And Cracked has managed to come up with six ways how…

6. The Environment is Doing Great

Ever since Al Gore became the boogeyman who springs up from the back seat every time we gas up the Hummer, environmentalism has been big on everyone’s mind. We try to recycle, carpool and eat less bald eagle. But is any of that enough? Well, probably not, no. But don’t worry, where your personal efforts fail, global economic crisis excels.

5. Great Deals on Whores

It says something about the power of the current economical crisis when even the oldest profession in the world feels the cold, uncircumcised sting of the recession in its rear end. Sadly, times being what they are, many conservative politicians and hard working fathers had to cut down on teenage-runaways; instead spending their meager extra dollars on things like grandma’s medication and HBO.

4. Tons of New Junk Food, and Fine Wine to Wash it All Down

If you tend to watch lowest common denominator shows, such as America’s Got Talent, Cops or anything on the FOX network, and the commercials that cater to the audiences of said shows, you probably already heard about KFC’s new grilled chicken despite the fact their very name makes this new idea look completely ridiculous. It’d be like Gary’s Fisting Emporium suddenly offering non-fisting services, like firm handshakes and hugs.

3. Old Media is Dying Faster

Let’s be honest: All of us have dreamed about making money off the Internet, but generally only the ones with a handful of undiagnosed manic disorders who undress in front of a camera for sweaty middle-aged men have made that dream a reality. Many companies still refuse to treat this series of tubes as anything serious, writing it off as some whippersnapper fad like Frisbees or Polio shots.

2. People are Forced to Grow Up

They say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And while that may be true, it doesn’t really mention douchebags who are poor but have rich parents. Where do those young men and women who wear knit scarves in the summer and wax philosophical over frappuccinos fit into the equation? Nowhere anymore.

1. You are Living Healthier and Feeling Better

Research by Stanford University and the University of North Carolina has shown that when times are good people tend to not take care of themselves. We eat bacon-wrapped bacon and drink Thunderbird while we shower. We eat out at restaurants, we neglect our families and drop the responsibilities of raising kids on stoned teenagers and crooked daycare centers because we are also usually overworked and overstressed when the economy is booming.

Wow…I really like the picture of that environment-lady…but the sentiment involved in these bullets has the faint whiff of, oh I can’t quite place it…+++sniff-sniff+++ That’s it! Now I got it! Liberal douchebag anti-human self-loathing claptrap.

In fact, Number One kind of reminds me of our Treasury Secretary’s asinine comments from a week ago.

Oh well. There’s something to be said for seeing silver linings in every cloud, anyway.

Just a fine piece of writin’, with some observations that really make you think. Especially as your yard-ape moseys out the door to his first day of school, be it public or private, in a few weeks…it’s got about six weeks of dust on it but it’s well worth pondering, whether you’re in the eighth grade on in your eighth decade.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten — required reading in those decadent days of my ’70s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.
:
So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O’Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we’d all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that:

The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we’ve lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we’re set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea.

Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.
:
We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned:

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

How does this start? It starts with a lazy intellect that believes one more rule can always solve everything.

The summer heat in Sacramento tops out at around 110. You can beat it by galavanting off some hundred miles East or West, to spend your weekend up in the mountains or down in the surf. But if you want to do right by your home city’s efforts to become a fun place and not California’s belly-button of drudge and debt — we have the river. With rafting. Get out of your air conditioned cocoon, expose your kids to the great outdoors the way the Good Lord intended, and have ’em assault each other with water cannons so they don’t grow up to be pussies.

Ah, but there’s a problem. Hooligans have been drinking, horsing around, bringing harm to themselves and others, and littering. What to do?

Sensible answer: Cite them for disorderly conduct. With escalating fines for repeated offenses. Punishment based on individual identity.

Bureaucrat answer: Ya kiddin’? Blah blah blah budget cuts blah blah blah police manpower. Yard-duty teacher mentality. If I make one exception I’ll have to make a thousand. It’s a shame we all have to go without something because of the bad behavior of just a few…but…that’s the way life is.

We’re taught that from the first grade onward. Our parents allow us to learn that, and then we allow our kids to learn it, and we mistakenly think of that as the glue that holds a “civilized” society together, rather than recognizing it as the anti-American toxic sludge that it is.

We think of this as the only way a people can be properly governed. There is some truth in that; it’s the only way sensible rules can be enforced, by a bureaucracy starved for quality thinking and starved for cash. Financially strapped because the tax base is wilting, dying on the vine. Starving to death because all the businesses are leaving. Because once it’s Saturday morning, everyone’s left town so they can be someplace they want to be. Where they can do things they want to do.

In Sacramento on a Friday afternoon, the freeways are clogged. People get the hell out of dodge, exactly the way schoolkids get out of school when that dismissal bell rings every day. For the same reason. So you see, the financial straits about which we hear so much, so often…and freedom…they’re connected. They are not separate issues.

Via Malkin…

We just switched it to Poor Richard Palatino Linotype, based on multiple comments that the new blog is harder to read than the old blog. The challenge we have here, is that we who are writing the blog are apparently not operating with the same set as some of you who are reading it. We were pretty taken aback when we read these comments, because on our system the font back at the old place (Tahoma) smashes things together pretty tightly. Frankly, we were pretty surprised nobody’s complained up until now. It’s pretty clear we’re not seeing what you’re seeing.

The optical equipment in our face isn’t working the same way, either. We’re among the fortunate few grinding along through middle age (we’re forty-three day after tomorrow) without any need for visual enhancement at all…and this turns into more of a hindrance than a help. We’ve spent that lifetime honing a preference for microprint. We find the bloaty stuff to be distracting. We thought the Bookman font would be pleasing to everyone, and it’s clear we were wrong.

The Palatino may not last for too long either. To work the right way, the font has to exist on our platform and on yours too. What we really need is a generic platform — the laptop is the closest thing we have to that, and that’s what I’m using now. It looks somewhat okay; compact, still easy to read. I just don’t like that name. Doesn’t ring a bell, seems exotic.

So I’m going to assume we’re not done yet.

Here are some samples. Let me know how they jive…

And now we do the same thing, embiggened…

Leave feedback in the comments below.

Yup, this is the new place, welcome to our virtual house-warming party. We made some minor aesthetic changes, hopefully you’re finding things a bit more readable. New furniture isn’t here yet, just toss your coats on the bed…

I didn’t run through a complete test script, so consider yourselves beta-testers. The “Items of Interest” in the sidebar — they aren’t done yet, they still point back at the old place. That last item was more a note-to-self for my sake, than anything else…we’ll be covering that… (Update: We got off our lazy fat asses and took care of it.)

Anyway, let us know what you think. Glad you could make it.

Big thanks to Terry “Trip” Trippany, the CEO, head waiter chief cook & bottle washer of Webloggin. For all his help getting things exported, cut over, set up, and last but not least all the free rent for the last three years.

For those who are just discovering us, here are the key dates:

11/12/04 – We get started on Blogger, with its big, soothing sans-serif font letters that say “Create a Blog. It’s Free.” We go for it, and the first post goes up.

Summer ’06 – By this time we’re several hundred blog posts into the experiment and we’ve started our Sitemeter account to keep track of who’s hitting us. Trip discovers us, says something about liking our writing, and we start swapping links.

10/20/06 – We become an official member of Webloggin, a community of bloggers scattered across the country, promoting blogging excellence. At about that time, Trip really starts hammering us about moving off of Blogger and getting onto WordPress, which we’d been thinking about doing for quite some time. (Blogger, in those days, was far less speedy & reliable compared to the way they tell me it is now.) When he volunteers his hosting space, we greedily accept.

A jump-command is left back at the old Blogger domain, which ricochets visitors there to the Webloggin address. It still works as I write this.

Late ’07 – We purchase the domain here and start misusing it horribly, using the FTP services to put it to work as pretty much just a 5GB virtual thumb drive. But you can tell from the domain name what our ultimate plan is…we’re just not getting around to things very well.

Last week – Our hand is forced when Trip announces he’s getting out of the hosting business.

Sometime soon – Another jump command will be left back at Webloggin, forwarding any visitors there, to here.

Any further details desired, probably the best way to get ’em is to poke around, peruse the Items of Interest, starting with the FAQ.

“HI I’M CAPS LOCK!!!” — heh. This is one of her better ones.

Link sent in an offline from blogger friend Phil.

Update: My favorite passage, on the subject of choosing the leaders of our government and therefore of the entire free world:

Former sports reporters certainly won’t do. We need former constitutional scholars. Who else, after all, has a better understanding of how to undermine the document?

Well, did it again. Offended another liberal friend.

It’s a dicey, personal subject and I don’t like to vent about such a thing on the innerwebs…even on my own, personal pages, which as we’ve said many-a-time before — altogether now — nobody reads anyway. But this time, the aggrieved party was sufficiently gracious to explain her feelings very early on. Not so early that she behaved with consistency. But early enough that it’s pretty simple to retrace what happened here.

I wanted to know if we had a wager in effect about the 2010 midterms. Or if our first upcoming bet was about the President being re-elected.

She presented a chart showing the public debt (as a proportion of GDP) has been going up when Republicans were office, and down when democrats were in office, from Truman onward anyway.

I questioned which party had Congress during those times, and sent her the chart exploring where the debt is projected to go from here-on-out.

She sent back a soothingly scolding retort observing that she “must have hit a nerve,” counseling me that her husband likes to argue but she does not.

How else do I put this? I’m tired of pretending it’s my problem. I understand good manners involve one side acting completely guilty and the other side acting completely innocent. I understand the protocol expected is for the righty-tighty to leap, chest-downward, on the grenade. I understand the expectation is to repeat the scene where Tom Sawyer gets the whipping so Becky whats-her-name’s glorious butt cheeks remain unscathed. I get all that.

I’m just tired of doing it. It comes down to something very simple. ONLY LIBERALS CAN PRESENT “FACTS” WITHOUT BECOMING EVIL.

So I replied as courteously as I possibly could. Bearing in mind, on the previous installment I did tease, and perhaps that didn’t go over as positively as I thought it would. Clearly I had done something unintentionally abrasive. But I’m tired of ignoring the elephant in the room, and the elephant in the room is this: The abrasive thing I did was to present factual evidence incompatible with the desirable trope. I presented some hard numbers that would compel a newcomer to at least remain open to an alternative point of view. That was my infraction. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise. Did I mention how tired I am of it?

Uh oh, I was genuinely afraid of that. The wise thing, I think, would be for me to let that go without comment, but it occurs to me that this would be dismissive on my part…perhaps even unfriendly. And that is not my aim. So I think the well-mannered thing to do here is to offer one of the half-apologies, so meaningless when offered by politicians, perhaps more genuine when exchanged among friends: To the extent my remarks caused offense, I apologize.

Let us endeavor not to repeat that type of exchange again. Lord knows it’s taken me long enough to learn my lesson(s). But I’m going to need some assistance from your class, the one that continues to be offended. Be consistent — FACTS ARE IN OR FACTS ARE OUT. Just call it my own personal weakness: I can’t deal with this rapid oscillation…your charts and graphs are wonderfully educating, mine drip with bile, make no point, instantly cause the exchange to turn ugly.

Xxxxxx and I have been making a habit out of watching “Boston Legal” reruns. The show has earned a stellar reputation for presenting both sides of the most contentious issues of the day. I have found it to be entertaining, and we have plowed our way through quite a few of them. After twenty thirty or so, I turned to Xxxxxx and said, sadly, “you know…I don’t think I’ve seen a single conservative idea expressed on this program, at least the way someone sympathetic to it would look at it, even one single time. So why do people give it high marks for presenting both sides?” After watching some more episodes it became clear: There are a lot of liberals out there who think this is what “honestly arguing both sides” looks like. They only want their side presented. The other side is just supposed to be lampooned. They don’t think there is a school of thought on the other side of the fence, there’s just lecherous old men who like to sexually harass the office help and shoot people.

And then I realized all those times Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx came into the office, wanting to engage me in an even-handed, open-minded, highbrow dialogue about politics — I really did violate rules of etiquette, from his point of view. Presenting hard information that illustrated why people had a different take on things, which is exactly what he was supposed to be wanting me to do, was an act of incivility. Wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. I was supposed to just sit there like Denny Crane and say things to make myself look foolish.

Like I said, if you want a conversation to go that way you need to explain the rules at the outset. People are NOT going to anticipate them; it isn’t as natural as you seem to think it is…You’re a decent person, and it seems you’re trying to form a bridge between two worlds that aren’t compatible. Not between conservatives & liberals, but between people who are destructive, and people who aren’t.

The conservatives & liberals, once they form an honest and decent respect for how the other side “ticks,” can respectfully get along with each other. The destructive and not-destructive…not so much. Anyway. Now you know, save the charts for people who aren’t likely to have something else to show you in return. Really sorry if I upset you.

Now on this one, like I said it’s crystal clear what happened. She presented fact, I presented fact, and wham-bam oh dear now we’re in something that has just turned ugly. It isn’t too hard to infer from that how things work: I can’t present fact. You can’t draw any other conclusion.

But this is one of the easier exchanges. I brought up the conversation. Sometimes, it’s the liberal that brings things up. What to do? I shouldn’t have said anything. If she offered some illusion of being interested in commenting on current events, I should have, for her benefit, doubted her. That is what I should have done. I recognized the dichotomy at work, demanded that she clarify the rules, and simultaneously offered my counterpoint. Obviously, that wasn’t good enough. I should have stood my ground on that virtual-disclosure-form, demanded something equivalent to a signature on it, before I said one single thing. Or sidestepped the entire thing altogether. Apparently, what was required of me, was nothing less than one of those two things.

Or go the Crane route: Sip some scotch, polish a shotgun, and make some comments about shooting people. Fit into the stereotype, in other words.

We have an entire generation of decent, otherwise-intellectually-capable people — actually multiple generations! — who have been lulled into thinking they have mentally noodled something out. Vote for this Replacement Jesus, get-on-board, be-a-part-of-this-thing…oh and here’s a cherry-picked graph, or statistic, that makes it look like the outcome of a deliberate cognitive process. Presto. They’re all rocket scientists and they know what they’re doin’. But they cannot withstand an idea that doesn’t fit in, even if it’s better supported. They cannot withstand a challenge to what they have decided to do..either the outcome of it, or the way it was decided. They cannot withstand any doubts about their inner decency, or the decency of their iPresident, or Mouthy Joe.

Cumulatively, all those things add up to the problem that cannot be mentioned in polite company: They cannot withstand anything. They want to “good-naturedly” talk some politics. Until they don’t.

Inspired by the post immediately previous, and the realization that our President has revived a campaign slogan for unthinking dolts to sell a dumb idea that He knows He cannot sell by appealing to reason and common sense — I decided to retitle the page called How To Make Large Numbers Of Some Reasonable People Do Dumb Things, Without Taking Any Responsibility For Telling Them To Do Any Of It.

The title, in spite of its length, wasn’t quite an accurate description of the contents inside. So I came up with something longer for a title, and completely re-wrote the contents. This page ranks pretty high on my list of pages that just might, possibly, with time, perhaps, morph into a real live book…maybe…but I’m not completely serious about that so I’m not afraid to expose the material to a public viewing. It’s not like it hasn’t been exposed already anyway. I’m not coming up with something new, I’m just describing something we see every month, every week, every day…

How To Motivate Large Numbers of People To Do a Dumb Thing, Without Anyone Associating the Dumb Thing With Your Name Later On.

Whether we like it or not, it would appear this “skill” is to become the lifeblood of our future generations. I see a tomorrow in which, if you can pull this off, you get to live under a roof, reproduce, and eat; if you can’t then you don’t, don’t and don’t. I see a future in which we systematically ostracize, throughout a process that involves many stages, anyone lacking the ability to do this.

So anyone who can’t do it, better learn how.

This is not to say I think all hope is lost — although anyone following the link could be forgiven for concluding I do possess such a pessimistic outlook. I really don’t. People, in my mind, are capable of some wonderful things when they put their minds to it…but their default state is not to put their minds to it. You could say I have a very “Christian” view of mankind’s default state. Our default mindset is nonsensical, dysfunctional, blighted. Once we get into groups to share our ignorance, the stupidity exponentially grows…like, for instance, twenty people are four times as likely to fall for obvious nonsense as ten people would be.

Once reminded of our failings, to the point where we snap out of this stupor-of-stupid, that’s when we can do things that are good.

Lately, it isn’t happening. But with time and a healthy sense of fatigue, it will. Keep your chin up.

In the meantime, gaze upon the stupidity rolling forth with as healthy an outlook as you can. Keep the eyeball-roll…we are all mortal, we are all flawed, we are all descended from she who took the apple from the snake, and he who chomped away at it. Find humor where you can. Record what you see for posterity.

If you are like me, you were taught in public school that Franklin Roosevelt heroically ended the Great Depression with his bold policy reforms. Now we’re living through exactly the same events all over again. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been flabbergasted at how less flattering these things when you’re seeing them up close, as a contemporary, without the rose-tinting effect of “history” and her biased, dirty “progressive” lens. It’s really amazing to me the substandard quality of the fertilizer being sold, and ordered up in huge quantities, right now.

You know what sums it up better than anything? That protest sign I saw from a tea party protest…somewhere…damn my laziness, I didn’t record a link to it…

How Can Debt Be The Problem AND The Solution??

Says it all.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Via American Geek (two years ago).

Although I perceive there would be a passionate disagreement between sides roughly equal in number over whether it’s a good thing, I further perceive there would have to be near-unanimous agreement that the spirit captured in the poster below is, today, either dead or slumbering. With our President flying around apologizing to seemingly everyone for seemingly everything, and not breathing so much as a peep of request for apologies to come back in the other direction, we’re just a little bit too Jean-Luc Picard-ish to comprehend the not-terribly-complicated concept of destroying those who would destroy you, so something else more worthy can be created or preserved. Our mood is just a tad bit too kum-ba-ya for that this year.

Kum-ba-ya does have its place, I’ll admit. Occasionally in human history, perhaps a war here & there might have taken place solely because two sides, both otherwise intent on preventing it from taking place, failed to take the time to understand each other. But with the science-fiction luxury of launching and then inspecting alternate timelines and alternate universes, I submit one would eventually discover this to be an exceedingly rare scenario. I haven’t even heard anyone take the time or effort to argue the point in any specific instance, except of course for the invasion of Iraq, and that was far from an intellectual argument. Just mob-protests and bullying. “Sanctions will work, war won’t,” they said. Sanctions had been tried; they didn’t work. War worked. They sneer at the “Mission Accomplished” banner and demand that I join them in heckling it. Saddam and his sons are dead and cold in the ground, where they should be. Why should I be heckling that sign?

But the real debate we ought to be having, it seems to me, is — how primitive does an antagonistic entity have to be, before some thought is put into perhaps reviving the old spirit? Before even our most rabid peaceniks are forced to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, kum-ba-ya is not the answer to everything? You can’t negotiate with a crazed mountain lion that’s already tasted human flesh, for example.

Could the peaceniks, those who demand all others negotiate, compromise, find common ground on things, be somehow persuaded to follow their own advice? Could they ever deign to accept, or merely contemplate, the concept that perhaps there is a spectrum of enemies, some of whom could be constructively brought to negotiation tables, others of whom, perhaps, could not? Where do the sharks embroiled in a feeding frenzy fit into that? Where does Kim Jong-Il?

Should that old fighting spirit be retired to the ash bin of history forever? Unconditionally? No matter who arises to confront us on the world’s stage next year? In the next century? Regardless of where they fit on that enemy-spectrum? How strong is our commitment to this sanctions-over-war Jean-Luc-Picard mindset? How strong should it be?

Seems to me that’s the question we should be trying to answer.

One has to wonder why those lovers of moderation, compromise and endless talks, those haters of extremism in all its forms, have left it up to me to be the first one to ask it. How’d that happen?

I’d just like to point out that “Government Plans to Meddle in the Economy, That Worked” is in my collection of really thin books, sandwiched somewhere between “Movies Made From Video Games That Don’t Suck” and “Well-Known Liberal Women I Wish I Could Date.” There are forty books crammed in that one section of my bookshelf, but you can whip through every single word while waiting for a pot of coffee if you’re quick enough flipping ’em open.

Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.

…as he throws out the first ball for the Texas Rangers.

Lots of folks miss him and are willing to say so.

A whole lot more, miss him and are not willing to say so.

Hat tip: Ace.

Just getting the reminder out there.

It just serves as yet another example that many feminists, while they claim they are “fighting” for choice, want absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with choice. They want to dictate. Women are supposed to make the choices that feminists say they should make, and that’s all there is to it. Feminists are pro-abortion, and therefore, any single woman (and let’s face it, the married ones, too) who chooses to keep her baby is treated as if she’s somehow a traitor to the cause. Being pro-abortion isn’t good enough; you’ve got to actually have them. It isn’t about letting abortion be legal. Feminists want women to be having abortions, and the mere mention of keeping it is terrible. On top of that, Hollywood suddenly had some kind of aneurysm and made not one, but two pro-life movies, and feminists are shrieking with outrage. No promoting pregnancies positively, right?

Ann at Feministing just loves, in italics, Neko Case, for doling out instructions to pregnant women to “just have the abortion…just have it and get on with your life.”

So let’s just make sure we’re clear on that. I think we can all agree that people who are truly concerned with “choice” and “freedom” aren’t going to be quite so excited or exuberant about making sure everyone does things the same way. We can agree on that with issues that aren’t related to abortion…logic therefore dictates, when the subject is abortion, the same rules apply. You’re either cool with people making their own decisions about things, or you’re not.

And the hardcore feminists seem to agree there’s something horrible and awful about the way these movies turned out.

Some context.

It’ll be interesting watching the talking points emerge on this one, now that any speculation on Mr. Adkisson’s motives has been effectively removed from dispute or doubt. If memory serves, the talking points for OK City were “Right-Wing Talk Radio Is Fueling Hatred And It Has To Stop”…and for September 11 it was “We Need To Stop These Policies That Are Making People Mad At Us Around the World.” Complete 180-degree opposite reactions.

I’m reasonably sure how this one’s gonna shake out. Atkisson’s letter makes it clear he got all ticked off at “liberals.” Any call for liberals to cease and desist in these things that make people angry, for their own protection? Don’t be a silly-willy; you only engage in that kind of propaganda to get those hated, zionist, Israel-sympathetic “neocons” out of power. This is gonna be more like…oh dear, the liberals are under attack, their ideas must be absolutely right, we’d better do everything they say.

Even though we’re already doing just that.

And stop those damnable right-wing bloggers from their blogging. They’re getting people hurt! And more gun control please. Anyway, that’s how I’m calling it. We’ll see.

Thanks to Texas Rainmaker for this one.

This mindset continues to confuse me…

1. Conservatives aren’t good people because we’re greedy.
2. Liberals aren’t like us, they aren’t greedy; that makes them better people.
3. Once elected to positions of power, liberals make the country better by making a bunch of wonderful new rules and “inspiring” people to do wonderful things.
4. And as Joe Biden pointed out, paying more taxes makes you more patriotic.

If these things represent inherent and intrinsic goodness, which liberal-minded people already have, why do they have to wait for that liberal guy to get elected? Why was Tom Daschle in all this trouble for not knowing his car-benefit was taxable — why would that be an issue? Why did Tim Geithner forget about his tax obligations? Why not just go ahead and pay it? Aren’t good people like them sending enormous checks in to the Treasury, on top of the tax liability rightly or wrongly computed for that year, to show what wonderful people they are?

One of ’em stuck a nasty crawly bug thing in Chekov’s ear, the other one gutted Mel Gibson like a fish.

Something’s going on in the afterlife. The Good Lord needed some wonderful, talented actors who specialize in playing rotten creepy jerks.

Smooth sailing, guys. Movie business isn’t gonna be the same without you.

McGoohan obit
Montalban obit
“Magnificent Bastard” television/movie trope

Comin’ around, comin’ around, comin’ around some more. Economists are starting to figure it out.

It’s a pretty important issue, now that everything is being repeated. And I mean everything. The economic conditions, the political events, how the two tie into each other.

Some mistakes are bound to be repeated. The big ones don’t have to be; not all of ’em.

Cassy’s back, feeling better hopefully, and she has some words for the folks instructing the rest of us to love the country, with them, only now that His Hopey-Changey-ness has been elected President.

What’s really pathetic is how for [Julianne] Malveaux, and many liberals like her, their love for their country is wrapped up in which politicians are running the place at the moment. Yet they howl in outrage if you question their patriotism, as if conditional love is just as good as unconditional love. Maybe I, a conservative in Flyover Country, am some kind of freak or something, but I love my country all the time. I love my country regardless of who is currently in office, I love my country for the good and the bad, and I will always fight for her. I don’t need to have a President with an (R) next to his name to love my country, nor does he have to be a specific race, gender, or religion for me to love her.

It says much worse about Julianne Malveaux than it does about America that her love for her country, and seemingly her self-worth as well, is dependant on a politician. I’m guessing as soon as Obama leaves office, she’ll just sink back into despair and victimhood, right?

Couldn’t agree more. There is something sickening about a fair-weather friendship. It doesn’t fill me with hopey-changeyness and I don’t think it makes anybody else too hopeful about anything either.

Now’s the time to push back. Let’s make it a bipartisan pushback. Patriotism, after all, knows no political season. Not in any country, and most definitely not in this one…

Jeffrey Perren of the Atlas Society pays homage to one of the world cinema’s most underrated films.

At bottom, it is a straightforward story. Rob Roy, an early 18th century Scottish leader is seeking to better his lot in life and that of his clansman. He borrows a thousand pounds (about $1 million in today’s currency) from a local Scottish Lord, Montrose, in order to invest in and herd cattle to market.

In short order, conniving Killearn (his ‘factor’ or accountant) and bastard whoremonger and wastrel gambler, the foppish Archie, cook up a scheme to steal the money and blame the theft on Rob’s close friend, Alan McDonald.

It is movie greatness because the hero, Robert Roy MacGregor, is tall, clean, pure, strong…and flawed. There’s one Big Bad and two Dragons. It is a child’s fairy tale…except dealing with real, adult, grown-up finance and credit headaches.

If you drag this classic home from Hollywood Video on a Friday night, and that night your credit card company or your auto loan company or your mortgage company calls asking about your next payment — do yourself a favor. Watch something else until Sunday night.

It’s a story about a middle-class man, saturated with honor, finding himself in miserable financial straights anyway. About the financial entanglements of great and powerful but flawed men, ruining the lives of humble but more honorable men.

And it has a vicious rape scene. And a powerful final duel, in which a DRCJ gets sliced in half the wrong way. Okay, I’ve said way too much. Go get that movie. Uh…don’t watch it Monday through Thursday. You’ll want to make a special event out of this. Tiger shrimp on the gas grill, on kabobs, with lime juice. Best chardonnay you can get. Pop this baby in. It’s a real treat. Trust me.

Oh, and if, at the end of it, you don’t think Tim Roth is not richly deserving of a marble statue in his likeness in a town square somewhere — you are absolutely tasteless. You deserve to see your lands raided, your home burned to the ground, you dog and your kid brother shot by Englishmen, your wife violated, your cattle slaughtered, and your flesh cut to ribbons one scratch at a time. Blarney.

In the same spirit as the post previous: Those who have so much better judgment than I do about politics and how humans should live together in a civilized society, are so smart, they need help getting the word out about their smartness.

Behold the cool-headed clear thinking and luminous wisdom of “McCain” commenting at Rick’s place.

McCain’s problem is not that he doesn’t understand, it is that he picked the wrong party this time around.

Bush and the Neocons have bankrupt our economy, constitution, world stature and too many parts of the American way of life.

(quick… what is the fear, I mean, security threat color level today?) Bin Laden GOT what he wanted when the US pulled out of Saudi Arabia. (one week before “Mission Accomplished”)

James A Baker ( “I fixed the Election for Bush”) was first in line to DEFEND the Saudis against lawsuitsfor the 9/11 attacks. The Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) was NEVER about Saddam as a threat, or WMD but controlling (slowing!) the flow of oil to keep the Texas Mafia in the money. ( windfall profits $300+ Billion for the US Oil Companies in the first three years after OIL.) Saddam was pissing them off by turning off and on the oil spigot and they couldn’t keep the price where they wanted.

( Wake up there is lots of oil but they have to keep YOU believing that there is a shortage so you swallow the $3.99 /gal)

The connections between the Bush/Cheney/Baker crew and the real home of America haters, the Saudis, are criminal. McCain was not their poster boy, to be sure, but he fell in line during the campaign. ( He said on Meet the Press,” I agree with GW”, big mistake for an eventual “change” campaign)

You have to enjoy the irony of the Welfare Daddies now on Wall Street. You know the fox has been watching the hen house when it has melted down to the point that the many conservative voices are calling for Nationalization of our banks. But fortunately the genius W. has enlightened us that “it turns out that these economic factors are interrelated” and ” its a house of cards” . Thanks Capt. Obvious. (I would love to see the polling of how many Americans think the Federal Reserve is a branch of the govt. vs. a private corp.)

The people who are still spewing the hate against Obama, I need to ask how this “dangerous sleeper cell” got into the US Senate! Where were you to “save” us before he got access to all of capitol hill…? If you knew all this important information, I think it was very unpatriotic of you to keep it secret until now.

What ? oh… you just made it up as he got closer to the White House. And why is McCain holding out on how to get Bin Laden, (“I know how to get him”). Is that “Country First”

I’ve read both OBama’s and McCain’s books and it is obvious to me that ONE worked his way up, like many of YOUR forefathers (“that one”) and ONE rode both Admiral’s coattails along for the party. (How many Nominees have strippers mentioned as part of their past at the national convention?) How many pilots in the military crash three jets and still get reinstated? Only when the base you are on is named after your granddaddy.

I do not think Obama is the messiah or anything close, I also am not stupid enough to think the decline of the US in the world can or will be reversed. But it is obvious that John McCain, when he gets under pressure starts to act mean and erratic.

He has moved too far in line with the Bush/Cheney admin. and he has no where to go to find votes except to send his Barracuda into the hills with her winking fear message. But even these people have seen the price of shotgun shells double since they “elected” W. last time. I’ve even heard that some of them think the (R) stands for Recession, probably just a MSM rumor.

Palin’s foreign policy “experience”, watching Putin fly over the Matanuska Valley, is the joke of the free world. Although she only just got a passport, she does have the distinct advantage of speaking in tongues, which should come in handy with any “End Times” world leaders she may encounter.

It is also interesting to see John McCain’s wife hit Obama with “walk in my shoes” rhetoric, but I would bet Obama would not know what to do with a $3500 pair of Manolo Blahnik’s and I’m sure the chill that went through her was a Percocet post- addiction flashback.

It’s over… unless Diebold can fire up their executable files one more time and if they do, it will be appropriate as the the US Executive Branch will turns into the equivilant of a Reality Show.

I can see it now ” Tune in this week, As Cindy gives us decorating tips with Dale Chihuly blowing Anheuser Busch bottles into $20,000 door prizes for your next fundraiser, and Sarah, gives us a tour of the new rabbit hutches at Number One Observatory Circle and we”ll accompany John to his anger management class where he tries to pick up the counselor.”

John McCain…do something really maverickesque and suspend your campaign permanently.

McCain’s problem is not that he doesn’t understand, it is that he picked the wrong party this time around. After straddling the fence for years , Mr “Not Congeniality” finally had to take one side of the dodge ball court. He would have had a better chance of forming the “hermaphrodite” party and picking Joe Lieberman.

Bush and the Neocons have bankrupt our economy, constitution, world stature and too many parts of the American way of life. (quick… what is the fear, I mean, security threat color level today?) Bin Laden GOT what he wanted when the US pulled out of Saudi Arabia. (one week before “Mission Accomplished”)

James A Baker (appointed to re-structure Iraq debt by the president of Iraq….George Bush) was first in line to DEFEND the Saudis against lawsuits for the 9/11 attacks. The Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) was NEVER about Saddam as a threat, or WMD but controlling (slowing!) the flow of oil to keep the Texas Mafia in the money. ( windfall profits $300+ Billion for the US Oil Companies in the first three years after OIL.) Saddam was pissing them off by turning off and on the oil spigot and they couldn’t keep the price where they wanted. (Wake up, there is lots of oil but they have to keep YOU believing that there is a shortage so you swallow the $3.XX /gal)

The connections between the Bush/Cheney/Baker/Rummy crew and the real home of America haters, the Saudis, are criminal. McCain was not their poster boy, to be sure, but he fell in line during the campaign. ( He said on Meet the Press,” I agree with GW”, big mistake for an eventual “change” campaign)

You have to enjoy the irony of the Welfare Daddies now on Wall Street. You KNOW the fox has been watching the hen house when it has melted down to the point that many conservative voices are calling for Nationalization of our banks. When you have to write into law (Google: Phil Gramm CFMA 2000 ) that Credit Default Swaps are “not subject to any local or state gambling laws,” that should be a red flag. ( “stop whining,” they were trying to put your Social Security on the Roulette Table.)

But fortunately, the genius W. has enlightened us that “it turns out that these economic factors are interrelated” and ” its a house of cards” . Thanks Capt. Obvious. (I would love to see a survey of how many Americans think the Federal Reserve is a branch of the govt. vs. a private corp.)

The people who are still spewing the hate against Obama, I need to ask how this “dangerous sleeper cell” got into the U.S. Senate! Where were you to “save” us before he got access to all of capitol hill…? If you knew all this important information, I think it was very unpatriotic of you to keep it secret until now. What ? oh… you just made it up as he got closer to the White House. And why is McCain holding out on how to get Bin Laden, (“I know how to get him”). Is that “Country First”. When you withhold information about the Security of the USA….I think there is a word in the law books for that.

I’ve read both OBama’s and McCain’s books and it is obvious to me that ONE worked his way up, like many of YOUR forefathers (“that one”) and ONE rode both Admiral’s coattails along for the party. (How many Presidential Nominees have strippers mentioned as part of their intro at the national convention?) How many pilots in the military crash three or is it four jets and still get reinstated? Only when the base you’re landing at is named after your Granddaddy.

I do not think Obama is the messiah or anything close, I also am not stupid enough to think the decline of the US in the world can or will be reversed. But it is obvious that John McCain, when he gets under pressure starts to act mean and erratic.

He has moved too far in line with the Bush/Cheney admin. and he has no where to go to find votes except to send his Barracuda into the hills with her winking fear message. Hey, even these people have seen the price of shotgun shells double since they “elected” W. last time. I’ve even heard that some of them think the (R) stands for Recession, probably just a MSM rumor. American’s are in their own economic “shock and awe” and that fear mongering message is being drowned out by the bill collectors ringing. Palin’s foreign policy “experience”, watching Putin fly over the Matanuska Valley, is the joke of the free world. But I have to admit, although she only just got a passport, she does have the distinct advantage of speaking in tongues, which should come in handy with any “End Times” world leaders she may encounter. Take that Rosetta Stone.

It is also interesting to see Cindy McCain hit Obama with “walk in my shoes” rhetoric, but I would bet Obama would not know what to do with a $3500 pair of Manolo Blahnik’s and I’m sure the chill that went through her was a Percocet post- addiction flashback.

It’s over…Obama will win… unless Diebold can fire up their executable files one more time and guarantee Mccain a win. If they do, The USA will dive like a Hanoi civilian bombing raid. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be curious to see that train wreck…I ADMIT that is why I watch NASCAR. With all the cameras and surveillance Cheney has installed in the White House before his departure, I’m sure a full scale Reality Show would be a cinch. Imagine a Reality show about the McCain /Palin Executive Branch…too bad “Big Brother” has already been taken for a title.

I can see it now ” Tune in this week, As Cindy gives us decorating tips with Dale Chihuly blowing Anheuser Busch bottles into $20,000 door prizes for your next fundraiser, and Sarah, gives us a tour of the new Queen Anne style rabbit hutches at Number One Observatory Circle AND we”ll accompany Pres John to his anger management class where he tries to pick up the counselor, but gets shot down again.

OK, that was just for me…

When I was young, my dad told me one thing about politics… It is a pendulum that will swing back after it has been pushed too far one direction. That sound you hear is the pendulum at warp speed.

If you really want to make history John McCain…do something really maverickesque and suspend your campaign permanently.

Much to learn…I still have…

Well now, isn’t that special.

Skepticism of Palin Growing, Poll Finds
By Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 2, 2008; Page A01

With the vice presidential candidates set to square off today in their only scheduled debate, public assessments of Sarah Palin’s readiness have plummeted, and she may now be a drag on the Republican ticket among key voter groups, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

I was just trying to remember I saw a headline similar to “Skepticism of Obama Growing” — since, I think it is fair to say, on more than one occasion skepticism of Obama has grown.

Can’t recall. Not a single example comes to mind. Can’t recall skepticism of Biden growing, either.

In early September, independents offered a divided verdict on Palin’s experience; now they take the negative view by about 2 to 1. Nearly two-thirds of both independent men and women in the new poll said Palin has insufficient experience to run the White House.

Obama was able for the first time to crack the 50 percent mark, albeit barely, on whether he has the experience to be president following Friday’s presidential debate, and the question is one of Palin’s central challenges as she prepares to face Biden in prime time before a national television audience.

We seem to have a lot of people who are deciding whether someone’s qualified to be President, based on performance in a debate. I wonder if they think that’s appropriate, or whether they’re being shoehorned into this behavior by the nature of the question being asked.

I’d sure like to see a poll about that. I’ve seen Presidents do an awful lot of things in my lifetime, and very few of those things have had anything to do with performance in a debate. About the closest thing I can think of, is giving a scripted speech, and I think most people would agree Palin has shown herself more competent than most in that department — certainly more competent than Joe Biden.

Now, if this was the Athenian Republic, and we were watching practiced philosophers “debate” in an amphitheater somewhere with accepted rules and protocols about what does & does not objectively count as a hit — intellectually, not emotionally — then, I’d say, the debate format would show more promise as a temperature-check about whether a candidate is “ready.” But…that isn’t what modern-day debates do, and I think most people understand that.

But you know what poll question would really count here? How much confidence do you have, Mister Voter, that the methods we use to pick our Presidents has some overlap with what exactly our country needs out of those people after they’re sworn in. I’d enjoy even more seeing that plotted across time, since about 1984. It’s at an all-time low, I expect.

And if that’s the case, there arises the necessity of asking these poll respondents if they think Palin is missing the intellectual acumen to actually serve as a competent President, or is missing the viable political aptitudes necessary to becoming one. Ah well, if it’s the latter of those, this slobbering Palin fan is more than ready to ‘fess up to having lost confidence in the last couple of weeks. But what would that mean, exactly?

And even that, has its problems. Sarah Palin is not a failure at the game of politics by any means; her approval rating, even cited by those ideologically hostile, is listed at sixty-four, seventy-three, or eighty-six percent. I’m pretty sure you’re not going to see a Governor Morgan Freeberg get an 86% approval rating, no matter what; not if he balances a budget, cures cancer, and kills a grizzly bear with a big knife all on the same day.

How are Joe Biden’s approval ratings in Delaware; are they eighty percent?

Add my name to the list of folks who wish they thought of it first.

Well, listen, anyways, I can’t seem to get some information I need to wrap this up. These things seem to either be ‘locked’ or ‘not available’. I’m sure it’s just some oversight or glitch or something, so if you could you tell me where these things are… … …have them written down here somewhere… oh wait. Sorry about the smears. It was raining out. I’ll just read it to you.

I do have to say I was somewhat surprised not to see the trademark “Oh, and eh…one more little thing.” Well, without that, it’s still all good.

Duffy gets the hat tip.

Denver News, via LGF, via Ace:

Police confirmed Wednesday that they found about a pound of sodium cyanide in a Denver hotel room where the body of a Canadian man was discovered earlier this week.

Police spokesman John White identified the white powder as sodium cyanide, the crystal form of cyanide. Fire officials say they found a bottle containing about a pound of the white powder, or between a pint and a quart by volume.

An expert told the Denver Post that the amount of cyanide is enough to kill hundreds of people.

The medical examiner’s office said it is awaiting test results to determine whether cyanide killed 29-year-old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, of Ottawa, Canada.
:
The upscale Burnsley Hotel is about two miles away from the Pepsi Center, where the DNC will be held from Aug. 25-Aug. 27. However, it is not on the list of hotels where delegates are staying.

The last day of the DNC will be held at Invesco Field at Mile High, which is three miles away from the hotel.

One hopes there is just a crapload of stuff they’ve found out about this gentleman and what his plans might have been, that for some reason is not being released to the public. But y’know, I can’t really think of an awful lot of things you can do with a pound of sodium cyanide. And among the things I can think of that you can do, the knowledge that the convention of a major political party was going to be happening within a handful of miles from that hotel, in just a few weeks, doesn’t eliminate any of them.

But profiling is bad…McCarthyism is bad…guilt-by-association is bad. So I suppose, finding out just who this fellow might’ve known, who he might have contacted before showing up in Denver, etc., all that stuff would be just plain wrong.

We have a cultural sensibility that is custom built and made-to-order for a nation that is not under attack. A nation of veal calves. Just how bad that problem is, I guess I’ll get a good feel for that as I make my efforts to follow up on this story. Hope it doesn’t just mysteriously submerge and trail off…I hope not…I hope, contrary to that, I’m going to see a press conference, just chock full of big meaty juicy facts. The public deserves no less. But how much hope am I really holding? Not much.

As long as it isn’t too “graphic.”

Cassy is back from vacation, and she had one observation to make that made me wince, and then wonder…

…Bourbon Street was a wreck. And not from Katrina. It was just shabby, sleazy-looking. There were piles and piles of garbage and sludge — literal sludge — on the sidewalks, in front of the restaurants and shops, and in the street.

I’m about eighty miles inland from San Francisco, which is a little bit different: It’s famous for the human waste matter piled up in the residential areas.

I’ve thought, more than once, that when a city decays to the point where fecal matter can be found lying in the public thoroughfares…and then decays some more, to the point where said product is eventually expected to be found there…some point-of-no-return has been reached. I don’t really care if I’m alone in thinking that, but I doubt like hell that I am. You just don’t live where there are piles of fresh wet feces, human or otherwise, staring you in the face. C’mon, get with it man…that’s gross.

So the graphic I’d like to see, is a ranking of major U.S. cities somehow lined up according to how entrenched the liberal democrats are in that area. How much stuff they run, how long they’ve been in charge. Boston and SF on the left side, in the middle you have the cities where they just got in day-before-yesteryear, and on the right side you decent heartland areas that are solidly Republican. And then, overlay that with where the human crap is expected to be found lying out in broad daylight, just looking at you like a lost puppy dog. Measure it in casino odds, I guess…five-to-one or whatever that if you go on a three-mile hike on a random trajectory, you’ll find some poo. Or, poo-piles-per-square-mile. That would be the Y axis of the chart, I guess. Just thinkin’ out loud here…

Because you have to understand where I’m coming from here. I do not like manure lying out where it doesn’t belong. I really don’t. I’m a parent, I’ve put up with past girlfriends and their poorly-trained cats and dogs, and I’ve done my time with misplaced crap. I’m retired. To me, this is like a baseline requirement of any household, county, township or valley that is supposedly ready to have people living in it. Baseline. No paddies. Not unless you handle livestock as part of your daily routine, and then of course only from the livestock. It’s almost like another bullet in the list of attributes any civilized society should have. Kids are toilet-trained early, and until then diapers are changed promptly. If you can’t housebreak a dog, you don’t have one. Poop-be-gone.

So back to the graph of crap out in broad daylight, versus whether the place is managed and run by donks…you know you’d see a defined and distinctive slope. You just know you would.