Sauce for the goose...

This has been going around Facebook for a day or so. Got it from Maddowblog which was easy to snag and came with an explanation.

Ed King of Portland, Maine's West End News found this old Women's Christian Temperance Union photo and thought he could do something with it. (History buffs: Temperance started in Portland, and the group lives on.)

THAT group?!! Holy shit...

The 2012 Political Animal Awards

Will Durst

BEST COSTUME: Rick Santorum for that winning period look- subtly harkening back to a young Mr. Rogers with rabies.
...

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY: Grover Norquist.

THE “OH MY GOD, NOT YOU AGAIN” AWARD: Whoever decided contraception made for a good election year wedge issue.

BEST BOY: Marcus Bachmann.
...

BEST ENSEMBLE IN A MUSICAL OR COMEDY: The entire Republican Party Presidential Nomination cast.

BEST ACTOR: Body of work award goes to Speaker of the House John Boehner for various portrayals as outraged defender of fiscal responsibility, obstinate party stalwart and sophisticated gentleman to whom gracious cooperation is of the highest priority and doing it all while orange.

BEST DIRECTION: The Koch Brothers.

More.

Shit ...

Literally.

As regulars around here know, I am the proud parent of these two little monsters:

Princess Ziva

Da Chooch

They are great dogs and I love them as much as a parent would love their human children; the Mrs. does too. That said, they are two little shit factories. My god, I think more comes out of them than goes in.

For the last 18 months, I've been either bagging it and tossing it in the trash (needless to say, the garbage is eye-watering by garbage day) or tossing it on the compost (which presents its own 'scent problems' come June, July, and August). It was making me nuts so I sat down and did some research.

Aside from paying some guy to come and pick up after them (that ain't happening), my only option was to compost it. Since I compost my grass and leaves anyway, I wanted to dispose of it where it did some good as opposed to just stinking. I looked around on the intarwebs and found a lot of products ranging from cheap (in quality and price) to gold-plated expensive (we are talking about dog shit after all).

So I did some more poking around on the Google and found this video a guy made of how he dealt with the problem with his two dogs. I went to Home Depot this morning and got busy.

I got a 30 gal. heavy duty plastic trashcan, 50 lbs. of sand, and a box of Rid-X (I use it in the septic system in the house too). I also poked around the yard and collected a 5 gal. bucket full of moderately sized rocks (this is Long Island and one thing we got a lot of - thanks to our geologic history - is rocks).

I drilled a million holes (1/2" dia.) in the side of the trashcan and cut out the bottom. After digging a deep enough hole at the edge of the compost, I filled the bottom with sand (at that depth, it's all clay here so the sand will help the water perk off). I stuck the trash can on top and tossed the rocks in before back-filling. I collected the day's haul, tossed in a half box of Rid-X, and poured 5 gal. of water on top of it all. The cover keeps the rain and bugs out. All good. Took me about 2 hours

I'll let you know how it works out ... or not.

Tax the shit out of them ...

That's what the Italians are doing:

After several years of scandal in which the Catholic Church has faced allegations of financial impropriety, paedophile priests and rumours of plots to kill the Pope, the Vatican is now facing a new €600m-a-year tax bill as Rome seeks to head off European Commission censure over controversial property tax breaks enjoyed by the Church.

...

And that's what we should be doing here. The megachurches, all of the Catholic Church's property, the synagogues, and every other house of worship. If the preachers play in politics, they should be taxed at double the rate.

Great thanks to Chris in Paris for the link.

Admin ...

I turned off word verification for comments thanks to the nagging kvetching suggestions of a couple old guys who I should send a gift certificate to Vision Center. Heh ... If I get too much spam I'm putting them back on.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

This song fits right in with all the phony religiosity we're hearing lately.

From 1993 Emmylou's album Cowgirl's Prayer

Emmylou Harris ~ Jerusalem Tomorrow

Thanks to Indigoinsf2.

Free Mexican Airforce

Continuing with today's theme, this is Peter Rowan (website), who wrote the song in the video just below this one. Complete with introductory funny story!

Thanks to MyTallTripod.

Since we have a theme today ...

A little musical accompaniment:

The New Riders of the Purple Sage - Panama Red

Church Of The Blessed Mary Jane

Fixer could be the Pope of this one. I believe he has satisfied the canonical requirements for sainthood as well.

But first, Old Fart rakes Orange Boner and his set over the coals. The smoking lamp is lit...



Everybody should subscribe to or bookmark oldfartrants on YouTube and refer to it often. The guy comes up with new good shit all the time.

"No Shit" Headline and Quote of the Day

Paul Krugman In Playboy Interview: 'People Should Be In Jail' Because Of Financial Crisis

One reason to keep up with politics

Fighter Jets Intercept Drug Plane in Obama's No-Fly Zone

Heh. Really bad timing for your weekly weed run ta Fixer's house, dude!

America's Real Debate

LATimes

Click on it. Holy shit the thing gets big!

Some among the sleek set in the fashion industry think the 19-year-old, self-promoting model is too chubby to be chic -- their definition of hefty encompassing 99% of the nation’s females. The fashion mavens denigrate Upton’s whole look – her too-blond hair, her generic, pouty cheerleader face and her long legs that one critic described as looking as if they belong to a player for the WNBA. The casting director for Victoria’s Secret fashion shows said she’d never allow such a skank to darken her runway. (We all know how Victoria’s Secret is the epitome of haute couture.)
...

Upton's defenders say she has a right to party. To suggest she is fat, they say, is tantamount to promoting anorexia. Her fans insist that Kate’s look is a healthier example for American girls, even if her beach attire indicates she can’t distinguish between panties and a Post-it stuck to a strand of dental floss.

The point here is not to take sides in this debate or even imply it has any importance. The Kate Upton kerfuffle simply lends a little perspective to the current political campaign. Journalists have been covering every twitch and twist of the Republican nomination fight for months now, millions of dollars have been spent on attack ads and robo calls and the candidates have roamed the countryside shaking hands and calling each other names, yet the number of people who have taken part in primaries and caucuses compared with the number of Americans who have stayed away is about the same as the ratio of fabric to bare skin in Kate’s beach shot.

Notable quote:

We may be in the midst of a titanic struggle for the soul of the country, but, in the land of the free, none of us are required to pay attention.

To which line I would add:

Until it's too late.

Yeah ...

Big money guy, he is. From the Democratic Party:

Romney portrays himself as the savior of the 2002 Olympics, but here's the truth: He spent $1.3 billion in federal dollars on the Salt Lake City games—more than all previous U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney didn't save the Olympics. The American taxpayer did.

Gordon knows his antics ...

Better than I do, but this guy Issa is a complete asshole. He's one who stacked the committee meeting on contraception with men and this is how he justifies it:

In case House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) anti-contraception hearing wasn't quite offensive enough yesterday, the Republican congressman added insult to injury last night by equating his opposition to birth control to Dr. Martin Luther King's fight for civil rights.

...

Boy wouldn't know a civil right if it bit him in the ass.

Aspirin ...

I loved Andrea Mitchell's reaction (I thought she was gonna faint) to Foster Friess' announcement that women should hold an aspirin between her knees as a form of cheap birth control. I personally haven't heard that line in 40 years and it goes to show you how these guys think.



Well, Drifty caught this too and has a few thoughts on the subject:

...

Now you know why RNC chair Reince Priebus always has the squirmy, uncomfortable look of a man who brutally crapped his pants an hour ago and still hasn't yet found a way to get behind a closed door and clean himself up. Now you know why, before Priebus, the GOP hired an incompetent House Negro and a self-loathing gay man to front for them. Because you have to have a superhuman capacity for ass-kissing and gag-reflex-suppression to beg for money from a CHUD like Foster Freiss.

...

When the people who have the money look at women's issues the way this asshole does, it should be no surprise that you have a panel of witnesses at a congressional committee hearing on the subject comprised of nothing but men.

So, let's review. The crazy racist bastids have basically chased away the Hispanic vote (except for some hardcore Cubanos in Miami) and now they're trying to chase away the women too. Do these assholes actually want to win in November or has it just turned into a contest to see who can out-crazy everybody else?

The celibate* old sexperts speak

The Gospel According to Bishops

*Altar boys don't count.

You ain't gonna believe this one either...

EssEffChron

Watch the video below and you might assume it’s a Saturday Night Live skit—well, it’s not. The uptight man in the purple shirt is dead serious about what he’s saying.

This anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda was created by the American Life League, the largest pro-life organization in the United States that opposes abortion under any circumstance, contraception, and embryonic stem cell research.

The video was created to show that Planned Parenthood is a “perverted” organization, turning America’s children into sex addicts through community events featuring penis-shaped balloons, vagina macaroons, vulva puppet shows, and giant vagina costumes. And then there’s all the masturbation literature, graphic images of naked boys and girls, and online descriptions of sexual organs. Planned Parenthood would tell you they offer these materials to educate youth and encourage safe sex but Michael Hichborn, media director of the American Life League, says, “They’re selling pornography to kids as science.” No matter, this video is quite an impressive collection of lewdness.

Go see for yourself. I'm not giving that trash the bandwidth.

Ya can't make this shit up...

Raw Story

Man has heart attack while eating ‘Triple Bypass Burger’

A restaurant called “The Heart Attack Grilled” finally earned its name on Saturday when a customer eating one of their Triple Bypass Burgers had a cardiac arrest.

“At the time of the incident I was performing bypass procedures on other patients,” restaurant owner Jon Basso told Raw Story. “My ‘head’ nurse informed me that one of our patients was having an actual heart attack.”

Basso comes to work dressed as a “doctor” and his waitresses wear sexy nurse costumes, but on this night they had to call in trained medical professionals.

Heh. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Face down in a burger.

Noooooo!

There ain't enough bleach in the fuckin' world...

And yes ...

I would giggle my ass off.



Watch the background (around 00:11) as a woman comes down the steps, texting at the same time. Sometimes I wonder where people's priorities are. Was the text really that important to risk serious injury? Had a girl fall into an open manhole last year because she had her head up her ass. I guess we should be happy they weren't driving at the time.

Thanks to Watertiger for the vid.

Keep yer gummint hands ...

Blah, blah, blah. Oliver Willis finds (in the NYT) another conservative idiot who just doesn't get it:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice. [my em]

...

Fucking amazing. Don't these people ever look in a mirror?

Obviousness ...

A Bible story from Drifty:

There should be a bible story about two brothers: Willard and Detroit.

One brother stayed on the farm his father had built, working hard and dutifully tending the fields even as the soil grew thin, many crops were lost and hard times came and kicked his ass over and over again.

...

Quote of the Day

JP:

... As Santorum creeps from the rear and washes across America Romney's getting more and more desperate to prove that, Yes, by God, I can paint the walls with my fecal matter as good as my rivals ...

Want "happy ending" GI?

She shoulda realized what she was doing before she did the Hoekstra ad, especially reinforcing the stereotype of her own people, but I'm glad she either woke up or someone explained it to her.

Lisa Chan, the actress who starred in former Rep. Pete Hoekstra's (R) Senate ad in Michigan that created a racial firestorm, apologized on Facebook Wednesday for the character she portrayed.

...

Good for her.

And just an anecdote from the other day, when I had to explain to a fellow vet why that ad was racist. I told him:

"Look at it this way," I said. "It would be equivalent of saying that Hoekstra is cheap ("Save-it-now" as opposed to "Spend-it-now" in the ad) and using an obviously Jewish person, like a Rabbi or Hasidim, going around picking up pennies on the sidewalk in order to save money."

I actually saw the cartoon light bulb go on above his head. It was a good day.

The essence ...

Of the Frothy Mixture's campaign, boiled down into four small sentences by Charlie Pierce:

...

(Vote for me. While others quailed, I dared to be proudly ignorant and paranoid. Come on in! The stupid's fine!)

...

Heh...

Thanks to Slate.

That Old Black Magic

MFBTIR* goes off on Bill Donohue. Heh.

As though Bill Donohue didn’t have enough to be cranky about.
...

What’s wrong with the rhythm method anyway? That’s how I got here.

Millions of people are nodding...

Donohue took time out from hyperventilating against the president to hyperventilate against the rapper Nicki Minaj. He was in a snit about Minaj arriving at the Grammys in a red Versace cloak resembling a cardinal’s, arm in arm with an actor dressed like the pope, and her over-the-top exorcist-themed number.

“Perhaps the most vulgar part was the sexual statement that showed a scantily clad female dancer stretching backwards while an altar boy knelt between her legs in prayer,” Donohue bristled.

Millions of altar boys are praying for female priests instead of the ones they have to do that to.

[...] The only good thing about it, as Marc Hogan wrote in Spin, was the chance that her devilish song might make “Bill Donohue’s head spin while spewing green vomit.”

Ah, to dream!

The satanic rap was merely the latest illustration of the renewed fascination with the ancient rite of exorcism. After languishing in the Catholic Church, exorcisms are back in fashion. In 2004, worried about the rise of the occult, Pope John Paul II asked Cardinal Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, to direct bishops around the world to appoint and train exorcists in their dioceses.

The infusion of Hispanic and African Catholics to the U.S., with their more intense belief in the supernatural, has brought a fresh demand.

The joke's on you, Holy Mofo Church. You didn't actually think The Other'd convert all the way, did you? Bwahahahaha! Only enough to keep you from killing them.

I think the Roman, Greek, Eastern, and probably Coptic Churches would shit if they knew what old gods got trotted out when it doesn't rain and the crops might fail. That's what they want to exorcise. Fat chance, robe boy.

*My Favorite Big-Titted Irish Redhead

A Texas Judge Reams Newt Gingrich's Vicious Ass

The only thing better than one Rude Pundit is two Rude Pundits in one day!

For big time fun, though, check out Appendix II, which, swear to God, will make you come with joy, as Biery fucks conservatives with a rhetorical strap-on by recounting the history of religion in a succinct, sarcastic, and utterly exhilarating way. After saying that Homo sapiens are the only creatures that know they're going to die, Biery writes, "Not wanting their existence to end, Homo sapiens developed a multitude of theories and hopes, encompassed in thousands of religions, of how they can avoid simply returning to the Earth from when they and other species came." Oh, yes, it does go on like that, talking about torture and war and the Constitution. It's the best judicial porn of the year.

On page 4, Biery has an intentional misspelling that should be the death knell of the career of one politician: "While religious institutions bestow many blessings and try to alleviate suffering, those acts of Grace are newtralized (my em) by religious Homo sapiens who exhibit an historical and continuing pernicious and pervasive tendency to kill other humans and confiscate the property of those, sometimes even within the same religion, who do not believe as they do."

Fuck, the Rude Pundit needs a cigarette.

Me too! Smoke 'em if ya got 'em.

The Right’s Inside-Out Constitution

Good essay by Robert Parry on states' rights and what the Constitution is all about.

According to the Right’s revisionist narrative, the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia for the purpose of tightly restricting the powers of the national government and broadly empowering the states – when the actual intent of the Constitutional Convention was nearly the opposite.

The Right has now popularized this bogus version of history so much that it has become a rallying cry for the Tea Party and other poorly informed Americans, including that self-proclaimed historian Newt Gingrich, who declared recently, “I believe in the Constitution; I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

Instead, the Right has sought to impose a reinterpretation of the Constitution by using its increasingly powerful media tools to revise the history of the United States and pretend that Madison and other Founders designed the Constitution as a document to establish the authority of the states to defy the federal government.

This revisionist view is now at the heart of the Tea Party movement and is reflected in comments by Republican presidential hopefuls, such as the insistence of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas that much of what the federal government has done domestically in recent decades has been unconstitutional. It also apparently was what Gingrich was driving at with his recent comment about his belief in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.

But the Right leaves out of this narrative the key fact of why the Constitution was drafted in the first place: to get rid of the Articles of Confederation with that language about sovereign and independent states in a non-binding “firm league of friendship.”

It simply doesn’t fit the Right’s narrative that the Constitution represented the nation’s single greatest consolidation of federal power – nor that the key Founders, including James Madison, saw this new constitutional authority as a practical way to build a stronger nation, then and for the future.

The wingnuts use the Constitution the same way they use the Bible, as a tool to mislead the ignorant and uninformed whom they know have never read either of them.

Delusions of Grandeur ...

The Frothy Mixture haz dem:

Forget the next Ronald Reagan, Rick Santorum is telling Michigan voters they may just have the reincarnation of America's first president on their hands.

...

You know, I can't envision Santorum crossing the Delaware.

The Conservative Obama ...

WARNING: Brain bleach will be required.

The Rude One does an excellent job of summing up the creation of an Obama that the conservatives need to believe in for all their bullshit to work:

...

See, conservative politicians and their media mouthpieces have gathered around a cauldron in the middle of an oil patch and they've filled it with Kenyan dirt and pelican blood and Muslim eyeballs and a whisker from Karl Marx's beard. They've danced nude around the giant pot, with flames licking its sides from the fire beneath it, Grover Norquist and Andrew Breitbart and one Koch or another and Karl Rove and others, adding their own spit and semen to the potion. They madly chanted to gods and ghosts of their crazed conservative forefathers, Reagan and McCarthy and Goldwater and Thurmond, willing into existence a horror, a phantom Obama that fulfills all their rhetorical needs. Oh, no, it doesn't look like the real Barack Obama in any way, but that's not the point. Surely, the creature that emerged from the viscous liquid of the cauldron, contorted and grotesque, bears enough of a resemblance that those who merely glance at it will be convinced that it is the same as the real President.

...

Ick.

Your bishop is stuck in my Santorum

Wednesday. Morford. Heh.

Completely insufficient level of sarcasm, really, given how it apparently really is 2012, well past the sexual revolution, the Pill, shattered glass ceilings, designer vibrators and dragging females around the cave by their lustrous hair without enthusiastic fetish/safe word consent, and here we are, stuck like an errant NuvaRing under the sweaty, sexually disgraceful thumbs of a shrinking but still shrieking subset of hyper-religious males who think women are vile and lesser and should not, cannot make choices for themselves regarding sex and war and love, et al.

Rick Santorum! Are you really back in the national spotlight for a blip of a cringe of a groan? Don't worry, it won't be for long. It won't take much time for your 15 minutes of swelling GOP fame to expire like Bachmann, Cain, Christine O'Donnell and other fringe nutballs before you, and you regress back to your rightful status as Dan Savage's plaything, as the world's favorite filthyfun Google search.

Do you know what conservatives fear and lament the most? They fear the end of a rose-colored, belligerently patriotic, stiffly Christian nation that never really existed. They lament that the very foundations of America and the angry, oppressive God that created it are crumbling beneath them, that the fabric of this fine nation is coming undone and they're powerless to stop it

I think it is probably unnecessary at this point for me to suggest you go read this.

Proud to be a New Yorker ...

Lotta firsts lately here. This is cool:

NEW YORK -- Two women who met as college students in Alaska and two men who met at a nightclub in Manhattan became the first same-sex couples Tuesday to be married at the Empire State Building.

...

I generally don't agree with Noot on anythng ...

But, like Charlie Pierce, I think Humanity's future is among the stars. I think a Moon base would be a goal to shoot for, and then moving farther afield from there.

I have to confess: The fact that N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civliization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civlizing Forces, proposed building a base on the moon by 2020, only to have the idea turned into a punchline and general ridicule, actually bothered the hell out of me. When did we become so quick to mock this kind of thing? When did our national imagination wither this way? When did exploration become just another "big government" program for pipsqueaks like Willard Romney to ridicule?

...

Some of us still have an imagination, Charlie, but we write fiction.

What if ...

A group of Muslim Imams took exception to some policy of the Preident's, as opposed to the Catholic bishops? Somehow, I don't think the results would be the same:

When did the 1st Amendment change from basically saying that you can practice whatever religion you want and you won’t be burned at the stake as a heretic and we’re not going to form or recognize a national religion like the Church of England? When did it change to “everyone everywhere has to do what a bunch of old catholics in funny hats wants, because otherwise it hurts their feelings?” And why does it only apply to certain religions?

I seriously wish other religions would get in on the act. I wish Keith Ellison would start sponsoring bills that allow insurers to cut people’s benefits if they don’t pray to Mecca a certain number of times a day. Or someone Jewish proposing a bill requiring circumcisions or you can’t get health insurance. Just flood the zone with bullshit so people can see how out of control our concept of religious liberty has become.

...

How many teabaggers would be screaming "Sharia Law"?

Great thanks to Jill for the link.

The Reactionary Mind

Attempts to answer the question "What makes a Conservative tick?"

Hopefully, some kind of timer, as in tick, tick, KA-FUCKIN'-BLOOEY!

These take some time to watch. Worth it.

Thanks to TheBigPictureRT.

Shorter: They want THEIR hierarchy, not OURS, and thus have domination over all things, public and PRIVATE. That's what we're fighting against, folks.

“We don’t need someone to think”

All morning I've been reading about the CPAC. Sickening. Salon comes the closest to a one-read solution. Here's a snippet from Gruber:

“We’re not auditioning for someone to tell us what to do,” he declared. “We know what to do. We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass. … We don’t need someone to think. … We need someone who knows how to hold a pen.”

I think he stopped short nominating George W. Bush who apparently was the Repug ideal.

Sickening.

Severe Conservative Syndrome

Dr. Paul on The Conservative Disease.

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

We need to quarantine them like lepers on Molokai before their disease rots all our peckers off. Send them all to the South. Then wall it off.

Can't fix it ...

If you still don't believe the Republicans (and I'm talking rank and file here, not their "leaders") are a collection of racist bastids, you haven't been paying attention. It's rampant enough to give Charles Johnson of Little Green Snotballs pause.

There’s a real sickness running rampant in the right wing; the Fox News comment thread on Whitney Houston’s death is yet another disgusting deluge of outright racism: Singer Whitney Houston Dies at 48 | Fox News.

...

The link is to Digby where you can go see for yourself. I don't link to right wing blogs.

Just sayin' ...

Stolen from the Being Liberal FB page.

Winning strategies ...

Yer doing it wrong:

Not satisfied with President Obama’s new religious accommodation, Republicans will move forward with legislation by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that permits any employer to deny birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Sunday.

...

So, Mitch the Chin is gonna beat this mule for as far as it will take him. Good luck with that.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

High School Science Project Laser Cannon Accidently Destroys Nancy Reagan Chandelier
Obama: “It was awesome!”

20% of Republicans May Vote for Obama
They're the same 20% of Republicans who believe he was born here.

1 in 5. More than I thought.

Teen Pregnancy, Abortion Rates Lowest Since 1972
Clearly due to teens heeding abstinence programs, avoiding suggestive entertainment and showing great restraint when around the opposite sex, and not due to widespread use of contraceptives.

Pennsylvania: Vending Machine at College Dispenses Morning-After Pill
It's next to a condom machine and a sperm bank ATM.

Ewwwwww...

Another Falklands Conflict Brewing
Meryl Streep cancels promotional tour of Argentina.

Heh.

Latte-come-lately

Go read about Starbucks invading India (hint: they're late to the party) here. I love the fake logo and wanted to share.



We have two Starbucks in my town of fifteen thousand, and they're about 50 feet apart. One's a regular store and one is in the Safeway next door. Hell, we've got a coffee bar, complete with barista, inside the entranceway to the hardware store across the street from 'em as well. Other places in town too. You're never far from a shot of overpriced coffee around here.

Halftime and Hyperbole

Joke Line gets it right.

They almost lost everything," Clint Eastwood growled in the best ad of the Super Bowl, a celebration of Chrysler's resurrection. "But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again." Any normal person watching this ad had to be thrilled--Eastwood's voice, the rousing script, the fighting spirit: "This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do, the world's going to hear the roar of our engines." But somehow, Karl Rove was "offended." The master Republican strategist saw the ad as a Chicago-style payback from Chrysler to Barack Obama for bailing out the company. Now, Rove is not a stupid man. He is a relentless partisan, but usually a clever one. And yet he managed to denigrate an American icon (Eastwood) known for his flinty integrity, expressing opinions most people would consider patriotic. How could he get it so wrong? The answer relates directly to the Republicans' muddled and inept campaign this year.

Rove lives in the hermetically sealed world of GOP fantasy. He's integral to the relentless pounding of wing-nut talk-show spin. In that world, Obama is the Antichrist--a combination of cynical Chicago pol, socialist, naf and teleprompter-reading tool of unseen forces (and maybe even, who knows, a secret Muslim immigrant). In that world, the notion that the auto bailout, or any Obama policy, actually worked is insidious. In that world, the notion that the government might organize us to "pull together" for the common good is a threat to individual liberty.
...

[...] But there is a paranoid edge to the Republican fantasy. [...]

Ya think? Much more.

Irony is KIA

There are three of these at Raw Story.

A test ...

Pic stolen from the Great Orange Satan.

In this country ...

We got hog calling. In Germany they call the deer:

The hunt is on for Germany’s champion deer caller.

Enthusiasts grunted, bawled and bellowed their way through imitations of red deer in the breeding season in the 14th edition of the competition at the Hunter & Dog Trade Fair in the city of Dortmund.

...

Of course, being Germans, the have apparatus. Video at the link.