There ya go, trying to link “Riehl” and “reality” again. The vague similarity in sound does not imply existence in the same world. And one cannot be held responsible for that which one cannot comprehend.

Gavin, Dan can’t actually read the MSM. He is trying to stay uncorrupted.

I think he’s trying as hard as possible to be stupid, I think he likes it when people make fun of him.

Sort of like the kid that punches himself in the face, and when it elicits laughs from those he respects, he just keeps punching himself until he’s unconscious.

Then he just gets up and does it again, even when no one is looking anymore.

Did you know France named a street after an American cop-killer?

Ice Motherfucking T?

à + le = au

Donc, “au Maître.” Unless you really do want to say something like “Thank you, Mistress!” and slip in a vocabulary mistake to earn punishment fierce enough to leave your modifiers dangling.

à + le = au

Donc, “au Maître.�

Suis désolé!1!

[fixed]

I hear there’s gonna be a library built for the guy who signed off on torture.

There is a “Kirstie Alley” in Boston. Granted, she’s no murderer, but she did slay half the gags she was part of on Cheers.

Hmm.

1. Can’t read the Washington Post (or maybe doesn’t know it exists)
2. Doesn’t know countries can’t name streets
3. Considers holding breath until he gets what he wants

And yet he’s still not demonstrably stupider than Mark Noonan or Fred Barnes. He’s going to have to try harder if he wants this year’s prize — the competition is fierce.

“I am not a clumsy, Clouseau-esque buffoon!”

I live in the South. There are streets and towns and counties and god-damn rock statues dedicated to all manners of racists, pro-slavery zealots and traitors. Welcome to America, Dan. If he didn’t live in his bi-coastal liberal enclave, he might know what it was like out here.

At what point did our leadership decide that their jobs were not to actually produce any work product, but merely to pose and posture and try to manage public opinion? These guys “work” 103 days this year, get nothing of any value done, and still find an opportunity to address a fucking street name in FRANCE?? And it passes 368-31? Thank you for doing the peoples business in such a dedicated fashion.

Rumsfeld’s memo was not about how to make things better, just about managing expectations. Congress passes meaningless legislation to demonstrate their american patriotism. Meanwhile people are old, sick, hungry, dying and desperately seeking an opportunity. And the people and the press watch all this happen and there’s virtually no outcry. Sad, really…

mikey

Is there another blogger who is as routinely hammered by his commenters as Dan Riehl? It seems like I every time I go over there, the commenters are always ripping him a new asshole. He has the inverse favorable/unfavorable comment ratio of most normal blogs. Great theater.

I once spoke at a symposium in Huntsville, Alabama in a building called the Von Braun Center. It’s named for a Nazi designer of terror weapons that killed civilians in the UK and elsewhere, which were built with Jewish (and other) slave labor. My joking reference to the old Tom Lehrer song may have led to my not bein invited the next year.

http://www.vonbrauncenter.com/

Loretta Lynn’s playing there next week!

Gavin – by posting that map you are giving the terrorists a direct guide to our US Naval Station in Long Beach!!!1!!!!

DO YOU WANT US TO LOSE?!

At least it wasn’t the map to Secretary Dumsfeld’s house. Or Pammy’s house on Lawn Guyland.

Wow, this was eve more important than renaming French Fries and French Toast.

Quel travail magnifique nos politiciens font.

(I don’t speak the Frog, so I may have made une petite erreur)

Lawn Guyland

First time I’ve seen it written. I know, I’m sheltered. Anyway, I’m still laughing. Thanks, ITTDGY.

The French have a different word for everything!

In Spanish: El Gato in el som-bre-ro!

I’ve been ruminating on something for a while, and despite my other erratic behaviour, hear me out.

So some are arguing that a minimum wage increase would put an extra burden on small buisinesses. Fair enough, perhaps it does.

However, in an increaingly service-based economy (and let’s be serious, where else would one make minimum wage?), this extra burden may actually help the economy on the whole. The good buisinesses that are able to turn a profit will cope with the wage increase, while the sucky ones go under. Without the competition offered by lesser shops, the ones with a decent buisiness model will be more free to expand and open up new locations. So, in effect, there may be a loss of jobs initially, but it will be buffered by the growing of the better restaurants, shops, etc.

Take, for example, coffee shops (or bars). I’m intimately familiar with the ones in my neck of the woods, and there’s plenty that are usually nearly empty (and in a college town, that says a lot) and I can’t imagine that they are in good financial health. Let’s say half of the coffe joints (bars) go under after the wage increase. Now, let’s say that for every 3 people that used to go to Awsome Beverages 1 person went to Sam’s Shitty Drinks. That means the remaining places have a 33% bigger populance to serve, and expand accordingly. The market is still saturated, but now with better coffee (scotch) and better wages.

In addition, the number of employees needed for a particular buisinesses doesn’t scale well with the number of locations that buisiness occupies. You need people to ferry good from one location to another in the event that the latter runs out of some product. A larger beaurocracy is needed for coordination and management. In the end, the total job in/de-crease should be close to zero.

I can’t be the first person to think of this, and yet I’ve never heard the wage debate address this before. I believe that this issue is never raised because politicians think it may offend the proprietors that suck at what they do. But you know what? Screw ’em. Being an American doesn’t give one license to write every car, meal or plane ticket off as a “Small Buisiness Expense”. It doesn’t mean you have a right to own a buisiness. Being an American means striving to do well at what you do, for the good of the population.

Writing off my humvee as an expense for my internet ticket scalping agency is my god given right, you dirty stinkin hippie.

Considering that Cobert managed to try to get a bridge named after him in, what, Yugoslavia? I’d chaulk this up under “crap we shouldn’t care about.”
It’s a good opportunity to try to brush up on four years of high school French 1, though.
…Que est la biblioteque?

Something like 73% of the American economy is based on the service industry.

You know, how hard would it be to write new minimum wage laws that say, “Business with less the X employees are not affected”? This would allow for the continuation of small, mom+pop places, that probably don’t offer benefits or anything anyway, and still improve the overall economy for the mainstream minimum wagers who work at corporate giants like McDonalds or Walmart.

On another note, I never heard of ‘scrappleface’ until this voting thing.

Scott Ott is to Sadly, No! as Julia Gorin is to the Daily Show. Cringe! And Little Green Chickenhawks is winning “best blog”. So I guess the scrappleface thing is no surprise.

Some Guy,

“Considering that Cobert managed to try to get a bridge named after him in, what, Yugoslavia?”

Hungary. One of my favorite moments was when Stephen got 5 million more votes than there are people in Hungary.

the_millionaire_lebowski, that’s all well and good, but if the government acknowledges the lowest rung of the working class by raising the minimum wage, it will be harder for the conservative movement to exploit this permanent underclass.

The overclass has already been insulated from wider society. They laugh at the poor people and makes jokes about excluding or killing them. The middle class thinks likes to think of themselves as part of the overclass. They play along with the hate speech. It makes them feel powerful. Plus, everyone else does it. The lower class gets poorer or is frozen in economic time.

If the American people actually start to think about the well-being of their fellow citizens, they might try to stop the conservative movement’s plan to control the masses with pithy slogans and a culture of violent opposition to modern society! Heavens, that would be terrible. Their plan, the divine right of kings lite, would be foiled again.

The neocons and neoliberals would only have themselves to talk to on tv. Ratings would drop because no one believes a single word out of their vicious mouths. Can you imagine how horrible it will be for them?

So now you see why you need to stop talking about this subject and start talking about eliminating your neighbors. Every time you condemn a minority, a neocon gets an erection.

@steve_e

That’s my point though. Good buisinesses generally have better goods and services, and this is something that the upper and middle class can identify with, IMO.

I mean, why does the upper-income-bracket population want crappy shops to survive? You said people (I’m assuming you were talking about the “small buisiness owners that suck”™) exploit their workers, but if those same buisiness owners are losing money or barly surviving, what is the driving force to keep doing it?

Fear of hippies, communists, socialists, and Europeans. Hell, I don’t know. The media has always talked a good game about the “free market” (they seem to think the US is one). A hell of a lot of people don’t use reason when discussing minimum wage. It comes down to an ideology based on various economic theories that many laypeople don’t understand. When I talk to people about minimum wage, they struggle to convince me that something horrible will happen to the whole American economy if it is raised. They’re sure that the economic theories they can’t explain are true.

Ummmm…can i just ask a kinda stoopid question?

Does anyone know why that street is named Mumia? I haven’t seen anything – other than Michelle – that actually says it was named afterMumia. For all I know it was named 50 years ago after some Alergian guy.

Mumia was made an honorary French citizen and had a street named after him, for the same reason some other sane countries might have named streets after Mandela or other victims of racist police states…

Ummmm…can i just ask a kinda stoopid question?

Does anyone know why that street is named Mumia? I haven’t seen anything – other than Michelle – that actually says it was named afterMumia. For all I know it was named 50 years ago after some Alergian guy

Obviously, NO! You can not ask that question! Because it might turn out that it is a different Mumia! And that would make a conservative meme look stupid and non-factual.

And it is far more important that our great conservative leaders and thinkers LOOK informed and competent than that they should actually BE informed and competent.

So don’t ask the question! Just repeat the meme!

JUST REPEAT THE MEME!

Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet. Bill O’Reilly said so.