seems like it would be obvious

If you aren't willing to stand up for your principles, you don't have any.

journalishm

Jonathan Alter and his carefully-coiffed combover just explained to that c-word, Essa Brewster on MSNBC, that the man who has had his image and video clips broadcast almost non-stop by the cable news networks for the last few weeks, Obama's reverend Wright, is a publicity hound because he went before an audience and spoke in his own defense and in explanation of his words. Of course, while Alter was slowly spelling it out for Ms. Brewer, the screen crawls also explained that Obama has renounced, but has not condemned his pastor's statements.

Apparently, if you get attacked by the media for two weeks and you speak up to defend yourself, you're a publicity seeker, and if you renounce somebody's statements but don't specifically condemn them, you haven't quite made your position clear.

I'm thinking the only way to resolve all of this is if Obama takes Mr. Wright hostage and on live television pops a full clip into his cranium and pisses on his twitching body.


Fortunately, John McCain is a straight-talkin' maverick.

it's not just me

...and don't get me started on the Huffingdrudge Repost:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042508.shtml

thanks again, asshole

I've been noticing the public service advertisements lately that have been warning us that "in February 2009, all television stations will begin broadcasting a digital signal only." They further explain that those of us who don't have digital televisions have nothing to worry about because any analog television that is connected to a cable service provider will still work just fine. You'd think that would be that from the smug tone of the ads.

Except for one thing.

I happen to live in the buckle of the tornado belt, central Kansas. There have been four tornadoes (ranging in strength from mild to a full-blown killer F5 that destroyed hundreds of houses and killed a couple of dozen people) in the last fifteen years that passed within ten miles of my location. In a tornadic storm, power and other cable-delivered services are the first things to go, and I have three little palm-sized portable televisions, one in each car and one in my basement, so that I can keep an eye on the local weather radar when the shit hits the fan.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has spent a fairly good sum (about five hundred dollars total in my case) to be able to have slightly better odds of staying alive during the storm season. Think about it, many of you that live in areas with a high incidence of violent weather are probably in the same boat. We are all going to be screwed for the next tornado season unless we go out and spend another few hundred dollars at the minimum to purchase new televisions capable of picking up digital broadcast signals. Meanwhile, I have three perfectly good pocket televisions that will soon be useful only as paperweights. How many lives are going to be lost because the Bush administration sold out to the cable industry?

I just hope mine isn't one of them.

sad day

Two weeks from today, I will be a former college professor. I handed in my resignation last night. My heart is broken, but I can no longer be a part of an educational system where passing students because they were present in class rather than successful in it is the norm.

numbers

After yesterday's primary contest in Pennsylvania, a total of three thousand two hundred and fifty delegates are now lined up in support of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Of that number, 48% of the delegates are committed to support Senator Clinton, and 52% of them are committed to support Senator Obama.

If I were in a hotly contested battle and I had 48% of the voters locked up, there was still a lot of campaigning left before a winner was going to be declared, and the campaign already had an established history of see-sawing back and forth between myself and my opponent, I would continue to fight to win like a Viking berserkr.

I want a candidate who will fight against the odds, especially when it's that close.

Really, I just want a candidate who will fight. Anything that is worth having is worth fighting for.

I really wish all of the Democratic concern trolls would shut the fuck up and let these two fine candidates fight this out to the end. It is the ONLY way that the party will unify for the real race, by having the knowledge that one candidate finally out-pointed the other once and for all. I happen to support Hillary Clinton more than Barack Obama. However, I will take whichever ultimately comes out on top and do my share to help keep the real enemy out of the presidency.

This is what representative democracy is all about, so please don't sabotage it, just let it play out naturally so that we know that we have a real winner at the end, not just whoever is left after the other one drops out.

he who laughs last

...is ME.

http://www.kansas.com/228/story/379250.html

Friday cat-blogging

Well, the freeloader has comfortably ensconced himself in what used to be the cat-free zone of the house, and after who knows how long of being on his own when he arrived last year, has become quite the spoiled and privileged kitty. He goes outside during daytime and chases bugs and birds in the yard, stares down the neighbor cats, sleeps on the patio, eats and sleeps when he chooses, and generally lives the life of Riley.

He is by far one of the most intelligent animals I have ever met, and has recently taught me how to play a new game with him: hide and seek.

He pounces on me from a "hiding" spot as I pass, bats my feet with soft retracted-claw paws, and then turns and runs. He stops a few feet away, looks up at me, and then runs a little farther and repeats it. I'm the stupid one, actually, because it took several efforts on his part before I caught on to what he wanted.

When he scampers away, I chase him and he runs and hides under something. I go find him, he runs away, and then I turn and run and hide. Moments later he slowly stalks the house until he finds me, then he turns and runs away and we repeat the process.

Last night, he and I chased each other around the house for about a half hour. I was actually winded from playing with him, and I run and work out regularly!

Somebody lost a most amazing kitty last year and the luck is mine to have found him, not the other way around.

a pair of queens

Reports over the last few days indicate that what might be a fifteen-minute film of Marilyn Monroe orally pleasuring an unidentified man was recently sold to a "private collector" for one and a half million dollars. While that price seems awfully low for a property that could bring far more revenues to the seller, and the lack of any kind of public bidding for an item that would certainly attract a lot of attention seems odd, I'll bet that I can tell you whose signature is on the check:

"Reginald Dwight."

"How did life begin in the first place, dude?"

What does that have to do with evolution in the first place, dude?

You weren't "Expelled," you flunked out, you fucking smug, dishonest, scientifically illiterate, Nixon-loving, wanker jagoff.


We need to get the NCSE's counter-site to the hideous little propaganda film, Expelled, to rank higher in the search engines. The way to do this is for lots and lots of you to link to the Expelled Exposed site with the word Expelled.

It's not hard: just copy this code into a blog post.

$a href="http://expelledexposed.com/">Expelled$
(replace the dollar signs with the appropriate arrows "<" and ">")

Whenever you write about the movie, use that link. Do it a bunch of times, if you want. It's more effective if many people use the same link every time, though, than for one person to be repetitive.

(Courtesy of PZ Myers.)

I am The One...

...and this is The Matrix.

a Maverick by any other name...

...is just another cheap Ford. Would you buy a used car from ANY of these people?

how the grownups would do it

Maverick John McCain today suggested that the Federal government have a moratorium on Federal gasoline taxes between Memorial Day and Labor Day this summer. His logic, if you can call it that, is that it will stimulate the economy as people take advantage of lower prices to drive around for the summer. Of course, it will put a further cramp on the availability and price of automotive fuel in the long run, and Federal taxes on gasoline represent slightly less than twenty cents per gallon anyway so it really wouldn't be that much of a benefit to the consumer anyway.

However, someone who was serious about trying to alleviate gasoline prices in this country while still providing the government with about twelve billion dollars in tax revenues that it would be deprived by the McCain "plan" would implement two simple measures that would have a far greater effect, although they wouldn't let people to continue to mindlessly waste increasingly scarce resources.

First, we need to bring back the 55 MPH national speed limit, and enforce it with fines of at least five hundred dollars for the first offense, a thousand for the second, and absolute and permanent revocation of driving privileges for the third offense. No exceptions. Abuse the privilege, lose the privilege. That would save about twenty-five percent of the fuel that we use annually right now and would drop world demand which would also cause a corresponding reduction in per-barrel prices. It would have the additional effect of making traveling on American highways far safer than it is today, what with millions of Nascar wanna-be's fired up on oppression, testosterone, Pabst, and Red Bull driving three hundred horsepower automotive missiles like there's a huge cash prize to be awarded to some lucky winner.

Second, we need to keep the Federal gasoline tax, but we need to make the gasoline producers pay it. Drop our pump prices by twenty cents and let the freeloaders who have been getting enormous tax breaks as they reap astronomical profits pay the tab instead of the citizens of the country. Put price fixes on gasoline so they can't just turn around and re-charge the consumer for it, and we have lower fuel costs but still get the tax revenues that are getting more crucial every day as the United States' infrastructure slowly decays.

These are not going to fix the energy crisis, but they will certainly make a big difference to the lives of millions and millions of hard-working Americans who have already been sodomized by the Bush administration long enough.

And, if you want to add one more thing that will help us start to get our country back on track in a large way, here it is, and believe me, it won't be popular.

It is time for America to give up the "lawn" thing. We waste way too much water and energy growing decorative ground coverings that serve absolutely no real purpose. The esthetic value of a green lawn is going to be meaningless in a country that can't afford food and a place to live. Let's go back to natural, unwatered plant cover for lawns. And I mean everything. Golf courses must go. Football and baseball fields can go turf or dirt. One golf course in the desert consumes as much water as fifty thousand average homes annually. That is once again a needless waste of resources that should be diverted elsewhere before it's too late.

We can't avoid a depression, but we can ameliorate the one that is approaching with some evasive action. If we don't, you can expect gas rationing, riots, and the cost of living escalating with ever-increasing speed. These three simple steps would have a vast impact on the coming crisis and all they require of us as a nation is some judiciously applied self-restraint and a little common sense.

Of course, if there actually was such a thing as "common sense" we wouldn't have a special name for it.

tax-day comic relief

This is apparently an old one, but it was new to me:

When Donald Rumsfeld briefed the President this morning, he told Bush that three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq. To everyone's amazement, all of the color ran from Bush's face. Then he collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visibly shaken, almost whimpering. Finally, he composed himself and asked, "Just exactly how many is a brazillion?"


(I'm really not that surprised he wouldn't know the answer. It's, like, a thousand medallions, right?)

fortified with irony

I can't be the only one that finds it uproariously funny that the usual right-wing tools have twisted their panties into a bunch over the notion that Barack Obama essentially said that small-town Americans were often "bigots." Are they really trying to convince us that the bible-belters are paragons of acceptance and inclusiveness? This would, of course, be the exact same bible-belters that voted for Reagan, Bush I and Bush C- because they were assured that the republicans wouldn't let the homos marry, that they wanted to deport all the brown people, and that they wanted to exterminate entire countries because they didn't believe in hayzeus, all of which of course represents some kind of undefined threat to the most powerful nation on the planet. No sirree, these are salt-of-the-earth people filled with tolerance and civic equality who just happen to still call black people "niggers," gay people "faggots," and middle-eastern people "towelheads."

But they aren't bigots.

Why losers win....

...from an NY Times article about Obama’s comments last week on small-town bitterness.

David Saunders, a Democratic strategist and rural advocate, advised John Edwards’s presidential campaign but is now neutral. He said he believed that Mr. Obama’s comments would offend rural voters.

“It could mean he’s rendered himself unelectable,” Mr. Saunders said. “This is a perfect example of why Democrats lose elections.”


The top issues for voters in the 2008 Presidential election are health care, the economy, and the war in Iraq, and they are desperate for solutions to all three. In spite of this, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and the press are all over Barack Obama for his comments about bitterness in small-town America. Numerous stories have reported that this might seal the deal for McCain, were he to go up against Obama.

How pathetic are we as a nation if that’s what it comes down to! Have we not learned that issues matter, that policy matters, certainly much more so than intangibles like “Can I relate to this person”, or “Does he understand me?”. This is the sort of thinking that elected George Bush twice, and look where that got us.

Is Barack Obama an elitist? I don’t know and I don’t care. John McCain owns multiple homes and is a multi-millionaire. His record on children's issues is among the lowest in the Senate, yet somehow we are supposed to believe he can relate to us better than Obama can. I think not. If McCain is elected, four years from now we’ll still be deep in Iraq and will have been led by a President who admitted his knowledge of economics is weak. And as the simpletons we are, we’ll scratch our heads and wonder how we got into this mess.

Maybe then, an “elitist” will not seem so bad after all.

that was close

I accidentally said "yes" to a new software update from Microsoft yesterday. Normally, I don't accept these things until I know what they are, because many automatic updates deal with DRM-oriented issues, and I don't like Microsoft's attitude that if it's their operating system I'm using that they get to tell me what I can and can't do with it even though I paid them for it already. Worst of all, this update was a browser update, something that usually incorporates those sorts of draconian music-industry-favoring DRM solutions that I hate. But, I clicked on the tab and the update started instead of giving me a list of what they were offering.

So, it was too late to cancel my download - Internet Explorer 7.

I am not a bigtime computer whiz, I use dedicated music hardware in my recording studio instead of Windows or Apple machines, and the times that I have been saddled with browser changes in the past were no fun and occasionally stressful. This time, at least so far, has been different.

IE7 does have a different "look" to it that bothered me a bit at first, but after a day of playing around with it, so far I'm really pleased with a lot of the modifications that have been made.

I'm hoping that some of them will correct the problems I've had from time to time with Blogger...

a photo of Milo at work

http://kittenwar.com/kittens/85945/

absent friends

Happy Birthday, Dad.

inside the big yellow head

(How come everybody says I'm such a misogynist when it's so obvious that I really love chicks? I mean, I just really, really love chicks. Especially cuties like this one. You know what I mean? How can they say that? Ooh, that's it, baby.)

Friday cat-blogging

I have been a daily visitor to I Can Has Cheezburger for well over a year now, and admit that while a lot of them are just dumb, some of the lolcat photos and captions make me giggle like a little kid. I'm obviously not the only one, as they have become one of the highest-trafficked humor sites on the internet and have spawned dozens of imitators.

For a long time, I just surfed in, scanned through the day's pics, and continued on with my more purposeful web browsing. Then, not long ago, I was killing an afternoon waiting for my car to be serviced, and I actually checked out the site more thoroughly than I had before and actually read some of the comments. The more I read, the more I was compelled to peruse the comments on other photos and even went back several pages in the photos reading comments there as well to see if what had struck me almost immediately was out of the ordinary for the site.

A large majority of the commenters there write in fluent lolcat-ese, with very specific and carefully-followed syntax, grammar, and spelling rules, a common shorthand for many terms, and with comment threads a few hundred comments long. As with most blog comment zones, a lot of people clearly are online chums and socialize with each other as part of the comments.

However, that's not what hit me. It dawned on me that a lot of these people are probably fetishists of the sort often known as "Furries" or "Fuzzies," those incredibly peculiar people who dress up in elaborate stuffed animal costumes and socialize with each other at private parties, up to and including costumed sexual encounters of varying degrees of eccentricity.


Picturing a lot of the lolcat commenters sitting around at their computers wearing purple dog suits and lavender cat suits with sweaty foreheads and sticky spots in their fake fur really puts a whole new slant on lolcat humor.

is it on the damned table now?

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4583256

ahhh, springtime in Mesopotamia

BAGHDAD (AP)

Five U.S. soldiers died in Iraq, including three killed in roadside bombings in Baghdad and north of the capital, the military said Wednesday.That raised to 17 the number of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq since Sunday.



Tell us again how things are looking up, Generally Betrayedus, please? It seems like only yesterday when we were hearing how much rosier the situation was getting there. Time certainly does fly, doesn't it?

logic is icky

MSNBC headline:
"Is Texas group a religious sect or clear-cut cult?"


...there's a difference?

Brokeback Maverick

I'm surprised that the Democrats haven't figured out how to deflate John McCain's image considering how easy it is to ridicule a "'74 Maverick."

god is dead

Well, Charlton Heston, anyway. Farewell to one of the last real movie stars.


Despite his gun-nutty religiosity, I can't help but fondly remember the man that brought me Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man, three of the most wonderful science-fiction films of all time.

Friday cat-blogging

Kitty's first, er, catnip buzz...

...or this dumb

http://newscoma.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/cat-found/

at least I'm not THIS dumb...

Chris Janzing of MSNBC just told me that the big oil company people were on Capital Hill today to explain "how they were making record profits while people were paying huge prices at the gas pumps."

Don't any of these fucking people even know how to tie their own shoes?

a clarification

I am an utter, monumental dumbass.

If you're waiting for an April Fool's joke, don't.