Real Rand Paul

Spotted at POLITICO.

Bye!

DVR at 84%. Must get to viewing. Nothing in the actuality world worth our two cents anyway.

Diagrams

Wing-Nut To Watch

Run down the list here ...

Psychotic-looking photo? ✔

Goofy-ass name ... ✔

Ashley Stinnett - Ashley Courtland Stinnett has been labeled as America’s “up and coming” voice of conservatism. Born and raised in West Virginia, Ashley grew up in theatre and the arts. While attending Marshall University, Ashley focused his attention on acting and modeling, landing various jobs on the East Coast.

Types for Tucker Carlson at The Daily Caller ... ✔

Inane blather ... ✔

Since April of last year, mainstream media outlets have portrayed the “Tea Party” movement as nothing more than a fringe element of so-called disenfranchised white voters. Of course, the majority of Americans realize this false label is nothing more than unfounded vitriol aimed at rallying an otherwise regressive liberal voting bloc.

Paul’s primary victory not only proved that establishment Republicans should be careful, but that grassroots campaigns can still work in the day and age of 24 hour news cycles coupled with corrupt liberal news bias.

The kind of political activism that carried Paul to victory is the nucleus of the Tea Party, which the mainstream media fails to recognize.

However, credit has to be given to Paul and his internal network which centered heavily around online fundraising, get-out-the-vote effort and an energized populous [sic] angered at the idea that the federal government has become too over-reaching in its total control of individual lives.

Types the exact opposite of what he means? ✔
Uses awkward & Freudian imagery? ✔

Predictably, some analysts will argue the Grayson campaign imploded down the final stretch, failing to ignore the strength of Paul’s staff and ground attack.

Lives in a clichéd fantasy world ... ✔

In the interim, established candidates across America are feeling a strain like never before, because this is a different kind of election cycle this year.

2010 is a year in which the average voter will turn on the most recognizable name on the ballot, not because it is a new-found fad, but because it is their right.

And, over the next few weeks, Paul will become a national symbol for the Tea Party movement much like his father was a reflection of anti-establishment during the 2008 presidential election-cycle.

This newfound excitement, along with a deeply rooted distaste for incumbency, could be just enough to turn the usual suspects in Washington upside down.

IT COULD HAPPEN!

Ashley Stinnett lives in West Virginia, where he serves as an adjunct college instructor, writer, media and public relations consultant, public speaker, volunteer for various conservative organizations, and a civilian recruiter for the NRA. He is registered with the Associated Press, the National Conference of Editorial Writers and is a nationally syndicated columnist with The North Star National.

Editor's Note: Tucker Carlson. Really. We doubt anything this lame would have been printed in the student newspaper at whatever boarding school Mumsy shipped you to. Bad enough as is, but to publish this fact-free (Well, we'll grant that the Medicare-profiting doctor did win the election.) puff-piece following candidate Paul's recent statements is almost criminal in the embarrassment it'll cause poor Ashley.

Navy Blue & Gold

March Toward Mediocrity.

The incident brings to light an unpleasant truth: the Naval Academy, where I have been a professor for 23 years, has lost its way. The same is true of the other service academies. They are a net loss to the taxpayers who finance them, as well as a huge disappointment to their students, who come expecting reality to match reputation. They need to be fixed or abolished.

The service academies are holdovers from the 19th century, when they were virtually the only avenue for producing an officer corps for the nation’s military and when such top-down institutions were taken for granted. But the world has changed, which the academies don’t seem to have noticed, or to have drawn any conclusions from.

Financial considerations as well:

A student can go to a civilian school like Vanderbilt, major in art history (which we don’t offer), have the usual college social experience and nightlife (which we forbid), be commissioned through R.O.T.C. — and apparently be just as good an officer as a Naval Academy product.

Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets. They come to us thinking they’ve entered a military Camelot, and find a maze of petty rules with no visible future application. These rules are applied inconsistently by the administration, and tend to change when a new superintendent is appointed every few years. The students quickly see through assurances that “people die if you do X” (like, “leave mold on your shower curtain,” a favorite claim of one recent administrator).

Stalling Power

The Lessons of History, as not-learned by the "warriors":

Afghans have a tradition of long-range ambushes against foreign forces. During the 1832-1842 British-Afghan war, the British found that their Brown Bess muskets could not reach insurgent sharpshooters firing higher-caliber Jezzail flintlocks.

Soviet soldiers in the 1980s found that their AK-47 rifles could not match the World War II-era bolt-action Lee-Enfield and Mauser rifles used by mujahedeen rebels.

"These are important considerations in Afghanistan, where NATO forces are frequently attacked by insurgents using ... sharpshooter's rifles, which are all chambered for a full-powered cartridge which dates back to the 1890s," said Paul Cornish, curator of firearms at the Imperial War Museum in London.

The heavier bullets enable Taliban militants to shoot at U.S. and NATO soldiers from positions well beyond the effective range of the coalition's rifles.

The Just Another Blog™ Editorial Board is considering shifting its position from its current "Get Our Boys & Girls Out Now!" to full backing of the indigenous resistance elements & calling for death to the imperialist aggressors.

TEA Partiers Of The Wk.

A Demonstration By History, Repeated

First few mins. funny, at least, & we like Japanese monster movie music.Here. Via. Whatever.

$17,000,000,000,000.00. SEVENTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS! Is That Clear?

Not to dismiss completely the article we mocked & derided below: The outro, w/ a wonderful fact to which we hadn't been privy:

And those who think the incomprehensible form of toxic capitalism that evolved in the snake pits of Wall Street should be left unfettered — in keeping with the emerging Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party and lobbyist-rolled representatives of both parties — should consider an astonishing figure from the Treasury Department.

The financial meltdown cost Americans $17 trillion in lost household net worth between 2007 and 2009, according to Alan Krueger, the chief economist for the department.

“How’s that hands-offey, non-regulatory [sic] thing workin’ for ya?” was the stinging tag of a recent cartoon by Stuart Carlson. It was meant as a punchline, but if this election does turn out to be about Real Stuff, it could also serve as a question every candidate will have to answer.

How is that working out for you cretins?

Schadenfreude: ++!

Dry Up & Blow Away

Another smart guy at The New York Times spots an inconsistency or two in the TEA Bagger Party's stance/platform/principles.

Doesn’t Ayn Rand’s philosophy hold that Wall Street should be free to run wild, that a national health care system for the elderly is tyranny and that the only way for people to live freely is with “full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism,” as Rand said?

We need to have this discussion; it is the fundamental disconnect among people who call themselves Tea Partiers. Rand Paul is the perfect person to force the issue. His father, Ron, was dismissed as a gadfly when he took fellow Republicans to task for putting a trillion dollars worth of wars on the credit card. Let’s see if the son also rises to fight.

Whatever. Simple facts about the glaringly obvious contradictions of glibertarianism & 'Baggery will be repeated until the last partier's bag has dried up & blown away, along w/ the last 'Bagger, most of whom are just about ready to be blown off.

AMERICAN WAY
How did it start?
Thousands of creeps
Killed in the park

But we come to belabor the less obvious:

Could we all, even the re-typers of the obvious, agree to reattach the three letters "ion" to the end of the word formerly known as "disconnection," making it again a noun rather than an awkward imperative?

Question Of The Day

Whose rights are being violated here? The gentleman in the center warming himself at the fire, or all the others, whose rights to free association, free speech & property ownership may be trumped by coercive anti-lynching laws?

Big Hollywood Approved, No Doubt

It's clean, & decent, except for the Lucky Strike adverts. We probably wouldn't have bothered, but these appeared around the same time, & they're perfectly embeddable.

Uras Mid-Week

Convention Wrap-Up, Three Mos. Late

One of the fascinated foreigners who attended the Nashville T.P. convention in February finally typed it up & handed it in.

Inside the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, it was rather different: what struck me was how many remained seated through the ovations, how many failed to clap, how many muttered quietly into the ears of their neighbours while others around them rose to their feet and hollered.

[...]

As we milled around in the convention centre lobby, we might have been mistaken for passengers on a cruise ship. We belonged to a similar demographic: most – though by no means all – over 50, white, and dressed in smart leisurewear. Few of us would see much change from the $1,500– $2,000 (£1,000-£1,400) we'd spent on travel to Nashville, the $558.95 convention fee, and a room at the opulent hotel. Seen as a group, we were, I thought, a shade too prosperous, too amiably chatty and mild- mannered, to pass as the voice of the enraged grassroots.

[...]

We said prayers, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and clapped in time to country music. Lisa Mei Norton, a former Air Force senior master sergeant, sang, "The shining light, on the right, the left just doesn't get,/Sarah Palin for change you won't regret ..." It would have taken a finely calibrated stopwatch to measure how very rapidly such folksy piety and patriotism could swivel into crude nativism, conspiracy theory, and xenophobia – and to measure, too, the dawning discomfort at this switch of tone registered by a sizable part of the audience.

Plenty more, though not enough to justify the three mo. delay.

Two-Headed Dog At Fonda

An image
& the set list.

Anything else is subjective; read if you must.

TV = Thai Violence

Burn, baby, burn!! Local action imagery, & from The NYT, video actualities & a photo.

In Bangkok, dem a-loot, dem a-shoot, dem a-wail, at, "according to Reuters, 'southeast Asia’s second biggest department store.'"

The Simple Truth About A Simpleton

Takes two paragraphs.

In his hasty farewell, Souder took the well-worn path of blaming his departure on Washington. "In the poisonous environment of Washington, D.C., any personal failing is seized upon, often twisted, for political gain," he complained. "I am resigning rather than put my family through that painful, drawn-out process."

Yet millions of people live in the Washington area, and relatively few of us have adulterous relationships with married subordinates we have hired to assist us in broadcasts for Christian media outlets. That, and not this town's "poisonous environment," is why Souder is resigning.

Also:

Late Update: Somehow we missed this earlier, but Nance also explains the happening of the affair by noting the lack of office door windows on Capitol Hill:

"Most Members do not live with their families while they are working in D.C. during the week and have even ditched common rules of etiquette that even major corporations follow such as office doors with windows or careful examination of employee/boss interaction."

American Awful

A Tea Party Troubador typed a few words from thin air for the WSJ about the McCarthyite blacklist currently imposed on the talentlessreactionary by liberal Hollywood, & liberal Hollywood fish-wrap the L.A. Times is silly enough to ask for examples:

However, like so many other conservatives who have made "kiss of death" claims, Kahn can't back it up. In the entire Journal story, he didn't come up with even one tiny specific example of liberal bias against his work. Born into a wealthy Pacific Palisades family, the 42-year-old writer earned good reviews for an early 30-minute short, 1993's "Chili Con Carne," but in the ensuing years, according to IMDB, he's only managed to direct one film, the 1998 teen drama, "Girl," about groupies and rock stars in the Seattle music scene, which earned lukewarm reviews and barely got a release.

What happens when that directing gig doesn't work out, & you get bitter & cling to nationalism, guns, religion, etc. If Bob Seger makes your skin crawl (which, of course, is the reaction nature intends) this will make your skin slough off & walk away.

Today's Hypocrite (One In An Infinite Series)

Adulterous Indiana Asshole & Republican Congressman Mark Souder:

Souder ultimately responded by saying that teen sex needs to be aggressively confronted, like date rape, because out-of-wedlock sex always leads to pregnancy and ruins lives. My dad said well-informed people use condoms. This led to the following exchange:

Zenilman: Teenagers having consensual intercourse or adults having sexual intercourse is not the same as a date rape or sexual harassment. The latter has a lot more of the consequences that you mentioned previously.

Souder: I don't think this data backs that statement up. I believe they are awful and I have worked with them, but you are not going to argue here that out-of-wedlock pregnancy and related things are less damaging overall to a life's career than somebody who has been sexually harassed, which, by the way, may also occur in the teen pregnancy and the out-of-wedlock or non-married sexual activity.

Zenilman: A consensual adult who is actually having sexual relations and is properly informed will be contracepting.

Souder: This isn't really a debate, and I am sorry I got us off into that. We have a substantial disagreement.

If Souder was my dad, I'd be very confused.

Just as Souder is.

Campaign Activities

No, Mickey Kaus hasn't done anything."Under Whitman's leadership, the porn site became one of the largest on the Internet." Did she buy all the porn herself? W/ her millions?