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!!

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?

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.

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.

You go girl!

Reading about Anucha Brown Sanders going crazy at some auction, bidding on everything in sight, she of suing Isiah Thomas for sexual harassment fame, and there's nothing like 11 mil to make your pain go away and I've been wondering is this progress? Feminists have had their day in the sun but I think much of sexual harassment law actually encourages women to see themselves as victims and I don't see how this empowers women. Celebs taking their secret admirers to court, now the UMA guy is a certified nutbag but what I really think bothers these gals is they don't want some average Joe going after them, they'd rather have Denzel or Leo DiCapricio, I mean DiCaprio. Was Anita Hill a pioneer or did she set women back? and whatever happened to that time-honored tradition of just slapping a man across his face? You see the morning paper gives z a little agita. Anucha, go easy with your windfall, you're making your sisters look bad.

Thought people mellowed with age

What's up with these liberal dinosaurs? always hating, never participating. Last time we checked Gloria Steinem embarassed herself on the NY Times Op-Ed page making the case that Bubba flashing Paula Jones was not sexual harassment but Clarence Thomas asking Anita Hill out more than once was, now she opines that McCain being a POW of the Vietcong for 5 1/2 years doesn't entitle him to the presidency (although methinks he's entitled to a free lapdance or two). Don't recall McCain running on this however, maybe I missed this as his platform, dunno but apparently everyone mellows with age except liberals, always fighting, always dividing the Universe into Good & Evil,

it's old.

Fat Acceptance

I am sympathetic with the whole Fat Acceptance Movement. I don't make fat jokes and if you're in that category you don't need people constantly reminding you of your state, as if you didn't know. BUT it ain't good for your health in the long-term.

File this under what was I thinking?

You may have heard. A branch of the ACLU has come out for Sen. Larry Craig, not so much in his denial but that toilet sex is protected, as long as the door is closed, gosh, people have "a reasonable expectation of privacy." So you have the runs or the cramps or your kid ain't feelin' too well,

gotta wait buddy

there's constitutionally protected activities going on in them thar stalls, you can put a cork in it and read a newspaper, they'll probably be done in a couple minutes anyway,

must be a penumbra of a penumbra or emantion from Roe, ah the spirit of Blackmun!

If SEX rules your life...

...Rush said something about this once, if you're the kind of person who lets sex rule your life then you'll destroy yourself in the end (something like this anyway, I don't remember his exact words but he put it rather dramatically). So this guy at work, he gets called to a union meeting because a young woman accused him of sex-chal harassment. Now this guy's a real playa or fancies himself to be but I also know this guy's style, he chats up any eye candy in sight but I think he stops short of the complete grossout, this woman has a history of making these type claims (good luck finding a boyfriend honey) but there's a lesson here -

when you're a playa you'll get by with most women but you're heading into some rough waters in this post-Anita Hill, post Anucha Brown Sanders age, the perils of a man whose mind is always on SEX, you think about it, you dream about it, you pursue it constantly, you want more notches on your belt. It's like Phil Donahue ALWAYS talked about IT on his show and you know something, his face started to resemble the male organ itself towards the end and have you seen Clinton's nose lately? Am I making sense here?

The bee-itch

You may have heard, a woman on one of John McCain's campaign stops asked him "so how do we beat this bitch?" to which he replied "that's an excellent question." Usual denunciations, now if you make the case the sitatution was highly inappropriate, well ok, I won't argue with you there, just seems to me in a more humorous, less pc age it would all have been so hilariously funny. McCain's from the olde school, for cryin' out loud the guy was a POW for 5 years, can't have a little fun?

Ever walk out of the store at the mall and forget where the hell you parked? So you're walking with your bag and you don't want to look like an idiot, all the silver Honda Civics begin to look alike - "Mommy, who's that man who can't find his car? Is he on drugs?" - and you begin to think your car was stolen until you finally find it and vow it will never happen again but it does.....

The new breast cancer/alcohol link

The neo-Puritan movement will come up with anything these days.

Drink up gals!

Hillary the Panderer

So much for Dick Morris' political strategy of triangulation which Bill Clinton followed with some success. Hillary at this point is not even pretending to appeal to the vast swath of conservative voters out there, it's full-throttle Left, to take a line from Dennis Miller as applied to Rush Limbaugh Hill is like a shopping carriage with a bad wheel that just constantly pulls leftward. Take the Jena 6.

In Jena, Louisiana 6 black high school students have been arrested and were to be prosecuted for attempted murder following the vicious beating of a white teenager, the charges have now been downgraded to battery. Seems a black student sat under a tree that was reserved for some white trash and three nooses appeared in the tree soon after. The white student was hospitalized and is now on the mend and an appeals court dismissed the conviction of one black student who was tried as an adult.

Now I don't for the life of me, maybe I'm dreaming, but I don't get how the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are referring to this sorry episode in race relations in this country as the next Selma but there she was, Madame herself, on Sharpton's radio show:

"I know you and I don't condone violence of any kind but this situation raises very serious questions of injustice and inequality (what injustice? if 6 whites had attacked a black they'd get at least 20 years and rightly so - z). And it shines a bright spotlight on the disparate treatment (emphasis z's) that happens all too often in our country still today in affecting African-American young people in the criminal justice system" (you mean thugs Hill whom respectable blacks don't even want to associate with? - editor).

The only relevant question here is this - did all these African-American young people who are allegedly receiving disparate treatment at the hands of our legal system guilty of the crimes they've gone to prison for? Hillary seems to be saying no otherwise her statement makes no logical sense so this would be a massive national scandal indeed, our country throwing innocent blacks in jail by the millions day after day BUT a little bird sat on z's shoulder the other day and told him that Hill is just

pandering (this happens when you take Timbaland's money)

Liberal commentary on the Cho matter

The latest is Marc Fisher's piece in yesterday's New York Post, for the sheer inner workings of the liberal mind it can't be beat. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's review panel charged with investigating the Virginia-Tech shootings came out, apparently heads are not gonna roll over this one. Is everyone mental? I mean there's a real crisis going on and they're talking about the, get this, the e-mails should have gone out faster. I'm sorry but if there's a psycho on campus getting ready to rock you get on the intercom, the loudspeaker, the bullhorn and get the people the hell out and lock the place down. Maybe we're too obsessed with the computer these days, it's like it's our only frame of reference even in an emergency ("Grandad's having a heart attack, e-mail your brother.")

But what I'm really getting at is the liberalism behind all the punditry. Now the reader may recall all the apocalyptic moral denunciations of Don Imus, you may have heard, but Cho was a sorry character who slipped through the cracks who didn't get the help he needed (kinda our fault as usual). At least he never chopped on black basketball players like Jimmy the Greek did once, a topic sportswriter Phil Mushnick is still obsessed with. And what's the deal with this quiet loner line already? Over 90% of whatever you want to call them probably wouldn't even shoot a deer, can we get over the defense of social cliques already? Few years ago criticism of cliques was all the rage, now it's a crime to not be in one.

Bottom line is Don Imus is still more evil than the Virginia-Tech killer, no talk of chemical-imbalance there. At worst Cho had issues, liberalism holds, as Mr. Fisher demonstrates, that he was mental but not evil. We reserve that phrase for the politically incorrect (Whoopie, watch your back).

The weight of the evidence

We've all been brought up to believe that stereotypes are

a bad thing

and so we go through life and come across situations that seem to bear out their truth at least to a degree but we know this is

a bad thought

and so we put it out of our heads until you're a chef let's say and your new black co-worker comes in everyday and the first thing on her mind is "did you make the fried chicken yet?" and you say "I saved a piece for you" and then you're frying some chicken tenders just to give them some color before you shoot them in the oven but she's bothering you again and you say "they're still raw, just wait 10 or 15 minutes."

I've heard many chefs say that Jewish customers in restaurants kvetch all the time. Jackie Mason even jokes about this, they complain about EVERYTHING even the salt and pepper shakers. Now this ain't a prejudiced thing 'cause I hear even politically liberal chefs say the same thing or

Spanish guys and their libidos which never seems to take a holiday.

Gays never talk effeminate of course or have limp wrists,

feminists are all fun and games of course and just love men in between all the heavy politicking. Just don't follow them around or have your florist send them a bouquet.

It's just the weight of the evidence, know what I'm saying?

Affirmative action

As a conservative I'm naturally against it but a better deal for everyone would be if, instead of a government program based on race we had an informal system based on economic need this way poor whites on welfare would benefit as well as blacks and Hispanics. At any rate one of the unintended consequences of affirmative action as it is today is that, on occasion, you do get someone who totally does not belong in that job, everyone knows it and at first you're mystified that nobody seems to talk about it and that nothing is done, it's a classic elephant in the living room moment. This is not the goal of the proponents of race-based hiring but I've seen it on at least a few occasions and that's when your Peter Principle kicks in.

Isaiah Washington, the black actor on "Grey's Anatomy" who made the gay slur against co-actor T.R. Knight, has been fired from the show and the man is angry, said he did everything they told him to re atoning and that they now want to have Knight's character as a centerpiece of the show so this is interesting, apparently gay men trump African-American men in the victim stakes only it took a while longer to fire Washington than CBS Radio did in canning the I-man, well he was just a rickety old white cowboy anyway. If T.R. had responded in kind and called Washington the n-word it would have had a kind of karmic cancelling effect or something and would have confounded and stunned the whole pc crowd, what to do? two members of historic and time-honored victim groups have engaged in name-calling! do we fire them both and so not have a tv series at all or send them both off for reprogramming? Barring that maybe all T.R. has to do is question global warming and become pro-life and he can join the growing ranks of the damned.

The Dark Cave of the Past - 1961 was a very bad year

From the New York Post TV Week for 6/12-23, Prime Time Adam Buckman, "TV jukebox pumps up summer shows":

"...'Mad Men' is the best new show of the summer. This series depicts the world of Madison Avenue advertising in 1961...For 'Mad Men', which premieres July 19, they have recreated the chauvinistic (emphasis mine) world of mid-town Manhattan at the dawn of the 1960s. People smoke all over the place - at their desks, in restaurants, even in elevators. Electric typewriters and push-button phones are considered the latest in 'new technology.' Everybody drinks, even during the day, and the men shamelessly harass their female co-workers, none of whom are co-equals."

So there you have it, the pc view of the Past as unmitigated Evil (the only thing missing from Buckman's commentary is back-alley abortions). This is the way men behaved when left to their own devices in those days without our current progressive legislation, new laws always being a necessity of course. Men of the Past being gentlemen was all a big hoax after all like Loch Ness. Puritanism is definitely the way to go, I mean smoking and drinking and flirtation in the office?? Call Mayor Bloomberg!! You can't come up with anything good about the Past you pc'ers? like, oh I don't know, intact families and low crime rates?

and why is the New York Post, widely considered the only truly conservative paper around these days, throwing around liberal buzzwords like homophobic (if homophobic means analphobic I plead guilty, got a problem with that)? And what's up with the word "preggers" now peppering Page Six, I mean that is sooooo gay. Just the other day some gay guy was reading about the latest celeb being preggers and said "that's way too gay for me."

Who will be the next poor mofo sent up sh*t's creek without a paddle?

Mel Gibson
Michael Richards
Isaiah Washington (almost up the creek if he does the right thing, if you know what I mean)
Don Imus

we're due

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is safe, and that includes our beloved Bob Newhart (careful Bob).

I am a solipsistic, self-absorbed, self-pitying, narcissistic and vindictive gay American

I am so not on Jim McGreevey's side in his nasty custody battle with ex-wife Dina Matos McGreevey regarding their young daughter Jacqueline. McGreevey, former Democratic governor of New Jersey, resigned the statehouse in August 2004 when scandal swirled when he, um, tapped his lover Golan Cipel for the job of Director of the NJ Dept. of Homeland Security. He wrote a coming out book about it all called simply The Confession in which he admits that, even when he was acting governor, he had quickie and anonymous gay sex at various rest stops along the Interstate. His ex-wife has now come out with her own version of their marriage, Silent Partner. McG wants little Jackie to spend at least half her time with him and his male lover, Australian money manager Mark O'Donnell, and in court papers filed he says her intent to block this shows her "irrational fears of his sexuality" (or perhaps all too rational fears). Quoth he:

"She is in deep denial. Why would she question what I have made clear? To try and lessen my gayness by making me bisexual is a clear form of homophobia." So now calling someone a bisexual is some kind of slur? and how did he have sex with her all those years?

What is going on in this guy's head?

The masculine/feminine culture debate revisited

I blogged about this not too long ago but it has resurfaced in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy. Conservatives Michelle Malkin and Jay Nordlinger and now libertarian Neil Boortz are saying that when a group of people are threatened by one long gunman you're going to die anyway and so the best course of action would be to rush the guy and thus limit the carnage. Makes sense to me but Lionel, who recently said that he wants to hear and read EVERYTHING, said this is beneath contempt. Maybe his point has to do with how Malkin, Nordlinger and Boortz presented their argument as somehow blaming the victim or what he called "the wussification of America" but I sure hope he's not actually criticizing the validity of their point. It's true fear is a great paralyzer in such a situation and you almost need a telepathic consensus to pull this thing off, hey wait a minute, that happened on Flight 93 that was headed straight to Washington on 9/11, the heroes on board all gave up their lives but a far greater tragedy was averted (hard to see it this way in the context of the other similar events of that day). In a way we have become a nation of victims and I don't mean this disparagingly in any way, it's simply a statement of fact whether Malkin and company present it politely or not. So why is pushing people to defend themselves more so controversial? Why can't schools hold classes in how to defend yourself and others in such a situation? This is another reason why I much prefer a masculine to a feminine culture.

Should we criminalize the past?

just like in 1984 and Brave New World

The past was about real romance, not match.com. The past had a breadth and depth to it that the modernists don't know they're doing away with. The past climate that is said to have produced an Imus is said to be bad and the past, pre-Clarence Thomas, that encouraged men to ask the same woman out more than once was bad too. Conservatives are about preserving the past and liberals want to change it. Why is the past bad?

From the New York Times for April the 14th, "Shock Talk Without Apologies", by Robert Wright. He's all for political correctness and feels Ann Coulter should be held to the same standard as Don Imus but the liberals of a bygone era said free speech means nothing if it doesn't protect the ugly and offensive. If people like Mr. Wright had their way things would be, well, perfectly boring. Anyway he makes this rather common but flawed point when he says:

"If social harmony is the goal sanctions should be focused along the ethnic fault lines that are most precarious. The black-white boundary is such a line given both the history of oppression and ongoing economic disparities between blacks and whites" (emphasis z's). I've lived close to a public housing project for much of my life and have noticed just as many poor whites living there as blacks. I myself, white as snow, have never lived high on the hog, most of the time I struggle like the rest of us. I wish I had a little more economic disparity to boast about, I would't have had to sell my used fishing boat a few years back because it was like having two cars.

Abandoning the past is not progress.