Pay No Attention to the Sound of Edward R. Murrow Spinning in His Grave

This is why: Daily Show's Moment of Zen.

The Daily Show - Moment of Zen - CNN Covers Anthony Weiner Confession
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To rip off a quote from Serenity: "There is no news. There is only the truth of the signal. And, there's the puppet theater the corporate jesters foist on the somnambulant public."

FSM forbid that the news shows ever pay attention to the point that the energy extraction companies have been funding the bullshit climate change deniers in the same way that the tobacco industry obfuscated the health risks of tobacco for decades. Or how they have silently managed to squash every attempt to develop energy sources that don't involve mining or drilling. Or how the corporations and the wealthy have enriched themselves for the last thirty years while the middle class and the working poor have been treading water.

No, can't pay attention to that. Those are harder stories and not as much fun to cover. They also hit home at the corporate masters of the news organizations.

So what we get is puppet theater.

You can fight back, a little. Turn off those jesters. Look for news elsewhere, even overseas.

Sometimes, There are Bloggers That Richly Deserve a Flogging

Here's the thing: While it's one thing to use photos of celebrities and politicians in snarky ways, it's not a cool thing to do it with just folk. It's especially not cool to do it in a snarky way that is sexually smarmy. And if/when the person whose photo you appropriated objects to your use of the photo, the minimal adult thing to do is to at least take it down. The gracious adult thing to do is to take it down and apologize.

This happened to a gun blogger, who found her photo used with a title of (her first name) and the word "porn". She objected and the scumbucket involved has refused to take it down.

Other bloggers are coming down on her side.

This gets into another issue, as Weerd discusses: Blog piracy. It's one thing to read something that someone else wrote and use that as inspiration for your own thoughts. Nice to give a pointer to who inspired you, but if it's your own thoughts, meh.

Link posts, where someone says "go read this" are fine, too. Hell, they're more than fine, they're how readership builds. I'd go so far to say that if you have a decent readership, you have a moral duty to link to new bloggers who you've noticed.

What is not cool is using a private person's image in a sexually smarmy and infantile way. (Also not cool, as Weerd noted, is to take the entirety of a post and pretty much pass it off as your own.)

The junior-high schoolish antics of the jackwagon in question gets to another issue for me, at least: The sexist crap of "male hobbies".

It's not just guns. It happens a lot in aviation. The fueling/parts/training places in airports are known as "Fixed-Base Operations" or FBOs. You get into an FBO's office by one of two ways, walking in from the flight line (the "air side") or from the street (the "ground side"). A woman who walks into a FBO from the ground side might as well paint herself with invisibility paint. A guy will be asked if he can be helped. Dealing with a new maintenance shop has sometimes required an extensive verbal smackdown to demonstrate to the mechanics that yes, I do know my own airplane.

I've walked into gunshops and I might as well have been covered with invisibility paint. When that doesn't happen, I've gotten the "kin we hep yoo, little lady" condescension. This has been going on since I first bought a firearm and it grates at me. One place I lived, I had a choice between buying stuff at a gunshop 30 miles away and five miles away; I'd go to the further one because it was run by a woman who made sure that women were welcomed and treated with respect.

I go pretty much exclusively to one gunshop where I live now over another for the same reason. Three years ago, I wanted to buy a Russian WW2 sniper rifle and I needed a gunshop to take delivery and do the transfer paperwork. I went in to ask one shop and, once I was able to blast the clerk away from his bullshit session, he gave me a hard time. The other shop said "no problem". I didn't know either of those places. I've not spent a dime in the first place and I've since bought three firearms from the second one, along with other shit.

This is a tough economy and it is not going to get better anytime soon. We may even be in another long depression. If you run a business that traditionally has mostly members of one gender patronizing your business and someone from the other gender walks in, it is in the interest of the survival of your business to make all potential customers welcome. There are women who shoot and fly. There are men who cook, sew and do needlepoint.

If you want these hobbies to survive and thrive, the base of enthusiasts must grow. If you don't like the idea of women shooting guns or flying airplanes, I respectfully suggest that you get over it.

Yesterday in Soviet America

A squad of SWAT cops in California broke down a man's door at 6 in the morning to serve a search warrant.

The search warrant was because his ex-wife defaulted on her student loans.

Whose SWAT team did the raid was not clear, whether it was the Stockton cops or goons from the Federal Department of Education. (That's right: The Department of Education has armed goons to collect on those student loans.)

Busting down a door at 6AM to serve a search warrant because of a defaulted loan? If that is not per se unreasonable, then I don't know what the frak is. The "protect and serve" motto is bullshit, unless the cops are protecting and serving the elites. They sure as hell aren't serving the people with fascist bullshit like this.

And, as BadTux has noted before, a hell of a lot of Americans, including 99.44% of the Teabaggers, are just fine with that.

UPDATE: It apparently was an operation by the DoEd's armed thugs, not the Stockton police, who sent one cop to watch. The fact that the target of the raid was no longer living there calls into question the competence of the DoEd's investigators.
as
(H/T to a comment here)

CSI Baja Oklahoma

Texas may hopefully be the only place in this country where the cops can get a search warrant based solely on the word of a self-proclaimed psychic.

The police in East Texas were led on a fruitless search on Tuesday evening when a woman, claiming to be a psychic, called in a sensational tip, saying she knew of a mass grave where dozens of dismembered bodies were buried. Equipped with a search warrant and cadaver-sniffing dogs, deputies from the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office converged on a home on a narrow country road near Hardin — about an hour outside Houston — in search of a macabre crime scene. ... But in the end, there was no grave, there were no bodies and there was no sign that any crime had been committed.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the cops in Texas used haruspicy as an investigative tool.

The Most Over-Used Phrase in Republican Circles This Year Is:

"What the Former Half-Term Governor of Alaska meant to say was...."

(Surely you know what this is in reference to.)

The Colbert Report
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(And yes, we always have been at war with Oceania)

How to Make a Terrific Hamburger in Three Easy Steps

1. Seal the patty in a plastic bag and soak it in hot water (130degF) for 30 minutes.

2. Remove the patty from the bag and dip in liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds.

3. Deep-fry the patty (oil at 450degF) for sixty seconds.

Easy-peasy, if you happen to have a container of LN2 in your pantry.

(No, I am not kidding.)

Deficits Are Not Bad; Party of Hoover Edition

The Republicans will run this country off the cliff before they will agree to raise taxes on anybody. So their answers to reducing the Federal budget deficit are to tighten the screws on the poor, the middle class and seniors. They'll let our national infrastructure fall to pieces (think Tim Pawlenty and I-35), they'll let public education descend to a system of test-prep courses (kids won't be able to do a damned thing, but by the Jeez, they can pass a test), but hands off of the rich and big business.

Republican practices led to the Gulf Oil Spill and the housing bubble/mortgage meltdown crisis. It has been Republicans who have run this country off the rails, as any casual look at Federal deficits for the last thirty years will show. Republicans brought us the specter of massive bank defaults a few years ago and the S&L debacle in the 1980s. Between the ideology of the GOP and the short-term greed embodied on ghouls like the Koch Brothers

Why anyone with three functioning neurons would trust those lunatics to operate an open-air Dairy Queen in Anchorage, Alaska in February, much less try to do anything about the economy, is beyond me. Republicans are ideologues who are as able to deal with economic facts and realities as would be a faith-healer who had to deal with a case of appendicitis.

But there are enough people who are following the GOP tin-flute sirens. Hell, there are millions of people who would vote for candidates who have no idea in which colony the Battle of Concord took place,[2] who Paul Revere was trying to warn,[3] (both of those candidates apparently slept through fourth grade history) or who is totally engrossed with the idea of trying to prevent man-on-dog sex.[4]

There are days when I think that sooner or later, the crazies will gain power and they will bring to fruition the GOP's century-long quest to smash the American economy, impoverish 99% of the American population and bring this country back to the social and living standards of the 1890s.[5] Of course, they've forgotten that the taxation of the 19th Century was insufficient to support a large standing national defense establishment, but that makes no difference to them.

Maybe we just ought to get it over with and get to doing what the Republicans want: Reducing this great country to Third or Fourth World nation with nuclear weapons.[6]
______________________________
[1] And the oil industry, the coal industry, the automotive industry, the Midwestern power generator, well, you get the idea. The Koch brothers are just the most effective ones at generating astroturf groups.
[2] Michele Bachmann
[3] Sarah Palin
[4] Rick Santorum
[5] Only because I think it unlikely that they will be able to institute legal slavery. Otherwise, it'll be the 1830s with electricity, but only for the rich.
[6] Like Russia.

Quote of the Day; Penis Edition

"Why the hell am I going to waste my time and give a press release about whether or not I have a penis? My fans don't care and neither do I."

--Lady Gaga, who was addressing the hermaphrodite rumors in an interview with Anderson Cooper. That footage didn't make the 60 Minutes piece, but it is here at 2:50 and there is more here.

Thought Experiment

As you may already know, there are many Mexicans who hold to the view that we essentially stole California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming from them through the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the Gadsten Purchase.

Now let's suppose that there is a movement to recover those territories. Suppose that a large number of unarmed Mexicans massed on the border, proclaimed that they were going to take back what was their land and began moving to cross over into American territory.

Would that not be an invasion and would the United States not be justified in responding to it as such?

You're the president. All you have is the military with their standard weapons. Your options are essentially limited to (a) let them come, or (b) shoot them.

What do you do and why?

Guest

I had a visitor over the weekend. The cats had varying reactions.

Gracie hid, either behind my bed or under the couch.

Jake apparently figured that a visitor meant two more hands to pet him, so he made the most of it.

George has the sniffles or a cold or allergies. In the past, he has not cottoned to this particular person. One time, when I had an apartment with two bathrooms, he would drop a turd each morning in guest bathroom. This time, he was mostly fine and wanted to be petted.

Except the first night: George jumped up onto the guest bed at 0300. He put his face right next to hers and then sneezed.

What we did: Shooting, flying and baking. It was a good time.