Category: Uncategorized

From the NYT:

In his address from the French Quarter, the president sounded like such a spendthrift bleeding heart that he is terrifying the right more than his father ever did.

Read my lips: By the time all this is over, people will be saying that Poppy was the true conservative in the family.

If the slow-witted Maureen Dowd can figure this out in only five years, you’d think that all those Three Monkey Republicans would have at least begun to get a clue.

The lying little Hmong murderer gets locked up for good:

A jury convicted an Asian immigrant of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of six deer hunters, rejecting his claims that he fired in self-defense after being shot at and taunted by racial slurs. Chai Soua Vang, an ethnic Hmong who came to this country from Southeast Asia more than 20 years ago, faces mandatory life in prison. Wisconsin does not have a death penalty.

Jurors deliberated about three hours before convicting Vang on six counts of first-degree intentional homicide and three counts of attempted homicide. In addition to the six dead, two hunters were wounded in the shootings Nov. 21 that began when the group of hunters confronted Vang for being on private land….

The slayings occurred during the state’s beloved deer hunting season and exposed racial tension between the predominantly white north woods residents and immigrants from the Hmong ethnic group. Outside court, Vang’s sister questioned the jury’s makeup.

“Everyone was white,” Chou Vang said. “They do not understand. They will never understand what my brother went through out there,” she said. “He was not a dog to sit there and let them shoot at him. He was proud of who he is.”

Here’s an idea, Vang. If you don’t want to get tried by white people, THEN DON’T KILL PEOPLE IN WISCONSIN! Go back to Hmong-chee-chee land and kill yellow people, then you can have an all-yellow jury. Won’t that be nice? Maybe they’ll care about your ethnic pride and understanding why your cretinous brother thinks it’s okay to trespass on private property and murder people because he doesn’t like how they talk to him.

Of course, the reason this loser family is here in the Midwest in the first place is because of yellow people killing yellow people. They were our allies in Vietnam, that’s great. But so was Stalin and we didn’t give him a farm in New Ulm, Minnesota.

This multi-cultural disaster has to end. Simply bringing people to America, or Holland or the UK doesn’t change how thousands of years of culture and tradition have shaped them and their families. Forget indoctrination attempts, if they don’t want do exactly as the Romans do, they don’t belong in Rome.

Dr. Z of SI is not only the best NFL read, but an honest liberal. From his Mailbag:

Nope, not Coors. I boycott it. Too politically right wing…. A great big Denville, N.J., thank you to Scott of Phoenix for his kind words and his observation, “You should be teaching a course at the local university.” Uh, not sure about that. The local university is Morris County College, and they all take business courses there. I flunked economics in school, not once but twice.

I’m guessing he probably doesn’t realize that he explained the reason for his political beliefs right there. Good humor.

Bill Simmons paraphrases a long list of complaints:

She hates that I play Madden on the treadmill and that I honestly care about my team’s record and stats. Last week, she happened to be watching when one of my guys intercepted a pass and streaked down the sideline for a sure TD, until I made him run out of bounds at the 2. When she asked why, I casually explained, “I’m trying to break the touchdown record with Dillon.” I can’t begin to tell you how much she hated that.

Space Bunny, on the other hand, not only buys me Maddens for my birthday every year, but on the rare occasion when she accidentally buys one for the wrong system, has been known to apologize profusely and go out and get the correct one herself. She’s even been heard to say: “hey, you haven’t been playing much PlayStation lately, what’s the matter?” and she schedules her outings with her friends at the same time as Champions League or NFL games since she knows I’m staying home anyhow.

Now, she’s not perfect. I’m convinced that she only supports Manchester United in order to annoy me – although she’s never taken it so far as to pull for Juve against Milan – she is biologically incapable of remaining awake during a third quarter regardless of what time of day it might be and she still mocks me cruelly for that time that Maddens 2003 fired me from my gig coaching the Kansas City Chiefs.

“You got what? Fired? By your game? [peals of laughter] So, now do you have to sit and watch it play by itself”

But she’s a good sport about fantasy football, is genuinely pleased when her Wallabies, (managed by Big Chilly’s little brother), do well and even nods and pretends to be saddened by the injustice of Mike Martz goes for it on fourth-and-ten instead of doing what every sane coach in the league would do and kicking the doggone field goal simply because Chokechain has Bulger and I’ve got Wilkins.

Of course, the fact that she’s slender, blonde and really smoking hot doesn’t hurt either. Now if I can just convince her to buy that Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit….

John Podhoretz quotes an unnamed “high-level muckety-muck” who is defending the Republican’s Dear Leader:

Most conservatives praised the President’s speech last night, though there are some who worry that we are embarking on a “new Great Society.” In my estimation this concern is ill-founded. Here’s why.

No one wants to spend billions of dollars if it can be avoided(1). Yet we face a situation in which the Gulf Coast region was hit by the worst natural disaster in American history. There is no alternative(2)but to spend billions of dollars to help the region’s innocent people(3) rebuild their infrastructure, remove debris, send health professional and medical supplies to those in need, provide shelter to hundreds of thousands of evacuee families, help displaced persons apply for temporary jobs and unemployment benefits, and so much more.

The federal government has a moral obligation(4)and a legal commitment (under the 1988 Stafford Act) to help a region recover from a disaster of this magnitude. Reconstruction costs for public infrastructure are built in; the question is what additional policies to advance. The President faced a choice: he could pursue policies that have been repeatedly tried and repeatedly failed — or he could pursue a new, more conservative approach(5). The President, as you might expect, has cast his lot with the latter.

Last night’s speech is an unprecedented effort to use conservative means to alleviate persistent poverty(6). The key to the President’s approach is to use the federal government to catalyze and energize private institutions and individual choice.(7)

The number of astoundingly inaccurate assertions in these four paragraphs is impressive.

1. Has this guy ever heard of the U.S. Congress?
2. Governments have not attempted to aid the overwhelming majority of victims of natural disasters for most of human history. Clearly, there is an alternative.
3. If you live in a coastal city below sea level, you’re not innocent. You are taking a risk.
4. A government is not an entity capable of having morals.
5. Everyone with a brain already knows the president isn’t a conservative. This empty rhetoric doesn’t fool anyone.
6. Perhaps declaring war on it would be a good idea! Oh, wait….
7. Attempting to ameliorate the consequences of individual choice is what caused the New Orleans disaster in the first place.

I like dogs, but one thing that I cannot stand is the male dog’s insistence on refusing to empty his bladder when given the opportunity. It is impossible for me to have the least bit of sympathy for a stupid dog that has had “an accident” less than two hours after the stupid beast was urinating outside.

I think I’d drop $250 on a device that would allow you to press a button and shock the idiot dog into emptying itself for once. Yes, I understand why you’re saving it for later, and no, I don’t care!

Lest you misunderstand, no, my dog didn’t have any such accidents today. It’s just that shocked and hurt look on his face when I tell him that he’s not done and he’ll damn well get back over to the Designated Canine Release Area and have another go at the trees there gets on my nerves. And despite his protests, there’s always enough for rounds two and three.

From Fox News Sunday:

06/17/01, Tony Snow hosting. The lead off guest was Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State. Mr. Powell gave an excellent recitation relevant to foreign affair matters. Mr. Powell was discussing Mr. Bush’s trip to Europe, and was at a point in his recitation covering certain concerns regarding Russia, and Russia being requested to cooperate with the United States to track down lost Nuclear materials and scientists who were unaccounted for after the break up of Russia, that now may be in the hands of, or in the case of the missing scientists, working for adversaries of the USA. The quote from Mr. Powell: “Finding the Russian scientists may be a problem being that Russia does not have a Social Security System, as here in America, that allows us to monitor, track down and capture an American citizen.”

Can anyone verify this quote? If it’s not an invention of the tinfoil brigade, I would think it tends to eliminate any doubt about what the compassionate conservatives intend to do with implantable chip technology once it’s been tested on enough cows, convicts and nightclubbers.

UPDATE – yes, it’s a fake. I suspected that it might be, as diplomats generally aren’t known for their blunt speech. Even the Nazis weren’t inclined to use the Berlin newspapers to announce that they were intending to convert Jewish bones into fertilizer.

Jay Mohr finishes what the Sports Guy started:

The WNBA finals begin Wednesday, and if you listen very closely you’ll be able to hear that nobody cares….

Sadly, when it comes to the WNBA, almost all of us are outsiders. Do you know anybody who has ever watched a game? Have you ever spoken about the WNBA at work? At home? Anywhere? The NBA and the networks that have aired the sport have tried in vain for far too long to prop up this league as entertainment. If you are entertained by 7-foot, 225-pound women from Poland who have less basketball skills than the worst NBA D-Leaguer then I guess you are one of the few people who cares.

I would have no objection to the WNBA if it were just another poorly conceived sports league that would quietly go off and die. But since it has been made into A Symbol by the same women who brought us Title IX and murdered dozens of men’s college sports programs, I consider it my solemn duty to piss all over it at every given opportunity.

What’s interesting about this is the way in which the younger sportswriters don’t feel the need to genuflect in front of feminist icons the way the older ones do. I suspect this is because we are the first generation of athletes to actually have competed on the same field as our female counterparts, so we don’t buy into the hype about how good the women supposedly are.

I have plenty of respect for the women who were sprinters, jumpers and hurdlers on my NCAA D1 track team. I spent every day with them, ate almost every meal with them and every Wednesday, vomited on my hands and knees next to them. (Wednesday was Speed day, let’s see you run 17 sub-28 200s without throwing up.) But they simply weren’t on the same level as us, and in the same vein, no man who’s ever played basketball would take that league seriously, much less follow it.

My guess is David Stern is going to have to pull the plug on the WNBA sooner rather than later. Now that some of the most popular sportswriters at ESPN and SI are openly mocking it, it can’t possibly hope to survive.

Nick R attempts to lay a trap:

Vox believes that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but what about black people? Far more blacks than women are willing to shun a candidate that stands for–in theory, at least–smaller government. More importantly, a much larger percentage of blacks than women are willing to support a candidate that wants bigger government, progressive taxation, legal partial-birth abortions, and so on.

First, it’s worth noting that the American black vote is largely a female vote, since a surprisingly large percentage of black men, having been convicted of felonies, cannot vote. Second, the available evidence strongly suggests that while the female preference for security and big government over liberty and small government is global – and therefore probably inherent – the same is not true for the global black vote.

Take Great Britain, for example. OBV [Operation Black Vote] also aims to convince both politicians and ethnic minority communities of the power of the black vote. Unlike in the United States — where there has long been recognition of a cohesive, if disenfranchised, black vote — in Britain ethnic minorities have been perceived as rather fragmented in their political allegiances.

In many Western European countries, the black vote tends to support the more conservative party, as many of the first- and second-generation African immigrants have direct experience of living under socialist governments and want no part of it. Black societies certainly have no shortage of issues, but unlike feminized equalitarian societies, they are not suicidal, have no problem reproducing themselves and therefore will likely continue to survive even if they remain unlikely to thrive.

But even if this were not so, I would stand by my logic. No group which reliably demonstrates a strong preference for security over liberty should be permitted to vote in any free society that wishes to remain free. The question ultimately boils down to what is more important, the preservation of a fraudulent illusion of limited quasi-democracy or the protection of genuine liberties.

Fatmammycat takes exception:

Vox, you should hang your head in shame for some of the things you have said about women, surely you have a mother or sisters, maybe even an aunt or two? Is this how you think of them? I wonder what ever happened to you to make you so full of venom.

There are two reasons one is contemptuous of another. One is a conscious belief in one’s own superiority. As I do not believe in inherent male superiority – men have their own, very different set of weaknesses and problems – this does not apply. The other reason is that one observes contemptible behavior.

My affection for the women I love and my positive relationships with them has little to do with the behavior and thought processes I witness in them and others around me. They have long been aware of what I think and they are likewise aware that there is nothing that I have said on the subject which cannot be supported conclusively, in both anecdotal and more substantive statistical manner. As Carolus noted, I barely even need to articulate my case, a simple selection of quotes from various female leaders and references to their actions suffices to speak for me.

Many fail to understand that “respect” is not a synonym for “like”. Nor are such things all-encompassing. One can greatly respect Terrell Owens for his toughness and his football ability while disliking him personally and harboring a total lack of respect for his selfishness and lack of character. And a predatory male player doesn’t hate women, he loves them, otherwise he would neither have such interest in them nor understand them well enough to win them over with such ease. He does not, of course, respect them or he would not use them as he does.

Let me share with you an example that might illuminate what Fatmammycat wrongly calls my “venom”. Now, Aunt Anne is a highly intelligent woman, very verbal and witty, who worked as a corporate executive when I was a teenager. One day when the extended family was having brunch at the golf club some years ago, the subject of my company’s lack of female employees happened to come up. I answered that I was not about to hire any women, as our location and the complete absence of educational training for our industry meant that we had to hire untrained people straight out of college and the last thing I wanted was to hire someone who’d require a year to train, then get married and quit two years later.

Aunt Anne took this response very personally as a serious offense to all women in general, to professional women in particular, and therefore to her. She was so furious that she stormed away from the table and out of the club, preferring to march angrily homeward rather than spend another moment in the vicinity of her mysogynistic young relative. Her husband, who is a fairly placid fellow, was a little taken aback by my response, which was not to apologize and humbly beg forgiveness, but to howl with uncontrollable laughter instead.

You see, he’d apparently forgotten that her experience as a corporate executive was as a human resources officer. And the individual who had originally brought the problem of hiring women recently graduated from college to my attention was none other than my aunt, who for years had often lamented the high rate of turnover she’d experienced in employing them. In fact, she’d even instituted a similar policy of refusing to employ them at her company, instead hiring only women in their late thirties and older.

As it turned out, I was well served by paying attention to Aunt Anne’s professional opinion rather than her personal feelings. In the seven years Big Chilly and I ran our development house, we never once had a single employee voluntarily leave our employment.

I don’t control women’s behavior and I have no influence over their thought processes. If you have a problem with my observations of them, you have three reasonable alternatives. The first is to take issue with the accuracy of my statements, something a few women have tried, mostly with embarrassingly ineffective results. The second is to bury your head in the sand, pretend that you never encountered them and wish them away; this appears to be the favored response. The third is to acknowledge their unpleasant reality and determine if they describe your own behavior and tendencies, then attempt to make the requisite adjustments.

It makes no difference to me what anyone reading this thinks or subsequently does with the information. The truth is what it is, and if my observations happen to accurately reflect a small part of it, then I am pleased.