The BIG issue in Ohio

jobs going overseas, NAFTA and GATT, plants closing, massive layoffs. Now here Republicans don't have any edge whatsoever although of course as has been amply pointed out in our blogs McCain ain't your typical conservative so maybe he can feel their pain but the issue naturally is a winner for any Democrat. Repubs are perfectly fine with the NWO (New World Order) stuff and they tend to belittle and disparage those who disagree with them...but I like Beth's point in her blog today about how most of us are going for McCain reluctantly whereas Obama excites real passion on his side. I used the analogy that for our side it's like going out with someone who you're not exactly crazy about like bothering some overharried secretary at work 'cause you're lonely as opposed to someone you really dig, who you're on the same page with, the connection (pizzaz, sizzle) in other words your dream date (I'm just chock full of the metaphors lately). Imagine an Obama-ite saying he ain't much but he's the best we have! Now I don't share Obama's political philosophy of course but he does excite me, like Stacy's mom he has it going on, turn gay for a day, have his baby,

dunno.

Hey brother, can you spare a couple of hundred?

Now I didn't know this but they were talking about panhandlers on the radio the other day and apparently alot of them are raking in the big bucks, sometimes $300 in a single day! Now I'm not overly judgemental about the homeless, there but for the grace of God. I know Sean and Rush take the position one should never be without a place to live, that they don't want to work. Wanting to work, that's a poor framing of the issue. Like Beth and I were talking the other day and we both agreed who exactly loves to work anyway? ain't the issue but they may have a point that they've stretched to an overgeneralization. You never really read or hear about some homeless guy having to be talked down from a bridge 'cause he's been out of a job for a couple years, maybe that's Sean's point, as long as they have a soup kitchen to go to and a place to sleep maybe they prefer it to your 9-5, dunno but I don't want to lose my compassionate conservative edge either...

GERALDO should just...

...get back inside Al Capone's vault and lock the door. Says there's no way the GOP will get the Hispanic vote, they're gonna go for the Dems 'cause of the illegal immigration issue. OK, let's explain this one again. Geraldo & co. bring up a chair and get a cup of coffee, class is now in session.

The difference between rights and privileges

(be quiet there in the back) "OK, so you've broken some law, a law, you didn't kill anyone or rob a bank, but you've committed a crime nevertheless, so what are we to do about it? The illegal alien has broken the LAW, violated our immigration policy and there are a myriad political views on the best way to handle this but if we allow you to stay and in effect we have (even conservatives like Sean Hannity) because we haven't deported you yet, then this is what is known as a privilege but you really have no absolute right to be here. Shakespeare said sometimes justice needs to be tempered by mercy but that's for us to decide, you cannot arrogantly demand a right for yourself that doesn't exist...OK, this is just a short class to get us started, to lay the proper legal bedrock for a sensible discussion of this controversial topic. We'll continue this at 9 sharp tomorrow morning so have a good day."

GERALDO (whispering): "This teacher sounds like a gran pendejo."

"WHAT?!?, you know I took a little Latin in the high school. If you can't control yourself..."

Karma and the Christian faith

Daniel Ruwe's excellent blog about religion got me thinking about faith in general. Pope Benedict said once about mainly the Eastern religions, I believe this was when he was still a cardinal, that the Christian faith is naturally and far superior to these systems based on good and bad karma. You see if I'm a Christian and have wronged somebody else or they have wronged me we can simply ask for each other's forgiveness and move on with our lives, we don't have to get stuck in that karmic rut. Beth and I once had this debate, maybe it started at some forum, I forget, but it was about forgiving and forgetting. My position, simply forgive and forget, her position you can forgive someone without forgetting. I think I understand her point better, it's like if a husband strays and his wife forgives him she will always remember the fact, the original act, if she had moral "amnesia" about it all this would hardly keep him in line. At any rate no karma to deal with, ain't that a bargain?

Some thoughts on the Sean Bell case

I've given the background to this tragic case many times in my blogging and it's easy enough to google. I was never into the whole bachelor party scene but that's just me. Re strip joints there are upscale ones and seedy ones, I'm not advertising for them but you do have men who go to these places not to relax and have a good time, they get some watered-down whiskey under their belts and before you know it there's a stabbing on the sidewalk. Happened once outside a place in Yonkers here and another incident in a "gentlemen's club" in Mt. Vernon once. Now the one Sean Bell and his friends went to on that fateful night was known for rampant drugs, guns and prostitution and the four officers in Queens who are about to go on trial for taking Mr. Bell's life were there because of the type of place it was. Moral of the story and as insensitive as this may sound Sean Bell was not in a good place, wrong place at the wrong time, and I'm sure the young woman whom he was going to marry that day knows this in her heart of hearts. I'm also more than a little tired of all the cop-bashing out there and personally have grown more pro-cop over the years, I most often give them the benefit of the doubt in these complicated cases. We'll see what happens but this case bothered me from Day One.

The speech Rudy never gave

I still say that there is almost a poetic requirement that the Mayor of 9/11 be the One to continue and eventually win the War on Terror but most people don't seem to agree with this script, Life need not be that artistic I guess but Rudy's big mistake was this. He courted his party's conservative base way too late in the game, if you're going to woo you have to get your application in early otherwise you're transparent, maybe a bit frenzied and not at all sincere. He should have laid the groundwork a year or two ago with a major speech or two soley on the Life Issues as in, "Upon further reflection I've come to the conclusion that the abortion issue lends itself best to some kind of legislative solution which Roe vs. Wade pre-empted. How can the Supreme Court, any Supreme Court, act like a bunch of OB-GYNs and dictate to the nation as a whole that aborting the fetus is legal up to the 3rd month or the 6th or even up until birth? You can even have some choicers who believe early abortions are ok but who are against some of the later mid-term ones still allowed by the Court. The late Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, endlessly complicated the issue and for this reason I've adjusted my earlier pro-choice views. Federalism is the best way of dealing with this contentious and highly emotional issue."

If he had done this early enough some of us might even have gotten a faint whiff of sincerity in the man, we all reserve the right to change or modify or calibrate our views over time and it would have showed that he gave further thought to the issue. It's just a hunch but I think most conservatives would more than gladly put up with a true pro-choice federalist in office.

Are you a...

...bang your head against the wall type of conservative? Used to listen to Sean Hannity for awhile but stopped, I understand he's for the War and all but I was worried there for awhile, he's one of those Ann Coulter type conservatives who can't seem to accept the fact that there's so many different kinds of political views out there let's just accept it and live with each other, doesn't mean you have to lose your passion though, just keep it in perspective. Take Coulter's books, of course her first one was funny, forget the title but it probably went along the lines of Liberals are Stupid and We're All Good but she's churned out like 10 books now and the formula never changes. I myself, being older in Life now, gotta watch the high blood pressure, hating is so yesterday which is why I have Laura Ingraham linked up to my blog. Passionate and conservative, highly intelligent and yet she can totally disagree with a big-time lib and yet say "but we still like them." She's the type of rightie you might accidentally catch in the Mall one day having a cup of java with Al Franken in the Food Court. Dunno, I'm just tired of banging my head against the wall my whole life. I don't want Hill as president but I'm with Beth on this one, the Sun will still rise the next day and we'll all go about our everyday lives.

Seems we're living in the Golden Age of Psychos

Well not a few months don't go by before there's another one, this time at some college in Illinois, seems some erstwhile bright and normal student hid behind a curtain onstage during a geology lecture and shot and killed five students and injured several others before taking his own life. Now whenever this happens you will duly note how the meds are to blame or, more specifically the fact that the person stopped taking his meds. Well if a pill is the only thing holding this person's life together then God help us all, he ain't living right. Vast majority of people who are mentally ill are not dangerous or violent although they can be annoying at times point being if you have a strong moral code and compass to begin with you can go bonkers but only up to a point. You may walk into a road and babble to everyone, tell everyone at work that they're conspiring to get rid of you but there are limits to your madness, the Good Lord gave you free will, if you're against killing to begin with maybe they'll just put you away in a nice home overlooking a lake somewhere for a time. Our friend Britney may do all kinds of whacked out things but she hasn't pulled a Columbine or VA Tech yet, my guess is her moral code is still there although frayed around the edges. Now I'm not against medical progress by any stretch but methinks they're pushing pills on society. You don't have to agree with me though, that's a'ight.

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.

Subprime musings

Michelle Malkin has finally touched on the subprime mortgage meltdown in two recent columns and I've been asking myself why I didn't bash her in my blog the next day as your typical conservative lacking compassion. Well I considered her points carefully that oftentimes it's the would be homeowner with delusions of grandeur that's the problem here, not that there aren't any predatory lenders out there. I went back over my own situation with credit cards. Overall I have a good credit history but for a few years there I was living well beyond my means, had to have this and that and it caught up with me, maxed out and needed help paying 'em off. That's behind me now but I have made a personal decision in my life, I don't have them and I don't use them anymore, cash and checks for everything. It's all about personal responsibility and wise decision-making. I learned my lesson, will these people out of their "homes" learn theirs?

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!

Morose thoughts

Like why can't they scientifically prove once and for all time that there's life after death then we wouldn't have to worry (and for those of you who say you don't give it a second thought it's in the back of your mental attic somewhere next to the ice skates and the Flexible Flyer). Then again in some cases there may be some who would still have to worry, sorry I brought it up. BTW I'm not the least bit afraid of dead people, live people on the other hand.....

Spontaneous Human Combustion

"uh, this is z's mother. He's not coming in today, he spontaneously human combusted last night."

Why I'm not your typical conservative right-wing Republican

First off I'm registered as an Independent not as a Republican. Although my bedrock philosophy is one of conservatism in every old-fashioned sense of the term, no globaloney, I am of the mind that the retirement age should actually be lowered instead of raised, let's say 55. Not gonna happen and all you economic conservatives out there will scold me for wanting to bust the national piggy bank and they're probably right but it's an ideal, it's what I feel in my heart. You've devoted say 20 or 25 years of your life to pure hardcore work, that should be enough and have a nice life. As well I feel if you as a conservative are really serious about doing something about the illegals either deport 'em all or regularize most of them, don't just talk about building a bigger and better fence. I've already made my position known. In theory anyway I am not against the idea of labor unions although I know there are drawbacks which cons like Linda Chavez and George Will are only too happy to point out. I am not just for lowering taxes, that's easy talk, but am for eliminating the income tax entirely and replacing it with a national sales tax. I'm not a dove but I'm not a hawk either. I am a conservative with an independent mind and God bless and have a nice day.

The voters are going to vote...

...for their national security blanket, Bigger Government, like that comforter you snuggle under on a bone-chilling winter night after you've had your goblet (or two) of the good stuff. Men too which is why McCain is up there on top and Huckabee is even in the running. Don't throw me out on a cold winter night to venture out alone, that's too libertarian. I want a bubble bath that maybe you can pay for, why don't you give me a rubber too 'cause I'm too lazy to go down to Walgreen's myself speaking of which I messed up a couple months ago with my girlfriend and now she has a bun in the oven. I can't quite scrape up the $350, can you help out a guy and gal down on their luck? I want to go to the ER because I have the runs and hang around the waiting room watching a Seinfeld rerun even though somebody else just came in with a real problem but has to wait a couple hours 'cause me and my friends are here.

I don't just want my mind masturbated, I want my life masturbated as well AND you're going to foot the bill.

In the curious matter of the male fetus...

...how is this just a part of the Woman's Body if you catch my drift? just one of many many inconsistencies of the choice movement like the 24-week cutoff point many states use to proscribe later abortions, by what mysterious alchemy is the unborn child not human just 3 days before "viability"? I call this the Cinderella Paradox as in "quick, it's 11:45, abort it, the fetus turns human at midnight!" OR the common agnostic approach to abortion which is we don't know the moral and human status of the fetus but let it happen anyway. You should have to prove the fetus is not human before you can suck it into oblivion which brings up the next point. Our science in general and in particular the study of the unborn known as fetology is so far advanced (think transvaginal ultrasound) that we can no longer fall back on the agnostic position, it ain't a bovine fetus after all.

It's all just masturbation of the mind folks.

The current crop...

...of Republican presidential contenders, McCain, Romney and Huck and the lack of real influence of third parties reminds me of the playlists of radio stations today. You don't really care for it but you have no choice, the songs are bland and slightly irritating but it's what everyone is listening to so it has to be good. They keep playing it over and over, think The Fray, and so you brainwash yourself and try to get into it (McCain would be a slow waltz, think Lawrence Welk). You don't have a CD player in your car (the 3rd Party) and you realize Maroon 5 is in that other party, Fergie's over there too and as a rock-ribbed conservative you're just depressed all the time.

"Sittin' by the dock of the bay
watching all the conservatives go away,
Traveled a thousand miles from home
Just to make this third party my home."

But who would Mary Jo Kopechne have endorsed?

Teddy Kennedy backs Obama and betrays Hillary.

So when can we say we have enough laws?

The function of the Congress or any legislative body for that matter is primarily to pass laws. If they don't pump out the legislation this is, you guessed it,

a bad thing,

and so it will haunt a candidate in the next race. Legislation is all about addressing issues and showing concern for people's problems but the second question before the Board today is how many laws do we as a society actually need? Why the obsession and constant need to legislate? as well the more laws you pass the less freedoms you have, it's basic arithmetic. So when can we send our parliament of ho's home?

How the Catholic Church has changed

In the olde days, as soon as a baby was born he/she was baptized as quickly as possible, probably within a few days at most. Today there's no hurry, a recent papal theological commission has pretty much dispensed with the never official dogma of Limbo anyway and so a few months go by after the birth, various people may be asked to be the godparents and an application is finally submitted to the parish but again, there's no rush. The pastor is likely to wait until a group of people need the sacrament and do 'em all on the same day. The issue before the Board today, maybe the sacraments aren't as important as they used to be. Can we blame the usual villain, Vatican 2?

Fred Thompson - a consistent political philosopher

He may not be a pro-life purist like Judie Brown of the American Life League, always going for the touchdown, aka that Constitional Amendment, but he's not a life-choicer like Mitt Romney either. He's a federalist or a believer in states' rights. Laura Ingraham brought up the fact that he was against government intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, well he can say he was consistent in his own head anyway. I myself was more into the whole angle of Terri could swallow on her own and so the laws in all 50 states say you have to feed a person by mouth. Her feeding tube was always a side issue anyway, they could have given her saline hydration by IV and as for his misguided comments about a federal law banning abortion meaning women and possibly their Moms and Dads going to jail, this had a silver lining. It allowed pro-lifers and in particular us bloggers to clarify the issue, hey, maybe Fred knew this all along. Anyway he has my vote if he's the nominee.

Whatever happend to our beloved frontrunner?

Rudy, down there in single digits in all the primaries so far, widely considered by far the odds-on favorite hands down even months before Iowa and New Hampshire. At this point in time his only option would appear to be to pull a Joe Lieberman and run as an Independent and then return to his old party after he's won (if this is even possible).

Rudy, wha'happened?

When the Law collides with Reality

There are laws on the books in many states, or proposed legislation, to treat drivers who have gone without sleep the same as drunken drivers. Makes a certain degree of sense but then again most people commute to work in cars, are you supposed to call out sick whenever you've had a sleepless night? Insomniacs hold down jobs just like the rest of us, maybe you can get away with calling out once or twice but what do the chronics do? will your typical boss understand that you may have a medical condition and you are trying to obey the Law? will the problems of Life never cease?

stranded in civilization.

What Mike Huckabee really is ~~~

~~~is a pro-life Democrat in the Bob Casey mold.

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?

I was thinking...

...you'd think by now abortion would peter out and become more or less a thing of the Past, we have about a 100 methods of birth control now and even if you're for abortion there's always the annoyance and inconvenience of having to make an appointment and going through with it (myself? I hate having to get haircuts and oil changes, can you take my car in for me please?) and geez, you could've really used that $300 for something else not to mention the off-chance that your God just might be against it in the End.

Some people thrive on chaos.

The wisdom of celebrities

From today's Page Six Magazine, actress Eva Amurri (whom I never heard of btw) gives us this pearl of wisdom:

On her parents Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins:

"Both of my parents have been arrested. Not many people can say that."

Why libertarianism has never really taken off

You'd think such a political philosophy would be the order of the day, people like Ron Paul should be elected President in a heartbeat, I mean what is more important and American and critical to a democracy and people's pursuit of happiness than unfettered liberty? then again we have

the drug situation,

and not just the ordinary drugs that used to make for movies like French Connection grown from poppy fields in Afghanistan but things made up by weird and evil scientists, mad eggheads who can't just go off in the woods and beat off around a log fire while drinking Coronas after a bad day of fishing like most normal American men...sci-fi writer Aldous Huxley sang their praises, the father of LSD and then there's also

unfettered abortion

late-term fetuses (proper usage now) in garbage bins & a kid's right (in libertarian views) to access porn in public libraries. Libertarianism will always be a minority and eccentric political movement, people want some protection from the Ravages of Life even if it means government has to step in every once in a while.

Bhutto.....

it's a shame, some people just don't want peace.

In z's view the largest obstable to a proper ecumenical understanding and accord between the world's religions is not things like

Mel Gibson

but radical Islam (wondering how a robust discussion of this is going over at Hannityland where they have special rules regarding conversations about Islam).

Make yourself at home

So I was at least 45 minutes delayed masturblogging today 'cos some computer user at the library leaves his station to go outside for a smoke, goes back to the computer, strike that, his computer, continues vegetating in front of YouTube all the while chatting on his cell, he has something in his ear with a wire, he thinks he's Jack Bauer...would you like a Corona and a bowl of party mix w/that?...another guy, the 30-something unemployed male live-at-home slug sitting next to him, also vegetating in front of YouTube...seems the days of staying at home circle-jerking to badly produced porn are a quaint relic from the Past, we seem to have evolved beyond this amoeba stage, now we take our act into the library -- SOLUTION: install software that cuts people off after a one-hour session let's say -- I'll buy you a computer, I'll take you to Circuit City myself in my 2005 Honda Civic, just get the hell off the computer already!!!

The Republi-Cult and how it works

"overtime, overtime! yeah, oh God no!"

The Cult wants to bring You over to its worldview ("you have a problem with Sarko? you socialist slacker you!") and so you start feeling guilty ("you know I really should like work more"). Work is like a Zen experience for them instead of a means to an end to pay off a few bills, like Denny Crane and Alan Shore they sit on the balcony afterhours smoking their Don Tomases and go over the day. Only people on welfare, the poor folk, like, or rather, are obsessed with Sex, preferably with Judge Judy droning on in the background. Yeah yeah, we're hip, there's always time for a little tapping...

in between jobs,

but we know what's more important, the opening bell on Wall Street and we will bash any Pope who gets in our way by sermonizing over our excesses,

and NO, you got it all wrong, the French don't know how to enjoy Life better than we do, the pussies wouldn't even go to War, there are no alternative views and we will invalidate them anyway by our clever use of name-calling (Michelle Malkin is our Asian pit bull if you please, don't get on our bad side),

and we're so stupid (aka The Stupid Party) that we don't even know our language doesn't resonate with the People anymore, we've lost the common touch and we'll most assuredly lose the next Election to HillObama. Our own Republican pollster Frank Luntz likes to remind us from time to time about how stupid we really sound but he can always be replaced, the only issue is how do we beat the Bitch?

What exactly is Mall Security???

The latest chapter in the Psycho Rules (because we let it), some 19-year old loser who lost his job at McDonald's and his girlfriend too went to a major mall in Omaha, Nebraska yesterday with a gun and shot 8 holiday shoppers to death. Now z always found these tragic episodes problematic, here you have one psychotic a-hole who wanted to "go out in style" (he also shot himself of course, they always do) against hordes of innocent people, I know your first impulse is to flee and find cover, fear is a great paralyzer (I'm thinking out loud here as I always do) but the larger issue is how do you define Mall Security? They don't even carry guns or tasers, some of them are ex-cons and you don't even see them patrolling the mall all day, chances are they're in the Mall Security office glancing at about 4 or 5 TV monitors on the wall if they're not dozing off already. Ditto VA Tech. Z is just tired of reading about these predictable tragedies every few months (they seem to follow a cycle), do we just passively accept our victimhood?

(it can only help him)

From the 12/5 edition of the New York Post:

Dems trade 'choice' words

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's team had a pro-choice supporter bash rival Sen. Barack Obama's record on abortion rights - but his camp responded with past praise from his basher.

Ellen Malcolm, president of pro-choice EMILY's List, held a press conference denouncing Obama for voting "present" instead of "yes" on a "critical" abortion rights bill when he was in the Illinois Legislature.

She also faulted a US Senate floor speech he gave opposing Chief Justice John Roberts because Obama "barely" mentioned Roe vs. Wade.

But Obama's camp released a May 2006 letter from Malcolm praising his "fighting to make change happen."

Geoff Earle

.....ooops, just a little more,

Saw a commercial for Efflexor last night, if your other antidepressants aren't really helping you there's this but potential side effects MAY include an increased risk for suicide especially in children and young adults (kids are depressed again because why?) and so help me out here, you're depressed and this pill MAY make you kill yourself, I'm not getting this one but look on the bright side, you won't be depessed any longer (but other people will because of what you did and then they'll take Efflexor)...reminds me a little of bequeathing,

Truthfully, only Rudy Hillary and Barack are the only real interesting candidates here. Watching the Sunday morning shows, now I know politics is a dry subject but these shows are so BORING, z-man just wants to go back to mast...masturblogging. I mean even before he was a serious candidate John McCain must have on these shows at least a thousand times, Tim Russert always looks like he has the trots and the men's room is ocupado.....prison boredom.

I'm not a big fan of talking and eating at the same time, for me it's an effort, you go visit people, it's a birthday party and everyone's chowing down talking a mile a minute about whatever, they're not bad people but can we have some rules here? Z-man, being the contemplative type, wants to stay home next time, watch the car chase in Bullitt one more time, really study it.

Thoughts on money

Had a debate once about you can't take it with you with an older person, said why not spend it while you can and have a good time and she made the point that bequeathing it is more important on down the line so I got to thinking let's put this into practice,

the children have been left their fortune by Mom and Dad, sharing the same guiding philosophy as they did they hardly spend it either so they grow old and make out their will and the succeeding generation does the same thing and so on for 5 generations but it just sits there, meanwhile Iran now has the nukes and Putin's successors have teamed up with China and they're threatening the West so yes, it IS important to have a nice nest egg,

"the money's there, don't worry but you can't touch it"
"why is it there?"
"I really don't know but it's important that it's there and it stays there"
"Can I take some out?"
"Of course but just a little bit at a time"
"Is that a mushroom cloud I see?"

A common male attitude

You'll often hear a married man or just one who has a steady girlfriend say this among the boys:

"Going to a strip club and getting a lap dance or two is not really cheating."

In a strictly legal sense, ok, if you define cheating as having intercourse (my my, how Billy Boy has corrupted the country, you asked for a legacy pal, you got it, thanx brotherman!), but in z's book it's cheating in a spiritual sense and anyway

if you really dug her you wouldn't be going there.

Like I'm not sure what's supposed to happen here

Worked in a deli once and the guy just went on his lunch, a nice young man with an eye for the ladies, and it's kinda slow, early evening and this attractive young lady approaches the counter, looked like Teri Hatcher, and so I very casually saunter over ready to take her order when a blur of color whuuushes past me, the guy's back from lunch and he does her order instead of me and I'm like

wa'happened?

and so, in his head the pretty young woman married to a corporate lawyer, they're both just back from Rio and she's getting the cold cuts, is ready to risk it all and have an affair with a 20-something deli clerk because he was exceedingly nice to her and got her a 1/2 pound of Boar's Head Ovengold Roasted Turkey Breast sliced razor-thin of course, he had to get his micrometer out and a 1/4 lb. of yellow American,

I had more to offer though, much more. I know how to make quiche but he scared her off.

I don't know how to break this to my folks

Sociologist or cultural professor or whatever she is, Christine B. Whelan, writing in yesterday's New York Post, says studies show that the college-educated fare much better in the romance and marriage stakes department, they are less likely to divorce than those without college degrees and far less likely to have kids out of wedlock than us uneducated yokels (presumably those with degrees never use drugs or watch porn either). The degreed also attract more members of the opposite sex, the Educated Man is more likely to be seen as a good provider (Dr. Laura's apologia for Social Darwinism).

I'm concerned. You see my Mom and Dad have been married for over 50 years now. Dad was a Navy WW2 vet and then drove a truck for almost 50 years, Mom never had a degree, both are now happily retired (or are they?) with full pensions and Social Security. How do I tell them they're on the road to ruin?

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.....

A poem.....

Be patient suffering soul, I hear thy cry
The trial fires may glow but I am nigh.
I see the silver and I will refine
Until My image shall upon it shine.
Fear not, for I am near, thy help to be
Greater than all thy pain My love for thee.

The New York Post

A friend of mine says he hates this paper but he's hooked on it. There's the high politics and commentary section to give it a somewhat respectable gloss and then there's the

SMUT

like some 18-year old pasty-faced porn geek is writing and editing certain sections and masturbating while he does it like yesterday's millionth sex survey about how New York City's women rank at the top in terms of kink.

I cannot endorse this paper anymore and I know Phil Mushnick feels the same way but he can't say anything. It's like watching Ron Jeremy, you have to take a shower afterwards.

The Camille Paglia theory of Britney's meltdown

Dr. Phil says it may be a wise thing to have her involuntarily committed, she may even pose a suicide risk the theory being that Owen Wilson, look how normal and happy-go-lucky he was and what he did so what would a kooky person do? I'd love to have Britney's life though, I mean the good aspects, you're being creative and artistic and don't have to put in your 9-5 like most of us paeons. Even if she never put out another CD and called it quits on her touring she has enough of the dinars to live happily ever after so

wha'sa problem?

I gotta go along with feminist writer Camille Paglia though. In any good investigation you can create a timeline and a linear clue quickly emerges, her life began to, ever so slightly, spiral out of control the day she and Madonna liplocked at the Video Music Awards on MTV, Paglia calls it her kiss of death. So maybe it's not so much what Dr. Phil says or the Brooke Shields theory of post-partum depression (is this responsible for the situation in the Middle East too Brooke?) but it may have everything to do with her moral compass. You look at that other problem child Lindsay and you feel her hopes are better, she at least seems very aware she has a problem and is actually more likeable than Brit who recently served her own Mom with a court order to stay away from her own grandkids while she's on her meds and don't blame it all on the paparazzi either, these people want fame but they don't want it but they still want their picture in the paper.

I personally don't believe Britney deserves all this coverage, a one-year blackout on all things Britney might be a good thing. Last I checked we had a War on Terror going on.....

The new breast cancer/alcohol link

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

Drink up gals!

Rudy courting the NRA

now it's getting downright creepy

very Nosferatu-like, like the undead Danny Glick boy in "Salem's Lot" floating up to the bedroom window of his friend and tapping on the glass

"right-wing base let me in
right-wing base let me in"

Ahmadinejad - I want you to want me

The leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Columbia University yesterday, introduced as a "cruel and petty dictator" by President Lee Bollinger of whom you may have heard. Lee came on strong right out of the gate so as not to have that screaming mimi, Michelle Malkin, write a column about him and about the precincts of the radical Left in academia that he inhabits. Forget about Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial, his nuclear ambitions, his call for Israel to be wiped off the map. Re gays he said this: "There are no homosexuals in Iran like in this country."

This is not good.

(In fact, this is serious stuff)

Holocaust denial. I had a neighbor once, an older gentleman and he gave my Mom some literature. I always thought he was a regular right-wing kind of guy, pro-life, opposed sex education, but there it was, "documentation" that the Jews invented the Holocaust to keep the $$$$$ rolling in. Now a respectable conspiracy theory I'm all for, mainstream ones like JFK's assassination and I'm all ears, but in order for the Holocaust to never have happened you'd have to have all the major historians in on it for starters. Wouldn't one of them say "I ain't gonna be a part of this"? The mind boggles,

Anyway

Fidel Castro is now the most respectable tyrant on the world stage, remarkable for his wondrous health-care system, no cruel and petty dictator he or, as Michael Moore believes

you scratch my nuts and I'll scratch yours.

What Confucius didn't tell you

Even if your life is not all that you'd like it to be, it's a failure in artistic terms, everybody is at least able to do one thing well and this gives some purpose to your life. For some people it's gardening, for others it's mechanical ability, some have an artistic bent and paint. No matter how my life is going I like to be known as the guy you go to if you want to make quiche. Confucius said "if you enjoy what you do you'll never work another day in your life." I was on a recent visit to the famed Culinary Institute of America (CIA for short) in New Hyde Park, New York just past Poughkeepsie and there was an energy in the air, young students in various classes learning the finer aspects of the gustatory arts. There is even a portrait of Paris Hilton's grandfather in the lobby, granddad must be proud up there. What Confucius didn't tell anyone is that in a few years time these aspiring chefs will be working some very long shifts, 12-14 hours a day for 6 days a week on average in some very hot kitchens where civility is not the norm. The flip side to Confucius' maxim is that you can quickly hate what you used to love to do.

There is a line near the end of the movie Wild at Heart where the fairy godmother in a vision of some sort tells the Nicolas Cage character, Sailor, "if you're truly wild at heart you'll fight for your dreams. Don't turn away from love." These are really some profound words, it's my whole philosophy of Life and even if you fail at your dreams you put up the good fight and it ain't over 'til your friends finally send you off with that cold-cut platter fringed with the olive loaf and the mortadella (no wonder this country is so fat, we're fixated on eating even while we're in mourning). Fight for your dreams even if others don't agree or put roadblocks on the path to your Happiness. Boredom is the bane of existence or, as the final line in the mystical poem "Manhunt in the Desert" says "take life by the root."

Let's touch on lab animals

Not much of a debate anymore but in its heyday animal experimentation to cure diseases was a hot topic. During such lulls we can look at these controversies with more of a level head and so I've been wondering, millions and millions of assorted creatures, from rodents to monkeys, have given their lives so let's posit that the researchers are morally correct, the larger goal is saving human lives and so some egghead psycho causes a tumor in a white rat, hey that's cool but

where are all the cures? (I'm not a vegan btw)

Next time you use some big word at work, well not really that big a word but big to them, and they say how smart you are ask them why they're so dumb. Next time someone says you're over their head say WHY? It's chic to be dumb, call them on it.

Why is it assumed, in a male-dominated work environment and you're a man, if you don't talk about your sex life you're not getting any? It's like do you want me to keep a diary? Poor Man's Kennedy's son wants to know.

Americans have a weird way of mourning, no matter how tragic the death, say your best friend gets hit by a Budweiser truck, everyone's obsessed with food, even before the death invites go out it's catering at your local deli. What? can't mourn on an empty stomach?

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)

If counting to 10 worked we wouldn't have Prozac

As everyone now knows Sally Field, during the Emmy broadcast, said this: "If mothers ruled the world there would be no {gd} wars in the first place." In her syndicated column of yesterday ("Sally the Sheep - This mom doesn't buy Fields' folly") the Asian pit bull of the Right, Michelle Malkin, writes that Field is your stereotypical Hollywood liberal and permissive parent:

"She's the mom who buys her teenager beer, condoms and a hotel room on prom night because she'd rather give in than assert her parental authority and do battle."

Now we don't know if the Flying Nun would hold underage drinking parties in her own home, I'm betting that she wouldn't, but this is slanderous and Malkin may very well have to eat some humble pie real soon.

Later on Malkin quotes a mother whose Marine son has already served three tours of duty in Iraq, a Ms. Deborah Johns. Re anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan Johns says: "She has never spoken for me. And she will never speak for me...We are not going to let the domestic enemies at home defeat us like they did during the Vietnam War" (another strain of the "We Almost Won in Vietnam if We Just Stuck it Out Longer" brigade). You see this is the overarching theme of the conservative movement, social and political stability which it turn leads to never questioning your own government, conservatives have made a religion out of conformity. "Domestic enemies", aka those '60s radical protestors of Vietnam, very McCarthyite indeed.

Like with cops so immersed in their own world (remember the FBI profiling of the late Richard Jewell) some, nay most, conservative talking heads are so immersed in their own world that they develop a kind of political tunnel vision (ditto for liberals btw). You have to understand that with Malkin if you in any way oppose the war you are in effect on the side of Evil and this is her starting point in all of her writing. Now I never thought awards shows like the Emmys should be given over to politics of whatever stripe but the way I look at it is this is still America and not Amerika and Gidget does have a perfect right to her opinion and to express it and to sue Malkin for libel and personal defamation if she so chooses.

A good rule to go by though is what I call the Bob Newhart Rule. Bob says that while he has strong views on things himself he always felt it was his thing to entertain and not educate. I didn't watch the Emmys 'cause I don't watch most TV these days, I have to rely on Tasmanian Devils like Malkin to fill me in.

For the love of work

Some people love the work experience, me? I love the leisure experience and here's where I differ most markedly with most conservatives these days, I haven't made a fetish out of work yet. I do believe in the hammock. Some people just love the adrenaline rush. I worked with a chef once in a supermarket and he went back to the restaurant scene, probably got bored with the somewhat more leisurely pace of a food retail outlet. For them they have to keep producing something, work for them is like what the Big O is for others, me? I like cogitating and meditating and mast, masturblogging. The workaholics, when they die are your poltergeists, restless spirits who can't stay six feet under. The chef ones have to knock the peppermill off the shelf when you're cooking, see, you should be using that. People who have lockers at work, isn't that getting a little too into it? which leads me into my latest dream sequence:

I'm on an old familiar bus route and I'm rapping with the oldsters on board but in the back of my mind is I drive a car so why am I taking the bus? There's some anxiety in the dream 'cause I have to transfer to another bus to get home and then I have to walk up a hill. My interpretation, I will most likely retire with just SS to live on since I get tired of working for the same company after a few years. I get frustrated with the overworkload, the corporate culture, the sameness of it all, the whatever so in my dream that's why I'm riding the bus, no pension to pay things like car insurance.

That new fall series about the Geico Cavemen, who said this would be a good idea? critics have seen early releases and panned the thing. They worked better in commercials. I say instead of a failed TV series do more ads and then compile them all on DVD.

Many times when a person says so-and-so is doing well they're not doing well at all. This happens often when someone leaves a job abruptly or moves out of the neighborhood and everyone starts inquiring how he or she is doing. A co-worker who is friends with the person who left will say "oh, I hear she's doing really great" even though she got tired of her family life and quit her job with no Plan B and left for another state and is living in an apartment with her girlfriend supporting her. Oh, she's doing great? What as, a prostitute? Like the guy I know who works two full-time jobs and boasts he always has time for a little "tapping." Gay.

A seminar I'd like to attend

When I can I go to my main library in the big YO, it's usually on my day off. Sometimes I go twice a day, I will go after work on occasion. You notice things, libraries are magnets for certain kinds of people, a subgroup being the ones who don't work. On my day off I'll go there when the place opens at 9, there's always a healthy looking, 40-something man there waiting for the doors to open. He drives, not a jalopy either, so somehow he finds a way to pay his car insurance. He doesn't look like he's missing for a meal either and he jumps on the computer as soon as the doors swing open and he'll be there later too. In between he reads the paper. Now my day off varies but he's always there so you can safely draw the conclusion that he's not brown-bagging it pulling off a 9-5. Maybe he's making wanksta movies (uncle booty productions, who knows?) but then there's another man, slightly younger but also of a hale and hearty complexion who parks himself in one of those cozy butt-numbing soft chairs they have for reading and he tackles a novel every day, Robert Ludlum, you name it, just like the snake plant on the circulation desk he's always there.

I myself haven't figured out a way yet to make ends meet without working and believe me I've been trying. I'd be real interested to know if any of these gentlemen are holding any type of seminars soon, I'd like to sign up.

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).

I'm going to chuck it all and become homeless

To hear conservatives tell it the homeless have the life. There's a homeless man in the big YO, a late 30-something blond guy with raggedy clothes who walks along that endless shopping plaza known as Central Ave. and who drinks coffee from cups that people throw away outside of Barnes and Noble. So one day we're driving along and my Republican friend, God bless him, says to me "look at that guy, he doesn't have a care in the world." Now I will admit sleeping under the stars on a 10 degree night does have a certain romantic appeal to it but I think this is why the Republican, whoever he is, will lose the next election to HillObama, that and lack of health insurance for millions of Americans. Now I understand the government paying your medical bills amounts to a form of European-style socialism but what is Republicans' alternative? It's like they don't even talk about it, it's not on their radar screen

WAR WAR WAR

so who better has their finger on the PULSE?

Memo to John Stossel, they're still pervs

"20/20" is slated tonight to have a special expose of Chris Hansen and his NBC Dateline series "To Catch a Predator." Now early on in my blogging I did raise questions about the aggressive nature of this show, what if somebody is later found innocent? what about entrapment? but by and large those e-mails are pretty straightforward and, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud sometimes a perv is just a perv.

Libertarian Stossel needs to go easy, every once in a while, every blue moon or so people do care what other people do in their bedrooms.

You need a pill for the pill for the pill

TV commercial for Requip, used to treat the mysterious Restless Legs Syndrome, side effects may include nausea, drowsiness, dizziness, vomiting - you'll need another pill for all the side effects and if that pill causes additional side effects then you'll need a pill for that and if that pill.....I think I'll stick with the original ailment thank you.

Cialis, possible side effect: priapism - an erection lasting for more than 4 hours. Hey, read a good book buddy!

Conservatives who are really closet libs

Ann Coulter is a liberal plant to make conservatives look bad, that's old news but how 'bout radio commentator Michael Savage? Apatriot over at Hannityland has called him a "closet liberal" for years and at the time I dismissed this out of hand but last night he wouldn't talk about

The Bridge,

and so chose instead to bash the homeless (hmmm...). You see the homeless have deliberately and with aforethought chosen their lot in life of eating out of garbage cans because they are lazy and don't like to work. Now the phrase "doesn't like to work" has got to be the biggest cultural brainwashing done by the Right to date, hey, if you don't like WORK there must be something wrong with you, right? Not to toot my own horn (but go ahead) I've worked hard my whole life and have gotten rave reviews from employers but if you asked me a simple and direct question, "do you like work?", philosophically I'm very much against it, it's like what man wouldn't rather have a fishing rod or golf club in his hand? Homeless people, yep, they have the life.

But the real tipoff that Savage (nee Weiner) is a closet lib is when he said the radical Islamists are that way because they're sexually repressed (hell this country isn't and look at our problems) and he said the solution would be to airlift massive amounts of porn over the Middle East and drop it down (and oh yes, he supported uber-liberal California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown once). Now I don't know if there's such a species as a pro-porn conservative so I have to check my encyclopedia but last time I looked Dennis Prager fancied himself one too.

So enjoy the new series and send in your candidates.

Our inept Department of Homeland Security

They've just ended the search for any real survivors in that tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis when our own Dept. of Homeland Security sent word out that it doesn't appear to be an act of terror. Excuse me but isn't it way too early to be making these assessments either one way or the other? Why not just say it's being investigated and here's another thought, how do we know there aren't terrorists amongst us who are construction workers and bridge repairers and working with steampipes underground of major metropolises who are deliberately weakening our infrastructure or others who are tainting our food supply? Even if this were the case political correctness would be our own undoing and we'd never get to the bottom of anything, don't like working with that Muslim Con-Ed guy? you racist pig you.

The tragic I-85W bridge in Minnesota, not saying it is but what's up with our Dept. of Homeland Security making such impromptu announcements? Why does Bush even keep this Chertoff guy on, this guy who shortchanged New York City of much-needed anti-terror funds even though everyone knows Gotham is at the top of Al-qaeda targets? It's a little sketchy to me.

Big write-up in yesterday's Post about Elisabeth Hasselbeck

Written by New York Post writer Maureen Callahan it took up the better of two pages. The article, "The Survivor", points out that she has lasted longer than most of her View co-hosts, Meredith Vieira, the original Star Jones and Rosie of course. Liberalism has become so accepted these days at least in certain quarters that getting abortions and committing adultery is now considered normative, small wonder that conservative Hasselbeck comes across as an oddball for saying such erstwhile traditional things as adulterers make bad parents. Sarah D. Bunting, co-editor in chief of the website Television without Pity, has a very popular forum on "The View" in which people sound off on, it seems, mostly Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Bunting: "If I were one of the women on this show I would just be tired of her at this point. Joy Behar, I think, is even done trying with her." Funny but I find Behar's political views, or the expression of them, to be downright obnoxious with her own rigid and overly broad characterizations of conservatives (and btw most female comics are not the least bit funny). Geez, you'd think this was some supermarket job and Elisabeth was some seafood manager not pulling her weight so seriously do some people take this show. Why its continuance is basic to the survival of the Republic escapes me. Of course two of her former "Survivor" co-stars have nothing but bad things to say about her (where are they now?) and even the Donald chimes in with she is "one of the dumber people on TV and an imbecile" (pot-kettle-black). Last season "Law and Order" even had an episode where a victim of rape and murder was named Elisabeth Hassenbeck.

It's only a show, it's like she's getting the Dan Quayle treatment or something. As the libs like to say don't like it change the friggin' channel.

Chelsea Clinton for President in 2016

Keep the Dynasty of Socialism going.

Hillary clearly has Barack beat on foreign policy issues. The latest, re Monday night's YouTube/CNN debate, or is that the CNN/YouTube debate?, Hillary said he would be naive to meet with the leaders of rogue nations like Iranian putzhead Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korean madman Kim Jong Il, Syrian leader Assad and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Hillary is clearly coming across as more manly than the rest of the bunch, she's coming across as so militaristic of late that Rudy or Whomever better think twice before going down the all leftwingers are pussies on foreign policy road. Barack though seems to be developing a John Mayer kind of foreign policy waiting on the world to change. Even though I was against the war from the start this song has always annoyed me, it's all too typical of the naive and sappy left-wing idealism of celebrities these days and I also hate him because he has lived first-hand your body is a wonderland with Jessica Simpson. As a kind of afterthought if Reagan had a MySpace page and answered a question about global warming from a talking snowman it would have lacked a certain gravitas but there we are, you might as well throw in a question on Lindsay Lohan too. The Repubs, by not participating in any of these "fun" debates (or were they even asked?) come across as the Boredom Brigade, they probably even stopped having sex years ago. I mean who can beat Obama Girl?

Pro-lifers are single-issue people? Would that were the case

The more pro-life conservatives expound on other issues the more I wish they would just stick to pro-life. Dr. Laura, a stalwart pro-life conservative woman on the radio giving traditional moral advice to the confused until one day she wrote that women should look at a man's bank account prior to making a decision to go out with him, in short the moral case for golddigging, and now where is she? I mean why sour your base with a materialistic crapshoot of a point, and then there's National Review's Rich Lowry, more useful than she but who never met a Big Business practice he didn't like and then there's that hot Asian babe, the Malkin chick, who pretty much thinks the whole anti-war movement is about giving Michael Moore a rimjob. Laura Ingraham, same deal. Now Malkin, Lowry and Ingraham are the best in the pro-life biz as far as I'm concerned, their argumentation is fresh and vital to a debate that George Will considers stale but it's the other stuff, like Laura once pooh-poohing studies that show Americans are in a blue funk mood because they're overworked and don't have enough leisure time.

Should conservatives help Obama's campaign?

He says he's a fresh face who wants to end the partisanship in Washington and solve problems, sounds good but behind his moderate mask is a doctrinaire liberal who reflexively criticizes recent conservative Supreme Court rulings having to do with affirmative action and late-term abortion. The question before the Board today - should conservatives help his campaign anyway in order to defeat Hillary? This is purely a pragmatic calculation and it's been done before, support a liberal against another liberal because you like that liberal even less, and even if Obama is the Democratic nominee any Republican contender worth his weight should make short shrift of his inexperience in the Congress and his naivete regarding foreign policy. And he's not all bad, he talks about blacks taking on personal responsibility which sounds like he has Coz as a campaign advisor, that's more than can be said for Hillary who just this past March took money from a rapper who used the n-word at least 20 times in a song. A Hillary presidency would definitely revive Rush's radio career which, let's face it, has been in the doldrums of late. Though he denies it to this day Bill launched his career and Hillary can ripen it but what's in it for the rest of us?

The New York Times has noted a small but fledgling movement of young Republican conservatives who have decided to help Obama and says it may be a harbinger of things to come. I think these people are attracted to his character not his policies, they would agree that Bill's recent condemnation of Bush's "pardoning" Scooter Libby only shows how arrogant this Washington power couple still is despite them living with the owls in Chappaqua. Barack is like opening the window to some moldy and cobwebbed attic and letting the sunshine and fresh air in, that musty old yearbook of the Clinton scandals lying in the corner, just put it on the sidewalk with the rest of the recyclables.

So please help the brother. Make checks payable to Barack Obama.....

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?

I know I'm supposed to blog about Scooter Libby

this is what some talking head said last night on "The Jim Lehrer Newshour", that the blogosphere would be going wild, rightie bloggers and liberal bloggers shootout at the OK Corral, but I'm an independent blogger, ok? Bush did the right thing by commuting Libby's 2 1/2 year prison sentence and so let's put it to bed. If this is the sexiest thing the blogosphere can come up with these days then I'll go elsewhere for my kicks. I really think Bob Novak rocks though.

Here's the deal. If electing a woman president is so important why don't the other male Democratic candidates get out of the race altogether, and that includes you Barack, and throw their weight and resources behind Hillary? No primary, ok, just achieve the last crowning achievement of the women's rights movement and put her in the Oval Office already or maybe this is just paying lip service to feminism. It's like step aside guys and put into practice what you've been saying all these years. Why does Hillary even have any male competition? This is so sexist. It's like Barack saying he's all for a "woman's right to choose" even to the point of partial-birth and then he picks up the abortion instruments and says "I can't do this, you're killing me."

How 'bout the Republicans putting up Condi Rice and making the race a real catfight? Rudy's face looks like that skull and crossbones emblem you used to see on the bottle of rat poison under your Mom's sink that used to scare you as a kid. We can do better than this and we must. Jungle fever, make it a chick thing is all 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.

If Hillary wins it all you can thank Ken Starr

Had he done a better job with Whitewater and how Hillary made 200G on cattle futures instead of issuing a report on Blowjob-gate I don't even think she'd be pursuing the Grand Prize right now and yet conservatives still refuse to admit this, that it was wrong to impeach Bill Clinton for lying in a sexual harassment case when they haven't been big fans of sexual harassment law all along ever since the days of Anita Hill (neither have I but z is a very consistent writer). Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, any other 'gate would have done fine except for Sexgate. Makes you wonder a little about Ken Starr, was he really on their team all along? Memo to conservatives, if you haven't noticed the mores of this country have changed drastically over even the last decade. Going after a sitting president solely on a sex charge (sorry Sean, I know, lying about sex) elicits more sympathy from the voting public these days than it would have in the past. There is a reason why the GOP keeps staying the Stupid Party.

The Sean Bell shooting case should come to trial soon. He was the 23-year old black man who was shot to death on Nov. 25, 2006 by cops in Queens NY after a bachelor party at the seedy Kalua strip bar, a gun, drug and prostitute-infested joint. He was to be married that same day. Two of his friends who were also in the car with him that morning were shot but survived and two of the four officers who fired some of the 50 bullets were indicted by a grand jury. I submit this - you're minding your own business and walking down the street, you're not breaking any laws, your chances of being shot and killed by a cop are infinitesmal at best, there's a better chance of Yoko Ono putting out a good album. There's also the ambience of crime in poor black urban areas to consider and cops are on edge, an angle the black activists never focus on. NYPD guidelines say a police officer cannot fire his weapon at a moving vehicle even if it is being used as a deadly weapon. The same guidelines don't say what a cop can do to save his life in such a situation. Careerwise I would not like to be a cop, a pimp gets more respect.

I'm the Sea Captain of my porno ship

Christopher Hitchens is all the rage right now with his atheist chic called God is Not Great but he doesn't offer a workable alternative to the world's faith systems maybe because there is none. The religion of Man teaches that Work is the main purpose of Life, the true Christian would say you were not born to be a drone. This is why it disturbs me that conservatives are ballyhooing the election of French President Nicholas Sarkozy with his promise to abolish the 35-hour workweek, the cons, if they haven't forgotten their social conservative roots, would say a work state is a godless state. Man, as well, has not be able to cure the Big One yet, cancer, and so Hitchens' philosophy of secular humanism doesn't work for me, why would I put on a pedestal a creature that overworks his fellow creatures and has stopped curing the ailments that afflict them? He's entitled to his opinions, it's just a poor substitute is all.

The work state leads to that tempting voice of nihilism, that shadowy figure on a sunny day that whispers in your ear until you agree that life's a bitch and then you die. So how do atheists like Hitch give meaning to it all? The grand theme of my blog - life is to be enjoyed and not just endured - is, in this sinner's humble view, more to be fulfilled in a balanced Christian life than in any secular system. I would submit that a person who enjoys sex more than he works understands the Meaning of it All better than some executive who works late and then has perfunctory sex when he goes home. These corporations have meetings - "ok, put him in charge of cheese" - and then you're like a mouse in a maze, "go find the cheese." Tantra or Kama-Sutra doesn't interest them, how can it if you don't have time to read or watch your kid's Little League game?

I was driving through the country the other day and noticed a little cultural trendoid, porn shops sprouting up next to places of worship, schools and parks where mothers take their kids. Used to be you had to put on a raincoat and head towards the wharf past the opium dens for your jollies but there he was, the big young blond manager of his very own porn emporium, the Proud Captain, a product of a system endorsed by Hitch that shows no deference whatsoever to Christian sensibilities.

The Sea Captain, standing tall, standing proud.

Bloomy the RINO

So now the erstwhile Republican Mayor of Gotham, Michael Bloomberg, has become an Independent so he can make the run in an already crowded field. It's not just that he echoes the Cinderella morality of today's blog title that I'd never vote for the guy, he's also living proof of the eternal truth of the Peter Principle. Take his latest, his traffic congestion pricing plan. From 6AM-6PM anyone who drives a motor vehicle into Manhattan below 86th Street gets slapped with a fine, $8 for cars and $21 for trucks, and this applies every day! Now trucks need to make deliveries to businesses during these hours and his plan, if implemented, would adversely affect business. NJ Governor Jon Corzine is being polite about it all and pointing out the pitfalls from his point of view but nobody seems willing to call the guy NUTSO and so I'm watching all the pundits on the morning shows today and they're all jazzed up about this guy who doesn't even know how to manage a large metropolis.

Hill and Bill's Sopranos video, I'd be really grasping to have a problem with this. We definitely need more humor in our political process and in life in general. I give it a thumbs up, two snaps and a circle.

The mouth is the best form of birth control

(get your mind out of the gutter) Within the past few years I've worked with 2 or 3 women, they're not unattractive by any stretch, and I thought to myself why can't I fantasize about them? It all reminds me of that old Henny Youngman quip, "I know you have to be somebody but why do you have to be you?" There are too many nice looking women with bad personalities out there, you're like how the hell did you come to be you? I am now convinced it all has to be part of the Master Plan, the Divine Cosmology, to give less comely women a fighting chance.

Bad sex leads to bad choices, this is my working theory to account for our high abortion rates. It's like when you have too much Scotch on a hot summer evening and then have weird dreams all night and then wake up in the morning all out of sorts or, if you're a man, you break down and rent a porno made by some retard, which pretty much describes over 90% of porn anyway, and so now you're angry at the producer, more angry at the video store manager who buys anything, and most of all you're angry at yourself,

where is the judgement?

For me good sex should not lead to the destruction of a fetus. I cannot separate the two, they are inextricably linked, the idea of potential feticide would just kill the mood for me and I've heard many other men from all shades of the political spectrum on the issue say the same thing. It's just not

sexy

now write an article about THAT Cosmo!

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."

Today's blog

Sometimes I wish I were a recluse with money.

People who don't go to the doctors all the time only when they really really really have to have quietly accepted their mortality and come to terms. It is the secular humanists who have to protect their health at all costs, after all after this life what is there? There was once a book called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker which had as its working thesis that practically everything we do in our culture is a denial of this very brute fact of our existence. People who die young because of bad habits like smoking and heavy drinking, is this tragic or merely unfortunate? Depends on how you view eternity I guess.

Mental disorders, are they always bad? Yes, judging by all those corny health textbooks we had to read in high school but I submit a person with OCD is a better and more efficient worker and if he runs any kind of food establishment and the health inspector is due the next day the chances are very high his business will pass. I know a chef who admits he's been hyper with ADHD ever since he was a kid and he says it helps him in the kitchen. Mental aberrations, make them work for you (caveat - though not in the Pugach sense!).

The National Review, every time some left-leaning literary figure dies they always seem to underrate his work (or is this just my overly active imagination?). Happened with the late playwright Arthur Miller of Death of a Salesman fame, he was no better than a high-school playwright at best according to an NR contributor, and now with the passing of novelist Kurt Vonnegut. I guess according to NR you can't be a great writer if you lean too far to the left so what are we to have, only right-wing lit? Don't bash greed, better to write about nothing, certainly not your own passionate convictions.

Young male Spanish deli managers - they're on top of you, they're behind you, they're humping you, you're taking a dump and they're paging you. Is this how they are in bed?

RE Today's Blog, to quote Dennis Miller, "of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" (it's a blog after all).

Memorial Day

OK, pet peeve time.

Put the memorial back into Memorial Day. Stores like Macy's started this a long time ago with their Memorial Day sales events and then we started celebrating the day not where it fell on the calendar but stuck it on a Monday so as our spoiled culture could enjoy long weekends and then crowd the beaches like a bunch of sardines and not even swim in the water because it's still too cold. In a word, fun.

They did this with Washington and Lincoln, attached it to Saturday and Sunday and then just whitewashed the whole thing by calling it President's Day. Um, excuse me but we shouldn't honor all presidents like this, most of all Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. It's like they wanna break everything down from its original meaning. Kind of like a, ahem.....

conspiracy

(calling Robodoon)

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).

The man was definitely controversial, no question about that

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007, RIP

If you're controversial this simply means that not everyone agrees with you so in this sense all of us are controversial to a degree. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority made it his business to add his very passionate voice regarding issues of life and death, porn and gay "rights", so it's only logical that many many people would take issue with this just the same way that a person who advocates for the things he was against is also by definition controversial since many people will disagree with him but, for the msm, it's as if controversy only cuts one way. A conservative is always controversial but a liberal never is. Got it now? libs are by nature non-ideological peacemakers and conservatives are polarizing figures. Now I never agreed with everything Falwell stood for, I think boycotts of tv shows smack of censorship and draw needless attention to otherwise worthless products, but he never did anything outside the law here, boycotts are our constitutional right as the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are always calling for them when it suits their own political liberal agendas.

Just my .02 on the Rev. Falwell's passing.

Is it all just a case of bad karma?

See, this is why I could never be an atheist/secular humanist, is THIS all there is? This is definitely not IT. Secular humanism promises a paradise on earth so unless you feel that grabbing your lunchpail at 5:30 in the morning and catching the bus to work is what IT's all about you're missing the BIGGER PICTURE. This ain't IT and all the major world faith systems understand this.

Someday someone will explain it all to us. Some guy'll be in the mall and some strange and enigmatic figure will approach him and they'll sit at a table in the food court and talk. "Do you know why your job sucks and you can't get a woman?" The poor slob is all ears now as for years he's been searching for a workable theory to explain it all. "It's because in a former life you were (a) Ghengis Khan, (b)Attila the Hun, or (c)a lowly guard at Auschwitz." You feel better now and go off to the cineplex to catch "Spider-Man 3" or some other escapist flick. It's at least more tolerable now to know that you're in the flip-side to The Secret and in your next life you'll be getting that poolside massage by that Asian whore...sorry, Asian beauty, never mind, it's hard to think in a pc world but you get the point.

However, if, on the other hand, you wake up in the morning and go to the bathroom and have a clean break you just know it's going to be a good day.

Conservatives are now fully Sarkazmic

Nicknamed "Sarko" by the Right, Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election Sunday night over socialist Segolene Royal. In today's New York Post Ralph Peters writes: "Nicolas Sarkozy, the president the people defiantly chose, is the most inspiring French leader since Charles de Gaulle's fall from power 40 years ago." Um Ralph, inspiring French leader? I thought he was still president-elect but no matter, the Right has a full-blown case of Sarkastic Priapism (you know, it won't go down in 4 hours so see a doctor). Peters then quotes Sarko and this chestnut: "It is hard to exaggerate the damage done to France by the 35-hour work week. How can anyone think that you're going to create wealth and jobs by working less?" Almost echoing this verbatim the Post editorial itself (May 8) says: "He (Sarko) says, rightly, that France's 35-hour work week has devastated the economy - producing a nation of slouchers" (emphasis mine). So, if you decide to work 9-4:30 everyday, that's seven hours of work minus, say, a half hour for lunch, for five days out of seven, you're a sloucher ruining your nation's economy. You see Beth, it's not just conspiratorial thinking on my part, Republicans really do get off on work and invalidate those, like their more religious-minded conservative brethren, who rightly point out that overwork is now the leading cause of divorce in the U.S. The materialistic secular conservatives, whom Bill O'Reilly never mentions, now rule the party and the more social conservatives are the only members of their own party that take that Darn Book too seriously, that work is a punishment from God for the original defiance of Adam, and you're not supposed to enjoy it that much, it's a little weird and not normal.

Beth, the more I listen to the Right these days the less I like the Right. I'm moving out of the Macabre House on the Right, maybe become a political recluse who never votes. Where do I belong?

Everybody jumps the shark sooner or later

It's the natural progression of things as in

"24" - it's always the same, Jack in a bind, Jack working outside the playbook, "your first priority is to arrest Jack and bring him back to CTU", the Big Dilemma - "Jack, this is Chloe, the president's head is going to explode and you have exactly 30 seconds before it does Jack" all the while he's on top of some train about to go through a dark tunnel, an archvillain who somehow escapes the tightest security at CTU, but this season's there's a twist, Jack's bro and Dad turned out to be evil working behind the scenes with the terrorists, Jack even tortured his own sibling and Pops murdered him with an IV injection 'cos he felt he was gonna spill the beans. Even the two executive producers now confess this season sucks.

Bill O'Reilly - insinuated in not so subtle terms that Rosie should be fired from "The View" instead of taking the earthy view that free speech sometimes comes with a small price tag and so move on.

Rosie - can't seem to settle down at any one gig. Maybe add ADHD to her depressive state as gets bored easily and can't stick with one job. Not the best judgement either, leaves "The View" shortly after her famous feud with Trump and so gives the illusion of his omnipotence. After her announcement he went home and Melania caught him grinding into the bed.

WCBS News in NY - last night had on "5 Sex Tips to Save Your Sex Life", it must be hard on the anchorperson who thinks he/she may have landed a serious journalistic job and then is forced to make cutsie-poo jokes after the report airs, "harharhar, get that Barry White music out." 5 Sex Tips you can read about in any Cosmo, #4 will give him a heart attack.

Any Matrix sequels

Sean Hannity - there are other subjects besides the war, take suggestions and stop acting like anyone who disagrees with you is evil.

...to be continued...

The average person is clueless, put it that way

I've had people say to me over the years I'm very smart, intelligent. You get this at work sometimes, ooh he's a really bright boy but I am convinced that most of us use only about 10% of our minds as they say. I would say that on my brightest days I rise to the mid-level on the intelligence scale but maybe I come across as a genius, an intellectual supernova because the rest of the people I come across are so dumb. I know this can be seen as a hubristic blog but I don't know how else to put it. I'm no George Will but people continually put me on some kind of pedestal. It's like the person at work who asks you a simple question, "how do you spell cat?" - well, kat of course. Maybe it's all the mind-numbing porn out there. On its May 1st broadcast the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" had a segment on all the millions of men out there who are addicted to Internet porn. Now the real problem for me is not that there are millions of men out there surfing Web porn but that they have no aesthetic standards at all to judge the stuff, they are addicted to the mindless. At least an obsessed devotee of Marilyn Monroe has a loftier ideal in place, him I can talk and relate to.

Lucifer playing chess with a bunch of idiots, that's how I see the world at the moment. We had a recent tragic case in NY where a man who was to go on trial for rape killed the woman who was to testify against him. The logic of a psycho, of course it never dawned on our wronged man that rape is wrong in the first place but now to prevent his rape trial he is now going on trial for murder. Or Muslim radicals blowing themselves up when their leaders never do. It's like Lucifer going on "Jeopardy" with the clueless and blowing them all away.

Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here.

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?

How to push people right or left, political mind games

Rush bashing liberals, the liberals say we're not like that and so even they get pulled rightward instead of saying everything he says about us is true. The more they insist they are not pro-abortion the more obvious it is they are but they get sucked into Rush's rightward vortex and will say things like abortion is a bad thing, I don't know anyone who is for abortion, do you? never met the guy, must be a psycho or something to be for feticide. So you go against the criticism by moving in the direction of the critic and the same thing happens to the conservatives, the more the libs paint them as rabid anti-abortionists the more reasonable, dare I say, liberal they become, "oh no, even if Roe is overturned tomorrow rest assured most states will still allow the procedure and the whole country was moving in the direction of, em, reform on abortion policy, wait a minute, did I just say reform."

Beth is the only one I understand.

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.

What's wrong with building a little mystery?

Since the subject of the loner is once again in the news here's another case where the past is considered a bad thing. The loner of the past was a mysterious individual but in a more positive and romantic sense than today, sexy even, in the movies he is the rugged individualist, the drifter through town. But when you get rid of the past you get rid of its poetry, its magic. So while it is important to talk about this national tragedy in terms of failures of security and whatnot let's clear the ground first of all media bias and debris against the past, let's rid ourselves of hostility against whole groups of people who aren't really bothering anyone. What the man lacked who did this terrible thing was a universal and objective moral code to live by which is why people with all types of grievances against society don't commit these acts.

The real issue is Right and Wrong.

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.

Finally some good writing on TV for a change

I've only sampled a few episodes of "30 Rock" on NBC, starring SNL's Tina Fey and actor Alec Baldwin, but the script crackles and pops with some bold writing. The show is about the goings on and inner workings at some sketch comedy show. The Tina character doesn't get along with some black guy and the guy says "you don't like me because I'm black" to which she replies "no, it's because you're a jerk. Why can't we all just not get along?" In another episode she falls madly in love with some guy she saw at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who spills every secret in his life to his group and she later says she was faking alcoholism to meet him, "ok, I'm a real nut-Anne Heche job". Then to make it up to him she spills some of her own secrets like "come next election I'm going to tell my friends I'm voting for Barack Obama but secretly vote for McCain."

anything politically incorrect is dear to z's heart.

That other 9-11 conspiracy theory

Though for the record it can be said the Bush Administration never officially said the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein planned or had anything to do with 9/11 the idea that our campaign in Iraq was to avenge the events of that fateful day somehow took firm root in the popular conservative mind. A co-worker of mine, from the time the war started, said good, we're finally doing something about bin-Laden! On the other hand Bush never cleared the air on the matter and let the conspiracist notion float to the point where today we still think we're fighting a War against Terror that is connected to al-Qaeda and 9/11. It's a War against Terror in the sense that it's far better to have another democracy in the Middle East besides Israel but this is in a general sense. A real test for whether you are a true neocon - if you had to choose (and you can't choose both) which would you prefer, that we did what we did and captured Saddam and that the Iraqis hanged him or that OBL face ultimate justice?

conspiracy theories - and we make fun of Charlie Sheen. Now Rosie is a dope, she has demonstrated this well, of that there is no longer any doubt, but Bill O'Reilly is strongly hinting that she should lose her job over her saying that the U.S. government planned 9/11. This is very dangerous to a free country, that only those who think inside the box like O'Reilly should have full unabridged free speech rights, I mean where would the z-man be? This is very selfish Bill, very selfish.

I mean it's one thing to be a little edgy

Leftie commentator Christopher Hitchens has just published a new book damning all the world's religions, yeah, he's that same Hitchens guy who once wrote a book bashing Mother Theresa in The Missionary Position. Being edgy without being charming is an unpardonable mannerism of style, you're just a hater, you may as well just flush yourself down the toilet. I mean is there anyone or anything this man likes? He's like Dante's Lucifer in his Inferno in the innermost core of hell encased not in fire but in a block of ice. You'd hate to bring such a guy to see your aging father in some nursing home - "yeah, when I get in that condition I'll tell ya what, you all can have some fun and have a game throwing peanuts in my mouth." Nice guy.

When celebrities bitch and moan it ain't the same thing

"Today" show co-host Meredith Vieira is now complaining that she has to get up at 3 in the morning every weekday and be driven into Manhattan at 4:30 to do her show. She calls it sleep deprivation but I ain't feeling her pain. I too get up early every day but I don't have my lack of sleep compensated by millions of dollars a year. Celebs also court fame but hate the paparazzi. I ain't defending them but stop acting like Britney and Lindsay and Paris in public, be low-key and operate under the radar. I don't recall seeing too many stories and photos about Danny Aiello.

24 is starting to resemble a bad comic book

Milo has taken an interest in Nadia. Now they both have very important jobs to do at CTU preventing the End of the World As We Know It but somehow Milo sees himself as God's gift to the female species and cornered this Islamic hottie last week and planted a nice wet one on her face and she seemed to like it. I found the whole thing annoying, it's not the z-man's style, and then there's President Wayne Palmer who has been working diligently to foil Vice President Noah Daniels' plan to nuke the Middle East. Palmer keeps asking his doctor for adrenaline shots to keep him from lapsing back into a coma and letting Daniels take charge of foreign policy even though this is raising his blood pressure through the roof. Palmer didn't like Daniels calling him weak and decided to launch the nuke strike anyway to prove what a man he is. This Oval Office definitely needs a Dr. Phil type. The show is just jumping the shark every week and it wouldn't surprise me if this is 24's last real season. It's more a graphic novel now than a drama, wrap it up and call it a season, put it on DVD and put something else on next January.