Whiskey Fire

Don't Spoil Their Fun

I watched the Transformers sequel, for reasons that escape me. This film will be reviewed in a 5 paragraph essay.

Ever since the beginning of history all over the world there have been movies and also robots. Transformers Two is a movie and in this movie there are robots and also they go to a desert, which is in Egypt and there is history there because that is where there are pyramids and also robots. This movie is awesome because of the robots and also history.

A lot of things happen in this movie. A lot of bad robots who are also things like airplanes try to kill a guy because he goes to college and sees things in his head that are crazy but turn out to be smart and then they go to Egypt. It is all because of history and how bad robots and good robots have a fight. Also there are Army guys. I think the good robots win but I am not sure because there are a lot of explosions that are cool.

A guy died and that was sad but I don't know who he was. And then he was alive and his girlfriend was hot. His girlfriend trapped an evil robot that is small and in a funny scene the small robot had sex with her ankle. This was a smart idea because the director knows that even though guys will mostly want to see the movie girls really like movies where girls get to do cool things like trapping small robots that have sex on their ankles.

The robots were cool! They had fights that had explosions! I think there were good robots and bad robots but it was hard to tell because they were all, like, robots that turned into cars and airplanes and I think one of them was also a toaster. And one was a hot girl but also an evil robot! I thought it was cool that even though the movie is about robots that turn into cars you could totally tell which robots are black. Two of the robots are totally black! They have fights all the time and I thought this was totally realistic because if black people were cars that turned into robots they also would probably have fights.

In conclusion I thought Transformers Two was awesome!!!! It had robots and fights and explosions and Egypt. Egypt was great because of the history but I thought it was also cool how even though the movie was mostly about robots there were also fart jokes which is cool because ordinarily robots don't fart. I heard the movie had great computer special effects and this was true!!! Transformers Two is a movie and in this movie there are robots and also they go to a desert, which is in Egypt and there is history there because that is where there are pyramids and also robots. This movie is awesome because of the robots and history also.

A Special Strategy

According to the always sagacious (trans: douchebag) Jacob Weisberg, there exists "a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party." Well, I guess you gotta be in it to win it. What you'd do with it, I cannot imagine.

One way to understand the divisions in the Republican Party is as a clash of regional philosophies. Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments. The big drama of the GOP over the past several decades has been the Northeastern view giving way to the Southern one. To see this transformation in a single family, witness the shift from George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush.

This is true as far as it goes, but it's also a very polite way of saying "the GOP is becoming more racist and stupid."

Yet since the second Bush left the White House, something different appears to be happening in Republicanland: a shift away from Southern-style conservatism to more of a Western variety. You see this in the figures who have dominated the GOP since Barack Obama's election 19 months ago: Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rand Paul. You see it in the right's overarching theme: opposition to any expanded role for government, whether in promoting economic recovery, extending health care coverage, or regulating financial markets. You see it most strongly in the Tea Party movement that in recent months has captured the party's imagination and driven its agenda.

Bullshit. Weisberg just made this Western/Southern shit up. "The GOP is becoming more racist and stupid" remains the essential point.

On many issues, such as guns, taxes, and immigration, Southern and Western conservatives come out in the same place. They get there, however, by different means. The fundamental distinction is between a politics based on social and cultural issues and one based on economics. Southern conservatives care about government's moral stance but don't mind when it spends freely on behalf of their constituents. Western conservatives, by contrast, are soft-libertarians who want government out of people's way on principle. Southern Republicans are guided by the Bible. Western Republicans read the Constitution. Seen in historical terms, it's the difference between a movement descended from George Wallace and one that harks back to Barry Goldwater.

In a sense, sure. But one might also remark that the Republican party is becoming more racist and stupid.

Tea Party darling Rand Paul's objection the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is clearly Goldwater's, not Wallace's. Wallace and his followers resisted civil rights because they wanted to maintain segregation. Goldwater favored integration but thought the civil rights bill infringed upon private property rights and free association. In a similar way, the Palin-Beck opposition to universal health insurance is based on their intrinsic dislike of activist government, rather than on a Southern Strategy argument that federal benefits will help poor blacks and not working-class whites. Many reporters have gone to Tea Party rallies looking for expressions of bigotry. What they have tended to find instead is a constitutional fundamentalism that argues that Washington has no right to tell individuals or states what to do.

Interesting. However, the "racist and stupid" hypothesis retains superior analytic power. "Certain signs at certain protests not existing is evidence of a regional philosophical slash ideological position held by a demographic base I never bothered to research" is, well, stupid.

The new Western conservatism is not simply a reincarnation of the old Goldwater version. Lacking anti-communism as an organizing principle, it has been forced to invent a collectivistic demon, depicting Obama's centrist liberalism as socialism with American face. Where the old Western conservatives had serious thinkers lurking in the background—Harry Jaffa, the Straussian political philosopher, wrote Goldwater's famous convention speech—the new wave is authentically anti-intellectual. At the same time, Western conservatism has become more inclusive. The embodiment of its frontier spirit is now a woman who proclaims, "There's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals—right next to the mashed potatoes."

This certainly weighs more to the "stupid" side, granted.

Palin and Beck are terrific entertainers and the Tea Party is a great show, all of which has made the conservative movement fun to watch lately. But cowboy-style constitutional fundamentalism is unlikely to prove a winning philosophy for Republicans beyond 2010. For that, they need a conservatism that hasn't been in evidence lately—a version that's not Western or Southern, but instead tolerant, moderate, and mainstream.

Jacob Weisberg is an absolute fucking tool: this might be another lesson to be drawn here. "I like the stupid racism so far, what fun, but maybe later on if it doesn't work out so good, then it might be a problem."

Brigadumb

Donald Trump's golf paradise is threatened by a right Scottish bastard.

Protesters opposed to Donald Trump's planned $1.5 billion Scottish golf resort say they've pulled a trick shot out of their bag.

At the center of the plan is local fisherman Michael Forbes, who has long been an irritant to Trump. Forbes has refused the American tycoon's offer of nearly $700,000 (488,000 pounds) to buy his family's 23-acre run-down farm, which sits at the center of the planned resort.

But Forbes has sold an acre of his land near Aberdeen to protesters who also disagree with Trump's plans – a sale which will force the property tycoon to face down more than 60 people.

The group, Tripping Up Trump, says it purchased the land and named it "The Bunker," after the sand trap that many golfers end up in.

"We've called this piece of the land the bunker because he will now find it impossible to force a sale as there will be so many names on it," group spokesman Martin Glegg said Wednesday. "This is the prime slot that Trump wants and there is no way he can get it now."

Glegg said he hoped eventually to have hundreds of names on the deeds.

You would need to be completely inhuman, lacking utterly a natural, wholesome sense of joie de fuck you, to not side utterly with these kilt-wearing motherfuckers. I mean:

Trump, who flew to Scotland on Wednesday, said: "Forbes is someone who I would love to see clean up his property. It is a slum and a pigsty. His barn is rusty, rotten and falling down."

And it's all his.

Trump and Forbes have a history of bad blood. Trump has called Forbes "the village idiot" for refusing to sell, and Forbes retaliated by calling Trump "a New York clown."

Heh. Forbes can come to my New York annnnny day he likes, drinks & sheep intestines on me.

We Didn't Know the Nut Was Loaded

Michael Medved and his indefensible mustache both believe that the perfidious Main Stream Media have very cleverly snookered the GOP by not telling the world what a complete loonball Rand Paul is before he won the Kentucky primary.

Rand Paul’s amazing meltdown in his first week as the GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky raises serious questions about media conspiracies – not because the network talking heads decided to ask him tough questions, but because they waited to pose those challenges until after he’d won his primary and the Republicans were stuck with him.

You can’t blame Rachel Maddow or George Stephanopoulos for confronting the candidate about his perplexing past statements on open housing or civil rights legislation but it’s tough to explain why they neglected these issues during Paul’s nomination fight against mainstream conservative Trey Grayson. Had prominent journalists confronted the “Tea Party Insurgent” a month earlier and had Rand Paul responded with the same sort of dodgy, incoherent, embarrassing answers he ineptly offered after his victory, it’s possible that the Republican Primary would have produced a different result, or at least proven much closer.

What I like best here is the idea that without Rachel Maddow, GOP primary voters are too thick to figure out on their own that the candidates they get most enthusiastic about are frightening nincompoops. Right:

Moreover, the Obama administration and its allies will continue to focus on the Kentucky candidate’s vulnerabilities as a means of discrediting the entire Tea Party movement and Republicans in general.... Already, there’s new attention focused on a Rand Paul speech in Bozeman Montana during his father’s Presidential campaign in 2008 where the future Senate candidate tried to scare the locals with paranoid visions of the non-existent “NAFTA Superhighway”: “It’s gonna go up through Texas, I guess all the way to Montana,” Dr. Paul warned. “So it’s a real thing…..”

If Rand Paul gets side-tracked with efforts to defend such delusional nonsense he frankly deserves to lose.

Yes, it is quite unfair to try to discredit the Tea Party movement by, say, quoting a Tea Party hero.  "Delusional nonsense" IS the "the Tea Party movement." 

Medved seems to be angling for the kingship of the land of the blind by ignoring the 2 X 4 in the last eye he has left. Those who don't care for "delusional nonsense" ought not to go around yapping about conspiracies cooked up by Rachel Maddow and George Stephanopoulous to ensure a fringe ideologue's victory in a Republican primary. Sorry! Paul is not at all on the GOP fringe. And neither is Medved, who says what he thinks Paul should have said, obviously:

If his interlocutors persisted in throwing back at him past statements where he questioned Civil Rights laws, the obvious retort would be: “I’ve been a private citizen, and a non-politician all my life and in that capacity I engaged in lots of philosophical speculation. Most of those abstract arguments from the past are utterly irrelevant to my campaign for the Senate. I’m now the nominee of the Republican Party for the world’s greatest legislative body. My platform is clear and specific. I’m running to cut spending and shrink government, and lift the debt burden from future generations. I’m not going to let the Democrats escape responsibility for their disastrous fiscal policies by trying to re-fight ancient Civil Rights battles of the ‘60’s where a higher percentage of Senate Republicans than Senate Democrats actually supported the historic legislation that today we all remember with pride.”

In short, he thinks Paul should have ducked the question more effectively by throwing around a higher class of bullshit. (The last bit is especially rich, given who those "Senate Democrats" happened to be, and what they became as a result of legislation like this, namely, Republicans.)

Stomped, Tripped

Saw this, was impressed.

When a reporter asked Bryant how he was feeling, he responded with one word, "Jovial."

Almost in disbelief the reporter asked Bryant to repeat what he said, and he said again sarcastically said "Jovial." Listen to Bryant's response.

Awesome. But I think he actually meant "jocund."

I love Molly I like this.

Soft Rock Renegades

I guess I always knew this was coming, but still, when you get the official confirmation of your superannuation, it's a bit rough. Whiskey, plz.

On the other hand for some strange reason I remain not especially weepily nostalgic about the Stone Temple Pilots, so much so, my credit card remains untempted by appeals of this sort. Go figure.

MORE. Oh, here's the spiel. Surprisingly, no STP, but I never gave a shit about Screaming Trees, either.

The ALT Vault 3 CD Music Collection

Can you feel that? It's the Rock Gods pounding their staffs of infinite head-banging power in celebration over the The ALT Vault 3 CD Set! Start a riot and get ready for the biggest rock revolution yet to come on the market. The Alt Vault Music Collection is full of more than 50 songs that'll get your blood pumping with maddening mayhem!

With artists like Silverchair, Screaming Trees, New Order, Dinosaur Jr., Jane's Addiction, and much more this alternative rock music collection is a perfect compilation of all the rock songs you've come to know and love. The Alt Vault 3 as seen on TV is the newest series in what stemmed from the Edge Music Collection 3 CD Set.

Why not dabble in the dark arts and purchase the ALT Vault 3 CD Set now!

If it really is the Rock Gods giving me this persistent throbbing headache, I should like them to cut it out. If they could dial it down to a +3 as opposed to Infinite Staff of Head-Banging Power, I would be pleased to employ the Mystic Aspirin of Gratitude.

Also, when "rock revolutions" "come on the market," pretty much by definition, they cease to be "rock revolutions."

Also, "Silverchair, Screaming Trees, New Order, Dinosaur Jr., Jane's Addiction"...?

And if I wanted to dabble in the dark arts I would have fucking told the Sorting Hat to put me in Slytherin. Which I motherfucking didn't.

Mind your pennies and the Dominatrices will take care of themselves

by Ripley

Like any good blogger, I was going through my archives (geek talk for clearing spam and reveling in the good comments) when I stumbled across this, from September 2008: 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 /PRNewswire/ — The Republican National Committee (RNC) today launched a new friend update to its social networking Web site, http://www.BarackBook.com.

The most recent friend update includes Kim Elton, the chairman of Alaska’s Legislative Council and an Obama supporter.

BarackBook will be updated routinely between now and Election Day with additional, new Obama friends. Users can receive automated updates or invite others to view BarackBook by installing the Facebook application here.

What's that?  You don't remember BarackBook.com?  I'll bet some poor fucking (probably soon-to-be-ex) GOP intern is going to remember it now.  Because it's still live. Yes, go there, right away!

Sure, it's fun to laugh.  But every $9.99 the GOP spends per month on BarackBook.com is $9.99 they could be spending on Sarah Palin.  Or the young lady who set up the GOP lesbian bondage nightclub parties for the old guys who - oh, wait, they fired her!  Umm... John McCain was a POW, y'know, so...

I'll bet you're checking those credit card statements real close now, aren't you, Mr. Steele?  Fiscal responsibility, and all that rot...

Rip -

Gloof. Shmuggalinmg.

Watching U.S. members of the House and Senate, and the president's Cabinet in a joint session of Congress stand and applaud Mexican President Felipe Calderon's slam of Arizona's new immigration enforcement law, I thought, "What a despicable act of disloyalty to one of their own states and a ludicrous leadership move to boot, especially when 71 percent of Arizonians agree with its new immigration law."

"Disloyalty"? Klexmer mitochondrion blap!

by va

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the White House economic plan, currently being constructed by the Obama administration's conservative fiscal commission, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

The Pete Peterson dearth panel is premised on the idea that Social Security (among other things, surely) needs to be hacked to bits because the bond markets and allied deficit hawks are demanding action to cut the budget; that Obama lacks the votes in the Senate for a serious jobs initiative; and that polls show voters care more about deficit reduction than about jobs. However, as the most important economists point out, bond markets are doing no such thing, and everybody else can go fuck themselves. Who will suffer the most when they cut Social Security? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or, frankly, myself, will have to stand in front of Obama’s “dearth panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “votes in the Senate,” whether we are worthy enough to eat food fit for human beings. Such a system is downright evil.

Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any discussion of the national budget. If the dignity of rich dudes in fancy suits interferes, then let them be covered in banana creme pies.

We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Gutting Social Security is a point of no return for government negligence in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Let's prove that fucker right about this one.

- Sarah Palin va

Not good at all.

Israel needs to come clean here; a willingness to sell nukes to an apartheid state? Oy.

Rub Her Legs

Gloof. Shmuggalinmg.

Watching U.S. members of the House and Senate, and the president's Cabinet in a joint session of Congress stand and applaud Mexican President Felipe Calderon's slam of Arizona's new immigration enforcement law, I thought, "What a despicable act of disloyalty to one of their own states and a ludicrous leadership move to boot, especially when 71 percent of Arizonians agree with its new immigration law."

"Disloyalty"? Klexmer mitochondrion blap!

Say No to Obama's Dearth Panel

by va

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the White House economic plan, currently being constructed by the Obama administration's conservative fiscal commission, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

The Pete Peterson dearth panel is premised on the idea that Social Security (among other things, surely) needs to be hacked to bits because the bond markets and allied deficit hawks are demanding action to cut the budget; that Obama lacks the votes in the Senate for a serious jobs initiative; and that polls show voters care more about deficit reduction than about jobs. However, as the most important economists point out, bond markets are doing no such thing, and everybody else can go fuck themselves. Who will suffer the most when they cut Social Security? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or, frankly, myself, will have to stand in front of Obama’s “dearth panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “votes in the Senate,” whether we are worthy enough to eat food fit for human beings. Such a system is downright evil.

Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any discussion of the national budget. If the dignity of rich dudes in fancy suits interferes, then let them be covered in banana creme pies.

We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Gutting Social Security is a point of no return for government negligence in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Let's prove that fucker right about this one.

- Sarah Palin va

Not Good

Not good at all.

Israel needs to come clean here; a willingness to sell nukes to an apartheid state? Oy.