Bad at math
Chris Christie, ladies and gentlemen. Because he’s really, really fat. I know, I know…I’m geeenius.
Seriously, this guy pissed me off with his wanton libertarian bashing. It’s not because there’s tension enough with the libertarians in the GOP (though there is). And it’s not because I’m closer to the libertarian view than any other (though I am). It pisses me of because it was so dumb.
To win the White House, you need all your own party behind you, and about four percent more of those confused voters milling about in the middle than the other guy. Starting out a candidacy by deliberately insulting a big part of your own base is self-destructively stupid.
It also signals he’s hoping to be this election’s “fuck you, wingnuts” candidate. You know, the one who sucks up to the big donors, alienates the base, wins the nomination ugly and then tries to turn us all out on election day by a combination of fear mongering and ridicule.
Oh, I am so very tired of that strategy. It’s been the default GOP game plan since ’92. Can we play another game now?
July 29, 2013 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 32
A moment’s reflection
Sadly, it looks like gulliblepratt’s fingers are slipping off the dick (ha! Nope. Never gets old). Nelson Mandela is said to be improving steadily. So, before he croaks indeed and criticizing him becomes some kind of special sooper dooper hate crime, let us pause for a moment and reflect that Mandela is a Commie and a terrorist piece of shit who richly deserved the prison sentence that pop culture sprung him out of.
Actually, I’m ‘onna let Kathy Shaidle do that, because I suspect criticizing Mandela is already some kind of special hate crime, and she has more guts than I have.
During this time, he and other ANC leaders formed its armed wing — Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Mandela was secretly appointed its commander in chief. – PBS special on Mandela
That “armed wing” carried out terror attacks at shopping centers, movie theaters and other civilian targets, not just “establishment” ones like courts and banks.
These attacks blew many innocent whites and blacks to bits.
And when Mandela was arrested, the authorities claimed to have uncovered “210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminium powder and 1 ton of black powder.” – Shaidle, at the link
What is it with the left and terrorist bombers? This week, Rolling Stone made a cover boy out of dreamy Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (is it mean spirited to hope his last stand somehow messed up that pretty face?). And then there’s Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, whose defense of the Weather Underground bombings is something like they weren’t very good ones. Oh, and Saint Yasser Arafat, who invented the suicide bomber?
It’s clear that some chunk of the left doesn’t just excuse these murderous assholes, but swoons over them. Why? What is it?
July 18, 2013 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 28
Vlad the Inhaler
So here’s Putin’s latest photo op: descending into the Bay of Finland in a bathyscaphe to eyeball the wreck of a 19th Century Russian frigate. Because I guess he’s decided that what the Russian people really want in a president is a Bond villain.
Here a sampling of his bizarre macho performances. I did not realize — if the hippies at the link can be believed — that the Siberian tiger he supposedly shot with a tranquilizer dart at a nature reserve was actually a zoo animal that subsequently died of an overdose of anesthetic. Sad, if true.
Can we go back to the days of rule by inbred show ponies, please? At least they were brought up with a sense of tradition and decorum.
July 17, 2013 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 20
Don’t despair, my imaginary friends on the internet!
Y’all know I have been down on politics lately. I despair of the weakness and mediocrity of ‘our guys’ as much as the duplicity and overreach of ‘the other guys.’ Well, I read an article in the Weekly Standard this morning that cheered me up a little.
The 25 Republican state Attorneys General are hunting in packs. They’re aggressive, they’re activist, they’re libertarian (whether they call it that or not), they have each other on speed dial and they’re banding together to block the worst excesses of the Obama administration.
The AGs are committed — “ruthlessly committed” is how Pruitt puts it — to obstructing the expansion of the federal government at the expense of the states. They are champions of federalism, the Tenth Amendment, states’ rights, and a defanged federal government. […] Republican AGs regard themselves as “the last line of defense” against Washington and its blob-like tendency to grow. It’s a conceit, but a defensible one.
It’s a trick they learned off Democrat AG’s, who (you may recall) would oft band together to turn companies upside down and shake them for $billions. Once in a while, I have to remind myself there are some very smart people in government, they just aren’t very visible.
Anyway, go read it. This is where Ted Cruz came from — he was one of the scrappy young lawyers in the Texas AG’s office. More like him, please.
The illustrator is Gary Locke. You may recognize his stuff; he’s done many covers for the Weekly Standard, among other clients. Drove me nuts squinting at the tiny thumbnails on the Standard’s site (if you click them, you don’t get a bigger picture, you get a subscription form) until I thought to Google Gary’s name.
Go look at purty art. He does a wicked good Barack Obama, and an excellent David Cameron.
July 15, 2013 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 12
Royalty, then and now
Not trying to make any profound point here, I just happened to see these two pictures within the hour.
The bottom shows our lords and masters at the G8 summit today, looking every inch the shabby mediocrities we know them to be.
The top shows nine inbred show ponies gathered for the funeral of Edward VII in 1910. Standing, King Haakon VII of Norway, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manoel of Portugal, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George I of Greece, King Albert of the Belgians. Seated: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King George V, King Frederik VIII of Denmark. They probably share more genetic material than Stepford wives.
Not sure I have a preference. On the one hand, if you’re going to lord it over me, it helps if you treat me to a little theater. Shiny boots, awesome whiskers. On the other hand, no. No, I want to take each of these swaggering hams by the back of the neck and slam his or her face repeatedly into a giant pile of mashed potatoes while chanting You. Are. Not. Special.
Whoo-pah! I think I might be a republican.
June 19, 2013 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 33
Backing into the news
Aw, Vlad and Barry don’t look like BFFs, do they? I love this picture. Lifted as is from this Telegraph article on the dress code for the G8. ‘Smart casual.’ Shit thee? I do not.
The news (including the punditry), still making me crazy mad at the moment. I avoid things that piss me off, especially if I’m helpless to do anything about them. But I don’t want to ignore news completely, lest something important sneak up behind me and smack me upside the head. So I basically go to all my old news sites and scan the headlines, but I don’t read the text unless it promises to offer me a crumb of comfort. A scintilla of schadenfreude. A fragment of fuck right off.
So, what about youse guys? Anyone want to share news-ignoring strategies, or perhaps links to some especially uplifting reads?
June 18, 2013 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 43
I came here to post stupid Photoshops and chicken blog, and I’m all out of stupid Photoshops
That’s it. It’s official. My brain has vapor-locked. I am now so full of rage and despair I am literally incapable of tweezing out a single off-pissing outrage to post about today.
Some think A scandal was released to distract from B scandal, and C scandal was leaked to kill B scandal, and D scandal was…what the hell are we up to now, N scandal? I think, probably not. Because they all boil down to one scandal: the government has grown incalculably huge, mighty, incompetent, partisan and, apparently, invulnerable and we — you and I, dear readers — are its natural enemies.
Most of the foot soldiers on our side of the fight are acting like the NSA is holding something juicy over their heads and demanding they act stupid.
That’s not a real accusation.
Well, except Lindsey Graham. I bet they have an awesome file on Miss Lindsey.
So I’m going to sit over here and chicken blog until the fog clears a little. Join me, won’t you? Or pick a scandal and bitch about it. Either one is good.
June 12, 2013 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 31
Ow.
Houston couple had tequila, argued before man fatally stabbed by stiletto heel
Yeah, I got nothing. Only, I cannot beLIEVE anyone on the right wants to debate whether or not Snowden is an asshole. I so totally don’t care. Don’t care. Is the government hoovering up domestic phone metadata or not? All else is noise.
June 11, 2013 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 15
If only there was a way to narrow the search down a little
I know, I know…we’ve known forever the spooks were data-mining. But not on this scale. If nothing else, I didn’t think private companies would cooperate with the government so happily. If nothing else, the technology wasn’t there to store and sift the sheer volume of data. Not until recently.
To hear Jim Sensenbrenner tell it, if the Feds were interested in somebody, they were supposed to get a warrant for his phone records (he wrote the Patriot Act, he should know). What they did instead was get a warrant for everybody’s records, so the records would be around in case they get interested in somebody later.
I have no words.
How carefully the higher ups have explained to us that no-one is listening in on phone conversations. Maybe, but the metadata is plenty bad enough. No, it is not okay for the government to know who’s calling a shrink or a clap clinic. I remind you, leaking shit is Obama’s signature move. In future, all of our candidates may have to be Mormons – nobody else is clean enough.
And for all that technological hoo-ha, they missed the Tsarnaev brothers – and Major Hasan – who should have rung more alarm bells than Quasimodo. I guess two hundred billion data points a month isn’t the same things as intelligence.
On a happier note, if you lose somebody’s phone number, you can file an FOIA request.
June 10, 2013 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 35
For this image, I am truly sorry
Oh, I am sorry. This is Lindsey Graham’s publicity still at full resolution. I swear I did not Photoshop this in any way, other than to make it monochrome. Then I sat down to do the weasel magic, but I just couldn’t…somehow…couldn’t look away from those pale, weird baby blues.
And I wasn’t strong enough to live with this picture all by myself.
So, Lindsey Graham, eh? National Journal reports that Lindsey mused aloud today whether bloggers deserve First Amendment protection. They describe it as a slip-up. Ha! Ha! Of course he knows they deserve First Amendment protection.
Actually, I buy that excuse. Even Graham isn’t boneheaded enough to claim the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply. But then the National Journal guy goes on to say something even stupider than Lindsey: “What Graham really meant to ask was whether bloggers deserve the specific protections of the First Amendment that are granted to the press.”
AHHHHHHHHH!!!! THERE ARE NO SPECIFIC PROTECTIONS GRANTED TO THE PRESS.
Here is the whole relevant chunk of the 1st Am:
“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
That’s it. That’s all. That’s the entirety of the text regarding the press in ALLLLL of the founding documents: Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. DO YOU SEE ANY SPECIFIC PROTECTIONS IN THERE, MISTER?!?
In fact, you could argue that speech — things non-journalists say — is mentioned before the press — things journalists say — and is therefore the more important and double-plus-protected of the two. But that’s just a “Mom always liked me best” kind of observation. Any custom or case law that has accreted around the First Amendment since then has to stand on its own merits, without wrapping itself in the Founders.
There.
Thenk yew.
I feel better.
Let the record show: I misspelled “Lindsey” with an E as “Lindsay” with an A throughout. I’ve just gone back and fixed it. Sorry if I misled you into a spelling error.
June 5, 2013 — 10:14 pm
Comments: 19