It ain't Merry Christmas but it'll do

Instead of starting a blog about quasars or the Gaza Strip or wallpaper or God forbid Happy Holidays and having it turn into some pro-abortion cistern of bad feeling I wanted to say something about my fellow Social Conservatives here. I don't see them poking their noses into people's lives. They live by broad social conservative principles, let's say they don't have sex outside of marriage and this covers a lot of ground I never heard of a group of them conducting surveys in their local neighborhoods on your sexual habits. The chances are very very good indeed they don't know anything about what Bob or Collins are doing or what Myself is up to (if anything, I think they talk big and wouldn't surprise me if one is 18 and blogging in his basement when he needs to be cleaning his room). In my neck of the woods I have absolutely no idea who's had or been a party to an abortion and I don't see myself trying to find out. Honestly I don't think conservatives as a rule conduct sex surveys at all, wasn't it Kinsey and Masters & Johnson who wanted to know what we were all up to? I always thought the man in the M&J team looked like that guy in Phantasm with the killer ball which brings to mind what one young wag once said on the Phil Donahue show: "how come most sex therapists look like you wouldn't want to have sex with them?" Dr. Ruth may be a veritable fount of sexual knowledge but let's pretty much keep it on an intellectual level. So besides social conservatives having a broad set of philosophical and moral principles they live by or at least try to (nothing wrong with having goals) I don't see how they're poking their nose into People's Business. I'm hearing a lot of talk of late but not much backing up. Now watch this blog get a big fat goose egg for comments and I'll start a blog about stamp collecting and everybody will unload. Fair Warning though, if you want to be an asshole and post about abortion on a totally non-abortion related topic I'm gonna delete your ass as in permanently.

I can't put my finger on it

There's a rather sizeable subgroup of people out there, they're not bad people by any stretch, you don't hate them, they don't deserve your opprobrium but there's just something about them, they're vaguely annoying, irritating in some way. Worked with a young guy once, didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't even drink coffee because it has caffeine. He came to work every single day always it seemed with a good night's sleep under his belt. I talked about it one day with someone how he's always so highly alert, efficient and she said "he doesn't abuse his body" but I found him annoying anyway with his energy/vitamin drink he always carried around with him. He seemed too perfect, the kind who lived a perfect life, never even uncorked one in a pinch, probably has a minor fortune in the bank because he always did the right thing and saved his money, never went out on New Year's and got hammered. He never came to work complaining of a poor night's sleep and for that reason alone you can't relate to him, you begin to think he's hiding some vast and dark secret, dust off the skeleton in the closet oh boy! as my friend said some people will put down gays but they'll be living weird lives themselves. I remember reading a newsletter from Fr. Bruce Ritter of Covenant House fame and how he was driving one day and on came Dr. Ruth with her "evil little chortle" as he put it (good line though) but look what happened to him. So the guy always did the same thing everyday, he'd sometimes go without his lunch maybe not so much to impress but because virtue demanded it. As a Religious Extremist I should have liked the guy but he was so perfect you began thinking if you hired a crane and tore down his house somewhere beneath the ruins would be his scat video collection or hire a PI and you'd find him going into some dungeon. You don't drink you don't smoke I'm cool with that, you don't have your cup of coffee or tea in the morning and you got my curiosity up bossman,

what's your story?

As a person...

...who feels that the majority of us do not wind up in Hell as a religious extremist I'm somewhat of a disappointment. I've always maintained it's a theological mystery and have a problem when priests or ministers go out on a limb here in their sermons. I'm not dogmatic either, it's none of the pastor's business imo how many times Lino circle-jerked on a Friday night. I find it hard not to be spiritual though and if anything anti-religious extremism is a problem. When Michael Schiavo forbade the hospice chaplain from giving Terri a drink of wine as part of the Last Rites that's pretty creepy in my book but anywho let's get to the nub or the hub shall we and define this case known in the lefty blogosphere as Religious Extremism, as it stands now it's a little vague and I invite as much bloviating and ranting as possible. If you don't believe in mermaids then why do you obsess about them?

Someone once told me the brain is like a computer

sometimes it needs to be reprogrammed. From drug abuse to disease you need to have the software put in again from time to time and maybe this will be the key to understanding modern medicine in the future. Might be a better pro-choice debate as well, had to have been some acidhead to come up with a rationale for partial-birth. Some people never sleep they're so wired, you have to shut the computer off at night you know and even then dreams are Nature's way of working out issues while you're asleep. Looking at some old black and white photographs is like googling your memory or mindbank, it's a wealth of data and I've been wondering of late why so many TV series having a new season start showing repeats about half way through, shouldn't be unless the writers are on drugs, Life gives you too much material I would think. People who masturbate your mind.

The thing I find annoying about smokers

Has nothing to do with the morality or health of the issue but a woman came over for Christmas and I'm watching her. Just in the door and she lights up and I'm fine, immediately after that she lights one up again and barely ten minutes go by and she's on her third one, another guest doing the same thing. It ain't the second-hand smoke either, I allow guests considerable social latitude it's that they ain't even enjoying it like you would a fine cigar or a pipe. Chain-smoking, hell why don't they just eat them? shove 'em in their mouth for lunch, have one coming out of the nostril and both ears while we're at it. It's a vile habit in the sense there's no sophistication involved like seeing a Cannon (William Conrad) fly-fishing in a trout stream with some apple tobacco wafting out of his pipe -- now that's living.

thoughts on a cold winter's night

musing while under the influence

They say you need to get that piece of paper to make it in Life but the real problem with Higher Education is not liberal college professors indoctrinating their class in the ways of radical leftism, WGAF?, the eggheads have a right to think and talk but the real issue is the typical liberal arts curriculum is so impractical. IMO you can't force someone to like the Bard or learn calculus and I've as yet to use higher math in my day-to-day affairs. You need to hone in and zone in on what truly interests you and that's where your trade or technical school is far better. Two years of college was enough for me, I now know who Jean-Paul Sartre was so I can now drop it in my blogging and impress everybody, yip-tee-doo! Like my chef friend says in France someone who knows how to cook is revered, over here you're kind of considered a failure, you're not up there on the same par with a clinical psychologist with a built-in pool in his backyard and a tennis court. People like you, oh you can cook? but like THAT'S IT??

Thoughts during Catholic worship. Nowadays practically 95% of the congregation goes up to Communion. Me? maybe half the time, the other half I don't feel worthy, there's something about the slime of sin, nothing major mind you but these folks who go up every Sunday without fail, are they that good?? I'm not buying it. Now the ones who sit it out, the few in the back who stick out like sore thumbs, the 40-something guy in the rear, you can't help but wonder what he did. It's none of my business but I think it involves a porno.

I have a beautiful view from my window during those bone-chilling winter nights. I can see downtown Yonkers and parts of Manhattan and there's just a gorgeous view of the GW Bridge. Life is good but I don't know why.

Seems to me they should have a system in place, some kind of heating cables under our roads right now so driving in January and February would be a breeze. Futuristic you say? well we found time to put a man on the Moon but we're like supposed to be some advanced civilization no? Of course this would cut into bailout money but you know at least have a theory in place by now.

Reminds me I have to get some eggnog, special blend later.

Buffers or the value of bad workers

EVERY place needs at least a few bad workers, there shouldn't be too many of them in any one workplace of course just one or two mind you and here's the reason why. They're buffers, let me say that again, you're working with a couple of buffers. A buffer is a bad worker but who is beneficial to you, he/she takes the boss's mind off what you're doing and onto what they're doing and it's always fun to talk about the buffer anyway, it's water cooler talk and would you rather they talk about you? The buffer just called out sick and threw a wrench into the whole work schedule so the boss starts talking about Ray as usual and you put in your two cents "yeah that Ray, what's up with that? calling out sick at the last minute. In my day..." so everybody likes to complain about Ray. What you want to do is never ever see the buffer(s) get fired, you certainly don't want to be instrumental in their firing yourself, you'll come to regret it later. Yeah the buffers get canned and you're all happy the next day but then the boss starts noticing more of what you're doing, those minor mistakes they always pick up on and you don't know what you had 'til you lost it, them were the days. Once worked with a kid, annoying as hell, always coming to work late with the most flimsy excuses but over time you find you can't hate him and that's the key to recognizing good buffer material, you don't know it yet but something tells you he's valuable as long as there's not too many of them and that's also pivotal to Z's Buffer Theory as long as they're not overly common their value actually increases. You actually become very tolerant of them whereas in the past you hated their guts, I mean it's not like the whole workplace sucks and once you recognize the practical reality of the situation you can more than deal with it, hell you might even buy him a beer. So never underestimate the value of a bad worker.

travelblogging, my landmark is the trump building

Had the day off yesterday and we went to the Yonkers Raceway Diner, had the Irish Breakfast and he had the Country-Style. You always have to have a cup of joe in a diner, it's mandatory and so I suggest we go to the newly renovated Greenburgh Public Library which just reopened yesterday. We work our way there, it's a meandering roadtrip as always 'cause that's how we like to do it and we pass the porno guy. He's a little shop on a busy, heavily traveled commercial thoroughfare and my friend goes "what's up with the main entrance? People go to this place, people they know can see them going in. It should have a back entrance or something, you have to go to the back of the hardware store first and then go through the sewer system." "Yeah, he can meet you midway in the ventilation duct." On the way to the fresh SuperLibrary, you can feel the pull of the magnetic structure at this point and I have a slight problem with our celebrity culture and media overexposure: "Jennifer Aniston does nothing for my life, how does it help?" We go inside the library, it's modern and hip architecture all the way, a corporate look, more spatial dimensions than anything else and it's so damn quiet. I know libraries are supposed to be this way but it's more than a tad eerie. You get that very strong futuristic sense "like some android or cyborg in a white lab coat asks if he can help you" - "I'm not John Connor." Great computer lab here though, a guy can blog his heart away. The main goal of our trip now over he says let's go over to the White Plains Mall. It's easy to go to from here, just follow the Landmark. I'm not too thrilled with this place, it's rundown and doesn't even have a FYE store but he tells the story of it's one of the original malls in the country. I think it's gangster but we go anyway. The comic and graphic books store is closed though on Tuesdays, must be the dork's high holy day or something so we hit the Japanese supermarket instead. Great seafood area, a big squid on ice with its eye looking at you, 10+ lb. bluefish, red snappers, Chilean Sea Bass, blue-claw crabs. Not too keen on the butcher section though, there's some cow tongue on display, some stomachs but I'm told it's a cultural thing, the Japanese use every part of the animal, it's their way of honoring it. That's nice but I think I'll pass on the chicken feet. We were barely in the mall for half an hour, maybe a little more and the municipal parking cost us 3 dollars!! (thuganomics). Now we're right up close to the new Trump Building in White Plains, a monstrosity, a beacon, a landmark, a tribute to EGO and my friend says he can see it all the way from the Palisades Parkway in Jersey. No matter where I drive I can see it for literally miles, it could even pass for a navigational marker for extraterrestrials. We drive past the wholesale flower place we used to work at, it's a nostalgic thing but it's now an electrical supply company, nothing lasts anymore it seems, New World Order stuff. We head on home, we could get a porno air freshener but we pass. It was a good day and you kick back and you smoke your Gispert that you bought the other day at Mom's Cigars and you ponder it. The stars are out now as it's unnaturally pitch black at 5 in the evening. Goat testicles?

Before I blog about OTHER things

some final thoughts on the issue (for now). Reading through the latest rantings of the choicers it's become fairly obvious to me at least that the issue of when human life begins is not a part of their moral calculus. No this is not being uncivil just an analysis on my part and so for them the value of choice trumps the value of life, in other words it is vastly more important to exercise your liberty in the form of choice even if that choice may involve the snuffing out of a nascent human life. For the RTLers life of course is the overriding concern and it is this very stark simplicity that most offends the choice crowd. They seem to revel in ambiguity and moral ambivalence, to say the issue is complex is to show one's mental sophistication and to oversimplify the issue in their view shows the mind of a social Neanderthal. Theirs is the intellect and ours is the narrow mind even after a lifetime of thinking to yourself you happen in the end to come to the pro-life conclusion. Abortion will for the foreseeable future be a tremendously polarizing issue simply because for the choicers it is factors other than pure reason that decides the issue for them (e.g. the woman's financial straits, is she really in love with him? can they make a go of it? etc).

Now there are some choicers, they may be in the minority, but you can say they're pro-life in the latter stages of the pregnancy and so if they don't find fault with the pro-life position here why is it problematic in the beginning unless to provide the woman with some sort of "window of opportunity"? So with these people you might say choice is not the overriding principle or it is at least tempered with other considerations. The abortion lobby and Obama's 100% rating from them is unique in being so outside the mainstream by adopting the mantra of choice throughout the pregnancy or most of it so why should fiscal conservatives adopt the same position at least in terms of the political strategy of never talking about the issue (but I'm repeating myself here ain't I)?

A final thought, speaking totally candidly here for the moment I honestly don't respect their position so why should I expect them to respect mine? As Joe once said abortion is a non-compromisable issue and I would add once an issue, any issue becomes debateable at least in terms of its underlying philosophical concepts it's only a matter of time before the act in question becomes morally approveable, we don't discuss the pros and cons of rape after all. For me civility means you're polite to other people as human beings although you can take issue with their positions. We're talking over each other as is often said because we adhere to different philosophical principles, for me I can't imagine believing the fetus is a member of the human species and then advocate for its destruction or at least the liberty to do so, the value of choice loses its luster for me at that moment. Post what you will but try to address the points (I know I know, I'm a comedian).

They doth protest too much

Daniel has made the decision to moderate the commenters over at his blog and has closed off his most recent pro-life thread "An End to Abortion." I can understand his decision so I will address those commenters like collins directly right here. I was discussing this with someone yesterday and she said people have abortions and they do this and they do that and no wonder everyone's so unhappy these days. I don't know anything about these people's personal lives nor care to but I think what drives alot of heat on the pro-choice side these days, the almost exorcistic rantings is guilt, they doth protest too much, it's personal Beth. As the woman I was talking to said "imagine you did something like this, how would you feel?" I also sense that some of the bloggers at Daniel's and elsewhere may be working for the abortion lobby, the lines are straight out of the Planned Parenthood playbook. With the notable exception of Erik who is genuinely pro-choice in my book Bob, Myself, TR and the rest of the gang reek of pro-abortionism which is their right of course but they're not really honest about it. Mention religion and they go into some kind of epileptic seizure thing, it's amazing those well into adulthood can still talk this way and it's indeed very tempting to make a personal judgement against them and the rest of the pro-abortion movement but I'll refrain, as they say it ain't Christian. None of my points were addressed AT ALL and if you said you'd pray for them they'd get even more unhinged. Also, regarding this issue and others like it civility is overrated, needed of course and you should try but a civil presentation of your views will not convince them, they're really not looking for a better tone although they may say so, they really hate you. If anything I think pro-lifers have been way too civil for way too long and should kind of man up about it and jab back if need be. It's been too often said imo that debates about abortion give off more heat than light, I say so be it it's not the light they're after anyway. And btw when you're a guest at somebody's house and have to use the facilities flush after you're done and wipe the rim, put the seat back down and leave it as you came in, you're a guest after all. Tell the owner you had a nice meal and a good time and go home. So that's that.

Celebrity stalkers

Not a week or even a few days go by it seems without reading about the latest celebrity stalker case. Now this is either a bogus issue or I'm not getting it. I scan the pages with my morning cup of joe, I see Alyssa Milano has one now so it's probably the usual details so I don't even read it and turn the page. They're now brief AP dispatches or something. Now Milano has gone on the record as saying she doesn't believe in monogamy, that it's unnatural so even if she does say yes right off the bat you have some issues, your average stalkeroon being rather ideologically inflexible. Now a long time ago you never really heard about stalkers as such so either stalking is in vogue or concern about it is, it's hard to tell which. My friend put his usual spin on things a while back, it's a sexy scenario he said, the cops protecting the woman and some of them ain't bad looking just like in the movies. Dunno if you can Munchhausen this though.

Now playing - Abortion

Back by popular demand. Pro-lifers have always borne the brunt of social criticism, criticism of the pro-choice side is scant to nonexistent. This is unfair and unwarranted like the worker who always gets yelled at while the others are doing far worse. It's always been this way as Pro-Choice is seen as the rational, the genteel position to take. It has all the courage of a non-position and when one calls themselves "pro-choice" it really doesn't tell you much at all. Simply repeating the mantra of CHOICE doesn't make one pro-choice of course just like if I recite some ancient Hebrew texts that doesn't automatically make me a Kabbalist. Choicers reflexively oppose any and all informed-consent legislation making them paradoxically into a bunch of anti-informed choicers when they should have been the ones who proposed these things in the first place. Man as a rational creature cannot knowingly fight for something evil hence those hardcore pro-choicers who can't even imagine a world without recourse to legal abortion MUST see at least some positive social good in it after all every other social movement in history from abolition to woman's suffrage to civil rights was based on fighting the good fight so the only philosophically correct description here is pro-abortion. Erik, commenting over at Daniel's latest blog about abortion comes closest in my book to being a bona-fide pro-choicer but he's in the definite minority. It's also rather ironic that it's the choicers themselves who are so obsessed with insinuating theological issues into the debate by constantly ascribing them to the lifers when the majority of them give a very logical and non-religious approach in the public square. What is philosophically so disturbing about the so-called pro-choice mentality is that it can lead to things like Nazism, chances are it won't but theoretically it can since its main premise is the scientific issue of when human life begins is no longer relevant to abortion policy or the Woman's Decision. Even Harry Blackmun, chief architect of Roe acknowledged in a footnote that should science ever prove the humanity of the unborn then of course the abortion case collapses. This is a paradigm shift in our moral thinking and it's no wonder that euthanasia is always a close cousin to abortion, it's the exact same philosophical underpinnings at work. Abortion, people deep down know it's wrong but spend all their lives trying to justify their decisions. It's an unacknowledged moral tension against Self, an erroneous mathematical formula that undermines the logic of its own premises and that's why even those choicers who chide us lifers for talking way too much about the issue talk about nothing else themselves judging by which blogs get the most hits. No matter what side we take on this controversial and troubling issue the worm of conscience brings us back to it time and again, it's the house of dark shadows and we ignore the hobgoblin in the attic making noise aka what we know in our hearts to be true. Carry on.

From a purely practical standpoint

for those of you who keep harping on why do we blog about abortion so much it certainly seems to get the most hits, the most comments going compared to some other topics and so pragmatically speaking what's wrong with it? We can blog all day about all and sundry topics especially the non-political but if abortion is what keeps the blogosphere all afire makes sense to me. Daniel hits on the theme of social conservatives, now most people equate social conservatives with opposition to abortion and so BINGO you have yourself a hot thread. Looking at my rather meager hitmeter I am almost forced to go with the topic, it's probably the only subject here that gets tao all excited. David999 recently put us all down as being stuck on stupid and that life doesn't revolve around abortion so where's his thoughts on pets, bad bosses, recipes, music, movies and blogging in general? No Dave we all know everything in life doesn't revolve around abortion but I think you like it when we discuss it anyway. If it's "oh not again!" then seems to me the best course of action would be not to leave any comments anyway on the abortion blogs, we'll see all the goose eggs and get the message.

Ya know?

Waiting

My pastor gave an interesting sermon this past Sunday part of which had to do with waiting. Somehow it tied in with the readings and he said when you stop to think about it most of our life is about waiting. You're waiting for a show to begin, for Mass to start, for work to let out, for someone to come out of the restroom, for your friend. In a way it's like being stuck in traffic, much of your life is consumed by it. You may be waiting for small things or for big things, waiting for something to happen even if you don't know what it is. Sometimes what we're waiting for takes a long time in coming or it never comes at all (success, true romance, justice). People who voted for McCain may have to wait four years or even eight. We're waiting for a pro-life culture, we're waiting for social equality, we're waiting for world peace, we're waiting for this and we're waiting for that.

The theme song to Mahogany asks "do you know where you're going to?" The drifter in Two Moon Junction says "I don't know where I'm going but I'm in a hurry to get there." Some of us wait all our lives. "I can feel it coming in the air tonight. I've been waiting for this moment all my life, oh lord!" but what's Phil Collins waiting for? It's like waiting gives Life its meaning, after all we are waiting for something and this gives us a kind of goal, a destination, a framework of anticipation. Then again some of us just scrap through our day not thinking of the Bigger Questions.

Right now I'm just waiting for some of my blogging friends to get home from work. Later.

True forgiveness means

there's nothing more to talk about.

What makes Christianity stand apart

In answer to the age-old question "why does God allow evil and suffering?" Christianity is the only world religion or faith system where God took on human form and suffered and died so in answer to the Question we may not have the full answer in this life but you could at least say God took part in our own suffering so to speak. Of course this all collapses if you view Jesus Christ as mere man, nice prophet and nothing more but for me the essence of Christianity is what I just said and you can't say this of the other religions. It helps make the Question bearable if not answerable and for a good read along this line read Taylor Caldwell's The Listener. It's almost as if God were saying to the human race since I gave my creatures free will I will allow evil to exist in the world but I, in the Second Person of the Trinity will also partake in the suffering it causes. Pretty profound if you stop to think about it. Now the dogmatic theologian will object that Christ died solely for our sins and to save us, that mine is an errant theology but that's my personal faith as Patrick M might say. Deep thought for the Day.

Lest we need a reminder

I am afraid to say I am detecting a pattern here, it seems the terrorists are intent on giving each individual country their own 9/11. What kind of a religion is this? Monday morning quarterbacking for a minute during the cycle of the Big Election public opinion surveys and exit polling consistently told us terrorism was very low on the list of voters' concerns, shockingly low imo and the Economy was all the rage. Now we have the atrocity in Mumbai, India and, thinking out loud here if terrorism was more properly important in voters' minds as it should have been conventional wisdom has always held that this helps the Republican side more, in this case McCain. Put another way if the collective voting psyche was different and more attuned to reality would McCain have done better, even pulled it off? 9/11 is like some unhappy island drifting off and disappearing into the fog, seems the further we get away from it the more we forget. I haven't yet yielded to the temptation to conclude the voting public is stupid but in addition to the social issues hardly making a blip on the radar screen, dunno, it's like having a big jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. It is also conventional wisdom to treat everything coming out of Joe Biden's mouth as one big guffaw, the personification of the brain fart but is it that far behind that Obama will be tested, will face some sort of crisis during the first six months of his Administration? In four years will he even want the job? The 3AM phone call, just transfer the call. "Hill on line 1."

Flippin' through some quotes

The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (389-286BC) was one of the earliest interpreters of the religion of taoism. Googled some quotes and here's a gem: "Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness." Here's another one for Bill Maher: "Men honor what lies within their sphere of knowledge but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it." But perhaps my favorite is this:

"To say that something is chance is to deny a principle at work."

Every now and then I look back at chapters in my own life, often the odder or more enigmatic events stand out, chance meetings, funny characters, mysterious chains-of-events, the unexplained meanings of things. Worked with a guy once and maybe it's because he's of a spiritual bent but he said to me one day he almost wound up at another job but felt he's at this one for a reason. Beth feels there's a significance in us forming an online friendship and I agree, it's as if it were destined to happen. We're living in a kind of agnostic existential vacuum right now where many place no more meaning on Life's little events than accidentally kicking a pebble while walking but quotes like this fascinate me. It then becomes this - since there are physical laws in place governing matter and the universe might not there be another operative set of laws that a philosopher can discern, a kind of spiritual physics? There is something vaguely optimistic in Tzu's quote even if we can't explain why we got four years of Jimmy Carter or the Dinkins Administration in New York. Hamlet said "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew (prepare for) them how we will." So enjoy this little fortune cookie. Now if someone could just explain David Lynch's Inland Empire.

Bill Maher (I'm sorry to bring him up again)

I agree with Patrick M, for me personal faith is more important than dogma but here's another thing. The vast majority of us can, if we look hard enough, find various items of faith that we disagree with, that we may even find illogical if not wholely irrational. In the Catholic faith we have the doctrine of transubstantiation, that when the priest consecrates the bread and wine at Mass it literally turns into the Body and Blood of Christ. We also have the Sacrament of Confession and many question why we have to confess our sins to a priest if we are sorry in our hearts. BUT here's the larger point, just because we don't accept everything and btw I don't think we should, reason should never take a back seat to faith, they can and should co-exist, so just because we come across a particular religious item or two (or even three or four but who's counting?) that turns logic on its head we don't turn into little snarky Bill Mahers. We still retain our faith, just because of a couple of technical points we don't say the whole edifice of faith is wrong or somehow corrupt or doesn't have any value or useful purpose. Many people like to say they're spiritual but not religious, I don't know what this is supposed to mean. I'll cut this in two and reserve a philosophical point for my next blog.

How much emphasis to give the abortion issue?

Pro-life doesn't seem to be a great theme here, the higher concern, the broader context is the continuing socialist narrative. While this of course is not unimportant it shouldn't have been the only thing on the table. Maybe it's because re abortion we're so settled in our ways on the issue and we see it as a distraction from the Larger Cause but I think we could have made a more effective presentation. Obama and his Socialist Agenda, folks probably don't even know what the word means, it has that amorphous ring to it but let's say Obama is a regular reader of the conservative blogosphere as well, he might be forgiven if he concludes they don't seem to talk about the a-word all that much so why should I be nudged or cajoled towards the Center on the issue? Maybe it is all about money, our money in the end only trouble is Obama the Socialist doesn't have a womb-view, a broader package. It's Ayn Rand and reading nothing else. There was a shade of grandeur when McCain addressed pro-life head on during the third and final debate but it didn't take long for the Boat to steer back on its Animal Farm voyage. Just my post-election post-mortem for what it's worth.

At one part in his victory speech Obama threw an olive branch to us, "and to those who didn't vote for me I hear your voices" but does he really? Well if he's listening we're taking notes, well some of us are anyway, for when he runs for his second term and it's quite obvious that's a given since he said it's probably gonna take more than one term to clean up The Mess. Now it is assumed that Mr. Men's Vogue is pro-choice of course, it is the only rational position after all but most folks really don't know the extent of it. He needs to distance himself from the FRINGE of NOW and Planned Parenthood, it's like the friend you need to dump, who holds you back, who pulls you down and this would finally free him up to formulate his own abortion policy. I never really got why social conservatives hitched their wagon to the Republican Party in the first place, they really don't give a damn about the issue anyway, they became infatuated with a whore. Should have gone their own way but that's a pet peeve of mine. Obama has said to pro-abortion groups that his very first act as president will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act which would codify Roe vs. Wade should that decision ever be overturned but when he attempts to woo The Middle again in 012 it'll come back to haunt him.....

the socialist narrative will continue after these brief commercial messages.

It was a personality-driven election anyway

McCain had a more than respectable showing, there's gonna be the usual grumblings about doing something with the electoral college and apparently Beth's homestate is the most important state in the nation. My channel-surfing was on overdrive last night, there was Bob Schieffer saying Palin was terrible during interviews, the WonderBoy over at ABC, Shepard Smith and the babes on FOX (yum-o), Brian Williams, Gwen Ifill...My id thought up a terrible joke that I haven't seen black people this happy since O.J. Simpson got acquitted but ya wanna know something? they participated in the process, my brothers were happy at work today, all was civil and there ain't anything undemocratic about it. So why should Obama govern from the center? with a Democratic House and Senate he doesn't have that leavening effect that Clinton had with a Republican Congress so expect at least four years of polar liberalism. As for abortion we've had our Republican day in the sun and abortion is still legal but regardless of the legal status of abortion if we want to call ourselves a pro-life country people need to stop having abortions. Yes I was down for a time last night when the election was beginning to take on definite contours, I'm not into getting hardcore drunk but I had an extra helping of the Christian Brothers just the same. The future of the Supreme Court is depressing and I haven't read the rest of the blogs yet but I would imagine they would say the usual in such a dire situation that we need to focus our energy and grassroots on the mid-terms. Sean & RUSH for four more years, I ain't gonna subject myself to this. The turnout was absolutely massive yesterday, a historic one where close to 65% of the country actually voted, biggest turnout in the last hundred years they said so whatever you think of the results this is heartening.

People who work off the clock during their day off even though the company doesn't want them to, the black man would never do this. People who punch for lunch and then work through lunch, the black man would never do this.

Reagan?

So was there a roundtable at some point...

...to define this term we use alot these days, "extremism", and how often do these roundtables meet to clarify what is extreme, moderate, conservative, liberal, politically eccentric, flaky, provocative in a charming way, radical, off-the-charts...ok kids today the Subject is Welfare.

Now in the Olde Days a person was ashamed to be on welfare, couldn't wait to get off it. Those were the truly sad cases, a woman with kids whose husband just dumped her...oh God how times have changed! Now I've had my spans of being out of work but it never even dawned on me to start fondling the Government Tit. Maybe it's the way I was brought up but during these depressing timeframes I automatically filled out a certain number of applications and wasted tons of postage sending the resumes out, this was in the days before the preferred online methods. It's just the way I'm programmed, wired, it's like breathing drinking and sleeping, you work as St. Paul says otherwise you don't eat...and so who exactly are these people who say if you don't believe in the Welfare State, the safety-net you're an extremist? Now class let's review once again z's main principle that in the end everything tends towards liberalism, even the vast majority of conservatives these days accept the need for welfare, just yesterday Sean Hannity said we still have a safety-net. I recall years and years ago RUSH said to just end welfare, just end it and people will be forced to work but you see RUSH is a bit of a paleo-con, never got with the program and while it seemed harsh to me at the time and likely to give conservatism a bad name I've lived it, I know with a strong family and a good community it's possible. This is the Marvin Olasky position which so influenced Newt Gingrich at the time when he was the Speaker of the House and got welfare reform through. Cooking is my thing not installing fences which I did at one time, you just did whatever got you through the day and blocked it out of your mind. Now some rather old radio interview has just surfaced with the self-avowed non-socialist Barack Obama saying the Supreme Court should get involved in redistributionist change, now if that isn't something out of Chiller Theatre I don't know what is. I'ma gonna vote this Tuesday of course but maybe I just won't watch any election coverage at all that night......get hammered.

What's a play about Obama without a skinhead or two?

Call me cynical but it's almost like it had to happen, the feds just busted a plot involving two skinheads who planned to drive towards Obama and shoot from open windows and also for good measure to shoot up a black high school. Now I agree with Joe the Blogger who holds that Al-Qaeda poses the biggest threat to Obama, radical Muslims who hold that Muslims converting to Christianity is punishable by death but there's a point to this whole ObamaDrama with two skinheads in the dramatis personae. I caught the report on the UPN 9 News last night here in New York and there was some expert talking of course and up flashed on the screen "Keeping Tabs on the Radical Right", you know something the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) might have as a regular bulletin for concerned citizens. Now I've lost alot of respect for Abe Foxman's group over the years ever since they lumped Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition in with various and sundry hate groups, being strident or shrill or rigid is not necessarily the same thing as being hateful and plotting mayhem. It's hard to read these things when they flash up on the screen and you're about to go to bed but I caught part of a sentence that went "even on more traditional websites..."

OK, so there you have it. There is a metaphysical, mystical association between the rest of us right-wingers and those skinheads, this goes beyond the loose ties of Obama/Ayers, these are spiritual wisps in the minds of the Left. To the msm we all share the same politics but the neo-Nazis rachet it up a notch or two is all. "Keeping Tabs on the Radical Right", um no, there's the right-wing and then there are skinheads and we don't inhabit the same political universe, sorry. Same thing they tried to do a few years back with mainstream pro-lifers and the occasional abortion clinic bomber, lump us all together and I can only think that this latest episode in ObamaDrama can only help the candidate, a few independents out there may equate conservative opposition to affirmative action let's say with a couple of weirdos out in the hinterlands. You've heard of sleight-of-hand, well the media practices sleight-of-mind, juxtapose certain things on the screen when you're tired and have to work the next day, it's a political imprint and the average person ain't even aware of it and not only that McCain looks positively dull by comparison. I mean if some people hate Obama that much he must really stand for something, the only person McCain might piss off is the cashier at the local supermarket ("it says here the Metamucil's on sale"). It's all like a coloring book, pass the crayons please.

So it's all Mr. Magoo's fault

There he was, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan being grilled by Democratic Rep. from CA Henry Waxman. Greenspan as we all know was in charge during the Clinton economic boom of the 90's and was a big champion of deregulation and lower interest rates and so Waxman asked him "so you would say your view of the world, your ideology was wrong?" and Greenspan said "partially" although he said that during the last 40 years he saw growing evidence that his views were right so he came to his new position rather late. What Waxman really means is that the conservative view of the world, the conservative ideology is wrong and no sane person would be against regulation of the market and most importantly Wall Street. Never mind that scores of people took out mortgages they could never pay back, to paraphrase the Bard the fault lies not in our stars but in conservatism. So here is the true essence of liberalism, as Bernie Goldberg once noted about the media and I'll apply here liberals don't really see themselves as liberal at all, just reasonable, their truths are so self-evident and so of course we can't let market forces go unfettered (the Randian view, since outdated). It's all good though, it's not that common that the issues in a presidential election become so clear and focused, this can only help the voter make a truly informed decision. We'll know how most of the country feels after November the 4th but I can feel it in the wind, there's nothing like a good nipple to suck on. If we're weaned off government too early we'll be sucking on blankets like cats taken away too early from their mothers so blame it all on Mr. Magoo if it makes you feel any better.

Conservatives secretly in love with the demigod

Seems the topic du jour this morning on the talk shows is Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal basically saying what any good Democrat would say, that Sarah Palin is not ready to be the Chief Executive and that this reflects poorly on McCain's judgement. This former Reagan speechwriter must have had an erotic dream about Bam and you know what they say, when you dream about someone you really want that person. If Salvador Dali were alive today a classic going for many millions would be a surreal image of Bam arising out of the ocean with his giant magic phallus bestowing peace and love and brotherhood upon the whole world.

Other big or I should say overrated story is Colin Powell's endorsement of Bam. I used to work with this young liberal Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx, one of those political junkies but on the other side, might as well be blogging for the Daily Kos so anyway we're rapping one day and I throw out that I thought Republicans have done more for African-Americans in general like putting them in key spots and I brought up Colin Powell and Condi Rice and he goes "yeah, those are house niggers." He might as well have said Scatman Crothers and Corey should be janitors at the White House (W: "Corey, throw another log on the fire"). It's kind of Life's Little Ironies that a few liberals I have encountered in my day-to-day travels are far more likely to use the N-word to sprinkle their speech than us racist conservatives, because they're liberals who are for all the right programs to help blacks down through the years they carry around in their wallet next to their Sam's Club membership card and their TGIF pass a License to Use the N-Word to be renewed every three years. Now I have a diverse workplace and he'd walk around all day referring to just people in general as "these niggers and I went to the mall the other day" and his general tally for n-wording might be 10-15X a day, I kid you not, and he'd freely verbalize in front of our black co-workers as well but it was accepted. Me? if I so much as used the word "niggardly" as in "the honchos are being very niggardly with their budget this year" it'd be "Z, come to the office NOW!" and there'd be no "please" qualifier or "when you get a chance." Well anyway Colin Powell was never a conservative in the first place and I've always found him vaguely annoying, his sense of his own self-importance ("I am about to pronouce"). He reminds me of a manager at work who won't always say HI to you in the men's room, he 's better than you, he knows it, you know it, he's on the computer in his office and you walk through and go "how 'bout that game last night" and he doesn't respond.

With so much study of the paranormal going on

I have a question. Now ghosts can do all sorts of nifty things, shake a hanging coffee cup for 20 minutes when there's no breeze in the kitchen, rap on the wall, turns lights on, move your glass of water you left on your nightstand, give off smells of which you don't know the origin of (perfume and pipe smoke are common ones), sit on the edge of your bed when you're dozing off, communicate to you in dreams, the list is as long as there are ghosts but I have as yet to hear of a practical case of a friendly ghost popping up your car door lock because you left your keys in your car.

BTW I'm not afraid of dead people, I'm afraid of live people.

It's McCain's to lose

He practically avoids the whole abortion issue by which he could make headway against Obama. Obama, if he wasn't a senator running for the highest office in the land could just as well be the president of Planned Parenthood. McCain should focus on his opposition to the "Born-Alive Infants Protection Act" which even Hillary and Ted Kennedy supported which practically puts Obama to the left of Freddy Krueger. Also culturally many aren't in tune with modern-day feminism anymore, it's more than a little off-center and has messed up women's heads. Fems have refashioned suitors from the old school as stalker-types with the kind of funny result that women routinely go out with and even marry the porn-addled average Charlie rather than a guy who sends them roses so add feticide to their psychologically vague male hatred and you have a potent mix. Telling a risque joke in the workplace is a crime in their book but strangling a mid-term infant on a cold metal table is not. Ayers is yesterday's news, if McCain can't paint Obama into a corner with the a-word and continues on his present course he deserves to lose. It's a culture war out there and although Pat Buchanan was demonized at the time for bringing this term into our national lexicon nowadays even liberals use it. Just make the feminist link is all, tie him in with the NOW crowd and on abortion legislation he's keeping it psycho. As it stands now conservatives have too many reasons to stay home. Cojones, grow a pair!!

McCain's past ties to abortion clinic bomber

Now that I have your attention. It' s not true of course but imagine if it were! and would the msm even use that all-important adjective tangential to describe his past associations? Now I understand why Bill Moyers has guests on his show saying Obama's past...er...links? to former Weathermen Underground terrorist Bill Ayers is irrelevant, inaccurate and in bad taste for the McCain campaign to point out but everyone seems to be saying it these days like trendy Demochick and FOX News analyst Kirsten Powers. I don't mean talking about the Obama/Ayers matter for three whole hours every day like Hannity does but what I'm not getting is why exactly is Obama's past ties, however tangential, to Ayers that unimportant? and why am I a racist if it's just one of many factors entering into my decision to vote against him? We are in love with Bam, what can I say?

My travelblog

Went up the line yesterday with my friend, on up the Taconic past Carmel NY where your ears pop, hooked up with I-84 W and up Route 9. Fishkill, Wappingers Falls, kind of a rundown town, a touch of ghetto, an element of romantic squalor. People who live here tend to work farther south towards the Westchester area where the wages are higher but live near Poughkeepsie 'cause the real estate is lower. There's a Giggles store here with its generic mind-numbing porn with a heavy bias towards the Japanese creepy stuff ("all actresses 18 or over and under duress"), seems a necessity in a depressed area, kind of in keeping with the theme and oh look, there's a Dairy Queen! don't see many of them around anymore. It was Tawana Brawley who put Wappingers on the map. There's a gourmet supermarket here by the name of Hannaford's, nice place. The main goal here was the Po'town Galleria, an ok mall as far as the mall scene goes but generic just the same with an overabundance of trendy t-shirt stores but I'm looking for practical, I really don't need a set of KISS whiskey shot glasses and a humorous set of mini-rubbers. I used to go fishing alot but now I'm a mallrat. After this we hit the Home Depot in the picturesque town of Carmel, this overall general store is so huge it's like an airport hangar, then back on 84 and on down the line. Now I just love the country but there's something about these pockets of civilization surrounded by the boondocks and these wide expanses of open field and swampland that, how do I put my finger on it? you're surrounded by woods and mountains and the possibility of a Bigfoot or two living up there in them thar hills and when the sun goes down there drops like a curtain a certain existential loneliness like UFOs can land here. A state trooper sits in his car on the divider of the highway, takes a couple sips from his hot cup of joe and a bite out of his cruller, glances up into the starry nighttime sky and goes WTF!?!, is that Colossal Man coming out of the saucer? (bleep-bleep) bb-idaho can relate but dunno, seems everything's generic these days. Caught part of the big debate last night of which I have a few thoughts, I always seem to sleep well after these things.....

Not voting as an act of conscience

I've never built my own personal philosophy around platitudes, first off they're often nuggets of false wisdom and there's also that faint whiff of conformity about them, the best distillation that groupthink has to offer but you can have your VSOP. For instance you often hear it said that it's your patriotic duty to vote and as an extension of this if you don't vote you have no right to complain. I disagree in this sense, let's say you sincerely feel both candidates would do damage to the country, you're not voting for the lesser of two evils anymore, you've conscientiously thought it through, turned it over, stretched it inside out and come to the same conclusion. In such a limited case, and I'm not talking here about young'ens who don't vote 'cause they're lazy, in this restricted scenario I hold that not voting can be an act of conscience. It's kind of like a person who never marries or ain't marrying anytime soon, sure he/she can do like everyone else and vet candidates they can live comfortably with, someone strongly likeable but the purist would insist you really should be in love with someone before you marry them and if he ain't feeling that amorous about anyone of late than not marrying can be a personal act of conscience albeit a painful one at times, better to be lonely for a bit than not be pure at heart. Stands to reason you should be "in love" with a candidate first before you pull the lever for him or her, of course the Obama-ites are enraptured but what about our side? Sean is only getting jiggy with it because he's such a party hound. I'm turning Conventional Wisdom on its head here, that's the Z-man thing, an outside the box kind of deal and the possibility is always there that I won't vote this time around. It's that remote option for most of us because we don't like to be held in contempt but I've always been the type to hold to an opinion even if 9 others disagree with me. As Benjamin Disraeli once said "the majority is usually wrong."

Maybe we're orbiting through a supernova of pot right now

Apparently the 9-11 conspiracy theories have more legs than a centipede. Michelle Malkin talks about this worldwide poll they did, some 16,000 respondents in sundry nations and seems many inhabitants of Planet Earth believe that somehow OBL and Al-qaeda were not behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks after all but our own government along with our best buddy Israel of course. Now I wouldn't waste my time responding to and counterbutting every technical point of the conspiracists, the true hallmark of any bona fide conspiracy theory is they come after you, think Karen Silkwood and auto accidents. Last I checked Charlie Sheen is still doing 2 1/2 Men, if he were really on to something he'd be walking down Sunset Boulevard and a big ole black sedan would pull up with at least 3 tall clad in black G-Men, all clean-shaven with Neo shades on. They'd take old Charlie around the block

and warn him,

then while the car is still in motion they'd push him out the door and he'd go rolling like a tumbleweed to the curb having learned his lesson never to speak of 9-11 conspiracy theories again, maybe he'd go home to a dead cat but that would be the end of it. Is the Hub of the Conspiracy having high-level meetings right now in some mid-Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park on how to deal with Rosie O'Donnell?

Sorry guys, this conspiracy theory's a dud, life should be so exciting.

Bam: "You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig"

en espanol: "Usted puede poner lapiz de labios en un puerco pero es todavia un puerco."

i'm lovin' it

But Howard Wolfson this begs the question

If the John Edwards scandal would likely have put all his voters in her corner just how did the Hillary Handvac fail to suck up this dirt? When you're watching TV at night sooner or later you have to realize the cat threw up behind the couch, there's a centipede on the rim of your coffee mug, or the mouse that got stuck behind the wall is just now starting to give off those wonderful aromas. Come on Hill, this'd be like on a big fishing expedition for lunker bass catching a bluegill on a strip of baloney on a warmup cast from shore. Losing the old Clinton touch, they have to have a time machine for these things, it must keep you up at night. BTW I bought my copy of the National Enquirer yesterday and got up to speed on that love child, yes my reading range encompasses Atlas Shrugged as well as Mike Walker, it's good to be broad-based as they say.

Guilt

The longer you live the more you become a student of human nature, things you took for granted in the past now form patterns not just for me but I've heard others say this. You're now a detective of the human psyche and of course there's a chance you are wrong but you don't think so. Take insomnia and here I'm talking about the chronic of the chronic cases, those people you come across like at work who never ever seem to get a decent or at least an adequate night's sleep. I'd have to say this is highly unusual, even the big-time insomniacs admit it's an off and on problem. Um, in my book this falls under the "you killed somebody buddy" category, maybe a hit-and-run, who knows? and brings to mind the Bard's classic "Macbeth doth murder sleep" speech. Discussed a person like this with somebody once and she goes "must have so much on his conscience." Or take the person you're ice-fishing with and it's an unusually severe winter, we're talking at least 3 feet of pure ice and just auguring the hole and your body will be sore for the next couple days so the two of you are walking out into the middle of the frozen lake and he goes "don't walk so close to me." Or maybe you're boating with someone else and just coming out of the harbor to catch some monster blues and he goes "don't go so far out" but that's where the blues be. So you start thinking ok so what did he do? It's almost as if they expect to see the Hand of God come up over the cliff ready to smite them, they know their Bad Karma is a couple weeks overdue and they're taking precautionary measures, I mean caution is a good thing and all but what's up with the overcaution? They're not ready to meet the Maker yet. Bishop Sheen was great at seeing through all this and held that unacknowledged or unconfessed guilt create unending neuroses, shadows in the mind. I'm all the listening ear but some people are just a tad off-center is all so the next time that chronic insomniac complains to me sleep sucked again last night and is it time to go home yet I might just pull out of my pocket a "ok, so what did you do?"

The two Joes

I have a question.

You work in an office with two managers named Joe, one of whom is white and the other one black. You don't quite have a handle on the black guy's last name yet and the phone rings and you pick it up. It's for Joe the African-American. If you say on the intercom "black Joe pick up line 2" is that considered racial? Conversely you can also say at another time "white Joe line 1" OR do you just say "Joe pick up line..." and let them both pick it up?

Has McCain lost his mojo?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wolf Blitzer's CNN show "Late Edition" on Sunday that Obama being the first African-American nominee of a major party is "great for our country. I do think it says we've come a long way." She said she's made her decision who to vote for but wouldn't reveal the answer and denies rumors that she wants to be Obama's VP. She'd be a great choice though. Picking Hillary would only be a reminder of Obama's traditional liberalism, since he is now under the powerful vortex of Z's Law of the Power of Negative Appraisal Condi is the ONLY way to go. Yes, Hillary is sooooo yesterday she's not even assured of the VP slot anymore, you got the black chick in leather boots who has strode the colossus of the World and who can greatly offset his inexperience in the foreign policy arena. An Obama/Rice administration even has, let's face it, a certain sex appeal for those bored with all things McCain and don't worry, she's pro-choice. Won't even be close, it's Kama-Sutra vs. Straight Missionary after a highball, it's the modern Shakespearian version of Batman as opposed to Adam West and Robin and the Batcave, it's Maroon 5 doing a song with Rihanna, it ROCKS!

These chicks have issues

"I dug my key into the side
Of his pretty little souped-up 4 wheel drive
Carved my name into his leather seat
I took a Louisville slugger to both head lights
Slashed a hole in all 4 tires
And maybe next time he'll think before he cheats."
(Before He Cheats - Carrie Underwood)

"And don't tell me you're sorry when you're not
Baby when I know you're only sorry you got caught."
(Take A Bow - Rihanna) ~~~btw I always thought this would be a great line a state trooper could use when he pulls you over, he could even sing it~~~

"I learned the hard way
That they all say
Things you want to hear
And my heavy heart sinks
deep down under you and
Your twisted words your help just hurts
You are not what I thought you were
Hello to high and dry."
(Love Song - Sara Bareilles)

I detect a theme here. They really should make this into the Men Suck World Concert Tour of 2008 so I say let the chicks vent. I have to say though I like the Bareilles song, for starters the singer has a very clear voice and you can make out every word without googling lyrics, something I have to do with Fergie and others from time to time. Take it away.

Shades of Gray

From a recent blog of napqueen's at http://www.napqueenspress.blogspot.com/ under "Are Conservatives Stupid? "Liberals can see the gray areas of an issue while conservatives see only black and white and are too stupid (emphasis mine) to see the gray."

Ah yes! I've been patiently waiting for this moment of ultimate clarity. It's the Peter Principle applied to moral philosophy and the result is moral relativism or agnosticism, a marked inability to come to final moral conclusions about things. We've reached our level of incompetence, our Final Placement, we can' t figure out Right from Wrong and we're never to be promoted...and we're happy about it! It's a Cohiba moment.

Z's Law of the Power of Negative Appraisal

A rather potent force in politics, in Life in general and here's how it works. A typical conservative will say something like liberals are pro-abortion or in favor of destroying the unborn. The lib says "oh no that's not us. We're not really for abortion, in fact nobody is, in what universe?" It also works the other way. A typical liberal will say conservatives don' t care at all about the poor and the poor conservative will reply "yeah but we give more." So criticism, especially political criticism, by its very nature exerts a powerful inward pull towards the direction of the position of the critic. So the law of criticism or negative appraisal is for the target to deny the point and then to move gradually towards the critic's stance so all I have to do is make a critical point and look what power I have! Liberals may be from Mars and conservatives from Venus but we take each other's points personally, to heart. This is why Obama has of late made great strides at least towards the political center in his rhetoric, it's all that name-calling in the past that he's a hardcore lib. Of course the exception to Z's Law of the Power of Negative Appraisal are all the left-wing bloggers out there who live in a universe all their own who can't understand one of their own being subject to the same laws of political gravity as the rest of us.

That Cartoon

The now classic New Yorker cartoon with Obama as some sort of anti-American Muslim and his wife as a Black Panther type, McCain was predictably outraged, "tasteless and offensive", but it would have been nice if he had said:

"You know something folks, I have the intellectual capacity to get it. It is so over the top it is obviously intended as some sort of social satire, a parody of right-wing fears of Obama. In fact let's use this as a watershed moment to get rid of Political Correctness once and for all. This PC regime of ours, it's not why I fought for our country. We're all adults here so grow up! BTW Jesse Jackson can't cut these out because they're made of brass."

Alas!

The LAW says go digital

So very early next year you'd better have a digital tv or converter box to convert the signals in your old tv to the new digital format otherwise you just might lose everything brother, not only this it's federal law. Now I'm hardly some techno-nerd but I read somewhere it has to do with using up all that "white space" on all those blank channels or something but already the conspiracists are whispering Big Brother will be watching you. Dunno, I'm more into reading again, Chef Ramsay can only do so much bleeping in one whole hour before I start channel-surfing again, I'm still wondering why The View is an important show basic to the Republic and why Oprah can talk about salacious topics that Stern got in trouble over on mainstream radio. As the bumper sticker goes

WHATEVER

Just something to blog about

Obama told a group of people the black father has been AWOL. Jesse Jackson was doing some show and didn't know his mike was still on and said "he talks down to black people. I wanna cut his nuts off." I don't know, sounds pretty gangster.

I honestly didn't know this

That there are now two, count 'em two, conservatives running in the presidential race. McCain of course and Obama. Obama recently came out for gun rights in D.C., says the ole death penalty can and ought to be used in some restricted but extreme cases (must have boned up on a couple of Dirty Harry DVDs), now says wiretaps without warrants is cool with him so long as there's some kind of Congressional oversight, said something about late-term abortions...let's see what else? That's good to know though and reassuring that no matter how the race turns out we'll have a true conservative in the White House.

Skiing down the slippery slope of gay marriage

The gay marriage deal, it's not so much what they do but the slippery slope. Let this one go and it's bro and sis who wanna get hitched, polygamists, the farmer in the dell.

Modern urban angst. So my friend and I are in this ritzy mall the other day and we're in a very manly Swiss Army type store and I'm just taggin' along, drifting away and then coming back to my pal and so he's paying for something at the counter and the clerk goes to me "you're together, right?" Now two things, I thought of saying something with a pinch, a dash mind you of the old sarcasm as in "no, I'm just following him around" to counter our little urban neuroses in this the age of Jack Jordan or (b) maybe he thought we were a couple ("hey Shaquila, look at them, they're sweet"). Whatever, put it away in the fridge, it'll keep.

Three days without blogging, I feel like there's a squirrel in my head that wants to get out. This weather man, you wake up in the morning and it 's soupy and muggy and just this gray blah sky out there and so you look forward to a day of gliding and sliding. I'd rather be chilling and grilling or waking and baking. So far this summer sucks.

I'm grateful for the little things

having a good night's rest, a family that helps you, a kindly phrase or gesture, a well-turned gam, finding some spare quarters in some pay phone, a girl who will give you the time of day, going to Wendy's during a lull period and five minutes later it gets busy, parking at a meter with alot of leftover time that somebody didn't use, going north on the parkway when the southbound lane is clogged for some reason, driving during July and August without school buses, going to Barnes & Noble with your magazine and actually finding a nice comfy chair without a duff in it and going through a whole day without skid marks.

John McCain's Ralph Nader

Big writeup in today's New York Times (A Candidate Runs to a GOP Chorus of "Don't" by Julie Bosman), former Republican Congressman from Georgia Bob Barr is already on the ballot in 30 states as the Libertarian Party candidate for president and could have a definite Ross Perot influence spoiling McCain's chances. In the article Barr relates the story of a recent meeting in Washington between himself and a group of Republicans who told him "look, we understand why you're doing this. We agree with why you're doing this. But please don't do it." Amusing stuff these self-loathing Republicans. The article goes on to say that while in Congress he voted for the USA Patriot Act and the Iraqi war, led impeachment against Clinton and on the subject of gay marriage introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in '96. He now says he's for a quick withdrawal of troops as in all of them, feels states should have their own say re gay marriage and is against wiretaps without warrants. The Moral of the Story folks, if we had decent candidates to begin with we wouldn't need spoilers and in this case Barr says he got fed up with the Republican Party straying from its roots of controlled spending and limited government. Think of it this way as z just loves the analogy. We as conservative and tradition-minded Republicans are asked to give our hand in marriage to McCain but as all the political universe knows it ain't a passionate thing by any stretch and there's Bob Barr over there winking at us, you sly dog you, and he knows we can do better as if to say "I got it goin' on."

Nancy Pelosi supports the "Fairness Doctrine"

She said that the proposed bill by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), called the "Broadcaster's Freedom Act" which would outlaw the "Fairness Doctrine", will not come up for a vote this year and she wants a revival of the "Fairness Doctrine." Dunno what the issue here is exactly. The msm are overwhelmingly liberal, talk radio is strongly conservative, no harm no foul. One side admits their bias, the other doesn't. As John Stossel once noted "asking the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water. Water? what water?" & at any rate free market forces have already determined that liberal talk radio is a big loser, does Al Franken and Air America ring a bell?

A recurring theme throughout History - the Ascent of the Psycho

A student of History could write a paper just on this theme alone which is basically people who belonged in lunatic asylums have run empires, countries and nations. Nero, Caligula, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ceausescu and the list goes on and on. As all the world knows Zimbabwean president or to be more specific the technical ex-president, Robert Mugabe, has run his country into the ground, an economic shambles with the usual starvation, mass fear and people trying to leave. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change party, won the election in March but apparently not by a wide enough margin so there was to be a runoff but Mugabe's Zanu-PF goon squads have been intimidating, torturing and killing people so Tsvangirai backed out. Now as usual the United Nations seems impotent to do something, can't get the supplies and humanitarian aid through, doesn't even have a consensus yet as it should over what to do about this 84-year old thug who's been in power way too long. The larger question is what exactly is the purpose of the UN anymore? why are rogue bodies allowed to have a say and can we replace the UN with something else?

George Carlin

When I heard the news my first reaction was he isn't supposed to die, he's just one of our regular social commentators we've gotten so used to. Now the fact that he's "dirty", he's not in the same sense of a Howard Stern, the curse word or the vulgarity is always in the service of some larger social or political point (think Lenny Bruce) not "ooh, look what I said!" Two examples will suffice. In one of his books he talks about all those cashiers who at the end of your transaction say to you "have a nice day" and Carlin would like to say back "just give me my f****n change." He also talks about that family uncle and we all have one who when he comes to visit lets the family dog liberally lick his face so he goes just a few minutes before your uncle lets him do this the dog's been cleaning himself so extremely well that and here Carlin goes on to give a rather coarse but hilarious and explicit description of just how clean your dog really is now. He is z's cup of tea, a kind of bourbon that burns the throat a little going down but you like the effects anyway and if something doesn't agree with you just put it down and go on to something else. I thought I'd add this, a favorite of Tim McCarver's - an idea that only Carlin can think up that somebody should go on Jeopardy and just stand there through the whole program, don't say a word and don't answer any questions and then go home. R.I.P.

Before we get started let's review the Obama ground rules first

At some fundraiser yesterday in Jacksonville Florida our political messiah said:

"We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black? He's got a feisty wife."

"and did I mention he's black?" well no you just did but now that you mention it I don't care if somebody's green or polka-dot or any shade in between, one term in the Senate does scare the living daylights out of me. Obama is not new, he's same old same old, change we can believe in would be throwing out the race card. And you already see all those political prognosticators and pollsters breaking us all down into racial camps and ethnic voting blocks, "whites won't go for that guy." Well yes many of them would if he were a black conservative, say if Thomas Sowell threw his hat into the ring, hell throw in Armstrong Williams as his vp (hey, now there's a thought). Oy vey, somebody please pass me that bowl of Prozac!

A car is not a cigarette Bloomy

As reported in today's New York Post yesterday in Boca Raton Florida NYC Mike Bloomberg said this: "They should be raising the gas tax encouraging people to reduce consumption. The anti-tax people don't like that but using capitalism to encourage the right behavior is exactly the right direction of going. Tax policy is the way government uses capitalism." No Bloomy, capitalism is just capitalism. If it's a planned economy you're talking about capitalism ceases to be capitalism. Market forces will encourage right behavior. Some pro-choicer you are!!

Republicans first, conservatives second

I know quite a few people who are actually much more conservative than John McCain who unhesitatingly say they are going to pull the lever for him. They're very status-quoish, party loyalty above all. For them he becomes the true conservative in the race by default due to the fact that Obama is so much more liberal than, well anyone including Hillary. By all means vote your conscience but I can't vote this way. Don't become a pragmatic liberal which is really a "conservative" who believes in bigger government. McCain has to talk a conservative game at this point so I can only believe his type of conservative voter believes he's being sincere but you know the old saying, "campaign from the right but rule from the center or left."

A Constitutionalist first

I am at heart a Constitutionalist first before being a libertarian. Put it this way, even if I were a pro-choicer I'd still be against Roe vs. Wade, there ain't no talk of trimesters in the Constitution or even in the emanations of its penumbras. Even if I were a pro-choicer in favor of Adam and Steve getting married I'd still be against what the California Supreme Court did by overturning a clear majority of the voters there. Whasa matter? don't wanna do the legwork in your state legislatures ya lazy bums ya! So even if I were a pro-choicer in favor of gay marriage who feels pot should be sold over the counter at CVS I still wouldn't have a gripe with people who don't want drivers on angel dust plowing into shoppers at crowded shopping malls, would Ben Franklin say that the War on Drugs is somehow wrong-headed and irresponsible as a national policy? The document comes first, not your personal preferences, libertarianism is not the same thing as constitutionalism. As that conservative wag Florence King once quipped "as ye roe so shall ye wade."

Tim Russert 1950-2008

Nothing seems to throw a man's lifework into sharper focus as when he leaves us, we tend to forget. It'll be strange watching "Meet the Press" this Sunday morning without Tim Russert. One of the most common forms of praise we're hearing about him yesterday and today is how unbiased the man was in his journalism, the sentiment most commonly expressed by politicians and everyone else is "he asked tough questions of everyone." I totally agree but the fact that everyone seems to be bringing it up, that it comes so naturally to mind, implies that most of the rest of the msm is just the opposite, otherwise why does this point stand out so clearly? One interview in particular stands out in my mind among many others and that is when he had Al Gore on and asked him his personal views on abortion. He asked the quite simple question three times and Al Gore just kept saying "I support the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision" but that's not what Russert asked him and truth be told Russert irked alot of feminists by his line of questioning. Bravo Tim! it was from the nature of his interviewing that if you didn't know any better you'd never have guessed he was a lifelong Democrat. Bob Newhart once said of himself that, while he has some strong political views "my job is not to educate but to entertain." If you change the last words around and put in "but to practice objective journalism" you have the man Russert. R.I.P.

Confuse people, be nice

Kind of a blanket statement but many neighbors, many people in general, if they're not nasty are at least indifferent, to be indifferent is not necessarily to be mean but a large chunk of the public falls into one of the two groups (or both). So I know this guy who used to live in a large city, neighbors today kind of keep to themselves and don't even say hi, many times you don't even know their names, just a big gray cloud of blah hanging over many sections of the country right now. So anyway the guy moves out to the country and on the second day a man comes up to him and says "good morning, how are you?" and he goes "what?" We had some storms last night, high winds, rain, a Dorothy and Toto watch for the upper areas and this morning the heat finally broke, so some older lady was walking in the street and goes to me "hello, good morning! Beautiful day, isn't it?" so I pause for a sec and then go "it sure is". Not used to it, like my friend says alot of people have a touch of I don't want to help you. I was talking to him at his job once and he went to ask a co-worker a question and he kinda grunted something piglike and kept walking and my friend imitates someone blowing an imaginary dart into your neck aka the societal insult. Used to go ice-fishing alot and I'm parking after a fairly decent snowfall and some guy comes out of his house and offers me his shovel so I can park better and I much appreciated such a rare act of kindness but for a nanosecond there you think maybe he's going back inside to finish his Cap'n Crunch in a skull and you're next. Women are known to blow the darts too so when one finally says to you in the library "you smell nice like you just got out of the shower" it takes time to register, you almost want to verify and confirm that it was an official act of niceness and maybe something more. So if you really wanna confuse the hell out of people be ye kind.

One nation under Prozac

Kind of a theory in progress of mine but seems to me in my day-to-day dealings with people in general and even through just plain observation, couldn't put my finger on it right away but it seems like there's this vast fog out there. People have lost the art of communicating clearly, people drive funny, nobody's coherent, there's some kind of a funk thing going on out there. The conclusion of my theory, most everybody is on something these days and if you're one of the few who isn't and you're totally clear-headed it's like a feeling of being, well, stranded. You have some of the same problems they do but you don't take anything. You can look at the sit'ation rationally, from many different angles, you've been buffeted by Life for sure like everybody else and have the bruises to show for it but you can still drive a car without farting along and drifting totally oblivious to the fact that you've just created a minor traffic jam behind you, you can still clearly communicate your desires to the waiter at your favorite restaurant without your mental fog making his job that much harder, you pay your bills on time and don't whip out your credit card just to pay for some Double 1/4 pounder with cheese at Mickie D's. Dunno, just might want to deal with the Amish these days.

I am proclaiming this day

National Get a Grip Day. Even conservatives have enjoyed the collective orbasm. As you all know by now (except apparently Hillary) Barack Obama is now the 1st black presidential candidate to win his party's nomination. That's cool, it's duly noted, but I don't get all bent out of shape about it. Dick Morris feels we are living in what he calls a post-racial era, dunno, if we were it'd be, to borrow a line from soapie, "BFD, I like pizza and beer." McCain is positively dull by comparison, he's an asterisk, a formality before letting History happen, a future question on Jeopardy, a Sunday crossword question. Hill has no choice but to accept the VP post, that is if Michelle lets her. It ain't the same though, what exactly was Ed McMahon's position again? If you take your conservative political philosophy seriously this is definitely one of those pass the Zoloft elections, either way you look at it Santa is coming on his sleigh with some Big Government goodies, most likely McCain won't be getting the reindeer to mush but he'll be helping hand them out. What's that you say, you don't believe in Santa? stick in the mud.

A referendum on the War

If Obama vs. McCain turns out to be a popular referendum on the Iraqi War Obama wins hands down. It matters not that these people may have originally supported the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam or if they opposed it from the getgo, it's only 2008 and McCain's gone on the record that the Iraqi campaign should go on 'til 2013 and then he'd withdraw the troops in an orderly fashion after declaring victory there. If a majority of the voting public, whatever their political persuasion, is tired of the war then it matters not what us conservative bloggers have to say, it's a done deal, McCain is toast. Now Obama has gone on the record himself saying to Jim Lehrer "we need to be as careful getting out as we were reckless going in", McCain is just same old same old and will go the way of what's-his-name hawking Viagra in a few years. I see one positive in a President Obama, RINOS out to pasture.

keeping it psycho

Channel-surfing last night and came across "Dateline NBC" and on came these women who had planned on putting out hits on their husbands only thing is they were really contracting out to an "undercover hitman", really a cop. Chris Hansen, of "To Catch of Predator" fame, narrated. Now what's scary, truly disturbing, is not that this is supercommon, it isn't, but it's common enough, these psycho chicks are out there. Every woman was casual about the whole thing, in the "transactions" they talked about it like grocery shopping or getting their hair done. We are living in the Golden Age of the Psycho folks and in the past these ladies had the edge since, as everyone knows, paranoia is

a bad thing

but Chris Hansen is onto their little game. It's all a cheapening of life, blame Roe if you want, blame relativism too, it all made for interesting, even fascinating television in a weird way. What makes this so hard is people don't walk around wearing t-shirts saying "I'm crazy". There's an old joke, an old saying, the people who act the most weird, the most eccentric, the most out-of-the-box or whatever are really not the ones to worry about, it's some of the normal folk out there but they go right under the radar screen because our weirdster alert is up. I like Chris Hansen's journalism more each day, it's groundbreaking in its own way. Kudos.

Your insensitive, politically incorrect Id at work

Had a dream the other night and it went like this. I was in the front of my house and a young black man passed by and stopped, nicely dressed in a casual way. Maybe new in town, kinda quiet and we just had a decent snowfall so to break the ice and be a friendly sort I suggest we build a snowman. Still kind of aloof so I try some humor and go "maybe we can stick a crackpipe in his mouth". Now many people still don't get this, humor in general, and the better comics will tell you it's not your intent to perpetuate stereotypes but to make fun of those very same stereotypes kinda like your Muslim friend you see on his cell phone and you say "what? do you have OBL on speed-dial?" It's whole purpose is to take the sting out of it and sometimes they laugh and sometimes they don't (more often it's the latter these days). It's humor, it need not come with a set of Monarch Notes, and you trust people to know what a NUANCE is. Anyways in my dream-sequence I'm like OH NO! the guy ain't laughing, he looks a little angry and that was kind of the end of it, off to another dream but I think the whole moral of the dream is that some jokes are best left in your head. Oh no, did I just blog about this?

Her remarks are not so much offensive...

...as confusing. Hillary met with the editorial board of the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader the other day and said she couldn't understood the forces that be that want her to end her campaign. She emphasized that Bill didn't win the Democratic nomination in '92 until mid-June when the California primary was held and then the killer line: "and we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California." Now in order to be offended we have to understand what was said first but on this one it wasn't so much I was offended as WTF! She later clarified that what she meant was that the Democratic Party has had primary contests that go into June. I call this having a nanosecond of insanity moment, kinda like when you're sleepwalking and think there's a squirrel in your room and you come to your senses and say WTF! It happens so quick, she had some neuron or two temporarily misfire, happens. Obama should have shut up, he'll have a nanosecond or two himself and he won't know when, it'll just come out as some involuntary sneeze/burp before he can stop it, there but for the grace of God. OF COURSE it could be a symptom of her impending meltdown.....

Denver angst

Now Hill says she's gonna take it all the way to Denver regardless saying she has more of the popular vote than Obama. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi politely explained on one of the morning shows today that it's the delegates that count and she's lacking in that department but that doesn't take into account her gargantuan ambition. Hillary will overthrow the Universe to become Commander-in-Chief if need be and may take this baby into Christmas. It's been said she's positioning herself for 2012, I don't think so, she wants 2012 to be her second term. To paraphrase that new one from Fergie the girl can't help it.

I've heard of sleepwalking but sleepdriving?

So I'm channel-surfing last night and rooting for my favorite Idol star to triumph,

David

I always thought David was by far and away the best, Dave sure can sing, what a voice that David has

so anyway in between I caught some "Frontline" about depression, some guy with it was showing all the pills he took to battle it, 5 or 6 of 'em, some to combat the side effects of the others like weight gain, real trial and error stuff and I'm like dude, just deal with it. Anyway on another station on comes this ad for the sleepaid Ambien CR, not just one layer like other sleepaids to help you fall asleep but a second layer to help you stay asleep, one possible side effect being driving while not fully awake.

Police Sergeant: "Do you know we clocked you doing 65 mph going down the wrong lane on the freeway? You coulda killed someone!!!"

Ambien Patient: "Yeah but I sure did get a good night's rest though and that's the important thing."

Geraldine Ferraro, old party hack

She's been touting the line that opposition to Hillary, especially in the msm, is sexist by nature. To be against her is to be sexist by definition. Real Gloria Steinem stuff, people stuck in cultural timewarps. Yes, dinosaurs still roam the Earth folks but here's why the T. Rexes are wrong. Think about it, think about the courts, the culture, our laws. Almost everything is seen through a women's eyes these days, her perspective from child-custody cases in divorce proceedings to Anucha Brown Sanders & oh, don't pay your child support you're a Deadbeat Dad facing some serious jail time. To take a man's view these days or even to consider it is considered retrograde. Whatever animates political opposition to Hillary it ain't this but there Ferraro was on the Today show this morning still talking like it's 1968. Now as has been already pointed out by some conservative commentators this is fascinating stuff to watch, this identity politics thing which is now so firmly entrenched in Democratic Party machinery. You have an African-American dude running, you have an older liberal chick in the race, it's like Ferraro is saying we'd sooner rid ourselves of our latent racism rather than our sexism. We're living in the Age of the Ism only now we have different schools of thought as to which Ism is more important, it's kinda like, how do I say? Al Sharpton and Gloria Allred oil-wrestling (sorry) with those superdelegates in the audience tired of the whole thing. Now what would have really made this race even more interesting than it already is would be for a Gay Guy to run.

Liberals hoist by their own petard

Now if we posit that racism is a part of human nature, I've heard a few libs in my day assert such a universal "truth", then it should cut across the board, no? Like when some social conservative brings up the racist philosophy of Planned Parenthood's founder, eugenicist Margaret Sanger, and why are so many abortion clinics located in so many poor urban areas and NO, their liberal anger at such an accusation, it's like you're a rightie version of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but I mean if we're all racists deep down and we have to work on this...

I'm not a liberal...

...I just have liberal positions (Obama)

"I'm not an alcoholic, I'm an alcohol abuser" (Billy Joel to Katie Couric)

I'm not a criminal, I just commit crimes.

I'm not a drug dealer, I just sell drugs.

I'm not a stalker, I just follow people (the old Jack Jordan line)

Welcome to the general election buddy!

Bush made some recent noise about those liberal "appeasers" of terrorists, those who want to compromise and talk with them and Obama took great offense at having his manhood questioned and so Bush and friends said

"were we talking about you brother?"

just a flava of the upcoming election brotherman, get used to it. Now Obama has gone on record as saying he would meet with the leaders of such rogue nations as Iran, Syria and North Korea and now doesn't like to be called a pansy on foreign policy. He'd rather it all be a game of whiffle ball between himself and Mac, softball even and he'll choose the umpire.

chin music bro, don't crowd the plate like that

but if you ask me this McCain guy seems in it to win it and now you can't even use the Hagee thing against him 'cause the good Rev just apologized to the Catholic League but you seem to have gotten a bad case of the cooties from that Wright guy and they don't seem to be going away. Then there's that Weatherman and I ain't talkin' 'bout Sam Champion. Dude, things are gonna get off the hook after your Convention and you can't keep quoting from your Emily Post Rules of Etiquette that you have tucked under your arm. Toughen up! grow a pair.

Some homey sayings

They say this in the kitchen alot: "If you have time to lean you have time to clean."

Saw this one in a restroom once: "If you sprinkle while you tinkle please be neat and wipe the seat."

On an edgy t-shirt: "It's funny until somebody gets hurt, then it's hilarious." (hmmm...don't know about that one)

"I used up all my sick time, now I'm calling in dead."

"Don't hate, participate" (we've covered that), "people who live inside your head" (like that poor man's Kennedy neighbor we all have, he's strictly middle-class but has clout, knows some bigshots and can park on the street cleaning side w/o getting a ticket), "people who masturbate your mind" (like what Obama is doing right now with practically everybody except a few lonely bloggers)

"the great mental flush" like when you dream all night about practically everything, your mind's way of going through your mental dumpster, didn't think that job of so many years ago could still haunt your dreams huh?

"I'm not afraid of dead people, I'm afraid of live people" (very apropos in this day & age) and finally,

"It's a great life if you don't weaken."

You may have heard

about the troubles currently besetting Staten Island Republican Rep. Vito Fossella, preached "family values" his whole life but got arrested recently for a DWI but more importantly, at least in terms of the media, is the revelation that, although married and a family guy, he had an extramarital affair with a lady, she got in the family way herself and bore him a daughter. Now there are calls in some quarters for him to resign but what I don't get, if you take out the DWI from the equation, our friend and hero Bill Clinton got away with hummers right there in the Oval Office (or in some hallway just off the library way there) with an intern no less, he was impeached for perjury in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case relating to this matter but he became stronger over time, he even seemed more popular after the sex stuff. T-shirts appeared out of nowhere in trendy malls across the nation - "so he had an affair, get over it" - and one guy told me "so what, my 401K is doing great", so what's the BIG DEAL about this Fossella guy anyway?

I'd sooner read a tube of toothpaste

than read Barbara Walters' new book Audition which, during one interview on a radio station here, she said would make a wonderful Mother's Day gift. Every book has to have a hook to sell and hers is her Affair. I was never into Barbara Walters, she once famously asked Katherine Hepburn "if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?" (oh I don't know, a weeping willow?) Never much was into celebrity worship anyway, hated those pre-Oscar specials where she'd chat up three big-time celebrities. I myself, if I met a celebrity today could care less to ask for their autograph, don't care if I have a mini-Mead memopad on me, that's for shopping lists and such. They all be so interesting during the Big Interview but I believe Don Rickles once said it best when he said of the famous they all go on the throne like us regular folk or words to that effect & don't bother those bigger bombshells, they of the golden, um, womb, 1/2 of 'em are already reserved for horndog crooner John Mayer anyway and kudos-cubed for ex-View co-host Star Jones' recent commentary on l'affaire Babs, it was refreshing. Now if she were to put the rest of her thoughts in print I'd be the first on line at Barnes&Noble.

Talk about baggage

Obama looks like he's getting ready to board JetBlue! There's the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then there's his longstanding friendship with 70's Weatherman terrorist and radical Bill Ayers, we have Obama's recent elitist comments at that SanFran get-together, and then there's his book in which he rather casually talks about his little bit of casual pot and coke use in his youth when times were rough ("a little pot, a little blow but no smack").

a little Samsonite action

...toothbrush (check), clean underwear (check), socks (check)...

"Sir, can I help you with that?"

That's mighty white of you

Why is it ok for Obama to talk of his support among African-Americans but Hillary can't talk about her support among middle-class working-class whites without college degrees? So what's up with organized punditry these days? they all speak with the same voice and this echo chamber insists Hillary leave now and cede the nomination to Obama or else risk tearing the very fabric of the Democratic Party apart. Whence comes this melodramatic hyperbole? (yes, I can out-Will George Will at times) In the olde days the longer and more drawn out and fierce a primary season was it was all good, now we have our candidate and he's gone through our crucible, should be the right guy (or gal) for the job. The chattering classes have got it all wrong, the real question is not should she drop out but is he even sellable in the general election against McCain? The Cult of Obama has gotten everyone, including even many prominent conservatives, totally disoriented and off-center. Wake up and smell the coffee people and pundits, who do you really want answering that phone at 3 in the AM?

anti-smoking ads

They've gotten more gruesome but the latest one, some woman who lost the tips of her fingers, now they're just stubs, has something to do with bone shear but I would hazard a week's salary and go out on a limb here and say the vast majority of smokers know it's bad for you, ok, so knowing this they've made their choice so what's the point of all these ads? I thought we were pro-choice here.

Alot of African news going on

Don't know if you 've heard, it was the smallest squib in the NY Post somewhere in the middle yesterday, but the other day a U.S. Navy ship in the Indian Ocean launched some cruise missiles deep into Somalia killing the al-Qaeda leader there, the notorious 30-old Aden Hashi Ayro. Also killed were Ayro's brother and ten of his top lieutenants. Then there's Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his refusal to step down graciously after losing an important election to the leader of the opposition party, Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe of the ZANU-PF party says it was 47.9% to 43.2% in which close case there's supposed to be some kind of run-off or something but Tsvangirai says he won by 50.3% and therefore things were rigged. Elsewhere there's a critical food shortage in Malawi, the main meal everyday from aide workers consists basically of your porridge, no Mickie D's or pizza joints over there. As a sidenote someone once gave me a small bag of Malawi gin, not bad.

It's not all about Paula, Miley, Britney, UMA, Lindsay or Jeremiah. There be another world out there and I'm glad to see the Bush Administration not so exclusively focused on Iraq anymore, there are many al-Qaeda cells in Africa, there have been embassies bombed there but it's all about "The Insider" these days and who crooner John Mayer is bedding or Patrick Dempsey being named by "People" magazine as sexiest man alive. So kudos to the Newshour with Jim Lehrer for their heavy focus on African issues recently, too bad even they were forced to cover Eliot Spite-zer's sex life not that long ago but they were forced to since he was a sitting governor, it's not like they had a panel discussion on Paula's Idol confusion (no, not one of us ever woke up not knowing what day it was or forgot somebody's name at work). Tabloid journalism, it's like when you were young and your Mom said to eat an orange when there's a box of Devil Dogs on top of the breadbox.

Would you argue with God?

or why even conservatism tends towards moral relativism in the end, aka liberalism

Steamtable Catholicism got me thinking. I mentioned there that even many of those staunch conservative and tradition-minded Catholics don't care to fully partake of that item known as Catholic Just War Doctrine which, honestly applied, holds that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ethically wrong. Has nothing to do with politics per se, one very important principle of the Church's teaching is that you cannot deliberately target innocent civilian populations in time of war, ok. Now I would hazard a guess most modern-day conservatives support Truman's action but the question before the board today is this - would you argue with God? Put another way, let's say when we go before God someday he kindly explains to us that by His Divine Reckoning that particular action was grossly immoral, would we still stubbornly hold to our positions and even argue the point before Him or would we humbly admit our mistake and errors in our moral reasoning? It's a rhetorical, theoretical question and can be applied to any issue under the sun, I'm using this one today because of the vast majorities who still say we did the right thing. The arguments advanced for the bombing all smack of moral relativism, pragmatism and I really need not repeat them here, the salient point being most people don't seem to care but what does God think? Shouldn't the moral compass of a religious and spiritual nation be higher than this?

Would you argue with God? (Honorable mention goes to conservative thinkers Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan and the late Russell Kirk for opposing the use of the Bomb)