~ from the outbox:

also, it looks like i was dead wrong about hillary’s ‘crying’ being a fuck up

now, it is all anyone talks about – how it ‘saved’ her campaign by getting all these sympathetic women to vote for her.

this seems condescending to the ability of women to make rational decisions,
but wtf do i know about it?

although, a woman just called in to day-to-day [w] to admonish all men for calling hillary clinton ‘hillary’ while calling barack obama ‘obama’, as though using a first name puts someone in ‘her’ place. has anyone seen a campaign sign for ms. clinton? what name does she use?

maybe people say ‘hillary’ (like ‘w’ in ’00) so as not to be confused with the other clinton (like bush) we had 8 years previously, which is fucking stupid on an entirely new level.

~ corporate politics is lame; there are some more interesting discussions over at cafe tableaux and sisyphean

~ what is wrong with people? or, how on earth are decisions made by nimrods? some 94% white guy on ‘here and now’ was just asked why he voted for clinton, and he responded, ‘i like her. [ pause ] health care.’ what does that even mean? what about health care? it is term that clinton has used. is that all this guy knows about it?

‘why did you vote for mitt romney?’
‘i like him. gays.’

‘why did you vote for dennis kucinich?’
‘i like him. tempeh.’

~ forecast! when that report by general petraeus that we have been waiting for all summer is released, it will say ‘some things in iraq have improved, and some things have not’.

~ forecast! steve fossett crashed his plane and is eluding rescuers, so that when he is ‘discovered’ after surviving in the desert for two weeks, he will look like more of a hardcore adventurer.

~ john mccain doesn’t discriminate, except when he does:

“McCain told sophomore William Sleaster he is opposed to any form of discrimination, but he supports the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy and he opposes same-sex marriage.”

didn’t we say earlier that john mccain is a bastard?

~ i still think that john mcain is a bastard, but journalists’ late efforts to make him look like a loser due to his broke and failing presidential campaign actually make him look like less of one (bastard):

“Now, the Arizona senator and Vietnam War hero travels without staff or with a single aide and rarely with national media crews. Last week, he arrived in Manchester, N.H., on a commercial flight. He carried his own bags through the airport and his top two aides in the state drove him to his hotel.”

wow! he carried his own bags! what a sap!

~ what we mean to say is, the enormous amounts of garbage that litter the streets and sidewalks of philadelphia – ‘cheetos’ bags, beer bottles, chicken bones – are a larger threat to a suitable quality of life than is the possibilty that a teenager might have a firearm. if teenagers aren’t swayed by the consequences of robbing or shooting someone, they aren’t going to be dismayed by the thought of being fined if they caught with a gun. they aren’t using guns because guns are available; they are using them because they have no other prospects around here. on top of that, frisking people in the streets is unconstitutional. cleaning up pizza boxes and campaign signs in the park – and picking up recycled materials from residences once a week – is not.

~ also, to the white house, if jimmy carter is ‘increasingly irrelevant’, then he wouldn’t be on the front page, and you wouldn’t be commenting on him. the fact that you go to the press with statements on him proves you have defeated your own argument.

~ baltimore quote: ‘if michael nutter didn’t want to be an asshole, instead of stopping and frisking citizens, he’d make it illegal to leave unsolicited pizza fliers on everyone’s door.’
to continue this trajectory: nutter, along with all the losers, should also be forced to personally walk through the city and pick up every one of these campaign signs that are littering public property such as clark park, telephone poles, and thoroughfare medians.

~ whilst the rest of the nation publickly mourns, so that images of their compassion might show up in yahoo! news’ most popular photos, why does the angry red planet demonstrate its own insensitivity with ‘crass’ manipulated images and anonymous posts to messageboards? one might note our affinity for satirical response to an obvious charade, but our attempts to puncture the u.s. facade of feigned sensitivity are eclipsed by this fossil from arizona:

In response to an audience question about military action against Iran, the Arizona senator [John McCain] briefly sang the chorus of the surf-rocker classic “Barbara Ann.”

“That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran,” he said in jest Wednesday, chuckling with the crowd. Then, he softly sang to the melody: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah …” The audience responded with more laughter. –msnbc.com

Granted he is an out of touch coot who doesn’t know what condoms are, but the fact that audience ‘laughs’ at the notion of bombing some folks arbitrarily suggests, or proves, that secretly laughed when they heard that a man named Cho shot down some kids in some town of which they’ve never heard.

~ in honor of jt, who complains as much that we don’t update this site as he carries on about npelosi, green line cafe quote:

“nancy pelosi is kind of cute”
“who?”

~ when it comes to banning gay marriage:

“I don’t believe there’s any issue that’s more important than this one,” said Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican.

does this dipshit have an email address? he is from a state that was royally fucked in last year’s hurricane, and he can’t think of something ‘more important’ than his attempts to legislate against equal rights for all americans. i suspect that if they could get him on the phone, there are more than several people in southern louisiana who could give him some ideas of what is ‘important’ this year.

apparently there is a paucity of ideas in those there congress halls, for the right-wing fringe represented by Senator Brownback froths that men getting married “is harmful to the future of the republic”. the future of the republic! So that is what the Republicans want to protect the nation from; it isn’t as though we are enmeshed in an never-ending war against terrorists and freedom-haters – according to Republicans we needn’t worry about the record national debt, the cost in lives or money, the u.s. marines’ defiling of our national integrity in haditha, busted medicare, fuel costs, our rent going up $50 next month, or those hordes of immigrants we were being told to worry about just last week. in fact, the mere mention of outlawing gays has persuaded people to forget that the republican senate plans this week to repeal taxes on the wealthiest americans.

The only thing that is possibly crazier than Sam Brownback is the notion of Canadian terrorists storming parliament and cutting off heads.

~ we woke in new hampshire to the news that president bush’s approval rating has dropped to 29%. traveling to philadelphia, we listened to the news regarding usa today’s revelation that the NSA has been taking notes on every phone call made by americans—whom they talk to, when and for how long they call, where they are when they do so. as we waited for months to see bush’s rating drop into the twenties, we were, aside from our outrage at being spied upon, bemused that his rating should now lose the remaining 29 points in a matter of hours; it must become zero percent, for where would they find an american citizen who approved of having the gov’t monitor their conversations?

however, we were surprised, which itself is surprising, given the mental lethargy of our neighbors, when npr gleefully reported that over 2/3 of americans said that spying on them is acceptable. One can almost hear the self-righteous thugs proclaim, ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide’ (if that principle were true, then the bush administration would not have killed the justice department investigation into the laws violated by the nsa’s original wiretapping), or the information is ‘just digits’. The purpose for warrants is not to impede the cops or to give comfort to terrorists; it is to put the burden upon the gov’t to prove that, when weighed against a potential crime, it is worth violating the rights of a particular suspect. the notion that every call made in america needs to be monitored by the gov’t – with or without a warrant, and in this case, without—demands that every call is suspicious and, by extension—no pun intended—every american is a suspect.

~ trent lott, referring to those of us who insist that our privacy, not to mention the constitution, be respected spouts, “Do we want security … or do we want to get in a twit about our civil libertarian rights?” By portraying us as a bunch of whiners, reducing our concerns about constitutional violations to being something silly like a ‘twit’, Lott is trying to embarrass us or make put us on the defensive, when, if anyone should feel like coward it is Lott—and anyone else who is frightened into allowing any restraint on our rights or invasion into privacy by the gov’t. If Patrick Henry had been half the pussy that Trent Lott is, we would still be drinking tea and/or chicory. Fact.

also the aforementioned ‘fact’ that a majority of americans agree that gov’t monitoring of their lives is ‘okay’ seems to be exaggerated:

‘A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens” –usa today