Michelle Obama’s unfortunate pluck
I get the impression Michelle Obama is, deep down, a pretty angry woman. But you know what really puts people off? That’s right: those scary Vampyra eyebrows. Michelle probably has a bit of a chip on her shoulder, but Michelle’s eyebrows are pissed. Michelle’s eyebrows have come to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and eyebrows can’t chew bubblegum.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Eyebrows are an artificial construct. The kinder, gentler Michelle on the right is only a pluck away (it’s just a pluck away, pluck away, pluck away). Generally, it’s not wise to take makeup advice from a weasel, but I know I’m right on this one. If Michelle came out for her big speech tonight with level, friendly, upturned suzy-housewife eyebrows, she’d bring down the house.
And that’s all the sense you’ll get out of me today. I played hooky. My cold isn’t very bad, but between that and the continued itches, I stuffed myself full of antihistamines. I’m barely connnnnnnnnnnnnnnzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………,,,,,,,,,,
August 25, 2008 — 1:34 pm
Comments: 37
Just trying to be helpful
Every four years, sure as shit, the media yammers about whether the Dems should “go negative” because the Republicans always “go negative” and even though people say they don’t like it when politicians “go negative” it really does work. So sure enough the Dems “go negative” and it doesn’t work and the Republicans “go negative” and it does work and the talking heads declare that Democrats are just too doggone nice to pull off the whole “go negative” gambit.
You know, for the smartypants egghead academic party, y’all sure can be pinheads.
Lean closer; I will to tell you the secret. Shhhhh. Look at this simple two-stage flow chart. Us red state peasants pour rumors into it. If they fall out the bottom, we ignore them. If the come flying out the right side, we run with it. Simple as that.
And we apply it equally to our friends and our enemies. Most of us, for example, were persuaded that Larry Craig was tapdancing for anonymous sex in the D.C. airport bathroom (step one) and that, yes, on the whole this was unspeakably creepy and ick (step two). He flunked the flowchart; I don’t know anyone who sticks up for Larry “Widestance” Craig.
On the other hand, it’s obvious the Dems aren’t applying the same decision matrix. Take the whole Swiftboat thing. What do they say? That Kerry didn’t knock the charges down early enough, or that he didn’t knock them down hard enough — when the problem is that at least some of the accusations were factually and provably true…and materially important. How do you knock something like that down? (C’mon…you don’t have to be a student of naval history to know that three purple hearts in four months without needing a day in the infirmary can’t be right (step one) and for someone running as the Military Guy, this matters (step two).)
Or Rathergate. Dan Rather pissed his whole career down his leg trying to get to first base proving that Bush had an easier time of it in the National Guard because he was the son of a political bigshot. Dude. Duuude. Even if he had gotten past step one, this would fail step two. Of course the son of a bigshot is going to have an easier time of it; bureaucracies instinctively cover their butts that way — whether the bigshot’s son wants them to or not. (Al Gore got a journalist’s gig and, rumor has it, a full-time minder. I’m not shocked. Nor, honestly, all that disapproving).
Oh, I’m not saying every wild-ass rumor that ‘wingers latch onto is a winner. And left and right have fundamental disagreements about what passes step two. But you can bet your ass any issue that catches fire this Fall, John Q. Sixpack is going to believe it survived this flow chart first.
Exit question: if you spend a lot of your time hammering the prediction that your opponent will go negative and avoid the issues, isn’t that going negative and avoiding the issues?
Incoming! Thanks for the link, Gabe. Oh! And SarahW at the Protein Wisdom Pub (which, if you haven’t been paying attention, is where all those PW posters who are not JeffG went).
August 21, 2008 — 12:09 pm
Comments: 58
Never try to con people in a language you don’t speak
“Hello. Nice sites! I also looking for free porns?: <URL here>” — that spammer guy in my filter
“A leader that God has blessed us with at this time.” — Nancy Pelosi, testifyin’ for the messiah
Oof! It hurts to watch the left flail around trying to communicate with us mouth-breathing redneck ‘wingers, doesn’t it? You can hear the little hamster wheels in their craniums squeaking: “These morons voted for Dubya. Twice. How hard can it be to put one over on them?”
A little beer, a little jesus, some eagles and flags and shit and eh voilà, those poor red state boobs’ll never know what hit ’em. Some lefty site I was cruising this morning had a comment congratulating the team for the great job they were doing with branding.
No. No you’re not. The faux ‘presidential seal’, the upside down flag badge, the weird retro-dustbowl iconography of the Buy American logo: pure iconographic gibberish. You’re speaking political Engrish.
It’s like…remember when your hipster mom tried to jive talk you in your own groovy lingo? Even if she got all the words right, she never got the music, because it wasn’t hers to get. When you try to talk ‘winger to ‘wingers, you embarrass yourselves and you embarrass us and you never even know it. Just like mom.
Now, Bill Clinton could speak fluent redneck. He grew up in the tents of the enemy. He was an oily, flatulent huckster, but he had the language of right-wing flag-humping populism down flat. You Obama people? You don’t. Stop trying.
August 20, 2008 — 10:39 am
Comments: 77
Clown wars
“When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.”
Seriously? She was carrying all that around in her purse? Was the thumb drive labeled “Shhhh…Super Secret al Qaeda Plan to Take Over the World”? Was she wearing a little black mask and pants and a striped shirt with “TERRORIST” written on it? Has any nation ever faced an enemy more cartoonishly slap-dash, underripe and just plain bug-fuck crazy?
Let’s take just one datum and think it through a little. The Statue of Liberty has symbolic importance to Americans, so I’ll give them that. But it’s on an island and access is controlled by the Parks Service. A search is involved, so you couldn’t carry much in the way of explosives. Not sure what explosives would do, anyway; the statue itself is a thin skin of copper stretched over a steel framework. Hard to damage. Maybe you could fly a plane into it (I accidentally did that all the time with Microsoft Flight Simulator). Might or might not work. Plus, small body count. In sum, not a very good target. So why even put it on a list, let alone walk around with it?
These fuckers are always being picked up with “maps of the subway system” or “lists of targets” — stuff that’s easily Googlable, perfectly innocent in isolation and make NO sense to be carrying around, unless the whole purpose is to buy yourself a world of hurt and look menacing in a headline. Honestly, when you’re just blue-skying your evil plans, it’s really, really not a good idea to write it all down and carry it on your person.
An earlier ABC News article quoted the Afghanistan National Police as saying she was carrying materials from the “Anarchist’s Arsenal” — bet you anything that’s our old friend the Anarchist’s Cookbook, helping angry Americans blow themselves up since 1971. How terrorized am I supposed to be by a pack of bozos getting their doomsday weapons out of a book you can buy on Amazon for twenty bucks? I think MIT ripped this chick off.
Staunch righty that I am, it would cross my mind that the government is making all this stupid shit up, until I remember how much of it there is. Like, remember this guy? Mohammed Taheri-Azar, former University of North Carolina student. Pleaded guilty yesterday to nine counts of attempted murder. Avenged Muslim deaths around the world by driving his SUV into a crowd of UNC students. Really, Mo? That’s your evil plan?
You know, you can give ’em all the education you want, but someday they’ll break loose and fly off down the road waving their arms and going “ULULULULULULULU!”
It’s like we’re fighting the Global War against Angry Pinwheeling Retards.
August 13, 2008 — 9:57 am
Comments: 21
Happy Victory Over Japan Day, y’all!
Okay, it’s not literally VJ Day. That would either be August 15-ish, when Japan actually surrendered in dubya-dubya-eye-eye, or September 2, when they filled out the paperwork. But as Rhode Island is the last state to observe the holiday, we figure we can do it any time we like. So we do it on the second Monday in August.
When I was in the Boston office, it used to piss me off that half my colleagues got the day off and I didn’t. But now I’m in the Providence office, I’m like “ha ha! Take that, you smelly Boston office losers!”
I think we chickened out and changed the name to Victory Day, though. Or We Love Our Little Yellow Friends Across the Sea Day. Or maybe it’s The Unions Never Give Up a Paid Holiday Day.
What do I care? Day off! 🙂
It’s raining. 🙁
August 11, 2008 — 8:56 am
Comments: 28
Art Crime
Hey, y’all, I’m in an all-day meeting in the Boston office today. The good news is, my old Mazda dealership can fit me in. The bad news: the Weaselmobile is currently due for about $1,200 in routine maintenance. Yay!
I’ll leave you with this. Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart decided the best way to reach voters in his district was to mail them his own personal comic book. The article calls it “edgy”. I call it “a huge steaming pile of loose monkeyshit” — which is, come to think of it, what “edgy” usually means.
It would be a lot more fun if these vile, psychotic drawings were his own, but he actually hired somebody to draw them. Somebody who, presumably, got paid. (Somebody named Shane Suiters, who may or may not be a tattoo artist. Lots of stuff bounced up when I Googled his name, but nothing I felt confident enough to print. Try it! It’s fun!).
Sadly…yes. You guessed: Brent is a Republican. Though really mostly what he is is a nutter. He’s had conflicts with fellow Republicans on the board, at least one of whom has played the “I urge him to get help” card.
You can (and I encourage you to) download the whole masterpiece here (3 megs, .pdf). Now, don’t tear the place up while I’m gone. And somebody please remember to let the dog out at least once today. That wasn’t fun to come home to, last time.
August 7, 2008 — 6:10 am
Comments: 40
Caring is not helping
My mother taught special ed for years and years. She said you could tell when a volunteer was going to wash out in the first week, because she’d be all, “oh, the poor darlings!” You have to be able to make retard jokes to hack it in the retard biz.
Me, I tend to be pretty far over in the boo-hoo end of the scale. “Well, isn’t that special, Princess,” I says to myself, “you care too much to help. We call that: FAIL.” So I make myself do whatever half-assed stuff I can manage, like give blood or visit the pussoes. Then I go home and drink. I’m Mama’s special little throbbing raw nerve ending.
I have huge admiration for the people who shovel the world’s shit for a living. Doctors and nurses. Soldiers. Cops. There’s a reason all the hardest professions have a reputation for black humor: it’s the only way they can bear to do what they do. And it’s awfully easy to slip off the tippy top of that bell curve into one of the unhelpful places on either side.
I got here thinking about Ingrid Newkirk, wondering if she started out okay and went batshit insane staring into the abyss. I don’t think so. There’s another kind of person that thrives in dark places: the kind for whom misery is like oxygen. Doctors, as a class, have given the world more than their fair share of serial killers.
Sometimes I think only religious people should tackle the hard jobs. Specifically, religions which teach of an afterlife (or a future life) chock full of justice. Or retribution. At the very least, a damn good reason why things have to be the way they are.
August 6, 2008 — 2:57 pm
Comments: 16
There ain’t no God but Allah, y’all
Workers at the Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee get eight paid holidays a year. Under the new contract they just signed, Labor Day is no longer one of them. Instead, they traded it for Eid al-Fitr — the last day of Ramadan, when Muslims break fast.
That’s because more than half the workforce (700 out of 1,200) is Muslim. Mostly Somali.
Shelbyville. That’s like Bugtussle, folks. Possum Holler. East Dawgtesticle. Shelbyville makes Mayberry look like Gotham City. Or did.
Somalis. Aren’t they the guys that dragged our dead soldiers through the streets? Why are we importing them? In quantity? To little bitty towns in Tennessee? Seriously, WTF?
August 4, 2008 — 8:23 am
Comments: 69
Ingrid Newkirk killed a thousand dogs and cats with her own hands
Meet Ingrid Newkirk, found of PETA, self-described ‘press slut’ and crazier than a whole six-pack of post-experimental laboratory baboons. Her Wikipedia entry (from which I pinched all this) makes it clear she’s a complete nutter — and it was written by a sympathizer. (How do I know? The author describes an experience Ingrid had in India, watching villagers bind a dog’s “arms and feet.” Dogs don’t have arms, sweetcheeks. It’s legs all the way around. Only an animal rights activist can be that retarded about actual animals).
Ingrid was born in Ware, England (sorry, Uncle B) in 1949. Her dad was an engineer and the family moved to India when she was young. There she rescued strays and helped her mother (a volunteer for Mother Teresa) roll bandages and prepare medicine for the lepers. There, I suspect, she learned to loathe every living creature that moveth in the waters and every creature that creepeth upon the earth. Just a guess.
The family moved to the States in the ’60s and she didn’t do anything batshit insane, that I am aware of, until 1970. That year, she took a litter of kittens to the shelter in Poolesville, Maryland where they were promptly gassed. Also, it was a horrible place and the woman at the shelter was rude to her. That really, really upset her, so she decided to work there.
Does that make sense? No, of course it doesn’t.
She describes how horrible her co-workers were, kicking the animals around and “stepping on the animals, crushing them like grapes” and how she complained to management, but nothing was done. Did that happen? Maybe. But it has the thin, high music of a personal sadistic fantasy to me. Anyhow, her solution in her own words:
“In the end, I would go to work early, before anyone got there, and I would just kill the animals myself. Because I couldn’t stand to let them go through that. I must have killed a thousand of them, sometimes dozens every day.”
Oh-kay.
Right.
Whoo!
Oh, look! More crazy:
“On my way down into the District, I would stop in Potomac and pick up triple-ground prime meat … I would break a raw egg and take onions and capers and I would mix it all, and I would go about checking on the animals while eating this raw food right out of my hand.”
Before she went vegan, obviously. Handling animals and munching on a fistful of raw meat. Jesus fucking christ in a cornfield, that’s some serious crazy. Of course, eating excellent quality raw meat in front of an animal on a meager shelter diet would be a great way to tease the shit out of it. Just saying.
But wait! There’s more:
“Shelters cannot humanely house and support all these animals until their natural deaths—they would be forced to live for years, lonely and stressed, in cramped cages or kennels, and other animals would have to be turned away because there would not be room for them. Turning unwanted animals loose to roam the streets is not a humane option. If they don’t starve, freeze, get hit by a car, or die of disease, they may be tormented and possibly killed by cruel juveniles or picked up by dealers who obtain animals to sell to laboratories.”
Noticed what’s not listed as an option: adopting them out as pets. Because people like Ingrid believe animals that rub along pretty well with humans are traitors and must die. That’s why PETA shelters adopted out LESS THAN ONE PERCENT of the animals they took in in 2007. Ingrid must’ve called in sick the day those 17 animals found homes.
You know what? I’m not even going to talk about the good things PETA has done. Because they have done good things along with the stupid things, and on issues that are very important to me, and I’m madder than hell that a sadistic fuck like Ingrid Newkirk got her attention-whoring psychotic stink all over them.
Furylanche! Rottweilerlanche! Malkinlanche! (And anyone else whose kind link got buried under the giant footprint that is Michelle Malkin). Welcome! Stay! I’ll do my best to continue pissing you off in the worst way. Wait…that’s a good thing, right?
August 1, 2008 — 9:41 am
Comments: 48
PETA kills kittens…lots and lots of them…
Y’all knew that, right? Sorry to be a downer, after all the happy kitteh pictures this week, but I was banging around the Web Saturday, wondering what happened in that North Carolina animal cruelty case against PETA. I’ll forget if I don’t blog what I found.
Remember that case? Two PETA employees were nicked for dumping dead animals in a public dumpster behind a restaurant. Turns out, their ‘adoption’ van was a mobile death wagon. As Dana Cheek, formerly of the Norfolk SPCA, put it:
I often receive phone calls from frantic people who have surrendered their pets to PETA with the understanding that PETA will “find them a good home.” Many of them are led to believe that the animals will be taken to a nearby shelter. Little do they know that the pets are killed in the PETA van before they even pull away from the pet owner’s home … PETA refuses to surrender animals they obtain to area shelters for rehoming. If only the celebrity “deep-pocket” donors on the west coast knew that their donations were going to kill adoptable cats and dogs here in Norfolk.
PETA’s response is that the animals are ‘damaged’ and must be put down. Eighty percent of them? Bullshit! The city dogcatcher pulls a higher proportion of healthy cats out of a typical animal-hoarder’s den of filth. Some of the dead animals recovered in the North Carolina case were very adoptable kittens, not a mark on them.
Oh, the outcome of that case? Both acquitted in February on the serious charges of animal cruelty and obtaining property by false pretenses, but they got a littering rap. Like Arlo. At least the trial gave PETAkillsanimals.com some ammo: testimony under oath.
Like the admission that PETA got a $9,370 tax deduction in 2002 for a walk-in freezer. You know — to hold all the adorable fuzzy corpses. That’s what the pair in North Carolina did wrong, I guess: dumped the bodies rather than follow instructions and bring them back to HQ for blanching. (Incidentally, I love the way the freezer appears right after deductions for the Freeda the Fish and Lettuce Lady costumes. Hypocrisy much?).
Look, Providence Animal Control — where I hang out — is a pretty high-kill shelter, I suspect. The Kitteh Man there tries his best and, from what I can tell, makes pretty good choices (I’ve known him to stick his hand in his own pocket for vet services). I don’t ask questions about that part, but there’s too much of the farm girl in me to come down hard for no-kill-under-any-circumstances. But this is PETA we’re talking here. The meat is murder people.
Speaking of which, PETAkillsanimals.com is funded by the Center for Consumer Freedom — a pro-business, pro-restaurant, pro-pharmaceutical, pro-consumer group, which PETArds are apt to take as prima facie evidence that everything PKA says is crap. But facts is facts. And the FOIA is the FOIA. And who the hell else is going to be motivated to check out these sick fucks if not people who have been their targets? Just the occasional lonely journalist, crying in the wilderness.
Look…if you must, give your money to your local guys. The ones that are trying real hard and barely squeaking by. PETA doesn’t just kill kittens, it kills them for no damn reason at all.
Welcome ‘lanchers of various flavors. If this post makes you mad, check out the one above, about Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA. Make sure you’ve had your blood pressure meds first. Whoooeee!
July 31, 2008 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 29