(Jeff Danziger at www.danzigercartoons.com)
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What’s the best hope for escape in your neighborhood tonight?
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads
(Jeff Danziger at www.danzigercartoons.com)
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What’s the best hope for escape in your neighborhood tonight?
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Sports, Assholes
Professional sports are not my personal choice for entertainment, but I do enjoy the side benefit that it provides steady employment for some consistently entertaining writers. As, for example, Tom Scocca at Slate, in a post subtitled “I Know Why I Cheer for a Birther Moron, But Why Does ESPN Cheer for Him?”
Last week, Amy K. Nelson of ESPN wrote a long profile of Scott, who she identified as “one of baseball’s most complex characters” and someone who “will require a deeper line of thinking.”
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Nope. Luke Scott, as he showed Nelson while roaming around Florida with her during spring training, is a standard-issue ignoramus, whose otherwise unfurnished mental spaces have been filled in with white-exceptionalist superpatriotism, gun-fetish paranoia, and assorted other fantasies and delusions scavenged from the county dump of red-blooded One-Hundred-Percent America….
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But Amy K. Nelson is interested in his character. Here are the complex-ish parts: he’s a white ballplayer who is friendly with his Latino teammates and speaks fluent Spanish—having grown up poor in Florida. He does charitable works “with no publicity,” except for the publicity that comes from letting that fact be known to a reporter profiling him for the biggest sports-media outlet in the country. And…well, no, that’s it. He has nice manners.
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Did I mention he hits baseballs hard? Being a sports fan, and a baseball fan in particular, means you are emotionally invested in a certain aspect of the lives and successes of people who have been rewarded, with tremendous amounts of money and fame, for doing (and being) what they did (and were) as 14-year-olds…
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Screwing around with guns in front of a national reporter, while a case of manslaughter or worse was hanging over his ballclub, was a piss-poor cognitive decision. Some leagues would find a way to discipline a player reckless and self-centered enough to do that. But Scott seems hell-bent on becoming the Carrie Prejean of baseball, and it won’t do the Orioles any good to help him along the way.
And the inestimable Charles P. Pierce, discussing the same article about the same ballplayer:
Leaving aside the learned disquisitions on constitutional law — “Godly principles”? James Madison just chugged a whole bottle of Madeira in the Beyond. — This Blog was most struck by this passage:
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“Most of Scott’s childhood friends are in prison, he says, or in the military; he would have been a Marine sniper had baseball not panned out. But it did.”
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Wait. Hold on a minute.
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Luke Scott “would’ve been” a Marine sniper, but he got too good at baseball to try out for the job? This Blog calls horse-hockey here. Assuming Scott is marksman enough to make the grade, if he wanted to be a Marine sniper, he would be a Marine sniper. He decided he preferred to play baseball for a living. Period. This Blog is not aware of any rule in the Corps reading to the effect that: “An applicant shall be denied entry to the Corps, and shall not be considered for specialized duty, if said applicant can hit .267 lifetime.”
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The barstools, alas, are full of guys who would’ve joined the military if it wasn’t for etc. etc. etc. And, if you’re going to run a quote like this, you should really get a statement from the Tillman family.
Click through to the links for much more excellence, including talk about actual baseball.
by DougJ| 22 Comments
This post is in: Music, Open Threads
One of my coworkers just received a CD consisting entirely of Irish drinking songs about cats.
What are all you hep cats about to today?
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 99 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I honestly don’t know what the crap this guy is talking about. It’s just batshit bananas. Something about unmarried women not wanting married women to have children because all single women are lesbians, or something?
I don’t know, you tell me:
Meeuwsen: There are lots of government-funded agencies in this country. Why do you think the President picked that one above all else to say, ‘not one penny’?
Robertson: Well it’s the left; it’s this culture of death. The far-left is livid about killing babies. They want to kill do this, they want to destroy. You go back, and I don’t want to play all this psychological stuff but nevertheless, if a woman is a lesbian, what advantage does she have over a married woman? Or what deficiency does she have?
Meeuwsen: Well she can’t have children
Robertson: That’s exactly right. And so if these married women don’t have children, if they abort their babies, then that kind of puts them on a level playing field. And you say, nobody’s there to express that? Isn’t that shocking, well think about it a little bit ladies and gentlemen.
What the–
I don’t–
I’m just gonna look at the amusing cartoon for a while…
(H/T Denise!)
[via Right Wing Watch; image via Natalie Dee]
by DougJ| 66 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Just got the following email with the subject “Counter tops enquiry”. I’m redacting the name in case it’s a real email:
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from ***********
to *********
date Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 10:03 AM
subject Counter Tops Enquiry
mailed-by yahoo.com
signed-by yahoo.com
With regards to your company am ******** with ********* and i will like to order Granite Counter Tops with the specs :
Absolute Black Island 36 X 76 with Full Bull nose edges (Quantity : 5)
Absolute Black Island 42 X 84 with Full Bull nose edges.(Quantity : 5)
So please kindly check on that and get back to me with the total pick-up ( Excluding shipping because they will be picked-up from your location ) price on that including sales tax Also is credit card payment acceptable ? Please Advise.
*********
Company : *********
Address : **************
Bonita Springs, FL 34135
Contact # *********
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012, Excellent Links, Republican Venality
Two related, must-read pieces from Mother Jones. Andy Kroll has an excellent, link-heavy post on The Right-Wing Network Behind the War on Unions:
… Behind the onslaught is a well-funded network of conservative think tanks that you’ve probably never heard of. Conceived by the same conservative ideologues who helped found the Heritage Foundation, the State Policy Network (SPN) is a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement. Its mission is simple: to back a constellation of state-level think tanks loosely modeled after Heritage that promote free-market principles and rail against unions, regulation, and tax increases. By blasting out policy recommendations and shaping lawmakers’ positions through briefings and private meetings, these think tanks cultivate cozy relationships with GOP politicians. And there’s a long tradition of revolving door relationships between SPN staffers and state governments. While they bill themselves as independent think tanks, SPN’s members frequently gather to swap ideas. “We’re all comrades in arms,” the network’s board chairman told the National Review in 2007….
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Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 “freedom centers,” or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states. SPN’s board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Institute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes. SPN uses their contributions to dole out annual grants to member groups, ranging from a few thousand dollars to $260,000, according to 2009 records.
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According to SPN’s website, Roe launched the conservative network “at the urging” of President Reagan himself as a way to shape state-level policy just as Heritage has influenced federal policy. Surveying the political landscape today, Roe’s and Reagan’s idea couldn’t have been more prescient. More than a dozen states are currently considering legislation weakening the clout of organized labor. In many of those states, SPN think tanks have been pushing for similar prescriptions for years via “research” papers, policy recommendations, and talking points that are widely distributed to lawmakers.
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… SPN think tanks do more than merely pepper politicians with briefings and a barrage of policy recommendations; they also serve as a farm team for the GOP. Reps. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) all ran SPN think tanks before entering Congress…
Yeah, that trio may not qualify for Mensa membership (even if they combined scores), but there’s an old proverb about relative political power: We all know their names but they don’t know ours.
And for more detail of the sick, twisted sociopathy behind SPN’s founders, Rick Perlstein goes “Inside the GOP’s Fact-Free Nation” to dissect “how political lying became normal”:”
…Ronald Reagan explicitly built his appeal around the notion that it was time to stop challenging the powerful. A new sort of lie took over: that the villains were not those deceiving the nation, but those exposing the deceit—those, as Reagan put it in his 1980 acceptance speech, who “say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith.” They were just so, so negative. According to the argument Reagan consistently made, Watergate revealed nothing essential about American politicians and institutions—the conspirators “were not criminals at heart.” In 1975, upon the humiliating fall of Saigon, he paraphrased Pope Pius XII to make the point that Vietnam had in fact been a noble cause: “America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.”
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The Gipper’s inauguration ushered in the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” era of political lying. But it took a deeper trend to accelerate the cultural shift away from truth-telling-as-patriotism to a full-scale epistemological implosion.
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Reagan rode into office accompanied by a generation of conservative professional janissaries convinced they were defending civilization against the forces of barbarism. And like many revolutionaries, they possessed an instrumental relationship to the truth: Lies could be necessary and proper, so long as they served the right side of history…
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“We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means,” wrote evangelist C. Peter Wagner in 1981. “If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.”
Historians will no doubt mention there’s a pivot where all great empires start privileging “civility” over “honesty“… and that’s the chapter future scholars title with some variation on “decline and fall”. Never expected to watch it unravel in real time, via HD broadband, did you?
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Open Threads
Dave Weigel, at Slate, reports that Ron Paul will announce his presidential exploratory committee tomorrow in Des Moines.
John H. Richardson, at Esquire‘s Political Blog, goes there, full eeyore:
There is something that currently plagues our nation: a kind of irritable grasping after conclusions, the kind that made me stopped blogging regularly for a while, as I fought in myself that lonely battle of the last five or six people in America who still think that life is way too complicated for any summing up that doesn’t involve math. But if someone held a gun to my head and asked me to say what I think about Ron Paul, after interviewing him and following him around for my new profile in the May issue, this is what I would say:
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Ron Paul is, or seems to be, a very sweet and shockingly naïve man who wants very much to do right by America. But his uncompromising vision of freedom would destroy America, really, by turbo-charging the powerful and the rich, who have shown throughout history that they have (with a few exceptions) zero social conscience and very little concern for the country. Already they’ve grasped most of the wealth and property in the country. Those in the top percentile are perfectly happy to throw Americans out of work and create jobs in China or Mexico if it means more profits, which they then bank overseas to avoid paying the taxes that create the relatively uncorrupted government under which they thrive. Given the nearly unlimited freedom from regulations and taxes that Republicans like Paul dream of, they’d be completely unrestrained. Eventually the desperate peasantry would realize, as they just realized throughout the Middle East, that the system was completely gamed against them. The result would be bloody revolution…
Seriously: Go read the whole post, at least, and if you’ve got the time the earlier posts & the interview excerpt are also worth perusing. Further recommendation, Richardson is the man responsible for last year’s excoriating Newt Gingrich profile. Paul’s not so entertaining (or terrifying) a subject as Gingrich, but that’s the difference between monomania and sociopathy for you.
Late Night Open Thread: Heightening the ContradictionsPost + Comments (41)