First Draft

Weekend Question Post

Are you married, partnered, single?

Tell me your love story.

A.

Saturday Blogwhoring Thread

LOLcat, motherfucker! Do you speak it?

Post away.

A.

Just a Reminder

 

For all of us.  Remember.  Setbacks are only temporary.  We've got right on our side.  We'll get knocked down from time to time.  But it ain't over 'til we've breathed our last.  And that ain't happened yet.

Friday Night Galactica Vid: Ain't Found A Way To Kill Me Yet

A.

I'll Trade You Erectile Dysfunction For Uncontrollable Bleeding Any Day

I'm just saying, if we're comparing lifestyle choices and all. It's not that I don't feel Jack Cafferty's pain, but if his dick doesn't work quite right, he can still leave the house on all 31 days of the month if he chooses.

Schmucks.

A.

I've Lost That Blogging Feeling....

I don't know for sure if I have outgrown blogging or if blogging has simply passed me by, but regardless of which is true I have been lurking for some time now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Kudos to Athenae for the marvelous, four-year ride here at First Draft.

Poll: Fading support for War in Afghanistan

From ABCNews:

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a startling 45 percent of Americans said they do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting, despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which provoked the war in the first place.

SNIP

Fifty-one percent of Americans now say that the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan has been unsuccessful, up from 24 percent in fall 2002.

Only 44 percent of Americans consider the war in Afghanistan a success, down from 70 percent in 2002.

Less than half of fed rebuilding money has made it's way to where needed in Louisiana

After three years.....

Of the nearly $7 billion that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved, or obligated for Louisiana rebuilding projects, $3.5 billion has been paid to local governments.

SNIP

According to the Louisiana Recovery Authority, FEMA has approved $482 million worth of rebuilding projects in Plaquemines Parish. But because of bureaucratic delays, funding shortages and disagreements about the real cost of rebuilding, so far, Plaquemines has only gotten reimbursed $127 million. That’s just 26 percent of available funds.

SNIP

Orleans Parish has only been reimbursed 41 percent of available FEMA funds; St. Bernard, 52 percent; Jefferson Parish, 58 percent; and St. Tammany has been reimbursed for 67 percent of available funds.

Friday Ferretblogging: Dingo War Command Is Calling!

So they get up, and they sit there. Or they wander around for a bit and THEN sit there. Then somebody scritches them, and they suddenly discover the need to rush off and confer with Ferret Central, or retrieve a fax, or something, and off they go to do their very important work elsewhere:

A.

Stupidest. Terrorists. Ever.

Dumbfellas. Unwise guys.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel accused six Arabs on Friday of trying to set up an al Qaeda cell in Israel and said one of them had proposed attacking helicopters used during a visit by President George W. Bush.

Israel's Shin Bet counter-intelligence agency said one of the suspects had used his mobile phone to film helicopters at a sports stadium in Jerusalem that was used as a landing site for Bush's delegation.

The suspect then posted queries on Web sites frequented by al Qaeda operatives, asking for guidance on how to shoot down the helicopters, the agency said in a statement.

Emphasis mine.

I think we need to start putting it on T-shirts: EVERYONE CAN SEE THE INTERNET.

A.

And just how exactly is that suppose to work?

Far too often I've read arguments that New Orleans should  be relocated rather than rebuilt. Of course there are many reasons to reject that argument but this goes to the point of the practicality of such...

ST. LOUIS -- Weeks after massive flooding in the Midwest, at least five states are considering federally funded buyouts so residents can move to higher ground.

SNIP

But FEMA expects more requests for buyouts than it can accommodate. (my emphasis)

Juxtapose

....This--- WaPo reports that "the Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world"

Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.

...With THIS--From NYT:

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

SNIP

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.

Good Reporter. Have A Cookie.

It's not all doom and gloom and suck. Sometimes they get it right:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain has called Social Security "a disgrace," he still cashes his own retirement check every month.

Quality snark.

A.

That McCain -- What A Cut-Up!

Or as Chris Matthews would say, HA! Ben Smith is nostalgic for the days when male politicians could crack rape jokes without being subject to "political correctness:

Ever hear that joke about waterboarding? How about the one about killing Iranians? And why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?

If you aren't familiar with those witty japes, then you've missed out on John McCain's lighter side. Rooted in a time before there was political correctness, and before there was the "South Park" backlash against political correctness, McCain's wisecracking persona is cutting at times, self-deprecating at others, and always amused by the political process swirling around him. Even in his pursuit of the White House, the candidate has — sometimes to the dismay of his handlers — managed to keep his sense of humor.

I wouldn't say we've missed those brilliant comic stylings, Ben. In fact, I think I could probably live a pretty happy life, the onerous demands of being a decent person notwithstanding, without missing for one second John McCain's sparking repartee.

Fuck me blind. And then it gets worse:

Earlier in his political career, the Arizona press reported that he'd cracked a rape joke that would now probably end any politician's career, a joke his aides then and now say he doesn't recall making.

Oh, sure, now it would end his political career, so it's a good thing he said it back then, before all the liberals pussified us by making us treat women like human beings.

Besides, John McCain is manly and strong:

To McCain's friends and supporters, the humor is a mark of his authenticity. To his detractors, some of the jokes are offensive and out of touch with contemporary mores. What's undeniable, though, is that the humor, with its political risks and, to some, its charm, is intrinsic to John McCain. He is a man of a certain generation, with a machismo forged from his experience as a Navy pilot and an aviator, a candidate who is more comfortable in his own skin than with a teleprompter.

I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

But guys! The jokes are funny to the backwards-ass mouthbreathing fuckwits he's telling them to!

McCain hasn't toned down the jokes, which often play better with the audiences at his town halls than when snipped out and recycled on YouTube, as was the case in an incident in which he — in jest — referred to a young man who asked about his age as "you little jerk," before telling him, "You're drafted."

Emphasis mine, because once again, it's the Internets' fault! Damn you, YouTube!

And it's hard out here for a pimp now that you can't demean people with less power in order to make your pathetic ass feel like a big man:

"The world has changed," former Sen. Kerrey said. "It's a lot harder to tell jokes than it used to be."

I so hate this argument, by the way. "It's a generational thing, being a sexist, racist prick. That used to be okay! Now it's not! Who can keep up?" I have older male friends and I had a grandfather and you know, not one of them ever picked on the political equivalent of the weaker kid in order to look cool for the room and then blamed it on his age bracket. And to basically say, "My generation is full of jackholes because nobody was there to stop us" is just about the most offensive thing you could say about your contemporaries. Besides a rape joke or two, that is.

A.

Further Dispatches from the Realm of Epic Fail

Thanks, Newsweek!

Please go read this article.

Are you done crying/puking/screaming/burning all the copies of Newsweek you can find?

Good.

Does this douche really believe what he's writing?  "The only way we'll have accountability is if we hold no one accountable."

I think he just re-killed Socrates.

The Sadlys have a good breakdown of this steaming turd of an article, so I'm not gonna go line-by-line.  I just wanted to point out a couple of things. 

Pardons would further a truth commission's most important goals: to uncover all important facts, identify innocent victims to be compensated, foster a serious conversation about what U.S. interrogation rules should be, recommend legal reforms, pave the way for appropriate apologies and restore America's good name.

What the fuck?  Really?  "Foster a serious conversation about what U.S. interrogation rules should be?"

We already fucking have those.  You dipshit.  In Federal law, military procedures, and that whole Geneva Convention thing, torturing people is prohibited.

And can we please put a moratorium on the Village-style use of the term "serious"?  I mean, in all previous conversations, did everyone wear silly hats and speak in pig Latin? 

Dear Stuart Taylor: Any "conversation" about interrogation rules that doesn't involve Jack Bauer is serious.  You're talking about torture, motherfucker.  It's gonna be serious.

Also, this:

[T]here is no evidence that any high-level official acted with criminal intent.

Really?  First of all, they sat around and discussed what they could get away with.  Remember?  When John Ashcroft turned out to be the good guy?  And, secondly, has that defense ever even gotten anyone out of a fucking speeding ticket?  "Oh, I'm sorry, officer.  I didn't mean to do that."

Fuck.  You.

Yes, I'm terribly unserious for using naughty words, I know.  But how does this motherfucker have a job?  "If we want to get to the bottom of this, we have to make sure no one gets punished."  Oh, how I wish my parents had thought like that.  And everyone in prison everywhere wishes that prosecutors had the same idea. 

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't contrast Mr. Taylor's (and the rest of the DC media's) attitude about government-sanctioned torture to his attitude toward a few, sad, furtive blowjobs a decade ago. 

Remember that?  Remember when the most important thing in the universe, the Gravest Threat to the Republic, was whose spunk was on a blue dress?  When we had a 500-page report (that may be the only official government document to use the word "toothy") that covered, in lurid yet boring detail, fewer than ten seual encounters?  Yeah, those were the days.  We couldn't have enough accountability about that.  And, yes, I know, Clinton was a Democrat.  But if he'd been a Republican, I would have given exactly the same amount of fuck: none. 

Back then, I actually had a subscription to Newsweek.  I canceled it after their wall-to-wall Lewinsky issue, just because I couldn't stand it anymore.  What sealed it for me was the little fake-ass dog-ear in the upper right-hand corner of the cover with the text "Exclusive: Lewinsky's E-mail."  Honestly.  That's tabloid shit.

And now here we are, a decade later, contravening centuries of legal precedent and moral imperatives, torturing people.

Torturing.

Yet nobody in the national press can be bothered to care.

Yes, I know.  Some people are bad people, and want to hurt us.  But you know what?  People fitting that description will always exist.  That doesn't mean that we get to throw away our humanity.  Even setting aside the moral imperative to treat all humans with dignity, torture is bullshit.  Out of sheer self-interest, we shouldn't torture because it will lead to some of us getting tortured in return.  And, out of hard-nosed practicality, we shouldn't torture because it doesn't work. 

But that moral imperative is important.  Damn important.  Torture demeans the torturer.  It creates monsters.  It terrifies, maims, and kills the tortured.  I'm not a big believer in Progress, but the fact that human societies have come to realize that torture is abhorrent and forbidden does represent a giant step forward.  That we in the United States have recently reversed course is a shame and a crime.  And it is a far, far more important concern than where the President's dick has been. 

If you just want to brush the whole thing under the rug, then you, too are a monster. 

Our national press is rotten to the core, and we need to do something about that.

Do Your Own Job

And quit your bitching, you damn kids:

The conventional wisdom regarding print journalism is that it is a dying breed, and that online media is the way of the future. Hence, newspapers across the country are axing employees like Paul Bunyan in a tree-chopping competition.

The excuses for such downsizing are legion: competition with blogs, cable news, and online classified-ad sites, readers' short attention spans, rising production costs, overstaffing, understaffing, liberal bias, corporate ownership, the decline of the American educational system, and personal digital assistants. You might as well blame it on the rain while you're at it, because one thing is certain: Traditional "dead tree" editions are a thing of the past.

Or are they?

The supposed decline of print media is not in fact an industry-wide phenomenon. Community newspapers have generally been profitable ventures for some time, and over the past decade have attracted the attention of media giants looking for publications that can positively contribute to the parent corporation's bottom line.

There are plenty of examples in the Puget Sound region of community remoras being attached to media leviathans. In 1996, the Washington Post–owned Everett Herald purchased Enterprise Newspapers, a chain of four community papers with circulations in Lynnwood, Edmonds, Mill Creek, and Shoreline. Similarly, The Seattle Times purchased The Issaquah Press in 1995, and since then has launched papers serving Newcastle, Sammamish, and Snoqualmie. Meanwhile, the McClatchy-owned Tacoma News Tribune operates a pair of weeklies, The Peninsula Gateway in Gig Harbor and The Puyallup Herald.

Yet the newspaper entity in Washington with the highest aggregate circulation is not the Blethen-operated Seattle Times and its affiliates, nor is it McClatchy, with its News Tribune, Tri-City Herald, and Olympian. Rather, it's Sound Publishing, a chain of some three-score community newspapers and shoppers that is a subsidiary of the British Columbia–based Black Press.

And, wouldn't you know it, the company relies almost entirely on dead-tree editions to get its message across.

I swear, every time I read about all the woe is us, newspapers are DOOMED, we must hire an Innovation Editor (no, really) to tell us how to set up a new media farm to explain how to write for Teh Interwebs and reach out to the Kids Today and nobody's reading anymore and OMG, whatever shall we do, I just want to pull a Bill O'Reilly and scream "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!"

Fuck it. We'll do it live. Just do your job. Do your job and do it well. Do what people need you to do. If you weren't fucking up, you wouldn't have six million media critics telling you you suck, and bloggers trying to fill in the holes in your reporting, and people pissed off at you. If you were getting the paper on the porch at 6 a.m. like you're supposed to, and making vacation stops when people ask for them, and distributing them to places people actually go, and marketing the shit out of the paper, and not paying your executives like they're Croesus while starving the people who actually do the work, if you were doing all that, you'd be fine, and to continue to pull your pud and talk about the Internet is just embarrassing.

Not that anyone listens to me. You see, you can deplore the influence of blogs without actually reading any, as we've learned so often in the past half-decade, so it's sucker's odds you'll ever see any of this, but for the sake of my sanity, stop being such fucking whiny little bitches all the time and just do the work.

Schmucks.

A.

Happy Obama Photo: Not Your Pet Goat Edition

My preznit digs the Skokie Public Library.

A.

A Reminder: Book Event July 23 in NYC

Be there. You'll get to meet Mr. A!

A.

Video Response to Conservative Mythmaking of Not a Drop of Oil was Spilled

Conservatives continue to justify off shore drilling by arguing there were no oil spills due to Katrina. Yet there were. I direct you to Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief who wrote...

Actually, there were at least 146 reported spills in Federal waters after Katrina and Rita, totaling over 700,000 gallons, the equivalent of seven "MAJOR" spills. Here are 43 satellite pictures of giant oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico after Katrina, stretching for scores of miles.

Worse, EIGHT MILLION gallons spilled out of Louisiana oil facilities after the storms. (The famous Exxon Valdez spill totaled 11 million.)

How is this not causing "a single oil spill"?

Excellent question!

Conservatives want to remind us and ask us to remember there were no major oil spills, with some contending not a drop was spilled. Indeed let's remember.  I offer the video below in order to do such.  The video contains portions of video from photojournalist David Leeson of the Dallas Morning News who covered the aftermath and clean up of the Murphy Oil Spill in Challmette, Louisiana which occured when a storage tank was dislodged and damaged.

UPDATE: While conservatives try to argue there were no spills in the Gulf as proof that the off shore rigs are safe they ignore that there were spills in the Gulf. They of course fail to mention the vulnerabilties of pipelines and storage facilities which when damaged have consequences as shown in the video below.  But they don't mention that.

Replay video | Share video | Watch more videos

Shorter NYT: Why Does Obama Walk On Water?

Is it to distract us from the fact that he can't turn it into wine?

The survey suggests that even as the nation crosses a racial threshold when it comes to politics — Mr. Obama, a Democrat, is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — many of the racial patterns in society remain unchanged in recent years.

Indeed, the poll showed markedly little change in the racial components of people’s daily lives since 2000, when The Times examined race relations in an extensive series of articles called “How Race Is Lived in America.”

As it was eight years ago, few Americans have regular contact with people of other races, and few say their own workplaces or their own neighborhoods are integrated. In this latest poll, over 40 percent of blacks said they believed they had been stopped by the police because of their race, the same figure as eight years ago; 7 percent of whites said the same thing.

Nearly 70 percent of blacks said they had encountered a specific instance of discrimination based on their race, compared with 62 percent in 2000; 26 percent of whites said they had been the victim of racial discrimination. (Over 50 percent of Hispanics said they had been the victim of racial discrimination.)

"Even after we did this series on how things are fucked up, things are still fucked up." Valid story. Might have been more valid if you as an institution hadn't been spending all your time in the past eight years fellating the people who fucked all this up in the first place, but still, valid story, NYT.

Still, I fail to see where Barack Obama has the responsibility to personally wipe out the existence of racist assholes and simpleminded dittoheads who think the reason they're still not king is that a black dude somewhere woke up this morning.

What was it Jesus said? The closeminded dickheads who hate everybody else for their own miserable failures and blame every minority they see for this one time they got cut off in traffic, you will always have with you? Something like that.

A.

Wrong Track

Shorter America: WE'RE FUCKED:

The survey, released Tuesday, also set a new AP-Ipsos floor for the number of people saying the country is heading in the right direction. Just 16 percent said the country is moving the right way, a virtual tie with the 17 percent who said so last month.

But Chris Matthews still thinks he'd like to have a beer with George Bush's manly characteristic!

In my life I've never seen a political narrative so completely divorced from reality. If this was Bill Clinton ... hell, this WAS Jimmy Carter only not as bad, and they were screaming for his head. Instead it's all "how can Bush make it all better, daddy?" and "can he salvage something, we desperately hope, so that WE can end the decade not having been the asshole in the story?"

I've never been one to publicly deplore journalistic gawking at train wrecks, mainly because the people who do that kind of thing, "isn't it awful how we cover disaster, quite the scum are we" are mostly looking to show off how superior they are as human beings. We could use some healthy train-wreck gawking here, some relish for the story of something so completely fucked up. We could use a little energy and enthusiasm for exposing every nasty corner of the complete and total miserable failure that has been the last eight years.

Instead of gawking, though, instead of pointing out how the train's, like, on fire, and goats are escaping, and the rest of the cargo just blew up, and here's why it went off the rails in the first place, the rails were old and warped and the engineer was going too fast and also really fucking dumb, and drunk, and his crew was a bunch of kindergarten dropouts and whatnot, no instead of that, we get ponderous thumbsuckers on how with just one more big push the conductor will right the train using only the powers of his mind. It's pathetic.

A.

It's Never Too Late

A 108-year-old blogging voice goes quiet:

Olive Riley’s been keeping me young.

Her example says; if a woman who left school in 1914, can embrace the internet in her 106th year, what is there you can’t do, friend?

John McCain should take note. He’s not Internet literate yet, apparently.

My parents both died tragically young, Dad at 59, and Mum at 65.

As I passed their death dates, I had the feeling of having reached the family age limit, of being on the downward slope. That is till I met Ollie.

Read the whole thing.

A.

Happy Obama Video: Bollywood Edition

See more funny videos and funny pictures on CollegeHumor

Via Maitri.

A.

Today on Athenae's Obsession with the Freepi: Sicko Math Edition

Freeper comment of the day, on losses in Afghanistan:

Our prayers go out to the families of those brave soldiers. However, for the BBC to call these losses “heavy” is misleading. US Heavy losses are:

Antietam: North: One Day: 2108
South: Same Day: 1,546

D Day: 1465 Dead

Those are heavy casualties for a single day of fighting. God bless our troops and give us the wisdom to keep things in perspective.

Yes. God grant you the unholy strength not to give a shit too much.

F*ng cowards we're fighting there. Come out and die like a man if you have the guts!

Who's WE, you flobbering buttplug?

Anyone who considers 9 killed to be ‘heavy losses’ is just exposing their ignorance.

"And God bless the families" stapled on at the end of this doesn't make it any less horrifying.

With all due respect to the value of these precious patriots’ lives, we are a ntion of wimps if losing 8 soldiers is “heavy losses.” IIRC, in March of 1945 we lost over 20,000 men.

That makes those who died today so much LESS DEAD! Thanks, Freepi!

There's only so much that can be learned in two and a half months of basic training. Who knows, a few years from now, some soldier may live because something in the back of his mind told him not to bunch up or not to move about predictably etc, etc, etc.

Even for the Freepi, this thread is pretty repulsive.

A.

'Keep Up The Fight'

Fournier:

Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line “H-E-R-O.” In response to Mr. Fournier’s e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this,” to which Mr. Fournier replied, “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.”

Look. Journalism is a fairly simple job. You go to a place, you see things, you talk to people, you get answers to your questions about what is going on, you tell everybody you can through the mechanism you have: paper, TV, radio, Internets, fucking mimeographed pages, handwritten notes shoved under people's doors. That's it. That's all there is. And there aren't that many rules. Don't fuck your sources. Don't make shit up. Don't steal things. Don't take presents in exchange for favorable coverage. There aren't that many things you can't do.

In my own journalsim days I can remember very clearly getting into some trouble for taking a frozen chicken and a box of sausage from this business I was writing about. They shoved them into my hands as I was leaving the processing facility, and I tried to refuse, but ... you're standing there holding a chicken, people are saying here, have it and not taking no for an answer, you know? I could throw it at them and thus piss them off, or I could take the damn chicken. When I brought it back to the office and put it in the newsroom fridge, my boss took me aside and said, look, this isn't cool. Don't do it again.

Did someone not have that conversation with Fournier? "Keep up the fight?" Seriously? "The Lord?" There's ingratiating yourself, the reportorial equivalent of flirting, where you in person say congrats to the candidate you're interviewing who's just won her election, in order to get a nice quote. That kind of thing happens all the time, but most decent reporters know where the line is, and it would be, I think, somewhere around "keep up the fight." At the level Fournier is at, at the level Karl Rove is at, it's not quite taking a chicken, but maybe someone should have pulled him aside and said next time, if you're hungry, just go to KFC.

A.

Republicans Are Shitbags

Yep.  Shitbags.

I mean, really.  What else can you say?

Some Republican shitbag paid to put this billboard up in Orlando.  Really.  That's not Photoshop, that's not a joke.

So, let's review:

• The 9/11 attacks happened during George W. Bush's presidency.
• George W. Bush is a Republican
• Ergo, having a Democrat as president means that something similar will happen again.

What.  The.  Fuck.

How does anyone come to that conclusion?  The logic of the fucking underpants gnomes makes more fucking sense than that.

As for all the people who shrug and say "It's a free country," well, they're right.  The government has no business stepping in and telling this shitbag what he can or cannot say.  But that doesn't mean that some things are so tasteless as to pass without remark or rebuke.  And, if enough people find something so horribly offensive as to make public statements about it, that ain't censorship.  Additionally, if people decide to boycott this shitbag's business because they are offended by what he's done, well, that ain't censorship, either.  That's pure capitalism.

So.  Republicans are shitbags.  Yeah, yeah.  I'm not exactly giving out new information here.

I think that this billboard is the sort of thing that enterprising reporters ought to ask John McCain about.  I mean, if Barack Obama has to answer for everything every Democrat/black person/liberal advocacy group/crazy preacher/etc says, then shouldn't we apply the same standard to McCain?  I realize, of course, that having Obama answer for any and all of those people is a stupid, stupid thing.  But if those are the rules applied to one candidate, they should be applied to all. 

What a fucking asshole.

What Business Is It Of Yours?

I'd jump into this a little more, but my head would explode and I'd have to clean up the mess:

“You know, I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, ‘We need to have English- only.’ They want to pass a law, ‘We want English-only,’” Obama said. “Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

“You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], ‘Merci beaucoup.’ Right? (Laughter) You know, no, I’m serious about this. We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job. You are so much more employable. You can be part of international business. So we should be emphasizing foreign languages in our schools from an early age, because children will actually learn a foreign language easier when they’re 5, or 6, or 7 than when they’re 46, like me.”

And cue the mouthbreathing wingnut asshole parade talking about how we should be forcing people to learn English at gunpoint, and how hard it is on them to press 1 for English, and how downtrodden is the American white man these days:

This man, I don't know what is in his water, if he's drinking any water. This man is a sick man. He is a scary man. I am outraged. I'm really mad.

I mean, I have been a proponent for English to be the official language for over two years now. I can't support any politician that doesn't agree on that. You are here, you must learn English. You must learn it now. We're not here to speak Spanish. You can learn all the languages you want, but English is the language that should be official in this country.

And I would like to make this statement right now for the thousands and thousands of e-mails over the last couple years I got in support of the English, which 80 percent of the people agree it should be the official language. If you believe in Joey Vento's English stand, you have got to go against this man. This man is bad for the country. Go against all your politicians. E-mail them. Make phone calls. Do whatever it takes.

I mean, what the fucking ... just WHAT, okay, this thing we're doing where we're making our national conversation like the snide remarks at the neighborhood barbecue about who does and doesn't mow his lawn, or who lets her dog out too late at night and thus the little pocket rat wakes up the whole block barking. Nasty, gossipy, stupid, condescending little assholes, sniping about who does and doesn't learn English. This makes me more insane than anything else in politics, this "I overheard somebody not speaking English once in a Kohl's therefore no one knows English anymore and damn it, that ain't right!" fucking thing.

Obama's doing about as well as he can on the campaign trail here, saying "Let's make this about what you know and don't know instead of worrying about everybody else's admissions to Berlitz."

To which I could only add "you whiny, irritating, smug scold making assumptions about what immigrants know and don't know. Go get a fucking hobby and stop staring at people through the blinds on your mental bay window, for fuck's sake. This shit doesn't matter, okay, it won't matter until we are all done handling all the people dying of preventable diseases and poverty and hunger, until we have fixed every hole in the roof of every school, until we have paid for the medical care of every soldier harmed in this country's cause, until we can walk down the streets of our cities and find them rebuilt and bereft of the homeless and the desperate, until no one is unwanted or unloved, until we have handled our country's shit like grown-ass human beings, you could not pay me to care what language the woman down the street uses to talk to her kids. You could not pay me. You could wave money in my face and it would not move me to get worked up about that, so for fuck's sake, go learn how to knit or something. Make a sweater. Be useful in some way. Jesus Orville Reddenbacher Christ."

A.

Narcissus

On Donohue and this whole PZ Myers pig fuck:

For such a staunch defender of Catholicism, it seems that Donohue doesn’t know much about it. His views consistently fall more with Protestant fundamentalists, and I’m increasingly suspicious that he’s less a true believer with his head up his own ass and more a right wing operative trying to increase the political power of the religious right by luring Catholics into the fold. The irony of all this is that the agenda is basically to turn America into a theocracy where the rights of atheists are threatened. Trying to orchestrate the public firings of prominent atheists because they are atheists is part of that, as is the hat tip to a fundie-not-Catholic view of evolutionary theory.

Chew this over with me a bit. The reason Donohue is adopting fundamentalist Protestant constructions and tactics is because his aim, like those of fundamentalist activists like Dobson and the unlamented Falwell, is not doctrinal adherence or political advancement but personal power. Validation of his poisonous narcissism. A mirror to make out with.

It’s not about respect for the Communion rite or the wafer itself. Donohue could give a fuck that Myers disrespected the Body of Christ. He’s not in this to make PZ Myers respect the Eucharist. If he was, he wouldn’t be screaming publicly for Myers’ head, he’d be attempting some kind of education, with his own being a healthy dose of understanding that nobody is really required to respect your traditions and beliefs. It would be nice if they did, but by doing so they are basically doing you a favor. Myers broke no rule Myers is required to follow here.

This also isn’t necessarily about political power, though. That his advocacy benefits the right wing shouldn’t persuade us that he’s really a winger at heart. That his goals dovetail with those of all the greatest assholes of our time is a happy coincidence for them and for him; however, he shouldn’t think for one minute they’re gonna invite him to their parties once his usefulness has lapsed and truth be told, I don’t think he does. I’ve said before that lots of the “conservatives” on the wingnut welfare circuit would be liberals in a flash if there was an equally easy buck to be made there. After all, public conversions from one political persuasion to another are worth millions in street cred with the “serious” press corps, it's just that the love comes quicker when you decide that Satan has better hors d’oeuvres and burn your Democratic Party badges and sash for a taste of Republican cocktail weenie.

What Donohue is after is seeing Donohue’s name everywhere he can plaster it, seeing himself on TV, hearing his voice raised in the wilderness, the lone arbiter of theological truth. Even other Catholics think he’s a fascist, and he makes a royal pain in the ass out of himself because he loves to hear himself talk. Taking it any more seriously than that with these guys is giving them more credit than they deserve. It’s not about religion and it’s not about politics. As with so many other tentacles hanging off the right-wing beastie, it’s about them.

Which doesn’t make it better, of course. It makes it worse.

Schmuck.

A.

Nailing It Again

If you're not reading Steve Rhodes every day, start:

Blog Fog 1. Memo to Tribune editorial board: No one is asking you to read their blogs or subscribe to their Twitter feeds. (Editorial about GenY microbloggers not available online (!), but trust me.)

2. Yes, young people are so caught up in connecting with friends online they don't know how to interact with humans in real life! Just like when the telephone was invented!

Will you please return to your home planet now?

Judging Julia
Yes, the rhythms of blogs are just killing us. No one wants to read anymore!

If only we could go back to the days when newspaper articles were works of great literature.

This Just In
Blogs are to blame for every ill in the universe.

Rappers breathe sigh of relief.

A.

City Life, New Orleans Edition

'Bout to open up a can of whoop ass.

Ahh, New Orleans.

The Big Easy Roller Girls have their own version of the running of the bulls.  In the Crescent City version, the bulls are the bad-ass chicks of New Orleans' roller derby league.  And they beat on the runners with wiffle ball bats.  How awesome is that? 

Scientists are still working on measuring the exact level of awesomeness.

I mean, fuck running in front of a bunch of cows.  This is much better.

Hat tip to reader Hell Kat, who knows a thing or two about derby.

Happy Obama Photo: He Shoots, He Scores

A.

City Life

I got home tonight at about 8 p.m., got off the train and was walking back to my place. Lovely summer evening, warm but not too warm, fading light turning everything rosy and soft.

A guy skates past me on the street. Rollerblades, goggles, a backpack.

In his left hand, held straight out, he held a pair of these.

In the opposite arm, cuddled close to his body, he had a live pet rabbit.

I love this town so much sometimes.

A.