Ahhh, but Zin...

Drug-addled gasbag Rush Limbaugh has gotten to the root of the obesity crisis:

I think you might then say that the obesity crisis could be the fault of government, liberal government. Food stamps, all those -- you know, I'm gonna tell you people a story. I -- just, well, the government, you could say, is killing these people because we know obesity kills, and the government's killing the poor. The Bush administration is killing the poor with too much food.

And so, now, we find out that there is obesity and all this amongst the poor more than amongst those who are not poor. It's sort of a textbook case of what happens when we let liberals have their way. I mean, for decades, all over the world, we've been beat about the head that there are hungry people out there, that they are starving. UNICEF--how many of you trick-or-treated for UNICEF? Did you "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF," We all did--did you? We all trick-or-treated. One of the biggest scams on the face of the earth. It was--the scam was to get everybody loving the United Nations. The scam was to get everybody thinking the United Nations is feeding poor people. Remember all these stories: "A dime a day will feed 20 kids in some outward place around the world"?

This is what happens when you let the left run things. We've been beat about the head. There are hungry people everywhere. UNICEF got it all started. We've seen the babies with the extended tummies, the walking skeletons, told that kids can't learn unless they're fed. We've been guilted into pouring resources on the problem. And now, now, the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished. Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn't teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn't teach them how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. [editor's note--WHAT????] The real bloat here, as we know, is in--is in government.

Zin--it's your fault we're fat.

Obesity? Heart disease? Pish tosh

While doing my "catch-up" reading (no pun intended), I found an article in Crain's Chicago Business about McDonald's stagnant growth because they apparently haven't developed a new hamburger in five years.

I stopped reading the article when I got to this graf:

Burger King last month introduced BK Stackers, burgers that come with two, three or four hamburger patties and up to eight slices of bacon. Wendy's this fall will introduce Double Melt cheeseburgers with condiments between the two patties. Jack in the Box just introduced a new Outlaw burger with a jumbo beef patty. And Hardee's and Carl's Jr. have been rolling out big burgers consistently for the last two years.

Yep, that sound you hear is of buttons popping and sewing machines in China making even larger pants for even fatter Americans. Stick around, kids, someday zubaz may be back as an element of the everyday wardrobe.

Some sports rants

I'm in a foul sports mood.

I grew up loving the University of Illinois Fighting Illini, and just bought tickets to see their game against Iowa. It's a reasonable day trip from here, I love college football and my dad wants to go--his first Illini game in years and one of his first big outings since my mom passed away.

So my beefs?

The tickets weren't cheap (Iowa fans travel so Illinois made it a "premium" game--$32 to sit in the end zone "horseshoe") but so be it. What angered me were the "service charges." This was not a third-party site, the purchase was from the university, but for 6 tickets, I was charged a "fee" of $28. Three bucks a ticket plus $10 per "order." For what? It costs you less than having an hourly employee at the window, and you have my marketing information for a lifetime. I know no one held a gun to my head, but it just left a sour taste in my mouth.

Next beef--it will be my last time to see Chief Illiniwek.



The chief goes away after 80 years, thanks to the NCAA.

I admit to being emotional and perhaps irrational on this one but:

1) Doesn't the NCAA have more important things to do? From illegal recruiting to gambling to shoe company payola to the joke of "student athletes," should the chief be that high on your list?

2) He is not a sideline mascot. No cheerleading, no ramming Bucky Badger into the goalposts. Halftime, that's it.

3) I was at the game when by Frank Fools Crow of the Oglala Sioux presented the costume (Pitt destroyed the Illini that day, they couldn't stop this Dan Marino kid, don't know if he amounted to much)in a respectful ceremony. This was NOT a caricature like Chief Wahoo or Chief Nok-a-Homa.

OK, no one's buying it, but again--another round of sour taste.

AND THEN THIS. (Call the bullpen and have Dumbass start to get loose)

From the Letters to the Editor of the paper that owns this sorrowful excuse for a baseball team we get this bit of idiocy from one Mark Gaddo in Indianapolis:

I have seen a disturbing trend at Wrigley Field as fans have been booing our players!...I also want the Cubs to enforce a code of behavior on the fans. It saddens me when Jacque Jones was being targeted by catcalls, derisive cheers and use of racial slurs.

OK, racial slurs--we can all agree, out. But--booing? "Derisive cheers?" Mark, did you watch Jacque Jones the first half of the season? For how much money?

Mark--

The Madness of King George

"Those who cannot remember the past will really **** things up."
Peter

The Simian Boy King tells us that:

If America were to pull out before Iraq can defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable--and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies--Saddam's former henchmen, armed groups with ties to Iran, and al Qaeda terrorists from all over the world who would suddenly have a base of operations far more valuable than Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The reality check imust be lost in the mail. Does George know that the first two are fighting each other and the third is just sitting back and absolutely enjoying the show? Does he understand that another name for one of the "armed groups with ties to Iran" is the IRAQI GOVERNMENT?

Don't know much about history.....

Logical fallacies

"The logical fallacy of false choice is a correlative-based fallacy in which options are presented as being exclusive when they may not be. It is often used to obscure the likelihood of one option or to reframe an argument on the user's terms."  Wikipedia

For example, take Darth Cheney's most recent bit of jingoistic saber-rattling:

"We have only two options in Iraq--victory or defeat."

Gosh we must avoid..defeat! That would be horrible! How could we live with..defeat? Our ONLY option is VICTORY!

Ladies and gentlemen, the false choice. 

Great Presidential Quotes

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Abraham Lincoln

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

Thomas Jefferson

"We face an enemy that has an ideology. They believe things. The best way to describe their ideology is to relate to you the fact that they think the opposite of the way we think."

America's National Disgrace

Do you have a Preferred Jihadist card?

From moonbat Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon:

"We have to fight this battle. We either fight it over there or we're going to fight it in the supermarkets and the streets of America."

Riiiiight, I see. I can hear it now:

"Attention, all stockers to the front, and we need a jihad cleanup in frozen please."

And remember,

VOTE REPUBLICAN OR DIE!

Great Headlines to be Tooken Out of Context

Thanks, CNN:

Pumping neck gave polygamist away

Ummm...based on the number of wives that he had, I'm guessing his neck wasn't the only thing on him pumping.

Freudian slip???

Odd, huh? I agree with Cheney and Rumsfeld in the same day!

Dick talked about people who "pervert a religious faith to serve a dark political objective -- to establish, by violence and intimidation, a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom." He claimed that these insidious people "seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology. This ideology rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of our society."

Our society, Dick? Don't you mean "their" society?? Oh wait, never mind.

Gee willikers, I agree with Rummy!

Yesterday, Rummy told us that "some seem not to have learned history's lessons." Gosh, Don, when did that light bulb go on? Lessons? History? Viet Nam? Napoleon and Russia? Pyrrhus?

He added that "any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere." Thank you, Captain Obvious. Lying us into an unprovoked war was certainly "wrong" and weakened the ability of this society to persevere."

Good night, Don.

Bet this will be a fun Thanksgiving..

ANYTHING is better than listening to the Idiot-in-Chief speak, but this was rich. Right-wing CNN newsbot Kyra Phillips

left her microphone on over the human dial tone:

“I’m very lucky at the network [not audible], he is genuinely a loving, no-ego [not audible] just a really passionate, compassionate, great, great human being. And they exist, they do exist. They’re hard to find, yep, but they are out there.....”

and then she turns ugly, slamming her sister-in-law:

“Mom’s got a good vibe. Brothers have to be, you know, protective. Except for mine, I’ve got to be protective of him. Ah yeah, I have to be protective of him. He’s married, three kids, but his wife is just a control freak.”

Happy Holidays...Happy Holidays...

I'm tired of bad news--I need a dumbass break

From the online Letters to the Editor in the Chicago Tribune, some buffoon named Barry, in discussing judicial activism, judge-made law and the common-law tradition, gave us this gem:

Judge made law went out with the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. Reviewing law for constitutionality first appeared in 1803. Now we have judge made law again in violation of the Constitution,but nobody seems to care about the judicial branch's usurping legislative function; only perceived violation by the executive branch is spotlighted.

There is only ONE thing to say:

Disaster

On the Bob Edwards show this morning on XMPR, he interviewed Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, authors of the new book Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. It was a fascinating interview.

In the book, Cooper and Block detailed the myriad failures, myths, and outright incompetence of the federal government's management of the preparation for and response to Katrina. The Department of Homeland Security takes the brunt of the blow, with Michael Chertoff getting eviscerated for his complete inability to understand what was going on or manage the disaster. The myth that the Bush Administration has tried to perpetrate that somehow this was a failure of local government is completely debunked - in fact, New Orleans managed a larger evacuation than any ever. Not only did more people get out, but a higher percentage were evacuated before Katrina hit than was expected. When Ernesto hits the Keys this week, they said, roughly 40% of people will evacuate. Over 80% of NO residents left before the hurricane hit.

In the months before Katrina, the people involved ran a simulation involving "Hurricane Pam", which was supposed to flood New Orleans. During that simulation, the local and state governments described what they could do, and the federal government essentially said that they could take care of everything else. When Katrina actually hit, the state and local governments did what they had planned on, for the most part. It was the federal government that failed.

Why did it fail? In short, because when DHS was established, the goal was not to deal with the recovery from a disaster, presumably from a terrorist attack, but to prevent or disrupt the attack. The assumption was made that natural disasters were something we knew how to handle, so there was no reason to worry about them. FEMA was demoted, and Michael Brown, while not an Emergency Management specialist, was thoroughly marginalized, so that when he did ask for things, he was told that unless Chertoff backed him up, nothing would happen.

What was Chertoff doing? He was assuming that it was a local problem. They had set up an internal condition that DHS wouldn't need to step in until the levees breached, so when the reports started coming in that the city was flooding, they asked "Did the levees breach?" When the responses came in that they thought so, but there was confusion, it didn't trigger a response from the feds. They got caught up in terminology - if a report came in that a levee had breached, and there really was a floodwall in that location, it was ignored. They had a definition that if a levee fell over, but half of it still stood, it wasn't breached. Chertoff was also treating the situation like an intelligence-gathering mission during a war - unless he could get multiple, independent confirmations of something, it didn't happen. As the reporters said "In a military situation, that makes sense - people could die if you make the wrong decisions. No one will die if too many supply helicopters bring water to New Orleans."

President Bush, at least in this book, got a bit of a break. He was letting his people handle it, letting them feed him information, and unless he heard something from Chertoff, there wasn't a need to do anything. Of course, that is one of his failings - he doesn't get involved, he waits for information instead of seeking it out, and he's overly loyal to incompetent cronies who know not too feed him any information that he doesn't want.

Bob Edwards asked the question that many of us asked during those horrific days - "Couldn't they just turn on the TV and see what was going on?" Apparently, no. When news coverage started coming in that there was a disaster starting to happen in the Convention Center, one of Chertoff's assistants is described (in his own words) as spending the evening making fun of the reporters for not knowing that the Convention Center was really the Superdome, and it wasn't until much, much later that he realized that the two were actually different places.

This was an abject failure of leadership. Never forget.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

From the Orlando Sentinel:

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said this week that the separation of church state is "a lie," that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that a failure to elect Christians to political office will allow lawmaking bodies to "legislate sin."

In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, Harris described her faith, saying it animates "everything I do," including her votes in Congress.

She warned that if voters do not send Christians to office, they risk creating a government that is doomed to fail.

"If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," she told interviewers, citing abortion and gay marriage as two examples of that sin.

Doing so, she said, "will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don't know better, we are leading them astray and it's wrong..."

Harris said that Americans "have internalized" the "lie" that church and state must not be mixed. In reality, she said, "we have to have the faithful in government" because that is God's will.

Separating religion and politics is "so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers," Harris said. "And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women," then "we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our founding fathers intended and that's (sic) certainly isn't what God intended."

Sad and pathetic, but proof that there is such a thing as karma. However, the paper seems to have left out her last comment--

BRING ME THOSE PUPPIES!

Happy Anniversary

I wish I had something profound to say, but the words just get strangled by the hatred, disgust and contempt I feel when I see this.