Overrated

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.

God Told Me That You're a Dick

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.

1. "I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes,"
2. "[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!

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.

Free Mountain Dew for Everyone!

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.

Now Fewer Americans Than Ever Believe in Facts

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.

Today in Hypocrisy

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?"

Really? THIS Is Something to Be Upset About?

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

Sarah, Plain and Simple-Minded

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.

Wait a Minute

Now, I'm as excited about anybody else regarding this past week's election. It fills me with a hope for my country that I had long since abandoned. Not to pee all over this, but let's stop for a second and consider two things. (I consciously waited a few days before posting this. We needed to celebrate a bit. But here we are.) We're gettng seriously into glass-half-empty territory here, but these are important things to consider before we go all giddy.

Thing 1: The Bush Administration

This actually comes in two parts, Thing 1(a) and Thing 1(b).

Thing 1(a) is the existing legacy of these turdheads. The damage that they have done to, among other things, the environment, workers' rights, women's rights, science, separation of church and state, the judiciary, our infrastructure, confidence in government, our standing on the world stage, and, oh, our constitution is going to take the better part of Obama's first term (hey! optimism!) just to discover and unravel, let alone to fix.

And the judiciary can't be fixed unless one of the Supreme Court justices contracts a particularly virulent communicable disease, taking Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas down with them. Barring that, those guys aren't going anywhere for the foreseeable future. The best-case scenario is that Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens are replaced with justices who will be similar to them. Obama's win won't shift the court back to the left. It will only prevent it from moving farther to the right. And this also leaves out the lower courts, which decide what even gets to the Supremes. Their effect goes largely unseen by the general populace. Dozens of creeps on the level of Scalia have been planted there over the last eight years. They're not going anywhere either.

And restoring regulations to industry is going to take forever, and will be violently opposed by the coal, oil, gas, logging and nuclear industries. Good luck with that. We can't take back the unnecessary pollution that has already been spewed and will continue to be spewed while we struggle to return some common sense to our environmental policy. Or bring back the polar bears and other less-cuddly animules that are dying out due to global warming. Which brings me to Thing 1(b).

Thing 1(b) is the inescapable fact that these guys are still in power for another two months. They have plenty of time to make things even more difficult for Big O. All presidents sneak in last-minute regulations designed to tie the hands of the next administration, or at least to make them look bad by repealing them. Read this to find out what we're up against here. We won't even mention all of the pardons for themselves and their buddies for civil rights violations, torture, illegal wiretapping, lying to congress etc.

Thing 2: 52%-47%

This felt like a big victory because Obama won a vast majority of electoral college votes. And the rest of the world is overwhelmingly pro-Obama. (Except, uh, Al Qaeda.) If the entire global population were allowed to vote in our election, Obama probably would have received 75-85% of the vote. But right here, he got just over half. What the hell is wrong with us?

Obama will undoubtedly be able to restore world opinion of us to a respectable level. He already has, without even doing anything in an official capacity. But right here at home, we have advanced a little but we've still got a long way to go. We're still a bit racist. We're still a bit anti-intellectual. We're still a bit untrusting of anything that smacks of gummint control, even if it's really government assistance. We're still not quite bright enough to take accusations like "socialist" with a real understanding of what the terms mean and how they relate to historical reality.

Considering a) how badly John McCain ran his campaign, b) how badly Bush/Cheney and the Republican Party have run this country, c) that 80% of the country told pollsters that the country was heading in the wrong direction, d) how little McCain's policies differed from Bush's, and e) how unbelievably ill-equipped Sarah Palin was for the office, it's pretty pathetic that almost half of us still thought it would be better to elect the same party again.

The hope that I have after this historic election is tempered by the sad realization that we have not, in fact, come such a long way, baby. But maybe we can get there. I'm willing to try if you are. I'll end with the same line I ended with earlier this week, because it holds true no matter what.

Let's get to work.