Crapfest

There's a reason I rarely bother to venture onto Facebook anymore, and today is a perfect example of why, post after post after fuckheaded rant about how Colin Kaepernick should be "deported" or fired or what-have-you, for the high crime of expressing his opinion.

I think some people need to be reminded of what the great things are about this country. Perhaps the most important feature is that every citizen has the inalienable right to be wrong, and even to be a jerk about it. Without that basic right, nothing else matters, we would all just be slaves to the swirling winds of mob rage.

I'm just cynical enough to believe that Kaepernick, who had been on the verge of being benched in favor of Blaine Gabbert, is trying to get traded to a team that will start him, although there are certainly better ways to go about that. Perhaps Kaepernick is utterly sincere in his sentiments, in which case there might be better ways to communicate that. We don't really know, and it's not really important.

What should be important is that, after a year-plus of listening to Fuckface Von Clownstick paint this country as a festering hellhole for his adoring throngs, it's more than a mild coincidence that the most ardent of the anti-Kaep screamers are also the most devout Clownstick acolytes. This is the conservatard mythos writ small -- the conservative can complain about the gubmint interfering with his ability to make and keep his money, but the second someone complains about how they're treated by agents of that same gubmint, these people come unglued.

They loves them some Drumpf because he's sooo un-PC, but the fact of the matter is, these people are as PC about their own pet causes as the most tiresome SJW tweeting from their safe space. I tend to agree with them that their country is lost, but it's lost because they are moronic, intolerant rageaholics who probably need a diagram on how to wipe their asses properly.

Lie of the Crier

Not sure what the hell Mike Huckabee thinks he's going to get out of bandwagoning and orchestrating the small (300 people? really?) pep rally for oft-married, recently converted super-Christian Kim Davis' release from county jail. If he thinks his single-issue preaching to the converted is going to get him so much as a low-level cabinet appointment in a never-gonna-happen Ted Cruz administration, he's even dumber than he sounds trying to defend this sanctimonious dunce.

Are her fifteen minutes up yet already? Again, who gives two shits what a handful of inbred rubes and jokers think about anything? They've already got their minds made up; we know who they'll be voting for next year and for the next ten to twenty years. There's no mystery about places like this. These are people who literally cannot decide whether or not they should be allowed to purchase alcohol. Are they Moooslims, or just stoopid?

Freedom of Choice

So the outrage de la semaine is, as it turns out, completely imaginary -- that is, a small business has been mercilessly e-heckled not because they refused to cater a gay wedding, but because they said they would refuse if asked. Is this what it's come to?

This is a tough one to be sure, friends 'n' neighbors, at least at first blush. From a practical standpoint, it's difficult to see how the appearance, right or wrong, of kajillions of cyber-twats over-reacting and e-spewing their self-righteous virtual venom is going to help win any converts to The Cause. All it's going to do is make the folks who already have their backs up pitch their coccyges that much higher, so much so that the pizza place in question -- which, let's recall, didn't actually have any complaints about discriminating against gay customers -- is now probably going to get a nice payday from ButthurtWingnutCrowdfunding.com, or whatever it's called.

It's one thing if a Big Corporation pulls that sort of shit and gets hit up with the Big Angry, quite another when it's a mom-and-pop prayer-circle pizza joint. I'm sure some noted sage or other had something pithy to say about picking and choosing one's battles wisely, but goddamned if some of these dopes never got the memo.

Of course, as you might suppose, that other side rushing to the defense of "religious freedom" is every bit as insufferable as their bien pensant counterparts, if anything even more so. I can't envision a scenario that puts me on the same side of any issue as noob tool Tom Cotton, and I'm not about to start with this issue, especially since the guy seems about as hinky as it gets. (Seriously, what kind of a grown-ass man buys birthday cake every few days?)

What all this nonsense has accomplished is that it's allowed idiots to crowdfund a cross to nail themselves to for their piety. This one is just a peach:

The florist who refused to provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding has netted more than $80,000 from an online crowdfunding page dedicated to “protect her and her livelihood.”

Stutzman was fined $1,000, plus $1 for court costs and fees in March for refusing to serve a gay couple when they tried to buy wedding flowers in 2013, reported ABC News.

Stutzman said even though one of the men who wanted the flowers was her friend, providing flowers for his marriage went against her beliefs as a Southern Baptist.

Well, with "friends" like that....

It would be interesting if one (1) of the media entities publicizing this martyrdom jabber would follow up on the crowdfunding aspect of all these people, see how many of those pledges actually pay up, or if some of them, once the drunken glow of self-satisfaction wears off, look at a pizza place getting nearly a million dollars pledged to it in the course of just a few days, and decide that for that amount of money, what's the harm in changing your mind?

The concern trolls will ask questions, as is their wont, and they should be answered, as they apply across the board: does a Muslim bakery have a right to refuse service to a Christian or Jew, or to an unaccompanied woman; does a gay wedding photographer have a right to refuse to serve a straight couple; and on and on. Turning some of these tables on the most strident voices, forcing them to confront their own choices and their own personal bigotries, might just beat it into the heads of at least a few of them.

The current whinging will die down soon enough, as these dumb things tend to do. But it will be back, again and again, as the perennial presidential campaign continues apace. We've come a long way on this issue in a very short amount of time -- it was barely ten years ago that ol' Turd Blossom used it as a wedge in the southern states to get the win for his boy Fredo, and to grab a few down-ticket races as a bonus. But people have come around, the anti-marriage laws have been dumped and replaced.

Right now it's being portrayed as "personal rights" or "religious freedom," in much the same way that the Woah o' Nawthun Aggression is about "states' rights." But as Primus said long ago, the flame that burns twice as bright burns only half as long, and this is no exception. Once the brave and noble e-defenders of liberty have moved on to the next imaginary outrage, gay patrons will remember, and they'll be buying their flowers and pizzas elsewhere. In the end, this is not politics, or even religion. It's just business.

Sarahnade

Looks like our favorite MILF (that's Moron I'd Like to Forget, smart guy) has outdone herself once again, to an extent that even tools like Byron York and Billy Kristol, who have never missed an opportunity to rub one out over her, are backing away slowly. Jon Stewart had probably the best line for whatever that stream of semi-drunken blather was burbling out of her cakehole:

“You know, that’s the kind of talk you hear before the pharmacist says, ‘Ma’am, you’ve gotta leave the Walgreens,’ Stewart said after one excerpt. “Now we know what it’s like to get cornered by Palin at an open-bar wedding.”

Perhaps more fascinating (to me, anyway) is the photo making the rounds, of Palin and veteran (and Medal of Honor recipient) Dakota Meyer, holding up an extremely homemade sign saying "Fuc_ You Michael Moore".

The sentiment itself is nothing, obviously, just usual useless woofing from the usual doofi. The interesting part is that Meyer (who presumably took the what appears to be roughly 12 seconds to scribble this thing) chose to self-censor by deleting the "k" from "fuck".

As you might imagine, I am rigorously anti-censorship in general, but really this sort of thing is literally -- and yes, I do mean literally -- incomprehensible to me. The censorship of a mainstream media outlet reporting a quote from someone who dared to say one of The Seven Dirty Words, okay -- I may disagree with it in principle, but I get why they did it. Conventionally a newspaper or magazine will typically print the dreaded f-word as "f***" or maybe "f--k", something like that, enough for you to get the gist without committing too heavily.

But I'll be damned if I understand self-censorship. Use the word you mean to use, by god, and either stand full behind that word, or pick a different one. Don't be fucking mealy-mouthed about it. Their inability to say what they mean to say is annoying as all hell, and again impossible to understand.

Then again, we live in a country where shitty fast food is hawked every ten minutes with a shitty cover of a shitty song about a violent home invasion. Any number of political campaigns have done that and worse, trying to cherry-pick a single phrase from an old hit song, even when the context of the song itself completely undermines the point the candidate is trying to make. Bush-Cheney using Won't Get Fooled Again, but not the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" part. I have never understood that, and I don't understand this removing-the-last-letter thing, like we don't all know what you're talking about, douchebag.

I'm curious as to what sort of dopey asshole thinks they're classin' up the jernt by removing the k from the word fuck. The cognitive dissonance, the inability to see the disconnect between trying to make what you think is a fresh, bold point, while simultaneously diluting its intent and impact.

Then you have the crosshairs in the two o's in "Moore". This is a classic example of some people never learning because they really don't intend to learn anything. Suppose we ask Gabrielle Giffords what she thinks about what crosshairs mean. Their chickenshit denials that they don't want anyone to get hurt are every bit as chickenshit as their ricockulous "fuc_ you" nonsense.

Fortunately, Palin's time seems to be just about up, whether or not she knows it, whether or not she even cares. Nobody cares whether she might really run for office, any more than they care if Donald Trump might run for office, because as dumb as these motherfuckers are, they're at least smart enough to know that neither Palin nor Trump will ever really run, because that's work, that's a job you actually have to show up for, and work with other people.

But the goons that empowered her in the first place, who have moved on to assholes like Ted Cruz now that Palin is used up, reveals herself to be meaner and weirder and dumber with each new appearance, they're still around, still voting against themselves, their families, their communities. They've managed to damn near destroy the country in slightly more than a generation, with nothing more than piss and fear and spite, and an endless supply of bullshit.

(And, of course, the bizarre impracticality of making every potential chief executive applying for the position to genuflect to a state which is statistically much different from the most populous and prosperous states, and contains just one percent of the nation's total population. As opposed to, say, California, where nearly 1 in 9 Americans reside, and which would be a top 10 world economy on its own. Nah, that would make too much sense. Let's let Meth County decide with a hawg-gelding competition.)

Endless Kabuki

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. -- Frank Zappa
Hollywood is like high school, but with money. -- Martin Mull

Traditionally the "silly season" for "news" has been in the summer, since people (somebody, anyway) are on vacation and paying even less attention than usual. But it seems like this week -- heading straight into what is an unseasonably nice weekend here in the NorCal (I'm barbecuing steaks in about an hour, fool, so suck on it, snow country! Global warming, amirite?) -- has had more than its rightful share of sheer nonsense.

Starting with the State of the Union, a completely useless pseudo-political appendage, nothing more than an extended plug for the now-perpetual campaign that undergirds this nation's version of political engagement. Yes, Obama managed a few bons mots at the stone-faced dipshits on the other side of the proverbial aisle. He's always talked a good game, that's how he got in. Walking said talk has always been another matter, the tedious, mindless intransigence of the opposition notwithstanding.

Somewhere along the line, the SOTU has morphed from a routine of the president giving the speech, and an individual from the opposition party being appointed to giving a single rebuttal, to multiple responses in the same key, all of them stupid. It would be one thing if the respondents each had a fresh take or perspective on what, let's face it, is simply a barrage of self-serving hortatory rhetorical boilerplate. But they don't; instead of orchestrating their views, the teatards all play a triangle, and ting it at random intervals, or perhaps to some indiscernible inner rhythm.

I think we all had the most fun with soup-brained cornhole Senator Bread Bags, who apparently grew up in Dust Bowl Oklahoma in the mid 1930s. Listen close, you dingbat -- I grew up poor, with farmers and dairymen in my family (though we didn't get the gubmint subsidies Senator Hawg Ballz' kinfolk got, apparently not enough to buy her actual shoes). I know what it's like to wear the same clothes and shoes two years at a time, to stretch the same dinner three or four nights.

But I never wore bread bags over my shoes, not the least reason for which is that bread bags are not particularly known for their exceptional durability; they are, after all, made specifically to encase a food item which typically lasts less than a week. I mean, we all know these "stories" are 100% grade-A bullshit, but usually there's at least some believability to some of them. Hawg Ballz didn't even bother to brush the peanuts off this one when she pulled it directly out of her ass.

Hey, whatever. If you're the sort that takes some sort of weird "pride" in stuffing plastic bags and cardboard into shoes that really should be replaced, more power to you. Hell, you might be up for the one-two jib-jab of the King and Queen of Holy Derp pretending one more blessed time to throw their pointy hats in the ring. Will anyone fall for it this time?

Do we really need to ask? No matter what the question is, regardless of the ninth-circle example of sheer stupidity, whenever you read it and ask if anyone is really that fucking dumb, invariably someone shuffles forward, finger jammed into nostril up to the third knuckle, as if to say, "Uh, yup."

Trump and Palin are just two of the speakers -- and you know I use the term loosely -- gathered at something called the Iowa Freedom Summit (because "Fuckfest 2016" would have been too obvious). A larger collection of card-carrying shitbirds you will not find outside of a state penitentiary. These are people who literally cannot wait to destroy what's left of their country, spread the profits among themselves, and then find newer and better ways to export said destruction as far and wide as possible.

The icing on this shit sandwich of a news week is the manufactured outrage over Michael Moore and Seth Rogen tweeting smartass remarks of mild dissent regarding Duh Most Patriotic Movie Evar. You see, when it's some frog rag getting lit up over its disparaging remarks about Islam, every conservadouche is suddenly a fucking free-speech champeen, never mind that Charlie Hebdo had said nasty things about the Catholic Church as well. But it's all good because booga-booga-moooslim.

But a couple people say that the movie felt a little propagandistic (gee, ya think?) and even Dean Fucking Cain (hey, I kinda remember him, I think) comes unglued. You would think that Moore had directly referred to Chris Kyle (PBUH) as a "coward," rather than mentioning that because Moore's uncle was killed by a sniper in WW2, Moore's family had routinely referred to that mode of killing as cowardly in general. (For the record, I happen to disagree; for the most part, killing is killing. I'd say a drone bombing of a wedding party is pretty fucking cowardly, though.)

And you'd think that Rogen had called Kyle a Nazi or something, instead of merely alluding to the reputedly (I haven't seen it yet, not in any rush, will probably Netflix it eventually) propagandistic nature of the film. And so now Dean Cain and, um, Kid Rock want to kick Rogen's ass or something.

There's a thread in the tenor of these hirsute defenders of Chris Kyle's sacred honor, as if they themselves had a vested interest. More to the point, the "he did this in order to give you your rights" tack is just nuts. I don't have an issue with Kyle's feelings about the people he shot, or Iraqis and Muslims in general. No doubt most of the individuals Kyle encountered or dispatched were, in fact, what most of us would regard as "savages"; I sure as hell can't think of many better words to describe the sort of motherless fucks who torture people with power drills.

But that is orthogonal to whether Iraq or any of its demonic hordes presented anything resembling an actual threat to the Homeland, or that we even had a clue as to what sort of people we were supporting or aligning ourselves with. "Destabilizing unfriendly regimes" has a nice ring to it, for the ear of the hegemon; the reality of it is much different, now more than ever. But it's not like any of the people Chris Kyle killed from afar were on the verge of hopping a plane the next day so they could strap themselves with Semtex and ball bearing and hit the nearest mall food court. Yet that seems to be the thrust of the arguments, the japing at Moore and Rogen (who, if you haven't heard, are fat).

Maybe when Martin Mull famously opined that showbiz (and that's all any of this is, folks; you might as well have TMZ doing political coverage anymore) was like high school with money, he was being too generous. Because these days it seems more like preschool.

And Jingo Was His Name. Ohhh.

The idea of "freedom of speech" is one of those things that resonates across the political spectrum, even if different people have radically different ideas about what exactly it means. What I think it means ultimately is that everyone has a right to be wrong, and even to be an obnoxious asshole about it. (See:  Party, Tea.) As long it doesn't pick anyone's pocket or break their arm, it can't -- and shouldn't -- be squelched.

So Bradley Cooper bought the film rights to deceased SEAL sniper (and serial fabulist) Chris Kyle's life, and got The Chair Haranguer to direct it. Oscars for everyone! And a perfect opportunity for Joe Average to refuse to flex his brain muscle one more blessed time. Who knew that people only want to see war movies where your side is clearly the good guys?

That's not to say that Michael Moore didn't know what he was instigating with his tweet about snipers being cowards. Moore has certainly made some wonderful movies and excellent points in the past, but he fails to understand what pretty much every liberal save Bill Clinton (who is a "liberal" only in the most technical sense, and only in comparison with the full-blood psychopaths on the other side) fails to understand -- the average 'murkin does not want the facts or discussion. He wants affirmation. He does not want to be challenged in his thoughts about The Troops, although he has yet to write his duly elected representatives to, you know, pay them better.

Even though the US military is obviously the largest in terms of firepower, one of the largest in terms of manpower, and by far the largest in area of deployment, there is actually only a very small percentage of Americans who serve or have served in the military, or even have a family member or friend in the military. Consequently, they are treated with a weird mix of misplaced reverence and outright ignorance. I'm not sure what you do, or why you do it, but I worship you for it, but not enough to keep you off food stamps, or to only send you to die for worthwhile causes. That's what all the ceremonial mumbo-jumbo boils down to, when the rubber meets the proverbial road.

Ceremony ends up mattering more than the people themselves; we would rather fold giant flags in football stadiums and participate in the obligatory 7th-inning stretch ritual than, I dunno, make the VA functional, get them jobs and counseling when they need it after returning. It's much easier to endlessly deal the more-patriotic-than-thou card off the bottom of the deck, than to think or do or say anything remotely useful to anyone besides themselves. Wrap it in a flag with plenty of empty benedictions, and you got yourself any random battle of twits virtually anywhere in this here fine country. It's not that difficult.

Here's what I suspect Joe 'murka's real take on snipers is:  their snipers are cowards, ours are heroes. That's all it ever is.

Animal Crackers

Loath as I am these days to even mention 'murka's favorite concern troll/party crasher (say her name aloud three times facing a mirror and she appears, without makeup, brandishing a straight razor, sort of a political Candyman), there are a couple of seemingly peripheral things that are actually more curious and interesting than the "story" itself:

• While it seems odd that a healthy 6-year old kid that must weigh around 50 pounds or so stands on his dog's back as a step-stool, the dog doesn't seem to mind at all. In a world where the exceptional cruelties of factory farming and canned hunting are routine, this is a big bowl of nothing.
• The only "organized" "response" to the photo is from PETA, which is about as reliable a cross-section of "liberals" as, say, the Oathkeepers adequately represent a meaningful proportion of "conservatives", even the knuckle-dragger types we have these days. PETA has also responded to Palin's typically idiotic response, indicating that they (PETA) are entirely willing to snipe back at Palin and play her little game. Good for them. But to be clear, PETA is an extremist organization, albeit a relatively harmless one (as long as you're not a pet cat or dog looking to get adopted). But you will find no person politically connected with any mainstream liberal organization, or the Democratic Party, who is on record as supporting anything PETA does or says. Yet Palin and her mindless amen corner insist that they are all the same. As is standard with these buffoons, every word, including "and" and "the", is a lie.
• Most curious of all is the dog's name -- Jill Hadassah. The origin and meaning of this name is unclear; the diehard Palin supporters at Powerline (no link because, get this, I don't link to assholes) seem content to believe that the "Hadassah" is a nod to the Zionist women's organization. If true, that weird. Regardless of ideology, I don't know what to make of people who name their pets to accord to their political worldview. (My pet iguanas, Nader and Chomsky, will back me up on this.)
• Scott Johnson at Powerline also averred to the possibility that, since the wives of two recent Democratic vice-presidential candidates (and current VP) are named Jill (Biden) and Hadassah (Lieberman), the dog's name may originate there. That would be pretty pathetic, and seems unlikely, but not impossible to imagine.

The main takeaway is how Palin continues to be able to make (again, solely in the eyes of her deluded supporters, but still) the appearance of something out of absolutely nothing. Her value proposition rests entirely on her perceived ability to tweak the sensitivities of hyper-alert libruls, most of whom exist in their fevered imaginations. It's all just another ankle-biting distraction.

It's Getting Drafty

OK, it's official -- with all the scheduling maneuvers and extensions, the hype and the barrage of ridonkulous mock drafts, the NFL draft has gotten completely out of hand. Already the hype has gotten to where folks are openly speculating if it might be pushed back yet another week, and extended to four days.

All this for something that the most rigorous statistical analysis imaginable can realistically characterize as a crapshoot. It's stunning to consider, even more so when factoring in the NCAA's recent problems with college players suddenly wanting to, you know, get paid for the profit they add to their schools' balance sheets.

These are situations and dynamics which will continue to get more, not less, problematic. The prognostication industry, despite its newer and better econometric regression analysis tools and formulas, is no better at determining how a random human being will work out with a team of random human beings, run by yet another staff of random human beings.

This is relevant because, at its cold heart, the NFL is a corporation, and as such, is a fairly rational indicator of business behavior and expectations. Modes of strategy, tactics, leadership, motivation, and especially public relations are inherent in virtually any NFL activity. So at the very least, it will be interesting to see how the corporation handles its eventual overreach in extending what used to be a fairly routine, mundane annual task.

Outkicking the Coverage

Still trying to process both sides of the meta-issue surrounding gay marriage: on the one hand, people should be able to register their opinions without fear of retribution, and businesses (especially small businesses) as a rule of thumb ought to be able to refuse service to whomever they choose; on the other hand, substitute the word "black" for "gay" in each of these instances, and see how that all resonates.

The acceptability of gay marriage has taken place with such speed and scale and breadth that it is difficult to keep up with it, and therefore difficult to develop sufficient mechanisms for talking about people who, less than a decade ago, were on the side of a clear majority, and now find themselves scrambling to find a viable role as principled dissenters.

There is a very clear distinction between, say, the late and unlamented Fred Phelps' psychotic, traitorous death cult, obsessing to an unholy degree over the very existence of homosexuals, and a small bakery or mom-and-pop photo studio that just isn't comfortable with providing services to something they don't believe in. It doesn't excuse the latter group from growing up on the issue, mind you, but they probably also don't deserve to get dragged into court over it.

Where the linked article makes a categorical error is in lumping every instance of late into a half-baked dish of opinions and outcomes. What happened with Phil Robertson, Brendon Eich, and the state of Arizona, all of them employees or business concerns being pressured by the interests of capitalism and customer pressure, is simply the way things work. Each of those folks said or did something that many gays found insulting, and activist groups, by definition, mobilized and made it clear that, well, gays collectively have enough discretionary income to respond in kind. In other words, they made it clear that they don't have to take shit from people who depend on customers, be they teevee viewers or tourists. Simple as that.

We all see instantly how offensive, in just the last couple of days, the comments from LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and teahadi ranchtard Cliven Bundy have resonated. There's just nothing debatable or defensible there. Well, Phil Robertson has repeatedly compared gays to criminals, drunkards, bestial enthusiasts. Should gays have to take shit from some pigfucking hillbilly, or do they have the right to tell Robertson's employer that maybe they won't patronize their product anymore?

Arizona was ready to legitimize the "turn away the gay" rights of businesses, and in a state that earns a good chunk of revenue from tourism, and is hosting the next Super Bowl, it became clear pretty quickly that their moralizing was going to cost them. Everything has its price.

Again, when we compare the ledger on each side, I would say that these noble, principled dissenters who suddenly find themselves unjustly persecuted for merely speaking their wittle minds, need to take a look at the big picture. In more than half the US states, people can still be fired just for being gay. No one, to my knowledge, has ever been beaten or killed for voicing their opinion against gay marriage, or homosexuals in general.

I think they're mostly just surprised at how quickly the tide of opinion turned against what they had thought was safe and acceptable. And that's okay, for a while, but it's time to get the memo, and understand that this dialogue -- a dialogue, let's remember, about the lives and rights of a group of consenting, law-abiding, tax-paying adults -- is back-and-forth. Each side has an inalienable right to call bullshit on the other for disingenuousness and intellectual dishonesty, and to vote accordingly with their wallets if necessary. Ain't that America?

Offensensitivity

Perhaps because the majority of the country has changed so much and so quickly on the issue, "gay marriage" is developing a set of meta-issues, and rather absurd ones at that. Now the question is longer whether discriminating against gay couples bears the same nasty whiff that discriminating against interracial couples did 40-50 years ago.

The most recent and persistent epiphenomenon is the martyrdom meme, perhaps best characterized in the self-imposed travails of Duck Dynasty honcho Phil Robertson and Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, the latter who was forced to resign for his contribution to California's Proposition 8 campaign back in 2008. So now Conor Friedersdorf's correspondent seems to epitomize the sort of person who feels aggrieved at whatever chilling effect is supposed to have taken place, as far as "allowing" what the aggrieved feel is legitimate difference of opinion.

And so it is, to a certain extent. Ostensibly, one of the great strengths of this country is that everyone has the right to be wrong, and even to be an asshole about it, so long as said opinion picks no pockets and breaks no arms. And that's where the problem arises, since in more than half of US states, you can be fired just for being gay in the first place, forget trying for a supposedly meaningless equal right to get married.

Nothing in life is absolute, and this applies to the Bill of Rights as well; you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't bring an assault rifle into a courthouse. There are balances that are struck all along the way in these sorts of debates, and hey guess what -- the First Amendment doesn't apply to companies and places of work. You can be an asshole, and other people can call you such. That's how it works.

That means that you can -- and should -- be fired from your job if you, say, host a website that advocates race war or features the crushing of small animals for the amusement of fucking creeps, even if such things happen not to be against the law (inexplicably, in the latter instance). You can, in fact, be fired from your job just for saying something impolitic, if your boss happens to feel that said speech costs the company sales and revenue. This is not exactly a secret or a surprise, and yet here you have grown-ass adults genuinely shocked that their sincerely, deeply held spiritual beliefs do not automatically grant them immunity from the consequences of discourse.

That's at least part of the reason why so many of us choose to blog in relative anonymity -- not to completely absolve ourselves from any and all consequences of what we might say out here on the internets, but because we are aware that even if we say something that is logical and accurate, we can still be held liable for it, if it has an adverse (or even a potential or perceived) impact on any organization we might be part of.

This particular issue is an opportunity to examine the idea that one's beliefs, no matter how sincere, do not automatically immunize them from participating in the same verbal scrum as the rest of us. I promise you, the small hint of opprobrium, of "hate" and "fear" as the CF correspondent put it, is a drop in the bucket compared to what "outsider" groups have felt even in the last generation or two, from gays to atheists to civil rights and antiwar protesters.

I think those folks and many others would find the idea hilarious, that someone could say something they have a pretty good idea will hit a significant portion of people the wrong way, and still expect to be exempt from even legitimate criticism (as opposed to, you know, the discrimination and violence that many dissenting groups have routinely faced). It may not be 100% "fair" to ostracize or fire someone for voicing the "wrong" opinion, but it is also not the duty of the rest of society to wait around for these people to start unpacking their ideological baggage, and letting it go, once and for all.

Plane and Simple

Have you had enough "missing plane" coverage yet? Well, I'm no Courtney Love, but I think Dr. Samuel L. Jackson may provide a clue as to what really happened.

Get the Duck Out

And you thought the "War" on Christmas was bad, as far as imaginary grievances go. This is one of those pseudo-cultural eructations that gives me the urge to shoot out the teevee and the computer, and head for a nice cabin deep in the woods. This country has lost whatever it had left for a mind.

For the record, I don't much care one way or the other about what Phil Robertson had to say about anything, anymore that I would care about what Spongebob Squarepants or the bottle blonde from The Big Bang Theory had to say about anything. (But you should read the entire article for yourself, simply because it's an interesting story, and Drew Magary, originally "Big Daddy Drew" at Kissing Suzy Kolber, is a damn good writer.) What Magary noted in his follow-up to the now-infamous article is about what I would have assumed -- that the Robertsons are essentially decent folk, a bit different, but we're all a bit different in our own way, I suppose.

The difference is that most of us don't have an employee-employer relationship with a cable network. Remember way back when last weekend, where we talked about how everything you see on teevee, no matter how much you lurve it, no matter how much integrity you might think it has, exists mainly to sell you shit? That, in spades. Maybe the Robertsons seriously think that the show is just a harmless bit of fun, where they get to goof around, make sure the world knows how much they love them some Jebus, and soak the rubes for swag and hundred-dollar duck calls.

But A&E -- you know, the network that airs the show and has a vested interest in protecting the brand -- just wants to keep the gravy train on the tracks. So when the lead character of its hillbilly sitcom goes and starts speaking his mind in a way that might make sponsors nervous, it's a bidness problem, pure and simple.

Swamp Thing

So....religious hillbillies turn out to be exactly what they say they are, and people seem to be shocked, surprised, dismayed even.

Or, you know, it could just be another lame publicity ploy, bullshit to make the pop-culture machine churn. Gosh, can't imagine it might be that.

What We've All Learned From Paula Deen

Jayzus. A whole week of navel-gazing, shirt-tearing, tearful nonsense, and ham-fisted apologies. And that was just Matt Lauer. [Hi-yoooo! - Ed.]

Really, did the largely self-imposed travails of 'murka's Buttah Queen evolve into some sort of nuanced, sophisticated observation of the nation's (not just the South, though they're obviously the most grievous, entrenched offender) race issues? Of course not. It turned into the predictable sideshow of Deen wallowing in abject, self-pitying burble. Pro tip:  even nailing oneself to the proverbial cross is easier with a stick of butter, y'all.

No, it just turned into another reminder that in a nation of 320 million people, a good chunk of them can only self-actualize and express themselves via consumerism. So of course as Deen is losing endorsers almost hourly, her cookbooks are flying off Amazon's virtual shelves. This is of a piece with last August, where we saw hordes of sweaty hillbillies racing their Hoverounds down to the nearest Chick-Fil-A to show their solidarity with the gay-bashing CEO. The idea that any of these acts might qualify as expressions of intellectual coherence tells you a lot about the folks indulging in those acts.

So it went as these things typically go, and ended up being almost not at all about Paula Deen, and whatever or how long ago her transgressions were. It's much more about a substantial chunk of like-minded people, who jes' don't see whut awl the fuss is about, where peoples just is whut they is, y'all.

Instead of helping Deen hide behind her lame "I'm just an old lady who was raised that way" defense, her enablers might consider that Deen was nearly 20 years old when the civil rights movement came to fruition, when southerners were forced to confront the moral ramifications of murdering college students, picking on schoolchildren, and siccing dogs and turning firehoses on people who had the nerve to be tired of that shit and said so.

There was a choice to be made then and there, and Deen, while obviously not a cross-burning, hood-wearing knuckle-dragger, chose like most southerners to pretend that offensive symbolism and ofay "humor" were just part of that fabled suthuhn cultcha. The anecdote she told about her great-great-grandfather killing himself after "losing" his "workers" tells you everything you need to know about that Lost Cause mentality, just completely obtuse, the stubborn refusal to see what has been right in front of them all along.

I don't know that Deen needs to have her career ruined over this particular kerfuffle, but I do know that her apologies seem to lazily trace the shopworn "I'm sorry if you were offended" trope of the insincere buffoon who isn't even quite sure what they did wrong. It mostly conveys the possibility that Deen hasn't really thought much about any of this, at least not deeply enough to understand why the descendants of the people her great-great grandfather owned might take umbrage at some of this.

People not from the south wonder what it will take for southerners to unscrew their heads from their asses on this thorny subject, why they can't just admit what everyone knows -- that the Civil War really was about slavery, and that slavery was and is a stain on this nation's soul. The South's greatest writer famously noted that the past is never over, nor even past, and that's part of it.

But it's also the inability of the remaining crackers to just admit these things to themselves, much less to outside observers. This refusal to acknowledge obvious historical facts -- facts corroborated by the papers of the Confederacy itself -- produces a condition where their backs are just instinctively up on this subject. It's not hard to see why -- to acknowledge the atrocity is to admit complicity, in a way, because they've so stridently defended the excesses and symbols all this time.

I don't think there's anything to talk them into or out of, all we can do is make sure to call "bullshit" when it's uttered.

[Update 6/30 1:37 PDT:  Also, too. If even half of what's alleged there is true, Deen and her goon brother deserve exactly what they're getting, and worse.]

It Was the Beast of Times, It Was the Wurst of Times

With the "revelations" about the NSA's domestic spying program, helpfully provided by a private contractor because outsourcing rulez, I suppose most of us find ourselves on a particular fence. On the one hand duh, this is a confirmation more than anything else, certainly not informing any sentient being of something they didn't already know or at least presume.

And in a nation of chronic over-sharers, where the Fourth Amendment is just a hazy memory, is this really a massive transgression? Is this going to make Chat Rouletters self-conscious, worried that the gubmint might be looking on them rabidly masturbating with a stranger?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they can build all the zettabyte storage hives out in the Utah desert that they want, and it's still just a massive garage. There is simply too much data, too many emails, phone calls, what have you, to randomly sift through. It's all search algorithms and tracking (and retroactively tracking) known entities.

You want a career tip, kids? Come up with a slightly better automated regression analysis tool that can work through these ginormous data backloads, and sell massive contracts for the licensing to that software to Big Brutha. You're welcome.

On the other hand....well, where to start? Even his supporters no longer consider Obama any sort of transformative figure, merely a perfidious, mediocre bulwark against much more transgressive opponents. But elected -- even in a bullshit election -- representatives typically reflect their constituencies. So one might safely assume that a bored, intellectually lazy populace that mouths pieties about "privacy" and "rights", but really wants daddy to do "whatever it takes" and not tell them about it, will sooner or later park another venal Dick Cheney type at the levers of power and unaccountability.

All of the things "purist" liberals have castigated Obama over -- drones, IRS searches, now this -- have been underpinned by this very real concern, that a less reliable character gets in, with all these nifty superpowers at his disposal. Obama, as a con-law-prof, knows this better than anyone, that these powers he arrogates unto himself will at some point pass to a psycho or an idiot or an asshole, with no checks or balances to offset clear precedents.

This is part of the current design of the system, though, a center-right party either mewling ineffectively against their far-right opponents, or acting in cahoots with them, and getting away with it because their captive-market supporters are sufficiently cowed by the utter insanity of the far-righters. Yet they are operationally more alike than different; on issues that actually affect your life in a day-to-day respect, they are nearly identical, as a clear majority of 'murkins are never going to marry someone of the same gender or seek an abortion.

It is not a coincidence or a mistake that "both" parties share major donors, some of whom have a vested interest in seeing the impending health care "reform" changes get diluted even more, since having the foxes write henhouse legislation in the first place just wasn't quite enough. Once the talking heads are done huffing and puffing their manufactured outrage, get ready for a fall season of "scandal fatigue" stories, the better to soften up the constituencies for the rentier class to call in their chips on their congresscritters.

Godwin's Lawn

Via a commenter at G&T comes this pearl-clutching hilarity:

I'm sure the Jews, among others, will be delighted to hear that it is now "absolutely not illegal" to have government agents targeting a particular minority among the population.

You know how it goes: "first they came for the conservatives, but I was not a conservative...."

Wow, like, fuckin' seriously, Chief? The operative verb 'mongst various scaremongers and effect-chillers is "target" -- as in, the big bad gubmint "targeted" these poor, poor teabaggers.

Naw, son, this is targeting:

See, what the IRS did to the 'baggers was sweat them on their insistence on tax-exempt status. That's all. Really? Yeah, really. No one got dragged to jail, or sent off to a camp, or even lost any actual money. But because a good number of these shitheads were being bankrolled by scumbag millionaires who don't have the balls to let the peons see what they do under cover of darkness, the gubmint decided to do its job, and make sure that the requirements for 501(c)(4) status were actually being met.

Was this high, dastardly crime perpetrated by the eeeeevil islamocommienazimoooslim wizard, presumably while on a break from blowing up Benghazi and causing hurricanes to rise from the ocean? I dunno, was Bush personally behind siccing the IRS on the NAACP and Greenpeace?

It is this, over everything else, that I loathe about the self-satisfied teabaggers and their tedious jabber -- it's all of a convenience. The economy started going in the shitter in 2007; they conveniently waited until March of 2009, when the new guy had barely even gotten the seat warm, to start their righteous jihad. They're up in arms over Benghazi, as if no diplomatic personnel had gotten killed in the previous administration, or that teabagger representatives dumped the State Department's request for more money to beef up security at embassies around the world. They're whining about it like Benghazi is the Biggest Thing Evah, even though almost half of them don't even know what fucking country Benghazi's in. Smooth move, morons.

And now this happy horseshit, a political reversal of similar activities perpetrated by the previous occupants of power, but of course that didn't matter then, because IOKIYAR. Not only do they get to ignore the exact same actions just a few years ago from their own party, but they get to extrapolate the current idiocy into yet another dark, sinister conspiracy, to invoke Hitler. Look, assholes, if this country is turning into a concentration camp, then how is it that you're on the fucking internets all day whinging about it. Jesus, Obama's even worse at this fascism thing than he is at the socialism.

Well, hope they enjoy that while it lasts. They're in for a tough haul, most likely; the only reason the Goopers are able even to cause this much disruption is because of their carefully gerrymandered districts. That might hold the fort for them until the next census, but by then the country will be browner, younger, poorer per capita. Meanwhile, they've overinvested in the freakshow wingnuts who, to say the least, critically undermine their constant plaints about smaller, less intrusive gubmint.

White People Problems

If the contents of my spam folder on any given day are an indication, there are almost literally numberless ways one can cadge a fair-to-decent living on these here intarnetz. So, uh, I have to ask -- did a new bidness model start up Sunday night, where commenters are getting paid to start with some variation on "I'm way too cool for school to own a teevee/watch the Oscars/see a Hollywood film" and end with some form of "....Seth McFarlane was waaay out of line with [pick a random bit]"? Because that's really what it seems like.

Look. I get that there is, sadly, an honest-to-Jebus industry around this one night, where overpaid ninnies strut and preen and stroke each other all night, and media minions press their noses up against the kewl-kids' restaurant window to sour-grapes their way through the ensuing week. Aside from England, bless its barnacle-encrusted hull, no country has mastered the art of making the truly inconsequential seem meaningful the way the American PR industry has. The vaunted ceremony and "pageantry" are, in and of themselves, more than a little unseemly to begin with, though in much different ways than McFarlane's stock in trade.

And McFarlane has become obscenely wealthy peddling the same cheesy frat-boy and bathroom schtick over and over again in Family Guy (not to mention its iterations in American Dad and The Cleveland Show). Some of it works, some not so much, some is just played out at this point, which McFarlane himself has tacitly acknowledged in more than one interview.

But it's undeniable that McFarlane has genuine layers of talent that aren't really out there in great quantities -- he's obviously a very gifted voice actor, can actually sing well, and clearly reveres not only many of the '80s fetish objects he routinely skewers, but also big-band classics and somewhat deeper cuts (in this day and age) such as the Hope/Crosby Road movies. McFarlane's sensibility is clearly much more fartsy than artsy, but he's also not your typical bonehead Jackass fan.

And that's more or less what he did, at least for the 70% or so of the show that I watched. Yes, the Captain Kirk/We Saw Your Boobs thing went on way too long, like most Family Guy bits, but even that is part of McFarlane's schtick, the meta joke of taking some stock borscht-belt dead fish and beating you over the head with it until there's nothing left but a dorsal fin and a bad smell. Which is to say, there were absolutely no surprises. They got what they paid for.

The show producers sought McFarlane in order to pull the young male demographic, not usually the Oscars' sweet spot. Apparently it worked in that regard, insofar as any young males would have been an improvement for the show. But the legitimacy of the show itself has played out, and it's like the producers don't quite understand that; I would be willing to wager that the number of people who really have the urge to see, say, a musical salute to 50 years of James Bond movies, is at the very least dwindling, if not almost completely non-existent.

So they brought the Family Guy guy in to provide some edge on what is essentially a bowling ball of a show, something with no edge whatsoever. Everybody keeps clamoring for Tina Fey, and I agree she is wonderful and would make a great host for anything, but maybe they were watching a different 30 Rock than I was for seven years, because I saw a show that routinely had some of the raunchiest and most thinly veiled double-entendres this side of South Park. Plus, you know, at least as many cutaway gags and non-sequiturs as Family Guy. I mean, I love Werewolf Barmitzvah and all, but there's not a huge amount of qualitative daylight between that and the giant chicken gags (which was obviously the point).

Fey is very clever in incorporating her natural "cool nerd chick" persona into the things she writes, but in her SNL days as well, she was never shy about getting her hands dirty for a laugh. Fey might be slightly more respectful of the process, because she has a family and still makes movies, where McFarlane couldn't care less, since he's rich enough to not have to care, and clearly just wants to spend the rest of his life banging every sweet young thing in Hollywood. But they're both pretty raunchy when they want to be, and frankly, that's what this puffy-shirt of an annual stroke-fest needs in the first place. Whether it's politically correct or not is -- or at least should be -- irrelevant. It's not like he called a nine-year-old the C word.

I'm not saying they need to bring in Gilbert Gottfried to do a roast or read excerpts from Fifty Shades of Grey, but I will unequivocally say that three hours of group fellatio bookended with weeks of fawning adulation and passive aggression is a dead entertainment model, except for the Kardashians.

Next year they'll bring back Billy Crystal to dutifully clean up yet another hosting snafu that they asked for. The talkerati will sharpen their snark crayons to a nub and talk shit about some 125 lb. tubbelard in a tight dress, and the usual 'net suspects can convene to remind each other that they're still too cool to watch this shit, but they heard it was really fucking boring.

Super Bowl Prediction

From the "better to be lucky than good" department, looks like my prediction from two weeks ago was almost down to the exact points. If only I had put money on it. Good game regardless, and the Niners, who are still young and healthy and rolling, will probably be back much sooner than the Ravens, who will have valuable pieces on defense to try to replace, and who still have to re-sign Joe Flacco, whose rate just went up.

Oh, and....Randy Moss still doesn't get that ring. Haw haw.

Inauguration Karaoke

Apparently we're all supposed to be mortified, or have an opinion, over what's-her-face's lip-synching at the inaugural ceremony. I find it difficult to either know or care the answer to this one. Since she yanked her earpiece out mid-song, it seems more likely that she was singing along with a backing "pad" of pre-recorded music, and somehow fell off the rhythm just a hair.

Live music, in any large venue, has become more about the event than the music anyway. Many bands and musicians are not 100% live nowadays. This is sad, but it should also gove pause, provide a small opportunity for people to think about what their expectations are with live performances. If you want satisfactory, predictable wallpaper, then this choreographed, Autotuned, lip-synching guff is right up your alley. If you want spontaneity, unpredictability, interaction with the audience, the give and take of volatile energy, go to a club.

As far as a presidential inauguration ceremony, I have no clue why you would bother in the first place, if the musicians are not actually going to do it live. What's the point? It's a question one could ask of a great many things in American life these days. That's sad; maybe I'm having a bit of an Andy Rooney moment here, but it seems like more things used to have an actual point to them, or at least a reason for being.

The thing is, she'll be doing it all over again next week at the Super Bowl next weekend, and the usual bozos will ponder the exact same imponderables, as if they had not seen the Black Guy Pees' noble effort at last year's big game. When presented with the choice between actual live music and mere choreographed spectacle, most will select the latter. As the saying goes, this is what you wanted, this is what you got.

Royal Flush

Okay, this is another one of those things you can just go ahead and file under "I don't get the outrage". A person taking their own life is always tragic, don't get me wrong. Permanent solution to a temporary problem, as they say.

But does anyone seriously believe that anyone would hurt or kill themselves over being pranked by a morning zoo radio show, or even that the DJs should have taken such an outcome into consideration before making the call? Really? Because honestly, it's barely conceivable to me that Jacintha Saldanhas would have even been fired from her job, unless she had willfully committed a huge violation of well-known hospital policy. Something else was clearly going on with her; this was at most a last-straw kind of thing.

Maybe this affords the media an opportunity to step back for a second, take a deep breath, and ponder the logical outcomes -- none of them possibly good, at best merely neutral and inert -- to spending the next six months swamping morons with meaningless "preggers" nonsense, acting like one of the most routine human activities is somehow special and unique this time around.

Seriously, from of the weirdos the mediots have whipped up on this, you'd think no one had ever fucking gotten pregnant before, like evar.