No Dancing in Church

Democrats' unbridled glee over the indictment of the Bughammer, Tom DeLay, is slightly misplaced, and not just for the obvious reason that DeLay makes a great villain, a foe so cartoonishly evil that he's easy to score on. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of strength to that argument.

But the real problem is more serious; there's no way this guy's going to get convicted, not even in Travis County, the most Commie bastion in the republic of Texas. Regardless of prosecutor Ronnie Earle's politics and their effect, if any, on his motivation in bringing indictment, it's an accepted article that any district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a toaster. Every district attorney in the country is a clever bastard, at least at the Wile E. Coyote standard; the fact of the indictment barely produces enough smoke to give us probable cause to suspect fire.

Again, don't get me wrong; DeLay's very existence is smoky and fiery. He's a pig, a criminal, a bully, and a fascist theocrat. I'm just saying that indictment does not equal conviction, and we are, after all, discussing a state indictment in Texas, where justice sometimes moves in mysterious ways. While few things would make me happier than Tom DeLay getting assfucked in a Texas state prison, I'm not taking it for granted until I hear his squeals.

The victimized squeals he's making now don't count. That's just the sound of political desperation. But the tone and content won't let up if the man oozes out of a conviction. They won't change, either, except to sound even more martyred--and believeably so, if the fucker skates, at least to the sorts of congenital idiots who would elect a Tom DeLay to national office.

I'm thinking that by September 29, 2006, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives will once again be none other than the Bughammer, Tom DeLay.

Anger

I know. I promised it to you. But I just haven't got any bile for you today. I'm all sore and logey from the weekend. I'm slammed at work. And I'm saving bile for an upcoming bit of writing that will require something bilious (I am contractually obligated to not reveal to you what that piece of work will be; if I tell you what it is, I will be punished in various ways, like drawing and quartering, forced dating with Ann Coulter, or simply being cast into the tarpits).

But I would be remiss if I did not encourage you to go visit two other very fine sites, linked in the sidebar: Survive This, and What's So Amazing?

These sites, run by the demon offspring of a place long ago and far away, offer the very finest in bilious satire about television programs that I know are watched by each and every one of you who isn't BlackdogRed (who is simply too intelligent for television that doesn't involve non-American football or Canadians named Bruce). In fact, the first now offers a heaping helping of Survivor-related wisdom by my friends TJ and Goth. TJ is an actual journalist, and Goth is an actual English major, so you know this has to be well-conceived, technically solid writing.

I'm off to once again smuggle myself across the Styx and back, but I thought that those of you who are so loyal as to click here once in a while deserved a postcard. Catch you from the next stop.

Being Nothingness

Tired. Long day yesterday driving and hanging with family and all that. Bitch of a week on the high court. I notice from my statistics report that I likely disappointed a couple of you by not posting for most of the week, but really, I got nothin' in the tank right now.

So I'll just recharge for the weekend and come back on Monday. I promise to find things to be angry at next week. Really.

Monday Blockage

I have no grand unifying theme this morning, but I do have some things to report.

-My father's mother, my last surviving grandparent, died on Friday. It was a mercy; she was 91 and had been in a nursing home for at least 10 years. She had no idea who anyone was, and she has been in indescribably poor health for a long time. She was a horribly bitter woman, and had every right to be; her birth was preceded by the death of her sister Ruth, who died in infancy at age 2 or so. For much of her life, my grandmother was tormented by her own mother's opinions of how Ruth's behavior would have differed from her own. Her husband, my favored grandfather, died 15 years ago (How I Spent My Thirtieth Birthday). Her great love, my favored grandfather's brother (Grandpa started looking better after her best friend roped in my great-uncle), died about 4 years ago, the last male of his generation in my family's dynastic line.

So this woman had a relatively fucked-up life, essentially through no fault of her own. Sure, people have had far worse lives. But for a non-African American in the 20th Century, this woman had a pretty fucked-up life, although she did in fact produce my father and my uncle, two perfectly fine human beings (although in essence, her mother raised them), leading to another perfectly fine line of human beings such as myself and my brother and The Crown Princes.

The other great story about my grandmother is told of August 9, 1974, the day that Richard Nixon left the Presidency. I was at her home, across town from my mother's parents' (Nana and Papa) home; we always stayed at Mom's parents' house on our visits to the home country (Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and nearby counties--every time I cross the county line on I-81, these words ring in my head: "Welcome Home, Little Fascist!").

Whoops. Longer story than I anticipated. So I'm dancing around gleefully, because I was, even at age 14, a dedicated agent of Communism in America. "Get out of my house, you little ingrate," snapped my grandmother, sending me on the long walk across town to my less opinionated grandparents, leaving my 9-year-old brother in her care.

Mind you, this is the almost entirely non-German side of the family.

On Thursday, my brother and I will make the long day's journey up there and back to bury my grandmother Miriam. Tim and I would be angling for the epitaph to read, "Ruth Wouldn't Have Died," but there won't be an epitaph--she'll share a names-and-dates-only headstone with my late grandfather. Her name's been on it since July 1990. It used to make for pretty odd visits to the family plot (and still does--the aforementioned great-uncle's widow survives, and her name's sitting there on his headstone awaiting the next funeral).

-In the realm of the slightly less personal, my football team sucks. How's yours?

On Saturday, I woke up more-or-less okay from my wake binge (immediately upon receiving news of a death in the family, I must fill a glass with scotch and ice and drink to Dead Marshalls, telling tales and reciting the begats; Ilse arrived at my home Friday evening to find me just embarked on this process, which lasted for three large drinks on an empty stomach--I drink, I fall down, no problem, right?), and Ilse and I headed off to College Park to pick up a couple of friends and head for the Maryland-West Virginia game. The day was supposed to be nice, and I suppose it was. It would have been nicer had we taken hats and sunscreen, because we really didn't expect a day with a solar index of a babasupermayamayagajillion. Maryland lost, heinously, horribly, stupidly; we were surrounded by gorram hillbillies in blue and yellow in our own gorram football stadium; and we now both look like cooked lobstahs. It was a nice day spent with our friends, though.

-And to the non-personal: Tim Noah of Slate tells us here about Senator Lindsay Graham's predilection for smearing Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It seems the Senator is fond of claiming to any who will listen (Fox News, mostly) that Ms. Justice Ginsburg wants to lower the age of consent to 12. This is a deliberate lie, one that even the most heinous of neo-Nazi liars are loathe to pick up on, as Mr. Noah aptly documents in his piece. Senator Graham's statement, given in the course of the Roberts confirmation hearing:

Well, there are all kind of hearts. There are bleeding hearts and there are hard hearts. And if I wanted to judge Justice Ginsburg on her heart, I might take a hard-hearted view of her and say she's a bleeding heart. She represents the ACLU. She wants the age of consent to be 12. She believes there's a constitutional right to prostitution. What kind of heart is that?

Lindsay Graham has cocksucking lips. He has the cutest little cocksucking lips in the United States Senate, and maybe in the whole Congress, since that cocksucker Bob Bauman was run out of town on a rail and back to the Eastern Shore of my own fine state to suck cocks and tell lies. It is patently obvious that this Jew-hating, race-baiting fungus of a human being is a seriously energetic cocksucker.

Lindsay Graham is also a lying sack of monkey diarrhea. I'd suggest that he be brutally anally sodomized by sailors from naval bases in his state of South Carolina, but the closeted little hypocrite cocksucker would probably enjoy it. He is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and should be run out of town on a rail, although he'd probably like that too.

I don't like theocratic fascist hypocrite liars. Do you?

Anal Loogies

Debate rages, on Slate and, I'm sure, elsewhere, about Judge Roberts' baseball analogy (to paraphrase, he's an umpire, he doesn't get to bat or pitch, which is his secret code to all of America that he will not be an activist judge, at least not in a way the Republican establishment doesn't want him to be). Dahlia Lithwick, who is writing her little Canadian ass off at a rate so astounding that I cannot sort out the links for you, first mocks, then adopts, the baseball analogy, yesterday likening Roberts to a man "standing in a batting cage with the pitching machine set way too slow" after accepting the premise that this whole analogy is symbolic of Roberts' overpoweringly stenchful humility.

What a pinko Canadian living in close proximity to the University of that hypocritical bootlick, false humanist, French-lover Thomas Jefferson knows about baseball or American law escapes me, but I've always sort of liked Lithwick, who seems to get it right more often than not, so I'll let her pass with just those few gratuitous and irrelevant insults.

Then Jack Shafer, whom I have recently insulted in these pages, gets into the act, pointing out quite correctly that what Roberts meant, in point of fact, is that a strike is what the umpire says it is. Roberts' baseball metaphor is his humble little nose-thumbing at the Senate. And you. If he is confirmed (and he will be), he will do whatever the fuck he pleases, which is actually okay, because it's what God intended--that the Chief Justice do whatever the fuck he pleases, I mean, not that the Chief Justice be a closeted frottageur with swastikas tattooed on the insides of his eyelids.

Shafer--and many of Slate's readers, apparently, although I can't be bothered to decipher what they have to say--continue the baseball shit ad nauseam. It puts me in mind of a line of FedEx commercials that I first saw over the weekend: businesspersons in meetings use football analogies in meetings, and are immediately scolded by uniformed NFL players (Jerome Bettis was one of them) who tell them to just shut the fuck up and use FedEx.

I had a brilliant column laid out as I was driving to work. Then I spent 10 minutes on the phone with Sasha, and it all evaporated. I have no idea what the fuck I was thinking of writing--maybe something about asshats, but I don't remember which ones. Good thing I have a Web to riff on, huh?

Stealing My Brain

Slate owes me royalties. Remember a few days ago, when I told you how moronic it is to blame Katrina on global warming? Of course you don't, because only three of you read it, and one of those was too pissed off by my call for moderation to comment. That's why you were all punished with four column feet of ranting about football yesterday.

Be that as it may, in a heartwarming display of internecine warfare in the biased liberal media, Slate has gone after Nicholas Kristof's idiotic Sunday Times column attempting to link Katrina to Bush's failure to sign the Kyoto protocol. After admitting that "we don't know whether Katrina was linked to global warming," Kristof proceeds to attempt to link Katrina to global warming. He then virtually ignores the evidence on natural tropical cycles and focuses on one scientist who also blithely ignores--and lies about--the evidence on natural tropical cycles, claiming that the recent upswing is "unprecedented."

We have no idea whether the recent upswing is unprecedented. There is a body of evidence on the cyclical nature of the thing, but as your government notes here, more research is needed. Your government also offers this tidbit in the same FAQ on cyclones. I know, I know. You don't believe your government. WMDs, cyclonic activity, the baby Jesus...what's next from these lying liartons?

Kristof's a jackass, I need to redouble my tinfoil hat to protect me from the predations of Slate, and while the Bush administration utterly failed the people of the Gulf Coast and needs to be held to account for it, let's just put that on our calendars for November 2008, shall we? Because inept and patently untruthful reporting isn't any more palatable coming from our side than it is coming from theirs.

Yes, The Game Ended Two Days Ago

We've just crossed the Styx of the first big football weekend of the fall, and my soul is dead-tired from all that paddling. My arse is similarly tired from the paddling that one of my favorite teams took as it closed off an ill-deserved victory.

It started early on Saturday, because the Terrapins (bow down in worship, unbeliever!) kicked off to Clemson a few minutes after noon. Gloom and despair overtook me because I quickly realized that the Rat Bastard Charlie Whitehurst, Clemson's quarterback for the last 314 academic years, had returned (I thought he had graduated used up his eligibility). But it looked good three quarters of the way through the game, despite the presence of this greasy little bastige who will never play a second of high-level professional football. At least, the scoreboard did; Maryland was up by a whopping 10 points or so.

Well, it would've looked good to an unbeliever like you. I? Knew that those orange-and-purple fucks had us right where they wanted us. And so it was, as a ridiculous roughing call deep in Clemson territory fueled their drive into our end zone. The alleged rougher, a fine young gentleman named Gerrick McPhearson who has never in his entire life unduly harmed so much as a fly, hurled a Clemson receiver out of bounds. Now, Mr. McPhearson had a choice; bring down the little orange fuck--a glorious and patriotic thing that happens on Our Nation's Football Fields every single day--or let him scamper down the sideline unmolested for yardage that might lead to a game-winning score. Mr. McPhearson simply flipped the little peckerwood out of bounds. It was what, in football circles, is called a tackle. The retard of a head linesman--a Clemson graduate, by all available evidence--who was standing right on top of the play apparently expected Mr. McPhearson to call for the little orange fuck's honorable surrender, though, because he threw a flag.

Okay, it's true that this left the orange fucks at about their own 25 or so, and that it was Whitehurst's 60-yard bomb over the head of our perfectly fine, but apparently just a tetch slow safety, Chris Varner, a few plays later that sealed our demise. And that was a coverage screwup--there were twin wideouts, and the corner stuck with the short route while the unfortunate Mr. Varner took the deep one. This being the exact same goddam route that the cornerback had successfully defensed two plays earlier.

It's also true that there were coaching breakdowns--the bomb was one of them, because I have no clue why you'd cover the short outside with an indescribably fast corner and the long outside with an inevitably slower safety--but there were fundamental problems in the play-calling, too. Clemson has a pretty tough defense, especially against the run. Our halfback is a not-shabby guy named Mario Merrills. Mario's built like a bull. He's pretty quick, too--sort of a low-grade Jamal Lewis, only...well, low grade. And probably not a convicted drug dealer. He breaks tackles real well, and he's neither the fastest nor slowest biggish-time running back I've ever seen. Our O-line, however, is young--chock full o' underclassmen. Not horrible, but certainly still learning the trade.

It took our coaching staff an awful long time to figure out that Mario was getting his head stuffed up his ass every time he ran up the middle. Which was, like, two out of every three plays. They got a little traction running him outside, and they got a little traction when they put in his smaller, faster, more lithe backup, Keon Lattimore, who was (mirabilis!) running outside. And it took most of the fucking afternoon and way too many forced fumbles for Our Other Lord and Savior Ralph Friedgen (the head coach, and he's only The Other One because you will bow down before Gary Williams, who coaches us in The Real Sport, and you personally will especially bow down, GermBabe, because I know you're still reading this) to get around to figuring out that we weren't moving the ball on the fucking ground.

We don't like losing to Clemson. They cheat, at least they did when Danny Ford was their coach, and since their coach is a guy with the last name of Bowden, you don't need to meet a very high standard of evidence to conclude that they still cheat. We don't like Charlie Whitehurst. We don't like losing on our home field. We'd better not do it on Saturday, when I will personally my own self be in attendance as My Beloved Terrapins take on our mortal Lex Luthor archrivals, the Hillbillies of West Bygod Virginia, in our the annual Beer Swilling and Couch Burning Festival of Brotherhood Between The States.

Our good friend Gothmog feels my pain, only far worse. My second football love is the Longhorns of the University of Texas. They're also one of Goth's loves, except that on Saturday night, in a major hoopla nationally televised event, the Horns were visiting some cow town in Ohio, home of Gothmog's first and mostest football love, the Ohio State University Fuckeyes. I learned to detest OSU when I spent a year as the guest of a small liberal arts college a short distance from said cow town. I say "guest" because while I was, in a very narrow administrative sense, a student of that school, I mostly just did hospitality stuff like consuming things and rubbing up against women.

And detest the big land-grant school we did, with snotty Eastern liberal intellectual pride in our string of 35 consecutive victories over them. In swimming. I'm pretty sure we topped them in snotty Eastern intellectualism, too.

Texas and OSU are both huge football programs--real football programs, compared to my beloved alma mater's (that is, the alma mater I graduated from, that being the aforementioned University of Maryland, which last won the national football championship in 1953 and has since been relegated to despair or the Poulan Weed-Eater Bowl, which are after all pretty much the same damn thing). Big-time regular-season hoopla events like this one, between big-ass football schools from different leagues, are rare things, because such schools try real hard not to play meaningful out-of-league games before the end of the year, lest they screw up their shot at an undefeated season (and hence a clear shot at the national title). This was, by any reasonable reckoning, the college football Game of the Year, and the televised hoopla surrounding it reflected that.

It was a good game, too--back and forth, exciting rallies, huge screaming mob-scene crowd, usually close on the scoreboard, lots of turnovers (and had OSU been better able to capitalize on its shutdown of Texas' high-powered offense through turnovers, it would be a much happier day in Columbus), lots of beauteous athleticism, some rare stuff (Texas managed to score on a safety when OSU was buried deep in its own territory, a score that eventually provided the margin of victory). The Texas quarterback is just freakin' amazing, and the OSU defense is monstrous good, especially their linebackers. Texas won on a late rally, driving to score a touchdown with a minute left in the game.

It was a really, really great game, and I'm sorry that Gothmog's season had to be screwed up by it. But it was great entertainment. I won't deny that I was pleased by the score, but I won't rub Goth's nose in that shit, either. I must, however, respectfully suggest that he lead a mob to force haircuts on his team's linebackers.

We (Ilse and I spent a rare and precious weekend on the couch together) spliced a soccer game into the big huge hairy Game of the Year, too, because we follow DC United, my media market's entry in Major League Soccer. They were playing at FC Dallas on Saturday night, and the game was televised. We saw United play Dallas (formerly The Burn, which produces all kinds of cool songs about sexually transmitted diseases when you go see DCU play them live) a few weeks ago at a suburban soccer park a few minutes from my home, in an open cup game (the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, if you care). DCU lost that game horribly--DCU was up one-nil (I'll adopt a slightly different language to discuss soccer proper football, thank you), but The Burn scored in stoppage time to tie the game, and after a half hour of overtime on a school night, topped DCU on penalty kicks, which is just vomitorious.

It was a different game at FCD's brand-spanking-new Pizza Hut Park, a soccer-only stadium that looks like it was built from leftover pizza delivery boxes. There were sections of the Atlantic Wall defending against D-Day that were more attractive than this Eastern European-looking pomo dump. But I don't care, because if I ever stay in Dallas longer than it takes me to change planes, I'll have friends to visit and won't bother with the concrete bastion that is Pizza Hut Park. I do have this to say to the designers: there will never be a soccer riot in this country, and if there is, it sure as hell isn't scheduled for Dallas.

It's hard to do justice to the flowing beauty of a soccer game in words, so I'll just note that DCU played reasonably non-poorly--well enough to win--and that my new favorite member of United is a young man named Facundo Erpen.

And Brian Carroll sucks; he could only suck worse had he attended Duke rather than Wake Forest. Every time I catch him using his insufferably inadequate little brain on the football pitch (don't you love it when I'm affective?), I want to run down and slap him. Just kick the fucking ball, Brian. No, don't think. Kick. That drunk Salvadoran mindlessly banging a drum down in the Barra Brava section thinks better than you do. Kick. Uhp? What'd I say? Did I say think about to whom you are kicking? Just kick, you little scrote. Don't think. React and kick. Bitch.

(To whom?! To whom?!)

Sorry. That last was a massively deep inside joke (you kicka da ball wit da side a you foot! would be the other) that brings us abruptly to Sunday. I know that many of my two or three readers spent yesterday as I did, watching the gluttonous orgy that is the NFL's opening weekend. My local media market was treated to the usual spectacle, that of its offensively and inaccurately named local franchise (the team is based in Virginia and plays its home games in Maryland, yet is named after Our Nation's Capital, and you all know about the offensive part) playing a really ugly game of football. This game was perpetrated against the Chicago Bears, who are the stuff of pathos; it was a hurricane-scale disaster, with the inept excuses for professional football teams knocking heads for what seemed like an eternity, preceded by an endless 9/11 wallow and followed by a maudlin trip to Charlotte to see the end of the New Orleans Saints' ultimate triumph over adversity and the Carolina Panthers.

The Foreskins' game was slovenly and droll. Our coach, Joe El Senor Jesucristo Supermayamaya Jefe Gibbs, is a senile old fartbag who thinks he's running a team in an era where you can punch a real man like John Riggins through the middle of the line, and your Hawgs will push those pansies on the other team over onto their little sissy keesters and the spectacularly hungover Riggo will blast 44 yards up the middle and put paid to those Godless little heathens.

Several critical reality-based factors intrude upon this rich fantasy. One is that it's not Joe's father's game any more, which is to say it's not Joe's game, because he's older than dirt and left the league for 12 years to go run stock cars around tracks in Our Nation's Glorious South. The players are all pansies, including the O-linesmen, and they're all prima donnas, and they're all jumping excitable me-first overamped drugged-up pieces of overpaid gooseshit who don't take guff from legendary old men like El Senor. None of them are John Riggins, and none of them, most especially the Foreskins' O-line, are remotely capable of knocking their corresponding defensive overamped drugged-up tubs of lard onto their overpaid keesters. And you cannot, in today's NFL, run the same fucking play 33 gorram times and advance the fucking football, a mentality that was only rebarred by El Senor's lengthy sojourn in a world where sport travels in a circle 200 times very very fast.

I wrote a lengthy piece in another online venue the day that El Senor returned to this fair city. Well, its fair suburbs, anyway. It was like MacArthur returning to Leyte. It was like Jesus returning overtop the Mormon Temple. It was like...it was fucking indescribable, the fawning obsequiety that this man's return to football, and to the fuckall pathetic wreck of a franchise that is the Redskins, engendered. To this day, 18 long months later, it makes me puke in a rocket-propelled manner. The man is a fraud. He gave us three Super Bowl championships, Back in the Day, and Heather Havrilesky Love Him for that. But he has no more clue how to operate a modern NFL franchise than I have a clue about how to get Lucy Liu to felch me.

Ilse, if you were drinking something when you read that last line: he shoots, he scores.

So the Skins open this tragicomedy by running their uberstar halfback, Clinton "Butter for Breakfast, No Cutlery" Portis, up the middle until he limps off the field with a high vagina sprain. During his absence, they run the ball up the middle once, and punt a few times, the Bears punting back in return. Late in the first quarter, El Senor finally gets around to running Ol' Lardfingers around to the outside. Woohoo! 8-yard gain, second and two! Time to push that ball upfield with a well-timed freebie pass, ayup, because even the MercyMutha can gain two yards on third down!

Not quite. El Senor calls the exact same motherfucking play, and Portis is stuffed for a two-yard loss. A few plays later, early in the second quarter, rookie-after-three-years quarterback Patrick Ramsey is viciously clotheslined at the Bears' 10-yard line, knocking him to the sidelines for what should be a bit.

Except it's not, it's the rest of the game. After one more exchange of three-and-outs, the inept Fox broadcast team announces that the Redskins' medical staff has cleared Patrick to return to the game. We wait for the rest of the game and do not see Patrick on the field again, although we do see him bouncing around the sidelines, singing "Put Me In Coach."

But it is not to be, because Patrick is a Godless heathen, and El Senor has spent our team's salary cap (another concept with which El Senor has grave difficulty) on an inept, left-handed (never, ever, ever play a left-handed quarterback, unless all of your quarterbacks are left-handed and that's just how you wanna live your damn life), older-than-dirt (that is to say, almost as old as me) fellow Christian traveller named Mark Brunell (although our Fox broadcast team will insist, for ten full game minutes, that the elderly scrag's name is Scott Brunell).

Mark Brunell is on this team for one reason; he's a Bible-thumping Christian. He is too old to play this game to any effect. He wallows around in the backfield, virtually immobile, and we've already canonized one immobile quarterback in this here town; we got limited room for saints. He is making five million dollars annually to not quarterback this team.

Patrick Ramsey has had an unfortunate three-year career here. He started as the first victim of our former coach, who shall not be named, although just watch the dance I do to dispel evil spirits if you should happen to name him. He spent one full season doing absolutely nothing save getting sacked, until he broke, and was replaced by Elizabeth Filarski's husband. Then he broke again last year, in his first year under the tutelage of the saints. There is a look in Patrick's eye that is hard to articulate, but let's try this: you'd better have a spare diaper in your hand if'n you say "Boo!" to the poor bastard.

There are things that need to be done with this football team. El Senor must be caused to go away. I don't care how. Mark-Scott Brunell must be caused to go away. I don't care how. Patrick Ramsey must be sent to a place that is warm and quiet and loves him, preferably a team with an offensive line. I don't care if he thence becomes Tom Brady; the poor guy is never going to amount to anything here. The team is pressing the salary cap and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt--they're going to have to do that soon anyway, because the team is about to undergo a massive salary cap crash. They've already had to start breaking up a damn good defense because they let the cap get out of control.

But first, they have to fire Gibbs. Ring up another excommunication for your old pal Satan.

I have one more football topic to explore. After the endless disaster that was the Redskins-Bears (and it was actually the first of the 1 PM games to end), I took a few hours off from football, and didn't return until well into the second quarter of the nightcap, the Ravens-Colts. I don't mind the Ravens; they're my emergency backup team, and no Redskins fan should be without something else to care about. I only watched a few minutes of the game, because it was visually hurtful to do so.

The Ravens' new unis are a war crime. Black jerseys, black pants, white socks. They look like beat poets without berets. They look like ogres dancing The Rites of Spring. They look like mimes without the facepaint. They are a fucking nightmare. New unis, please.

TV Week

It's TV Week over at Salon, my minions. That means it's definitely time for you to get over and watch the brief advertisement to which they will subject you, each and every day this week (unless you're already part of their self-righteous pinko subscription base, in which case you need only click and visit), so that you can read every word My Beloved Heather Havrilesky writes about Our Glorious Nation's glorious scheme of high-quality television programming.

Support this national treasure (I mean Ms. Havrilesky) in her travail--the poor dear actually works for a living--during this tumultuous period of television newness by poring over every syllable of her excretions. And put down your damn book, you egghead, and watch some television. Satan commands it.

My Excommunication

I don't believe in global warming.

Don't get me wrong. I do believe there's evidence that average temperatures may be rising. I just don't think it's scientifically demonstrable that there's a connection between the intuitively obvious increase in emissions of so-called greenhouse gases and the increase in average temperatures. I don't believe there's evidence that increased tropical activity is anything other than a cyclical phenomenon. I don't believe that the environmental case has been proved, not even close.

There are issues where I think the evidence is pretty strong--chlorofluorocarbons and seasonal decreases in ozone levels at the poles, for instance. And regardless of the strength of the evidence, I see nothing wrong with decreasing hydrocarbon emissions (which have other ill effects, as anyone who's been to London and blown black boogers knows), or the use of certain propellants (a mechanical pump works fine, and your hair looks great, and nice shoes, wanna fuck?), or cow farts, for that matter.

But blaming disasters like Katrina on global warming--and I haven't seen a lot of it, but one mention of such stupidity is enough to set me off on something like this--doesn't add to the environmental movement's street cred with The Big Stupids. There is ample evidence, that I'd link to if I weren't too lazy to search for it, that cyclonic activity is, in fact, cyclical, and that this is just the first time we've gone through the heavy part of the cycle when places like New Orleans and Florida were so heavily invested with media-networked humanity and the money and real estate it engenders.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go find, and throw spitballs at, the Rainbow Warrior.

What the Hell, I Can Be As Giddy As Anyone

Right. I tempered it yesterday (and will do so today, with a thought-provoking link) by noting that there is some small truth to the notion that energy should be directed to helping the victims of our country's great natural disaster (the Gulf Coast, smartass, not the last two presidential elections), rather than to taking heads. After all, the need for help is immediate, and we can take heads later. As my friend Sasha says, "Can we put that on our calendars, please?"

But the devotion of the right wing to turning this affair into an amped-up call for civil war on the disadvantaged is beyond control. Items to check out:

-Sidney Blumenthal, whom I generally think is a pompous, self-absorbed prat, catalogs failings and outrages in a Salon column here, focusing on the disaster and its aftermath as yet more condemnation of the right wing's dedication to no government save that which makes the rich richer and further stratifies our society and culture. Sidney's got his facts straight, which is sort of surprising considering that none of them involve him personally sucking on the body parts of former Presidents.

-Jack Shafer, whom I generally think is an unnecessarily sharp-tongued crapweasel (tempered by his tendency to be not horribly wrong) who should've stuck with My Local Alternative Weekly (rather than advancing his career--I mean, c'mon, who's Jack supposed to be serving here, him or me?), writes a very compelling argument on why New Orleans might should not be rebuilt here, in Slate. The gist, which is not horribly wrong, is that NoLa was a dysfunctional city built on swamp and fill in an area known to be flood-prone and geographically disadvantaged in the extreme. Also in Slate, Steve Landesburg provides a more traditionally economics-based argument against "too much" disaster assistance, here. I have trouble getting behind this one, but offer it up out of my dutiful sense that no information is too much for my gentle readers.

-From Salon, via Atrios: A bunch of firefighters arrived in Atlanta to help out with rescue operations on the Gulf Coast, but have been both detained there and essentially ordered to help out as FEMA toadies. Some of them removed their FEMA t-shirts in protest. FEMA spokesperson Mary Hudak: "I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country."

Wow. Others have put it much more nicely, so I'll just get to the root: Fuck you, Mary Hudak, you fascist, agitprop-addicted smear artist. And get the fuck out of my country's government, after shutting your hideously stupid, disrespectful, ill-informed, treasonous, divisive pie hole.

Then die.

-It could be worse. I could send you over to get Malkinized. But I won't.

Okay, we're outraged enough now, right? Pour me a fucking Glenlivet, this blogging shit is real work.

What? Dubya? Flip-Flop?

Salon points out more base hypocrisy from the presidency. Remember back when it was important for Madame Justice O'Connor's successor to be enbenched by the opening of the Supreme Court's term? Not so important now, apparently. It is, however, important for the Senate to confirm Judge Roberts as Chief immediately, and anything else will be unduly dilatory, treasonous, terroristic, and political.

No, never y'all mind who's replacing the moderate, y'all just confirm Long John right now now now. Don't make us call y'all terrists.

Walking on Sunshine

There's some truth to the notion that the most important thing that can be done for the people of the ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi coasts is to help them, instead of bitching about the help they haven't gotten.

But it's apparent that there's a lot more truth to the notion that the amount of help they haven't gotten is a war crime. This crime is compounded by the Bush administration's habit of treating even respectful requests for accountability as treasonous (or worse, terrorism).

I can understand, in a very narrow and technical sense, the reluctance of those directly connected to the administration to accept any responsibility for the base incompetence that has marked the federal response to this disaster, and even their eagerness to blame overwhelmed state and local officials. Breathe deep, I said I "understand" it, not "condone" it. These people are, in theory, trying to get someone elected.

What I can't understand is the right-wingers'--bloggers, talking heads, pseudo-politicals, and others--adamant defense of the indefensible, and their hateful attacks on Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco. It is beyond argument that the effects of this storm far transcended the coping capacity of a state or local government. Michael Brown's inexcusable fiddling about is by now well-documented; even some of the most fascist bloggers are quite correctly calling for his head.

What the fuck is wrong with you people?

Crankypants

Still. Thanks to those of you who've wished well, here and offline.

For now, I have but one thing to say, to someone for whom I have no other method of reachout:

We still loves Da Moon.