law to know that your country deeply values your service.

I was proud to sign the Repeal Act into law last December because I knew that it would enhance our national security, increase our military readiness, and bring us closer to the principles of equality and fairness that define us as Americans. Today’s achievement is a tribute to all the patriots who fought and marched for change; to Members of Congress, from both parties, who voted for repeal; to our civilian and military leaders who ensured a smooth transition; and to the professionalism of our men and women in uniform who showed that they were ready to move forward together, as one team, to meet the missions we ask of them.

For more than two centuries, we have worked to extend America’s promise to all our citizens. Our armed forces have been both a mirror and a catalyst of that progress, and our troops, including gays and lesbians, have given their lives to defend the freedoms and liberties that we cherish as Americans. Today, every American can be proud that we have taken another great step toward keeping our military the finest in the world and toward fulfilling our nation’s founding ideals.

An open letter to the ad people for Opera Southwest.

2011-09-18T13:27:00.008-06:00

OK, I'm not in advertising, and so I have no evidence to support this. But when you're selecting a picture to advertise your productions, it seems to me that, unless that's actually the effect you're trying to get, you don't necessarily want to use a picture that makes a beautiful woman look like a drag queen.

This is just a theory, and I will freely admit that I could be wrong.

Thank you for your time.

Skinny genes?

2011-09-17T14:30:00.011-06:00

In a move sure to enrage Teabaggers everywhere, Blue Cross of California has just been ordered by an appeals court to pay for treatment of anorexia, adding yet another disease to the list of ailments that health insurers have to pay for. (It's shocking - shocking, I tell you! Why should health insurance companies be expected to spend money making people healthy?)

Anorexia is actually not given the respect it deserves, probably because fat people are already ridiculed, and anorexia is thought of as just an extreme extension of somebody trying to get thin. But, really, since studies show that 1 in 5 women (.doc file) suffer from some form of eating disorder, which have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness (the death rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for girls 15-24 years old), perhaps more attention should be paid to it. (More fun facts here.)

After all, it was just last November that Isabelle Caro died, after becoming famous as the face of an Italian ad campaign for fashion label Nolita trying to combat anorexia. She died at age 28, at 5'4" and around 60 pounds.

The problem, of course, is the modern fixation on body image. A normal, healthy body is never skinny enough; more than just fat-shaming, people are constantly mocked for every point of Body Mass Index. This is not to say that we don't have an obesity issue in America; but we have a body-image issue that dwarfs it.

Nobody, for example, would accuse actress and comedienne Aisha Tyler (right) of being overweight. But try to get one of her pictures into a magazine, and a horde of airbrush-wielding Photoshop geeks go to work.

(That last image stolen from here, if you're curious)

And they're proud of it. As one editor put it, without a trace of irony:

"Yes, of course we do post-production corrections on our images," SELF editor in chief Lucy Danziger told "Entertainment Tonight." "Kelly Clarkson exudes confidence, and is a great role model for women of all sizes and stages of their life. She works out and is strong and healthy, and our picture shows her confidence and beauty. She literally glows from within..."

That same story goes on to quote one of many experts who are seeing the dangers of this practice.

"The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes. They're creating things that are physically impossible," said Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College professor of computer science who specializes in digital forensics and photo manipulation. "We're seeing really radical digital plastic surgery. It's moving towards the Barbie doll model of what a woman should look like -- big breasts, tiny waist, ridiculously long legs, elongated neck."

Perhaps the problem is that health and fashion magazines are in an unhealthy universe of their own. But if they're the problem, somebody needs to find a solution.

Cheerleading for a past that never existed

2011-09-15T17:40:00.005-06:00

Have I mentioned that RenewAmerica is an unfettered font of feculence? Well, it's true. They don't allow comments on their articles, probably because the sheer weight of the ignorance, stupidity and paranoia expands to fill all available space.

(In the case of some of these columnists, they occasionally reprint their drivel elsewhere, where they do allow comments. But not all of them.)

Case in point: Selwyn Duke. I guess he thinks he looks intelligent, gazing off into the distance (in this case, the distant past) stroking his chin; I think he's contemplating adding more fiber in his diet. But he, for some reason, spewed several hundred words extolling the virtues of this commercial for the "Gung Ho Commando Outfit."

Every toy gun in the commercial looks (gasp!) realistic; there are no sissified colors, no orange plastic piece at the end of the barrel."

(Let's just pretend that the commercial isn't in black and white, OK? That seems like the polite thing to do.)

Yet, in the times that it aired, you never heard of a child being shot after pointing one of these toy weapons at a policeman.

I suppose that, if I was to be completely honest, I have no evidence that his cognitive impairment has a genetic source. After all, one can only imagine the psychological damage caused by a lifetime spent with the name "Selwyn."

My mother always told me not to argue with the mentally challenged, but when did I ever listen to her? And these stories aren't particularly difficult to find.

5-year-old with toy gun killed by officer

(March 5, 1983) A 5-year-old boy locked in his bedroom while his mother was at work was shot to death Thursday night by an Orange County police officer who mistook him for a possible burglary suspect.

The boy, Patrick Andrew Mason, who stood 47 inches tall, was holding a toy gun in his dimly lit bedroom when the officer kicked in the locked door after twice yelling he was a police officer, witnesses said.

The 24-year-old unidentified officer - on the Stanton Police Department 15 months - told investigators he fired his weapon when he saw a "shadowy figure holding a gun" in the room lit only by the flickering light from a television set.

And that's another reason the rule was enacted. Frequently, a cop isn't seeing "a kid with a toy gun," but a "shadowy figure holding a gun." He doesn't have time to assess age, height, weight, or fucking eye color. He's faced with a person holding a gun.

All that, despite Selwyn's assertion that "As for policemen, they could assume that a child wouldn't target them with a real gun." Which is stupid on a number of levels - as a kid, we had a set of brothers living down the street; one of them shot and killed the other, because they were playing with Daddy's gun.

The story I found, by the way, was not, technically, the 1970s (although arguments can be made), when Selwyn claimed he was a boy. But since the rule that toy guns be brightly colored or have an orange plug wasn't enacted until 1992, I'm pretty comfortable with saying he's an idiot.

2011-09-11T17:13:00.008-06:00

My son didn't think I was very funny while we were running errands today. I kept wishing the cashiers "Have a happy 9/11!"

(OK, he laughed the first time, too.)

You know, it's funny. People say "Well, you'll always remember where you were on 9/11. Yeah, not really. I was still in the Air Force at that point, working missile field security.

F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming has about 200 missile sites attached to it, and I was stationed there.

I came in from the missile field that morning, having spend the previous 12 hours guarding our nuclear weapons from terrorists. So, when my wife woke me up to show me what was going on in New York with horror on her face, my response was "Oh, crap. Well, I'd better get some more sleep, because this is about all I'm going to get."

And it was true. A few hours after that, I was woken up again, to come get my gun and hang out until the guys at the top figured out where everybody needed to be. So, in uniform and unshaven, I sat against a wall and napped until they came and got me again, and I was stationed upstairs in the squadron building, manning phones in an office where the phones never rang, mostly falling asleep until the door opened and the books (which I'd cunningly placed to get knocked off if the door opened) hit the floor.

So, really, I can tell you where I was on 9/11, but I don't have a lot of clear memories on the subject.

Personally, I have to agree with the Buzzflash editor, who points out that "It's Long Past Time to Get Over 9-11." Because I'm well past it.

I ended up in Iraq because of that whole thing - maybe I have the wrong attitude.

(And yes, I know that none of the people involved in 9/11 had anything to do with Iraq. But that was how Bush sold it, so that is, in essence, why I was there. Over at Consortium News, one writer asked where we might be if there had been a reasonable reaction to 9/11. But that's "what if," not "what was.")

Paul Krugman made an important point on the subject:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. (The) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

But in the end, how do we react to the events of 9/11?

Well, some people try to make a buck off of it.

A year after the fact, Salon.com examined how people were selling out to the 9/11 demon. But it's gotten so much worse. The Village Voice recently looked at some people who've been able to cash in on the tragedy.

Most news media seem dedicated to crappy memorials to their own picture library. Some work better than others.

Regretsy.com, which spends it's time making fun of people pretending that they have artistic talent through arts and crafts, examines some of the worst attempts to cash in on 9/11. Often in handmade form.

Herman "Hey, I'm a Black Republican" Cain felt he needed to pander a lot, and committed one of the worst examples of mindless meme-stroking ever put into digital form.

(And, you know, since I'm reposting his video, apparently it's effective. I'm told that most progressives can't make it past the 30-second mark. I made it almost a minute. So you know.)

But, then, what's the worst, most cold-bloodedest (yes, it's a word) piece of 9/11 merchandising? Well, my vote would be on this.

It's true

2011-09-11T13:52:00.002-06:00

I can be a dick sometimes.

And yes, that's what I'm using as my FB icon these days. You got a problem with that?

Want to eat? Pee in this, please.

2011-09-10T12:46:00.012-06:00

As either of my long-time readers could tell you, I have held for quite some time that South Carolina just sucks. And they keep on trying to prove it.

Latest idiocy: Governor Nikki Haley (R-Obviously) wants to drug test people who get unemployment benefits.

In her words (and channeling her inner teenage cheerleader), "I so want drug testing. I so want it."

But, being a Republican, if the facts don't match the "common wisdom," she's more than happy to make shit up.

"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn't read and write properly," Haley said.

Fortunately, the Huffington Post reporter did that thing we used to call "journalism" and asked somebody if she was right.

Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.

"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."

The River Site doesn't even test applicants. "We only test them when they have been accepted," Giusti said.

I'll give Haley a little bit of credit, though. She got the one thing right.

"That's what we have in South Carolina," she continued. "We don't have an unemployment problem. We have an education and poverty problem."

The rest is crap, but she's finally figured out one of the chief causes of unemployment. I mean, it's a shame that she couldn't have figured it out a couple of months ago, when she tried to slash education funding for the state so badly that the state Legislature, Democrat and Republican, overturned most of her budget and overrode her attempts to veto. But at least she knows it now, right?

Of course, Teabaggers don't care about facts; they care about ideology. Governor Rick Scott of Florida instituted a drug testing policy for unemployment, which didn't do the state a lick of good.

The law, which took effect July 1, requires applicants to pay for their own drug tests. Those who test drug-free are reimbursed by the state, and those who fail cannot receive benefits for a year.

Having begun the drug testing in mid-July, the state Department of Children and Families is still tabulating the results. But at least 1,000 welfare applicants took the drug tests through mid-August, according to the department, which expects at least 1,500 applicants to take the tests monthly.

So far, they say, about 2 percent of applicants are failing the test; another 2 percent are not completing the application process, for reasons unspecified.

Cost of the tests averages about $30. Assuming that 1,000 to 1,500 applicants take the test every month, the state will owe about $28,800-$43,200 monthly in reimbursements to those who test drug-free.

That compares with roughly $32,200-$48,200 the state may save on one month's worth of rejected applicants.

The paper went on to calculate that Florida will save $40,800-$98,400, an amount which will be eaten up in staff hours and other resources in administering the program. Oh, and they're going to spend over a million dollars defending it in court. So, Rick Scott just cost Floridians more money that they don't have. So that's some awesome leadership, right there.

Now, if you do the math, the national rate of drug use is about 8.9 percent of the population aged 12 or older. (The majority of those users are 18 or older, but that's like math and stuff, so screw that.) Now, if only 2-4% of the people applying for unemployment are drug users, that means that the unemployed population is actually using less drugs than the rest of America. (Maybe because they can't afford them - that might make sense...)

Obviously, Governor Haley can't do simple logic.

Beating up a right-wing meme

2011-09-05T16:05:00.009-06:00

There is a fairly standard homophobic meme, which says that decriminalizing homosexuality is a slippery slope which leads to all manner of interesting behavior. The most obvious example of this is our boy Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum; I talked about his use of this particular argument yesterday.

But how can you dispute this somewhat idiotic idea?

Answer: You can't. You're wasting your time. The people who find this kind of argument convincing aren't swayed by logic. But personally, I enjoy it, so let's press on.

Well, then, what is the danger, exactly? What is the inevitable result of all this brightly-colored gayness? The usual list includes two or more of the usual suspects.

1. obscenity
2. fornication
3. adultery
4. adult incest
5. bestiality
6. pedophilia (with or without added incestuousness)
7. bigamy
8. the complete destruction of marriage as we know it

And really, that last one, which occasionally stands by itself, is the easiest to rebut.

Just ask "how?" How will marriage becoming more available, to more people, destroy the entire concept of marriage? You'd be amazed how many people can't actually answer that.

Let's consider the rest of these ignorant concepts, in no particular order.

Obscenity: You don't see this one too often. "Freedom of speech" and all that. So fuck it. Let's move on.

Fornication and Adultery: Now, this is a slightly tricky area, and a vaguely sexist one, at that. Fornication is mentioned less frequently these days, but you might run across it. Sex, when not between two people married to each other, is "fornication" if the both partners are single. It's "adultery" if either partner is married.

(Really, it all goes back to the fact that, until fairly recently, women were property. The legal definition just tells you which property crime has occurred.)

But really, both of these are idiotic examples. Fornication isn't a crime, but the results of it can be. Spreading an incurable disease or not taking financial responsibility for the potential pregnancy? That's where the blame should be pointed.

And adultery is a civil matter. In most states, it can be cause for a divorce, but that's between the husband and wife.

So the right answer to this one is simply "You're saying that adultery doesn't go on now? And hasn't gone on since time immemorial? Are you going to claim that more men will fool around on their wives because some other men are in a committed, legally-binding relationship? Why?"

(Notice the pattern here? "How?" and "why?" are the two easiest crowbars to dismantle the argument.)

Bestiality and Pedophilia: You've got to remember that when our idiot wingnut friend try to start listing all the things that homosexuality will lead to, they often like to include these two. (Because, you know, if two men are attracted to each other, they'll be attracted to anything!)

These two examples are stunningly simple to rebut. Just point out the all-important word "consensual." Children and dogs can't consent to anything. If they don't immediately concede the point, go on the attack: "So, by your logic, because heterosexuality is legal, so is rape?"

Incest and Polygamy: Now, these are the only remotely tricky ground that's out there. Because it's true: once you widen the definition of marriage, you have to explain why you don't throw it open to practitioners of either of these activities.

This is particularly true of polygamy. My personal attitude toward polygamy is "why not?" Toss the idea to a couple of lawyers, let them draw up a standard boilerplate contract for multiple party marriages, and let people hook up in whatever polymorphic patterns they want. All kinds of good reasons that this would be beneficial: guidance for the kids, economic stability, and so on. But that's a much longer argument than I want to get into.

Incidentally, the most common polygamous "marriage" in America these days is the creepy cult-like one, with the ugly overtones of misogyny and rape. Those are bad. Of course, it's equally bad when dealing with an overbearing, controlling husband and his wife, too. So, really, that's another, longer discussion that I don't feel the need to open up.

As for incest, well, look into the health problems of purebred dogs: they're just a mobile mass of medical maladies, from hip dysplasia in German Shepherds and Labradors, to epilepsy in beagles, dachshunds and Dalmatians. It's the inevitable result of reinforcing genetic problems by breeding from too small a gene pool.

After all, as we've already shown, these people are making an openly false comparison, and really, there are only two types of people who’d use it:

1. People with limited critical faculties, who never actually think about the talking points they repeat.

2. People who know exactly the size of the lie they’re spewing, and don’t care.

In either case, when you’re faced with this level of lemon-scented bullshit, why should you feel constrained to stick with simple logic, when you can easily turn their own rhetorical style back on them? So, instead of getting completely sidetracked from the issue of gay marriage, I recommend, as I often do, the attack.

Just ask a simple question: Why do you oppose polygamy and incest? After all, the Bible is in favor of both of them.

First of all, Jesus didn't say that "Marriage is between one man and one woman." What he said was "at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female... For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." (Matthew 19:4-6)

So, first, he wasn't defining marriage, he was justifying not getting divorced. And it's really rude to take your Lord and Savior out of context like that. Especially since you don't then go on one more verse to where He explains, "you shouldn't get divorced, you shouldn't get married,l and you shouldn't have sex at all." (Matthew 19:8-12)

It was the Apostle Paul who later added, "Well, if you can't keep your pants on, you should marry somebody." (1 Corinthians 7:8-9) And he never even met Jesus, so why are you taking his word?

The Bible can't even figure out what incest is. The definition comes from three different places in the Old Testament: Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, and scattered around Deuteronomy. They're all very specifically written for men (remember, women are property), and the three sources don't even agree.

Best example: nowhere in the Bible does it say you can't have sex with your daughter. Both chapters of Leviticus tell you that your stepdaughter and your daughter-in-law are off-limits, but it's apparently open season on your own girlspawn.

(Also completely available as partners: all your cousins, your step-sister, your niece, any aunt on your mother's side, and Grandma.)

This biblical confusion about incest is emphasized with the fact that Lot, the only good man in Sodom or Gommorah, had drunken sex with both his daughters and conceived two sons: his son through his older daughter founded the Kingdom of Moab, and the one through his baby girl founded the Kingdom of Ammon. (Genesis 19:30-38)

More than that, though, Abraham, the holiest man in the Bible, is considered the father of all Christendom (and all the Jews, and Mohammed); he married his half-sister on his father's side. (Genesis 20:12) His son Isaac married his cousin Rebekah (Genesis 24:15). And both of the sons of Isaac married their cousins (Genesis 28:9, Genesis 29)

I'm not entirely clear what this says about the "Children of Abraham."

And most people already know that the Bible is full of examples of polygamy. Many, if not most, of the major prophets of God had two or more wives - Abraham and Jacob (obviously), Gideon (the guy who put all the Bibles in the hotel rooms), King David and the wisest of all men, King Solomon, are all fine examples.

And if anybody tries to claim that the Old Testament doesn't matter any more, thanks to Jesus? Well, you've just hit the jackpot.

First of all, Jesus said, over and over, that the Old Testament was still important, still valid, and, indeed, "all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." (2 Timothy 3:16; also see Matthew 5:18-19, Luke 16:17, and Matthew 5:17, among many other places)

On top of which, and possibly more important, if the words of the Old Testament don't matter, then why is it they're opposed to homosexuals again?

Religion is fun.

Speak, Ricky, speak!

2011-09-03T12:57:00.021-06:00

In an interview last week on CNN, Rick Santorum got a little cranky when the often-tedious Piers Morgan suggested he (Ricky) might, just possibly, be a little homophobic.

Now, that's a seven-minute video, and if you don't want to wade through all that, the money shot (heh) is as follows.

...the quote that I have been, quote, "criticized" for was almost identical to a quote in a 1980 Supreme Court case where the majority decision basically said what I said. And, by the way, the minority, Justice Scalia in this case -- it was Justice White who was Democratic appointee under John Kennedy who said pretty much exactly what I said and Justice Scalia pretty much said exactly what I said which is that if the Supreme Court establishes a right to consensual sexual activity, then it's hard to draw the line between what sexual activity will be permitted under the Constitution and it leaves open a long list of consensual activities that most people I think would find rather unappealing.

And so, that's what I said. I stand by the comment. Just like I'm sure Justice Scalia and Justice White stood by their comments.

So, here we have a fine example of Frothy trying to lube up his own record, so that he can ass-rape the Supreme Court.

(Note: I left all the meaningless crap in that second paragraph of his, just to show that I'm not taking him out of context. Please compare to the original, as well.)

See, little Ricky is a lawyer, but he's been mouthing meaningless political platitudes for so long that he can't keep his case-law straight. Because that "1980" Supreme Court decision? What he's thinking of is the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision, which upheld an anti-sodomy law in Georgia. (This was the majority opinion, written by Justice Byron White, that Santorum was trying to talk about, but then he got all confused.)

Now, while Santorum is trying to shove his "man on dog" quote down Justice White's throat, what White actually said was, in short, "There are victimless crimes, but they're still illegal. So even if you want to do something in private, there are other sexual crimes that we'd have to start listing and debating, and we don't want to do that." (Or, in his words, "We are unwilling to start down that road.")

So, not quite as extensive as Santorum's statement. And, more important, it was kind of stupid of Frothy to bring it up, since in 2003, Bowers was formally reversed by Lawrence v. Texas (which destroyed a sodomy law still on the books). That case was when Scalia wrote a pissy minority opinion (and that's why Frothy couldn't keep his "minority" and "majority" opinions straight).

Now, in dissenting against Lawrence Scalia whined:

...(the Texas law says that) certain forms of sexual behavior are "immoral and unacceptable," ... the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity...

If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.

So that was at least a little closer to what Santorum actually said. He misquoted the losing side of an argument.

Which I think pretty much sums up his candidacy in one fell swoop.

PETA does porn

2011-08-31T10:27:00.002-06:00

Just when you think that things can’t get any weirder, people step up and do something insane, apparently just to keep you confused.

This time, it’s our friends in PETA. They’ve decided that just having nekkid celebs isn’t good enough. It’s time to have a full blown (heh) porn site.

On Slate, Hannah Rubenstein has an important point:

What kind of target audiences are these? Porn-seeking individuals who, after being assaulted by images of beak-less chickens and eyeless rabbits, feel disgusted and betrayed by the site, or, even worse, porn-seeking individuals who aren’t deterred by images depicting the graphic mistreatment of animals? How does this help PETA’s stated cause for the porn site: to promote veganism?

But really, you know that PETA is just doing it for the publicity. And obviously they’ve managed that one pretty well.

So I’m thinking, probably no donkey show. But what’s their stand on furries?

Math is hard, Barbie!

2011-08-28T14:16:00.006-06:00

The Trophy Wife asked me a question, which turned out to have a slightly different answer than she thought. Her question was "When was the last hurricane to hit New York?"

Because Irene got more media attention than normal, she figured it had been a while.

As it turns out, there have been 84 "tropical or subtropical cyclones that have affected the state of New York since the 17th century." About one a year, recently.

However, looking over the list, I noticed something. The groups seemed roughly the same size, but the last one, up to modern day, was a decade. The groups preceding it were quarter centuries. Then a half century. Then a century.

So I charted it (thank you, Excel). Filtering out Irene (to keep it in even decades), the X Axis (that's the horizontal line, for those of you with a standard American education) is decades. The Y Axis (that's the other one) is the number of storms. (Feel free to do the math yourself.)

I'm not saying it means anything. Because we all know that climate change (a.k.a. "global warming") is a myth, right? Just because there have been increasing numbers of storms hitting New York since the Industrial Era? Coincidence, right?

Race and Politics in the 21st Century

2011-08-27T13:04:00.014-06:00

It's somewhat jarring to be reading, say, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and stumble across the following exchange.

In gay conversation over our wine, after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir'd the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them. One of his friends, who sat next to me, says, "Franklin, why do you continue to side with these damn'd Quakers? Had not you better sell them? The proprietor would give you a good price."

"The governor," says I, "has not yet blacked them enough." He, indeed, had labored hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wip'd off his coloring as fast as he laid it on, and plac'd it, in return, thick upon his own face; so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he, as well as Mr. Hamilton, grew tir'd of the contest, and quitted the government.

This is not to say that Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, just that he was no more racist than other white people of the time.

People occasionally complain that the meaning of words has changed over time. But it's not just words, it's attitudes that evolve, as well. Ideas and terms that used to be completely acceptable are now things that you want to avoid.

But because it's hard to argue that racism doesn't exist, the right-wing now has to hide, disguise, and lie about their own bigotry in order to keep pushing us boldly backwards into the 19th Century.

Now, you should understand that I'm not trying to claim that all Republicans are racist. But when you're fishing for trout, you go to a river, not a sandbox.

It’s funny how often the right wing has to apologize for calling Obama "tar baby" or "boy, but for some reason, they keep using those very same terms. Why is that?

The answer, of course, is that it’s all about "dog whistle terminology" – the simple stereotypes that racists prefer; terms that they can slip into conversation or speeches to alert other racists that they've found a "fellow traveler."

Our friends at World Net Daily are fond of the stereotype of Obama as lazy. Last week, WND publisher Joseph Farah wrote a column where he said "You won't hear me complain that Obama is taking his 17th vacation in the last two-and-half years... We should be grateful the man has no work ethic. Just imagine the damage he would have done to the country if he did."

That's just another example of the Republican Party’s badly-hidden language of racism. Because, in reality, we know how lazy Obama is, right?

This strategy was explained in 1981 by Reagan advisor Lee Atwater.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Sometimes, racism comes with collateral damage. In New Jersey, for example, Assemblyman Pat Delaney resigned from his position representing the eighth district last July, when, not he, but his wife, sent an email to challenger (and former Olympic Gold medalist) Carl Lewis, which included the line "Imagine having dark skin and name recognition and the nerve to think that equalled (sic) knowing something about politics." (I wonder if it equalled knowing something about spellcheck?)

The right-wing efforts to keep race in the forefront of what we laughingly call "people's minds" take a relatively predictable course. They have to present Obama as different from "you and me," like he's somehow alien, and therefore dangerous.

One of the most infamous efforts of recent times would have to be Fox Nation's front page from two weeks ago, reprinting a story from Politico.

Have to give them points for accuracy: Obama's birthday party didn't create jobs. On the other hand, neither did John Boehner's golf game, Haley Barbour's Klan rally or Mitch McConnell masturbating to pictures of sea turtles. But since it was an unreasonable comparison, we'll ignore that part.

The primary slant to the story is the specific mention of "hip-hop" (with its connotations of "scary black thug"). Odd how Fox "News" zips past mention of hip-hop luminaries like Nancy Pelosi, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, and completely ignores things like a performance by all-white pop group OK Go.

As Chris Good put it in The Atlantic:

There doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of hip hop at this BBQ, based on Politico's account, except that a DJ played some of it, along with Motown and '70s and '80s R&B -- which sounds, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't go to a lot of these, kind of like the musical sampling at a contemporary bar mitzvah party.

Of course, that was Fox Nation, and Media Matters documented Fox Nation’s curiously high number of race-baiting headlines. But it's all part of the same strategy. It's why they kept talking about Obama going to a "black power" church (and why they're going to be talking about it again, coming into the 2012 election).

Because he's black. And therefore, he's a scary thug.

(Incidentally, do a quick google for "obama+thug" - you might be surprised at the number of hits you get).

It's actually an on-going strategy (as you might have guessed from fact that Lee Atwater explained it 30 years ago.) Pat Buchanan, for example, has a long history of making racially-questionable comments, but he recently wrote an article where he made the following curious turn of phrase.

Mocked by The Wall Street Journal and Sen. John McCain as the little people of the Lord of the Rings books, the Tea Party "Hobbits" are indeed returning to Middle Earth -- to nail the coonskin to the wall.

He didn’t just pull that particular word out of thin air – it doesn’t relate to anything else in the article.

Perhaps, if GOP members don’t want to be accused of racism, they should avoid passing around racist pictures. Especially if they've been caught doing the same thing before.

(Incidentally, please stop saying "I can't be racist! I have black friends!" That's not an excuse - that's an old joke.)

But as that great philosopher Lee Papa is wont to point out, the one thing we know about motherfuckers is that they will fuck their mothers.

Being the group of greasy lying assbags that they are, our friends on the right wing will open their eyes wide, wave their hands in distress, and say that their words are being taken out of context, that people are too sensitive (or "playing the race card"), and that liberals take an "innocent joke" and blow it all out of proportion.

And that might even be a valid point, if this only happened once in a while. But when it happens over and over on a continuous basis, that denial starts to stink worse than the decaying corpse of their collective conscience.

The Clutching of Tea-stained Pearls

2011-08-22T17:44:00.010-06:00

Three California House members held a "Kitchen Table Summit" ("Town Halls" are so passé), and Maxine Waters did what so few of our congresscritters are willing to do. She took a stand.

"I'm not afraid of anybody. This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned, the Tea Party can go straight to hell."

Personally, I think she should have gone with "Teabaggers," but, you know, decorum and shit.

I have no problem with what she said (particularly since her statement has been an unspoken theme in many of my blog posts over the last two years or so). But interestingly, it seems that some people got their panties all knotted up when her harsh words assaulted their delicate, shell-like ears.

Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, co-founders of the Tea Party Patriots, are calling on President Obama and leaders of the Democratic Party to "censure their own." They lambasted previous comments from Democrats that Tea Party supporters are "terrorists" and "hostage takers."

"Is civility required only of their opponents?" Martin and Meckler said in a statement. "...The president's silence on these latest violations of civility has been deafening, but not surprising."

Or to translate: "She said mean things and he didn't do anything!"

I suppose we should ignore that Obama's been staying out of almost all of the partisan infighting. And I guarantee that we're supposed to ignore all of the following statements:

"(An) Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug" ~~ Mark Williams, national spokesman for the Tea Party Express (2009-2010), on President Obama

"You lie!" ~~ Joe Wilson (R-SC; member, Tea Party Caucus), interrupting Obama's address before a joint session of Congress, after Obama said his health care plan would not cover illegal immigrants (Sept. 9, 2009)

"He has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity." ~~ Trent Franks (R-AZ; member, Tea Party Caucus), on President Obama (Sept. 26, 2009)

"We're on to them; we're on to this gangster government... I'd say it's time for these little piggies to go home," ~~ Michele Bachmann (R-MN; founder and chair, Tea Party Caucus), at the Tea Party's Tax Day protest in Washington, D.C. (April 15, 2010)
Please note: only one quote from Bachmann, despite reams of the stuff, from "death panels" to calling members of Congress "anti-American"
"You know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out." ~~ Nevada GOP candidate and Tea Party darling Sharron Angle (Jan. 14, 2010)
And yes, only one Sharron Angle quote, too. She also had a raft of 'em, but she didn't get elected.

And to be fair, she might have meant "take out" as in "take out of office." Unless you take the whole quote in context, that is...
"As your governor, you're going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell." ~~ Governor Paul LePage (then Tea Party-backed candidate LePage, Sept. 29, 2010)
And I'm not saying that particular quote sounds familiar or anything...
"The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida … would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror" ~~ Iowa Rep. Steve King (member, Tea Party Caucus), on the result of candidate Obama getting elected president (Mar. 8, 2008)

Please note that I mostly avoided any failed Tea Party Candidate (except Angle, who was too wide-eyed and drooling to avoid). Like Glen Urquhart, who asked why liberals were Nazis (very common among the unhinged Right), or... really, Christine O'Donnell was one of the only Tea Party candidates who didn't spend most of her time vilifying her opponents - she was too busy proving herself to be a science-hating fundamentalist, with no real talent for either logic or statistics.

I'm not saying it means anything. I'm just saying that it's interesting.

Yes, my mind does work that way...

2011-08-21T11:37:00.008-06:00

So I saw this graphic at WhatWouldJackDo.net (via Infidel753):

But I've got this bad habit of thinking about stuff.

$1,250, at $10 a minute, is only a little over two hours of actual work... of suckage... of... of having random people clamp themselves on one of your fake nipples. So that's not too bad, I guess, for walking around the beach, getting some fascinating tan marks, for eight to ten hours.

Mother's milk is... body-temperature margaritas? Really? I guess that explains why babies do nothing but sleep, drink and cry.

This is not a job for large-breasted women, though - the flatter you are, the more storage capacity you'll have.

To be exact, $1,250 is 125 minutes (roughly 62 minutes per fake tit). 125 different people (assuming nobody goes for seconds). How do you sanitize a fake nipple? Does she even bother? She probably should, but I'm thinking that a bleach wipe-down might affect the flavor of the margarita.

Looking at her, she probably hasn't breast-fed a baby (I could be wrong, but let's just move past that). Will she ever, now? Wouldn't that cause some weird feelings about the whole experience?

I know where the fundies will come down on this issue: running in smaller and smaller circles, shrieking "Sin! Sign of the the end times! Whore!" However, from a vaguely more enlightened standpoint, I'm not sure what I think about this. Is she being exploited for her sexuality? Or is she exploiting the guys for being prisoners of their hormones?

What, exactly, is the back of the booze-bra made of? I know that a lot of guys hope for clear plastic, but considering sweating and vinyl... and sticking... ewww... just ewww!

And most importantly, does she prorate? If you only want 30 seconds of margarita, can you get that for five dollars?

Little Ricky

2011-08-17T18:05:00.011-06:00

It seems that our friends in the media are now considering Governor Goodhair to be a viable candidate for President. Well, sure. He might be some mutant version of a "serious statesman." Why the fuck not? Hell, if Michelle "Batshit Crazy" Bachmann is a viable candidate, why not Rick Perry, right?

And, really, while I know that the media is too scared of accusations of "liberal bias" to get tough with the man, I have some questions that I'd like to hear somebody ask. Like the following:

Now, Governor, you keep hinting that Texas should secede. You never quite say "the s-word," but you come so close, because you know the crazy people love that shit.

Now, if you think that Texas should split off from America, but then you say you want to be the President of that same United States... how do you balance those two thoughts?

In fact, if you think about it, Governor, despite your rhetoric that Obama was taking us over the edge, we're still here. Haven't gone over any edge. And not likely to, either. But you felt that the American people would allow themselves, to be taken in (hell, already had been) by a demagogue. Why do you think that everybody who doesn't believe just like you do is stupid and easily-led? Why don't you believe in America, Ricky?

Of course, right after saying that government was too big and spent too much money and Texas should (consider that maybe they might, if they wanted to) secede, you told Obama that you wanted half a million dollars worth of Tamiflu, and later told Obama he wasn't sending enough troops to secure the border... a border that you would have to secure for yourself...

I'm sorry, Governor. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around that. Anyway, I hope that by this time you're aware that the whole "Texas can secede!" thing is a steaming pile of lies, right? And that the other politicians in Texas are laughing at you over this, right?

First of all, Governor, I'd just like to say that your hair looks spectacular. Of course, it always does, doesn't it? Now, there's a rumor that's been following you for several years now, that you might be gay. Although I don't believe that there's anything more than a passing resemblance between you and one of the Village People, I was wondering if you'd care to comment on that?

Recently, your college transcript was leaked to the press, and it turns out that at Texas A&M, you could barely pull a C average: couple of F's, a lot of D's, and only two A's, one of them in something called Improv. of Learning - what exactly is that, Governor? Is that a remedial course or something? Never mind; it doesn't matter. But anyway, Governor, Texas Agricultural & Mechanical University is not an Ivy League institution (seriously, somebody should look up what Texans mean when they call somebody an "Aggie"); so, if it's true that your time there "helped shape who (you are) today," and you spent that time trying to flunk out of school, who exactly does that make you?

On that subject, a Bachelor's Degree is also called a "four-year degree" - you took five years at Texas Pigs & Tractors, from 1968 to 1972, to earn your Animal Science degree. Does your leadership as governor for the last decade have anything to do with Texas now leading the nation in percentage of adults without a high school diploma?

You've been pushing the power of prayer a lot; you seem to feel that people should talk to God. On April 21, you called on the citizens of Texas to pray for rain. At that point, about 15% of Texas was experiencing what's called "exceptional" drought conditions. By August 9th, that had increased to almost 80%. What was God telling you then, Rick?

You seem very proud of Texas. You seem to think you've done great things for the state, as it's longest-running governor. And you have. Texas leads the rest of the nation in a number of areas. It has the fourth highest poverty rate; last year, it tied with Mississippi for the largest percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs; you lead the country in percentage of workers without health insurance, and kids without health insurance (and since Texas is less healthy than 80% of the country, think about what that means).

Face facts, Perry. In the same way Bush wrecked the country during his tenure as President, he ass-raped Texas during his time as governor. The difference is, in Texas, his successor only made things worse.

Interesting phrasing of the day

2011-08-15T22:38:00.003-06:00

OK, so there's this astoundingly rare genetic mutation that causes some very (very, very) few people to be born without fingerprints.

Quick complete-geek aside.

...people with a rare disease known as adermatoglyphia do not have fingerprints from birth. Affecting only four known extended families worldwide, the condition is also called immigration-delay disease, since a lack of fingerprints makes it difficult for people to cross international borders.

In an effort to find the cause of the disease, dermatologist Eli Sprecher sequenced the DNA of 16 members of one family with adermatoglyphia in Switzerland. Seven had normal fingerprints, and the other nine did not.

Sorry. I live for shit like that. It's the ultimate trivia answer. But that's not the point here.

Neither is the fact that the article goes on to explain that "immigration-delay disease doesn't come with any side effects besides a minor reduction in the ability to sweat." It seems that there are other print-suppressing conditions that also come with other side effects. So that sucks.

I just want to know one thing. When Rachel Kaufman wrote this for National Geographic, did she intentionally write the following sentence?

After investigating a number of genes to find evidence of mutation, the researchers came up empty-handed

Turkey In the Straw

2011-08-14T11:40:00.004-06:00

So, Michelle Bachmann has won the Iowa Straw Poll. What does this mean for the country?

She's gotten more coverage in the last few weeks than she could've hoped for. On the basis of his showing in the straw poll, Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race. Our submissive media has been trumpeting this particular "first American caucus" as if it were the most important indicator of the election.

Well, I think it's important to note one little detail about the history of this particular poll.

The Ames Straw Pole has been held a total of six times (in 1979, and then in 1987, 1995, 1999, 2007 and now in 2011). In all that time, it correctly predicted the upcoming president of the United States once. In real terms, that is an accuracy rate of 17%.

It's roughly as accurate as throwing a handful of corn over a list of candidates, and letting the chicken choose the winner.

So the results mean less than nothing, and we can expect to see the GOP continue to do what they've always done.

That, my friends, is the importance to the American political landscape of the Ames Straw Poll.

Romney vs Heston

2011-08-13T11:06:00.002-06:00

OK, so Mittens exposed himself in public this week.

So, we know where he stands in the fight between people and our corporate overlords, right?

By the way, doesn't that statement sound awfully familiar?

Yeah, somebody else got that idea, too.

And then there's this post. And I think we'll be seeing more of it as time goes on.

Now, we need to keep this quote out there in front of people (yeah, it's sad when Mitt Romney looks like a reasonable candidate, but look at the rest of the field...), but I suppose we should think about things carefully, though.

How long before a meme just gets worn out? Will this one stick to Romney's shoe like a 4' piece of errant toilet paper? (Anybody remember the Howard Dean Scream?) Or will this one just get old and stale before the 2012 elections?

Just spitballin' here.

Time for an investigation

2011-08-06T11:07:00.004-06:00

It's unfortunate that the GOP has enough power that they've neutered most consumer protection agencies in their attempts to allow rich people to continue stealing from the poor.

The question of the moment, though, is whether they can cover up fraud.

What you might have missed last week, during the debate over the debt ceiling being raised, was the trigger for a huge dip in the bond market. Someone placed a single buy of one billion dollars on the bond futures market. One of the largest single purchases in recent history, betting on the US economy getting worse and our credit rating getting downgraded.

The question that needs to be asked is, was it insider trading?

I believe what happened is a debt-ceiling deal was done in Washington and leaked to a major proprietary trader. Everyone knows the debt negotiations in Washington have been an extreme game of brinksmanship between political parties, but now someone knows how that game played out.

This had the hallmarks of one of the largest bond shops in the world knowing something the rest of the market didn't.

The number of shops or even central banks that can take on this level of market risk is extremely small.

So, who was willing to bet that, two weeks later, the US credit rating would be downgraded from AAA to AA+?

For that matter, was it somebody in Congress? Somebody who had a hand in the idiotic behavior of the GOP these past few months, which directly caused the downgrade?

For example, Eric Cantor was one of the key reasons that the budget ceiling negotiations didn't reach an agreement for so long, and when the economy took a hit like it just did, Cantor made a bundle.

(Here's a new phrase for you: "Conflict of interest." Look it up.)

After all, if insider trading is illegal on Wall Street, it seems to me that it should be illegal in Congress, too. It isn't, but it should be.

It's never going to happen. Why would a Congresscritter vote to stop making money based on the laws he's passing? Which leads to a similar question: why would Congress vote to raise taxes on the richest Americans, when the majority of them - including most of the new Teabaggers - are millionaires?

Asshats of the Week

2011-08-05T08:36:00.001-06:00

OK, so this couple in Nebraska, the Alstatt's, took a legal immigrant from Laos named Ae Xaypanya, and used him as an indentured servant.

Xaypanya said the Alstatts took his green card, passport and Social Security card and, at one point, demanded $25,000 for them. They also set up a joint bank account with him and withdrew his wages...

Xaypanya then went to the Alstatts’ tailor shop in Omaha to retrieve his documents and signed a contract saying he’d pay $9,000 for them...

Xaypanya also learned that papers he previously signed thinking they were medical insurance forms were actually life insurance documents, naming the Alstatts’ daughter as the beneficiary.

In a 2009 search of the Alstatts’ home and business, agents found hundreds of files on foreign nationals containing immigration documents, court records say. Investigators also found blank Laotian birth certificates, altered identity documents and evidence that the couple was practicing writing other people’s signatures...

Immigration officers tried to interview other alleged victims but found they were reluctant to speak against the couple. Some immediately called the Alstatts after being interviewed, according to court documents. One woman who allegedly worked for the Alstatts without pay told authorities she was afraid to testify against them.

They aren't slavers. They're just good capitalists.

You can bet they vote Republican.

NZ woman loses hand in Croatian yacht sex

2011-08-04T09:51:00.004-06:00

A New Zealand woman nearly died after her hand was accidentally severed during holiday sex on a yacht in Croatia.

(Note: that sentence originally read "after her hand has accidentally severed" - apparently, that's how they talk in Kiwi Land.)

The 28-year-old woman was having sex with a British man on a bathroom sink aboard the yacht when the sink broke, severing her hand when she fell, the Croatian Times reported...

"It appears they were engaged in a passionate act in the bathroom where at some stage the sink broke -- leaving a jagged edge that severed the woman's hand when she fell to the floor," police spokesman Kraljevic Gudelj said.

I wouldn't have thought you needed to point this out: if you lose a limb during sex, you're probably doing it wrong.

You want some santorum on your toast?

2011-08-04T09:28:00.004-06:00

It seems to me, anyway, that if somebody had the "Google problem" that Santorum does, he might just back off a little. You know, stop being the most outspoken gay basher outside of the Westboro Baptist Church, maybe. (Especially now that Dan Savage is threatening to make it worse.)

Especially as we approach the 2012 election season, the frothy mixture would love to change the results you get when you google his name, but he really doesn't have that option (short of hiring a mob of hackers to roam the internet, chopping out all references to his name anywhere near any mention of anal sex, anyway).

But, considering the nature of his problem, don't you think it would be smart to avoid certain actions? For example, wouldn't it be smart for him not to offer to hand out free samples of Santorum Jelly at the Ames Straw Poll?

It's just a thought.
__________

Update: (8/14/11) Oh, for Christ's sake!

The price of propaganda

2011-08-02T17:52:00.007-06:00

OK, let's be real.

What is the effect of years of anti-Muslim bigotry being spewed, screaming about "sharia law is taking over!" and "they won't stop until every Christian is dead!" and every other ignorant statement puked up by Pam Geller and her ilk?

A blond Norwegian Christian kills other Norwegian non-Muslims on the theory that he was fighting a war against the encroachment of Islam.

But that was an easy one, right?

OK, then. What is the effect of years of people shouting "baby killer!" and "abortion is murder!" and trying to defund or destroy Planned Parenthood at every opportunity?

Some toothless inbreeder tries to firebomb a Planned Parenthood clinic, apparently not aware that diesel fuel is a terrible accelerant, as it does not explode and has a flashpoint of 143°F. Which is why he caused minimal damage.

Oh, and diesel is currently more expensive than gasoline.

Oh, and one more thing: that particular Planned Parenthood clinic didn't perform abortions!

One wonders how humanity manages to survive, when they seem to be racing headlong back toward the feces-flinging stage.

Thought for the Day

2011-07-28T16:39:00.001-06:00

In a perfect world, the light would change, and all the cars would start moving at once.

It needed to be said...

2011-07-27T11:08:00.001-06:00

You know what makes me crazy? Lithium.

...no, wait. Other way around...

Never mind.

Amy Winehouse (9/14/83 – 7/23/11)

2011-07-23T13:07:00.003-06:00

Amy Jade Winehouse, dead at 27.

Who could've guessed?

_______

Update: Following an extended googling (based solely on the positive recommendation of Ms Nance), I have to say that, if you looked at her as strictly a jazz artist, she had her points.

But I still don't like her voice.

What is wrong with Republicans?

2011-07-22T06:20:00.003-06:00

How does a group like the GOP manage to become a leading force in American politics? This is a group of small-minded schemers so openly venal and opportunistic that they're a top hat and handlebar mustache away from being actual cartoon villains.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, openly campaigns on the fact that his number one priority is not fixing the economy or getting jobs for the unemployed; no, his only focus is making sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president.

Eric Cantor, the House Majority Whip, currently leading the talks to prevent the economy from completely tanking, is proud of having shares in a fund that will only pay off if the economy gets worse. And nobody considers this to be a conflict of interest.

The leading lights of the party are currently pushing the 2012 Goat Rodeo: a collection of ego-driven misfits and losers so actively insane that if you can remember to pull your dick out of your pants before you pee, you're considered a front runner. (And yes, I'm including both Sarah "Undefeated" Palin and Batboy Bachmann in that metaphor.)

Since Obama was sworn in as president, the best description of the Republican "strategy" is "Deny, Delay, and Do Nothing," in the hopes that if things get worse, Obama gets the blame.

And there's a significant portion of Republican voters who buy into that theory, because they're openly stupid. Oh, and because of brain damage caused by interesting chemicals that Republican policies allow to enter our food supply - you know, paint thinner, mercury, that kind of thing...

The GOP openly lies or obfuscates about every issue, and yet, despite the unwillingness in the press to call them on it, they consistently refer to the "liberal bias" in the media.

Remember death panels? What about "Obama is a Muslim"? Or "...socialist"? "...communist"? Or even "...terrorist"?

Does anybody remember James O'Keefe? Lied about ACORN? Tried to break into a congresswoman's office and bug her phone? Yeah, he's still at it. Still not in jail. Go figure.

Despite overwhelming evidence that birth control prevents abortion and teen pregnancy, when birth control is offered through the new health care law, what’s the right-wing take on it? "Obamacare will force insurance companies to pay for abortion!"

And it's not just at the national level. Here in New Mexico, we have Teabagging governor Suzanna Martinez, who (in a move completely at odds with the standard GOP theory that rich people are happiest when you throw money at them) made an effort to slash film industry subsidies, where moviemakers have a percentage of their in-state expenditures returned to them, and one of the only requirements is that they hire 75% of their crew from New Mexico citizens.

The State Legislature only agreed to cap subsidies, which is still a disincentive to filmmakers, who have brought billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the state. And the plan still backfired.

New Mexico will shell out an estimated $20 million to $30 million more than expected in film rebates – around $95 million overall – after film and television projects rushed to beat a July 1 effective date for a new state cap on the subsidies.

So, where other Republicans are simply doing nothing to improve the economy, our governor is losing money, driving out industry and destroying jobs. So this is what "winning" looks like?

Your NASA history

2011-07-20T17:34:00.003-06:00

So, despite the fact that NASA recently flew the space shuttle for the last time, today is the 42nd anniversary of the first moon landing.

Jesus Christ!

2011-07-18T09:59:00.009-06:00

A couple in Anderson County, SC has decided that Jesus decided to appear to them on a receipt from Walmart.

Jacob Simmons and his fiancee, Gentry Lee Sutherland, said they bought some pictures from Walmart on Sunday, June 12.

The following Wednesday, the couple had just come home from a church service when Simmons spotted the receipt on the floor of Sutherland's apartment. He says the receipt had changed. "I was leaving the kitchen and I just looked on the floor, and it was like it was looking at me," Simmons said.

It's just like in Scripture - "...and on the third day, he arose again, and ascended into Commerce..."

Just to be fair, let's leave aside uncomfortable questions like "could they find a more redneck religious icon than a Walmart receipt?" and move on to the more interesting questions. Like "Why did Jesus choose to appear there?"

Why would Jesus, much like an anal-probing alien, choose to appear in South Carolina, the colostomy bag of America?

Could it be because Simmons and Sutherland are an unmarried couple cohabitating in a single apartment, and Jesus wanted them to know that they're going to hell?

Was He just trying to pass along the message "Yo, hick! Can you clean this pigsty? I've been laying here for three days!"

Perhaps it was a marketing ploy by Walmart: "I'd come back from the dead for savings like these! Even if they are destroying the economy!" (And really, this is sheer genius as advertising goes: it's a ploy that will go over big in the Bible Belt.)

But to be honest, I think that Mr Simmons has misidentified his picture. Because really, it looks more like Charles Manson to me.

But I'm pretty sure that this miraculous appearance doesn't mean "Go start killing everybody in the neighborhood (or as they call it in South Carolina, "urban beautification"). Jesus has been aggressively marketing Himself of late, appearing on telephone poles, rocking chairs, and even some crackhead's cell phone.

I'd say that for answers, we should turn, as we always do, to that other bearded guy in robes.

The Edge of Glory - Lady Gaga

2011-07-16T12:10:00.011-06:00

I don't spend a lot of time listening to pop music, but it happens. Admittedly, the rest of the radio stations programmed into the car radio have to suck balls before it happens, but that isn't really uncommon some days.

So I clicked over earlier this week, and heard "the Edge of Glory." I didn't know it was Lady Gaga until the DJ informed me when it was over. I thought maybe it was some retro song from the 80's.

And speaking of retro stuff from the 80's, if you listen very carefully, Clarence Clemons even gets a saxophone solo around two thirds of the way through. (In fact, the song was released in May of this year, and a month later, he was dead. Coincidence? I don't think so...)

Like most pop songs, she builds the entire song around her hook. In this case, the chorus is this:

I'm on the edge of glory
And I'm hanging on a moment of truth
I'm on the edge of glory
And I'm hanging on a moment with you

OK, it's Lady Gaga. So it's probably unfair of me to expect The Leaves of Grass. But... well, this is, after all, pop music, so I guess you aren't actually supposed to listen to the lyrics. Or something.

But "glory"? I don't think that word means what you think that word means, Ms. Germanotta.

glo·ry
noun /ˈglôrē/ (plural: glories)
1. High renown or honor won by notable achievements
2. Magnificence; great beauty
3. A thing that is beautiful or distinctive; a special cause for pride, respect, or delight

But there is, I suppose, a religious aspect to the word.

4. Praise, worship, and thanksgiving offered to God
5. The splendor and bliss of heaven
6. A luminous ring or halo, esp. as depicted around the head of Jesus Christ or a saint

And maybe that's what she's going for. The religious aspects of the word, as in "oh god oh god Oh God OH GOD OH GOD!!"

Because this is quite possibly one of the shallowest songs imposed upon the pop music scene since Harry Wayne Casey and his Band of the Sun explained how we should put on our boogie shoes in order to boogie with him.

There are only two real verses to this song, and neither one is challenging lyrically. Removing the repeat of "tonight, yeah baby/tonight, yeah baby" (although god knows that repetition seems to be the theme of this song), the first "verse" consists of:

There ain't no reason you and me should be alone tonight,
I got a reason Yoo-hoo should take me home tonight.

Yes, she rhymed "home" and "alone" - I've heard worse. But she either had a problem fitting the second line into the rhythm, or she's being taken home by a chocolate drink.

I need a man that thinks it's right when it's so wrong tonight
Right on the limits where we know we both belong tonight.

It's hard to feel the rush
To push the dangerous,

Yes, she's pushing an adjective.

I'm gonna run back to, to the edge with you,

Again with the rhythmic problems. You wouldn't think that a good Catholic girl would have a problem with the Rhythm Method, but she decided that the solution was to repeat the word "to."

Where we can both fall o'er in love.

And she may not be Walt Whitman, but she channels some 18th Century Irish poet or another, because that word is very clearly o'er.

And then the chorus, which consists of endless repetitions of the phrase "I'm on the edge of glory," which she starts by interspersing the phrases "hanging on a moment of truth" and "hanging on a moment with you," but she gives up and just repeats the phrase "the edge." And then she gets to the second verse, if you can call it that.

Another shot before we kiss the other side tonight,
I'm on the edge of something final we call life tonight.

I'm not clear what she means by "something final" here, but that's OK. Neither is she - she's just glad she found words that fit the line.

Put on your shades because I'm dancing in the flames tonight.
It isn't hell if everybody knows my name tonight.

And that, in fact, describes Lady Gaga to a T. She wants to always be the most noticeable person in the room.

She then repeats the verse about "pushing dangerous" (which might make it a second chorus, except it's more like a punctuation mark on the verse), and that's it for new lyrics. Not even halfway through the song, and she gives up on words; the song is five-and-a-half minutes long, and at the 2:27 mark, she's done. She spends the remaining three minutes repeating the words "I'm on the edge with you."

Over and over, and over again.

Her video really doesn't mean anything, except to exemplify the words she centers her life around - "Look at me!" Clarence Clemons is the only other person who appears in the video: it's mostly her, prancing around in an S&M hooker outfit, completely eschewing her usual band of backup dancers.

If you absolutely have to see it, here it is.

Her personal trainer should be commended. Her hairstylist? (Or more likely, "wigmaker.") Not so much.

Quick thought on women in elevators

2011-07-11T23:40:00.004-06:00

Now, if you don't occasionally wander through the godless corners of the internet, you might have no idea, but a vlogger named Skepchick posted a video where (right about the 4:30 mark, if you're in a hurry), she mentions an encounter she had.

Basically, she'd given a talk explaining that when men sexualize her, it creeps her out. So, when a guy (later established to have been present at that talk) followed her onto an elevator and asked her up to his room, she was uncomfortable.

And that blew up, with a lot of people trying to claim that she was calling all men rapists, and women should just chill out, and on and on. Because... well, because men are dicks, mostly. I should know - I happen to be one myself. Some of us repress that side of our personalities, but far too many don't.

(In the midst of all this exaggeration, a world-famous atheist tried to poo-poo the whole thing, essentially saying that women in Muslim countries have it far worse, so women in America should stop complaining. You know, something like claiming that people are blown up in Jerusalem a lot, so if you get knifed in Boston, just walk it off and quit whining.)

Now, I just have one thing to say about this (of course, I'm going to take way too long saying it, but that's just me). And, actually, it breaks into two parts.

First, that's not what she said!! Christ, the video is right up above here, and I told you where to look! Go watch the fucking thing!

* ahem *

But (he continues in a calmer voice), since you brought it up, yes, women do, in fact, get raped in elevators. In fact, one guy in New York enjoyed it so much that he went out and tried it again. Which inspired copycats.

(Pro-tip: when googling for examples of "elevator rape," be sure that SafeSearch is on. That also happens to be a twisted fantasy for some guys. Which should actually tell you something.)

Also, two fairly common justifications for this dickish attitude on the part of guys:

1. Well, elevator rape isn't very common!
Yeah, asshole. Neither is homosexual rape. Do you want to be the lucky one?

2. It's stupid to worry, because elevators have security cameras!
OK, rich boy. First, no, many of them don't - cameras are expensive. Second, many of the places that have cameras don't have them monitored in real time - that's also expensive. And third, even where the camera has been installed (and here's a dirty little secret of the security business for you), they often don't work. It's just that the people in charge don't want you to know that: they're hoping for a placebo effect on crime.

So, fuck you very much, you fat, privileged, self-important pricks. Women get raped every day. And sometimes it happens in elevators.

I hope that nobody you care about becomes a statistic.

The American Taliban

2011-07-09T10:43:00.012-06:00

Well, Rick Santorum has joined Michele Bachmann in signing the Family Leader pledge, also known as

THE MARRIAGE VOW
A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY

As far as I can tell, that small "i" in the word family is supposed to denote humility or some crap. It's also the only sign of humility on the whole damned Family Leader website (other than repeated uses of the words "humble" and "humility," of course). They're associated with both "Focus on the Family" and the "Family Research Council," two of the most strident right-wing Christian conservative groups out there.

The president of Family Leader is Bob Vander Plaats, and he's a special breed of crazy. He's tried to explain in the past that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to the suspension of the Constitution, the removal of property rights for individuals, and the destruction of the Second Amendment. (Yes, I'm serious about that.) His former campaign manager describes him as "obsessed with the gay-marriage issue."

Since most of the items on the Family Leader's little list have been staple Republican issues for years, I'm not entirely clear why so many of the other front-runners in the 2012 GOP Goat Rodeo are backing slowly away from it. Except that maybe, when you put it all in one place like this, it becomes a little more distasteful to the average American.

Because, really, what this "vow" wants is to put the Christian Taliban in place in America.

There have been a number of objections to parts of this pledge. For example, the first bullet point listed during the preamble to this steaming pile of piety is fascinating.

• Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an AfricanAmerican baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

As Cheryl Contee put it at Jack & Jill Politics:

Given that families were broken up regularly for sales during slavery and that rape by masters was pretty common, this could not be more offensive. I mean, putting aside the statistics on this, which are likely off-base, I could not be more angry. When will Republicans inquire with (sic) actual Black people whether or not we’re ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points?

But let's take a look at the actual "Candidate Vow" that Bachmann and Santorum signed on to support, shall we?

Personal fidelity to my spouse.

So, we're not likely to see this supported by Newt Gingrich, are we? Or, for that matter, most Republicans. Somewhere between John McCain's divorces and John Boehner's rumored affairs, I don't see the GOP adopting this as a plank, really.

Respect for the marital bonds of others.

Unless you're gay-married. Because that's just icky.

Official fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, supporting the elevation of none but faithful constitutionalists as judges or justices.

See, now, there's a tricky issue, right there. Because a "faithful constitutionalist" wouldn't have allowed any Constitutional Amendments, would he? So that whole "Bill of Rights" thing? Yeah, that's out the window. We wouldn't have had to ban Prohibition, but, then again, we wouldn't have had Prohibition in the first place, so I guess there's that.

Oh, and blacks would only be three-fifths of a person. You know, it's the little issues like these that make me wonder about "constitutional originalists."

Vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage – faithful monogamy between one man and one woman – through statutory-, bureaucratic-, or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.

Yup, there's that gay marriage thing again.

Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.

Wow. Coming from people who refuse to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and global warming, that's almost humorous. But what the hell does it really mean? "Recognition of the evidence?" Doesn't really say anything, except "yeah, I guess that's right..."

Support for prompt reform of uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy, and marital/divorce law, and extended "second chance" or "cooling-off" periods for those seeking a "quickie divorce."

"uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy"? Wow, that would be a fascinating list. Of course, since you've already accepted their bullshit studies in the previous paragraph, I guess the list of what you have to support has probably already been made.

Earnest, bona fide legal advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the federal and state levels.

That's funny. You'd think that the part of DOMA that keeps states from having to accept gay marriages from other states would bother those "constitutional originalists," wouldn't it? You know, that whole Full Faith and Credit Clause (Article IV, Section 1, US Constitution), where it says that "acts, records and judicial proceedings (from each state) shall have the same full faith and credit in every court within the United States and its Territories and Possessions" as they do in the original state.

Steadfast embrace of a federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman in all of the United States.

See? Once again, "constitutional originalists" who want to amend the fucking Constitution.

Logic. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy – our next generation of American children – from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.

You know, right at first glance, that looks like a really good part of this whole vow. It's a list of stuff everybody should be against, right?

Well, look closer. Once you get past the "human trafficking" and "sexual slavery," you'll notice that "abortion" is right there next to "infanticide," you'll note that they're not only trying to ban prostitution, but pornography. (We'll be dealing, of course, with their definition of pornography.) And can you please explain what they mean by "seduction into promiscuity" or "other types of coercion or stolen innocence?"

I mean, come on! Do you know how many things have been said to lead to promiscuity? Music of just about every kind, whether rock, rap or pop - go back far enough, even jazz has been accused of being "devil music." The media in general might be at fault. Even dancing at all is immoral. (You didn't think that the screenwriter for Footloose - Dean Pitchford, if you're curious - got the idea out of nowhere, did you?)

It isn't just sexy clothing that lead our children away from the Paths of Righteousness, it might even be something as simple as pants.

The list is endless. So how far do you think these people will want to press the issue?

Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.); plus prompt termination of military policymakers who would expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.

The gays again. This time in our military. (Maybe Vander Plaats really is obsessed with homosexuality. Methinks he doth protest too much...)

And incidentally, the womenfolk aren't strong enough to be in the military! They need to be back home pumping out babies!

Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.

Um... does that include the stuff in the Bible, too? Because I might be willing to support this if it did.

Recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.

You know, that doesn't necessarily sound all that scary, because many of you might not be familiar with the Quiverfull movement. Yeah, they're out there.

Commitment to downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA's $14.3 trillion public debt, its $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities, its $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and its $3.5 trillion federal budget.

Except for those parts of the government that do the stuff we want, and the new parts to support the requirements of this vow right here...

Fierce defense of the First Amendment's rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.

Free speech, but only for our side. You have to admire that one.

OK, so maybe I do see why the other GOP candidates aren't signing on to this.
_____________

Update (7/11/11): Although the link I used shows the original, it seems that FAMiLY LEADER has removed the only-offensive-if-you-know-a-black-person bullet point about slavery. And seriously, you can't blame them - there can't be more than 12 black people in Iowa, can there? And you can't expect Bob Vander Plaats to know all of them, can you?

Quick English lesson

2011-07-07T17:14:00.007-06:00

There's a place in Chandler, Arizona, called the Heart Attack Grill.

On the front door of the 100-seat, retro-themed establishment, a "warning" from the Surgeon General urges: "Go away. If you come in this place, it's going to kill you." Patrons (referred to as "patients") must don hospital gowns and medical bracelets. "Prescriptions" (not orders) are written by women dressed in tight, short nurse uniforms. At the grill, owner Jon Basso flips burgers bedecked in doctor's scrubs as a stethoscope hangs from his neck and a cigarette dangles from his mouth.

The menu: "Flatliner" fries, full-sugar colas, unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes, and four sizes of meat towers ranging from the "single" to the "quadruple bypass burger." If you finish the biggest meal, a nurse will push you to your car in a wheelchair.

Want more? There’s always more at the Heart Attack Grill.

People who weigh more than 350 pounds eat for free. The restaurant's spokesmodel is a 600-pound former college football player. The diner's website shows an enlarged, pulsing heart while bragging that the food is "worth dying for."

...one word the menu doesn’t contain is the single most important ingredient in Basso’s diet plan: satire.

Remember that. It makes fun of the modern obsession with health. It's satire.

Now, here's a story I missed a couple of months ago.

Blair River, the 575-pound spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill, an Arizona restaurant that serves shamelessly high-calorie burgers and fries, died Tuesday at the age of 29, following a bout of the flu... River came down with the flu last week, and after four days in the hospital, he succumbed to pneumonia...

"Obesity increases your risk for just about every condition, and it can make nearly every acute health problem worse," says Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

And that's the difference between "satire" and "irony."

A bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.

2011-07-03T18:20:00.003-06:00

OK, I can beat the bacon story. And I don't even need to fisk it. The most I've laughed this week was when I tried to read it out loud. And the more research I did to see if it was true, the worse it got.

I'm not even going to try to rephrase this: I'm not sure I can write about it without commenting. I'm just going to assemble the story from three different sources, because nobody seems to have all the good details.

A security guard came up with a bizarre remedy to remove a wart - he shot off his finger with a shotgun.

Sean Murphy, 38, from Doncaster, had seen his GP repeatedly about the problem and also tried a variety of traditional ointments and creams. But when the persistent wart refused to disappear, he opted for the firepower of a 12-bore Beretta he claimed he had found under a hedge a few months earlier.

South Yorkshire Police are still trying to discover how the Beretta found its way to the hedge where Murphy found it. They know it was stolen in a burglary two years ago, but have no further record of its passage through the criminal underworld.

Murphy, who hails from Doncaster in northern England, had lost his job as a security guard shortly before the incident in March. The wart, which was about the size of a dime, plagued him for at least five years. "It was hurting a lot and causing my finger to bend," Murphy said. "I'd been to the doctors and tried all sorts of things, but it wouldn't go."

He said he drank several pints of beer to build up his courage before carrying out the operation outside the caravan where he was living at the time. He stretched out his left hand, pointing the end of the barrel at an angle to the offending wart, and used his other hand to hold the stock steady and pull the trigger.

Murphy denies that the beer affected his aim. He insists the fault lay with the weapon’s recoil."I didn't expect to lose my finger as well when I shot it, but the gun recoiled and that was it," he said. "The wart was gone and so was most of my finger. There was nothing left of it, so no chance of re-attaching it."

His lawyer, Richard Haigh, said Murphy "has been a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him." Murphy was also ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid community work and pay costs of £100.

After leaving Doncaster Magistrates' Court with a suspended 16-week prison sentence, Murphy said, "I'm happy with that. I know I could have gone to jail for up to 15 years for a firearms offence. My solicitor did a very good job. The best thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me lot of trouble."

Discipline is Important! (or: Kids! What'cha gonna do?)

2011-07-02T13:59:00.006-06:00

I think that my favorite news story of the week (as happens once in a long while) has no politics involved.

I mean, sure, you could point out that Grandma is the perfect Republican, and was just trying to prevent the socialist redistribution of bacon, but you'd be stretching the point somewhat. And, besides, BACON!!!

Granny Busted For Bacon Beef With Grandson, 9
Cops: Suspect, 64, thought boy bogarted the meat

I believe "bogarting the meat" was just legalized in New York and New Hampshire, along with gay marriage.

JUNE 30--Angered that her grandson ate too much bacon at breakfast, a 63-year-old woman chased the boy out of her Pennsylvania home and pinned him down on the front lawn, where she blasted him in the face with a garden hose, police allege.

Yes, you read that correctly. Let me emphasize a few points here.

Angered that her grandson ate too much bacon at breakfast - perhaps she was just looking after the child's welfare? We do have a nation of obese children, after all... no, never mind. I'm pretty sure "altruism" isn't a factor in this story.

a 63-year-old woman - people keep using the phrase "old enough to know better" as if it made any damned sense at all.

Marilee Ann Kolynych was busted Tuesday evening on endangering the welfare of children, simple assault, harassment, and disorderly conduct charges. Her grandson, 9, was not injured during the attack.

See? Nobody got hurt. Just a little family fun.

In a Clifton Heights Police Department report, Officer James Press noted that the child "stated that he had been getting tortured by his grandmother…all day for an incident that took place during breakfast."

You know, sometimes kids act up, and you just have to take a stand.

According to Press, the matter involved the child consuming more bacon than anyone else, which angered Kolynych.

Somehow, we seem to have gotten back to the "proper nutrition" argument.

A witness told Press that Kolynych chased her grandson around the yard before throwing him to the ground and "sitting on top of him beating him on his legs and spraying water at very close range into (the boy's) face."

At the same time? Grandma's got skills! Plus, I could swear that I already mentioned that discipline is important, didn't I?

The child told cops that "the nozzle setting was on full blast."

Well, the little bastard probably never brushes his teeth.

"Your honor, I continue to dispute the 'child abuse' portion of the charges! After all, the prosecuting attorney has already admitted to having a Waterpik® at home, and forcing his children to use it!"

The child eventually broke free and "ran across the street, using a neighbor’s phone to call his mother, who was in the basement while the incident was taking place out front."

Now, please note that the news report does not say "hiding in the basement." That's an unreasonable and unfair interpretation, and you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it.

Even after the boy’s mother arrived outside, a witness reported, Kolynych continued to chase after the child.

Well, if Mom's not going to take a stand, somebody has to.

By the way.

Not involved.

But that I burn much more in boiling sweat

2011-06-27T23:05:00.005-06:00

See that white tent, just past the SUV that photobombed me? That's a fireworks tent set up in a parking lot.. It's got balloons, one sad little "Fireworks!" banner (that's the orange thing off to the right), no air conditioning, and a cheap plastic roof (whatever they're making cheap tents out of these days).

The person behind the plain wood counter in the tent is smoking. I didn't go in to look. They just always are.

We live in a desert. The temperature is going to be in the high nineties all week.

See that sign in the building beyond it? Looks like a number one? That's the logo for Page One Books, the largest locally-owned bookstore in Albuquerque. Which happens to be 30 yards away from the fireworks tent.

Because people are stupid.
___________

I'm not a big fan of fireworks, as it turns out.

The Wallow Fire, the largest wildfire in Arizona history, spread into New Mexico around the Luna, NM area. As of today, it's 80% contained.

Update/expansion: It was started on May 29th. So far (and 24 hours later than the initial post here, it's at almost 90% containment), it's destroyed roughly 540 thousand acres. Six towns (Eager, Springerville, Nutrioso, Alpine, Luna and Blue River) were evacuated, and it's taken almost 2,000 people to fight it.

Los Alamos was evacuated because of wildfires today. The fires have, in fact, crossed over into the boundaries of the Los Alamos nuclear lab, if you're curious; that's called the Las Conchas fire, and as of today, it's eaten about 45,000 acres of the Santa Fe National Forest, and as I write this, it is zero percent contained.

The 346 Fire in Belen, NM (named after the Highway 346 Bridge, currently its northern boundary) is a mere 150-acre fire; it's destroyed 3 houses and several outbuildings, and is threatening about 150-200 more. Earlier today, they suspected that they'll have it contained by Wednesday. Of course, they weren't taking into account the 25 mph winds (with 40 mph gusts) that are kicking up.

The Horseshoe 2 fire in southeast Arizona never made it to the New Mexico border. It destroyed 223 thousand acres, but is now considered contained, as of Saturday. Crews will be downgrading to a Type 3 team Wednesday, if nothing goes wrong.

The Pacheco fire, north of Santa Fe, has only destroyed about ten thousand acres. It's been going a week and a half, and it's currently about 10% contained.

State law in New Mexico prevents them from implementing a ban on fireworks, even during one of the worst fire seasons ever.

Oh, and in case you missed it, next Monday is the Fourth of July.

Depression-era cooking... or not

2011-06-25T23:59:00.008-06:00

Some of you may have noticed that the economy could be better. It's just a rumor at this point, but I've heard people suggest that. And if you're looking to save pennies wherever possible, here's an idea that the Trophy Wife and I have started doing, which basically goes back to the concept of "Use everything."

Now, a quick disclaimer: the Trophy Wife and I cook from scratch a lot. Which, by itself, can save you money. First, unprocessed ingredients tend to cost less. And further down the road, eating healthier can save you money in medical bills. (Plus it tastes better, unless you really suck as a cook. But that can be fixed...)

When you start to cook from scratch, you'll notice that you end up using stock a lot: beef stock, chicken stock, and even (less often, unless you're vegetarian) vegetable stock. Stock making isn't hard, and plenty of people are happy to tell you how. Here's a quick overview.

I'll tell you one thing about this stock recipe: bitch is crazy. Completely batshit. She took a simple concept, and made it cost about five to ten times what it should.

Let's start with the chicken. What the hell is she doing putting an entire chicken into her stockpot? She is literally wasting all of the meat, because it's going to add very little to the stock, and when it's done, it is literally only good for dog food (now, admittedly, the dogs will be overjoyed, but they also stick their noses in each other's butts).

What you want is the bones, cooked or not. The remaining carcass from a whole cooked chicken is perfect; with the larger stock pots, you want two. (Also, you know that turkey skeleton left at the table after the relatives descend on it like piranha's? Same thing - I think turkey and chicken stock are interchangeable, but some people will argue that. For example, the wife...) Plus, since you were only going to throw those bones away, this is pretty much free.

Now, as to the vegetables, she's once again wasting perfectly good food. And here's where, with just a little planning, we keep this stock basically free (we're paying for water, a couple of spices, and the cost of running the stove; oh, and some ice, but that comes later).

When you peel an onion, what do you do with the top and bottom ends and the outer skin? If you compost it, well, good for you; most of us just throw it out.

Likewise carrots. Most of us scrape off the outer layer, chop both ends (and the greens, if you buy them that way), and toss it. Garlic skins and the dry brown tip where it came off the bulb? The ends of celery? You just throw it away, right?

Instead, keep a bowl above your cutting board (or in the sink, or by your feet as you sit on the floor in your lonely cell; wherever you cut the stuff up), and stick the peelings in that. When you're done, put them in a ziplock bag and shove it in the freezer. Every time you cut up vegetables, pull out the bag and shove in the new stuff. When it gets full, use a marker to put the month and year on it, and shove it to the back of the freezer.

The only real tips about what vegetables to include are pretty simple.

• You don't want to put things like potato peelings into the bag. For one thing, what the hell are you doing not eating the peel? For another, starch doesn't add anything to stock, except to thicken it more than you want.

• Bell peppers are in the same family as their hotter cousins ( jalapeños, habaneros and the like), and all the heat in those peppers comes from the membranes and seeds inside. It's just bitter in the bell pepper, but who needs that?

• When you overcook cabbage (like, say, boiling it for hours), it breaks down and throws out sulfur compounds. Which doesn't improve your stock at all.

• Beet stalks turn the stock a bright red, or reddish-brown. We like that. You might not.

By the time you need stock again, you pull out a bag or two (depending on the size of your stockpot), throw in the bones, one or two bay leaves and a handful of peppercorns, and run that sucker up to a boil. Back off the heat until it's at a bare simmer, and let it go for several hours.

The description we used when we asked our kids to check the boil every so often was "the Bog of Eternal Stench" from Labyrinth: one bubble breaking the surface every few seconds, rather than a rolling boil. And basically, the stock is done when the bones break easily to fingertip pressure when you fish one out; in fact, if you've extracted all the connective tissue, they pretty much crumble to the touch.

We usually take two days to boil this stuff: if you trust your stove, you can let it boil overnight, but depending on your household situation, you might be risking a fire (or boiled cat, which is a completely different flavor). We just ice the stock down overnight (see below) and restart it in the morning.

The next secret they don't tell you? Don't try to skim the fat off while it's hot. Our method is that we bought a set of three stock pots. We lay out newspapers, and carefully pour the big pot through a colander into the medium pot ("carefully" being the important word - it's boiling hot). Then we lid the pot, stick it in a cooler on a folded towel (it's a plastic cooler - think about it) with two ten-pound bags of ice emptied around it.

(Alton Brown suggests some frozen water bottles in the stock, too: your choice. One other trick, though. Leave the colander draining above the stock pot until it stops dripping juicy goodness, and then you can throw the solids out. For that matter, you can compost them, if that's how you roll. Personally, I use a fork - it's still hot, remember - to pick out the biggest chunks of meat, and carefully separate the meat from the remains of the bones. And then I put it the meat in a plastic container in the fridge, and supplement the dog's food. They seem to approve.)

That was my next biggest problem with the video, by the way; right after using whole chickens instead of just bones. If you stick a big pot of boiling hot liquid into your freezer, you're going to defrost your freezer and ruin anything else in there. Plus, frozen fat doesn't come off nearly as easily.

The next day, you peel off the yellowish-brown disk of fat off the top, and do what you want with it. We put a little schmaltz on the dog's food once any boiled chicken runs out. They seem to appreciate it.

The fat's going to come off in chunks, not as a disk. Don't let that bother you, all the little pieces float. You need a good-sized slotted spoon, a little patience, and a container for the fat.

Then we pour it into small ziplock bags, one cup per bag. (If you use more, go for two cups per bag - again, your choice.) We freeze it flat on cookie sheets and store it until we need it.

I've seen people say you can freeze it into ice cube trays, so you have convenient one-tablespoon cubes. Which is great if you use one tablespoon of stock at a time. Also, if it's a plastic ice-cube tray, don't ever plan to use it for ice again. Oils and any remaining fat will be happy to bond with the plastic, and unless you're drinking iced chicken soup, that might be an issue.

By the way, this same method can be used for beef stock; in our case, we've used both beef bones and ox tails (until the price started going up). But lately, we've found the cheapest thing on the market: hooves, often labeled as "beef feet" around here. Since they're nothing but collagen, they make the most amazing stock.

And finally (you could probably have worked this out), you can make vegetable stock, which only takes a couple of hours and there's no fat to mess with.

And if you're really into composting, you can recycle the remaining vegetable matter one final time. (I don't, but I support the idea.)

One word of warning: this is not a method for the anal-retentive cook who obsessively measures every last grain of salt. Our vegetable mix is different every time, which can subtly change the stock. But if you're not a professional cook, making 500 identical dishes every day, this probably isn't going to matter to you. It's that little bit of chaos that keeps things interesting.

A crashing Boortz

2011-06-21T23:54:00.005-06:00

Radio talk-show host Neal Boortz picked up a little press last week, and now he's complaining about it. So this week, he gave a big ol' non-apology. I'm going to reprint a big chunk of it here (interesting punctuation issues and all) to be sure I'm not taking him out of context.

As examples we'll use the Huffington post, a well known leftist website, and another named ournewsnow.com, a website with the slogan "The revolution will not be televised; whatever in the world that means, that titled their little bit about me thusly: "Atlanta Talk Show Host Codes Race Killings." Both of these websites printed the following quote from me:
"This town is starting to look like a garbage heap. And we got too damn many urban thugs, yo, ruining the quality of life for everybody. And I'll tell you what it's gonna take. You people, you are - you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta.
Well ... that wasn't exactly all I said. Here's the part they left off:
"We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city."
These websites, you see, wanted to portray me as having called for people to simply get guns and start killing blacks. They didn't include the beginning of my comments where I referenced two violent carjackings in Atlanta, nor did they see fit to include that part of my statement that related to self defense. No surprise. If you have an agenda to push, you do whatever editing is necessary to keep your message on point...

OK, so there's his basic message, or so he claims. It's all right to kill somebody, if you think they're robbing you. You know, basic libertarian, Second Amendment stuff. This isn't a healthy trend (ask Bernie Goetz), but I digress.)

Now Boortz takes a while complaining about his treatment by the "liberal media," until we get to this.

(Ed) Shultz picked up on my comments from Media Matters and then ... before he played it on his MSNBC show ... he did a little creative editing. My comments related to self defense, but Schultz, like other critics, needed to get the self defense aspect out of the way so that he could portray me as, in his words, as "reckless, stupid and racist" and to tell his audience that I had "advocated murder in the streets of Atlanta." You can't say that I was advocating murder if it's clear that I'm talking about defending yourself from a carjacker --- so that part was taken out. Here, again, is what I said:
You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. "We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city."

See? That makes it all better.

He follows that with more whining about how badly he's mistreated by the "liberal media," and he'd like an apology. And he's not a racist, but he doesn't care if you call him one.

And then he says this.

Here's a nasty little secret for you. Pretty much every time the Atlanta media reports a violent crime in the city; whether it's a rape, an assault, a shooting, a carjacking or the murder of three people who worked in a car wash that doubles as a rap music recording studio, (no kidding this happened last week), one of the first thoughts that will cross most people's minds is that the perpetrators were young black males. I'm sure this is the case in most other large urban areas. Sometimes these initial impressions will be false, but not that often. Are these thoughts racist? Do these first impressions occur because of some deeply held belief that young black males are genetically predisposed to commit crimes? Hardly. These initial impressions are brought about by recognition of the fact that young black males are engaged in criminal activity in numbers way out of proportion to their percentage of the population - a recognition that there is a culture of crime and violence in the urban community. Yes, I can give you some statistics. You might not like them, but they're there for you to develop on your own, if you care to, using FBI crime data.

See? He's not racist! Everybody is, and he's just saying it for them!

And then he abuses statistics for a while, to show that most crime is committed by blacks and hispanics. Now, it would be rude of me to point out that these are the same statistics used by Klansmen to show that they aren't racist, they're only protecting their own kind!

And burning crosses (but that's just a hobby).

Instead, I'm just going to ponder the statistics he didn't use. The one from the Atlanta police, that shows that crime in Atlanta has been dropping steadily. In fact, crime in all of Georgia has been dropping for the last 30 years (a few indicators spiked in the early 90s, probably due to the influence of Vanilla Ice).

What other statistics does he ignore? Well, how about the fact that two-thirds of the population of Atlanta is black. So, just off the top of my head, I'd say that there's a good chance that two-thirds of the criminals are black. But that's just me.

And the rest of his statistics are equally idiotic. They're debunked or explained on a regular basis, but they're still quoted. By racists, who refuse to admit that their statistics are crap.

Nor is this the first time Boortz showed his racist side (and again, nice long quotes to let you get everything in context).

So, yeah, I think I'm more than happy to label him as a useless, bigoted fucknozzle, and racist to his evil little core.

Slow Club - "Two Cousins"

2011-06-21T22:15:00.002-06:00

If I'm honest, I think the song's a little boring. The dancers, though?

What the hell is that? There's a little tap, a little soft-shoe, a buck-and-wing on and off, and some honest-to-Bojangles shuffle. Maybe some dance historian can break this down, but I can't.

So... um...

2011-06-21T21:47:00.004-06:00

This what y'all get up to in the country?

Y'all need a hobby, son.