Since the rest of the Sadly, No! office staff is apparently off on some tequila-lime-meth bender and likely won’t be back for some days, it has devolved upon to me to keep this place open — and without much time during the day to do it. So let’s go looking for easy targets of ridicule. Hmmm. Who first pops to mind? Who else? The Gaytriots, two gay guys whose mission in life seems to be to convince straight Republicans that there are gays who enjoy being wedge issues and second-class citizens as long as they are protected from the evil Mooslims, the Kennedy clan, abortion clinics, and higher taxes.
In his latest post, Dan — the “GayPatriotWest” — engages in major handwringing over the purchase of a $43 DVD player, but, having made the splurge, is now convinced that he has the bestest technology ever to play his old Bette Davis movies. (If I made that up, I’d be accused of perpetrating a bigoted stereotype. In this gay household, we went BluRay in order to watch movies with lots of car chases and explosions in high definition.)
But we hit pay dirt with Dan’s next post: “GayPatriot LA Outing to El Coyote” That’s right. Dan has just torn out his last quarter-ounce of self-respect, beaten it to death with a pair of spiked high heels, and left it out front for pickup in a trash bag already containing his dignity and his last 15 I.Q. points. For those of you who just got back from two months in a cave in Afghanistan, El Coyote is a popular L.A. restaurant where a member of its board of directors made a contribution in support of Proposition 8 which made gay marriage illegal in California. This led to an outcry (and a boycott) from the restaurant’s substantial gay clientele.
We need make clear that all gay people do not completely politicize their lives as have these angry activists.
Please e-mail me to let me know whether you prefer we do this for dinner on New Year’s Day or next Sunday, January 4.
Oh, and to encourage business, once we set the date, I’m buying margaritas for the first five people to show up!
And, hence, the “Magic Homo” reference. Poor Dan is the gay man who shows up to assuage straight guilt, to convince straight people that it’s okay to treat him differently because, after all, he’s always got his collection of Bette Davis movies to fall back on. Every sty has, it seems, the pig that writes a letter of apology to Oscar Mayer for not being quite plump enough.
Oh, and about that trip to El Coyote, it would be wrong, just wrong for anyone from here to go. Instead, just remember to continue ratfucking the Gaytriots’ Très Très Très Très Fabulously Grandissimo blOgress Divinely Delicious Diva 20009 contest by voting for Pam Geller, who seems to be having a meltdown right now that there are still women and children left alive in the Gaza Strip. Pam has almost three thousand votes, effectively stealing the tiara from Tammy Bruce who might well have won but for our efforts. Tammy should really demand that Pam, like Kathy Shaidle, be disqualified because of all the votes she has received from all us gay abortionists.
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline’s laziest blogger, is all teary-eyed this morning about the imminent departure of Little Debbie Howell from her position as Ombudsman at the Washington Post. Poor thing, he muses, all she did was say that Jack Abramoff contributed to Democrats (when he hadn’t) and the next thing she knew she was subjected to “personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech” from “emotionally disturbed leftists.”
Here’s one of those emails from an “emotionally disturbed” leftist:
You dumb shit, … you stupid asshole, … [g]o crawl back into your hole, you stupid … shithead. And don’t bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don’t qualify, you stupid shit.
Oh, wait. Did we get something mixed up here? Uh oh, indeed we did. That was a charming little email sent by Powerline co-blogger John Hinderaker back in 2005 to an email correspondent. Well, I always thought Hinderaker was a bit off and it’s awfully nice of Paul to confirm that at last.
Because liberals politicize everything, only conservatives are allowed to decide what’s racist. As a conservative, I assure you that a white person calling Barack a “Negro” isn’t racist because Barack is, after all, a Negro.
Ersatz liberal Joel Stein has written a column in the LA Times that caused Jim Hoft, aka The Gateway Pundit, to have the first orgasm he’s had in the last twenty years that didn’t involve four AA batteries and a picture of George Bush in a flight suit:
An Honest Lib: “Conservatives are right. They do love America more.”
Joel Stein at the LA Times nails it:
“But I’ve come to believe conservatives are right. They do love America more. Sure, we liberals claim that our love is deeper because we seek to improve the United States by pointing out its flaws. But calling your wife fat isn’t love. True love is the blind belief that your child is the smartest, cutest, most charming person in the world, one you would gladly die for. I’m more in ‘like’ with my country.”
Fox News’ Sean Hannity loves this country so much, he did an entire episode of “Hannity’s America” titled “The Greatest Nation on Earth.” In that one hour he said, several times, “the U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth.” One of the surest signs of love is it makes you talk stupid.
The liberal media (except Fox News now that Alan Colmes has quit)
Gun laws (unless they only apply to Negroes)
San Francisco, Massachusetts, Hollywood, DC (except for the Hard Rock Cafe and the monuments)
Major League Soccer
Labor unions
The federal government
Habeas corpus
Para español, oprima el dos.
And on and on and on . . .
I would be tempted to ask why the LA Times pays for Joel to write this mindless drivel, but then again you have to remember that they pay Jonah “the Whale” Goldberg to write columns too. His latest:
Does anyone know what we’re supposed to call this decade? … We’re coming up on the last year of it and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the “oughts,” as in, “back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting.”
More than once, I would suspect, and more than in “ought-six.”
First off, the biggest ass-kissing media refers to Michelle Obama as a ‘distinguished attorney” despite the fact that Michelle Obama has been “inactive” since 1993. Click here: ARDC | Lawyer
Search
ARDC - Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission
of the Supreme Court of Illinois !
Click to enlarge image. Everyday another Obama skeleton comes careening out of the closet.
This ADRC is for discipline reasons…not for those volunteering to stop practicing. It is COURT ORDERED…not
“Michelle Obama ordered.” Their website is very clear about their function and why they step in. (see below)
If this was a Republican, the Democrooks would have her up on charges already.
WFT?? OMFG!!! Michelle probably a sex-crazed bisexual goat on the steps of the Illinois Supreme Court! OR MAYBE SHE STOLE MONEY FROM A JEWISH SENIOR CITIZEN’S TRUST FUND WHILE NUDE AND HIGH ON CRACK!!!!!! And then she shot Barack’s grandmother to death so she could destroy the true birth certificate that was in granny’s nightstand showing that Obama was born in the darkest jungles of Africa.
Prior to November 1, 1999, former Supreme Court Rule 770 provided for a proceeding in the Court for any voluntary transfer to inactive status, whether because of some incapacitating condition or solely as a matter of the lawyer’s preference because the lawyer would not be practicing law.
In other words, prior to 1999, all voluntary decisions to go inactive were “court-ordered.”
You just can’t be this stupid by accident. So you know what to do. Go vote for Pamela for Grande Venti Conservative Blogress, Fabulous Diva, and Absolutely Divine Princess 2009.
ABOVE: Kathy Shaidle, the real “Conservative Blogress 2009″
Sometime overnight, Kathy Shaidle was removed by the Gaytriots from their Blogress election, allegedly because she asked to be removed. Just like, as you might recall, Gore asked the Supreme Court to decide against him. Before this little bit of Florida-style election rigging, Ms. Shaidle had almost 2000 votes and more than 70% of the votes cast. Sure, sure, of course she just walked away from a landslide victory. Well, I want to let Ms. Shaidle know that she’ll always be the Très Très Très Grande Divine Conservative Blogress 2009 in our hearts and minds.
But, back to business now. Bruce and Dan don’t want to let your votes count. Are we going to take this sitting down? Of course not. Let’s not let Bruce and Dan flush our votes down the toilet, particularly where it seems that, if nothing else, our votes can disqualify a Blogress.
Behind the real Blogress of 2009, the second favorite was Pamela “Atlas Shrieks” Geller. If we give her 2,000 votes, perhaps Bruce and Dan will dish out to her the same fate they dished out to poor Ms. Shaidle. So vote for Pam as often as you can. Do it for justice. Do it for Kathy!
In case you need a reason to vote for Pammiecakes, which I shouldn’t think you do, here’s a reason. It appears that Pamela has been lacing her Crown Royal eggnog with a little crystal meth lately because she apparently can’t remember now what she has said from one post to the next. First, Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff was, according to Pam, the victim of Jew-hating FBI agents. Scarcely 3 hours later Pam was saying that Madoff was guilty as sin and a major Dhimmirat contributor, meaning that Dhimmirats should give back all those criminal funds they received.
So, kids, let’s get back to ratfucking and vote Pamela off Blogress Island.
When I scroll down the page looking at Newsbusters every day, it’s like five or six wingnut heads going “robble robble robble robble robble.” Next, my feed reader recommends Atlas Shrugs, which sounds like an irregular clattery noise and a constant wild, cigarette-timbred scream — like an adult in a high chair tumbling down the semicircular master staircase of a Long Island faux-marble mini-mansion, forever.
But back to Newsbusters, I noticed this morning that they were going “robble robble,” and felt that I should say something back.
The roundtable on Monday night’s Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC was not kind to the New York Times’s hit piece on Sunday’s front page that blamed President Bush and only Bush for the mortgage meltdown, ignoring the Democrats in Congress who protected the irresponsible push for more “affordable housing” by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (as Times Watch noted yesterday).
Nina Easton, Washington bureau chief of Fortune magazine, pronounced herself “flabbergasted when I read this story, flabbergasted….You cannot write a story about affordable housing policies and blame it on George Bush instead of the Democrats. I mean, it’s just, it’s outrageous.”
And there’s more from there, including a choice quote from our man Krauthammer. What I don’t understand, though, about all of this blame-shifting — which started in September or thereabouts, and is now matured into an advanced game of self-referential wingnut counter-counterattack — is what they intend to do when someone, at long last, forces them to explain their math.
Above: Figures in dollars
This is just a cursory, throw-it-out-there sort of thing, and there’s a lot to be checked, added and/or corrected (like the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac figure, which reflects the bailout total), but we have here a certain bold elegance of proportion that I am confident would not fully be lost to a more rigorous analysis.
Also, ‘Clay Waters’ is a total porn name. Also, I should sort of explain the basics of credit default swaps, to whatever extent I’m smart enough to understand them, because they haven’t been well explained — with one caveat among several being that there’s more to the problem than just CDS exposure.
Imagine, let’s say, that you could take out insurance policies on things that you didn’t own, for instance on other people’s cars. If a car that you bet on gets into an accident, you get paid — while the owner gets nothing and indeed never even knows that you exist. Imagine also that you could sell these insurance policies on other people’s cars without owning any equity in them, either, and also without the knowledge of the owners, or anything like that.
Imagine further that once you bought or sold one of these insurance policies, you could turn around and trade it to someone else, who could then repackage it and trade it to someone else, etc., and so on and so forth, many times over, with everyone betting and hedging and side-betting with greater and greater exposure on other people’s cars, in Tulipomanic fashion. This market is almost completely unregulated and without standards, such that if someone sells you an insurance policy and then sells their end of the contract to someone else, who then sells it to someone else who goes bankrupt, you end up screwed, and too bad for you. Imagine roughly 60 trillion dollars** of obligations tied up in such schemes, and in schemes-upon-schemes, and who-even-knows-what.
It’s like that, except with mortgages instead of cars — and whoopsie, as no one could ever have predicted, the housing bubble collapsed, sending defaults up and real estate prices down, and making lots of sad faces.
Aah, what the hell, I can’t resist: Here’s Dr. Krapphammer:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The only surprise I had in reading this was why it took the Times so long to get around to blaming the entire collapse on George Bush. After all, they blamed everything else on Bush, I mean, from, you know, the droughts in Kansas to Hurricane Katrina. Look, the truth is that there are two realities here. One is that we set as a national goal 30 years ago expanding home ownership, especially for low-income and minorities, and it was accelerated in the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, Bush, who defined his ideology as “compassionate,” continued it. And the other truth is that in his administration he continued but he did try to regulate the out of control Fannie and Freddie, who were really at the root of this explosion. We had Franklin Raines in 1999, the CEO at the time, boasting that they had lowered the down payment requirements and were now going to lower the interest rates paid by these lower income subprime people, which was obviously a huge risk, and it was ignored, and it led ultimately to the calamity that we’re in today.
Sure, no, let’s pass it even further down the chain. We believe that ultimately, the fault rests with the manufacturers of Tyvek and drywall, for there would be no mortgage crisis without their eager connivance at the very root of this breakdown, without their shortsighted goal of grossly expanding the number of new or renovated houses on the market, increasing real estate inflation, as it were, while flagrantly abusing the financial system by expecting it to guarantee a mortgage for any new house they felt like insulating or covering the inside walls of. No wait, we blame the contractors, or wait, no, the landscapers. No, their helpers, the little Mexican guys.
If people like this were in a truck driving off a cliff, they’d be arguing with the cliff with their big, loud talking mouths all the way over the edge, whereupon they’d argue briefly with the oncoming ground.
Merry Christmas and fappy holidays (Chappy Chanukkah and a Riiste-Tet [cf.]), and I’ll try to check in soon!
* [It's spelled that way because it's 'Joyeux,' and then there's no 'l' at the end, har har urk ow pelted with sardine cans agh.]
In what has to be the worst idea since lawn darts, the dim-witted Gay Patriots have decided to hold a contest to determine who is the “Grande [sic] Conservative Blogress Diva 2009.” There’s enough funny here to keep us busy until 2012, even leaving aside the faux-French “grande.” For instance, there is the accidentally revealing similarity of “blogress” and “ogress,” which seems particularly apt given the line-up of nominees, which includes Our Lady of the Shit Moat, Sister Hypochondria, Professor Wine Box, Old Mrs. Attila the Gun, Atlas Shrieks, Frau Eva Schlusselweiss, and Canada’s very own Four Feet Six Inches of Stupid. Not surprisingly, the whole idea of giving a prize to a woman has left the commenters at Gay Patriot a little, er, flaccid.
So, it’s up to us SadlyNauts to bring a little oomph to the Très Grande Conservative Ogress 2009 competition. And the best way to do that is to go over there and voteen masse for Kathy Shaidle, aka Five Feet of Fury Four Feet Six Inches of Stupid. The best reason for voting for Shaidle is that Bruce and Dan do not seem to have stumbled upon the delicious irony of Gay “Patriots” giving a best blogger award to a foreigner. That alone is reason to give the lavender, white and blue ribbon to Shaidle. But there’s more — the vile pint-sized racist is a raging homophobe too. Finally, having a bunch of liberal gay abortionists and closet jihadists tip the vote in her favor as a joke is just the ratfuckery that the award deserves, especially given the loathsome lineup of nominees offered by the Gay Patriots.
And just in case you needed one more reason to go vote for her, consider this recent post where she defends not having to back up racist comments when people ask her if she has any support for them:
“Do you have proof to back up that racist statement? Any studies? Any statistics??”
Of course not, you dickhead.
Unlike you, I didn’t waste the last good years of my life being brainwashed in academia; I lived with and worked with and talked with actual, normal human beings (professors definitely don’t count) and that’s how I formed my knowledge of how the world really works. Through the evidence of my senses and my own personal experiences.
I do not rely upon junk science or faux history or Marxist theory.
Most of these commenters and bloggers are clearly jealous of the simple fact that I’m smarter and more worldly than they are, that all their “education” and backpacking around the world actually made them dumber than I am — but they can’t admit that.
If that doesn’t make you want to vote for Shaidle (”Hate You Can Believe In”), then nothing will. Right now Sister Hypochondria and Atlas Shrieks are ahead. Go vote for Shaidle!
UPDATE: Shaidle has now pulled into the lead, but keep voting anyway, please! We want her to have a commanding lead in front of the rest so that they can’t catch up.
SECOND UPDATE: The Gay Patriots have demonstrated that Gay Patriots like to fix elections. They have stealthily and without explanation tried to remove Kathy Shaidle from the poll as it appears on their site. But, here’s a link to the poll where you can still vote for Kathy. The voting links in this post have also been fixed to direct you to that poll instead. Shame on you, Bruce and Dan! Let every vote count!!
THIRD AND FINAL UPDATE: Shaidle has been disqualified. Go here for details.
Confederate Yankee is here to explain the economy and why its collapse is the fault of you. We join this Confederate Yankee post already in progress.
[...] And so the government is going to steal $17.4 billion more from taxpayers to prolong the inevitable death of unions companies that don’t deserve to live.
For that matter, much of the manufacturing in this country doesn’t deserve to live, particularly that created with non-competitive union labor so prevalent in the Northeast and upper Midwest.
It looks like he’s gone into abandon New Orleans mode again, only this time he’s saying it was a stupid idea to build a country where a recession could get it.
[...] The simple fact of the matter is that the U.S. auto industry is not just Ford, Chrysler, and GM, but Honda, Toyota, and other “foreign” manufacturers that build cars here on the mainland United States. What separates the successful companies that aren’t asking for a bailout from the leaches grubbing for tax dollars from your already empty wallet? Greedy, bloated, self-serving and uncompetitive union labor, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW).
Oh no, not the United Auto Workers (UAW)!
Okay, well, as you’re noticing the received distortions about the auto companies vis-à-vis the UAW (the suspicion has long been with us that Mr. Yankee consumes talk radio — which, given his position as a conservative blogger of some prominence, is like a moonshiner who gets wrecked on airplane glue), note as well the ease with which conservatives have pivoted to support Japanese companies against nominally American ones, and their new skepticism toward the sort of blue-collar flypaper that was set out by John McCain back in, oh gosh, way back in September of 2008: “Our workers are the most innovative, the hardest-working, the best-skilled, most productive, most competitive in the world. That’s the American worker. And my opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals — the American worker and their innovation, their entrepreneurship, the small business, those are the fundamentals of America, and I think they’re strong. But they are being threatened today.”
Then again, McCain’s speechwriter smartly conjoined ‘worker’ with ‘entrepreneurship’ and ’small business,’ so it can’t be said that he didn’t actually mean toilers in the fields of ownership and finance. Sneaky that way! Back to Mr. Yankee:
Non-union car factories are cranking out the smaller, higher-quality, more fuel efficient fleets that America wants to buy, while the unionized Big Three are cranking out bloated beasts that carry and estimated $2,000 of overhead per vehicle because of concessions the automakers have made the unions over the years in noncompetitive benefits and pensions.
This has become a popular unsourced claim, but even more appealing has been the plaint that American car companies are going under because they’ve been forced by government regulation to build smaller, more fuel-efficient cars instead of bloated beasts, etc. Perhaps the first set of imaginary circumstances can negotiate a free trade agreement with the second set, creating what business experts call a “win-win.”
As a result of this bloat, to make their cars competitive on the price point, unionized companies have to remove $2,000 from some other part of that vehicle, affecting the overall quality, durability, fit, finish, and reliability. Detroit is in trouble because they’re cranking out cars that are worth less than their competitors, and buyers know it.
Is this true? We don’t know! Luckily, we have this:
Above: Book we luckily have
If the average GM car takes 22.15 person-hours to build, and even if by some accounting unknown to art or science each GM worker were actually, in real life and not in some conservative crack dream, making $73 per hour (totaling $1,616.95 in labor costs per car), then how full of crap does the $2,000 figure appear to be?
Answer: If we assume that each car ought to carry $0.00 in labor costs — i.e., to be built by slaves who forage elsewhere for food and shelter; or by a combination of those slaves and some kind of robot that you can acquire for free, and that doesn’t require any power and never breaks down — the figure appears even then to be full of at least $383.05 worth of crap, per car.1
We rejoin this Confederate Yankee post already in progress:
[...] Michigan, New York, California… look at a the map of the areas most affected during our current economic crisis, and you’ll see areas of large populations in the Northeast, West Coast, and upper Midwest (historical big government Democratic enclaves) and a handful of swing states.
We looked and looked, and no such map was to be seen. Maybe there was a plate in the hardcover version of his post that’s missing from the paperback edition.
In any case, it’s certainly weird that the areas most affected by the crisis are centers of populations and finance. You’d think the deep South would be the first to crash, with the Franklin Mint bubble taking out Waffle House and Cracker Barrel, whose collapse would wipe out the rustic knick-knack manufacturers, dropping the floor out from under the Beanie Baby speculators, and so on down the line until you reach John Deere, at which point it’s game-over for Amway, Carhartt, Philip Morris, Mary Kay, QVC, Bob’s Big Boy, and the whole line of dominoes leading from Bally/Midway and the rest of the video poker manufacturers to Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly, and from there to one Branson concern after the next, wiping out Winnebago before toppling various Indian tribes and their casino buffet and dream-catcher keychain suppliers, landing subsequently on Disney itself, at which point the coastal elites would notice something missing but not be able to put their finger quite on what it was, until 3AM one night when they sat bolt upright in bed, saying, “Oh my God, whatever happened to the Jonas Brothers?”
Democrats in Congress (and soon to be in the White House) are unwilling to address the fact that the big government economic politics of FDR and LBJ are the politics of long-term economic failure.
This is an idea worthy of admiration. After the Clinton-blamers had recited their catechisms, and after Rush Limbaugh did what Rush Limbaugh does by blustering and har-harring about ‘the Obama Recession,’ Ace, a man of vision in some ways, raised the standard of étonne-moi! by blaming the current situation on Jimmy Carter. But now with “the politics of long-term economic failure,” we learn that the economy has been tanking ever since America stopped listening to Herbert Hoover — or, actually, it’s a brilliant enough phrase that you could blame everything on Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Era if you wanted to, or on the cruel way in which John Adams marginalized Alexander Hamilton, or come to think of it on Oliver Cromwell.
Also, note that the Democrats are in trouble once again for their refusal to address this wacky rationalization that Mr. Yankee just invented. I would mention in reply that Republicans are unwilling to address their own prosampiquity, which is a word I invented.
They are continuing to sap the ability of businesses to do business, while pandering to the unions that are dragging their constituencies into ruin.
Someday America will come to its senses, and businesses will be exempt from all laws while workers receive no pay.
Ever alert to the siren call of European riots, Mark Steyn is at it again over at America’s Shittiest Website™, using the riots as an opportunity for him to bash both Muslims and al-Beeb at the same time. Those Allah-worshipping jihadists at the BBC, you see, failed to point out, in language clear enough to be understood by Steyn’s semi-literate enthusiasts, that the riots are the work of dusky youth of the Islamofascist variety:
Swedish City Hit By Youth Riots
Let’s take a wild guess here. Would the “Swedish city” happen to be “Malmo”? Why, amazingly, yes:
Dozens of youths have rioted in the southern Swedish city of Malmo for a second consecutive night, setting cars on fire and clashing with police.
While we’re on a roll, would it happen to be the part of Malmo known as “Rosengard”? Why, right again!
People stand near a burning barricades on the main road in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rosengard…
“Immigrant-dominated”, eh? Is that a way of saying it’s the most heavily Muslim neighborhood of Sweden’s most Muslim city? Ah, well, let’s not go that far. All the BBC is prepared to say is that the otherwise non-specific youths’ riotous activities were “linked to the closure of an Islamic centre”.
Well, of course, the reason for the BBC’s reticence here might just be that some of the rioters were blond-haired, blue-eyed, white Christian Swedes:
Police spokesman Charley Nilsson says no injuries have been reported, but several trailers, containers, garbage bins and at least two cars were set ablaze in Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city. One person was arrested.
The violence has escalated every night since Monday, when police removed squatters protesting the eviction of an Islamic group from their basement premises in an immigrant neighborhood. Nilsson says leftist activists from other parts of the city have joined the protests.
Oddly, Steyn also has nothing to say about the recent riots by Greek Orthodox youth in Athens.
For the last year or so, I’ve sort of vanished completely from most of my online friends and hangouts. It’s been a weird year, most noticeably so for what appears to be the death of my sense of humor. I think my total inability to laugh at much of anything started late last year, when one of my tenth grade students was murdered, leaving behind an infant son. It’s something of a challenge to try to teach effectively in a classroom with a desk suddenly empty under such circumstances. A few weeks after that, I was driving to my school to go to work, only to come upon an accident which must have happened not five minutes earlier - a truck had hit a student waiting for a bus, and the child was still pinned beneath the truck. I knew the neighborhood and that bus stop, and I knew that the bus the child was waiting for would have been taking him or her off to one of the local middle schools, so my first reaction was one of relief - the injured child was not going to be one of my students.
When I realized that I was feeling, I fell into a pretty heavy duty spiral of frustration and shame and helpless anger. It felt like I was showing the same attitude I always deplore in other people - only caring about what happens to kids when they’re “one of ours” in some way. It’s the sort of attitude that causes the national media freakout from freakout queens like Nancy Grace whenever anyone does something to a white kid, but completely ignores it when bad shit happens to black kids. A couple of days before the election, in fact, one of the students who attended one of the high schools in the area where I teach was shot, his body set on fire and dumped behind the railroad tracks. Try and find any information on the story - I dare you. I teach in Miami - go ahead and search newsfeeds or Google or whatever. There was nothing on it - a brief in the crimes section, maybe,- because the kids I teach are throwaway kids in this country’s eyes.
I guess I’ve just been feeling hopeless because the things that are important to me don’t seem to be important to any voice that gets listened to on a large scale. And seeing children die over it can sort of take the humor out of things.
So I voted for Obama. And he’s given me Rahm Emmanuel, Arne Duncan, and Rick Warren. It’s an entire slate of people who don’t care much at all for the people and things that I care about. And yet what choice did I have? What choice do I have now? I think I’ve lost teh funny, and I don’t know if it’s coming back any time soon.
So anyway, I felt like I had to say something about the whole Rick Warren folderol, and I started off writing something, and I think it might have been funny at the start, but by the time I was done it felt about as funny as knowing that kids who grow up in poverty show brain function abnormalities similar to stroke patients. But I’m just going to go ahead and stick it under the fold, so that if you want to look at it and try to figure out whether it’s funny or just depressing you can. I just don’t know if I can tell the difference myself anymore.
The deck seems stacked against those of us who favor free markets.
It would seem so at this time, yes.
The free-market economy can…
No, because wait. Right here is the difference between the Powerline guys and people who aren’t made out of spite and Der, and who don’t have little cuckoo-bird figurines of Robert Taft popping out of their foreheads. When sane people witness the world financial system melting down, it gives them pause.
In Australia in the 1900s, some antipodean, arm-gartered Mirengoff was adjusting his green eyeshade and spitting on his hands and crafting editorial sentences like, “The deck seems stacked against those of us who favor the introduction of rabbits.” His oeuvre is as obscure to us today as Mirengoff’s will be to the marauders who ransack our houses in search of gasoline and antibiotics.
The free-market economy can produce astonishing growth for decades, with only brief, minor interruptions. But these minor interruptions can become the pretext for significant government intervention. And when a major crisis comes along, every 70 years or so, it becomes the basis for a massive increase in government entanglement in the economy.
You can probably see where he’s going with this.
It isn’t any worse than Jonah Goldberg’s Wednesday column (Shorter Jonah Goldberg: A crisis is no time to change course), and while we’re on the subject, I ought to confess that I’ve never agreed with the popular view that Jonah is the stupidest stupe in all of Stupidland, or even that he ranks particularly low among conservative writers. I’ve always, actually, thought that he was pretty clever in an underachieving, college-atavistic way, like the characterological ‘good arguer’ who would raise his hand a lot in class, but finesse his research papers and talk his way out of homework assignments. The fact that he ended up on CNN gassing off on foreign policy was, I always figured, an artifact of our modern intellectual culture in its preoccupation with credentials over qualifications and either of the two over expertise.
Conversely and on the other hand, I believe that the Powerline guys are genuinely stupid. Not ’stupid’ in the simple way of a playground insult, but in the sense that they’re like a trio of cranky upper-middle-class saucer enthusiasts, intellectual cultists who never learn anything and who indeed keep repeating the same comical mistakes again and again — like Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on a human face, forever,’ except it’s a tasseled loafer on a flaming bag of dogshit.
Moreover, I’ve never been able, as others say they have, to distinguish among them in their stupidity beyond the fact that John Hinderaker has the fustiest style and is the most likely to say something interesting, e.g. a claim like “liberals have no sense of humor” just as the camera pans to reveal a rotting shark dangling above him, then a closeup of a fraying rope.
The free-market economy can produce astonishing growth for…
I still can’t remember from day to day whether Mirengoff is the one who looks like this guy, or whether he’s the one who looks like Newman from Seinfeld.
The free-
But in any case, the reason I’m mentioning Jonah and his latest column is that together with this thing of Mirengoff’s, you can really see the success of the slow, at first aspirational, ultimately decades-long and richly financed conservative project of piling up cooked information and slanted analyses, paper after column after article after study, until they almost literally have no historical or social referents that aren’t ideological.
Porter Good, Cingular Wireless store manager by day and pretend pirate blogger by night, is stomping his peg leg on his ship’s deck, because of this news item:
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health–and the brother of incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel–will serve as a senior counselor at the White House Office of Management and Budget on health policy, two Democratic officials said Thursday.
Here’s what Porter thinks about that scandalous news item:
Cough*nepotism*cough.
Can you imagine if GWB had brought on a relative in such a manner. The Left’s enmity would have over-flowed, and they would have ramped their seething factor to at least an 8 (remember, a 1 on the seething scale is their normal constant outrage.) Here, eh.
Sadly, no!
Vice President Dick Cheney’s son-in-law, Philip Perry: Deputy Attorney General.
Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s son, Michael Powell: Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Budget Director Mitchell Daniels’ sister Deborah Daniels: Assistant Attorney General.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s brother Mark McClellan: Member, President’s Council of Economic Advisers and Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration.
Ken Mehlman’s brother Bruce Mehlman: Assistant Secretary of Commerce.
Michael Chertoff’s chief of staff’s wife Julie Myers: Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security.
For bonus giggles, watch the cellphone huckster and faux pirate get all twisted up trying to figure out what a bioethicist is:
BTW, what the hell is a bioethicist? Is that actually a real job, or, is it one of those made up positions that Liberals constantly come up with so they do not really have to work for a living, but, can spread their lunacy and political viewpoints? Ready the Wikipedia entry, sounds more like the job of “performance artist.” Someone who has no skills in actual art, so, they fake it.
A fellow from Denmark draws our attention to a recent Thomas Sowell column. Let’s see how many words Thomas needs before he uses the N-word!
Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.
Freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler.
Wow, 42 — pretty impressive. Let’s continue!
There are high schools across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as “community service.”
Yes, all these damn liberal universities and schools — forcing their students to do community service. Those damn sons of bitches at Liberty University:
Community service is required for all undergraduate resident students[.]
Kay Hymowitz is obsessed with black women, but not in a good, lesbianatical, brown-sugar kind of way. No, Hymowitz has made a career out of screaming, at every available opportunity, about the shameful number of unwed Negro mothers and their bastard spawn, and how this is the cause of everything that’s wrong with black culture from rap music to low-riding pants to Jeremiah Wright.
Not surprisingly, then, an article in the New York Times headlined “2-Parent Black Families Showing Gains” has Hymowitz fussing and fuming over at America’s Shittiest Website™ about how this is yet another attempt by the liberal media to, er, whitewash indisputable evidence of the inferiority of the Negro race:
The New York Times headline “2-Parent Black Families Showing Gains,” Wednesday seemed like great news. … After decades of decline, more black kids are finally growing up with their mothers and fathers!
Alas, check out the third paragraph of the piece: “The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents.” What the data is [sic] really saying, it turns out, is that more black children are living with a woman who may or may not be their mother, and a man who either may or may not be their father, and may or may not be married to the woman who may or may not be their mother.
This kind of razor sharp analysis is why Hymowitz is on the wingnut dole at the Manhattan Institute. Because the data aren’t saying that at all. A change in the definition of parents to include cohabiting couples resulted in the increase in the number of parents; it didn’t — and couldn’t — increase the number of children with cohabiting parents. Here’s a simple way to explain it. If I change the definition of “annoying asswipe” from anyone on the payroll of the National Review to anyone on the payroll of the National Review or the Manhattan Institute, that will increase the number of annoying asswipes in the world. It will not, however, increase the number of people who are on the payroll of the Manhattan Institute.
If you think misinforming the business community is easy, try being like, “Dudes, we must buy lots of oil from overseas because embargoes only make the Arabs mad,” and like, “Alternative energy sucks because carbon taxes will totally wreck our economy,” while acting the whole time like, “Duh, I have no idea that the point of creating alternative energy sources is to create so-called ‘alternative energy sources.’”
Note: Jude Wanniski was the intellectual architect of supply-side economics and a former editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial section. Before his death in 2005, the Falstaffan Wanniski spent the wingnut street cred he had accrued over a lifetime by writing powerfully against the war in Iraq and the ‘imperial’ presidency of George W. Bush, and against the phenomenon of neoconservatism in general, without fundamentally changing the politics that had made him an icon of the postwar conservative movement. Arthur Laffer, the colleague after whom Wanniski named the supply-side deus ex machina, the Laffer Curve, has proven infinitely more adaptable.
HTML adds: Quoth Laffer:
If a carbon tax increase were offset dollar-for-dollar with an income tax rate cut, I for one would strongly support the policy. The economy would benefit because the progressive income tax does far more damage than a carbon tax would, and we’d use less oil. It’s a win-win situation. Yet this perspective appears to be totally outside the Obama team’s ken.
Right. Incidentally, this proposal is also, um, central to the point of David Frum’s “new” Republicanism. “New” actually meaning it’s just the most recent way by which wingnuts hope to soak the poor and send a windfall to the rich. Or in G. H. W. Bush-speak, “progressive taxes, bad; regressive taxes, good.” But look at the cute little wingnuts, so eager to make deals, cooperate, be bi-partisan. Aren’t they trying? If only those meanie liberals would stop noticing the wingers’ transparent bad faith! If only those halitosic liberals, in their Bad Galbraith way, would stop huffing and puffing about wingnuts’ ill-disguised attempts to enoble the crudest kind of selfishness — which is too, is too, a virtue, just as St. Ayn said it was (not to mention St. Rush’s corollary: “Tax the Poor!” which just makes sense, you know?). If only! Well, say Frum and Laffer more in sorrow than anger, if you won’t work with us when we’re trying to reach out to you, we’ll be forced to work against you. Why can’t liberals be reasonable?
HTML adds MOAR:Garry Wills’s take on Arthur Laffer, from Reagan’s America.
