Other Places

I think so:

So if this little beer bash accomplished anything -- besides boosting the market share of Bud Light, Bucklers, Sam Adams, and Blue Moon beers -- it may get the cop and the prof in other places like Toledo or Albuquerque or Miami to sit down and talk.

Southern Issues

Um, South, could you do something about this?

Beaked Squid

Digby writes about all the slack-jawed coverage of BeerFest 2009:

Hasn't a shark bitten someone lately? I know there have been giant beaked squid in San Diego. Would that do? Please?

Cut Out

I love those guys over at Blogs For Victory (formerly Blogs For Bush). No one really leans into it quite like they do.

It’s nice to see Americans waking up to Obama’s partisanship and lack of leadership. He claimed to be a uniter, but has proven to be more divisive than any of his predecessors.

Just goes to show you that anyone can read off a teleprompter… but some people just aren’t cut out to be president. And Barack Obama has shown that he is really just an Illinois state senator playing a president on TV… and a really bad one at that.

Don't forget to pick yourself up a nice "HOPE for Terrorists" banner ad while you're there!

One Leader

Republican House minority whip Eric Cantor:

At last count, there were at least 32 active czars that we knew of, meaning the current administration has more czars than Imperial Russia.

Matthew Yglesias:

The thing about Imperial Russia is that as a centralized autocracy it only had one czar. Having multiple people in positions of authority makes a political system less, rather than more, autocratic. Consider, “under Hitler, Germany had only one Fuhrer, but in the contemporary United States there are dozens of important political leaders.” Do you find that idea alarming? Are we worse than the Nazis? Of course not.

Pieces

What happens when your stories get mixed up? You just assert that everything's fine.

Michael Warren, a Collegiate Network intern at National Review, writes:

Blue Moon has an unwarranted reputation for being less manly than your average brew, but leave it to Crowley, the tough cop, to blast that stigma to pieces.

Um, okay?

The Country Awaits Obama's Shopping Trip

How surreal is this?



From a tweet by Mark Knoller:

Here's the scene in the Kroger's (near deli counter) of Obama event. (Photo by CBS' Susan Harmon.)

guntotinglibertarian

After Glenn Beck called the President a "racist" yesterday morning, Bill Shine, SVP of Programming told TVNewser, "During Fox & Friends this morning, Glenn Beck expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel. And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions."

This was posted over at conservative blog Hot Air, where the comments are just horrifying. For example:

Go, Glenn

The truth is what it is.

Ogabe hates white America.

guntotinglibertarian on July 28, 2009 at 10:36 PM

Or:

The Precedent wants to exact revenge on whites, the successful, and the West. It’s all very obvious and it would be nice if people stopped acting as if they didn’t see it and started talking about the reality we are living with.

progressoverpeace on July 28, 2009 at 11:07 PM

Some serious violent undertones going on here.

Again, you can't blame the blog for this, but, as Pam notes, the race-stoking is getting out of control across the board of the remnants of the so-called conservative movement.

Ten Times

Ladies and gentlemen...



Bill O'Reilly!

Bill O'Reilly: Here are the letters. Peter Gillies, Victoria, Canada: "Has anyone noticed that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?" Well, that's to be expected, Peter, because we have ten times as many people as you do. That translates to ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.

Teaching the people!

(via)

Drow vs Mind Flayer

If you don't know what a Mind Flayer is, you may skip this post. If you do, read on...

Although I'm not very active in it, I am a whole-life fan of most all things D&D and fantasy. I've often gotten a kick out of Jon Schindette's blog. Jon is the Senior Art Director for Dungeons & Dragons (with Wizards of the Coast), and he posts often about the world of fantasy and game art, how to be a part of the business, what he looks for, etc, etc.

Today he has posted the submissions from challenge he set up last week.

The topic: Drow vs. Mind Flayer.

Lots of fun candidates (and certainly some clunkers). Many where I loved one character but not the other. This one, #14 (he posted the submissions with just numbers, not names), is my favorite overall:



Artists were also required to submit their entries with a book template overlay.


Check out the whole gallery!

Electronic Jesus

I really hated when Dan Lyons had his whiny little personal blog for a year, but he's been back for a bit as Fake Steve and, truly, this is his calling:

We told you we didn't care about the netbook market, so you went ahead with your plans, but now we're about to put you out of business -- iTablet is in the final stages, which means Apple will be taking over the market you created and then reinventing it in such a way that it immediately becomes 10 times bigger than it used to be, and all the money goes to Apple.

Honestly, Apple faithful, I feel like Jesus coming down from Mount Zion with those stone tablets. Except my tablet is electronic, which Katie says makes me Electronic Jesus.

War Pron

The "WHERES AR PATRIOTZ??!" talk continues at NRO with this from Maggie Gallagher:

The best evidence for the bias of Hollywood is the absence of films that encourage and reward patriotism.  I don't mind the presence of lefty anti-war films. They just make me mad because they remind me of the huge, gaping absence of films celebrating the heroism of men at war.

Where are my generation's World War II films? 

People are hungry for heroism.  Why is this market niche so persistently never filled, or diverted into comic book characters?

It's very hard to explain.

What happened to our feel-good war movies?

Very True

I wrote earlier today about Jonah Goldberg complaining that GI Joe wasn't going to be USA USA PATRIOTIC!!! enough for his taste, and joked that he probably liked True Lies, a fucking racist pile of shit.

And...along comes his co-NRO'er, Stephen Spruiell, holding that movie up like it's some kind of wingnut manifesto. Perhaps it's more important to them than Red Dawn?

Iron Man made strides in terms of Hollywood's ability, post True Lies, to depict Islamic jihadists as unambiguously bad guys and not would-be goatherders radicalized by Bush's refusal to sign Kyoto. But don't forget that the main bad guy in that movie was still a corporate fat cat. It's like they're trying really hard — but not quite getting there.

Above: Bad Guy

No!

Of course it was Bachmann.

Inhofe Says Fuck It

Why do we even bother anymore?

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe says that oil and gas usage doesn’t create any pollution.

Proud, OK?

Edroso Explores The Depths For You

I highly recommend Roy Edroso's regular column "Exploring The Right Wing." His latest, Rightbloggers Will Tell You Who The Real Racists Are in the Henry Louis Gates Case, is full of gems like these:

At American Spectator, William Tucker recalled being unfairly challenged by a transit cop for bringing his bike on the New York subway; though this is perfectly legal, Tucker meekly acceded to "the gun and the legal authority" of the cop. This demonstrates to Tucker that "Gates is an egotist" who probably wanted to be arrested.

Intellectual Conservative finally offered what we may take as the definitive rightblogger legal analysis: "Being a 'black man in America' does not grant you the right to be obnoxious."

All this bodes ill for the Resistance if Obama uses the police to implement his liberal fascist agenda in America. Maybe they'll find a way to resist politely enough to evade arrest.

American Power attacked Gates from a sociological angle. In the disordered mind of Gates, he said, "'The Man' is always getting down on the black dude. But those dudes commit the most crimes, and profiling is perfectly legitimate as a crimefighting tool when the odds are that a certain demographic is prone to particular types of criminal activity." He offered further evidence: "I frankly can understand the fears of people flying cross-continental airliners when they see Middle Eastern and Muslim passengers on board." You see the connection: Maybe the officer mistook Gates' bronchitic rasp for a call to jihad.

Slate's Mickey Kaus pioneered what became a popular theme: that contrary to Gates' claim of police discrimination on account of his race, it was actually Gates who "has stereotypes" about policemen. "Isn't it pretty clear that Gates had a narrative in his head too?" he said. "...Again, from his own words it looks like he rushes a bit to the conclusion that a white man in a similar situation would have been treated differently." One wonders where Professor Gates got such an idea. Maybe as a Professor of African American Studies, he read it somewhere. (Patterico seconded: "The Officer Didn't Stereotype Henry Louis Gates -- Henry Louis Gates Stereotyped the Officer.")

The original contains the links to each of these posts.

All We Need Is Him

Jonah thinks that he's a hero that just needs to stand up and say "hey, you guys, you'd better start making our heroes SUPER-PATRIOTS again, you hear me??"

I bet he loves True Lies.

Jonah's "Profound" Protest

Jonah Goldberg gets an email from a reader thanking him for his courage:

I just want to thank you, belatedly, for the inspiration (courage?) you gave me a few years back, to simply use a paper towel to open a bathroom door and to leave the paper towel on the floor if no wastebasket is provided.  At my law firm’s office building, and many other buildings that I frequent (and in which I’ve left paper towels on the floor), wastebaskets have been provided next to the bathroom doors within a few weeks of my first paper-towel drop.  And the group dynamic is fascinating.  At my office building, I had never seen a paper towel on the floor before I first dropped one there.  But in the few weeks between my first “drop,” and management’s placement of a wastebasket, there were probably 15 or so paper towels a day dropped next to the door.

I doubt you started the practice. But many San Diegans who now enjoy wastebaskets by the bathroom door in buildings across the city are unknowingly indebted to your publicity of this simple, yet profound, form of protest against unsanitary property-management practices.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Beware the "Don't Litter" Fascists!

Clearly the best way to request a trash can for your building's public bathroom is to drop a dirty paper towel on the ground.

When do we get to give these people their own state to run as they see fit?

"Purchased"

I agree with Tristero:

Merely promising to give up control is not enough. It must be impossible to alter the content of a book, magazine, newspaper, etc once a user has purchased it, for any reason whatsoever.

Oops

As we say on the internetz, hawwwesome!

A database update from AVG over the weekend made the Windows antivirus software attack users' iTunes installations, mistakenly viewing the application's library files as a Trojan virus and placing them in quarantine.

Foreign Beer

For the record:

Incidentally, asked at the White House press gaggle this morning which beers the president and his guests would likely be drinking, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs noted that the President hoisted a Budweiser at the All-Star Game (natch; he was in St. Louis) while Sgt. Crowley told the president he was more partial to Blue Moon.

Gates told the Boston Globe he likes Red Stripe and Beck's, but the White House doesn’t stock foreign beer.

Inclusive Exuberance

The official marketing agency proposal for Microsoft's upcoming retail stores describes their overall "value proposition" as "Inclusive Exuberance."

The Answer Is No

Matt Barber proves my old adage that if the headline of a wingnut article is a question, the answer is no.

Matt's article is called Is There a Co-Pay with Forced Abortion?, and it ends this way:

Forced abortion? Compulsory sterilization? Well, maybe not yet, but is it really that much of a stretch?

Just Helping

Is that so, Rich Tucker?

There’s a reason the officer wanted Gates to come out of the house, and it’s not so he could pistol whip him (if not worse). It’s so the police could check the house and make sure there wasn’t anyone else -- an intruder -- there.

If Michele Bachmann is Busy, Be Sure to Consult Package of Mixed Salted Nuts

Last night I talked to a guy who claimed the health care bill would force you to get government insurance if you switched jobs, "and it says so right on page 16."

Where had I heard that? Oh yeah! Noted loon and Repub Congresswoman for Minnesota Michele Bachmann, that's where! Except she claimed you'd be forced off your private plan after 5 years. Ah, tomato-tomahto.

I'm still reeling a little bit. Crazy Michele Bachmann produced a meme? That someone real actually believed? Someone who considers himself a newshound? Astounding.

Actually, his argument is more like this Investor's Business Daily editorial from last week--after Bachmann's comment--which builds a full page of text upon one funny-obvious misreading.

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

What does page 16 actually say? It says that after 5 years, employer-provided health insurance plans must meet the same standards as plans that will be sold through the new exchange. So, in a way, you won't have exactly the same plan. But I guess arguing about what standards our insurance should meet is a bit boring compared to FREAKINGOUTTHEDEMSGONNACONTROLMYLIFE.

(b) Grace Period for Current Employment-based Health Plans-

(1) GRACE PERIOD-

(A) IN GENERAL- The Commissioner shall establish a grace period whereby, for plan years beginning after the end of the 5-year period beginning with Y1, an employment-based health plan in operation as of the day before the first day of Y1 must meet the same requirements as apply to a qualified health benefits plan under section 101, including the essential benefit package requirement under section 121.

UPDATE: Dang Thomas link isn't working. To find the bill and the electronic text of page 16, search here (by bill number) for H.R.3200 and click on "Sec. 102 Protecting the choice to keep current coverage."

Enjoying The Benefits

publius:

Every single Democrat -- every single one -- is currently enjoying the benefits of campaign promises to fix health care.  The Democratic Party has made it a goal for decades to fix health care coverage in this country.  The issue is intricately tied up with the "brand" in a way that few issues are.  The party advantages on this issue not only helped get Obama elected, it helped the Democrats secure big majorities -- the fruits of which all of them are enjoying, including the most conservative ones.

And so now the question is -- to put it bluntly -- whether the Democratic Party is one giant fraud.  Is this an issue that Democrats really care about?  Is it something they're willing to fight for?  Are they willing to put aside the normal idiocy of legislative sausage-making, and I-want-mine-ism?  Or is it just a campaign promise they roll out in the fall to help beat Republicans so that they can go about raising money? 

Undeserving

Hey, wingnuts, I can't remember - is it that Obama's not cool and thus undeserving of respect or that he's a "beefcake" that is thus undeserving of respect?

Nobody Does Hypocrisy Like The NY Post

Gawker on how the NY Post posted a slideshow of the voyeur images it was ostensibly denouncing.

Words are simply not sufficient to express the New York Post's fury at this perverted, unnatural desecration. No, it will take a slide show of images from the nude video for the Post to properly communicate how livid it is at this breakdown of all that is good and moral. The powerful caption, accompanied by three Erin Andrews nooodddzzzzz:

VIOLATION: ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews (above) was the innocent victim of a perv-cam-wielding sicko who secretly took these images of her in her hotel room and posted them online.

The New York Post is both nauseated and indignant.

"A Very High Status Guy Trying To Bully The Cop"

The story of Professor Henry Louis Gates being arrested as he tried to get into his own home is horrifying and shameful.

But I'm sure everyone's wondering: what does Jonah Goldberg think?

Lots of email has come in since last night when I posted about Henry Louis Gates' arrest. The responses from readers are interesting in that they reflect a divide running through conservatives I've noticed before. About half the readers think Gates' is hilariously in the wrong. The other half, give or take, think that the cop was transparently to blame for the whole mess. That's a gross generalization of several dozen emails, but I think it reflects how conservatives, like Americans generally, are of two views when it comes to cops. One side is inclined to distrust them, see them as potential abusers of authority —  mere men with badges and guns. Another side is deferential to police. That is not to say they condone abuse or sanction cops being above the law. But they give cops the benefit of the doubt for a host of reasons.

I'm more in the latter camp. I think being a cop is a very tough job, requiring a lot of patience and decency, with lots of headaches. And, I believe that citizens should err on the side of trying to make cops' jobs a little easier.  Yes, I've had confrontations with police before and I don't think they were always in the right. But as a matter of instinct, that's where I come down. But I know plenty of conservatives — including many relatives — who instantly assume the cops are just taking advantage of a little power and are loathe to defer to them.

I don't think this divide is unique to conservatives. As I say, I think it runs straight through the American, and, no doubt,  human heart. But it's interesting in this context because I think conservatives are expected to be far more deferential to law enforcement. And, when I read the Gates' police report, I immediately sympathized with the cop who had to deal with a very high status guy trying to bully the cop in part by accusing him — unfairly, by my lights —  of racism. It's very interesting to read lots of conservatives offer good faith disagreements.

What an ass.

I'm Being Sarcastic

Thanks, Microsoft, for bringing us "Advertars." I like Spencer's description of the horror:

Imagine playing a MMO. Now imagine playing the same game with a color changing Zune avatar and the Trix Rabbit shouting “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!” during a raid.

Isn't Anything Like A Funeral

Jed Lewison:

Look, Mark [Sanford], I don't know if you've ever been to a funeral, but what you've been through over the past few weeks -- a five-day vacation with your mistress in Argentina and another five-day vacation with your wife in an undisclosed location (all the while pulling down a fat paycheck) -- isn't anything like a funeral.

2 Pound Frozen Ham Sliced, The End

Hopefully this will be the end of the ham story:

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack just issued a statement referring to the $100 million available to the states for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) through the stimulus bill. TEFAP, he said, "acquires food that is distributed to local organizations that assist the needy – including food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens."

Said Vilsack: "The Recovery Act funds referenced in press reports allowed states to purchase ham, cheese and dairy products for these food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries that provide assistance to people who otherwise do not have access to food. This program will help reduce hunger of those hardest hit by the current economic recession. The references to '2 pound frozen ham sliced' are to the sizes of the packaging.  Press reports suggesting that the Recovery Act spent $1.191 million to buy “2 pounds of ham” are wrong. In fact, the contract in question purchased 760,000 pounds of ham for $1.191m, at a cost of approximately $1.50 per pound.

Can y'all shut the fuck up now? Let's get back to talking about Sarah Palin's hair, 'mkay?

AREN'T

RedState explains that mmpff, grgrlg, bwuh?

But, like in 2001, the terrorists have underestimated who the American People are. I’ll note briefly who they AREN’T: Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Code Pink and their friends.

First...

Mark Sanford is back talking publicly again, and he's sure got his priorities straight:

While there have been lifetimes of lessons learned over the past weeks, three things most immediately come to mind:

• One, forgiveness and grace really do matter...

So, the first thing that comes to your mind here is what everyone besides you needs to do?

Shorter GOP

Please don't damage the wonderful health care system we have in America!

At Least

Amazon has still lost a great deal of goodwill in the recent "deleting sold books" incident, but at least they are now saying this:

"We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."

Fed Up

Jesse Taylor:

Post-racialism’s advocates usually fall into two broad camps: minority advocates who want us to move past the restrictive effects of race on society, and racist white people who are really fed up with having to restrain their awesome jokes about how Sasha Obama crip walks to school every day.  Post-racialism can only work with a full and complete understanding of race’s effects on society coupled with a conscious effort to remedy those effects; anything else is just providing cover to racism.

"Poor Command of English"

I do not hold the blog itself responsible for what commenters say. But I will say this this post from DrewM at Ace of Spades, itself a bit of denialist optimism, has definitely brought the crazy in their commenters. I particularly like this one:



This seems like just the kind of "oh my God, you're wrong on everything" kind of perspectives that I wouldn't know what to do if I met on the street.

"No safeguards again letting the unqualified attain positions of power?" Instead of having 17 of the 100 democratically chosen political leaders of our country meet for 4 days of hearings in preparation to ultimately vote themselves on this position, perhaps we could improve the process by providing Arbalest with final veto power?

Beer Or Not

Jonathan Chait:

Dylan's terrific dissection of Politico's unspeakably dumb story, which reports that President Obama is "under scrutiny" for being spotted drinking a beer at sports events and other non-work occassions, reminds me of something. Remember last year, when Obama was under scrutiny for his alleged aversion to beer?

Grateful

I'm sure she's ever so grateful for their judgement.

"Big John" Cornyn Doesn't Play To Emotions

No identity politics here, move along...

Curiosity

Joan Walsh:

[M]y Caucasian certainty about our new era of race relations, as whites become a minority group, has been shaken watching the way Republicans have treated Sotomayor in these three days -- as an exotic, hot-tempered curiosity who isn't quite like the rest of us, and whose 17 years of legal rulings matter far less than the words she uses to encourage minority law students. These three days show we haven't come that far at all.

I can't say it any better than Mike Madden, who's live-blogging the Sotomayor hearings today: "So far, it's been remarkable to watch the GOP bash Sotomayor for saying she'd have empathy with some people because of her background and life experience, and also bash her for not having empathy with the firefighters in the Ricci case."

I'm confident Sotomayor will survive her grilling, but seriously, with leadership like this, the GOP might not survive as a national party. 

Pesky Back Hair from Doug TenNapel

This, from Breitbart's Haunted Clown Toilet of Angry Sad, may well be the greatest wingnut post of all time:

I Now Pronounce You Government and Wife
A new Gallup poll shows that married people are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. The propensity for marriage among Republicans was the same regardless of race or age groups. So this is my formal call to all single Democrats who want to get married; it’s time to change your party affiliation or you’ll go through life alone, or worse, with some flaky narcissist with commitment issues.

We all pretty much know that most Democrats can’t be trusted and that’s reflected in this marriage poll. It’s not that Democrat women are ugly, because we’ve seen too many cute ones out there. The men aren’t hideous either, unless you think a soft, effeminate man hen-pecked his whole life by his domineering mother is hideous. The main reason people don’t get married is out of a fear of divorce– a fear of a breaking of vows. And Democrats talk with their feet when it comes to making commitments with those who philosophically have no grounding to keep any commitment. Did Obama shut down Gitmo? Will he get health reform finished before August recess? Is he going to cut taxes for most Americans?

I go to dinner with a bunch of Hollywood Republicans every month or so and I’ll tell you one thing, the women are easy on the eyes, none more conservative or good looking than my Beloved. Republican women are happy, they don’t mope around like victims or screech about how terrible men are for being men. The men at these get-togethers are happier and generally sport less hair product. Married men are polled to have more sex and more satisfying sex than singles so Republican men have another great quality over their unmarried Democrat counterparts.

Marriage works better for Republicans because how long can a relationship last when victimhood and class struggle are the stock and trade of the household? Every married couple will champion the virtues of personal responsibility which is alien to the donkey platform.

Finally, what Democrat needs a spouse when the government is the head of the house? The federal open wallet makes for a provider of food, housing, education and PBS without all that pesky back hair.

(my emphasis - so hard to pick a best part!)

Better Yet, Soccer

Rachel Abrams at Weekly Standard thinks Obama had no place at an American Baseball game, being such a Euro fag:

And second, he may have thrown out the first pitch wearing a Chicago White Sox jacket ("My wife thinks I look cute in it"), but there was nothing in his cool aspect or his broadcast-booth blarney to suggest a true love for the game, like that of, say, our 43rd president. This guy should stick to golfing, or, better yet, to kicking a soccer ball around the White House lawn. It suits him: more Europeanish, less Americanish.

Everything they see with their eyes is a lie - they still know his secret non-Americanness.

MeMe Roth is a Horrible Person

Christ! MeMe Roth is a horrible person.

Auto-Tune the News #6: Michael Jackson. drugs. Palin.

I've resisted this for a while, but give it at least a couple minutes of your time. Shit's hilarious and unlike anything else I've ever experienced.

"Real"

Another lazy article about there being "two sides to every story," this from Newsweek:

Meet The Sotomayors

One is a Latina firebrand, the other a model of judicial restraint. It's the latter who will appear before the senate judiciary committee. But it's the former, conservative critics fear, who will sit on the highest court in the land. Will the real Sonia Sotomayor please stand up?

Nitpick

Inspired by a review of Meghan McArdle, DougJ asks:

But—and I know I’m obsessed with this—why does contrarian concern trolling of liberal policies have to be the dominant mode of so much of the punditocracy? I understand the value of one or two New Republic-type columnists but why do there to be thousands? And why is that when a more-or-less exact replica of dozens of other contrarian concern trolls appears, that replica is greeted as a “fresh voice”?

I’m willing to offer one possible explanation: conservativism is so intellectually bereft that there’s no way to even discuss its positions without laughing, so the default smart-ass position is to nitpick at liberals. But I still don’t think that explains why there is so much of this stuff and why pissing off liberals is considered so important.

Six Percent

Pew Research poll says only 5% 6% of scientists call themselves Republican.

Update: INSTAPUTZ:

When 94% of an entire class of well-educated professionals has summarily rejected your party, you're in big, big trouble.

(I also fixed the number I had posted from 5 to 6)

We All Know

Are you fucking kidding me, John?

McCain said a special investigation would only publicize "bad things" that harm America's image in the world.

"We all know that the operatives who did it, most likely, were under orders to do it," McCain said.

"Do we want America's image harmed by dragging this out further and further?" he continued, calling photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq the "greatest recruiting tool" for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

John says "we all know" who did it, and that they were "under orders to do it," then who, dear John, gave those orders? We can prosecute them and close up this investigation nice and neat, sparing you the "embarrassment" of an investigation.

Clearly you'd never want to embarrass America.

Great Idea, Eric

Any political coalition in America would be proud to have Eric Dondero on their side:

While it may be too late to revoke Barack Hussein Obama's hold on the Presidency, it is not too late to make the issue of his birth outside of the United States, most likely in Kenya, an issue for Campaign 2012.

From Zero To Wingnut in Three Paragraphs

Here's some serious high-grade wingnuttery from one Paul A. Ibbetson at RenewAmerica. He starts innocuously enough...

Another Elvis sighting
"I just saw Elvis!" Even decades after the death of the legendary singer, people still exclaim these same words with detailed accounts of their personal sighting of "The King." I, along with most of the nation, mourned Presley's death in 1977 but for me, like for most people, that day was the closing of the living story of Elvis, not the beginning of the secret life of the musician/actor. When we look critically at the Elvis sighting phenomena of more than three decades, we can see a complex mental conditioning that allows certain people to come to a place where logic and reason are altered to a point where the next guy shuffling down the sidewalk in a pair of blue suede shoes could be "you know who."

Fine...okay...but two paragraphs later, Paul spins around and shows you his wingnut, front and center!

In the political sphere we see the same psychological reality building that created the immortal Elvis scenario being used by the modern liberal. Wrapped within radical leftist organizations, such as PETA, the man-made global warming crowd, or the tax-and-spend liberals that Barack Obama faithfully leads, we see the same framing of non-reality that has brought some Elvis admirers to seeing the equivalent of jumpsuits and capes that don't really exist. The radicals at PETA ignore the fact that they exploit women to save chickens, and that their mission statement falls in diametric opposition to mainstream Christianity. The man-made global warming crowd disregards the direct evidence that their green initiatives will most certainly destroy the American economy and, of course, that the planet keeps getting cooler, in order to follow a socialistic game plan to "save the Earth."

Yahtzee!

Blackberry Support

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #1179, originally uploaded by Ape Lad.

I really really really love Hobotopia.

Oh, Noonan

Been a little light on the blogging of late, it being summer and warm and all, but damn if Noonan can't bring me back:

The best I can do right now is to issue a blanket condemnation of all those in our society who propagate lies - such as, for instance, the lie that racism still keeps a black person down.

A brave man, Mark Noonan.

Extra hilarious is the final paragraph of the post, which reads:

Keep this in mind - tell the truth, all the time and every where. About things great and small. Do your utmost to allow not the slightest untruth pass your lips or, worse, settle in your heart. We live in an Age of Lies and we are seeing the ever more terrible results they bring. Its time to bring a halt to this.

...and directly below this conclusion is this banner image:



Thanks for leading by example, Mark!

If Not For You Kids And Your Pesky Momentum!

The Next Right, a site I'm trying to respect as representing intelligent opposition, has a list of Top 20 things the Right should do. But this one seems a little ham-fisted:

16. Turn the Left’s apparent strengths (brand, power, media adoration, momentum) into weaknesses, a la Sun Tzu.

Well, okay, maybe, but those "strengths" you mention are the fact that everyone likes the Left better. That's not a strength, per se, it's a cumulative effect of other strengths. This is not the kind of strength you can turn around - although god knows the Right tried throughout the campaign. The Britney Spears ad, suggesting it's embarrassing and shallow that so many people actually like Obama, the suggestion that Obama's unAmerican because so many people come out to see him in Europe...all the way to now, where the Right continues to sneer like fucking Cartman at what they still call "The One."

Many of the ideas on this list seem thoughtful, but suggesting they just need to fix - er, turn around, "a la Sun Tzu" - the strength of everyone liking Obama is perhaps the wrong way to go about it.

And good luck with the last one:

20. More meme machine, less policy argument. (Emotion, images, stories & sticky sayings.)

Less policy!

Cut The Cord For Him

I think this is a very insightful take on Sanford from Josh Marshall:

I know there are a lot of people who are genuinely questioning Sanford's sanity at this point -- when you put together the furtive trips and the endless new revelations. But am I the only one who thinks that he appears to be deeply in love with this woman and should just go be with her?

The marriage seems clearly to be over. And if it wasn't on his first day back from Argentina, it's hard to conceive how it isn't now.

That isn't to understate all the damage and hurt he's caused to his family, his children and his supporters; let alone the breach of faith with his constituents, not over the affair but over the dereliction of duty. But notwithstanding his claims that he wants to stay in office and repair his marriage, Sanford's every action suggests overwhelmingly that he is desperate not only to get kicked out of office but to get kicked out of his marriage as well.

Everything he's said seems geared to reach back out to his mistress in Argentina (to perhaps re-cement the possibility of continuing the relationship?) and force a final breach with his wife. It is almost as if his upbringing, culture, religion and simply familial obligation require one thing but he's doing everything he can to make those requirements beyond his capacity to fulfill. Put simply, it's like he wants his wife to cut the cord for him.

(my emphasis)

Lieberman Lites

Can't wait to see all the Lieberman Lites that will be popping up in the Senate - Democrats that will permit a filibuster on important Democratic Party platform legislation so that they can look tough and independent.

Packaging Versus Contents, as the Concepts Relate to Sarah Palin and Dana Milbank

If you've ever wondered just what the hell happened with the McCain campaign's relationship with Sarah Palin -- and just what the freaking hell is wrong with her -- here's a great Vanity Fair article by Todd Purdum.

Most of all, I'm struck by how familiar she seems. It's rare, but occasionally I've met a person who denies that the facts are important at all -- they seem unwilling or unable to understand why the rest of us place so much importance on them. Now, I'm not someone who thinks that politicians always lie or never lie, of course. Sometimes politicians see or convey the world in a way that's most convenient for them politically, but they generally recognize some relationship between their ideas and the real world. It may not be so with Palin:

At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small. By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview, this time with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign.

Later in the story, a couple unnamed folks suggest that she's got narcissistic personality disorder -- they'd actually consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on it. Whatever her problem, her behavior at least sounds compatible to that of someone with such a cluster B personality disorder.

On a side note, this is what bothers me most about WaPo columnist Dana Milbank, my Villager of recent pointed interest. He'll find an entertaining metaphor for some D.C. event, and he'll write about the scene, the personalities, the conflict, the drama ... and never get around to the important facts, who is bullshitting and who's earnest. It's not important.

Here's A Siegel riffing on a Milbank column that portrays Al Gore as the mystical Oracle at Delphi handing hazy, impenetrable wisdom on climate change to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee/superstitious ancient Greeks. As with the boxing-match metaphor in his "A Thrilla Near the Hilla," this Oracle frame is a fine way to avoid talking about facts when they matter most. And avoiding global warming facts is a fine way to keep from offending the craziest Republicans.

[Milbank's article:] Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) begged the Goracle to look further into the future. "What does your modeling tell you about how long we're going to be around as a species?" he inquired.

The Goracle chuckled. "I don't claim the expertise to answer a question like that, Senator."

It was a jarring reminder that the Goracle is, indeed, mortal. Once Al Gore was a mere vice president, but now he is a Nobel laureate and climate-change prophet. He repeats phrases such as "unified national smart grid" the way he once did "no controlling legal authority" -- and the ridicule has been replaced by worship, even by his political foes.

The chairman worried that the Goracle may have been offended by "naysayers" who thought it funny that Gore's testimony before the committee came on a morning after a snow-and-ice storm in the capital. "The little snow in Washington does nothing to diminish the reality of the crisis," Kerry said at the start of the hearing.

Really think, Dana, that the issue is whether Al Gore was offended or not? How about dealing with the substance that global warming deniers love to confuse people whenever a weather event works conveniently with their agenda to distort science?