Spirit Is Willing, Flesh Is Weak

On May 17 I pointed out that “Women are being taxed to pay for men’s erections” which is absolutely not the way any reputable news organization chose to report on the Medicare coverage of Viagra and other performance-enhancing drugs — although, I noted, the deliberately provocative headline was 100% truthful.

Well chalk this one up under the “good” column for the House of Representatives in the 109th Congress. The House has voted 285 to 121 to stop this insanity.

Impotence drugs such as Viagra would not be covered by Medicaid and Medicare, the government health programs for the poor and the aged, under new prohibitions approved by the House on Friday.

By a 285-121 vote, the House approved an amendment by Rep. Steve King (news, bio, voting record), R-Iowa, to stop the government from paying for the drugs. King said his amendment would save taxpayers $105 million next year alone.

You know what else needs to happen? This needs to get publicized. I’m really all for horny men gettin’ some, as long as I’m not paying for it, and mathematically $105 million really doesn’t count out of $2.6 trillion in federal outlays.

What cheeses me off has to do with the insanity of our social programs. It all has to do with lowering the pain threshhold. The program is proposed, and we have to debate something vital to human existence like oxygen, basic sustenance, medicine, shelter, or the like. Once the program gets going, the pain threshhold is lowered, and lowered, and lowered again, ad nauseum.

Until we find ourselves paying for boners. If you love a liberal, make sure he or she knows about this story, and emphasize that this is the rule, not the exception. This is the way social programs work.

It’s all very European. You like Europe? Go there. Leave our money-grubbing capitalists alone, and let them pay for their own erections, not somebody else’s.

Go Get ‘Em, Karl

For some time I have noticed that while conservatives like to tell people what they should be thinking about, liberals like to just tell people what to think. For example, there really isn’t too much intellectual reason to engage in any of the following beliefs:

• Hillary Clinton is a smart woman
• We’d have fewer wars if women ran the world
• A President Kerry would have much more credibility with the world
• People want to kill Americans because of American policy (and would stop wanting to kill if the policies changed)
• The United Nations can help us to achieve world peace
• Gun control makes our streets safer
• Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened

…and a whole bunch of other left-wing axioms that, when they are offered, are offered on platters of heated rhetoric rather than cool-headed consideration of available facts and reasoned inferences drawn from those facts. More tellingly — and I have a lot of experience to base this on — if a dissenting voice emerges to simply challenge what is being alleged, the support or proof for the allegation is almost never forthcoming. Instead, the liberal argues like a seven-year-old, with the tried-and-true “You’re STUPID!!!” line of attack.

In other words, liberals like to bully and intimidate. They say, think what I think, see things as I see them, or I will talk over you and call you a big fat stupid doo-doo head.

So the Democrats who are in power are really getting apoplectic about this:

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

This is a whole different style of arguing from what liberals are used to. Mr. Rove is summarizing the news as he sees it. If you want to challenge this, you can’t really debate the facts that he’s summarizing, because, well, they’re facts — furthermore, he’s referring to events in the news that have been right out in front of all our faces for nearly four years now. If you wanted to argue this framework with him, you would have to examine his line of thinking. By offering repeated exposure to those facts, this examination would be more devastating to the liberal movement, than his original comment itself.

So Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi blossom forward with their righteous indignation, and their mock outrage, and their “cascade of criticism” and demands for Mr. Rove to resign.

If I was a senior Democratic advisor, I’d suggest a different defense and then wince a little bit when they rejected my advice — probably pull out my resume and start brushing it up.

After all, when someone says something damaging about you that is provably false or demonstrably falacious, you don’t respond with a “cascade of criticism”. Why would you?

Furthermore, they’ve offered an interesting contrast here. Karl Rove is expressing an opinion and then allowing the rest of us to go about our business, whether we sign on to what he said or not. Democrats are telling Karl Rove what he must do, telling President Bush what he should do, telling the rest of us what we ought to think. Must. Should. Ought.

I doubt any one among their leadership could comment on this without using one of those three words.

How very European of them.

Tweak A Geek

How to tweak a Star Wars geek…

…tell him you read somewhere that “Kenobi” is Swahili for “Loses Every Fight”.

Think about it.

Is My Downstairs Neighbor A War Criminal?

You say, “I’m going to leave you chained up on the floor in the fetal position with no chair and I’m going to fiddle around with the room temperature until you tear your hair out” and without knowing who you’re referring to, I say “gee, that sounds like Pol Pot.”

Would I say that?

You say “I’m going to play rap music really loud all night long and force you to listen to it” and I’m going to say “that sounds just like the Soviets in their gulags” or “that sounds an awful lot like Hitler.”

Hitler & Stalin were all about playing bad music and cranking the volume?

I know this is just crazy talk. But in the United States Senate it makes a lot of sense, apparently. Quothe Richard Durbin, Democrat from Illinois:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Now it’s clear what is happening here: I’m capturing the utter ridiculousness of something said on the Senate floor, by treating it as if it is an expression of thought when it’s really an expression of emotion. There’s no way Dick Durbin really wants to compare playing rap music, with what the Nazis did. In all likelihood, he said what sounded good at the time and appealed to his constituents, and didn’t realize how silly it is until he saw it in writing.

But that’s unfair of me, isn’t it? After all, the Senate is not a place where people follow logical arguments and make sound decisions about courses of action based on reasoned opinions which in turn are based on principled deliberations of established, solid facts. Heavens, no. The Senate is a place where emotion is supposed to rule the day, right? We’re talking about defending the lives of millions of innocent men, women and children. Emotion must trump logic, of course, even when it places the systematic extermination of millions of political dissidents and innocent jews, on par with playing yucky music really loud and monkeying around with the AC.

Just to review: I made what Dick Durbin said, look pretty silly, but I didn’t do it by poking fun. All I did was take what he said, down to the letter, seriously, as if he really meant for it to be taken seriously. This is the most intellectually devastating thing you can do to a piss-poor silly nonsensical idea.

Do we like nonsensical ideas to be argued when the issue is protecting our country from people who are trying to kill us?

I’m Not A Liberal

Keep Your Eye On This Today III

The Senate may, or should, or must, or perhaps will, vote on cloture to end debate on the nomination of John Bolton for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

…a bipartisan report on the U.N., released today…notes that “until and unless it changes dramatically, the United Nations will remain an uncertain instrument, both for the governments that comprise it and for those who look to it for salvation.”

Out here in real-person-land, this has been noted for quite some time. Oh well, here’s hoping that whether Mr. Bolton gets in or not, things change drastically. The way they are right now is quite bad.

Keep Your Eye On This Today II

Remember Terri Schiavo? Her autopsy results are going to be made public today. This will be interesting, but the politics surrounding the results will be even more interesting. My prediction: Both sides will have fresh ammunition, as they see it, and there will be a lot of arguing.

Keep Your Eye On This Today I

Last night there was a 7.0 earthquake in the ocean off Crescent City, CA. A tsunami alert was issued all up & down the west coast. Probably nuthin’.

They’re OUR Pawns!

Derrick Z. Jackson is upset about Janice Rogers Brown, or more precisely, he’s upset that she’s a black female judge and the Republicans are trying to get her nominated to the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia. He feels it’s hypocritical. This is the kind of thing that really cracks me up.

Born in the mid-1960’s, I have spent a lifetime listening to liberals “educate” me about how they are all for poor non-white minority groups, while conservatives are “against” those minorities. I grew up with a living room in which all the furniture was arranged to face toward the idiot-box, where my family and I would soak up prime-time idiot-shows designed to educate us idiots how enlightened liberals were and how bigoted conservatives were. ABC, CBS, NBC were all in on the act. M*A*S*H educated me that war was always insane, so logically of course, there was no reason to declare it, ever. Nevermind that we all lived in a free country that was started by a war.

Then as I entered the world of adulthood, funny things began to happen. Reagan was elected, and then he nominated the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hello? I thought Republicans wanted women to stay in the kitchen. Pundits in the newspaper, on television, on radio, started to try to tell me what to think. When minorities were nominated by Republican presidents it was evidence of hypocrisy, but Bill Clinton was supposed to be given credit for doing exactly the same thing. George H. W. Bush was supposed to apologize to somebody for nominating Clarence Thomas. Well wait a minute, I thought “special episodes” of Mary Tyler Moore had educated me that minorities weren’t supposed to be treated any different, especially when & if they were placed in positions of trust.

I grew up in a state of perpetual confusion over this. Being concerned in any way at all over the subject of someone’s skin color, I was told, was the province of dimwits. At the same time, I watched people I was told were overwhelmingly smart, get into verbal knock-down drag-outs over peoples’ skin color.

Now all pretense of subtlety has been dropped, at least by Derrick Z. Jackson who is angry with Republicans for, once again, standing behind Brown who is female and black. Jackson is upset about something: He has detected a trend in the way Brown’s background is played up by Republican sponsors. “Daughter of sharecroppers.”

Sure, I agree. Janice Rogers Brown must have done something more noteworthy & accomplished than being the daughter of sharecroppers.

And your point is? John F. Kennedy did more noteworthy things than be the scion of a wealthy American family struck multiple times by (Darwinian) tragedy. His wife did more noteworthy things than own a silly hat. So what? When it comes time to recite Jack & Jackie’s resumes, the first things to tumble out of people’s mouths have something to do with “family has endured so much tragedy” and “pink pillbox hat.” We hear it over and over again, and that’s politics. Hillary Clinton has “worked hard.”John Kerry is “nuanced.”

Let us just cut through the bull for a second. Derrick Jackson is upset because Republicans are supporting, and therefore reaping political profit from, a person with dark skin. Derrick Jackson thinks Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to do this, that it is a privilege reserved for Democrats & other factions opposed to Republicans. It’s hypocritical, in their case, after all. Republicans never back minorities. Except when they do…in which case, it doesn’t count. Because then, Republicans are being hypocritical.

The free will enjoyed & exercised by Janice Rogers Brown, herself, is particularly vexing to people like Jackson. Brown is plenty sharp enough to understand what Republicans and Democrats are all about, and she’s plenty proud enough to refuse to be exploited. Since she’s black, and she obviously agrees with the Republican platform at least in some respects, she’s terribly dangerous to the status quo. She has made a conscious decision: I’m black, I grew up poor, and I could profit from my status through affirmative action. I choose not to, because if I do that, it will congest any avenue of success for those who come after me. I choose to rely on my own abilities, come what may, because this will open up avenues for other people who have abilities, regardless of what their skin color may be and how they grew up.

Congratulations to her. And as I’m often fond of saying about this and many other issues: If one person can do it anywhere, then anyone can do it everywhere.

Jackson, emotionally, is incapable of handling this in silence.

His article, boiled down to its rough essentials, says this: Lay off those black people, you Republicans! They’re OUR pawns!

Jackson, and those sympathetic to his point of view, are all going to be fascinating people to watch in the next few weeks. They’re journalists, but ironically they are trying to stop facts from getting out — any facts that would be damaging to the liberal monopoly of “minority rights” — “minority” as Democrats define them, and “rights” as Democrats define them. I think this is a professional betrayal: Journalists are supposed to be all about objectivity, and getting facts out. So let’s cause further pain to traitors like Derrick Jackson…let’s piss on the snowman a little bit more. Just for grins.

Democrats have a VERY checkered history with minority rights, and that is a charitable description. Let’s go over some of the problems in history, shall we.

1. During the Civil War, Republicans fought not only to win the war & free the slaves, but to make sure that full rights were conferred on those freed-men. Democrats opposed this. Republicans supported, and Democrats opposed, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

2. During the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a faction led by southern Democrats tried to defeat the CRA. Republicans voted in large numbers, in both houses, to get this legislation passed. If Republicans did not back it, the numbers would not have been there to get it through.

3. The case of Strom Thurmond opposing civil rights and then becoming a Republican, is highly deceptive. If you were in Kindergarten when Strom Thurmond ran for president as a DEMOCRAT segregationist, you would have completed high school, and almost certainly college as well, before Thurmond ever became a Republican.

4. Although Thomas Jefferson is claimed by Democrats as the founder of their party, things get interesting if you read what he actually wrote, especially during the time of his presidency from 1801 to 1809. He sounds just like Rush Limbaugh. Especially when he starts complaining about Federalists taking over the “judiciary” because they can’t win at the ballot box.

Don’t believe a single word of any of the points above. Do your own research.

The notion that Democrats champion minority rights, or have a history of doing so, is ripe for challenge, as is the notion that Republicans have any heritage of inherent hostility to same. Even if this were not the case, it is hardly productive to castigate one party or the other for nominating a “daughter of sharecroppers” to an appeals court, or to use that tagline in promoting her nomination. Most Americans want to live in a place where people have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want & whatever they’re willing to prove they can do, regardless of how they grew up. We also want to live in a place where the press tells us what the facts are, and we are left to form our own opinions — not where columnists like Jackson tell us that Republicans “overdid” something “to a level that is laughable”.

Jackson, to the best I can tell, makes no case anywhere in his article that the allegation about sharecropper parents is false. He doesn’t seem to be concerned with the veracity of the statement, only about whether or not it is offensive to him when it is pointed out.

Depending On Which Language You Speak?

Does this strike anyone else as ironic? If Bill Richardson, Gov. of New Mexico and formerly Bill Clinton’s Energy Secretary, runs for President, he will bring credibility.

“He brings credibility and he brings recognition,” said Gustavo Moral, the conference’s organizer, “that the Latino community in New Hampshire is growing.”

So all we need to know is whether this credibility-bringer will bring his credibility to the Presidential race. Mister Messiah of Credibility, how say you?

“I want to be very clear about this presidential stuff,” Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said at yesterday’s New Hampshire Latino Summit. “No, I will not run for president.”

Then, switching to Spanish, he told the heavily Hispanic crowd, “Segura que si, voy a ser candidato!”

Rough translation: You bet I am!

So…in this post-Clinton era of true things being false and false things being true and liars being effective leaders and truthful people being called liars…I guess we like this stuff. You switch languages and say the polar opposite of what you just said.

I must be getting old. There was a time we paid attention to these public figures to find out what their positions were, and even if they were utterly, completely unambiguous in every single language they dared to use, we debated the tiny minutiae of what they said. The more credibility they had, the less we debated. The less credibility they had, the more we debated. If they walked into the speech having some credibility and they ended the speech having less credibility, it was called a bad speech.

Now, they contradict themselves on purpose and we celebrate it. Ooh, boy, this can’t be a good thing.

Underwear Gangs

If you don’t watch for burglars twenty-four/seven, your home may be plundered by a nearly-naked burglar whose body just slips out of your grip when you try to collar him:

Sok Tum, a police commander in Tram Kak district, told the newspaper that two burglars wearing nothing but underpants and daubed in oil – to make them harder to identify and their bodies more difficult to grip by pursuers – had raided two homes in Leay Bo sub-district on May 30.

I just don’t know what else to say about it. It’s like Arsenio Hall’s “Things That Make You Go Hmmmm….”

Wow, What An Idea! Let’s Call It “Capitalism”

A few days ago I was carping away about how everything good in life, particularly the Tomb Raider Lady’s rack, was disappearing. Well now we have something that makes life fun that is actually getting bigger, or anyway, at least thinking about it. What an oasis of hope for the future in a vast all-present desert of oppression, suffocation and despair.

Hooters Airline Has Lofty Plans
At a time when the whole airline industry is struggling, Hooters Air has had so much success that they are expanding to new businesses and new cities.

This is substantiated by a few other pieces, including a press release on the official site. The service area map that is posted there, effective June 11, is included below.

Hooters Air Takes Over Service from Lehigh Valley Air in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Adds Additional Service to Myrtle Beach

Myrtle Beach, SC – Hooters Air will expand its flight service from Allentown, Pennsylvania when it begins service on routes formerly served by Lehigh Valley Air effective May 8th. In addition to the current service to St. Petersburg and Ft. Lauderdale, Hooters Air will add flights to Myrtle Beach beginning June 11th.

“Allentown opens up another great market for us,” stated Hooters Air President Mark Peterson. “We are taking over a program started by Lehigh Valley Air and will make some small adjustments to the schedule in order to improve the program and add more great destinations.”

Let’s put some thought into defining the very least significance this could possibly have for us. You’d have to be a moron, or brain-damaged, to look at this and not conclude there was a capitalist lesson for somebody somewhere. An industry in which huge money changes hands everyday, is getting absolutely hammered. One interest within the industry is having a dandy time and expanding. Hello? HELLO?

This is so much bigger than gawking at college girls in their skimpy outfits. SO much bigger. For one thing, in addition to being fun, Hooter’s has a lot of practical purposes most people don’t realize. Hooter’s and business travel go together like potatoes & gravy. Milk & chocolate. Beer & shots. While I haven’t flown Hooters Air before, I have travelled on business more than the average bear and I’ve learned a few things about how to get good service when you really need to depend on it. Good service saves you from missing connecting flights. Good service makes the difference between getting done what you flew out to do, or not. Every businessman catching that 5 a.m. shuttle to the airport, the thought you know is going through his mind, is whether or not he will deal with service people at the rental car desk, or at the flight check-in desk, or at the hotel desk, who hate customers. Let’s face it: You have to like dealing with people to succeed at those jobs, but you don’t have to like it to have those jobs.

Just flying in one day, you are depending on the people you meet who have been tasked to provide you with services. Some of those people will hold your life in their hands. You can receive bad service and still succeed, but the handicap factor is not to be underestimated.

What do tank tops and orange shorts have to do with good service, you ask?

To answer that, I have to rely not so much on logic but on my own experience. I can definitely see there’s a connection. There are Hooter’s girls who mumble, frown and sulk, but they are very very few and very far between — searching for frowners and culkers, I’m far better off looking for them at a Denny’s, or a Chucky Cheese, or some kind of data center. I think what sets this establishment apart, is the tips. I know, nobody tips a cute girl in short-shorts double or triple what they would tip a middle-age matronly toothless waitress, but here’s a wake-up call: This is a delusive concept of “nobody”. It’s the same nobody that never buys National Enquirer, since everybody is just glancing at the cover in the grocery check-out line — “nobody” ever actually ponies up some cash on it.

I’ll fess up right here and now, I tip more at Hooter’s. Generally, 15% is a good tip from me, but I wouldn’t dream of running up a $25 tab at Hooter’s, tipping $3.75 & calling it good. It’s unthinkable.

And then there is the matter of attrition. Maybe you are one of these exceptional anti-help-anybody people who happen to work at Hooter’s. Quite possible. But if that’s the case wouldn’t you take your crappy attitude and leave it at home with your long pants? You’re getting tipped forty percent. If you MUST come to work and constantly roll your eyes & sigh at people to remind them what a pain in the ass it is to be listening to them, you’d get tipped zero percent while your co-workers were getting tipped something sky-high. Wouldn’t that be an unmistakable clue that you should try something else?

So by natural attrition, and by attracting a friendly demographic of potential applicants in the first place, it would appear Hooter’s has ways of ensuring it is staffed by positive, upbeat professionals overall. Upbeat service means upbeat customers, which means upbeat tips or tipping potential. That leads to more upbeat service. It’s called “getting started on the right foot.” This isn’t Katy-Couric “perky perky perky” service; this is common-sense service, that can figure out you need to get something done and will get out of your way. When you want them out of the way. Which, of course, ends up being not very often.

Now here’s something else to think about. We’re talking about flying here. Now think back on your experiences with flight attendants. All the indignant looks you got if you dared ask for a second bag of peanuts or another four ounces of Pepsi. Wouldn’t you just love to fly on an airline where quality of service to the customer, was just as important to the flight attendants as it is to the average Hooter’s girl?

It’s a no-brainer. Even disregarding the nice-looking busts & hips & thighs, I am SO down with this. If the trend about expanding the business holds for long, I’ll take it as a given that I’m not alone on that. And it will be interesting to see if the competing airlines are quick to take a lesson from it.

Here’s My Whole Deal on Filibusters

Here is the link to the Wikipedia page on filibusters. It’s probably worth bookmarking, since Wiki can be updated by the community-at-large, and the subject is a procedure that is enjoying a rapidly evolving history at the moment.

There are four things I’d like to highlight from a high-level history of the filibuster. This just has to do with how we got the filibuster and what it’s all about — these highlights are not Republican-friendly or Democrat-hostile, they’re simply facts.

• In 1789, by following Senate rules, you could shut a fellow Senator up and “move to the previous question”;
• This was changed in 1806, so that you had to let the Senator talk as long as he wanted, and the filibuster was born;
• In 1917, the motion of cloture was born — with a two-thirds super-majority (of those voting), you could end the filibuster;
• Since 1917, a number of changes have been adopted adjusting the super-majority — it goes down when Senators think it’s too hard to reach, it goes up when they think it’s too easy.

This clashes head-on with what people have been “educated” about this procedure. Ever single water-cooler or pool-hall debate I’ve seen on filibusters, someone will casually refer to the filibuster as a time-honored tradition that has been with our nation since the very beginning. It’s not so. When our nation got started, debate was brought to an end and attention was moved to action, or other issues, just like in any other deliberative body. After the filibuster arrived, another century came & went before we got to this idea of using it to force a super-majority.

And since then, we’ve been quibbling about what the super-majority is.

This is simply not a part of what you would call “tradition” and it certainly isn’t part of the spirit of the Constitution.

Here is the link to the much-discussed Washington Post poll indicating that “most” Americans are opposed to the rules change that would end filibustering of judicial nominees. The Washington Post got into a little bit of hot water over this. The story surfaces in chat rooms and around water coolers, as evidence that Americans want to keep “the filibuster”. This is an accurate reflection of the issue but it’s not an accurate reflection of the Post’s story. The Post’s summary is “a strong majority of Americans oppose changing the rules to make it easier for Republican leaders to win confirmation of President Bush’s court nominees, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll”. It does not use the word “filibuster”.

The question that was asked of the 1,007 respondents, also, does not use the word “filibuster.” As the story has been repeated, reprinted and regurgitated, the word “filibuster” sneaks in — two-thirds of us are “opposed to ending the filibuster”. This goes back to the headline that was used internally by The Post itself, so The Post is guilty of producing more confusion than clarity here. Ombudsman Michael Getler addressed the issue here.

For those who are not familiar with ombudsmens’ columns, they can be pretty unsatisfying, especially when you think something’s amiss and the ombudsman agrees with you. The ombudsman recites the facts, then he goes into reader reactions, then usually he will partially exonerate the newspaper before diving into what he thinks ought to have been done differently. End of column. And you’re left asking, “and…?” It’s human nature to hope that somewhere, some reporter is being summoned into his editor’s office and called to account for making the ombudsman upset. Maybe having his paycheck docked. It’s not gonna happen. Ombudsmen usually don’t have “teeth”, and cannot have teeth. They write their opinion that “shuckee darn, yup, that sure isn’t a good thing” and that has to be the end of it.

My take on it is, while there is always a danger of a “false consensus,” there are some issues where a poll does more to invite confusion and abuse than it does to settle any uncertainties, and this is one of them. Americans distrust politicians. If this isn’t subject to serious dispute, why conduct a poll about it? You don’t have to. Okay, why do Americans distrust politicians? A lot of it has to do with this stereotype about collecting fat paychecks, sitting around debating endlessly, doing nothing. Is that subject to disagreement? I don’t think so. So what exactly is a filibuster?

So we’re keeping this “time-honored tradition” of the filibuster as a mechanism to prevent majority rule in a popularly-elected legislative body. Here is your link to the Memorandum of Understanding text that represents the agreement reached by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. What it means, is a matter of opinion. The binding effect of the Memorandum, also, is a matter of opinion, and since the consequences of breaking it are going to be purely political, my opinion is it doesn’t mean much.

Are filibusters of judicial nominees unconstitutional? Absolutely! The Constitution comments only on “Advice and Consent” in Article II. The relevant passage says the President “…shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law”. This means (in just my uneducated opinion) such Advice and Consent is a right, and an obligation, conferred upon the Senate.

Now you can take what follows for what it’s worth; it might have some relevance to the discussion.

When the words, above, were written, we did not yet have a Seventeenth Amendment which makes the Senators subject to popular election. Back then, the States had representation in our nation’s capitol. If we had a President who did just a dandy job of representing the Will of the People, but was overly hostile to the interests of State legislatures, and manifested that hostility in his nominees, it was the job of the Senate to shoot his nominees down. To shoot them down. Not to use procedural rules to sit on the nominations. Senate Rules are just fine, but the Constitution trumps them.

And the Constitution requires the Senate, which was designed to be the representation of State legislatures, to give a vote. Advice and Consent. The nomineee gets in, or he doesn’t. But give your answer. The President can’t do anything without the Senate, that’s the “Consent” part; the Senate gives its answer, that’s the Advice part.

Nowadays, the Senate represents the people, effectively functioning as a second House of Representatives. As a separate chamber, it has its own rules, and we have some loudmouths running around — most of them Democrats — inferring that these separate rules are a traditional way of forcing more calm, cool, deliberative debate in the upper chamber. This is just so much nonsense.

Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit III

Danbury, CT. This ought to take care of the “they park that way so that their oh so very nice expensive cars don’t get dinged” crowd. Now take a good look. What a slob. If you’re on a moped, congratulations, you get to squeeze into that itty-bitty space this dickhead left. Everyone else can hoof it from wherever-way-out-there they finally find a place to park.

Destroy Those Stickers

A court has upheld separation of church and state.

Hooray!

The court ordered that stickers affixed to school textbooks, violating the separation of church and state, be removed and destroyed.

Hooray!

The stickers promoted a fundamentalist Christian view of creationism over evolution, on textbooks paid for by taxpayers, and the court ordered the stickers gone.

Hooray!

Well…actually, the stickers didn’t promote a particular viewpoint, they just attacked the universally-accepted theory of evolution. They’re gone!

Hooray!

Well…actually, the stickers didn’t really attack much of anything. They ARE gone, but what they said was this.

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

The stickers have been removed according to the court order.

Hoo– …uh, hmmm.

Yeah…you got it. The First Amendment has been interpreted to prohibit you from thinking for yourself. Saying anything, anything at all, against whatever theory the scientific community has determined to be fashionable, is to be stricken down the very second the striking-down can be justified by any connection, whatsoever, however unsubstantial it may be, to the expenditure of taxpayer funds.

I’m not going to get all frothy-at-the-mouth about this. If you think what happened is correct and my categorization of it is unfair, nothing I can say will change your mind. If you recognize what is amiss here, you don’t need me to embellish it any further.

I’m Thirty!

Thirty states, that is. In the interest of full disclosure, one of them is DC.

It is abundantly clear what needs to be done about this. I’ve got to get ahold of a motorcycle, and swing through the bayou.

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Lara Croft Is A C Cup Now

It’s gotten spooky. It’s gotten to the point that, when you see something that makes living life a little bit more fun, you just know it’s a matter of time before it will be gone. Continuing the diabolical campaign to get rid of everything good in life, the “Tomb Raider” girl’s tits are the next two things to go.

In an attempt to appeal to more female players the creators of computer game icon Lara Croft have re-vamped her image to remove one of her most prominent and remarked-upon features — her generous bust.

For years, Croft’s gravity-defying chest, waspish waist and long legs have delighted teenage boys playing the various editions of “Tomb Raider,” the computer game in which she stars.

According to Saturday’s edition of The Times newspaper, British computer game firm Eidos, which created Croft, has changed her physique to one less likely to put off female players.

In the soon-to-be-released “Tomb Raider: Legend,” the eighth title to feature Croft, her DD-size bust has been reduced to a more modest C-cup and some of her more revealing outfits have been ditched, the report said.

My opinion? It’s the same opinion I’d have about pairing the “Murder She Wrote” lady up with a goofy sidekick played by Rob Schneider or Joe Pesci. The same opinion I’d have about lacing “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’ with lots of exploding cars.

Guy stuff for guys, gal stuff for gals. Making things androgenous or all-gender-friendly *never* seems to yield greater profits, or to help mitigate losses. Still, if Eidos thinks a chubby waist, tiny knockers, cottage-cheese thighs and a modest round-neck sweater will pull in some female video-game purse money, they are free to try.

Let me just say this on whether or not such a scheme has the potential to actually work though.

I do know women who don’t like Tomb Raider.

I do know women who don’t like Tomb Raider because they are put off by the fact that Lara Croft is, let us say, just better-looking in general than these women.

These women would not — would not — not, not, not — buy Tomb Raider if the Tomb Raider girl’s tits were shrunk. I guarantee it. They would not. Not a single one. Not one. Never, never, not ever.

The tits aren’t costing you any sales, guys. I got a feeling a flat chest on Lara Croft is more likely to meet approval with some of your female marketing executives, than with any of your female potential customers who you think aren’t shelling out like they should.

Stand Up For Medicare

Medicare can be, is, and will continue to be, used to provide drugs to address male impotence, to the tune of $2 billion over the next decade.

I love to highlight how, based on the way you present a story, you can partially dictate what the public reaction is going to be. If I were King of Newspaper Editors for a day, I might promote that story under this headline:

Women are being taxed to pay for men’s erections.

Hey. Under the harsh glare of the Spotlight of Truth, it checks out, right? That’s better than Newsweek can say.

A Style Of Thought

Mexican President Vicente Fox has apologized for his “race remarks” as The Chicago Tribune calls them. Speaking Friday in Peuto Vallarta, Fox extolled the virtues of his country’s #1 export product which is illegal aliens.

“There’s no doubt that the Mexican men and women � full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work � are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States,” Fox told a meeting of the Texas-Mexico Frozen Food Council in the western city of Puerto Vallarta on Friday.

Oops, that’s pretty far from what passes for politically-correct in the USA these days.

And that’s exactly the point some of the Fox sympathizers tried to make yesterday.

Victor Hugo Flores, a 30-year-old bond salesman, cringed when asked what he thought of Fox’s Friday comment, but said it isn’t too different from popular sayings celebrating what Mexicans see as a strong work ethic among blacks.

“It was bad, but it really isn’t racist,” he said. “Maybe the president shouldn’t have said it. But here we say things like, `He works like a black person,’ and it’s normal.”

You know why a defensive argument like that devastates President Fox and his comments, like no assaulting argument possibly could: It makes sense. As Americans we tend to forget that when we have imposed cultural pressure on people’s individual thoughts, coercing them to comply with what is considered acceptable by our prevailing culture, the rest of the world isn’t doing the same thing. So from time to time it’s natural we have a rude awakening with how other people think.

But doesn’t that make Fox’s comments all the more telling. This whole thing the United States has gone through — that it’s wrong to say “Mexicans steal things” or “Jews haggle over prices way too much” or “white people always lie” — it turns out, that whole taboo makes sense.

A guy steals stuff. Some guy is known for working his ass off. Some guy builds a rep for lying all the time. You don’t paint an entire race of people that way, unless you enjoy being wrong, often.

That’s the American style of thought — individual attributes for individuals, group attributes for groups. Vicente Fox showed on Friday he has a different style of thought, and if he wants to hide behind apologies like this, he’s still showing it.

How is this relevant? Because Vicente Fox is in a shouting match lately with right-thinking Americans like myself, about what it is his chief export product does to the American economy. It’s been going on and on because it’s so hard to prove one side right or the other side right — but it’s critical to President Fox’s argument, to demonstrate that he has his finger on the pulse of what is really going on. That when he says his people who are immigrating to my country, illegally, are working their butts off and not committing any crimes, he knows what he’s talking about.

Well, it is unlikely he has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on if this is the way he thinks. You can’t point to tens of thousands of people running across a river, and make an unfounded blanket generalization like “they are working their butts off and obeying all the laws” unless you don’t really have a stake in the veracity of what you’re saying. But that is exactly what President Fox has been doing for years now.

Now, his sympathizers are in an intellectually untenable position. They must maintain it is correct to say “undocumented immigrants from Mexico work harder than American citizens” but at the same time excoriate the idea that “blacks have a different work ethic from whites” (better, or worse). Essentially, they have to champion one unfounded blanket statement while rightfully repudiating another, solely on the basis that it is an unfounded blanket statement.

If Captain Kirk were having this argument with an ancient computer, this is just about the time the smoke would start coming out of the vents and circuits would start popping.

Fortunately for President Fox, his audience is not people who think logically. That is a blanket statement that finds reasonable foundation in the content of his messages: He has been maintaining “I am encouraging these people to cross the border and get the hell out of my country but that doesn’t mean they’re people you don’t want around, you should accept them with open arms even though I don’t want them where I am.” There is a certain strain of people who buy into this. Out of logical necessity, they must be the kind of people who never ask “If it’s such a great deal, why do you need me?”

They get e-mail about exciting ways to make money at home, and they nibble at the bait instead of asking the obvious question “why is this guy who wrote the e-mail, not quietly taking advantage of this without my participation, if it’s such a great deal?” This audience is not exactly filled with rocket scientists. If they possessed even average intelligence, the message wouldn’t work.

Because that’s exactly the offer Fox is making: Hey, these are wonderful people — that’s why I want to get rid of them.

Let’s Abolish Freedom of the Press

Oh, there’s going to be panic over that headline I’m sure. But let me explain. Among those polled, 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press, in a major poll to be released Monday, conducted by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy. The poll also revealed significant gaps in opinion on news, and its place in society, between members of the press and the general public.

In one finding, 43% of the public say they believe the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree. Just 14% of the public can name �freedom of the press� as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution…

I think I can help explain this. The press has abused its position of trust by not doing its job. They do not tell people what people need to know anymore; they mold and shape our society in ways they think will protect the classes of people they want to protect. Let’s just take the example of an editorial that pissed me off, just yesterday morning. Worrying About The Right Things, which was published a week ago (link requires registration) explores the idea that gee, maybe liberals haven’t given Janice Rogers Brown a fair shake and she could be a decent judge after all.

What would make Janice Rogers Brown a decent judge? In People v. Conrad Richard McKay, Brown dissented from the majority opinion that Richard McKay’s Fourth-amendment rights were not violated when a policeman patted him down and found a baggie of methamphetamine in his sock.

Brown was the lone dissenter in this opinion. Let’s sum it up. Guy gets pulled over on a bicycle. He’s a black guy, which is important to Ginger Rutland, author of the editorial. He has no driver’s license. The cop pats him down and finds the substance. Guy gets 32 months for illegal possession. Knowning that, if there was a Fourth-Amendment violation here, it would mean the druggie has to be sprung from jail, would you say such a violation took place? Janice Rogers Brown says yes, everyone else on the court says no.

Like most “ordinary” people, I’m going to have to shock the shit out of Ginger Rutland by confessing that, actually, I am far to the right of even Janice Rogers Brown. Furthermore, it is crap like this — even in an editorial column — that erodes our faith not only in the press, but the justice system. The bicycle guy committed a crime. Yes, it is a victimless crime, at least, so far as anyone can determine from the facts available, but a crime nonetheless. Furthermore, he is guilty and his guilt has been proven. It is undisputed.

For the past forty years we’ve been playing this game where, hey, if the guy is guilty but the way you found out he’s guilty, is unconstitutional, then the guy isn’t guilty. That is bullshit. And I say that being a big, passionate advocate of the axiom that the Constitution must be upheld — but — get this — it doesn’t necessarily follow that, to enforce the Constitution, we have to pretend that false things are true and that true things are false.

Today’s journalists take it as a given that enforcement of the Constitution trumps truth; they make their living according to it. If the Constitution has been violated, we have to pretend people with baggies in their socks don’t have baggies in their socks. And, by extension, we have to pretend that guys who rape and kill little girls, don’t rape and kill little girls.

Rutland spends much of her column weeping for the economic plight, and the unfortunate skin color, of the guy with meth in his sock. Apparently, if he was middle-class and white, his Fourth-Amendment rights would not have been violated. Did you catch that? The Fourth Amendment is only for poor black people. If you don’t agree with my interpretation, read her treatise from beginning to end. She says “Judges who ‘gnaw through ropes’ to protect people being hassled by cops represent the kind of judicial activism I can support.”

This is the kind of bullshit that arouses suspicion and mistrust. For one thing, I could take out a subscription to the Sacramento Bee for ten solid years, read every page, and the information I would gather about why we have a Fourth Amendment, and what it was intended to do, I could fit on a postage stamp. That newspaper just doesn’t give a damn about it, nor do any newspapers. The press, like the justice system, thinks of it as a game. You collar the bad guy, bring him in, he gets sentenced, he appeals, maybe his rights were violated and maybe not. We all argue about it and newspapers get sold. In the course of the game, lies become facts and facts become lies, guys with meth in their socks suddenly don’t have meth in their socks.

But what’s ironic — to me — is if you are this poor guy with his desperate circumstances riding his bicycle around, and you’re at the mercy of the police because you are so poor and put-upon — you are also at the mercy of something else: Truth. As a general rule in life, people who are in the trenches, who work dirty jobs, who are poor, or who are closest to the action about which other people make life-and-death decisions…they live and die according to facts. When you pretend things that are true are false, or things that are false are true, you are engaging in a luxurious pastime that is not available to people who are closer to the exigencies of life than you are.

For example, if the guy who lives next door to you is a drug dealer, that is a fact and it affects how you live.

And that, in turn, means that to take part in a mental-contortionist argument like the following…

He has meth in his sock but the way the meth was found, was by a search which the court determined was violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, therefore the search was illegal, therefore he does not have any meth in his sock.

…is a luxury which you simply cannot afford. It is truly ironic that for one poor guy, like Conrad Richard McKay, whose rights are being championed by columnists like Rutland — there are maybe a hundred more poor people whose right to live a safe everyday life, is being trampled upon by her impassioned ramblings, and Rutland is probably completely freakin’ oblivious to this.

And that is the real gap between the press and “normal” people.

Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit II

Hotel parking lot in Albany, NY. An utterly, completely empty hotel parking lot. No, the driver was not just dashing into a room to get a forgotten wallet or comb, to run right back out again. Nothing like that at all.

I can’t prove it, but I’ve got an unsettling feeling that people are basically slapping their cars into the parking lot, lines be damned, because their cars are getting bigger. In other words, you have a little car, you must do a good job parking, but if it’s a big car, you can let it all go to shit. Now, think about that for a second. How disturbing is that.

Really Bad News

Today’s kids don’t have to walk to school sixteen miles in snow up to their bellybuttons, uphill both ways, they don’t have to spend all their free time doing household chores and odd jobs like I did, and now they don’t eaven halv two wurry abowt speling.

Examiners marking an English test taken by 600,000 14-year-olds have been told not to deduct marks for incorrect spelling on the main writing paper, worth nearly a third of the overall marks.

The rule, issued by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, means that pupils could spell every word wrongly in the most significant piece of writing that they are required to do and yet still receive full marks.

There are two really obvious things to point out here.

One, I can’t say a single word about this without sounding like a really old man. To everyone, save for those who already realize what’s wrong with this without me mentioning a single word. It’s a case of tyranny-of-majority, and dumbing-down; the “Let’s Ignore Bad Spelling” ruling was handed down after too many of the kids taking the test, failed to get the spelling right. They got the content right, I assume, because the administrators figured something out. Quotas are not being met, but if we discount spelling, we can meet the quotas. So the kids have some brains. Trying to use those brains to get words spelled right, has yielded substandard results, so hey, let’s take spelling off the table then we can meet our quotas.

It all comes down to, the God damn kids don’t have to do what I had to do when I was a kid. And get off my damn lawn.

Two: To those of you who, on another subject, will argue that school is all about developing social skills, the FACT that this is a huge mistake should be beyond any dissent. Just think about the social aspect in terms of situations where you have to convince the other person of your intellect.

You want to sell me your motorcycle. It’s a chain drive motorcycle and I’ve got a real thing about shaft drive motorcycles so I’m not willing to buy. You send me an e-mail saying “Hay, their ain’t nuthing rong with a chayn driyv, it’s wurked for me!!!” You think I’m going to stop and read beyond the first sentence of your thesis, let alone change my mind about shaft drive motorcycles? You don’t have as much of a chance as you would have if you spelled things right.

Or let’s say I’m a liberal and you’re a conservative and you drop me an e-mail saying “Yoo liberalz shuld stop ragging on George W. Bush about wepunz of mas dystrucshun, yoo no our troups did find a hole bunch of them owt their in Iruq.” This is a case of trying to convince me of something that, due to my biases, I’m not initially willing to believe. You think you’ll get far by misspelling things? Nonsense. The mind of the liberal looks for any excuse it can to stop listening to an opposing argument. Throw in a few misspelled words, and you’re wasting your time.

Not that conservatives are any better. One of the things liberals have tried repeatedly to throw our way, is that our current president was selected, not elected. How do you think it would go down if a liberal wrote to a conservative and said “It may suprise you to gno that their wuz a lots of balot boxes hidan in floruda that were votz for algore.” It would just be further evidence that these conspiracy theories are aimed at, and consumed by, people who aren’t that bright and therefore the theories are not in need of any serious attention. I’d skim through just enough to get a little bit of a laugh for the day.

As a society, we do not write things down as much as we used to. A few of us have to correspond through e-mail in order to do our jobs; there are phone numbers, e-mail addresses, maybe a shopping list or two. The rest of the writing we do, I’d say, is stuff aimed at other people who do not initially agree with us about something, meant to change the mind of the audience. That’s probably a good eighty or ninety percent of everything we write, if you count word for word. E-mail, blog entries like this one, posts in rapidly lengthening and incendiary threads.

So three-quarters of everything we write is written to change the mind of a hostile audience. And when you try to change the mind of a hostile audience, your efforts fail a hundred percent of the time if you don’t spell everything right. We learn to spell correctly when we are held accountable when we go to school, and our schools are going to stop holding children accountable. Therefore: The medium of the written word will soon cease to be a viable and worthy forum.

You know, a few years ago this wouldn’t even be necessary. The little shits can’t spell, you just go ahead and flunk ’em. If NONE of the little shits can spell, then you start flunking EVERYBODY until they learn how to get the job done. But now we have all these learning disabilities and with that, we have lost our ability to hold the children accountable for the work they do. So this has actually been inevitable for years now.

As far as that goes, are you ready for another rude surprise? Try looking at some blogs and reading some of the threads posted under the hottest news stories out there. This problem with spelling is nothing new. What we have been losing, and continue to lose, is craftsmanship, which ultimately is the notion that the quality of work says something indelible, good or bad, about the person who made it. With that, we are losing our ability to communicate.

Wow, They DO Work For Us After All

We can send messages to these people. The Senate agreed on something they couldn’t agree on a year ago. I feel like Sally Field right now. You’re listening to us, you’re really, really listening.

Congress has approved an additional $82 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan and to combat terrorism worldwide, boosting the cost of the global effort since 2001 to more than $300 billion.

Yipeee. But it boosts the price. Gosh, when you spend money on a project that isn’t done yet, it boosts the price. I guess we and the Senate are on one side of this thing, and the Associated Press is on the other.

The Senate approved the measure Tuesday on a 100-0 vote.

All right.

The measure also requires states to start issuing more uniform driver’s licenses and verify the citizenship or legal status of people getting them. It also toughens asylum laws, authorizes the completion of a fence spanning the California-Mexican border and provides money to hire more Border Patrol agents.

Boom chucka lucka lucka.

Thank you, troops. And thank you, Minutemen.

Not Our Finest Hour

Pat Buchanan scored a hole-in-one with his critique over the weekend of President Bush’s visit to Moscow. It should be required reading for anyone who tries to keep up with important historical events as well as current events, since the era & related events receiving Pat’s attention, tend to get covered up or at least tend to get viewed with a blurry lens. It’s hard to learn this stuff with a Google search, with a printed encyclopedia, and even with an old-fashioned trip to the local library:

May 8, 2005
What Exactly Is Bush Celebrating in Moscow?
By Pat Buchanan

To Americans, World War II ended with the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, following detonation of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9.

But for Russians, who did not enter the war on Japan until Aug. 8, 1945, “The Great Patriotic War” ended on May 9, with the surrender of Nazi Germany. Which raises a question:
What exactly is President Bush celebrating in Moscow?

The destruction of Bolshevism was always the great goal of Hitler. And the Red Army eventually bore the brunt of battle, losing 10 times as many soldiers as America and Britain together.

But were we and the Soviets ever fighting for the same things, as FDR believed? Or was Stalin’s war against Hitler but another phase of Bolshevism’s war to eradicate Christianity and the West?

Vladimir Putin, a patriot and nationalist who retains a nostalgia for the empire he served as a KGB agent, refuses to renounce the Hitler-Stalin Pact of Aug. 23, 1939. Under the secret protocols of that pact, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were ceded to Stalin, as was eastern Poland.

Hitler’s attack on Poland, the success of which was guaranteed by that pact, came on Sept. 1, 1939. On Sept. 17, Stalin, who had hidden in the weeds to see how Britain and France would react to Hitler’s invasion, stormed into Poland from the east and claimed his share of the martyred nation. Six years of terror for Poles began, ending in 44 years of captivity in the bowels of what Ronald Reagan bravely called an “evil empire.”

As a result of this war, Hitler’s 1,000-Year Reich lasted 12 years and Germany was destroyed as no other nation save Japan. Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden and Berlin were reduced to rubble.

Between 13 million and 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the Baltic region, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Two million, mostly women and children, perished in an orgy of murder, rape and massacre that attended that greatest forced exodus in European history.

As a result of the Great Patriotic War, Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia — endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century.

Again, what, exactly, is Bush celebrating in Moscow?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a soldier of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Let us hear from him about what a wonderful cause it was. As for Putin, into whose soul Bush has looked, his position is understandable. From the vantage point of Russian vital interests, the Hitler-Stalin pact was a brilliant coup.

Hitler was on the path to war. The war he wanted was one with the Soviet Union: to kill it, carve it up and put every Bolshevik to the sword. His war was also to be a racist war. Hitler wanted to impose Germanic rule over Slavic peoples.

Stalin, with his pact, redirected Hitler’s Panzers to the west and bought the Red Army two more precious years to prepare for Hitler’s onslaught — years Stalin used well.

How did Stalin succeed?

On March 31, 1939, the British and French — in panic after Hitler drove into Prague without resistance — handed Poland an unsolicited war guarantee they could not honor and did not intend to honor. It was a bluff. But believing in that guarantee, the brave Poles defied Hitler over Danzig, stood and fought, and were crushed, as the British and French hid inside the Maginot Line.

But because they had declared war on him, though they had no plan to attack him, Hitler, in April 1940, invaded Denmark and Norway, and in May, the Low Countries and France. In three weeks, he threw the British army off the continent at Dunkirk, and, in six weeks, crushed France.

Meanwhile, Stalin provided Hitler all the food and fuel he had requested and declared Britain and France to be the aggressors against his Nazi partner.

When Stalin’s turn came and Hitler invaded on June 22, 1941, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, who had negotiated the Hitler-Stalin — or Molotov-Ribbentrop — pact, said plaintively to the German ambassador, “What have we done to deserve this?”

Churchill and FDR rushed to embrace Stalin, gave him everything he demanded and more, and at Tehran and Yalta, ceded to him custody of all the peoples of Eastern Europe and of Poland, for which Britain had gone to war.

What Putin is celebrating is easy to see. But, tell me again: What exactly is our president celebrating in Moscow?

This is something I don’t understand about the way George W. Bush manages political situations, and I only understand a little tiny bit about the way America manages political situations. Bush, and his family dynasty as well, appears to place a great deal of importance on this concept of “political capital”. Like any successful politician, he believes in a “balance” of capital that must be “checked” frequently and accurately, just like the checking account balance of someone who doesn’t wish to be overdrawn. However, when the time comes to spend the political capital, it must be spent big time. Come the end of the “year”, whenever that is, the account balance will be zero no matter what; so you might as well spend as much as you can, or the difference between what was spent and what could have been spent, will be wasted.

George Bush, his father, and close friends of the family have made several comments that help support these viewpoints.

Apparently, someone in the administration feels there is sufficient political capital available to spend on celebrating V.E. Day in Russia, and if this capital is not spent it will be wasted. As I’ve said before: The lowliest Bush has held higher office, has more in the bank, and comes up in Google search results more often, than the most prestigious Freeberg — so who in the hell am I to argue. But I can certainly question, because there is an abundance of things here I do not understand.

Like: Why not simply celebrate Hitler’s removal from power?

And: What in the hell is it with FDR? Let’s re-examine my favorite pet peeve for a second.

Franklin Roosevelt locked up Japanese-Americans and stole their land, because they had Japanese blood. If Roosevelt were a Republican, we would look back on this and say “Ooh, Franklin Roosevelt did a bad thing.” it would be impossible to get a grade school education without being told about this. Any time the name “Roosevelt” was articulated on the news, there would be an obligatory closing-line about Japanese Internment (just as you can’t say “Reagan” without mentioning “Iran-Contra”, or “Nixon” without “Watergate”).

But when we look back on Japanese Internment, that was a bad thing we did. America is ashamed. This doesn’t make too much sense, because at the time our country seems to have been far from united politically on locking these people up. Roosevelt, and those closest to him, were pretty gung-ho about it, but even in his inner circles there was dissention about this move.

And we come to the infamous Yalta conference, wherein accords were reached that would result in 20 million people being exterminated in Soviet gulags. Thanks to President Bush, America is sorry about this even though Franklin Roosevelt is the guy right in the frigging picture.

America stands behind what its leaders do, doesn’t it?

Of course we do.

But it seems the answer to that question varies with the letter that goes in back of that leader’s last name. To those who think we should somehow apologize for removing Saddam Hussein from power, America didn’t do the job, George W. Bush did it, and it was, as the saying goes, “Not In Our Name”. Yet at the same time, we all seem to agree Yalta was a bad move, as was Japanese Internment — and nobody is ready, willing or able to recall that Roosevelt did these things, pretty much on his own, with lackluster-at-best grassroots support.

Which concerns me a lot. The more I read about what happened then versus what is happening now, it appears there were a lot more people opposed to Roosevelt’s policies back then, than toward Bush’s policies today.

We continue to pressure ourselves to apologize for things Roosevelt did. But an apology to the rest of the world is meaningless if our country is not determined to avoid previous mistakes. And the fact of the matter is, if a young, energetic, Democrat with a head chock full of ideas came along, just like Roosevelt did in 1932, we’d elect him in just as big a landslide, and we’d be just as negligent today in checking the new leader’s more questionable decisions, as we were back then.

I can’t stand Roosevelt. You know that old rule about not going shopping for groceries on an empty stomach? Roosevelt is a lesson that we shouldn’t annoint our heroes on an empty stomach. It’s human nature — if you’re starving and your family is starving, and someone comes along and feeds them, you’ll stand behind that guy no matter what he does. In the days to come he can screw things up royally, and you’ll still support him — after he’s dead, you’ll take the fall for everything, after the apologists have run out of things to say, still not blaming your rescuer directly for any of his various gaffes. That’s the mistake we made.

In the final analysis it all comes down to this: You can’t think straight on an empty stomach.

Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit

This car retails for close to a hundred grand. The coolness of the car is not really the topic of conversation here, but just for the record, I do consider this to be a very cool car. Yes, I do admire the car. Yes, I do admire people who own the car — until they park like dipshits and then I don’t. No, I am not jealous of the car. I am jealous of having to walk fifty paces to get to the storefront as opposed to a hundred and fifty paces, as I had to do, because this douchebag chose to double-park.

I say chose. That should be proven just from the photograph, but there are some additional factors you don’t see here.

• The parking lot was not empty. It was quite full.
• The owner/driver and his girlfriend were right friggin’ there and decided to climb in and get ready to depart as I approached — they were clearly aware that people like me had been inconvenienced, and I was about to do or say something.

You can barely see the top of the owner’s head. He’s watching me in the rear view mirror, wondering what I’m doing. I loved this part. He couldn’t quite start up & pull out, because I was standing slightly in the way. The look on his face was priceless. What’s this guy in back of me doing? He seems to be taking a picture with his cell phone. Is he going to report me? Is it illegal to park like this? Gee I don’t know, maybe it is, oh shit.

I didn’t confront anybody. The few seconds of squirming around was revenge enough for a piddly hundred unnecessary paces on my part. Your car costs ninety grand, my phone costs four hundred dollars. Your cool car can’t take a picture of my cool phone, but guess what…+click+

Oh and one other thing douchebag. You want your precious Viper to not get scratched when you go to the mall? VERY reasonable concern. Here’s a tip, asshole. TAKE A 1983 DATSUN!!! Leave the Viper in the garage. You MORON.

Oh, and uh…nice car.

Shut Up And Bring Him A Cold One

This is actually a wonderful story. A swiss couple has just completed a five-year marathon around the world for charity. But all you guys who think marathon-running women are hot, are in for a big disappointment. According to the article, the hubby ran, the wife rode a scooter.

The Swiss husband-and-wife team of Serge and Nicole Roetheli have completed a five-year marathon around the world to collect funds for charity.

They arrived back in their hometown of Saillon in canton Valais on Saturday, after Serge had run over 40,000 kilometres, and raising SFr300,000 ($250,000) in the process.

The couple set off on their round-the-world trip on February 13, 2000. Five years later, they are back where it all began after travelling across five continents.

“We wanted to be free, have an adventure as a couple and help children in need,” said Serge shortly before arriving home. “Now it�s time to share our experiences with other people.”

While the runner slogged his way along the planet�s roads, his wife was right beside him, riding on a scooter or a motorbike with a trailer containing all their gear.

“There�s no way I would have started this without Nicole,” Serge told swissinfo. “It�s something we began together and we will finish it together.”

The hardest thing was simply running, said Serge, who was covering marathon distances six days a week.

If I’m that husband, there are a few rules for resuming “normal” life again. If it’s Friday night and we’re having the classic argument about going out dancing versus staying home, and I’m the one who wants to stay home, we’re staying. And when I say “while you’re in there can you get me a beer?” the question-mark on the end is only a courtesy. Bring it and pop it open for me. If we’re out, go buy some.

Twenty-seven thousand MILES, five years, me on foot, her in a scooter. Normally I think with the right woman, I’m pretty good at avoiding arguments. But by the morning of day three, I’d be looking at her kind of funny. This guy must be a Saint.

Now he’s got the ultimate trump card, too. Pick up some milk on the way home from work? I don’t think so, cupcake. Use your scooter.

I Am…Rabies

Which Horrible Affliction are you?
A Rum and Monkey disease.

Humor That’s Not Funny

I was listening to Michael Savage take a call defending Laura Bush’s roasting of her own husband, President Bush. The caller chose to use what I guess is the only thing you could possibly say for the First Lady, the tried-and-true “aw gee whiz, can’t ya take a joke” defense, and it occurred to me we collectively have a serious problem today that goes far beyond the jocular realm of joking and roasting.

See, from the transcripts I’ve read, Laura Bush’s jokes were not only abusive, but they simply weren’t funny — at least, not to anyone who wasn’t already bearing hostile passions toward the President at the moment Laura Bush seized the stage. Particularly bothersome was the caller’s cavalier comment, “I don’t know of any wives who don’t make fun of their husbands once in awhile.” There is no middle ground on this. If you accept that ridiculing a husband is an indispensible part of marriage, Laura Bush only did what was natural, vital to a happy marriage, and indeed, what was long overdue. On the other hand, if you accept that some wives do *not* do this, then Laura’s behavior has been stripped of not only any defense it had, but any defense it possibly *could* have. Other married women respect their husbands; why can’t she?

And that illustrates why, although humor is ordinarily a private matter, this brand of it must be everybody’s business. If most people are in agreement with this caller, or if most people are merely sympathetic to what the caller said, I’m pretty sure I’ve been married for the last time. Marriage is a state of existence where ignoring what other people think, and *how* other people think, is a luxury you’ve given up forever. Your sense of humor is everybody else’s business, and their is yours. Jokes about being a “Desperate Housewife,” at the expense of your husband, are not harmless fun and they’re certainly not normal. I don’t care what anybody says, if this is an integral part of matrimony these days, count me out.

To those who would then accuse me of being humorless, I guess my response would have to be, at least in this one facet of comedy under discussion, you’re right.

I would then have to ask, are there any other ways to make people laugh? If not, then who exactly is it who lacks a sense of humor?

Humor is at its best when, if it is being used as a political weapon, this hostile purpose is relegated to a distant second-place status; the primary motive for the humor should be to entertain. Comedians ignore this rule at the expense of comedic value. To illustrate this, let’s take an example with a target I’d personally find delicious, Bill Clinton.

I say “You know why Hillary is so mad at Bill all the time? He makes her wear flat shoes in public so she doesn’t tower over him.” That was a classic joke about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman when they were splitting up. A little on the mean side, not really knee-slapper material, but with Cruise/Kidman it has some humor in it because it connects to something widely understood about the targets. While his ex-wife is known for her regal, statuesque form (imdb biography lists her at 5′ 10�”), Tom Cruise is vertically compromised. Bill Clinton, at 6’2″, is not. With Cruise the joke is funny, with Clinton it isn’t. The Clinton joke, used in front of an audience of people who can’t stand Bill Clinton, like me, remains unfunny.

Suppose for the sake of argument, Hillary were to vouch for the anecdote that Bill makes her wear flats. This would make my hypothetical more similar to the unfortunate roasting event; Intellectually, you’d then have to accept it. She’s still his wife; who the hell would *you* be to contradict her? But here’s the kicker: Even then, the joke wouldn’t be funny. To worry about women towering over him, especially his own wife, is not Bill’s rep. To be told what kind of footwear to put on, by some guy, certainly is not Hillary’s.

So if such an expose came about, it would be heavy on the “oh my gosh” and extremely light on the “ha, ha”. It would not be humorous, and the only reason to laugh at such a thing would be out of petty meanness. It is human nature that to all of us at some time, and perhaps to some of us all the time, petty meanness can feel pretty good. By all accounts, this becomes a part of life inside the beltway. But all things that feel good, are not necessarily humor.

That’s the trouble I have with Laura’s “jokes”. Sure they drew laughter, but the material failed to connect with anything in the President’s “rep” save for this tidbit about going to bed early. Compare that to the howlers involving things the President actually did, for example, talking about putting food on your family, or injuring himself while eating pretzels. Out of necessity, then, any laughter rewarding Laura Bush had to be one part titter-titter and about eight to ten parts just-plain-mean.

Perhaps the time has come to admit something. The business activity — that is precisely what it is — of drawing political blood from political opponents in public, political settings, has been looking for shelter after shelter lately, like an ugly, vicious, venemous spider looking for a dark place. It has found a particularly suitable refuge in humor, where, when meanness is accused of being meanness, meanness can then lash back with the almost foolproof “can’t you take a joke” defense.

I say, for the sake of our collective intellectual health, if a joke passes the “being mean” test and fails the “being funny” test, let’s call it what it is. Surely that’s not an extreme position to take.

One other thing; I take it as a given, until it’s proven to me otherwise, that the woman who called Michael Savage is far, far in the majority with her idiotic ideas about how wives should treat their husbands. If you conduct a poll, especially among women, she is right and I am wrong. Any of you single, lusty women who are smarter than I am in this way, do me a favor. I’m big and fat and ugly and I never smile and I thoroughly lack what you think is “humor”. To ensure the happiness of all of us, let’s play a game where I’m Michael Corleone and you’re Fredo. You go someplace where you think I might be, let me know a day in advance so I won’t be there. And for God’s sake, stop hitting on me.

Hot Elephant Sex!

More Republicans are happy or extremely happy with their sex lives, they’re more likely to wear something sexy to enhance the experience, more likely to be enjoying a committed relationship with a significant other, and they’re less likely than Democrats to fake an orgasm.

Explanation? Democrats are bad people. Good explanation I’d actually bet something on? Well… honestly, I’d have to suppose some better-quality thinking is in order.

I notice in the realm of economics, the thinking of Republicans and Democrats is significantly different. Over the years I have noticed when I discuss economic issues with Democrats, often they will ask what I make every year, add ten thousand to that number, and promise me I will never, ever, ever, ever make more than that number in my entire life. I have yet to meet a Republican who will do anything remotely like this — Republicans, if they promise me anything, make assurances I will make a fortune, lose it all, make it back again, lose it again, etc. Or if I won’t, then they will.

This simplifies things grossly, but still, I believe, summarizes the situation usefully: Democrats think circumstances are inseparably welded to people, whereas Republicans think circumstances are inseparably welded to the things people do — which the people can change any split second, just by deciding to do so. What this has to do with the improvement of your sex life over time, especially with a particular partner, should be obvious. Great lovers are made more than they are born.

And as I’m often fond of pointing out in my more childish and crude moments, for reasons that escape me, Democrats overall seem to have some prurient fascination with sexual positions and activities that do not result in the woman having a climax. They like to have Surgeons General who push masturbation on school children, they worship male Presidents who receive oral sex from female interns and then lie about it, they like men who are uncertain about their sexual identities to jump over the fence and beef up the statistics of the homosexual population. They shower celebrity status upon certain families whose surname rhymes with “Pxlfefennedy”, in which husbands knock up wives eight times or more in rapid succession, and then take off for a long string of sweet young things in spiked heels that don’t smell like baby vomit or fabric softener.

For a party that is supposed to be concerned with womens’ liberation, they don’t strike me as overly preoccupied with the woman actually having a good time.

Anyway, it makes sense. If something’s wrong in your bedroom, and money-wise you actually believe people are born with letters branded on their foreheads like “R” for rich and “P” for poor and are going to their graves in whatever economic circumstances they’re in…AND you don’t think that highly of giving women fun to begin with…how likely are you, really, to fix what’s busted in the bedroom?

I know there are some silly spots in what’s written above…but I just can’t think of anything that would be more “accepted” (in other words, dry) and still explain these patterns. Maybe someone else can.

People Stacker vs. Greyhound Hopper

Continuing the theme about how we’re “all” getting sick and tired of hearing about runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, appropriately enough perhaps, but at the wrong time — just when it is becoming really newsworthy:

How many people really, truly, in their heart of hearts, actually want to know more about Abu Ghraib and the ongoing legal workings of Lynndie England’s trial?

I’d like to know more about Wilbanks and a lot less about Abu Ghraib. But I recognize that I’m not a representative sample. “Most” people, I suppose, are more or less equally curious about & equally saturated with both stories. And yet, the coverage of both stories has not been equal. The notion that we should “move on” from the Wilbanks affair, now that the bride has been exposed as a liar, seems to me to be kind of…pressured. Artificial. Thank goodness Jennifer is okay, but Lord knows, if she just stayed missing and nothing else happened here, we were set to hear about this day in day out, month in and month out. Now a “just another missing person” story has been transformed into a fascinating expose of a shameless sociopath, which could benefit us all. Whoops, we’re tired, nothing to see here.

The story does have a limited lifespan, but that’s because people understand the key players here are strange, superficial, probably of limited intellect and probably not the kind of people you want to study for too long. This is why there’s not much demand for a three-hour special episode of “Jerry Springer”. Strange people are like ice cream; fun to consume for, maybe, a few minutes and then after that you want to stop.

And yet, what exactly would you call Abu Ghraib?

The coverage goes on and on and on, about every little detail…save the one that is most important. The one thing that is under-reported in Abu Ghraib, that I would like to know more about, is the notion that privates and specialists were ordered to do things that may have violated international treaties, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and then plausible deniability was preserved so that the people who dirtied their hands could be blamed for everything.

So a story that makes America look bad, is overplayed, except for the part about lying.

Another story about a missing bride, was all set to be overplayed, until the story became all about lying. Now the satellite trucks are packed up & moved out.

But based on my face-to-face discussions with people…”real” people, who are much more tuned-in to what “most” people think than I can ever be…I don’t see much correlation between what people want to know about, and the decisions that these editors are making about what readers will read and what television viewers will see.

It doesn’t look like marketing research at all. Nothing grassroots about it. It looks so from-the-top-down. So forced. So phony.

In fact, the last time the elites lectured to us commoners so shamelessly about what it was we wanted to know, and what it was we didn’t want to know…the first thing I can recall is this thing about not having sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. Private matter, move on, nothing to see here. Every story is fascinating until it morphs into a story about lying.

You know what I think is happening here?

I think this country is about to become a place where the practice of lying, in any shape, form, size, intention or motive…is shunned. Where there is thought to be no acceptable excuse for telling a lie, especially to large numbers of people. Where once a person, especially a public figure, is exposed as a liar, people never, ever listen to what that person has to say, ever again.

Where, Republican or Democrat, a person caught deliberately telling a lie, is greeted with about as much widespread sympathy as…someone burning a cross on a neighbor’s lawn.

We’re teetering on the brink of “falling” into that “abyss”. What a wonderful thing that would be, to at least have some universal agreement that truth is good and lying is bad. That lies can be dangerous things, at least as dangerous as…let’s say…tobacco.

And that prospect absolutely terrifies people who are responsible for reporting the news.

How much news have we experienced in the last quarter century — especially the bad kind of news, which makes the most money for those who deliver it — resulting directly from liars being believed?

No, if you do anything at all with reporting the news, you can’t afford to work in a culture where people recognize the danger of a lie and act accordingly. News people are paid on commission. No bad news, the paychecks get smaller. People-at-large make rational, adult decisions based on trusting the trustworthy and doubting the known liars, and before you know it, there is less bad news. Anything that might possibly lead to a national dialog on the high expense of lies, and the danger to human life that results from lying, must be avoided.

Ergo. Jennifer is missing and may be dead, the masses must be “instructed” that they are fascinated with this story, even after the prospect of additional “news” within the story becomes remote. Jennifer is found and revealed to have fabricated the whole thing, you “instruct” the masses that they are fed up, exhausted, and ready to move on.

You doubt me?

How many times last year did you hear “Bush lied, people died”? A lot, right?

How many times did you hear an explanation of what, exactly, the lie was?

Whoa…crickets are chirping.