Whiskey Fire

A Quick Note on Marketing

Apparently, some folks are more than a little butthurt about Dems finally learning how to market their agenda to Americans. Yes, the "War on Women" is taking its toll on wingnuts, too.

But I think the phrase "War on Women" is genius, and I hope Dems double down on the strategy of using it. It's simple, it's memorable; that it has the benefit of accurately--if a bit hyperbolically--describing a real injustice is just icing on the cake.

I wish progressives and Democrats took the opportunity to frame debates more often. Nine times out of ten, we fight these fights on wingnut terms.

You know what I'd like to see next? I'd like for Dems and liberals to begin saying things like

"I consider it my patriotic duty to pay taxes. Yes, it's patriotic to pay taxes."

or  

"Taxes pay for a civilized society."

These ideas are simple and easy to articulate; there's no excuse not to Luntz these babies, like, yesterday.

Can you imagine a world where Republicans/wingnuts don't have taxes to bleat about?

 

--vacuumslayer

Big Bunny Is Watching

Other Beesness: From the land of B^4 and N__B, a new bee!

"They use humans as a salt lick," said entomologist John Ascher, who netted the first known specimen of the species in 2010 while strolling in Brooklyn's Prospect Park near his home. "They land on your arm and lap up the sweat."

...

These bees prefer sweaty people—over most animals—because the human diet usually is so salty that their perspiration is saturated with the essential nutrient, experts said.

...

In the end, only DNA testing by sweat bee specialist Jason Gibbs at Cornell University could identify its niche. Last November, they announced the discovery of Lasioglossum gotham, in a peer-reviewed journal called Zootaxa. The newbie joined the growing catalog of easily overlooked wild native bees.

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

~

Hello Fart

I'm going to read the whole thing -- or at least, I will gaze at it, dumbfounded, and then have some whiskey. So there is no point in not examining the early emanations.

One of the great differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives will freely admit that they have an ideology. We’re kind of dorks that way, squabbling over old texts like Dungeons and Dragons geeks, wearing ties with pictures of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke on them.

"Conservatives" have an identity politics. "Conservative thought" equals "necktie nerd derby." Precisely.

But mainstream liberals from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama — and the intellectuals and journalists who love them — often assert that they are simply dispassionate slaves to the facts; they are realists, pragmatists, empiricists. Liberals insist that they live right downtown in the “reality-based community,” and if only their Republican opponents weren’t so blinded by ideology and stupidity, then they could work with them.

Yes: wingnuts are wrong.

And "our Republican opponents" are liars.

And...?

This has been a theme of Obama’s presidency from the start. A couple of days before his inauguration,Obama proclaimed: “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry” (an odd pronouncement, given that “bigoted” America had just elected its first black president).

!

All right, that was way dumb, I'm skipping ahead...

Oh fuck it, I'm going to sleep.

Oh Why Not

Whatever. Commentary.

Polls have shown that the effort has not been enough to prevent a precipitous drop in his share of the prospective Jewish vote from the 78 percent he garnered in 2008. However, it will probably help him maintain a comfortable majority of Jewish votes in November as most of this predominantly liberal demographic is prepared to either ignore his past history of conflict with Israel or actually believes in the sincerity of his election-year conversion.

"Polls have shown" nothing of the kind.

But this amuses:

it will probably help him maintain a comfortable majority of Jewish votes in November as most of this predominantly liberal demographic is prepared to either ignore his past history of conflict with Israel

Wow. You're an American liberal Jew, clearly you support Obama's "conflict with Israel"... wait, what?

If this made any sort of sense, it would be, uh, sensical?

 

Strictly Comedy

This is wonderful.

The victimization claiming is comical, omigod yes.

But then, to keep perspective.

Name the teenager who commited suicide because of a profound shame at being, deep down, a Christian.

Go ahead.

Black Ghost Pie

Right Blogs are always perplexing and off-putting, but then they discuss race, and one realizes that they probably shouldn't ever talk about anything.

So, here, something stupid.

The Narrative just took a bullet to the chest.

Perhaps inevitably, the story starts with, yes, a dog:

A pit bull named Big Boi began menacing George and Shellie Zimmerman in the fall of 2009.

The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law’s dog. Zimmerman called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came to the house, county records show. “Don’t use pepper spray,” he told the Zimmermans … “Get a gun.”

The policeman suggested he buy a gun. Do the police tell a lot of people they consider irresponsible and dangerous to buy guns? Probably not.

Given that the whole point of the Martin/Zimmerman mess is to do with the potential irresponsibility of law enforcement officers as regards private citizens shooting other private citizens...

Holy Smokes. Why are you loonballs bragging?

It becomes more ghastly.

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

That sound you hear is the press frantically trying to figure out how to update their ethnic style guides — is Zimmerman now a “black white Hispanic?” Or do we use the Obama standard (ever heard our historic POTUS called a “white black?” no you have not), in which case I guess Zimmerman is just… black.

This is so weird.

The only people in Modern America who would ever say that you are Black because of your "Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather" are the sort of people who seriously speak of crap like "octoroons."These people wear pointy white hats and fuck them.

Fuckitty-fuck-fuck.

FUCK.

That sound you hear is the press frantically trying to figure out how to update their ethnic style guides — is Zimmerman now a “black white Hispanic?” Or do we use the Obama standard (ever heard our historic POTUS called a “white black?” no you have not), in which case I guess Zimmerman is just… black.

OMIGOD.

How could there ever be Black and White Hispanics. Gracious.

And...

 

Right.

It's so silly to talk about race and Hispanics because they all look alike.

!

But then you have the idiocy of "Zimmerman's Afro-Peruvian Great-Ancestor Means He Can't Be a Racist."

That's as persuasive as saying, "I can't be guilty of this homophobic murder, because once I let a fag suck my cock."

Further investigation, see, might be in order.

Like Crucifying Oil Company Executives Would Even Be BAD...

All of Greater Wingnuttia is aghast because the EPA has admitted in a Top Secret Video that it wants to quite literally, and not at all figuratively, crucify all the Job Creators in the fossil fuel industry.

The situation is so grave, why, Senator Daniel Inhofe has taken the unprecedented measure of complaining about it, which he just never does, because Inhofe has a long history of never ever not once making up nonsensical reasons to pretend that wealthy oil company executives are the Top Number One Most Oppressed People Ever (MOPEs).

Of course, you could actually watch the video to see that what the EPA guy was talking about was that since his department is underfunded and understaffed it can't really do its job of protecting the environment. Thus, when they catch a company "breaking the law" (actual quote!), they try to make an example of that company that was "breaking the law," so that other companies won't be tempted to "break the law."

So what Inhofe is complaining about is that the EPA is cruelly doing what it can despite its lack of resources to keep oil companies from breaking the law.

Because if oil companies can't break the law, Inhofe has a cry.

Also whining in this regard would be a blog housed at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation has chosen to decorate this blog with head shots of two fine young wingnuts smirking like absolute douchebags. Why have they done this? One cannot say. Strange are the ways of the wingnut mind. Anyhow, wow, what a pair of douchebags.

I Want to Ban Horrible Mustaches

This is perhaps not the dumbest thing to ever emanate from the vicinity of John Stossel's head, but it's certainly up there, somewhere.

I don't suggest that we ignore the experts and eat like pigs. But the scientific question should not overshadow the more fundamental issue. Who should decide what you can eat: you? Or the state? Should government decide what we may eat, any more than it decides where we live or how long our hair will be? The Food Police claim that they just want to help us make informed choices. But that's not all they want to do. They try to get government to force us to make healthy choices.

Meanwhile, the Free Market has done a wonderful job of making sure that poorer Americans have for-shit nutritional choices for cheap food.

But you knew that. Here is the throwaway line that turns Stossel's nonsense into Fun:

It is no coincidence that the push for more food regulation came at a time when Congress obsessed about the rising cost of medical care. When government pays for your health care, it will inevitably be drawn into regulating your personal life. First, politicians promise to pay. Then, they propose to control you.

No shit....

So, "Freedom" means that the government should pay the bill for the irresponsible actions of private corporations at the expense of the health of American citizens.

I trust my democracy more than I trust McDonald's Corp.

Or at least the theoretical democracy that remains unsold.

John Stossel also has a dick mustache.

Fat Black Gas Exudes, Boogaloo

The worst thing about Liberal Fascism: You Have to Be Shitting Me, This Got Published? was that it was incredibly boring.

I remarked on this at the time. Roy had the best explanation for why this might be, namely, that the whole godawful mess was nothing but a mindlessly, interminably sustained regurgitation of hoary self-pleasuring totally new-millenium yet dustily-pedigreed commonplace godawful right-wing American wingnut horseshit.

The one thing the book utterly wasn't, and remains isn't, and will never be, world without end, would be "scholarship." Though it was indeed quite close to genuinely painful, and not comical, watching Goldberg's apparently sincerely held aspirations to the contrary dashed, the poor dope. (It was, in the heel of the windup, comical.)

Goldberg's brand-spacklin'-new Tyranny of Cliche is, rumor has it, his Revenge at having everyone laugh at his stupid first book. Perhaps Dame Rumor is in this regard misinformed; I've been paying less attention to the dummy than I previously used. But his dinky log-roll blog about the book does suggest some resentment, complete with the usual boomerang haymakers.

But this is this class of Incisive Thought that impresses:

For instance, one phrase that drives me crazy that we hear from politicians of all stripes is “Einstein defined insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

First of all does anyone know if he really said that?

Second, this is absurd. You know a better word for “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?

“Practice.”

A mean-spirited reader would tell him about (a) Google, and (b) the long, dreadful history of airplane food jokes.

Please don't! It is kinder thus.

But Sweet Fuckme Cheeseus, you can read the Introduction for free. It boldly defies cliche by beginning with a quote from Orwell.

The burden is that Progressives are stupid for thinking that Social Security shouldn't be fucked with, because Thomas Friedman is a dick and that Conservatives are Honest.

Srsly.

And I'll have to read the rest of this shit. I can do no less for my Readers.

SEND WHISKEY NOW.

Definitions

Libertarian (n.): The special class of utter idiot/asshole who could argue with absolute sincerity that the most glaring example of the "collapse of the rule of law" in whole entire 2008 housing market debacle was that fucking Dodd-Frank got passed.

(Feel free to add your own.)