Obama - more concerned about birth control than rising gas prices

It'd be like if JFK were more worried about fat kids during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obama's Political Understanding of Sex: Get Involved. Do you really want government in the bedroom though telling insurance companies they have to pay for contraceptives for women? Now to me Sex is a private affair and I wouldn't think of walking around White Plains all day begging for a handout to pay for some rubbers and a tube of Astroglide but they're saying now gas is gonna hit some kind of record this summer, might reach $5/gallon and this of course has to do with Iran (many say oil speculators - http://weblogs.wpix.com/news/larrymendte/2011/05/wall_street_does_it_again.html). Now you'll notice once Khadafy bit the dust the price of regular began to dip ever so slightly but Jim Cramer of Mad Money said this morning on the Today Show that as long as Iran has its nuclear program gas will be a problem, oh God you mean 'til the End Times!?! True Iran only exports about 2.5% of its oil to the US but the bulk of it goes to Europe and then there's the critical Strait of Hormuz to consider which Iran has threatened to cut off. So what does Obama do? he grabs the horns of the Catholic Church over an issue formerly understood and settled, Don't Go There. Pick a fight with the RC Church in an election year with gas set to hit $5/gal - WTG!!! your political advisors must hate you. BTW congrats to His Eminence from NY Cardinal Dolan. I was reading in the paper the other day that David Brock of Media Matters is literally spending millions of dollars to get more favorable media coverage of Obama (HUH?). They'll be more than happy to do it for free David with Brian Williams sucking on his left nut and Rachel Maddow directing the jizm onto a poster of Rick Santorum. Just read on Drudge the European Union has just approved a whopping $172B bailout for Greece. Of course there has to be some deep cuts and oversight......hey Obama are you following any of this? Now I realize many of the Kool-Aid drinkers out there still see Obama as some kind of Savior but even as Messiahs go he's pretty weak. I think Dolan sucked all his charisma out of him and I just know he has a big old cold one on tap if Obama goes down to defeat.

Politics or the Simple Tale of John and Moussa

Moussa was my colleague in the chef section, a kind of gourmet food niche and John worked in bakery with his croissants and rum-babas and tiramisu, rolls and cinnamon twists. So anyways one day Moussa is complaining because he hasn't had a day off in like 10 or 11 days, in fact he's agitated and who wouldn't be. Say last week he had Monday off and this week he has a Friday off just to set the scene. Sometimes managers due this out of mysterious vindictive motives known only to them but whatever. Of course as should be well known by now the workplace trend these days is only one day off a week 'til we get like Japan with no days off and we wind up literally killing ourselves jumping out of windows 'cause we can't take it anymore. OK so John says "you don't get it. This week starts a new schedule, it's a new week" but Moussa counters with "It's not right, I had last Monday off and this week I have to wait 'til Friday to have a day off. That's like 10 or 11 days of straight work." John: "You don't understand, it's a new week." Mousse: "yada yada yada" - John: "You don't get it, last week is last week and this week is a new week." Moussa: "I'm thinking of calling the union." John: "See here's the thing, last week..." So back and forth they go in this fashion for like 20 minutes saying the exact and I mean exact same thing and I'm just listening to this fine conversation dicing my veggies and checking the roast beef, really honing in. Now they both were saying the truth parts of it anyway, Moussa was right that he had to work like 10 straight days but John was also right that this is a new workweek and as such your day off may change and frequently does. Neither one understood or quite comprehended the other's point so after a bonus round of about 10 minutes of this stuff it kind of petered itself out and they kinda didn't talk to each other after this. So that was that. It was hilarious:)

To kind of cap off the previous abortion thread

When you consider trans-fats, smoking, incandescent light bulbs, school vouchers, the 2nd Amendment, dirty jokes in the workplace, asking a woman out more than once, religious groups in NYC being able to use public-school buildings for after-hours prayer services...Oh God the list gets long!...cupcakes in school vending machines, the right of the average American to be as fat and lazy as he/she wants, making gay jokes, the right of the Church to provide their employees health coverage consistent with their moral and religious beliefs, giving more of their own money back to the American taxpayer to use as they see fit, the freedom of businesses to yes fail (gasp!), hydrofracking for natural gas and thereby creating thousands of new jobs in a bad economy etc. etc. etbloodycetera aren't conservatives for more freedom across-the-board than your average liberal? Can we sum it up best this way? -- Many conservatives are not pro-choice on abortion but are pro-choice about nearly everything else whereas many liberals are pro-choice on abortion but not much else?

Frustrations of a blogger

What are yours? For me it's a quite long laundry list and cumulatively it makes for a far less enjoyable session at the old blog than it normally would be. The comment section doesn't usually go quite the way you expected, not that it should and therein lies the adventure but there are frequent misrepresentations and misreadings of what you just posted for the day. There's a steady diet of ad hominem and sometimes even a lack of respect for the host, the administrator, the moderator, that'd be me. People say the snarkiest things, it's the old social curare dart shot in the neck through a straw (phhhewt...) and happens at the least expected moments like when you sit down with your coffee and cruller and you're in a fairly good mood all things considered. There's the existential putdown, you're this you're that and then the Arguments from Intimidation which is heavily tied in with ad hominem. There are personal attacks on you at other blogs from time to time, there's the closing off of debates through their own definition of terms and sets of facts as used by some commenters, there's the endless hairsplitting and parsing of language which misses the larger points as usual and makes for dry reading like the warranty on your new toaster oven (you'd think this were an ABA or National Law Journal blog). There's posting without thinking, impetuous commenting, happens alot. Folks who can't understand your point or who choose not to and this doesn't mean you have to agree. So would a monologue be better, closing off the Comments Section entirely? not here but maybe more editorial control would. A blog is better than a forum as you have a far more creative and artistic say over things and you don't have to deal with an omnipresent mod all the time because you're in effect the mod. It's your own creative domain but as such if you delete what you don't like then you're a censor. What to do, what to do??? Well anyway if you want I'll throw out the usual topic:

Charlie Sheen are you paying attention?

Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston (RIP 1963-2012)

So why is "pro-abortion" such an offensive term?

The vast majority of folks who oppose abortion much prefer to go by the label "pro-life." However most people would also say that despite their preferred political and philosophical description they do in fact oppose the practice of abortion or are what you would call anti-abortion. The vast majority of folks who want abortion to be kept legal much prefer to go by the label "pro-choice" but despite their preferred moniker it would seem logical to me that many of them are underneath it all also pro-abortion. I much understand the standard practice of preferred labeling or packaging, it makes sense on alot of levels and not meaning to be contentious here but what's the difference?

Honesty (not so much)

I'm gonna have to take my car in for an oil change perhaps next week. Now every mechanic you ask will tell you have your oil changed every 3,000 miles (don't believe me go do a survey) but when I was reading my Honda Civic manual a few weeks ago it said every 5,000 miles. Hmmmmmm. Your doctor tells you to drop the weight and we'll take you off the blood-pressure meds, it was ALOT of hard work with constantly reinforced social pressure at places like work to not lose that much weight and not only that but you shed 5-10 bonus pounds just for good measure and your doctor still keeps you on the pills and you politely remind him of this. Does he have stock in the pharmaceutical industry? perhaps the Vytorin tissue box in the waiting room is an indication. Older married woman at work with an autistic son, kinda uses her personal situation for leverage to get the hours she wants and to get out of jury duty. It's not like she's a single mom and he's at home alone and can hurt himself and autism is the thing these days anyway, they get by. Look I have a couple of autistic cats. Those high school girls in upstate NY you may have heard in a town you probably never heard of by the name of Le Roy, they mysteriously came down with Tourette's-like symptoms but the authorities and experts and resident psychologists are chalking it up to, you guessed it Anxiety. Look there's alot of free-floating anxiety in the air these days, God knows I've been dealing with it my whole life but I never twitched or cursed somebody out because of it. What a bunch of bullshit and I don't think even the paid shrinks believe one word of it. Turns out that according to one local newscast here there was once some sort of toxic train wreck once in Le Roy's history and Erin Brockovich has gotten involved not that anybody's not telling the Truth here. It's like at work with the weird psychedelics in the water, well if you're not feeling well one day they'll always chalk it up to you're known to partake of the adult beverages on a fairly regular basis, you may have made the mistake of letting this slip in loose conversation perhaps in a humorous vein and he has been dieting recently (read: starving himself). You see Truth these days is like the Constitution, it's elastic. It's not outright dishonesty or lying, it's a shading, a stretching, selecting the best elements of truth out there that most strike your fancy like those Le Roy girls probably do have some anxiety (who doesn't?) hence ~~~ or since most new cars do require a more frequent oil change well a car's a car or yeah you lost over 60 lbs. and we did say weight is a major factor but your blood pressure's still too close to 140 (actually maybe it was 132 over 84 that day and that was right after work) and well you can never be too careful (read: lawsuits), it's your health after all. Honesty, now don't be a glutton now:)

Would libertarians have gone to war against Hitler?

I was pondering this thought today and I think not. The fact that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust would have been deemed an internal affair by the libertarian/isolationist mind and in this thought experiment I have to kind of leave out Japan and Pearl Harbor since even Ron Paul I believe would go to war if our country were directly attacked. What's up with China and Russia these days, are they some sort of evil Axis or something? Maybe there's some truth to the various evangelical/ultra-traditional Catholic apocalyptic scenarios that they're gonna be two very heavy players in the End Times and not in a good way. Syria's Bashar al-Assad continues to kill innocent Syrian anti-government protesters practically on a daily basis now, the UN finally gets some gumption to at least condemn his tyranny and to call for regime change but China and Russia shoot it down by exercising their vetoes. In fact some Russian minister explained the decision by saying the proposed UN resolution amounts to a call for regime change, well DUH!!! The guy's a despot and mass murderer in the best mold and then President Obama who has finally gotten somewhat heated over the situation says a military option is off the table. That would be grudgingly respectable had he not gone after Col. Moammar Khadafy but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds as they say. I do agree with Ron Paul on a number of things, turns out the Bunny Ranch in Nevada is enthusiastically supporting his candidacy because he's for states' rights and has said you can't legislate virtue. I'm not so sure if I'd want the 'hos and potheads behind me though but he's ultimately unelectable imo and I believe that is due to his extreme isolationism and the Hitler question proposed at the top there would be an excellent excellent question to pose to him in debate again leaving out the whole Hirohito angle and truthfully I don't think the Jewish issue was why we went to war in the first place. Hitler did in fact pose a grave threat to the entire world if you understand your History but the salient point here is even if a libertarian were to say it was right to go to war against Germany the Jews would not enter into the equation and that's what I'm getting at which brings up the whole other issue of anti-Semitism. Apartheid in South Africa and the government killing of anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, was that our concern too? Rwanda? Yes for me at least but a libertarian is apt to say no so that brings up that whole other can of worms regarding Race. I'll let soapie sort out the fine print, I'm only posing the Questions.