"In that Obama has rendered no act of contrition or repentance, and is at the moment, at liberty in the land, we do, here and now, separate him from the precious body and blood of Christ, and from the society of all Christians. We exclude him from our Holy Mother Church and all her sacraments, in heaven, or on Earth. We declare him excommunicate and anathema. We cast him into the outer darkness. We judge him damned with the devil and his fallen angels and all the reprobate, to eternal fire and everlasting pain!"

HT: Mabuse

"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book." --Northrop Frye

One of the recurring themes in the discussion of the "new media" (internet, blogs, databases, web pages, online encyclopedia's, Google's thirst to control and contain all the information in the known universe, the cloud, ebooks, etc.) is if bytes will "replace" books. To many, it certainly looks that way on any given day at any given rest stop on the Information Highway. After all, the current Holy Grail of Deep Geek Hipness is to have everything -- every scrap, note, frame, word, and image -- stored on one's iPad for display at the touch of a fingertip. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Be that as it may, the book is not going anywhere. Indeed, the book -- in form and concept -- is the foundation of the new media; it is contained within and yet contains it. The very way in which we discuss the new media ( web pages, web browsing, and that constant root of all places cyber, the place, space and file called "index.html" ) asserts that the book remains the dominant permanent record of all things worth keeping. Storage mediums come and go in the cyberverse ( One word: "floppy."), but I don't think that the age when all information and opinions and records and history is held in some immense GoogleServer pile is one which we should welcome. Distributed information is more powerful and more secure when it is distributed not only throughout the Net, but in more than one medium.

The way-new information universe, straddled by the ever growing hulk that is ("First don't be evil." ) Google is barely out of infancy and just about due to grow into "The Terrible Twos." The book, by contrast, represent a fully mature information retrieval system.

What is good about the book? What makes it persistently valuable in storing, not the trivia of the day, but that which is valuable to humanity over the long term?

Let's review:

1) No "advanced" technology required. Ability to manufacture present in all areas of the globe.
2 ) Crude but functioning units can be made by kindergartners with pencil, paper and glue.
3) Operating system and interface rock solid.
4) All types of information can be stored.
5) Has been demonstrated to be able to retain information in retrievable form across several thousand years.
6) Of the two, the User will often crash first.
7) All parts can be recycled.
8) All or part can be backed-up at any Kinkos.
9) Can be powered for hours with one candle.
10) All users receive up to 12 years of interface training free.

Add to that the tactile and aesthetic pleasures of fine books where art combines with craft, and you have something that will be with humankind long after today's high-tech toys are consigned to a museum and listed in their paperback catalog. Perhaps there may be some new innovation at the dawn of some new day that will really and for all time displace the book, but that innovation and that dawn of that day is not yet. For now, if it is a really important bit of knowledge or expression we put it in a book. Just to be safe.

First we shall see the Rise of the Newter. This will be the naturual result of a simple qwest for a more nutritious conservative food than Romney burgers.

Then we shall hear of the disaster of nominating Mitt: In a word "Biblical."

And then.... finally we shall hear of the final prophecy of Gingrich the Traveller fulfilled:

"Gingrich the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"

All of which will continue until the Republican Keymaster finds the Republican Gatekeeper, which in 2012 can only mean a Palin Paul ticket:

With the magic of the Palin | Paul ticket launched into the American mainstream, it will be time to go forth and confront the waiting Democrat monster:

"I tried to think of the most harmless thing... something from my childhood.... something that could never, ever possibly destroy us...."

What could possibly go wrong?

Alas, having served two terms, George is no longer eligible as the dream conservative candidate.

Over at neo neocon the Kwazy Konservatives Kristallnacht of the Long Knives has exploded into ALLCAPS in neo-neocon's The Sentiment . I note that it is "The Sentiment" and not "The Prestige" as in

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"."

The onslaught begins when I remark, quite calmly, that

Sadly, the second coming of George Washington has been cancelled for the duration.

This is followed by one reliapundit who Says:

WINNING IS ONE THING AND GOVERNING ANOTHER. WE NEED TO BOTH DEFEAT OBAMA AND PUT AN ABLE EXECUTIVE IN THE OVAL OFFICE. ONLY MITT CAN DO BOTH.

Which is far too much for one gellieba who punches in CAPSLOCK to assert:

ONLY A MONSTER CAN BEAT A MONSTER.
VOTE NEWTON LEROY GINGRICH !!!

After which neo is hard pressed to keep the outbreak of Romney Derangement Syndrome under control.

Oh well, I guess RDS is just something we're going to have to live with until this thing is decided. At which point the carping will become worse should anyone other than George Washington get the nomination. Until then, as the great Jackie Gleason says,

What's missing from the middle of the "Bob Dole, John McCain" set? Or shall we say, who's missing?

Hint: His father was once president of the United States and he, running from the center as a "compassionate conservative" and a buddy of Ted Kennedy and other sleazeball liberals also served as president of the United States -- two (2!) terms. Oh, he also had experience running a business or two and being governor of a state.

I just love the way in which that man is always conveniently left out of the arguments against Republicans running from the center.

HT: Morgan at His House

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!

Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,

So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

-- Ezra Pound, ca. 1915

Last night, because he's infected, Juan Willliams indulged himself in, as Morgan puts it, GoodPerson Fever;

["an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the demonstration of certain positive attributes to strangers, for purposes of self-validation. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle if these positive attributes don’t really exist, or if there is a great need to achieve this validation for purposes of acquiring social status, contrasted with a much lower level of confidence that these attributes really exist."].

Williams did this by whipping out the extra-large race card he carries in and trying to lay it on Newt Gingrich. Morgan notes:

"We’ve got all these ninnies just like Juan Williams, running around everywhere, and even worse still they are disproportionately represented in the hallways of power. Every decision made has to be absolutely non-offensive, and that includes the decisions of others, about matters well outside of their purview, and so they end up excoriating strangers for violating the Could Be Construed As standard. In other words, they get offended on behalf of other people, people who exist only in theory and might very well not exist at all in reality."

Unlike previous uses of the race card, last night didn't work out for Williams in the manner he's used to. Here's Williams being used like a hand puppet by Newt last night:

Elements of both sides will note this is "the playing of the race card" by Williams followed by the playing of it "right-back-at-cha" by Gingrich. Those elements and others will, from time to time, bemoan the fact that race is playing a role in the election. This ritual "bemoanment" is, to my mind, nothing more than the standard beclownment that both sides indulge in these days.

I suppose that the politically correct stance, one that you will see the president and his critics take at every moment they are not busy playing the race card, is that race has nothing to do with the election of 2012. This is, as everyone knows in their secret lives, utter nonsense. Besides the fact that race seeps into every substantive political issue in America (Hey, that's just how we roll.), it is going to be honed especially keen in the 2012 presidential run. Whether it will be used as a rapier or a machete has yet to be determined.

In the baldest possible terms you are going to be seeing a contest that will pit black against white. Since one hue is already decided the only remaining question is "how white?" Both sides will, officially, be doing all they can to insist that this is not an issue and both will not mind terribly if it is.

On the Obama side, he needs to cling, bitterly it may be, to a phalanx of voters who are not African-American in order to win. He can do this with love, with agreement, with fanaticism, and/or with guilt. Of these, the largest segment he can call on would be that powered by guilt. Knowing this the Obama machine can be counted on never to really let up on the "they hate him not because of the content of his character but because of the color of his skin." This will only get them so far, but combined with other factions, it may get them just far enough for Obama 2.0.

The reason white guilt may still be enough to drag Obama over the goal line is because the Obama Administration for these last few years has not been just about Obama and Progressivism. It has been about the entire African-American Affirmative Equality Project [AAAEP].The AAAEP has been a looming part of the American landscape for over 50 years and is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Put simply, as the leader of the AAAEP brand Obama -- no matter how much his ideas and policies fail and fail utterly -- is, himself, too black to fail. A failure on Obama's part implies, irrevocably, a failure on the part of AAAEP even though that would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, true. In a very real sense, since this is politics, the truth is irrelevant to the impression. The impression would be all that matters. Needless to say, a lot of white people -- as well as nearly all African Americans -- would be quite upset by such a verdict from history. Upset enough to be willing to say and do almost anything to keep it from happening.

A very small sign that this is the case is present above in the behavior of Juan Williams, an African-American with a Hispanic name, who --regardless of how shabbily the progressives have treated him in the last few years -- seems compelled to use the racial ugly stick upside Newt Gingrich's albino head. Poor Juan can do nothing other. He's a captive of his race and his time. As are the rest of the elements of the 2012 Presidential Race.

When it comes to Mitt Romney we already have seen the beginning of the coming tsunami of articles and opinions about his overwhelming whiteness. The opening salvo came a few days ago in an extended New York Times meditation on the whiteness of the Mitt. In a very real sense, Romney's the Moby Dick of Republican candidates and the whiteness of the Mitt will launch a thousand whaleboats with ten thousand tattooed Maori harpooners in the bows.

At the end of the day it's going to be Moby Mitt vs. Too-Black-To-Fail. Any way you look at it, it's going to be a wild ride and civility is going to have nothing to do with it. The only civil thing about the whole uncivil process will be how closely the principles stay to the first principle about the 2012 election: No matter how much it may be about race, you aren't allowed to say it has anything at all to do with race.

Got that. Good. On with the show.

"You know how you can tell that "everyone wants freedom" is baloney?....

Continued...

Gallup has some news that should be reassuring -- Conservatives Remain the Largest Ideological Group in U.S.

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

It "should be reassuring" if only many of those online that pass themselves off as "conservative" weren't currently demonstrating to all and sundry that, like too much perfectionism, too much conservatism is a mistake.

Yes, nothing is damaging the "Conservative Brand" lately more than the rolling stupidity that is lumping itself around the failure of the Republicans to come up with a viable candidate that is more "Conservative" than Mitt Romney. This "failure", which was predictable as long as four years ago, is causing many online 'conservatives to drop into premature political menopause with whining, hot flashes of anger, and the grinding of dull, old, axes. They are pissed, it would seem, because nobody other than Romney can carry the fight to Obama in the coming election. The more demented among them are declaring, shades of McCain/2008, that they will take their retracted balls and go home on election day rather than vote against Obama.

These people are deeply stupefied and confused. Ideology will do that to you. They seem to think, to actually believe, that this coming election is about only voting if you can vote for a candidate you like. Let me disabuse these kids of this silly notion right away. The election of 2012 ain't a conservative popularity contest. It's a war to, first, last, and always, destroy any possibility of a second term for Barack Hussain Obama.

This is not a "Vote-For" election. This is a "Vote-Against" election. This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election. That is what it is about and that is all it is about.

If people can't understand, at this point, that very simple concept their minds are much too simple to be conservatives and they might as well go off and sit at the kiddy table and write in "Vermin Supreme" with a blunt pink crayon.

If true conservatives want to have a truly conservative candidate in a truly conservative party they will have to commit to the long march. You know, "the long march" like the one the left took through out political, academic, religious, and media institutions. The one they spent decades on. The long hard road to political supremacy. The one that takes work and money.

That's the one thing I don't see erstwhile conservatives actually doing from election to election. Instead they run their lives and their businesses off on the side and they show up every three years or so to watch the little red hens of politics take the nomination away from their conservative flavor of the week.

The way the Republican party is set up in the primary system means that to even have a shot at winning it you have to be running for it years and years and years before the actual elections. That's what Romney's been doing. That's the game and he's got the pieces in place to win it. You may not like it, but, hey, change it or play it.

But if you're beat because your "choices" are late to the party like Perry, or not really in it to win it like Newt, don't start blaming Romney the little red hen.

It's just not dignified to hold your breath, stamp your feet, and threaten to take your retracted balls and go home.

So suck it up and remember this: This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election.

Go now, my conservative friends, and sin no more.

[Greetings InstaPunditeers! Check out the vast elsewhere here so that we can put a quake in your quaker, some shake in your shaker, and a rock in your sock!]

Yeah. Right.: "As a Reagan Republican it frankly never occurred to me..." Newt is now out-Mitting Mitt

Control: We have a rotten apple, Mitt.

Control: [to Romney] There's a mole, right at the top of the Republican Circus. And he's been there for years.

If you've seen the new remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the last few weeks, you've seen the last few weeks of the Republican Party's endless quest to shoot itself. After all, the party has not just nurtured a single spy but a whole festering nest of spies and turncoats in its upper reaches for decades. Indeed if you have any position at all in the Republican Party you are, in essence, a stealth Democrat.

Proof? Cast your eyes on the survivors of the run for the presidential nomination. Got it?

Continued...

My Back Pages: Debating on the step of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, 1966. (Left to right:) Me (Somewhat younger but just as strident), An Iranian friend named "Jaz" -- worked with me in the UC library, a refugee from the Shah's Iran -- probably went back after the fall of the Shah, (foreground right)"The Anti-Communist." He lost his eye in the Hungarian Uprising and had to run for the border and on into the West to stay alive. In this picture he's attempting to convince me that Communism is an evil ideology. I'm not buying it then, but I buy it now.

Lately Americans seem to be slimming on a daily drip-feed of despair for our future and estrangement from our past. It's not a new diet in this country, but it is starting to assume the proportions of a runaway fad diet, a political Pritikins. This thin gruel is what's being poured into us from Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C.

If you look closely at this diet for a diminished America you see a familiar list of "ingredients." The list is composed of the ideological stock and trade of a significant segment of Americans to whom this nation, as conceived by our founders, and struggled for for more than 200 years is merely one long, large joke; the Baby Boomers.

And I should know. After all, that boy in the picture up there -- that boy that thought Communism was "something we could live with" -- that young boy was me.

In my small way, I took part in the crafting of The Boomers’ Big Joke on America. For years I thought there was nothing funnier. Conceived during the waning months of World War II, I had no idea I was a Baby Boomer, but that, in the end, was what I was. And being a member of this large and fortunate generation gave me the leisure to develop quite a sense of humor when it came to basic human values. It even gave one woman of my cohort, Stanley Ann Dunham, the opportunity to actually conceive the punch line to our joke, her emasculate conception, the current clone passing as “President.”

When I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, we were the Brave New World's social engineers driving our little red choo-choo round the bend. We were the innovators, and we were busy innovating the brave new world wherein everything about the old world of our parents seemed either hilarious or evil.

Our program was quite clear early on and it hasn't changed a jot since those years, it has simply gotten more pervasive and elaborate. After all, we're older now and we're in control. We can finally fund these things. With your money.

Here’s how things went in our Brave New Whirled:

• God, if he didn't emerge from 500 mikes of pure Sandoz LSD, was just a funny old guy a little bit like Santa Claus but with less of a user base.
  
• The Bill of Rights was okay as long as you could figure out someway to erase a few of the amendments involving guns and add a host of new ones involving groups.
  
• The Constitution? Too long and too arcane to really read with care. It was a given so what did we care?
  
• History? The only really happening history was the future, man. Ours.
  
• The United States? They were really "AmeriKKKa" -- Satan incarnate.
  
• The US Military? Baby killers and agents of Satan.
  
• The Police? Pigs.
  
• The Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, and a host of other evil dictators and fascists? Heroes of "The People."
  
• The People? Really wonderful as long as you didn't really have to hang out with them.
  
• Voting in political parties? Stupid. We were into "participatory democracy" which involved really long meetings. ( This is now known as "emergent democracy" and involves really long online discussion threads.)
  
• We believed in sex and drugs and rock and roll.
  
• We were determined to resist "the man" on all levels.
  
• We were young.

Continued...

Presented for your consideration, a two minute slice of what listening to poets who meant what they said and said what they meant must have been like over 1,000 years ago.

These are the opening lines of the oldest English epic poem*, Beowulf, declaimed in the style popular at the time of their origins. Beowulf, written in England, but set in Scandinavia has variously been dated to between the 8th and the early 11th centuries. Take two minutes to listen to this vanished art brought back to fitful life.

The clip begins in an intentionally disarming fashion which, I think, helps us to make a leap of imagination from the present day to the night gatherings around bonfires and flickering torches in which these tales of love and death were told. Attending what can only be a recreation of these arcane styles of declamation seems an effete ritual these days. I'd submit it seems so only because we have grown so used to "all-entertainment all-the-time everywhere," we cannot imagine the impact of these original entertainments when they were the rarest thing in a human life bounded by works and days.

Part story, part panegyric, part worship, the reciting of an epic was an event that could span days, even weeks. How the earliest bards held all of the poem in memory is still somewhat of a mystery, but the rhetorical structure of the poem, known set-pieces played much as jazz would be played centuries later, and various methods of loci, or "Memory Palaces" probably all played a role. No matter how it was done, the fact that it could be done with Beowulf, which runs to nearly 3,200 lines remains impressive. Other epics loom larger than that.

And it wasn't enough to declaim the epic, you had to provide a few musical bridges, many voices, and a lot of acting. For this reason, as well as their rarity, Bards were held in high esteem. Later poets would try, on paper at least, to recapture this sort of esteem but, except for a period in Soviet Russia, poets and poetry have fallen on hard times in recent centuries, becoming an art esteemed slightly above slip mold ceramics.

"I don't get no respect" is a common plaint of our contemporary "poetic" poets attached to their various academic sinecures like stunted embryos on withering umbilicals. About once every twenty years, you'll hear the barbaric yawps of spoken word poets try to cut their way through the petrified forests of the groves of academe, but most are quickly subsumed back into the dusty compost of poetasters and poet poseurs.

The Beats had a run at it in the 1950s, but slumped back into their own comfy berths in the spiritual opium dens of what used to be the "counter-culture." Now the well-codified hipster poet is content with his underwritten "job for life." The Beats went on the road with a Howl but have ended in the cul-de-sac of Maya Angelou.

The "singer-songwriter" poets of the late 1960s / early 1970s had their run powered by the advent of Bob Dylan, who still can impress when he comes to work. But money changes everything and most of them soon vanished into Hotel California.

Currently, there's a craze for Poetry Slams that manages to produce some arresting, if forgettable, work in an environment more conducive to what was once "a battle of the bands." At this time, Slams are touted as "bigger than ever," a sure sign this phenomenon, famous for having fewer formal rules than Rap, has passed its peak.

Ah, but then there is Rap, you say. And in a sense you'd be right since Rap certainly fulfills the aspect of declamation and can even gesture towards length. It is also energetic in terms of its heavy reliance of percussion and a vocal range from shouting to shrill. Rap also benefits from scenting itself with Eau de Hood and delivers a simulacrum of the real. But Rap has been heavily ossified for well over a decade and may soon find itself with more than its share of petrified forests and post-mortum effects. It's hard to imagine people in more than a thousand years gathering to hear some android with an attitude running the changes of Wu-Tang Clan's Forever.

You'd think -- with the advent of the Internet and the much heralded (Global) (Hive) Mind -- it would be easy to jump start epic poetry again as a major art form, but you'd be wrong. One element is missing from the mix of low barriers to entry, cheap recording and distribution, and an audience in the millions for any sort of dreck that manages to be cranked out from the star-making machinery. Poetry today has everything it needs for an epic to bloom except the ability to declaim in the affirmative voice.

Poetry today is, for the most part, deeply embedded in the secular culture, and there is no affirmative available to that culture, since the affirmative depends on a belief in something other than, larger than, the self. Today's denial of the spirit and celebration of the now and the now alone blocks any ability to sound the affirmative, to strike the strings that soul sing, and higher sing. It's the solution that Wallace Stephens sought but could never attain, as he notes in The Man with the Blue Guitar

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Poetry can't matter as it once mattered because the base ground of being has been yanked out from under the culture, leaving it stranded in mid-air, unable to ascend, having only the fall before it.

Still, we can hear the echoes of what that more heroic and poetic age must have been like, at least at festival time, in the brief two minutes in the clip above. In a way, it's a good thing that it is only two minutes. Most can spare that but would find themselves at sea if anything much longer would be required of them.

As the poet says, "Humankind cannot bear / very much reality."

---

(HT: Myth & True Myth @ Belmont Club)
*Oldest in the sense of an epic poem, not a collection of songs as in The Book of Taliesin.

Republished from May 2009 because "All the news just repeats itself / Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen"

As they did the Christmas season last year, they’ve come twice in the last day. They’re kids out running “a raise money for NARAL” scam. They get a cut of anything they pull in, and they use any info they get to sell to Planned Parenthood or other death mills.

They’re pleasant and they are enthusiastic (I love the painting! I really admire the tree!) and they hand you the clipboard expecting you to sign in your enthusiasm to support their “work.”

I listen and then I tell them, “No, I don’t support what you’re doing or the people and causes that you represent. I think it’s evil for you to do this, and worse still to do it for money.”

Here in Seattle's Queen Anne, where smiles, nods and signups for their scam are their usual rewards, they seem genuinely surprised and taken aback.

“You mean you’re not pro-choice?”

I assure them that I am not even if though, long ago, I was.

Continued...

It's rightly called by the clumsy and unattractive term "Blogosphere," a word that does not trip lightly off the tongue. It has, as usual, no sense of proportion and less sense of shame. This has been particularly evident in the last few days with the passing of two men, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens.

Along with untold hundreds of other's I had my pass at Hitchens soon after his death foretold was announced as a fait accompli. I was saddened by his passing as much as I am saddened by the passing of many whom I do not know except via their work but for whom I come to have more than a passing interest if not a bit of respect. I wrote what I had to say about Hitchens fairly early on the day his death was announced but was unprepared for the tsunami of comment that came along on the heels of my own marginally interesting reflections and continued..... and continued.... and continued... until one would have thought that the revealed author of the New Testament had passed on without finishing the Book of Revelations.

Continued...

MAP FROM THE CREATOR @ Mythbusters’ Cannonball Map - PerceptionBuilder.com via Cannonball Run via Neatorama

My favorite, laff-riot story of the week has to be the Mythbusters' cannonball that went a bit beyond its range. It began with something seemingly simple to accomplish; firing a cannonball at a bunch of water tanks. "No problem," say the Mythbusters' hosts, "Nada problema. We've done this THOUSANDS of time." (Or words to that effect)

In my experience, any time human beings start to mess around with explosives, flammable substances, fireworks, or artillery with the attitude of "No problem we've done this THOUSANDS of times," that's the time you should start digging a deep hole to hide in.

Continued...

They'll tell you we are running out. They lie.

From North American Energy Inventory, December 2011

You can get as uptight and concerned about Newt, Mitt, Herman, Rick, Ron, Michelle, and all the others that you want. I’m taking a nap. You can follow the up-trend, the down-trend, the around-the-bend-trend, or the down and out and flushed away trend. I’m kicking back on the beach. You can follow the come back, the back down, the buck up and the suck up to your heart’s content. I’m rolling into the hammock for the duration. You can get uptight, out of sight, bent out of -- or bent into -- shape. I’m taking the seventh inning stretch for months. You can be pissed off, pissed on, or just pissed. I’m staying high and dry.

The long or the short of it all is that between now and the elections almost one year from now the frantic antics and the doings and undoings of whomever the Republicans nominate for president can be spun until you come all undone.... and it won’t make one thin dime’s worth of difference to me. You know right now if you’ve got a smidgen of a scintilla of the sense God gave a goober that you will vote for that candidate and against Barack Obama come hell or high water. And if you know that, knowing who is really just a detail. Vlad the Impaler? Sounds like he's got just the accessory those Occupiers need.

Me? I know I am voting for NotO. It came over me today like a thunderclap. And now that I know it I also know that I can relax about this whole circus that’s currently being spun around the “nominating” “process.” Why? Because now that I know I’m voting for the candidate no matter who -- or even what -- it is, I don’t care who -- or what -- it is. As long as it can be categorized as “Not Obama,” I’m for it. That’s a very relaxing thought. All I need to do now is just kick back and wait for election day. All this other stuff is simply postmortem effects and the noise made by beating cold dead horses on dull old anvils. Wake me when it’s time to vote. Until then just refill my pina colada from time to time. Thanks.

Sorry but I’m not sold by this morning’s autofornication festival among the pundit Republicans. They’ll have to try much harder to convince me they are anything other than blood simple and bone stupid. From a glance around the sphere I take it that because Rick Perry didn’t have bad Fed agency number 3 dripping off the tip of his tongue that he’s out of the game. Is that the deal? Is that the requirement? Is that the one item that undoes the incontrovertible success of years of successful governance? Really? If that's what you think join the ever lengthening Republican line to tongue kiss Barack Obama.

I don’t think the end of the Perry candidacy has been reached for one single solitary rooten-tooten moment. Indeed I think that those who are whipping out their “He’s Toast” fork are only competing for the Drool Cup awards of 2011. To my mind, not being able to come up with the necessary smooth palaver 99.9999% of the time is a positive recommendation to the office of President. Indeed I don’t know why the current field of Repubs subject themselves to these “anything but debates” debates time after time. I don’t notice the current resident doing so and, if anyone is unfit to be president, it’s the current resident.

Or have we some how all forgotten how clueless Obama actually is when it comes to things like basic arithmetic, the history of the United States of America, the history of Europe, the state of Israel, capitalism, and a dozen other items he knows zip, zero, nada about? Is that it? Do we think that the his three years of being in the job has actually made him less stupid? Is that how stupid we've become?

In the past week death loving Republicans and those who would kill Republicans have worked together hand in glove to damage at least two of those running in this mug’s game leading up to Iowa. They’ve done a great job repeating and magnifying slander when it comes to Herman Cain, and now a similar host seem to want to make people believe that Rick Perry is also somehow “unfit.”

Really? All I can see are a bunch of bozos who don’t belong on the conservative bus spending a lot of time free-riding everyone towards certain defeat. Excuse me if I don’t buy into the blather this AM. It’s beyond stupid. It’s vintage DUMBTH. It’s typical Republican. You know, the losers.

SCOTT M COMMENTING IN "Liberals barely glance at the black conservative hanging in the courthouse square. Nothing new to see here," writes:

"Conservatives are confused and charge liberals of hypocrisy because conservatives are looking at the world from their internal perspective. Once you understand and ACT as if you recognize liberals act in furtherance of their power, and use all situations toward that goal, it's much easier to understand the liberal world. NOW, NAACP, PETA, etc, they will each demand destruction of their constituents if that is what advances liberal hegemony.

"When conservatives charge liberals with being hypocrites it's exactly like the rural goobers from Dirtpatch, Indiana charging the Three Card Monty players with dishonesty. YEH, that's the point of the game. Why didn't you know that before you started playing with them? Are you going to lecture the TCM players on good sportsmanship? Don't you think the TCM players are laughing at you while you tell them to give up the money from the game so they can win the admiration of those with middle-class values?

"If recognizing liberals as rank hypocrites was the way to victory, why are they still occupying civil society and all levers of power? Maybe "discovering" liberal are hypocrites and trying to convince conservative-minded people that acting in a conservative manner is consistent isn't a winning strategy? Maybe occupying liberal seats of power with disruptive behavior and hounding them at every waking moment works better? It sure worked to take over the culture.

"We outnumber liberals 2-1. But liberals get off their rears and do things. We tell each other our behavior and ideas are more pleasant and successful, and then ignore the fight until election day. We pretend if we win the election, we've won the argument and it's safe to go home. We are almost as weak and useless as our RINO officeholders. When you hide from liberals you surrender to liberals. Every moment of peace and comfort you allow liberals is a refuge liberals use to continue to ruin the country. Conservatives seem more interested in being right than achieving a victory. The people we are fighting with and the people we hope to win over are not logic and fact driven. If they were they would already be on our side. The moderates and independents, not to mention the Democrats, are the people that saw the 20th century and still aren't sure if big government statism is the answer to all of our problems. They don't lack for facts. They've avoided the facts. That's why they aren't conservative.

"You can't pick a candidate that will preempt liberal smears, so pick a candidate that will fight and win. Romney isn't electable. Romney is the man that lost to the man that lost to Obama. Conservatives are so afraid of a fight they hope to find a candidate that hits all the check marks so nobody will attack him. The desire for a candidate the libs can't attack should be proof your worldview is dysfunctional.

There might have been sex or there might have been autofondling, or fondling in an auto. It was a he or a she or an it that the unsourced source might have seen being fondled or spoken to or otherwise sexually bareassed or harassed or something fondling. The source or the non-source or the source of the source said he, she -- or even it -- was getting into a cab or a rickshaw or a refrigerator box that was hanging around Herman Cain sometime in the mid to late 1990s. Some say it was a Herman Cain branded cab. Some say Cain was driving it, or in the trunk, or making weird statements about the person that may or may not have been getting into the cab after Cain slipped them the sekrit sex sign which would be a chin wag with the hand.

Others say it was an unsourced cab aka a TAXI. Pa-Yammas Media was reporting something about something about someone who might have seen or said something sometime somehow that included Herman Cain in the deep background playing a harmonica. The Pa-Yammas story required corrections and retractions but it only got corrections which were, in the final analysis, inncorrect.

Bottom line: Herman Cain was a Republican and a black man which made him fit for immediate deblacking. Something or someone got into some cab somewhere at some time in the late 1990s and went back to Herman Cains’ home, apartment, condo, mansion, pizza parlor, Airstream trailer, neighborhood, city, state, region, or planet. He, she or it stayed there for a minute, an hour, overnight, or perhaps longer or shorter, and was seen at work the next day looking like he, she or it was at work. Of all this our reporters are absolutely sure except when we are not and need to issue a correction. And another correction. And another. Stay tuned. This just in...

"The revolution will not be televised; It will be streamed."

Continued...

Scott Adams speaks @ The official Dilbert website

When it came to voting in elections I once spent a lot of time “weighing my options” . I would research this and read that. I’d study the “non-partisan” handbook that came in the mail outlining the pros and cons of all the issues, candidates, and referendums on the forthcoming ballot. I’d discuss issues with friends and associates and sometimes even debate those same issues at meetings and forums. I’d dig into the background of candidates, and always ask “Qui bono” when it came to new measures, projects, taxes, fees and other effluvia attendant on a democracy.

This process has now been filed under, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” It led, in retrospect, to a lot of wrong votes that also “seemed like a good idea at the time.”

My new default voting position is much simpler, much more relaxing, much more efficient, and has a greater likelihood of being correct than my previous efforts. It has the added benefit of being capable of being stated in very simple terms.

My present default position is: “If voting yes on this measure or candidate will result in ceding more power to, or giving more money to, the government or any element of the government, vote NO.”

That means, in its purest form to "vote NO" on anything or anyone if it is in violation of the first principle of no more power or money. After all, politics is only something we do to get to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These days it seems to me that in life one achieves the most happiness by saying “Yes.” Yes to the day. Yes to the world. Yes to life. Yes to the cute puppies. Yes to the ones worthy of live. Yes to God. Yes to the whole wide and wonderful universe. Even, God forgive me, Yes to "Yes to the Dress."

Once upon a time it seemed to me that one achieved the most happiness in politics by saying “Yes.” Yes to “new, previously undiscovered ‘rights’.” Yes to the funding of projects that would make the city a better, bigger and brighter place regardless of the plainly visible fact that all the other previous public projects made it a more dismal sinkhole. Yes to man with his hand out for a handshake and a hand out who was going to make all God’s children happy with just a few more of my dollars. Yes to the bond issue that would guarantee a new bridge and road right after ten years of expensive study on how it would impact the sex lives of rhinos and snail darters. Yes to affirmative unction. Yes to this or that or the other thing that would, at last, bring on that great getting up morning in America where all would be equal and the grunting sows in the government somehow, mysteriously, much more equal than others.

In the end all I could see and hear from all this yessing was a country flushing itself and its future down the crapper, and the refrain from an ancient Tin-Pan Alley ditty that goes,

“When you ask him anything
He never answers “No.”
He just yes-yes’s you to death,
And then he takes your dough,
And tells you ‘Yes, we have no bananas....”

I give and I give and I say yes and yes and don’t even get a banana? I think it’s time to try another way; to give another answer: “NO,” or to be colorful and transnational about it all, "NYET!" I don’t think I am at all alone in this. Indeed, I think NYET is the wave of the future.

I admit that there may be times when NYET requires nuance; requires something a tad less than an adamantine attitude. One may, when it comes to electing human beings, be required to judge which candidate is likely to grab for less power and to grub for less money. That is always a sad moment when dealing with politics but, absent armed insurrection, it seems something that is unavoidable given the offerings placed on the plate for citizen consumption.

Nevertheless, having a clear and simple default position of saying NYET to more power or more money seems to me to be a sensible stand to take. It’s not only the right way, it’s the Reagan way. Nancy, that is: “JUST SAY NO.”

From Tom Weller's MINIMS

"While Wall Street may be responsible for bad things, it is Wall Street who financed putting a million miles of fiber optic cables crisscrossing continents and under oceans. It is Wall Street that financed the thousands of cell towers. It is Wall Street from which venture capital comes to finance startups like Twitter. Thus, tweeting “Down with capitalism” from your iPhone for those around the word to read seems to be the most ironic thing a person can do. The live stream from the protest site, shared with 12,000 (at this moment) people across the Internet is a testament to Wall Street's allocation of capital that these protesters fight against." --Errata Security: Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet [ ← Entire article highly recommended ]

The word is about, there's something evolving,
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving...
They say the next big thing is here,
That the revolution´s near,
But to me it seems quite clear
Thats it's all just a little bit of history repeating.

The newspapers shout a new style is growing,
But it don't know if it's coming or going,
There is fashion, there is fad
Some is good, some is bad
And the joke rather sad,
That it's all just a little bit of History repeating.

... and I've seen it before
... and I'll see it again
... yes I've seen it before
... just little bits of history repeating

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women, and transgendered—and any other human who is able to elude the tyranny of work for a couple of weeks—are created equal.

"We gather to be free not of tyranny, but of responsibility and college tuitions. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that a government long established and a nation long prosperous be changed for light and transient causes. So let our demands* be submitted to a candid world.

"First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness—

"even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context...

"...but down with the modern gilded age!.....

Read the Rest Right HERE: Occupy Wall Street: A Manifesto - Reason Magazine

We've been having a "spirited" discussion in Dreamdating is Over: Right Now "Romney | Cain" is the Ticket and "Getting US Back to Business" is the Slogan [Bumped] @ AMERICAN DIGEST. One conclusion to the Romney|Cain ticket -- or indeed to any generic Republican on the ticket, has just been aptly summed up by our own Don Rodrigo. Take it away, Don!

---

If Romney is the nominee and next President, then an all-Republican Congress will have to keep pressure on him to steer the proper course.

That will be a challenge. What may happen is that Romney will become the "darling" of the MSM for "standing up" to the "extremist" Congress. I hope not. I hope the VP choice will be solidly conservative and exert pressure on Romney.

To be utterly realistic: we are a center-right country. We posters here tend to forget the CENTER part. We are currently, and have been for some time, RULED by a center-left coalition. Our best bet for the foreseeable future is to have center-right governance for the foreseeable future. A smart GOP Congress (both houses) would steer the president to that path, rather than try to pull him hard right. Sorry folks, but that beats the alternative we have now.

My biggest concern with a President Romney is what he does with the Supreme Court when Ginsburg retires (and I hope she waits until 2013). "Moderate" GOP presidents have an infuriating habit of nominating ciphers like Souter, and even Reagan gave us that ditz O'Connor. Now Bush the First gave us Thomas, and another Thomas is what we need.

Oh yes, folks: THAT SUPREME COURT THING:

For all you would-be sourpuss dropouts: the idea of four more years of Obama in regards to the Supreme Court ought to have you crapping in your pants. While I may have misgivings about a GOP president nominating a cipher, we all know damned well that what we'll get with Obama, don't we?

Please think this through, fence-sitters: Think comprehensivley. GOP/conservative power is increasing at the state level, and redistricting is going to favor the GOP, even if only as a marginal improvement; let's take what we can get. If both the House and Senate are GOP, that's another bonus. If the president is republican, then the chances for a genuinely conservative court go up. Also, ANY Republican president is going to be enthusiastic about allowing America's looming hydrocarbon boom (oil, gas and coal) go forward, and ANY GOP president is going to boost business's confidence sky-high, and unleash them.

All these things are for the good. America will enjoy a rennaissance while in GOP hands. Get my drift? Do I have to slap you harder, or do you fnally get it?

Four years of Obama is plenty for enough people to get the message about the sheer stupidity of electing people like him and putting his party in charge of anything, but ONLY if it's followed by a boom presided over by a GOP political majority. Eight years of Obama, even with an opposition Congress will be very, very bad news for America. Remember, this guy has used the executive order and unleashed the federal agencies with a regularity and vengeance never seen in modern American history. And remember, his party has been making noises about suspending democracy.

Do you get it now? I sure as Hell hope so. If Romney ends up being the nominee, show up at the polls, hold your nose, shove the New Black Panther morons out of the way, and vote for Romney, or whichever ham sandwich the Stupid Party offers up.

With Christie out, and Palin out riding fences, it looks like it's time to start calling the smart play instead of fantasy land lollygagging in the setting sun.

Continued...

"Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean. From his present dissatisfaction man reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden. He also reasons that somewhere ahead lies a promised land, a land without conflict. Meanwhile, he is miserably en passage; this myth lies deeper than religious faith." (John Fowles, The Aristos, 1964)

Mrs. Michael Kinsley aka Patty Stonesifer

"Look, I’m sorry, but New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie cannot be president: He is just too fat." -- Michael Kinsley | The Rumford Meteor

And when he gets home his wife says, "You know, you've got to sleep sometime. Pass the cheesecake, dear."

Today neoneocon continues her observations on the suitability of Chris Christie to be president given his ample girth. She notes:

Churchill, as many have pointed out, had a number of supposed risk factors but lived to be 90, and was PM for the last time at the age of 80. I think this tut-tutting at the fat is one of the vestiges of Puritanism in our society, which has always had that tendency. Sir Winston would not approve.

Nor do I. Here's another teaching aid for those you know who think Christie is too big to be president while maintaining that our Smoking President Slim is "too smart to fail."

"It ain't cute."

Continued...

Continued...

Continued...

Dear Onion,
After a couple of decades of being the nation's go-to-url for mirth, you've simply lost it. It's not working. It's lame. You are not delivering "teh funny." You are becoming merely a stand-in for a garden bulb we use to cook lots of stuff. I look upon your works at The Onion - America's Finest News Source and I see this collection of headlines wrought by your paid staff of jokesters and quipsters. These are the "fruits" of joke meetings and story conferences and all sort of "work, work, work." Your "staff" of paid comedy writers have the entire world of news to draw from and yet these are the headlines I see:

Continued...

Comment of the Month (So Far): Responding to Zombie's statement @ Day of FAIL[noted in sidebar],

"If you think you can "win the argument" against protesters like these, then I recommend you watch these videos for a reality check. No one is allowed to win anything against them, because the rules already define you as the loser,"

AD commenter Scott M offers these thoughts:

"But, in Mayberry if you are nice enough and speak calmly enough and use facts you can change everyone's mind. In fact, the only reason people don't already agree with you is because you have explained carefully enough the benefits of thinking like you.

"Conservatives are largely cowards on defense while Liberals are on offense. Liberals haven't so much taken over culture, but Conservatives have retreated and given the field to the Liberals. Conservatives preemptively warn a mildly unpleasant idea may be forthcoming and they are forever including their enemy's argument for equal time while arguing.

"No matter how often Liberals prove themselves to be full of hate, hypocrisy, lies, or Marxism no Conservative will conclude Liberals are haters, hypocrites, liars, or Marxists. It's like every time you encounter a rabid wolverine first you must offer food, try to pet it, and then re-tell your story from the emergency room after your bowels have been slashed open. Next rabid wolverine, same outcome.

"It would be nice to live in Mayberry, we don't, and our enemies have been assured no matter what filthy names the call us, and what outrageous things they do to us, we will react in a Mayberry fashion.

"Even when we win elections our side immediately sets about including our opponents and playing nice.... and losing.

"Liberals want to rule the world and Conservatives want to be left alone. That is a recipe for easy defeat.

"What will your enemies do when they control more of the culture? They will demonize you and your children even more, and they will have fewer limits on their actions.

"Get in their face and punch back twice as hard. Stop serving lemonade to the Marxists."

Continued...

Not a teaspoon of testosterone left. Not one.

Continued...

Look at these happy little green robots and admire how carefully they were selected to represent all genders and demographics

Head robot of Portland, Mayor Sam Adams (oh the shame he attaches to that illustrious name!) tells his fellow green robots to shape the fuck up: "I want to thank my City Council colleagues for passing a measure today that makes food scrap composting possible. We’re currently sending 29,000 tons of useful food scraps to landfills each year. Beginning October 31, the new waste collection program will let you throw these food scraps in the green yard debris roll cart so they can be turned into useful compost. In addition, your collection schedule will change as less of what you throw away goes in the trash. The green yard debris cart will now be picked up weekly – just like the blue recycling cart and yellow bin – and trash will be picked up every-other-week."##

The little green bin is proliferating everywhere these days. Just one more task that the green fascists have gotten all the citizens to pitch in and do. Plus you pay extra for the privilege of doing the work for the state. What a deal!

You'll recall how this make-work state project started. First you were told to bundle your newspapers and put them out in a stack. (Magazines in coated paper in a separate bundle, thank you.) This led, over time, to a glut of newsprint that put pulp mills in Maine out of business; then to such a tsunami of glut that the newspapers were going into landfills just the same. Just on separate trucks purchased and manned by the city for that purpose.

Then you were told to separate out the glass from the trash and put it in those open blue bins. Small at first but now these bins are gigundo in size and cost. This led, in pretty much no time at all, to a glut in recycled glass that led to huge mountains of glass trash growing quietly outside of all major cities. After all, there are only so many glass tiles and glass blocks that the market can absorb. Then it's right into the landfills again. On new separate trucks, of course.

Then came the plastic bins for plastic. Then the consolidation of the plastic and glass bins -- since it was all really going into the landfill it really didn't matter.

Then came the "Yard Waste" bins because, well, in large cities large cities were suppose to compost all this crap from yards into rich humus. This of course led to humus mountains outside of all large cities and programs where the cities would give you some compost if you picked it up. That you were hauling the composted yard waste back to the yard after it had been hauled to the compost heap from the yard was, well, sort of glossed over. But the compost mountains grew anyway.

At this point you had, behind your house or to the side, a trash can, a glass and plastic recycling bin, and a yard waste bin... minimum. But you do not, it seems, have enough bins behind your house since the city can, it seems, charge you for picking up each and every bin as well as sell you the bin in the first place.

This is a good deal for the city and now it seems the cities want to extend it to yet another bin. This is the small green bin for the "organic kitchen waste" previously known as "garbage" that previously went into, well, your "garbage can."

The deal here is that you are supposed to pick through your garbage with your hands and put into the new tiny green bin only the choicest bits of pre-compost compost. Then you set that bin out on the day for it's collection after a week of pawing through the crap.

That makes four (count 'em) 4 bins to keep track of and to pay for, each one more foul than the one before.

You'd think that an operation that had a monopoly on such a rich resource of salvage could make money operating it. You'd be right. It makes money by charging you more for doing its work for it. And by selling you yet another bin.

But there is hope for the guerrillas among us. These new green bins, being vile and odiferous, are the perfect means of smuggling toxic chemicals out of the house and into the landfills without paying for Hazmat service.

Let's say that, after the forced retirement of the incandescent bulb, and the forced import of mercury filled bulbs into your house you actually break one. (Hey, it could happen.) With the little green bin you can just hide the shards under the kitty litter and avoid the $2,500 clean-up fee from the EPA.

I know that lots of cities are meeting their budget shortfalls not by firing staff but by actually hiring Garbage Cops to patrol your bins, but I'm willing to bet these dolts are not going to be digging into kitty litter and kitchen waste. I'm betting they'll be the number one cops in the doughnut shops for 95% of their shifts.

So, you know that pile of old dead flourescent tubes you've got in the garage because you're not willing to pay the city the $50 for the "special pickup?" Get yourself a teeny-weeny green bin and some kitty litter.

Problem solved.

Years ago I had some first hand, online experience with the legions of passionate Ron Paul supporters. Yes, they are irritating. Yes, they are relentless. But, yes, they've got a point. Stewart makes it for them in this clip.

Continued...

Sarah Palin should run for the Presidency.

It doesn't matter if her campaign lasts only a few days or a few weeks. If she's out of the contest by the primaries, that's fine and dandy. I won't cry over it, and neither will she, I bet. But she must, MUST give it a try.

"The biggest risk is not to take one." I heard that quote somewhere, a long time ago. She cannot live with "What if's". She must try it. Who knows what may happen? What's the worse part - the she might not be nominated? Heck, even if she's not, that would be a blessing in disguise for her.

I still think, after all of these past months, that Sarah Palin is, among the Republican candidates, The Only One With Steel-clad Testicular Fortitude that could have only been inherited from Margaret Thatcher. (The same kind that kicked British unions in the rear to never recover; kick-started a long time of prosperity; kicked the Argentinean Army into disgrace in the Falklands War, and provided one third of the Triumvirate that dismantled the Iron Curtain.)

Today, it is just like in the late 70s: perilous times, which called for extraordinary fortitude to face extraordinary challenges. Thatcher knew what needed to be done in Britain, and did it. And (I am quite certain about this), so does Sarah Palin in America.

-- Newton: Comment on Sarah Palin Takes in the Iowa State Fair

COKIE ROBERTS: "The problem that we have here is the Constitution of the United States of America which actually does require people to come together from different perspectives whether it's divided government or not." -- NewsBusters.org

Ah yes, the eternal "problem" of the Constitution. Always in the way of the progressives getting their way. It never occurs to them that, were they ever dispose of the problem document and "get their way," the next thing on its way to them would be a bullet straight into their ear answering the eternal question about the progressive brain -- "Will it blend?". After all, any tyranny takes out the troublemakers first, and who makes more trouble with fewer life and career consequences than the Cokie Roberts of this land?

I swear that this wizened hag with the Ed "Kookie" Burns hairdo and the steely look of permanent lesbian bed death deep in the eyes is going to compel me to make a commenting macro for her and her ilk. Just press "Shift-F12" and "Go-fuck-yourself-with-an-atom-bomb" hits the text box and clicks "Submit" on full auto. It'll save me decades in a day.

[Note: Almost a year after I wrote the following a note of thanks arrives from a reader: "It was posted just a week after I learned my wife had been having an affair, and it gave me the first real laugh since the news broke. I bookmarked that post and have referred to it regularly, especially throughout the divorce and custody battle (believe it or not, I won). " What can one say other than, "At American Digest, the pleasure is to serve." ]

Scene:
FALSTAFF, sitting upon the ground telling sad stories of the deaths of kings
.... some poison'd by their wives.

Enter FOOL.

FOOL: Good Sir John, how fare thee.

FALSTAFF: I fare well but soon must fare thee well.

FOOL: Nay. Take thy shadow off thyself.
Do but drink this bottle down and we shall merry be.

FALSTAFF: Merry? Me? Falstaff shall no more merry be.

FOOL: But thou art known from Land's End to John O'Groats
as the merriest of Harry’s merry band.
And I stand witness from our revels past
that all such tales are true.

FALSTAFF: Oh, fine Fool, if you seek one
who would be merry with you
you seek not old Sir John.

FOOL: Posh and bother, good Sir John,
with these sweet cakes
and this good ale
how can you not merry be?

FALSTAFF: I may not now make merry
because I have made myself marry.

FOOL: Merry? The very stones echo back
your merry laughter from across the years.

FALSTAFF: You hear me amiss.
I am not merry because I married am.

Continued...

"Hello Suckers!" was the greeting Texas Guinan# used to shout out to the swells and the elite when they came into her speakeasy, the 300 Club during Prohibition. They loved it and New Yorkers who are wealthy continue to love being insulted by the help and the whores of Manhattan. The help and the whores don't mind. They get their big hits on their tips jars and the band plays on. Lately though the band playing on in the New York and DC speakeasys seems more and more like the band playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on the stern of the Titanic.

There's been a lot of metaphor slapped onto the ObamaDrama playing out in DC in the last week. It's been called Kabuki, it's been called Noh, it's been called a Chinese shadow puppet production. It's none of those.

Instead it's something we've seen before headlining the floor show wherever flagons of Lethe and bonghits of Oblivion are being sold. Watching Obama and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and trying to figure out who's going to come out on top is like trying to figure out who is best at recapitulating the sold out performances of Le Petomane "playing O Sole Mio and La Marseillaise on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus" at the Moulin Rouge in Paris back in 1892. The only difference is that Le Petomane could flatulate on key. Washington is just playing musical chairs with Poo-Poo Cushions.

In case you haven't noticed, none of this current Fart Festival is about actually "reducing" the size of the government. It is about reducing the rate at which government will grow. The Republican plan is "Same shit. Smaller cups." Any recovering alcoholic will tell you that you can drink a pint of whiskey in an hour out of a pint jar or out of a shot glass to the same effect.

This bongo beating Bullshit Shriners Parade on the Potomac goes on, and on, and on, and on.... and to tell you the truth it's getting as numbing as having a two-foot piece of rebar nailed down the center of your spine. What this Clown Convention really needs to get some attention is a good old fashioned auto-da-fe with everyone involved dumped inside the Wicker Man.

Via Ann Barnhardt

At the very least it's enough to make one regret that tar, feathers and riding out of town on a rail has gone out of fashion.

And they still have a lot of chumps on their side. People still dumb enough and depraved enough to warrant shaming and shunning by all right thinking Americans whenever they show their face and open their mouths.

What a bunch of chumps these morons who voted Obama and the Crimocrats into power turned out to be. And now all those chumps (along with the rest of us who had to endure their bullshit) are about to feel the Government's teeth clamp onto their buttocks and chew straight up through to their esophagus. In the hope and change era of their crack-pipe dreams, government seem like a solution, the ultimate solution. They forgot the previous meaning of "ultimate solution."

The con that's still unfolding in Washington ain't no Kabuki on steroids. Instead it reminds me of that scene in Goodfellas where a desperate businessman, looking for hope and change in his fortunes, makes a deal with a known mobster. It went something like this:

---

Government said, You run the joint. Maybe I'll try to help you.

And the chumps agreed, God bless you, Government. You've always been fair with me.

Now the chumps have got everyone the Government as a partner. Any problems, they goes to the Government. Trouble with a bill, to the Government. Trouble with jobs, liquidity, healthcare, they calls the Government.

But now the chumps have to pay the Government... every week no matter what.

"Business bad? Fuck you, pay me."

"Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me."

"The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me."

Also, now the Government could do anything. Like run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody will pay for it anyway.

Take deliveries at the front door and sell it out the back at a discount.

Take a case of booze and sell it.

It doesn't matter. It's all profit.

Then finally, when there's nothing left... when you can't borrow
another buck from the Chinese... you bust the joint out.

You light a match.

"Hello suckers! Fuck you pay me."

It was my own private mondegreen moment, but I heard "pees" when he almost certainly meant "peas." Didn't he?

Continued...

[Note: 2006 and then 2008 and now... HERE WE GO AGAIN! ]

"I cannot wait to welcome my gay brothers and sisters

to the Holy Realm of Sanctified Bliss ...

before they sober up and snap out of it!"

Continued...

Westsound is of sound mind when he nails a particular issue concerning seating in:If you won’t look before you leap…don’t blame me when there’s no water in the pond.

Try and imagine girls, the conclusions we men might reach if upon using an automobile women consistently and unanimously complained that after use of the car by the men in their lives, they just couldn’t figure out how to reach the gas and brake pedals upon inserting themselves in the driver’s seat. If rather than simply adjusting the seat and getting on with their day, they made a sport out of using this as an example of the basic mental inferiority and savagery of the human male. Feels good! Of course from our perspective we would be thinking, if the shiny buttons controlling the seat are too confusing for you, or if you are too scatter-brained to remember to check and adjust the seat position as necessary, why don’t you just say so and in the interests of chivalry toward such delicate blossoms we will gladly accommodate your lack of problem solving skills. I might add that the operation of a toilet seat, while quite a bit simpler to operate than the seat controls on your average automobile, still seems to elude the grasp of the supposedly superior female mind.

For many years now, the "seat always down after use" instruction from GynoAmericans to the men who put up with their rollicking insanity has always been one that sets my teeth on fire.

Continued...

Sippican hits it with his nail gun. A tough man but a fair man:

There's a dead spruce that an enormous pileated woodpecker is disassembling. He's as big as a toddler and as dumb as a blog writer, with much the same method -- constantly bashing his head on spots that appear rotten looking for juicy grubs, destroying the whole thing in the process. -- Sippican Cottage: Garden Of Unearthly Delights

Think about everything that the real daddy does: pay the bills, buy the food, put a fucking roof over your head. Everything you could ever ask for. Make your world a better, safer place. And what does Daddy get for all his work? The big piece of chicken. -- Chris Rock

Let's quit pretending, okay? It's not that big a deal and "the day" only reminds us that you don't think it's that big a deal either. Check out the Google numbers to confirm: "Mothers Day," 163 Million; "Fathers Day, 38 Million." Case closed.

But no stress. No blame. Be happy, keep healthy, and stay out of prison. Do those three things and we're generally fine with the rest. Unless you ask us about the details" and then we might tell you. But only if you ask us. If you don't ask us we take that as a sign you don't really want to find out the truth, because the truth is more than your heart can hold. So our policy as dads is, "You don't ask, we don't tell." Even today which, you would think, would be the day when we can say and do anything we want and get flowers and chocolates in return. But we don't. Because what real father really needs a "Day?"

The only people that seem to really need a "Fathers Day" are those in the stores since they don't really seem to have that much else going on in June. And even in the stores, "Fathers Day" is really sort of lackluster, isn't it? No big display build-up, pretty skimpy Hallmark section, no real cascade of ads and "buy it now or else" banners overhead, no huge point-of-purchase end-of-row displays once you get out of Power Tools ("Wow, a Makita Cordless Sawzall wrapped in a tie with a frog pattern! Hold out the hand that has offended me!"). Not even ProFlowers sends you heavy breathing last-minute emails about this day. Like I said: Steak, beer, card, chair.

Good fathers are like deep wells of cool water and, as the song says, you never miss your water until the well runs dry... or is bricked-up, or sent away from the home, or just wanders off due to lack of interest on the part of the other half of your parentage. It's hard to say how that last thing happens, and you'll never get anything other than the victim story from your mom. But if you ask us (and you better not) it often happens that the shit gets so deep he just wakes up one morning and hears in his head, "Just hop on the bus, Gus. / You don't need to discuss much." It can happen and it does happen more and more frequently as the critical role of the Father is more and more devolved by the culture into that of sperm donor.

Today we hear the complaints of more and more kids failing to thrive in a culture that fills their cups with self-esteem instead of guidance, with sand instead of water, but we never seem to connect that failure to thrive with the drive to reduce the Father to a fool and a cash machine. Well, you get what you don't pay for.

What we don't hear much about any more is "the deadbeat dad." The "deadbeat dad" had a long run during the Bush years when the President came from a family with, to say the least, a strong father model. It was as if large sectors of the culture wanted to underscore not the innate decency of most fathers, but the failings of a few fathers. In the present, now that the president of the United States is the disposable son of the world's most famous deadbeat dad, we don't hear so much about that type any longer. It is at if large sectors of the culture wanted to underscore that its better to have dreams of a father than to actually have a father.

Of course the truth is more complicated than that. It could well be that if men, even those who support the president completely, were to know what it was like to actually have to live with the president's odd and disturbed mother, they would all look at the president's absent father and say, "Whoa, I'd split too if I had to wake up next to her for the rest of my life." And in that we'd see that not all deadbeat dads are cads. Some are just trying to save their own life and are in flight from women whose one goal in life is to sell crazy in their homes every single day. Sometimes even the strongest of father has to hit the road.

But for those who have not and for those that will not and even for those who are on the road and never coming back... hey, this is your day. Rejoice and be glad in it and try not to strangle any kid who gives you a tie.

This is the point where everybody says, "Oh just shoot me." Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade • The Register

Continued...

Zombie: Why the Hypocrisy Defense is political suicide for liberalism

"Not quite so effective an argument when seen this way, is it?"

"The feminists have yet to produce a single piece of writing, devoted to their cause, which any rational creature could attach importance to....

Continued...

The Technium: When Hard Books Disappear

Continued...

A new video on the heels of Romney's announcing he will run for President: "You've gotten through your whole life on your looks, money, and the ability to BS people. You lack that one quality we all insist upon. That quality is 'integrity' and you, sir, do not have it." That's in the first minute. There are 12 more minutes to come.

Continued...

How our rulers make us accustomed to living smaller lives.

Continued...

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand eleven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fifth. -- Presidential Proclamation| The White House

Commenter @ (Wizbang)

I understand that July will be "Straight, Old, Working In the Private Sector for the Last 40 years, Raised Good Kids, Still Married to the Same Woman for 30 Years, Balding, Bad Breath, Aching Knees, Skin Cancer, Always Irritated, Pays All His Bills, Can't Break 90, Never Broke a Law Americans" (SOWITPSFTL40YRGKSMTTSWF30YBBBAKSCAIPAHBCB90NBALA) Month.

Continued...

"Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito!"

Ann Barnhardt's web page is HERE. No, it doesn't have permalinks. No, she's not on Facebook.

Continued...

Via the ever crepuscular Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

Now: Bernie Goetz, who became a household name after shooting four young men in New York City in 1984, holds two young squirrels in Union Square Park. Goetz, who said the men had tried to rob him, was later convicted for illegal possession of a firearm. The incident sparked a national dialogue on American’s perception of race and the legal limits of self defense. Goetz, now 63, has undertaken squirrel rescue as a cause. -- WSJ

Then: "I decided to shoot as many as I could as quickly as I could. I did a fast draw, and shot with one hand (my right), pulling the trigger prior to the gun being aligned on the targets. All actual shots plus my draw time occurred easily within 1.6 seconds or less. This is not as difficult to do as some might think, and occasionally I give a description of the technique along with a re-enactment.

Continued...

Well, first of all you gotta go out and find the paper stock from 1961 which isn't easy in a moist climate like Hawaii.

Make it a ream since you're going to have to replace a lot of certificates with numbers leading up to and away from this one. At least 100 in each direction. (Might want to slowly and carefully assassinate some of those contemporary births with natural causes -- see the How-To Manuals from the Kennedy era.)

Continued...

Once upon a time that skeevy communist Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar, "This machine kills fascists." Well, this Republican ticket kills moonbats and progressives:

That's right, kills them dead. One look at this concept by an unprepared moonbat and...

It is presently unknown just how many cerebral hemorrhages, massive coronary infarctions, and Medusasque turning to stone in the middle of the street deaths this ticket would cause, but it would be entertaining to find out.

Simply put, this is a ticket that could work for the benefit of the Republican party even if it never ran.

Continued...

Presented for your edification, a comment from one pissed-off vet found at: Rush to Palin critics: Obama is destroying the FREAKING COUNTRY! | The Right Scoop

The Right Wing intelligentsia have their sites aimed at Palin again and Rush seems mystified at their reasoning. After all, he says, Obama is the real problem, not Sarah Palin:

Look, I don’t understand all this [anti-Palin vitriol]. The problem is Obama! The Democrat party is destroying the FREAKING COUNTRY! And we’re sitting here sniping over…I’D VOTE FOR ELMER FUDD! if the Republicans nominated him, if Obama’s the Democrat.

First up in the comment thread, these thoughts from one Bob Zee:

“[Palin] is “divisive” because the conservative movement is full of cowards who bend over because they are afraid of the left and the media.

Why not fight against the smears? Why not fight for the truth? Instead conservatives run and hide and then wonder why even after 8 years of BUSH the country moved to the left!

While Governor, her state was one of 2 out of 50 that created net jobs. I COULD WRITE FOR HOURS ABOUT HER ACCOMPLISHMENTS, but it would not do a damn thing for people like Krauthammer and other fraudulent, cowardly, so called conservatives. How come the other intellectual governors that Krauthammer praises could not eke out some job gains? Odd huh?

WAKE UP!!!! Do you want to know why the jobs are gone? Do you want to to know why your nation is turning into a shit hole?

Continued...

"The question is, O Daddy Warbucks of the World, 'Will you drill?' And the answer is, 'Why bother just now?'"

Then Duke stands up and beats his chest,
Says "I made it. Why can't all the rest?
You got nothing to lose
But the shine on your shoes"
-- Steve Strauss, Wolfgang & Strauss

I'VE KNOWN MORE THAN A FEW very rich men. Some of them came by their wealth via a win in the sperm race. Some of them got a very big hit from the money machine in the first Internet Bubble lottery. Some of them married or divorced into it. Some of them got gobs of greenbacks the "old fashioned way, they worked for it."

Let's say you're one of these. Let's say you are so wealthy that, as one said to a friend of mine, "I no longer need a 'rate of return'." You've got ALL the stuff you will ever need and the dough just keeps piling up. You've got the private plane and your advisors keep saying you need the private helicopter "for tax purposes."

Continued...

But this video gives you a hint:

HT: Maggie's Farm

In the brain-dead manner of many new-age social media twits, Kovas Boguta gives the old Arab mind Visualizing The New Arab Mind - Computational History.

The preening Boguta has created the following chart that identifies the heavy tweeters of the Egyptian freedom movement.

[Click to enlarge]

He explains it by writing: Experts say Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future. Now that Mubarak has stepped down, I can share the work I've done making that metaphor tangible, and visualizing the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and across the Middle East. It is based on their Twitter activity, capturing the freedom of expression and association that is possible in that medium, and which is representative of a new collective consciousness taking form.

"A new collective consciousness taking form?" Well, maybe in the happy world of Kovas Boguta and others that actually believe the clap-trap of twitter's world saving powers. But not, I think, the way such handy clots of information will actually be used.

The Muslim Brotherhood, once they overcome their wild laughter at "a new collective consciousness taking form," would be remiss as a terrorist organization bent on the control of Egypt if it did not use this bit of Boguta's research methodically.

That method would be to extrapolate the twitter handles to the real names of the tweeters and put them on a list for re-education or death en route to the new regime in Egypt.

Thirsting for such recognition a commenter on the thread actually wrote, "My name is there separated from Ghonim by 2 nodes. Actually, I don't feel like I do such an effect and I was amazed that my bubble is relatively big."

At the same time, a comment of mine pointing out the potential evil uses of this information yesterday was scrubbed from the thread by today. Too much reality I guess.

I wonder if Boguta and his ilk will be interested in tracking the shooting, throat cuttings, and beheadings that befall members of his Egypt Influence Network over the next three to five years. Probably not. He'll be on to the next big thing that promises fresh fields and pastures new. He won't ever see the mass graves.

Westsound Modern dubs this the Most offensive commercial in Super Bowl history, and wonders if he is being overly sensitive. I think not. It certainly is a contender. To find one worse would require watching a lot of commercials in which the wretched excess of the purchase price for the slot nearly always exceeds the importance of the product or service, and are seldom either amusing of memorable. Superbowl ads are just a feckless corporation's way of announcing they have recently acquired, or still have, a penis in excess of one inch. Groupon's effort here falls into the recent penis graft category. That's the sort of thing that happens when a faith that has lasted nearly 1,200 years is co-opted by an Internet company that will be fortunate to last for 1,200 days.

What's seen here is more than the decline of respect for an ancient and now effectively extinct culture, it's the end of the road for this particular aged and faux Leftish "cause." The brief copy of the ad as "acted" by D-list celebrity Timothy (My career is over) Hutton sums up the end of the line for the BoomerGeezers "Free Tibet" movement.

"Free Tibet" is the most geriatric and sclerotic of Leftoid causes. This hoary mind-movie has been playing in one form or another since the invasion of Tibet in 1950, but matured in the fateful sixties. Since then there hasn't been one freshman college class that hasn't been urged to wear the t-shirts and sign the petitions demanding China somehow be forced to get out. It was never stated how they would be forced to leave, it was just assumed that somehow the spirit of Ghandi or some western army would do the dirty work.

"Free Tibet" was a more romantic cause than Che even if the t-shirts aren't as cool. But with this ad at the superbowl I think we can finally say the stake has been driven through the heart of the "Free Tibet" fantasy.

Sure we may see Richard Gere pop up here and there like a gerbil spouting his nonsense, but Tibet and Freedom are no longer an operative Leftoid bitching point. Tibet is now just another tourist destination in The Peoples Republic of China; just another ethnic food court for the liberal elite to brag on back home.

Hutton might just have well have bagged the line about Tibetans "whipping up an amazing fish curry" and quoted Marx instead: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Sigh.

[Special Envoy to Egypt Frank G. Wisner] told a group of diplomats and security experts that “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical — it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy.”

But just before his remarks, Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton gave a strategy overview that stood at odds with that assessment. At a minimum, she said, Mr. Mubarak must move out of the way so that his vice president, Omar Suleiman, can engage in talks with protest leaders over everything from constitutional changes to free and fair elections. -- NY Times via JustOneMinute: Winning The Future In Egypt (Ongoing...)

It's time to give the reigning princess of RHINOplasty the recognition she deserves. I'm beginning to think that the only thing more disastrous than John McCain's candidacy was his paternity. At the very least, his candidacy is over.

"Republican Meghan McCain earned her cover spot on the debut issue of Maksim magazine with her comment “Michelle Bachmann is no better than a poor man’s Sarah Palin” on Lawrence O’ Donnell's MSNBC show “The Last Word”. Adding to her long list of attacks on conservative women." -- Maksim @ The People's Blog

[Complaints concerning retinal burn, severe mood alteration to an otherwise nice day can be registered in the comments.]

Two meme dreams emerged over the last week in conversations and on the web. I'm sure you've noticed both even though neither means anything.

On the left the straw being grasped and held as if it was a baseball bat about to knock something somewhere out of the park is, "His numbers are UP!" -- which comes and goes in the comments to this item as it does in many other places along the muddy banks of Denial:

Wow!… Even the Dye Jobs Are Staged on KA-CHING!

The meaning of "His numbers are UP!" is evidently that with one successful "Together we mourn" speech tucked under his belt, and the bowl of warm "Jobs" drool about to be served to the nation and congress this week, there is nothing, but nothing, in the next two years that will deny him The Resurrection.

Yes, roll away the stone, brothers and sisters! Neither insidious unemployment, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, Arab atomics, crashing global economies, warmal colding, nor an alienated tea-drinking multitude of independent voters with "Won't Get Fooled Again" looping on their iPods, can stop this enfant terrible from another bite at the apple. After all, "His numbers are UP!" and what goes up never comes down. That's their plaintive hope.

As somebody's pappy once said, "Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first."

But not all straws are in the desperate grasp of the left. On the right we hear -- when it comes to the magic Mitt man -- the same refrain, "His numbers are UP!" The breathlessly repeated news kibble that Romney Wins New Hampshire Republican Straw Poll is supposed to be an indicator that... well.... "His numbers are UP!" As above the subtext is "what goes up can never come down so all you other contenders who don't have the support of some republicans in New Hampshire might just as well sit down and wait for his inauguration, for, LO AND BEHOLD!, the Mitt is the O-slayer for whom we have waited all these loooooong years." That's their plaintive hope.

As somebody's pappy once said, "Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first."

More hair-care for men but with a subtler dye job.... just a touch of gray. Most "presidential."

"His numbers are UP!" only says to me that our long national nightmare of hearing about who is certain to win in 2012 has only just begun. Between now and that distant November, the world will have its way with both these pretenders. It won't be pretty, but it will be, as always, instructive.

"It's a confusing day when the best man in the country
is a lipstick wearing, cookie baking hockey mom hottie
from Nowhere, Alaska, but so it goes." -- RCJ

I’m seeing a lot of “Woe is us” kvetching and whining cropping up around the sphere in the last few days. Powerline’s got a dose of this social media disease (SMD). Pajamas has a dose. Rove and Krauthammer are probably close to Patient Zero when it comes to the origin of the dose. Innumerable others have a dose. And now they all seek to “give a dose to the ones they love most” -- fellow Republicans and the American people.

The SMD in question is the sudden onset of the “Oh, God, we’ve got nothing but losers to run for President in 2012” syndrome as they wander about the echoing warehouse of their traditional and perennial candidates and see... well, they see losers. And these clear and present losers constitute a collection of schmos that cannot be seen to be able to beat the New and Improved Obama that has emerged in the last week or so, phoenix-life, from the ashes of Tucson.

Wasn't it only yesterday that many of these same doughnuts were dropping their pundit kibble around the idea that "Hey, Hillary could beat this guy!" Why yes, I do believe it was just about only yesterday. Today we're back to the "This bozo is unbeatable."

I have to admit they’ve got a point when your cardboard candidate warehouse is only stocked with the worn and below average offerings of Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich, Paul, Pawlenty, et. al. This is indeed a shabby set of known political hacks, sad sacks, and knobjobs. None of them is going to light up the sky with fireworks.

But you have to remember that this view only comes about because they can’t really face the fact that the only winner they’ve got is a woman who lives in Alaska. Even if they could, they've been told not to.

Instead, all the “kool konservative Katzenjammer kids” seem to have climbed into Karl Rove’s jockstrap for a few wheezing jogs around the post-partum electoral blues circuit. And as they take their laps it seems to me there’s a lot of warning flatulance being emitted that smells out, “Don’t do it, Sarah! Think of the children!”

Why this should be so is beyond me until I recall that the primary force of conservative politics in the last few decades has been to lose no matter what the cost. It’s a comfortable place for these guys; a pose they’re cozy in. After all, why take a shot at winning when you can lose your way into whining?

So, instead of telling their leftoid bosom buddies in the media to pound sand when it comes to Palin, they’re taking the high and civil road of willful failure -- as usual. Not a grain of true grit in the carload. In fact, when it comes right down to it these folks are just paper conservative tigers who have yet to learn that politics ain’t beanbag because they like to slouch in their beanbag chairs and watch the Obamamachine roll over the squashable bodies of Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich et al.

After all, why back a potential winner, a person that people get excited about, a person with clear and unadulterated values, views and opinions, when the losers are so much more huggable? These colonized minds of the never-radical right would run the Geico Gecko before Palin -- if only because their wives would make their lives hell if they didn't.

I call this whining what it is -- the new right wing mental disease, RPDS (Republican Palin Derangement Syndrome.) It’s highly infectious, debilitates the host on contact, weakens the party structure, and is fatal to winning in 2012. People with a fatal dose of RPDS are easy to spot. They're the ones who'd actually consider drafting John McCain.

Fortunately, between now and November, 2012, the people will have something to say about this. I hope they'll at least have a choice, not a Gecko.

Illo by Moonbattery via Diogenes' Middle Finger.

Originally written and published on November 5th, 2010 and more right now than it was then.

Maddow and MSNBC President Phil Griffin: "He's Making a List and Checking It Off"

Now nonoperative: Keith Olbermann suspended over political donations - Politics - Decision 2010 - msnbc.com

Msnbc TV host Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely on Friday for making campaign donations to three Democratic congressional candidates, apparently in violation of NBC News ethics policy.

Now operative: Keith Olbermann FIRED for being too much of an asshole for even MSNBC to stomach a second longer than it had to.

Msnbc TV host Keith Olbermann was finally fired definitely on Friday for making a ratings-sucking violation of NBC News / Comcast profits policy.

The announcement came in a one-sentence statement from msnbc TV President Phil Griffin: “I became aware of revolted and disgusted by Keith's lower standards of mental and physical hygiene political contributions late last night. , and his inability to keep his ratings higher than a gnat's scrotum. Mindful of what will be the new Comcast/NBC News policy and standards regarding profitability, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay fired his ass permanently.”

State of play today [November 2010]: GE owns MSNBC.... but not for long. It's unload[ed] this black hole of ratings on Comcast around year end.

Comcast is a profits-driven enterprise that does not easily tolerate the loss of a dollar. (Don't think so? Subscribe and watch your sweet cheap new customer deal slowly inflate upward over a year or so.)

Axes have been honed and held ready at Comcast for some time: Communications Chief to Depart NBC Universal - NYTimes.com

NBC Universal [and universally loathed] Jeff Zucker announced he was departing as chief executive, Allison Gollust, the executive vice president of corporate communications, has told her staff she too will be leaving the company when the takeover by Comcast is completed.

When Comcast takes control there will be blood for the sake of profits and ideology won't matter a hoot.

What does matter [as was shown today, January 21, 2011] is who exactly gets to keep their jobs at MSNBC, Will it be a loss leader like Olbermann [NOPE] or a conscientious executive like current President Phil Griffin [YES] who is "aware", acts quickly, and is "mindful"? "Without pay" is good corporate-speak too. It show's that Griffin is ready and able and willing to make the cuts where it counts. Olbermann makes somewhere around $4,000,000 a year. Even if he's just suspended for a month that sends $308,000 straight to the bottom line. [Bottom line now improved by around $4,000,000 a month which, especially in this day and age, buys A LOT of television news resources in people and reportage.]

It's not about Olbermann's job. It's about Griffin's.

Well played, Phil.

Update: Don Surber has this most tersely as "Fool. Money. Parted."

Update: Van der leun to Olbermann 1/21, "Door. Ass. Bang."

Update: Spend six minutes here with Jon Stewart as he chain-saws and parts out Olberman last year on the Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Special Comment - Keith Olbermann's Name-Calling
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The people's genius of The People's Cube, Maksim, made this cover for Prog Fantasy Magazine: The Palin Issue adding:

Inside This Issue: Location of her underground lair. Evil Sarah's Deadly Arsenal: Ray Gun, Mind-Numb Robot Army, Mind Controlling Dog Whistle, Insanity Inducing Target Map, Hypnotizing Sex Appeal. 10 Things You Should Know About Sarah: Dumb yet brilliantly evil. Thinks the planet is only 47 years old. Shoots kittens and puppies for sport. Violates the Prime Directive just for fun. Our Friends Are Stealing From Us: the New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN are selling our ideas as hard news. Brain Exercises: How to trick your mind into believing facts are fiction and vice versa. New Study: All conservative speech is vitriol and leads to violence. Progressive speech will align your chakras. Next Issue: The Tea Party's plan to summon Cthulhu and control the world.

The theme of the week/month/year that the autofellationists of both left and right are sharing deeply today seems to be ye olde "Palin not qualified" canard. From Powerline to Daily Kos they seem united in their Stop Palin circle jerk.

Well, it's early innings for 2012 as yet, and the people, not the pundits and pudpullers of the right and left, will have something to say about it after all.

In the meantime it only goes to confirm my old adage:

"Go ahead. Take my pay."

I like Michael Medved well enough-- even if I do wonder “Just exactly what is the ‘second’ most popular show on politics and culture?” Alas, like many of the long running rightpundits of late he’s begun to grate on me with his too often tossed off chunks of pundit kibble.

The bowl of kibble served lukewarm today was his predictable, almost Talmudic, examination of why the Right (in Medved speak “everyone -- my angry listeners especially”) needs to tone it down. He was especially vociferous when repeating his often stated belief that Barack Obama is not actually out to harm America. Again and again he rebuffed callers with this assertion; an assertion that I fail to see reflected in almost every act, if not every word, uttered by the president. But evidently Medved does and whenever he goes to this assertion, as he goes to several Medved-branded mental tape loops, I always think, “Well, maybe in your happy world.”

Like other pundits dispensing his daily kibble, Medved has his schtick and his “reasonable thoughtful man on the right now brings you angry and/or whacko guests and phone-ins” for your continued listening pleasure. It’s a branding mechanism and Medved certainly can’t default to the Full Savage. That slot is already taken, thank you very much. Instead, Medved chooses to become the very model of the rigorously rational rightist who seeks to “engage on the issues and leave the passions out of it.” He’s uniquely equipped to do so and it works for him as far as it goes.

Of course, he’s being co-opted nicely by the uncivil civilians of the left who started and have sustained the whole silly civility discussion for a week. Since he’s an intelligent man Medved may even know it but, locked in his radio persona, he can only go with it. He’s got some company in that with pundit after pundit checking in to say, in essence, “You know, they have a point. We should be more civil.” Which is, of course, a fatal step since they all and sundry have just violated a cardinal debating principle of William F. Buckley: To paraphrase, “Never, ever accept an opponent,s premise. Get you opponent to accept yours.”

Aficionados of Buckley’s classic “Firing Line” shows will recall the master’s method of reducing “infallible arguments to fallacious premises.” What Medved and the other consolers of the left are doing these days in their engagement with this strawest of dogs is elevating the left’s fallacious premise that the right is most uncivil to an infallible argument. That argument is that the Right really has been (without really knowing it) most uncivil and needs to clean up its act if “our politics” are to return to a level and “civil” playing field.

O timor! O mortis! O would that Buckley wouldst be living at this hour to set Medved and the fellow travelers at National Review back on the Right path. Instead, Medved and others are in danger of becoming the poster children for the spoonerism, “I used to be Snow Right, but I drifted.”

Does this work? Why yes it does. Time after time, the nice Right falls over themselves in falling for it. Already we see that chinless, lying gobschmucked putz E.J. Dionne Jr.calling for a "GOP test: A civil and honest health-care discussion." Oh really? Like the oh-so-civil and oh-so-honest health-care discussion that went on for most of 2009 in the congress? I. Don't. Think. So. Dionne, you cretinous, chancrous tool. My "discussion" with you and your ilk starts with "ST" and runs to "FU."

I'm against the trend of the last few days as the “Rational right pundits” slowly and steadily buy into the Big Lie that the Right is being uncivil. The fact of the matter is that it hasn’t been, it has only been perceived to be by the left now that they losing their grip on the absolute power they thought they would hold onto forever since 2008.

In historic terms, in America and elsewhere in the world, the Left always becomes increasingly uncivil in direct proportion to its loss of power. When they gain power the pleasures of being uncivil on the left do not, of course, stop with talk. Ever. And after they achieve absolute power in other societies, it always and everywhere goes directly to guns and purges. That’s their method and their madness, over and over again, and we ignore it at our peril. With the left in power, you don't get a lot of lonely lunatics shooting random people in the head, you get organized death squads shooting people on lists in the head.

Conversely, when power begins to slip away from the left in America it invariably calls out for more civility from its opponents and will riot to get it. This is what is happening now and the left, should it be successful in this -- look for it to be harped on at the forthcoming state of the union address -- it will be the first to whip out the long knives, declare a Kristallnacht, a cultural revolution, and lock and load.

The left not only expects the “nice guys” of the “rational right” to come around to their way of thinking, they depend upon it. And they should since that’s been the pattern of these things for as long as I can remember.

I’ve even tried this a couple of times but, alas, no longer. My nice, reasonable right guy is all used up these days. I've got compassion fatigue. I see the left dealing, once again, from the bottom of their media marked card deck (when do they do otherwise?), and I’m not feeling too civil about them and their plans these days. I've seen enough of their "handful of 'gimme' and mouth full of 'gimme more'."

Speaking for myself -- in a calm and rational tone as I reach to upset their crooked card table and draw my metaphoric popcult pistol -- I have to say, “I know what you're thinking. ‘Did he fire six insults or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as we're playing for the future of the Republic, and being as this is a 2010 iMac, the most powerful personal computer in the world, and would blow your premise clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? ”

Or, to quote the much more pithy Don Surber, "The left wants us to be civil -- after being so uncivil for a decade. Bite me."

One of the small economies about living in New York City for years and relocating to the West Coast is to be had in clothing costs. If one of your jobs in New York was being a men's fashion editor for a magazine, you find that you don't buy clothes so much as have them.

In any case, I dumped clothes by the cartload before I moved, and I still had far too many when I arrived. Since I don't ski, the usefulness of items that would put Nanook of the North into a sweat during January in Greenland are pretty dubious. As a result, I've been pretty much out of the clothing shopping cycle for years and I find it, to say the least, refreshing.

In Seattle if you hold some fleece jackets, a couple of hooded sweatshirts, a few work shirts and two pairs of jeans for "formal occasions," you're pretty much done. But "wear happens" and I've noted that my Levis have been getting -- even for Levis -- fairly grotty in the last couple of months. Yesterday, I decided they about to be redefined as "rags," and I so set off to purchase my first new pair of jeans in at least six years.

Since I'm a hit-and-run shopper I did what any American male in search of jeans-to-go would do, I turned left into the parking lot of the first Gap I saw and sauntered inside confident of my mission. Unlike women of my acquaintance who practice "catch and release shopping" in order to increase their collection of designer shopping bags, I knew what I wanted. I also knew how much I was going to spend. This was in sharp contrast to many women who never really spend any money on clothes, but only "save" money on clothes. [ Me: "You look great in that new outfit with the shoes and the hat. How much did they cost?" Her: "Would you believe I saved over $800 on this? How great is that?" Me: "That's really great."]

I firmly believe that if you have to spend more than 15 minutes in a clothing store, you don't need what you think you need. My list was short. I wanted one pair of five pocket denim jeans, blue, crisp, and coming in at no more than $50. The Gap was the place for me.

Fool. Yes, fool. For if you want to find a pair of crisp, new blue jeans in trendy grunge Seattle, you'd better pack a lunch, because you are about to find yourself trapped inside an episode of "Shop Trek."

It's not that you can't buy some new jeans at the Gap, it is just that you can't buy any new new jeans.

Yes, it would seem that sometime in the last decade, the American people have become so fat and so happy and so inordinately lazy that they no longer want to put their own wear, sweat and stress into their Levis. Nope, it seems that the entire country will only buy jeans that have already been worn into a shambles, reduced, as new, to the rags I already had at home.

You've got new jeans at the Gap that look like they've had non-union and unlucky sweatshop employees of Sri Lanka of all shapes and sizes stuffed into them and then dragged for miles along country roads. They've got jeans with the off -the-rack look as if they've been sandblasted at a construction site in Tijuana -- after Happy Hour.

You've got jeans that look as if the person inside them was persuaded to run through a scene of "Dirty Dancing" with a belt-sander .

You've got jeans that seem to have been stolen out of a wedding reception in Afghanistan after a predator strike went terribly wrong.

And you've got jeans that I swear have the finish and light golden color stained deep into the blue that you could only get if you buried them in a Chicago feedlot and let several herds of cattle rain down on them for a month.

Pre-shredded, pre-torn, pre-raveled at the seams, pre-faded, pre-pissed upon and a dozen other industrial or inhuman processes all combined to give me a section of men's jeans at the Gap that looked like the changing room right next to a mass grave. All displayed proudly and marked and priced as "New."

I'd long been aware of a certain market on eBay, Eastern Europe, and Japan among the tragically hip for vintage worn Levis. I'd accepted that as one accepts the fact that there will always be a market real and facsimile shrunken heads. I'd been vaguely conscious of the "stone-washed" process in denim, but thought that was only popular among Suburban housewives of the expanding midriff. But I'd just not caught up with the fact that it was no longer necessary, or fashionable, to break-in your own Levis when you could have a process or a prisoner or a refugee do it for you.

It was once the case that when you bought a pair of Levis they were not only board stiff, they were two sizes large so you could "shrink to fit." The other miracle about them was that they could turn any laundry within two blocks of your house blue for the first five washings. Wear? Wear happened -- slowly, over years, like the mellowing of a fine Bordeaux. Long gone. Where are the Levis of yesteryear? In the Ginzo district in Tokyo selling for $1,110 a pair.

Where are the Levis and Gap jeans of next year? Probably on the ass of some hapless bastards in lock-down at a prison in either Arizona or Bangladesh. After all, if my web host can outsource his service calls to India, surely it is only a matter of time before our Levi pre-wearing is outsourced as well.

Did I buy any new jeans? Of course not. I came home and looked at the two half-rotten pair I own, frayed at the cuff, a hole in one knee, and stained from five years hard-riding. I slipped a pair on, chose an Hawaiian shirt that would be ashamed if it was a tie, slapped a fleece hoody over that, and took a turn in front of the mirror.

Ah, that Tropical-Balkan-Refugee-Gansta look. The very glass of fashion.

It's hard to know what to hate more here, the cutely crafted crapulousness of the message, or the thought that the state and the Feds paid some otherwise unemployable and brain-dead drool-cups to produce it.

Little Miss Attila alerted me to this at Ace's place and I shall be a long time forgiving her.

Genghis of Ace wisely notes that the state of Washington, run by slobbering liberals for slobbering progressives, has a $5 billion shortfall -- soon to bloom by another billion or so -- and yet continues to spend money of tripe like this.

Well, of course, it does. Spending money on tripe is what Democrat establishments do without thinking twice. And in this state, unthinking Dems are par for the course... especially in Seattle, King County, and the capitol in Olympia. They dump the change of the chumps who vote them in willy-nilly and probably will until the last ding-dong of Democrat doom.

We're always reminded that when money's tight around Washington and Seattle it'll have to be the Police, the Firemen, and the Libraries that are the first to go. It's never junk like this and it's never the useless state employees who sign off on it that will go. They're far too sensitive to miss a paycheck. Parasites always are.

I'm also moved by how sensitive this video is to the political niceties of the age. Note how many, proportionally speaking, African Americans show up. It must have strained the producers to cast it since, demographically speaking, Washington is one of the Whitest states in the Union.

Still, the formalities have to be obeyed.

Another nice touch is everybody sneezing into, or covering their mouths with, their elbows. This is, of course, to keep from covering your mouth with your hand lest you later -- before washing you hands -- pass your cooties on to another unwary citizen. This is also a new technique invented by the state for its subjects.

It needs to be this way since in the brave new world of demented Democrat bureaucrats they know full well that none of the kids running amuck in the state were raised right by their parents.

In this they may have a point.

More proof that there is no bullshit this nation will not eat.

[Snarky Illustration of Key Title Word Deleted]

In the comments to They say that if you want a friend in Washington get yourself a dog... @ AMERICAN DIGEST Daphne notes:

I'm tired of seeing the failure in chief constantly splashed across your front page.

Seriously, why so much time spent linking to scatty bullshit on this incompetent, inconsequential asshole?

I'd much rather read your thoughts on almost any other topic than our current presidential travesty. I'm way overbaked on Obama.

Posted by: Daphne at December 12, 2010 3:47 PM

To which I reply to her sage counsel,

You know, Daphne, that was my thought exactly this afternoon. I'm sick of this schmuck too. I think I'll take a turn and turn away from these brimming bowls of steaming pundit kibble.

Posted by: vanderleun at December 12, 2010 4:42 PM

And so be it. I'm taking the cure and purging the page of his puss over the next day or so. He really is a revolting example of a "person," made only more revolting by all those who still "believe."

Oh well, God will punish them.

Of course, it will only be a matter of time before I'm forced to post,

Life imitates farce: WikiLeaks founder Assange has encrypted Guantanamo documents, will release them if arrested. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has circulated across the internet an encrypted “poison pill” cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay.

Humm, where have we heard that before? Oh, yes....

I was sleepin’ like a rat
When I heard something jerkin’
There stood Julian
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
He said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this movie before.”
-- Bob Dylan, Motorpsycho Nightmare

On the phone today a friend informs me that Macy's is having a sale.

"Macy's? Macy's always has a sale! Things are priced at "full price" there for about two hours and then the dive down to break even begins."

"Ah, but this was a special sale. A sale for gifts."

"Gifts? What about gifts? Who you getting gifts for?"

"Everybody. Don't you know that gifting time has begun?"

"Begun? When? I just noticed that daylight savings time has begun. Don't we get to enjoy the savings before the givings?"

"Not any more."

"God! It NEVER stops!

"Last week, save the effing Republic!

"This week save an hour of daylight!

"In a couple of weeks cook everyone a gigantic meal!

"Then go out and blow about a grand on gifts and get back $200 in gifts! Plus a lot of torn paper with pictures of dwarfs, horned beasts, and an old bearded man hitting on a hash pipe!"

"So, what do you want?"

"What I want is to cut straight to January 1, 2011 so I can get the hangover done with. God! It NEVER stops!"

Illustration from Serr8d's Cutting Edge

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-- Yeats

Of all people Time’s Mark Halperin, tool and fool and formerly full-time Obama pegboy, writes, "The White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters."

The phrase "White House" is used here as a beard for "Obama" since it is clear that there is nothing to the White House that is not Obamaesque. Indeed, the use of code is becoming all the more prevalent now that this one man disaster is about to break over "his" party like a sewage tsunami of epic proportions.

In the backwash there will be expectations of Obama "triangulating" and scuttling crabwise and widdershins towards "the center." Even now various contractual pundits are filling their online and on-air blatherfests with this foolishness simply because they have nothing else to say. Only the shabby history of the Clinton debacle informs them.

The chances of a "move to the center" on the part of this preening narcissist are exactly zero. It's not about governing. It's not about the "Democrats." It's not about what is "good for America." It's about none of those things and precisely about.... the Seinfeldian nothing. It's about the big zero, President O, who will do what he set out to do, fulfill his own internal vision of his "destiny."

And in that vision what is good for O is what is bad for America. It's not really that the current desk jockey in the Oval office is incompetent. He's not. He's always gotten exactly what he wanted through a clever triangulation of his own interests, the personal interests of others, and dullness of others so besotted with leftist pap that if they don't hate the country that gave them everything, have little use for it.

Riding on a wave of peri-geriatic guilt from the baby-boomers of a paler persuasion, the mountebank and bounder has bounded straight into a job that lets him, at long last, indulge his passions for self-aggrandizement and misrule. This man is a hater, a wrecker, and a racist.

To think he will "move to the center" like the fawning lapdog that was Bill Clinton is to misread him utterly. The center does not hold him. He's a creature of edge cities, off-brand cultures, and twisted ideas. What he loves is the abyss. He is the man that is an island. He has no part of the main nor is there any heart for the heartland within him. There is no American soil between his toes, only the ever shifting sands of some Hawaiian beach.

The persistence of the birth certificate controversy has its roots not in some existence or non-existence of some document, but in the very real sense of most sensible people that this American has no America in him at all. He is not of this continent, nor is he from the American grain. Like Peer Gynt's onion you could peel him to the innermost level and find only nothing where the core should be. The only thing contained in that sphere, if it could be measured, is the spite and contempt for the country that one can smell oozing from every pore and informing the tone of every word.

This man hates the culture that produced him and with reason. Far from reining him in, the coming destruction of the Democrats only frees him to get his hate on in a more direct and unrestrained manner.

Elected under the cloak of being a "uniter," this is a man whose one central wish is to disassemble the Constitution and the United States at the same time. When the oath was given, his heart said, "destroy, dissolve, and leave defenseless the Constitution of the United States, so help me Me."

He doesn't need the congress to go on. He's the commander in chief without an anchor or a center. He can do quite enough all by himself.

Depend upon it.

In a thoughtful reply to Side-Lines: Green Martyr with "Embiggened" Ideas Go Boom American Digest commenter FrankP, looks at a rare class act in American television journalism from his comfy chair in Angleterre:

I watched this story unfold on Fox News Channel from the comfort of my armchair in Norfolk, England, throughout our evening (your morning).

Megan Kelly kicked it off with a breaking news item and tentatively put together the early stages in her clinical and precise way, then handed over to Shep Smith. He fleshed it out during the dramatic stand-off with a gradual supply of background gen which moved it from a possible 'Asian' terrorist strike, to an environmental nut-job pantomime, in very smooth transition.

Interjected were vox pops from eye-witnesses and harrowing pictures of infants being removed from danger in their cots, one sitting up and apparently enjoying the incident (unlike his rescuers) despite looking a little bemused by all the excitement.

Shep, in his inimitable way sailed through an hour of faultless non-stop commentary, orchestrating the whole shebang with characteristic consummate ease and interjecting his wry humour into the incident without stepping over the line. He managed to get a couple of digs at Al Gore in the process.

Then Neil Cavuto took over. During his stint the researchers had contacted the husband of Lee's sister; Cavuto proceeded to tease from him the story of Lee's life and gradual decline of his mental health. Cavuto got more or less the complete story of Lee's families trials and tribulations resulting from Lee's descent into madness.

All this with a life and death stand-off being depicted by a multi-screen set up. Brilliant. It was a masterpiece of reportage.

Unfortunately I missed the denouement because just as we got to the vinegar strokes, we had a power-cut (not unusual in these here parts these days; it’s the Socialism thing – beware!). By the time power was restored, Beck was already into his usual entertaining crusader shtick - and didn't even mention it. It was only later when I scoured the Internet and discovered that Lee had been whacked by the SWAT cops; by then it was yesterday's potatoes and I went to bed.

The point of my own long ramble about it is to underscore for you guys that you are very lucky to have Fox News. We have nothing even approaching its professional journalistic and production qualities in Britain. The Fox Channel gets written off here by our liberal/communist MSM as a right-wing looney / commercialistic outfit.

The two hours plus of the Lee hostage siege was gripping telly and the journalists and producers should collect some sort of award as a result. Only in America, indeed! Congratulation to Fox - and all who sail in her.

As for the lies and corruption of the Al Gore bandwagon - perhaps some of them should reflect on what their cynical scams can provoke in the minds of the impressionable. The evil bastards won't - of course.

Posted by: Frank P at September 2, 2010 7:31 AM

Listen, it don't really matter to me
Baby, you believe what you wanna believe.
You see, you don't have to live like a refugee.
-- Tom Petty

Central to the 'progressives' suicidal rush to condemn the Cross and celebrate the Mosque is their decades long and continuing attempt to equate "tolerance" with "approval." These two states are not the same thing which is why the English language provides two distinctly different words.

Why does the First Amendment enshrine both speech and religion as things the state shall not legislate against or establish an approved version thereof? To formalize "tolerance" without requiring "approval."

In this wise, it is possible to form a society of individuals with vastly different ideas and religions in which the liberty of all is respected by all. In essence we agree that I tolerate your worship of a moon god and you tolerate my worship of a tree. It's "live and let live" at the most basic level. If, on the other hand, you decide that I have to make continuous noises of "approval" of the moon god in order for you to grant me the right to worship the tree god in peace, we are headed towards an argument that ends in guns.

Stated bluntly the American tradition is that I don't require approval of my beliefs from you and you don't insist on my approval of your beliefs. Regardless of what we may do, we tacitly agree not to do things which exacerbate a state of mutual disrespect. We mutually agree not to get in each others faces about these issues with acts like, oh I don't know, building a temple to the moon god so that it casts a shadow across my cemetery. Doing so starts a process of disrespect that also tends, if history is any guide, to end in guns and fire.

"Toleration does not require approval." It really is the simplest of social compacts and like all great and simple ideas bringing in nuance and qualifiers doesn't strengthen our common bonds as a society. On the contrary, it only weakens them. This is well known to those that seek to create a climate of continual upheaval in the mistaken belief that, in the end, the fire will not consume them. They should reflect that civil war consumes all. Then again, perhaps they know and knowing do not care.

It is well to reflect that every single move in the past few decades that has resulted in a loss of individual liberty has begun in a plea for tolerance and ended with non-negotiable demands for approval. Those familiar with the decades of the 1840s and the 1850s, the last time the fires in the minds of men grew this hot, will recognize our current conundrum as mirrored in the various issues that led up to and away from the Missouri Compromise. Many were ready, up until the very last moment, to tolerate slavery. But most were not prepared to step over that line into outright approval. Yet those who began in asking for tolerance for slavery ended in demanding approval. As always, it ended in guns and the sweeping away of an old and corrupt institution.

In the spirit of America, I am prepared to tolerate a vast and unfettered range of religions, beliefs, lifestyles, and other things that my fellow citizens may wish to don in order to decorate their lives and souls. But if they come to me and seek my unfettered approval for this or that hobby-horse they have chosen to ride I shall reserve my approval according to my judgment. Should they then, like piqued children, insist on my approval of this or my disapproval of that as a requirement in custom or in law for my continued full citizenship in this nation, we will find ourselves at daggers drawn.

I show you the American contract enshrined in the Declaration and codified in the Constitution. Like Lincoln, I show you a land "conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal." Like Whitman, I give you "the sign of democracy."

From these founding principles, forged and tested in fire, we have built a land in which we -- difficult as it may be -- agree to "tolerate" each other. I do not require, nor do I seek to compel, your "approval." Beware if you seek to compel mine.

Here's a particularly apt description of the current inhabitants of the American left from American Digest commenter, Western Chauvinist:

I've been calling those on the left "vampires" because when you hold a mirror up to them, they don't begin to see themselves. I've been trying to gently explain that they're not arguing the issues, only demonizing their opponents, and they just can't/won't see it. I couldn't possibly be talking about them this way. They are the virtuous ones.

I think this is due to either narcissism (which would be unsurprising given the self-esteem movement of the last several decades) or extreme cognitive dissonance. Either way it supports the idea that liberalism (which is really leftism now) is a mental disorder. My evangelical friend says it is a spiritual disorder, which may get more to the point of the "vampire" label.

.... and it isn't Jahweh, Jesus, or Allah.

Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim

But, as noted at Spengler | A First Things Blog

"All that is beside the point. That Obama has a deep personal sympathy for Islam is beyond doubt. The President takes every opportunity to emphasize it. But he is not a Muslim, only the thrice-abandoned child and step-child of Muslims and an anthropologist mother who deeply sympathized with the struggle of Muslims to resist globalization. He has a deep antipathy to the American view of things, insisting that "American exceptinalism" is no different than "Greek exceptionalism." He belongs neither to the United States, nor to the Muslim world; he is a gifted outsider with a talent for persuasion who profiled Americans the way anthropologist profile primitive tribes, and in a variant of the old adventure-movie script, made himself our king.

Once again my vision for a new green America takes a giant step thanks to the current government of "really smart people:" Cash for Clunkers May Cost Up to $45,354 Per Vehicle. Sooner of later, the Obama Administration is going to have to implement my fiendish plan from 2005:

Hybrid government issue hybrid cars for all Americans, Free! (Well, almost)

---

The Didik: Rejoice! Your Government's Car is Here to Help You Kill Global Warming. Varoooonk!

I know saturation pollution first hand. I was born in Los Angeles in the smog of the late 40s. Electric cars were either long forgotten or not yet envisioned.LA was Smogville for Angeleans at that time. I can remember walking to school in smog so thick it seemed that my father would march in front of us with a machete. Black flakes of soot settled on the white enamel of my mother's stove as she cursed the black streaks in the collars of my father's starched white Hathaway shirts. The air, on the clear days, was best described as "ocher."

Now a haze still lingers over Los Angeles, but you need distance and elevation to make it out. There are days when the wind and weather collaborate that shine crisp and clear. Even though the automobile population of Los Angeles has quintupled since my childhood, a great deal of progress has been made in smog control and reduction. Compared to my childhood, the air of Los Angeles is now pure and pristine.

Alas, to Progressives, this progress is no progress; any improvement shy of perfection is no improvement at all. Automobiles remain. Pollution remains. Los Angeles remains. Curses, foiled again!

Worse still, the middle class remains. It grows larger, more affluent and greedy for the good life than ever. None of this is "A Good Thing." To Progressives, seeing Utopia forever just out of reach, and locked in the immortal dystopia of the now, only perfection persuades. Anything less is just not good enough. Ever.

"The Four Horseman are on cruise control among us.
They are driving Hummers."

Cash for Clunkers? Not. Good. Enough. Ever. For the Priests of Perpetual Perfection, it never will be. For the carping Friends of the Sierra Club's Earth and the jet-owning Hollywood Hypocrites, the situation remains drastic. Petroleum-Armageddon is always just one tank of gas away from destroying Earth. Every tank of gas bought and burned threatens life as we know it on every mile of every road, urban, suburban, and rural, in these states. The Four Horseman are on cruise control. They are driving used Hummers.

A savior is at hand, however, in the new hybrid vehicles popping up like dubious

Continued...

[Note: I'm filing this under "An agreeable person is one who agrees with me." Especially when it's Victor Davis Hanson:

"Gender. Here I am worried, as I have expressed previously, about the marked differences in the way our cultural elite express themselves. Hollywood offers an instructive example. Why can't any of our actors talk like a Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Bill Holden, or Gregory Peck? I'm not asking for Jack Palance or Fess Parker, just a normal male mainstream voice. I know there are Al Pacinos and Robert De Niros, but they too seem to fade before the new wave of DiCaprios. Elites talk (and probably sound) like the freedmen in Petronius' Satyricon. Today's male's voice is often far more feminine than that of 50 years ago. Sort of whiney, sort of nasally, sort of fussy. Being overexact, sighing, artificially pausing, all that seems part of the new elite parlance. In terms of vocabulary, the absolute ("he's no damn good," "she's a coward, "he ran the business to hell") is avoided. Pejoratives and swearing resemble adolescent temper tantrums rather than threats that might well presage violence." -Victor Hanson, Pity the Postmodern Cultural Elite]

Joel Stein, "Humorist"
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
-- Bob Dylan: Desolation Row

LIKE SOME HAGGARD CRACK WHORE banging on the door of a dealer's den willing to do anything , the hapless Joel ( "I despise our troops." ) Stein has been passed randomly about the blogsphere in the last couple of days.

Once a blogpile of such mountainous proportions starts, there's little left to comment on in terms of the content of Stein's small dry excretion after the first five hours. By that time the whole quisling screed has been pretty much picked apart like a biology major dissects an owl's pellet and glues the contents to a board with captions.

Continued...

Morgan @ House of Eratosthenes wants to work up some new names for old things:

"We have a lot of things infesting us that seem to hang around from one year to the next, because nobody puts together an organized campaign to make ‘em go away. And it isn’t possible to put together such a campaign if these things aren’t named. I thought, without taking the time to actually invent the names, I should start a little list of what they are."

Interesting. Here's my free-association "off-the-pop-of-my-head" names for the infestations collected on Morgan's list. Add or subtract at will.

1. Vaginism: That branch of feminism that seeks to divide privilege from responsibility, so that all gender disparities having to do with privilege can be ended, but disparities dealing with responsibility can endure indefinitely.


2. The Apocolyptics: That sect of Christianity that seeks to win converts through fear and threats, by linking random disasters to the vengeance of an angry, spurned God.


3. Fellatioration: Excessive adoration for a public figure based not on the sensibilities of his ideas, or their likely success, but rather on the uneducated perception that he would be a close and dear friend if only his acquaintance could be made somehow.

Continued...

"I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who'll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff." -- Cory Doctorow

Inside the iPad: “This week apple released the thing that does stuff that their other stuff already does”

Continued...

Richard at the Belmont Club with his usual clarity makes a little list that shouldn't be missed in » A Reason To Believe:

Continued...

An item on Obama in my sidebar on Wednesday gives the impression that troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere are not exactly as overjoyed to see the president as they were to see George Bush. That may or may not be the case, but this image from the Wall Street Journal certainly doesn't convey that. In fact it gives the opposite impression.

Having seen it, I'd be remiss not to note and post it here:

Continued...

"And the face at first just ghostly turned a whiter shade of pale..."

The face of (Muhammad) (Karl Marx) (Rasputin) (Jesus) that so many around the blogosphere are seeing today is, alas, a mere figleaf of their imaginations. Sorry, kids, it just isn't there.

How do I know? I used an ancient reporting technique. I walked to the corner and looked for myself at the real cover on-sale now for $5.95 [Pass]. Nope. No face. Instead, there's just your average highlight on the apple representing either a reflection of one of the main umbrella lights used for portraiture photography, or something dropped in by the Newsweek photoshop jockey making everything nice on the final image.

Now I had some fun with this in the sidebar yesterday, but like many things on the web, "If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing." Today, this thing is all over. What people are freaking out about is either a subtle photoshop (which I doubt), or an artifact of pixillation that happens when an image is reduced and optimized for web display. The latter is by far the most likely explanation.

The whole kerfuffle brings to mind the infamous spotting of "Nig" in the Hillary Clinton "Who Answers the Phone at 3AM" spot.

Here's that apple under normal copying from website to website:

See a ghostly bearded face? Of course you do. Want to see it more clearly still. Here let me hit the same image with a whiff of the Unsharp mask.

Chilling, what? So, grasshopper, the question for you is: "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" Answer: Neither. Hie thee to a magazine rack and look for yourself.

Jim Linderman has a nice little collection of interesting books and blogs on vintage sleaze, old time religion, and other charming but harmless subjects. In general I enjoy them. But every so often he just loses it. I think he goes to "Media Matters" for his latest information and that infection may explain his current attack of BDS. Watch as his little red choo-choo comes right off the rails:

Continued...

Enough with the government trying at every opportunity to crawl inside you house, life and mind. Mark Krikorian's idea. My illustration in case somebody needs a demo:

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year's form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business (despite the New York Times' assurances to the contrary on today's editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don't do it. Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties. -- Sending a Message with the Census - Mark Krikorian

Morgan at the House of Eratosthenes spotted this. It deserves to be part of the catechism of losing. I'd also observe that it is the habit of conservatives to bring a calm and logical argument to an ideological gunfight.

"The President's Proposal," as the 11-page White House document is headlined, is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. It includes more taxes, more subsidies and even less cost control than the Senate bill. And it purports to fix the special-interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them—but by expanding them to everyone. -- President Obama and Health Care - WSJ.com

When Obama steps up with his personalized version of Obamacare, many in the pundit pabulum game express their Kabukiesque befuddlement. Why, they ask, would – in the face of the widespread hatred of this program – Obama and the Democrats still push this pig down the throat of the python? There’s a lot of clucking of tongues over Obama strapping the Rising Sun bandana on his forehead and going full kamikaze on the sitting Democrats in the halls of Congress. Some say it makes no sense. Others say it’s full-court cynical. None of these people gets it.

Why is Obama insisting the Democrats give unto him massive and repetitive Obamallatio when it comes to health care in America? It is simplicity itself. It is because, even after decades of fiddling about and dicking around with American healthcare on the local, state, and national level, the American government has given us a system today that, frankly, is not yet fucked up enough!

Continued...

If anybody still has any doubts about the degenerative effect a long, strong dose of Communism can have on the human brain, let him read the following "news dispatch" from Cuba:

Cuba Implements Program to Fight Effects of Climate Change | Cuba News Headlines. Cuban Daily News (CDN is of course a state news agency and has to be wery, wery careful about what it says and how it says it. As a result it has become an outlet skilled in saying nothing.)

Cuba began to implement a comprehensive program to face the consequences of climate change, mainly regarding the mitigation and adaptation to its negative effects caused by the developed world’s consumerism.

Well, all one can say, Fidelistas anonymous, is it's about time! It's nice to see your "planning" kick in just when the rest of the world is chucking the scam and moving on. But in case we're missing some hidden point, tell us again what's going on down Havana way... Continued...

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What will it be about? Anything.

There are no limits to my subject material. I’ll write a poem about flowers. I’ll write a poem about dragons. I’ll write a poem about a flower that fights a dragon and you’ll be all smug and think, Well obviously the dragon would win. But don’t get too comfortable with that mindset because, like a stealth bomber ravaging your brainscape with heartfelt language, here I come out of the blue with all these poetic details explaining why the flower winning is not only plausible but necessary. -- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Monologue:

If you enter “Dostoyevsky” into the search function of Twitter, you don’t come up with much interesting these days. --Dostoyevsky — Marginal Revolution

Clint is right. It IS halftime in America. We're down by about 5 trillion. Time to switch quarterbacks. -- Clint Eastwood's Chrysler Super Bowl Ad: The Untold Obama Connection - The Hollywood Reporter

Elementary school students learn what journalists do. “

Everyday exciting things happen” to journalists, according to a third-grade textbook found by the Stuff Journalists Like blog. “A good journalist works very hard to make sure his or her stories are interesting and true.”

No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way.

Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy's fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business. Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore? -- ｫ Don Surber

The "O" Face Splat! Geek-in-chief Obama tests marshmallow gun "The Secret Service is going to be mad at me about this,"

Obama said, before energetically pumping a compressor and shooting the marshmallow gun, invented by 14-year-old Joey Hudy. Obama watched open-mouthed as the candy shot across the room before crashing into the wall near the entrance to the Red Room, an elegant state parlor which stuffed with rare 19th century French furniture.

The man who "got" Bin Laden. Yeah, right.

I'm sure there will be a lot of takers to explain that house as mental illness, but like I said: I'm not buying.

The person went feral. Back into a state of nature. It's the hunter-gatherer Eden ruined by Western Civilization that we're told we need to go back to that's on display here. She was living off the land. When the land is covered with stripmalls, pizza and Diet Pepsi represents the nuts and berries. --Sippican Cottage: So You Want To Be A Landlord

Planned Parenthood is very far from the uncontroversial organization the Susan G. Komen Foundation aspires to be. According to its most recent annual report, for 2010, Planned Parenthood sells abortions to nine out of every 10 pregnant women who come to its clinics.

And it's known throughout the country as an implacable and aggressive opponent of any meaningful restrictions on deliberate feticide.... Breast-cancer victims are only the latest hostages taken by Planned Parenthood. Unless the organization is finally held to account, they will surely not be the last. --Robert George and Carter Snead: - WSJ.com

I still like the Charles Murray argument which is, basically, that the poor are increasingly populated by the cognitively inferior and that taking away certain social controls has lifted the lid off of the crock pot.

The cognitively inferior need stringently enforced social codes in order to stay on the straight and narrow. So what has happened over the past several decades is that the cream of the crop are leaving the areas where dumb people reside, and the voice of morality has diminished. This is a double whammy on the dumb class. --Folgers ｫ Gucci Little Piggy

At 1,000 feet above the water... 40 knots too fast with the glideslope full scale deflection below us. Obviously, this is not going to work.

Me- Ok, this is not a stable approach. Let's go around and try it again. He says something that makes me laugh... Now? Me- Yes, now... Go around. -- Flight Level 390:

There is not enough money in the world to pay back America's national debt.

Total United States currency (paper and electronic entries in reserve accounts) sums to about $2 trillion. The national debt sums to over $14 trillion. If people ever really suspected that the U.S. monetary printing press was broken, there would be the mother of all bank runs. Bond holders would redeem their U.S. debt instead of rolling it over. Savers would hold tightly to any real currency. --Europe's Wile E. Coyote Moment

On the same day a report revealed the names of a number of top donors to presidential campaigns, President Barack Obama spent time with around 25 wealthy donors who paid $35,800 each to be with him behind closed doors at a Washington hotel. --President Obama Spends Afternoon With Wealthy Donors In DC ｫ CBS Washington

Voters this year look set to continue an odd pattern that's prevailed in presidential politics for a quarter century.

They will elect either a candidate with a famous father or with no father. The surviving serious contenders—Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney—all exemplify one of these two categories. For the seventh consecutive election, the winning candidate will be either a privileged prince with an adored, powerful patriarch, or an up-from-nothing scrapper with no relationship with his biological dad. -- Michael Medved: Presidential Fathers and Sons - WSJ.com

In 1993 geneticist Dean Hamer studied pairs of brothers

who were very loosely defined as “exclusively or mostly” homosexual. He claimed to find a pattern in a specific region of the X chromosome that such brothers seemed to disproportionately share. This was widely trumpeted in the media as the landmark discovery of a “gay gene.” But Hamer and others failed to subsequently replicate his results. In fact, a 1999 Canadian study contradicted them. Hamer is a gay man who has reportedly stated he hoped his research would help end intolerance toward homosexuals. He also later claimed he’d discovered the “God gene,” so take whatever he says with a grain of DNA. --Homosexuality: What’s Choice Got to Do With it? - Taki's Magazine

Hit the piste like Grizzly Adams’ gung-ho nephew with your very own Beardski. Part insulating ski mask, part fake beard; these spectacular accessories will make you look like the most experienced man on the slopes. --Beardski @ Firebox.com

Answer: you sold it for a mess of pottage.

When civilization abandoned institutional Christianity for liberalism, then abandoned Christian notions of decency and individualism for socialism, and then abandoned Christian notions of chivalry and truth for political correctness, and then abandoned Christian notions of the objectivity of truth, beauty and virtue for the roaring abyss of nihilism, civilization lost the engine and motive of its progress. When you stopped calling yourself sons of God and started calling yourself naked apes, you stopped climbing Jacob’s Ladder toward the angels, and slumped instead toward the jungle where Nature red in tooth and claw holds reign. -- Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's Journal

Where Christian virtues fail there liberty turns into license and licentiousness: pornographers admired as men of business. Wealth promotes an industry of envy, as lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians make it their daily business to loot what others produce. Medicine turns to infanticide, and the Hippocratic Oath languishes. Science goes mad, and says the universe is nothing but a carousel of atoms, and your brain a defective calculation machine that merely hallucinates self-awareness and free will. --Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's Journal

but rather of the candidates themselves. None of them are worthy -- at least at this point --€” of the presidency. A three-term congresswoman and a half-term governor are as unready as Barack Obama was in 2008. Let's not fight fire with fire. Let's use water. That usually works unless it is a grease fire. --The view from the fence « Don Surber

"The $4 million price tag is the least of it." -- The 1st of 14 screens @ Business Insider

It does not believe that most of the national debates are a tempest in a teacup

that can be settled amicably behind closed doors. It is uninterested in bipartisan great compromisers, it seeks fighters who will stand up for its agenda. It is not interested in the progressive voyage to the national future that has been taken up by both parties, what it would like is independence from their reign of policy terror. It would like to roll back the progressive policymaking of both parties. --Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield RTWT!

Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago,

those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth. --Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax The Observer

U S Bases

What would you report home to Tehran after reading the Washington Post day after day?

I think you'd end up saying: "We can't compete with the Krauthammers. They are better than us at putting together words. Therefore we can't guarantee that the ruling class in Washington won't work itself into another frenzy like it did in 2003 and do something stupid. So, we'd better get ourselves a few nukes as a deterrent." --Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: The Great Game ain't so great anymore

JUST ABOUT AS BAD A GAME AS YOU'D EXPECT FROM TWO MEDIOCRE TEAMS...

There are Year-Rounders who brave the 120ｰF summer inferno, and Snowbirds who land from as far as Canada with their souped-up RVs and pensions,

soul-searching Gypsy Kids who arrive by train with little more than the ragged clothes on their back, Spaz Kids and their electro-psychedelic outdoor parties, and Scrappers who risk life and limb to collect shrapnel from the gunnery range that flanks the camp, where Navy SEAL teams train year-round (and where rumor has it they prepared for the Osama bin Laden raid). That's to say nothing of the rowdy bikers who pass through, or the meth-addled loners on the outer edges inclined to greet a trespasser with a gunshot. -- Slab City: Living Off the Grid in California's Badlands

Once an honest and intelligent person opens himself to the facts,

it becomes very difficult to support big wind power on any basis whatsoever. Unless, of course, you are a big developer or investor in government subsidised wind farms. In that case, there are $billions to be made, without the need to provide any useful power to the public, whatsoever. A neat scam, if you can live with yourself. Just ask Warren Buffett. --Al Fin Energy:

those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones,

the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the “way you look”, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on. My God, man, how did Barack Obama & Co. conjure up so many demons? -- Works and Days » Are You "Them"?

“Slow traffic keep right” is such a simple rule to understand,

but evidently they’re issuing drivers licenses to people too stupid to understand that rule, who are probably also too stupid to figure out that passing a semi-truck might require use of the accelerator pedal. (Trust me, idiot: It’s down there on the floorboard of your car, probably somewhere on the right side.) If there were any justice in the world, state troopers wouldn’t be laying radar traps for guys doing 82 mph in a 65 mph zone, but would instead be issuing tickets to slow-moving idiots who take more than a few seconds to pass a semi-truck. -- Hate Hoax Busted by Cop’s Dash-Cam (Also: You Idiots, Get Out of My Way!) : The Other McCain

How exactly do we know, from the photo, that she is on the political left rather than right?  Seriously.  Here is her blog and profile.  Here is her Twitter feed.  How do we know?  And that we know — should it make you less confident in your own political beliefs?  WWRHS? -- Assorted links -- €” Marginal Revolution

The status quo must be thought of as a direction, not merely a state,

considering how predictable change has become. (Does anyone dispute at this point that, for example, gay marriage will soon be legalized, most likely by the courts?) Political action must address this change, must figure out where it stands relative to that change and act accordingly; if it limits itself to addressing the present, it may end up misdirecting its energy, addressing issues that will soon resolve themselves by pure inertia and ignoring issues for which the direction that inertia will eventually drive them in has not yet been decided. --Anonymous admits its irrelevance

If you had to write one big check for the whole twelve years of public education of the 88 percent or so of the entire population of the United States that doesn't go to private schools, at 2011 rates of $10,441 per person per year, it would be a check for thirty-three trillion, eight hundred forty-eight billion, eight hundred eighty-six million dollars. --Sippican Cottage: Bin Laden; Joe Biden; Whatever

Tru' dat, but every few days it seems that this whining "candidate" redefines "sore loser:"

"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn't deserve congratulations. I think that's reprehensible, I think it's dishonest, and I think it's shameful." --Gingrich: Romney didn’t deserve congrats – CNN Political Ticker

Sigh. The person who doesn't deserve congrats for the regularly scheduled destruction of Newt Gingrich is.... Newt Gingrich!

Hoping for another visitation from ye olde Proverbs 5:3

Valentine's Day gift ideas for the nerd in your life.

Over 700 abandoned settlements bear the collective name The Dead Cities of Syria....

Between the cities of Aleppo and Hama there is a limestone massif and it is here these ancient settlements were built by their once prosperous peoples. The area is about thirty kilometers in width yet is several times longer – extending to almost 140 kilometers in length.... An extensive and fascinating photo essay @ Kuriositas

Kenneth Boehr, Clara Lazen's science teacher, handed out the usual ball-and-stick models used

to visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she'd made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn't sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical. -- | Popular Science

No fool like an old.... etc. A Day With Warren Buffett Offers Wealth of Photo Opportunities

The ritual ends with a photo shoot. Each student gets to take two pictures with Mr. Buffett. The first one is a serious shot, the second is a funny pose of their choosing.

Would the ritual ended with sepaku for the hilariously named "Sage of Omaha."

Obama: 'I have fallen on my knees with great regularity' - Investors.com

No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. -- | ZeroHedge

To all Roman Catholics who voted for Mr Barack Obama: SUUUCKERS! -- | John C. Wright's Journal

Re: The Planned Parenthood Paroxysm --

It is a fresh reminder that the left fully absorbed and adapted the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they capture an institution, they aren'€™t giving it up.  How dare a private foundation stop coughing up the dough.  It explains why "diversity" means conformity to liberal views in newsrooms, college faculties, and Hollywood studios.  It's why the left reacts with howls of outrage every time you propose reducing taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, even as the left disingenuously argues that NPR and PBS receive only a "tiny"€ amount of tax subsidy.  It should also remind us how the left will fight every battle to shrink government like it was Verdun.  Which suggests one obvious conclusion if you're an incoming Romney Administration: go big.  Go after everything at once.  -- | Power Line

An hour's worth of C-SPAN Q&A: Diana West, Syndicated Columnist, Universal Uclick - YouTube

Diana West, discusses her weekly online column syndicated in over 100 newspapers nationwide. She writes about cultural and political issues from a self-described conservative viewpoint. She talks about some themes in her columns, including the spread of Islamic law throughout formerly non-Islamic areas of the western world and her opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

a scared mother of four on food stamps, or her selfless Community Activist advocate.

No one champions the simple strivers, those who take care of themselves and in the process alleviate society of one more charity case, and along the way create wealth via 'gains from trade' implicit in market transactions. A simple prosperous mensch who does not hypocritically claim he primarily works for others is off the radar, implicitly insulting to any intellectual making considerably less than him. The kind of change Murray is talking about will not happen until productive, successful people again feel pride in their distinguishing learned characteristics, including the willingness to shame people who do not have them. -- Falkenblog: Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower

As for Romney and his disregard, real or putative, for the poor,

I would suspect he has actually done more for the poor than anyone else in the presidential sweepstakes, by virtue of the tithes he has paid to his church and the whopping taxes he has actually paid. While we might carp and squeal about his tax rates, the actual amount of cabbage he has forked over in his career to the federal government must cover a sizable acreage indeed, and we assume that even given the spectacular ineptitude of that same government in distributing assistance to the needy without leakages of Mississippi dimensions into various private spillways and sluice gates, a fair amount of Mitt's earnings must have found its way into the pockets of the deserving. -- | The Daily Cannibal

Obama's After Lunch Schedule as given by a commenter on: Just What Does Barack Obama Do All Day @ The Daily Caller

2:00 PM: Golf with Plouffe
5:00 PM: Dinner with the wookie
6:00 PM: Sneak a cigarette
6:15 PM: Watch Oprah on Tivo
8:00 PM: Smoke a joint and have sex with a male campaign staffer
8:05 PM: Done with sex
8:10 PM: Watch the wookie scarf down everything in the White House refrigerator
9:00 PM: Hold the wookie's head as she "purges" her snack
9:30 PM: Watch Ray Maddow fantasize about sex with him
10:00 PM: Pass out

I rarely encounter men I feel immediately threatened by.

The ones I do are 1) really big-ass black guys with hardcore street cred, 320 pounds and a lot off tattoo chatter on their arm, 2) Mexican psycho dudes with tattoos on their face. See the commonality? Once you etch shit in your face you are telling the world that you have ceased belonging. This is a clear signal of danger. Animals use subtle aromatic spear to ward off predators. Man now uses skin ink. Heavy skin ink. -- Men in East L.A. that scare me ｫ An Unmarried Man

The formal statement of Anathema goes like this:

Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive Barack Hussain Obama himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.

That would pretty much work for me. What about the Catholics among us?

☛ Thinking Right Archives ☚

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• "We declare him ... anathema; we judge him damned!" -- If the Catholic Church Had Any Stones Left This Is What You'd See at Sunday Services This Week
• Bleached Woodpulp + Ink + Glue = A Mature Information Retrieval System
• Schmuck Trek: How the Republican Primaries Will Come to Imitate Critical Moments from "Ghostbusters"
• RDS: The ALLCAPS NEWTERS Signal the Outbreak of Severe Romney Derangement Syndrome
• The Argument Against a Republican Running from the Center Sooner or Later Always Includes This Set: "Bob Dole, John McCain?"
• Stuff Liberals Say: "George.... Doubleyou....Bu..."
• Meltoff
• The Quest to Replace Joe Biden in 2012 Reaches Its Obvious Conclusion
• "Too Black to Fail:" Juan Williams and the Race Card Played Two Ways
• Comment of the Week So Far: "You know how you can tell that 'everyone wants freedom' is baloney?"
• "Conservatives Remain the Largest Ideological Group in U.S." (And, of Late, the Dumbest) [Bumped]
• The Mole
• The Boomers’ Buffet: Diet for a Smaller Nation
• "LISTEN!:" When Poetry Mattered
• The Strangers Knocking At My Door
• Havel vs. Hitchens: Blogosphere have you no sense of decency or proportion?
• Kaa-BOOM!: An errant cannonball's tale. [Bumped and Updated w/ Map]
• North America's Energy Resources
• Waiting for Not-O
• On Idiot Repug Pundits Running Amuck