Briefly

WE got new underpants for Bam-Bam. The previous ones were too small. Ilse didn't understand that briefs could be too small. She thought we menfolk like our boys snug. While this probably explains a great many things about Ilse, I'm not sure exactly what they are.

IF you are sporting a bumper sticker advertising a political concept, philosophy, or sporting team with which I sympathize, please do not drive like a dick.

Say Hi to Sid

THE Washington Capitals fucking rock, and the word "douche" is too nice, and far too tasteful, for Sidney Crosby.

Note the Sid-friendly spin on the title of the video. Lessee...play is stopped, and Sid hooks Ovie, shoves him over the boards, whining the whole time, and then has a high vagina sprain when Ovie pays him back. Niiiiiice. That's definitely Ovie roughing Sid up.

I've discoursed before on my abject, most unpretty hatred of every Eastern Conference NHL team that isn't the Caps, and on my grievous distaste for much of the Western Conference as well. When it comes to hockey, I am, in fact, a black hole of hatin'. I can hate other hockey teams with the best of them. I got the PhD in Hatin'. There is no hell fiery enough to punish me for the degree and volume of my hockey hate. This may sound a little Brer Rabbity to some of my closer friends, but really, I am a bad, bad person when it comes to hockey fandom/hatedom, and in an eternal, philosophical sense, I almost certainly deserve some form of retribution for this stain on my karma.

Even so, Sid Crosby is such a hateful, whinging, bleeding pussy that it detracts from my enjoyment of how much I hate the Rangers, Flyers, Devils, Bruins, Islanders, and Canadiens. I mean, seriously, the Pens are fucking-A despicable, and it's a long, hard hate, born of far more spite than is healthy to have experienced in one short lifetime, a hatin' awesome enough to match my 40-year hate on the fucking Habs, which dates back to Ken Motherfucking Dryden (yeah, yeah, you kids get off my lawn).

So fuck you, Sid Crosby, you fucking viral cockblight, for fucking up my joy in hatin', for monopolizing my black soul's dark places so thoroughly (at least until tomorrow night, when the Caps take on the Flyers) that I couldn't even properly hate on Sergei Gonchar and Brooks Orpik and NBC's coverage of yesterday's game total monster ass-whupping. While you, Sid Crosby, are in fact a douche, your douchedom is of a character far too grotesque, too pestilential, too infected, too seedy, too odiferous, to be articulated in this hallowed space. Just fuck you, Sid, and with the dick of someone I don't like.

All this is a little funny, because Thursday, I'm taking this guy and Planet, the Best Kid Ever, to a Caps game (her first, I believe; I'm not sure about him) against the Thrashers, who aren't really worth the energy to hate. I hope they're not disappointed.

Okay, that wasn't brief. I got rolling. Totally my bad.

FINALLY, I can't find an online cite to the story, but I heard on my local all-news, all Badenful all morning, all scary all panicky traffic guy all afternoon, radio station that the president of my local locality's county council is a douche. Now, this is a douchedom less spectacularly pustulent than the aforementioned pestilential douchedom of Cindy Crysby. But it's still pretty doucheriffic, because this guy loves trees almost as much as he hates teachers. The man belongs on the Left Coast, which hasn't stopped him from getting elected and hanging in long enough to take his turn as head of the council (it rotates, I think annually). But now, the aforementioned radio station tells me (without backing it up on the station's Web site) that Council President Duckfucker is tearing into the county Board of Education for its $13-million (chump change) contract to buy Promethean Boards, claiming it violated state law for the Board to scatter a few pennies to install these things in every classroom in the county without first sucking Council President Duckfucker's tiny shrivelled classic liberal pussy dick.

Ilse, Goth (blog deceased), and this wise and wonderful uberwoman, will tell you that Promethean Boards are a life-altering event for teachers. I've seen them in action, and as a total layperson, I agree totally. That Council President Duckfucker wants to interpose his tree-loving self into the educational spending process in this, a top-ten U.S. school system, is just diamond shitting of the worst sort. That this jerk has actually caused me to abstain from voting in a council election makes it even worse. Suck it, Phil Andrews.

Big Autism Newsy Day

Three big stories coming from the world of autism today. The biggest is that the Special Masters in the U.S. federal Autism Omnibus proceeding denied compensation for vaccine-related injury to three petitioners who asserted that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine caused their childrens' autism. These three cases were test cases for around 5,000 other cases under the vaccine injury program. They involved only claims about the MMR vaccine; claims regarding the use of thimerosol in vaccines, and on vaccines in general, have yet to be decided. Today's decisions certainly don't bode well for the petitioners in those cases.

Key elements of today's decisions:

1) This wasn't close. The decisions blasted the quality of the petitioners' evidence. The most excellent and sublime Kathleen Seidel has more on this at Neurodiversity.
2) These cases were subject to a pretty light burden of proof, one that has been characterized as "50 percent plus a feather." The petitioners didn't meet that burden. Thus, these cases didn't come close to meeting a greatly diminished standard than many legal decisions.

Advocates of the purported--and now thoroughly, fatally debunked--link between vaccines and autism are having difficulty dealing with this. Many of them are still silent (the decisions are, at this writing, less than 12 hours old), and many are falling back on conspiracy theories, faulty logic, and straw men. Just STFU, and let's get on with treatment research, increased funding for behavioral interventions, and public education into how best to help those on the autism spectrum fit into the alien planet they find themselves on (and how best to help us aliens fit with them).

This last is tricky. Another story--this is actually a few days old, but I heard it today, so it's news to me--comes from Ohio, where an 18-year-old severely autistic man is in jail and under indictment and alleged to have killed his mother (h/t Kristina Chew). This is a seriously fucking sad story. This kid is likely rotting in jail wondering where Mommy is. The likelihood that he meant her harm is almost nil; it's inconceiveable that he could've had the capacity to mean her harm. And judging from some of the comments on the story linked above, there is a serious shitload of assholes in Ohio.

While sad, the story is indicative of nothing, typical of nothing, and will cause Ilse's ex, the incomparably stupid Oafus, to continue pustulating that Bam-Bam--who is by no means severely dysfunctional--needs to be fucking institutionalized. Fuckface.

Finally--and this is today's news--comes a tale of woe involving ourside hero Keith Olbermann, who really stuck his dick in a cheese grater. Olbermann first invoked the name of Andrew Wakefield, a British physician and noted liar and falsifier of research data who singlehandedly caused the MMR scare that now has unvaccinated children and adolescents dying of measles, as a Worst Person in the World. Wakefield was largely brought down by the journalism of Brian Deer, a...well, journalist. After Olbermann was besieged by antivaccination fucktards such as David Kirby, he decided that Deer himself was a WPITW, alleging that Deer initiated complaints of malfeasance against Wakefield, then profited by writing about them. It appears that Olbermann was also incensed by Deer's crime of working for a Murdoch-owned paper.

One problem: Kirby (who bragged about this on idiocy snotrag HuffPo) and his ilk are lying fucks. Deer wasn't the complainant in the case that brought Wakefield down (I've linked to Orac's coverage of this story as it unfolded, but there are other places you can get the story, lest you be one of my few readers who eschews Orac).

So Olbermann's a stupid fuck, and one who's so paranoid about Murdoch that he'll say anything to slam Old Dead Zombie Ruppert. Yeah, I know, I have trouble getting too excited about that part, too. The point, though, is that while Olbermann appears to have been duped, the con man was David Kirby, who continues to think that research docs are thieves and murderers, while chelators and diet practitioners are holy, who continues to move goalposts and plant untruths, and who continues to champion the very odd notion that the plural of "anecdote" is "data." Fuck you, David Kirby.

Disaster Narrowly Averted

I hadn't commented on this yet because of the possibility that he would actually be confirmed--in which case I never would've commented, for reasons obvious to those of you who know who I am, and suspectable to those who don't know exactly--but Ba'al is great for preventing the ascension of Tom Daschle to Sec'y of HHS. The chance that Daschle would've brought about meaningful change in health care was nil.*

I think it went down like this: The Obama people are generally nice, and don't want to piss anyone off without a reason, despite their penchant for picking jaded Clintonista hacks for key posts*** and their affinity for picking asshat right-wingers for political leverage that isn't going to develop. They assume, in good faith****, that people like Daschle have the good sense to understand when they've become liabilities.

Sadly, no.

So when it became apparent to the Obama folk that the Senate was about to confirm its old butt buddy and leave our President holding his very first gratuitous and unnecessary flaming bag of dog shit, they stepped in and gently adjusted the dirty whore's attitude just a tad.

This and this***** (the word you're looking for is "pussy"******) do nothing to dampen my ardor for this theory.

Buh-bye, Senator Daschle, you painted fucking tart.

Oh, and let's just go ahead and launch a preemptive strike against the inevitable observation on my civility and objectivity from the most staunch of defenders of the clean-living, hard-working-and-honestly-dirty-handed Midwestern civility and middlingness ethic, which observation I can clearly see getting ready to pop up over the closest ridgeline to spray me with conveniently contrarian centrist attention-whore seed from its unswervingly fair-minded Firehose of Moderation: Fuck you, Purple.

* A waggle of the Satanic weenie to Whispers for a headsup on the first Greenwald post, and my gratitude to him as well for calmly and seriously considering the matter after I bludgeoned him to death with my righteous outrage about it on Saturday, peeing most ungraciously over his initial observations on a well-considered, if suboptimally timed**, comparison between media treatment of Daschle and Geithner and media treatment of Presidents who lie and start wars of aggression and suspend habeas corpus and authorize torture.

**You did say, "Run with it," dood.

***To wit.

****I concede the flaw in my theory, but while it's hard to believe that Rahm the Destroyer is capable of assuming good faith, I think he's got orders.

*****A friendly flap of the Satanic flippers to Sasha, who provided the video and Ezra links.

******"The word you're looking for is 'pussy'" meme is more likely than not the intellectual property of this guy.

Dear NFL

Uhm...you could at least pretend to review that incomplete pass by Warner to determine that the officials completely fucked it up and it was not, in fact, anything that even remotely resembled a fumble?

None of which excuses the Cardinals' reversion to the defense that couldn't possibly have gotten them into the Super Bowl. But still, dood. I mean, you could just maybe sort of act like you didn't feel some compulsion to hand the game to those Yinzer fucks?

Holy crap.