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Doug might finally get his.(Hat tip: joejoejoe)
I WANT ONE OF MY VERY OWN. Gimme. (He would fit in my overnight bag and we could travel the world together having wacky adventures!)
Vintage clothing porn. I don’t do the ’70s thing myself but Bluebird finds some beautiful things.
Somebody introduce David Simon toMarcy Wheeler beforehe shoots off his mouth again about not seeing any bloggers in the courthouses, please? I like the man’s work and don’t want to watch him embarrass himself. (Hat tip:Virgo)
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Asked who was responsible for theeconomic meltdown,
80 percent in the poll blamed banks, financial institutions and
corporations. Some 70 percent also blamed consumers for taking on too
much debt and the formerBush administration for lax regulation. Only 26 percent said the Obama administration was not doing enough to turn the situation around.
Two-thirds of respondents approve of the way Obama is handling the
presidency, and 60 percent approve of the way he is handling the
economy.
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Good morning everyone – there’s lotsa Freeper insanity waiting for us to test and grade, so let’s get suited up, crack the airlock door, and have at it!
First up –Freepers worry about their image – and their asses:
Posted onWednesday, March 18, 2009 11:25:30 AM bySloopJohnB
Police in Missouri apparently are being instructed to keep on eye on conservatives.
According to this AP article the government of the state of Missouri
has issued a report “informing” state police that people with third
party bumper stickers on their cars or who believe the NAFTA
superhighway is an attempt create a North American Union are subversive
members of paramilitary militias and potential terrorists.
Now why in the name of heaven would they worry about Freeper-style “patriots”?
Let me think…
Oh, yeah.
But to the Freepers? They’re being unfairly singled out.
Andwe’re millions strong.
Ok – maybe “unfairly” is the wrong word.
Did that moron just call himself a potential terrorist? Out loud?
Hmm – those guys were “the thin blue line” when they were beating up hippies.
Now the same guys are “goons”. And the vets and rednecks are gonna stop em. Right.
Here today, goon tomorrow.
Dipshit, when a cop pulls you over, you’re gonna do what every one else does – hand over your license, registration and insurance card, and keep your hands in plain sight. You want to commit suicide by cop? Don’t let me stop ya.
That’s “tens of thousands strong”, and there’s not gonna be any trouble because almost all of you are cowardly little turds talking armed insurrection, but doing exactly dick about it.
I’m sure there’s some potential McVeighs among you, but we do have a remedy for such types.
It involves a nice comfortable gurney.
In a word…sane.
“First they came for the Hummers, but I did not drive a Hummer.
Then they came for the F-150s, but I did not drive a F-150.
They they …ooooh…shiny object!”
I’ve got a better idea.
Why don’t I just make fun of you and your paranoid FRiends in a web forum?
I know it’s not the Franz Kafka nightmare you’ve hyped yourself into believing, but ya gotta start somewhere.
That’s right! Clinton totally blew up the Murrah building, and then framed McVeigh for it!
“Some say”, after all.
Fortunately, the commenters in the KansasCity.com article dispel any notions that militia – um – members – are dangerous:
More assholiness after the j
Is it me or is there something vaguely and uncomfortably adulatory about headlines like this?
Especially when they accompany stories about people like this?
It’s like they’re trying to find a way to say “lunatic bigot” or “one crazy motherfucker” or “says any damn fool thing what pops into his head and foists his fear of penis onto the world at large through advocacy for denying people equal justice and access to, you know, health care, as if that’s going to help with his fixation on man-meat” without saying exactly that so they end up with what sounds complimentary because when you extract all the epithets this is what you end up with: Outspoken. Unabashed. Passionate. Never a quiet force.
I get that the Anchorage Daily News can’t refer to him as “Wayne Anthony Ross, professional asshole elevated from small-scale fucktardery to statewide goat-fellating through the ingenious maverickiness of Sarah Palin which is why anybody outside of Alaska noticed him at all,” but one wonders if there isn’t an adjective that applies to Ross which wouldn’t also apply equally to someone who didn’t spend every hour of every day trying to make the world paranoid and hateful.
Via ONTD.
A.
Then yesterday, I
saw one that took it a step farther. A flag, first half Obama, second
half Confederate flag. I almost went back and bought one, just for the
sheer bizarreness of it. But I didn’t, ’cause I’m broke. I’m trying to
figure out the audience for that, besides post-post-post-post ironic
hipsters.
Via Metaquotes.
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The man in charge of the Republican party, ladies and gentlemen. Draw all the pretty charts you want. So long as you continue to pledge fealty to this disgusting creature, Democrats will hang him around your necks and leave him there to rot in all his bloated, bleating glory. And fucking SMILE while we do it.
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My head feels like mush. I don’t know what it was about this week; there was a lot of work but not any major crises; nevertheless I arrived at the weekend just feeling like somebody’d run over my brainmeats with a tractor and then sort of haphazardly shoveled them back inside my skull. Somebody called yesterday and asked “How are you?” and I wasn’t trying to be dramatic, the only thing I could come up with was, “I have no idea.” I need … I don’t know, a hot bath, a stiff drink, something.
What do you do to recharge the batteries?
A.
But at least it’s not SOCIALISM!
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Richard Pryor once noted that when a black man deals with the criminal justice system and is looking for justice, that’s what he finds: just us.Ryan Moats found that out on Thursday.
Moats, a back up running back for the Houston Texans, blew through a red light on the way to Baylor Medical Center. Athletes speeding and disobeying traffic signals is par for the course, but Moats was trying to get his wife to the hospital to say goodbye to her mother, who was dying. Officer Robert Powell followed Moats into the parking lot and detained him on a traffic violation. Moats’ wife, Tamishia, managed to make it into the hospital while Powell continued to process Moats’ ticket.
Despite pleas from a nurse, who confirmed that Moats’ mother-in-law was in fact dying, and a Plano police officer, who came upon the scene, Powell plodded along with the ticket. At one point, he told Moats “I can screw you over.” Charming.
The Dallas Police Department has placed Mr. Congeniality on administrative leave, ripped up the ticket and formally apologized to Moats, none of which will give him back that moment in time. What is likely to follow is what always follows: never-ending analysis of the moment, a series of stories in which people come out of the woodwork saying this guy was an asshole to them too and several columns by prominent columnists loading up against this guy. He’s an easy target, but he’s beside the point.
What happened when he saw Moats step out of the car was less about the rule of law and more about establishing dominance. In order to function in a jobin which people die by completing simple traffic stops, police must maintain a sense of discipline, order and strength. Failure to retain control of a situation can lead to an officer being a cautionary tale of another kind.
Still, there’s a fine line between control and a power trip and Powell clearly crossed it. Even more, his actions cast police once again in the morality play of black vs. blue. Whilecolumnistsandeditorial writers have noted that the smoking gun of racism hasn’t been located, it’s on everyone’s minds. As stupid as Powell was in the 17-minute exchange, the one saving grace he has is that he managed not to use the “n” word while threatening Moats.
If there is a modicum of importance to athletics, it’s that it often provides people with an escape from every day life. If there’s a modicum of value to athletics, it’s that it focuses a microscope on specific social ills that might not otherwise garner the proper level of attention. Moats rushed for 94 yards last season, a paltry sum by NFL standards. And yet thanks to those 94 yards, millions of citizens were able to see an injustice that might otherwise have been ignored. This exchange is likely to get at least one bad cop off the street, reinforce the notion that we don’t tolerate crap like this as a society and perhaps get us to take one more look at the issue of race, even if it’s just for an instant.
For Moats, however, that must be small consolation as he woke up this morning, screwed over.
Is it no longer a thing that you’re supposed to STFU in the library? I’m asking because it’s been a while since I did a sustained amount of hanging out in my local temple to the written word, and things seem … louder there. By a lot. Is this me telling the kids to get off my lawn in which case I’ll get over it, or has something really changed in which case I’ll just wear some earplugs?
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Gather round folks, it’s the QTBS, ’80s theme week edition (don’t know how this happened, but I apologize in advance…)
– I know it’s not funny, but every time I seethis companyin the news I think of this. It’s the product of too much MTV as a kid in the ‘80s.
– Speaking of which, thank God I only listen to shitty ‘80s music.
– The people who wrotethis study need to spend a Saturday in Wal-Mart watching parents interact with kids. I think they’d reverse their position really quickly. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a kid who got spanked by my parents on occasion. The few times they had to resort to this measure, they would take me to a private place (usually a bathroom) and do the deed. My attitude was quickly readjusted, but until the time I was 12, every time my folks asked if I needed to go to the bathroom, I had a twitch and a “Why? What did I do?” response at the ready. My kid is still in the formative stage, but my wife and I have talked about this a bit (we’re believers in the “count to three” thing, but if you get to three, you’d better be ready to deliver on the threat).
Question of the day: What are your thoughts on the spanking thing?
– It’s not bad enough that some celebs are arrogant enough to believe we need to know about what they’re doing every second of the day via Twitter, but now we’re told that most of them aren’t actually doing the Twittering themselves. I guess this is what I’ll be training kids for in the future: “Hey, if you can pass advanced reporting and graduate, maybe you can get a job Tweeting for 50 Cent!”
– Who says a snappy headline can’t attract a casual reader?
–Yet another instance of the people who should be defending the law defending their own interests instead. Hey, Barney Fife and friends, theft is theft. If you don’t like it when people write something negative about you, don’t break the law. It’s not like they picked on you for illegally parking your squad. You were arrested on suspicion of DRUG TRAFFICKING. Embrace the horror of your own stupidity, or at least allow others to read about. What makes this even dumber is that the paper still has a WEBSITE, which is likely getting tons more traffic now that people are reporting on your theft of their newspapers.
– Finally, I find myself in anxious anticipationof this.Jay McInerney is one of my favorite authors and part of a great ‘80s nihilism movement. As the 1990s and beyond crept in, some of his stuff wandered but at least he didn’t goBretEastonEllis on us. If you ever want to read a great book, pick up almost anything Jay’s written. Model Behavior is still one of my favorites.
Thanks for letting me share your air. Be back next week.
Doc
This is what morning looks like in our house, every single day:
A.
The audience for NPR’s daily news programs, including “Morning Edition”
and “All Things Considered,” reached a record last year, driven by
widespread interest in the presidential election, and the general
decline of radio news elsewhere. Washington-based NPR will release new
figures to its stations today showing that the cumulative audience for
its daily news programs hit 20.9 million a week, a 9 percent increase
over the previous year.
The weekly audience for all the programming fed by Washington-based
NPR — including talk shows and music — also reached a record last
year, with 23.6 million people tuning in each week, an 8.7 percent
increase over 2007.
While almost every news organization saw its audience spike during
the political campaign last year, NPR’s surge continues a trend that
goes back to at least the fall of 2000, when the organization began
aggregating audience data from hundreds of affiliated public stations
across the country. NPR saw a big audience increase after the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has added listeners since. Its audience
has grown 47 percent since 2000, according to figures from Arbitron.
You know, I rail on this one a lot because it’s the one I know enough about to counter easily, but the utter dishonesty of the conventional wisdom on this particular issue makes me wonder how many other accepted “realities” in various industries are complete bullshit.
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Bobby Jindal repeated the ‘hope he fails’ mantra earlier this week at a $2500 dollar a plate fundraiser.Fred Thompson awoke from his nap long enough to gum on a cigar and add his own amen. Somewhere, Rush Limbaugh snickered…
Meanwhile, across the country, tent cities have sprouted like weeds, the definitive legacy of the last administration, which DID fail–uterly, totally, completely. An administration supported by people like…Jindal…Thompson…andLimbaugh.
You’d think the degree of failure might shame these people into a measure of silence (to their credit, Bush himself and Condolleezza Rice have taken that route)…but you’d think wrong. And I guess it helps to have amedia that’s been carrying GOP water for so long that they rush to the defense of…Dick Cheney.
You know, maybe it’s just me, but when I see Dick Cheney smugly preening about how he and George managed to “keep the country safe” after 9/11–perhaps THE most ghoulishmulligan ever, and of course there are the anthrax attacks so conveniently swept under the rug–I think about the shipwrecked economy, or the trashed Constitution…or 8/29 (i.e., the flood–the closest thing we’d get to a dress rehearsal of some sort of attack)…or the open-ended wars daily costing us lives and money…and I wonder:
Why do they need to attack us again? Bush-Cheney did a bang up job all by themselves.
And the people who supported them–Jindal, Thompson, Limbaugh, et al, should be treated with the disdain they deserve. Their leader, and his system were DISCREDITED…completely. They’ve had enough chances to try again. They failed.
Why do they get treated with any measure of respect?
A survivor of HiroshimaAND Nagasaki:
TOKYO
— A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a
survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II,
officials said Tuesday.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certifiedhibakusha,
or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki,
but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three
days earlier as well, city officials said.
Yamaguchi was in
Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped
an atomic bomb. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent
the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki
just in time for the second attack, city officials said.