Sunday, March 31, 2013

Euphemism For The Ages

Phil Spector's daughter:
It was in February of that year that my dad was first caught up in the death of Lana Clarkson.
Really, Nicole Spector? "First caught up in the death of Lana Clarkson," as if he'd gotten tangled in some fishing line while taking a walk on the Santa Monica Pier?

Everything's Political II

In further sporting schadenfreude, happy to see the now-American League Houston Astros beat the Texas Rangers, who formerly employed George W(orst). Bush as their figurehead.

Adding to the thrills: The Astros payroll for their 25 players is less than the annual salary of Yankee Alex Rodriguez.

Everything's Political

Not giving shit one about college basketball or the NCAA tournament, but not unpleased to see Duke U., the school that gave Richard M. "Tricky Dick" Nixon (37th President of the United States & the only one to resign in disgrace) his legal education ("When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.") lose, & lose big.And screw hair-coloring crypto-fascist Duke hoops coach Kryzyzewski (better known as "Coach K" because cretinous Yankee can't pronounce Kryzyzewski).

Upside Down & Backwards

While over-thinking the entire sado-masochistic Easter mess it occurred to us that south of the equator the Xian festival of rebirth (Completely different & has nothing to do w/ any other supernatural scams' spring fests!) is celebrated in the fall, the season of dying & death. Is Xianity designed only for those in the more populous hemisphere, even 'though whatever increase in suckers Catholics & other denominations are enjoying is mostly in the global south?

Or is it actually more appropriate for a death-fetishizing faith tradition that pretends no one really dies to observe "rebirth" even as the leaves are falling from the trees?

He Is Risen

J.C. Has Risen From The Grave

Odd we never previously thought of this tune in the Passover context.Or it would be odd if age & overuse weren't making our cheese-like brain ooze from our ears.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Crime Family Report

If you wondered what the Chandler crime* family was up to now that they've nothing to do w/ the L.A. Times (We weren't either but here it is anyway.) at least one of them (Not much info about him on the Internet, but we're guessing this Otis is a grandson of the original Otis Chandler.) is making more money than you are. And all it took was some family money & the family name.

We can only assume that this goodreads operation is a plot of some gov't. agency or another to determine who is a reader (potential subversive) & what they are reading (proof of subversion, or, at best, non-conformity).

*"He was a member of the San Fernando Syndicate, a group of investors who bought land in the San Fernando Valley based on inside knowledge that the Los Angeles aqueduct would soon irrigate it. Otis used the LA Times to frighten citizens (with news stories of a false drought) to vote for a 1905 bond issue that funded the aqueduct."

Yup, Manichean paranoid & grifter:
Otis was known for his conservative political views, which were reflected in the paper. His home was one of three buildings that were targeted in the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing. During his time as publisher of the Times Otis is known for coining the phrase "You are either with me, or against me."

Will Nobody Think Of The Children?

We're thinking foster care for the remaining two after the third shoots itself (or one of the others) in a horrible "accident": "I didn't think ... it was loaded." Then addiction, suicide &/or a spree killing.
Donna & Luke (Mississippi)
Guns & ammo, or shoes for the children? Tough decision.

Other frightened (& frightening) people here. Via Vice.

Trial & Error

Mark Evanier saw the David Mamet-typed & directed, Al Pacino-starring movie about the murder of Lana Clarkson by Phil Spector (It's not "only in theaters," it's HBO.) & shares some thoughts. Shame on M.E.; he doesn't assume Spector's innocence.
The film is not only an ugly case for Spector’s innocence, it’s a bad case for it. Over and over, we hear that he’s being prosecuted because he’s rich and famous and the proof that happens is … what? Spector wasn’t that famous except maybe in his own mind. A jury could easily be selected of folks who’d never heard of him. There’s no history of suspected murderers being indicted because they were celebrities. There is a long history of police in the Los Angeles area giving preferential treatment to celebrities and they sure waited a long time before indicting a man that everyone knew was probably guilty from the moment the crime was reported. And even if somehow, rich/famous folks are more likely to be prosecuted when suspicious murders happen around them, the “famous” disadvantage gets offset by the “rich” advantage. They can hire legal Dream Teams — the best money can buy.

I’m going to get off this because I doubt many folks reading this who care about this case think Spector was railroaded. I was just kind of amazed — and in a sense, relieved — that even slanting the facts to prove the guy innocent didn’t prove him innocent. And I was amazed that the film was such a waste of time as drama. About all I learned was that Phil Spector does a decent impression of Al Pacino.
Our interest here is in responsibly speculating if it was Mamet's coming out of the reactionary closet that lead him to take Spector's side. Is the conviction of a (certain level of) celebrity of the Caucasian persuasion for using Second Amendment rights to put a woman in her place an indication to Mamet of how the monolithic left is irredeemably evil & so on? Or has Mamet has always been this much of a jerk?

Chicken/egg time: Does entering the world of wing-nuttia bring out the hitherto unsuspected inner jerk, or is jerk-offery a pre-requisite to becoming a reactionary? We'll probably have to slice into a few extremist brains to determine the answer. Where's that scalpel?

Loony Moonie On Sodomy

The editor emeritus of The Washington Times is very anxious, & takes to the pages of said Times to go off on "the love that dare not speak its name." Yes, he typed that, & he really would prefer no one speak it, although he does manage to name-check it: "Sodomy." And just as the discerning reader seeing the phrase "Now I'm not a racist, but ..." knows instantly that the typist is a racist & is about to drag out yet another ancient stereotype or three, when "sodomy" appears in any context other than "Rum, sodomy & the lash" the reader knows there's a  homophobe at work. (In this case a four or five-yr. old homophobe who thinks it's  "yucky.") We'll go out on a limb & figure he's not intentionally funny or pathetic, but anyone who goes back to Jimmy & Amy Carter to make an alleged point about Sen. Portman (Hypocrite-Not Unless It Affects Me Personally) & his son is just fucking sad.

Enough intro: It's written at a grade level appropriate for the sorts of people who take The Washington Times seriously, so most readers here should breeze right through  & it's so inane we doubt it'll raise blood pressure or cause heads to slam on desks. Hell, some might even feel a twinge of pity for the old bastard as his world collapses around him. Not us, obviously, but someone, maybe.
Sodomy is the latest hot thing in Washington. You don't have to participate in it to think how cool it is. The love that dare not speak its name has become the passion that shouts from the housetops. Closets are emptying all over town.

From now on - "going forward," in the cliche of washingtonspeak - reporters and pundits need not interview candidates for Congress. They'll just talk to their kids to see what the candidates think. The Children's Hour hasn't been this popular since Jimmy Carter reassured us that he had consulted little Amy about arms control and she agreed that nuclear war is not good for living things.

Rob Portman, the senator from Ohio who was almost Mitt Romney's running mate, took his marching orders from his son after the boy told Mom and Dad that he was gay. The senator couldn't wait to announce it in the newspapers, writing a long op-ed about it in the Columbus Dispatch. We're all for privacy in modern America until we get the urge to "share" the smarmy details of our lives.

Mr. Portman explained the deviation from his convictions of the past, when as a member of the House of Representatives he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act now being argued at the Supreme Court, as a function of evolution. Evolution has hit hard in Washington, as the pols line up to tell everyone how they've learned to appreciate the yucky expansion of the marital bed.

First it was President Obama, whose mind turned out to be a triumph of Darwinian speculation. Then it was Joseph R. Biden, or maybe the vice president leaped first and the president tagged along; then Hillary Rodham Clinton, followed by Bubba, who can't remember everything he evolved from in that dark and mysterious land of the magic huckleberry*. Evolution soon spread across the partisan aisle, first to Mr. Portman and then back across to Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

A first cousin of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. arrived in Washington from San Francisco on Monday and announced that she is a lesbian and will attend the Supreme Court hearings as a guest of Cousin John. "He's a smart man," says Jean Podrasky. "He is a good man. I believe he sees where the tide is going. I do trust him. I absolutely trust that he will go in a good direction."

Ordinarily no one can guess what a Supreme Court justice will say or do, but Chief Justice Roberts demonstrated in the Obamacare decision that he tries to fit respect for the Constitution into his decisions when he can, but a good public opinion of the court is more important. Like Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, he's a swinger, too.

Over the weekend Karl Rove, ever in pursuit of the hip and the hot, said he could "imagine" the next Republican presidential nominee endorsing same-sex marriage. Karl suffers a stunted imagination. Republicans of Karl's ilk are demonstrating evolution on steroids and by 2016 there may not be room on either ticket for anyone but a man of lace, lavender and peau de soie. Or Hillary.

Handicapping Supreme Court deliberations is a fool's game, as any lawyer will tell you, and ordinarily the justices don't read the Gallup poll, or Rasmussen either. But this is a new day and who knows? Chief Justice Roberts' cousin may be on to something.

The latest uninformed speculation is that the high court will find a middle ground, to leave it to the states to define marriage and what sanction to give synthetic versions of it. The Washington Post, always lustful about the latest fashion, decrees that "the political argument over same-sex marriage is over." That's what other wiseheads said about abortion 40 years ago after Roe v. Wade.

Nobody wants another 40 years of angry debate and contentious argument over a "right" found not in the Constitution but in a "penumbra," like the one the high court found to support Roe v. Wade. If the justices find another one, the debate will no more end than a penumbra ended the abortion debate. Like the abortion debate, the same-sex marriage argument is one between personal convenience and moral conviction.

Gays in America seek something beyond the power of the courts to convey - the blessing of the straight society they profess to disdain, and the recognition that homosexual union is equal to marriage as society has known it since before the Flood. Thousands of years of tradition, nurtured by the church, the synagogue and the mosque, can't be dissolved by whim or caprice, however artful.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Curiosity piqued: Has anyone seen professions of disdain for straight society from any but the most radical of radical queers? It's even money that we have more disdain for society, straight or otherwise, than the average gay person.

Which "Flood"? Sandy, in New York? The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927?
*No fucking idea. We doubt if Pruden knows what the hell he's talking about either.

Friday, March 29, 2013

F.I.G.

The headline is an abbreviation for FUCK IRA GLASS & his middle-brow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road tote-bagging Nasty Putrid Radio shitshow, This American Life. To wit, a load of crap concerning disability, debunked here.

Tell you what, Glass-hole, keep to your cute little stories about whatever your Volvo-driving audience of fuckheads are interested in (We have no actual idea; who in hell listens to that mind-rot?) because you & your entire staff of hipster jag-offs are incapable of reporting on anything beyond the inane crap most of your subjects recite.
Another on the target list, via alicublog.

We can assure our fellow Americans that here at Just Another Blog (From L.A.)™ we are so fucking nuts that we received disability almost immediately, no necessity for an appeal. If any of these people think this reporter is faking it (or has the slightest reason to continue living, disability payments or not) they will discover exactly how filled w/ rage we are; they'll be begging us not to shoot them, please. No mercy for us, no mercy for them. Pretty straightforward, isn't it?

We'll be standing our ground, if you know what we mean, against liars like Glass, & against any & all (or as many as we can get) politicians who might vote to reduce disability benefits we paid for by the very wage-slavery which originally helped drive us mad (mad crazy & mad pissed & raging) in the first place. (Ironic, huh? We really paid for wasting our life working for an almost living.) In other words, we'll answer lies & votes w/ bullets, not w/ more votes. (Turns out guns are the only defense against certain portions of the gov't., specifically the legislative & executive branches.)
NB, motherfuckers: This is not a joke*. Fucking w/ our limited income is the actual & moral equivalent of (at best) a mugging, & might well result in our early death. If we have no reason to continue living, we don't see why any one else should be allowed to have oxygen we won't be using. We will absolutely defend ourselves, or take as much revenge as we can before the ammo runs out.
*Or is it? Or is this a bogus ass-covering disclaimer meant to give us time to amass an arsenal? Or is this all a sad plea for attention & page-views? Keep guessing!
A final warning: "Fuck me? Fuck w/ Me!"
Added N-FUCKING-B: Notified moments before press time that the building in which we maintain our bunker has been sold. If the new owners decide to stop taking Section Eight, or to raise rent over the Section Eight maximum, we can ++guarantee they will be the recipients of serious flaming wrath. If we don't have any place to hang our hat, they won't either.

Absolutely serious: Getting our grubby & murderous paws on guns & ammo can be a pain in the ass, & isn't cheap, but committing arson is like falling off a log (And extra fun if there are people firmly attached to pipes or something inside the burning bldg. as the smoke & flames race through it.) no matter the price of gas. And matches are free.

Lost Weekend

How convenient that Hay-soos X faked his own death on a Friday afternoon, giving him & his apostolic frat brothers the whole wknd. in which to party before pulling their big "I'm not dead" prank. Must've been hell waking up in that cave Sunday morning, hungover, wondering why it was so dark in there & where his pants were.

And, Internet our ass! We cursorially searched high & wide for Pontius Pilate & the Nail-Pounding Four but the only references thereto are from us. If we could remember the name of their big hit we might have better luck. Alternately, why bother?

"Pontius Pilate & The Nail-Driving Five" do show up, but c'mon.Not actually insufferable (other than the vocals). And, pink (& black) bunny ears!

S'pose He Coulda Said "Taco Benders"

Die like a stuck pig, wouldja Don?You gotta wonder how many "niggers" his pappy hadhired in the good old days. And you can bet that whoever he "hadhired" were poorly paid & cheated out of most of their wages besides. Tomatoes were probably soaked in Alar or whatever, too. Fuck these people.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Ignorance

Few people had ever heard of Steubenville, Ohio, until a shocking act of violence catapulted the small town onto the national stage. What most people don’t know is that Steubenville is home to North America’s largest evangelical teen gathering, and for three days each summer in high school, I joined them.
You're not much of an American if you don't know that Steubenville is Dean Martin's birthplace. What's happening to our cultural history?

L.A. Story

The part of L.A. that's filthy w/ cee-ment ponds & leaf-blowers, anyway.
An elderly man was found dead at the bottom of a residential pool Tuesday night, and authorities are investigating how the victim, who worked at the home as a gardener, drowned.

The 72-year-old unidentified man was pulled out of the pool by authorities late Tuesday night, and according to a Los Angeles Police sergeant the victim had a leaf blower strapped to his back, reports City News Service.
More details.

Culture Clash At The Sock Hop*

Mick Farren calls it surreal.
*Not actually a sock hop; allow for some literary license, OK?

You Will Never Be Happy, Libtard

This should have been shot on film, because it screams projection. All you need to hear is Ginni Thomas's opening question.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

National Crime Blotter

Alright! Stealing mobile 'phones is a "national crime epidemic." Why "alright?" Because this web log is in favor of many so-called criminal acts, especially those performed against assholes, the wealthy & most especially wealthy assholes, although that's a mighty fine distinction.

Another positive result is that the scummy nature of corporations is (again, & when the hell will the sheep wise the fuck up?) clearly displayed.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón recently held an acrimonious conference call with the nation’s largest wireless carriers and their lobbyists*. “They refused to even entertain the idea of a technological solution to this,” Gascón said about the February call. “I told them in no uncertain terms that I believed they were motivated by profit and not social responsibility.” He plans to meet this week with representatives of Apple, maker of the iPhone, which is a major target of cellular thieves, to press his case for new technology that would allow phones to be permanently disabled after a theft.

In Washington, police chief Cathy Lanier says new federal laws are needed to mandate that all wireless carriers participate in new database systems that make it difficult to resubscribe stolen phones to cellular service. She is also pushing to shut down third-party buyers and resellers of phones, which she blames in part for a recent uptick in cell-phone crime reports in Washington. “Everybody is making money off the victims of street crime,” she said. “So it’s just very frustrating.”
"Everybody" but us, so locals had best watch it if we're near you & we see you blathering into your 'phone, holding it as if you were Linus from Peanuts w/ his security blanket.
Look familiar? Substitute a 'phone for the blanket & it's YOU!!
Just grow the fuck up already. No matter how much time you spend squawking on your 'phone, you will always be alone.
*About a step above gun manufacturers & the NRA.

Open Letter To Hate-Filled Idiots

Shut your fucking pie-holes about "redefining" marriage until you've stopped redefining fetuses & embryos as "unborn children." Thank you.

Art Beat Continues

File under: Text, medieval obsession w/.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Conk Job Of The Wk.

Or some period of time as yet to be determined.

MAD? You Betcha!

The influence of MAD* on the non-conformists, creeps, losers & general weirdos (i.e., the interesting members) of this reporter's generation probably can't be overstated, especially among aging losers expressing themselves on the Internet. (Hi there!)
Rude, irreverent, and with 58 years of history now behind them, [Hey, that's us! — Editor] MAD magazine’s movie satires gave some of us our first encounters with the modern cinematic canon.

[...]

While film studies majors gasp over the deconstruction of genre in the works of David Lynch and the meta-movies of Charlie Kaufman, “the usual gang of idiots” over at MAD have been deconstructing, meta-narrativing, and postmodernizing motion pictures since the very first movie parody (Hah! Noon!) appeared in 1954.
Also the mocking of comic books, esp. in the reprint paperbacks those of us who are around the same age as the magazine snatched up in the '60s, & a lot of other crap. We've nothing else, but we'll link to what inspired this observation of the obvious.
*The magazine, not Mutually Assured Destruction, although that M.A.D.'s influence on us all might deserve a look as well. Could someone get on that right away before the rest of us die & can't answer your survey?

What. Ever.

What Happened
in Vegas?

Why are Las Vegas bartenders now mostly women?

Slate.

Put A Hundred Down & Buy A Car

Dionne Warwick files
for bankruptcy, owes
over $10 million

Warwick, 72, known for "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" and other popular songs, filed the petition on March 21 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey, the state where she was born and currently lives. She listed total assets of $25,500 and total liabilities of more than $10.7 million, nearly all tax claims by the Internal Revenue Service and the state of California, according to the filing.
Reuters via Entertainment on Today via Breaking News.

Marriage Is For Squares

It's a corrupt & bourgeois institution & no one should have any interest in perpetuating its patriarchal bullshit, let alone actually marrying another human being. Talk about "icky," our skin crawls just thinking about it.

Shorter: Marriage is fascism. Fuck it.

That's What I Like About The South:
Family Values

Family values proponent/filthy hypocrite Sen. "Diaper Dave" Vitter now a hot prospect for Louisiana gubnor in 2015. What a state, potentially replacing Exorcist fan numero uno, Bobby (Piyush) Jindal, w/ a guy who pays women to watch him poop in his adult diaper*.

One lucky pants-pooper:
He was never criminally charged. The Senate Ethics Committee, chaired by Boxer, dismissed the case, finding that whatever the conduct was, it occurred “before your Senate candidacy” in 2004 and “did not involve use of public office.”
Right, & he never pooped his diaper again. Not bloody likely. Once a sick, twisted & disgusting perv, always a sick, twisted & disgusting perv. Pedophiles, rapists, yada, that shit is firmly imprinted on their minds & it never really goes away.

So vote his ass in, Louisiana, but don't be surprised at what comes out of that ass, you fucking jerks.

*What a shame Mrs. Senator Shitter was such a prude she wouldn't help Dave w/ his repugnant desires. They could've kept it all in the family.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Good News For Mickey Kaus!

In the future, Mr. Kaus will be able to have his goats & eat them too.
And according to a new study published in the ecology journal Oikos, feral goats may also flourish on this thin, ephemeral silver lining of climate change. Whether that would be good news for anyone but goats, however, remains to be seen.
We've no idea of Mickey's stand on climate change, but now that he knows which side his bread's buttered on, we can assume he will adopt policies favoring carbon emissions. (And just maybe goat emissions too.)

Theme Song Of The Wk.

Sadly, not that rampaging.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

On The Art Beat

Tilda Swinton takes a nap.
Zzzzzz ...

Sheriffin' Ain't Hard

BONUS backstage footage at (19:25) & (29:40).If Sheriff Wright is correct, he must be napping 12 hrs. a day, six hrs. a wk., probably in his office.
"We've got miles and miles of highway that need things done to them," Chumley said. "We have had situations where we are subcontracting work to out of town and out of state to do mowing and cleaning for us."

To get the bill moved forward, Chumley said he is working with lawmakers across the aisle, including a Democratic representative in the State House who he said sees a need for change too.

Wright said he doesn't want violent offenders being put on the chain gangs, but rather people who commit lower level, nonviolent crimes, such as larceny.

"You work somebody six days a week, 12 hours a day, they don't have time to sit around and think about how to be stupid anymore," Wright said.
If you assumed this selection, get off our lawn. (Fer fuck's sake, we resisted this. And this.)

Horse Feathers II

Inside stuff really only of interest to those who've walked these mean & lying streets.
The way Moe always told the story, the director wanted them to do this scene in which all the other players dogpile on top of them. Moe, on behalf of himself and his fellow knuckleheads, refused, saying they’d get hurt. He said that earlier in the filming, Larry had lost a tooth when a faked punch was botched and turned real, and that Curly broke his leg in the dumbwaiter scene which you’ll see in the film. Curly doesn’t appear to have a broken leg in the rest of the movie so I don’t know what that’s all about.

Anyway, Moe said no to the dogpile scene. The director argued it was safe. Moe put his foot down and finally, filming shut down for an hour or two until suitable stunt doubles were brought in. The scene was shot, everyone piled onto the stunt guys … and when it was all over, the doubles had multiple broken bones. At least, that’s how Moe told the story. It’s apparently the shot with the photographer.

The football scenes were shot at Gilmore Stadium, which was located at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly — where CBS Television City now stands. You can spot a few Gilmore signs in the background plus there’s the name on the scoreboard. You can also see the sign for the Fairfax Theater, which is now closed and awaiting demolition…but it’s still right where it was at that intersection.
Sorry to hear the Fairfax is going. One of the last of the neighborhood theaters; not even turning one screen into three kept it going.

Brave New World

Drones nothing. Newest forensic action: Checking for radiation at the (possible) crime scene.

From the Not-Peggy Noonan file (Our italics, obviously.):
"It would be wrong to speculate on the cause of death until the postmortem has been carried out. We do not have any evidence at this stage to suggest third-party involvement," said Detective Chief Inspector Kevin Brown*.
Actual research & thought (musing, certainly) on the (apparently & allegedly) deserving victim, a Bush crony, via No More Mr Nice Blog & The Exiled.
*If that's his reallegal name.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

10 Years Ago

Dragon Models 1/72 M1A1 Abrams,
1st Marine Expeditionary Force, Iraq 2003

The perfect gift for little terrorist-killing patriots or amputee veterans w/ PTSD; chickenhawks & Keyboard Commandos will love pushing it around on the floor & making "BOOM!" noises.

Just Had To Share

Never heard of it, but it comes highly recommended:
This is a movie that liberals and black people
will find it entertaining.

When The Music's Over ...

Celebrate Earth Hour Tonight By
Switching Your Lights Off At 8:30 pm2030

Sit in the dark & listen to this for an hr. (Do turn it the fuck down before playing. LOUD!)Stupid hippies.

UPDATE (1859PDT 23 March 2013): Video now adjusted to start at the eco-dialogue. How we forgot that, esp. in this context, is beyond us. Alzheimer's?

Plus which: If you bothered, did the video play? When we were in Compose checking the time setting it advised it "couldn't be played on some sites." Yet it plays for us when published. Extra-irksome as we have had some very clever stuff (now forgotten) fully typed which we didn't run because of that message. We are tired of learning more crap all the time/every day. Off our lawn, new concepts!

BUSINESS ALERT!

Dear Patriot:
Just a last heads-up that this astonishing how-to
"art of killing" military-ops DVD package will be
cancelled in a couple hours.
See it while you can, HERE!
I'm just taking WAY to much heat for this... and you
will probably never see this sort of thing again.

Why? Because, to put it bluntly, this package is
something that I'm just plain uncomfortable with.
I never wanted to get involved with in the first place.
Too wicked and violent. You won't see this product
in magazines or posted on my main website.
You can only see it HERE... for a limited time.
It's just too darn vicious.
I'm going to make it available only for a few more
hours 
so guys like you... who I know can be trusted
with this kind of dangerous stuff... will still get a chance
to see it.
If you're squeamish, or if you are just plain uncomfortable
with knowing what the most dangerous men on the
planet know
... then please simply ignore this message.
Discover the secrets of Black Ops now!
Regards,
Bob Pierce
President, FightFast/TRS
What can we add?

Monopoly

Friday, March 22, 2013

Where's The Outrage?

Built from the ground up; opened recently.
Bloomberg nothing, here's nanny corporation fascism on the loose. How much outrage will this generate among principled & freedom-loving conservatives?
CVS Caremark, which has 200,000 employees, told all workers who use the company insurance plan to have a doctor determine their weight, height, body fat, blood pressure and glucose and fasting lipid levels by May 1, the Boston Herald reported.

"Our benefits program is evolving to help our colleagues take more responsibility for improving their health and managing health-associated costs," the company said in a statement.

"This is an incredibly coercive and invasive thing to ask employees to do," Patient Privacy Rights founder Dr. Deborah Peel told the newspaper.

CVS said it will pay for the weight, body fat and blood screenings.

"Health screenings of this nature are increasingly common with employer-sponsored health plans," the company said.

If workers don’t provide the information, their medical coverage will jump by $50 a month.
Does CVS pay well enough that its "colleagues" can eat not un-healthy food? Or are they forced to consume the processed crap CVS sells?
Yummy & good.

A Wk. Passes Like Nothing

Although technically the above was shot over a mo. ago.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Bengahzi: Worse Than Watergate!

©Nick Anderson Houston Chronicle

Short Memories

MSNBC's on-air personalities have been going on & on about G.W. Bush's Iraq war & how right they & others were to oppose it. Have they all forgetten that MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for questioning the war & being "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."?

Yes, "liberal" MSNBC, whose corporate parents in 2003 were General Electric's NBC division & Microsoft. One cannot get any more liberal than those two corporate personages.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Thou Shalt Not Lie

Whichever Commandment the "no lying one" is, both fundamentalist Jesus-loon Michele Bachmann
Some readers might question why we are checking a statement by Bachmann for a second day in a row. We concede that it might seem a bit much, but her assertions often reflect comments that have bounced around, unchecked, in the blogosphere.
& pseudo-Catholic Paul Ryan have been judged & found wanting. Says quite a bit about them, their religion & their gawd that both of them feel they can violate "His" "Commandments" w/ impunity, doesn't it?

And what is w/ the people of Minnesota & Wisconsin (at least the districts that keep returning these two liars to Congress)? They're fucking morons just like the rest of you is what's w/ them.It's hard to think of populations outside the Confederacy more deserving of black helicopter visits to Federal Educating the Morons & Assholes camps than those two districts. And not for reëducation, but for the primary education they were deprived of. It should probably start w/ math. Or reading comprehension.
Bachmann made two key errors here. First, she misinterpreted Tanner’s point. Then, she blithely assumed the ratio was applicable to the Food Stamp program when budget data show she’s off by more than a factor of 10 (or a factor of 200, if you just count salaries.) So Bachmann yet again earns Four Pinocchios. But there really aren’t enough Pinocchios for such misleading use of statistics in a major speech.
Some social norms can't be left to the schools; that whole truth/lies deal, for example. So what did Rep. Ryan's Catholic family & religion teach him?
It's not just today, either. Ryan keeps reinforcing suspicions that his memory is alarmingly bad.

Ryan doesn't remember that he used to refer to his own plan to end Medicare as "vouchers."

Ryan doesn't remember taking credit for the sequestration policy he later condemned.

Ryan doesn't remember learning about Democratic alternatives to the sequester.

Ryan doesn't remember what happened with the 2011 "super committee."

Ryan doesn't remember Bill Clinton's tax increases.

Ryan doesn't remember the times he condemned social-insurance programs as "taker" programs.

Ryan doesn't remember all of the times he appealed to the Obama administration for stimulus funds for his congressional district.

Ryan doesn't remember his marathon times.

Ryan doesn't remember how much he was inspired by Ayn Rand.

Ryan doesn't remember his own speeches.

Everyone can be forgetful once in a while, but the Republican Budget Committee chairman seems to forget rather important details and developments so often, it's rather unsettling.

The alternative, of course, is that Ryan's memory is fine and he shamelessly lies when it suits his purposes, but why be uncharitable? Let's instead just assume that the poor congressman suffers from a terrible memory.
We suppose that this consistency in his stated policies & unwavering dedication to the truth are why the conventional wisdom throughout the punditocracy is that Mr. Ryan is very serious & principled.

Our conclusion is that it's perfectly alright if you're a Republican, it's equally OK if you're a Christian, Commandments be damned, & if you are both Republican & Christian it's probably obligatory to lie through one's teeth.

They're as two-faced as Mormons.

Through A Looking Glass Darkly

From Mr. Fish.
Hmmmm ... Norman Rockwell, George Lincoln Rockwell. Whaddaya know.

Birds To Follow

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Popes & Geese

Heard this live, now we can share.

Images Of An Indefinite Period Of Time

The "Joe the Plumber" gun give-away closes 31 March. If you're like us & two wks. isn't nearly enough time to click & submit, the same weapon is being given away by a different conserv-o-weasel w/ a web site, who will continue accepting e-mail addresses until 31 May. To stir the bloodlustwhet the appetite he (via the Breitbart sucker list this time; Not-Joe the Not-a-Plumber's came from RedState Marketplace) sent us our first image:
Last month, my daughter Bethany and I went hog hunting with our friends Doug and Regis Giles. We were using AR-15s. Despite what national news commentators say, the AR-15 is NOT an “assault weapon” or “weapon of mass destruction.”

In honor of this magnificent rifle, we are giving away a new AR-15 to the lucky American who wins this drawing.
"Magnificent? It's mah-velous!"

Hands, Time On

W. Dave noted that spam Blogshit allowed was not Russki porn or Ugg sales, & that the [s]pammer blog actually has some nice pictures (including the dicknose all the way at the end).

We went even farther (the Kraut section) & found this:
You can't even escape him on the other side of the damn planet. ++irksome in that the "nice/twice" line belongs to Walla Walla 99362, not that New York, New York hasn't given it a shot.

On The Radio

After Louie Gohmert made a fool of himself  at his CPAC2013 panel appearance he was one hot item on radio row. We enjoyed these shots because the two radio hostesses look more like sidewalk hostesses. Nice shoes ladies.
These are family values people?
Maybe the Gambino family.

We shouldn't be so mean. Those two will never get the FOXNews gigs they're so obviously dreaming of by hiding their talents.

Polite Society Up-Date

At a MALL★WART in the frozen north, where men are men & women are scarce, a man w/ a service dog
entered the store in a motorized cart at about 3 p.m. and went to the sporting goods section. [Manager Jason] Mahi asked him to put the dog on a leash or leave. The man then pulled out a gun and shot the manager in the abdomen, police said.
Guns & scooters. If only he'd had a snake flag on his motorized cart.

Not to worry about the dog, it's getting a ride too.
Officers removed the man’s prosthetic legs and put him in the back of a patrol car, the Anchorage Daily News reported. They held his dog in the back of another police cruiser. An officer said she was driving the dog home.
Dig it w/ sound off & captions on. Or both on, if you like that sort of thing.

Papism

Junta Pope Frankie One-Lung to be sworn in today.

Because We Hate You

We present Michele Bachmann, interviewed by Marvin Olasky. Marv's a real prize, per a Wiki we found.
Olasky was born in Boston , Massachusetts, United States, to a Russian-Jewish family and graduated from Yale University in 1971 with a B.A. in American Studies. In 1976 he earned his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan. He became an atheist in adolescence and a Marxist in college, ultimately joining the Communist Party USA in 1972. He left the Communist Party the following year and in 1976 became a Christian after reading the New Testament and a number of Christian authors.
Another Ross Douthat or Rod Dreher, exchanging eternal truths every few minutes. Where will he flit next?(We're a bit disappointed this doesn't auto-play any more.)

Did Too Build That!

Converts are always the most zealous; conversions that involve identifying w/ the oppressor & hating oneself for being one of the oppressed must require extra zeal. For the thirty yrs. since he decided which side his bread was buttered on, Dinesh D'Souza's been very zealous about getting as much as he can from advocating colonialism & slavery.

"Slavery is seen as, in a sense, robbing the free labor of African-Americans." He said it, & that is the context. At (7:00) of this (10:29) at CPAC 2013. Free markets & ... wait for it now ... the meaning of America! Entrepreneurs, he says. Abso-fuggin-lutely. History clearly shows that no one had ever made a profit before America was stolen from the "Indians" & built by slave labor. Not only that, but history (Confucius, even) was always terribly mean to business. Why, in Dinesh's native land the merchants & traders were just one caste above the hated untouchables.

D.D. continues beating the dead horse of the anti-colonialism he attributed to Obama in book & movie form, linking it to the eternal (& entirely imagined) jihad against free enterprise, innovation, hard work, merchanting & trading. Then he connects Obama's (father's) anti-colonialism to a foreign policy that exists only in his head. We suppose the "bankrupting the country" fantasy is too dissonant even for the delusional when the Dow is at a record high & the brave & noble rich are getting richer.

But after Obama this & Obama that, we're told that Barack Obama is so over, because the United States is a lot bigger than Barack Obama. Not exactly what conservatives were saying before the election, but who are we to pick nits? Had the Prez not been reëlected, the narrative (& plugs for D'Souza's previous dreckumentary, 2016: Obama's America . Remember?) might have gone in a different direction.

In line w/ the rather grubby interpretation of America as a strictly commercial proposition is a firm belief that it is ++un-moral that parking valets (takers & parasites, obviously) think they are makers, & this badthink can only be rebutted by making "the moral case for free enterprise and for America. [Applause] A conservatism that did that would be a conservatism that would be viable and powerful again." This is an excellent moral case that should be made every time it can be worked into conversation, spewed over the airwaves or typed on the Internet. Really.

Notes & Filler

If you watch nothing else, check the beginning minute & enjoy the teaser from yet another D'Souza D'opus, a love song to America titled America. "What would the world look like if America never existed?" Nor should you miss the music they play him off w/.

It would be very irresponsible not to speculate if Mr. D'Souza's "fiancée" came to CPAC2013 w/ him, & whether they shared a room at this beautiful resort.

Last & least, we would've just run the video (And w/o having to type anything beyond the standard "Christ, what an asshole.") but so-called public service C-SPAN won't allow it to be embedded. Free speech, assholes. Ever hear of it?

Monday, March 18, 2013

It's Futile, It's Sad

Richard Hell must be ready to die: He has an auto-bio on the shelves or wherever it is one gets books these days.

Legs McNeil reviews:
Richard and I have remained friends throughout the years, though we don't talk as much as we once did. Probably because in the mid-’90s, Richard and I were invited, along with Kathy Acker and Allen Ginsberg, to speak with William Burroughs at some highbrow literary event in Lawrence, Kansas. Immediately afterwards, Kathy Acker died of breast cancer, then Allen Ginsberg went, and then William Burroughs. Both Richard and I wondered who was going to be next.

So Richard would call and drawl, “So Legs ... uh ... how ya feeling?”

And then laugh hysterically.
Not this one.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Conservative Paranoid Action Conference

Again, & as always, we pull what we find amusing, insightful or hurtful, & make no claim, good or bad, for anything we haven't quoted. That typed, here's the link & the guaranteed-to-be-good parts.
When “Friends of Hamas” inventor and Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro spouts off unhinged aphorisms to scattered applause — “Our enemy is the government", “The media has to be destroyed where it stands”, and “If you’re not making them cry, you’re not doing it right” — it riffs off a tired but tried and true script.

The whole scene all recalls Richard Hofstadter’s anthropological admonition that “The paranoid spokesman … is always manning the barricades of civilization ... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.

[...]

The John Birch Society was expelled, as was the gay conservative group GOProud — both deemed unfit for conservative company. But there were still the self-styled knights of anti-socialism – The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property – passing out pamphlets on “10 Reasons to Reject Socialism” and “10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must Be Opposed.”

There were ubiquitous glossy pamphlets from a group called America’s Survival that describe “Obama’s Plan for the Disarmament of Israel” “Obama’s Revolution and The Drugging of America” (featuring a photo of a wild-eyed Charles Manson, naturally), and, just in time to greet Pope Francis, a description of how “The Roman Catholic Church has been compromised philosophically – not only by infiltrators from the homosexual movement and Marxists, but by adherents of the so called ‘New Age’ philosophy.” Even the free Spanish language newspaper, “El Sueno Americano”, that piled up unread on stands, featured an article on 63 sites where drones were active in the USA, asking “is this the change you voted for?” For conspiracy entrepreneurs, the specter of King Obama and his benefactor George Soros is always lurking in the shadows of otherwise polite conversation.

When Hofstatder wrote about paranoids’ belief that their political enemy “makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced,” he could be credited with great prescience, if it weren’t for the fact that this is just a recycled script sold to enthusiastic new dupes.
OK, more than enough.

Metaphor

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Yesterday's Quote Of The Day

"One little lady got tired of the federal government telling her what to do. I've reached that point, Mr. Speaker, that I'm tired of giving in to the federal government." -- Idaho state Rep. Brent Crane (R), quoted by the Idaho Statesman, botching a comparison of Rosa Parks' arrest for violating a local law refusing to give up her seat on a bus to opposing a state-run health insurance exchange.
Political Wire.

Republican Re-Branding Report

GOP Brand MkI
Less sneering, more smiling when saying anything about women or sex (Nothing about rape, ever!) add tokenism, & don't admit you want to destroy the health care system out loud & in public. That should cover re-branding.
NEW! IMPROVED! GOP Brand MkII (It's really different!)
Also: Triumph in the Kulturkampf. Strictly From Hunger Games, via Herr Doktor Zoom at yr Wonket:
GOP Brand MkIIa: High-profit packaging for the serious rube.
But never neglect the base: For one thing, they can't be easily grifted unless their anxieties are stoked & they feel victimized. How, then, to appeal to the wretched, mostly white males who think "feminazis" is hee-larious? Alyssa Rosenberg shows us, & adds:
And if I were Megyn Kelly, I’d be gritting my teeth and hoping that Fox had a plan to move me to Fox proper in primetime, or that Jeff Zucker’s CNN might be interested in hiring me and letting me wear a blazer.
Go on, take over the culture. Just be careful w/ the Torch of Liberty, W for Wolverines. Fire burn dem.

Macrame?

More local abuse here.
For starters we’re so spread out – from desert to mountains to sea – that LA is encircled by 29 small townships you’ve never heard of, like Vernon, Cudahy and Bell, of legendary corruption.  These small suburbs of our giant suburb are often controlled by ethnic (increasingly Latino) machines whose efficiency at robbing their constituents is equaled only by their resistence to reform.

Our powerless mayor, Antonio Villagorsa, the city’s first Spanish-speaking head since 1848 when a Mexico-ruled LA was just a dusty, hyper-violent cow town, is now term-limited out, hence the so-called contest.  Antonio has great teeth, fine skin, is a friend of labor (sometimes) and unusually skilled at suffocating scandal.   (Like breaking up his family for an affair with a TV reporter.)
We have no idea why those two paragraphs appeared; the incumbent mayor isn't running, & the residents of the buffer zone don't vote in Los Angeles elections.

Ah. Writer Clancy Sigal is 86+. Blacklisted & split for England. Sorry dude. You get a pass (this time). Chances of this reporter even hitting that age, let alone typing half as well are low.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Recess Report

Video mostly to make this load load even more slowly, MPS having already whipped it outexposed it, but charity cheat Sean Hannity is so perfect a demonstration of right wing childishness we had to go w/ it.

"Baracus Obamus I." Chee-ziz. That's, what, third-grade level, & that high only because of the pseudo-Latin suffix; we assume kindergarteners wouldn't know from Latin. (As always, what do we know, esp. about what children know?)

Many right-wing worrywarts seem on the slippery & proverbial slope from juvenile to infantile; how much longer until literal, actual, no shit poo-flinging starts? Could even be Mark Levin there. He strikes us as mighty high-strung.

Enjoy!

Will Be Missed

Death of a comedian.
A star of the club circuit from the 60s
to the 80s, Norman was also
well known for his chicken impressions.

(Semi) Local Sheep Activity

Ignorance Dep't.: Surrounded by the domestic variety; didn't know wild ones were so near.
[T]he herd ... has a mountain top view of Azusa, Rancho Cucamonga, Duarte and other eastern San Gabriel suburbs.
Bighorns, yet.

A story of someone who went counting sheep, but didn't see any & froze to death in the wind. Photo by someone who spotted some elsewhere.

Papal Trivia

No number.
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican says the new pope's official name is Pope Francis, without a Roman numeral.

Spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi sought to clear up any possible confusion, noting that Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who announced the name to the world, said simply "Francis." It is listed that way in the first Vatican bulletin on the new pope.

"It will become Francis I after we have a Francis II," Lombardi quipped.
From the AP. All rights reversed.

Another McArdle Item W/ Which We Didn't Want To Deal Right Now

Nonetheless we slogged on. We really should be paid (we could use the money) for wasting our time w/ this garbage.

"Both sides do it," sez she. Because making the current office holder an unrecognizable & contradictory (Affirmative Action TelePrompTer-using dimbulb or gay evil socialist genius destroying Wall St.?) caricature of all that honkies fear & loathe is exactly equivalent to calling a certifiable war criminal & election thief "Hitler."We can not tell you how glad we are we weren't awake to see this.Beyond the tele-crap above, two print items we'd contemplated abusing before, but eventually gave up on because we were sick of seeing the two open tabs (& we had so many open Chrome was using too much memory) so we closed them. But we couldn't forget them. Now we've arsed ourself.

Dumb (OK, ignorant.) bunny Megan had apparently never heard of gangs of vicious teens raiding stores en masse. (It was going on even before every little creep had a damn idiotPhone.) until she saw it somewhere. We most enjoyed the subhead:

Dozens of teenagers mobbing stores for a simultaneous shoplifting spree. How are merchants supposed to defend against this sort of mass attack?

Is it "shoplifting" if the youth go into the temples of commodity fetishism & just grab shit from the shelves w/ no attempt at concealing what they're doing? And it wouldn't be Megan if her concern for the money-grubbers wasn't so touching. "Who will think of the merchants?" Of course, they're 7-Eleven® owners, not "merchants." And "attack" might be a little strong. (Here we could interject something along the lines of "We'll show you an attack, ninny!") Concluding paragraph:
Obviously, I'm not going to suggest that we should all give up cell phones because some teenagers may be misusing them. But I hope that someone is working on some sort of solution for this--technological or otherwise.
2x4s to their heads, Missy? That seems to be your solution to any one threatening the sanctity of property.

No, not over yet. This one's more inane than anything else. Except that after several mins. of scrolling up & down McArdle's Daily Beast oeuvre we can't find it; maybe it was so stupid it was disappeared. Fuck it, should've gone w/ our first instinct, as in the headline.

Also, wavier hair.