Bankruptcy

Some of the soapster's most recent comments about Big Government got me thinking and instead of directly responding to his previous remarks I thought I'd do a blog about how far back the problem really goes and today we're gonna focus on this thing called Bankruptcy. Now I always have First Impressions of everything, gut feelings, call it my Primeval Conservatism at work and if you provide a good or service for somebody and you don't get paid and that person or company or corporate entity does not have to pay you after hiding behind a bankrupty filing well that just seems immoral and unjust to me. Of course your initial reaction can me modified by other factors as I feel credit-card companies charge usurious (there's a word you don't hear anymore) interest rates and so the person legitimately trying to pay off his debt gets shafted. Now I'm no lawyer and don't know all the intricacies of bankruptcy law, there's this chapter and that chapter and a few subclauses but you take a large company that has gone into 3 billion dollars in debt let's say and then they get protected by the Bankruptcy Court and get a chance to reorganize their gangster outfit and even get a bailout or loan for their troubles. Well HOW exactly did they go 3 billion dollars into the hole in the first place? At what point in time did nobody notice what was going on? Where was the company auditor in all of this, asleep at the switch? Was there corruption, were honchos putting their hands in the till? The people who were responsible, have they been held to task and if need be prosecuted or at least told to look for other work? Well in our fictitious example (or maybe the better word is factitious) all these questions become moot as they in effect get rewarded for their past bad behavior. Now I have a few philosophical issues with Ayn Rand but at least in her vision if a company deserves to go out of business they deserve to go out of business and in a pure laissez-faire marketplace system businessmen would be forced to be more careful and then there's the question of how is a bankrupt company gonna pay off a government loan (well actually a bank loan but the government is somehow involved as always)? So a couple of immoral things have happened, the vendors who provided certain goods and services won't get paid and the company gets rewarded in effect for their past bad, irresponsible or even corrupt behavior by getting a loan because it's been deemed by Big Government they're too big to fail.

The Republicans "reformed" bankruptcy laws, the Dems want to swing back but I say we need to start at Square One again. IMO it's the bailouts that drive the Tea Party. I give you something, you don't pay me and the government protects you and even arranges to get you more money. If you don't see the dysfunction here then you're not a true conservative, maybe a neocon at best. President Obama in his speech at the AZ Memorial Service spoke briefly about what he called "the forces that divide us." Well no Mr. President it's the forces that disagree with you and your vision of what government should be but this old old polemical device seems to be a favorite of his. So in effect we are left with failing companies that have run their course, should be out of business by their own doing but are being propped up by the government. Remember when the Five & Dime (Woolworth's) went out of business? THAT'S the natural course of events or used to be and it may be Destiny's way of telling you you need to be doing something else with your life, accept it. The Question Before the Board today: should we get rid of ALL bankruptcy laws?:)

On the shooting

In the tragic wake of the shooting last Saturday in Arizona where Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded you could almost have written the msm's script for them (actually strike the word "almost"). Channel-surfing last night and stopped to browse a little at "Meet the Press" (but only a little as I can't take much of this stuff lately) and caught key words like Tea Party (what did they have to do with it?), free speech, we have to watch the words we use, Sarah Palin (but of course!) etc. etc. This is the usual framing of the issue by the msm after such a tragic event and follows the narrative arc set by the George Tiller murder which is basically that right-wing rhetoric is ultimately responsible for these happenings. The young shooter, Jared Loughner is known to be anti-government and as soon as I read that in my morning paper the day after the massacre I already knew what the media spin would be. Now many people and groups have been "anti-government" down through the ages and many were lauded by the Left (e.g. Vietnam) so when did all of a sudden being against the government or anti-government if you will become

a bad thing?

Used to work with a Jamaican chef back in the day, always struck me as being very intelligent and he felt AIDS was invented by the U.S. government which when you stop to think about it why should there be a new disease? You had the CIA's MK-ULTRA's social experiment dosing unsuspecting citizens with the mind-altering LSD, a documented conspiracy so who's to say where one's grasp on reality ends and paranoia begins? At any rate the Moral of the Story is that assholes exist, have always existed and will always exist. It is said the Columbine shooters were obsessed with the movie The Matrix, does that mean the movie should never have been made or we can't enjoy it (although the sequels were existentially painful)? So to kind of drive the Point home here the Tea Party ain't the real problem or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or O'Reilly or Sarah Palin or your right-wing mailman......the simple fact of the matter is the existence of the asshole a problem eternally perplexing to Mankind that dates back to the Stone Age. I don't know what makes the Asshole tick and they can wreak all kinds of havoc but if Leviathan Government uses the case of the asshole who takes matters into his own hands to say you shouldn't criticize Leviathan Government and if the media backs them up then I see that as kind of a bigger problem and I think that's the whole point actually of the predictable media commentary (I almost said coverage, 'twould be nice if the msm could just get back to coverage). It's using such tragedies for political ends and then the second point after they're done bashing conservatives becomes Gun Control. It's really why I've been reading field guides to mammals lately:)

Maybe it's me

but lately I just find people downright insufferable. I ain't blogging that much politically because really, if you get a boner over Boehner I can't help you. The real downside to John McCain losing the presidency is his omnipresence again on the Sunday morning political roundtables, frankly I 'd rather watch Gadget Girlz. I'd sooner do a blog on Buddhism than this current political season. I'm a misanthrope who can't even get off on Politics anymore. God if I read once again about how we can make the Tax Code better for everyone, just chuck the damn thing in the circular file already and be done with it. Can somebody tell me why Kim Kardashian is important? I ain't getting it. You know I mean this in all seriousness, I'd rather read a Field Guide to the Mammals than any of the current political bestsellers out there. A Self-Defense Guide will stand you in better stead than any of the crap churned out by Ann Coulter or James Carville. I'm going to services now, see you tomorrow or Monday:)

and protect us from all anxiety

One of my favorite lines in the whole Mass occurs around the time of the consecration when the priest says "and protect us from all anxiety." It's an unusual line in that it's not overtly religious in the sense of save us from the fires of hell and that sort of thing, hell theology itself causes anxiety and for me the thing right now is this free-floating anxiety out there. Had a pretty good blast of Ole Man Winter day after Christmas and so folks hit the food stores before in droves, pounded the area delis pretty hard and so that's the thing with anxiety, it's hard to define but in your head when mixed with a healthy dose of imagination it takes on distorted dimensions. Now I'm sure a few people actually needed food but I think in many people's minds they had visions of being homebound for a week slowly starving to death. Never quite got this but anyway I was scheduled to work the night shift yesterday but after a couple hours shoveling out my car made what I thought was a very educated decision on my part to just call work and tell 'em I'm not coming in. The plow came through very late in the day as I live on one of those side roads on top of a hill and the tipping point for me was that in my neighborhood it's very hard to find a space at night in such situations and so the co-mgr. picks up the phone and you always get this, it's like from a playbook or something -- Me: "There are too many problems in my neighborhood (yada yada)..." Him (tooting his own horn): "We all have problems but I made it in" but I remained firm and he hung up. Bears mentioning he's a self-described Republican and I'm telling you your average Republican is not good on labor issues, is not on the side of the worker which is why we need a kind of fusion politics these days, recognize the shortcomings of whatever political side we fall down on and combine the best ideas from both although I do realize this deviates from the enemies' camp approach and is problematic for many who seem to revel in a kind of political trench warfare. Dad became sick right before Christmas so nobody was gonna visit there, kids might get sick and so all things considered it was definitely one of those off-center holidays. Talked to my best bud last night and we really don't critique each other about how we may fall short in the friendship department, that ain't true blue and he deals with the same shit at his job and so we rapped about that. It takes too much energy to hate but I'm telling you civil service people have it good, too many flakes falling from the sky and they just head on home, no conservative boss trying to lay a guilt trip on you either. I'm not big on New Year's Resolutions, never was and if you're gonna do something no better time like the Present and so while most people vow to lose weight after the Holidays been there done that and no I didn't lose those last nine pounds all in one week, got close and decided to round it off and today I'm at that ideal weight I've talked about but that's probably because I shoveled so much of the white stuff yesterday. Truth be told I know this correction guard and he used to be a husky guy until I went to a party one day and barely recognized him, thought he had the cancer or something but he simply decided to lose the pounds although imo it's better in his line of work the way he was. OK so last post before the New Year's and let's stop causing each other anxiety, Life's too short anyway. Adopt an animal, chill back and if someone gets offended because you refuse to marry your job that's their problem. Me? my main thing today is trying to find a use for anchovies:)

From Don't Ask/Don't Tell to TMI

President Obama is gonna sign the thing and allow gays to serve openly in the military. I really got no problem here and nondiscrimination means they should have the same opportunity to serve in stupid wars as the rest of us but for me it's always been a matter of TMI. You enroll in the military, WHY would you tell anyone you're gay?? You enroll in the military, WHY would you tell anyone you're straight?? So you like to have a schnitzel shoved down your throat, the issue wouldn't seem germane just like that Jets coach foot fetish. To serve "openly" in the military for me anyway conjures up images of hardons in the male showers, spreading your ass cheeks, whatever. There's just something wrong with the issue or how it's framed:)

2010 - a strange year

but Happy Holidays just the same. So I pretty much have thrown off those few extra remaining pounds so am pretty much ending the diet thing today but got to thinking about our nation's obesity epidemic and here's why it won't get any better: we get contradictory medical and social advice. Now this really should be one of the happiest times of my life, I set a goal for myself and reached it but little did I know at the time but it would also be one of the most annoying times of my life and that's because Folks-at-Large don't know how to think about this issue, they get spooky. So the country's obese among us are counseled to lose weight sooner rather than later but ALSO make sure you eat enough since running parallel to this Important Issue in the msm for the past few years has been eating disorders like anorexia and so you're a porker getting these contradictory signals and so the human mind is naturally going to still err on the side of eating a little too much and then you'll bitch about how hard it is to lose weight but not to worry because Dr. OZ tells you to nosh all day and so the cycle just repeats itself because you can't think for yourself or God forbid out-of-the-box (what's that?). What the fuck is with all the crime shows on TV? I mean you always gotta have a couple and if I were to choose I'd go with Hawaii Five-O but it's everywhere, serial killers eating Cap'n Crunch out of skulls and I hear the UMA stalker has been arrested again for bothering her. What I don't get about the whole celebrity stalking craze is where in hell is the attraction to these vapid celebrities in the first place?? I blame E.T. and Access Hollywood. Mean People Suck, you know the type, always prepared with the cutting remark like a nail file or hanky to be whipped out at a moment's notice. It's reflexive like on my first job. You know when you and a person walking from the other way don't know how to pass each other? who knows why it happens but you feel awkward and so I try to pass this old crank coming into the lounge from the other way and she goes "I sure hope you don't drive" (shooooooppp, social dart firmly embedded in neck, thank you). It's weird but you'll remember this stuff years later usually when you're drinking. I already mentioned I lost all this weight but you feel like you did something wrong. I think we're an overmedicated country right now and so you have to put up with your bipolar boss every day because she has the right to be that way. Just give me a good Charles Bronson movie at night and I'm good. Have a good one and may the New Year be even stranger.

I found this fascinating

Woke up this morning and didn't know what to blog about exactly, different thoughts in a kind of formless mass. Since others' loved ones having health issues is a recurring theme I looked up some stuff from an old book I once read to kind of refresh the old memory base and before long I became absolutely absorbed. This is from the book Beyond MS: It's All in the Image by Nancy A. Bent, Ph.D (Brandon House, NY - 1995) and it's from the Introduction by Dr. Akhter Ahsen called "The Art of Restoration":

"...(Eidetic Image Therapy) is meant as a procedure of return to the natural state of health, not as an emphasis on disease...As was said earlier Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' turned out to be a painting not of the night, as was thought, but of the morning, just the opposite. It had so much varnish on it and had accumulated so much dirt over the years that it only looked like a night scene. That is an apt metaphor for what a patient usually is - a night scene...It is the person's own psyche that moves the limbs and not another individual who externally moves around or massages the body muscles because the true knowledge of movement and healing is only procurable when the person deeply initiates the activity from within."

Here, you can read the whole thing at: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-MS-Its-All-Image/dp/0913412848#reader_0913412848

Think about it and it's true, during the course of your day it's your own Mind which moves your limbs and your body in ways that you want without you even thinking about it. I think that is part of the gist of the passage I just quoted and for me points to Rene Descartes' ghost in the machine. The original functioning of the organism according to its DNA blueprint, that is the goal of modern eidetics. The part about Rembrandt's classic Night Watch (1642) is most interesting. Here was a painting that was commissioned by Captain Banning Cocq and several members of his civic guards as a kind of group portrait and was originally 13' X 16' and had 34 figures in it. It had so much dirt and varnish on it over the years as that is the nature of art collecting that only after WWII was it properly restored according to the artist's original vision and became known as Day Watch.

Every now and then we're gonna get a little culture under our belts.

Conservatives who know more about porn than you do

L. Brent Bozell III in yesterday's NY Post writes about some porn actor who got AIDS on the set and is upset, makes the point that folks don't like to see condoms used in these films and so they really don't care as much as they should. Says Vivid Entertainment had a mandatory condom policy for seven years and saw a 20% drop in sales.

I didn't know that.

I'll betcha porno pete didn't know that either. Anytime I gotta do a research paper on the topic I'm gonna go to my man Brent.

The Existential Blog

The fishbowl known as work, the personal questions. Usually there can't be that much work to do if they're grilling you. My Life is fucked up OK? I don't know how I got here. You embellish your answers which is tricky when you're not ready and haven't rehearsed but lurking underneath is The Judgement and you quickly extricate yourself by making a beeline for the Men's Room. When you lose weight people act strange around you. Friend knows I've been dieting and I told him before I picked him up the other day I just had a McRib but he buys me a cheese danish anyway so I ate it to be polite. When you're shedding the pounds real quick there are counterforces at work, the Counter-Conspiracy so we're eating at Stew Leonard's and I'm by the salad bar getting my tuna and whatever else and he's packing it on at the hot food buffet as if to show me and he goes "I'm not judging you" which is fine but why'd he say I'm not judging you? It's we're either all gonna lose weight together, simultaneous-like or not at all. Obama's extending the Bush tax cuts, good for him. Well absinthe is back on the market, a little Van Gogh/Wormwood action. Now just the other day at work everyone was stupendously happy which is fine but more than a little strange for your typical go-back-to-work Monday and so the woman packs out the blue cheese crumbles in their containers but prices them all as roasted porkloin. Get that thujone rockin' for the Holidays!! Wikipedia -- no fan of Assange but you can't tell me those rape prosecutions aren't politically motivated. Let me play catchup and see what I missed. BTW I cracked the 3rd Secret, we're all going to Hell.

In the interests of fighting terror we have to know the size of your penis

Why doesn't Janet Napolitano step through the thing? 'tis the creepy season. Whatcha got up your bunghole buddy?? Anything is theoretically possible of course but I don't think a bladder cancer survivor with a urine bag is gonna blow up a plane. The TSA says 90% of passengers are behind the patdowns and full body scans, that's an awfully high % for any poll don'tcha think? OMG is that Ron Jeremy?!?

The Trojan Pope

Many years ago when I was more active at Catholic religious forums I recall a hot theological topic at the time. Catholic theologians were beginning to carve out a narrow exception for licit condom use, that of a married couple where the husband is say HIV positive. No big deal I thought at the time so the other night when I'm groggy and getting ready for bed I heard something on the news about Pope Benedict saying condoms can be ok in certain cases and I thought again no big deal as he's finally resolved this quirky theological problem. So the next day in my morning paper I read that in some book he wrote he was actually referring to male prostitutes. Last I checked many people still have moral problems with the practice of prostitution, certainly the Church has never endorsed it. So what to make of all this?

More and more rather than relegating Fatima to the dustbin of History recent events have made this prophetic message more relevant than ever. The prophetic element having to do with some sort of antipope towards the End who would lead the Catholic masses astray drawing away 1/3 of the Church hierarchy with him (i.e. 1/3 of the stars of heaven), the wave of diabolical disorientation to come well you have to say putting the most positive spin on things maybe Benedict wants to make a point about all this. The Vatican is denying this is a revolutionary change in Church teaching of course but it is, not the part about an HIV husband but the male prostitutes and first and foremost if a Pope teaches in error you have no duty to follow him. It's disturbing though and what other revolutionary changes in Church teaching are just around the corner although they won't be termed such? Make no mistake, this is one pope I am not following and that is the inherent problem in Roman Catholicism, always has been and that is blind obedience to a pope who can teach in error thereby putting into jeopardy his flock's salvation. It sows confusion in the minds of the faithful but on a happier note Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

A word about the Election

Optical Scanners - made the decision to go vote with my folks and an elderly neighbor and so we go in the place and the first thing I notice is where the hell are all the voting booths?!? Then ya got these DMV-type workers (liberal cousin: are you trying to say they were all black?) who hand you the sheet and a black marker with no verbal instructions whatsoever from Uniqua and Pumpkin and so everyone is helping everyone else and my Mom's sheet got crumpled in the machine somehow and so the lady takes it and scribbles VOID over the top and sets it aside and the thought occured WHERE THE HELL IS THE PRIVACY? Back in the day, yesterday in fact you went in the booth and closed the curtain and you didn't have to tell a soul about it afterwards if you didn't want to, could've left some jizm in there now everyone including the janitor knows how you voted. Well I hope the NY Post is proud of themselves, Andy Cuomo is now the Governor here in NY - WTG!!! I mean I get it that they didn't endorse Paladino although I disagree with it but to push for a liberal Dem from the only purportedly conservatve rag in Town? It's clear State Editor Fred Dicker has a thing about social conservatives, I think that's what animated his reporting if you could call it that all along but anyway so the Repubs took back the House which just goes to show the ancient wisdom of the old Z-man Rule that no political party has permanent power although to hear the liberal chattering classes in Washington talk about it after Obama's Rise to Power. It's like the American Voter is schizo or something, no firm political identity they just make one chamber into Republican and the other chamber stays Democrat. It's clear though Obama doesn't see his Agenda as being at fault and I really wasn't that jazzed up about it all 'cept glad to see Nancy Pelosi having her gavel taken away. What's your take? I just think everyone is on drugs.

With conservative papers like this who needs the liberal media?

The New York Post endorses Andrew Cuomo for Governor of New York. It's not really surprising though, you knew something was up with its heavily skewed reporting in the gubernatorial race led by State Editor Fred Dicker. The Post goes against the Tea Party in the person of Buffalo businessman Carl Paladino which only proves yet again the old Z-maxim that everything tends towards liberalism in the end. I love New York but politically it's an absolutely depressing state to live in and when the only purportedly conservative paper in town so heartily endorses a liberal Democrat for Governor you have to just block your mind off to it and enter the voting booth. More and more on a daily basis I agree with the soapster that there really is not one whit of difference between (name a typical mainstream conservative and liberal) and I'm gonna apply this to the media here. Conservative media, what's that?

The Overregulators don't see themselves as having a problem

I've been running this through my head yesterday and decided to use it as an analogy of what's been bothering me about this group of benevolent nanny-staters who are pretty much regulating or trying to regulate every area of our lives right now. It's the example I love to use of the Hannityland political forums with its myriad rules and regulations and I'll get to the Crux of the Problem in a minute. Lista has been commenting on blogs that move too fast and she ain't seen nothin' yet. At say the Hannity Forum on Politics let's say you're a little slow or have been away and you see an older thread you think you could constructively contribute to that'll move the topic back to the front page and everyone gets annoyed and complains to a mod there (dunno how many they have at this point but they keep recruiting more) and it becomes a Violation. You see the front page moves so fast that you post a new thread and check in on it after two or three hours and it's already on page two or three. So in our example which is a perfect one btw (not like some Carvel shit) here's the reason why things never get better over there like some overregulated workplace where nobody has any fun anymore.

They don't know they have a problem, that they're overregulating.

It's done with benevolent intentions of course, it's necessary. They can theoretically see that overregulating can be a problem and they'll agree with you but that's just theoretical, they themselves are not overregulating. So you don't want people to buy sugary drinks with food stamps, that's not overregulating (although I have a problem with the original welfare and that's an even bigger crux of a deeper problem but for another day.) No liberal thinks of himself or herself as an overregulator, just perfectly reasonable rules and laws being codified here. It's like Saty sees herself as a socialist but not the kind who wants to run your life for you so it's like a nice positive twist to an old definition that nobody likes anyway (cake/eating it too). If you support drug testing in order to become a deli clerk or a cashier for God's sake that's not overregulation just having a reasonable policy in place because we want to see what people are doing and want to hire the Best. A bicycle helmut is for Your Own Good, it's a reg but not an overreg until we pass the next reg and We Will but that too would not be an overreg...geez what is an overreg anyway? and it's like Pink says, "you're just like a Pill, instead of making me better you're making me ill." It's like alcoholism and denial, we can never become what we're criticized to be. It's like how much masturbation is too much masturbation? One dude masturbates 2X a day and another guy masturbates 5X a day, who is one to criticize the other? If you go to the top Overregulator if there is such a thing he'll just tell you to accept your confinement, it's a perspective thing anyway and what one person views as a cage another will see as a mansion. In short a Liberal can never actually become a Liberal, that's just a dirty word anyway.

In short the moral of our little story is that it's not the Mods at Hannityland who are the Problem, it's YOU. The problem ain't LEE, he's just keeping YOU guys in check. You just have a bad attitude.

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?