EFFin’ Unsound

Posted by Carl Ballard

Now that Eric Earling is gone from Sound Politics, there is some question about its survival. But at least there will always be the Public Blog to kick around.

Who wears the pants in the family?

I know sometimes my posts can have strange titles that only I and a select group of nerds get, but seriously, what the fuck? The post is about Obama picking the food at the White House. Joe Biden wears a dress because Obama picks the food? Is the sexist implication that Biden is subordinate to Obama, because sans the unnecessary sexism, duh.

From none other than The New York Times.

When President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. meet for their standing Friday lunch engagement, Mr. Obama always picks the cuisine — a subtle break from previous administrations in which the president and the vice president typically ordered off a menu, and a reminder, if any was needed, about who is in charge. [there’s a paragraph break in the actual story here - Carl] “The dietary bar is set by the president,” said Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff. [more to this sentence that will sadly come into play here emphasis mine, “who recently fielded a prelunch query from the White House kitchen about whether Mr. Biden wanted sour cream with his tacos (he did). ‘Biden eats anything. He’s a pretty easy guy that way.’” - Carl again]

It really makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. What a controlling jerk.

Yeah. What an asshole. By the by, from the same piece (not linked in the original post)

Top aides say it has become customary for Mr. Obama to solicit Mr. Biden’s opinion at the end of meetings. But his views by no means always carry the day. At one January meeting to discuss the budget, Mr. Biden railed that the government was in no fiscal shape to pursue a health care overhaul this year — to the dismay of many present and others who heard about it.

The vice president later backed off, but Mr. Obama — who disagreed strongly with the view — has come to see Mr. Biden as a useful contrarian in the course of decision-making.

Hm. Sort of seems like he wants to hear other views. So I guess your metaphor is in ruins.

So if Barry Obama wants Thai, everybody has to eat Thai.

Or brown bag it. Maybe they were taking too much time on the menu and not enough on fixing the mess Bush left. In any event, is anybody really complaining that they don’t get to pick the food when they meet with the leader of the free world?

The white house has a chef. He has nothing better to do than cook whatever the President and his guests want. Would it really be so bad if Joe had a pork chop sandwich while BO was having macrobiotic rice? Heck, if they are meeting once a week, why can’t Joe phone in his order in advance? It’s like taking the kids to a food court at the mall and demanding that everybody eat exactly what you are having.

Well according to the part of the sentence you forgot to quote when you put this up, his chief of staff says, “Biden eats anything.” So, you know, maybe Biden agreed to the policy before it was set.

And yet this is symptomatic of a wider attitude among progressives. They want to tell us what to eat (transfat ban), what to drive (black cars may be getting banned in CA because people might run their auto air conditioners), how long or hard of a shower we can take (I ripped the damn lowflow blockage right out of my showerhead).

Low flow shower heads are the reason liberalism is doomed to failure.

We should all be very, very concerned about an administration that is so driven to tell us what to think and how to act in our daily lives. It is going to get much worse before it gets better.

It’s so driven to tell us what to think that it decides what gets eaten at staff meetings? Seriously.

– posted by thehim

– posted by thehim

I’m going to just piggy back on Demo Kid’s recent post because it’s the same idiot writing the same horseshit (just a different day):

Have you bought your gun yet?

As I told my father-in-law recently (who fell victim to a lot of the “Obama is going to take your guns away” propaganda as well), I won’t be buying a gun unless Obama actually tries to take away my right to do so (and with my knowledge of the drug war, I’m very well aware that Obama wouldn’t be able to keep me from buying a gun simply by making gun ownership illegal). But I still remain convinced that the only way Obama would ever do that is if we have an actual armed rebellion in this country first.

Can you shoot it accurately under pressure?

Not as well as a trained soldier, but I’m still optimistic that if wingnut nation takes up arms against Obama, the trained soldiers will be on the right side of that battle. And that’s where the comparisons between Nazi Germany and today’s America should be understood.

These are the goons that will be knocking on your door at midnight to take you away to the re-education camps in railway cars.

No, the goons who come to your door at midnight and take you away are the drug cops enforcing the laws that morons like you demand that we have.

And they don’t knock.

Am I worried? Heck yeah.

Are you a paranoid retard? Heck yeah.

Is this over-reaction?

Uh, yeah.

If I told you, in the beginning of Hitler’s movement, that the very youth he was training would grow up to run the gas chambers that slaughter millions of Jews, you wouldn’t believe me.

What the fuck are you talking about? Have you read Mein Kampf? Hitler explained exactly how he felt that Germany needed to remove its Jewish population. You’d have to be the most naive person on Earth to read Mein Kampf and think, “Nah, that guy isn’t going to do anything bad.” The book is chilling.

You wouldn’t believe that Hitler, who was so nice and full of compassion for his people would slaughter the Jews so horrifically.

Sure, when Hitler wrote:

“In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by the slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by the Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light - a kike!”

He was just expressing his compassion for the Jewish people he would eventually slaughter.

As always, every post from Jonathan Gardner is the stupidest post he’s ever written.

And you wouldn’t believe that those nice, regimented youth would be the ones to do it.

Of course I would. But just because people are nice and regimented doesn’t automatically mean that they’re going to do something evil. It’s possible that they could do something evil, but that depends on who they follow. Anyone who was following what Hitler was saying knew that his followers were very capable of evil things.

You can either regret that you didn’t pay attention after the fact, or you can take action now to ensure that it never happens in the first place.

I am paying attention, and I’m far more afraid of the idiots who think that Obama is taking their guns away than I’m afraid of people who view Obama as an infallible leader (even though both are nuts).

Obama’s youth program is an abomination and must never come to fruition.

There’s no forced conscription to any groups, just voluntary programs that people can join. If you can’t tell the difference between that and what happened with Nazi Germany and the Hitler Youth, you need to pick up a history book.

These people must be discouraged from joining it.

As always with Jonathan, the true path to liberty lies in making everyone else’s decisions. What a crazy psycho.

Obama must never be allowed to raise a civil army, nor be allowed to take one hour of time from our youth in indoctrination.

What the fuck? Can someone please explain to me where these morons are getting these ideas from?

From Lynne Varner at the Seattle Times Ed Board blog. I’m not unsympathetic. There is a part of me that just wants tea bags back. And tossed salad. And - yes - glory holes. Still I think that ship has sailed.

If authorities at Jackson High School in Mill Creek were hip enough to run with the MySpace-Facebook crowd, they might not have egg on their faces, left with $4,000 worth of class spirit T-shirts and contemplating spending another $5,000 to hide slogans on the shirts that some students call offensive.

Yeah whatever. Kids are kids, and administrators are administrators.

According to this Seattle Times story, class names were put on the shirts that sounded innocent enough, for example: Freshman were “Krabby Patty and Juniors were “Mole Rat.” But some students said the terms are actually crude descriptions of people.

Dirty Sanchez class of 2010. 2011: the Santorums.

Student leaders’ [sic] said that Krabby Patty comes from the television cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Mole Rat from another popular cartoon. I guess I might have been more suspicious if I had first visited this slang dictionary.. [sic] Spend some time on the site and be prepared to be offended. A lot.

Yes. Many of the things on the site are crude and offensive. I kind of think that’s the point. Otherwise it’s tough to know what people mean when they say crude and offensive things.

But at what point does this become ridiculous? Feeling peckish, I looked up cake and while the first reference is a sweet pastry, the second and third meanings cannot be mentioned on the website of a family newspaper. And skirt? According to the dictionary’s meaning, I’ll have to slap the next person who says skirt in my presence.

Cake? A woman’s butt and cocaine? You can’t mention cocaine on the web? Jesus. As for skirt, World War Two era slang ooh. I mean, yeah, it’s kind of an offensive term, but you had to look it up on the Urban Dictionary to know what it means?

A lexicographical calamity, this is not.

All right, time to switch gears rather quickly.

Jackson officials shouldn’t spend a dime more on these shirts. Students have already accomplished their first goal: these T-shirts will never, ever be forgotten. And if they are, a quick media search will bring it all back up again. The rest of us can take solace from the fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson called language the archives of history. It should reflect the times.

I guess after some being offended, the end. I guess I don’t understand this paragraph in light of oh, we can’t say things on our web page.

- posted by demo kid

Don Ward, boy genius, is now whining about how every hour should be “Earth Hour”. I don’t even want to comment on the disturbing mental images:

There’s no word on whether you are allowed to use candles for illumination after the lights are off. But if not, it certainly gives you a good opportunity to get freaky with your significant other. Well at least for six or seven minutes.

but thinking about the inevitable eye rolls from readers with two X-chromosomes is quite funny. I hope to heck that if Don’s others are not too significant, future dates don’t Google him and get this story.

What I’m really wondering is this, though: are conservatives ever proactive about ANYTHING related to the environment? You’ll get no argument from me that the hydroelectricity that powers Seattle is cleaner than coal plants in the Ohio Valley (although there is some debate about the magnitude of those benefits over the life-cycle), and I’ve often found that many gestures like this don’t change much of the behavior that really needs to be changed. But do any of the conservatives carping on these issues ever present solutions that don’t include the words, “The market will take care of that,” or, “That really isn’t a problem”?

Mission Accomplished

- posted by demo kid

Why do I get irate with Jonathan Gardner? Well, when he posts this:

Liberals never tolerate debate since they cannot debate. They don’t know how to do it. Once they learn, they refuse to debate their beliefs at all.

but then publishes, in rapid succession, two posts that invoke Nazi Germany for examples, it shows that he really is the worst kind of hypocrite. He isn’t interested in debate. He’s interested in holding on to his beliefs, no matter how mad they may be, and twisting truths to make bombastic and inflammatory claims to “prove” them. That’s not argumentation as much as it is close-minded partisanship. So when he says, laughably:

We, unlike the liberal, can defend our philosophy with sound arguments and practical examples throughout history.

he can only do it when those “sound arguments” and “practical examples” are named “Nazi Germany”, “Zimbabwe”, “North Korea”, “Cuba”, or “Soviet Russia”.

Seriously, can someone that proposes to imprison people for adultery / premarital sex / homosexuality, kill government employees (including police, military, and kids working for Americorps), and dissolve all social services whatsoever (except those provided out of the goodness of the hearts of the rich), actually be taken seriously as a rational thinker and debater in a modern liberal democracy?

– posted by thehim

Normally I like to post the more serious stuff at HorsesAss, but I’ve been hammering away at the Bruce Olson trial so much (he was found Not Guilty today!), I think I’ll post this one here. Bryan Myrick, the new Seattle Conservative Examiner, takes on Norm Stamper and his views on drug legalization. As we’ve mentioned here before, Myrick is no wingnut, but he does take a few swings at some strawmen here, so I feel like breaking this one down:

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- posted by demo kid

Damon Linker from The New Republic posts a reaction to a speech given to the American Enterprise Institute by Charles Murray. (Yes, The Bell Curve guy.) Fascinating read, and Mr. Linker provides a nice, neat summary of the irrational arguments of many conservative libertarians:

What Murray offers in his lecture is just a slight variation on good old-fashioned Donner Party Conservatism.

For those unfamiliar with the delightful appellation, coined by blogger John Holbo in 2003, it refers to the brand of conservative thinking that defends America’s relatively minimal welfare state and anemic economic regulations on the grounds that it’s good for people to have to struggle and suffer to get by — just like those plucky, entrepreneurial pioneers who resorted to cannibalism to avoid starvation while trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains back in the winter of 1846-1847.

…

By contrast, Donner Party Conservatives like Murray deny that any trade-offs are required — and that’s what makes their ideology so easy, so delusional, and so pernicious. Yes, they say, the American approach to economic and social policy makes life much harder for the poor, but far from being cruel, heartless, or selfish — or an unfortunate consequence of protecting freedom, fostering growth, or encouraging economic vitality — the added burden on the poor should actually be viewed as a benefit. After all, if quality health care and child care were more widely available, if public transportation were more reliable and affordable, if schools and other social services were more effective — if, in a word, our society devoted a bit more of its vast resources to alleviating the struggles of the poor — then we would be depriving them of the possibility of happiness. How thoughtful and generous of us not to alleviate their suffering!

Sound like anyone we know?

And is it just me, or does it seem funny that conservatives denounce evoluation, but rabidly push for economic natural selection to thin out poor people?

Pudge proves that righteous populist anger will always have trouble finding a home in the Republican party.

Would You Keep Your AIG Bonus?

Remember when SP was strictly about Washington State issues? Me either.

If I got a bonus from AIG, and I was not a super-rich executive or someone else who was to blame for this mess, and Obama or my CEO came to me and said “please give your bonus back,” I’d tell them to get bent. Honestly, what kind of person would give back their hard-earned money? And don’t tell me an “altruistic” one, because that person could always take the money and give it to charity, where it would do far more good than if you gave it to AIG or the government.

I think that’s why they’re going with government action instead of politely engraved invitations. I have some sympathy for the ex post facto argument*, but this is just silly. The House legislation only applies to households making over $250,000. I’m sorry, but we got where we are in large part putting ourselves into the shoes of people making that money every year.

If I were an executive who could afford to give it back and needed to put a good face on this for the company, or if I felt guilty about my role in the crisis, then maybe I’d give it back. But presumably most of the several thousand people who got bonuses don’t fall into those categories, and have no intention of doing so.

I believe the proper response to that is, “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.” I mean really, how valuable can anyone be to that particular failed company?

So, would you give the money back? Even if Obama called you personally and promised to be your BFF if you did?

Again, the whole point of the discussion we’ve been having here is about legislation, not asking politely.

(Please let’s not have general rants here, and just stick to the topic: would you give back the bonus?)

It’s kind of an uninteresting topic except as a springboard to a general rant.

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