How much emphasis to give the abortion issue?

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

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

the socialist narrative will continue after these brief commercial messages.

It was a personality-driven election anyway

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

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

Reagan?

So was there a roundtable at some point...

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

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

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

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

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

So it's all Mr. Magoo's fault

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

Conservatives secretly in love with the demigod

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

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

With so much study of the paranormal going on

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

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

It's McCain's to lose

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

McCain's past ties to abortion clinic bomber

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

My travelblog

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

Not voting as an act of conscience

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

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

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

and warn him,

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

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

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

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

i'm lovin' it

But Howard Wolfson this begs the question

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

Guilt

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

The two Joes

I have a question.

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

Has McCain lost his mojo?

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

These chicks have issues

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

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

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

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

Shades of Gray

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

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

Z's Law of the Power of Negative Appraisal

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

That Cartoon

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

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

Alas!

The LAW says go digital

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

WHATEVER

Just something to blog about

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

I honestly didn't know this

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

Skiing down the slippery slope of gay marriage

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

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

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

I'm grateful for the little things

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

John McCain's Ralph Nader

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

Nancy Pelosi supports the "Fairness Doctrine"

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

A recurring theme throughout History - the Ascent of the Psycho

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

George Carlin

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

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

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

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

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

A car is not a cigarette Bloomy

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

Republicans first, conservatives second

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

A Constitutionalist first

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

Tim Russert 1950-2008

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

Confuse people, be nice

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

One nation under Prozac

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

I am proclaiming this day

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

A referendum on the War

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

keeping it psycho

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

a bad thing

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

Your insensitive, politically incorrect Id at work

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

Her remarks are not so much offensive...

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

Denver angst

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

I've heard of sleepwalking but sleepdriving?

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

David

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

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

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

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

Geraldine Ferraro, old party hack

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

Liberals hoist by their own petard

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

I'm not a liberal...

...I just have liberal positions (Obama)

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the general election buddy!

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

"were we talking about you brother?"

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

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

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

Some homey sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may have heard

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

I'd sooner read a tube of toothpaste

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

Talk about baggage

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

a little Samsonite action

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

"Sir, can I help you with that?"

That's mighty white of you

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

anti-smoking ads

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

Alot of African news going on

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

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

Would you argue with God?

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

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

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

Row row row your boat

Maybe the Rev. Wright is really a closet Hillary supporter. Political reporter Fred Dicker over at the NY Post says he's bitter over Obama's "betrayal" and that's why he unloaded the other day. Whatever, some friends just have a penchant for always embarrassing you. Fished with a guy once on a large lake, two nice girls were sunbathing on a large rock and we were fishing in the area. Nice time to strike up a conversation, no? But I know how the guy is, with a couple beers under his belt the guttural slob side comes out so I just ignored the situation and rowed as far away from them as possible (if need be I had my line down pat: "No, I don't know this guy. He's homeless and I just picked him up. I'm dropping him off at the bridge so he can hitch a ride."). So what Obama needs to do, when the Rev. has a few Snapples and has to pull into shore to use a tree Obama needs to shove his johnboat off when he's not looking and just strand him there and continue rowing rowing rowing. Yeah, when he's finished and he zips himself up Obama will see him in the distance yelling and screaming and waving his arms but this is supposed to be a serious campaign, no? So the wind be against you brother, a little more muscle on that left oar.

You go girl!

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

More on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright,

Now the z-man blog is all about having a different angle and so it seems to me righties can criticize American society all they want, Malkin can bash our pornofied culture to her heart's content and yet her patriotism is never called into question, ditto Maggie Gallagher and our divorce culture, Laura Ingraham and our abortion culture and yet I agree much with what all three have to say on these matters. Lefties can't do this though over their pet issues like economic, social and racial injustice and so it seems to me the right to criticize your own country cuts one way which is not to say the Rev. Wright is not radical and bombastic but I'm just trying to make sense of our current political climate. Maybe it has to do more with the way we express ourselves, after all Laura has never called for the bombing of abortion clinics on her side of the aisle, and the Right generally being critical of conspiracy theories in general (so what Mad Scientist invented the AIDS virus pray tell?). But since we be on the subject of conspiracy theories why doesn't the Rev. Wright give a major speech on the origins of Planned Parenthood, the racism of its founder Margaret Sanger and why doesn't he see the abortion of black babies as a silent form of genocide? There's alot on the plate here so chow down!

The AmChurch

Bob Novak, in today's column, talks about some major Catholic pro-abortion politicians who received Communion during the two masses celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI during his six-day stay here. They are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. John Kerry, Christopher Dodd and Edward M. Kennedy on the Democratic side and Rudolph Guiliani on the RINO side. The three Dems received the sacred host at Nationals Park in Washington courtesy of Archbishop Donald Wuerl there and Guiliani at Yankee Stadium courtesy of New York Cardinal Edward Egan although I heard on the radio just now that Egan says he was against Guiliani's action and agrees with the Pope's declaration on the matter. I call this the Bob Novak Effect, just like when he nailed Hillary and her plans to get and broadcast dirt on Obama and she immediately denied that so now Cardinal Egan is saying, in so many words, that this impeccable and well-respected journalist of many decades standing has his facts wrong. As I keep saying there's the official Roman Catholic Church headed by the pope in the Eternal City with its official and unchangeable doctrines and dogmas and then there's the AmChurch (American Church). Gotta love that Bob Novak Effect though, it's off the hook.

What I don't get...

...is many of the same African-Americans who are today condemning and denouncing the verdict in the Sean Bell case once were cheering and overjoyed when O.J. was acquited.

Why a Hillary vs. McCain contest could swing towards Hillary

To begin even his most "ardent" conservative supporters readily admit he's not 100% or 80% or even 70% conservative,

ERGO (big Latin word for "therefore"),

he has a liberal side which leads me to believe that many of those voters who are liberally disposed, either center or left-of-center would go for him, ergo they might figure if we go for him why don't we just go for her? Ronald Reagan, now he was a bona-fide conservative (for the most part, yeah I'm aware of the deficits rung up during the Reagan years) and he attracted a mainly conservative vote, even those blue-collar Dems who crossed party lines were also social conservatives but the punditocracy (of which z is a member now I guess) says that McCain will garner all kinds of votes. Like maybe the Republican Party, aka the Stupid Party, is shooting itself in the foot over this one and when he loses he'll be hawking Viagra too in a couple years like what's his name? I know this liberal guy, he's a hardcore Democrat and a good friend, and we were talking one day at work, this was a couple years before even these primaries, and he said he wouldn't mind seeing McCain in the Oval Office one day, he was the one who brought up the subject and he went further and said he'd even vote for him, now what does that say?

Jimmy Carter still thinks he's president

So I see his picture in the paper today, all serious and pensive like a sitting president, and he's been trying to broker a big Mideast peace package by, among other things, talking to the leader of the terrorist group Hamas. Must miss the Anwar Sadat/Menachem Begin days but I'm beginning to think we have a budding syndrome on our hands here just waiting for a name, ex-presidents who can't just retire and go away and hit the links but

get involved,

perhaps in his own mind he still sees himself as a great president, dunno, maybe this is one symptom of the syndrome as yet to be named but it annoys, geez guy, gas lines were high, 'member? and you took in a whole boatload or two or three of rogue criminals from Cuba courtesy of ole Fidel, go home and rent a classic movie, know what I'm sayin'?

RETIRE ALREADY!!!

Robowhat?

Yup, the young people be experimenting with the cough medicines. New term for Webster, robotripping as in taking well beyond the recommended dosage of such cough medicines as Robitussin, say 20, 30 or even 50 liquid gels. Read an article about this the other day, more and more young people are doing this to get high, to go on a trip, but then their blood pressure skyrockets, they're totally out of it and usually some nurse or doctor then calls the bewildered parents who had no idea. The age is getting stranger by the day, used to be the biggie was pot. I never got the whole trip thing, I mean whatever personal problem you're tripping from is going to be right back there foursquare and center when you get back. Must be bored, they're not out playing baseball and fishing anymore, that's too Fred MacMurrayish I guess. So watch out for all those robotrippers out there, the newest and youngest members of our zombie-fied culture.

Pope Benedict's remarks at youth rally

This was in my neck of the woods, St. Joseph's Seminary in the big YO on April the 19th on a lovely Saturday, would've loved to have gone but watched it on TV just the same. Closed-captioning is wonderful, it helps not just the hard of hearing but all of us. I was able to enjoy a fine cigar outside on the patio while reading Pope Benedict's inspiring words on the screen while looking through the window. One of his main messages to these young people was this era of moral confusion we live in and what he called "the manipulation of the mind" that produces this moral confusion. He did not mention the a-word (abortion) or any other specific word for that matter since he deliberately seems to have cultivated a pastoral style that goes to first principles in a generalized way in the hopes of making us more amenable to the Church's teachings, he wants to get beyond the NO-NO-NO part as he is fond of saying but we all know what he's talking about. One passage in particular struck me and he seems to have purposely evoked the Message of Fatima as his predecessor often did: "The second area of darkness - that which affects the mind - often goes unnoticed and for this reason is particularly sinister. The manipulation of truth distorts our perception of reality and tarnishes our imagination and aspirations...yet freedom is a delicate value. It can be misunderstood or misused so as to lead not to the happiness we all expect it to yield but to a dark arena of manipulation in which our understanding of self and the world becomes confused and distorted by those who have an ulterior agenda." It's as if this is Benedict's own theological explanation for part of the Message of Fatima wherein the Virgin Mary says to Lucia: "Look my child, don't be surprised if, at a certain moment, a certain diabolical disorientation affects the best of minds, a disequlibrium, so that they no longer judge according to the voice of my Son and of Peter." What better way to describe the times we now live in?

The best way I can describe Pope Benedict's birthday

healing, a balm, it's something we as a nation who suffered through 9/11 really needed. The news is always bad, always has been, seems ratings thrive on bad news, his papal visit coinciding with his 81st birthday, it's like just what the doctor ordered. I am usually not big on pomp and circumstance, though I wasn't there in person the sheer pageantry on the South Lawn of the White House yesterday I really enjoyed. Weatherwise the perfect day too, it's like God was smiling. 'Tis a simple blog today, Life in general is bad enough, I just found it healing is all.

Mean People

They could be people in general, many times they're bosses and I'm not talking about somebody having a bad day. It takes such an effort to be this way, it saps you of your energy and ain't good for your health, what purpose does it serve exactly to be known as a toxic person if I were sitting them down for an interview. Rational bosses are known to get more out of their employees, the respect trickles down but what do mean people in general garner? So how do mean people see themselves? do they have an inkling? Even Scrooge came around after a time so wassup?

A divorce culture is a depressed culture

a working theory of mine, I could be wrong so go easy, I've been known to think out loud here a few times. Used to be you'd go to the pharmacy for your flu medicine or whatever and there might be a handful of people on line, just recently I went to shop at a Walgreen's and the parking lot was jam-packed as it always is, turns out many of them were on line to see the pharmacist, it looked like Ticketron for a minute, young and old, didn't matter. Our society is not whole imo, it's not really intact, emotional issues and baggage are the order of the day, unresolved issues, routine divorce, abortion an everyday occurence, ergo more problems. Now z would much rather see people take more natural routes to these things, a more holistic approach but I can't judge them either, people are tired of being tired, tired of being depressed, tired of whatever and so here's something, has a few side effects but let's try it. Z's point is a conservative society would be a better society, a healthier society, divorce being rare only when necessary, forgiveness, resolving issues for a change, abortion being more or less a relic of the past, families helping each other out in times of need instead of this one not talking to that one for 20 years...we ain't livin' right, and if it wasn't just cats and babies who slept right and never got depressed might there be less of a line at Walgreen's?

The Hitchens bug is going around

Obama has put conservatives on the couch, blue-collar workers he said are bitter about life due to economic conditions and so they often turn to things like religion and become pro-gun, anti-trade and anti-immigrant. Hillary blasted back calling him an elitist and says she learned as a kid how to shoot a gun, he makes an Annie Oakley and duck-blind comment which was actually quite funny, gone is the old Obama of political civility, Jay Leno could have written this one. This is it folks, the 12th round, the 9th inning and word has it, according to Bob Novak, that her "ousted" political advisor Mark Penn still has her ear. This is really fun entertaining stuff and I only wish we had this on the Republican side but that one was over way too early imo. The Hitchens Virus, it's a bug that first starts up, well you know where, and it concerns all things religious and revered through the ages. Don't hate, participate.

DONAHUE

He's been retired for years now, after his seminal talk show finally went off the air, well he had no choice what with the Big O and all, he hooked up with MSNBC with a more political type show that failed and now he's made an anti-Iraq war movie, "Body of War." So here's what's up with Phil, he wants to be relevant again like in the good old days when he'd have on his show some sexually active grandmother and he takes her hand and says "God bless you grandma" all at 4:30 in the afternoon when the kids just got home from school and Mom's making some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some "more Ovaltine Mom" in the kitchen. It's like this, everyone has either a talk show or a blog these days, hell the local dogcatcher even has a blog, so Phil sees everyone on the bridge with their fishing poles leaning against the rails and sitting on their white buckets that they keep the snappers in and he

wants to get in there too,

"Hey buddy, can I have a cold one? How's the action?" "Pretty damn good, everyone's gotten something today, guy's got a monster blue over there" so he runs home and gets his spincaster, hasn't used it in awhile and hopes the line still holds, it's old and so he squeezes himself in next to the other anglers, "hey, is that Joe Scarborough?", only thing is he ain't catching anything, everything he does post-retirement is a big fat flopperoony.

So I hear Bill's been defending Hillary's version of sniper fire in Bosnia and she's like it ain't helping, darling dearest hubby why don't you STFU?

Daughtry has a nice sound

Went up the line yesterday way up in the sticks, packed a few miles on the car, kinda my version of a retreat aka a daytrip, had the station tuned and on came a few hits by Daughtry, just one of many stars flung off that fiery pinwheel known as "American Idol." Has a nice sound to it like he was born to do what he's doing, has a heavy touch of angst to his lyrics not in a depressing way but haunting just the same, hard to put into a genre (philosophical rock?) but perfect for a long trip. I'm going with Michael Johns on this season, caught him midthrough but saw enough to know he should win hands down. So far through these many seasons though nobody has that unique trademark sound like a Daughtry, he's like Steve Perry of Journey, other singers may be great but they don't have that extra hard-to-put-down-in-words quality, count me a fan.

Finally, a Hollywood celebrity who gets it

There is something refreshing about Richard Gere's support for the Tibetan democracy movement, shows you don't always have to support socialist and communist regimes like Cuba. Michael Moore & co., wanna jump on board?

Talking and shilling

Time was talk radio was the new kid on the block, unwelcome by the liberal msm for counterbalancing their liberal bias, but it's like it became so infatuated with itself and its political influence it began losing sight of its original goal. Rush was fresh and funny when he first started out, his political parodies were first-rate but now he's just a rubber-stamp for everything Bush especially on the immigration problem. And as for Sean, well a week or so ago a caller called up asking him but what about McCain's own pastor problem and while Sean didn't dismiss such concerns outright he downplayed it by drawing a sharp line of distinction between Obama's own pastor problem and McCain's, his reasoning being that the Rev. John Hagee isn't McCain's personal minister/spiritual advisor but this misses the point imo. By his warm acceptance of Hagee's endorsement he is saying, even if this wasn't his intent, that we should be tolerant of intolerance but Sean, like Rush, has become a shill for a party and a president. Re the Iraq war you should be for the war not because Sean tells you you should be for it, this ain't thinking, but because in your heart you're for it, make sense? and you should also not have such a closed mental universe, political solipsism if you will, that you can't accept the fact that people have political differences about everything under the sun. There are still many good pockets of talk radio still worth listening to, Laura Ingraham's at the top of my list, but I think a good part of it has outlived and outdone itself, intoxicated with its own power, its hackneyed use of the formula the Democrats can do no right and the Republicans can do no wrong. I don't listen to much of it in the car anymore, I have my preset music stations and when they grind the same playlist into the ground everyday I fall back on my CD player. I check out Hannity only on a very occasional basis and it's always SO-SO (same old same old) or SS-DD as people like to say at work.

Jay-Z and Beyonce are getting hitched!!!

& they might even live in Scarsdale, NY! Actually I don't find this particularly interesting, on second thought I don't find it interesting at all. It's like when I'm watching some of those evening entertainment shows and there's George Clooney being interviewed about this movie or that girlfriend I find myself being vaguely irritated, it's not so much George Clooney even though of course he's a big-time lib, I just never got this whole celebrity worship thing. I might admire somebody's craft and want to know a little about his or her life but that's about it. We have a war going on amongst other things, I'm sorry, I don't get it.

The Government Checkbook

I know myself that I have very finite resources in my checking account, usually people have bigger savings accounts than their checking accounts but even combining the two finitude is the fiscal reality here. I can't write a check for a new speedboat if I don't have the money, in the days of yore you'd wind up in debtor's prison. These everyday rules for the rest of us don't seem to apply to the federal government though and maybe that should be the yardstick whereby we choose our next President. So right off the bat it can't be Obama or Hill and Mac we are reminded time and again ain't a true dyed-in-the-wool conservative so maybe the Constitutional Party is where it's at. The Federal Reserve, our nation's central banking system, can just print more money in a pinch but if we did that, had a printing press in our basement we'd be arrested for counterfeiting. The richest person in the world isn't Vladimir Putin or Adnan Kashogi, it's the U.S. Government, or at least they act that way.

The 2nd Collection at all the Masses today...

...is to help defray the costs of gassing up the Popemobile during Benedict's upcoming trip to NYC this month. You should have received your envelopes in the mail and if you could make a very sacrificial and minimal payment of at least $20 it would be most appreciated.

Our zombie-fied nation

or why do people walk in the road? Regretfully might be a new feature of this blog.

This has been a phenomenon for years now and I don't mean simply crossing the street or even jaywalking but literally people, usually they're not alone but in groups of at least two, who walk down the road at a leisurely pace. This cuts across all racial and age groups, maybe in some cases of the young it can mean a statement of defiance, dunno, but none of them even look around them. You have to ever so slowly pass them and hope a toot or two won't anger them. My .02 worth, most of 'em are on drugs, could be the illegal variety, could be over-the-counter and prescription drugs. Saw a commercial the other day for some wonder drug and the woman goes nonchalantly "I take five different medications already." Oh, OK. The way I was brought up was roads are exclusively for motor vehicles, maybe a bike or two can get into the act but that's it, "cross at the green, not in-between", but when you have people in LA-LA Land, well, it's kinda like being in some horror movie, Zoloft Nation or something.

Meat Lasagna - European Style

The key to making a great European-style lasagna is your meat sauce, it has to be packed with flavor. Now you need a heavy-duty stockpot for this as you'll need to get this very very hot first, the oil will start to smoke, and a thin pot will have somebody call the Fire Department in no time. Get some nice white onions and dice them up rather small with a chef's knife, have some crushed garlic on the side and when that pot is hot enough put your onions in and a spoonful or two of the garlic. Now whenever any recipe calls for onions always sautee them first so as to bring out their flavor, 5 minutes or so. So you have your ground beef, not too lean 'cause you want that fat, and you put all that into your pot and mix it all up with a wooden spoon so it cooks thoroughly. Now you add your spices, salt and pepper, garlic powder, crushed oregano and parsley flakes, a few packets of Goya Sazon, really anything you can come up with, even some Italian dressing. When the meat sauce is almost done as it begins to turn brown add some cans of crushed tomatoes, some diced tomatoes, I like Del Monte with the basil/garlic/oregano blend, and a small can of tomato paste, depending on how much you're making you be the judge on how much. So the meat sauce takes a while but not too long either 'cause it's going to get cooked again when you put your lasagna in the oven. Meat sauce done so pour it into a colander over the sink but not too long, you want to save that fat, and when you're done straining pour it into a long hotel pan. Now you have another hotel pan and you ladle some marinara sauce on the bottom and spread it around, next I add my lasagna noodles, I tend to prefer the big industrial ones but no matter, and into your first layer you spread your meat around, then add your dollops of ricotta cheese in rows and then sprinkle in your shredded mozzarella and don't be bashful here, next spritz on some parmesan cheese, then add another layer of lasagna noodles and repeat the next layer as you did the first. When you're done adding your last noodles to form the top very important to spread some more marinara sauce all around else it will crack when you bake it and lastly spritz on some more parmesan, get a bakery sheet or parchment paper and put that on top and lastly some aluminum foil. If you don't add the paper some bits of the foil will flake off and you don't want that. You have your oven set to 350 or 375 degrees if you life and I bake it off for at least 50 minutes, better a little too long than too short, you want that mozzarella to melt. Take it out and let it cool on the side for about 1/2 hour before putting it in the 'fridge if you're not gonna eat it right away. A word about bay leaves which many chefs like to use when their meat sauce is simmering, when putting together your lasagna always take them out of your meat sauce as they're not really edible and people can choke, their use is purely for the flavor. Bon Appetit!

Book reviewers

I've long held that since we're all human it is virtually impossible to be 100% objective at all times and this came to mind after reading two very divergent reviews of the new book out by Melody Peterson sarcastically entitled Our Daily Meds. OK, so her whole premise is the pharmaceutical industry is greedy and gets dubious drugs to market before proper and thorough studies are done and once on the market lobbyists for these corporations strongly ply doctors to dispense them more and more and yada yada yada and do we really have chemical imbalances in our brains and what about all these potentially serious side effects to the most popular drugs and...well you get the picture, hers is not an uncommon position on the drug industry. Now the first review I read was very positive and called it important work but the second one was just the opposite and pretty much dubbed her part of the anti-medical progress crowd which brings home the point our biases are brought to bear on everything, ditto for movie reviews of films dealing with controversial topics, think Michael Moore. The point of today's blog is not my own personal position on the meds situation though I do tilt towards her position that we are a vastly overmedicated society but how we review and critique things we may strongly disagree with (or even agree with for that matter) which kinda got me thinking are book and movie reviews worth reading and considering in the first place? In an artistic sense isn't a review of anything literary or cinematic that may be loaded with social and political themes simply a reflection of ourselves and our own moral certitudes and pieties?

Our cashless society

I was watching this paid program on NBC last night about low fixed-rate loans by the government so more average folk can buy homes, it's Uncle Sam's way of trying to solve the subprime mortgage mess. The loans are completely protected by the federal government so lenders would not lose anything, they are guaranteed. Hey, I'm no egghead economic scholar, sounds good but the part that got me were the four people at the end who had questions for the expert. They had various questions about the loan program but all four were swimming in credit-card debt, not only that but the show's financial authority figure said nothing on this like tear 'em up and don't use 'em for now or only use them to rent a hotel room or if your car breaks down on a cross-country trip. I kid you not but the other day at Wendy's I saw a young couple whip out their piece of plastic to buy some burgers, is this worth going into debt over? I've made the personal decision to not use credit cards for now, I paid them off years ago and you know something? I'm better off, have more money in the bank and live well within my means. So these four troopers who maxed out on their credit cards are going for these government loans to own a home, well good luck but this Gotta Have It Generation doesn't set an example for the Next Generation.

Clearly Barack has rattled Hillary's cage

How else to explain her self-sabotaging ways? If it were anybody else, John Edwards or Joe Biden let's say, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts you wouldn't be hearing about all that sniper fire on the Bosnian tarmac or her pivotal role in the Irish Peace Process. NO, she didn't misspeak because she didn't remember every detail correctly or was sleep-deprived, she is clearly threatened by Barack's meteoric political ascendancy and so when you're under this much stress and pressure people weird themselves out. She wants it so badly she's self-sabotaging her own campaign and like the famous band still playing while the Titanic sank she doesn't know enough to say "stop the orchestra, we have a problem here."

Made in China

Don't know how we can protest and lodge our discontent over China's current crackdown of the pro-democracy movement in Tibet, after all even our toothpicks and keychains are made in China (apparently we now longer have the technology to make dolls over here). Sure the Administration always lodges its pro-forma condemnations but what kind of teeth does it really have? Nixon was famous for opening up trade with China but I don't think he had in mind that you couldn't walk into a Payless Shoe Source and not have trouble finding a sneaker made in America. New World Order.

Sex addiction, the new excuse?

So now we know what ex-NY Governor Eliot Spite-zer's problem really is, he's a sex addict. Now I know this stuff has been documented by people like Dr. Patrick Carnes, actor Michael Douglas once admitted to it but I think the real upshot of all this is therapy is replacing the concept of sin and free will. The famous psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger even wrote about this years and years ago in his Whatever Became of Sin? and that's going way back but even then rationalization was a problem. It probably helps explain wife Silda's apparent decision to stick it out with him but are serial cheaters now to be understood to be silently suffering with their addictions and is there a Pill just around the corner? They can even name it Spitzotrol or something, it'll be his legacy.

Should news conferences henceforth be rated?

As in G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17? and how would you rate the press conference New York's new governor David Paterson gave the other day? Well it certainly had your adult themes, adultery and serial affairs, it even had some psychology thrown in (he did it because she did it first). It was kinda like a mild R so maybe we'll give it a PG-13, maybe it shoulda had a parental warning advisory scrawled at the top of the screen. Wondering, and it's probably wise but during his next meeting with reporters the kiddies should be shooed out of the room. If anything it doesn't set a good moral example, I've heard women say it's bottom of the barrel stuff. Maybe he can give his next press conference after 9 PM when the kids are safely tucked away.

Is McCain getting a free pass?

So far it's all about Barack Obama and his pastor problem, you know, the Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn This Country, Land That I Hate" Wright, and Barack was even forced to give a major speech distancing himself from the Rev's theology. For the last few days Hannity's been beating this horse on the airwaves but what about John McCain's own pastor problem? nary a word. McCain recently warmly accepted the endorsement of one John Hagee, prominent evangelical pastor and friend and advocate for Israel to the point where he has publicly said that when those Jewish settlers were forced to leave their settlements in the Gaza Strip God punished US with Hurricane Katrina. Not only that but Hagee holds that the Roman Catholic Church is the seat of the Antichrist. All Mac said was a tepid "I can accept someone's endorsement without agreeing with all of their positions." So where is his major Obama-esque speech clarifying his own Rev problem? and in fairness shouldn't Hannity be talking about this as well? I am not loyal to the Republican Party come hell or high water, I am loyal to conservative principles first, read into that what you will Mr. McCain.

Aren't we all crimed out by now?

Crime has been a HUGE staple of TV over the last several years judging by all the C.S.I.'s alone (next up - "C.S.I. Anchorage, Alaska") and it's not just crime, it's lurid crime. "Dateline", "48 Hours Mystery", even "20/20" has gotten into the act on occasion. Ever since Hannibal Lecter first made his debut we seem to have this cultural fascination with the dark side. Personally I find it very depressing like I was checking out the new Fox lineup last night, something called "Canterbury's Law" starring Juliana Margulies. So far so good, a new legal drama I thought but in walks some guy into her law office and opens up a duffel bag and there are human remains inside. He claims to be psychic and offers to help her find her missing son. Anyway turns out he may not be psychic after all and may have killed five or six young boys and buried them. Turns out he has an advanced and inoperable brain tumor and can't remember whether he did the crimes or not and so I wasted a good part of the evening watching the current weirdness of the latest TV schedule and then you go to bed in a disturbed mood like doesn't TV offer inspiration anymore, human interest stories and people helping each other out? When film critic Michael Medved knocked all the hoopla over "Silence of the Lambs" getting an Oscar nod I thought maybe he was just being his overly critical self, if it's not his cup of tea don't rent it but I now see it was only the beginning of a trend, a genre that Laura Ingraham calls "tragedy tv" and check out all those nasty and gruesome anti-smoking ads on the tube, we all know by now it's bad for you but as the NY Post's Andrea Peyser said the other day by golly children are watching. It might seem radical but I'm almost there. As the bumper sticker says

KILL YOUR TELEVISION!