The League of Duck-Slaying Moonbats
Well! Who would ever have thought? The American Hunters and Shooters Association has endorsed Barack Obama.
Who they? you may ask. Ignoring your appalling grammar for the moment, the AHSA is a flakey-fakey “gun-rights” organization set up solely to endorse far left entities like Barack Obama so all you beery gun-humping rednecks will think he’s a bit of okay.
It was founded in 2005 by Ray Schoenke, a Kos diarist who, in fairness, really does shoot ducks, apparently. At least, most of his conversations seem to take place in a duck blind. Schoenke has pissed away thousands on Handgun Control, Inc., Americans Coming Together and a dozen of the sleazeballingest Democrats ever to run for public office. So when Schoenke says “nonpartisan” you can be sure he’s just said a word that has four syllables.
The AHSA domain was originally registered to DCS, a Democrat new media operation, but they must have realized that didn’t look good.
Also not looking so good? Having John Rosenthal, once Chairman of the Massachusetts gun-grabbers Stop Handgun Violence, on the board. Under the bus with you, sir! Or, as they put it, “we acknowledge that his active involvement with certain gun control organizations made it very difficult for Mr. Rosenthal to subscribe to and support our policies that at times could be inconsistent with those of a pro-gun hunting and shooting organization.” I haven’t diagrammed a sentence in a real long time, but I’m pretty sure that one is accidentally WAY closer to the truth than they intended.
Their web site reads like somebody sat down of an afternoon and thought, “okay, but what if I really did like guns? What would that sound like?” Or as David Petzel of Field and Stream put it, “Mostly, their position statements are vapid, along the lines of ‘Don’t push old ladies into moving traffic. Don’t set stray dogs on fire.'”
In fact, the web site appears to be all there is to the AHSA. That, and press releases. And it’s working…kind of. US Snooze briefly reported the endorsement with a straight face. The Washington Post did a bit on them, too. I loved this part:
As proof of his gun-toting credentials, Schoenke says he likes nothing better than heading to Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shooting a duck, then cleaning it, cooking it and eating it. “I own guns,” he boasts. “I have guns everywhere.”
I have guns sticking out all over my body. When I open my mouth, guns fall out. On hot Summer days, guns ooze out of my pores. I shit guns, I swear to god. It’s hard to say which part of murdering a small fluffy animal I like best: the warm, slippery lifeblood pouring over my fingers, or the part where my teeth meet in its throat and the terrified thrashing and kicking get slower…slower…slower.
I love when lefties play pretend ‘winger: they’re so delightfully tone deaf.
Schoenke hopes this macho, carnivorous image will make pro-gun voters more open to accepting “common sense” limits on gun buying. Such changes can’t be so bad, he wants gunners to say, if fellow enthusiasts also support them.
Ch’mere! Ch’mere, rednecks! Gun! Pretty gun! No, no…lookit the gun! No, don’t look at the legislation, lookit the gun!
I’ve heard of these guys before, through the NRA (Schoenke has a massive hate-on for the NRA). Then Jonn of This Ain’t Hell posted about the Obama endorsement a couple of days ago. I went from there to Confederate Yankee to Say Uncle. Lots of stuff out there about them; there’s nothing new here. But it’s important to pile on. The AHSA exists solely to give pro-gun cred to anti-gunners.
That dog won’t hunt.
April 21, 2008 — 5:46 am
Comments: 61
An equality of misery: the only equality government can guarantee
The downside of the new, expanded Moronosphere: I keep reading stuff I want to go back to and I can’t remember where I saw it. Here’s one I managed to find again, thanks to Andrew’s Dad.
You probably heard that Cuba is finally going to unban cellphones (legally, anyway — a lot of ordinary Cubans had cadged phones off tourists). Here’s the charming way the AP put it:
Getting through the day without a cell phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to cell phones as well as kitchen appliances, hotels and other luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba.
Got that? To preserve relative economic equality, you must ban basic goods the rest of the world takes for granted. The equality of communism is an equal grinding poverty.
Why? Because you can’t make a poor man into a rich man by giving him money, but you can make a rich man poor by taking his stuff away and not letting him amass more. Rich and poor aren’t static qualities; they flow from attitudes and behaviors. The moment Cuba takes oppression away, some people — by fair means and foul — will manage to accumulate more than others.
You know the old saying: you could divide the world’s money equally among us and, five years later, we’d all be right back where we started. Me, I think there’d be some degree of permanent shift: good and bad luck are a factor in some fortunes. But the general principle holds.
You only have to look at the number of people whose lives are ruined by winning the lottery. Like these lumpen idiots who won £100,000 on a scratch ticket in 2006. They’ve pissed it all away, and now they’re back demanding government benefits.
That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the reaction of posters on the site where I read about it: many said government benefits are a right and lottery winnings are a windfall that is supposed to be pissed away on luxuries.
An attitude of poverty.
April 16, 2008 — 12:34 pm
Comments: 37
Shattering my worldview, one dead hippie peace activist at a time
Okay, so this Italian artist — Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, known as Pippa Bacca — decides to hitch right across the Middle East to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Wearing a wedding dress. For peace.
I know: makes perfect sense to me, too. “She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.”
Okay, y’all aren’t going to believe this next part: it didn’t have a happy ending.
She was hitching with a friend. They separated in Istanbul and planned to meet up again in Beirut.
Then she vanished and turned up naked and stone dead under some bushes in the woods in Turkey.
A Turk named Murat Karatas was nicked when he tried to use her cellphone. He confessed he had picked her up at a gas station and raped and murdered her.
I know! Can you believe it? It’s like the ordinary laws of time and space don’t apply!
April 12, 2008 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 56
Madness
The San Francisco City Hall is a beautiful, ornate building in the Beaux-Arts style. It was built to replace one the earthquake knocked down and has been continuously renovated, including a record-breakingly huge seismic retrofit of the dome after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
But they missed a spot. In the room where the Board of Supervisors sits, the president’s chair is on a raised dais. Five steps leading to one chair. Steps without handicap access.
This is San Francisco we’re talking. Can’t just let it go. Particularly when Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier — who is not the president and never will be, but is in a wheel chair — threatens to sue the city.
Okay, whatever. Let the lady have her ramp. What can it possibly cost to build a ramp over five steps? Oh, about a million and a quarter.
It starts with a hundred grand worth of design work and 3D models. Then there’s the asbestos tile and lead paint removal. The dias is carved out of Manchurian oak, and they don’t just give that stuff away in corn flake boxes, you know.
Let’s see…there’s a supervisor, a construction consultant and an electrical consultant. The Bureau of Architecture, Bureau of Construction Management and Department of Technology and Information Services get involved. There’s $16,500 just in permits and fees. Oh, these things add up. Even before you toss in the $300,000 for the new audio-visual system, which you might as well do at the same time because construction will mess with the existing system.
The kicker? The president doesn’t actually use the chair these days. He sits on the floor with everyone else. So the chair is entirely symbolic.
Exactly! says Michela Alioto-Pier. Symbols matter. We didn’t leave the segregated waterfountains in place because they were historical, did we?
“I deserve equal access to every part of the chamber,” Alioto-Pier told her colleagues, adding that ending discrimination is worth the $1 million.
Discrimination. White people discriminated against black people. The laws of physics discriminate against cripples. Honestly, it’s not the same thing, injustice-wise. And I wonder when persons of color are going to get sick of the civil rights movement being compared to every little bitch and gripe on the leftist To Do list.
The president of the Board of Supervisors balked (after the price tag went public, anyhow), pointing out that a million plus can build a lot of ramps around the city that people will actually use, but Alioto-Pier will have none of it. Access to every inch of City Hall is what she wants, and the law by-god says she should have it.
And this is what’s wrong with grievance politicians: they don’t hugely care about fixing anything. Making things better would be bad for business. It’s about proving how important their particular special need is by forcing vast sums of public money to be thrown at it. It’s about status and dominance and sweet, sweet media attention. It’s about harnessing the awesome power of the state to their personal attention whoring.
That’s how you spot professional activists: when you give them what they want, they get angrier.
I remember years ago, we were all pretty embarrassed when it was pointed out how simple it would be to make sidewalks easier for people in wheelchairs. Everyone happily signed onto the sensible idea of a few spots near the entrance for handicapped parking. That turned into this. Bad liberal movements often get their first push from the good nature of the general population.
See, lefties, this is why righties fight your pet causes so hard. It’s not that wingers hate cripples. It’s that whenever we think we’re signing up for a sensible solution to a real problem, somehow ten years down the line you have us paying $10,000 an inch for an empty gesture. Just to prove you can.
April 2, 2008 — 9:11 am
Comments: 35
Spitzer: cold feet not an option
So, it turns out somebody working for Republican operative Roger Stone dropped a dime on Elliot Spitzer. Or, more accurately, dropped an email to the FBI. Stone got his information from ”a social contact in an adult-themed club.”
Per the Wikipedia entry, Stone is the one who organized the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” — remember all those dudes in natty suits hammering on the doors where the Florida recount was happening? That thing. He recently founded an anti–Hillary Clinton 527 called Citizens United Not Timid, acronym intentional.
The thumbnail biography makes him sound a bit of nutter, actually.
Anyhow, there’s old bad blood between him and Spitzer, apparently. Chris Matthews accused Stone on-air of leaving a threatening message on Spitzer’s dad’s answering machine, referring to the former as your “phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son.”
I don’t find the story all that interesting, but I could not possibly walk past this datum:
“It is also my client’s understanding from the same source that Gov. Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information.”
It’s those little details that breathe life into a drama, you know?
March 24, 2008 — 2:50 pm
Comments: 22
African plus American does not equal African-American
For somebody who doesn’t like to talk about race, I’ve certainly done a lot of it this week. Eh. Here goes. This article in the American Spectator touched on something that I’ve thought a lot about in the days since Obama’s Pastor Wright problem surfaced: the profound hostility that often exists between African Americans of different shades of brown.
Check out this widely circulated picture of Wright and Obama together. The two men don’t have a hell of a lot of melanin between them. Wright is the paler of the two; he could easily pass for some variety of Southern European. Obama isn’t much darker, and he has an added problem: he’s no more descended from slaves than I am.
I’m guessing both men have been deeply pained by identity problems in their lives. Wright tried to solve his and cement his group identity by wearing dashikis and peddling the most vitriolic hate-whitey creed he could get away with. Obama tried to solve his and cement his group identity by cleaving to Wright — and, clearly, Obama would rather throw his typical white grandmother under a bus than renounce the relationship.
Is he going to skate on this? I don’t know. I watched the Race Speech live and thought it sounded polished and thoughtful. But he’s gotten this far by promising white folks he’s something new. This week, he felt compelled to reassure black folks he’s something old and familiar.
March 21, 2008 — 12:44 pm
Comments: 4
The doctor called. Your purity test came back…
Purity test. Feh. I could live without hearing that phrase again. Oooo…conservatives are applying purity tests. How intolerant, priggish, stubborn, unreasonable. Is that a niff of Church Lady I smell? Bullshit. Bullshit tactics worthy of a liberal.
Look, most of us depart in some way from conservative orthodoxy. But because conservatism is a structure built on ideas, where we dissent, we have to explain. How can the platform can stand with a plank removed? People who pick and choose issues randomly without regard to the underlying ideas — à la carte Republicans — can fairly be suspected of not having a fucking clue what they believe.
Take abortion. Not one of ‘my’ issues, really, but it’s a good illustration. I think we’d all agree that the central problem is when does a fetus become a human being? — with the right putting the blessed event more toward the whoopee end of the process and the left more toward the owee end.
Would that be fair? Once it’s a people, you can’t kill it; until then, you’ve got some leeway, right?
So whichever way you come down on this one, you would logically come down the same way on the fetal stem cell question, no? Well, not necessarily. I can imagine ways to justify being, say, anti-abortion and pro-fetal stem cell research.
Pretty good reasoning: embryos for research are taken early, before I believe they constitute a human. Abortion, on the other hand, is still legal too late in the process.
Okay reasoning: I don’t think the fetus is a person, but I believe abortion is harmful to women psychologically and should be outlawed on that basis.
Bad, morally confused reasoning: fetal stem cell research “has helped make progress against Parkinson’s disease.” He added, “I’d like to have less intensity on this issue.”
So, there you have it! Murder, not murder. Whatevs. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.
March 18, 2008 — 12:06 pm
Comments: 43
I did not know that
It doesn’t quite line up with what one may hear from Amnesty International and its ilk, but in fact there is a long line of people waiting to get into Gitmo. The U.S. Coast Guard reportedly intercepts some 600 refugees, not all of them from Cuba, in the sea around the base every month. Gitmo itself houses around 30 migrants at any given time.
—Jacob Laksin The American Spectator
March 14, 2008 — 8:12 am
Comments: none
Blind Lemon Paterson
Whoa! I just found out (via Protein Wisdom) that the lieutenant governor of New York is a brother. And he’s blind. That is so excellent! Why, the blues lyrics practically write themselves!
Look! He even has a little blues beard and everything.
According to GaySocialites.com (what? I found it on a Google images search), Republican Joe Bruno of the Senate will then become Lt. Governor. And Paterson was originally tipped to replace Hillary! should she claw her way to the presidency (he’s an experienced NY pol), so New York politics should shake up nicely after this. Thank you, Eliot Spitzer, for being such a horndog scumbag.
I wonder if that means Paterson can pick Bruno’s successor? I believe the R’s have a one-seat majority at present, so that could be even interestinger.
This is as good a place as any to post the Rules for Blues. Uncle B sent me this recently (well, this particular version I snagged off the Web on account of I can’t access my email from work. Yeah. Got the blues about that). The original Rules for Blues started out modestly in 1947 and quickly took on a life of its own. Here’s a standard incarnation.
1. Most Blues begin, “Woke up this morning.”
2. “I got a good woman,” is a bad way to begin the Blues, ‘less you stick something nasty in the next line, like “I got a good woman with the meanest face in town.”
3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes … sort of: “Got a good woman – with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Margaret Thatcher – and she weigh 500 pound.”
4. The Blues are not about choice. You stuck in a ditch: You stuck in a ditch, ain’t no way out.
5. Blues cars: Chevys and Cadillacs and broken down trucks. Blues don’t travel in Volvos, BMWs, or Sport Utility Vehicles. Most Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Jet aircraft and state-sponsored motor pools ain’t even in the running. Walkin’ plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does fixin’ to die.
6. Teenagers can’t sing the Blues. They ain’t fixin’ to die yet. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, adulthood means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.
7. Blues can take place in New York City, but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada. Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just depression. Chicago, St.Louis, and Kansas City still the best places to have the Blues. You cannot have the blues in any place that don’t get rain.
8. A man with male pattern baldness ain’t the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is. Breaking your leg cuz you skiing is not the blues.
9. Breaking your leg cuz a alligator be chomping on it is.
10. You can’t have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The lighting is wrong. Go outside to the parking lot or sit by the dumpster.
11. Good places for the Blues: a) highway b) jailhouse c) empty bed
Bad places: a) Nordstrom’s b) gallery openings c) Ivy League institutions d) golf courses.
12. No one will believe it’s the Blues if you wear a suit, ‘less you happen to be a old black man, and you slept in it.
13. Do you have the right to sing the Blues? Yes, if: a) you’re older than dirt b) you’re blind c) you shot a man in Memphis d) you can’t be satisfied.
No, if: a) you have all your teeth b) you were once blind but now can see c) the man in Memphis lived d) you have a retirement plan or trust fund.
14. Blues is not a matter of color. It’s a matter of bad luck. Tiger Woods cannot sing the blues. Gary Coleman could. Ugly white people also got a leg up on the blues.
15. If you ask for water and Baby give you gasoline, it’s the Blues. Other acceptable Blues beverages are: a) bad wine b) bad whiskey or bad bourbon c) muddy water d) black coffee. The following are NOT Blues beverages: a) mixed drinks b) kosher wine c) Snapple d) sparkling water.
16. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it’s a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying lonely on a broken down cot. You can’t have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or getting liposuction.
17. Some Blues names for women: a) Sadie b) Big Mama c) Bessie d) Fat River Dumpling.
Some Blues names for men: a) Joe b) Willie c) Little Willie d) Big Willie.
Persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia, and Rainbow can’t sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.
18. Make yer own Blues name (starter kit): name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.) first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi, etc.) last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.) For example, Blind Lime Jefferson, or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc.
19. I don’t care how tragic your life: you own a computer, you cannot sing the blues. You best destroy it – with fire, a spilled bottle of Mad Dog, or get out a shotgun. Maybe your big woman just done sat on it. I don’t care.
March 12, 2008 — 8:12 am
Comments: 26
So what’s halfway between a pickle and a hammer?
I don’t know, but it’s hard and it’s sour.
The language of politics is unhelpful. Left and right. Conservative and progressive. Red and blue. There are places halfway between these two things, aren’t there?
No. There are not.
Let’s stop and bold that sucker: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HALFWAY BETWEEN CONSERVATIVE AND PROGRESSIVE.
Each side has a coherent philosophy, a whole set of ideas about how the world works and the proper role of government. The individual issues they address are, for the most part, different. Not on a continuum. You either understand and buy in, or you don’t. You can believe something totally different, but you cannot blend left and right and make a convincing picklehammer.
Zo! A centrist isn’t a mild variety of lefty or righty. A centrist is someone who, at some level, doesn’t get the central argument of either side. They are some combination of
Confused. Intellectually lazy. Not possessing an underlying philosophy at all, approaching every issue individually. Cafeteria style.
Opportunistic. Seeing R and D purely as a branding issue. When one or the other parties has an exceptionally strong election, these are the people who discover whole new worlds of conviction and cross the aisle to sit with the popular kids.
Idiosyncratic. I’m a bit in this camp, myself. Most of us are. There are some parts of the platform I don’t buy. It’s okay to differ from a political orthodoxy, if you can explain how it still works. Ideologies are whole structures; if you pull out that one plank, explain why the the building doesn’t fall down. If you pull out a bunch of planks, you’ll have to use the lumber to build something new.
I’d rather argue with a leftist than a centrist any day. The leftist at least has a structure to push against. Arguing with a ‘moderate’ is like snot wrestling.
March 11, 2008 — 10:54 am
Comments: 78