Spanky McSchmanky's Extraterrestrial House of Pancakes

What the Hell Is Wrong With You Idiots? Didn't You Hear What Herman Cain Said?

2011-11-07T14:55:00.003-05:00

Geez. Herman Cain continues to prove just how incredibly un-presidential he is. Rachel Maddow has talked extensively about just how silly a candidate Cain has been from the get-go. Cain is certainly a clown. But he's at the point where poll numbers say he must be taken seriously. And so we do.

But Cain doesn't want to be taken seriously. He wants to talk but he doesn't want to listen. It's rare to see a person so uninterested in actual discourse. Even schmucks like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner pretend that they're answering the question when they're completely avoiding it. (Check out the "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" archives for numerous examples of "message control".) Cain just takes complete umbrage that the press would want to talk about anything other than his talking points. And if he's questioned he starts talking like everyone else is 14 and they just can't get it through their thick little skulls that Cain has it. Everything that comes out of his mouth has that "What the hell is wrong with you idiots?" tone to it. (Cain: "The sky is green." Reporter: "Mr. Cain, with all due respect, the sky is not and never has been green." Cain: "What the hell is wrong with you idiots? Didn't you just hear me say the sky is green? No more questions.")

So when the sexual harassment allegations came up (and, like Dahlia Lithwick, I'm willing to consider them allegations until we know more) Cain reacted predictably. "I already told you nothing happened. What the hell is wrong with you idiots?" My favorite part was his campaign manager (you know, the smoking guy) saying that if the allegations have merit the accusers should be willing to face Cain publicly. Of course, they signed non-disclosure agreements, so legally they can't say anything. How convenient.

So today's news is fun. Yet another accuser, and this one is going public. I have no idea whether what this woman is saying is true (although, credibility grows the more instances of something occur, so...) but I found Cain's official statement to be utterly hilarious.

“Activist celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred is bringing forth more false accusations against the character of Republican front-runner Herman Cain,” the statement said. “All allegations of harassment against Mr. Cain are completely false. Mr. Cain has never harassed anyone. Fortunately the American people will not allow Mr. Cain’s bold ’9-9-9 Plan’, clear foreign policy vision and plans for energy independence to be overshadowed by these bogus attacks.”

Where to begin... At the beginning, I reckon. Look at the first three words, referring to the accuser's legal counsel. Activist (bad). Celebrity (really bad). Lawyer (unbelievably bad, unless they're representing a corporation or corporate executive). So right off the bat we can't trust anything that comes out of this person's mouth. Even though Gloria Allred didn't make the statement. Guilt by association.

Next, the statement refers to "Republican front-runner Herman Cain". Ah yes, let's make sure that everyone knows he's the front-runner. This is important how? This is foreshadowing of the blatant campaigning to follow later in the statement. More on that in a bit.

Then we have a categorical statement. “All allegations of harassment against Mr. Cain are completely false." Wow. So not one of them has even a shred of truth in it? Look, when someone says they are 100% innocent, odds are they are at least 75% guilty. And this doesn't leave them any wiggle room when they are proved even 25% guilty. This is typical Cain though. The truth takes a backseat to the message.

Last comes my favorite part. Now that we know that these ladies are full of it, we can get on to the campaign. And let's start by using that broad brush again by invoking "The American people", whom we know are never ever wrong. Unless they support taxing rich people. They will "not allow" Cain's policy proposals, conveniently mentioned by name in this statement, "to be overshadowed by these bogus attacks."

Wow.

So in responding to serious allegations of inappropriate behavior, Cain makes a campaign speech. Classy.

This may or may not be the straw that breaks this camel's back. I mean, really, if there are still this many people out there who think this is a serious candidate then we're well beyond screwed already. And folks like that are already disinclined to let a little thing like reality change their minds about anything.

Dumb Letters: It's Science If I Say It Is

2011-10-25T09:41:00.003-04:00

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

The words "science", "reason" and "facts" apparently don't mean what we think they do.

Here's what some folks at the Creation Museum have to say about science and religion.

"Accepting the Bible as God’s literal truth doesn’t mean that we discount science. It does mean that we interpret scientific evidence from the biblical viewpoint. We evaluate the same evidence as evolutionists, but they interpret it from their viewpoint. Evidence isn’t labeled with dates and facts; we arrive at conclusions about the unobservable past based on our pre-existing beliefs. This exercise also involves reason."

It doesn't mean that you discount science? That's exactly what it means! Oy. If you arrive at conclusions based on your pre-existing beliefs then you, by definition, are anti-science. The letter writer seems to think that science means taking something you believe and making the facts fit it. Their "viewpoint" is no different from those of "evolutionists", even though the creationists are working backwards and the actual scientists are working forwards.

Science requires an open mind. And while this isn't always in complete evidence even in the best of us, a true scientist will throw out everything they think they know if the facts prove them wrong. These people won't. Ugh.

Believe what you want, people. But please don't bother trying to convince us that you're into science. It makes you look even sillier.

Have a Crumb Bean Sandwich

2011-08-17T14:21:00.004-04:00

Wow. The list of things you can make money on just got a bit bigger. Apparently you can now be paid for not wearing clothes. I don't mean like being a stripper. I mean like not wearing specific clothes. This not-to-be-named dude from a not-to-be-named "reality" program has been offered money to not wear clothes from a not-to-be-named retailer. It seems their brand is being tarnished a bit, in their not-so-humble opinion.

So I reckon I need to get what amounts to a proposal together. Here's what I have so far. Tell me what you think.

Dear Slabbercrombie & Flinch,

First off, let me say how much I admire your catalogs. I enjoy "shopping" with them in my bathroom. You certainly seem to have developed quite the brand for yourself there. And the peeps out there sure are digging it too.

Although I have never purchased any of your products nor worn them in public, and I am not a public figure nor can reasonably hope to be one in the immediate future, I would like to let you know that I am hereby requesting compensation for preventing such a situation from ever occurring. I prefer to nip things in the bud. You can't unring a bell, as they say.

I would not want to be responsible for the further degradation of the brand that you have so skillfully cultivated. I'm considerably older than your target demographic. I'm balding on top and I'm just a bit paunchy. I also eat quite a bit of garlic, which affects both my breath and my perspiration, which tends to be voluminous when compared to that of the average person. And I have a tendency to declaim quite loudly and repeatedly to whomever is within earshot just where I purchased my daily outfit, which (I must say) does not get changed or washed with any frequency. Let me add here that I live in New York City and ride public transportation, so my audience tends to be large and diverse.

I'm certain that the last thing you want is for millions of New Yorkers to be referring to "that loud, smelly Slabbercrombie & Flinch guy" and have them showing me on the "Today" show. Can you imagine? I could be like the Naked Cowboy. Tourists would have their picture taken with me. Well, maybe not with me. There is the smell. And the head lice. But near me. With me in the background. Like they do with Mount Rushmore. And your company stock, not to mention your cultural cachet, would take a beating the likes of which hasn't been seen in this country since "The Outlaw Josey Wales".

I'm not a greedy man. I'm only thinking $10-20,000 per week would be sufficient to keep me out of Slabbercrombie & Flinch couture. Just think of the upside. It's a tax write-off, if nothing else.

Please let me know at your earliest convenience when my first check will arrive. And thanks. Slabbercrombie & Flinch!

Your humble servant,
MAB

4,823 Iowans Can't Be Wrong, Can They?

2011-08-15T21:28:00.003-04:00

So, The Stepford Wife wins the Ames Straw Poll. And now we're supposed to take her seriously. Let's put aside the fact that nobody in this pathetic race to the bottom deserves to be taken seriously. What does this "triumph" really mean?

Well, first let's think about what The Ames Straw Poll is and what it isn't. What is it? Well, according to Wikipedia (I already linked above; sorry, not doing it again):

"The poll takes place among attendees of a fundraising dinner benefiting the Iowa Republican Party. Before the vote, each candidate is given a chance to make a short speech to the attendees.

The poll has been described as a cross between a political convention and a county fair, where Iowa voters have a chance to mingle, eat barbecue and have a little fun. The party divides the venue into sections and auctions each to the candidates, who can then set up booths to present their case to the voters. The larger areas and those closest to the entrance often fetch the highest price. In 2011 bidding started at $15,000 and ranged to as high as $31,000 (bid by Ron Paul).

Non-Republicans are allowed to vote in the Ames Straw Poll. However, all voters must be at least 16 1/2 years of age, be legal residents of the state of Iowa or a student attending an Iowa university/college, and purchase a ticket priced at $30, however some campaigns pay the fee for their supporters."

And what isn't it? A primary or a caucus. That doesn't happen until next year when the vultures will descend anew on Iowa.

So, it's a fundraising event sponsored by a local branch of a national party that charges thirty bucks for the privilege of getting in and eating hot dogs and listening to Mike Huckabee play the bass at a tent bought by one of the candidates that allows people of non-voting age to participate. In a very small state. With a total of just over 16,000 people voting. Which is slightly more than the population of my hometown, which I can guarantee you was never asked its opinion on anything, let alone had said opinion be national news and the cause of a major candidate dropping out of a presidential race.

So out of the 16,000 Iowans (and students who just happen to be there) who paid thirty bucks to go into a tent, about one quarter of them chose The Stepford Wife. That's 4,823 Iowans, some of whom are, again, not of legal voting age. You may have heard that Ron Paul came in a close second. But you probably didn't. It was all Stepford Wife, all the time. And we are supposed to consider this a legitimizing event.

There's a reason that the two candidates who actually have a chance of winning the Republican nomination didn't bother to show up. It's a farce. And they would only cheapen themselves by participating in it. Which is undoubtedly the last positive thing I will say about either of them. Except maybe that they aren't quite as batshit crazy as The Stepford Wife.

Five Other Things to Watch For

2011-08-11T10:20:00.004-04:00

The NYT has a little preview of tonight's "debate" in Iowa. They title it "Five Things to Watch for in Iowa Debate". I'm so fed up with these people and their downward spiral into turning the Republican Party into the largest fringe group in the United States. (Yes, this is a contradiction in terms. But this is what it feels like to watch the world around you go insane.)

Here are Five Other Things to Watch For in tonight's debate. And you won't have to look that hard, I promise you.*

1. Crazy

2. Really Crazy

3. Crazy Cleverly Disguised as Sane

4. Crazy Very Thinly Disguised as Sane

5. Absolutely Batshit Fucking Crazy

Oh, and also mean. Really really mean. That's six things, I know. Seven if you count stupid. Enjoy your evening.

* I apologize for the complete lack of insight in this post. Sometimes you just throw your hands up in the air because it does just as much good as arguing sensibly. Although, in my defense, Thing to Watch For #5 in the Times article is basically the same as mine.

Dumb Letters: Who's Really in Charge Here

2011-08-05T17:06:00.003-04:00

This is hilarious. It's from today's Boston Globe. I don't know if I can even respond to it, it's so wrongheaded in every respect.

I'll quote it in full.

"CALLING THE Tea Party movement “terrorists’’ is grossly misplaced. Indeed, the real domestic terrorism going on in our country is our socialist government’s confiscatory taxation, public education indoctrination, and economy-crushing regulations, and the extreme environmental movement raising the cost of living.

The spontaneous Tea Party movement is a reaction to the way many American voters feel about big, intrusive, out-of-control government. Demonizing the movement will only make it grow to be heard loud and clear in the 2012 elections and beyond, until the people and the states take America back.

A push from two-thirds of the states for a constitutional convention to propose amendments is long overdue. A balanced budget amendment with teeth should be first on the agenda."

Oh my god. Does this person actually believe that our government is socialist? We have the least socialistic government in the free world. By far.

And is there really an "extreme environmental movement"? And what would be their goals? Really really clean air? Incredibly pure water? Oh no! How nefarious! And we all know how powerful they are. (Check out the pictures in those links and ask yourself how much "economy-crushing" regulations we think we need. I'm thinking more than we have.)

And does he really believe that the Tea Party "movement" was spontaneous, and not created by Dick Armey in order to capitalize on racism and grievance? Everyone all just had the same idea at the same time? Okay, if you say so. Everybody likes to think that they're "grass roots".

And what exactly are we taking America back from? The corporations that dominate it? The Tea Party is doing nothing if not ensuring further and greater domination by an economic elite, all in the name of populism. The irony would be rip-snortingly funny if it weren't doing such incredible damage to our nation. These people have no idea how much they're helping to perpetuate the status quo.

The sad truth is that the country has not changed much since Barack Obama took office. At least not in how it's governed and in who really controls things. The only difference is in perception, which has been mercilessly fueled by the right-wing media.

I'd love to take America back too. From ignorance.

Dumb Letters: Privatize Yourself

2011-07-31T11:09:00.004-04:00

This is a whopper from some knucklehead from the Cascade Policy Institute. (I'm not linking to them. You can Google them if you want. Basically they worship at the altar of Milton Friedman.)

The issue seems to be that U.S. National Parks aren't serving their "customers" the way some people think they should be. The letter writer seems to think that the issue is the "bureaucratic mentality" at the Parks Service. I always love this idea. Free-market ideologues always love to complain about "bureaucracy" in government, as if there were absolutely no bureaucracies in corporations.

"Instead of remaining a lumbering Leviathan, the Park Service should embrace market principles and privatize the parks. ... Since these privately managed parks wouldn’t have the luxury of using other people’s money, they would need to accommodate consumer demand. The solution? Privatize them, of course."

Of course. Consumer demand? Really? I thought that the Parks Service was about keeping lands pure so they wouldn't be overrun by sprawl, industry and advertising. Privatizing them would lead to exactly the kind of "progress" that the National Parks were supposed to forestall.

Of course, if they were using private money, those people supplying the money would naturally be expecting a return on their investment. And how would they be getting that? Trees don't generate a lot of revenue, unless you're cutting them down. I'm thinking it would be along the lines of turning all of our parks into Disney World, with fee-based attractions and miles and miles of advertising. A significant improvement over all of those boring trees, I'm sure.

"In addition, since these lands would be managed by environmentalists in the private sector, there would be little risk of regulatory capture by special interests, which was all too common in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations."

What environmentalists in the private sector? I also love how "special interests" means people looking out for the public welfare and not, oh, the oil industry, which looks out for the profits of a very few people.

The comments section shows a wealth of wisdom in knocking this lunatic down. I wish the WaPo would have given the responses to this letter equal placement. This guy is ludicrous.

Vive la Similarité/Différence (your choice)

2011-07-14T12:13:00.004-04:00

Joyeux le quatorze juillet! It's Bastille Day again. What does that mean for us here in America?

Well, it means that we should celebrate the fact that we're just like France. Thanks, David McCullough, for explaining it for us.

Except, wait. He's full of crap. We're nothing like France. So sayeth Edward Glaeser.

Mon dieux!

When Is a Person Not a Person?

2011-07-11T21:22:00.003-04:00

Jesus, Mitch McConnell is odious. Just freaking odious.

Here's a very short Salon item about something stupid McConnell said recently. But Salon got the emphasis wrong in this one. It was entirely inappropriate to bring up the Casey Anthony case when discussing trials for suspected terrorists. But McConnell's real ignorance was shown in this gem.

"I don't think a foreigner is entitled to all the protection in the Bill of Rights."

Really, Mitch? You don't think? Do you need to research that? 'Cause I can help you there.

Our constitution, which conservatives have pretended to revere so much recently, not only does not support this, it directly contradicts it. Here's what it says about the matter. It's Amendment V, which has only been on the books for 220 years or so, so I can see how Mitch might have missed the news.

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

See, it says "no citizen shall be..." What? It doesn't say "citizen"? It says "person"? Oh. That stinks. That covers, like, everybody. What kind of country is this, anyway?

SCOTUS Finds R Rating Unconstitutional!

2011-06-27T20:49:00.005-04:00

I'm having a rough time with the logic behind this one.

I'm as behind free expression as anyone on this planet. I don't think there should be censorship of any kind. If you want to make something, make it. If you want to say something, say it. If it's profane or shocking or just plain stupid, so be it.

The SCOTUS decision today uses this kind of free speech absolutism to justify getting rid of California's ban on the sale of violent video games to children. Here's what Justice Scalia had to say about this.

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

I'm totally with him as far as that statement goes. Fist Amendment protection all the way. But here's the problem. California wasn't banning this type of expression. At all. It was only saying that you couldn't sell violent games to minors. That is a completely different thing. It's not even a First Amendment issue.

I don't see how this is any different than not letting kids into R-rated movies. Or (and you knew this was coming) giving them access to porn. Really. If we follow the logic here, and not very far at that, then no one in government has any right to say that children shouldn't have unfettered access to all of the porn they can consume.

Here's Scalia again.

Justice Scalia acknowledged that Justice Alito had identified some disturbing images. “But disgust,” Justice Scalia wrote, “is not a valid basis for restricting expression.”

Again, this ban did not restrict expression. It did not tell video game makers what kinds of games they could make. It simply said they couldn't sell them to minors. Just like porn. Or violent movies.

I think I may agree with Clarence Thomas here for the first time ever.

“ ‘The freedom of speech,’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians,” Justice Thomas wrote.

Scalia responds:

“He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none,” Justice Scalia wrote of Justice Thomas.

Okay. I'll be happy to approach any one of Scalia's underage relatives and begin a conversation with them about how much sex I'd like to have with them. Then I'll show them some nice hardcore porn. And a Takashi Miike film fest. And maybe "Triumph of the Will". I'm sure he'll find absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, they should be exposed to new ideas. To hell with their parents.

Chris Christie Plays the Victim

2011-06-26T16:40:00.005-04:00

I never really bought Chris Christie's schtick about being an honest guy with whom you may not agree but who will always tell you the truth. He lost me for all time today on "Meet the Press".

The transcript is not yet available, so I can't yet quote what I'd like to in this space. But you can watch the whole segment, if you can stomach it. Most of it is Republican boilerplate that I'm not on board with but I can't claim is fundamentally dishonest like almost everything that comes out of Mitch McConnell's mouth.

The part that got me going was the bit close to the end of the segment, about 13 minutes in, when David Gregory shows a clip of Christie on another show being questioned about sending his kids to private school as he slashes funding for public schools.

It seemed like a reasonable question to me. The questioner probably sends her kids to public school and she wants to know why he's reserving privilege for his own kids while telling the rest of the state's parents who can't afford private school that they're SOL.

So does Christie answer the question? No, but he does take victimhood to a new level. Really, you need to watch this. It's shocking. Rather than discuss the public schools, he acts as if the questioner is calling him a bad parent. I was shocked at how awful his initial response was. I was even more shocked at how he expanded on it to David Gregory. Apparently, this is something that no one has a right to talk about. If you bring up public schools you're just insulting Chris Christie. He even managed to defend himself with the "This is who I am" bit.

Okay, Governor, it is who you are. And you're an asshole. You managed to fill another five minutes pretending that your rights as a parent were being questioned and your privacy was being violated somehow. But you never addressed what the questioner actually wanted to know, which was how you could so cavalierly leave the rest of the state's parents out to dry. You made it all about you, which is really distressing. You basically told her and everyone else in New Jersey to fuck off. Oh, and fuck your fucking kids too, NJ parents.

Until today I thought that maybe this guy was a bit less disgraceful than the average Republican. He's not. He's a disgusting hypocritical creep.

UPDATE: And I forgot to say "narcissistic".

It's Only Fraud If You're the One Doing It

2011-05-29T10:13:00.004-04:00

So, if you watch Fox News or generally subscribe to the Republican party line you surely know for a fact that voter fraud is a grave and very real threat to our fragile democracy. So you certainly must support all of the efforts being put in place by multiple states to ensure the integrity of our votes.

Of course, in the real world, voter fraud is about as much of a threat to democracy as the infield fly rule.

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.

So, because after five years of the Bush administration investigating and finding nothing of any real impact going on, the natural response of the Republican Party is to push harder to eliminate the scourge that their own president's administration found to be virtually non-existent. They would have done it sooner but they needed to take over a mess of state legislatures first. Which they now have.

Is there a single honest person alive who doesn't know what this is really about? The people least likely to have photo IDs, which is the new standard that the Repubs are pushing, are (and this is entirely coincidental, I'm sure) the same folks who are most likely to vote for Democrats. That is, poor people, black people, young people, poor black young people and the elderly, who are turning on the GOP like German Shepherds over the Paul Ryan gang's efforts to kill Medicare.

So the voter fraud issue needs to be revived in order to a) deflect attention from the actual problems we have right now, and b) help to ensure that fewer people who might vote against them next year and in years beyond are actually able to do so.

This is gutter politics. This is gross. This is much more of a threat to democracy than the supposed voter fraud going on. Tens of thousands of voters will be turned away or have their votes not counted. And I think we know who's going to benefit from all of this.

Surprised?

Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

2011-05-23T23:16:00.005-04:00

Easiest job in the world? I'm guessing copy editor at ESPN.com. Here's the Boston Bruins current roster.

The B's apparently have not one, not two, but three players from a country that hasn't existed since 1992. I suppose that it was technically their birthplace, as they were all born before the split. But still...

Dumb Letters: The Narcissist

2011-05-06T11:39:00.002-04:00

I reckon we see what we want to see. I'm loving this letter to the WaPo about The Prez's announcement of an assassination you may have heard about.

When the happy announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed was made, it was disappointing to hear the president report the event by drawing so much attention to himself. He practically made it seem as if he had been there and pulled the trigger. Even if credit is due to him, it was immodest at best not to give all the attention to the men and women of the intelligence and Special Operations services who ushered bin Laden out of the world.

So much of contemporary life is sullied by politicians seeking advantage from situations largely outside their control. The country needs good news more than it needs the president’s preening.

Really? Do I even need to comment on this? He neither said nor implied that he did it. Or anything even close to it. He said "The United States" has done this. And then he went to New York City and didn't say a freaking word. Contrast.

I suppose the president, commander-in-chief of our military and supposed leader of all of us, was supposed to have one of the Navy SEALs do the talking. Because he shouldn't seem immodest. The dude gave a speech and announced what the hell happened. Get over yourself and your fantasies about the guy.

Crikey, this is about as preen-free a president as you can get.

He Couldn't Get Any Lower

2011-04-12T20:47:00.002-04:00

Or could he? I had to read the article to be sure.

Because what ESPN.com said happened to Lawrence Taylor could be taken in more than one way.

That's low, man.

Uninterested? Only If You're Disinterested

2011-04-08T13:02:00.003-04:00

I'm a bit of a language geek. Which is not to say that I always write or speak in perfect English. If I did, that last sentence would have been part of the first sentence.

But I have my bugaboos. So does Ben Yagoda over at Slate.

Yes, I know that language changes over time and some things that we consider perfectly acceptable would have left folks in prior centuries aghast. My main concern is the same as Yagoda's, the few words for which we have no proper substitute.

"Literally", of course, is the granddaddy of them. To me, anyway. Yagoda avoids its discussion. Maybe it's too obvious. Or too painful.

As Yagoda points out when discussing "disinterested", there is no exact synonym for that word. (Oddly enough, in a prior paragraph, he points out that "impartial" means roughly the same thing.) But this is even more true for "literally". Please try to name a synonym for it. Once it loses its meaning, we have no single word left to express this concept. This is where language's evolution becomes devolution.

Wipe Your Butt With Our New Poll

2011-04-07T11:34:00.005-04:00

If you know me, you know how much I love polls/surveys. Not taking polls, but dissecting them. This one isn't even worth dissecting. It's idiotic on its face.

Polls are supposed to be information-gathering devices. This information can be used for marketing, customer service evaluation, testing political winds, etc. Sometimes a poll that's taken for a legitimate purpose is still illegitimate. Check these out if you want to know what I think about polls/surveys that do this.

But Charmin's poll is clearly not intended to gather useful information. It's only purpose is to get people who just love to have their opinions heard to click on an advertisement. It's so transparent that I can't imagine anyone clicking on it. I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many who saw the ad just couldn't resist pulling the trigger. And what they clicked. "Ooh, is Charmin extremely new and different or just very new and different? It wipes my butt in such new and different ways. But just how new and different? I'm torn."

Slime Machine

2011-04-06T17:17:00.004-04:00

Okay, so one of the dangers of Netflix streaming movies is that you have no risk but your time when you decide to watch something. Before, when you put a disc in your queue you were at least committing to having a physical object in your house. If you couldn't choke it down, you put it in the red envelope and had to spend a few days waiting in shame for its replacement, preferably something of greater cultural value than "Dude, Where's My Car?"

With the streaming thing, the threshold for a queue add has been drastically reduced. Hey, I'll just watch it for a few minutes. If it's really that awful, I'll just turn it off and go on to the next thing. Instantly!

This is fine in theory, but when you have certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies it can be a trap. Some of us absolutely cannot watch a movie or TV show in which we have even the slightest interest if it has already begun. (Yes, just like Alvy Singer.) And we do not begin to watch or read something that we do not eventually finish. I once slogged through 600-odd painful pages of "The Alienist". Hey, maybe it'll get better. (It didn't.)

Which brings us to "Hot Tub Time Machine". (You can follow the link if you want a full synopsis. Not bothering here.)

I'm about the target demographic for this film. The soundtrack was the soundtrack of my teenage years. If nothing else, I figured I'd chuckle a few times and enjoy the soundtrack. Which I sorta did. Not just the obvious choices (Men Without Hats, Spandau Ballet, Serious Moonlight-era Bowie) but the few inspired oddities, both truly awesome (The Replacements!) and awesomely cheesy (Nu Shooz!).

It's a total guy movie, which is not really my thing. But I can enjoy it if it's funny enough. In that department, it's a coin toss. I'm not quite sure if I wasted an hour-forty or if the few chuckles and titties made it a better bet at the time than another episode of "Torchwood" (which is still there waiting patiently for me, thank goodness).

But what really concerns me here are the morals we're meant (or not) to take away from this cinematic enterprise. And at this point we'll give the obligatory HERE BE SPOILERS!

The film, to its credit, doesn't cast its main characters in a flattering light. We pity them but we don't really like them. But that's what made it harder for me to swallow the ending, which we'll get to in a second.

Early in the film, John Cusack laments that all they had in the 80s was "Reagan and AIDS", the two plagues that were at their grossest back then but continue to pollute our lives today. So one might reasonably expect that, if we were to deconstruct the thing, we might find at least a mild indictment of the values we had back then. The Gordon Gekko "greed is good" era was as slick, empty and one-dimensional as Oliver Stone's screenplays condemning it.

Well, here's what happens at the end. After spending most of the 80s flashback trying to do everything that they did the first time around in a perhaps-vain attempt to avoid the Butterfly Effect, they end by saying "fuck it" and doing whatever the heck they want. Rob Corddry's character even stays behind when the others return to the present in order to take advantage of his knowledge of the future.

I found this a bit depressing. Once the three other principals made their way back to 2010, things were quite different. For all of them. But not because, as in "A Christmas Carol" or even "Back to the Future", they did things better or were kinder people or worked harder as a result of reliving the past. They didn't have epiphanies. Their lives were better because they cheated. And the movie is okay with this. It actually celebrates it.

Rob Corddry is filthy stinking rich because he knew about Google and Twitter and Motley Crue before everyone else. Craig Robinson is well-off because he pre-empted his wife from cheating on him in the future and wowed an audience by teaching his band a Black Eyed Peas song from the future instead of lamely crooning "Careless Whisper", as he did the first time around. John Cusack meets a music journalist that he ends up with instead of brooding over the girl who stabbed him in the eye (and, as he learns, would have stabbed him in the eye either way).

To boil this down to one sentence, "Hot Tub Time Machine" teaches us that the road to happiness and wealth is insider trading. It isn't a repudiation of the 80s. It's a celebration of its worst aspects, which just happen to have exploded again in this decade. Rob Corddry's character is a dick at the beginning of the movie and he's a dick at the end. But now he's a rich dick. And he isn't rich because he earned it. We're supposed to feel good?

No. This left a very bad taste in my mouth. And it wasn't because of Salt-n-Pepa. It's a total glorification of corruption. And really, not funny enough to mask that fact. The characters in "The Producers" were much funnier and much more sympathetic. And they ended up in jail.

Overrated

2011-03-21T11:17:00.004-04:00

I'm not a big fan of taunting. I'm talking specifically about sports fans taunting opposing players, coaches and, worst of all, fans. Although I do tend to frown upon taunting in regular life too. ("You call yourself a cabby? Any idiot knows you take 10th Avenue. STUCK in TRAFF-ic!" [Clap. Clap. Clapclapclap.] "STUCK in TRAFF-ic!" [Clap. Clap. Clapclapclap.])

I think it shows an ugly side of human nature that people would take more pleasure in the downfall of another than they would take pleasure in the achievement of their own team. As a born-and-bred New Englander and longstanding member of Red Sox Nation, I hate the Yankees as much as the next guy. But when the Sox beat the Yanks, I'm happy that the Sox beat the Yanks. I'm happy for the Sox. I'm not as concerned that the guy wearing pinstripes feels personal shame and humiliation.

So, I'm not really into the chants of "Yankees suck". Partly because it's so patently untrue that the whole enterprise smacks of wishful thinking and is therefore more than a little bit pathetic. The Yankees are, historically and currently, the least sucky team in the history of professional sports. Why else would we bother hating them? And "Jeter swallows" is downright offensive. I will say no more on it, lest it be dignified. (As if such a thing is possible.) I'd rather cheer my team on than attempt to degrade another, no matter how much I don't care for them.

Which brings me to today's real point of contention, chanting "o-ver-rat-ed" at a team that is being vanquished by another, presumably underrated, team. This is taunting, of course. But, even more than chanting "[the other team] sucks", it paints the chanter as a bit ignorant and as someone who is actually dissing his/her own team.

Listen. If the other team is overrated, that means that they're not really as good as the conventional wisdom holds. Which means that when you're chanting that the other team is overrated, you're really demeaning your own team. "Hey, those guys really aren't all that good!" So, now you're crowing that your team just survived a squeaker with a team that isn't very good? What does that say about your guys?

Wouldn't it be more uplifting to say, "You guys are a very talented assemblage of physical prowess and game management. And the team for whom we cheer has defeated you, making them even more awesome and reflecting their glory on us who wear the same colors as we cheer!"

I reckon that doesn't make much of a chant.

Smart Letters: The Cost of Energy

2011-03-16T11:10:00.004-04:00

Free-marketeers who poo-poo renewable energy never ever ever discuss the costs to society that are never borne by the energy industry. Kenneth Miller of New York City lays them out succinctly. (It's the last letter on the page.) This is why subsidizing the oil industry is sheer madness and subsidizing renewable energy is sound policy. Vitally important, in fact.

The recent argument for nuclear power has been that it is the only large-scale energy source that is economically competitive with fossil fuels and that won’t contribute to global warming. But as the horrible disaster in Japan is making clear, nuclear energy comes with many hidden costs.

These are already manifest in the government insurance that is necessary to raise capital to build reactors and in the government responsibility for nuclear waste disposal. Add to this the government responsibility for the costs of disaster management and recovery and for decommissioning ruined reactors, not to mention whatever dollar amount you want to assign to the lives lost or ruined in disasters, and the real costs soar.

Fossil fuels also have the hidden costs of climate change, which will likely dwarf those of nuclear power, as well as the costs of oil spills and other disasters and myriad government subsidies.

If all of these hidden costs were factored in, we might find that renewables are by far the cheapest source of energy.

Information Exploitation

2011-03-15T11:38:00.005-04:00

It's too soon. We can't talk about it. No, it's still too soon. We can't talk about it. No, no. Come back to me in a little while. Yes, later. Much later. When you've calmed down a bit. I'm sorry, what were we talking about?

Jonah Goldberg seems to think that we shouldn't be referring to the recent and still unfolding nuclear disaster(s) in Japan as reasons why nuclear power may not be such a great idea. It's a tragedy. (Can't argue with that.) But it's still happening right now so we shouldn't "exploit" it for some sneaky awful political agenda. Like saving lives.

This happens all the time. Something awful happens, usually because of something the energy industry did. Some of us meekly raise our hands and say, "Um, excuse me, but doesn't this prove what we've been saying all along? That what we're doing here is inherently dangerous and harmful to the environment?" Then the captains of industry come rushing in to say, "No no, it's perfectly safe.*" *"As long as there are never any natural disasters or the hint of human error. Or terrorism."

And people like Jonah Goldberg are right there to back them up by claiming that anyone merely pointing out the fact of the disaster is using it for their own political agenda and therefore disrespecting the thousands/millions affected by said disaster. I guess if our agenda is something like "Nuclear power is bad because terrible shit happens so we maybe shouldn't use it so much" then it's considered tacky to say so when terrible shit actually happens.

But wait, Jonah says. You said yourself that shit happens. Shit happens! We can't stop doing everything because something bad might happen, right? So a few hundred people get their faces melted off. Hey, it could have been a few thousand. The system works! (Jonah actually makes this point, if a bit less in extremis. It's in the third-to-last paragraph.) Let's congratulate ourselves and build a few more nuclear plants. We're going to need them now that those other ones have melted down. But we'll need to build them somewhere else. Too much radiation already in that place.

Sorry, Jonah. But when we have preventable catastrophes like this it is the perfect time to bring up the folly of raping the earth for short-term gain. The truth does not take a vacation because it's inconvenient for you to look at it. We are not "thirst[y] to confirm...[our]...preferred policies". We are pained that we have to go through this again and again and again while people like you refuse to listen as more and more people die.

God Told Me That You're a Dick

2011-03-14T17:26:00.004-04:00

Why is it that anytime anything awful happens some fucknut says it's God telling us something? Of course, exactly what God is trying to tell us is open to interpretation. But it's usually about gay people, atheists, liberals, New Yorkers, or gay atheist liberal New Yorkers. (Is there any other kind?)

This stupid little girl is just exultant over the incredible horror in Japan. Apparently, this was a message to atheists. I hadn't realized that every single person on the east coast of Japan was an atheist. But thanks for playing, girlie. I hope you don't have any atheists in a 150-mile radius of your house. Because when God comes a-calling for them, you and your Barbies are getting sucked into the maelstrom with them.

I'll give her a pass, though, because she's just a tot. Once she's all growed up and spewing the same nonsense (and -- I hate to be so pessimistic, but -- I'm fairly confident she will be) then we can hold her in something that doesn't resemble pity so much as contempt. Especially if she gets her own radio and/or TV show.

Like this shithead. Mr. Beck uses the old I'm-not-really-saying-what-I'm-saying bit, which I love. It absolves people -- at least in their own minds, and possibly the law's, in certain states -- of guilt. "I didn't really say that the people in Japan had it coming! (But I just did.)"

See if you can look in the mirror and say the following two things without telling yourself that at least one of them can't possibly be true.

"I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes,"
"[T]here's a message being sent. And that is, 'Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.' I'm just saying."

So, God didn't cause the earthquake, but the earthquake that just happened is a message. But not from God. The message is presumably from the Avon Lady.

Oh, and of course Glenn Beck knows exactly what the message is. All that stuff you're doing is bad! Well, we're doing an awful lot of stuff down here, Glenn. Which of it exactly is the problem? I'm thinking that watching your batshit crazy show would be pretty high up, if I were God.

And is just Japan doing it or is it us too? Because if it's us, God missed by about 6,000 miles. Our god is an awesomely stupid god, apparently. One who has a lot of incredibly stupid and hateful followers.

Look Out for That Clock!

2011-03-13T12:32:00.005-04:00

Every year, twice a year, we go through the whole Daylight Savings Time thing. And every year, twice a year, we hear people complaining about "losing an hour of sleep" (or gaining it) and how the time change screws up their delicately balanced internal clock. Hogwash. Really. It's complete nonsense.

Major changes in your sleep cycle can certainly wreak havoc on you. This is what jet lag is. Ask anyone who's flown to Europe or Asia. Or Hawaii. Or even coast-to-coast. But when we change the clocks twice a year we're only talking about one hour. Just one hour. "Oh, MAB," I can hear you saying, "That's still a time change! It messed me up!" Yeah? Okay, here's a question for you. What time do you get up to go to work on a normal weekday? For some, it's 6:00. For some it's 7:00.

Okay, now what time do you get up on a normal weekend day? I guarantee you it isn't 6 or 7 for the vast majority. It's probably closer to 9 or 10. ("It's Saturday! I get to sleep in!") So, unless you go to bed and wake up at exactly the same time every day, you are screwing with your sleep cycle far more drastically than this measly hour that switches but twice a year. And you're doing it every week.

That messed-up feeling you're having is entirely in your head. It's fed, of course, by perceived wisdom and even our media. I've seen "reports" on local and even national news warning people to be careful when driving after time changes. 'Cause you're so messed up. You'll definitely be groggy. So thanks for feeding the nonsense, American media.

So you didn't "lose an hour of sleep" last night. You probably slept as much as you would have anyway. This is why they do this on a weekend, when you mess with your internal clock all the time anyway. You lost an hour of watching TV, or reading cranky blog posts.

I have nothing to say on the merits of Daylight Savings Time. I don't care one way or the other what time we all agree it is. We can argue over whether it's better to have it lighter in the morning or in the evening. Go to it. But the discussion and accompanying grief about "gaining" or "losing" sleep is just plain silly.

It's just an hour, people. Get over it.

That Was One Hell of a Hockey Game

2011-02-08T09:17:00.005-05:00

I like how the Boston Globe shows us the scores of the most recent games played by the local boys and their next opponent. It allows us to recap the recent history of rivalries and jog our fond memories of the last time, say, the Celtics played the Grizzlies. Good times.

Remember that freaking awesome B's-Canadiens game last time out? That was a statbuster.

I remember they pulled both goalies early in the first period. Everyone on both teams got hat tricks. It was a major boost to the local millinery economy. Let's do it again, B's!

Porn in the USA

2011-02-06T11:37:00.003-05:00

This story from NPR caught my ear the other day.

It shouldn't be news that there are certain aspects of our society that are distasteful to religious conservatives. Gay people, the First Amendment, science... Porn is also on the list. It doesn't even have to be gay porn. It's all bad. So I wasn't surprised to hear a story on NPR about how religious groups are dealing with this particular scourge.

What I didn't expect was the tone of the piece. Porn was treated as a disease, akin to gambling or alcoholism, by the religious groups in question. That's to be expected. But the NPR piece never once questioned this. The entire piece takes porn on exactly the terms laid out by the religious groups. It's a given that porn is a disease that must be overcome. No questions asked.

I can see how people can be addicted to porn and how it may interfere with their lives. (Just like non-porn web surfing or any other form of procrastination.) But this isn't discussed. It isn't the addiction, if that even exists, that's the problem. It's porn in general. There are no gray areas. Porn is taken to be a societal problem on its face and thank the Big Guy that these guys are here to help. You can be cured of the porn just like you can be cured of the gay.

Still think NPR is some crazy liberal media outlet?

I Don't Beg Your Pardon

2011-02-03T11:02:00.005-05:00

Need a laugh? Read this.

Apparently, Tom Campbell thinks it would be a great idea to pardon Tom DeLay. Can't say I agree. Surprised?

We went through this type of thing a few years ago with Scooter Libby. Someone does something wrong, gets busted, and then someone else says "Oh, he's a good guy. He did it all for the right reasons. Just pardon him." You won't hear that kind of talk about folks in the hood who swiped food for their families to eat. But you hear it quite a bit when people in power abuse that power and are forced to pay for it, even a little. They become the wronged party.

Campbell's arguments are disjointed, unoriginal and woefully unconvincing. First he says he isn't a big Tom DeLay fan. This establishes his "impartiality". Then he compares DeLay with Charlie Rangel, noting that Rangel got off relatively easy, in his opinion. Then he says that three years in the slammer is unfair. (Compared to what? One year?) Then he says DeLay's motives were pure and that he didn't stand to gain personally. (This shouldn't matter. But, for the record, he did benefit quite a bit, personally and politically. Campbell is engaging in sophistry. There were indeed "no personal slush funds" [that we know of] but there were plenty of other goodies.) Then we get a lecture on civility. (Huh?) And then a caution against descending into "politics as blood sport" (as if DeLay wasn't engaging in that himself), followed by the tried-and-true "hasn't he suffered enough?" line. Then, inexplicably, the Tucson shooting gets hauled in.

After all of the usual nonsense, Campbell boils it down to "Think about the children!" Oy. This is not a person who feels he's laid out an airtight case.

This following bit is great.

In many countries, it is not enough to defeat opponents. Politics is a blood sport in which you must destroy them if you can. Do we wish to descend to that level? I don't think so.

That is why DeLay should be allowed to retire to private life with what he has left. He has been punished enough. He lost his position as majority leader and his congressional seat. He lost his place on the national stage. Prison will satisfy the vindictive desires of some but will trigger in others a desire for revenge.

Oh, okay. So maybe we should pardon every fucking criminal in the country. Because undoubtedly revenge is the only possible outcome. Prison is always vindictive. It's never deserved.

See, it isn't about Tom DeLay and the illegal shit he did. It's about satisfying someone else's bloodlust. And I think that Campbell's comment about DeLay's lost place on the national stage means that he desperately wants us to forget this gem.

Apart from all of this nonsense is the idea of what a pardon really is. It isn't, and was never meant to be, a method to ensure that guilty people never did their time. It was supposed to be a way for guilty, contrite people who did their time to be forgiven due to the fact that they had learned from their mistakes and had begun to make themselves into decent members of society.

The most horrible precedent was set by Chevy Chase in 1974. In that one, there wasn't even a trial, let alone a verdict or a sentence. They skipped right to the pardon. So now any time anyone in a leadership position gets convicted, we're supposed to just forget about it because one of their buddies vouches for them. Because really, they shouldn't have to serve as much time as the guy who gets busted for swiping a few videotapes. Now that was a bad guy. Lock him up.

Most importantly, acceptance of a pardon is supposed to be an admission of guilt. You will never get that from Tom DeLay. In fact he's appealing the court's decision. How can you pardon someone who's appealing the decision?

Taxation for Representation

2011-01-27T11:45:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure why Michele Bachmann gets so much press.

Okay, scratch that. I do know why. Because she says dumb shit, just like someone else we know and love or hate depending on where we sit and how much grey matter we're sporting.

She's now riding this wave of neo-constitutionalism that has a stubborn tendency to ignore the parts of the constitution that contradict their goals. This is remarkably similar to the tendency of many, who are (perhaps not coincidentally) on the same side of the political fence, to ignore the parts of their other sacred document that don't support their views.

Although the teabaggers like to flout their reverence for the Founding Fathers (a phrase, by the way, coined by one of our most corrupt leaders), the U.S. Constitution was left intentionally open to interpretation. (And change. Amendments, anyone?) What does "general welfare" mean to you? How about "common defense"? A "well-regulated militia", maybe? They're all covered. And they're all pretty damn vague.

I just looked at Article 1 - Section 8, the section that is perhaps most frequently ignored by the teabaggers. Here's what it says.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Wanna do some "interpretation" with me? Cool.

I'm sure that people like Steve Forbes would argue that "uniform" means a flat tax. But what this really means is that no one state should be taxed more than another. That is, that the federal income tax rates should be the same for individuals living in every state. My federal tax can't be 10% in New York, but 15% in Alabama.

But take a leap with me for a moment. Could this possibly mean that each state should bear the same total burden? If we need to collect $1 trillion dollars, do we get 1/50 of it from each state? That would be "uniform", right? "No!", you scream. There are way more people in New York than in Wyoming. And way more money there. They should pay more. (These complaints would come from Wyoming far more than from New York.)

But ask those same folks in Wyoming how they feel about the Senate and it's a different story. They get two senators, New York gets two senators. So our constitution demands that each state get equal representation in one of our two houses of legislation. So howzabout they pony up for that? Equal representation, equal tax burden.

Maybe the federal tax rate should be adjusted for the amount of representation you get in congress. Toss the House into the mix, if you want. That'll level things a bit. But not entirely. Wyoming has 3 legislators in D.C., one for every 188,000 residents. New york has 31 legislators, one for every 625,000 residents. Maybe Wyoming should pay a bit more for that extra representation. More than three times as much, by my cheap calculation. Don't want to pay more? Okay, send one or two of those folks home.

And while we're at it, we can stop taxing the folks in D.C. at all.

Of course, I don't mean any of this. Except the last bit about the D.C. taxes. That I mean. But really, is it any crazier than some of the crap the teabaggers are tossing at us?

Grab Grab Grab (What I Just Gave You)

2010-11-23T12:30:00.003-05:00

You can always count on Tea Party types to make arguments in defense of the U.S. Constitution that fundamentally misunderstand the U.S. Constitution.

Here's the latest from Fox News spokes idiot Sarah P, as quoted in Salon. Her beef is with "power grabs" by the federal government.

What we're seeing today is the inevitable result of national leaders who have forgotten the fundamental wisdom of the Tenth Amendment [which provides for America's federalist system]. Just as Mr. Jefferson warned us, as soon as we as a country disregarded the fact that the federal government's powers are limited, and that we as states and individuals hold the balance of the power, the floodgates were opened to the torrent of federal power grabs we're seeing today. Take the federal income tax, for example. We tend to think there are two constants in life: death and taxes. But America hasn't always had an income tax. The first federal income tax on individuals was imposed in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. But the tax was never meant to be permanent, and Congress repealed it ten years after it was enacted. It wasn't until 1913 that the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and the individual federal income tax that we know today was created.

What is most dangerous about these power grabs is that they're usually done in the name of a good cause--insuring the uninsured, for example--and have a big wad of cash attached to them.

Hilarious, as usual. She's right on some things. Of course we haven't always had an income tax. And the original tax she cites was not permanent. But once you make an amendment to the constitution, that's pretty much meant to be permanent. (18th Amendment, we didn't mean you.) And that's what we did.

What's dumb about this, on first glance, is a typical case of 10th Amendment confusion, which is sadly prevalent in the TP. Here's what the 10th says.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Okay. And the 16th Amendment was...in the constitution. The constitution can't be unconstitutional, lady. Oy.

But the dumbest thing about Mrs. P's complaint is that any time the constitution is amended -- and I'd love to know, as I would with most of her pronouncements, whether she doesn't know this or she's just conveniently ignoring it -- it has to be ratified by 75% of the states. In other words, a constitutional amendment cannot, by definition, be a federal power grab. At least 38 of our 50 states have to say yes for it to take effect. And 42 of the then-48 states said cool to the 16th Amendment. (Three rejected it and three more never took it up.) Assuming that Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia's silence on the matter equalled consent, that's 93% approval from the states from whom power was being "grabbed". Nice.

This nitwit continues to say dumb shit on a regular basis. And our media continue to quote her dumb shit. Please stop. Or at least have the common decency to say, "Hey, that is some dumb shit right there. And here's why." It isn't all that difficult. What are you people going to do when you come up against an actual skilled sophist (like, say, Karl Rove)?

Barbara Billingsley

2010-10-16T21:44:00.004-04:00

I wasn't completely sure she was still around. But man, this lady was a champ.

Although it was already a bit long in the tooth by the time I was a kid, "Leave It to Beaver" was a huge part of my childhood. Can I tell you how much I love(d) this show? In the past year or so I had been combing through the archives, available for streaming on Netflix. It has not lost any of its charm. In fact, it may be better than I remember.

"Beaver" is constantly held up as a paradigm of cold war squeaky clean America, old fashioned and conservative. Well, kinda. Nuclear families. Bed on time. Wash behind your ears. Blah blah blah. But watching clusters of episodes recently made me rethink this.

Although Ward and June had rules for Wally and The Beave, they weren't total hardasses. They were always loving and understanding with the boys, even when they did really dumb shit. And when they lied, covered it up and -- inevitably -- were found out, Ward and June were usually more disappointed than angry. And they sat the kids down and spoke with them calmly about what they did and why they did it and exhorted them to come to the 'rents and talk to them whenever anything of the sort dealt with in that particular episode arose again.

The elder Cleavers weren't the type to say "In my day, kids had respect for their elders!" They knew that they weren't much different when they were kids and that boys will be boys. They knew that, ultimately, most of what Wally and Beaver learned, they'd learn it through experience, not by listening to a lecture. And as long as no one got hurt, it was all good. They never yelled. They never hit. It was, dare I say it, a pretty liberal show. And not just for its time.

Wholesome? Oh yes. But hardly the hoary cliche of Eisenhower America it's often made out to be. Yes, Ward went to the office and June stayed home and took care of the house, always immaculately dressed and coiffed. But the Cleavers were both active participants in their children's lives. And they discussed matters of discipline and the kids' well-being together. Ward never put his foot down and said "Because I said so!" or "I'm the man of the house, and what I say goes!" Ward and June both knew that even they didn't always know best and admitted when they were wrong. And not just between the two of them. To their kids.

I could fill up an entire post about the language on the show, which is utterly brilliant in its own right. Ward and June spoke perfect standard American English but the youngsters on the show had a patois all their own. I wasn't around when the show aired, so I can't tell you how accurate it was to the time. But there never was then and never was after that a show that had "goofy" and "crummy" and "hunka" and "hollerin' at" and "little creep" and dozens of other nuggets of linguistic awesomeness as part of its arsenal. The writing was only nominated for an Emmy once (and didn't win). This is criminal.

At the heart of the show, though, was the lady that just passed. She was filled with love for her family and a wisdom that is stereotypical of mid- to late- 20th century TV motherhood. But it all began with her. She was the mom you wish you had.

Higher Taxes Make You Work Less, Because You Don't Like Money

2010-10-11T00:46:00.003-04:00

Does anyone still believe this? Former GWB advisor Greg Mankiw has taken the time to compose an article reiterating the old line that taxes make people not want to work. And I took the time to read it. Call me a masochist.

Oh boy. Here we go.

You wanna read it first? Here it is. Knock yourself out.

There are a few completely dishonest calculations in the piece. And a few assumptions that rankle. But the basic concept is one that's always irked me. That is, "I'd rather have nothing than have something of which I have to give part away."

We've heard it before. Taxes are a disincentive to work. Really? I can see how people might not like paying their taxes. I can see how people may argue over how much is too much. (Is 30% too much? How about 50%?) But I cannot understand people saying that because any amount is taxed, they won't bother making any money because it just isn't worth it to them.

Mankiw begins by saying that he's doing just fine, thank you very much. But what should he do if someone asks him if he'd like to make a few bucks at a speaking engagement? Apparently the answer is to turn it down. Not because he doesn't need the money. (He doesn't. Remember?) But because he wouldn't be able to leave as much of it for his children as he would if there were no taxes of any kind. Not lower taxes, mind you. No taxes. Oh. Okay.

Here's his logic, such as it is.

"Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article. If there were no taxes of any kind, this $1,000 of income would translate into $1,000 in extra saving. If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding."

That is simply the miracle of bullshit. Because the no-tax scenario does not exist, why are we talking about it?

But now we're not just talking about taxes here, it seems. He has now invested his money in a company that is doing very well and his $1000 has magically transformed, 30 years from now, into $10,000. Nice. But what's wrong with just having the $1000 you earned in the first place? Well, nothing. Unless your aim is to make the point that $1000 is really $10,000 and you need a benchmark with which to whip that original sum. So find a way to make it $10,000.

"Now let’s put taxes into the calculus. First, assuming that the Bush tax cuts expire, I would pay 39.6 percent in federal income taxes on that extra income. Beyond that, the phaseout of deductions adds 1.2 percentage points to my effective marginal tax rate. I also pay Medicare tax, which the recent health care bill is raising to 3.8 percent, starting in 2013. And in Massachusetts, I pay 5.3 percent in state income taxes, part of which I get back as a federal deduction. Putting all those taxes together, that $1,000 of pretax income becomes only $523 of saving."

It must be true. It's calculus! Okay. Now we're down to $523 after taxes. But hold on. We're assuming the top marginal rate, and we're assuming the GWB cuts expire. (Should we really assume that?) And we're also assuming a tax rate (Medicare) that doesn't begin for another three years. Still, even so, you have $523 left, right? That's something. Oh, wait. More horrible horrible taxes that make making money just not worth it.

"And that saving no longer earns 8 percent. First, the corporation in which I have invested pays a 35 percent corporate tax on its earnings. So I get only 5.2 percent in dividends and capital gains. Then, on that income, I pay taxes at the federal and state level. As a result, I earn about 4 percent after taxes, and the $523 in saving grows to $1,700 after 30 years."

Okay, so now he's comparing a theoretical 8% return on an investment with only 5.2%, which is still pretty damn solid, particularly in today's economy. But now we're down from the completely untaxed and wisely invested $1000 becoming a nice fat $10,000 (in 30 years) to it being only $1700. A mere pittance. Oh, but he's giving it to his kids, right? I think we know where we're going next.

"Then, when my children inherit the money, the estate tax will kick in. The marginal estate tax rate is scheduled to go as high as 55 percent next year, but Congress may reduce it a bit. Most likely, when that $1,700 enters my estate, my kids will get, at most, $1,000 of it."

Ah, yes. The estate tax. Again, we're assuming the top rate here. Which doesn't yet exist. So, Mankiw's horrible horrible scenario comes down to working for $1000 and having his kids inherit $1000. In the absolute worst-case scenario. Which doesn't exist. I'm crying here. Hey, Greg. Tell your kids to get a job instead of waiting 30 years to get that lousy $1700.

"HERE’S the bottom line: Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family’s marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. Is it any wonder that I turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered?"

No. But not for the reasons he states. He doesn't work because he has enough money already. If he needed more, he'd take the assignment. If he didn't have any money at all, would he not take it? Would he rather have the $523 or $0? Has he never worked in his life? Because he's paid taxes at these rates already, presumably, if he has. But why? He says he has no incentive. And yet...he's worked. And continues to do so. This article's existence is proof.

Mankiw's argument seems to boil down to not wanting to pay any taxes. So apparently if someone said to Mankiw, "Hey, I'll give you 1000 bucks to do something" he'd say yes. But if they said, "Hey, I'll give you 2000 bucks but after tax it will end up being 1000 bucks" he'd say no. This makes absolutely no sense.

The equation shouldn't be "how much is going to the government". It should be "how much is going to me". If the answer to the last question is more than zero, then you have an incentive to work. If you don't, it's just spite.

Let's kick Mankiw out of this scenario and pop in an actual person, Joe Schmo. Joe isn't in the top tax bracket. Joe has rent to pay. And food to buy. Joe gets an offer of $1000 to write an article. Joe knows that he'll probably only take home about $750 of it. (Because he isn't in Mankiw's bracket.) So, Joe can a) take the job and have $750 towards paying his rent or b) not take the job because the taxes have taken away his incentive to work. Gee, what do you think he does? His incentive to work is paying his fucking rent.

And another thing: Joe isn't going to invest his money (which, contrary to what Mankiw says, could result in him ultimately getting nothing, if the company goes under). He's going to spend it. So the "miracle of compounding" never plays into it. And the evil estate tax is immaterial. Even if he did have $1000 to leave to his kids 30 years from now, unless he had another $1,999,000 to add to it, there would be no estate tax for his kids to worry about. None.

Mankiw's article is the most elitist piece of crap I've seen in the NYT, or any media outlet, in some time. And here's how he ends it.

"But don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden."

So, if what he's saying is true and he won't take that writing job because he doesn't need the money and he's disincented anyway because of his tax burden, then guess who gets the job. It's Joe Schmo! So Mankiw's last statement is, by his own logic, false. Because Joe now has $750 that he wouldn't have had if we didn't tax Greg Mankiw. Who is a schmuck.

Free Mountain Dew for Everyone!

2010-10-08T10:53:00.005-04:00

Really? This is a controversy? People are actually up in arms about restricting food stamps so they can't be used to buy soda? Oh no! They're "playing God"!

This is the kind of crap that gives welfare a bad name.

People, listen. It is not "playing God" to say that government money that is given to people to keep children from starving should actually be used to keep children from starving and not just loading them with sugar and empty calories.

Holy crap. Not a controversy. Really. Not a controversy. Thanks, ABC News, for pretending it is.

Bernard Schwartz

2010-09-30T16:35:00.006-04:00

Okay, it's Tony Curtis. But Bernard Schwartz was just way too jewy for Hollywood.

And besides, he wouldn't have been known as Stony Curtis if he hadn't changed his name. I mean, come on. Stony Curtis. Now that's a name for a rock star.

Ahem. Sorry.

I was never a big fan of Mr. Curtis. Even in his best movies ("Spartacus", "The Sweet Smell of Success") he seemed like window dressing. Or worse.

I think I liked him best in "Some Like It Hot". He seemed to let loose a bit more there. But even then, I found myself wishing for someone a bit less...I don't know. Unsettling, maybe. Maybe it was those icy blue eyes. Expressionless. He never seemed like he belonged in any of the movies I've seen him in. Except maybe "Sweet Smell". His "I think I'd just as soon be someplace else" manner made the most sense in that creepy world.

At any rate, he's out of here. Maybe he's going to the castle of his faddah. Which lies over yonder.

And if he hadn't changed his name? Why then, Fred would have been the stunt double for (wait for it)...

Bernie Quartz!

Chasing the Road Runner on an ACME Segway

2010-09-28T21:30:00.004-04:00

I'm always torn. Death shouldn't ever be funny. Not real death, anyway. Cartoon death is funny. But real life death happens to real people. With real family that loved them. Even Richard Nixon had family that loved him. Nixon! Imagine that.

So I'll just have to take a deep breath, walk in a circle three times and ask forgiveness of the universe for THINKING THIS IS REALLY FREAKING FUNNY.

Don't want to click through? Here's the headline.

Owner of Segway Company Dies in a Segway Accident

Ha! Sorry. It's just funny. And (it gets better) he plunged off a cliff! Like Wile E. Coyote! Maybe it was a cartoon death after all.

Sorry.

No, really. Sorry.

It's Sex With Someone I Love

2010-09-17T10:22:00.005-04:00

Okay, so the Tea Party has just handed another seat back to the Democrats. Thank you, Delaware Republicans.

Two things about Christine O'Donnell.

Thing 1: What the hell is this?

Why are you in the picture? Honey, let me explain something to you. Your husband wasn't masturbating all these years because he was trying to perfect the sexual experience flying solo. He was doing it because there didn't happen to be anyone else in the room with him. He didn't have a vagina to stick his thing into so he improvised with whatever was handy. Now that he does, if you really think he's going to prefer masturbation to that sweet sweet part-of-God's-plan vagina that you're sporting, then yes, I would question why you are in the picture. But not for the reason you think. It's either because your husband is gay or that you're just really terrible at the nasty. Any straight guy would prefer a female body that is sleeping, lethargic or outright dead to their own hand. Maybe you should have practiced a bit yourself.

Thing 2: The folks on the news are talking about this like it's some kind of tidal wave that's sweeping the nation. But look at the numbers here. No, really. Look at them. They're right here.

Machine		Absentee	Total	Percent
Votes		Votes	Votes	Votes
UNITED STATES SENATOR	325 of 325 Districts Reported
REPUBLICAN PARTY
MICHAEL N. CASTLE	26201	820	27021	46 . 9 %
CHRISTINE O'DONNELL	29882	679	30561	53 . 1 %

30,000 votes. That's it. A nation of over 300 million. A state of about 885,000.

She got 53% of the votes cast in the primary. But overall, only 3% of the people in her very dinky state voted for her. 1/100 of 1% of the nation. And it's being treated as a historic event and a triumph for the nutjobs in this country. Please.

Some more perspective? There are slightly fewer than 30,000 people in the town of my birth. And nobody pays any freaking attention when those people vote on anything. Staten Island has almost half a million people, not much less than the whole state of Delaware. And they're considered irrelevant not just in the country, not just in the state, but in New York City, where they account for less than 1/16 of the city's population.

Enjoy playing the masturbation videos and having another Palinesque nitwit to focus on for a little while, American media. But don't kid yourself that this is a significant event. All it is is the fringe forfeiting another decent shot at Republicans gaining another seat.

Dumb Letters: Stem Cells Are People Too

2010-08-26T11:58:00.004-04:00

See if you can spot the flaw in this argument from today's NYT letters section. We're talking stem cells here.

I commend Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth for issuing a ruling on Monday preventing the Obama administration from carrying out its embryonic stem cell research. The American people should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life.

Human life begins at conception with the formation of a genetically complete, self-directing human entity, the embryo.

Human beings are not raw materials that can be exploited or commodities that can be bought and sold. We must help those who are suffering, but we may not use a good end to justify an evil means. The respect for every human life is an essential condition of our society.

Any method of genetic manipulation that involves the alteration or destruction of human embryos is nothing more than Frankenstein science.

Did you catch it? It's a bit clever.

My first question to this letter writer would be "Where do the embryos in question come from?" I'm guessing they aren't yanking them out of women's bodies after they have been heteronormatively inseminated by their lawfully wedded husbands. These embryos, for the most part, have been created in petri dishes with the express purpose of being selected for their health and desirability and then placed into women's wombs with "scientific" implements, after choosing among several of them so that the customers can keep the best one(s) and discard the rest.

"Conception", in this case, takes place in the lab. And the embryos in question are "commodities" that are being bought and sold already. That's why they exist in the first place. The fact that the ones being used for research were going to be thrown away doesn't seem to affect the writer. How is this evil? Sounds like the creation of these embryos should be classified as evil, if the writer wants to be consistent. Either that or we need to keep every single one we create frozen forever. We can keep them with Ted Williams's head, I guess.

Oh, and "self-directing"? Not sure what that's supposed to mean. But I'm sure it's some kind of religious code.

Now Fewer Americans Than Ever Believe in Facts

2010-08-22T21:47:00.003-04:00

Just when I think we can't get any dumber.

I had always thought that polls were supposed to be about people's opinions. I mean, they used to call them, more descriptively, opinion polls. "Who do you think should be president?" "What do you think about the bottle bill?" "Who's hotter, Megan Fox or Newt Gingrich?"

Apparently, we've added a new subsection of polling...fact polling. We ask people if they believe if something factual is actually factual. No, I'm not talking about asking whether people believe in God. I'm talking about this poll.

Holy crap.

We have reduced facts to nothing more than one more thing we can have opinions about. "Is the president a muslim? What's your opinion?"

The only value a poll like this has is to show just how fucking stupid we are. What's possibly worse than the 18% of people who believe (based on what?) that Obama is a muslim is the 43% of people who "don't know", more than the number who think he's a christian. This could just be chalked up to inattention. I mean, I don't know what religion some people are. (But we're usually not talking about the president of a religion-obsessed nation here.) But the same poll last year showed only 34% who didn't know. Huh? Did they forget? Or did they get stupider?

Let's have some more polls, shall we?

"Is Dick Cheney bald? What's your opinion?"

"Do the New York Yankees play in Yankee Stadium? What's your opinion?"

"Is the moon orbiting the earth? What's your opinion?"

"What's the name of that thing pumping blood through your body right now? What's your opinion?"

"Does the F train stop at Broadway-Lafayette? What's your opinion?"

Next week, only 53% of Americans think that the "heart" is what pumps their blood, down from 57% last year.

Dr. Laura Jumps the Shark (Again, But This Time She Gets Eaten on Purpose)

2010-08-20T13:05:00.005-04:00

Okay, this is puzzling.

So Dr. Laura spends 30 years insulting people on the radio and basically being just a nasty bigoted person. Then one day recently, a black woman calls and complains about some mildly racist things said by her white husband's friends. Dr. Laura responds by ranting about why it's okay for some people to use a certain word while it isn't okay for others to use it. Some people criticize Dr. Laura. (Nothing new here.) Dr. Laura then apologizes. (Definitely something new there.) Then Dr. Laura quits her show.

Wait. What? She quits her show? What the hell for?

It isn't like this is the first time she's pissed people off. She didn't quit then.

Frankly, I don't think that what she said was all that controversial, in the grand scheme of things and in relation to some of the other crap that's come out of her mouth. Certain black comics do use that particular word a lot. And the rules can be confusing. (Tip to Dr. L and everyone else: When in doubt, don't use it.) She was just basically an insensitive ass about it. Which is the norm for her. Even if her viewpoint has some validity, she still wasn't sensitive to other people's views of the word, regardless of how it's used by certain entertainers (and people in my neighborhood). And she particularly wasn't sensitive to her caller, who asked her to refrain before Dr. Laura used the word several more times.

But she did apologize. And her apology was startlingly coherent and (it seemed) sincere. I thought she'd just go back to being this horrible...person (I refrained from using another word that people find offensive here) on the radio with a niche audience and that would be that.

But she quit. Okay, fine. she quit. But here's the problem. Why did she quit, according to her? (Do you want to wait for it? No? Okay.) Her First Amendment rights are being violated.

Oy. Presumably this is what she was talking about. Not sure how it applies, but whatever.

Dr. Laura, this is an honest question for you. Did the government come in and tell you that you couldn't say what you said? Did they shut down your show? Did they threaten to? Because that's how your First Amendment rights get violated. Not by other people exercising those same rights to tell you that you're full of shit and a bunch of sponsors siding with them. You don't have a constitutional right to have a bunch of corporations pay you for being a bigot.

I don't think the First Amendment is the problem here. I think it's you. I think you were sick of doing your show and wanted a way out that could be used to paint other people as the problem. Sorry, no. I actually had a bit of sympathy for you for a few seconds there. You're welcome to go away now.

Or not.

Yuck!

2010-08-18T22:46:00.004-04:00

Bedbugs? Really? These things were supposed to have been eradicated during World War II.

What the crap?

And at the movies, no less. And in office buildings. And, by the way, not just here in New Bug City. They've even gone international.

I haven't seen them in my building yet (although I've heard rumors of them being dangerously close). But just thinking about it is making me itchy.

No matter what you think you've done, you just cannot eliminate something that's been around for 40 million years. They were here long before us and they'll be here long after we're gone.

Gross.

Freedom of Religion*

2010-08-15T21:51:00.004-04:00

* Some restrictions may apply. Not valid for muslims within a two-block radius of specific construction sites.

Oh no! The president has stated matter-of-factly that our constitution means more than the paranoid ramblings of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and everyone else who thinks that allowing a muslim community center to be built (and really, do they need our permission?) is tantamount to treason.

"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."

Really, in a sane society this would be about the most non-controversial thing a president could say. And all of you "strict constructionists" out there may want to stop and think how you feel about this. But, as much as a non-issue this should be, the people on the news seem to have another thing that they can milk for ratings. Controversy!

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

"Will this be an issue for Obama and the Democrats in the fall?" Crikey, I hope so. Let's have them point out just how bigoted and non-strict-constructionist the knuckleheads on the right are being here. Can we please please please have this debate with the tea party people who are soooo in love with our constitution? I'd love to see them attempt to defend their position on constitutional grounds. That'd make a fine and tasty pretzel, I'm sure.

Listen, people. There is nothing remotely controversial about saying we should follow the law and let private citizens build a legal building on a site that they own. And do not bring up the sensitivity thing. It shouldn't come into play. That's not a legal argument. If we need to be sensitive then should we knock down the existing mosque (not community center, like this new "controversial" thing, but an actual mosque) that sits just four blocks from the "sacred ground"? And what should the sacred perimeter be? Ten blocks? Twenty? Slippery slope, anyone?

Dumb Letters: That Robe Is Sooooo Gay

2010-08-11T21:21:00.003-04:00

Shall we do a dumb letter? Yeah, it's been a while. We've missed several months of sheer idiocy. Back to the grind.

Here's a lulu from the Boston Globe. I love the title: Judge's Decision on Prop. 8 Tears at Throat of Democracy

It isn't just bad. It tears at the throat of democracy. Ow! Stop! You're tearing at my throat! And I'm wearing white! I have to give them props for the vivid language, as dumb as I think the sentiment is.

Let's just reprint the whole damn thing, shall we?

THE DECISION by chief US district judge Vaughn Walker, who is openly gay, to overturn the voter-approved Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman in California, slices at the jugular of true democracy. His 138-page ruling is nothing more than an exercise in rationalizing without thinking rationally.

Actually, it was one of the most rationally argued decisions I've ever heard, legally, morally culturally and logically. And hey, he's openly gay? (Well, he isn't exactly open, but that's another story.) Two problems with that. First, if he were not gay and he decided the other way, would we then be able to say "A straight man passed this judgment! How dare he!" Second, the "openly" part. Would it be better or worse if he were a closeted gay? I'm not sure. Tell me, please, dear rational letter writer.

Walker bases his conclusion primarily on his ability to divine the “discriminatory intent’’ of California voters when they cast their votes for Proposition 8, but leaves out the possibility of his own preconceived bias as a gay man.

No, he didn't base his conclusion primarily, secondarily or tertiarily on discriminatory intent, although that was certainly in the bill and in its mostly out-of-state pimpers. (Does people in Utah pushing a bill in California "tear at the throat" of democracy?) He based it on equality before the law. Read it. No, really, read the fucking thing. It's about equality and whether the state has a compelling interest in discriminating. And his "preconceived bias" as a gay man seems to pale in comparison to your own, which you are about to show us.

Walker’s ruling illustrates that he does not understand the essential public purpose of marriage, which is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. He replaces this public purpose with private purposes of adults’ feelings and desires.

Do I even need to respond to this? Really? The public purpose of marriage is as a legal contract between two parties. And this is where equal protection comes in. The private purpose is whatever the crap you or your preferred religious institution want it to be. My dad remarried well after he or his wife had any intention of having children. Not married, they? I have two other sets of friends my age that have no intention of reproducing. Not married, they? My uncle has been divorced twice and widowed twice. He just married Lucky Lady #5. Why? He doesn't want to be alone. Not married, he? He got married for an "adult feeling", perhaps even a "desire". You wanna tell him? And how about people who can't conceive? Not married, they? I feel stupid even writing this, it's so obvious.

It’s time to put a stop to judges who redefine our most fundamental social institutions and use liberal courts to obtain political goals they cannot obtain at the ballot box.

Okay, let's just quit now. Why have judges if they don't have the power to overturn laws? Really, what purpose do they serve if we cannot sue what we consider to be an unjust law? Why even argue the decision on its merits if the ballot box is supposed to be the end of the story?

Howzabout we pass a law saying no one past child-bearing age can get married? Okay? Or maybe no one who has had a letter published in the Boston Globe? Sound good? If we did, I'd support your right to sue to have that law overturned. Because the people don't always know what's best. And they rarely know what's constitutional.

Newt World Odor

2010-08-03T19:06:00.003-04:00

I actually agree with Richard Cohen about something.

Well, that isn't that crazy. He's one of those people that makes me nuts by often making sense but just as often being a complete nitwit. (Which, of course, is another way of saying that I agree with him half of the time. You know how that works.)

Anyway, he often blindly defends the Israeli government/military in a manner that I find off-putting. But he's making a play for tolerance here, which is buying him a few benefit-of-the-doubt points in my carefully maintained ledger.

The big issue here is the election-year xenophobia and downright racism being trotted out to get cheap airtime and press and to secure the votes of xenophobes, racists, racist xenophobes and xenophobic racists.

I'll find you some dumb letters about this soon, but New Gingrich is dumb enough for everybody. Well, that's not true. He isn't dumb. He's very smart. Which means that he's lying most of the time. Because he says the same things the dumb people say.

Cohen's column, from the WaPo, is here. One of my favorite bits is how he calls out the use of the scary and ill-defined "they". You know who "they" are. Well, you don't, really. But you do know that "they" are out to getcha. And they will, unless you help to get them first. Or at least vote Republican. You can read that bit for yourself, but here's a nice bit about cultural relativism.

Gingrich noted that there "are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia." True enough. However, it is not the government of Saudi Arabia that seeks to open a mosque in Lower Manhattan, but a private group. In addition, and just for the record, Saudi Arabia does not represent all of Islam and, also just for the record, the al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, would gladly have added the vast Saudi royal family to the list of victims. In recompense, the Saudis would just as gladly apply some dull swords to the necks of al-Qaeda's leaders. It is the way of the desert, or something like that.

I would also note that women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. Applying Gingrichian logic, it follows that no Muslim women should be allowed to drive in the United States and its possessions and territories -- or, for that matter, use a BlackBerry, since the United Arab Emirates is about to block some of its key functions. I'm sure Gingrich would agree.

The truth here is not that some racist and/or xenophobic people ("they", perhaps?) are afraid of The Terrorists opening up shop near Ground Zero. It's that they're afraid that a center which is meant to promote dialogue and understanding will actually do so. They're afraid that once we see that they are just like us (only, like, different) that we won't be able to call them "they". We need "they" because we are defined by having enemies. And if we don't, then they won't have anything with which to frighten people into doing Newt Gingrich's bidding.

Where Does the Time Go? or, Race to the Bottom

2010-07-31T22:39:00.005-04:00

Okay, I'm back. What did I miss?

Seriously, I just went for a bathroom break.

What?

How many months ago?

Really?

Oh. Well...sorry. I'm here now. Oh, and by the way, you do NOT want to go in there.

Anyway, I'm attempting to re-enter this stupid blogosphere again after a major (and unannounced) sabbatical. I'll try to keep this one short, so as not to tax my little noggin or the patience of those who may have stumbled onto this item. Want to know how my brain works? Check the archive. You'll get the picture. More to come soon.

So, what I'm incensed about this week is the coverage of the Shirley Sherrod story. You know the deal. Right-wing media lies about something, Obama administration employee gets axed to avoid further recrimination from right-wing media, no one apologizes, and we talk about something completely irrelevant for a few weeks.

Now you're saying, "Hey, MAB. This is totally relevant. We should be talking about this." To which I would say, "Shut up. This is my stinking blog." But what I would really say is, "No, we aren't talking about it. The conversation is about something else entirely."

Watch last week's Sunday talk shows. Both CBS's "Face the Nation" and ABC's "This Week" had as their big fat topics "race". Great. A fine topic. And one we probably should talk about more. But this isn't what the story is. The story is, and let's gather around close here so we don't miss it, the right-wing media lied about something and got someone fired on purpose.

Really, people. Race was just the tool that was used. But the real issue here is not how we talk about race. It's that we were told something that was untrue and we were told it deliberately in order to make someone look bad. Why are we talking about anything else? Is it so commonplace for bottom-feeders like Faux News and Andrew Breitbart to propagate this sort of disgraceful bullshit that it isn't even a story anymore? If this is so, what the hell have we become as a nation?

Please please please, American media. Can the race talk for a bit and concentrate on the real story.

Oh, and thanks for waiting for me, readers. And for not knocking on the bathroom door the whole time. It only makes me nervous.

Dumb Letters: Whatever It Is, I'm Against It

2010-01-29T16:14:00.003-05:00

Some of them just leave you scratching your heads. This one is almost entirely incoherent. I have no idea what the writer is really getting at, other than "I'm a concerned citizen and I have something to say." Although the Globe editorial board tried to give it some focus in its title.

I am an unenrolled voter. President Obama did not say anything in his State of the Union address that he should not have said long before, and he could not list a single achievement.

Um, okay. So would he have been better off not saying it at all, then? So you could then complain about how he never said it? And if he had listed his achievements, I'm guessing you would have complained that the speech was self-congratulatory and called him an arrogant narcissist. Right?

He chided the Republicans in attendance, and made a misguided attack on the Supreme Court of the United States, by calling for legislation around its recent ruling on campaign spending.

Some of us don't consider this misguided. In fact, most of us don't. The Supreme Court has a long history of making bad decisions. And Congress has a long history of passing laws to mitigate the effects of Supreme Court decisions, most recently the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act. Often the Supreme Court makes a ruling in a certain way because Congress has not been clear on what the law should be and so the court reverts to the closest constituional interpretation they can make. If this doesn't sit well with Congress, they clarify the law. If the court doesn't like this, they strike the new law down when a case comes before them. It's called checks and balances. Don't like it? Get a new country.

Oh, and if anyone ever deserved a good chiding, it was the Republicans in attendance. He said nothing out of line about them. In fact, under the circumstances, he was downright charitable towards them. He's done nothing but reach out to them to try and work with the minority party. He's received nothing but scorn (and zero votes) for his efforts. It takes two to tango. And one party isn't dancing. GWB was much much worse when it came to chiding the opposition party over not following his demands.

He promised to open up the rolls in the military to special interests, which
should be the military’s call.

And who is the commander-in-chief of the military? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? And how much do like that "special interests" business? Exactly which "special interest" are we discussing here? The oil lobby?

President Obama has a long way to go, and continuing to put down traditional
American values will not get him far.

If anyone can point to a single instance of Obama doing anything of the sort I haven't seen it. Exactly what "traditional American values" are we talking about here? Fairness? Equality? (Whiteness, maybe?) This dude is making this up. And I'm not sure how "far" he wants to go, but right now he's the POTUS. And he didn't get there by being anything other than what he is right now.

The nation has woken up, but the current leadership has not.

When did this happen? Woken up from what? The implication here is that the 2008 election happened in some kind of drunken stupor and that cute flight attendant has turned out to be, in the harsh light of day, not only 15-20 years older than we thought but also of dubious gender. And married to a member of the Gambino family. Now that we're all right and sane we don't like what we really liked just a year ago. Okay, bud. Whatever you say.

There is still time for the president to lead and prosper. However, his State of the Union address was unconvincing as to his willingness to put country first.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Which country was he talking about when he said "my fellow Americans" and "God bless the United States of America"? Slovenia? This was the McCain campaign's slogan and they proved how country-first they were by picking an uneducated spokesmodel to be one rather irregular heartbeat away from the presidency. If Obama isn't putting country first, then what exactly is he doing? Is there some agenda that we don't know about that is ahead of the country's? The writer doesn't say. Which is par for the course.

Free Speech = $$$$$

2010-01-24T14:23:00.004-05:00

Here's Mitch McConnell on "Meet the Press" regarding this week's Supreme Court decision, giving corporations carte blanche to spend as much as they want to smear candidates they don't like. (Transcript here.) Host David Gregory has just asked McConnell if he thinks this will benefit Democrats or Republicans.

SEN. McCONNELL: Well, I don't know who it benefits, but it's an important victory for the First Amendment. Right now if you're General Electric and you own NBC, you can say anything you want to about any candidate right up to the day of the election. But if you're a corporation or a union that doesn't own a media outlet, you haven't been able to. So you've had this big gap in the First Amendment applying one standard to media-owned corporations, another standard to unions and corporations that don't own media outlets. Now the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment is for everyone. I think that's a step in the right direction.

Say what?

This isn't bullshit but it is serious spin. He makes a fair point about some corporations owning media outlets and others not owning them. (They just give to the candidates directly.) But the issue here isn't corporation vs. corporation. It's corporation vs. common citizen, the former a legal construct created by the state and the latter the subject of all of those supposed protections in the Constitution.

McConnell is basically saying that everything is fair now because Exxon/Mobil can now spend as much as GE to get its message out. But can I spend that much?

Well, I suppose I can. All I need is several billion dollars and I can have the same rights as Exxon/Mobil or GE. "Saying something", which is protected under the First Amendment, has now officially been equated with "spending buttloads of cash to influence an election".

David Gregory, of course, just lets the statement stand and doesn't once mention the effect on regular people.

Thanks, David, for your hard-hitting journalism. No wonder McConnell is like a barnacle on your freaking show.

Supremely Undemocratic

2010-01-22T12:19:00.003-05:00

I was going to post something on the unbelievably damaging Supreme Court decision on corporate money in politics. Then I read this bit from Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Irvine's law school in the LA Times. He's got it covered and he saved me some typing.

Some of the more important points (although this is really a no-brainer for anyone who's been paying attention):

[T]he conservative justices have demonstrated that decades of conservative criticism of judicial activism was nonsense. Conservative justices are happy to be activists when it serves their ideological agenda.

...

To conservatives...the phrase "judicial activism" has come to mean any decision with a liberal outcome.

...

For decades, conservatives have argued that judicial restraint requires that courts protect rights only if they are stated in the text of the Constitution or were clearly intended by the document's framers. This, for example, is the core of the conservative attack on Roe vs. Wade. But there is not the slightest shred of evidence that the framers of the 1st Amendment meant to protect the rights of corporations to spend money in election campaigns. The conservatives were glad to abandon the "original meaning" when it served their purposes.

The conservative majority, which in recent years has dramatically limited free speech in other areas -- such as for government employees and for students -- was willing to expand the free speech of corporations. There is no way to see this other than as the conservative justices using judicial review to advance the traditional
conservative ideological agenda.

Almost 10 years ago, in Bush vs. Gore, the five conservative justices for the first time decided a presidential election. One would have thought that decision would have laid to rest the notion that judicial activism is a tool of liberal judges and revealed that the real judicial activism today is from the right. Perhaps Thursday's decision will finally reveal the truth.

Let's all say it together, people. "Judicial activism" is complete bullshit.

I will add two other notes that Chemerinsky doesn't go into, although I understand why nobody's talking about the second one.

1. Roberts, Scalia and Co. have also touted judicial restraint as meaning narrow rulings on the case at hand and not broad, sweeping, legislating-from-the-bench type decisions. They used this to justify claiming that Bush v. Gore could not even be used as precedent, which is laughable for obvious reasons. And yet, they could have made a narrow ruling on the case at hand, which was whether a certain group could play a Hillary-bashing movie on TV right before an election. Instead, the court opened it up to let in corporations who weren't even making a claim and gave them rights that they didn't need and shouldn't have. Judicial activism of the highest order.

2. The group Citizens United, the original claimant in the case, was originally called, get this, Citizens United Not Timid. Ha! Clever. Like the logo? Just in case you didn't get it. You can understand why there's no reference to this on their current website. The old URL doesn't even redirect. But I can't imagine why Keith Olbermann, at least, isn't bringing it up.

Karen Hughes Lies to Us ... Again

2010-01-18T16:20:00.004-05:00

It's astonishing to me what some people think other people will believe. Not because I don't think they'll believe it. The Tea Party "movement" is a prime example of being able to get people really fired up about something that doesn't exist. I mean, after all, I'm even impressed that there's a bunch of angry people complaining about how their taxes have gone up and are out of control (Taxed Enough Already, if you buy that) when 95% of them, assuming a representative sample of the tax base makes up the movement, are seeing a tax reduction under this crazy socialist re-distributor of wealth. The re-distribution is going your way, people. Quit complaining. Unless this is really about something else that they don't care to confess. Which it probably is. No, what gets me is how people can spew complete crap like that with a straight face. And get paid big bucks to do so.

Today's jaw-dropper came from Karen Hughes on NBC's "Meet the Press" this Sunday. (Watch it here. Read it here.) The roundtable was discussing how BO has done in his first year and Ms. Hughes, former aide to guess-who, had something really dumb to say. And this is after, by the way, defending Dick Cheney's inappropriate and hypocritical criticisms and calling for criminals to be unilaterally declared enemy combatants and stripped of their rights, which we won't get into.

Bob Woodward had just put the lie to the idea that Obama is some kind of European-style socialist. (Thanks for that, Bob, by the way.) I'll give you the full context.

MR. WOODWARD: But, you know, what's interesting from, who is Barack Obama as president? And, and, and there are people who tried--there was a column The Washington Post Friday in which Charles Krauthammer tried to essentially say he is a European-style socialist because of health care and he's trying to do these other things. Now, I'm trying to do a book on President Obama, and calling him a European socialist is just not even in the ballpark. It's like taking and calling President Bush, because he arranged and worked with Teddy Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, or a prescription drug plan for the elderly, calling George Bush a European socialist, which would be absurd.

MS. HUGHES: Well, I'm not in the name-calling game...

MR. WOODWARD: Barack Obama is not that.

MS. HUGHES: ...but, Bob, would you, would you admit that he has governed far to the left of the way he campaigned? He campaigned as a centrist and has not governed that way.

WHAT? To the left? Far to the left? What the hell are you smoking? You people were all complaining about how left-wing his campaign was. Now, when it's convenient to do so, you act like you all liked him way back when and he's so disappointed you by not being that person you met and fell in love with not so long ago. Come on.

I've noted many times that there is spin and then there is utter bullshit. This falls squarely on the bullshit side, particularly as she states it as if it's just common knowledge and poor Bob Woodward has to just come out and admit it.

Let's review.

Campaigner Obama pledges to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

President Obama has talked about pulling troops out of Iraq but hasn't done so. And he has severely escalated the war in Afghanistan.

MOVEMENT: To the right.

Campaigner Obama pledges to cut taxes for folks making under $250,000 per annum and raise them a little for folks making more.

President Obama does just this.

MOVEMENT: None.

Campaigner Obama pledges to shut down Gitmo within a year, end torture, release those held without charges and prosecute terrorists the old-fashioned way, through our highly useful legal system that we used to be so proud of.

President Obama has not yet shut down Gitmo. He has made the decision to prosecute some, but not all, suspected terrorists in the courts. Many more are still being held without charge or sent to military tribunals. And we'll just have to take his word that they aren't being tortured. Let's hope not.

MOVEMENT: To the right.

Campaigner Obama pledged to fight for universal health care.

President Obama not only didn't put universal health care forth as the starting point (with an expectation that compromise would be necessary) but he started with a simple public option, which was then jettisoned along with almost every thing else worthy of the word "reform". And the bill is still in danger of not passing. And he doesn't seem all that concerned about the situation.

MOVEMENT: To the right.

That's most of what anybody gives a crap about these days. He's moved the country slightly to the left. (It was already so far right under the Bushies that this is not even an accomplishment.) But to even make the suggestion that he's governed to the left, let alone the far left, of what he campaigned on is the most ridiculous nonsense one could possibly hope to spout. He's either done exactly what he said he would or he's gone to the right. If anyone can tell me one area where he's gone left of what he campaigned on, I'm all ears. But I'm not seeing it.

Good to see you, Karen. (Not.) You haven't changed a bit.

Art Clokey

2010-01-09T21:26:00.005-05:00

Geez, this dude was still alive? Apparently so. But not anymore.

Art Clokey was responsible for one of the most oddly beloved of animated characters, Gumby.

I used to watch Gumby when I was a kid, just like everybody else. And I can still sing the song, which is pretty whimsical. But the animations themselves were often really really messed up. I'm talking about the stuff of nightmares here.

This is one of the earliest Gumby shorts. Check it out. The visuals, the soundtrack, the plot (such as it is). Terrifying. This is better suited for college kids on dope than children.

Clokey talked about his scientific background and how he tried to make things realistic, like with a rotating module to create artificial gravity. (Kubrick had the same thing in "2001". Nice.) And yet how do they get Gumby down from the moon? With the effing firetruck!

And nobody ever asks how Gumby got there or why. They just look through the telescope and say "Oh, there he is" as if they had already checked the bathroom and the crystal meth lab and this was the next logical place to look.

And how do you like those little triangle creatures with the eyes that pop out. Eyes that get blown clear off one creature's head by Gumby's dad, by the way. Without even checking to see if the little fuckers just wanted to play. Did they really look that threatening? Did they have weapons?

Thanks for the nightmares, Art.

Dumb Letters: It's All So Simple If You're Not Nuts

2010-01-08T17:26:00.005-05:00

From today's LA Times:

So U.S. border security officials learned enough about alleged Nigerian bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab while Flight 253 was airborne that they planned to question him when he landed. I guess they wanted to be sure the horses were well clear of the barn.

Had a sky marshal been aboard this high-risk flight, as we were promised by our government after 9/11, it would have been a simple matter to have the airline send the flight crew a data message while en route, whereupon the sky marshal could have handcuffed the suspect, then searched him -- while the horses were still safely in the barn.

Is this administration nuts, or is it me?

It's you.

It's always a simple matter, isn't it? That 20/20 hindsight sure makes things nice and clear, doesn't it? Damn, if I ran the circus we'd have some awesome shit.

There are over 30,000 commerical flights in the air every day in this country. Let's just say one air marshal can handle being on two a day. That means we'd need 15,000 trained air marshals in action every day. So, taking weekends, vacations and personal days into account, we really need about 25,000 air marshals.

How much does an air marshal make? If answer.com is to be believed, between $36,400 and $83,900. You can do the math. Nah, I will. If we take a pure average, we're looking at $1,503,750,000 a year. I suppose that's chump change when you compare it to the bank bailout or, heck, any of our foreign wars. But do we really want to add this to our already anxiety-ridden flights?

So, after sending everyone through a full body scan, removing their shoes, digging through all of their bags and making them sit quietly in their seats for at least the last hour of the flight with no book to read, no iPod to listen to and no snacks, stress-reducing grippy things or barf bags we'll have a sky marshal in there to whom we can send a text message so he'll know which dude got through all of the other stuff. Oh, and rather than watch the dude like a hawk, he'll just cuff him. 'Cause that's how we roll now.

Yep, it's you.

Dumb Letters: Still Not Paying for That

2009-12-26T09:28:00.004-05:00

Rarely is such a clear distillation of a simple-minded mindset presented to us. I can't even call it an ideology because it doesn't even rise to that level.

From today's LA Times.

I am not so worried about the employee retirement program that will reduce the city of Los Angeles' civilian workforce at least 9%. It all boils down to priorities. In order of importance:

1. Tax cuts.

2. Tax cuts.

3. Tax cuts . . .

26. Tax cuts.

27. Make sure the city can be a reasonable place to live.

There is always fat and waste to cut.

Yep. The myopia about tax cuts is just mind-boggling to me. It says a lot about the anti-government forces that they have nothing else to add to the discussion other than "I don't want to be taxed so much." There is never a discussion about where the tax funds are going, whether the assessment is progressive enough or whether anything worthwhile is being done with those funds. All that matters is their personal bottom line.

It's most hilarious when they tack on to their "list" that the only other thing anyone should do is "make sure the city is a reasonable place to live". Yes, we'll do that by cutting taxes. Which pay for roads, parks, police, sanitation and schools. Smart.

Arnold Stang

2009-12-22T18:33:00.005-05:00

Remember how on MTV's "Remote Control" they had a category called "Alive or Dead"? Always loved that one. We've had two people shuffle off on us this week, neither of whom I realized was still alive. One was a complete charlatan and another was a comic treasure.

Guess which one Oral Roberts was.

Never mind him, I'm here to write about Arnold Stang. You may not recognize his face, although it was a great one. But the voice is unmistakable.

Here he is as the Bilko ripoff "Top Cat", using his slightly more cool voice.

But the total nerd voice was his real stock-in-trade. Even when he was in live action he was a cartoon. Here he is as one of the gas station attendants (he's the skinny one) in a priceless scene from "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World", fleeing in terror as Jonathan Winters wrecks the joint. The real mayhem starts about 4:30 in.

"Irwin, we're gonna have to kill him!"

The Taxation of My Patience

2009-12-21T12:31:00.002-05:00

Remember this quote from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"?

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

It was about a newspaper man refusing to print the truth because...oh, what the hell, let's mix our aphorisms, "A lie gets half way around the world before the truth gets its boots on." In this case, the lie was all the way around the world and it just wasn't worth chasing.

Words matter. Spin works. And the Republicans have been calling the estate tax "the death tax" for so long that even mainstream media outlets have no problem calling it that. It looks like the LA Times has flat-out given up. Check out the title of this editorial.

You read that right. Just in case you didn't, here it is again.

The Taxation of Death

We can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the estate tax is a nice thing or the end of civilization as we know it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But they aren't entitled to their own facts. In this case, death is not taxed. Death never has been taxed. What is being taxed is inheritance. And, more importantly, the estate tax is not actually called "the death tax". Never has been, never will be.

The fact that the word "estate" implies a lot of money is one of the reasons it's never used by its opponents. Taxing estates? What could be wrong with that? But taxing death? Unfair! 98% of beneficiaries or heirs (more words they don't use) will never be subject to it. And the ones who are subject to it should consider themselves fortunate. Even after Uncle Sam takes his bite, they're still inheriting at least a million bucks. Oh no! Poor them!

This is not a tax on death, it's a tax on income. Income which was not earned by the person receiving it. Unless the tax goes up to 100%, then the argument that people want to leave something to their children and can't just doesn't fly.

But, as I mentioned, the real issue I have here is not the merits of the tax but the use of language. The LA Times has succumbed to the right-wing spin machine by adopting their terminology, which is entirely unofficial and entirely inaccurate.

Here's the opening line:

The old saw about the only certainties in life being death and taxes isn't quite right: We'll also always be arguing about the taxation of death.

Now, the editorial actually raises some valid points about some upper-middle-class folks getting socked with a wee bit of pain. And they do use the word "heirs", to their credit. This is all good. But to promote the canard that the thing being taxed here is death and not non-earned income is inexcusable.

Please, LA Times editors. Stop.

Everyone Complains About the Weatherman but Nobody Ever Does Anything About Him

2009-12-20T12:29:00.003-05:00

Has it really been nearly a month since I've posted something here? Yikes. It's not like there hasn't been anything to talk about. The health care fiasco continues, Tiger Woods gets more attention than anything like that deserves, Joe Lieberman bravely soldiers on in his attempt to become the biggest asshole of this young century. (And trust me, that's a mighty high bar set by The Idiot and The Dark Lord.)

So what am I concerned with today? The weather. Well, not really the weather, but with weatherpeople. This includes both actual meteorologists and the smiling knuckleheads who point at maps on the teevee because they're better looking than the actual meteorologists.

I'm not going to go into a rant about how they're always wrong and they ruined my day. I'm going to go into a rant about the people who always go into rants about how they're always wrong and ruined their day. These people have problems. And the weatherpeople are the least of it.

Listen, people. Predicting the weather is not simple. There are a ton of variables involved and almost all of them are subject to change on a moment's notice. Given the broad range of things that could change between the time you get your forecast and the time you leave your man-cave for your place of employment or enjoyment it's pretty amazing that we get weather predictions as accurate as we do. It's like predicting what a cat is going to do. You may have a good sense of it and get it most of the time but it keeps surprising you.

And yet, this is the kind of thing I see and hear in my everyday life and on places like the Facebooks:

"The weather report called for about a foot of snow. We didn't even get an inch!"

"Being a weatherman must be the easiest job in the world."

"There will be weather today. Could be 80, could snow. Can I have my paycheck now?"

"People won't let me be wrong as often in my job as weathermen. "

"They're predicting [fill in the blank] but they're always wrong."

I'm guessing the penultimate person's job involves something like holding a scanner up to a barcode and then pressing the enter button. So no, dear person, if you were wrong as often as the weatherman you would not only be fired but you would be in the state hospital.

And there are plenty of other jobs where the failure rate is even higher and nobody seems to complain about them. And some of them involve predictions too. How often has Bill Kristol been right about anything? People still pay him to blather about things he obviously either doesn't understand or is being dishonest about. And all of those guys on ESPN who tell you who's going to win every game in the NFL this week? About 60% on target, if they're pretty good at it. But they're "experts" and the weatherpeople are complete idiots.

I would invite all of the people who complain about the weatherpeople "always" being wrong to do three things.

Thing 1: Mark on your calendar every day how close to accurate the weatherperson's forecast was. I'm guessing that for every day you screamed about them "always" being wrong, there were 9 or 10 days when it was pretty much on target. And when it wasn't quite on it didn't have any tangible effect on your life. "They said it was going to be 70 but it only got up to 65. Those bastards!"

Thing 2: Go try to predict the weather yourself. Really. I'm not kidding. Go try it. Tell me how you do. You wouldn't even know where to begin, I'm sure. I know, I know, you're not paid to do it. Trust me, you never will be.

Thing 3: If you really have no confidence in these people who are ignoramuses at best and hostile disseminators of bad information specifically designed to make you angry at worst, then please just stop reading/watching/listening to your local forecast. You already know it's always wrong. So why bother? Or is it more important to you to have something to complain about?

Predicting the weather is always always always an educated guess. Quit complaining about it and get a life. There are plenty of other things more worthy of your bile.

What's the (Squirrel) Poop?

2009-11-28T17:25:00.003-05:00

I was in Prospect Park today here in Brooklyn and noted that this is indeed the busy season if you happen to be a squirrel.

The furry little guys were out in full force digging through the leaves for acorns to bring back to the homestead for the winter. They were scrambling around madly and occasionally fighting with their fellow bushy-tailed rodents over the best nuts. A similar scene was playing out in malls all across America.

I'm not sure what path my brain took to get there, but the whole thing got me to thinking about squirrel poop. Nobody ever mentions squirrel poop. Dog poop, bird poop, cat poop, horse poop...they're all part of city life. Squirrel poop? Not so much, apparently. But squirrels must poop, right? They're animals, and mammals at that. They eat, they scamper about, they have butts. Ergo, they poop. So where is it? It must be there, right?

But nobody ever says, "Aw, fuck, I just stepped in squirrel poop!" And you never hear anyone holler, "I looked up and a goddamn squirrel pooped right on my head!" Are the poops just too small to see? Birds that are much smaller than squirrels manage to make their poop known. And I've seen some dogs running around that shouldn't be picking any fights with your garden variety squirrel.

Any scatologists out there that can enlighten me on squirrel poop? Google isn't exactly doing it on this topic. And I wanna know.

Ken Ober

2009-11-20T21:51:00.004-05:00

Well, here's another one who dropped off before his time.

Ken Ober was known to many as the host of MTV's "Remote Control". It was the first, and probably best, of many game shows on the channel that subverted the format with jokey categories and gimmicks like a chair that sent contestants flipping over backwards when they lost and a spinning wheel from which contestants were supposed to identify music video "artists".

I had my shot on that wheel in the show's final season. The episode I was in aired on St. Patrick's Day 1990 but it was taped on a freaking freezing Manhattan day the prior December. I remember I had planned to wear my NYU sweatshirt on the show but they changed us all into green shirts and stupid hats for the occasion.

Ober didn't come backstage to greet the contestants. He just showed up on set. But he did show me some personal grace. There was a question about which four characters besides Barney and Fred could see the Great Gazoo. Deductive reasoning got it for me. Dino was one, of course. And the other characters must be the ones who weren't going to blab to anyone about it. Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, who didn't talk. And Dino's counterpart in the Rubble house, Hoppy the Hopasaurus, of course.

Ober, and everyone else on the show, seemed awfully surprised that I actually answered the question. I think it may have been intended as a stumper. (They often put in questions for which they didn't expect an answer.) After the question, an interruption from "Ken's mother" took place. Ken said "Wow, Mom, I'm just dusted that that kid got that one." Then he looked at me and gave me the thumbs-up while Mom said something stupid.

I ended up winning the day, even though I did something really stupid and almost lost because of it. (I won't go into it here. Ask me about it some time.) And I correctly identified all but one video in the Grand Prize round, missing out on a trip to, where else, Ireland. The video I missed was by Bobby Brown. My response upon learning what I missed? "I hate Bobby Brown!" I said this on national television at the height of the man's popularity. I really heard it from the studio audience, who had been totally with me up to that point.

The whole thing was totally fun and I went home with a bunch of prizes, including a motorcycle that I never rode, all of which I had to pay taxes on. Boo.

Thanks, Ken, for giving me my first and only (so far; I'll get on "Jeopardy" if it kills me) game show experience. You'll be fondly remembered.

Dumb Letters: Betraying America by Upholding American Ideals

2009-11-17T20:58:00.004-05:00

It's a sign of how low we've sunk that bringing criminals to trial is now considered by some to be a capitulation to terrorists. I would have thunk that letting them go and giving them Hershey's Kisses would be capitulation. But apparently putting them on trial in a court of justice is now tantamount to surrender. I guess the lynch mob is a sign of progress for some people.

A story in the NYTimes about the impending 9/11 trials in New York City elicited letters ranging from those proud of our (occassional) adherence to our own standards of human rights to those out for heads on a stick. This is my favorite.

The plan to bring the terrorists to New York City is an abomination and easily the most pernicious step the Obama administration has taken to date.

Wow. Strong language. Merriam-Webster's defines "pernicious" as "highly injurious or destructive" and notes that it infers "irreparable harm done through evil or insidious corrupting ior undermining". The implication here is not one of poor judgment but of actual conspiracy. It's a willful act of treason against the president's own country. Beyond that, the writer calls it only "the most pernicious" of what are presumably many pernicious things the Big O has done. This guy must really hate America. I won't even get into abomination.

It is almost certain that such a monumentally misguided decision will have a chilling and deleterious effect not only on our ability to prosecute current and future detainees, but also on our ability to prosecute the overall war on terror. These are war criminals, not American citizens.

So if you aren't an American citizen you must be a war criminal. It's one or the other. And if you aren't an American citizen you apparently have no rights whatsoever. That's us, America, the shining beacon for the rest of the world, where all men are created equal, as long as they were born here. (And white.)

The reason you have a Guantánamo in the first place is to avoid the circus that this will inevitably become.

Actually, no. The reason we have a Guantanamo in the first place is because we needed a place where no laws exist. We can't give people American trials there because they aren't in America. And we can't give them Geneva Convention rights because they aren't in Cuba. They aren't anywhere so we can just make up whatever rules suit our purposes.

And any trial has the potential to become a circus. If that potential was a factor in whether to prosecute any trial then we wouldn't bother with half of them. I guess we shouldn't have tried O.J. Simpson or Bernie Madoff or David Berkowitz or Charles Manson or Timothy McVeigh. Can't risk a circus now.

In so doing, the president has placed politics above principle and consequently has violated his most sacred oath: the protection of American citizens.

Politics? What politics? There's nothing more boring than justice, dude. The Idiot had no problem trampling on our constitution for political reasons. The principles that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are dealing in here are the ones in that same constitution. You know, the one that says that everyone (everyone) gets their day in court. And their day in court is also ours. They get to plead their case but we get to plead ours too. Don't like it? You can leave.

And here's some news for you. I know that listening to The Idiot for 8 years may have given you some goofy ideas about what our government, and specifically our president, is supposed to do. But, putting aside the fact that this decision will not endanger American lives in any way (do we really think that they'd let this go to trial if they didn't have a slam-dunk case? or that they'd really let them go if they were actually acquitted?), no American president has ever taken an oath to protect the American people. They take an oath to uphold the constitution. You can read it here. It's short and sweet. Our ideals are more important than any life or lives. And way more important than yours.

Belichoke

2009-11-16T22:01:00.003-05:00

This was one of the most humiliating losses in New England sports history. And no one should have to tell you that that's a pretty high bar to jump.

I won't be the first to say it and you can be certain that I'll be far from the last. But I'll say it anyway.

WHAT THE HELL WAS BILL BELICHICK THINKING?

Okay, technically, I do know what he was thinking. He was thinking that all my offense has to do is get two yards on this next play and the game's over. But if they don't, Bill? Then you have problems. And everyone in New England cursing you out for weeks, possibly years, on end.

Ordinarily this situation (4th & 2 on your own 28 yard line) is a no-brainer. You punt. You simply punt. There isn't even anything to consider. Even if you're fairly confident that you can get those two yards, the potential downside is too horrifying to risk it. The only reason Belichick would go for it would be to keep the ball out of the increasingly dangerous Peyton Manning's hands. But if you're concerned that Peyton Manning can take the ball 70 yards on you, shouldn't you be even more concerned about leaving him only 29? Huh?

It also sends a terrible message to your defense. Boys, we can't trust you to keep a team from going 70 yards in under two minutes and driving it all the way into the end zone. How pathetic is that?

The Pats had already done some dumb things in the game. They tried to sit on their lead (which, truth be told, should have worked) in the fourth quarter. And they blew two timeouts in bizarre fashion, which precluded them from challenging the spot on The Play of Stupidity. Although they probably would have lost the challenge anyway.

But another play that no one is mentioning in the shuffle was almost as important. Here's the situation. Manning and the Colts are storming down field in what looks like an inevitable touchdown drive. Their first play is an easy 15-yard pass to Reggie Wayne. On 1st down from the 14, Manning hands it off to Joseph Addai. He zips through a giant hole and looks like he's headed for the end zone. Vince Wilfork and Ron Brace make a herculean effort to drag him down at the 1. Great play? Maybe if there were only 5 seconds left. There is 1:20 left on the clock. This is important.

If Addai scores the touchdown, the Pats have 1:10 or so (after the kickoff return) to try to get into field goal range. Even with no timeouts, it's possible. After the tackle, the clock runs down to 0:36 before the next play starts and when the Colts finally punch it in there are only 16 seconds left.

Now, I'm sure some will say that you never let someone score on purpose. You give your defense a shot at stopping them. And yes, they may have stopped them. But Belichick already made it quite clear that he didn't think he could stop Manning from gaining 70 yards. Why would he think he could stop him from getting 1?

This is a game that was in the bag. That isn't smart analysis. It's just a fact. There is no excuse for losing this game. Give credit to Peyton Manning for taking full advantage of the Pats' terrible decision-making and execution in the fourth quarter, which they started with a 17-point lead. Even with that, not any schmo could have pulled this out. It took a superstar. But the Pats should have known better than to give him the chance. Shame.

Dumb Letters: The Oxy Morons

2009-11-15T22:16:00.003-05:00

I don't get some people. Here's a couple writing to the NYTimes about what they didn't like about "Sesame Street".

Two decades ago, when our children were young, we weren’t wild about “Sesame Street.”

Most of the puppet characters were male, and the choppy format seemed designed to help reduce a child’s attention span.

Okay, I don't think that the first area of critique is an entirely valid reason for not watching something. If most of the characters were female, would that be okay? And the writers use the word "most". So there were some female characters, apparently. Not enough? What's the right amount? And were the male puppets (that, from what I know, lack genitalia) pushing some agenda of male-domination? If they were, I missed it. Which was probably part of CPW's nefarious plan, I guess.

The second point is a valid critique, althought the letter writers infer an active plot to reduce the chidrens' attention spans by using the phrase "designed to" instead of something on the lines of "had the unintended consequences of". This leaves a bad taste.

And no one really learns anything from a passive experience like television.
“Educational television” is still an oxymoron.

Okay, this is bullshit. We learn passively all the time. I'm all for hands-on education, but it isn't the only way we learn. I taught myself to read by watching "Sesame Street". I learned from it. It's simply impossible that I'm the only one. I continue to learn by watching television. It's not that you watch. It's what you watch. Just like it's what you read, what you listen to and who you talk to. And yet these snobs dismiss the entire concept with "no one really learns anything". So I guess they didn't ever tell their kids not to touch the stove. That would be passive learning. Better to let them learn by touching it themselves. "Educational television" is not now, nor ever was, an oxymoron.

But wait, these people can't leave well enough alone.

Our children preferred a now-forgotten series, introduced by James Earl Jones, called “Long Ago and Far Away,” which presented a wonderful tale accompanied by beautiful art.

There were no product tie-ins like Tickle Me Elmo, though, so that program wasn’t a moneymaker in the way that “Sesame Street” is.

WHAT? They went right from complaining about how nobody learns anything from television to extolling the virtues of...a television program.

And the fact that "Sesame Street" licensed their characters for merchandising is entirely irrelevant to the conversation. The program is the program. The products exist entirely outside of it. You can watch the show without buying the Tickle Me Elmo, believe it or not. I'm really not sure how one program is better than another because it didn't market its characters. Is making money a bad thing? Is it better to give money to CTW, that has a mission to educate kids, albeit in a way that these two chuckleheads find inferior to wonderful tales and beautiful art, or to some for-profit whose only interest is making money?

These are the kinds of people that even liberals would want to slap in the face.

Veterans Day

2009-11-11T22:03:00.003-05:00

I was about to write something about Veterans Day. But then I realized that I already had.

Here's a reprint from last year. I haven't changed my mind one bit and have nothing to add.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I'm always a bit conflicted on Veteran's Day and Memorial Day. You see, I'm basically a pacifist. I think all war is stupid and I wonder why anyone would glorify it. But I know, I know, sometimes it's necessary. Unfortunately, I think a very small percentage of wars falls into that category. With 20/20 hindsight we can usually see how things could have been headed off. Alas, foresight is not so keen. And of course, the Law of Unintended Consequences often comes into play. One never knows what is truly necessary and what isn't. Even after the fact. But I think we err on the side of war way too often. We forget that, as Jimmy Carter said, "Although war is sometimes a necessary evil, it is always evil."

Here we must make a clear differentiation between those who fight our wars (and who we honor) and those who make the decisions to send them off to do so (who we generally despise).

When I see pictures of fine men and women at Walter Reed that are missing arms, legs, eyes, large pieces of their heads and even larger pieces of their souls I get pretty pissed. These people signed up to defend us. Few actually do. More often than not, they're on the offensive, thousands of miles away from the homeland. This is an increase of tragedy. The loss is utterly unnecessary.
Our leaders should have to look at pictures of these people all day, every day. They should invent a computer program that simulates the minds of PTSD soldiers and make our leaders feel what they feel on a regular basis. Nightmares, daymares, jitteriness, moral numbness and isolation. And fear. Maybe they'd think twice about sending other people's sons and daughters off to kill and die to satisfy their geopolitical wet dreams. I'd even settle for them thinking once about it. War sucks the humanity out of people.

My own views on the necessity of their vocations aside, I have great respect for the people who don the uniform and serve. There is nothing any of us can do that compares to it. It's something I am constitutionally incapable of doing. Even when they are being sent on fool's errands, they are serving us. They are doing their job for the country they love. And it's not exactly a cushy one. Or a well-paying one.

It's almost criminal that I'm getting paid more for sitting in an office building than somebody who's getting shot at every day. Not to mention the warmongers who sent them to do so. And senators and federal executives get lovely parting gifts, including pensions and lucrative careers on the public speaking circuit. Your average soldier? Not much. Part of their college tuition and medical care. That's the very least we can do. Really. I think that anybody who goes through combat should be taken care of for life. LIFE. And their immediate families should be taken care of too. Why do we give a scumbag like Tom DeLay a bigger pension than somebody who went and got his legs blown off and wakes up screaming every night at 3AM? It makes no sense.

There will always be veterans of the military. I've got some in my family. Although they didn't fight, thankfully. But I want for there to be no veterans of war. It won't happen in my lifetime. Most of the soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are half my age. And it won't happen in our children's lifetime. It will probably never happen.

But we should at least work towards making sure that we have fewer and fewer veterans as time goes on. Can we do that, please?

Dumb Letters: You Have No Idea What I'm Going Through!

2009-11-06T11:44:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I'm just not sure.

This person wrote in to the LA Times to decry the horrible horrible liberals infesting today's Republican party. Didn't know about that? Me neither.

Describing people like Dede Scozzafava as a "moderate Republican" is disingenuous. She's a liberal on almost every issue.

The GOP rebellion is led by those rejecting the left's attempt to undermine their party with liberal Democrats who pose as Republicans.

Wait wait wait. It's the left that's undermining your party? The Democratic Party doesn't even count as left-wing. What leftists get anywhere near the Republican Party? Or want to, for that matter?

You may get an occasional person with a gay relative that keeps their mouth shut on gay rights issues. (Doesn't fight for them, by the way. Just doesn't actively fight against them.) But since when are moderates, i.e. persons who occasionally think for themselves on one or two issues, been some kind of disease inflicted on you guys by the left. What are they, spies? They chose their own party, ya big dummy.

And by the way, a "liberal Democrat" is not the same thing as a liberal. It's all relative. Real liberals are as disgusted with their party as you seem to be with yours.

News stories imply these core believers are extremists -- but these are accusations by a media that for decades have been in the pocket of Democrats and supported radical agendas.

Like the Civil Rights Act. And the Environmental Protection Agency. And the Constitution.

Consider the following alternative scenario: How would liberals feel if the Democratic Party had pro-life candidates who supported the war on terror, reduced taxes, voted against bailouts, didn't want government healthcare and saw the United Nations as a threat to American sovereignty?

Okay, this is the part when I lose him. Is this guy serious? That, by the way, is not a rhetorical question. I really don't know. Is this guy dumb enough to not know how many Democrats support one or more of those positions? Or is he making an ironic point? Does he actually understand and feel our pain and this is his clever way of commiserating and therefore bringing us gently into his point?

Pro-life candidates? How about Bob Casey? And Harry Reid, who is only the Senate Majority Leader.

Supported the war on terror? How about...ALL OF THEM. What was the vote on the Patriot Act again? Oh yeah, 98-1. Thank you, Russ Feingold, for spoiling the no-hitter.

Reduced taxes? Um, yeah. This actually happens quite a bit. The Dems just don't ordinarily agree to give a lot of money to people who already have a lot of money. Like the really really rich people who got really really richer under GWB. You may note that Barack Obama promised to, and did, reduce taxes on everyone making under $250K per annum. And a good chunk of them are now screaming in the streets about how high their taxes are and how they can't take it any more. Because Glenn Beck asked them who they believed, him or their lyin' accountant's tables.

Bailouts? That, I believe, was a Republican plan. Plenty of our guys on board though, yes.

Government healthcare? Joe Lieberman ring a bell? Not Democrat enough? Okay. Ben Nelson? Mary Landrieu? Max Baucus? Max Baucus. You know, the head of the freaking committee that deals with it?

And UN as a threat to American sovereignty? Okay, you got me there. This is the one that makes me think he may be serious. I can't think of a single Democrat that has gone on record with that paranoid fantasy.

You were so close, letter writer. You almost had me. But you pushed it.

Lieberman Finds More Knives with Which to Stab His Party

2009-10-27T20:51:00.006-04:00

Wow, I'm so glad that Barack Obama and Harry Reid supported Joe Lieberman after he stumped for John McCain. "He's with us on everything except the war," they said. Well, that's like saying "He's with us on everything except rape." I've had enough of this shithead since his pathetic showing as a running mate for Al Gore. He was a terrible choice as Democratic standard-bearer then and he's only gotten worse since then. Way worse. Progressively worse. (I shouldn't say "progressively". He's been anything but progressive.)

What was that about "everything except the war"? Oh yeah, and health care. Not just "I won't vote for the bill" not with us. More like "I will actively support a filibuster" not with us. Feel better now, guys? See what that gesture has gotten you?

Someone please tell me why this person who lost a Democratic primary, no longer has a D next to his name and campaigned for the candidate with an R next to his name -- who also happened to support every George W. Bush policy and picked an empty-headed spokesmodel as his running mate -- still has positions of leadership within the Democratic party.

What will it take, people? Does he have to actually try to assassinate the president? Kick him out. Kick him way out. He is not one of us. He can stay in the Senate if he wants. He won his seat (sort of) fair and square. But let an actual Democrat take over his leadership positions. I don't care who. He is the bottom of the pile. Please please please. Go blow, Joe.

59-0

2009-10-19T15:02:00.004-04:00

It's been a gruesome week for New England sports fans. We've had a splendid decade up to now so it's tough for us to complain about anything for a while. But the Sox made us remember what it was like to be a Sox fan pre-2004 in last week's Game 3 vs. Los Angeles. (That was Spanish for "The Angels", by the way, not English for "Los Angeles", the city, where the Angels don't play.) 9th inning. Two outs. 6-4 lead. Bases empty. 0-2 count on the #9 hitter. One strike away from getting back in the series. Oh, and on the mound is a guy with a lifetime playoff ERA of 0.00. Howzit end?

Yep, feels like old times. Painful.

We tried to make ourselves feel better by switching to the Patriots game. Hurray! A 10-point lead at the half! The Pats are back! Oh, no.

That's what it used to be like to be a Pats fan too.

So thank you, Patriots, for giving us a good old-fashioned ass-whupping yesterday. 59-0! What was that score again? 59-0.

I just need to type that again. 59-0.

One more time. 59-0.

"Yes!" you say. A shutout! Okay, yeah. A shutout is, like, 10-0. Or 13-0. Usually when you score 59 points, the other team scores 35. But no. The 0 is great but it isn't exactly the number that pops out at you, is it? It's the one that starts with 5 and ends with 9. Okay, have to do it again. 59-0.

The box score at halftime was already absurd. 45-0. (An NFL record, by the way.) Tom Brady with 345 yards and 5 touchdowns. We didn't even want them to come out for the second half. Really, nowhere to go but down. Seriously. I mean, think about what would have happened if the second half wasn't a letdown. If they just equalled the first half, the score would have been 90-0. Brady would have destroyed the single-game passing records with 690 yards and 10 touchdowns. Impossible!

So, all they really had to do was not suck in the second half. Well, they outscored them 14-0, mostly with backup QB Brian Hoyer making sure Brady didn't get cheap-shotted out of the game for no reason.

A letdown? Yeah, but who's complaining?

Oh, and by the way, the Titans two quarterbacks combined to complete 2 of 14 passes for -7 yards. Yes, that's negative. Wow. They completed just as many passes to Patriots players.

Feeling better about this team, we are. Please, Patriots. More of this.

Columbus Day

2009-10-12T10:44:00.008-04:00

One of the joys of living in New York City is that, although we have fantastic libraries here, the city itself is a primary source. Book report on Ellis Island? Get on the boat. Back by lunchtime. "Starry Night"? Yeah, we've got that.

On this fine day which somehow isn't quite a holiday anymore (which seems to get a lot of the local Eye-talian contingent in a bit of a knicker twist), let's talk about what we've got here in the Apple to commemorate the man.

We've got a big parade. It doesn't really celebrate Columbus per se. It's just another one of our endless stream of ethnic pride parades. You know, the ones that are so gauche and unseemly when they're being participated in by folks of other ethnic persuasions (you know, the ones who got here after your group, whenever that was) but are wholesome and wonderful when your particular group (you know, the ones who came here for the right reasons) is whooping it up, waving at the city council member or athlete that happens to belong to the tribe and, if that's part of your heritage, vomiting.

We've also got some streets. Columbus Avenue is a biggie, although it becomes 9th Avenue as it gets further downtown. Closer to Little Italy, oddly enough.

The top of the line, though, is Columbus Circle. It was a big horrifying mess of a traffic circle for a long time. Until its recent renovation, to navigate it on foot from one side to another was to take your life into your own hands, or at least the hands of a passel of NYC cabbies, and you know how good and caring those hands are. To navigate it now is to be late for wherever it is you're going. With order comes inconvenience, folks.

I recently got bored trying to get from the Whole Foods in the fresh new Time Warner Center to my usual lunchtime perch in Central Park, which requires crossing three separate rights-of-way, and just crossed one street into the center of the circle. There's a mammoth Columbus memorial thing there (umm, duh), which I've seen a milllion times, but never up close until now.

A revelation.

Here's what the inscription on the side reads.

"To the world he gave a world." Yep. I think you know where we're going with this.

We've been revising the book on Columbus for years now. He's gone from a heroic explorer to basically a genocidal creep and lives probably somewhere in between for most people. Where that in-between is depends largely on your political persuasion and possibly whether you belong to a particular one of the above-mentioned ethnic groups. (Guess which one!)

We always hear these people screaming whenever some of their cherished orthodoxies are challenged. It's no wonder they cling to religion and reject science. If you build your world on universal immutable truths, and something you thought you knew turns out to be not quite true, your whole world falls apart. ("Hey, what are all these dead bodies doing in this closet?" "Shh! Never mind that. The history books have already gone to the printers!") Of course, they would never ever try to re-write the history books themselves.

But did we always feel so straightforward about Columbus and his legacy before liberalism run rampant and insufferable political correctness? Here's a picture I snapped of a high relief on the side of the monument showing Columbus and his crew upon arrival in The New World.

It's downright inspiring! They're so full of wonder. So full of awe and appreciation for the golden land they've found and for the deity made flesh that led them there.

But wait, while they're all fawning over the captain, there's one dude with something else on his mind. There he is on the right. What's he pointing at? Must be some gold. Or lots and lots of food. "Um, chief? Chee-eef. CHIEF!"

Aw, crap on a stick. There's Indians here. Somebody call Terminix.

So, it doesn't seem that it was ever as cut and dry as we thought. Even in a monument to the guy, it acknowledges that even though he "discovered" the place there were still kinda some people here already. And not exactly very dangerous ones, from the looks of it. Which group in the above picture do you think is going to keep the land?

Happy Columbus Day!

America Loves Garlic Milkshakes!

2009-10-02T08:49:00.004-04:00

John Boehner just gets dumber and dumber.

Here's what he had to say yesterday about the public option.

“I’m still trying to find the first American to talk to who’s in favor of the public option, other than a member of Congress or the administration. I’ve not talked to one, and I get to a lot of places and I’ve not had anyone come up to me — I know I’m inviting it — and lobby for the public option,” Boehner said.

“This thing (the public option) is about as unpopular as a garlic milkshake...”

He's looking about as hard for that lonesome American as O.J. is looking for Nicole's real killers.

Poll after poll shows between 50% and 75% of Americans supporting a public option.

Maybe Boehner just doesn't get out of his home state of Ohio very much. Well, here's a Quinnipiac poll (you have to scroll down almost all the way) showing 57% support and only 35% against in Ohio.

Well, maybe he only speaks to Republicans in his state. Okay, this is worst-case scenario here. Really stretching it. Even 28% of Republicans in Ohio support a public option. So, giving Boehner the most outrageous benefit of the doubt, even if Boehner never leaves his home state and studiously avoids anyone not in his own party, if he's spoken to more than 3 people, odds are he's run into one who supports this. And yet he just can't seem to find anyone who supports this horrible horrible thing, the poor dear.

We have two options here, and it doesn't take a genius to see this. Either John Boehner is incredibly stupid, or he is incredibly -- what's the word? -- LYING. There is no third option.

Skunks!

2009-09-29T19:36:00.002-04:00

Okay, I ordinarily don't write about personal things on this blog, but this is just too cool.

Here's a bit from The Rachel Maddow Show about skunks invading New York City. Some of you may recognize the music in the background of the piece. I almost crapped my pants when I heard it.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

After all these years, ASCAP may finally be sending me that first check. Glad it wasn't on Faux News or I never would have known about it.

Meet the Press and Play It for a Sucker

2009-09-21T15:43:00.006-04:00

If you have the stomach for it, watch this lengthy clip. It's hard to sit through just a few minutes of it, but I managed to hold my vomit in and make it to the end. It saddens me to report that I am not a better person for it.

But, if you want to know what the problem with "bipartisanship" is, this is a fine place to start. Representative (and House minority leader) John Boehner and senator Lindsay Graham are, how shall we say it, not exactly dealing in good faith here. And, as someone has pointed out previously, bipartisanship is a two-way street. And the traffic's only going one way right now.

These guys are regulars on shows like this. But if any of these shows had any journalistic standards at all, they'd be laughed off the sound stage on a regular basis. There's spin and there's complete bullshit and Mssrs. Boehner and Graham are way on the stinky side of that equation.

David Gregory occasionally interjects The Tough Question, as he always does to make himself look like a real journalist, but when one of his guests says something patently false, he just lets it go. This is why shitheads like this love these shows. It makes them look like they've run the gantlet, when they've done nothing of the sort. They control the message totally.

Here's the video. Have the Tylenol ready. And the Rolaids, for that matter. What the hell, get the whiskey too.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The transcript is here, if you can't handle looking at the crumbs. And believe me, it's tough.

Some choice moments, refuted (naturally) by Yours Truly.

BOEHNER: And if you look at what the president has been supporting, it’s this big government plan that has some 51 new agencies, boards, commissions, mandates that is going to get in the way of delivering quality care to the American people.

And your evidence for this is...what? How exactly is this going to "get in the way"? Are they going to be in the hospitals telling doctors not to treat patients? Like the insurance companies do now? We'll never know because Gregory doesn't ask.

GRAHAM: The president is selling something that people, quite frankly, are not buying. He’s been on everything but the food channel. Just a few weeks—you know, last week he was addressing the nation.

His problem is when he says the public auction—option won’t affect your healthcare choice, people don’t believe that. ... It’s about the president selling something that people inherently believe sounds too good and doesn’t add up.

People? What people? Here's what a Harris poll said last week.

Based on what you've read, seen or heard, how would you rate the health care plans proposed by each of the following?

President Obama: 53% good, 47% Bad
Democrats in Congress: 46 / 54
Republicans in Congress: 35 / 65

See, Lindsay, you would be one of those "Republicans in Congress" up there. You too, Boehner, FYI.

BOEHNER: Americans today are getting more news about what’s happening in their government than they have ever gotten before, and Americans are genuinely scared to death. Scared to death...

And if this is one of those "news" sources, I can see why. Imagine how scared they are if they watch Fox News, where you guys are the only ones whose "opinions" are considered worthwhile.

BOEHNER: There’s been no bipartisan conversation on Capitol Hill about health care. At some point when these big government plans fail—and they will, the Congress will not pass this—it’s really time for the president to hit the reset button, just stop all of this and let’s sit down and start over in a bipartisan way to build a plan that Americans will support.

You lie! There have been over 160 Republican amendments added to the current bill. Well beyond this, the "public option", which doesn't even seem to be on the table anymore, was a compromise to begin with. If the Democrats had any brains in their heads, they would have started with single-payer (which 60% of doctors support, by the way, those radicals) and the public option might have been a disappointing but fair compromise, not that they deserve one. This is a complete failure of politics.

And you know what, fuck you guys. You didn't give a shit about being "bipartisan" when you were in the majority. Public opinion is not on your side, and yet you speak as if it is not only on your side, but overwhelmingly so. Piss off.

This next one is my favorite.

GRAHAM: [Obama]’s changed his rhetoric because the speech was a disaster. What he’s trying to sell to the American people, they don’t buy. ... So the president’s saying things that people want to hear, but the details don’t add up.

Really? His approval rating went up after the speech and support for a public option, which was always at least in the 50% range before all of the bullshit started spewing, went up again too. To 76%. The speech was only a disaster if you wanted those numbers to go in the other direction. No honest person would ever call it a disaster. And no honest person would ever call Lindsay Graham an honest person. The American people, apparently, are buying it. But you'd never know it from watching "Meet the Press".

Democrat Is a Relative Term

2009-09-18T16:46:00.006-04:00

I used to live in a place called Staten Island. It's a dreary place that I am glad to be rid of. There are many things to dislike about the rock. (To be fair, it has a few charms, but these are vastly outweighed by its uglies.) But among the worst is its politics. As a recent movee, I still get the campaign literature from the candidates there. This is what passes for a Democrat in Staten Island. It's a flyer from New York City Councilmember Ken Mitchell. (Yes, I voted for the guy. Oy.) Notice the complete absence of the words "Democrat" or "Democratic Party", although his website mentions an endorsement from the SI Democratic Party.

Can you read that? Here's what the bullets say:

Fighting to restore fiscally responsible local government.
Working to make state budgets spend only what the voters of Staten Island are willing to pay in taxes. [MAB: what, like nothing?]
Championing tax relief for our senior citizens.
Listening to the voices of local businesses and residents who want solutions that do not require increasing their tax burden nor expanding the scope of government.
Supports legislation that will require at least a two thirds vote of all council members for the passage of any law or resolution that raises taxes.
Securing property tax rebates for Staten Island homeowners.
Has fought to cut waste and unnecessary spending in the city budget to hold the line on taxes.

Wait a minute, I thought we were the party of tax-and-spend. So Kenny is totally against all of these horrible taxes? Okay, fine. So let's just not spend anything then. Every one for themself. But geez, Kenny. That two-thirds-to-raise-taxes thing hasn't worked out so well for California. The state is considered by many to be ungovernable.

Hey, what's this? Another flyer.

The bullets again:

Fighting to restore vital services to the seniors of Staten Island.
Keeping open senior centers which were threatened with closure.
Saving transportation programs which provide buses for our seniors to travel to medical appointments, shop for groceries, and visit family and friends.
And then a repeat of some of the same anti-tax bullets from the last flyer.

Do I need to ask the obvious question? Where is this money supposed to come from? The schools, maybe? How about the roads that everyone out there complains about? Or the already woefully inadequate public transportation? Yes, let's keep special programs to get old people to the grocery but forget all of those (black) people who have to take the bus to get to work (and the grocery). And, I don't know, help the economy.

The flip-side of the flyer says "Our seniors have worked hard, fought to keep our country free and the world safe, and taught and supported the next generation. In short, they've done everything right. WE HAVE TO DO RIGHT BY THEM!"

Talk about generalization. All of them did right? Everything right? All of them fought the commies? All of them taught and supported the youngsters? Not that old fucker who lived down the street and called the cops whenever we got near his yard. I'm not giving that bastard a ride anywhere. He can suck it.

We should have just let these knuckleheads secede and find out just how difficult government and budgeting really is. But we needed a place to dump our trash. Now that Fresh Kills is closed, the place has no purpose, other than as a shortcut to Philly. Good riddance, Stupid Island.

Today in Hypocrisy

2009-09-18T12:05:00.002-04:00

You can't make this stuff up.

Apparently, the folks who went to Washington to complain about all of the government spending are upset that the government didn't spend enough to make it easier for them to complain about government spending.

You have to read this from the Wall Street Journal. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) has a bit of a beef with our nation's capital and its woeful lack of amenities for him and his crew of nutjobs and racists. There weren't enough trains! Oh no!

It gets better. The stimulus package had millions for improvements for the Metro. Guess who voted against it? Oh, here it is.

"We shouldn't be giving people free stuff! Hey, where's my stuff?"

Trauma

2009-09-17T21:27:00.005-04:00

Well, this makes perfect sense. A giant Times Square-sized advertisement for an undoubtedly entertaining television program. Fire up the Tivo!

Here in New York City we enjoy seeing larger-than-life-size images of things on fire and people in states of panic (trauma, one might say), particularly on a lovely mid-September morning.

Thanks, NBC. Nice work.

Dumb Letters: Joe Wilson

2009-09-14T14:29:00.001-04:00

We knew there would be dumb letters aplenty on this issue. Heck, there are two right on this page in the LA Times.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel at this point in American history. The stupid has become mainstream.

Here's what Stupid #1 had to say.

Although Wilson's comment to Obama was inappropriate, I am glad somebody had the nerve to speak up to Obama.

All those yes-men surround Obama, and the president thinks he's fooling everyone. Behind Obama's back is when the truth comes out. Finally, somebody said it to his face.

Thank you, Joe Wilson.

This would be great if somebody really did need to say it. But nobody did. Let me say this again: THE MAN WAS NOT LYING. He just plain wasn't.

I hate to keep coming back to comparing the right's stinkbombs to their attitudes towards their departed dear leader, but I can't help it. It was well-known and documented that The Idiot was surrounded by people who told him what he wanted to hear or manipulated him into thinking the way his handlers wanted him to think. Accusing Obama of existing in some kind of toady bubble is ludicrous and hypocritical, like almost everything else these nitwits say.

Here's Stupid #2:

Although I think Wilson was out of order and his conduct regrettable, he was also quite correct.

The House health reform legislation has loopholes, which I think Democrats are probably aware of.

Oy. No, it doesn't. What this chucklehead is talking about doesn't rise to the level of a loophole. A loophole is an oversight that allows someone to game the system. The bill explicitly states that illegals aren't covered. But, apparently, not specifically requiring proof of citizenship before the EMTs scrape you off of the sidewalk is considered a loophole to these people. Nice.

He wasn't quite correct. In fact (and I said "fact", not "opinion"), he was quite wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Watch Keith explain it all for you. He even forgives him his rudeness. Just not his wrongness. Thank you, Keith.

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Meet Joe Wilson, Professional Asshole

2009-09-11T11:47:00.004-04:00

What is there to say about Representative Joe Wilson's jaw-dropping breach of decorum at President Obama's health care speech? It defies belief.

Even if he really thought that BO was lying (he wasn't, by the way; not even a little), this was not the place to say so. This wasn't a debate, it was a speech. The Dems sat and listened to The Idiot lie to them about much more important things for eight years and never once did they do what I was doing at home. Which was standing up and saying exactly what Joe Wilson did to Obama. But I can call my TV screen a liar in the privacy of my own home. And even in a sternly-worded letter to my local newspaper. If I were in that chamber, I'd have to sit on my hands. It's proper.

What's even more ridiculous than one idiot heckling the president is the (inevitable, I suppose) defenders of the outburst. We were lectured on "respect for the office" for eight years until, conveniently, we didn't need to respect the office anymore. Because now things are different. Now we have some kind of un-American radical in office. Who just happened to have been elected mere months ago by a clear majority of American voters. But truth must be told. And Joe Wilson is our hero.

Oh, and pre-2000 respect for the office wasn't such a big deal either. Remember that? But 9/11 changed everything. Until it changed black. I mean, back.

The Right has become unbelievably unhinged since their worldview has come crashing down. Thomas Frank has a great piece in the >shudder< Wall Street Journal today detailing the steps that we've skipped on the road to outrage. Good stuff.

Wilson's outburst was stupid on several levels. First off, it was just culturally stupid. Decorum. We've covered this.

Second, his charge was based on a perceived loophole in the bill, not any fundamental issue with the bill. (It's actually pretty hilarious. Because there is no specific requirement to prove citizenship at the time of treatment, it's feasible that someone could sneak in and get some. Which is tantamount to explicitly offering care to illegals, of course. Bring your passport at all times. You'll need it to get into that ambulance.) So, even if he believed in the loophole, it didn't reach the level of a lie. But hollering "That's not entirely true, sir, and I'll be glad to demonstrate the flaw in your plan if given the opportunity!" is a bit too, shall we say, nuanced, for the current Republican party. "You lie!" is closer to the sixth-grade level they've been floating on lately.

Third, and I'm surprised that no one has talked about this, this was a pretty minor point that he was objecting to. Health care for illegal immigrants? There are so many larger points to concern yourself with, even in this particular debate. And this is the one that he stood up for and blew whatever reputation he had? You know, if I were a member of congress and I had one shot at a big movie moment, I'd save it for something really earth-shattering like, say, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction". As it is, Wilson just looks like a garden variety racist. Not to mention petty.

As Eugene Robinson notes, Wilson's was the worst, but hardly the only, breach of decorum. But here we are. Enjoy your devoted cult following, GOP. The rest of us think you're a bunch of petulant, childish assholes.

UPDATE: E.J. Dionne has now talked about the thing that I was surprised that no one was talking about. Read it here.

Dumb Letters: Problem? What Problem?

2009-09-09T15:15:00.005-04:00

You know, I could pick a dumb letter out every day just on health care and what passes for debate in the this country.

Here's a nice one from the Chicago Tribune that's basically just the usual self-reliance thing. But there's a myopia to it that is alarmingly typical of those on the other side.

This is another one of those letters that has something to pick apart in every other line. Let's do that. If you want to read the whole thing first, I'll wait.

Done? Okay.

I find it rather disheartening to read many of the letters to the editor regarding the health-care debate. I wonder where people come up with some of the stuff they're griping about.

Uh oh. This spells trouble. We're going to see a lot of this in this letter. "I don't have any problems, so why would anybody else? Your HMO just denied your claim and your husband died? I'm fine, thank you. What's your problem?"

All of my experiences with the doctors and hospitals were very positive. I never once thought that I would want to go to another country for any of this work.

Great. Good for you. But that's not what the debate is about. It's about how it's managed and paid for. The doctors and hospitals aren't the problem. The insurance racket is.

And I never thought that it was someone else's responsibility to pay for it. Whatever happened to self-reliance?

Here we go. We're going to revisit this, because the letter writer later complains about "handouts". You knew it was coming.

The Democratic Party has done everything that it can to make as many people count on handouts as possible. We subsidize housing, heating, cooling, food, school lunches and breakfasts, day care; now we want to add health care to that list.

What, like this is some kind of plot? To what end? What do we gain by making people dependent on "handouts"? More votes? Wow. Great. Hey, it worked for the Republicans. They hand out so much to corporations that they all count on it now.

And I have two things to say about those awful hadnouts. First, all of the things that the letter writer mentions as subsidized are good things, essential things, things that a caring society would have no problem with.

Second, let's add a few things that Mr. Self-Reliance has undoubtedly taken advantage of himself. The police, the fire department, the highway department, the military and, not just the school lunches, but the whole damn school system. Want to be self-reliant? Put out your own fires. Take down that mugger by yourself. Teach your own kids (actually, don't; please don't). And invade that foreign nation on your own. Enjoy.

Nearly everyone I know has good things to say about their health care.

Yes, we know. But that isn't the problem. Don't you read my blog?

The main problem seems to be the cost of insurance.

Ah, good. Now we're getting to a point of agreement. Maybe this guy is okay after all.

It seems to me that the main reason for the high costs are that they are caused by government regulations. They force insurance companies to cover things that have nothing to do with a person's health, such as Viagra, fertility treatments, etc.

WHAT? You really think that this is the problem? A few boner pills? The cost of all of the Viagra in the world wouldn't cover one CEO's salary. If the government really wanted to force the insurance companies to do something, it would force them to cover everybody and not exclude based on pre-existing conditions. Or better yet, make all profits illegal. But they won't. They get too much money from them. Which is why things like Viagra are covered, by the way.

Let's have real competition in the market like we do with everything else. Health Savings Accounts work great. You have every incentive to go to the doctor only when you really need to, as you get to keep the money you don't spend.

Do I have to point out how stupid this is? Let's think about the "more competition" thing. How do insurance companies make money? Not by providing care but by denying it. More competition would mean companies working harder to drive down costs. There is one, and only one, way to do this: by denying more claims. Great idea, sport.

And Health Savings Accounts. They "work great" if you have money in them. If you don't, then what? My wallet works great when it's full of pictures of Andrew Jackson. When it doesn't, I can't get any of the stores to give me anything. I say I have a wallet and they just laugh at me. But don't worry. Competition will take care of everything.

And if it's in my account, then the benefit of not going to the doctor is really pointless. If I spend the money I saved by not going to the doctor (which would stimulate the economy, by the way), then it's not in my account in case I need it, which is the whole point of having the account. And if I do need it and use it all for health expenditures, well, now it's empty. What if something else happens? Do you understand this, dipshit?

I have incentive not to eat food too. The less I eat, the more money I keep. Think how much I could save by fasting for 365 days a year.

These accounts are in the Democrats' cross-hairs and will be gone if they get this health-care bill through. The only reason I can possibly think of why they want to get rid of them is that they work and people like them.

Okay, they don't formally exist. So they can't be in anyone's cross-hairs. Dude, if you want to keep an account for yourself strictly for health care, there is nothing to stop you from doing so. And hey, you know what else works and people like? Medicare. And all of those aforementioned "handouts". But this guy has a problem with that.

That is the problem. They want to control every aspect of as many people's lives as possible.

By giving them more choices. Yes, it all makes perfect sense. Knucklehead.

Froot Loops Are Health Food! I Know It's True Because the Food Industry Said So

2009-09-05T09:38:00.004-04:00

You really do need to read every section of the newspaper. Or skim it, at least. This is from the Business section of today's New York Times. You simply must read this. If you have any illusions that any industry of any kind can regulate itself, then this should put the nail in the coffin of that particular notion.

Several giants of the food industry have come together to agree on a "Smart Choice" label to "help" consumers find "healthier" products to eat. Like fruits and vegetables and whole grains, right? No. More like Froot Loops and Hellmann's mayonnaise. Of course.

I had to stop reading this every paragraph or two in order to quote the stupidity to my family. It's literally jaw-dropping. (I'm one of those people whose jaw does indeed drop when he can't believe what he's seeing/hearing/smelling.)

Here are some of my favorite quotes.

“The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” [Smart Choices board president] Dr. [Eileen T.] Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ”

Okay, so if consumers are so smart, then why do you need to put a label on something that says "smart"? Pander much? I guess she figures if you put the words "smart" and "choice" in her quote, then the people who arent' so smart will buy it. Not buying it here. Insulted that she'd think I would. But I guess I'm not her target audience.

Froot Loops qualifies for the label because it meets standards set by the Smart Choices Program for fiber and Vitamins A and C, and because it does not exceed limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains the maximum amount of sugar allowed under the program for cereals, 12 grams per serving, which in the case of Froot Loops is 41 percent of the product, measured by weight. That is more sugar than in many popular brands of cookies.

“Froot Loops is an excellent source of many essential vitamins and minerals and it is also a good source of fiber with only 12 grams of sugar,” said Celeste A. Clark, senior vice president of global nutrition for Kellogg’s, which makes Froot Loops. “You cannot judge the nutritional merits of a food product based on one ingredient.”

Holy crap. Apparently, as long as you pump some laboratory nutrients into a pile of sugar then it qualifies as "smart". But I'm rushing to judgment. Sugar is just "one ingredient", after all. Froot Loops are the nutritional equivalent of a relationship where the guy is fantastic in bed but he beats you every night. "Don't judge him based on that!"

Here's my personal favorite.

[Dr. Kennedy] said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

Holy crap. I'm rushing around. I'm a busy parent. I don't know what to do. And I'm really not all that smart, even though Dr. Kennedy told me I was. How could I be if I don't know if a doughnut is a good choice for breakfast? But wait! This check mark tells me that Froot Loops are better! Yes! Hey, are they putting a super-duper check mark on that banana? 'Cause that seems like an even better choice. No? No. My only choices are Froot Loops and doughnut. That's it. Want a choice. Rushing around.

I guess that is somewhat logical. I mean, it's all relative. Hey, would I be better off giving my kids a bowl of Froot Loops or a pile of arsenic-laden buffalo feces? Clearly, Froot Loops are the smart choice. Thank you, Dr. Kennedy!

I could keep going, but this piece is so rich in mind-boggling quotes that I could just copy the whole thing verbatim. I'll leave the rest to you. Go. Read. Unreal.

Really? THIS Is Something to Be Upset About?

2009-09-04T14:15:00.005-04:00

It's hard to imagine people in this country getting any more petty and stupid. Congratulations, America. You've done it again.

The latest manufactured outrage? The President of the United States is going to make a speech to school children. Oh no! He's the first to ever do this! He's going to idoctrinate our children with all of his socialist propaganda!

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Seriously, people. Do you have any idea how stupid this makes you look? He's talking to your children about staying in school and your response is to take them out of school. The gentleman (and I use that term quite loosely) who thinks that "values" should be taught by parents, and this is why he's keeping his kids home, may want to think about the fact that he sends his kids to school every other day to be taught by people who presumably are not him. Better start keeping them home every day, dad. They're getting indoctrinated.

So lots of kids will fall a day behind in their studies because their parents don't want them to hear ten minutes of boilerplate stay-in-school, which they won't listen to anyway, from a man with whom they disagree on a number of completely unrelated issues.

It doesn't matter what Obama talks about. Apparently, he'll be using his hypnotic powers to promote gay marriage and universal health care without our poor children even knowing about it. Obama will say "Stay in school, kids!" but they'll come home saying "The workers control the means of production!"

As much as I hate to fall back on this argument, I'm sure that the simple truth is that many parents don't want their children taking advice from a black man. We've come a short way, baby.

Dick Cheney Can Suck My Ass

2009-08-31T17:02:00.004-04:00

Seriously. And while he's at it, he can suck the whole nation's giant, boil-ridden ass too. Twice.

Remember when Jimmy Carter criticized The Idiot and his gang? And pretty mildly too, given the circumstances, if you ask me. (And I know you do.) Okay, so he called them "the worst in history". But really, that just barely scratched the surface.

Anyway, you heard howls about an ex-president criticizing a sitting president. An awful breach of decorum! Spitting on a long-standing unwritten rule! The horror of such disrespect! And anyway, who was he to talk?

Of course, now that he's no longer president (yes, president), Dick has been piling it on. Obama was barely inaugurated when Dick started blaming the next terrorist attack on him. Classy.

It's pretty hilarious to hear the head of the most politicized White House in American history claim that any investigation into their criminal activities must be "intensely partisan" and "politicized". You guys would never do anything like that, would you, Dick?

This is all about deflection. Cheney would just disappear if he weren't going to be implicated in all of this. After all, this did not happen in a vacuum. Everything that happened was ordered by somebody. Rules were re-written and legal "opinions" were ordered. Dick needs to get the word out now so when he gets dragged into court (well, he probably won't be but he knows that he should be, in a country that respects the rule of law) he has some right-wing, and maybe "moderate" opinion on his side.

Even if you survive cancer, it continues to define your life. No matter what we do, these cancers will stay with us until long after we're gone. Thanks a bunch, dick.

Edward M. Kennedy

2009-08-27T12:11:00.005-04:00

No biographical details should be necessary here. That's been covered extensively elsewhere, in print and in video. (I'm not even bothering to link. If you're connected, you've seen it all.)

Ted Kennedy was the senator in my home state since before I was born. Think about that. The same man has held that seat for my entire life. But just holding a senate seat is not that difficult. The power of incumbency only grows with time. At some point, unless you do something really horrible like try to pass a bill mandating abortions for every woman due to give birth on a Tuesday, it's a lifetime position like the Supreme Court. But what you do with that position is what makes you.

Teddy was a bit of a goof in his younger days. Not a great student and prone to bad behavior. But, unlike some other children of privilege who were goofs in their younger days and went into politics based on their family name, he worked hard to become a legislator of the top order. And beyond that a fighter, a real and true fighter, for unabashedly liberal causes. When Reaganism was in vogue (and still is, among a certain subset of our brainwashed nation) he defended not just the word "liberal", which had become, and continues to be, a dirty word to some, but the ideals behind it. He was not ashamed to say that compassion meant more than just feeling for others but acting on their behalf. This was the "great work".

No one expected much of Ted. But he ended up being the most consequential of all the Kennedys (Eunice being a possible exception). Even after the scandals of Chappaquiddick and his nephew William Kennedy Smith, he proved that there are second (and third and fourth) acts in American lives. The totality of Ted Kennedy, even with his personal disgraces, was overwhelmingly a net positive. You can thank him if you have a disability, or are a woman, or a child, or care about civil rights, or if you just happen to have a body. His death may re-focus energy on passing some form of useful health care legislation.

In our corporate-controlled government, Ted's example will not be followed by many. But a true government of, by and for the people would be populated by a lot more Ted Kennedys and a lot fewer John Boehners and Mitch McConnells.

Goodbye, senator. And thank you. You will be sorely missed.

PYSBRIoM: Doug Glanville

2009-08-24T11:21:00.005-04:00

I was cool to this guy's blog at first. Who needs another ex-jock yapping about a game that he never was a superstar at in the first place? I can be judgmental. This is where I am deficient. To my credit, I did come back and read it every now and then. I like to give people a reasonable opportunity to win me over. This is where I am not deficient. Glad I did.

Doug Glanville knows the game and he knows how to write. Just as importantly, he's the rare smart jock whose intelligence and interests range well outside of the foul lines. I've been watching baseball (and reading about baseball) for many years. But there are very few writers who can hold my interest on the topic. There is the occasional Roger Angell, who isn't really a baseball writer but a writer who happens to write about baseball. Or revolutionary stat geek like Bill James.

But Glanville has won me over with his clear-headed and informative bits about baseball culture and the real struggles and concerns of the human beings that play the game. His current piece is about why players should bother showing up when their team is clearly going nowhere. Believe it or not, they should. And Glanville will tell you why. He gives even longtime fans new things to think about.

Robert Novak

2009-08-19T10:09:00.004-04:00

Good riddance, you lying motherfucker.

I'm sure you had family that loved you. To them, I offer my profound condolences.

For the rest of us, you were a smug, deceitful right-wing apologist and propagandist who cared less about the truth and the safety and well-being of everyday Americans than you did about promoting your own ghastly ideology.

It's fitting that you died of a malignant brain tumor because you had the most malignant of brains.

You were the kind of person that makes me dearly wish that I believed in an afterlife, particularly the hot and crispy place, where right about now you would undoubtedly be checking in for an extended stay after a hasty triage to determine your proper infernal stateroom.

The world is a better place without you. You would probably take that as a compliment, as it implies that you "made a difference". Feel free. We'll get on with our lives without you to pollute our air any further.

You Call This a Debate? Take Out the "t" and Add a "cl".

2009-08-18T17:11:00.005-04:00

Hello, people. I haven't been around much lately. I've been thinking about stuff, just not writing about it.

One of the things I've been thinking about is health care. (Really? You're, like, the only one. Nobody's talking about it.)

You know, we all had a lovely series of moments when Obama was elected and took office. Hurray, America. We elected a black man. The Bush/Cheney era was ending. It was cleansing. It was wonderful. A new day was dawning.

Bullshit. Utter fucking bullshit. We are now seeing just how dishonest and depraved this nation really is.

Obama was never a flaming liberal. He was always a pragmatic centrist "liberal". I knew he was in trouble almost immediately upon taking office when the stimulus bill, for which Obama spent a lot of time attempting to get Republican buy-in got, oh, zero Republican votes. The red flag was not that the bill got no Republican votes. I kind of expected that. The red flag was that Republicans and their enablers in the supposedly liberal media howled with fury about how partisan Obama was being. "He never consulted us! This bill was supposed to be bipartisan and it's the most partisan bill ever! He's a fraud!" I knew at this point that nothing would be easy and that there was nothing, literally nothing he could do to get anything worthwhile done. Bipartisanship requires two willing parties. And we were at least one short. Country first? Nuh-uh.

And here we are at health care, a big issue for folks and one for which there is broad support among the American electorate. Here's a lovely New York Times poll showing that 72% of Americans support a government-run health plan. 72%! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get 72% of Americans to agree on anything? We can't get 72% of Americans to agree that torture is a bad thing. Yes, torture, which is unequivocally and unambiguously illegal under domestic and international law, not to mention immoral and ineffective. But 72% were for a public plan. And 7% had no opinion in the health care poll, which means only 20% of Americans opposed it. That's slightly more than the number that like Dick Cheney. And athlete's foot.

And yet, where are we with the public option (which, by the way, is only a shadow of what we should be moving towards, which is universal single-payer)? Well, it's about to be killed. Why? Because of a few people shouting at town hall meetings, per the direction of a few right-wing and corporate-sponsored groups, and media ass monkeys all around the joint.

I really don't have the strenght to go into the details right now, which you undoubtedly know already, but suffice it to say that every single argument I've heard against a public plan, let alone single-payer, has contained at least one whopping big fat honking lie. Not an untruth, not a stretch, not a minor prevarication, but something grossly, demonstrably false. Death panels! 6-month waits! No choices! Government takeover! Tyranny! All of it patently untrue and promoted relentlessly by the insurance industry and Fox News. Surprise surprise.

For crying out loud, they took out end-of-life care counseling (counseling!) because apparently it was easier to do so than to just explain why the death panel idea was a lie. How low must your opinion of the American people be when you can't debunk something so easily debunked?

Not low enough, apparently. Because now they're talking about taking the public option out of the mix. Why? Because lying works. That's how stupid we are. Congratulations, insurance industry. This is an absolute triumph of propaganda. You've managed to take a topic about which there was broad consensus and make it seem like an apocalyptic gummint nightmare to which the villagers were revolting with the pitchforks and the torches in an inspiring show of democracy in action.

Hey, Congress. If you're thinking of passing a bill that can't even include something so modest, and for which there was such support, for fear of pissing off a few yahoos and the corporations whose bidding they do, don't bother, okay? I can't bear the thought of you and the president congratulating yourselves for doing something worse than doing nothing.

I have officially lost all of the good feelings I had about this country around the turn of last year. My opinion of this country is actually lower than it was during the nightmare that was the Bush administration. And that is really saying something.

Kenya Dig It?

2009-08-05T16:35:00.004-04:00

Apparently, the birthers read my blog. Before my comments, they hadn't even bothered to forge a birth certificate for Obama. Situation rectified.

Of course, the thing's an obvious fake, debunkable with just minutes of Google time.

I thought I'd get one too. Here 'tis.

Go here for yours.

Enjoy!

Birth, Right?

2009-07-28T10:20:00.005-04:00

I'm really having a difficult time understanding people. (This is news?) We just emerged from eight years of an utterly lawless administration, of which we continue to learn more and more details of just how far they were willing to go to undermine our constitution and system of checks and balances.

Some of us weren't happy with this and expressed our displeasure at the time. Our reward? We were told that we were deranged. Literally. They coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome in order to plant the idea that we weren't reacting to actual crimes being committed by our so-called leaders but that we were poisoned by an irrational hatred of the man himself. This was really putting the cart of hatred before the horse of insanely undemocratic and immoral policy. It was a clever -- if cheap and dishonest -- way of deflecting attention away from the criminals and towards those nuts who would call them on their criminality. Sand in the face.

Now, here we are in the future. I certainly don't expect everyone to agree with our new leader. I'm a fan in general, but I have some serious issues with him. (First and foremost, his insistence on continuing some of the worst policies of his predecessor.) But the people who believe that Obama is not a U.S. citizen are seriously, literally, certifiably deranged.

How on earth can a person continue to insist, in spite of overwhelming (or at least, satisfactorily convincing) evidence to the contrary, that The Prez was somehow born in Africa? These people show up at rallies and at town halls insisting that there is some sort of conspiracy on and that we're still waiting for him to show proof of birth. This, of course, is over a year after his birth certificate was produced and published. Oh, and the State of Hawaii certified more than once that he was born there. And, yeah, after two Honolulu newspapers dug up their archives to find the announcement that the Obamas had a baby boy on August 4th, 1961.

This should be more than enough to satisfy anyone.

And yet, we still have this.

For extra fun, go to the YouTube page where this video came from and enjoy the eloquent comments.

I'd be willing to give them the benefit of a small amount of doubt if there were the teeny-tiniest base on which to build their nutty theory (and I apologize here for demeaning the word "theory"), such as a claim of a birth certificate from Kenya, for instance. Haven't heard about it. This is built on a foundation of nothing.

The absolute rage displayed by these people, and utter indifference to reason or logic, tells me that this is not about facts. It's about people who simply can't comprehend that their vision of America is moribund. And this is the way they express it, by clinging to a fable. They couldn't possibly be wrong. Obama couldn't possibly be popular. It must be a hoax. Facts to the contrary? Scream louder.

Deranged.

Insensitive Asshole Wins Golf Tournament

2009-07-20T16:01:00.002-04:00

This is pretty much the definition of bittersweet.

Virtually unknown professional golfer comes out of nowhere to capture his first major tournament. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? Yay, Stewart Cink!

But no. The whole week everyone was watching 59-year-old has-been (and not-really-expected-to-be-at-his-age) Tom Watson, who had been leading for most of the week at this year's British Open. Piss on this story if you dare. Nobody who was not related to another golfer in the tournament wasn't rooting for the old dude to reclaim his former glory.

He didn't. And all he had to do was make par on the last hole, even after Sink birdied it. Nope. Didn't happen. Well, there was still a four-hole aggregate playoff. Oops. The geezer really croaked on that one. Oh well.

How much does it suck to be the guy that wrecked the feel-good story of the year? I bet the first-place money helps. But still.

Thanks for winning, you big jerk.

That's Not What They Meant When They Said That Skin Sells

2009-07-15T10:18:00.007-04:00

Advertisements must be viewed to be effective. On TV, they get the full 30 seconds with no competition. In print and on the web, they need to pull your focus away from the exciting content you are so lustily consuming and say "Hey, look at me! I'm so goddamn interesting you will never get to that article about the new Harry Potter movie. At least not until after you've clicked through to the product I'm selling."

There are a few ways to do this. First, and most obvious, is the "Look at my tits!" ploy. Men will never ever stop falling for this. No matter how crass we consider it when examining the ads intellectually, the inner 16-year-old screams "Look at her tits!" And we do.

Second, there are the usual bright shiny colors and exciting graphics. This can be enhanced with new-and-improved Flash animations that actually fly across the screen to more effectively obscure your originally desired content, sometimes even forcing you to click on the "X" to close the offending doodad before you can view anything it obscures. Annoying.

But here's my least favorite. I got this screen shot from today's online edition of the New York Times.

Did you see it? It's subtle, I know.

I'll say this for it, it certainly draws focus. Of course, now I'm not interested in breakfast. Or lunch. Ever.

But they aren't selling lunch. They're selling...what? I'm guessing some kind of cure for the horrible affliction visited upon the poor slob pictured, with his/her face mercifully cropped. Delightful.

I could find out if I really wanted to. There's a button that says "Click here to learn more". What I really want is the one that says "Click here to learn less" or, more to the point "Erase this ad from your memory". Only twenty dollars.

Sarah Palin, Babykiller

2009-07-13T10:30:00.004-04:00

Every day we get more evidence that not allowing Sarah Palin into the White House was a serious dodged bullet.

Today, we get this chilling photo from Jim Wilson of the New York Times showing just how demonic Governor Palin and her minions are.

As onlookers beam in approval, Palin mercilessly stabs this screaming baby to death with a fine point indelible marker.

Culture of Life indeed.

Robert McNamara

2009-07-06T13:58:00.003-04:00

One fewer reservation at L'Inferne Marriott. Good riddance to one of the 20th century's most cold-blooded wasters of human life.

Everything of importance that this man did was well before my time, except for recanting most of it. For this, watch Errol Morris's chilling documentary "The Fog of War".

Apparently, he did some good too. His obituary will tell you all about his work on behalf of tolerance, education and whatnot. But this can't make up for the evil that was Vietnam and his place at the forefront of it.

In Morris's film, which you really need to see if you haven't already, he sounds as if he's describing a product launch that didn't go as planned. He's not entirely unsympathetic in the film, which is the most sobering part of it. It's an important reminder that people will commit the most horrible acts thinking that they're doing good, and that evil is not Darth Vader or Sauron but actual human beings with families, values and ideals who have really bad solutions to problems.

"Dr. Strangelove" was a satire, but about the only thing different in "The Fog of War" is the accent and the apology. The sentiment is pretty much the same. Humans are no more than pawns in the game and their actual lives have no meaning.

Goodnight, Doctor. Enjoy the company where you're going.

Karl Malden

2009-07-02T16:23:00.004-04:00

Admit it. You thought he had been dead for years already. He was 97, after all. 97!

Growing up, I knew him as the guy on the American Express ads with the funny hat. And as the dude on "Streets of San Francisco" with Kirk Douglas's son. And he was old then.

It was only later that I found his earlier work in two classic films, "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire", both directed by the great Elia Kazan and both starring some dude named Brando. He was clearly meant to be a character actor. That mug and that schnozz were there even back then. Not a handsome man.

But, as it goes, he could act. And he had himself a long and distinguished career. He stands in stark contrast to this week's other celebrity snuffings. Unlike Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, he lived a long life unmarred by controversy or suffering. His greatest achievement? He was married to the same woman for 70 years. 70! That's beautiful.

A good and well-lived life. Thanks, Karl, for doing it the way it oughta be done.

Congratulations, It's a Thing!

2009-06-30T15:49:00.004-04:00

I am not a traditional person. I am interested in ideas that break down existing social models. I am a firm believer that some things that we take for granted are simply arbitrary and should not be followed just because "that's what you do".

But this is fucking stupid. Not because it's different, but because it's stupid.

Here's the short version for those who don't feel like clicking: A young couple in Sweden have not revealed the gender of their baby...who is nearly 3 years old.

Their concern seems to be that gender roles are social constructs and that letting people know what little "Pop" is would make people treat Pop in the way proscribed for tots of whichever gender Pop is, therefore destroying Pop's impressionable little mind.

Okay, I understand this to a certain degree, but it's really not that big of a deal. You can treat the child in a gender-neutral fashion if you like, but there's only so much you can control other people.

And they seem to undermine their own argument by not just dressing Pop in gender-neutral clothing but by allowing Pop to wear dresses some days and pants others. What do they expect those other people to think of their little girl in the dress? How do they think they'll act?

It seems that this whole process just makes a much bigger deal out of the kid's gender than it really should be, which would have the exact opposite effect of the one intended by the kid's parents.

People treat black people and white people differently too. But you can't just wish this away and blur the lines, hoping that people won't notice. Look how well that worked out for Michael Jackson. They just ended up talking about it more.

Apparently, they'll reveal Pop's gender when Pop is ready to do so. I'm sure we all can't wait for Pop's coming-out party when s/he is no longer ashamed of his/her own genitalia, whatever it happens to be. I didn't care before. Now I do. Congratulations, dummies.

Where Did You Hide the Drugs, Honey? Never Mind

2009-06-29T15:03:00.005-04:00

Well, it's nice to know that the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't think it's appropriate to strip search 13-year-old girls based on hearsay. Hooray for us.

But, wait. The decision was 8-1, which means somebody thought it was okay. Guess who? Yep. Long Dong Silver himself.

Get a load of this sound legal reasoning.

"Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," [Thomas] wrote, "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announced the safest places to secrete contraband in school."

Oy.

Okay, first off, this is not a legal argument. It's a practical one. And Mr. Strict Constructionist is not supposed to concern himself with such things. You can be a criminal and still have your rights violated. And telling people their rights is not the same thing as inviting them to break the law.

Second, does he really think that the vast majority of miscreants has never thought of hiding things in their underwear before? Or that everything's going in there now that everybody knows no one's going to look? Is every guarantee of privacy to be considered just an opportunity for abuse? If so, we have a lot of work to do, because once everyone realizes that no one is going to look in their freezer without probable cause, they're going to be hiding lots of decapitated human heads in there. And the kids will all be walking funny because their inviolable underpants are going to be so weighed down with drugs, weapons and illegal immigrants.

This is an utterly fascistic statement on Thomas's part. I hope he comes to realize that some day.

Lastly, he actually accuses her of being guilty in his choice of words. He doesn't say "nor would she be the last". He says "nor will she be the last", implying that she actually did hide the (non-existent) pills in there. They just didn't look hard enough, apparently. It took me a few reads to even notice it, which makes me think that using the correct word in the first part was meant to deflect people from noticing the second part. I wouldn't put it past him.

Dumb Letters: I'm Not Rude, You're Boring

2009-06-26T13:41:00.007-04:00

This letter (the second one on the page) bugs the heck out of me on two very different levels. It's in response to a bit about just how rude it is to be diddling with your name-brand smart-phone device during a business meeting. Read letter first, read me gripe later.

If listeners are pulling out their BlackBerries at a meeting, speakers should take it as a signal that they need to improve their communication skills. It is the speaker's responsibility to be concise, show his or her commitment to the topic and reach out to make a connection with each listener in the room.

Making an impact in a meeting doesn't just happen; the speaker needs to work at it.

Too many executives get caught up in what they're saying that they don't think about the impression they're sending out by how they're saying it. No wonder listeners are tuning out and turning on their BlackBerries.

Okay, first off, rude is rude. I shouldn't have to, but let me say that again with italics and bold and - what the hell - all caps: RUDE IS RUDE. I don't care if the speaker is as boring as the TP(X)611. If you have a meeting scheduled from 12-1, then you can pick up your messages at 1:01. End of story. If you even have one of those things in the meeting, you may as well just say "fuck you" to the speaker and be done with it. Obviously, your time is much more important than anyone else's and you shouldn't deign to be in this meeting with these low-lifes who bothered to show up and meet you in person rather than ping you on your little toy from their secure undisclosed location, which is probably the Starbucks on Broadway and 51st. Get over yourself.

Second gripe: this is another self-serving letter, a close relative to yesterday's dumb letter. But in a way, more pernicious. Guess what the letter-writer does for a living? Here's what it says under her name.

The writer is a speech coach.

Ha! You know, I probably could have told you that without even reading that tidbit. Of course, she can't make any money off of people just having common courtesy. So it's obviously the speaker's fault. And hey, she can help! For free, I'm sure. This is essentially an advertisement for herself, published gratis by our pals at the NYT. Congrats, fellas. Either you're complicit or you've been had.

And what great logic. Next time I'm at the movies and I'm bored I'm just going to whip out my banjo and start hollerin' some folk tunes. Nobody else will mind. After all, it's the filmmaker's responsibility to keep me engaged. If they can't, well, it's no wonder the banjo comes out and "Come Home Bill Bailey" takes over. What else am I supposed to do? It can only lead to better movies.

You-Must-Really-Think-We're Dumb Letters: The Cost of Health Care

2009-06-25T10:42:00.009-04:00

Some people say that numbers don't lie. Others say "There are lies, damn lies and statistics."

I say that numbers don't lie, people do. Which places me squarely in the middle of those two sayings. That's just like me.

Here's a lovely letter about health care costs from a chap at the Pacific Research Institute, as published in today's New York Times. (By the way, the PRI's website touts the organization as "promoting individual freedom and personal responsibility". Guess where they're coming from.)

A recent study that I conducted for the Pacific Research Institute contradicts the majority opinion registered in your recent poll, namely that “government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the private sector.” Across nearly four decades, the opposite has been true.

The institute’s study compares the cost increases of all health care nationwide apart from the two flagship government-run programs, Medicare and Medicaid, with Medicare’s cost increases. Since 1970, Medicare’s costs — even without the prescription drug benefit — have risen 34 percent more per patient.

The government has done a far worse job at holding down health care costs.

Hmm, notice anything missing there? I do. Monsieur notes that Medicare/Medicaid costs have risen at a higher rate per patient compared with what I'm assuming is a national average. (He doesn't say exactly what the comparison number is.) But it doesn't say what the actual cost is for each.

Is this important? Let's say I get my broccoli at Sam's Government Produce for $1.50. You get your broccoli at Max's Corporate Fruit and Veggie Stand for oh, $90.00. Forty years later, the price at Sam's has gone up to $10.50. Wow, a 600% increase! That's way more than the mere 50% increase at Max's, where you're now paying just $135.00 for your broccoli. So Max clearly knows how to keep his costs down, right? Right?

But wait, there's more. This "study" goes back to 1970, which means that about half of the data come from a period before managed care became the standard in the 1990s. Hardly a fair comparison. Coincidence? Uh-huh. I'd like to see the numbers from, say, 1995 on.

Sit down. We're not done here. This also doesn't take into account the quality of the care. Insurance companies hold down costs, as the first letter-writer in the NYT link notes, by denying care to existing patients and by charging giant deductibles that dissuade people from seeking treatment in the first place. Oh yeah, and by not even covering people who might actually need the coverage (i.e. sick people). So, a large and costly segment of the population is not included in the study for the writer's "good guys". Here's a surprise: sick people cost more to treat than healthy people. Who'da thunk?

This attempt at "research" is a joke. It's a level below a damn lie.

Bork Doesn't Seem to Know Beans

2009-06-23T11:17:00.005-04:00

Jesus effing crapdoodle, Robert Bork is out of his mind.

Here's a little Q&A with him from this week's new-and-improved(?) Newsweak.

The highlights? You're going to love this one. It's a gem.

Q: As it's currently composed, this is sometimes called a conservative court.
A: I don't see it at all. It's a very left-leaning, liberal court.

HUH? Rub your eyes, pinch yourself and read it again.

And here's another bit that didn't make the print edition but is in the online Extended Dance Mix of Stupid.

[T]he court has moved so far to the left that any correction back to the proper central position would look like conservative activism to some people.

Holy shit. I don't know what to say about that. Except holy shit.

We are more fortunate than ever that this nutjob isn't on the Supreme Court. Things are bad enough already without someone who thinks that the most reliably reactionary court in U.S. history has somehow strayed way to the left. Yowza.

Newsweek rightly called this tidbit "The View from 1987", because this dude is living in the past.

Sarah, Plain and Simple-Minded

2009-06-17T11:34:00.005-04:00

Sarah Palin can't even accept an apology properly. Is it possible for this idiot to comment on anything (anything?) without saying something that's either a) self-serving, b) factually wrong, c) immaterial, d) conservative red meat or e) some combination of the above?

So Letterman makes a stupid joke. Not in the best of taste but no worse than some things that were said on late-night TV during last year's campaign. But she got plenty of publicity last year. Now she needs to work harder to get her face out there more on her own. So she takes a joke about her and her stupid family (yes, I said stupid and I mean it) and tries to make it about "all young women" and "rape". It couldn't possibly be just about her and the poor choices she and her family have made.

The guy apologizes. But this is too easy a way to end the news cycle. She needs to keep it going. So she hammers some more. He apologizes again, which I think was totally unnecessary and played right into her media-grubbing little hands. The apology is so humble, obsequious even, that it would be virtually impossible for her to do anything but accept it graciously. (Which may have been Letterman's secret plan all along, come to think of it.) And does she?

Almost.

Here's the first part:

"Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve."

Okay, that's not really what it was about, but that's fine. As good as we could have expected from her. Then she goes on:

"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction. And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech -- in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect."

What the...? Can you not just accept an apology without bringing the troops into this? What the hell do they have to do with anything? Are they in Iraq and Afghanistan right now because our U.S.-installed puppet governments there are somehow threatening to come over here and shut down our media and our legal system, silencing all who may exercise their 1st Amendment rights? How exactly are they doing that? Was somebody there posing a threat to our constitution? Argh!

And that last bit about promoting "equality and respect". Is that like when she promoted equality by calling people in small towns "the real America", essentially saying that we city and East Coast types were somehow inferior? Or when she promoted respect by saying that Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists"?

Go away, you stupid, ignorant Barbie doll.

It's the Only Thing That's Free in the Sports World

2009-06-12T10:20:00.003-04:00

The Los Angeles Lakers had no business winning last night's Game 4 of the NBA Finals. No business. People say this kind of thing all the time. "Shoulda done this... Shoulda made that... Shouldn'ta let 'em do the other thing..." But really. No business. The game was over.

Here's the situation. You need this game to tie the series at two games each. Your team has a three-point lead and possession of the ball with fifteen seconds left in the game. You pass inside to your big man who gets fouled in the act of shooting with 11.1 seconds left. Game over? Game over.

Now, all the big man has to do is make one of two free throws to make it a two-possession game and end it. Said big man is a 50% free throw shooter. Which is terrible. But really, just make one and we're done here.

Big man misses both. Okay, still we have a three-point lead. The only way the other guys can tie and send the game to OT it is to make a three-pointer. How do you stop that? Well, good defense is one way. Another way is to foul the other guys before they get into a shooting situation. Duh. Worst case scenario: they make two free throws and you get the ball back and then they have to foul you blah blah blah and then the clock runs out.

So what happens? They inbound the ball. You get back on defense. Your guy guarding the man with the ball doesn't foul him but sets up to defend two feet behind the three-point line! Guess what happens.

There is simply no excuse for losing this game. None. The Magic should be ashamed of themselves. Even with their atrocious free-throw shooting (they missed fifteen overall and seven in the fourth quarter alone) they still had the game locked up and they played stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.

I can't even watch the rest of this series.

Which, it looks like, will now have just one more game.

Idiots.

Great Moments in Advertising: Whiten Your Teeth with Photoshop

2009-06-10T16:48:00.006-04:00

Check out this lame excuse for an ad. Apparently, these people have yellow teeth.

Okay, either these people are also afflicted with serious jaundice (in which case, their teeth are the least of their worries) or these images were tinted yellow. I'm guessing the latter.

Learn how to use Photoshop, people. You could have focused on just the teeth, if you'd just read a little teensy bit of the instructions. They're under "Help".

Oh, and I'm pretty sure the second photo is supposed to be white. (The teeth, that is.) It doesn't look all that different from the first one.

"That's the Way I Was Raised"

2009-06-10T11:27:00.004-04:00

Could we please retire this phrase? And it's variant "that's the way I was brought up"?

All this really means is "I don't have to take responsibility for my opinions or actions. It's all my parents' doing. Therefore, you cannot challenge me on it. I couldn't be bothered to examine whether this opinion/action/personal hygiene method was proper, ethical or legal on my own."

Some of us were "raised" by good people. Some of us were raised by assholes. Some of us were raised by good people who just weren't all that smart. Or maybe were a bit behind the times.

Please feel free to give your parents whatever credit they have coming. But no matter who you were raised by or how, please take responsibility for your own views and modus vivendi. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be taken seriously.

Thank you.

Dumb Letters: I'm Not Paying for That Either

2009-06-08T11:20:00.005-04:00

From today's NYTimes, a response to an editorial concerning a potential tax on soda and other sugar-based empty-calorie drinks.

What happened to personal responsibility? What happened to parental responsibility? When did taxation become the best solution to any problem? Is the federal government the only entity in our country that can raise children now?

This is just another idea on how to raise money for state-sponsored health care with a fig leaf of a reason to do so. Let’s try removing soda machines from our schools, providing healthier school lunches and ensuring that our gym classes are financed. There are plenty of commonsense things that can be done to achieve healthier progeny, alas not many that simultaneously finance health care.

Hmm. Looks like this isn't a person who really cares much about this issue. It's just a knee-jerk anti-tax response.

Let's begin with the opening statement. We've got four rhetorical questions. Questions 1, 2 and 4 are the standard libertarian mantra that we're all responsible for our own lives and government should just butt the heck out, cultural forces be damned. But these are a bit of a smoke screen for Question 3, which is basically "stop taxing me". For anything. Ever.

How do we know this is the real issue? Let's go to paragraph 2, wherein the writer gives us some other "ideas" on how to reduce obesity in children. (I should point out that, contrary to the suggestion by the writer that these are original ideas, almost all of them are suggested in the editorial about which this letter was written.) So, if government doesn't have solutions to our problems, why are you suggesting them? Who's going to kick the soda machine vendors out? And how do we make up the lost revenue when they do? And how, pray tell, do we propose to finance those gym classes? Surely not taxes. Taxes are bad, in case you haven't heard.

The writer probably has a 12-Coke-a-day habit and isn't interested in having to shell out a few more bucks to feed his habit. The fig leaf is on this writer, who is so against "socialized" health care that any tax on anything that may be used to provide it in any form must be seen as bad.

Man Killed by His Own Reputation, Sez NBC News

2009-06-01T10:17:00.006-04:00

This is not a post about the abortion debate. It's a post about language and how its subtleties can distort truth.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered yesterday. He was a provider of abortions and was somewhat controversial for providing late-term (but legal) abortions. Although it is suspected that he may have performed some later-than-legal abortions.

This is how NBC Nightly News reported on the murder.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Did you catch it? It was right at the beginning. "His notoriety cost him his life." Not a bullet. Not some crazed person who didn't agree with what Dr. Tiller did. Dr. Tiller himself caused his death. This is an irresponsible use of language.

I guess if I go murder Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld they'll have a news report saying that they were magically killed by their own notoriety. I'd have nothing to do with it.

No matter what you think of this man and his actions, he did not kill himself and he did not bring his death upon himself. He was murdered.

Despair Not For We Shall Prevail in Time

2009-05-27T16:17:00.005-04:00

A lot of my liberal friends are up in arms that the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. I'm not. I'm even a bit glad that they did.

The problem here isn't the court. The problem is Proposition 8 itself. And California's ridiculous rules for amending its constitution. Remember that this is the exact same court that gave Cali gays the right to marry in the first place. We loved them when they did that. They said marriage was a constitutional right. Of course, if they determine that it's a constitutional right, well, the only way to make it unconstitutional again is to change the bleeding constitution, which is exactly what Prop 8 did.

The constitution, which the CSC is sworn to uphold, is different now than when they made their initial decision. The (kinda wobbly) grounds for this particular suit were based on whether the constitution was amended or revised. There are two different standards for those things. An amendment only needs a majority vote whereas a revision requires legislation with a two-thirds majority. Dumb? Yes. Legal? Also yes. These things are far from mutually exclusive.

The process, while moronic, was entirely legal. The meatheads in California passed an amendment through their own codified-into-stupidity rules. It's idiotic that 50.1% of the state can decide to amend their constitution, which is supposed to protect rights, in order to deny rights. And massive funds for propaganda coming in from Utah? Sure. Bring it on. But those are the rules. If the CSC had ruled to overturn the vote, they would have been wrong. And there would have been the biggest, nastiest, ugliest right-wing hissy fit about judicial activism that you would ever have the misfortune to experience. And they would have been right, for once.

This is a temporary setback, but it always was. Prop 8 supporters are on the wrong side of history. Full marriage rights are inevitable. I sense that the right knows this and are throwing up as many roadblocks as they can. California will have them soon enough, probably in a few years when they put it back up for a vote and the demographics change just enough to swing it. Younger voters, and those not quite old enough to vote, favor full marriage equality by a pretty hefty margin. The numbers get lower as the voting age gets higher. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It won't be long.

This is not really a sad day. If you had asked even the most optimistic gay rights advocates five years ago where we'd be now I don't think any of them would have predicted that more than half a dozen states would either have full equality or be leaning hard in that direction. (Should I say it? Okay. I'll say it. Fucking Iowa!) But here we are. It's actually moving very swiftly, by historical standards. Someday, even sooner than we think, we'll wonder what all the fuss was about. And Miss California's fake boobs will explode in her face.

And So to My Oar...

2009-05-26T12:39:00.004-04:00

Well, we kind of expected this. Sonia Sotomayor is going to be the next Supreme Court justice.

I know, I know, she's only been nominated. She still needs to be confirmed.

There is no doubt that the Republican'ts are going to try and paint the nastiest, most scary librul picture of her that they can. But they're not going to block this. They don't have the votes and there's no way in hell they're going to filibuster a Hispanic female nominee unless there was proof that she did something really really heinous. Crikey, Clarence Thomas got in and he had credible sexual harassment allegations against him, not to mention a pretty unspectacular legal career up to that point.

So it'll get ugly. And you'll hear the following phrases over and over until you want to jam knitting needles into your ears to make the pain stop. (Yes, stop.)

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
---Sonia Sotomayor

And...

“[A] court of appeals is where policy is made.”
---Sonia Sotomayor

Oh no! Identity politics and judicial activism! Run for the hills! We need more "strict constructionists" who think that corporations have more rights than individuals and that only certain people have the rights that were supposedly endowed on us all by our "creator" even as they mock-venerate the framers of the constitution.

Please. She's not perfect. But she'll be fine.

I do have concerns about how long she'll be able to serve. She's only 54, not much older than John Roberts but she has diabetes, which could conceivably knock 15 to 20 years off her life. Roberts could still be messing up our lives for 30 or 40 more years. My freaking mortgage will be paid off by then.

I'm not thrilled to pieces. But it's a good start for BO's SCOTUS picks. And Elena Kagan will be ready when near-nonagenarian John Paul Stevens either kicks the bucket or hangs up his hat at some point in the next few years.

Here's Your Speech, Mr. President

2009-05-14T14:22:00.004-04:00

My fellow Americans,

There has been some heated controversy over whether the United States government should release a certain group of photos to the public. These photos were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union and show abuse of prisoners held in United States custody.

There are many who feel that sharing these images with the world will serve to inflame passions in those who would do us harm. Others feel that the public deserves to know the truth about what was done in its name, regardless of the consequences.

It is my considered opinion that, while these images may indeed exacerbate feelings of anger toward our country with those already inclined to such feelings, and possibly even ignite new fires of hatred among certain others, it would be even more damaging to tell the world that we have something to hide. If we share these images, we may hear, at the least, "How could you do such a thing?" If we don't, we will definitely hear, at the least, "What are you so ashamed of?"

The release of these images is not to suggest that there is no shame here. There is. We do feel shame for the abuses that occurred. And we solemnly vow that we will do everything in our power to ensure that they will never again take place in a country that is free, democratic and committed to the rule of law. We are confident that an honest accounting of our actions will send the signal to the world that we are capable of reflection and improvement and that, no matter what has happened in the past, the light of truth will lead us toward a brighter day of healing and reconciliation with not only the global community but with our own constitution.

It is with a heavy heart that I share these images with the public. They are difficult to view. Many of them are ugly and disturbing. But a free nation is never afraid to face its demons. And as we confront ours by sharing these images with our own citizens and with the citizens of the world, we ask those who choose to view them to do so not with an eye towards retribution but with a renewed sense that we are a strong nation that will prevail over those who wish to do us harm not by hiding in the shadows but by seeking the light of truth and freedom in all of our endeavors.

Thank you and may the United States of America always be a beacon of hope for the world.

Sessions in the Sun

2009-05-06T12:52:00.008-04:00

You know what I hate?

Actually, you probably do. The list is long and much of it has been covered in this space.

But right now. What I'm thinking about. Okay, I'll tell you. It's the completely misguided (or possibly dishonest) views about what a judge's job is that are constantly spewed by conservatives.

Antonin Scalia considers himself a "strict constructionist". This is a nonsensical idea. The concept holds that the constitution is settled and that all you have to do is read it and follow it. Judges supposedly shouldn't "legislate from the bench". They shouldn't "interpret" the law, they should simply follow it. Of course, this is easily knocked down. After all, if the law didn't require occasional interpretation we wouldn't need judges now, would we? How many 5-4 decisions have we had? Someone's not following the law.

"Strict constructionism" is just a rhetorical dodge anyway, a way to pass off reactionary viewpoints and judgements as "what the Founding Fathers envisioned". Bullshit. The Founding Fathers never would have stopped ballots from being counted. Or told someone that they couldn't sue for pay discrimination because said discrimination had been cleverly hidden from them until after the arbitrary statute of limitations had passed. "Sorry. My hands are tied. It's not me. It's the law." Uh-huh.

We'll continue to hear more of the "following the law" bullshit as we get closer to an Obama Supreme Court appointment.

Here's professional racist Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) on what makes a good judge (lifted from this Salon article).

"As long as they have a deep commitment to the law and recognize that when they put on the robe, that they go beyond politics and they're required to subordinate themselves to the law as written."

Actually, no. One of the Supreme Court's main functions is to check the legislative branch by passing judgement on the constitutionality of its laws. If the law is unconstitutional, not only do they not subordinate themselves to it, they strike it down. That's their job. And this man is now the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hooray for us.

Spanky McSchmanky's Extraterrestrial House of Pancakes

What the Hell Is Wrong With You Idiots? Didn't You Hear What Herman Cain Said?

Dumb Letters: It's Science If I Say It Is

Have a Crumb Bean Sandwich

4,823 Iowans Can't Be Wrong, Can They?

Five Other Things to Watch For

Dumb Letters: Who's Really in Charge Here

Dumb Letters: Privatize Yourself

Vive la Similarité/Différence (your choice)

When Is a Person Not a Person?

SCOTUS Finds R Rating Unconstitutional!

Chris Christie Plays the Victim

It's Only Fraud If You're the One Doing It

Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Dumb Letters: The Narcissist

He Couldn't Get Any Lower

Uninterested? Only If You're Disinterested

Wipe Your Butt With Our New Poll

Slime Machine

Overrated

Smart Letters: The Cost of Energy

Information Exploitation

God Told Me That You're a Dick

Look Out for That Clock!

That Was One Hell of a Hockey Game

Porn in the USA

I Don't Beg Your Pardon

Taxation for Representation

Grab Grab Grab (What I Just Gave You)

Barbara Billingsley

Higher Taxes Make You Work Less, Because You Don't Like Money

Free Mountain Dew for Everyone!

Bernard Schwartz

Chasing the Road Runner on an ACME Segway

Owner of Segway Company Dies in a Segway Accident

It's Sex With Someone I Love

UNITED STATES SENATOR

Dumb Letters: Stem Cells Are People Too

Now Fewer Americans Than Ever Believe in Facts

Dr. Laura Jumps the Shark (Again, But This Time She Gets Eaten on Purpose)

Yuck!

Freedom of Religion*

Dumb Letters: That Robe Is Sooooo Gay

Newt World Odor

Where Does the Time Go? or, Race to the Bottom

Dumb Letters: Whatever It Is, I'm Against It

Free Speech = $$$$$

Supremely Undemocratic

Karen Hughes Lies to Us ... Again

Art Clokey

Dumb Letters: It's All So Simple If You're Not Nuts

Dumb Letters: Still Not Paying for That

Arnold Stang

The Taxation of My Patience

Everyone Complains About the Weatherman but Nobody Ever Does Anything About Him

What's the (Squirrel) Poop?

Ken Ober

Dumb Letters: Betraying America by Upholding American Ideals

Belichoke

Dumb Letters: The Oxy Morons

Veterans Day

Dumb Letters: You Have No Idea What I'm Going Through!

Lieberman Finds More Knives with Which to Stab His Party

59-0

Columbus Day

America Loves Garlic Milkshakes!

Skunks!

Meet the Press and Play It for a Sucker

Democrat Is a Relative Term

Today in Hypocrisy

Trauma

Dumb Letters: Joe Wilson

Meet Joe Wilson, Professional Asshole

Dumb Letters: Problem? What Problem?

Froot Loops Are Health Food! I Know It's True Because the Food Industry Said So

Really? THIS Is Something to Be Upset About?

Dick Cheney Can Suck My Ass

Edward M. Kennedy

PYSBRIoM: Doug Glanville

Robert Novak