Jesus Glocking Christ

Schools, universities, national parks, restaurants, bars - why not church!

Personally, I can feel manly with only my penis holstered up by my underwear. (No, I don't consider it a concealed weapon.) I don't need a .38 under the front seat of my car or a semiautomatic next to the bed to keep me feeling adequate if someone gives me the finger on the highway or says something about my equipment or skills in bed. These theoretical situations are why I have a brain.

Bottom line: A lot of these people are so far around the bend that they ought not be permitted out on the grounds alone, much less armed. Eventually, one of them will miss when reaching for the toilet paper after squeezing off a round, absentmindedly pick up the bathroom gun, and shoot himself in the ass. I guess that's one way to get ripped a new asshole.

Culture dish

Donald Trump, hair-architect blowhard legacy real estate deal-making multi-marriage reality TV celebrity who couldn't make money from a casino and would be white trash if he didn't have all that inherited money, will decide whether Carrie Prejean, Chrisjin anti-gay California blond Barbie beauty queen with godless torpedo implants and underage lingerie photos in the closet, gets to remain Miss California USA. Kit Seelye reports. In the New York Times!

It just doesn't get any more dismally perfect than this.

I really, really hope these aren't the end times. It would be awful to go out on a note like this.

Antidote for bullshit

Krugman hits the bullseye, then splits his own arrow.

[W]hen the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the report, it made an interesting catch. It turns out that Treasury’s hypothetical families got all their gains from the so-called middle-class provisions of the Bush tax cuts: the Child Tax Credit, the reduced tax bracket for lower incomes and marriage penalty relief.

These all happen to be provisions that Mr. Obama proposes leaving in place. In other words, the Bush administration itself implicitly defines the middle class as consisting of people making too little to end up paying additional taxes under the Obama plan.

Of course, all the evidence in the world won’t stop Republicans from claiming, as they always do, that Democrats are going to impose a crippling tax burden on ordinary hard-working Americans. But it just ain’t so.

"It just ain't so" is the safe characterization of virtually anything the Bushists, including John McCain, say about social class, income, and taxes.

Kit Seelye and Patrick Healy, in the same allegedly liberal newspaper, of course give the he-said-she-said battle of press operations with no attempt at proportion or lie-catching.

You can't handle the truth

Obama gave a speech on race from the heart. It was honest and frank. It was fair-minded and clear-eyed and filled with exactly the reason, understanding, and sympathy that America needs in its leaders. Above all, it was authentic.

There is no Republican in public life who could deliver such a speech, much less write it himself, as Obama did. There are precious few other Democrats, if any. Even Bill Clinton couldn't do it.

Yet, instead of judging the speech on its own considerable merit, Katharine Seelye of course judges it on the basis of how others are spinning it. This is par for the course for Seelye, who always spins to the detriment of Democrats. Here she's spinning for Hillary, but, come the general, that won't last.

Seelye poses as wanting to know whether the speech was effective in the white working class, or whether, in a formula she adopts straight from Rush Limbaugh, 'whether the speech cements Mr. Obama as the “black candidate” in the minds of blue-collar whites'. What she appears to want, really, is simply to put out the narrative that these voters won't accept Obama, that it wasn't "effective".

Seelye quotes a bunch of Democrats who supposedly have working class cred (even though several are academics), and only one of them has a concrete criticism - and that's that the speech didn't contain enough policy. Shit, not enough policy! What will we do? We'll have to listen to everyone else's dry policy dissertations to see how it really ought to be done.

January 2009

I once offended a local Democrat by deriding Joe Lieberman, and I haven't seen her at a meeting since. I wonder how she feels about Lieberman's endorsement of John McCain. I feel completely vindicated, much as when I pushed a racist voter away from my Congressional candidate in 1974.

My fervent hope is that the Senate Majority Leader who defeats Harry Reid in January of 2009 will drum Lieberman out of the Democratic Party caucus. Could it be more clear that he's not a Democrat? You have to wonder about Connecticut Democrats who voted for him.

Self-satisfaction

Everyone who comments on the news is self-important, not excluding someone like me who doesn't even have much of an audience.

What's annoying about Katharine Seelye is her complete self-satisfaction. She's just thrilled she's writing about convention blogging nine months early. She's so smug to think that bloggers and useless MSMers like her will be interviewing each other in 2008. Most likely, she'll be interviewing bloggers, not the other way around. Not that I'm important enough to be there, but why would any of us want to hear the conventional wisdom from her?

And of course Seelye, typically, gives Republicans equal credit for something they're hardly even doing. You watch, their bloggers will all be from the MSM, trying to be cool and failing abjectly.