News

1. I cleaned up. There was stuff in the links that was old, moribund, dramatically changed, and in one sad case, deceased. Thanks to BFF for the inspiration to get around to doing something that's needed doing for a very long time.

2. I am unemployed. Low-effort Kickstarter ideas welcome (turns out "Bologna sandwich" was already taken).

3. Yes. Jill Stein is a fucking dipshit who has no business running for office. I don't care whether she's pandering to anti-vaxxers or actually is one. And yes, it is, in fact, one or the other. Don't fucking embarrass yourself by arguing otherwise--you got nothing. No one is putting words in her mouth or on her Twitter feed (or deleting them from her Twitter feed) for her.

4. Databoy makes his way to the University of Turtles very, very soon. I won't claim success yet, because the scoreboard's not showing zeroes. But it's close.

5. I forget what eight was for.

Irony Is the Sound of Freedom, Part Infinity

"Give me my privacy!" they Tweeted. When that didn't work they Facebooked it. Then they went to Snapchat and Instagram to post pics of them demanding their privacy. They were appalled when we paid attention.

Oh, wait; no, they weren't.

"Politicians are tools for the wealthy!" they cried, "Rock the don'tvote!" They made no exception for an aging hippie who's been an attention whore completely dissociated from functional political reality since sometime after the Civil Rights movement's greatest hits, a senile jackass who's completely morally bankrupt on key issues of concern to his base.

Oh, wait; yes, they did.

"You get the fuck off my lawn!" he shouted at himself. He did.

Oh, wait; no, he didn't.

Who's Running For President?

I don't give a flying fuck. All of the Republicans are demonstrably batshit crazy, in a willfully evil way. All of the Democrat have a vanishingly tiny chance of affecting my life in anything but the most infinitesimal way. And are not meaningfully less willfully evil, if that. The amount of noise generated by this would drive me bugfuck, if I allowed it to. Some beloveds have already allowed they to become bugfuck. This is a sad. They should take drugs for it. I should take drugs because they're big grownup beloveds and I have no control over what they do, or any ensuing sad.

Will I vote for Her? Not in the winnowing, no. In the Big One? I don't give a flying fuck. You, personally, I give a flying fuck, beloved. All the beloveds, even the ones who can't read. They don't give a flying fuck either.

By the way, they're not typos. And that was a pome, maybe. Shorts. Yum. Landru out.

Information Free

Beloveds know I've been recovering from pneumonia for over two weeks now. Please focus on "recovering" rather than on "pneumonia." Thank you.

Items and judgments:

The Surveillance State: Yes. Of course it's bad. You think it's news? Holy shit, how do you keep from drowning when you look up in the rain?

Glenn Greenwald: Shut the fuck up and enjoy the Confederations Cup, you self-promoting bitch. Or the protests against it. I don't give a fuck. Just shut the fuck up.

VRA: Holy shit. What a pack of fucking tools.

DOMA: Isn't John Roberts a fascinating human being? Savior and tool? Jeebus.

That'll do. Vamos United.

So You Think Rand Paul Is Your Friend

Uhm...okay. Have a nice life.

Put Alternatively

Look, I don't fucking care any more whether you vote. You've convinced yourself, you've made your choice. There's no need for me to link to TBogg's recycled evergreen; you're certain that the entirety of the math is Obama equals drones (no, no--if you're going to be that fucking reductionist--and you have, again and again--I get to be so, too). What the fuck ever. For my part, I'm convinced enough that you're probably not stupid enough to actually vote for Romney, and for that reason, I cannot convince myself that you truly believe that Romney's election would be a better case. But it's close, and you may be fucking stupider than I think you are.

And it probably doesn't matter. It's increasingly obvious that a Romney win would involve some unprecedented combination of weirdness and heinous fuckery. Do I think Romney's people incapable of that level of heinous fuckery? Of course not. That'd be even stupider than I think I am. But it'd be a serious shitload of heinous fuckery.

There's been a lot of what appears to me to be concern trollery as the election season has heated up. But again, I could be wrong about that characterization, and here and there, I've tried to address it calmly and without pointing too dramatically at the underlying stupid. Obviously, that's difficult for me; it's an emotionally charged thing, and I'm as self-righteous as you are. Further, I think I've just plain done a crappy job of it.

I often say that I dislike Loomis. It's true that I think he's a dirty fucking treehugging hippie, and that's where I most often find myself at odds with him. But decency demands that I concede that he is a very good writer on labor history, and he's a very sharp political scientist and political historian--the former puts me to sleep, and the latter holds my interest until someone hands me a novel about Russian tanks facing off against the Nazis at Prokhorovka, or a link to a moderately pornographic Webcomic. Which is why I respect the very sharp part.

I think Loomis gets it right here, in a piece summarizing his disappointment over some elements' behavior during this election cycle. If you're serious about wanting to understand, you should read the whole post. But he summarizes better than I ever could:

To summarize:

1. Change happens outside the election cycles–elections are for institutionalizing the changes you have attempted to make in the past 4 years.

2. Every single U.S. president has blood on his hands. Voting in a presidential election is always a choice between two evils.

3. We need to think less about our own personal moral position in voting. It’s not about you. It’s about the community where you live. Even if you vote for Jill Stein, the blood of Pakistani babies killed in drone strikes is on your hands. You cannot wash off that blood without changing the system–something that 3rd parties have never done. You want clean hands–organize the American public around the issues you care about. It will take the rest of your life. That is the timeline of real change.

4. There actually are lessons from the past on these issues. There are lessons in how to organize. And there are lessons about what third parties do and do not do. When someone can tell me what value a third party has had to pushing the agenda to the left in the last 80 years, I’ll be real interested in hearing it.

5. We need a tougher and smarter left. The self-described left punditry and journalists in 2012 has been individualistic, holier than thou, disorganized, and narcissistic. The real story of the left this year is smart and tough–the Chicago Teachers Union. That’s how you demand and make change. Writing editorials obscuring the differences between Obama and Romney and encouraging well-meaning people to protest vote is worse than worthless–it’s mendacious and serves as a tool for conservatives to continue pushing this nation back to the Gilded Age.

If you read the Loomis, and the most important thing is still that Obama hurt your fee-fees...well, I guess there's not a lot more to say. Do what you will, and do your best to enjoy the spectacle.

Oh, and if you think you are one person, or a particular person, don't. Seriously. Deadeye totally fucking seriously.

But to echo the one guy who probably most thinks it's about him, if you're a Marylander: yes on 4 and 6, please. Especially 6. Maryland needs to lead the way on this simple and fundamental matter of human fucking decency.

Not to echo that same guy, because I'm not, but also yes on 5, please, because I'm a partisan political hack; no on 3, because it derives from some asshole pissed off because some PG County Council member didn't get slushed out of office fast enough; and yes on 7, because it's a war between competing casino interests, which isn't compelling, but yes keeps the money in Maryland rather than shipping it to Delaware and West Virginia. 

And in MoCo, please, please, please, vote no on B. Both parties and the fucking County Council, and the fucking County Executive want you to validate their clear and sordid violation of a negotiated union contract. Fuck them.

It's Really Pretty Simple

It's been an ugly couple of days on the Twitter machine and in the blogs. In general, I'm with Loomis, TBogg (who does an awesome job of calling out the aimless millennial dumbfuck Cali hippie vibe that the Occupy for Romney movement stenches of), Rebecca Solnit, and others (for instance). Here's why: the Occupy for Romney movement will tell you that this makes me a mouthpiece for the Democratic National Corporation, that I'm an Obamabot, that my vote for Obama will be a vote for killing civilians with drones. Uhm...yeah, sure. Fuck you, you tendentious and ignorant pricks, and maybe go back and retake whatever course you learned government in, because--and I know this will surprise you--the government does, in fact, extend beyond the military.

Like most people who want to oversimplify (misogynists), start shrill namecalling (Republicans and middle schoolers) and whimper when it's turned back on them, argue ad reductam and deny the importance of anything that doesn't fit their worldview (Greenwald), and pretend that they're victims (Christians), the Occupy for Romney movement is just a pack of propagandists. Why, exactly, they've so deliberately (in each sense) blinded themselves to principles they claim to hold dear, and why they've decided that whichever issue is most important to them obviates all others, and why they've actually reached the stunning (and remarkably ignorant) conclusion that a Romney presidency would be less bad than an Obama one is beyond me. But they have. And anyone who disagrees is a bully, is telling them to shut up, is a corporate tool. The line of reasoning very quickly devolves into black helicopter madness.

I have no patience for this. I am appalled that people I believe to be of good conscience could reach such stunningly illogical and paranoid conclusions. Speaking of paranoia, I begin to wonder whether the Occupy for Romney movement is every bit as astroturfed, and by the same people, as the Tea Partiers. See? I can do paranoid too. Dipshits.

Most of all, I just get really fucking tired. The left has spent the last four years watching the right tear itself apart. It's the break we've been waiting for as the dialog and the Democratic Party have been reactively drawn to the right. Well, guess what? The not-really-left and not-really-right are the fucking majority. You gotta throw them a few bones. Giant Clinton/Obama bones? Maybe one or two, sure. Not as a way of life.  But if you do it more or less right, you can keep it to that, to what's necessary, and keep the trend in the right direction.Now, instead of building something, instead of figuring out commonalities among those leaning left, the Occupy for Romney movement wants to push anyone less left than them all the way to the right.

Well, that's just monstrously stupid--much like the Republicans of the last four years have been. I sincerely doubt that it'll cause Obama to lose the upcoming election, though I doubted that a self-serving dimwit like Ralph Nader could've cost Al Gore the 2000 election. What I am sure of is that it will guarantee that there's nothing to build if Obama is re-elected, because people who should be on board for the building will be off kicking dirt because they didn't get their personal fucking special pony. Whatever the fuck pony their special one is.

Fucking madness. Fucking Jeffersonianism run fucking wild. Jeebus.

Solidarity Forever

Support the Chicago Teachers Union as they strike for better conditions for Chicago's students. This isn't about salaries, it's about ridiculous class sizes, primitive physical conditions in the city's schools, improving associated social services, and ending the relentless privatization of schools--a goal supported, incredibly, by Democratic Party leadership.

Bonus: your support for CTU will piss off Rahm Emanuel. It doesn't get any better than that, does it?

Seriously, Rahm Emanuel has gone over to the Dark Side on this, assuming he wasn't already there. Which is, I know, quite the assumption. But Democrats trying to bust unions? What a load of fucking horseshit.

Fuck Rahm Emanuel. Support CTU.

Happy Mothers Day, or, No Will for Outrage

There are two things really severely annoying me now, and I really only have the time to acknowledge them because not farting about this will rankle all weekend when I should be helping Data and Bam honor their mother, and of course honoring my own sainted mother, the She-Nurse of the SS.

Now, it's no secret that those scheming and selfish gay folk have monopolized the news this week, what with setting themselves up to be bashed in North Carolina (sadly enough, the home of the She-Nurse, though of course she did the right thing, because if she didn't I'd hate her too much to show my love with that nom d'blog), and then deviously gangfucking Barack Obama in his tight preznitential ass with their big gay dicks until he submitted and put on leather chaps and admitted he's been lying for years about loving the ghey and that Sasha and Malia were only procreationalized because Bill Ayers milked him into a bottle and sold the precious jism to Michelle for her nefarious use.

Damn them. And damn him for loving them. Y'know who almost always says it pretty well? Dahlia, that's who. So yeah, what she said, plus, special to everyone who wants to pretend that BarryO publicly stating, as Preznit of the Motherfucking United States, that he supports gay marriage, isn't good enough, because W: just fuck off. I mean, seriously. No one is saying that his support for gay marriage wipes out his warmongering, so quit fucking shitting up the Internets with that fucking strawman, and the other one about how "I support gay marriage," which is what he unequivocally said, badly mangled though it emerged from the newly christened preznitential cocksucker, somehow isn't good enough and he should personally assfuck every state legislature and cracker until they submit to ghey onions.

Furthermore, I'm fucking sick of you. Yes, war is bad. Killing people is bad. Fucking with the Constitution is bad. Therefore, shit on him at every fucking opportunity, keep fucking pretending about the black Corporate helicopters, keep pretending there's no difference whatsoever that's good enough. Keep up the fucking playground taunting of anyone who doesn't accept your absolute stance, who rejects that compassionate Mittens, the gay preppie's worst delayed-time-bomb nightmare, would be demonstrably worse, because there's some alternative that prevents all death and inequity.

Fucking sophist bullshit, objectively no fucking better or more intellectually sophisticated than...

Jonah Goldberg. No, I'm not fucking kidding. But just typing that name illifies me, so let's let Susan do the heavy lifting, and really, she does that lifting very well. I'm leaving all the thinking to her, thanks. Okay, not all, because Alex Pareene did a pretty awesome job, too.

Yeah, okay, I guess I lied. Three things. And I suppose I do have the will for outrage. My bad.
Oh, and fuck Blogger.

Strategy

Okay, so contra this, Hogeland (actually, Martin Luther King, channelled through Hogeland, and furthered by some logorrhea I read regularly) has convinced me that my thinking was pretty lazy when I wrote that, if assaulted by police for even minor violations of bullshit laws:

your two reasonable and lawful options are to run the fuck away, or put your hands on your head and wait to be arrested. I'm not surprised that some people choose, under that particular stress, to throw shit at the cops, or otherwise resist violently. That they do does not obviate that they were, themselves, assaulted by the state on specious grounds, and it doesn't invalidate the movement.

It's not the first part that's lazy. The lazy and problematic bit is that resisting police instruction, legal or illegal, does constructively invalidate the movement. My problem, in addition to some inherent intellectual laziness, was that I was being far too nice. Hogeland quotes King:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Anarchists (I include faux anarchists, pseudo-anarchists, partial anarchists, and mere sophists, without classifying named individuals) will quibble, but King disposes of that pretty neatly; of course they'll quibble. They're against law. I'm so dramatically unconvinced that the answer to lawlessness by power is anarchy that I've just flatly abandoned most of my reading in that realm. I recognize that this puts me squarely in the camp of faith in due process. Is that a religion as dumb as any other? Might it be my downfall, our downfall? Sure. History and math say it's more likely #Occupy's downfall, unless so-called civilization is doomed to fail anyway, and if that's the dilly I'll go apologize to all the faux anarchists, pseudo-anarchists, and partial anarchists if I''m not too busy or too dead. Sophists I'll still shoot, since the collapse of order will leave me free to do so without legal consequence, pretty much the only thing that restrains me now.

A beloved says that all publicity is good publicity. Decency forbids me from going too far with this, but the fatal flaw here is that this maxim goes for pigs as well as for protesters. Would pigs make shit up whether or not protesters are pure? Of course they would. But you have to give them the chance to fuck up thusly, and it's very clear that #Occupy isn't doing so.

To the extent, of course, that #Occupy can be said to be an entity capable of doing one thing or another. But that's a strategic fail that belies more than I'm willing to concede without a fight at this point--and I'm not yet intellectually equipped for that fight, which I might, after all, lose.

Dancing a Fuck-Me Jig While Tripping Balls Because It Doesn't Look Like He's Going To Dance It For Any Other Reason, Now, Does It?

Let's leave the reporting to the whore Goff, since he usually manages to get the fact-like bits more or less straight. In short, MLS grand poohbah Don "Anschutz Sounds Like Anschluss and That's Good Enough for Me" Garber has thrown down a gauntlet, or pissed in a circle, or some such twaddle, in an effort to bring United's stadium situation to a head. He thinks we've seen our last game on Loud Side, at least in the place that has always been our home. Speculation is rampant about whether this means we're going to the Capital One Boomer Esiason Memorial Helmetball Field at Five Guys Curly Byrd Stadium at Comcast Lot One of the Verizon University of Maryland at M&T College Park, or whether we're gonna demolish a piece of MLK Boulevard up in Bawlmer.

I'm not arguing that DC should give United a stadium. Neither is anyone else, and DC doesn't seem to fucking get that. They never have gotten it, and after the city willingly submitted to the Lerners bending them over and assraping them for Nationals Park, it's decided that "stadium" equals "assrape." DC has a pretty simple choice: single-event-based revenue for RFK, which is large and rusty and raccoon-infested, or that revenue stream plus reasonable lease terms for 18-20 additional scheduled events there each year. Thus far, DC has chosen the obviously retarded route of trying to rape blood from a rock.

No more, it seems. I've done my best over the years to suppress BFF's panicky whimpering over the larger issues here (though he has always been philosophically correct in his pessimism about it, and that's neither new nor changed by Anschluss Don's statement in the State of the League address), but it's no longer fair to call it "panicked." I think the chance of DC agreeing to reasonable lease terms is near nil, because it's a dysfunctional city run by complete fucking retards, and RFK is operated for the city by a contractor that doesn't particularly give a shit. Where that leaves us, geographically, is still equally likely to be okay or horrible. And where that leaves our seats is, as BFF has always argued, in a fucking end zone, unless we end up in Byrd, where there will be a reasonable chance of a Loud Side (at a venue policed by UMD criminal justice grads--yay!).

Or maybe I'm just tripping balls. Again.

Yeah. Remember the good times.

Why I'd Really Like Some People To STFU About #Occupy

I'm not gonna lie; #Occupy annoys me. Not because I disagree or anything. And certainly not because it's physically or logistically inconvenient, though my job will take me to the neighborhood around the World Bank one day this week, which may well be entertaining. But it's not like #Occupy Gaithersburg is on the way. No one's dumb enough to try to occupy Gaithersburg.

Of course #Occupy is intellectually inconvenient: Though I try very hard to leave complicity-whinging to others, how guilty should I feel about the obvious need for massive wealth redistribution? Is my bank evil, and is the bank I'd switch to, if I weren't so fucking lazy, simply less evil? How will my autistic son fare in the new world order, which will presumably include far fewer of the processed crunchy, salty chip-type foods that are, along with pizza and McDonalds, the great mass of his diet? Can I just pay some more taxes and avoid actually getting lined up against the wall like the motherfucker that I am?

But I'm callous, and it's easy for me to give these questions (other than the one about Bam-Bam) only a few moments' thought before I dash off to the next part of the thrill ride that is my day-to-day existence. So that's not it. What annoys me about #Occupy is the massive outburst of fucktardery it engenders.

No Message:  I keep reading about how #Occupy is doomed to fail because it has no message. The level of lazy or obtuse it requires to not be able to discern a message here is stupefying. Look. My personal favorite, for reasons known to those of you who know me as something other than a cartoon Internet rock star, is "You Know Things are Messed Up When Librarians Start Marching." Super bonus points to the librarian in question for fucking up the capitalization, not that that's relevant to the matter at hand. "Close Corporate Tax Loopholes, Tax Religious Groups, End the Wars, Legalize Weed, and Bring Back Arrested Development" is also exceedingly awesome.

So the movement is stupid because not everyone is protesting about the same specific symptom of our culture, our economy, our governance? The movement is irrelevant because you're too lazy to read the signs and discern some obvious themes? Get bent, asshole, but more to the point, shut the fuck up.

The same goes for the linked complaint about the movement's lack of discernable leadership. Look, I think the Greek demos style consensus model is pretty fucking lame, and not tremendously effective in the sense of focus. So the fuck what? Friend Jack Crow makes, as a general proposition, some engaging arguments about power (I don't agree with him when it comes to function, but I find it hard to argue with him about the dynamic). What, exactly, is wrong with letting #Occupy experiment with actualizing shared power--especially when all it's sharing is power over how to protest? 

Dirty Unwashed Hippies: OMGWTFBBQ, how incredibly fucking dreary. Edroso does a better job with this than most of the other bloggers to whom I pay attention. Hippie-bashing (except as practiced by Eric Cartman) is every bit as massively retarded as it was when Richard Fucking Nixon pioneered it. It's especially totemic for fans of police riots. Like...oh. Nixon. Never mind. I don't know what it is about peoples' hair that makes other people want to shoot them. It's pretty fucking psychopathic, no? Unless you're talking about Kyle Beckerman. Someone hold that useless shit down while I shave his head, please.

The dirty unwashed hippie meme has begot the safety and sanitation meme that many cities are using as justification for their police riots. This is pretty fucking simple to me. The First Amendment does not guarantee the right of peaceable assembly as long as you don't take a dump in the park. It doesn't guarantee the right of peaceable assembly as long as you leave room in the park for mommies and their baby carriages. Camping out at McPherson Square is not the same fucking thing as crying wolf in a crowded theatre. Using some turds on the ground as an excuse to suppress the Constitution is like...well, it's not like anything. It is what it is, and the notion that you're in the wrong if you're attacked by rioting police, that you deserve to be shot or gassed or beanbagged or whatever when you're attacked by the state is simply unAmerican. At least it is if you're the Tea Party, which is peopled by citizens who think that the Second Amendment is there to defend them from the government.

I happen to think that, if you're at McPherson Square and the police attack (they won't--it's not surprising or coincidental that DC is among the places where state-sponsored violence hasn't erupted, because My Local Law Enforcers, for all their flavors and stripes and kit, have Been There more times than I can count, and they're not dumb enough to be provoked, which is both gratifying and scary), your two reasonable and lawful options are to run the fuck away, or put your hands on your head and wait to be arrested. I'm not surprised that some people choose, under that particular stress, to throw shit at the cops, or otherwise resist violently. That they do does not obviate that they were, themselves, assaulted by the state on specious grounds, and it doesn't invalidate the movement.


You're Under Arrest for Closing Your Account: Yeah, really. I got to this at a chain of links that began at LGM and ended with a video from #Occupy Santa Cruz.  Two protesters entered a BoA branch in Santa Cruz to close their accounts. No following word on whether, when they left the signs outside the next day, they were allowed to close their accounts, but it says here at Alternet that BoA charges a fee for account closure.

The protesters in that video weren't arrested--in fact, it appears that the Santa Cruz cops, at least the two in the video, aren't stupid. Not so (allegedly) at a Citibank in New York, where Citibank officials (allegedly) locked protesters in and had them arrested as they tried to close their accounts. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? How fucking stupid/arrogant is "I've got your money, shut up, I'm calling the cops"?

My question earlier was not entirely jokified; the money from which our family operates is in accounts at CapOne, which purchased Chevy Chase, a local/metro operation, a little over a year ago. We're credit union members (Ilse is, as you may recall, a unionized public employee), but that's a pain in the arse logistically. I'm also a USAA member, and I could bank there. While I have the impression that it's not in the same class of banking evil as the big fellas, I don't pay enough attention to know.


You're Fired: BFF and many others wrote last week about Lisa Simeone, who got fired by a production company associated with NPR for her #Occupy-related activities. She may or may not have been unfired; I lost track. NPR may or may not have gotten her fired; I'll never know. Lisa Simeone was no longer a journalist; all of her professional broadcast activities were about music.

More laterly, or maybe concomitantly, a journalist named Caitlin Curran went to an #Occupy protest in New York, and held up a sign, and got photographed, and the photo went all Internetty, and she got canned as a freelance Web producer by The Takeaway, a public radio production of, it appears, no consequence or integrity (hint: their Web site features a NYT semen-exchange widget). Pearl-clutching commentary on her piece on Gawker sets a pretty rigid standard for journalists, apparently allowing no research or opinion of any kind. Of course, we could just tell that to Fox News, but TBogg focuses it even better, reminding us that snarky, stupid #Occupy-basher Erin Burnett, of notoriously liberal mainstream newsfeces outlet CNN, is engaged to a Citibank executive.

Oh, snap.

In Conclusion: Of course, this is all just alternately formed, and better-formed, inconvenient intellect, so all that up top was a fucking lie, at the bottom, like it usually is. And of course I still have no desire to blow up our culture to fix anything. Of course I'm willing to have my life changed some--I'm serious about paying more taxes, about redistributing some of my wealth (which is not, to me or mine, substantial, but is far greater than that of a ridiculous percentage of humans) in some meaningful way, and assuming I'm not the only one going up against the wall--it's not like I'm even close to the one percent.

Here's the biggest intellectual inconvenience: Do those limits to my willingness make me a dick? I don't think so. I don't know if most Occupiers think so, either. But I'm watching and listening, because that's sure something I'd like to know. That others, many better off than me, some less so, are so fucking dismissive of the movement, is their poverty.

What TBogg Said

Please vote yes on Question A here in MoCo.

If you're too pissed at The Man and his Mens and Womens to vote, TBogg has a little story for you:

Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.

You don’t live there.

Grow the fuck up.

TBogg, who has his ups and downs, originally wrote that in response to some moron Naderite. It's wonderful how the very best things stay current.

The very best thing about this day, win or lose, is that we can be fucking done with this, and Commies and anarchists and fucking hippie rage junkies and white middle class pussies (love to BFF) can get back to hating curbstompers, while they amp up their hatred of us.

Update: BFF and I had our words yesterday in private, and it was funny (or so I thought) and it was closure. The above gun wasn't pointed at him. But it's not unreasonable that he felt smugged at, and I apologize. To him and him alone.

If you're not voting for some sophist reasons related to class struggle, fuck you. If you're not voting because you think there's some value in letting curbstompers be elected to teach Democrats a lesson, fuck you. If you're not voting because you're an anarchist, you're too fucking stupid for me to waste my time on. If you think that The Kind will win over curbstompers, you're not only too fucking stupid for me to waste my time on, you should go line up at the nearest House O' Curbstomping for your turn.

The man can speak for himself, but I think that BFF is apathetic (yes, it's a disease). He's disillusioned. He's feeling burned. All fair. He's responding to it differently than I do. He responds differently to a lot of things than I do. There's nothing wrong with any of that. Disagreement does not equal disenchantment. He's the creative one, I'm the dickhead realist. It's thrived for quite some time--as long as it's been since we settled into those spaces. It will continue to do so.

However: he had every reason to read the above this morning and think I was being a dick. For being less than cognizant of that, I was. And explanatory snorffle aside, I apologize. 

Also, and independently: I Remember (via BFF's dynamic bloggy links).

My Turn At The Apocalypse

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Baiting To Oblivion

I actually think Bob Somerby is a pedantic scold who knows better than most how to beat a dead horse to pulp. There are things I respect about him, which is why his site has been linked to your right ever since I figured out how to lay such things out. His neverending mewling over the rape of Al Gore is a fine example of my characterization; he's not wrong on the facts or the substance, and there's no statute of limitations on the crimes the media, Gore's political opponents, and the Supremes perpetrated against him. On the other hand, Somerby's nearly decade-old vendetta against his media contemporaries is getting a bit stale, and frankly, I'm not going to start liking Chris Matthews now that he sometimes pretends to be a liberal again. Al's rich enough to pay for his carbon offsets. In the scheme of preventable and rightable crimes against humanity, there's stuff I'd rather lose sleep over.

I've come close, a few times, to writing about Somerby and The Daily Howler, but on those occasions when I've felt quite nearly peeved enough to comment, my grievance has turned out to be reducible to triviality, not worth the effort to log in to Blooger, either to write about it or to take him off my blogroll. It's probably true that my reaction to Somerby is visceral; his tone and phrasing and emphasis sometimes--maybe too often--come off as pure-D concern troll. But I don't think that's what he is. He is genuinely a liberal, and the problem enters because he's ideologically, epistemologically, and dialectically pure. Admirable traits--but not qualities that make him seem like something other than a concern troll (and truly, it's not like he's looking for a fight, like a real concern troll--he has no comments functionality on his blog, and I haven't seen him turning up in other peoples' neighborhoods chiding them for not caring enough that Al Gore is leaking Naomi Wolf's bodily fluids).

Wow. Two introductory paragraphs on love and hate, just because I'm intrigued by an idea Somerby has. I guess I feel I need to justify--to myself, since I'm the one both writing and reading this--linking to the guy's major product. It's fairly obvious that Somerby has a knack for twisting my nads about my own complicity, as if I needed more help with that (and at a far more personal level than Somerby could provide) than I get nearly every day.

Anyway, Somerby is pitching the idea that we're killing ourselves by screaming that the Teabaggers (an epithet he hates, but he can, well, lick my bag, to make a related dick joke that he'd particularly despise, because his various forms of purity include a, well, puritanical streak and an obsession with fairness toward people who are completely unconcerned about being fair to us) are racists. I'm unable to conclude that he's wrong. It's hard not to conclude that Teabaggers are stupid--they are. It's hard not to conclude that they're largely racists--they are. There's simply no rational argument about either, and little or no point in engaging the argument. But Somerby is painfully correct when he calculates the political wisdom of banging on those two drums without far more substantial and compelling accompaniment.

Yesterday's post notwithstanding, I genuinely try not to scold for real. Anything I write about dogma-N isn't really a scold; it's another chapter in 40 years of rough-and-tumble, yet purely playful, oneupsmanship with one of my most trusted confidantes, and in a long process of trying to entertain one another. Seriously scolding Somerby for scolding me (and you) gives me pause; but like Celia the Sylph, he's far too impressed with how fucking right and pure and good he is. Which doesn't mean he's wrong about how we ought to discourse publically with and about pig-ignorant racists.

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.

The Rob Blagojevich Hair Band Fan Club

Nah. He ain't look like a longshoremens' union shop steward to me.

God damn, I love this country. Don't you?

And, uhm, yeah, I don't blog much. What the fuck ever.

Update: Y'know, there are way too many jokes to make about this, but not only is the guy the stupidest motherfucker who ever lived until the next stupidest motherfucker who ever lived*, he was the stupidest motherfucker who ever lived, while doing it on Pat Fitzgerald's beat**. I'm thinking that plus the haircut might open this case up to a serious insanity plea.

*The "(adjective noun) until the next time" meme is probably the intellectual property of this guy, who once tried to swipe "Emiliano Heskey" from me. But I'm a better person than he is.

**And isn't this really just the Fitzmas that Pat wasn't able to give us the last time? God damn, I love this country.

Let Me Explain

If you are voting for John McCain because Sarah Palin is a woman, then you are an idiot and you have failed in your responsibility to society to use your vote wisely. If you are a woman and you are voting for John McCain because Sarah Palin is a woman, all of the above is true, and the fate you best deserve involves Robert Duvall and pregnancy at gunpoint.

It's unfortunate if you think I am a misogynist for any of the above, or for stating that Sarah Palin is a Creationist, gun-toting, polar-bear-hating, Gilead-loving, oil-guzzling opportunist whose main claims to fame are that she finished second in a beauty contest and that she was mayor of a hick town for two years before kicking Frank Murkowski in the ribs while he was down (not that he didn’t have it coming), so that she could take over at the head of the line at the fucking trough that is Alaska politics--at which trough she has herself lapped heartily.

It's unfortunate because, if you are representative of the sampling of what I've read on this topic (including stuff written by PUMAs who have the unmitigated gall to carry the "Advertise Liberally" logo on their blogs) you are just fucking diseased, and I hope you don't get the fate you actually deserve--because I'm not nearly as much of a misogynist as you are.

I am in a contemplative snit, and I don't like where my thoughts are going, because they are seriously Hamiltonian in tone and nature. And while I'm an Alex guy in general, and I think it's fun to toy around with the notion that some people are too stupid to vote, it scares me when I actually get close to getting there, because I'm an American too, and unlike people who would casually propel us further into fascism because Sarah Palin has a twat, I understand what the fuck that means.

Or maybe I should just stop reading the fucking Intertubes.

No. No, Our Presidential Candidates Aren't Fucking Stupid

Senators Obama and Clinton have stepped into the brave world of autism ignorance in their quest to make Pennsylvania relevant. Obama believes the evidence on vaccines and autism is "inconclusive"; it isn't. Clinton (along with Obama) has pledged to increase funding for further study of this maggot-ridden horse (thus depriving, by necessity, funding for more promising avenues of research or, even better, family and community-centered interventions). Fuck 'em both.

Orac does this better than I can, mostly because he's smarter and also, of course, because this flavor of stupid doesn't choke him to inarticulation. He also further elucidates the two Democratic senators' stupid by examining the record better than the Post did.

Hat tip to highly favored homie and serial Obamalover bDr for sending me a link to this shite and goading me into blooging. On that note--the fog clears soon, beloved minions. The fog clears soon.

The Bunnies Have Spoken

The Governor of Whoresmurfing is no more. Let us return now to the forest and cavort.