Speaking of the pet calendar, please get your entries in! The first deadline was yesterday.
Look for Pet Calendar Info in the upper right, just under the balloon man; that’s where you’ll find the info if you’re on a computer or a tablet in landscape mode. If you’re on a phone, or on a tablet in portrait mode, look for it in the hamburger; that’s what some people call the 3 horizontal lines (top right) on a mobile device.
John is planning a couple of In Memoriam pages at the front of the 2020 BJ Pet Calendar, and we need your help.
Do you have a favorite comment by General Stuck or Schlemazel? Stories from a meetup with efgoldman? Something you learned from greennotGreen or Scotian?
Was there an epic fight between the General and Cornerstone? You know, more than the usual. A favorite Charlie story? Words of wisdom from Schlemazel? Something that greennotGreen shared that particularly touched you?
Do you know some charming thing about one of our beloved commenters that we would all love to hear about? Something that would make us laugh, or wipe our eyes?
I searched for each person, and there are 461 pages of threads that match with efgoldman, 67 for greennotGreen, 217 for Schlemazel, 1302 for General Stuck, and 12 pages for Scotian.
There may be more for pages for General Stuck, but he changed his nym fairly frequently and I don’t remember all the nyms he used. Searching for “stuck” gave the best results and found a couple of his nyms. Do you guys remember any nyms for Stuck besides General Stuck and General Winfield Stuck? (edit: Stuck in the Funhouse, supplied by Librarian.)
Do you remember the spelling of the other nym was that was close to Schlemazel, but not exactly that? Or what his original nym was before he switched it to one of those? Satby did some sleuthing, and it was Schlemizel in 2012. That gives us a few more years of his comments.
I know he and I had a long conversation about why he changed his nym, but to find that one I need to know the original spelling before it became Schlemazel. If I could find that conversation, I think we could find what his first nym had been.
Reminder: all of efgoldman’s original comments were somehow corrupted on the old site and were no longer there in the old database when we checked about year ago. Any comments that efgoldman REPLIED to are in there. So if EF wrote a comment about the awesome watermelon he found at the farmer’s market, that comment is not in the wordpress database. But if YOU wrote a comment about the awesome watermelon you found, and efgoldman replied to your comment, his reply will be in there.
We have at least a couple of folks with great Google Fu – Steeplejack and Another Scott. They did some efgoldman sleuthing last year, and I believe Steep is making a last ditch effort with a 2-year old backup to see if any of efgoldman’s comments can be found. If there’s something that was important that you haven’t been able to find, maybe they can help us out? Subaru Diane, I hope you see this, too!
In the meantime, if you have stories, memories, or quotes to share, jump right in!
Let’s take this great idea of John’s and turn it into something special. Are you guys up for that?
Update: We want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute ideas for the In Memoriam section, if you so desire. Since the deadline is so short, if you think you might be proposing something over the next few days, please pipe up in the comments IN THIS THREAD to let us know that so we can plan for more input. Or not. Thank You!
Update 12/10: If you would like to contribute further to the In Memoriam portion of the calendar, please send email to WaterGirl at the balloon-juice address.
chopper
there was that one time efgoldman said ‘fuckem’.
WaterGirl
@chopper: hahahahaha
debbie
Laverne and Shirley sang “Schlemezal, Schlemazel” but that first one is a made-up word. The actual word (I believe) is “Schlemiel” so you might want to try that, or some variation of it.
Mary G
I tried to find a Stuck quote I love yesterday and went through about nine days of posts and had 10 things. It’s hard to choose.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: It is hard. Maybe you can narrow it down to 5 and put them here in separate comments?
zhena gogolia
I’ll just repeat what I said in John’s initial thread — My God, just looking at this list — “General Stuck, efgoldman, greennotGreen, Scotian, schlemazel” — I got tears in my eyes and was overwhelmed with memories of people I never laid eyes on, but whose unique and irreplaceable souls shone forth on this blog.
Mnemosyne
Not to get all supernatural on everyone, but if all of efgoldman’s comments mysteriously disappeared from the database, maybe that’s not how he wants to be remembered?
zhena gogolia
General Stuck: Full of kindness, loved Charlie so much, had a wry and cynical take on politics
efgoldman: Loved music, adored his wife and family, gave the word “curmudgeon” new glamour
scotian and greennotgreen I will always remember for their calm courage in the face of death and their willingness to bring us along on the journey
Schlemazel: He was a mensch
The Pale Scot
Laverne & Shirley Show Opening
Really, that one was easy, maybe “Squiggy” is another one
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: Except all his replies are still there. :-) So unless he was making a judgment about his ability to make an original comment, which I find highly unlikely, I think we’re good. Plus, it’s no surprise to me that the database was corrupt. I’m sure we lost more than just efgoldman’s comments, it’s just that now don’t know what the other ones are yet. That’s my take, for what’s it’s worth.
Librarian
One of Stuck’s nyms was Stuck in the Funhouse.
WaterGirl
@Librarian: Yes it was! Just did a search on that, yay!
edit: And of course a librarian would know something like that. :-)
germy
WaterGirl
WaterGirl
Photo ideas for the In Memoriam page:
– Charlie (I know we can’t download, but I doubt the General would mind if we took a screen capture of an awesome Charlie photo and put a little version of the photo in the General Stuck section.
– Tunch
– Ellie and Happy Walter with antlers, living his best life with debit and crew at Christmastime.
Sab
Scotian’s sister still has the Gofundme site open ( David MacDonald.) He was, characteristcally modest in his request. His sister thought more would be needed. We stopped donating when he died. Sister asked for 50,000. We stopped at 15,000. I know nothing about them personally.
WaterGirl
Not entirely shocked that the site had trouble with a bunch of us (likely) searching the 12BG indexed database at the same time.
Another Scott
I’ve posted before that a lot of efg’s stuff is at the Wayback Machine. I don’t know how to easily search for all of his comments there (if it’s even possible), but the latest thing I’ve been able to quickly find is in North Carolina Legislative Coup Under Cover of Law is Underway from December 14, 2016 (captured on 12/16/2016). Anyone wanting to look for his wit and wisdom can poke around there.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@WaterGirl: Is there a way to run a wildcard search? My MySQL knowledge is rusty but I think you should be able to use something like:
The exact query would of course depend upon the query language and the names of fields and tables, but that might find you several variants of “Stuck”, which to be fair, probably weren’t the only names he used, but I bet several variants that people have forgotten might turn up. I have no idea how FYWP’s comment database works, and someone has probably already thought of this, but just wanted to make sure all bases were covered.
…also, it feels really weird to use code tags for something that’s not sarcasm on one of these blogs.
Regarding the missing comments… no one has older backups lying around somewhere? I know a lot of servers run automated backups, but probably only keep them for a limited time. Then again, that’s probably occurred to someone here already too. Just want to make sure nothing got overlooked.
I wish I had something pertinent to add about our departed commenters. efgoldman was the only one I felt like I knew even a tenth as well as I should have liked, and even then, I still feel like people who were here longer than I was knew him a lot better. I best remember his love of music and I remember the fuckems. The phrase has to be spelt fuckem now; I will not accept any other spelling. It doesn’t feel the same when anyone else says it, but I still try to keep it alive in his honour.
(…come to think of it, my paraphrase of Cato the Elder at the end of each of my comments is really just a wordier version of “Fuckem”.)
Ceterum censeo factionem Republicanam esse delendam.
satby
Found this great one from Schlemizel (earlier iteration of Schlemazel):
Schlemizel
NOVEMBER 23, 2012 AT 2:38 PM
I know this is a repost & even worse it is a repost of my own post and in the same thread but I hope you forgive me, I really liked this & wanted it cleaned up a bit
DEAR EDITOR:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no war on Christmas. Papa says, ‘If you see it on FAUX News it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a War on Christmas?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.
No war on Christmas?
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by rationality in an irrational age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not provable by rational observation. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, can be little. The reaction to this great universe of ours can be for man to be a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a war on Christmas. It exists as certainly as hate and stinginess and demagoguery exist, and you know that they abound and give to their life its highest ugly and lowest meaning. Alas! How merry might be the world if there were a war on Christmas. It might be as merry as if there were no teabagers. There would be no inchoate hate then, no petty sniping, no panic to make less tolerable this existence. We should have enjoyment, except in insensate cruelty and slights. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be increased.
Not believe in the war on Christmas! You might as well not believe in T-bone eating Bucks! You might get your papa to hire men to watch all of FAUX News to catch the war dispatches, but even if they did not witness BillO frothing at the mouth, what would that prove? Nobody sees the war on Christmas, but that is a sign that there is a real war on Christmas. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see (according to FAUX News). Did you ever see welfare queens driving Cadillacs on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the evils there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
No war on Christmas!? Thank God! it lives, and it lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, it will continue to make mad the ‘brains’ of morans.
Ohio Mom
As Leo Rosten explains in “The Joys of Yiddish,” “A shlemiel is a man who is always spilling hot soup — down the neck of a shlimazl.”
When you think about circumstances of Schlemazel’s final illness, his Nym is almost too painfully ironic.
Yutsano
@satby: Put that on December or GTFO.
I have an anecdote about Mr. EF goldman, but I’m trying to figure out how to word it.
Patricia Kayden
Efgoldman was a frequent commenter at LGM too. Not sure if you want to collaborate with them in your memoriam though.
OzarkHillbilly
I have fond memories (well, actually feelings) of all the above. And a few not so fond (feelings anyway) of all the above (remember that time they s/he pissed me off with that totally out of left field comment???? Yeah! WTF were we talking about? Why can’t I remember it? It was important, Dawg Dammit!!!!) Except for Schlemazel. I don’t think he ever said anything that pissed me off in any way, shape or form. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always knew if he said something I didn’t agree with, I needed to take another look at it. A true mensch.
What can I say? Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…
You get the idea.
J R in WV
I always thot Efgoldman mostly said “fuck ’em…”
That seems the more correct way to say it than mashing the two words together. I could sure be wrong; I’m getting pretty old and your memory isn’t what it once was. My wife says I am now often wrong but never unsure… and that could be true.
Has anyone thought of General Stuck’s hummingbird pictures?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/oxpecker/5022265580/in/photostream/ seems to still work well…
WaterGirl
@(((CassandraLeo))):
No stone was left unturned. Trust me on this. The only remaining possibility is the 2-year old WP database from the old BJ test server. I arranged with the developer to go through that database once we rolled out to see if the efgoldman original comments were in there in any form, so they could be pulled in some way and even though they couldn’t be in the BJ wordpress database, at least they would not be lost forever. I give it less than a 1% chance. It’s worth doing but I don’t have much hope.
WaterGirl
Just a reminder that we are asking you to post any and all quotes, stories, etc in the comments of this thread, so all the input is in a single place. Thank you!
eclare
This always touched me:
WaterGirl
@eclare: That’s a good one. Thanks for finding it. As I read your comment just now, I flashed back to the coffee shop and where I was sitting when I read that when she first wrote it, and i started crying in the coffee shop.
J R in WV
OK, General Stuck posted to Flickr as Sam from NM, and at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/oxpecker/5010151992/in/photostream/
I hit a
motherloadcouple of pics of Charlie, the pooch, with “Charlie says GO Reds” as the first title of a photo.As I page through, there are also some landscape photos in there too..
And more of Charlie the dawg.
MoxieM
@WaterGirl: Just lovely.
And naturally, followed by a hearty, “Fuckem!!” for Old Lang Syne.
(It really is a lovely thought and the best way to do life. Thank you for sharing.)
getsmartin
@J R in WV: Thanks for that link. I do recall Stuck’s excellent hummingbird photos. He and I had corresponded about technique a bit and I recall he was more than pleased to share his insights.
WaterGirl
@MoxieM: I think you are probably replying to the quote from greennotGreen? Someone had sent it by email and I was pasting it in when I saw that eclare had just posted it herself, so I quickly deleted the comment I had just posted. Since your @watergirl doesn’t go anywhere, I am guessing that is what you were responding to, yet?
beth
hey, just popping in to thank everyone who has sent in a photo for the calendar so far. you should have received a reply acknowledging i got your photo. if you sent something and haven’t heard back from me, check the address and send it again, please.
i also want to reiterate that we are doing this on an insane deadline so please be sure to get your photos in soon if you haven’t already. a gentle reminder of the deadlines and let me know if you have any questions:
Q. What’s the deadline for sending photos?
A. Your photos must be submitted by this coming Monday, Dec 9, but it’s even better if you can submit your photos by this Friday, Dec 6.
Q. What if I sent my 2020 calendar photos in earlier this year?
A. If you sent calendar photos earlier this year, please send them again.
Q: What happens if I don’t get my photos in on time? Am I out of luck?
A: Send the photos and ask whether it’s too late. If you get them in by Dec 12, you have a fighting chance, but there’s no guarantee.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@J R in WV: The surviving replies I’ve been able to find from him have it as one word, which matches with my recollection. It’s possible he only took to writing it as one word later on, though.
…anyway, at least you’re expressing uncertainty at this point, so I guess the “never unsure” part isn’t true now, at least. lol
@WaterGirl: I was afraid of that. Too bad. At least his comments on LGM are still intact (or were last I checked, anyway).
Would the wildcard search work for Stuck?
Ceterum censeo factionem Republicanam esse delendam.
WaterGirl
We want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute ideas for the In Memoriam section, if you so desire. Since the deadline is so short, if you think you might be proposing something over the next few days, please pipe up in the comments IN THIS THREAD to let us know that so we can plan for more input. Or not. Thank You!
WaterGirl
@(((CassandraLeo))): You can search for “stuck” and “general stuck” and “stuck in the funhouse” and “general winfield stuck” using the search box that towed the top on the right. It will bring up all the threads he posted in with those names.
It doesn’t take direct SQL queries.
The post results are in order of the best match, not chronological, so the threads with the most instances of his nym will be toward the top.
realbtl
No guarantees on this since I’m old but I think Stuck had the General Winfield something (Scott?) for a short time.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@WaterGirl: Yeah, I kind of figured that. I was asking if one of the site administrators with access to the comment database had run such a query. Sorry for the ambiguity. I don’t even know if the comments are stored in a database (though I can’t imagine what else they’d be stored in) or what database format is used to store them, but I’d imagine most database formats that are in common usage today would allow administrators to run queries.
There’s probably even a way to tally the number of comments made by each nym matching a specific pattern, like:
So then you’d know how many comments Stuck made under each nym (that contained the word “Stuck”, at least).
…Something like that query, anyway. I haven’t dusted off my MySQL query writing skills in years, so my syntax might be off. It’s been so long that I can’t even recall whether MySQL treats the contents of string variables as case-sensitive. Anyway, perhaps it’s something that one of the server admins could try.
Ceterum censeo factionem Republicanam esse delendam.
WaterGirl
@(((CassandraLeo))): Not a bad idea, but their plate is pretty full with other stuff, so I’m not comfortable asking them to run queries for us for this.
Miss Bianca
@J R in WV: Wow, those hummie photos are amazing. Put mine to shame!
And Charlie sure looks cute.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: Charlie was adorable. I think he got a bath every Friday night. I remember when Stuck got Charlie, they were quite the pair.
MoxieM
@WaterGirl: Yes, intended for the block quote from eclare. apologies for the mess.
Mary G
Just going to put Stuck quotes I like and someone else can pick, or people can vote:
General Stuck
APRIL 5, 2012 AT 11:06 PM
@efgoldman:
Aren’t you afraid of that shit leaking over from AZ on one side and TX on the other?
Sometimes, I just start chanting and shaking my love beads, and the fear goes away. Too many aging flower child’n around here for the nutters to stay long. Something like garlic cloves and holy water for them, I m
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 6, 2012 AT 11:04 PM
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Oh, that’s just mclaren blowing off some steam. Always happens at the end of a lunar cycle. Nothing to howl at, except the dark empty space, and Balloon Juice.
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 9, 2012 AT 7:35 PM
It has only been one generation, barely, since the iron curtain came down and the Cold War came to a close. Most of us spent a part of our formative years during that 40 year run of twin superpowers struggling to impose their vastly different ideologies on far flung places of the world.
To simplify, the individual versus the collective, and that was what was pounded into most American skulls up until circa 1990. People not alive during the early 60’s especially, have a hard time understanding the deeply insidious and palpable fear that came with that cold war, not only from nuclear annihilation, but also from “the red collective’ sneakily sapping our precious bodily fluids.
It was a fear made to order for the right wing to exploit politically with them being the furthest from that place on the poll spectrum, with exaggerated claims that any kind of social policy for the general welfare could lead to forming collective cadres, and an end to individual liberty.
And for the dimmer bulbs among us, and there are way too many, that kind of fear in a democracy is easy to spread like a virus from one moron to the next.
It took an assassinated beloved president that brought a dem supermajority to squeak through medicare, and that likely would not have happened if not confined to the elderly.
And you just can’t run a country, nor a capitalist one, without some kinds of safety net for the certain losers, nor can you do it without a vibrant middle class to create buffers to the extreme in either direction. And to feed the free market beast with adequate consumerism against the insatiable greedy supply side monster, if left to its own devices.
And then there is health care, a vital resource everyone will need sooner or later, therefore not meant for the free market profiteering model, that every other western nation has figured out that keeping it under the capitalist system, is a sure recipe for national economic disaster.
The Cold War mentality is still with us, and still has pol arrows in the quivers of the GOP. I figure at least one more generation, and maybe two, until we can have a majority of voters not raised on duck and cover from the Red Menace, currently demogogued as your average liberal in the dem party and soshulist Kenyan Usurpers. That we can have a solid social safety net, without turning into commie stooges.
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 11, 2012 AT 5:37 PM
Republicans have always lied about policy, to basically make up for votes potentially lost to this or that group of faction. Usually, to stir up enough dust to hide their knobbery of the 1 percent, at the cost of the rest of us. But those lies have been measured and always with outlets for plausible deniability, if word got out what they are up to. Not anymore, they are letting their fiction freek flags fly in whatever direction that suits what they perceive as the threat to power on any given day. It is truly stunning, this disconnect with reality we are seeing, as was spoken of by conservadem John Yarmuth Rep. Ky., concerning the blathering lies coming from the mouth of his states minority leader in the US senate. Sending him a letting made public, concerning Mitch’s untethered bullshit on the ACA in a recent Courier Journal Op Ed by McConnell.
pdf full letter
For a Kentucky congressman to send such a formal complaint to a Kentucky senator, is kind of far out, especially when the letter accuses Mitch of, in effect, lying through his teeth .
It is everywhere you look, the unbound fiction coming out of the GOP, with seeming nary a concern about going too far, or any kind of backlash. Maybe they will get away with it and win the election, and confirm for eternity that this country doesn’t deserve to survive.
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 12, 2012 AT 3:38 PM
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Th wingnuts thought they’d found the Rosen cure to undo all the damage from their jihad to create democracy by invading the national uterus/ And now Donahue opens his piehole, and hands back the hot potato in the war on women. Reminds me of my first panty raid as a college freshmen, standing stunned at the foot of the womens dorm, looking skyward amidst a downpour of panties raining down on my head, and thinking to myself, this could be heaven, or this could be hell
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 5, 2012 AT 9:47 PM
@doofus:
Depends on what is offered in compromise, but compromise is the essence of what democracy is all about. You can give away too much in efforts to compromise, for sure, but approval of the general premise that compromise is essential to a healthy functioning democracy, is, I suspect, what most of that 59 percent of democrats polled, were meaning. The fact that the other side has gone insane, and has cast aside any good faith effort to compromise, is not a democrat problem. It is a republican/and national problem that is very serious, if not changed fairly soon. Without that good faith mindset to compromise, with the goal of fairness for both sides giving up some of what they want, means that we are steering ourselves to stalemate and you can’t govern a country that way. And if policy and political differences are not handled in such a way with measured compromise, then we begin teetering toward politics by other means.
Mary G
General Stuck (on self glorifiication)
APRIL 3, 2012 AT 10:03 PM
I do know about chronic disease and have written some about mine in the past here. It has turned me into something of a hermit, from once being a highly social person. Not to belabor details, but among other symptoms, it has left me deaf in one ear, and about half of the hearing in my other ear is gone. With increasing poor balance.
If not for the VA, finally, after decades, making a provisional diagnoses and treatment that has helped my rare ailment, but not cured, I doubt I’d be above ground by now. But not before going first through years of a living of hell on earth, having a rare condition, no insurance, and at that time, not even the VA, until Clinton expanded the pool of vets to be covered.
So it is all kinds of emo for me, this ACA law, not so much for myself, personally, getting decent health care from the VA now, but for those who are sick and left in the lurch to fend for themselves in the richest country in the world. It is why the anger at both the wingnuts and their law of the jungle bullshit, and some on the left bitching about making rich insurance companies richer and wanting the ACA to have not passed for that reason.
The folks out there in need, don’t have the luxury of fine pol ideology, nor sacrificing the imperfect to wait for the ideal. It’s life and death struggle for too many, and it mostly is played out silently, suffered by those who fell through the cracks, and there are more than a few.
Mary G
APRIL 4, 2012 AT 12:18 PM
@Felanius Kootea:
Scalia is a craven asshole, and I try to comfort myself with parables of it being darkest just before the light shines, or some such pollyanish noodlings.
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 5, 2012 AT 6:22 PM
It’s not that Democrats need to make every hill a hill to do die on.
Some hills you just need to stretch out on, fire up the crack pipe, and scout for guverment drones.
frosty
@Mary G: Those are great quotes you pulled. I especially like the one about the hill to (not) die on.
His thoughts in the ACA were prescient too.
Thanks for this.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Thank you so much for pulling all of these together. They are all good.
Mary G, this is exactly what we were looking for / hoping for. Hopefully there are other people doing exactly the same thing for some of the others, and even Stuck. I miss him even more after reading your collection.
Mary G
Still looking for the Stuck quote I loved. The hard drive that had its bookmark saved is corrupted and Googling every which way I can think of has yielded no results. But I found this pithy one from a discussion of the war on women:
General Stuck
APRIL 12, 2012 AT 8:28 PM
Next will be a murder rap for jerking off. You wait, slippery slope, sticky situation, all that kind of shit
ETA: followup
General Stuck
APRIL 12, 2012 AT 8:36 PM
@jl:
On further reflection, you are correct. All spent sperm will receive a decent burial, 21 gun salute, and a Medals of Freedom/wingnut
Mary G
Classic as food fight over Obama’s failures starts:
General Stuck
APRIL 13, 2012 AT 11:15 AM
Here we go again
This may be a good day to start sniffing glue
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Those are great!
Do you have some key words? I remember seeing Steep find a song for Subaru Diane that she had tried for ages to find, with no success.
edit: damn those corrupted hard drives and databases!
Mary G
Reply from Schmiezel/Schmazel:
Schlemizel
APRIL 14, 2012 AT 10:18 AM
@General Stuck:
I have been taking shit here for some time saying Rev. Huckleberry would be his choice. (HEY! its a guess & as good as anyones at this point). Frothy is purging his web site so as to appear to get behind the GOP pick but there would be way too many great sound bites of him demolishing Willard. Besides he wants to remain clean for 16 went he can destroy the GOP for a generation (pasta please hear our prayer).
I also suspect little Ayn Paul is on the list. Partly to reward daddy dearest for his help during the primary but also to get the young & stupid Paultard vote.
Given the recent debacle it now makes sense that Willard would like an estrogen enhanced running mate. That would put Nikki Haley into play (plus she can pretend to be Indian when she is whiter than I am that would be huge for the GOP, a white who they can pretend is colored)
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 15, 2012 AT 10:51 AM
If Jesus had packed heat, they never would have nailed him to that cross.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: That one is so good. Great, even.
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 15, 2012 AT 4:16 PM
I am not afraid of my government. I suppose that is because having worked in it for more than a few years, I have an idea how it functions. The right wing is the worst demonizing and fear mongering about men in black doing this or that evil thing to them, on a whim. And while there is certainly concern about too much power currently given policing agencies throughout the state and fed government, that is mostly a function of a right wing court for several decades, and too many citizens favoring tough policing, and that excesses won’t happen to them. But there are those on the left who feed this paranoia outsized to reality.
Our fed government is, and has been, and should be considered one of the good things about this country, and is actually very resistant to much tampering by politicos from any ideological stripe and ill intent. It is like the immovable object and irresistible force all at once. And has been built over the centuries to resist change and manipulation for broader pol purposes.
If you have worked for any federal agency, you would know that everything, and I mean everything, is under this or that regulation, that almost always chugs along as a force unto itself, toward whatever purpose it was created by congress, in the first place.
This mindset is reinforced by many layers of oversight, both internal and external to any one agency or department. It is a matrix set in near concrete, and only changes slowly, or by direct congressional mandate.
That does not mean what congress directs the government bureaucracy to do should be taken as something that should be done, but it does mean, it can within human imperfections, be expected to do what it is ordered to do by the congress and the president and the courts.
This bullshit about blown up fear from right or left that the government is a big boogyman out to get your ass, is simply, by and large bullshit. And most of the time, when folks in positions of responsibility go off the reservation, they get caught at it. It is very difficult to get away with misbehavior for very long, even at the top levels, without people finding out.
So, by all means, keep an eye out for shit like the Patriot ACT to remain temporary, and restrained, and other borderline shit, and agitate like hell to curb excess police powers the courts and congress have created, but fuckers like Chuck Norris, the right wing in general, and some on the left. Give it a rest, trying to make citizens terrified of their government through exaggerated accusations, without any or much evidence, to back up such claims.
We really do, with all our many other problems, have a solid federal government, that moves like a mindless robot doing what the regulations say it should do.
Mary G
General Stuck
APRIL 16, 2012 AT 4:52 PM
Reminds me of my pappy, a charter member of the Reagan Love Society. He had on one wall of his real estate brokers office, a huge pic of Ronnie sitting in the oval office. And huge like one entire wall about 20 feet wide. I used to raz him with “pops” ‘think that poster is big enough’/ He’d give me that sad that my son is communist look, and just say, ran outta wall.
Lizzy L
Damn it. I’ve been gone for a while, and I drop back in to discover that efg is gone. Fuckem. I knew it was coming, but still… I am now officially bummed.
WaterGirl
@Lizzy L: I’m so sorry you had to find out this way.
Elizabelle
@WaterGirl: May I say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE having Recent Comments back, so we can see what’s going on in the threads.
And rest in power to all our jackals no longer in this world.
WaterGirl
@Elizabelle: Oh, good! Yay.
Miss Bianca
I think I got my entries in OK – just waiting for a confirmatory email!
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: Hi Miss Bianca, are these pet pics for the calendar, or entries for possible inclusion in the In Memoriam section?
WaterGirl
If anyone else is interested in contributing quotes or stories for the calendar – about any or all of the beloved commenters we have lost, please send email to WaterGirl at my balloon-juice address.
Big thanks to those who contributed already!
CliosFanBoy
Did you get the photos I sent? (Spud is one of them)> I never got a response.
WaterGirl
@CliosFanBoy: Will check.
WaterGirl
@CliosFanBoy: I checked with Beth and your photos arrived. I think you will have received your confirmation by the time you read this.