janet jackson's hospital visit

'twas just a "health malfunction" ;)

oh bama

All Hail Kommunity Organiznik! Koming to a Krisis near you! Details at 6 and 11!

Related quote overheard: "America is ready for a black president, just not one whose initials are B.O. and whose name rhymes with "yo mama"."

Related pic, my caption: "Friends, Romans, bitter religious gun nuts, lend me your ears - and 15 bucks for some arugula."

;)

comparison chart

"Earth is the center of the universe"
- ancient belief

"The Sun is the center of the universe"
- Copernicus

"Nothing is the center of the universe"
- Einstein

"You are the center of the universe"
- Hubbard, LaVey, Manson, Narcissus, Nietzche, Oprah, Rand, Robbins, Harris and Klebold, et.al, ad.infinitum, ad.nauseam

"None of the above" - Genesis 1

pseudo-psoetic 2

(this probably wouldn't make much sense even if you read the original first)


well crud. i
thought
he was gone
for good


hadn't seen him
for a year
or more

he used to
rummage around
my backyard
(and front)
about as long
as i can
remember



weird
there was plenty
of food around
last summer. i
guess he got
hurt
or
sick
or
something scared
him away

(?)


after a
while i stopped
feeding him

well no, not really
feeding him

just leaving out
table scraps
and stuff


anyway
must have
been monday

(oh, and he
dug through the
trashcans, too. i
should'a found
a lid

or something

)

or tuesday

remember


no
monday

he was sniffing
around
again
like he had never
left


no, he hadn't grown
actually. i
just forgot
how big
he was

and

mangy


looks hungry too. i
gotta be
careful going out

he's growling

hasn't learned any
new tricks

or really
changed much


but his face
is still
as friendly
as ever

yeah, me too

kristi in idaho needs a bailout:

Top Ten Reasons I Demand the American Taxpayer to Pay My Student Loans On My Behalf Even Though I Don’t Have A Real Job and Spend My Days Drinking Diet Dr. Pepper and Writing Top Ten Lists on the Internet

1. It’s not my fault I went to college. Everyone made me go. No one told me it would be expensive. I thought I was signing the paperwork on my cafeteria lunch plan, not loan papers.


2. It’s not my fault I didn’t get a really great executive type job straight out of college, or that I choose not to work now, and that I am therefore incapable or unwilling to pay my loans. How was I to know that a degree in history would not lend itself to great riches? Or that a minor in English is not a veritable goldmine? Nobody told me. I am guiltless.


3. I’ve got potential to be awesome. 'Potential to be awesome' is the new criteria for 'sound investment decision.' SO PAY MY LOANS ALREADY!!!


4. I shouldn’t be made to sing like Annie. Here’s the scenario: My husband gets tired of my oreo-eating, internet-watching days. He quote wises up end quote. He leaves me and my sad little ragamuffin children. My kids become Dickensian waifs who have to beg on the streets and I go to debtor’s prison where I am heartily befriended by all the other lady debtors on account of my short stature and cute freckles. They call me ‘Wendy,’ like the hamburger girl and make me sing ‘Tomorrow’ from Annie. Everyday. I hate you for not paying my student loans for me.



5. WHAT’S THAT THING OVER THERE????? (swipes wallet)


6. And then there’s Africa. I know that in a perfectly just and reasonable world, a person like me would be responsible for my own semi-retarded financial decisions. But since there are children starving in Africa things aren’t fair, are they? Pay my loans!!!


7. There are two kinds of people in the universe: a. people who are exempt from all the laws of the federal and state governments, and also from the stupid laws perpetrated by the SEC, as well as unspoken laws of decency and good taste and b. everyone else. I’m in category a. on account of my track record of breaking laws of federal and state governments, as well as my track record of embezzling and insider trading and massive fraud-doing. Me being in category a. and you being in category b. defines our relationship in a way that includes you sending me your credit card numbers so that I may pay off my student loans.


8. Speaking with this obnoxiously aggressive tone really just reiterates the desperation of the situation, not how wrong I am. I am absolutely *indignant* that you are questioning my moral authority and need for your loan payments. How dare you. People are going to LOSE THEIR HOUSES AND IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT!!! HOW CAN YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT????????


9. Your own student loan debts are irrelevant to the situation. This is not about you. Stop being selfish.


10. It is not a problem that you don’t have the money to pay off my loans. Is that all you’re worried about? That you don’t have the money? Don’t be an awfully ridiculous person with pithy and ridiculous concerns. You have a couple of options.
1. Option one: You get some green construction paper and a marker. You draw a head with a wig, a pyramid, a ‘ONE DOLLAR,’ and some other mystical squiggles on it. You do this several thousand times. Then you give me all of your ‘dollars’ and I take care of the student loan debt.
2. Option two: You don’t actually make the dollars, but tell me that you did and promise that they are on the way. I’ll let my lenders know that the dollars will be there eventually, and in the meantime I borrow some more dollars because I would really love a vacation and also a sailboat. This new debt is also your responsibility, by the way.
3. Option three: My personal favorite. You tell me you don’t have the money. I say, “That’s ok. I’m going to provide funding that will create jobs out of thin air, like magic. You will be able to get one of these magical jobs, then you will be able to use the money to pay off my debt.” Problem solved.

It’s all so easy and understandable, isn’t it? Of course it is. Now is the time where you send me your money and I comfort you with meaningless promises that will not actually provide comfort, or logic, for that matter. It is also the time when you might want to consider investing in precious metals, a foreign currency or whatever it is people invest in during economic depressions. I heard bow-tie and suspender manufacturers did great the last time around.

(slightly edited)

early halloween

there's protestors against everything these days ;)

yes and no

amnesty: no

isolationism: yes, no, and yes

freedom: yes and yes

bazooka, i guess

since we're apparently forbidden from "shooting the actual criminals"

move along 3

and please try to make some right turns occasionally

move along 2

...and take your scandals with you

move along 1

nothing to see here

mortgage crisis news

i doubt you'll hear a peep about this on the evening news:

Kevin Hassett, Bloomberg

...the story is now clear... Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were... enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even "on the page" of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a "world-class regulator" that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks... The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie "continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road," he said. "We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk."

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing."

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

...fertilizer too, probably

there's a lot of worms near these "grass roots"

it's!

...been a longer weekend than usual. will post something before too long...

the cult of darwin

this onion article is to darwinism as that new yorker cover is to obama - reality masquerading as sarcasm.

p.s. i think the first image looks more like che guevara ;)

pop quiz

who is it?

I am under 45 years old, I love the outdoors, I hunt, I am a Republican reformer, I have taken on the Republican Party establishment, I have a number of children, I have a spot on the national ticket as vice president with less than two years in the governor's office.

answer at viewpoint

on msm elitism

Lileks rips them in his inimitable style:

Where was I? Ah, ye: I hate Elites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.

Sigh. Well, let’s turn that around. I need a plumber, so naturally I call up a professor who specializes in Roman aqueducts, because what I really need when the faucet is broken is someone who can place it in the context of the ancients’ understanding of fluid dynamics and potable-water storage systems.

The term “elitist” does not mean a smart person with an area of expertise. It means a person who occupies a narrow stratum of society, usually academic – although people in think-tanks who view the world through steepled fingers qualify as well – whose Olympian perspective is usually predicated on a set of assumptions about people tinged with equal parts indulgent condescension and faint amusement, as an anthropologist might bring to the study of a Cargo Cult. It also confuses proximity to the Washington Monument with access to truth.

A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise -- lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world -- are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what's left of our precious freedoms.

All that is loveliest about this earth? They actually have the power to destroy flowers, Mozart, sunsets, children’s laughter, dog’s smiles, the sound of crickets, and Megan Fox? They have this power?...

Once home, she phones Brother Strawman:

When I got home from church, I... called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, "Don't you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?"

I am unwilling to say what God can and cannot do, but I think “hot flame” is low on the lists of things from which He instinctively recoils. Naturally, the man of God heartily concurs:

And he said, "Absolutely. They are everything He or She** hates in a Christian."

It would be instructive to know why, and illustrative to find which points of Rev. Wright’s theology God loves more than McCain’s, but I suppose when you’ve taken a vow to lead a simple life everything is above your pay grade.

I have been in a better mood ever since.

No doubt; nothing gives the soul peace like knowing God hates the same people you do.

I'll only add one comment about one line the rip-ee wrote:

"Fill up a box with really cool clothes that you haven't worn in a year, and take it to a thrift shop."

Funny, the most charitable people I know vote predominately (R)*, and most of the "smug egomaniacs" I know vote straight-ticket (D) without thinking.

*with the exception of relatives of my grandparents' generation who voted democrat before that party went insane in '68 .

** p.s. one more thought: i would not put too much stock in what that 'jesuit friend' says about God if that friend hasn't read His Book closely enough to know whether He refers to Himself as a "he" or as a "she".

on race and name-calling

warning: some of you may be offended by certain words in the following article, but that's entirely relevant to the point.

local malcontent clarifies issues about the usage of racially-specific terms:

Let's get this ugly matrix of language out into the open OK?

Overall, it seems to me that to be called a 'racial-specific' name like "Chief" or "Nigger" or "Homeboy" very deeply depends upon the level of friendship between the two or more persons involved. If a stranger were to call me "Chief", I'd become alert for any other language he/she used, and whether that other language was friendly or not. While my close friends of any race do not call me 'Chief', if they were to do so, I'd not let it go as a racial insult, unless that type of stuff continued, and became annoying to me. In rap music, some rappers use the other term mentioned above regularly to unknown fans, and I have heard that term used without insult among black friends, all who know each other well. However, that other term is generally used as a self-identifier, to say "I'm cool, I'm down widya", for acceptance within that racial group. The very same way that the terms "Heyyah" and "Yahhay", within Indian circles are used - one of those is friendly, I'll just say.

That is the personal, the intimate viewpoint I have: On the personal, friendly, wannabe level.
On a somewhat larger scale, but still one which remains within one's own racial identity, some terms of racial identification are intended as direct terms of derision, merely to single out someone who is considered to be anti-social or unliked by the speaker, to influence others within that race to feel the same way: "The drunk Indian, the ho, that spic, just a Pollack, the damn Jew, etc." These identifiers are never heard by the person being referenced; they are a racial slur then, SIMPLY BY DRAWING A RACIAL EPITHETS with these words, in describing another person.

On a grander, but still a general level, there are terms which are undeniably insulting to members of each race. Need I list some of them?

How about "Cracker"? How about "Whitebread"? How about "Blanketass"? How about "Sambo"? How about "Chink"? How about "Wetback"? How about "Tarbaby"? How about "Papoose"? How about "Towelhead"? How about "Camel jockey"? Ever been called any of those terms, yourself?

All offensive, and all wrong to be said by anyone who claims to have a shred of decency about themselves.

On that same level of the matrix of racism / identifiers, and as a Conservative American, I would add this - It Is Wrong, It Is Divisive to categorize any group or any individual living here in our American Stew, as a HYPHENATED-AMERICAN. It is nothing more than another attempt to divide our people, and It Is Wrong.

I am friends with African-Americans who have never ever been to Africa, Jews who've never been to Israel, a German-American woman who has never even wanted to visit Germany~! - Not to mention all the Italian-Americans, the Brazilian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans,,,, who themselves DO NOT SELF IDENTIFY AS THAT, yet must endure being categorized as that, by others. Or be catagorized as worse-.

This too, is wrong, is an attempt by someone somewhere to try and divide ALL OF US AMERICANS.

**I told Don in my email to him, that I hate the term "Native American"; and I do. What can be more separating, more divisive among real, red-blooded Americans than some group being better than other equals by being termed "Native"?!! Where were you born - in any American state or territory? Well, welcome to the world of being a "Native American". That is all that term should mean.

And again speaking personally, on the subject of all the uproar and the offense on sports teams being named after Indians, like the Cleveland Indians, the Florida State Univ. Seminoles, the Fighting Illini, the Chicago Blackhawks, (my gosh~!) the Atlanta Braves or the Kansas City Chiefs - Why don't you people get a life, and cease being so easily offended? None of those teams represent YOU - otherwise, they'd be called the Pathetic Washington Crybabies of the NFL. Instead, they represent the warrior, the aggressive, the fighting winner and strong spirit of us INDIANS, and essentially of Us All Americans, fools.

If you are a friend of mine, call me "Chief", and we will both smile, and have a good laugh... Together.

don't go green

it'll shrink your brain:

Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage.

Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system.

noticed by vodkapundit, who somehow failed to mention the part that:

Brain scans of more than 1,800 people found that people who downed 14 drinks or more a week had 1.6% more brain shrinkage than teetotallers.

harsh language warning

and deservedly so:

...Democrats today present as sick and crazed political party that is so greedy and hungry for power that it will do anything, including selling its country down the drain, to get it back.

Regardless of the race of the Democrats' selected nominee, Martin Luther King's dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin has been transformed into a tawdry thing; a dried husk in which they wrap their skeletal remains, a hollow phrase spewed by the ascendent race hustlers of the party and lapped up by their acolytes...

The gangrene that has rotted the body of the party has transformed it into some transnational Dorian Gray. Strutting and noble and handsome when preening before the cameras and the crowds, but putrid and pestilential when you see it as it is in the dull light of its polluted "new morning."...

Instead of inspiration the Democrat Party delivers shopworn socialist solution, numbing boredom, sheer despair, intellectual and spiritual poverty, sexism, and the worst sort of racism seen since it gave birth to the Klu Klux Klan. Classical racism loathes "the other." The new racism of the Democrat requires one loathe oneself first and last, and to accuse those that do not of racism...

Like they say in the National Parks, "Once a bear is hooked on garbage, there's no cure."

all this and more from someone who voted stright-ticket democrat until 2004.

---

update - currently the last comment at that thread, a ray of hope:

All I can say is it does my heart good to know there are people in the Democrat party who still retain a sense of fair play and goodness towards people who disagree - sometimes vehemently - on politics. It was said by someone, "we can disagree without being disagreeable." How true, and how easily the current incarnation of the Democrat leadership has disregarded that concept.

I refuse to believe their are Democrats who march in lockstep with the extremism of todays Dem party. I refuse to believe there are Democrats who believe killing babies is no big deal. I refuse to believe there are Democrats who believe cutting and running is the way to support our military and national interests. I refuse to believe there are Democrats who think it's perfectly okay to make up the most vicious lies (spread via a like-thinking media) about an opposing candidate, while on the other hand accusing the people they are smearing with lying about them!

This thread has given me hope that there are people who can see above all this garbage.