Lightening the Loafers

I think this cinches the deal -- if Schwarzenegger can handle the gay marriage ruling here in Homofornia, then the rest of the manly men in Gawd's Own Party oughta should be able to.

In a meeting with The Chronicle's editorial board on Friday, Schwarzenegger was asked to clarify his position.

"First, I have always said that for me, marriage is between a man and a woman," he said.

Then he added: "But I don't want to make everyone else go in that direction."

Schwarzenegger said he vetoed same-sex marriage legislation because he felt the Legislature shouldn't override voter-approved Proposition 22, which had defined marriage as between a man and a woman and was nullified by the high court on Thursday.

However, the governor said he doesn't necessarily feel the same when it comes to the Supreme Court overturning a statute enacted by a voter initiative.

"When the people vote, people are not legal experts, constitutional experts or any of that," he said. "I think that's why we have the courts. People may vote with good intentions, but then the court says, 'This is not constitutional.'

"It's not that the court interferes with the will of the people," he added. "But the court says, 'You voted for something, but it's not constitutionally right, so let's rework this.' That's really the idea."

While he supports the notion that same-sex couples should enjoy the same protections as heterosexual couples, the governor said same-sex marriage is not something that he has felt strongly about. He added that he has attended ceremonies for domestic partnerships.

He's exactly right, legally and morally. People (including myself) have given Ahnold a hard time here and there for some of his more meatheaded antics, but the guy was the biggest movie star on the planet not so long ago. You don't get to that point without understanding what motivates large groups of people, and here he iterates precisely that the reason this court ruling is pretty solid is because it restricts the ability of one group of people to impose their proprietary "morality" on another group of people, to the detriment of their basic rights. And that's why future initiatives in California's much-abused referendum process are doomed to fail.

But more than that, what was refreshing about Schwarzenegger's take on this was his personal observation. Essentially he's saying, "It's not my thing personally, but I've been to gay weddings, and it's not a big deal. There are more important issues."

Indeed, you would think that with two simultaneous wars, a tanking economy, and a fractious campaign to anoint the next schmuck who thinks they want to lead this dog-and-pony show, this would not even be a blip. But naturally, the focus instantly turns to how the timing of this ruling favors Saint Straight Talk, especially since Obama couldn't win California. Well, it doesn't help McCain here, except in the areas (such as, um, the one I live in) that were going for him in the first place. So McCain takes San Diego, Orange and Ventura Counties, and most of Central California and the Sacramento Valley. That's not nearly enough to take the whole state, especially in a demotivated Republican climate, especially in a state where the state Republican party leadership is probably a used-car dealer from Bakersfield and a staff of three. Seriously, these guys are fuckin' incompetent.

However, it's the perfect roughage for the constant ideological kampfers. Let's take a trip to ClownHall and see what their geniuses are up to, starting with convicted felon Chuck Colson:

In essence, these judges have created a new right out of thin air. Now, they base this decision, in part, on a precedent of the case in California declaring the ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

But over the centuries in Western civilization, public policy has recognized the vital role of the family—that the heterosexual family needed to be protected and defended in the law, because it provided crucial benefits for the well-being of society and family. That is different than a question of civil rights. Marriage always, everywhere until recent years, has been protected for the good of the state and the families.

Now, the problem is that the people of California cannot overturn this decision. Even an amendment to the California constitution will not help now. It all boils down to this: the need for a federal constitutional amendment—and soon, before other states start doing the same thing.

....

I guess I am not surprised by what happened in California. I have seen judges out of control for years. What I cannot fathom is how they would do it under the guise of natural rights. If the democratic process means anything, it means the consent of the governed. We cannot let the courts do this, or we do not have a democracy.

This is unfettered nonsense. Maybe Colson should have read the Federalist Papers while he was in the joint, and better understood what the Founding Fathers meant by "the necessity of auxiliary precautions"; i.e., the need for checks and balances, not only between branches of government, but on the occasions of buffoonery the people tend to visit upon themselves.

What the predominately Republican California Supreme Court has said is that the "will of the people" cannot be used to deny basic rights to homosexuals any more than it can be utilized to disenfranchise women or keep slaves. There is never a shortage of yahoos begging for the chance to vote against themselves or for the stupidest tripe to be plastered against a brick wall, if they think it voices their need for tribal self-identification. The court recognized that, wisely using Loving as a precedent. What Colson and his cohort need to do, instead of wasting everyone's time and diddling with the Constitution, is just get over it and grow the hell up already.

Another ClownHall denizen takes a more snide attack on California itself, for having the temerity to upset the Gawwwwwd-uh! that lives in her head:

By one vote, the California Supreme Court today rejected the expressed will of Californians to limit marriage to a man and a woman.

In 2000, a 61.4 percent majority of Californians passed Proposition 22, which limited marriage to a man and a woman and precluded California’s recognition of same-sex “marriages” consummated elsewhere.

....

The California Supreme Court has opened the door to a legal battle royal across the nation. Homosexual couples will flock to California to marry, return to their home states, and file lawsuits to force the recognition of their Land of Fruits and Nuts marriages—and the destruction of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Heh. "Land of Fruits and Nuts". Never heard that one before. Listen here, Sweet Cheeks -- one in every nine Americans lives in California. The state is the sixth largest economy in the world. We get less back from our federal tax dollars than anyone else, because of all the fucking deadbeat states in flyover country, who apparently don't produce much other than "Jesus Saves" billboards, enormous balls of twine, and the kind of desperation that can only be produced by generations of failure and cultural stasis. What else could possibly be available in Cawker City, Kansas, besides a Stuckey's and poorly-given (if no doubt eager) blowjobs? So, you know, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, m'kay?

As for Plop 22, there was a funny -- no, hilarious -- pained missive on the local news station's viewer e-mail segment. (Unfortunately, no available link to the specific e-mail.) Out of six e-mails read, five were howling in dismay at what these black-robed despots had wrought, and how mad Jeezus was going to be about it. Really, I felt like getting them a tissue.

Anyway, one of these spiteful little goobers wrote in whinging about how she had put in so much work canvassing houses for Plop 22, how all her hard work was now for naught, blah blah blah. Lady, I hope it put corns and calluses on your feet, and 'roids in your pooter. I hope it keeps you up at night, for a while at least. And I can't wait for them to come back by my house this time around; neither I nor my (yes, female) wife will be nearly as polite as last time.

But really, more than the usual scorn and contempt, what I'm really starting to feel for these people is pity, because they're utterly wasting their lives, their time, whatever good fortune they've had in life so far, squandering it on something that means utterly nothing. Their time would be better spent making a house-sized ball of twine, than endlessly nurturing this pointless obsession of theirs.

Finally we have (for ClownHall) the voice of reason, Debra J. Saunders. Saunders, to her credit, voted against Plop 22 and as a libertarian on social matters, has no weird issues about the ickiness of pole-smokers and donut-bumpers. (In fact, with this crowd, the more vocal they are, the more likely that either they're closet-cases or they have gay children that they're embarrassed about.) So Deb's on the right track, but ends her (reader-rated) one-star column on a diminished chord:

Mayor Gavin Newsom went on CNN to chide the fogies of the world who see this decision as a threat to civilization as we know it.

Newsom is right. America will not fall into the sea and Western civilization will not collapse.

In fact, this decision changed little. California law already has ensured equal rights for gays and lesbians. All this ruling did is change a name.

In short, there was no substantive reason for the court to rule as it did. And in jumping in too soon, the judges have created a permanent opposition -- similar to the permanent opposition to abortion laws -- that would not exist if California voters had changed the law for themselves, as they eventually would have done.

Which makes the George court's decision all that much more heavy-handed.

Feh. You can't have it both ways; you can't take the path of moral bravery (given your party base's rhetorical constraints) for yourself, and then turn around and excuse the moral cowardice or stupidity of others on the same issue. This is awful weak tea, prognosticating that Californians "eventually" would have grown up and overturned the previous initiative. It's like the Lost Causers claiming that the former Confederacy would have "eventually" repudiated slavery on their own had that meddling bastard Lincoln not interfered. Some things simply do not deserve to be excused or overlooked.

Not that they won't try, but this is going to be a non-starter for the mossback theosophists this time around. This ain't 2004, fools -- people are broke and pissed, and the current Republican nominee is locked in an ideological embrace with the Worst Preznit Evah, even as he finds the balls to talk about "the change [we] deserve", using a pharmaceutical slogan to inappropriately position himself. [Correction: the "change" slogan is actually being put forth by House Republicans, not directly by McCain himself. It is no less hilarious for that. Perhaps they can put Tom DeLay's mug shot on the posters.] Change what, muthafucka? From Iraq to Iran, from younger and dumber to older and crankier, from a Pinto to a Pacer? Straight Talk might peel a couple of points from the "Gawd Hates Fags" contingent, but fuck 'em anyways. I don't want to find common ground with them, I'm just waiting for them to die off already.

In the meantime, congratulations to the gay peoples for the legal recognition of a formality which many of them had already been living de facto, and hopefully this small victory proves more lasting for you.

The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing

Interesting article on gas prices here, with plenty of points to agree with and to heckle. First off, he's right that blaming the Saudis or Big Oil or whoever, and endorsing a "gas-tax holiday" or SPR moratorium is just stupid. These things don't even qualify as band-aids, so temporary and useless they would be. Those ideas are scams every bit as much as ethanol.

But the idea of comparing today's prices with those of 1922 rings false, because the factors of demand, supply, and costs of extraction, refining, and transportation were entirely different. Transportation needs were also competely different then; you didn't have hordes of suburbanites commuting for hours every day in and out of the cities where they work, like you do now. There may be comparable factors along the way, among several historical points, but it seems pointless to use these to declaim the complaints about rising fuel costs.

It's also inane to point out that they pay twice as much for gasoline in Europe, for reasons everyone should be at least moderately acquainted with. Europe has extensive and very well maintained public transportation systems, light and heavy rail all over the continent, which is paid for in part by that heavily taxed gasoline.

American fuel is taxed heavily not through the actual taxes, but the externalities -- a defense budget larger than the next couple dozen countries combined, infrastructural improvement and maintenance, heavily favoring air travel over rail travel, etc. And now rising food costs are sufficiently offsetting (and then some) any putative savings conferred by ethanol. Some of these externalities can be attributed to larger geographic distances here than in Europe, but it is a tax all the same, and surely drives the actual price of American gasoline much closer to European levels (where, oddly enough, you don't hear much whinging about prices because there are other options available).

Americans need to get something straight, and sooner rather than later -- gas prices are never coming back down, and most of it is our own damned fault. People allowed themselves to be gulled into buying immense exurban assault vehicles for the most mundane of chores. It's as if it never occurred to them that driving an RV to the fuckin' supermarket was wasteful. Well, it is, and when you multiply it by six million or twenty million or what have you, and run those numbers over the years, you have an aggregate impact on demand and consumption.

And globalization has empowered a billion Chinese with those same toys and desires, and needs for the precious. And they're much closer to most of it than we are, and they have a lot more cash to throw around. And there's not a goddamn thing we can do about it; Fredo's latest hat-in-hand genuflection to his Saudi overlords was rebuffed almost before he got there. Funny how easy he thought all that there jawbonin' would be back in the day. Then again, he was against nation buildin' too, which shows you how reality keeps rudely interrupting his power-nap approach to serious thinkamatin'. This is a guy whose ability to suss the intentions of other leaders basically ends at the tip of his nose.

(Of course, Junior immediately returned from Saudi and tried to sour-grapes the whole prospect anyway, and insists that it just emphasizes the need for more exploration and refining capacity, rather than, say, spending that money and time developing infrastructural uses for photovoltaic technology. There is no reason that air-conditioned office parks across the Sun Belt cannot be solar-powered, right now.)

I do agree (against my own rational self-interest, as it turns out, since I commute) that higher gas prices are the only thing that will get people's heads out of their asses sufficiently to stop being wasteful. But comparisons such as this are completely useless:

(Gasoline is also cheap compared with other essential fuels. A Starbucks venti latte costs the equivalent of $23 per gallon, while Budweiser beer runs $11 per gallon.)

I've also argued with people who used the per-gallon cost of bottled water in comparison. How many gallons of bottled water or Starbucks are these people drinking every day to get to and from their jobs? It's asinine.

Look, this is the free market everyone pretends to worship. If oil companies thought the market could support $200/bbl, that's what it would be. Hell, if we attack Iran, it almost certainly will be there overnight. There is only one thing individuals can do to make a difference on this, and that's to use it as efficiently as possible. Drive smaller; drive less. I'm not sure what sort of yahoo really thinks that an 18¢ price reduction over the summer -- even on the wild notion that the oil companies wouldn't just put that in their pockets and keep prices right where they are -- makes any sort of difference at all. It barely qualifies as stupid.

The real thing that sucks is that working families who already eke their way through life as it is are stuck; gasoline expenditures simply become a rising percentage of where their income goes. All their options -- find a more efficient car; find a job with a shorter commute; move closer to the decent jobs -- tend to be cost-prohibitive, especially in a tight job market. (Yes, yes, unemployment is 5%, which is great news for the folks who need to get a second Kwik-E-Mart job on nights and weekends to cover their nut.)

It would be nice to see a news story focus on those factors. At least the candidates -- even McCain, to a certain extent -- have proposals to start moving in the right direction. But nothing will impact prices so quickly or so extensively as addressing the issue of waste and consumption. It doesn't mean we all have to bicycle to work and raise hemp in communes, it just means that driving a 10mpg schooner to the goddamned post office is no longer feasible. Something's gotta give, and some things will have to be given up. Maybe we start with waste.

Salesmen

I recall seeing this commercial several months ago for the first time, and saying to the wife, "I bet this guy could sell ketchup popsicles to women in white gloves."

The first thing I notice is the physical grace. Vince puts the Shamwow through its paces with the fluid dexterity of a three-card monte dealer. Cleaning up spills appears not just effortless, but fun.

There's a genius, too, in his hectoring tone. He makes us feel like idiots for even entertaining the notion of not buying a Shamwow. "You're gonna spend $20 every month on paper towels, anyway," he says, palms up and head tilted back. He seems truly dumbfounded that anyone might fail to see the wisdom of dropping 28 bucks (including shipping) on a set of rags.

Salesmanship is one of those knacks that has usually evaded me, though I have had jobs where I believed in the product enough to move it. But Vince has his shit nailed; he conveys his confidence in the product with the deliberation and rhythm of phrasing and emphasis. Robert Fripp once said that technique can be recognized by its apparent effortlessness, and so it is here.

These days, when I do watch the teevee, I always have a book handy so I can just read while the barrage of boner-pill and boner-vehicle commercials wails through my living room. And like most people, I am entirely immune from infomercials. (Somebody's watching them and buying from them, though; I don't know anyone who admits to watching Two and a Half Men either, but somehow it's been keeping Charlie Sheen neck-deep in syndication royalties and pussy for some years now.)

But Vince's little sideshow is actually kinda fun, in the Lyle Lanley sense. I'm never going to buy the monorail, but the pitch is enjoyable enough. It doesn't hurt that Vince has sued both Anna Nicole Smith and the Scientologists. This is the kind of guy who helpfully tells conventioneers who come to his town where the best place to look for strange is, and if you fail at that, he'll steer you to the rub-and-tug parlor his cousin owns. There's never enough people like that.

Priorities

Is there some reason (besides, perhaps, his coziness with the telecoms) why Specter is running around like some caricature from Friday Night Lights or King of the Hill? What the hell is this guy's problem? Signal-stealing, if one must, is part of the game; why do you think coaches always have a hand or a laminate over their mouths as they call the next play?

The fact is that a team that has to win by such means is not going to be good enough to win big or consistently, and the Patriots, whatever else I may have ranted about them in the past, have had more going for them than any advantage that might be had by stealing signals or watching practice film (as opposed to, you know, game film, like every team does every week).

If Specter really wants to make himself useful and roll the Pats, he should call a hearing on the "tuck rule" game. That shit was wickety-wack. Failing that, there's gotta be literally a thousand better uses for his very expensive time.

Burning Down the House

I thought it wise to pray to ASHING, though I do not know that god.
-- Stephen Vincent Benét, By the Waters of Babylon

The old people shopped in a panic. When the TV didn't fill them with rage, it scared them half to death.
-- Don DeLillo, White Noise

I think it's safe to say that when Peggy Noonan is making sense, trouble's a-brewin':

If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

To be sure, Nooners' epiphanies are no doubt fueled more by instinctive distaste for all things Clinton (and at this point, it's kinda hard to blame her) than by serious commitment to brotherly love. And while McCain might well have sunk himself if he had said what Miss Thang did about the coveted cracker base last week, it's hard to imagine that at least a sizable plurality of conservative commentators wouldn't have resorted to their usual passive-aggressive tropes in his defense.

Still, her essential point is correct, and this cheap cracker-baiting is unacceptable, even if there may be geographic pockets of truth to it. I'd like to think that the media, with their unerring nose for the cheapest, least relevant shit, simply managed to find the angriest goobers they could in limning the peculiar political bent of Appalachia. But every one of them, when pressed on why they could never bring themselves to vote for Obama, either snuffled through the usual nonsense about flag pins 'n' preachers, or were simply more upfront about their racism. Not one of them, as far as I'd seen in the coverage from network news to The Daily Show, could come up with a remotely coherent reason why they couldn't vote for Obama.

Per usual, Taibbi is likely on the right track.

Whereas the Clinton rallies seem to embrace the combative nature of this contest, in the Obama camp one frequently finds people who are deeply troubled by it. "He's been a complete gentleman," says Amala Lane, an Obama volunteer from New York who came down to Pennsylvania for the primary. "This is exactly what Obama is trying to get us beyond: this blue-state/red-state thing."

Listening to Lane — a soft-spoken, white, college-educated intellectual who worked as a teacher overseas — you can see exactly where Obama has gone wrong. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Obama polled well among people exactly like this: liberals and college graduates. In the Full Metal Jacket paradigm, faggots and sailors. Earlier in the campaign, the Obama camp was so busy stewing over Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama's South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson's and worrying about being painted as a "black candidate" that they forgot to worry about being painted as something even worse, in American political terms: the candidate of liberal intellectuals.

With all his verbose deflections of Hillary's attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to "obliterate" Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who'll crawl through the mud for "Madam President" while marching to classic rock tunes like the "Horst Wessel Song." Clinton's genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road.

Ironic, isn't it, that someone who endured political taunts of "wonkism" and "elitism", of implicit traitorousness and intellectual arrogance, for all those years, resorts to precisely the same tactics in her increasingly futile effort to claw her way to the middle? All that time we listened to them whinge about how unfairly they'd been maligned and hunted, and their shithead friends rushed to the barricades to pen unreadable books in their defense -- and they took the first opportunity to become exactly what they despise. Shee-it, about all that's missing from this one is a clandestine ratfucking of Larry Hagman.

To a great extent, the concern over the Clintons' tactics throwing the election over to Poor Ol' Straight Talk are overblown at this juncture. Most of the disappointed Hillarians will, despite their current plaints, get over themselves and vote for Obama. The ones who don't were never going to, and probably wouldn't have really voted for a girl either. Really, pathological hangups and projected psychological difficulties tend to run in patterns; people who have problems with negroes also have problems with females. Probably something to do with fetal alcohol syndrome.

And speaking of fetal alcohol syndrome, Clownhall takes a stab at spelling out What Bubba Wants (other than a blood relative to sodomize):

The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.

Well, sure. What are they supposed to do, explain that their approach to the government basically consists of upward wealth transfers and taking foreign policy suggestions from think-tanks populated by ideological inbreeders, that it's essentially a practical joke? If the Republicans ever took their thumb off the scale, the whole counter would flip over.

But so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.

Riiiiight. That's why they voted for George W. Bush, twice. That's why they bought the schtick of a lobbyist/actor who tooled around Tennessee in a pick'emup truck. Well, not so much around the state. More like from the parking lot where he left his Lexus, out to the stump in Sixtoe Gulch where he'd tug his overalls for twenty minutes, tell them that everything they think they know is gospel truth, and promise to make Junior Samples his Secretary of State. Yeah, there's just no foolin' these folks.

I mean, really. These people clearly couldn't spot a poser if he showed up in a muscle shirt and started playing Achy Breaky Heart. There's no easier mark on the planet than a hostile rube who refuses to learn or discuss anything he didn't pick up on the third go-round of second grade.

I'm sure this schtick has been around since the first ensi of Eridu told the townsfolk that his rival and the rival's god were claiming to better than them and their god. No better way to get a dumbass' back up than to tell them that someone thinks they're better'n you, whether or not they actually said that, and regardless of whether it's true in the first place. Prob'ly fags anyways.

That dumb fucking cow they showed on The Daily Show earlier tonight, rambling about how she couldn't trust someone from another race runnin' this here country? Fuck her, and fuck the dipshit crackers that think like that. Fuck 'em right in the neck. There are people who better than that, but apparently they don't make as good copy for the intrepid reporter trying to put together his never-been-done-before What's Whitey's Deal With Obama? ofay news item.

Some Americans do feel antipathy toward "people who aren't like them," but that antipathy isn't about racial or ethnic differences.

Sure it is. Oh, you can add cultural differences into that mix as well, but it's a pretty clear pattern that many of us in all parts of the country have seen in play, frequently by our own family members. (Thankfully, I can't think of anyone in my family who's quite that bad, and even the ones who do complain are more of the Archie Bunker, blowing off steam but always voting Democrat(ic) anyway type.) As J. Billington Bulworth astutely pointed out, rich people stay well on top by pitting poor white people against poor black people.

The folks who are getting suckered into registering their ignorance and xenophobia on national teevee as part of a defense-contractor-owned "news program" might do well to follow the overall food chain, consider their own place in it, and kindly sit down and shut their fucking cakeholes until they have managed to read something without pictures or glossy paper, that may disabuse them of their toxic stupidity. Really, it's okay to not want to vote for Barack Obama, but do us all a favor and come up with a marginally responsible reason.

Remember kids, he's not just a black guy with a white mom, he's a white guy with a black dad. Both things are equally true, but when either enters into the decision-making process, the point is already lost.

Caddyschmuck

The sacrifices he makes:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - [Junior] said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year.

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said in an interview for Yahoo! News and Politico magazine.

You know what else sends the wrong signal, Chief? Grossly exaggerating your rationales; canning experienced military advisors who disagree with your brilliant strategery, while promoting inept yes-men; taunting the enemy with "bring 'em on"; dumping $2 bn per week into this endless snipe hunt; gentrifying the Green Zone with luxury condos and an amusement park while the rest of the country has intermittent power and water at best. And on and on.

Christ, the usual turd-burglars are scrambling to cobble together some sort of observation on what sort of "legacy" Bush will leave. I honestly cannot think of a single thing that didn't either directly benefit his donor class, or adversely impact the nation's fortunes. Usually both. (Small exceptions: increasing AIDS relief for Africa and debt forgiveness. I mean, whoopdee-fuckin'-doo, in the overall scheme of things.)

You made your bed, hoss, you may as well go ahead and play golf in it for all it's worth. The sad thing is that he probably sincerely believes that this matters, not that it's ever stopped him from mountain biking and clearing brush. It doesn't even seem to occur to him that he is deeply resented despite quitting golf, that whether he played or not wouldn't matter in the least if he had ever displayed even a trace of sentience or competence.

Go. Go shoot a round. Really, it doesn't matter anymore, except to the extent that every minute on the back nine is a minute away from lawndarting the country. I just do not understand why this is newsworthy now, four years after we watched that drive on Fahrenheit 9/11. Whatever and ever, amen.

Nothin' Beats a Joe Blob

Lieberman makes the rounds for Ratfuck Monday.

When Wolf Blitzer pointed out that Obama also labels Hamas a terrorist organization, making his position the same as McCain's, Lieberman said, "that's true," adding that Obama "clearly doesn't support any of the values and goals of Hamas."

You think Obama's wondering why the hell he didn't stump for Ned Lamont last year? Jesus, you hope that at least the Dems have enough balls between them to ditch this hump once and for all. No more committee chairmanships, nothin', freeze this prick out. You're dead to us, Fredo.

Neunundneunzig Luftballons

Welcome BalloonJuicers. Feel free to put your feet on the couch; that's why we have it covered in plastic. And a big thanks to Ron at CenterFace for the endorsement. Just when I have lost my faith in humanity. Be sure to check out Ron's nasty little epistle o' love to the garment-rending Clintonistas. As a spectator sport, this will certainly do until football season finally begins.

Lost In Translation

Briefly noting the contretemps between IOZ and La Goldstein, just for the entertainment value. Pound for pound, Goldstein is probably as solid a juggler of deconstructivist chainsaws as anyone out there, I'll wager. But that's primarily because I generally don't have the patience to sift through such flummery unless there is clarity and utility in its ultimate deployment.

While I tend to agree with the principle of originalism as far as acknowledging that the founding fathers said what they meant, it seems that too often people find themselves in the weeds, hacking away and thinking that interminable bouts of semiotic glossolalia won't actually burrow them further into said weeds. Look, even if we acknowledge the infallibility of the FFs' intent and ability to circumscribe said intent with definable permanence, we also have to acknowledge that not all of what they meant was worth keeping, and that grown-ups are able to deal with those verities.

They meant to only give white male landowning gentry a full vote. They meant to subjugate Africans and keep them as slaves; they meant to keep women disenfranchised. They could not have anticipated AR-15's and 90-round banana clips of armor-piercing bullets, nor the creeping authoritarianism of an unapologetic doofus tragically entrusted with the responsibility of steering the ship of state. What is so difficult to understand about the urgency of rectifying situations such as those, without having to dither in tenuous slippery slope arguments, and without discounting the preponderance of rightness that resided in their original arguments?

What makes it a sound exercise in futility is the column itself whence Goldstein's discursion originated, particularly this excerpt [emphasis in original] intimating Obama's pending judicial radicalism.

"Barack Obama," explained spokesman Tommy Vietor, "has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice, and what's truly elitist is to appoint judges who will protect the powerful and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves."

Really? Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, knows full well that the Supreme Court isn't charged with upholding subjective world views on "economic and social justice" — quite the opposite, in fact.

Justices solemnly swear to "administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich." So judges, incredible as this may sound, are not prohibited from "protecting" the powerful if the powerful happen to be right on the constitutional issue.

To suggest otherwise, as Obama has, is to suggest they should ignore their oath.

Harsanyi lamely "concedes" that "both sides" are "posturing", a noncommittal "no shit, Sherlock" moment if ever there were one. And to call the above excerpt a willful misreading of what Vietor said (or signified, if you must) would be an understatement roughly equivalent to pointing out that George W. Bush is not a terribly skilled orator.

Implicit in all this is that there has heretofore been some (hell, any) imbalance in favor of the poor and disempowered, or even equity between the protections they receive and the protections the powerful receive. You know, the Kelo decision didn't endanger the property of anybody powerful, it merely made it easier for cities and developers to skull-fuck little old ladies if they got in the way of their gentrification efforts. (And yes, Kelo is one decision where the sacred liberal SCOTUS braintrust got it wrong, big time.)

If Roe and then perhaps Griswold were to get repealed because Preznit Straight Talk filled Stevens' and Ginsburg's seats with another couple Combover Tony clones, the wayward coed daughters of the powerful would still get their abortions, still cherish their many opportunities to go out and look for a new mistake without someone looking over their shoulders. You don't even have to tally up wealth discrepancies to discern class distinctions, you need merely to comprehend the consequences each faces when they fuck up, whether in terms of actual criminality or merely trespassing the moral boundaries of the folks who spend their waking hours worried that someone else might be having a good time.

The idea that even the vague hint of economic and social justice automatically signifies the onset of barbarians at the sacred gates says a lot about the predominant mindset at work. It's as if, usual misgivings about their foreign policy acumen set to one side for the moment, this gang hadn't already done its damndest to reinstate a socioeconomic outlook right out of the Gilded Age, an outlook that has infested even their foreign policy adventures. It is all of a piece, and has been since day one, since well before 9/11. These fuckers would have had Ken Lay running the DoE if they could have gotten away with it.

The cliché is that we are a nation of laws rather than men, which never fails to make me laugh. But even if you accept this premise at face value, the fact is that laws are here to facilitate the quality of the lives of humans, and not the other way around. This does not mean, contrary to the lurid fables originalists like to gull and prod one another with, a deluge of communal hedonism and redistributive theft. It might -- and, given the rational skepticism anyone should have about Obama's ability or even will to follow through on so many rhetorical promises, I emphasize might -- translate into some semblance of accountability from people who are otherwise exempt from such an outmoded concept.

It's something when anyone can muster such energy at the shadow of a rhetorical abstraction, and compose elaborate plaints about the sanctity of the Constitution and its inviolable constructs, without so much as a mention of the current occupants' scorched-earth treatment of the very same document. There is no neoclown who would have sat idly by while people were kidnapped on the other side of the world, held without charge, and violently force-fed for half a decade in Guantanamo, not under a Democratic president. Hell, they took turns mounting their high horse when Clinton bombed Serbia for a couple months (though, of course, they have fuck-all to say about the hub for drug and human trafficking the area has turned into since then). There is no self-satisfied fiscal conservative who would have put up for a goddamned second with dropping pallets of hundred-dollar bills into the Iraq desert, to be disbursed and skimmed at will, under any pretense, much less the Wilsonian one that has been consistently presented. It's going to take a generation to remove Cheney's shit-stains from the Constitution, and they can scarcely be bothered. But one of Obama's lackeys said something about social and economic justice. I mean, holy fucking shit, Batman.

All laws are meant, in principle, to ensure accountability, to grant redress, and yes to protect the weak from the predations of the powerful -- which, by definition, does not typically happen in the other direction. The state, and by extension the entities who propagate it and profit from it, have the monopoly on use of force, Hume's paradox notwithstanding. And if laws to do not protect individuals' right to be left alone, if they don't demand accountability for outright murder, then they -- and the humans who interpret and enforce them -- are not doing their jobs.

The idea that only Obama and his putative acolytes are responsible for shadowing and encoding their own meanings and intentions into the clarity of the legal codes, whether civil, criminal, or military, is intellectually and morally obtuse, and worthy only of the most contemptuously cynical regard as to motive. They're incapable of good-faith efforts.

God Squad

This Slate article on Christian culture starts off rather oddly, I think, beyond just the almost Penthouse Forum stylings of the opening sentence.

One night, a couple of years ago, I walked in on a group of evangelical college boys sitting on a bed watching The Daily Show. I felt alarmed, and embarrassed, as if I had caught them reading Playboy or something else they had to be shielded from. Jon Stewart, after all, spends at least one-quarter of his show making fun of people like them. But they eagerly invited me in. I soon learned that they watched the show every night it was on, finals or no finals. So strong was their devotion to Jon Stewart that I was tempted to ask: If Jesus came back on a Tuesday night at 11, would you get off the bed?

There are at least a couple of peculiar assertions in that opening paragraph. One is that The Daily Show uses Christians and/or their belief system as a comedic punching bag. I watch the show pretty regularly, and I really can't think offhand of anything that fits that description. Poking fun at "intelligent design" advocates, creationist museums, goofballs who peddle quack science in an effort to circumvent evidence that conflicts with their dogma, sure. But those people are few and far between as comic fodder on TDS, and when they are the political subtext can be clearly seen. They are not being picked on because they're Christians, but because they're charlatans.

The other notion is that Christians need their own subculture that caters to them. This smells more like marketing than anything else, the business instinct to niche-peddle to people, rather than simply producing something that can reach out beyond the bounds of the niche and have some mass appeal. Bands such as U2 and King's X are probably no less Christian than, say, Stryper was, but they made more of an impact because they concentrated on making better music, and let that universalize their appeal.

Certainly it's understandable why people from socially conservative belief systems might want to actively dissociate themselves from the lame-brained vulgarities of popular culture. But those are pretty easy to sidestep -- I mean, no one's making anybody watch Tila Tequila or any of the interchangeable has-been fuckfests on the E! Channel. No one makes teenage girls wear the coin slot thong, or get a butt hat, or a nipple/clit piercing. People are either conformist mallrats, all expressing their individuality in eerily similar patterns, or they aren't.

Even TDS itself is only irreverent in comparison to the dutiful, slavish handjobbery that comprises most "news" media, particularly television. Stewart pokes fun at Bush's manifold incompetencies, and then has McCain on for the thirteenth time, for a round of softballs that would make Larry King blush. TDS is more of an outlet of catharsis at this point than anything truly significant, a place where we can go to snicker at the abusive absurdities that comprise our political system, and then go right back to either pretending that we can have any effect on it, or ignoring it all in favor of some cheap video soma. That's something that the religious and the secular alike can appreciate.

Heart of Dorkness

So for no good reason at all, I'm checking out Amazon's "Guitar Gods" contributor section, and I stumble across this happy monkey-fuck of a thread. Note how seamlessly it transitions from the initial asshole "joking" about Dimebag Darrell (who, if half of what I've heard and read about him over the years is true, was a total mensch) being shot, to the other bozo lecturing everyone on how all dictatorships are "leftist". Hunh? I thought this was a guitar thread, you thumb-dick.

Anyway, fun stuff. Do check it out if you have time to kill (and, well, you're here, which means that you do). Like mouth-breathing rats stuck in a cage, some of these folks are. As always, I remember my first beer.