Some miner points

Nobody cared about Politics in that Chilean mine. We are human first and liberals or conservatives second. Should the liberal miners have been the last ones to get in that capsule?

Next time you have trouble sticking to your diet consider that these brave souls were rationed two spoonfuls of tuna, half a glass of milk and a couple crackers every 48 hours at the beginning of their ordeal which as ABC's 20/20 told us last night was not enough for nourishment but to prevent the body from going into withdrawal and shock. This has inspired me to not see only one main meal every 24 hours as that big a deal. Had some Muscle Milk this morning, banana creme flavor. Tasted more like paint but I'm not complaining.

Si es Goya tiene que ser bueno.

Oh God, now we have to relive the social issues with another Cuomo?

Background: NY GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino as you may have heard spoke to a Brooklyn Hasidic congregation the other day and said some things. Kids should not be "brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn't." They'd "be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family." Emphasized that he chose not to march in New York's Gay Pride Parade whereas his Democratic rival Andrew Cuomo did. Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto said his speech was "stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality. These comments, along with other views he has espoused, make it clear that he is way out of the mainstream and is unfit to represent New York." The Paladino spokesman shot back that Cuomo should discuss with his pastor his support for partial-birth abortion.

Deconstruction: Kids are being brainwashed into thinking -- Well that really is undeniable when you consider the thrust of modern-day sex education.
Kids would be better off and more successful getting married -- Not quite true if you're looking at it from purely the financial angle. Seems alot of gay men are rather affluent, cultured and successful in their own right. Going down the old poop shoot and having a respectable bank account do not seem interrelated or maybe they are.
Stunning homophobia -- There's that word again. Eye of the beholder stuff but hey it's a buzzword to appeal to a certain base. You have four urinals at a rest stop along the Interstate and two guys naturally space themselves apart. Are they homophobes? who worries about this stuff?
Glaring disregard for basic equality -- Has Paladino advocated discrimination against gays in the workplace? reinstating anti-sodomy laws? seems he's just voicing a POV at odds with, well liberalism. Cuomo should stop talking smack.
Way out of the mainstream -- It is clear Paladino is appealing to the social conservative base part of which is the Hasidim. If the social conservative base in this country were that tiny and out of the mainstream he wouldn't waste his time appealing to it. Remember he is campaigning for a high political office and if his views were really that far outside the mainstream he wouldn't have said it. Makes no sense.
Unfit to hold public office -- In what way? because he has politically incorrect viewpoints? What about Charlie Rangel? Cuomo was last seen hobnobbing at the Harlem Congressman's 80th birthday bash and this guy wants to clean up Albany?
Partial-birth abortion -- My thing is I don't want to go through another Cuomo explaining the Social Issues. It's grueling, the sophistry and obfuscation is a slow form of torture and Once Is Enough. It's like Gaga replicating Madonna, do we deserve this?
& finally a word about societal mores: Be that as it may there will always be some residual cultural distaste for rectal activity among the boys. Combined with the civic virtue of tolerance this amounts to at worst being mildly anti-gay. That's a social more, always has been and so Paladino, agree or disagree with him here is not outside the mainstream. Liberals have a problem with social mores, always have and if Cuomo were say carpetbagging and campaigning in Ohio or Wisconsin would he be saying these things? Should Paladino have gone here? who knows but there was Meredith Vieira interviewing Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann this morning about basically her views on all this even though her thing ain't New York and as I said it really is a tempest in a teapot. You should be able to raise your kids any way you want. They're not wards of the State after all and this really is the libertarian position here.

probably has a wide stance.

daytripping

Went up the line yesterday and stopped at the Military Museum of Southern New England in Danbury CT. This place should be a required class trip and then some as it really breaks down WW2 in all its stages. There are tanks outside in the yard, British, American and Soviet models and all kinds of military artifacts in the museum itself. Of course some Nazi memorabilia is displayed but it's in historical context and you really get a sense of the tragedy of war here and the sacrifices men made for our freedom. That cyberslut over at Duke should really come here, get some perspective on Life and then we hit the Danbury Fair Mall. In the car my friend started doing Shock the Monkey in an Irish brogue ("cover me when I sleep...") and so how are you giving back? Saw a road banner in the big YO, St. John the Baptist Casino Night. Why not just have a Whorehouse too to benefit the school and church? So we're on Rte. 6 coming from Danbury heading into Brewster and the road is sparse, lonely and desolate with a few scattered businesses and dwellings here and there and it's like a UFO would land somewhere here at 3 in the morning (State Trooper: "Holy Shit!!!"). My friend goes this place is nice but weird like you'd have a longtime married couple here without any kids and so you heard of the Bigfoot Belt, there's a Porno Belt here. Starting just past the Danbury border ya got one and when you head on into the Village of Brewster itself there's another one. A real hole in the wall place, some claustrophobic dump with the usual generic porn and there's like some exhaust fan here or maybe that's the Mexican deli next door, you're thinking bedbugs. This is the squalor part of Town but then you got your more upscale Giggles ("Why not?") in Carmel, Wappingers Falls and Hyde Park just past Po'town, things the weary traveler needs to know. Just because it's the Country doesn't mean it doesn't have an Underbelly, some David Lynchian cavern where some guy with an apple in his mouth just crapped in a diaper. These food courts in the malls, heavy on the Asian cuisine and Southwestern grilled fare. He pigged out, I held off. The Diet you know. Dunno what it is but malls get me depressed after a while, must be that existential vibe you got as a kid when your Mom and Dad were parking in the waffle-ceilinged parking garage at the Galleria and then later on you saw some gay-oriented graffiti in the Men's Room ("watch the monkey get hot, monkey"). The historically-minded traveler, the porno venturer, the spiritual-seeker, the cultural researcher, the consumerist, it's all here. Did you know Sears actually sells jeans already with rips in them? back in the day you would've thrown them out. Hey it's another Travelblog!

Life is short.

Pro-choice and pro-abortion

Re Pro-Lifers
Soapie: "...they demonize Pro-Choice advocates (even calling them pro-abortion in some instances)..."
Satyavati: "It's proCHOICE Beth. Can you stop with the hyperinflammatory rhetoric now? Please?"

It's not demonizing or hyperinflammatory. If we called them pro-death it would be but pro-abortion in most cases is simply accurate and objective. Let's break it down:

IF you say you're personally opposed to abortion but support abortion rights you are by proper definition pro-choice and not pro-abortion. People who work for Planned Parenthood are not personally opposed to abortion otherwise they wouldn't be working there. To say they are pro-abortion is not a pejorative simply that they have no moral objections to the act otherwise again they would be doing something else with their lives. Planned Parenthood is known for pushing abortion but let's say they didn't, just presented all the options. Then they would be pro-choice but would also at the same time be pro-abortion because, let's face it that's what they do. If you're not against abortion then you're something else. If you present neutrality on the act then that makes you morally indifferent to the act and in a roundabout way makes you pro-abortion. You can be against porn but be for Free Speech. You can also be for porn and obviously for free speech. You can be indifferent to porn and be for free speech in which case you're not against porn. If you work in a porn shop you cannot in any way be said to not be pro-porn. ONLY in the first case though can it accurately be said you're not pro-porn. If you do not in some sense oppose something then you are for it. In all his years of journalism I've never heard Bill Moyers voice a personal qualm about the act of abortion so it's fair to conclude he doesn't oppose it in even a personal way. That's not demonizing or hyperrhetoric just a fair verdict. I have not yet called Saty with her preternatural compartmentalization pro-abortion because in the past anyway she made it clear she feels killing any living creature is wrong and carries with it bad karma. That's a clarification or important nuance most pro-choicers never make but for Beth and me we just find her fascinating as well as perplexing. It's interesting and curious why the very label "pro-abortion" conjures up such feelings since there would seem to be something wrong with the act itself if one shies away from the label. I'm very pro-heart surgery and pro-appendectomy ya know? Trouble is Pro-Choice doesn't tell me much and can run the gamut from personally opposed as I said to gungho. It's the safest thing to say at a Manhattan cocktail party and you don't have to go out on a limb, it's like some safe box you check off on some questionnaire. In my labelling system though I call them pro-choice and pro-life and that works. Perhaps anti-anti-abortion?

The latest chapter in why we really don't have free speech in this country

As you well know by now CNN host Rick Sanchez, a Cuban-American has been axed for comments he made this past Thursday on the satellite radio show "Stand Up! with Pete Dominick." He called Comedy Central pundit I guess you could call him Jon Stewart a bigot who has "a white liberal establishment point-of-view" and said the media in general is filled with "elite Northeast liberals" but here's the kicker. He pointed out that Jews like Stewart don't face the same discrimination as Mexicans and implied that CNN and the msm are being run by Jews and elitists who look down on Hispanics. OK so deconstructing and soapie can help me out here:

Jon Stewart is a bigot - anybody's opinion
who has a white liberal establishment point-of-view - obvious
msm filled with elite Northeast liberals - the sky is blue and the earth is round
Jews don't face the same discrimination as Mexicans - would seem to be true although for some reason you can't say this
CNN and the msm are run by Jews - you'd really have to do a complete ethnic breakdown of news producers and directors and presidents of news divisions here. Anyone wanna do this? Saty?
and elitists who look down on Hispanics - entirely subjective but hey it's the man's opinion and last I checked

About the only place you can talk freely these days is in your living room but be careful of your cable guy, he might report you. Some elements of truth, overall it wasn't great, kind of icky but I've heard worse. For me it's a Free Speech thing and basically Rants are covered. What do you think?

The more I think about it

the more Michael Kinsley's proposal makes sense. In order to "resolve" the gay marriage debate he has said why not have the government get out of the marriage business as in completely? no hetero or homo kind of deals. Now the conservative argument has always been government needs to recognize and foster the institution of marriage in order to promote positive social goods like social stability and procreation (the National Review argument) but while I'm not against the government officially recognizing this in some way is there really THAT compelling a reason for government to get involved at all? Full Disclosure - At work today I was minding my own business when a co-worker while working alongside the older lady manager (a curious sort) said "we're waiting for your wedding day" and a couple of other pertinent questions. However this would involve a whole sideblog about the DGTZ (or Don't Go There Zone) and the ever curious mofos daily buzzing around its perimeter, social conformist cops, folks who procreate somehow feeling more important than people like you, the desire to work in Peace, are they really talking behind your back when they should be working? & a Host of Other Related Issues. Suffice to say gays would make a far stronger case if they simply adopted the Kinsley Proposal. If the government should get out of My Sex Life then by the same token why should they officially sanction my arrangements? You could still get "married" if you wish but that'd be your business......social gnats......and divorce would cease to exist because its predeccesor, marriage, would cease to exist. You'd think conservatives would be making these arguments. With our track record of hetero marriage it's like gays serving in the military, WHY?

Stranded

Political correctness

Political correctness means

you have a bad attitude.

Take the title of Mal's latest blog - What the Hell Is a Black Caucus and Why Are They Allowed to Exist? - there's a bad 'tude going on there. It's like with the opponents of the GZ Mosque, pc is not interested in arguing the merits of the case, it's YOU have a bad attitude. No other possibility exists. IT permeates politics, the workplace, Life in general. IF you rebel against it you're a dark force. Stop hating. If you work with a dickhead or a getover smile and love your brother. PC means we won't hire you to slice bologna if you smoke a doobie in your downtime. It means if you ask a woman out more than once you're a stalker. It means you can't even say the word nigger even if you're only reporting that Chris Rock likes to say the word nigger but somehow he can joke about when he goes to the ATM he looks over his shoulder for niggers but you can't. Don't hate, participate. PC means love your chemo even if you look like an Auschwitz survivor afterwords. PC means The Customer Is Always Right, it means if you're a Muslim then we'll overlook your hatred of gays but not if you're an evangelical Christian. I saw a bumper sticker the other day - WW2 Vet, I Served My Country, Did You? WTF is that???

lose the 'tude!

Is the right to abortion self-evident?

I would submit that nothing is self-evident right off the bat. I'm assuming that all our respective political philosophies required a great deal of thought in shaping what they are today, the Final Version but I do get the sense liberals these days have it all figured out. Here's a kind of philosophical question: despite the millions of abortions in this country and the millions across the globe what if the right to abortion doesn't even exist? that all this time we were practicing a nonright? that this right never even existed in the first place? What are the consequences of this? Have to say this, millions and millions of people doing the same thing does not mean they have the right to do this or that the more common something becomes the more moral it becomes. Back-alley abortions, this may sound harsh but I really don't talk about it because I really don't care. If a pregnant woman wants to throw herself down the stairs just don't hit the cat at the bottom. It's not in my equation because the simple Nub of the Matter is is it right or wrong? do you have a right to do it and is it the taking of a human life? Is SEX necessary? I don't mean it feels good and all that, we all know the otherworldy pleasures involved and I'm not anti-sex by any stretch, quite the contrary but is it necessary? ties in with soapie's proposal of Sex as a Contract, you know what it is and you accept the risks going in. I would submit this: if you do not in some sense oppose the practice then you are not really a conservative. A libertarian maybe but not a true con and I'll give my reasons. I just wanted to let the Liberal on the Bike continue on his merry way lecturing the kids not wearing their helmuts and move This here. Before long The Impasse will have been reached and maybe by then I'll just be moderating. Should be fun:)

Is it more important to win the debate or have a discussion?

Unless you're an amoeba most folks have what's known as a political philosophy but sometimes our so-called inconsistencies are simply the recognition that our philosophy may have a logical absurdity or two if stretched, the Quirk (e.g. brother and sister should not get married). One can be strongly libertarian in spirit but hate abortion and Saty and soap bring up the usual tried-and-true pro-choice angles, really the skip in the record as if we've never heard them before. If we don't agree with Shaw for instance she tends to think we haven't considered her points. Oh no darling we hear you loud and clear we just disagree with you. That's possible ain't it? There's no need to pulverize your opponent, this scorched earth policy (S-Block). I like to think of this place as a coffee klatch, a passionate but friendly cafe. There's no need to break the saucer or piss in the sink.

Debated with Saty at her blog a few months back and for me Michael Schiavo at best was and is a questionable character so we got into a whole medical discussion and before long you reach The Impasse, a ravine or chasm with a shaky footbridge. For me I've reached the end of my walk, may as well turn around and head back to the car. IMO nobody won that one and I'm philosophical about it. It makes for a good Google search and I'm glad I did it. Not her but if people want to hold his water for him I got no problem so long as you don't begrudge me my take. You can even bring your 9/11 Truther movement over here and I won't get personal which reminds me I have to check out Alex Jones' views on the Mosque.

There develops over time if you're a true conservative a certain what I call Conservative Convergence. By this I mean it's ok to question aspects of your own movement from time to time, I've done it many times myself but after awhile you find yourself agreeing more and more with your fellow conservatives and kind of put the old feuds in a shoebox. It's better for society to be pro-life, the GZ mosque, unions are bad, traditional mores should be defended etc. etc. My own definition of being a true conservative is this: libertarianism or maximum liberty but with respect for social mores which many times we get the first part but not that leavening factor. You can be for maximum liberty and still see the wisdom in that it's better off for society to be pro-life for instance and I'm not even talking about the finer points of that debate which have been hammered home time and again (Soapie's Foundry) but the general principle. There's no need for a porn shop to be located within close proximity to a church and angel dust needs to stay banned for reasons of public safety. Many times marijuana is mixed with phencyclidine unbeknownst to the pothead and if you think your local drug dealer has a moral code you're an idiot.

How would you like your coffee?

The near universal consensus in favor of Christ

Now before this blog gets quickly misinterpreted, mentally Sherroded I'll try to frame this in as objective a way as I can. You're a space visitor, you've been around for a few weeks now and you notice that if someone is writing out a check today they'll put the date at Sept. 14, 2010. Now you do a little research into their calendar system (yes Saty I know all about the Chinese calendar so before you get started) and it seems to be almost universally agreed upon, in fact it's not even controversial that on a worldwide basis today is Tuesday, Sept. the 14th, 2010. So there was BC/AD, Before Christ and Anno Domini or "The Year of Our Lord.". Raquel Welch was 1,000,000 years BC with her perfect cave hairstyle and shaved legs but you notice that this Christman, nobody else even comes close to his historical importance. I mean to rejigger the entire calendar system of the World, dividing all of Time and History into before his birth and after his birth, well we don't do that with Buddha or anybody else (BB- Before Buddha, AC - After Confucius) which is not to put the Buddha down but as a space visitor you come to the conclusion that this historical event of Christ's birth, life and death was so important, so pivotal to civilization that there must be some kind of worldwide consensus that still exists to this day in favor of that one man over All The Others. Do you personally know anybody who when writing out a check says "I ain't writing that" when jotting down today's date? In fact this is inarguable, has nothing to do with my personal views as a Christian but is simply the way we do things, an objective fact and I don't even hear atheists or nontheists protest the point.

OK, now attack!!! I've only two responses you are going to hear: What day is today? and Y2K.

A liberal on a bike

Went on my almost daily now long hardcore walk on the beautiful and rustic bike path here that stretches on for miles and the usual crowd: rollerbladers, joggers, old couples walking, fat folks doing the slow shuffle, hounds taking dumps and your ever present bicyclists. It is the law in NYS now that bicyclists have to wear a helmut (that's another issue for another day) so anyways these two young black fellas are peaceably riding along on their two bikes without helmuts of any kind, more like baseball caps and this yuppie on a bike coming the other way, you know the superfit kind without an ounce of lard with the silver designer helmut passes them and right before passing them goes "your heads!! Guys where are your helmuts?!?" and he then proceeds on his way shaking his head, the roving lecturer. Now a libertarian would never do this, I can't imagine soapie in a million years doing this and I could care less. "Where's the condoms guys?" Busybodies, nanny-staters, buttinskies, benevolent stalkers, overall Pains-In-The-Asses.

Listening to Hannity years ago and they were talking about the fat of the land so the caller goes when he walks into a restaurant and sees a Mom giving her fat daughter an ice cream sundae he wants to go up to them and say "what are you doing?" and Hannity apparently agreed. Why do they care so much? I have as my new thesis that Sarcasm is the Defense of Right Order and the two black bicyclists could have said "fuck off hedge fund manager" but didn't but they would have been well within their rights. Libertarianism is looking better to me day after day and would have absolutely nothing to say to that Mom and her porker in Friendly's.

On my leisurely walks among the babbling streams and the forested trees with the goldfinches darting about and the turtles basking on their logs I'm generally mulling over problems, Life's overall suckiness condition. Folks not wearing their helmuts or husketeers sucking down a banana split at Carvel doesn't enter the whole existential picture here. I'll bet most folks are like this, it's my ex just made my life hell and Why the Hell Am I Here not that guy just took a piss in the woods. There was a guy at Barnes & Noble once sitting in one of those big soft comfy chairs reading a mag. He had shorts on and his sack was hanging out. I didn't even say anything.

Get involved.

Specifically why is the Tea Party a bad thing?

Addressed mainly to Shaw and Saty and other like-minded folk. A few weeks back my conservative friend (see even he is confused) asked me what the Tea Party is and I gave him a kind of general answer but I was somewhat at a loss too. All I know is that it's supposed to be

a Bad Thing

and it reminds me of the whole deal with salt. By now it's a universally recognized truth that salt is bad for you but nobody explains why so we go into the store looking for low-salt items, low-sodium cold cuts but nobody really knows why. All I know is that the Tea Party has largely avoided the social issues, seems to have moved beyond the whole pro-life/pro-choice matrix whereas I think and I've always felt that conservatism without pro-life is an empty victory. So for me without this foundation the Tea Party leaves me more than a little spiritually unfulfilled. I'm not a tea partier myself but I don't have the same hostility to the movement the msm has and most liberals. It's definitely a counter-Obama movement but it really started before Obama, with those bank bailouts and folks being asked to mail in a tea bag to their representative's office. I'm also hearing about race alot but this is like an old TV Guide still hanging around the house, why not just chuck it? or maybe it's kept around for nostalgic purposes. This whole teabagging thing, that might have been mildly funny when it first came out but I was a little surprised liberals would make a popular gay sexual practice into a pejorative.

I don't want mental, emotional diarrhetic dribblings here. I want DETAILS.

Zesty swordfish with roasted asparagus

I love to experiment while cooking. You're not being judged on Master Chef on technical presentation, you're in your own private kitchen fulfilling the #1 Rule of Cooking which a Jamaican chef explained to me once and that is whatever pleases your palate. Cooking, dunno know why but it's alot like politics - My way of cooking is The way - when just give me something good to eat, something that sticks to my ribs. Anyway bought a swordfish steak last week and here's what I did:

Diced up a small tomato, 1/2 a white onion and a jalapeno, all small dice (on Master Chef they'd have to be perfect squares but I ain't into the ocd style of cooking). Put them in a small bowl and added some olive oil and mixed it up. Drizzled everything on top of the swordfish and then some bread crumbs and even some Parmesan (dunno if Joe Bastianich would approve but fuck him), the whole idea being to give it that toasted appearance. Got my oven preheated to 400 (don't tell anyone but it was actually a toaster oven) and then put the steak on a foil tray. OK oven ready and so on another tray just below that was my asparagus which was drizzled with some olive oil, salt & peppa and a freshly crushed garlic clove. I prefer freshly crushed garlic to the bottled kind but whatever. So I'm watching the thing for about, oh I don't know 10 or 15 minutes, even used a small flashlight to see what's going on in there and towards the end just cranked that baby up to 450. Total time about 20, 22 minutes and put the bad boy on my plate with the asparagus kind of on each side. I actually think Gordon Ramsay would have liked it and the guy in the middle but Joe would have just taken a bite and walked away. You know I do my own thing in the kitchen and it rocked!! The cat outside even smelled it from all the way out there and came in and jumped up on the table. The things you can do with such modest equipment and it's good for you too. I didn't do anything radical like you see in some cookbooks and put a pineapple on top, chefs must be getting bored or something these days. Bon appetit!

This cult of negative non-inspiration out there

What d'ya think of this sermon? This past Sunday the pastor got into a whole homily on narrow is the gate that leads to heaven and few there are who enter it. Now that's fine as it was the reading for the day but I never heard one like this one before. He said what he's about to say is gonna sound somewhat harsh and he proceeded to say not all our friends, relatives, not even everyone in this parish who has passed on are in heaven. So I felt maybe he's alluding to Purgatory but then he went on -- "and not all of them are going to heaven." I started gauging the audience, hard to read but I did hear a couple of positive reviews afterwards which surprised me but let's put the brakes on this theological locomotive before we careen off into the ravine. Since the sermon was so unrelievedly negative, bleak I had this thought that yeah maybe the gate that leads to heaven is indeed narrow in which case it just might take that much longer for everyone to enter through. A single-file deal but that's not what I thought he had in mind and I would have been shot down if I raised my hand and offered my heretical counterdeal.

Who winds up in heaven, who doesn't, how many, all these are theological mysteries and it is the height of theological arrogance for a pastor, any minister to opine such. He knows this? God told him this? and what about him, hmmmmm??? This was crossing a line but organized religion does cross lines every now and then. How is this different from the radical Muslim believing all non-Muslims are infidels headed for the pit? So there I was sitting in the back of the church getting uninspired, depressed even. I've suffered enough in this life, you mean there's more to come in eternity? It was a surreal moment and so I was going over my tinnitus-like condition, my irregular bowels down through the ages, all those nights of poor sleep, psycho bosses and all the other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the icing on this crap cake of Life, woes in the romance department but you mean to tell me that's only a warmup?

You're killing me!

There's something about Robert Gibbs' comments that have been bothering me

Just because President Obama has apparently managed to piss off the left-wing blogosphere doesn't make him a conservative or even a moderate (Shaw is a notable exception but then again Shaw is Shaw). Gibbs' remarks that they won't be satisfied until we have a Canadian style health care system and Dennis Kucinich as president, well if you deconstruct that that doesn't mean Obama wouldn't prefer to have the public option. Indeed he's on the record as supporting such but basically he saw the political handwriting on the wall and to borrow a page from Patrick M he went with practicality over principle. If I say or do something that pisses off the soapster let's say, I get Mal's knickers in a twist too, hell let's say I got under Beth's skin as well, I just got geeeeeZed and the Zep bloviated on me well that doesn't mean I'm no longer a part of their world. I'm beginning to think this is the whole point and maybe Obama actually welcomes criticism from the left-wing blogosphere as this will make him appear the pragmatic moderate, the realistic centrist by comparison. It's like with the gays, they like him and all but every once in a while they feel he doesn't go far enough. Obama himself likes them but there's always a little pragmatic distance in between, some political breathing room. He's not gonna put the jelly fist in himself or slip on the semen in the boomboom room during a campaign stop. Though he's gotten a 100% positive report card from NARAL on the topic of abortion he's barely spoken and the one time he did he acted the aloof intellectual above it all, maybe even vaguely pro-life in a misty morning sense. I think Gibbs believes his own comments but his boss knows the real deal.

Consistency, the hobgoblin of small minds

Ah sweet consistency! Dave Miller searches for it, the soapster is probably more consistent than most, most hold it up as a virtue but there's just a little something I've discovered quite on my own. In fact it's rather disturbing, unsettling even and it's something we'd rather not face. It's

the Quirk,

oooooohhhhhh!!!!!! and many times it leads to Icky Things. Basically I've come to the realization over time that quite a few of our positions if logically applied to their stretching points have quirks, in fact they're built-in and it doesn't really matter where these positions fall on the political spectrum. If you're a bona-fide libertarian then you readily accept the premise that there's something wrong with our civil rights laws at least the parts that forbid private companies from discriminating against African-Americans (Rand Paul kind of acknowledged the quirk and then ran away from it). If you're a federalist then you have to accept miscegenation laws should they unhappily make a return. If you're for the gay marriage then you have to welcome the brother and sister team, even polygamy. While we're on the subject of Sex if you're a Catholic and don't accept artificial birth control as morally licit then you have to accept the notion that you should only have sex when you want a kid. Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a loophole and I once received a newsletter in the mail from some ultra-traditionalist Catholic sect that had a problem with even Pope John Paul 2 pushing NFP as basically it's just what I said: you should only have sex when you want a kid which is not the Z-man position of course but we are discussing quirks here. Terri Schiavo was a vegetable and not even human, a common enough position at the time except that you'd also have to accept the scenario then of somebody walking into her hospice room and then stabbing her to death and not having to face prosecution. Chris Rock talks about niggers, I should be able to as well. Now it's not the Z-man position that Chris Rock should talk about niggers but once you accept the Premise......I could go on. Pro-choice would mean you'd have to accept a world without abortion if let's say pro-lifers won in the marketplace of ideas and then every doctor on the planet for reasons of conscience refused to perform the procedure. I left Pro-life out you say? I leave that to Miss Saty. Quirks are political particles shooting around the political universe but we refuse to even acknowledge their existence and people (like me) who bring them up are accused of slippery-sloping. It's why a Protestant minister I once worked with said to me he doesn't believe in logic, he seemed to know. This list is very incomplete, quirks are EVERYWHERE but just to get things started let's go with gay marriage and a brother and sister wanting to marry each other, hell let's throw in some happy polygamists too for good measure. What some people call slippery-sloping is simply the acknowledgement that quirks exist and we'd better start addressing them. The slippery slope, you're skiiing towards the Quirk anyway. Doesn't matter either if the theoretical scenario under discussion is absurd (for the time being) or otherwise not realistic, quirks exist at the very end of many positions on the political spectrum these days. It truly is a funkadelic world.

Even mass murder has to be racially politicized

No sooner were the bodies cold then the CEO of Budweiser there in Manchester, CT had to address reporters at a press conference saying no, the Hartford Distributors of Bud aren't a bunch of racists. What's wrong with this picture? Thirty-four year old Omar Thornton who was black, on the job for two years and caught on video surveillance stealing beer and fired that very morning shot eight co-workers to death and then offed himself. His motive? they were all racists and his only regret was that he couldn't get more as he said to that 911 dispatcher. He claims to have seen racist scribblings on the walls of the men's room and complained to his long-time girlfriend that he was subject to constant racial harassment on the job and claimed to have logged a complaint with the union and they failed to followup. Here's two theories: either he was a delusional paranoid/schizophrenic or on some psychedelic like LSD or PCP or both. You know I'd do an autopsy just for the hell of it. A constant obsession with race is unhealthy and it'd be easy enough to blame liberalism for the tragic events but while I won't make that connection let's discuss liberalism anyway as it pertains to race. You know the disturbing part though? in the last two days I've talked to people who seemed rather sympathetic to the shooter not in the sense that they condoned what he did of course but the racial stuff ya know and unions we all know how they are. This is how far liberalism has corrupted our national psyche and in liberal calculus people like Don Imus and Andrew Breitbart are somehow more evil than mass murderers who somehow slipped through the system and didn't get the help they deserved and had a right to (recall liberal commentary on the Cho and VA Tech matter). Strong shades of the LI Railroad Massacre and Colin Ferguson's black rage, an exculpatory term coined by the late radical lawyer William Kunstler. I wasn't even gonna do a blog on this until Race entered the picture. I have no words, I am so SICK of this!!! If anything I would have thought the usual liberal push for stronger gun control measures in the wake of these type tragic events but seems we have to discuss race first. Talk about it all you want, these folks didn't deserve to lose their lives:)

Thoughts on mortality

At 45 when you have the pleasure of getting your first prostate exam you can kind of feel the crooked bony finger of the old Grim Reaper caressing your behind. Death and food - we're nervous, let's eat. We've developed weird cultural formalae for dealing with the inevitable. You'll be driving along with your friend and pass San Giannini's Restaurant and he goes "we ate there." "Oh, what was the occasion?" "My sister got hit by a Budweiser truck." Dunno man, I'm in mourning right now and don't need to go to some fancy Italian restaurant but that's just me. Went to a wake once with my Mom and we're sitting there and she whispers to me "this is macabre" and it is. Worked in a library many years back, the interlibrary loan department and one of the more popular books was, I kid you not, Mortuary Science. I've been meaning to do a blog for some time now on Weird Careers like you're some guy who works at the local animal shelter and part of your job is euthanizing perfectly healthy dogs and cats. Now I can't judge but how do you go home at night and like yourself? You work in a slaughterhouse and day in and day out the cows are hung upside down and you slit their throats. Later on you have sex with your girl but it's existential sex, some bleak black and white passionless thing and there's some angst eating away at your soul and she can sense it. You're a fuckin' monster but there are lesser careers you could have chosen like cleaning up in the porno booths after a long hard day of a bunch of lonely men jacking off to bad porno loops. Ya got your bleach, your spackle bucket and you drop the quarters in and stir everything up with that big pole they give you. At least you didn't kill anybody though.

Judge in California just killed Prop 8, you know the ban on gay marriage there. I don't lobby for it, I don't lobby against it. It's not my thing but I do think we reserve the right as a society to be tolerant but mildly anti-gay. A week ago my NYC government station, Ch. 25 here ran a whole evening's worth of gay programming and you can take this stuff in small doses but my overall reaction was why don't they just put on some cooking show instead? Ever since I can remember my bowels down through the years have been, shall we say irregular? (Dannon - Activia). God bless 'em but I don't know how they do this stuff day in and day out. The occasion when I'm even ready for a butt plug roughly coincides with the whole lunar eclipse cycle. Friend and I hiked up Mt. Spitzenberg in Peekskill last winter and somebody told him "that's a notorious gay hangout" like you go up there and expect to see a bunch of Mad Max biker dudes with spiked collars and nipple hooks brutalizing each other. Probably more and more states are gonna go with the gay marriage with friendly activist judges enabling the whole process and I don't see that we can do a whole lot about it. Things are just too gay lately but hey they're citizens right? ain't sneaking over The Fence like some others but it's like when you're out with your buddies at the Palisades Mall, you all don't have girlfriends and you begin to feel like a roving fag pack so why don't you just go to the rest area on 684 and get it over with?

The colonoscopy is old Mr. Death getting gay with you, he's sexually harassing you now and it's a topic I look forward to blogging about in a few years or so. There are other things to be concerned about like I'm just worried about the next workplace psycho getting ready to rock. There really is no game plan in place, no self-defense scenarios to work with (when was the last time you even had a meeting about this stuff?), it's just Ortiz comes to work a little upset today and Katie Couric is talking about you at 6:30 in the evening.

Sex, Food, Death -- whatever you want to talk about today.

Thoughts on unions

Since I blog about work alot, not the most popular threads since most folks seem to prefer straight politics, I've always had a running concern about how specific to get so I'm usually fairly vague for obvious reasons. Now I've had two jobs in my life that had major unions behind them, the dues always go up of course and there is the endless politicking for Democratic politicians (I'm beginning to think my union is socialist) and so I've come to two conclusions. Unions are corrupt and they don't help you. Now as the story goes back in the day one union for food workers was having trouble with the funds, going under and the very food company they were always at odds with at the negotiation table bailed them out instead of letting them go under......hmmmmmm......Now if you ask most workers do you work in a better workplace environment with good morale because of your union they always hesitate and pretty much the only thing they can come up with are those automatic raises you get even the slackers (and that's ANOTHER problem). Now I've seen folks whom the manager didn't like, he or she is on the firing line for whatever reason (manager ain't getting laid, whatever) and there has to be a union meeting set up of course before they can fire you and the union instead of fighting for the worker practically rubber-stamps the decision of management. As my friend says about unions, priests and lawyers you go to them with a problem or issue and they have this retarded clown look on their face - "I can't help you" - and though I've been pro-union my whole life I'm beginning to think we'd be better off without them. Went to a shop steward once with a legitimate issue and he warned me against pursuing it - "Joe's gonna cut your hours if you do" - but I was only discussing it, hashing it out because, well you're the shop steward buddy. Sure you will always have injustice and unfairness in the workplace but when the union doesn't care or backs up the management side instead of hearing out and fighting for the lowly worker you know something's up, something ain't right and it's a sage piece of advice I proffer to others before pursuing something know what you're dealing with. Hell they might all be having sex with each other and the rightness or wrongness of an issue may be as plain as day to YOU but cha'know. Oh doesn't matter if you're black either, not in the world of thuganomics. You simply want more bang for the buck and you can do without that socialist newsletter you get every month.

What are your thoughts on unions? (soapie must have a few)

Anthony Wiener's tirade on the House floor

It was shameful, not Wiener but the House vote dealing with health care coverage for all those 9/11 first responders. This shows the perverseness of our political system, corrupt beyond all hope that Bush bailed out the banks, then Obama bailed out some major financial firms and a large part of the auto industry and all these literally billions of dollars could have been used instead to cover first responders' health care needs which are considerable. In this day and age if you express emotion you're irrational but I do respect raw emotion when I see it if it is based on principle. The New York Post editorial today took some sarcastic jibes of course at this Brooklyn Democrat saying he needs some meds (haha) but that's what the invalidators do even if you're 120% right about something but make the mistake of showing passion - "he's crazy!!" The target of much of Wiener's ire was the Republican Congressman from Long Island, Peter King who retorted that it was the Democrats who changed the rules to require a 2/3 majority to pass. Now the Post's main gripe against the so-called Zadroga Bill is that you can have scamsters come in and take their piece of the pie (WELL DUH!) but the answer to this one is really quite simple, require medical proof that you were effected by 9/11 toxins. You see here's a basic fact about human nature as applied to our health and really Life in general -- if you're not experiencing something yourself, if you're not suffering in the same way then you have the leisure to talk about it in the abstract. Happened to me at work quite recently. Talked with the boss about some personal health issues mostly related to the psychedelic water I along with a few others drank and while it wasn't denied there are problems you and the others still have to work nights, don't leave early, here's the work you have to do. It's over their heads, it's not relateable and so I have more than a passing bias here about this important legislation in the Congress. Corruption is the natural order of things, it's human nature to first cover things up as it is alleged happened in the Yonkers Fire Department about ten years ago. It is alleged that a group of Yonkers firefighters dosed other Yonkers firefighters with LSD without their knowledge. The predictable health effects and it is alleged the YFD knew about the results of the bloodwork but the YFD chose the route of saying "so-and-so was a heavy drinker." As this relates to the concerns of the Post about scammers and 9/11 you can then turn that around and say those with bona-fide health problems relating to 9/11 will have their stories questioned too because government coffers are tight. After all we're dealing with human nature.

What a shameful chapter in our political history, that Goldman Sachs and General Motors got millions and millions of dollars in bailout money but our 9/11 first responders are still suffering from effects of 9/11 toxins while somebody in Congress who is justifiably outraged over this is told to take his meds. Of course it's all Abstract. It's a Dali thing, you wouldn't understand.

What the critics of the critics of the Ground Zero mosque don't get

Islam is problematic.

You have two major schools of thought on Islam. One, that at the very core of Islam right there in the Qu'ran itself is a call for violent jihad. This is a question that the mods at Hannityland in their infinite wisdom have refused to allow an open discussion of. In fact it will get you banned there but that only has the effect of having it percolate somewhere else rather than openly and honestly addressing the question. Having known a few Muslims in my day it's not my view and so to borrow a page from Wikipedia this article needs attention from an expert on the subject. See the talk page for details. The Z-man Portal may be able to recruit an expert (I wonder who, hmmm??). The second major school of thought is the pc one, that violent jihadists are a terrible minority within the larger peaceful Islam but this begs the question if the psychos are really such a tiny group you'd think they would have petered out or died off by now. The Z-man position happily splits the difference acknowledging that most Muslims are perfectly peaceful but that that radical minority is a substantial minority. It's not enough to paint critics of the Ground Zero mosque as a bunch of hateful Islamophobes, rather it's to acknowledge that Islam is problematic.

Discuss.

Immigration, the new abortion

Really the hot-button and most controversial issue of today. Oh God the heady days of Operation Rescue and a used-car salesman named Randall Terry but that was back in the day. That issue is now in a Tupperware safely tucked away in the back of the icebox. We all have our positions as is well-known and we don't belabor it anymore. George Will believes the issue has become stale, not so immigration. There's also the same polarization, the same division and passion which is why the issue never gets resolved. The way I see it EITHER round up and deport all those, what is it now 12 million? illegal aliens or better yet (my position) regularize the majority who are hard-working and responsible and family-oriented. Problem being half, probably a majority would really like the former and the other half (or less) is like me. Now if the 12 million are allowed to stay here in their twilight legal status this is in effect affording them a privilege, the privilege of living and working here and we'll look the other way. My position is this is phony, better to make them official. As regards the AZ law while I'm no constitutional scholar my gut tells me they have the right to set their own policy. Sure it's a police state and I deeply disagree with it but for the Obama Justice Dept. to take them to court strongly smacks of racial pandering in an important midterm election year. I'd like to do something with these folks and rounding 'em up and sending 'em all back home doesn't seem feasible. Perhaps it does to you, dunno if this is the official right-wing position but it seems to be. Si es Goya tiene que ser bueno.

When does life begin?

Which set of statements is true?

(a) You came from a fertilized ovum. You came from an embryo. You came from a fetus.

OR

(b) You once were a fertilized ovum. You once were an embryo. You once were a fetus.

If you make a timeline of your own existence and then go backwards in time that timeline will obviously begin at Conception. Now some pro-choicers would have it that at the very beginning of that timeline, perhaps up to about 6 or 7 months if you use the outdated Roe model still in popular use today then within that 6-7 month timeframe you were something else entirely, came from something else. In other words there was a point in your existence when you weren't even human (evolution in the womb? dunno) but since statement (b) above is obviously correct how does this square with the choicer's view? If you once were that fertilized ovum, that embryo, that fetus then YOU were still YOU, it's the timeline of YOUR own existence beginning at Conception. You can't argue with the Math.

So begin but be well-advised that when you advance your traditional pro-choice views I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Don't just throw it out there all confident-like. Think of it like a chess match and as I already know what your answers are going to be I already have my countermoves set up.

A TRUE conservative would......

This is a rhetorical blog and sometimes a liberal on the board will misread (not mentioning any names but it's not the nurse) and so the following does not necessarily represent my own views but how do you feel about the following statement? (I can make a fairly educated guess as to soapie's position):

A true conservative would get rid of --

All welfare and unemployment benefits
Medicaid and Medicare
Social Security
Get rid of all minimum-wage laws
Abolish the Dept. of Education
Abolish the IRS
Ban abortion

and for good measure would also get rid of the Post Office as it currently exists by privatizing it.

OK you get some wiggle room here so if not now then over time. Personally I'd get rid of the IRS in a heartbeat and instead of the cost of a first-class stamp going up practically every year now I'd privatize this racket, open it up to more competition and I would also send abortion back to the states where it belongs. As for the first three, the Big Three, those all began as liberal big-government programs and I daresay it'd be a rare conservative bird indeed who would call for their outright repeal so really everything trends towards liberalism in the end doesn't it? Yanking the Big Three would cause massive social upheaval to put it mildly. Of course liberals would argue banning abortion would also accomplish that but that's for people who have made a habit out of the practice imo but I want to get to something the singer Seal said in 2007 in an interview on A&E's "Private Sessions", in fact it stunned me when I caught a repeat the other night. Now don't get me wrong, I like the man and his music, his haunting vocals, his rich and humanistic lyrics but in the middle of the show he talked about happiness and how you have the right to be happy, have the right to whatever you desire, it's your birthright he emphasized as if this is self-evident and I think without knowing it he really tumbled across the essence, the very marrow of liberalism. You SHOULD be happy, nay you have the RIGHT to be happy (a good job with good wages, a good health-care package, a rock-hard erection, healthy food, great shelter, don't let an unwanted fetus stand in your way etc.). Now Seal didn't say these things of course, he never explained how your very birthright is to be enforced but by contrast conservatives must want you to suffer. "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps young man!" "Show your boss you deserve that raise by working your ass off" "Teach a man how to fish and he'll have food for life" and other nostrums and slogans. All those years of existential angst, if only I realized what Seal realizes I'd be having that poolside Asian massage right now, 'tis my right after all. Added a couple Seal songs to my playlist the other day to show I'm not biased but he really enunciated very well the endgame of liberalism even if he wasn't aware of it.

Just how long do you plan on being out of work anyway?

Certain thoughts form in my head sometimes while watching the news, not nice thoughts either. They kind of come out of the political id somewhere and so I saw a couple days back President Obama at the podium with some well-dressed, poised woman off to his side who was just overjoyed it seemed to me that the bill just passed restoring federal unemployment benefits for about 2 million Americans who've been out of work for more than 26 weeks. House vote 272-152, will add a cool $34 bil to the deficit and debt but hey. The spin: Republicans are being their usual harsh asshole selves. But wait a minute, getting back to that woman by Obama's side the other day she can't find work anywhere? I'm sure there's a deli who would hire her, some department store and so the question needs to be posed to the jobless: are you willing to take a job that you hate? Is it that you really can't find work or you can't find something that you like? Had a department head once, a young guy who felt unemployment insurance was a form of welfare but this other chef was a hardcore Dem and so they got into this political discussion one day and the chef's position was kinda you should plan on using it some day because in his words "I'm paying into it." I was out of work a few months myself back in the day and had credit card and other bills to pay and the reason why I took anything I could get was the simple motivation: FEAR. I never went on welfare or took unemployment bennies precisely because I took some jobs that I hated. All were on the lower end of the pay scale, one I liked but the rest was I had to do what I had to do. This extension is going to foster the culture of dependence on government even more since as was apparent during Obama's press conference the whole stigma of getting a check from the government for doing essentially nothing is pretty much gone.

Finally a word about hatred on the Net. Just yesterday I was glancing over at Pam's blog and for some reason known only to Octopus the subject of Mad Mel brought out all his hatred for bluepitball practically calling blue a wife-beater. While probably not legally actionable it walks right up to the edge. I never got this. I mean I get the passionate, the heated debates but the visceral hatred for your political opposite is just beyond me, over my head and it's not like this is something new. It's been going on for YEARS. You know the funny thing about my Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod blogs is I think I came out fairly strongly against Breitbart so instead of finding common ground, something libs always say they want if only we conservatives would cooperate, it brought out some issues about ME. It's fucked up.

It's not so much that Mel Gibson and Shirley Sherrod are bigots

I just think we like to talk about Race. It makes us feel more virtuous about ourselves apparently. Mel Gibson's real crime in the past was that he said something against the Jews, don't go there. Shirley Sherrod was a great right-wing blogging topic until more came out. Samir Shabazz of the New Black Panthers is a racist psycho plain and simple and his type is the most dangerous not a drunken Mel or a heavily edited Sherrod is the way I see it. Might we expend our energy and our righteous rage on the folks who really matter? Jesse Jackson once infamously referred to New York City as Hymietown and while it was obviously anti-Semitic in nature I prefer to see it more in the nostalgic light of a brain fart. It's his liberal record that I'm against. Maybe an important part of a post-racialist America will be being able to laugh at race. Race is a quirky topic because it has been so heavily circumscribed by political correctness that we can't say much on it unless you're David Mamet. Sometimes I think we're better off not even discussing it. Fred Barnes is a racist? that's not even blogworthy in my book.

Hated in life, beloved in death - George Steinbrenner (1930-2010)

I heard some people complain because they broke into "Judge Judy" halfway through an interesting court case -- BREAKING NEWS -- because Derek Jeter had something to say and it wasn't just WCBS, all the major stations in New York cut in. Sure it was only a tiny fraction of the Jacko treatment but I thought the guy was no good after what he did to Yogi and taking away dental coverage for Yankee employees and firing Billy Martin so many times and he couldn't even appear as himself on "Seinfeld" and......God you know I remember in the Boss's heyday NY sportswriters always bashing the guy for this or that and now he's a Saint? I really don't have any overriding passionate conviction about the man. His passing is newsworthy of course just pointing out that his pre and post-death coverage seem to be about two different men but that's the way we are I guess. RIP

Sperm, War and God

Why atheism falls short

Had this thought this morning. My Dad served in the Navy during WW2 and I was conceived well after the war. Now if he had perished the atheist would say I wouldn't be here right now but I think most folks would simply say I'd have a different Dad. Now when my father's sperm cell united with my mother's egg that led to ME but if a different sperm cell of his had done the trick would I still be here? Again most people would say I'd still be ME but would have black hair and brown eyes maybe instead of blonde hair and green eyes, maybe I'd be shorter too. If you backed an atheist into a corner over this he might be forced to conclude you had only a 1 in a million chance of coming into existence since that one sperm cell that united with your mother's egg led to YOU but that would in effect make us all into a bunch of walking Lottos. The math doesn't add up, this science of probability that the godless would be forced to fall back on. So if my Dad had sacrificed his life in WW2 and I still would have been born in some form that'd point to Somebody being in charge. Likewise since he survived his tour of duty if another sperm cell of my Dad's had united with my Mom's egg and I still would have come into existence that all points to some type of principle of consciousness at work, the existence of some sort of soul dynamic and ultimately to Somebody being in charge. There's a spiritual, mystical sense to it all even if the rest of Life doesn't make sense. I just want the Bill Mahers and the Christopher Hitchenses to explain the Math. Religion isn't irrational, atheism is.

The Rehab Racket

Was debating whether or not to do a Lindsay Lohan blog. It was either that or I Love Obama/I Hate Obama and I sure as hell ain't gonna do a LeBron James blog (egotist!) so we're gonna go with the Lohan.

Look I don't wish ill on anyone. I'm not from the Andrea Peyser School of Writing which even when I agree with her I think she's way over the top. Call her P-Block as she just wants to DESTROY whoever's on her shitlist for that day. So Lindsay Lohan has gotten 90 days in jail from a Beverly Hills judge for violating her probation over her two DUIs. Now these court-ordered shrink sessions, in her case rehab which she hasn't been faithfully attending, there's something vaguely police statish about forcing someone to talk to some bald-pated bespectacled pc creep (can we throw in "w/orange goatee"?) with advanced degress in what is basically a very inexact science. I say punish the person for whatever they've done and basically be done with it, save moral education for another day. The other thing that bothers me is this enforced puritanism. Puritanism has never really died in this country, it has just taken on new forms. Ms. Lohan is only 24, to expect her to never have an adult beverage for the rest of her life, well that's putting the demon back into the bottle when we need to demystify it. WHY do people drink to excess? THAT is the issue not the alcohol per se which in moderation has far more pleasant effects imo than getting stone-cold drunk (never understood this). It's a psychological issue but since we don't put it in its proper perspective we're left with rackets like Alcoholics Anonymous, a saccharine confession/sacrament of your sins in front of the class as your initiation ritual. It's time we grow up and eschew this creeping puritanism as the road to recovery when it only becomes more of a tempation since even one drop is forbidden. It's fashionable to be against the spirits, everyone at work acts like they're Mother Cabrini and never touch the stuff but I thought we were Adults. Can we talk?

Lindsay Lohan has done wrong and needs to be punished but not for skipping class. Punish her for the original misdeed and btw WTF's up with Mel Gibson???

abortionsport

In New York City it would qualify as an Olympic event. Forty years ago New York became the first state to legalize abortion, old news but as of 2008 according to the NYC Health Dept. there were almost 90,000 abortions in the five boroughs (- a few 100 but Z likes to round off, it makes the math easier). In other words 7 abortions for every live birth and among black women the ratio of abortions to live births was 3/2. Well abortion itself is old news but it's the liberal response to these numbers that, well let's hear what NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn (Democrat/Liberal of course) had to say:

"We can reduce the number of unintended pregnancies by expanding access to contraceptives and increasing sex education."

THIS is the standard liberal line when uncomfortable subjects like too-high abortion rates come up. On the surface this seems perfectly logical and who can argue with it although Z with his libertarian thrust opposes ALL sex education even if it comes from conservative chastity advocates simply for the reason that SEX doesn't belong in the classroom but in the home with your Dad finding your Hustler under your mattress and scolding you that you're gonna make some fat Jewish guy rich. Teach kids to make a living that's what I say. But whatever, the reason why this doesn't work in practice is that if abortion is widely available with hardly any social stigma attached to it at least in places like New York City people feel no pressing or urgent reason to use contraceptives in the first place. Abortion simply becomes A method of birth control, maybe THE method for some folks. You could airlift boatloads of rubbers over the Manhattan skyline and drop 'em down with little smiley faces on them but only a certain % are gonna use 'em, the whole taking-a-shower-with-a-suit-on thing, and well this might be a good time to get to Black Culture.

UH-OH

Like my bro worked for a company once with a few black co-workers, you had a black stripper who'd basically hump 'em & dump 'em, married women, didn't matter and he was party to at least five abortions at last count. It's not like my bro pumped him for information either, he was right upfront about his lifestyle choices, you know, bj's caught on cells, that kind of thing. Plow a different chick on the sofa every week, Springer on in the background and, oh yeah another one called out sick one day and said to the boss "I'm calling out sick today, I have to take my girlfriend for an abortion." Now to be sure

They're not all like this,

but I'm talking about a kind of ghetto mentality even if they're no longer in the ghetto, absentee fathers, you know the usual stuff Coz got in trouble over for even discussing. A subset of the population, all the negative social indicators writ large...hey don't get on my case Margaret Sanger wanted to eliminate them. (Standard conservative racist line follows): Now most of them aren't like this, ya got your white upper middle-class Heathers chicks getting their "uterine contents" aspirated out on a quite frequent basis too but taken as a whole we got more methods of birth control than ever, sex'chal matters being discussed quite frankly in the Schools and we still got this abortion craze. I'm surprised Speaker Quinn being a lesbian herself didn't say Go Anal...hey I got The Weekend off, let me have some fun. Worked with a young guy a few years ago, white trash type who split up with his girl but made nice to her for "one last piece of ass" and so came to work one day and quite openly asked everyone how much an abortion costs. There's a thread in all of this if you'll notice, abortion being taken quite casually not the usual liberal line that abortion is this agonizing moral choice for people, Macbeth hallucinating a bloody dagger, existentialism and all that. I mean isn't it time pro-choicers take on their own side for a change? The widespread practice of abortion undermines social responsibility and ya wanna know something? I can't even blame Obama for this one. You ain't livin' right.

Happy 4th of July folks!!!

Obama's socialist ranking

"We are poised to pass the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression." - President Obama at the White House

"Never let a crisis go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel

CRISIS - SOLUTION

This new consumer protection bureau to monitor credit-card companies, mortgage brokers and banks will be housed in the Federal Reserve. Getting the willies yet?

OK, we had quite a discussion here back in the day whether or not Obama is a socialist. Daniel pointed out that based on the true technical definition of a socialist and a socialist system Obama is not one so let's posit that. BUT he goes right up to the edge of being one, always two or three steps removed. To put it in movie ratings terms you have your R, your NC-17 and your hardcore X. Obama is definitely in NC-17 territory, never quite the technical definition of a working socialist but, here read this from the Washington Post today:

Lawmakers guide Dodd-Frank bill for Wall Street reform into homestretch by David Cho, Jia Lynn Yang and Brady Dennis
(re Goldman Sachs)
"...In the coming year a regulatory council could force the bank to shed its sizeable hedge funds and private-equity activities. It also could be banned from making financial trades for its own profit instead of for clients, shaving roughly 10 percent from the firm's revenue."

So we're gonna have alot more regulators than we had in the past with vastly more powers. Risky activities, somehow I always thought they were the hallmark of capitalism, they could be limited in the future but derivatives haven't been banned outright under the proposed bill. Also if this passes and it will banks will have to have more money put in reserve for those bad times but the regulators will figure this out don't you worry. I know I know auto dealers have been exempt from your new consumer protections and most mutual fund and insurance companies made out ok, community banks are good but on the capitalist/socialist scale there's a sense out there that Obama's philosophy is closer to the socialist end than the capitalist end. Liberalism has gradations just like conservatism has and Obama certainly doesn't talk as if he's in love with our capitalist system. Ours as soapie is fond of pointing out is a mixed economy, not pure capitalism but I don't like where this is headed. It moves us further along on that scale even if it would be more important to plug that damn hole in the Gulf first. I've yet to hear Obama say anything positive about wealth and wealth creation which doesn't prove ipso facto that he's One of Them but he's definitely an NC-17 kind of guy pushing the envelope. Question is if he does get a 2nd Term will he go hardcore?

The Westchester County Gun Show

When it comes to guns I'm a superfreak. I'm a little liberal on the issue but in the end take your basic conservative position, well yeah conservative but without your NRA extremism. Today there's a gun show going on at the Westchester County Center here in White Plains NY. Now the last County Executive Andy Spano, a Democrat banned the thing but now we got a Repub in office, Rob Astorino and he brought it back. Now what is the main purpose, actually the only purpose of a gun or firearm? It's to kill people at least theoretically so I've always found those who drool over guns at these shows to be somehow, to be charitable here of the Ozark mentality. Not quite right in the head, a couple screws need tightening is all, Off-Center and it's like the time at my sister-in-law's. The story goes they saw a deer in their yard once as they live in the sticks and while everyone was ooohing and aaahing one of the friends goes "I wish I had my gun right now" and, well it was kind of those brain farts again, the type of thing you shouldn't express at least in mixed company anyway. Basically the guy's a dickhead but he's kind of emblematic of the species. Now my bro ain't into guns either but few years back as a favor he took a friend to the same gun show and there sitting at some table was some guy with swastikas on his belt selling some white supremacy books. Friend goes ignore him most folks ain't that way but my brother wanted to get the hell out of there just the same. Now on the other hand I've always said pass all the gun control measures you like and for the record I'm not against all of them but it'll only affect the law-abiding and honest among us. Criminals by definition break the law, that's why they're known as criminals and so to somehow disarm the rest of the populace seems well to me that's it's a complicated issue not given to easy liberal sermonizing. So gun shows attract weird people and I kinda have to go with Spano on this one although he effectively booted himself out of office by constantly raising people's property taxes. Rob Astorino, good ole Republican boy gotta open up the cowboy show again. If I'm somewhat Satyish on the issue that's because I am, the gun crowd gives me the willies, the heebeejeebies and you can sex it up all you want by having Sarah Palin eating a bowl of Moose Nose Stew but when I'm driving up the line on the Taconic in the Dutchess County area and pass Farmer Joe's Road you can't help but think of some farmer/Dad sneaking into his daughter's room at night, gap-toothed perverted overalled church usher bastardo on Sunday (don't like me making jokes? change the name of the road). I know I'm stereotyping but then again my friend and I were driving on Sprout Brook Road recently by some nature preserve/trailway system, that's kinda in the general hillbilly geographic area I'm talking about here and the sign had a bullet hole in it so I said let's get out of here. Conservatives who are birdwatchers, dayhikers, yuppie cyclists, Pelican-cleaners, photobugs, mallrats, I-podding skateboarding mofos, I think we need to go with them and leave the gun enthusiasts/masturbators at home. It's just a vibe thing.

How come lib critics of the President aren't racists too?

(I have borrowed some of the following information from Moderate Republicans' blog of 6/17, Obama, Oil Spills and Rhetoric. Mod Repub, ever a useful resource)

First it was Kirsten Powers who seemed the first to fall out of love with him, then the Ragin' Cajun' went ballistic. I heard also that Olbermann had something not nice to say. So what was the impetus for all this? The Crisis in the Gulf of course, yes it took something of this magnitude for them to finally turn this spaceship around and head back towards Earth but here's a list of some other liberals who've had critical things to say:

E.J. Dionne (Wash. Post) - a fair lib imo not given to hyperventilating
Gail Collins (Ole Gray Lady) - I recall her name from somewhere and it wasn't for her conservative musings
David Broder (Wash. Post) - I think he's some type of lib but I'm not really sure. Seen him on gabfests with Gwen Ifill on PBS and he always looked kind of boring to me like he'd get out his lawn chair with a few other oldsters and sit outside of Macy's on a hot sweltering day in July. Looks like he uses the stall in the Men's Room alot.
Tina Brown - THE Tina Brown
Robert Reich (HuffPo) - we all remember him.
Roger Simon (Politico),

& on it goes. Now many of them are saying the same things you or I might say. You know I gotta break this down and get to the Westchester County Gun Show but I'm just sayin' if you're a Tea Party motherfucker you're a racist by definition but if you hang with the above set your criticism is somehow more cerebral and fair. In short why has criticism of Obama become niggerized but only on the conservative end?

The Mother Hen retires

It's not that I find Helen Thomas to be an obligatory subject for a blog post. Quite the contrary, I pretty much blog about what I damn well please but how does this grab you? She had every right to say what she said even though it was offensive and racist and whatever else you want to throw in there. You see that's the thing about Free Speech, it's only real test comes when a Helen Thomas comes along or a Don Imus or a South Park or a Glenn Beck or a Larry Flynt or a......and it seems like in too many of these cases we simply fail the test. A rabbi asked her what she thinks of Israel and she said they should get out of Palestine and move back to Germany and Poland and so if he didn't like the response why'd he ask her? So is Helen Thomas an anti-Semitic bigot? at 89 probably as I'm sure she didn't just wake up one day on the wrong spot.

The thing about the Middle East is I don't pretend to understand it. It's one of those things you need Monarch Notes for and both sides insist the other side is 100% wrong and they are 100% right. Obama is getting alot of heat these days for being anti-Israel and for snubbing Bibi as some war criminal but again unless you're a Mideast junkie who's to say? The Mideast is the world's most controversial issue and I think the sheer tenacity of the issue over the years is what grates on me most. It's 2010, the Palestinians should have a homeland by now so we can move on to other pressing international issues that desperately need attention. I've always found the continent of Africa interesting with its long history of wars and despots and coups, its diamonds, tribes, culture, dialects and way of life and was pondering the other day about the usual conservative rationale for toppling Saddam when those phantom WMDs failed to materialize. They said and continue to say sure that was some f*'ed up intel but not only Iraq but the world is now better off without him and I was thinking the same can be said of Robert Mugabe. Africa has always been some type of nightmare continent, well parts of it anyway and as a kid growing up I was always thankful I wasn't born there to maybe wind up as part of Idi Amin's dinner banquet. It's a continent that desperately needs saving and its Third World status has gone on way too long. Let's talk about THAT.

Helen Thomas, this is what happens when you're still working at 89. She apologized for what she said and seems to me after 50 years of covering the White House there's a better way to go out.

How did liberals become so conservative on the matter of the Oil Spill?

Normally they wouldn't be. If Bush were in charge today, OMG if Bush were in charge today you can bet dollars to doughnuts that that scalawag Michael Moore would probably do a scathing documentary on it. Pretty safe bet that MoveOn.org would have something to say too. Now I wasn't gonna do a new blog on this subject so soon but Shaw's blog yesterday inspired me. Actually alot of folks both right and left have some very good points to make. Mal's point that the government and BP should just get together and solve the damn thing first makes the most sense, assign blame and let the bashing begin but LATER. I also get Saty's point that the government doesn't have the technical know-how to cap the damn thing but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be involved at all and pretend it ain't happening. Actually I find the liberals to be most inconsistent here first because they're normally such big environmentalists and such strong advocates of the government taking the leading role in other environmental matters such as global warming and climate change. Nay in the liberal cosmos those aren't just matters but crises as well. Funny thing though is if we conservatives said what they are saying we should say, namely advocate for no governmental involvement in the matter whatsoever we'd be lambasted for that too. Basically the reason the libs have come up with this curious application of a very basic conservative, libertarian free-market position/approach here is really quite simple: they are still so damn in love with Obama that it's the ONLY logical position open to them whereby they can still defend their man. It's parabolic logic at least for a liberal, a default position and they know it just like if your brakes fail you pump the pedal up and down or turn off the keys or just jump the hell out of the car. I strive for absolute honesty here in my blog and on another matter if I am mildly curious why the Gores are separating or divorcing then you liberal bloggers have every right to opine why Rush seems to keep turning off his wives. Have at it, it's all good. On the crisis in the Gulf the consensus has been reached rather quickly among people as varied as James Carville, Colin Powell and Malcontent that Obama has been disengaged from this crisis from Day One, doesn't know how to handle it but the hardcore libs still aroused by Obama deny he's been Peter-Principled into office and would rather attack conservatives as if this is gonna somehow save all those Brown Pelicans and the Louisiana shrimp industry. Actually this is the one issue that we should all be nonideological on, could've been a proud moment. As liberal Matt Rose has said Obama is a loser. Just admit it, it'll make the pain go away.

It's not race, the fact of the matter is...

...that when this country chose to elect a one-term junior Senator from Illinois and put him in the White House he was in effect Peter-Principled. He is now 49 years old so the question is can he unPeter-Principle himself? I don't think that's ever been done before, it goes against the Principle itself. Two and a half more years of PP'ing, at least look at the blogging material!!! For all you libs look on the bright side, Sarah Palin can be Peter-Principled too.

Progressive conservatism

Z said I should do a blog about this and not having much else to blog about these days besides Oil and maybe Lindsay Lohan it's a good idea. It's a term I used the other day in the Rand Paul discussion and it really means things like if we've made some social progress, in this case regarding race, then by all means just accept it. Don't go back and reargue the whole 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater is not the guiding force of the movement anymore. Progressive conservatism is meant to directly take on what I consider the drawbacks of libertarianism or rather extreme libertarianism. Some drawbacks of extreme libertarianism in my view:

(1) Free association means if you're a private establishment you have the right to discriminate against blacks (or anyone of your choosing). It's retro and backwards and definitely out-of-the-mainstream. It's an interesting intellectual point but ultimately folds in on itself. Libertarians are not big on civil rights, the rest of us got with the program a long time ago and have moved on. They're in a timewarp.
(2) The War on Drugs is somehow invalid in libertarian thought. No it's not and it's kind of murky if libertarians actually support drug use as a harmless recreational activity or simply it's legalization. The War on Drugs seems to conjure up alot of passion on their part but explain WHY it's invalid. The root of the anger at government over this is also interesting, is it as simple as you want to drop some acid? Not sure why the National Review has become a leader in this vanguard, maybe Wm. F. Buckley Jr. toked towards the end. Rich Lowry is usually more sensible than this.
(3) Pro-Life. Libertarians hate social conservatives and their concerns. This is why Barry Goldwater became testy in his old age towards the Right. They got no problem with starving the cognitively disabled to death as long as they're able to order Chinese and a pizza while they're visiting their aging uncle who is now on the ultimate diet and a burden on the family treasury. On the unborn they really really hate you and get all fidgety. They've no use for Pro-Life as there's no $$$$$$ involved, the only thing they seem to care about. They tend to be secular (tend?).

Those are just three items plucked at random. Even though they're not racists themselves their intellectual framework would allow racist practices to flourish. They have no problem with narcotizing the masses even if you have some LSD and PCP mind-bending mofos walking around. If you somehow make it past the birth process they'll deny you food and water in your old age or disabled state or allow others to do so (BUTT OUT!!!). Most of us here are libertarian to a point but our libertarianism is moderated and allows for other social and moral concerns. It's a blend as any successful recipe has to be, theirs is one ingredient. LIBERTY AT ALL COSTS has never really caught on though and despite the wide variety of political beliefs in this country theirs is as minority status as you can get though they somehow feel their influence is so important it should be more dominant within the party.

Progressive conservatism - Accepting racial progress, drugs are bad for society and it's better to have a pro-life culture to name but a few. Progressive conservatism, if the enemy does something good give him credit but as of this date the only good thing I can come up with (seriously) is when Obama gave the go-ahead to have those Navy snipers shoot the Somali pirates and that's going backaways. We can throw in progressive conservatism is by no means hawkish but not pacifist in nature either. We don't need anymore cowboy diplomacy but we don't need a president apologizing to our enemies either. Progessive conservatism is forward-looking and hopeful and it's a theme I'll have more to say on in the future.

WTG Rand Paul!

Historic and landmark civil rights legislation has been bothering you for how long now? The new Republican winner of the KY primary recently told MSNBC that private businesses should not have to abide by civil rights laws. Rand, who has strong Tea Party support, is known as a libertarian kind of guy. Just when Republicans have finally shed the skin of a largely undeserved imo racial reputation

DUDE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?

Pretty funkadelic. Rand reminds me of that quirky member of your extended family, some relative down the line, say some aunt who's visiting. You're all sitting on the patio conversating on a nice day and Mamie goes "Hitler was a very intelligent man." Now you don't exactly know what she means by that but she says it loud enough so the guy bbq'ing next door freezes just for a nanosecond in the midflip of a burger and you're like "Mamie, can you lower your voice? You're not exactly part of the mainstream."

I know someone here is gonna strongly object but anyone else really wanna jump on this here Bandwagon?

Scientology - dangerous cult or religious fad?

So what do you think of the sci-fis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_McPherson
http://www.lisamcpherson.org/

The sad story above predates Obama's Rise to Power as do alot of Other Bad Things. Yes we will on occasion explore some older topics here as it's not an Obamacentric Universe. Wondering too why so many Hollywood celebs today never gravitate towards the more traditional faith systems, it's either Kabbalah or Scientology these days. I guess Jesus never rode on a spaceship before, I mean how uncool is that? Tom Cruise is the best-known sci-fier, I just think he's naive but they all remind me of the creepy characters out of that Mel Gibson movie Edge of Darkness only instead of nuclear criminals you're dealing with a bunch of conspiratorial cultists. So how did such a weird religion catch on? BTW you are perfectly welcome to tie all of this in with Obama, I mean he is some kind of Omega dude isn't he?

Confiscatory taxation as a violation of the purpose of work

Dunno if Aristotle would say the things I'm about to say but I'm borrowing a very important concept of his and using it in my own way. Aristotle used a word, the telos, and basically what that means is the purpose or end of something. Teleology is the study of the nature, purpose and ends of things so what is the telos of work? For a very few it might be something aesthetic or emotional but let's go out on a limb here and say for the majority of us work means to be able to have food, clothing and shelter. As soapie likes to point out it's a means to an end at least for most of us.

The Problem With Overwork

Let's say I with my normal 35 or 40 hour workweek have enough to procure the basic necessities of life. I'm not living high on the hog like King Henry VIII throwing ham hocks over my shoulder but I am now able to afford adequate food, clothing and shelter. Now let's say I have a workaholic boss who wants me to go over, work alot of OT well then that violates the telos or purpose or end of work for me. Those extra hours and that extra work go far beyond fulfilling what I consider to be the telos of work as it relates to me. Now somebody else might look upon those extra hours as an opportunity. Now the telos as it relates to him or her is to be able to afford more food and clothing and to pay off and secure more of that shelter but the problem with the modern Work State is that the telos of work applies differently to different people. Just because you want to work like a Mexican shouldn't mean I have to.

So Where Does the Idea of Income Taxes Come From?

Having settled upon a workable definition of the nature and purpose of work or the telos of work I'm gonna go a little further out on that limb here and venture that for the majority of us the purpose or end of work does not include giving part of our earnings which we contracted for with a second party and forking it over to the government to do with as they see fit, no way. Giving various percentages of our earnings to the government in the form of taxes in order to redistribute the fruits of the sweat of your brow is a new definition of the telos of work and could only have been invented by a liberal (try Karl Marx) but it certainly isn't the original purpose or end of work as commonly understood.

So the problem or issue with work for many of us is twofold: we are working longer hours and doing more and harder work to please others (e.g. the boss, the company) when that extra work may go against the telos of work for us but more importantly confiscatory taxation is violating the principle of work for everyone regardless of individual work ethics. Now we just mentioned that the reason many folks are willing to work those extra shifts is to help pay off the mortgage or put their kids through college let's say so if it's mutual the telos of work has not yet been violated but let's say you're a bus driver and happily put in a 60+ hour workweek anticipating your next paycheck but then see that a good chunk of that extra income just went to the government well then the purpose or end of work has been seriously violated. One of the basic differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives get the concept of telos more certainly as it relates to work whereas liberals expand the telos of work to include more on their social agenda and that is because conservatives and liberals see the purpose or end of government, the telos of government as being two very different things and that is the subject of our next lecture. For your assignment......

Rigatoni Gorgonzola - a fine summer salad

Boil three boxes of Mezze Rigatoni (that's the smaller rigatoni). I like Barilla as it holds up well. Boil for 8-10 minutes or whatever the instructions call for. Personally I'm not into al dente but just go slightly past al dente, you certainly don't want your pasta overboiled and mushy. Cool the pasta off in a colander or strainer under cold running water. Now get yourself a nice big mixing bowl and add 2 or 3 cans of medium black pitted olives and 2 or 3 of those small containers of baby tomatoes you see in the produce department. Get yourself a nice red Vidalia onion but don't dice it, slice it up and throw it in. You should be able to find the gorgonzola cheese in crumble form in any of the finer delis at the cheese island. If they're out of gorgonzola your average blue cheese works perfectly fine as a substitute as it has a similar gustatory effect and they're all from the same family anyway. Make sure you put enough cheese in there. Put a decent amount of Italian dressing in the bowl, put on your latex or vinyl gloves and mix well. If it's your preference you can spritz on some dill weed.

Serves 3-5 (or one fat person)

Was Jesus a liberal?

This is really a Dave Miller thread. I just might watch Beth and Dave from the grandstands for 3 innings or so as I enjoy my piss-warm beer and overpriced hot dog.

Nothing else matters

I feel this way about Pro-Life. The idea for this blog has been gnawing at me for some time now and I expressed it once before and it is this: let's say conservatives got everything they ever dreamed of and then some but that abortion and euthanasia were still the law of the land and was to be forevermore for me at least this would be a spiritually empty victory. In fact I feel so strongly about this that it is reason enough for me to stop blogging since what good is talking about all the other stuff if we don't have a pro-life culture first? For me it's as if having a pro-life society would free us up to consider more fully and less distractedly these other important parts of the conservative agenda but without this what good is all the rest? For the record I will continue to blog probably until the day the Good Lord calls me home but am just emphasizing how passionate some of us are about the issue.

Nothing else really matters if you have an event that in pro-life terms is such a tragedy, a kind of moral catastrophe and this may or may not help to explain the mystery of the "retired" bloggers or at least some of them, not everything at your heart's core gets expressed in print, and speaking for myself I've often considered not blogging or retiring from blogging since the pro-life issues are so much on the back-burner these days. I mean how can we even talk about Obama the Socialist let alone concentrate fully on this issue and others like it when as I said there's been so many recent horrors on the pro-life front?

I really think there needs to be something so newsworthy in pro-life terms, some event so positive and of such moral magnitude that it will rock us back to our collective senses, make us rethink our attitudes towards the unborn, the disabled and the elderly, the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless, the totally vulnerable among us. To continue on this pro-abortion/pro-euthanasia arc is so depressing that what good is all the rest of what we ever dreamed or fantasized about if we still continue down this destructive course?

Today's blog is simply a lament, to explain a thorn that's been in my side for awhile now before I continue to blog about the Other Important Issues of the Day. It's just something for your consideration.

The Smaller Gov't Test

by not voting.

Now let's say Bob Smith is a rock-ribbed all-American Republican so we all get on the Bob Smith Bandwagon, blog in his favor etc. Bob Smith is such a stud. Now here's the basic problem or dilemma for the libertarian -- whomever you pull the lever for in November, your local city councilman, your state guy or gal, your Senator or Representative in the Congress you are voting to put a legislator into office and what is the primary function of a legislator pray tell?? well it's not to repeal laws (that Barry Goldwater fantasy) but to pass them. Now if you're like me we have enough laws already, strike that if anything we have way too many. Got this brand new cast-iron pan at Bed, Bath & Beyond a few days ago, Emeril-Ware if I may plug that, and yesterday got that baby nice and hot and seared a couple of nice old salmon steaks in there and time comes when you stick a fork in that baby and say MG she's done! Same thing with our system of government or laws, the F'n thing is done, anything else is gilding the lily. So basically for your true libertarian voting for even a Republican makes absolutely no sense. Whether Democrat or Republican I'm voting for what? a lawmaker, now why would I do that? Now Beth just blogged that we are a nation of laws and they say that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Yes it is if you have too many of them. We've tried everything else, why not try the libertarian experiment?

The #1 Rule of Cooking

We're all aware of places people eat out that cut corners and if we aren't then Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" has brought that home. You see it all the time, you'll walk into a supermarket let's say and see on the hot table some gangster meatloaf, some gangster spinach lasagna rolls that have already been in the packout section and are expiring that day, some overdone gangster chicken, gangster mac & cheese, gangster turkey burgers. So some hapless soul will get a little diarrhea, it ain't gonna kill you. You hope nobody will notice, it's Thuganomics but a really good chef friend of mine gave me an important piece of advice one day, he's a proud Culinary Institute of America grad and you could say it's the #1 Rule of Cooking -- If you're not willing to put it in your own mouth don't have somebody else put it in theirs.

That's what she said to me.

Will the oil spill become President Obama's Katrina?

& it really doesn't matter if it's fair or not, just that it happened on his watch and the buck has to stop with someone. One thing it shows if we need more proof is government is inefficient, even downright incompetent at solving major problems. Turns out 200,000 gallons of oil gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico every day may have been a conservative estimate and there's talk this may be worse than the Exxon Valdez. Dead sea turtles have already been washing up on shore, I got a problem with that. Long story short do you really want them in charge of your health-care too?

4 very provocative questions

& I'll give you my answers in a bit.

(1) In your day to day do you find yourself enjoying less freedom?
(2) Do you accept Obama as your president?
(3) Is capitalism a perfect system?
(4) Should the Archie comic strip have a gay character?

OK as for (1) in large part the answer is no but that's probably because of my simplistic lifestyle. I got up this morning and had a cup of coffee, went to Stop & Shop, hit the library and otherwise did what the hell I wanted to do on MY terms and nobody but nobody stopped me. However if I were building an extension to my house most likely I'd need some type of permit or if I planned on starting up a small business I'd probably be burdened by onerous rules and regs so in that case I'd have more of a mixed response and I'd like to hear yours. (2) is surely the most controversial and if you even consider the option of saying NO then you're considered dangerous by the liberal set although what's interesting here is I think it's safe to say a good bulk of 'em didn't even consider George Bush to be a valid president, I mean it was a no-brainer as far as they were concerned. For me re Obama this remains an open question. If he truly is a socialist or Marxist then no I can't accept him as my president but this question seems to be still very much up in the air at the moment with conservatives saying yes he is a socialist and libs saying we all go to K-Mart to get our tinfoil hats. Certainly when a president goes against almost everything you believe in and hold dear, when he is so diametrically opposed to your own way of thinking it becomes very hard indeed for anyone liberal or conservative to accept him as a valid president but most times you should. When you start commenting here I want honest responses, just give us a straight Mal answer yes or no. (3) OF COURSE capitalism is not a perfect system despite your rank-and-file conservatives acting like it is but overall it's the best system on the face of the globe and the operative principle here is freedom and any shortcomings of the capitalistic system should be corrected in their own way. As you know the Dems are preparing another rush job of some major legislation and this time instead of trying to reform health-care they're trying to reform Wall Street, some 1,300 pages worth and again they don't want the country to have time to read it. Gotta love 'em! (4) and we saved the most fun for last. The Archie comics have introduced their first gay character, Kevin Keller, who is going to Riverdale High with the rest of the gang. He explains to Jughead why he just ain't that into Veronica and so Jughead is gonna have a little fun with this and let Veronica figure it out on her own (heehee). Now my answer has absolutely nothing to do with being anti-gay but I just think the strip should be non-controversial. Now presumably Kevin is gonna act with decorum and is not gonna grab Jughead's balls but what's next? Veronica gets an abortion or Betty has a stalker? ("Oh Archie I killed our baby, I can never live with myself!" or Betty: "should I buy a gun?") I'm just sayin' Archie used to be an oasis from all of this, the complexities of the Larger Society. On the other hand it does make the storyline more interesting, I mean how many times can the gang go to the malt shop?

The Person of the Week Who Should Just Go Away Already -- Ashley Dupre. She's become a larger scourge on this country than bubble-gum pop. If that Billy Mumy character from Twilight Zone were here he'd just wish her into the cornfield.