Whiskey Fire

We Write Letters

Dear Jim:

The fact that only far-right white people showed up at a rally that far-right white people billed as proving that far-right white people are the True Heirs of the Civil Rights Movement is, as it happens, newsworthy. That this fact obviously speaks to the "character" of the far-right white people making such preposterous claims is not the fault of reality.

Love,

Thers

(By the way, Treacher gets pretty badly "pwned" in his own comments section here; you'd feel bad for him, except he's so clearly being a dick. Definitely worth a spelunk.)

Whole Lotta Patriotism & Reaction

All-American Academician & California State employee Donald Douglas takes note of the recent NYT piece on changing demographics in California's Orange County, where reaction once reigned supreme & Douglas probably felt safe.

Yeah, we actually have diversity down here, and there's still a whole lot of patriotism left.

Mmm, there sure is, & diverse people aren't part of any patriotism, you may be damn sure.

Changing demographics are not the only trouble in the O.C., though. Carpetbaggers!

But NYT is watching and waiting, hoping for that demographic tide to topple the county's GOP hegemony

Not to worry, adds Donald.

[I]t ain't happening any time soon, not if local tea party action is any indication:

Absolutely, because the always fair & balanced Orange County Register's story Douglas linked has to do w/ the Orange County Congressional delegation (Five reactionaries, one Loretta Sanchez) & nothing to do w/ the pics Douglas snapped at what Wonkette called a "slob picnic" & Douglas identifies as "Irvine Tax Day Tea Party." We can therefore conclude, right along w/ our academician friend Donald, that a Congressional delegation that hasn't yet reflected all the demographic changes occurring in Orange County, & a few pictures of forty or fifty loons & their silly signs are proof positive that patriotism will stand against the diverse hordes. See?Patriotism writ large. (Good job squeezing in the "t" in "arrogant," cretin. You run your small business that way?) 

 M. Bouffant

The Wingnut Mind, Such as It Is

Actual-and-for-true Big Dumb Journalist attempt to refute photographic evidence:

However, CBS News wins the big prize here.  In a web piece called Glenn Beck; “Something Beyond Imagination Is Happening,” the last-place news network actually reported their estimate for the crowd to be 87,000.  Seriously.  There has been no claim of website hacking by CBS, so one must assume that they meant what they wrote when stating; “Approximately 87,000 people attended the rally, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News. The estimate was made using aerial photos taken at noon, which was judged to be the height of the event. The estimate has a margin of error of 9,000 people.”  CBS News is also the network setting records in the ratings department, the low ratings department.

It's not especially a secret that wingnuts don't like it when someone says something that doesn't flatter their grossly distorted self-perceptions, but this is still pretty ballsy. "Your pictures don't show 400,000-plus imaginary people, and that's why nobody likes you!"

The Flying Party

For the American Conservative, no social forum known to humankind is more savage, oppressive, and cruel than the Cocktail Party. It's like the Terrordome, only with canapes. I.e., this limp wimple sported by Sr. Kathryn J. Lopez, OLSB*:

Could politics end the mommy wars?

What mommy wars, you ask? One short answer is: the ones that make for awkward silences at cocktail parties when a woman is asked what she does and she responds that she raises her children. The feminist revolution would have us believe this undignified.

Except in K-Lo's case, she says "I stay home and care for my cats!" in the manner of Vivien Leigh announcing how God is her witness she won't go hungry again, and then defiantly swallowing an entire miniature hot dog without chewing.

Anyway, wingnuts sure do go to some weird cocktail parties. I at least hope her cab driver on the ride home was able to pick her up by telling her something pithy.

That, and just skimming the rest of the column, K-Lo knows about as much about what actual "feminists" think as she does about what happens at actual parties.

* Our Lady of the Soggy Biscuit.

Strictly Comedy

The tedium of the Beck-a-pa-snooza is hard to overcome, but William Jac-ob-sen manages to amuse. Verbatim!

The image on The Washington Post [see note below] website of the Restoring Honor rally today in Washington, D.C., reminded me of the advertising concept of subliminal seduction, where images are inserted into an advertisement in such a way as to send a message to the viewer without the viewer knowing it.

WaPo's article about the rally carried a time stamp of 1:38 p.m., but the photo of a near empty crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial clearly was taken long before the tens or hundreds of thousands of rally participants arrived. 

Tens or hundreds, what's the diff? DAMN YOU, EM ESS EM!

Oh, it was "tens."

In other Shit-Head-Ed Le-Gal In-Sur-Rec-Tion news, Jacobsen thinks Think Progress are total lame-o's for not being able to discover any racist signs at the "Glenn Beck Is as Important as Martin Luther King Jr" speech, apparently not realizing, or caring, that Glenn Beck told his loyal Barcalounger Brigadiers not to bring any signs, which was, at emerges, wise, considering that they couldn't even properly spell their racist t-shirts.

MAS. Che Guava-Ra rules the chyrons, like Fergus rules the brazen cars.

Oh Yah

This. Because I keep forgetting.

I like this part:

Not that 87K isn’t impressive! After all, Beck gets, what, about 1.8 million viewers? I myself would not have ever imagined in a million years that 4.8% of Glenn Beck’s audience could have managed to raise themselves off their sofas without a week’s notice and a derrick, so you have to give them applause on that score.

In Shocking News, Climate Scientist Revealed to Not Be Evil Shyster

Remember how Global Climate Change is a Hoax n' Fraud because the chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachuri, had masterminded the whole "entire body of scientific evidence" scam as part of a clever get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme? Sure you do!

Of course:

In December, the Sunday Telegraph carried a long and prominent feature written by Christopher Booker and Richard North, titled: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

The subtitle alleged that Pachauri has been "making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies". The article maintained that the money made by Pachauri while working for other organisations "must run into millions of dollars".

It described his outside interests as "highly lucrative commercial jobs". It proposed that these payments caused a "conflict of interest" with his IPCC role. It also complained that we don't know "how much we all pay him" as chairman of the IPCC.

The story (which has subsequently been removed from the Sunday Telegraph's website) immediately travelled around the world. It was reproduced on hundreds of blogs. The allegations it contained were widely aired in the media and generally believed. For a while, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri's "dodgy" business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest.

There was just one problem: the story was untrue.

It's not just that Pachauri hadn't been profiting from the help he has given to charities, businesses and institutions, his accounts show that he is scrupulous to the point of self-denial. After the Sunday Telegraph published its story, the organisation for which Pachauri works - a charity called The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) - asked the auditors KPMG to review his financial relationships. Today, for the first time, the Guardian is publishing KPMG's report.

KPMG studied all Pachauri's financial records, accounts and tax returns, as well as TERI's accounts, for the period 1 April 2008 – 31 December 2009. It found that any money paid as a result of the work that Pachauri had done for other organisations went not to him but to TERI. None of the money was paid back to him by TERI: he received only his annual salary, which is £45,000.

Not that the truth will have any bearing on the public "debate" on what to do about climate change, but still, this will provide a nice footnote for the future historian writing a "what the hell went wrong" thesis, which she will probably have to write in a wetsuit.

This Is What I Like To Read

Even the short run looks gloomy, and the slightly longer run -- the next twenty to thirty years -- could be a turning point in human history.

Not that every moment isn't, maybe, a turning point, depending. And not that the rest of the article, snappy third paragraph aside, isn't (as far as could be determined by a cursory scan) a litany of hippie-dippie verdancy; there is some (not enough) litanizing of what's going wrong w/ everything, & we always like that.

[A Swede named Rockstrom] and his colleagues have worked out the biophysical conditions that allowed human beings to appear and then prosper on the planet -- the safe operating conditions for humanity. They have quantified nine interlinked planetary conditions and their boundaries, which include climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss and other eco-indicators necessary for human survival and civilized development. Three of these boundaries have already been overstepped because of growing global reliance on fossil fuels, industrialized forms of agriculture, and overuse of natural resources. The world economy is fast approaching almost all of the other boundaries.

Rockstrom and his colleagues' work and analysis deserves the widest possible attention -- yet few public figures in the US seem to have heard of him.

America does not want to be alarmed by facts, but by scary boogie men. Always helps to keep that in mind. Ripped from the headlines:

[M]any firsthand observers [...] have amply documented the country's horrifying amount of air, water and soil pollution. Anyone who has visited China in recent years can view the air pollution, dirty rivers, incredible traffic jams, and endless urbanization for themselves.

OK, no hope there then. Anywhere, really. Certainly none here.

Public opinion is in our favor. There is a climate majority. Nearly 75% of Americans tell pollsters that they believe the earth's temperature is warming and that human behavior is responsible. Solid majorities think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies and expect oil to be replaced as a major source of fuel with 25 years. Yet, our political system seems unable to act and our president unable to lead.

Please remind me of the last time the system acted in favor of something that needed action. (Tax cuts & wars excepted, of course.) Cynic that I am, I imagine a Bradley effect: 75% of those polled are all for action, but a different tune will be warbled or screeched if any cutbacks or contractions are necessary, whether in gated communities or urban tenements.

What do we need to do as Americans? Tom Friedman thinks we need a Green Tea Party -- and perhaps that would help.

Not terribly fair to mock the typist, as he does weasel around it, but isn't mentioning Friedman a violation of one of those irksome Intertubular discourse things; that is, quoting him w/o identifying him as the Mustache of Understanding or the Great Friend of the Taxi Driver is an automatic disqualification? Picayune bull aside, imagining a Green Tea Party is pretty damn funny. Is there not a "Green" Party, which should be winning elections if any of the sheep gave a flying fuck at a rolling dough-nut about much beyond their next dough-nut?

M. Bouffant (Pardon the non-standard text; too damn lazy to reformat from the original text chez moi.)

Alone, Stinking, Afraid

Oh hello, Ted Nugent, you weird gristly has-been paranoid cretin.

There are no words to express the outrage Americans would have expressed if the Japanese government had proposed to build a memorial to their fallen soldiers at Pearl Harbor immediately following World War II.

Well, uh, OK. But I suppose there are likewise "no words" to describe how Americans would respond to many other absurd hypothetical situations. Suppose a Muslim butterfly flew up Ted Nugent's ass and started a mosque in his colon. Would that somehow desecrate the asshole that shat out this ridiculous column, and thus annoy Americans? I think it likely. Nuke Mecca!

We can only hope President Truman would have ordered our military to carpet-bomb and firebomb the Japanese again for being so rude and stupid.

Er, nuke Mecca, ha ha, was a joke...?

This is by the way something that appeared in the Washington Times. Yes, a newspaper. Honestly, have your pets shit on it. It's a newspaper.

Slice it any way you want, but the Muslim community is being tremendously rude and stupid for wanting to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero in New York City.

Well, this specific "Muslim community" has been in that area since before 9/11, which I guess is especially insensitive of them. I guess they should have realized that they became non-New-Yorkers as soon as people they didn't know, but with whom they tenuously shared a religion if you squint enough, tried to kill their, uh, fellow New Yorkers, and them. 

Ted Nugent, by the way, pisses on the Dennis Prager-ean Civility Posturing better than I could manage, so take it away, Motor City Madtits: 

Let's call a spade a spade here. If Islam is the religion of peace, then I'm a malnourished, tofu-eating anti-hunter.

That fact is that much of the world's terrorism is committed by Muslims in the name of Allah. These voodoo nut jobs and their voodoo religion believe that, according to the Koran, killing nonbelievers makes Allah happy.

Moreover, Muslim-run countries provide the funds and other support for this terrorism and indoctrinate their youth to hate all things Western.

Killing is good. Peace is bad. And we are supposed to believe Islam is a peaceful religion?

Islam is no more a peaceful religion than Jim Jones was a Christian prophet. Islam attracts violent maniacs stuck in the year 4, reduces women to third-class citizens, discriminates, persecutes and kills Christians and burns their churches; stones people for punishment; and believes in world domination. Saudi Arabia, a Muslim theocracy, goes so far as to outlaw all other religions other than Islam. Sounds like real nice, neighborly Islamic folks.

It goes on in this vein.

Ted Nugent, by the way, is the current Republican Party mainstream.

Sweet dreams.

I Don't Judge

But I don't own any fucking stuffed animals.