Everyone you’ll ever meet, is exactly like you.

Nobody is thinking about anything except what they can do to make you happy.

Whenever they do something nice for you, it becomes their job from that day forward. Show that you belong in the driver’s seat. You’ll feel really good about it later.

The day you figure out those three items are horse squeeze, you’re well on your way to growing up and getting something useful done.

Did Barry just tell a whopper about ducking out of the nuclear summit to attend his daughter’s soccer game?

[T]he story has several problems. The first one is a biggie in that there were no scheduled soccer games for Sidwell Friends April 10, as evidenced here. The second is that the area reported that the game was played at appears to be one of high crime…

What’s more concerning is that no one can confirm if the Secret Service even accompanied Obama on his adventure. Furthermore, let’s look at the elapsed time. If the president left the White House at 9:20AM as reported, according to Mapquest, it takes about sixteen minutes to get from the White House to 40th and Chesapeake NW, bringing his arrival time to the field at 9:36AM or so. But then he would have had to leave the field at the latest at 10:00AM to return to the White House at the documented time of 10:17AM. So he spent about twenty minutes at the game? When did the game end? That time is vague as well.
:
Even three days later, there are still no pictures of the president from Saturday’s game. The USA just disarmed to Russia, Poland’s president and 95 others were killed hours before, and there were many international leaders in Washington, D.C. for the nuclear summit set to begin on Monday, April 12.

Nothing malicious going on here, IMO. If I have to speculate, I’d say someone close to the top made the call: Just tell the riff-raff whatever you think they’ll be happy hearing. Soccer game. Everybody loves the doting dad who shows up at a soccer game. It was purely focus-group driven.

I used to marvel at the Clintons’ lies, how some of the lies told didn’t seem to present any obvious payoff, nor could anyone possessing reasonable levels of intellect fail to detect the near-certain potential of getting caught. Our current Secretary of State having been named after Sir Edmund Hillary is one example that comes immediately to mind. It’s as if the lies are being told as a sort of leisure activity…a competitive sport in itself.

I’m told Sarah Palin is unqualified for this office and, furthermore, that she’s doing it all for the money and possesses a staggering level of disrespect for her “fans.” She has quite the doting-mommy rep; wonder if she would have told an obvious fib about ducking out to watch her kids’ soccer game. Something tells me no. Something tells me, also, that we’re a little bit too concerned about smarts and not concerned enough about character.

I’m further told by that something that we’re about to be gloriously schooled with regard to these skewed priorities of ours. People have quite the capacity for putting up with shenanigans, until said shenanigans start hitting ’em in the pocketbook. Then things start to change right quick.

Having someone in charge who you think is oh-so-much smarter than you…who also thinks He is oh-so-much smarter than you…and isn’t inclined to deal honestly with you, can be awfully expensive. How much of that can we afford? This, to me, is the pivotal question — not “Where is the soccer game being played” or “Can you tell me what the Bush Doctrine is.”

Neal Boortz read my mind as I put together the previous post…and found the perfect nugget that shows us where exactly it’s all headed.

Barack Obama and the Democrats are so eager to make America more like Europe. With our current spending levels and our soon-to-be taxation techniques – the value-added tax – they are well on their way to solidifying a full-fledged moocher society. Which leads me to this…coming soon to the United States:

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.

“It’s really hard,” said Mrs Davey, 29, who is seven months pregnant. “We can’t afford holidays and I don’t want my kids living on a council estate and struggling like I have.

“The price of living is going up but benefits are going down. My carer’s allowance is only going up by 80p this year and petrol is so expensive now, I’m worried how we’ll cope.

“We’re still waiting for somewhere bigger.”

Mrs Davey has never had a full-time job while her 35-year-old husband gave up his post in administration nine years ago after realising they would be better off living off the state.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flatscreen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer – not to mention four mobile phones.

With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seater minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes.

But according to the Daveys they have nothing to be thankful for.

“It doesn’t bother me that taxpayers are paying for me to have a large family,” added Mrs Davey.

“We couldn’t afford to care for our children without benefits, but as long as they have everything they need, I don’t think I’m selfish.

“Most of the parents at our kids’ school are on benefits.”

She added: “I don’t feel bad about being subsidised by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there.

“If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to. I don’t put in anything because I don’t pay taxes, but if I could work I would.”

To the gulag she goes!

This thing about having the huge pack of whelps, is actually the oldest part of our present decline. Think about it: What’s the one thing about childbirth that has changed most drastically over the last hundred years? Answer: The financial implications. Children used to be assets. Today, they’re liabilities.

What do you do with liabilities? You avoid having them in the first place…if you’re smart. And so we have an Idiocracy world, in which the gene pool becomes more and more polluted, as smart, independent, capable people only reproduce in quantities they have the wherewithal to manage…and the dependency class reproduces in far greater volume, not meeting up with any discouragement in this enterprise from anywhere.

The result? One or two kids, over here, are taught when you want something you have to work for it…fifteen kids over there are taught how to whimper, whine, snivel and protest.

Coming soon to America.

Thanks go to blogger friend Rick for the find.

The pointlessness to trying, that is made manifestly clear by this cartoon, is the key to dividing and conquering the enemy I think. He presents a unified front in dismissing the idea that the economy may very well lose its oomph with extravagant entitlement programs, soaring debt and ever-more-progressive tax policies. But the enemy is not unified, in spite of appearances, when he snickers and laughs at us as we point out the obvious.

His leadership, I think, knows we are right. You can tell by what remedies are designed, packaged, and proposed to us. It goes back to my observation that unpleasant things are never bad for the environment. Never, never, not ever. Cushy toilet paper that feels good on your derriere, is destroying the planet — crappy, scratchy, substandard utilitarian-grade sandpaper is never destroying the planet. Just the good stuff.

I think the leadership understands the point being made. When there is no payoff for real success, the incentive disappears. The economy is driven by individual incentive. They only dismiss this because they have to. When everything they want done, is designed to remove the joy from living any & all life save for those lifestyles most dilatory, it’s clear what they’re trying to do. So they aren’t really dismissing the idea.

Their dismissal is amplified by the huge layer of useful idiots, underneath them, who genuinely doubt it. In their small minds, there is one reason and one reason alone to champion the cause of any one class, even to defend the class when it is under attack: You’re afraid the victim will be heckled and hounded into some kind of statistical or financial oblivion. And so they snicker, they chortle, they roll their eyes and make sarcastic comments — anything to avoid facing the truth, that when we tax “the rich” punitively we’re really taxing our children and grandchildren.

And then there is the even bigger layer of useful idiots underneath them who don’t even think things out that far. These are the “pie people” who think if one guy’s pie slice is larger, nevermind the reason, someone else’s slice must have been made smaller and now we need to have Soshul Jusstuss. This bottom-layer of useful-idiot, ironically enough, thinks we are the useful idiots. They think “Wall Street” has sent us into the heartland to join the Tea Party, to do their bidding. For free.

But the truth is that there are some powerful economic forces around the world, with much to gain if the mightiest financial superpower the planet has ever seen — can be somehow brought down to its knees. And that will certainly happen if the individual incentive is removed from the equation…if it is just too much of a pain in the ass to try to get ahead, and nobody bothers anymore. It’s a serious issue. Talk to anyone who has actually managed to put the family dynasty on top…not to inherit it, but to start out low, and end up high. Ask them what it took. If President Soetoro is right and we’re all better off if we spread the wealth around, it’s just a natural consequence of that new policy of “change” to say — fuggedabowdit. Let’s all just clamor for our social justice, for our 35-hour weeks and our 70 days of paid vacation every year, and we’ll all just sit around swanky bistros sipping Turkish coffee all day talking about bullshit.

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg points out — if America is going to become just another European country, then someone, somewhere, is going to have to become the new America.

When the facts aren’t on your side, when logic isn’t on your side, use slander.

Opponents of the fiscally conservative tea party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic and moronic.

Jason Levin, creator of http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15—tax filing day, when tea party groups across the country are planning to gather and protest high taxes.

“Every time we have someone on camera saying that Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen, we want someone sitting next to him saying, ‘That’s right, he’s an alien from outer space!'” Levin said.
:
Levin says they want to exaggerate the group’s least appealing qualities, further distance the tea party from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them.

Exaggerate the unappealing qualities? Or spin them from whole cloth?

Their web site seems to call for the latter…

Whenever possible, we will act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them…Sound like fun? It is!! If you’d like to join us… [emphasis mine]

Funny thing is — from this guy’s web site, from his Twitter feed, you kind of pick up the impression that he’s anxious for the word to get out about this effort. Now, I haven’t completely got this figured out, I don’t think…or else he hasn’t…but it seems to me fairly obvious that his chosen method of deception depends on keeping this on the low-down. Doesn’t it?

Aw hell, let’s help him out. If ever you do see a tea party protester shouting racist bullshit in the air, or carrying around a misspelled sign, let the word go forth across the four winds that there remains more homework to be done. Or…better yet. Anyone who disagrees with Obama is supposed to be racist? I guess any tea partier who’s caught being racist, is bound to turn out to be a “party crasher” so we should all just ignore that.

I’d like to know this guy’s angle. Is he a useful-idiot? Or maybe he’s being paid for this…wouldn’t that be a gol’-dang deal. Or maybe he’s just super excited about Obama’s policies. And what motivates that, I wonder? Inquiring minds wanna know.

But I don’t suppose I’m gonna find out.

Kyle-Anne Shiver walks us through the equation — and pulls no punches.

If President Obama were really the smartest guy of his generation, then he would have done the following:

He would have, first and foremost, surrounded himself with unimpeachable, morally sound, and experienced cabinet members. Instead he filled his cabinet with Clinton retreads, tax cheats, polarizing ideologues, and unfit-for-the-real-world academics.

Dumb. Really dumb.

Second, President Obama — if he were really smart — would have told his Chicago intimates, especially Desiree Rogers and his wife, Michelle, that until the economy was in full — very full — rebound, there would be no expensive, vulgar partying in the people’s house. Knowing full well that he had come into the presidency on his own rhetoric that we were facing the worst “economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Barack Obama would have known better — if he were really smart — than to order up gala parties with imported Wagu beef at $100 per pound, while he was speaking out the other side of his mouth about the disgusting nature of executive retreats to Las Vegas. A smart man would have known the people would see him as a hypocrite.

Instead, the Obamas partied hardy to the thralls of every society page in the country, quickly making themselves the butt of jokes from coast to coast.

Third, President Obama — if he were really smart — would have turned serious executive instead of media addict. He would not have appeared on a late-night comedy show. He would not have spent more time in front of a camera’s glow than he spent at his desk. He would have rolled up his sleeves and gotten down to the hard work of governing instead of hamming it up in public 24/7, which any truly smart person knows is not only bound to get old very fast, but also sends out the message loud and clear that no one is actually acting as president.

There’s like, a bunch of comments underneath alerting Ms. Shiver to the fact that The Holy One isn’t a dumbass at all, that He fully intends to do all the damage He is doing. They draw from tracts & theses like this.

This misses the point, in my mind.

We just spent a shitload of time being told not only that Holy Man is a raving sooper-genius, but that He has America’s best interests at heart. Now, if it is a proven matter of fact that both of these premises cannot hold up — does it really matter worth a tinker’s damn which one has failed us?

Neal Boortz is noticing something he’s actually been noticing for awhile.

President TOTUS’ approval rating is continuing to slide downward downward downward…since about the beginning of 2010 the number has been within a stone’s throw of the percentage of voters who pay absolutely no income taxes whatsoever. Now, at 47%, all perceptible difference between the two quotients, is gone. The margin-of-error is certainly well beyond whatever difference remains.

Perhaps this is Holy One’s bedrock — the threshold beneath of which any further sinking is a logical impossibility. And maybe this is why politicians choose to become democrats; you give away money to people that you took from other people, take the credit for it as if it came out of your own wallet. How & why do people & did people ever fall for this? I dunno. But anyway…your “bedrock” altitude ends up way in the high forties, as in, when you’re screwing up all over the place and everyone knows it, that’s where you end up.

Contrasted with the politician who intones, and acts out, the dictum that “Robin Hood” government is just-plain-wrong. He has to perform, or else his “bedrock” is about half as much, somewhere around twenty-two.

Giveaway-politics is the refuge of politicians who know their policies suck ass. And it seems to me that, generation by generation, it’s working better and better.

Update: Intentionally or not, blogger friend Gerard provides a link to the perfect graphic at iOwnTheWorld.com.

Mona Charen:

In the latest installment of politically correct, not to say Orwellian, language emanating from the Obama administration, the term “rogue states” has been sidelined in favor of “outliers.” The switch was unveiled as part of the just released Nuclear Posture Review. States like North Korea and Iran, labeled “rogue” by the Bush administration, will no longer labor under that punitive adjective.

This is telling. While the administration insists that the full spectrum of new initiatives — from the New Start treaty to the Nuclear Posture Review to the Nuclear Security Summit — are aimed at containing the world’s two most provocative nations, Iran and North Korea, the stream of euphemisms they’ve insisted upon sends the opposite message.

Rogue isn’t even a particularly harsh word. When applied to individuals, it is frequently paired with “lovable.” Regarding elephants, it suggests an animal that is out of control, but not necessarily vicious. Still, it was too severe for the Obama administration.

Outlier has no negative connotations at all. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “One whose domicile is distant from his or her place of business.” The Macintosh computer dictionary adds a secondary connotation of exclusion from a group. So to employ the label “outliers” for nations that are, by any civilized measure, criminal is pusillanimous. No doubt the leadership in Iran has also noticed that an administration that softens its words has also modified its proposed sanctions. Whereas once Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of “crippling” sanctions, she has now climbed down to “sanctions that bite.” Can annoying sanctions be far behind?

The administration does not like to use hurtful words to our enemies. Our friends are another matter. Compare the treatment Great Britain, Honduras, and Israel have received with the walking on eggshells approach to our foes. Early on, the administration jettisoned the term “Global War on Terror” in favor of a catch phrase only a bureaucrat could have coined — “overseas contingency operations.” The word “terrorism” was similarly airbrushed from official language. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano prefers the term “man-caused disasters” because “it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear …” A more anodyne term has now surfaced from a number of officials — “countering violent extremism.”

The detainees in Guantanamo, too, have had a name change. They will no longer be called “enemy combatants.” The new name hasn’t been chosen yet, though cynics might just use “former clients of Obama Justice Department lawyers.”

I’ve never understood why the left does this. It certainly isn’t something that wins elections, and it may have a powerful effect in the opposite direction. It isn’t defensible because anything you say to defend it, just comes out sounding stupid.

I recall when this was done for the benefit of handicapped people…although I have trouble remembering the year. There was a “Hyphenated” movement — if you were in a wheelchair you were mobility-impaired, if you were short you were vertically-challenged. There was one pairing up between receding hairlines and “folically challenged” but I think that was satire deployed for the purpose of calling out the lunacy, by Johnny Carson if memory serves. The satire ultimately worked.

The question that really needs to be raised is what’s wrong with the older nmemonic. Why create a new term. Now, as was the case then, the problem is not that the older phrase fails to convey something that should be conveyed; the problem is that the older phrase does convey something that someone in some position of authority does not want conveyed.

This is a problem. If the undesirable conveyed meaning was severely at odds with the truth, it would wear out on its own. So there is a widespread perception that politically-correct overhaul operations like this are the tools of professional and compulsive liars, and I & all thinking persons find that perception to be accurate overall.

Josh Painter brings us news that Sarah Palin has apparently bludgeoned the Obama administration into a more commonsense position — once again. Gateway Pundit agrees.

For the last decade plus, I notice the democrat party has been repeatedly trounced by people they have declared to be morons. Not just Palin. What’s-his-name too. The Crawford guy. Except he had to have an official title of some kind in order to beat ’em at their own game over and over. Palin, on the other hand, is just a private citizen.

Update: Under one of my posts at Right Wing News, interested commentator AF_Vet backs well-known left-wing gadfly D_Vega up against the wall over this latest event and wants to know what Vega has to say about it…Vega having gone on the record repeatedly to say Palin doesn’t know what she’s talking about. (Apparently not having bothered to acquaint himself with what exactly it was Palin was saying.)

AF_Vet says “This oughta be good.” We agree. We are watching carefully along with him.

Update 4/12/10: Aaaaaannnnnnndddddd….drum roll please. It’s the “As I’ve/He’s Said All Along Back To Day One” defense. There’s no change to the policy you’re only imagining it because you’re so stoooopid.

Anyone else shocked to see that one coming?

Okay, I want to see a virtual show-of-hands. Is there anyone here sympathetic to Barry’s position, or who knows somebody who is…who, as of Friday after the policy had been first announced, honestly down to the marrow of their bones interpreted it to mean “if we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off.”

I guess being a lefty means never having to tell the truth about your initial perceptions of things, or your heroes’ initial intent behind their things. History always began this morning when your Mom made you wake up.

And although I’m not sure whether the good “Republican” knows what exactly it is he did here, the liberal side of the blogosphere is now abuzz and who in the world can blame them? What a motherlode.

“The question has been raised about whether or not our president is a socialist,” Paul said. “I am sure there are some people here who believe it. But in the technical sense, in the economic definition of a what a socialist is, no, he’s not a socialist.”

“He’s a corporatist,” Paul continued. “And unfortunately we have corporatists inside the Republican party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country.”

Paul said examples of President Obama’s “corporatism” were evident in the heath care reform bill he signed into law last month. He said the mandate in the bill put the power over health care in the hands of corporations rather than private citizens.
:
He said the only hope Republicans have is to change the bill for the better. Paul said he will introduce his own legislative fix when the Congress returns from recess next week.

“There’s one piece of legislation that I’m going to introduce, it’s going to be one page long,” he said. “It will be to remove the mandate so you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.”

His speech, which touched on his oft-repeated calls to close down American military bases overseas and shift toward libertarian-style social policy, drew cheers from the Paul fans in the crowd and what sounded like boos from others in the room.

What incredible, staggering ineptitude. Folks, this is why Palin’s screw-up in front of Katie Couric means so little to me, right here. Couric never had her for lunch quite as scrumptiously as did the liberals just now feast on Dr. Paul’s bleached bones. He dug his own hole and walked right into it. Their only out, thus far, has been to carefully avoid any & all discussion of this “economic definition of a what a socialist is” and make fun of anyone & everyone who’d call President Soetoro a socialist.

And they got a so-called “Republican” now helping them with that. To the best of my knowledge, Congressman Paul never did take on my favorite question about this: So if ya wanna be called a socialist, what exactly do ya gotta do??

I wonder what Ron Paul would say about what blogger friend Phil wrote on this subject:

[I]f Socialized Medicine isn’t socialism … if nationalizing companies isn’t socialism … if redistribution of wealth isn’t socialism … maybe we have diffferent [sic] dictionaries.

He Who Walks On Water told Joe the Plumber “I just think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Is there some credible reason why that cannot be the very definition of socialism? If it isn’t, then exactly what use does this word provide to us, why should it be part of the language at all?

The Holy One’s thin-skinned-ness, or lack of class, or ignorant and unrepentant chauvinism — whatever it is — is a personal quirk. But four decades and change after He became a person, He also became the anointed spiritual leader of a nation that never before needed one, as well as our 44^th President.

And so the wisdom or lack thereof regarding His decision deserves some inspection. Charles Krauthammer brings it.

[I]f the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty…the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.”
:
This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.

Apart from being morally bizarre, the Obama policy is strategically loopy. Does anyone believe that North Korea or Iran will be more persuaded to abjure nuclear weapons because they could then carry out a biological or chemical attack on the United States without fear of nuclear retaliation?

I note, with great interest, that it seems to be a staple idea of the democrat party that foreign policy needs to be managed this way. We should rely on the Picard vs. Tazmanian Devil paradigm, which states that when a conflict occurs between a civilized force and a savage one, the savage mindset will be influenced by the civilized one rather than the other way ’round. They will learn from our superior example.

I struggle to recall any episode in human history in which this has been demonstrated to work.

I also struggle to recall any election campaign, in which a democrat contender behaved this way toward his Republican opponent. I pledge to limit my firepower; because being the less aggressive force is more important to me than winning.

Republicans and democrats do seem to behave toward each other with more-or-less equal servings of hostility.

Except the Republicans, on average, are even more hostile to terrorists than they are to the opposing political party. I’m just wishing my current President would show half as much hostility toward those who seek to kill my fellow countrymen, as He and His people show toward Republicans, conservatives and tea party activists. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Krauthammer has it right. This new policy is so bollywonkers and fubar’d, Janet Napolitano must think it’ll work perfectly.

Update: Buck found the perfect cartoon.

“Freedom,” wrote the fictitious Winston Smith in George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 — Part I, Chapter 7 — “is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that much is granted, all else follows.”

I hate to say 1984 is too rosy and cheerful to reflect reality, but I’m afraid that is the situation. Freedom, says Freeberg, is the freedom to say that two plus two make four — and if that much is denied, nothing else matters.

Freedom is not freedom if it is subject to the approval of others. Freedom, therefore, must possess the intrinsic authority and ability to occasionally piss people off. Or — to not piss anyone off at all…but at least possess the option. Those of superior rank, those of elevated station, those with letters in back of their names, those who hold “chits” on other persons in positions of enormous power — they have to be able to get red-faced, screaming, shouting, plate-throwing goblet-shattering mad, and not able to do a single thing about it. While you go on your merry way. Watching South Park, or blogging, or driving wherever you want.

Eating saturated fat. Drinking beer. Smacking your wife on the ass and telling her she’s still got it.

Babbling away about two and two making four…

I’m afraid the situation is, we have these freedoms as long as those who are in power don’t mind us having those freedoms. So long as that is the case, two and two make four. They’ll be sure and tell us the minute that changes. And that isn’t freedom.

For eight whole years we were told the Bush administration was “trampling” on our “freedoms.” Occasionally a Bush defender would inquire of the agitated Michael Moore fan, “What could you do without the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, specifically, that you can’t do with it??” And the subject would change. And then it would circle back. Into the comfortable old diatribe. Bush is eroding our freedoms.

Now, we really are losing our freedoms. Sure, we get to do stuff…the same way I get to drive onward, after the checkpoint guard looks at my paperssssssss.

We’re losing our vigilance. Too many of my countrymen call that free. And there are too many others who are looking for excuses to revoke even that much.

To retain our freedoms that we’re supposed to value so highly, we need some widespread education. People need to learn about…people. They need to have it taught to them that there are people running around, all over the place, who are blisteringly offended at the idea that two and two make four. Freedom is something that isn’t popular with everybody. If we have to take a poll on it before it is granted, then it is as good as gone.

As in sixty years late?

Fights over children — who gets custody, how much for child support — are at the heart of any family law court on any given day. The faces change, but the stories and disputes rarely do.

So it is on today’s docket in the Los Angeles courtroom of Judge Elia Weinbach. At least on paper. The dispute between Rosemary Douglas and Urban Joseph Grass over back child support seems familiar: She claims he never paid; he says he never knew.

In this case, however, the mom has a head of gray hair and has been collecting Social Security for more than a decade. The father was born in the heart of the Jazz Age, when a fellow named Coolidge resided in the White House. And the “child” in question is that only on some yellowing piece of paper. In real life he is a retired grandfather.

“He was ordered to do something. He didn’t do it,” said the 81-year-old Douglas. “He didn’t challenge it, not legally anyway. I’d always thought about this. It was never far from my mind. Finally I decided, why not? Why not try one more time?”

The story began in 1950. Douglas got pregnant and was not married. She insists Grass was the father and that he wanted nothing to do with her. After her son Gerald was born, she said she went to court to get an order for child support because she had no alternative.
:
Now a widow, Douglas said she could use the $57,000 that she claims Grass owes her, which includes ever-rising interest. But more important than the money, she said, is the principle. When she managed to locate him in Texas, she hired a process server to deliver court papers.

“If a judgment is rendered, you have to satisfy that judgment,” she said. “He owes this.”

Well yeah, if he really owes it then go to town granny. I do think he’s entitled to a test, especially if you’re socking him with interest. And the “could use the money” part is really objectionable I must say…especially in view of said interest.

I got slammed by something like this, and it wasn’t child support. My child support payments are made typically early…which is out of necessity…that’s a story I’d rather not get into. But this other thing on which I was technically in arrears, having to do with the creditor’s lawyer popping out of the bushes after decades, demand letter in hand, charging as much interest as is technically possible — that was messed up. I found out through that experience that lawyers routinely advise their clients to do this. Hunker down for a dog’s age, let the interest rack up, and then ambush the bastard and charge him through the nose.

It’s a word to the wise. You’re responsible for knowing the “final” situation involved with each transaction beyond the shadow of any doubt, even if life’s eddies and currents don’t make that easily manageable. Your idea of “final” might not really be final. I learned it, and I learned at a discount because I fought that gouging and I mostly won. But I was lucky.

Great argument for tort reform. And yes I’d include child support in that. “Could use the money”? This contradicts the spirit of American civil law, IMO. Wrongs should be redressed, but if one party’s financial comfort is an issue before the court and the other’s is not, then the parties are not on equal footing. Getting slapped with sixty years of interest when you’re a retired light-colonel and 81? Yikes.

The “child” is a grandfather. Hehe, that’s rich.

Oh well. Hope there are some opportunities to stay tuned into this one. Although I doubt it…and something tells me all things are not necessarily as they appear.

Chris Currey begins his tale thusly…

I am an old Republican. I am religious, yet not a fanatic. I am a free-marketer; yet, I believe in the role of the government as a fair evenhanded referee.

Stopped reading. What’s the fucking point?

Leaving the rest up to The Other McCain, who is at least getting some laughs out of it.

You belong in the purge-bowl, pal. With a courtesy-flush. You’re as much an “old Republican” as Fidel.

Purge them. Wipe out any trace. Deport them on boxcars. Tar and feather them. “Fair evenhanded referee”…feh. I used to have some healthy curiosity about whether these people were sociopathic liars, or whether they just completely missed the point altogether. I do not have this curiosity anymore, it’s done left me.

It is an attack, again, on definitions of things. A failure to comprehend basic cause-and-effect. Here, one last time let us treat the mindset as something on the up-and-up: What, specifically, is it about the government that makes the people within it so fair and evenhanded? What makes them so noble and so wise that they, many of whom have never worked a day in their lives, can approach the President or the CEO of Acme Widget Co. who may have been producing widgets for fifty years or more as-man-and-boy…and tell him the right way to make widgets?

But I’m done with that. This is not on the up-and-up. This is a liberal. A hardcore egg-sucking dog of a liberal wearing a disguise, and it’s a crappy disguise at that. Begone with you, and everyone like you, and take your hammer and sickle with you.

While I was sitting in the smoke-filled saloon in the middle of nowhere, I did manage to whip out my phone and see what was on Phil’s page. Pretty interesting stuff actually. He’s got some relatives who are pulling out the ol’ moderation/extremism bit trying to prop up this albatross — You have to have some central planning, what about the interstates? — etc.

This is, as I pointed out, a lie. Progressivism, socialism, call it what you will; it’s a shark, it doesn’t stop. Moderation is conservatism. It’s far more accurate to say “of course you have to leave some things up to the people to decide…the ones who are most closely impacted by whatever it is.” To which, socialism is about, saying no to that. Nyet. Nein. Everything worth deciding has to be brought to the Kremlin. The only decisions to be left up to the people, are the decisions that headquarters has decided to leave up to the people. For the time being. Cosmetically. But the super-duper smart people at the epicenter decide everything worth deciding. No exceptions allowed, none.

Coincidentally, when I got back from the trip I found Glenn Reynolds discussing exactly that in great detail…and why it’ll never work.

Any economic planner who attempts to [centrally operate a diverse market] will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can’t possibly be smart enough to make them work.

I don’t know why the socialists argue about this stuff, I really don’t. They act like they have great big bundles of anecdotes they can bring to the table to prove, on an historical backdrop, that their way is right. And they don’t.

But this is the wrong question. The right question is one that deals with human psychology: Why is it that we are tempted, over and over again, to try out this failed experiment? If it’s a process of evolving the human condition and making ourselves better and better across the generations — doesn’t evolution involve rejecting the antiquated and unfit, as much as incubating and incorporating the new? Sometime, somewhere, something has to be dismissed. Socialism is as good a candidate for dismissal as any. As Phil points out, that does not equal the rejection of anything and everything that has been centrally planned. But you do have to reject anything & everything that has to do with local control, in order to show some hospitality or acceptance to the idea of progressivism/socialism.

Reagan’s quote really says it all, in my opinion: “If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”

Four in ten are democrats or independents.

The national breakdown of the Tea Party composition is 57 percent Republican, 28 percent Independent and 13 percent Democratic, according to three national polls by the Winston Group, a Republican-leaning firm that conducted the surveys on behalf of an education advocacy group. Two-thirds of the group call themselves conservative, 26 are moderate and 8 percent say they are liberal.

The Winston Group conducted three national telephone surveys of 1,000 registered voters between December and February. Of those polled, 17 percent – more than 500 people — said they were “part of the Tea Party movement.”

Allahpundit has video of David Letterman interviewing a representative of the movement (hat tip to FrankJ). She comes off as rather non-nutty, non-birther, non-racist and live-and-let-live.

Too bad. The millions of dollars that have been spent trying to portray the tea party as the rightful heir of the Ku Klux Klan, is likely on par with what it takes to bring a typical summer blockbuster to the big screen. This sets that effort back a ways. “Letterman” is being crossed off the cocktail party invite lists as I write this, no doubt.

4-Block World, via Gerard once again.

Some time ago the former Governor of Alaska asked “How’s that hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?” Now that it’s been a couple of months, someone at DailyKOS figured out hey, that sounds like it could be a valid point, we’d better put together some stuff to at least pretend to answer it.

The end result looks pretty impressive.

Pretty damn well actually, in just one year President Obama…

Passed Healthcare Reform (ending preexisting conditions, giving small business subsidies for providing insurance, Creating 3.2M HC-related jobs over the next 10 years, closing the medicare donut hole in drug coverage, ensuring coverage for all kids up till the age of 26, covering 32 million americans, expanding medicaid to cover the rest, all while cutting the national debt by a 100 billion dollars) – Check.

Signed into law Tax Cuts for all middle income families, and 95% of all Americans – Check

Signed an Arms control agreement with Russia to dismantle nuclear weapons – Check

Reauthorized SCHIP to cover all Children – Check

Saved the entire stock market from collapsing (from a low point of a dow of 6000 within a month of Obama taking office, to close to 11,000 just an year later, basically preventing millions of retirement accounts from getting wiped out) – Check

Ended the ban on travel for people with HIV – Check

Stopped the dismissals of homosexual individuals serving in the military by the Pentagon (It’s the first step to dismantling DA,DT completely) – Check

Ended the federal crackdown on Medicinal Marijuana centers in CA – Check

Passed into law Mortgage Fraud Protections – Check

Ended the ban on Stem Cell Research – Check

Passed Student Loan Reform, and Used The Savings to Significantly Increase Financial Aid Loans and Grants – Check

Engaged in diplomatic dialogue with Middle Eastern countries, instead of using language like “Axis of Evil” that achieves nothing other than to piss them off some more. – Check

Passed Credit Card Reform (Minimizing Predatory Lending, Making the terms of credit cards clear, eliminating arbitrary rate increases) – Check

Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have had the new job loss numbers from their peak right as Obama took office, go down steadily month after month, every single month like clockwork to the point that finally, this month is going to have job growth in the six figures (a trend expected to accelerate this whole year) – Check

Reversed the ban on sending foreign aid to countries with legal abortions (The Mexico City Policy) – Check

Signed the Expanded Hate Crimes Bill – Check

Helped stem down employment discrimination by passing the Lilly Ledbetter Act – Check

Of course, George Bush had a list like this; so did Bill Clinton. It’s really not that hard. Every little thing that promotes the President’s agenda, like halting the ban on stem cell research, you act like it’s an “accomplishment” on par with replacing a toilet, repairing a car’s busted exhaust manifold, patching a roof…

…and, of course, everything that costs money you pretend like it doesn’t. Or even better still, hazily imply that the President Himself is busting out His own wallet to cover everything. No burden being put on the backs of the taxpayer; Obama’s just “covering” everybody.

Go ahead and confuse the gonna-dooz with the hav-dunz. That’s always a favorite game among losers. Oh look, Obama saved us hundreds of billions of dollars on our deficit.

Interestingly, if you buy Palin’s book and look in the back of it, she’s got a “brag sheet” of her own and it doesn’t read like this. Hav-dunz are hav-dunz, period.

Perhaps that’s why the voters aren’t buying it…poor Obama…

In the survey last Friday through Sunday, the president gets tough treatment:

• Obama’s standing on four key personal qualities, including being a strong and decisive leader and understanding the problems Americans face in their lives, has dipped. For the first time since the 2008 campaign, he fails to win a majority of people saying he shares their values and can manage the government effectively.

• Twenty-six percent say he deserves “a great deal” of the blame for the nation’s economic problems, nearly double the number who felt that way last summer. In all, half say he deserves at least a moderate amount of blame.
:
• By 50%-46%, those surveyed say Obama doesn’t deserve re-election.

Now, 2012 is still a ways off and the landscape of America’s politics is a rocky, jagged, sloped and complicated terrain. A lot can change in the time that remains.

But where American politics is complicated, Barack Obama is not. Words like “freedom” and “liberty” do not appear in Obama’s brag sheet and will not appear in any released between now and then. Everything He gives us, He takes away from somebody else. The rules He passes that supposedly make us safe, and supposedly improve our lives, are concerned with gladdening the hearts of extremist liberals from Haight-Ashbury first, and improving the lives of ordinary Americans, second. Ah, and if you’re paying your own way you are not what Obama thinks of as an “ordinary American.”

So He cannot, and will not, do anything to reverse course on this sagging approval rating. The only thing that will halt the decline is when it reaches bedrock. In Obama’s case, there are a lot of layers that will look like bedrock that really aren’t. I’m thinking…young people, inwardly realizing they’ve made a dreadful mistake, remaining egotistically invested in it and refusing to admit it was a mistake.

Those scaffolds will crumble as Obama’s approval continues to dip. Generally, young people who are enamored of a popular position, aren’t going to stick with it too long when it becomes unpopular. They want to be the first to drop it and move on, not the last. And then there is this natural curvature of time to consider. As a 43-year-old man, I may jealously guard some of the dumbass decisions I made when I was 41 and pretend they were wise decisions…or at least…not dumbass.

Back when I was 23 and even more dumbass and more stubborn, how did I feel about the dumbass decisions I made when I was 21? Would I have resorted to extremes to pretend those were wise decisions? Eh, not so much. The nature of youth is transience; I was flipping from one Morgan to another Morgan much more frequently. The ego was sensitive enough, but it just wasn’t there to be invested or protected.

Obama cannot count on young people. It’s just a fact. Exuberance is no substitute for real dedication.

And the biggest factor in deciding if we can have a Sarah Palin taking the oath in three years, is whether she wants the job. Oh sure you can look smart by bashing her and making fun of her for leaving the “G” off the ends of her words. But if you can’t keep her from winning the nomination that way — and you can’t — then, once that takes place, it’s a whole different ball game.

The Obama choice then becomes one of keeping all kinds of hardcore lefty policies in place, which we’ll be feeling in our pockets that we cannot afford…just to make sure people in the White House put the letter G on the ends of their words. Rejecting the quaint midwestern accents — in favor of the filthy, notoriously corrupt Chicago machine. Well, teleprompter or not, “cool” can’t cut through that. A well-timed quip from Tina Fey can’t cut through it either.

When the time comes for Obama’s advisers to say “That’s enough, Mister President; You must stop immediately and turn right, or lose in 2012” — He won’t stop. He doesn’t have what it takes. He lacks the humility.

Bottom line: If she wants it, the job is hers.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Look what Old Iron found…via Zombie.

Off-Topic But Related: I disagree with former Gov. Palin on that questionable word. I understand how it grates on the ears of those who have a close relationship with a special-needs child…

…but there are those of us who are parents of children who are not special-needs. Children who, nevertheless, ah…let us just say their communicative experiences with the academic world are not quite ideal. The cooked-up campfire-story made-up “learning disabilities”; if your kid is within three years or so in age of my kid, and he isn’t getting along with his teachers like gangbusters, you know what I’m talking about. We can’t call the kids inattentive or disobedient or bratty or ill-tempered or just plain mouthy, those options have all been eliminated. So we fall back on the phony-baloney learning disabilities.

Sorry, Sarah. If we’re manufacturing the goddamn things, we have to have some kind of a name we can call ’em.

Maybe it’s not quite so off-topic. In my mind’s-eye, I imagine this is the next issue to be pursued between “futureman” and the curious Eisenhower-era audience. Yeah that’s right fellas; we stigmatize against strength, and reward laziness and weakness. Then we wonder why our economy is in the shitter. I’ll bet you thought you’d already hear the worst of it, huh?

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Update: Since it’s my last night in town, my lady has taken a break from watching the gawdawful Extreme Makeover Home Edition bullshit so we can watch South Park, specifically The Snuke.

Those poor bastards in the photograph. When Future-man gets to the whole Clinton/Lewinsky thing, they’re all going to have a fucking aneurysm. I lived through it myself, and I still don’t get it.

He cheated on her — and then, the affair was dragged out in front of the entire country in lurid detail for over a year. When all was said and done, she was not only a sympathetic figure, but qualified to become a Senator representing a state with which she had practically no connection whatsoever…because she was a betrayed housewife. Just that and nothing more. That’s how sympathetic a figure she was.

But he was a sympathetic figure as well. Was, and is. Leader of the free world was simply unable to control his animal impulses. And got yelled at by his bitchy wife. We need to give him all the breaks we can.

If you don’t see what’s all cockeyed about this…well, hell. You thaw out some dude who was frozen in 1957, and explain it to him. See how that flies.

And then tweet it for me, with your breakfast.

Yet another sign that we’re becoming communists-in-all-but-name. The workers. The companies. The overworked workers, the bad evil companies.

Productivity is up, but the workers are working too hard. There’s no payroll increase because the workers are working like frightened idiots.

It seems it’s never time to breathe that sigh of relief. It’s always a disaster.

A strong March job-growth number — at a time when the economy is growing at only a middling pace — would suggest that the productivity boom has largely run its course. Regardless, the question of what caused the burst in workers’ efficiency is one of the great unanswered questions of the expansion and has huge stakes for the economy over the coming year.

“It is an episode that we’re going to — we, economists in general — are going to want to understand better and look at for a long time,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said at a hearing last week in which he described the productivity gains as “extraordinary” and acknowledged he had not foreseen them.

Businesses have certainly not been investing in new equipment that might enable workers to be more efficient — capital expenditures plummeted during the recession and are rebounding slowly. And the structural shifts occurring in the economy are so profound that one would expect productivity to be lower, rather than higher, as people need new training to work in parts of the economy that are growing, such as exports and the clean-energy sector.

So what’s happening? As best as anyone can guess, the crisis that began in 2007 and deepened in 2008 caused both businesses and workers to panic. Companies cut even more staff than the decrease in demand for their products would warrant. They were hoarding cash, fearful that they wouldn’t have access to capital down the road.

When demand for their products leveled off in the middle of last year, the companies could have stopped cutting jobs or even hired people back. But they didn’t — payrolls have continued declining.

Instead companies squeezed more work out of remaining employees, accounting for a 3.8 percent boost in worker productivity in 2009, the best in seven years. Which raises the question: Why couldn’t companies have achieved those gains back when the economy was in better shape? The answer to that may lie on the other side of the equation — employees.

Workers were in a panic of their own in 2009. Fearful of losing their jobs, people seem to have become more willing to stretch themselves to the limit to get more done in any given hour of work. And they have been tolerant of furloughs and cutbacks in hours, which in better times would drive them to find a new employer. This has given companies the leeway to cut back without the fear of losing valuable employees for good.

Dennis Prager:

Leftism, though secular, must be understood as a religion. The Leftist value system’s hold on its adherents is as strong as the hold Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have on theirs. Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life, which inspired her passion for the health-care bill, is as strong as a pro-life Christian’s belief in the sanctity of the life of the unborn.

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Now, most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s. But this argument only reinforces my argument that Leftism has conquered the Christianity and the Judaism of Leftist Christians and Jews. If there is no difference between Leftist moral values and those of Judaism or Christianity, then Christianity is little more than Leftism with “Jesus” rhetoric and Judaism is Leftism with Jewish terms — such as “Tikkun Olam” (“repairing the world”) and “Prophetic values.”

But if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along? And, if Judaism is essentially a set of Left-wing values, does that mean that the Torah and the Talmud are Leftist documents? Or are the two pillars of Judaism generally wrong?

More questions:

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible on the Left?

Why are so few pro-life Catholics and Protestants on the Left? Do they not care about the poor?

Of course, that is what people on the Left believe. As the former head of the Democratic party, Howard Dean, said, “In contradistinction to the Republicans, we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.”

They believe such things despite the fact that traditional Protestants and Catholics have created more institutions to take care of the sick and needy than probably any other group in the world, and despite the fact that religious Americans give more charity and volunteer more time than secular Americans do.

And why have the great majority of Orthodox Jews rejected the Left? For Jews on the Left, the explanation is simple: Orthodox Jews have primitive beliefs and, therefore, primitive values.

For the Leftist, all opposition to the Left, secular or religious, is primitive and usually worse. So this doesn’t tell us much. What might tell us much? This: With a handful of exceptions, Orthodox Jews know Judaism far better than non-Orthodox Jews do. Given how few of them are Leftist, this would suggest that Judaism and Leftism are indeed in conflict.

But that doesn’t matter to most Jews on the Left, because to be a good person, one need not know Judaism, let alone follow Judaism. One needs only to feel what is right; and, when in doubt, one can determine what is right from the New York Times, not from sacred Jewish texts.

Where the analogy breaks down is here: I’ve met quite a few folks practicing different religions, who were ready, willing and able to believe right down to the marrow of their bones, that whoever was not a member of their creed might be just as decent a person.

That’s just not true of what Prager sees as “Leftism.”

I wrote previously that leftists seem to be driven by an instinct honed by thousands of years of behavioral molding and shaping that comes from living in villages — and sending out, throughout the village, the message that if & when the famine comes, ostracize someone else but Not Me. So much of the time, when you argue with a leftist, it all seems to spiral inward back to the black-hole argument that the leftist is a wonderful person and you’re just a big stinker. Nevermind how distant from this the original topic is. It all just keeps going back to that. My theory is that the village-ostracism-during-famine ritual, by determining which instincts are to be evolved, refined, and carried forward, is what powers that.

I used to think it was just my experience; I am something of a big stinker, after all. Now that it’s a more modern world more intimately connected with itself, I realize many others are having this experience as well. Liberals cannot and will not stick to the subject at hand. They just feel this is the right thing to do — and you don’t. They’re compassionate and you’re not.

This is the real reason why you can’t argue politics at work, folks. This is the real reason why we are so damned contentious. The truth that nobody seems to want to admit, is that it’s the liberals making it that way. Once you define yourself as being morally superior to your opposition, it isn’t enough to make the point, strut like a peacock, “agree-to-disagree” and walk away. That creates a situation of silence-equals-consent. It becomes a moral imperative to do something to destroy your opponent, to stir up the crowd against him. To get the message out that the ostracism needs to take place and that time is of the essence.

Start the cannibalism right now, what’s the point of waiting until we’re hungry?

No transcripts or other remarks, I’ll just embed the two clips. And then echo what Noel Sheppard asked at Newsbusters: “This is what passes for journalism today?”

Modern western civilization is represented poorly by exhibits such as these; they are almost slanderous. If I were a caveman thawed from a block of ice, or an alien visiting our planet for the first time…or perhaps an angel or deity walking on Creation trying to get a feel for the human condition…I would be abysmally unimpressed with our intellect, and our willingness to feed it. I would find our curiosity underwhelming; damnably so. My take-away would be “they fill a big room, pretend to learn things, and make a big show out of attacking others they want to attack, while learning nothing. And then they cherry-pick sound bites out of the experience, broadcast it and call it ‘news.'”

In short, my one-line summary would be that we look for an emotional high out of every little experience, like a druggie feeding his habit. We learn nothing, we know we learn nothing, and we don’t care. It’s all for the high.

Conservative…liberal…whatever. It’s past high time we all got embarrassed about this. Maybe we watch too much reality-teevee.

Hat tip to Rick.

Interesting editorial by Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal; could be useful for those still trying to figure out who this guy is who claims to be our President.

It argues that the hardcore extremist liberal stuff is an effect more than a cause.

A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme—if not obsession—in the Obama presidency. In Iowa, a day after signing health care into law, he put himself into competition with history. If history shapes men, “We still have the power to shape history.” But this adds up to one thing: He is likely to be the most liberal president in American history. And, oddly, he may be a more effective liberal precisely because his liberalism is something he uses more than he believes in. As the far left constantly reminds us, he is not really a true believer. Rather liberalism is his ticket to grandiosity and to historical significance.

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and “the good”—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today’s liberalism is focused on “the good” more than on freedom. And ideas of “the good” are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

I’ve heard it said that reporters fall under this spell too. They don’t get out of bed every morning wondering what the most left-wing pablum is that they can manage to regurgitate today; instead, they graduate from journalism school wanting “to change the world for the better.”

Well, okay then. Because of Obama’s crusade, and His inability to say no — the job goes to Sarah if she wants it. Even if you like this Be-A-Liberal-So-I-Can-Be-A-Somebody stuff, it quickly reaches a saturation point.

Especially when it costs real money.

There comes a point where you hafta get off the ride. That’s hafta, not wanna.

Telegraph.co.uk. Their headline is not quite accurate…but the difference is really just a technicality if you’re one of the producers:

Over its opening weekend at the beginning of March, only around a dozen people went to see Motherhood, a semi-autobiographical account of parenting in New York written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann.

The film took just £88 at the British box office on its opening weekend.

On its debut Sunday, takings at the box office were just £9 – the price of a ticket for one person.

Only one British cinema was given permission to launch the film earlier this month, with the film’s producers hoping that exclusivity would generate a buzz and lead to box office success by word of mouth.

Instead, cinema goers stayed away from the Apollo West End in record numbers in a move that will be embarrassing for Thurman, the star of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill who divides her time between London and New York.

And then — it gets funny. If you’re not one of the producers.

The spectacular failure of the film to find an audience has resulted in a row between producers and Metrodome, the company responsible for marketing the film in the UK.

When Jana Edelbaum, one of the producers, was told how badly it had fared at the British box office, she said: “You’re kidding? We must have broken a new record for grosses.”

But she defended the film, insisting that Metrodome was to blame and that she would demand a full explanation.

She said: “Think how much crap succeeds at the cinema. Motherhood is not bad. I’ve seen movies that are not half as good.”

Then it gets hilarious.

If you’re not one of the producers.

Barry Norman, the film critic, said: “I have never heard of anything like this before. This is not some small, independent movie.

“It’s astonishing that only about 11 people could be bothered to go and see Uma Thurman.

“The reviews were very poor indeed, but that alone isn’t enough to explain this. It’s a reasonable assumption that there was a marketing and advertising catastrophe, and people didn’t know it was showing.

“But Apollo cinemas aren’t in tucked-away places. They’re all prominently located.”

Gawd, this tickles my funnybone. I don’t know why. I think it’s the mindset…somehow, putting out a decent, watchable movie is just out of the question.

The reviews are in, and it’s a turd. But dammit, that still doesn’t explain why more people didn’t come to see our crap! It’s not like we stuck it out of the way or anything, it was right there in plain sight. What’s going on with the world? It’s getting to the point where if you leave a log on the sidewalk baking in the sun, people won’t chow down on it anymore.

What the hell is the matter with our marketing wing? I remember the days when people would come running for a nice piece of scat, spoons in hand!

Via Gerard.

Hollywood’s adoration of communist dictators has always baffled me. The to-the-last-man saturation of it. What do communist thugs have to do with movie-making anyhow.

And so Sean Penn’s remark was of particular interest; and no, I don’t think he’s “kooky,” I think he just likes communists. As does most of Hollywood.

I wonder how Sean Penn would feel about reinstating the Hays Code. Maybe the rest of the country can work out a deal with him. A weekend in the pokey for anybody who calls the communist dictator a communist dictator…and if any movie ever glorifies crime, or depraved behavior, or violence against women and children, or showers us with yet more good-guys-kinda-bad or bad-guys-kinda-good…or contains any of the other things I don’t want to see in movies ever again…it gets shuttered up tight deep in a warehouse somewhere, forgotten, before it makes a single dime.

Yeah, that’s my open letter. How ’bout it Mr. Penn?

If you agree with James Clyburn about anything at all, that makes you a racist.

Our nation’s very latest spectacle in shut-uppery.

Times/Union:

Millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party, and it appears increasingly likely that they’ll take the midterms elections in November with them. Their departure could well lead to a GOP landslide on a scale not seen since 1994.

For more than three decades before the 2008 election, no Democratic president had won a majority of the electorate. In part, that was because of low support — never more than 38 percent — among white male voters. Things changed with Obama, who not only won a majority of all people voting, but also pulled in 41 percent of white male voters.

Polling suggests that the shift was not because of Obama but because of the financial meltdown that preceded the election. It was only after the economic collapse that Obama’s white male support climbed above the 38 percent ceiling. It was also at that point that Obama first sustained a clear majority among all registered voters, according to the Gallup tracking poll.
:
Today, among whites, only 35 percent of men and 43 percent of women say they will back Democrats in the fall election. Women’s preferences have remained steady since July 2009. But white men’s support for a Democratic Congress has fallen eight percentage points, according to Gallup.

In 2008 it was “Vote for Barack Obama or we’re going to call you a bunch of dirty rotten creepy racists.” In 2010 it’s “Barack Obama is still in trouble so we’re going to call you a bunch of dirty rotten creepy racists.”

These guys aren’t showing racism, progressivism, intelligence or stupidity. They’re just demonstrating a working long-term memory.

Maybe when our elections go back to being about the candidates, rather than about the inner decency or lack thereof within the people voting for the candidates — we’ll get a decent President.