The Electron Runes

God Issues Earthquake Statement

2011-08-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Earthquake Result of Shift in Tectonic Plates, Not Divine Retribution

The creator of the universe has issued the following statement about the 5.9 magnitude earthquake that hit the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. this afternoon:

"Before anyone gets the idea that today's earthquake was some sort of divine punishment of people who support same-sex marriage, universal healthcare, taxing the wealthy, or a woman's right to choose, let me just state that nothing could be further than the truth, and that this quake, like all previous quakes in the history of the world, was in fact the result of two tectonic plates getting a little bit stuck and then breaking free.

"I'm issuing this preemptive statement because I know some of you are getting your sound bites ready. I'm looking at you, Pat Robertson. Just keep it to yourself this time. You too, Falwell. Wait, Falwell's dead? OK, well, Limbaugh or Beck or anyone else that sees heavenly retribution when and only when it's convenient to their cause. I don't have time to keep track of them all or remember their names, but I can assure you I find their supernatural interpretations of natural disasters quite tiresome, annoying, and presumptuous. Thank you."

Can We Afford Another Norman Conquest?

2011-08-19T06:13:00.000-07:00

Michele "Don't Know Much About History" Bachmann makes the Runes again today after a radio interview in which she noted that Americans are worried about "the rise of China, the rise of India, and the rise of the Soviet Union," which would be a pretty neat trick considering the Soviet Union has not existed for 20 years.

Twenty years. Does Bachmann ever read the newspaper? I mean, even if she didn't read the paper the day the USSR broke up into independent countries (December 1991), has she read one since then? Has she looked at a world map in the last couple of decades?

I mean, the last time the Soviet Union existed, Elvis Presley had been dead for 14 years. By the way, happy birthday, Elvis.

I'm one American who isn't worried about the rise of the Soviet Union. However, we should probably keep an eye on the Prussians. For that matter, those sneaky Visigoths should never be counted out either. I've also heard the Babylonians are massing on the Assyrian border. And can we really afford another Norman Conquest?

Of course, to be perfectly fair, I'm guessing 90% of Bachmann's supporters aren't aware the Soviet Union no longer exists either.

* * *

Bachmann went on to say that thanks to the debt-ceiling bill, President Obama is going to "whack $500 billion at a time when we're fighting three wars." She didn't happen to mention that any fighting we're doing these days isn't actually a war and isn't actually necessary.

Bachmann Fails Government 101

2011-08-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

See, why would you take the time to poke fun at a picture of Michele Bachmann eating a corn dog when all you have to do is wait a few minutes for her to say something idiotic? Eating a corn dog doesn't make someone a bad presidential candidate, but not understanding how the government works sure as hell does.

In an interview with CNN, Bachmann trotted out the tired old phrase "legislating from the bench" in reference to Varnum, the 2009 Iowa Supreme Court decision that allowed same-sex marriage here. She's opposed, she said, to legislating from the bench. She's opposed to judges "substituting their opinion for that of the people," which is what she thinks happened in Iowa.

OK, listen closely, Michele: Judges have one job, and that's to interpret the laws in light of the Constitution. Judges do not consult "the people" before making their decisions. They don't have to. If judges based their interpretation of the laws based on the will of the people, we wouldn't need judges. Hell, we wouldn't even need law schools.

Does Michele Bachmann really not know this?

I mean, I can understand pretending not to know it in order to appeal to the uneducated. But those people are already going to vote for her. How does a real or pretend misunderstanding of how government works help you win over the undecided? The independent? The people who actually know what role the judicial branch is supposed to play?

The CNN interviewer asked Bachmann what harm she thought had been done by the 2009 ruling. She didn't answer the question, but rather said it was more important for people to "weigh in on the laws they choose to live under." In other words, she thought the people should have been able to vote on same-sex marriage.

But what people, Michele? The bigoted? The self-righteous? We had a vote last November and a slim majority of Iowans--incited by out-of-state special interest groups--fired three Supreme Court justices. Not for malfeasance. Not for corruption. For disagreeing with them.

For doing their jobs right, essentially.

I wish Bachmann had attempted to answer the question about what harm had befallen Iowa since gay men and women were allowed to marry. If she were truly honest, she would have had to admit that the state has proceeded apace with nary a blip attributed to Varnum. If on the other hand she was just being Michele Bachmann, she would have come up with something. I have a feeling, though, that she probably would have just echoed what the State claimed during the 2009 hearing might happen if same-sex marriage were allowed--harm to children of same-sex couples, basically. The Court found these arguments specious and unsupported.

Of course, "specious and unsupported" means "perfectly logical" to the people Bachmann is trying to appeal to.

The Corn Dog Affair

2011-08-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

By now everyone has seen the ridiculous picture of Michele Bachmann eating a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair, and of course there have been scores of lascivious comments about how it looks like she's performing fellatio and isn't that hilarious and ha ha Michele Bachman is going on down on a corn dog and so on and so on.

The jokes are tiresome, and they're cheap, and even taking into account what a nasty human being and even worse presidential prospect Bachmann is, they're not really fair. Yeah, remember this date, because this is going to be the first and last day the Runes ever sort of stands up for Michele Bachmann.

Let's approach this from a comedy standpoint: Corn dogs are not a new invention. They've been around since the '20s. Everyone knows what they look like. Everyone knows they go in your mouth. So if you believe that someone eating a corn dog appears to be performing fellatio, then you have to believe that everyone eating a corn dog appears to be performing fellatio. Thus, there is no joke. You can't pick and choose: "Hey, this person I don't like looks as if he or she is knob-gobbling that corn dog--but of course it looks perfectly respectable when I do it."

Some pundits and bloggers and Facebook commenters have said that publishing the unflattering picture of Bachmann is an attempt to sexually humiliate a female presidential candidate. (One person, apparently new to the planet, asked "Would the same picture have been published if it were a man with half a corn dog in his mouth?" Uh--yes.) Others are taking a more sophomoric approach, posting remarks implying that Bachmann is sure enjoying that phallic substitute, wink wink. The former group might be jumping to conclusions; the latter group's leering is misguided because, again, you can't make fun of someone else's enjoyment of, uh, corn dogs if it's something you enjoy yourself. After all, to borrow (and truncate) a quote from Lenny Bruce, "...that's one nice lady."

There are plenty of good reasons to make fun of Michele Bachmann, including the fact that she thinks aligning herself with the right-wing fringe is going to make her electable in November 2012. But hey, as a corn dog eater she has nothing to be ashamed of.

Things That Aren't Going To Happen

2011-08-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

Here's one thing I know for sure: I'm never going to be involved in the election process for a new pope. One reason is that popes are elected by the College of Cardinals, a group of which I will never be a member for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I'm not Catholic.

I only mention this because the sad human being and delusional presidential candidate Rick Santorum was in the news again today, blathering on about how the Iowa Supreme Court tried to "redefine nature" by allowing same-sex marriage in this state in 2009. (As in my previous Santorum post, I wish someone would start pinning him down on phrases like this. "Hey, Rick, can you point to the passage in the court's decision that redefines nature, or, if you can't do that, could you explain what the hell you mean by redefining nature? Because not only didn't it happen, it doesn't make sense.")

In the midst of his blathering, Santorum was asked if he would appoint a Supreme Court justice who would reinstate anti-sodomy laws. According to the story in Mother Jones magazine, he dodged the question. But beyond the idiocy of someone who thinks it's perfectly sensible and Constitutional for government to regulate what two consenting adults do in private, I have to laugh at anyone who thinks Santorum will ever in his life have an opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice.

The closest this twit will ever come to selecting a Supreme Court justice will be if he coaches a team in the Fantasy Judicial League.

America, We Have A Problem

2011-08-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

This is a piece I posted on Facebook a few days before Congress screwed the pooch on the debt-ceiling compromise. Looks like you're going to have to squint to read it, so here's a recap. That first little Venn diagram shows that the government--the people we elect to office--is a subset of all Americans. If someone wants to argue that point, bring it on.

The second Venn diagram illustrates what I consider a problem (and by the way, of all the things I've forgotten from junior high math, why isn't the Venn diagram one of them?). The problem is that most elected officials think that being elected lifts them out of the set they came from. As the diagram shows, they think Washington orbits the rest of America. This isn't a good thing. If they feel they don't have to work for the greater good of the entire country (because, say, they're in the pockets of corporate interests), then who will? Who's going to protect us from the people we elected? Who's going to bring these people down to Earth where they came from?

Here's another part of the problem. Too many Americans also think Washington orbits the rest of us. Too many people have forgotten that the government--and the power it holds--comes from us. Thus, we hear constant griping: "The government can't do anything right," "I love my country but don't trust my government," "If you think [whatever] is screwed up now, wait till government gets a hold of it." And those who gripe are naturally going to be highly susceptible to the Tea Party message that "the government" is the problem.

If you can't point to any examples of your elected officials working on your behalf (or if elected officials actually do do something on your behalf and the opposition manages to make you think exactly the opposite--hello, admittedly flawed healthcare bill), then hell, no wonder you think of the government as your enemy.

This has to change.

We have to stop thinking that our elected officials are somehow above the rest of us. Sadly, this probably means we'll have to stop thinking that way before the elected officials do. We have to start thinking of the government as "us" instead of "them." That's the kind of thinking that led to the safety nets of Social Security and Medicare. That's the kind of thinking that led to consumer protection and worker safety laws. That's the kind of thinking that's going to get us out of this "Every man for himself" mindset.

Social Security isn't the government helping us. It's us helping us.

Universal healthcare isn't a socialist* plot. It's us helping us.

Our elected officials aren't "them." They're us. Or they're supposed to be, anyway.

There are people who say we should leave everything up to the vagaries of the free market. I say those people are worshiping at the wrong altar.

If we don't start electing people who will stand up for us, our elected officials might as well start wearing the logos of the corporations who are sponsoring them.

*The use of scare-words by corporate tools will be covered in a future entry.

E. Coli Claims Life of Local Sailor

2011-08-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Remember the big e.coli outbreak of 2006? Yeah, I wouldn't have either except that I was reminiscing in my long-forgotten Rat Race Choir blog and found this entry from September of that year. Enjoy.

WHARFTOWN, Mass. - Contaminated spinach is being blamed for the death yesterday of Popeye T. Sailorman, a colorful local character known for his massive forearms, his infectious laugh, and his decades-long rivalry with a local bully known only as Brutus.

Witnesses say Popeye had just squeezed open a can of spinach, forcing the contents to arc into the air and land in his open mouth--a feat of dexterity he had performed on numerous occasions without incident. Only after the elderly sailor dropped to the ground and began vomiting did the onlookers notice that the can was labeled Earthbound Farms, a brand of spinach recalled recently because of its link to an outbreak of e.coli.

"He was strong to the finish," said an acquaintance, Wimpy J. Wellington. "Well, except for when he was convulsing and screaming for a merciful end to the excruciatingly painful cramps, bloody diarrhea, and complete kidney failure."

Popeye's longtime girlfriend, Olive Oyl, released this statement: "Popeye was always ready to fight for my honor. It's one of life's bitter ironies that he was felled by the vegetable he loved most, the vegetable that gave him his incredible strength.

"I'll miss him," concluded Ms Oyl. "He was what he was."

Rick Santorum's Fantasy World

2011-08-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

Noted GOP presidential candidate and sad human being Rick Santorum is in the news again today. That's the trouble with living in Iowa during the pre-caucus season--I didn't even get a chance to blog about the last thing he was in the news for before he shot off his mouth again. (Two days ago Santorum signed the National Organization for Marriage's pledge that as president he would try to amend the Constitution to define marriage as "one man, one woman," which isn't really news because I suspect Santorum signs one or two pledges of this sort before breakfast every day, but which I would have used as a dig at Mitt Romney, who also signed the pledge in an effort to prove that there are no depths to which he will not sink to grab the votes of the most hatefully diseased minds in the state.)

So yesterday Santorum told the Des Moines Register editorial board that the courts have "created a right to sexual liberty that diminishes the right to religious liberty." I hope the editorial board laughed in his face, but I don't know anyone on the board so I don't know if that's their style or not. The story doesn't say one way or the other, so let's assume they heard him out.

His explanation: "Same-sex marriages jeopardizes religious liberty because the government may threaten license-holders such as marriage counselors who refuse to treat gay couples." He goes on to say that the courts have thus created a "super-right."

Much the way Santorum has created an argument that is "super-specious."

Sexual liberty, beyond the fact that it has nothing to do with same-sex marriage, is not now nor has it ever been a right granted by the courts. It's yours when you're born. It's a human right. You are free to have sex with anyone who is legally and mentally capable of granting consent. Courts and governments through history have tried to repress this right, but it makes no different if they're repressing it or recognizing it: The right exists.

Santorum doesn't want to acknowledge this because he lives in a fantasy world where his religious beliefs trump everything else. He also told the Register editors that if the pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of pleasure, then "we won't be a country very long."

This is where I wish someone would have asked "Rick--what the hell do you mean by that? I mean, seriously, that doesn't make sense. What will happen to the country? Tell us how it will cease to be a country. Please explain what you're talking about instead of making vague threats."

Personally, I think the country would be in more danger--certainly the Constitution would be--if people like Rick Santorum were given the power to define "the pursuit of happiness."

Newts in the News

2011-08-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

Well, we're five months away from the Iowa Caucuses and every day a different combination of Republican presidental candidates descends on the state and traipses around saying silly things. At this point in the process, candidates are not looking for the votes of moderate Republicans and certainly not interested in independent voters. They're mainly trying to out-bigot and out-reactionary each other so they can bring out the most rabid anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Obama voters next January. There'll be time enough to court sensible folks if they win the nomination.

So who's making news in Iowa today? Let's start with Newt Gingrich, who addressed a group of civic leaders at the Cedar Rapids Country Club (truly a man of the people, that Newt) and made up a new phrase, "bureaucratic socialism," to describe Obama's policies. He also called the president a left-wing radical, which if true would certainly be news to all of us who have watched Obama capitulate to the right-wingers for the last couple of years. The actual quote was "Obama is a left-wing radical who wants to raise taxes." I don't know if the Newt has noticed, but (a) most economists agree that eliminating the Bush tax cuts is essential to a balanced budget, (b) most Americans think this is the fair thing to do, and (c) if Obama wants to raise taxes, he has a funny way of showing it--namely, not raising taxes.

According to the story in the Register, the Newt got a hearty round of applause for suggesting that the Wall Street reforms enacted in 2010--the reforms meant to prevent the unethical practices that led to the economic quagmire we're still in--should be repealed. Who stands to benefit from the absence of such regulations? The people who already have all the money.

But that doesn't bother the Newt. He says Wall Street reform "restricts business" and is an example of unnecessary government regulation. I have no doubt that's where the applause broke out. To Newt and his followers at the Cedar Rapids Country Club, there's no such thing as a necessary government regulation. If it stands in the way of the rich getting richer, it's unnecessary.

And later, when the Newt said "Obama is creating bureaucratic socialism," the newspaper account doesn't give the context, other than the fact that it must have followed the equally fanciful "left-wing radical" remark. But I'm not sure the Newt needed context in that crowd. I'm not sure he needed complete sentences. He could just as easily have read from a list of dog-whistle words: socialist, left-wing, unnecessary regulations, raise taxes, ya-da-ta, ya-da-ta.

And the Cedar Rapids Country Club would have thought he was actually saying something.

Return of the Runes

2011-08-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because the 2012 campaigns are heating up. Maybe it's because I have more to say than I can fit in a Facebook status.

Or maybe it's because I keep running into stuff like this:

The drought in Texas has killed all the fish in the OC Fisher reservoir in the western part of the state, and has caused an overabundance of a bacteria called Chromatiaceae, which thrives in oxygen-deprived water. The presence of all this bacteria has also given what's left of the water a blood-red hue.

Now, according to the story on msnbc.com, the picture of this blood-red reservoir caught the attention of an Indiana theologian named Paul Begley, who responded with a YouTube video in which he noted that this could in fact be a sign of the apocalypse--which a lot of people seem to be in quite a hurry for, though that's another entry for another time.

Begley cited a verse in Revelation that goes something like "The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died."

I stopped caring about apocalyptic predictions when I learned in one of my college religion classes that people have been making them for about 2000 years. But by golly, when some attention-craving yahoo with a camcorder can read Revelation and interpret "the sea" as "a 5000-acre lake in west Texas," I know one thing: It's time to crank up the Runes again.

Remembering September 11

2008-09-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

I’d been queasy all afternoon, but on the evening of September 10, 2001 I managed to drag myself out to the ballpark and go 4-for-4 in the last game of the CMF&Z Voodoo Bats’ coed slow-pitch softball season. I was still nauseous the next morning, so I called in sick and planned to rest at home all day.

And I would have, except that Love and Theft, Bob Dylan’s first album of new songs in four years, was being released that day. I drove to Target in West Des Moines to be the first on my block to own it—and as I walked through the electronics section, past the wall of TVs, I saw smoke coming out of the World Trade Center.

A plane had crashed into the building, they said.

That seemed impossible and ridiculous. Was it some idiot who lost control of his small twin-engine? They surely didn’t run flight patterns over the WTC, did they? And even if they did, the odds against a plane going down into such a major landmark had to be astronomical.

I was back home before I heard the real story. Hijackers. Terrorists. And then the truly unbelievable announcement that the first tower had collapsed.

I remember thinking they were mistaken. They said collapsed but they couldn’t have meant collapsed.

But there was the footage. It reminded me of when we used to crush pop cans by standing on them and poking the opposite sides at the same time.

I thought of the people inside, going about their business, feeling safe, never dreaming of any horror such as this. Whoever would have listed “Fear of an airplane being deliberately flown into my building” among his list of fears?

I thought of the people working on the floor the first plane hit, looking out the window at the nose of a jet getting larger and larger. I thought of the people on the jet, in utter shock that this was how it was going to end. I thought of the fanatic at the controls—the superstitious hateful fanatic—and wished there were a hell where he could be told: You were wrong.

The horror has diminished for me: I knew no one in New York at the time, suffered no anguish waiting on a call from a loved one. The horror has diminished but the sense of outrage lives on, and so with nothing political to say in this post I’ll just add my voice to those remembering the victims of September 11.

Barack Obama and Lipstickgate

2008-09-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

The willfully ignorant are out in force these days, all upset about Barack Obama and Lipstickgate. They’re wringing their hands, they’re getting their undies in a knot, and if it’ll help draw attention to themselves they’re probably wringing their undies too.

I’m referring of course to the pretend outrage over Obama’s comment about John McCain’s claim to be the candidate of change. Speaking at a rally in Lebanon, Virginia, Obama said:

“You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

Unfortunately for Obama and fortunately for the willful ignoramuses, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin had made a joke at the Republican National Convention, noting that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick. Lipstick was thus fresh in the little minds of the sort of kneejerk Republicans who want desperately to believe their party has a corner on gentility, fairness, purity, and goodness. In these tiny minds, Barack Obama was referring to Sarah Palin as a pig.

And the media—too often as willfully ignorant as the rest of these clowns—gave them the voice they needed, as if there were honestly some debate about Obama’s meaning.

Never mind that the phrase “lipstick on a pig” has been in the lexicon for years (and enjoys a resurgence every four years, coincidentally enough). Never mind that McCain used the phrase years ago to refer to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposals. Never mind that it’s unfathomable that any presidential candidate in the 21st century would refer to his opponent as a pig—let alone one as gentlemanly as Obama, who had earlier noted that Palin’s family would be off-limits as campaign fodder.

No, these people had to pretend that they believed the unbelievable. Their outrage was manufactured and deceitful, and they know it. But here’s the sad part: They also know they only have to fool enough of the truly ignorant to keep this bullshit alive. So right now there’s a registered voter in Palookaville saying “I can’t vote for a man that calls a woman a pig,” and he’s saying it to two friends, and they’re saying it to two friends, and no matter what goes on between now and election day they’re going to remember something that never happened.

And the willfully ignorant will pat themselves on the back.

By the Way, Nostradamus Didn't Know Beans Either

2008-09-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Back in high school I read Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth and got all freaked out about it because this Lindsey character’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation indicated pretty clearly that we were living in the end times. That would be the 1970s, if you’re keeping score.

Lindsey had it all figured out. I don’t remember the details, but the Soviet Union figured heavily into it, and the European Economic Community, and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, and of course everybody’s favorite boogeyman, the antichrist. There was rapture this and tribulation that, and I was terrified. I mean, it had to be true, right? They wouldn’t have published it if it weren’t true, right?

I had all the critical-thinking skills of a gnat back then. Hell, I thought The Amityville Horror was a true story because it said “A True Story” right on the cover. Luckily I took a religion class in college and learned that people had been interpreting the Revelation pretty regularly for centuries, and that oddly enough they all found parallels between those biblical prophecies and whatever was going on in the world that day.

But this brings me back to an earlier post, about the co-worker who claims to believe Barack Obama is the antichrist. I still don’t know who this co-worker is, but I’d love to find out so I can ask if he or she is planning to vote for Obama. After all, a key element in any serious interpretation of Revelation is the antichrist’s rise to power. Do the people who make this outlandish Obama/antichrist claim really want to be the ones to thwart biblical prophecy? Aren’t they afraid of crossing up their deity?

Which is it? Do they take the prophecy literally or not? If they do, it sets up a catch-22 Joseph Heller would be proud of:

Co-Worker: I believe Obama is the antichrist.
Runes: Really. So you’re going to vote for him and help bring about the end times.
Co-Worker: No! I can’t vote for Obama—he’s the antichrist!
Runes: So you don’t believe the prophecy.
Co-Worker: Wrong. I do believe the prophecy, but that doesn’t mean I want it to happen in my lifetime.
Runes: So you think somewhere down the road, the antichrist will come to power.
Co-Worker: Exactly.
Runes: Therefore, it’s not Obama—so you can vote for him.
Co-Worker: I can’t vote for Obama.
Runes: Why not?
Co-Worker: He’s a Democrat/liberal/socialist/Muslim/ terrorist/African-American. And inexperienced.

Reasoning With Reason

2008-08-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember the first time I ever heard the phrase “a piece of work” used disparagingly about a person with kooky beliefs or habits, but I do remember thinking it was both hilarious and incredibly apt. It’s a perfect phrase. You can call someone weird, but weird covers everything from Carrot Top to Son of Sam. “Piece of work” gets right to the point. You can’t say it without rolling your eyes or shaking your head or both.

The phrase is fresh on my mind today because this morning I discovered a blogger named Reason McLucus on the Des Moines Register site, and man, this guy is a piece of work.

According to his bio, Reason is 62 years old, a resident of Kansas, a Vietnam veteran, and “a mathematician who looks at how social and physical systems work.” He doesn’t claim that being a mathematician helps him understand how social and physical systems work—he just likes to look.

He does, however, say, that he has 100 hours of graduate study beyond his M.A. in American history. With those sorts of academic credentials going for him, one might think Reason could deliver a cogent analysis of the campaign landscape on the eve of the Democratic Convention.

One would be wrong.

The subtitle of Reason’s blog is “Fighting ignorance with knowledge and logic,” neither of which are evident in today’s post, called “Another Bush Administration.” Here’s Reason, coming right out of the blocks:

Democrats have been claiming that a John McCain administration would be a third Bush administration. However, it’s the Democrats who are offering the ticket that more closely resembles the Bush administration.

Say again? Two of the most liberal members of the Senate are more like Bush-Cheney than McCain and whomever? In his 100 hours of doctorate-level study, has Reason discovered some hidden nuance linking these four men, some insight we ordinary folks would have missed?

Uh, no, he has not. According to Mr McLucus:

Democrats will offer an inexperienced young presidential candidate with an older experienced vice president to tell him what to do—at least that is how the Democrats claim the Bush administration has functioned.

Well, substitute “dimwitted” for “inexperienced” and “morally bankrupt” for “older experienced,” and that’s pretty much how the Bush administration has been functioning for almost eight years now.

Reason goes on to say that Biden is actually more qualified to be president than Obama, which might or might not be true and isn’t really relevant, considering the primaries were over several weeks ago. He goes on to note:

Biden is a bad choice for Barack Obama’s running mate because Biden’s presence on the ticket will highlight Obama’s inexperience.

If Obama is as inexperienced in foreign policy as his detractors claim, then choosing a VP candidate who has foreign-policy experience should be reassuring, right? Not according to Reason, who uses his mighty powers of logic to claim that Biden’s experience only draws attention to Obama’s lack thereof. By Reason’s dubious reasoning, Obama should have selected a running mate with no experience whatsoever—because then nobody would notice.

Biden’s past comments about Obama’s inexperience could also hurt Obama’s chances of winning. Republicans certainly will be using those comments to discredit Obama.

Ah yes, six months ago, Joe Biden said something to the effect that Obama didn’t have the experience to be president. What was the context? Hmmm—oh yes, I remember now: Biden was running for president at the time. Apparently, Reason isn’t aware that primary candidates sometimes say things to make voters want to vote for them instead of the others. He’s right about one thing: Republicans will undoubtedly try to use this scrap of nothing to try to discredit Obama. As the Swift Boat weasels proved, there’s a whole mess of registered voters who’ll believe any damn thing you tell them.

Reason, don’t worry, buddy. Obama is well aware of Biden’s comment during the primaries. If he held any grudges, he wouldn’t have chosen Biden as his running mate.

Obama has been claiming he wants to bring change to Washington. His choice of a career Senator as his running mate indicates he is attempting to convince older voters that “Change” is just a buzz word to con young voters into supporting him.

This might be the dumbest paragraph in the piece, which makes it one of the dumbest of all time. I’d love to hear Reason use knowledge and logic to explain why Obama would want to convince older voters that he’s trying to con young voters into supporting him. The sentence makes no sense. Then again, neither does the idea that being a career Senator disqualifies one from trying to change things in Washington. See if you can figure this one out, Reason: What Obama and the rest of us want to change is the corrupt, immoral, un-American policies of the current resident of the White House.

Obama has no real intention of really changing anything in Washington.

Thank you, Amazing Kreskin. Your psychic abilities are every bit as sensible as your political insights.

I’ve browsed around a little bit in the rest of Reason’s posts, and to his credit, he comes out strongly against parents leaving their children in hot cars. But when it comes to talking politics, he’s truly a piece of work.

Cavalcade of News on the March, Part 2

2008-08-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

Here’s a truly jaw-dropping moment from the recent news:

On "Face the Nation" Sunday, Republican slimebag Karl Rove said he expects Barack Obama to choose a VP candidate that will help him win battleground states, without regard to that candidate’s leadership potential. According to cbsnews.com, Rove said

“I think he’s going to make an intensely political choice, not a governing choice. He’s going to view this through the prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to say, he’s going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He’s not going to be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president.”

Pardon me while I reattach my jaw. By Rove’s logic, Bush Sr must have chosen intellectual featherweight Dan Quayle as his 1988 running mate because Quayle actually had some presidential qualifications, not because he was a conservative Midwesterner with boyish good looks and the sturdy resolve of a lap dog. By Rove’s logic, Dan Quayle was the second-most qualified person to be the leader of the free world. Gee, you’d think a candidate of that caliber would still be active in politics, delivering fiery speeches about his vision for a better America, instead of working for a private investment firm.

(By the way, there probably aren’t a lot of blogs bashing Dan Quayle these days. Another reason you can count on the Runes for the most timely and insightful political commentary.)

Need another example? By Rove’s logic, Dick Cheney would make a good president. And maybe he would, if the Society of Grouchy Old Pricks ever deposes their current regime. But until showing contempt for Americans is recognized as an attribute of a good leader, I’m willing to believe the Poor Dope chose Cheney for entirely different reasons—most of them involving his shriveled black heart.

For seven long years, Karl Rove has been the shameless mouthpiece of an administration that puts party before country at every opportunity. Of course, it helps to be shameless if you’re going to accuse the Democrats of doing something you’ve made a pretty good living at.

* * *

Just a quick take on this one: I had to shake my head at the way both McCain and the Poor Dope demanded a diplomatic solution to the fighting between Russia and Georgia. Don’t those Russians know that we’re the only country allowed to solve problems—even non-existent ones—with military might? According to the Los Angeles Times, Bush told Moscow that its attacks in Georgia had “substantially damaged” its standing in the world and its relations with the West.

Well, he oughta know.

I’m sure Russia enjoyed being lectured by a guy with the moral authority of a cucumber.

Cavalcade of News on the March

2008-08-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I wish John Edwards had kept his thing in his pants back when the opportunity presented herself. I’m surprised but not devastated by the news of his extramarital affair; after all, he didn’t promise to be faithful to me till death do us part. I’m mostly disappointed that he’s probably blown the chance to be a key member of an Obama administration.

I caucused for Edwards last January and he was my second choice after Howard Dean in 2004, and of all the Democratic candidates in the race when this campaign started a couple of eons ago, I still think he was the most aware of and the most concerned about the plight of working families.

That said, I want to go back to a quote I read from a Hillary Clinton supporter shortly after Obama clinched the nomination. This supporter complained that after it came down to a two-person race, the media’s love affair with Obama made the difference.

I’d like to point out that the media’s love affair with both Obama and Clinton was what made it a two-person race in the first place. In my estimation (and that of the thousands of other Iowans who helped him earn 15 delegates at the caucus last January), Edwards’ experience and ideas made him the best choice to defeat the Republicans in November—but somehow he got dubbed the pretty-boy candidate, the haircut candidate, and the media treated him as an also-ran before the campaign was barely off the ground. (Actually, my political views matched up 100 percent with those of Dennis Kucinich, but he was treated as the joke candidate from day one.)

He who lives by the media love affair dies by the media love affair. Sadly, that shows that media pundits have entirely too much influence on the electoral process. Even more sadly, it shows that the electorate is too easily influenced.

Say the Pledge, Dammit--Say It!

2008-08-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama was speaking at a town-hall meeting at Baldwin-Wallace College Tuesday when he was interrupted by a guy complaining that he hadn’t asked the audience to say the pledge of allegiance. True story.

There are a handful of things Obama could have said in this situation. He could have said “Nobody’s allegiance is in question here.” Or he could have said “What are you, a fifth-grader?” Or he could have said “If you need forced pseudo-patriotic ritual to give your life meaning, there’s a Hitler Youth meeting down the hall.”

Instead he humored the heckler and invited him to lead the audience in the pledge. The heckler did so, the audience recited it with him, and there were no further incidents.

Naturally, I wanted to find out what make a grown man love the pledge so much. He identified himself only as John Q. Public, but I managed to pretend to track him down and make up this exclusive interview:

Runes: Mr Public, everyone wants to know: Why the pledge of allegiance? If you felt compelled to demand some group activity that reminded you of childhood, why not a game of dodge ball or a rousing chorus of “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes”?

Public: Frankly, I was caught up in the spirit of the event. I just wanted to make sure everyone in the crowd was as loyal to America as I am.

Runes: And how did you ascertain that?

Public: By making everyone pledge their allegiance. With that simple act, I assured Mr Obama that he was in the midst of loyal Americans, and that he could speak freely.

Runes: OK, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but what if someone in the crowd was actually disloyal to America but attempted to fool you by saying the pledge of allegiance?

Public: Doesn’t matter. Once you say the words, your allegiance has been pledged. You can’t go back on it. It’s in the books. “All your allegiance are belong to us,” as the kids say.

Runes: So the pledge has magical powers, is what you’re saying.

Public: It helped us win the Cold War, didn’t it?

Runes: Uh…

Public: I have to go now. My unicorn is here.

If I Play My Cards Right, I'll Have $5 In No Time

2008-07-31T19:20:00.000-07:00

I work with a good mix of people--Democrats and Republicans, religious and non-religious, left-brained and right-brained. I don't have a clue what most of them do when they leave the office. Some go home to their families, some go home to their pets, some go home to their fix-it projects. I think there are some that don't actually leave the office, so in that case I don't know what they do when I'm not there.

At least one of them, it would seem, listens to a lot of talk radio while thumbing through the latest interpretation of the Revelation. A friend of mine has it on good authority that someone in our office is convinced that Barack Obama is the antichrist.

(My friend's source is a former co-worker who refused to reveal the name of this deep political thinker--whether to protect him or her from humiliation or just to drive the rest of us nuts, I don't know.)

I've heard some crazy-ass ideas in my time (the concept of an antichrist at all strikes me as pretty goofy), but this one is particularly asinine when you take a close look at the self-professed Christian who's been in the White House for lo these many long years. Would Jesus have cozied up to the rich? Would Jesus have lied to his followers? Would Jesus have invaded a sovereign nation and killed a half a million of its residents? George Bush has done all these things, and he's proud of it.

So now I'm wondering this: If Obama is, as my mysterious co-worker and probably countless other yahoos believe, the antichrist, then what the hell does that make George Bush? What's worse than the antichrist in Christian mythology? Anything?

I finally decided that if Obama is the antichrist, George Bush must be the guy who makes the antichrist seem like an OK fella.

And then I decided that would be the first t-shirt on the virtual t-shirt rack at The Electron Runes Emporium, a shop at Cafe Press. The link is over yonder in the left column, and I figure if every Runes reader buys one of these shirts, I'll have an extra five bucks in my pocket in no time. Hot dang.

I'll add some inventory by and by. Right now this shirt is the only thing available--although it does come in a variety of styles, sleeve lengths, and colors.

Antichrist. Oh, brother.

Bad Day in the Blogosphere

2008-07-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was all set to write about my 30-year high school reunion, but I was distracted by a column in the Register called Blogosphere’s Best, the title of which might lead someone to believe that the excerpts therein represented some of the smartest and most insightful writing on the internet.

And maybe normally that’s the case. Maybe today the Blogosphere’s Best editor was up against a hellish deadline.

That’s the only explanation I can find for this blurb, which they found on a website called Rhymes With Right:

You know all that stuff that we’ve been hearing from the Obamabots [about the Iraq war]? Well, they become fair game on January 20, 2009, if Barack Obama wins the election. After all, it will then be President Obama’s war, and by their own logic, it will be his supporters who have a moral obligation to go fight while those who voted against him stay home and engage in a higher form of patriotism—“dissent” designed to undercut the lawfully elected president, demoralize the military, and provide aid and comfort to the enemies of America.

I’m already looking forward to Operation Yellow Donkey, calling out all the college Democrats for not dropping out and signing up in the first 30 days of the Obama administration.

No, I’m serious. That’s what it said.

This is what happens when people dig in their heels and refuse to acknowledge that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a rather colossal mistake by a rather poor president. It messes up their critical thinking skills. For starters, only the willfully ignorant will be calling the occupation of Iraq “President Obama’s war” after his inauguration. It might well be one of the many piles of poop the Poor Dope leaves for the next president to clean up, but on no account will it become the next president’s war. As the late great George Carlin once said, “Two guys on an elevator and one of them farts, everybody knows who did it.”

No amount of air freshener will ever clean the stench of Iraq away from George W. Bush. And by the way, pardon me for the scatological turn that last paragraph took.

Second, I’m pretty sure that someone has given the writer of Rhymes With Right a joke definition of “chicken hawk.” The word itself isn’t used in this passage, but he’s dancing all around it as if he wants to think he believes he knows what it means. When he says he expects college Democrats to drop out and enlist, he seems to be under the impression that that’s some sort of witty “turnabout is fair play” observation. (And he even attempts to back it up with the phrase “by their own logic,” which is utterly nonsensical.)

Let’s see if we can’t clear it up for this writer. First, it was college-age Republicans who were chided in liberal blogs over the past five years for loudly proclaiming their support for the invasion—as long as they weren’t asked to go take part in the fighting. Like their hero Dick Cheney, they all had better things to do. Second, college-age Democrats who have always supported getting the hell out of Iraq aren’t suddenly going to turn hawkish just because some right-wing blogger wants to call the occupation “President Obama’s war.”

I’m also trying to figure out which “lawfully elected president” this blogger is referring to. It’s been a while since we had one.

Close the Door, You're Letting the Yahoos In

2008-07-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

In a recent letter to the Des Moines Register, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Iowa suggests that “the social conservative agenda as a foundation of the party, fortunately, is no longer attractive to a majority of voters.”

Joy Corning was writing in response to the recent election of some social conservatives to the highest levels of state GOP leadership, and according to her:

“[Social conservatives] apparently believe the party’s declines can be reversed by championing anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-stem- cell research, anti-whatever-they-don’t-like positions as the lead campaign issues. Why? In other parts of the country it has been obvious that Republicans are seeking a leader rooted in more basic, centrist, traditional principles. McCain has triumphed over every candidate who tried to focus debate on abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research and the rest of the social conservative agenda.”

That’s kind of a breath of fresh air, especially for anyone who remembers the days before the religious right oozed their way into the GOP. Don’t get me wrong: There wasn’t much about the Republican party I would have embraced before Reagan opened the door to these yahoos anyway, but at least it was a legitimate political ethos, based in Constitutional principles.

The religious right couldn’t care less about the Constitution. They’ll only be happy with a theocracy where they can make your choices for you.

So I have a tough time feeling sorry for Ms Corning and the “real” Republicans who now find their party being overrun by short-sighted people with narrow minds. They’ve been pandering to these people for almost 30 years now, using them as the Republican base (because there aren’t enough millionaires to go around), counting on the fact that most of them will vote against their economic self-interest if they can earn heavenly brownie points in the process—and now suddenly they’re surprised that some of them have slithered into positions of leadership?

It might be a little late to tell these people “Oh, sorry, we’re not really the anti-abortion, anti-gay party. We’re sorry you got the wrong impression when we desperately needed all your votes.”

Dear Hank Steinbrenner

2008-06-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written much about baseball here in the Runes, but I do like to point out stupid comments no matter where they come from. Last week there was a good one from Hank Steinbrenner—George’s son, and the big cheese with the New York Yankees these days—after the Yankees’ number one pitcher, Chien-Ming Wang, injured his leg while running the bases in an interleague game against the Houston Astros..

Just as a reminder for less-than-casual baseball fans, the American League uses a designated hitter who bats in the pitcher’s spot, while in the National League, pitchers bat just like everyone else—shortstops, catchers, outfielders, etc. The Yankees play in the American League, where pitchers don’t have to bat—except when they play interleague games in National League parks, which is what they were doing in Houston.

Anyway. Wang is out for 6-10 weeks, so Steinbrenner took the opportunity to call for a rule change, to wit:

“The National League needs to join the 21st century. They need to grow up and join the 21st century. I’ve got my pitchers running the bases, and one of them gets hurt. He’s going to be out. I don’t like that, and it’s about time they address it. That was a rule from the 1800s.”

The National League has responded:

Dear Hank—

Sorry to hear about your pitcher getting injured while he was playing baseball in a baseball game. Those baseball injuries have been known to happen to baseball players, especially when playing against other baseball players in baseball games. We did hear that right, didn’t I? He was injured playing baseball, wasn’t he? We’d hate to find out that a baseball player suffered a baseball injury doing something other than playing baseball.

Thanks for the invitation to grow up and join the 21st century. We’ll take it under advisement and put a committee on it, but just to clarify—our league is the one that started in 1876, 25 years before yours, right? Not the other way around? And our league is the one that didn't change its rules in 1973 in a cynical attempt to add more offense and draw more fans, correct? Just making sure. Just wanted to make sure who was telling whom to grow up.

Please pass our best wishes on to Mr Wang.

Sincerely,
The National League

P.S. Hey, if you want to complain, you can always write to “Commissioner” Bud Selig and complain about how interleague play creates inequitable schedules.

P.P.S. We don’t know what your dad told you, but you don’t have to act like a dick if you don’t want to.

Report From the Front Line

2008-06-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s where I stand on recreational drugs: Don’t use ‘em, never have, don’t think they should be illegal, wouldn’t use them if they were legal. I don’t wish to be around people while they’re using and in fact I’d prefer not to know about their using, but it’s not a condition of friendship.

I mention this because this past Friday I saw firsthand a minor skirmish in the seemingly interminable “war on drugs,” which I suspect was declared years ago by someone with a cocktail in his hand. I was driving east on I-80, going around the Quad Cities on my way home to Indiana, when I noticed two diamond-shaped orange signs announcing “Be prepared to stop.”

A half-mile or so later, two more signs: “Random drug search ahead.”

And a little ways after that: “All cars subject to search.”

That’s the third time I’ve seen these warning signs on I-80, and each time I’ve been struck by what the subsequent car stops and drug searches had in common: They didn’t exist.

After you get past the final pair of signs, there’s nothing. No police checkpoints, no DEA agents, no drug-sniffing dogs.

Because there’s no such thing as a random drug search on the interstate. George Bush’s America isn’t quite a police state yet.

So what’s the point of the signs?

I’m no Constitutional scholar, but I do know there’s a little thing called just cause. (This doesn’t mean the police can stop you “just cause” they feel like it.) If you give the police a reason to search you for drugs—if they can see it or smell it or if you’re watching “The Wizard of Oz” while listening to “Dark Side of the Moon”—they can and will.

And if you see those orange signs and freak out and do a U-turn on the interstate, there’s a man in a police helicopter who’s going to radio the words “Just cause” to a man in a police car.

Now, if you’re a drug dealer working the Iowa-Illinois territory (and really, what are the odds that one of the half-dozen Runes readers is?), I suggest getting a real job. And if you’re just some doofus going to Moline to share your stash with your old lady, take note: Don’t get spooked by the orange signs. There’s no search. They’re counting on the fact that you spent more time in high school getting baked than learning about your Constitutional rights.

Just Doin’ Muh Job

2008-05-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

In post-9/11 America, the Bush administration has created and nurtured a climate of fear, a landscape where you don’t have to be all that paranoid to see terrorists in every shadow.

One of the saddest casualties of such a state is the loss of subjectivity, the abdication of common sense that results from an unyielding loyalty to regulations. I saw this in action Saturday afternoon at Kansas City International Airport, Terminal A, Gate 25, when an elderly man was pulled out of the security line and given the electronic-wand treatment, over and over and over.

He was an unassuming gentleman with a doughy face, a striped polo shirt, and a New York cap. They made him lift his arms while they ran the wand all around his body, and he complied willingly, cooperatively. I’ve been pulled out of line before and found it best to go along with a smile, to let the underpaid TSA guys do their thing without hassle, and that’s what this fellow was doing.

KCI is set up so the people who accompany you to the airport can stay in visual contact even after you go through security, and there outside the gate that day were a man and a woman—the elderly man’s son and possibly his daughter or daughter-in-law—watching to make sure the old man made it to his plane. The son was about my age, mid-40s or so, and after a few minutes of watching his father being inspected, he approached the emergency exit and asked the female TSA agent there what the holdup was. I didn’t hear her response, but the son spoke again in a more agitated fashion: “He’s an 80-year-old man, he’s not well, and you’re making him stand with this arms up for ten minutes!”

The woman signaled for assistance. Two white-shirted TSA guys came to the exit and asked what the problem was. Again the son appealed to their sensitivity, explaining that his father was old and not well, and that standing in that position wasn’t helping his health any. His companion asked “Would you treat your own father like that?”

The answer came straight of the manual: “We have to screen him. We have to follow regulations.”

The son said he wasn’t suggesting that no one screen passengers, and again asked that they be more sensitive to his father’s condition.

And they wouldn’t do it. Two more TSA agents poked their heads through the emergency-exit doorway. Two more seemed to be hovering outside the gate in case they needed to use force on this man pleading for common sense—essentially asking someone to let his father put his arms down.

Any one of them could have relayed that message to the guy with the wand. Any one of them could have said “Hey, Charlie—this guy’s 80 and his son says he’s not well. Let him rest for a minute.”

But they’d sworn allegiance to the regulations. They had to go by the book. As long as they could rely on the book, they wouldn’t have to think. The son raised his voice a time or two, he called the whole procedure ridiculous, and from what I could tell he wanted desperately to rush through the gate and rescue his dad—but he was remarkably restrained and stayed civil through his indignation, even while the screeners continued to take their sweet time clearing the old man for travel.

I shared a sympathetic look with the man and woman before I left. There wasn’t much else I could do.

Adventures in Hospital Billing

2008-05-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

You want know how much I enjoy dealing with hospital billing departments? (Just pretend you do and say Yes.) Here’s how much I enjoy dealing with hospital billing departments: I find kidney stones and sore throats to be excruciatingly painful, but I’d rather have a kidney stone and a sore throat than deal with hospital billing departments.

In fact, I’d rather have a sore throat in my kidney than open another bill from people who assume that if you don’t pay the entire balance immediately, you must be planning to flee the country with their medical care still inside you.

Right now I’m dealing with a bill for a couple of hospital classes I attended last winter to learn about Type 2 diabetes and how to keep it from becoming Type 1. My health insurance covered all but about $307 of the cost, and of course if I’d paid the whole $307 at the outset I wouldn’t need to write this post.

However, I decided to spread my payments out over time, and they apparently don’t like that. I don’t understand why they don’t like it, because I suspect that if you took a survey of people who work in hospital billing departments, the results would show that all of them prefer convenient monthly payments.

Anyway.

First bill, I sent ‘em $25. The next bill came with a suggestion that I should call the billing department if I knew what was good for me, so I called and spoke to a friendly woman who set me up with monthly payments of $32. Next bill, I sent ‘em $32.

In March I moved from an apartment in West Des Moines to a house in Clive, and despite my very clear forwarding instructions to the US Postal Service the next bill didn’t get forwarded. I don’t know why. Maybe the USPS dog ate it. I was aware there’d been a long interval between statements, but since a large chunk of my March finances was already earmarked for moving expenses and car repairs, I didn’t get all that worked up about it. The hospital did. There was a note on the next statement that said I’d missed a payment and now owed $64, and that I should call the billing department again if I knew what was good for me.

I didn’t make that call. Partly because I have a stubborn streak, partly because I didn’t appreciate the intimidating tone, and partly because I didn’t see the point. The statement said I owed $64, so I sent them $100 as a sign of good faith, a sign that I wasn’t planning to skip out on the bill. That took my balance down to $118, and the way I saw it, I was a month and $4 ahead on my payments.

The hospital didn’t agree. (It’s Mercy Medical in Des Moines, by the way—I’d hate for someone to Google them and miss out on this story.) On the next statement, they listed the amount due as $118, with no mention anywhere of my agreed-upon $32 payments. There was, however, a note that said “Numerous attempts have been made to contact you” along with the requisite suggestion to call the billing department within 15 days if I didn’t want any trouble.

Now, the intimidation didn’t bother me as much as the greatly exaggerated claim that they’d made numerous attempts to contact me. When I signed up for the diabetes class in November, I listed my home phone number, my work phone number, and my cell phone number. I didn’t receive any voice mails from Mercy Medical on my work phone or cell phone (voice mails are a popular way to contact someone when you’re making numerous attempts to do so), nor did the caller ID on either phone reveal any unusual numbers. I suppose it’s possible that they called the home phone I listed, but since that number was disconnected in March I can’t believe they were dumb enough to try it more than once. There aren’t too many ways to interpret the phrase “You’ve reached a number that has been disconnected.”

So unless they just called a bunch of random numbers asking for Dono (which, technically, could be considered numerous attempts to contact me), I believe I caught them in a lie. And when I dutifully called the billing department and left a message, I politely told them so.

Three weeks later, they still haven’t returned my call.

Oh, Wait, Here’s Some More Stuff

* There are a whole mess of good reasons for European-style universal healthcare. This post wasn’t meant to be one of them, but hey, if the shoe fits.

* Microsoft Word’s spell check didn’t like the word “ureter” in the first paragraph. (Didn’t care much for it in this paragraph either.) It suggested urethra, greeter, renter, and writer as possible substitutes. Not sure why. According to Merriam-Webster, ureter has been in the language since 1543—about 90 years before the first use of urethra, if you’re keeping score.

* The new hospital under construction in West Des Moines is going to be called The Michael R. Myers Hospital. If you’re reading this in the Des Moines metro, please join me in referring to it as the Austin Powers.

Master Humorist Mike Huckabee

2008-05-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

Despite all the furor about Mike Huckabee’s misguided attempt at humor at last Friday’s NRA meeting, I don’t for a minute think he meant the punch line to refer to an assassination attempt. In case you’ve forgotten the story (thanks to the four-day delay between news events and Runes postings thereon), the former Republican presidential candidate was in the middle of a speech when he was interrupted by a loud noise offstage. Quipped the Huckster: “That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He was getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him, and he dove for the floor.”

According to Yahoo News, “there were only a few murmurs in the crowd” after the remark. Man, Mike, if you can’t get laughs with a joke about a liberal Democrat being frightened by a gun at a freakin NRA meeting, you can’t get laughs anywhere.

Be that as it may. Huckabee may be a doofus, but he was guilty of nothing more sinister than shameless pandering. He thought the NRA audience would wet themselves laughing at the idea of Obama diving to the floor at the very sight of a gun. He thought he was playing to a crowd of Bubbas who would guffaw and snort “That’s right—them libruls is a-skeered of firearms!”

But the tepid reaction would seem to point toward a crowd with a slightly more sophisticated sense of humor, a crowd that felt uncomfortable about the suggestion of violence aimed at a presidential candidate, a crowd that probably wondered how the hell one goes about tripping off a chair.

Now, I don’t want to give the NRA meeting attendees more credit than they deserve—for all I know they all reached for their concealed weapons as soon as they heard the noise backstage. I also hate to let Huckabee off the hook for buying in to the whole “Gun lovers good, liberals bad” horseshit. But dammit, I know a little bit about humor. I’ve been writing and performing comedy in some form for most of my life, and there’s a lesson here I can’t pass up, even when it helps a pipsqueak like Huckabee. (There’s a precedent for this. In the April 14, 2007 edition of the Runes, I offered Ronald Reagan an easy fix that would have greatly improved his lame joke about bombing the Soviet Union and would have made it actually funny. My advice went unheeded, presumably because Reagan had died sometime during his second administration.)

Anyway, Huckabee, listen up. Next time you’re at an NRA meeting and there’s a loud noise backstage, here’s what you do. No, wait—here’s what you don’t do: You don’t make any kind of reference to someone aiming a gun at Barack Obama. Got that? It’s rude, it’s unfunny, and it doesn’t look good coming from someone who purports to be a Christian. No, here’s what you do instead: You misrepresent the Democratic Party’s position on gun control, and build the humor on that. (Don’t worry—it’s not hard to do. It’s second-nature to most Republican candidates and pretty much all right-wing pundits.)

OK, ready? Here comes your improved joke. There’s a loud noise backstage, and you say “Hey, that must have been Barack Obama trying to take someone’s gun away from him.” Rimshot. Adjust tie. Big laughs. And if you’re feeling confident in your timing, wait a beat and then say “And tripping off a chair.”

Now, I know I’ve said in the past that verisimilitude is the essence of humor. It has to sound real to be funny. But in this case, don’t worry. Misrepresenting what your opponents believe in will sound real enough to the sort of people who would invite you to speak to them anyway.

It's Good To Be Back

2008-05-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

It’s good to be back. If, indeed, I am. It’s hard to say right now.

I’d like to apologize to the twos of readers who missed the Runes during its lengthy absence, and who sent emails expressing their fear that something heavy might have fallen on me or that I might have been incinerated by divine lightning bolt after manufacturing a quote from God in my August 14 post about the concerned Christians of Athens, Alabama and their efforts to outlaw liquor sales in their community. No such lightning bolt materialized, though I did receive a sarcastic chiding from an anonymous reader who said that quoting God is a good way to get into heaven.

This was obviously an anonymous reader who hadn’t spent much time in the Runes archives.

Anyway. It’s been nine months since I posted, and on the off-chance you might be wondering why, here’s the closest thing I have to an explanation: Last August I got busted for surfing the internet at work. They got me dead to rights and showed me a whole list of sites I’d visited: a St Louis Cardinals fan site, my credit union online teller, a couple of political blogs, and the Runes. Scandalous, I know—not a naked picture in the bunch, but nevertheless I contritely agreed to curtail my web-surfing during working hours.

But wait, you might be asking—where’s the connection? Why did you stop posting at the Runes just because you couldn’t surf the internet at work? Why didn’t you just write and post from home? Why did you stop when you were on such a roll?

(OK, you might not be asking that last one.)

Truth is, it suddenly felt dirty. I know I don’t have much of a following, but by golly I want people to visit the Runes because it makes them laugh, or because it makes them think, or because they share my indignation about hypocrisy and self-righteousness and willful ignorance, or even because they’re strongly in favor of those things. The idea that anyone would look at the Runes for any other reason just kind of creeped me out.

Hey, I didn’t say it was a good explanation.

So here it is April 2008. I’ve passed up some choice stories just because I wasn’t in the Runes frame of mind. But today, with John McCain trying to make people forget he’s spent the last seven years making a nest in the Poor Dope’s shorts, and with the Poor Dope continuing to smirk his way through the last year of his disaster, and with the Democrats we elected to get something done in 2006 still doing nothing, the time is right.

Back to the Runes. Let’s see what happens.

Prohibition in Alabama

2007-08-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

As a result of a petition drive by Christians who oppose drinking on moral grounds, the people of Athens, Alabama will vote today on whether or not to prohibit the sale of alcohol within city limits.

It was only four years ago when they voted to allow alcohol sales. Apparently it took three and a half years for people to stop wailing and gnashing their teeth long enough to get up a petition.

If the measure passes, it will still be legal to possess and consume alcohol in Athens, which strikes me as hilarious because it means they’re essentially voting on the question “Do you want to keep $250,000 in extra tax revenue out of the hands of the city government, and another $250,000 out of the local schools?”*

Two other measures are up for referendum today: “Should Athens cut off its nose to spite its face?” and “Would you like the city to shoot itself in the foot?”

If the measure passes, those who drink will continue to do so, even if it means spending their money out of town. Those who signed the petition and led the charge for prohibition will congratulate themselves on their great moral victory against tax revenue. Ah, but their consciences will be clear: “At least I live in a town where it’s illegal to sell alcohol, and if that don’t get me some heavenly brownie points, I don’t know what will.”

The best quote in the story comes from the Reverend Eddie Gooch of the United Methodist Church, one of the petition-drive leaders who says he isn’t worried about the city losing business or tax revenue. Says Gooch: “Normal economic growth and God will make up any difference if residents dump the bottle.”

God could not be reached for comment, but he did issue this statement: “If Eddie Gooch thinks I’m shelling out half a million bucks to make up for a shortfall he’s largely responsible for, he’s dumber than a bag of hammers.”

*These figures come from Athens mayor Dan Williams in the Associated Press story.

Ideology Trumps Humanity in Texas

2007-08-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time favorite bumper stickers is “Jesus is coming—and he’s pissed.”

The people of High Point Church in Arlington, Texas undoubtedly believe the first part, and are doing their best to make sure the second part comes true, too. This is the church that agreed to hold a memorial service for a Gulf War veteran whose brother is a church custodian—then reneged, 24 hours before the service, when they learned the deceased was gay.

The veteran was Cecil Sinclair, who died at age 46 from a post-surgical infection. Church pastor Gary Simons said no one knew Sinclair was gay until members putting together a video tribute ran across pictures of men “engaging in clear affection, kissing and embracing.”

Sinclair’s sister, Kathleen Wright, denied that any of the pictures provided showed men kissing or hugging. Nevertheless, Simons pulled the plug on the memorial service, but noted that “Even though we could not condone that lifestyle, we went above and beyond for the family through many acts of love and kindness.”

Well, well, well. Thanks for being the lifestyle judge there, Gary. Seems to me that the family probably wanted the service held at the church because they thought it would be a comfort to family and friends in attendance. They were grieving, and thought a religious service would provide a balm to the weary, as the old hymn goes.

I doubt if they were asking for mandatory attendance from church members. Nobody who might have been offended was likely to show up, but if they had, they might have learned a nice lesson about gay people and the families who love them. They might have seen with their own eyes that Cecil Sinclair didn’t choose his orientation. They might have had to reconsider their beliefs.

Of course, I don’t think megachurch pastors really want church members reconsidering their beliefs, certainly not if the result means humanity trumps ideology.

Simons also said “We did decline to host the service—not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle.”

Yeah, right. The decision wasn’t based on hatred, but on principle. It’s a little hard to tell the difference from where I sit.

Songs About Dumb People

2007-08-09T22:36:00.000-07:00

You know, not every post here at the Runes has to shine the mini-flashlight of truth on the self-righteous, the self-important, the self-deluded, and the self-goofy. We don’t always have to pick on the warmongers, the Pharisees, the pretend-ignorants, or the Poor Dope and his poor dopey sycophants.

Sometimes it’s enough to look at a moment in America’s cultural past and say “What in the hell was that all about?”

I’m referring, as of course you know, to the song “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” a number-one hit written by Bobby Russell and recorded by Vicki Lawrence back in 1973.

Nothing against Vicki Lawrence, mind you. In fact it’s fair to say that I had quite a crush on her back in the heyday of “The Carol Burnett Show,” and so when she hit the top of the record charts I was happy for her.

But I heard the song on the radio this week, and I thought: “Man. That’s one dumb song.”

If you don’t remember “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” it’s kind of a Southern Gothic murder ballad about a guy who’s executed for a murder committed by his sister. A person could write a pretty good song about a guy who’s executed for a murder committed by his sister, and by good I don’t mean sell-a-million-records good but sensible-lyrics-with-internal-logic good. The Vicki Lawrence version is the former.

The song starts out with a fellow named Seth, who’s back in his Georgia hometown after two weeks away. Instead of heading straight home to see his “young bride,” he stops at a bar and meets up with his best friend Andy, who regretfully informs him that his wife has been cheating with a boy named Amos. (I love the fact that Amos and Andy can make it into a song that takes place in Georgia in 1973.)

Seth gets upset at this news, but Andy isn’t smart enough to know when to quit. For some bizarre reason he goes on to say “To tell you the truth, I’ve been with her myself.” Short of actually describing the sex acts he performed with Seth’s wife, I’m not sure Andy could have said anything stupider to a man who has just learned his wife is cheating on him. How did he expect Seth to respond? “Thanks, Andy—I feel a lot better knowing my wife slept with more than one person while I was away. Here’s your medal for honesty.”

In the next verse, “Andy got scared and left the bar,” possibly because he realized no medal for honesty was forthcoming. Seth heads home to an empty house and finds the only thing his Papa had left him: a gun. Next thing you know he’s on his way to Andy’s house, located in the backwoods. There’s a-gonna be a shootin’—except that when Seth arrives and looks in the back door, he finds Andy already “lyin’ there in a puddle of blood.” Someone has already knocked off Andy.

Now here’s where it gets even farther off track. Here’s where Seth shows that Andy didn’t have the corner on stupidity in that neck of the woods: “Now the Georgia Patrol was makin’ the rounds, so he fired a shot just to flag ‘em down.”

He fired a shot? To attract state troopers to a crime scene?! Nice move there, Einstein.

But even after firing his misguided shot, Seth still should have had time to get the hell out of there. First off, imagine the Georgia Patrolmen, making the rounds in their state trooper car, undoubtedly with a pretty large region to cover. A shot is fired and they miraculously hear it over their George Jones 8-track and official state police radio. The only explanation for what happens next is that one of the troopers must be some sort of robotic cop with a prototype global positioning system implanted in his head: “That shot could only have come from Stupid Andy’s place in the backwoods!”

The police arrive at the scene and find Andy dead and Seth holding a gun. The next line is “A big-bellied sheriff grabbed his gun and said ‘Why’d you do it?’” (I think it would have been funny is the line had been “A big-bellied sheriff grabbed his gun and said ‘Damn, that’s still hot.’”) There’s a trial, but it’s a sham: The judge is in a hurry to get home to supper, so he finds Seth guilty and sets the execution date for the next day or the very near future. Only then do we find out that the narrator of the song is Seth’s little sister, and that she has killed not only Andy but her cheating sister-in-law. As she puts it, “Little sister don’t miss when she aims her gun.”

Now, I suppose it’s possible that the sister used the very gun Seth had inherited from their father, which would explain why Seth’s lawyer didn’t introduce any ballistics evidence in the trial. But there’s hardly any way to read or hear these lyrics without coming to the conclusion that the little sister is a freakin’ psychopath. First off, she had to know that when a man who’s been cheating with another man’s wife is found dead, there’s one obvious suspect the police would look for first, if, of course, he hadn’t been dumb enough to be standing around the murder scene holding a smoking gun. She set her brother up like a bottle of grape Nehi.

Second, she claims in the last verse that “They hung my brother before I could say the tracks he saw while on his way to Andy’s house and back that night were mine.” Oh, really? They hung him that quickly, did they? What were you doing, sleeping in? Were you going over sketch ideas with Harvey Korman? Did you get lost on the way to the courthouse? I’d say there was plenty of time for the little sister to confess if she wanted to.

But she didn’t want to. She had the taste for blood after she killed Seth’s wife and noted “That’s one body that’ll never be found.” It’s possible she hid the body in the backwoods, but I think she ate it.

By the way, while the title of the song is “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” and while the first line of the chorus is “That’s the night that the lights went out in Georgia,” at no time in any of the verses do any lights actually go out in Georgia.

They Could Always Write In Jesus

2007-08-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

OK, back to the Des Moines Register and their hard-hitting expose of evangelicals who can’t find a Republican presidential candidate whose views are as narrow-minded and provincial as theirs. Here at the Runes, our official position on this issue is “Tough bongos.”

Why? Because in their hurry to elect one of their own kind, the evangelicals failed to notice their candidate was a man of no character and less intelligence, a man beholden to no one but the super-rich. In the past six years, how many man-on-the-street interviews have included some variation of the line “All I know is Bush is a Christian, and that’s good enough for me”?

That’s pathetic. That’s the rapture mentality for you: Earthly things don’t matter to me cause I’m a-gonna be lifted up to heaven.

There’s a running theme through that Register article, and it should give a good dose of the willies to anyone who’s serious about the political process and making the country stronger. Let’s see if we can detect that theme:

[Members of the Central Assembly of God Church] are turned off by poll-driven and single-issue candidates who are ignoring their top priorities—abortion and same-sex marriage.

[The senior pastor of First Federated Church of Des Moines said] “The war with Iraq is on everybody’s mind. Right to life and gay marriage, which are important to Christian conservatives, aren’t as big with the general public.”

“We seem to be losing traction,” said [a Central Assembly of God member]. “The pendulum seems to be swinging in the other direction.”

Everyone who said the theme was “Our obsession with other people’s lives is far more important than the interests of the country at large,” give yourself ten points.

Ignoring the fact that we can’t technically be at war with Iraq because for all practical purposes we are Iraq, let’s try to figure out why the deaths of 3000 American soldiers and the continued health and well-being of a hundred thousand live ones just might be a tad more important to the general public than the nuptials of Chuck and Larry in Massachusetts.

The question answers itself. The general public (as defined by the senior pastor above) understands the human cost of war, grieves for the families of the dead, and is mature enough to realize that with every death our national defense grows weaker by a power of one. The evangelicals can’t be bothered with that. They’re too busy freaking out over two men kissing.

It takes a sanctimonious soul and a callous heart to claim that preventing same-sex marriage is a higher priority than ending the fiasco in Iraq. Most human beings recognize those qualities as character flaws.

Maybe that’s why the evangelicals are losing traction.

Pity The Poor Evangelicals

2007-08-02T15:04:00.000-07:00

In its never-ending quest to keep Iowans informed of the events that shape our lives, the Des Moines Register recently blew the lid off a story so big that if there had been a page before the front page, that’s where they would have put it.

Don’t read on if you’re faint of heart. But thank your lucky stars the Register had the integrity and fortitude to report on this shocking development:

Iowa evangelicals are having trouble finding a Republican candidate to back.

Yeah. Right there on the front page: “GOP presidential candidates fail to appeal to a key constituency.”

Well, in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson, boo-freakin-hoo. Forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for a group of people who in 2004 shuffled into the voting booths like good little sheep and reelected the immoral, corrupt, bloodthirsty sonofabitch whose godly pandering was an obvious sham to any of us who didn’t have our thumbs up our Bibles.

In terms of knowing the difference between right and wrong, these evangelicals have no credibility. And now they’re crying because the GOP front-runners haven’t bowed down and kissed the feet of their two pet issues: abortion and same-sex marriage.

American men and women are dying in the Iraq quagmire. Insurance companies are making obscene profits while denying coverage to sick people. Manufacturing jobs are drifting overseas. The gap between rich and poor is growing wider. And these people are looking for a candidate who will make them feel better about sticking their noses where they don’t belong.

If you consider abortion wrong, don’t have one. If you don’t want to marry a person of your own sex, don’t fall in love with one. But godDAMN, how short-sighted, superstitious, and stupid do you have to be to base your entire political belief system on things that don’t affect you in the slightest?

A guy named Ken from Altoona says “If a person can’t live by the Ten Commandments, how can he lead the nation?”

Easy, Ken. He swears to uphold the Constitution. That’s what we require in a leader. He protects the rights of every citizen and he doesn’t send them off to die to protect his oil investments. Your boy George thinks the swearing-in part of the inauguration ceremony was a mere formality, and he’s not doing too well in the Commandments department, either. Bearing false witness. Killing thousands of Iraqis. Coveting oil and money and power and whatever else he’s coveting these days.

This is what the evangelicals have wrought. Their stubborn insistence that the Poor Dope is a godly man shows them to be incredibly poor judges of character. And their insistence on blathering on about abortion and same-sex marriage shows them to be blind to the real problems facing this country today.

* * *

I’m not done with this topic, but I’m out of time today. Next week I want to take a closer look at the Register story.

Random Thoughts on Cal Thomas

2007-07-31T18:10:00.000-07:00

No, not Cal Ripken. Cal Thomas. Sorry.

As “America’s most widely syndicated op-ed columnist,” Cal Thomas has always failed to impress me. He’s one of these guys who treats any liberal idea with a condescending pat on the head, as if it’s something to grow out of. He’s smug and snide and he comes off as a right-wing Mr Belvidere, without the wit and charm of a Clifton Webb.

Cal recently weighed in on last week’s CNN YouTube Debate, in which the Democratic candidates answered questions from among thousands that had been videotaped by concerned Americans and then uploaded to YouTube. Now, I don’t know about Cal’s regular readers, but any warm body who follows the campaign process even casually should be well aware that these televised Q&A sessions are technically not debates. I don’t think it’s necessary to keep pointing this out, but Cal, not wanting to pass up a chance to be pedantic, makes sure to note that “As before, this was not a real debate.”

He does give CNN credit for trying to liven up a dull and “too-long” campaign season with the YouTube format, but then complains that “This was a boring version of ‘American Idol,’ or worse, a political rip-off of ‘The Price is Right’ (How much do you think each candidate is worth? Come on down!)”

Talk about padding the column. How was it like American Idol, Cal? How was it a rip-off of The Price Is Right? It was the same thing it always is: A question is asked, the candidates answer, and you move on to the next question. That’s been the format for years. With nine candidates competing for time, you’re not going to get deeply nuanced answers, you’re not going to get much in the way of follow-up, and you’re probably not going to hear anything that’ll make you change your mind about your favorite candidate. At best—especially with the first caucus still more than five months away—you’re going to get the urge to read up on a candidate you might previously haven’t thought much about.

Cal goes on:
The problem with televised cattle calls is that the moderator and audience take at face value what politicians tell them. It is as if they are expressing themselves for the first time on every subject and Democrats are rarely asked about contradictory positions they’ve taken and whether it was conviction, or focus groups, that “converted” them. Republicans are always asked such questions.

Those italics are mine, by the way. It might be true that Republicans are always asked about their contradictory positions, but I’m not aware of any planet in this solar system on which it’s happening. Ever since the Poor Dope took office in 2001, there’s a very obvious contradiction that I don’t remember any Republican (including the Dope himself) being asked: “Why did you swear to defend the Constitution—and then not?”

I wonder if Cal would agree that that’s a contradictory position Americans deserve an answer to.

Cal also manages to pontificate on the old “We’re fighting them over there” nonsense, noting that if he had been the moderator of the debate, or televised cattle call, or whatever, he would have asked Hillary Clinton “Do you now believe the insurgents and terrorists would not take over the country [after U.S. withdrawal] and use it as a base to come after us here?”

I don’t know how Sen. Clinton might have responded to that, but I do remember enough about my “Non-Democratic Regimes” political science class in college that terrorists wouldn’t know what to do with a country if they did take it over. These are radical extremists, not revolutionaries looking to topple a regime and install their own government. Suicide bombers aren’t really looking for ways to make the trains run on time—or in this case, to provide electricity and water to a country in ruins.

Terrorism, in short, isn’t a system of government. It’s a tactic. The Poor Dope and his War on Terra supporters of the Cal Thomas variety are doing a great job pretending they don’t understand that.

Turn! Turn! Turn!

2007-07-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

Back before it was legal to turn right on a red light, there was no such thing as a “No Turn on Red” sign. It would have been like a sign that said “No Ramming Other Cars” or “No Running Over Pedestrians,” because, obviously, there are just some things so illegal you don’t need to be reminded of them. You don’t see a lot of signs that say “No Murder,” “No Arson,” “No Embezzling,” etc.

I was living in Indiana when it became legal to turn right on red, and my dad used to share his theory about why the law was passed. He always said it was because some sign company had a surplus of No Turn on Red signs and needed to get them out of the warehouse.

I could see his point. Shortly after the law was passed, No Turn on Red signs popped up all over in Crawfordsville (the largest city close to us, and for a long time the largest city I wasn’t afraid to drive in). We had this great new law designed to improve traffic flow, but somebody was arbitrarily deciding which intersections it couldn’t be used at.

Because, my dad joked, or half-joked, someone got a good deal on those signs.

The first moving violation of my life came in 1986 in Decatur, Illinois, when I failed to notice the No Turn on Red sign at the corner of Woodford and Garfield. I came to a stop, made sure nothing was coming, and turned right onto Garfield Avenue—on red. Busted.

I don’t know why you couldn’t turn right on red there; after all, if you looked to your left you had a pretty straight shot down Garfield. So even though I was driving safely and endangering no one, the City of Decatur hit me up for a few bucks thanks to an arbitrary sign placement.

The maddening part about that ticket was that one block west of the Woodford/Garfield intersection, there was just a stop sign at the cross street. The visibility was worse than it was on Woodford, but if you wanted to turn right onto Garfield you were free to do so at your discretion.

Laws that promote the general welfare are good. Laws that are just revenue-generators are not.

Here in the Des Moines metro, we’re in the fifth year of a five-year plan to revamp and expand I-235, the freeway that runs through the middle of town. The project has included rebuilding a number of bridges and widening the exits (two turn lanes in each direction on some of them—big-time!).

The problem is that when they rebuilt some of the bridges, they extended the little concrete wall between the road and the pedestrian walkway across the bridge. They extended them so much that when you came off the exit and wanted to turn right on red, you couldn’t do it without taking your life in your hands.

Because the wall stuck out so far it was impossible to see if traffic was coming.

The sensible solution would have been to shorten the walls a little bit. However, the sensible solution lost out to the cheaper solution. Apparently that warehouse still had lots of No Turn on Red signs, because now half the exits off I-235 forbid turning right on red.

It was the right move for safety reasons. But with gas over $3 a gallon and awareness of energy conservation on the rise again, we have hundreds of cars idling at these exits every day. Does that make sense?

Iced Coffee and Lazy Copywriting

2007-07-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

McDonald’s has a radio spot running right now that drives me up a wall. The setting is a business meeting of some sort, and the chairman says “All in favor of taking a break for some iced coffee from McDonald’s, say Aye.”

A chorus of Ayes goes up, because honestly, who’s going to vote against any kind of break in the workday? The chairman then asks “All opposed?” and one lone guy says “Nay.”

There’s a brief pause, and then a voice that sounds like it belongs to a 12-year-old boy shouts “Get him!” The meeting-goers then turn into an angry mob and presumably thrash the guy who dared vote his conscience about the friggin iced coffee break.

Why?

Why is there a 12-year-old boy in this business meeting? And why, when the Ayes have clearly won the vote and the iced coffee break is all but written in the employee handbook, is the boy so vindictive?

Does he hate the man who voted No? Or is it just lazy copywriting without a shred of integrity?

Every time I hear this—which is pretty much every morning—it makes me glad I don’t write advertising copy for a living. Then I remember I do write advertising copy for a living and it makes me wonder if the guy who wrote the McDonald’s spot is making more money than I am.

Because if true, that would be wrong.

Actually it makes me think he’s got something on his creative director, some blackmail pictures or something. Because honestly, if you’re working on a high-profile account like McDonald’s and you can’t come up with anything better than “Get him!”, you might be in the wrong business.

One More Thing

Another quick story about the advertising business. My old boss back in Decatur used to sum up the agency/client relationship thus: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't keep him from pissing in it."

This is true. But sometimes you can't even get the horse's attention. From 1995-97 I did some freelance copywriting for clients in and around central Illinois, and when I wasn't busy (which was, sadly, most of the time), I'd go through the newspaper or listen to the radio, trying to find prospects in dire need of better creative. I'd then write them a letter, send them a brochure and demo tape, and ask to be given a crack at their next advertising project.

I didn't get a whole lot of business that way, but of all the business I didn't get, my favorite was a store that sold auto parts in downtown Decatur. These guys had run an ad in the Herald and Review that was not only hand-lettered and hand-illustrated with a pencil, but hand-erased as well. I mean the illustration was right out of Napoleon Dynamite's notebook, and you could see the erased lines in the newspaper ad itself.

I wrote and offered my services, but they didn't see the value in it. They were apparently quite happy with their in-house marketing department, eraser lines and all.

The Opposite of the Height of Hypocrisy

2007-07-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
—Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

And today, class, that word is “hypocritical,” a word most popular with people who have only the slightest inkling of its definition.

I happen to have an example right here, because it’d be a pretty short post if I didn’t. This observation was posted in the comments section at the Rolling Stone website’s coverage of last weekend’s Live Earth series of concerts:

I thought Gore said that people need to use less energy and depend on fuel less to help put a stop to global warming. So lets put together a set of concerts that use tons of lights, problably the amount of electricty it takes to power several towns. Also, How did the artists get to these concerts? They had to take jets and then either a car or a bus to get to these venues. These concerts were so hypocritical, it just further proves how stupid some of these artist really are.

This comment comes from someone named Teabag, who lives by the old axiom that spelling, punctuation, and subject/verb agreement don’t matter on the internet, though of course he’s hardly the only member of that club. Teabag says it’s hypocritical for people who want to raise awareness about global warming to use any energy at all in their attempt to spread the word.

Now, I suppose it’s possible that the old Teebster actually means what he says, that he’s opposed on general principle to large well-lit gatherings to which the attendees traveled on anything other than bicycles. He might well walk to work, reuse the same brown bag for his lunch day after day, and use a hamster-powered generator to fire up his laptop long enough to rail against the wasteful ways of those jet-takin’ musicians.

But that doesn’t seem likely, does it? No, Teabag seems more like one of those global-warming deniers whose favorite talk-radio guy told him it was a hoax and gave him a few talking points for doing battle with us bleeding-heart do-gooders. (“One of the concerts was in Antarctica, which, if you liberals haven’t noticed, is covered in snow year round—some global warming, huh?!”) Teabag also shows his true colors by trotting out that old standby of the pretend-confused: “But I thought Al Gore said people need to use less energy!” (You can get away with the “But I thought you said” ploy until you’re about six years old. After that people know you’re fibbing.)

And of course, there’s the hypocrisy angle. Concerts involving “tons of lights,” or gatherings where people have to come by jet or bus, are okay as long as nobody involved states a political view that conflicts with those Teabag holds dear. The poor guy can’t get his head around the fact that people who understand how important it is to raise awareness of global warming would actually make an effort to raise awareness of global warming. Each musician could have stayed home, played songs on the front porch, and relied on his or her neighbors to pass the word along, but somehow the concert organizers thought it might be more effective to reach, oh, two billion people at once.

I think that’s the part that bothers old Teabag. Whatever energy was spent on producing the Live Earth concerts will be counteracted in the long run as more and more people get the message and adjust their lifestyles. That’s how raising awareness works, and there’s nothing hypocritical about it.

Easy on Those Fireworks

2007-07-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

This essay first appeared on the op-ed page of the Chicago Tribune back in 2002. I was going to write a new piece about the proliferation of fireworks displays, but lo and behold I realized I still had this one on my hard drive. It’s five years old but even more applicable today.

On April 26 [2002], the Portland Beavers beat the Iowa Cubs 7-5 in a Pacific Coast League game. The temperature was down in the high 40s by the time the game was over, but a couple hundred of us stuck around anyway to see the post-game fireworks.

And it occurred to me while I was sitting there in a sweatshirt and jacket and hat and gloves that there’s something very strange and disconcerting about watching fireworks on a chilly night in April. In fact, it might be even more strange than the fact that a baseball team from Iowa is playing in the Pacific Coast League.

It’s strange because when I was growing up, fireworks were reserved for special occasions. Well, one special occasion, actually: the Fourth of July. You could see them on the third, too, between movies at the Ben-Hur Drive-in Theater, but for the most part you had to wait until Independence Day itself to ooh and aah over the big professional fireworks. We were told they were expensive as all get out, which is why it was a good thing they were only needed once a year. I don’t have any idea how much fireworks cost in 1970s dollars, but it was enough that we were supposed to feel grateful we got to see any at all. I always imagined we had a choice: one more cannon cracker or a fully staffed fire department for the rest of the year.

Not only did we have to wait a whole year between fireworks displays back then, there were also excruciatingly long character-building intervals between individual rockets. I remember one Fourth when the people in charge shot off one rocket every twenty minutes like clockwork. And you’d hope, watching that rare rocket streak to its apex, that it wouldn’t be another one of those little ones with the tiny explosion and fewer sparks than you could get from a Bic lighter—but that’s generally what it was because that, for the most part, was what the fireworks committee could afford.

Still, though, they’d manage to throw in a huge one now and then, the kind where the sparks shoot out in the shape of a gigantic boutonniere, and the crowd would ooh and aah in legitimate awe. If it was a particularly good display, there would always come a moment when people in the audience realized they were all saying “Ooh” and “Aah” in unison. From then on there would be self-conscious attempts to add other sounds to the mix, like “Ohhh” and “Wow” and “Neato” and what-have-you, but when you’re truly impressed by a fireworks display, nothing really beats or sounds more natural than “Ooh” and “Aah.”

And if you were lucky, there’d be a grand finale.

Some, of course, were grander than others. Depending on the budget.

These days you don’t have to wait a year to see fireworks. (Evidently they aren’t as expensive as they used to be—that or a whole lot of sponsors have a whole lot of money in their explosives budgets.) Minor league teams regularly schedule post-game displays to help get people in the seats (even on chilly nights in April), and you’ll occasionally see them advertised as part of other events that have nothing to do with Independence Day. I don’t know if this is good or bad, although I can say without a doubt that the fireworks themselves have come a long way from what I grew up with. There’s no booster club member taking twenty minutes to set up the launcher and then realizing he’s out of matches, so there’s no waiting between rockets. Today the whole display looks like a hundred grand finales from 25 years ago, one rocket after another, sometimes a dozen going up at once in a non-stop spectacle of dazzling light and tremendous noise. They’re synchronized to music these days, too, usually a medley of stirring, brass-heavy songs from Star Wars or Aaron Copland. You don’t see a lot of fireworks displays set to Leonard Cohen.

But the most strange and disconcerting thought that occurred to me on that chilly night of April 26 is that I’m afraid someday we’ll reach a point of diminishing returns on our expanded fireworks season. I’m afraid someday we won’t even hear the self-conscious oohs and aahs because the most astounding displays will have become too commonplace to astound people anymore. I’m afraid someday we’ll see people leaving the game after the last out because, hey, we saw fireworks last week.

I like the idea of saving fireworks for a special occasion, and wouldn’t mind seeing them with less frequency.

Especially (and I apologize for resorting to this phrase) if it keeps people from being burnt out on them.

Zack Hill and the Unelected Judges

2007-07-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Q. When is “unelected” a pejorative term?

A. Whenever a court makes a decision that right-wingers don’t agree with, at which point they insist that “unelected judges” are a threat to the very fabric of society. The people who blather on about unelected judges would have you believe that anyone off the street can stumble into a courtroom and declare himself the judge.

They’re absolutely silent on the issue of not being elected when it comes to decisions they support, of course. Last week the Supreme Court ruled that schools could restrict the speech of students at school-sponsored events (the infamous “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case), but those who agreed with the decision somehow forgot to mention the five “unelected judges” who wrote the majority opinion.

It would never occur to me to take issue with unelected judges. I paid enough attention in Mr Hart’s junior-high history class to know that judges are appointed—and that they’re appointed by Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and whoever else happens to be holding the office in charge of appointing judges. It is absolutely irrelevant that judges aren’t elected: You might as well complain about unelected umpires at your local Little League game.

Which brings me to a comic strip called Zack Hill, by John Deering and John Newcombe. Zack Hill is a funky-haired 10-year-old who makes pithy observations about life and growing up and whatnot. He has a crush on an apple-cheeked classmate named Tanja and he’s pursued by a Goth-like girl named Winona. His widowed mom runs a boarding house full of wacky characters. There’s occasional political humor, but it’s always been fair-minded—and it’s never fallen into the category of blindly partisan, hideously unfunny tripe like Mallard Fillmore.

However. Today’s strip got my dander up. (Much of the Runes has been written in a state of heightened dander.) It’s a four-panel Sunday strip and it shows the four main kid characters reciting the pledge of allegiance. (For my thoughts on the validity of forced pledges, see here.) When it comes to the part where most people reciting something by rote would say “one nation under God,” the rebellious Zack says “one nation under unelected judges who rule we can’t acknowledge God in public.”

Oh, Zack, Zack, I know you’re only ten years old, but your cartoonists have led you down the horseshit path for reasons I can’t fathom. First off, there’s the whole “unelected judges” thing I covered earlier. But then it gets worse: When did any judge ever say you couldn’t acknowledge God in public? Such a ruling would be unconstitutional, Zack—you’ve been sadly misinformed.

Forcing the words “under God” into the pledge—and forcing children to say them—was an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion. Beyond that, you’re free to evoke God and Zeus and Cthulhu to your heart’s content, and pretending you’re not is disingenuous.

The last panel shows Zack saying “…and liberty and justice for all judges.” It’s not really funny and it doesn’t make much sense, so maybe Deering and Newcombe just wanted to point out that 10-year-olds don’t have a firm grasp of political nuance.

Seems like an odd way to go about it, though.

Random Thoughts To Confirm My Continued Existence

2007-06-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

I was heading to Indiana on I-74 last weekend and noticed a new bit of gun poetry somewhere around Champaign, Illinois. See if you can spot the lapse in logic in this one:

When gun control
Has you beat
Criminals will
Own the street

Remember, the audience they’re trying to reach with this doggerel doesn’t happen to include writers of left-leaning blogs. No, they’re going after people who are sick and tired of the government trying to pry guns out of their cold dead hands.

And if they have to pretend that gun control means the elimination of local law enforcement agencies, well, you know, whatever it takes.

* * *

Quick update: You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I emailed my post “Still Disconcerted” to each of the Democratic candidates, asking for an explanation of why they said they would authorize the killing of Osama Bin Laden even if it meant the death of innocent civilians (Dennis Kucinich is the only one who said he wouldn’t). I also asked who they were trying to appeal to with that position, because the rabid Bush-loving kill-em-all types aren’t going to be voting in the Democratic primaries anyway.

To date, only the Kucinich campaign has responded to my email, thanking me for writing and confirming what we already knew, that Kucinich has never wavered from his antiwar stance. I made it onto Edwards’ and Obama’s fundraising email list, but I opted out—which someone at those respective campaign headquarters must have interpreted to mean I didn’t want any email from them. That’s not true: I want an answer.

I made it onto Chris Dodd’s fundraising list, too, but instead of opting out I’ve been replying to the request for funds with my own request for an explanation. Neither one of us has budged so far.

* * *

One more thing. There’s some ridiculous website now that will rate your blog as if it were a movie being submitted to the MPAA. The Electron Runes was granted an NC-17 rating, based on the fact that the word gun was used 18 times, death six times, dead five times, hell four times, gays twice, and pain once.

Pain?!

Enlightenment, Part 1

2007-06-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

It’s been about a year now since a couple of roving missionaries knocked on my apartment door and invited me to come to their church. There was a woman a little older than me and one in her 20s, both modestly dressed. The younger one stood quietly while the older one went through the spiel and asked if I was confused by all the different claims made by all the different religions.

I acknowledged that there were certainly a lot of claims, though I had to admit I wasn’t exactly confused by them.

She acknowledged my acknowledgement and asked if I attended church. I said I hadn’t been a regular churchgoer for years. She politely asked why not, and I said “It just stopped making sense to me.”

She made her pitch anyway, letting me know that her church had taken all the confusion out of religion simply by following the Bible. “It’s all right in here,” she said, tapping her copy. I shrugged and shook my head and said “That’s the part that stopped making sense to me.”

I don’t know exactly when I stopped believing in deities, but I know the process began while I was still a firm believer. Anyone who’s been through the process knows that’s not necessarily a contradiction. You see things and you want to doubt but you won’t let yourself.

The table was being set. All I had to do was admit to being hungry.

Rural Indiana wasn’t exactly a hotbed of diverse beliefs when I was growing up, so I was under the impression the church was the final arbiter of truth and the rest of society was just catching up. Salvation was the ultimate goal, and I believed everyone else in the world must think so, too.

Look around you, kid. Look around at the 125 people here in their Sunday clothes, older than you, smarter than you, more faithful than you—do you think they’d be here on a Sunday morning if there weren’t a perfectly good reason to be?

I believed because that’s what you do. That’s what you do when you’re a kid and the only thing you see is other people believing. In sixth grade, 1971, I visited a Wednesday-evening Baptist service with a friend and picked up one of those little Jack Chick comic-book tracts designed to scare people into righteousness (my own church was Disciples of Christ, where nobody tried to scare anybody). This particular tract railed against hippies and stated that the peace symbol was the sign of the antichrist, and of course I, with all the critical thinking skills of a popsicle stick, assumed it was true. It had to be—it came from a church, didn’t it?

The next week we sixth-graders were lined up after recess and I noticed another friend of mine with a peace-symbol button on his jacket. I explained ever so helpfully that he was wearing the sign of the antichrist, and he responded with well-justified indignation: “Oh, I suppose God is for war.” I didn’t have an answer for that. There was a scriptural reference in the tract, but I read Revelation front to back and never did find anything about a peace symbol.

I did the whole confirmation and baptism thing in seventh grade. In our church that meant taking a few weeks of special classes to prepare you to say Yes to the question “Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

But honestly, they might just as well have skipped the classes and said “We’re going to line you up in front of the church and ask you a question, at which point you will say Yes.”

Saying Yes meant we publicly acknowledged that 2000 years ago a supernatural being took human form, died, and came back to life. Keep in mind that for years we’d all been brought up to believe that 2000 years ago an all-powerful supernatural being took human form, died, and came back to life, so this wasn’t a huge stretch for us. Nobody had ever challenged us to think seriously about the believability and likelihood of the story, nor did they have much reason to. Everyone else believed it, so why shouldn’t we?

(Or, more accurately, everyone else believed it, so it must have happened. This is why they set the confirmation and baptism age high enough that you’ll want to answer correctly and join the rest of the crowd, but not so high that you’ll say you need to think it over first. Implausibility, I now realize, isn’t sufficient reason for believing in something.)

So on that Easter Sunday in 1973, they chalked up eight new souls. Our names were added to the church membership, and after the ceremony we were all congratulated by our families and the church elders and whatnot, as if we’d walked on water and not just toed the company line.

Of course, it was a pretty big deal to me at the time. Who couldn’t get behind salvation? Who wouldn’t choose eternal life? It was nice knowing we had virtually automatic forgiveness for our sins, but the way I understood it, our magical baptismal dunking had washed away any desire we might have had to sin in the first place.

So that was the cloak I wrapped myself in for the next several years. As a point of clarification, I was never a Bible-thumper, never an evangelical, never a crusader. I was never obnoxious about my faith and I never tried to convert anyone else. It was personal to me.

It was also a tremendous handicap. While I’d always had a thirst for knowledge, I was only willing to receive it up to the point where it conflicted with my religious beliefs. I attended a well-respected liberal arts college and was surrounded by great literature and humanist thought, but I’m pretty sure my GPA would have been higher if I hadn’t had to filter everything through Biblical literalism.

I was protected by the Armor of Truth. Fortunately, it had a few chinks.

(to be continued)

Evolution #9

2007-06-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

According to a recent Gallup poll, 70% of Republicans don’t believe in the theory of evolution. That seems outrageous when you think of the GOP as the party of bankers and millionaires, yet it’s perfectly understandable when you realize that a whole lot of people call themselves Republicans simply because they don’t have a Christian Fundamentalist Party to belong to. They’re throwing off the curve, though in fairness I’m not sure they’re as much to blame as the Republican politicians who pander to them.

The poll also revealed that only 53% of Americans believe evolution is “definitely or probably true.” Most of the blogs I read regularly have already covered this, and have lamented quite rightly that it shows a depressing ignorance about something that should be one of the basic building blocks of every person’s education.

Of course, some of the folks who reject evolution do so because they’ll get kicked out of the club if they don’t. When religious leaders frame the debate as “evolution vs your immortal soul,” it’s no surprise that anyone with a superstitious, credulous approach to life is going to line up on the side of not burning for eternity.

There are churches where the people believe in theistic evolution, where the Bible is considered a mix of history and metaphor, and where people are encouraged to use their powers of reason. I suspect Gary Bauer doesn’t go to one of those churches. Remember Gary Bauer? He ran for president in 2000 and is known for such hysterical announcements as “Our society will be destroyed if we say it’s OK for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman.”

Bauer’s never been known for intellectual nuance, but USA Today trotted him out anyway for a quote in a story about the evolution poll. Now, one thing you can count on from evolution deniers: They love reducing this complex scientific topic to the level of a cartoon.

Not a funny cartoon, either. More like a Mallard Fillmore. True to form, Bauer told USA Today that “Most of us don’t think we’re just apes with trousers.”

(I’m looking into the rumor that Charles Darwin’s original title was The Origin of Species: Apes With Trousers.)

If you take a hundred evolution deniers and ask them to sum up their opposition in a single sentence, 90 will say “We ain’t related to monkeys.” (Five will start spouting the pretend-science of Intelligent Design proponents, and the other five will ask what you mean by a sentence.) Given enough time, you might make a handful understand that we are related to monkeys—and apes and wombats and figs and amoeba. Maybe.

But every time a dimbulb like Gary Bauer misrepresents the theory of evolution by making a joke about trouser-wearing apes, another mind closes a little bit tighter.

The USA Today story also quoted someone named Don Racheter, described as a “fiscal and cultural conservative who heads a free-market think tank in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.” Racheter says “People have a right to their own view on how life began and how [that] should be taught.”

No arguments there. You’re free to hold your own views, no matter how kooky. You’re free to believe your kookiest views should be taught, too. But speaking of kooky views, Racheter says he’s surprised that Democrats don’t agree. He says Democrats “ought to be for choice in religion and choice in education as well as choice in reproductive rights.”

Huh? I don’t know any Democrat who’s anti-choice on religion. I think most of us are pretty much behind choice in reproductive rights as well. But choice in education? What does that even mean?

If it means teaching a valid scientific alternative to evolution, go for it. But since such a thing doesn’t exist, I can only assume Mr Racheter thinks creation myths are a worthy use of science-class time. I found a list of 46 at this site, so that ought to take up a semester or two right there.

One More Thing

On Monday I sent a copy of the post titled "Still Disconcerted" to each of the Democratic candidates, asking if they honestly thought it was acceptable to assassinate Osama Bin Laden if it meant the deaths of innocent civilians. (On the email to Dennis Kucinich, of course, I acknowledged that he answered that question No in the New Hampshire debate.) So far I've received automatic replies from Clinton, Edwards, Obama, and Dodd. If anyone actually answers the question, I'll let you know.

A Cup of Ice

2007-06-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

If this were one of those what-I-had-for-breakfast blogs instead of whatever the hell kind of blog it actually is, you’d already know that in the past month I visited New York City for the first time and became smitten with the city and one of its inhabitants. You’d already know that some guy turned left into the path of my car in a little town in rural Illinois, causing $2100 worth of damage and prompting me to get out of the car and yell “goddammit” at the top of my lungs (and that I was surprised not to receive a citation for disturbing the peace: “We don’t say the GD-word in these here parts, boy—at least not in such a public forum”).

You’d also already know that after 28 years of being a fan of the Roches, I finally saw them perform live in Iowa City—and actually got to meet and chat with them afterwards.

It was all very exciting, obviously, but it’s not the sort of thing I want to write about here at the Runes. However, something absurd happened last night that I thought my twos of readers might enjoy hearing about.

My younger daughter and I were returning home from a trip to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, where Phillies righthander Jon Lieber had just tossed a three-hit shutout against the Royals. I stopped for gas at a Shell store just off 435 North, and after filling the tank I went inside for a drink. As is my custom in convenience stores, I got a bottle of pop out of the cooler, then filled a cup up with ice. (For some reason I find this preferable to fountain drinks.)

The woman at the counter informed me that I could save money by getting the ice in a larger cup. “There’s a special,” said she. “You can get the 44-ounce cup for 79 cents, as opposed to the 32-ounce cup for a dollar-nine.”

“Yes, I noticed that,” I noted cheerily, “but I’m not getting a fountain drink. I just want the ice.”

“OK, I’ll give you an ice cup,” she replied, proffering a cup much smaller than the 32-ouncer I had already filled with ice.

“But I want more ice than that,” I said by way of rejoinder.

“Then I’ll have to charge you for a fountain drink.”

“Balderdash, good woman! Prithee explain why thou wouldst charge me for both a fountain drink and the bottled beverage I selected myself from yon cooler?” (I’m kind of paraphrasing here.)

“Our distributor says we have to—”

“You know what? It’s not that important.” Since I’d already paid for my gas at the pump, I left the store in very non-dramatic fashion, leaving her to deal with about a nickel’s worth of ice and plastic cup, which I assume and hope she threw away. Distributor’s rules or no, I didn’t care to stick around and listen to why it’s okay to gouge customers by charging $1.09 for a 32-ounce cup of ice.

Most stores just give you the ice, and some charge a dime or fifteen cents. The store down the street, Pour Boys, was nice enough to give me the ice and will now be my official convenience store of choice for future trips to Kansas City.

Coming soon: What I Had For Breakfast.

Still Disconcerted

2007-06-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

I’m still kind of disconcerted about the moment in the Democratic debate in which all but one of the candidates raised a hand to signify that “Yes, I would fire a missile into Osama Bin Laden’s guts even if it meant killing some innocent civilians.”

I’m disconcerted because I can’t figure out whom they’re trying to appeal to with that response. Have they forgotten November? Have they forgotten the mass turnover in the House and Senate? Have they forgotten the message we intended to send back then?

The results of the November elections did more than just quantify public dissatisfaction with the Iraq quagmire: They repudiated everything President Poor Dope stands for: corruption, aggression, cronyism, and a stupidly undiplomatic approach to foreign policy. The voters demanded change. (And the fact that we haven’t seen a whole hell of a lot of it will be the subject of a future post.)

The voters demanded change, but their response to the Osama question shows that the Democratic candidates (with the exception of Kucinich) still don’t get it. Reasonable people understand that blowing up Bin Laden solves nothing. Reasonable people understand that killing more innocents in pursuit of a criminal the current administration has given up on is unacceptable.

And since I would define reasonable people as those responsible for keeping the poor dope’s approval ratings in the low 30s, I have to ask again: Who were the Democratic candidates hoping to reach with that mind-boggling show of hands?

Were they honestly trying to appeal to the 28-32% still loyally, stubbornly, desperately clinging to their belief that the poor dope knows what he’s doing? Here’s a news flash: Those people aren’t voting in the Democratic primaries. They don’t care how many innocent civilians die, and they don’t particularly care how many American soldiers die, either.

They’re the ones offering such brilliant political solutions as “Pave the whole Middle East.”

They’re not you. They’re not us. They don’t matter.

If you want to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice when you become president, you’ll have a grateful nation behind you. But if you’re just going to shoot first and ask questions later like you’re applying for a position in the current administration of thugs, then stop pretending you have something different to offer.

The Bloodthirsty Bunch

2007-06-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

I’m a little concerned about a couple of things I heard in Sunday’s Democratic debate. The first is Hillary Clinton’s statement that “We’re safer now than we were.”

If she’s talking about those of us within U.S. borders right now, her comment is immeasurable and therefore meaningless. If she’s talking about American troops serving in a country they should never have been sent to in the first place, it’s downright insulting.

Hillary looked very confident and poised at the debate, and she had enough good things to say that I might eventually be persuaded to let her out of my Republican-lite doghouse. But “We’re safer now than we were” is an empty phrase, and we’ve already spent six years with a president who can’t communicate in anything but empty phrases. Give us some substance, please.

The other thing was much more disturbing. Moderator Wolf Blitzer posed the following question, which I’m paraphrasing: “If the intelligence community knew the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, but that he would only be there for 20 minutes, would you move to eliminate him even if that meant killing innocent civilians?”

Now, you and I both know that’s a bullshit question, for a lot of reasons. When you have a field of eight presidential candidates eager to explain their positions to the public, why in the world would you be asking yes-or-no questions? What would have been wrong with asking something more open-ended, like “As president, what would you do to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice?”

Instead they turned it into a ridiculous hypothetical, a situation the candidates might encounter if they were playing Osama: The Video Game.

And unfortunately, with the shining exception of Dennis Kucinich, the candidates blew the response.

Kucinich, who’s been consistent in his antiwar sensibilities since he ran in 2004, was the first to respond: “I don't think that a president of the United States who believes in peace and who wants to create peace in the world is going to be using assassination as a tool, because when you do that, it comes back at your country.” That’s a bit of wisdom completely lost on the current administration of asshats, by the way.

Barack Obama took a different approach: “Osama Bin Laden has declared war on us, killed 3,000 people, and under existing law, including international law, when you've got a military target like Bin Laden, you take him out.” Well, aside from the fact that I think you have to be a sovereign nation before you can declare war on one, this completely dodges the “innocent civilians” issue. How many hundred thousand dead Iraqis are there now? Did the death of any particular one of them bring us closer to finding Bin Laden?

Blitzer then posed the question to the whole panel as a “show of hands” type thing (which, even though he’d been doing it all night, still came off as kind of simplistic and surreal), asking who among them would fire a missile that would kill Bin Laden and anyone who happened to be in the neighborhood.

They all raised their hands, except Kucinich. And that’s pretty freakin sad.

Do we need another bloodthirsty president? Do any of the candidates honestly believe that terrorism dies with Bin Laden, that blowing him up closes the book on 9/11?

I’m not saying Osama Bin Laden doesn’t deserve to die. I’m saying a dead Bin Laden wouldn’t make us any safer, especially if he’s surrounded by a bunch of dead people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And by the way, if President Poor Dope really wanted to find Bin Laden, he could have invested a small percentage of what he’s wasted in Iraq to do so. If he isn’t going to make the effort, why is the question important enough to ask the Democratic candidates?

Guns and Poetry

2007-05-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

There’s a difference between gun owners and gun nuts. You can be a gun owner without being a gun nut, but I can’t imagine there being any gun nuts who aren’t gun owners. (Although I suppose it’s possible. There are a lot of people who are nuts about occupying Iraq but who can’t bring themselves to enlist and occupy it themselves.)

I think gun owners cross the line into gun nuttery when they (1) interpret even the slightest gun control effort as the first step in a massive national gun roundup, and (2) believe that more guns are the answer to all of life’s problems. After the Virginia Tech shooting, some of these people said the tragedy could have been averted if students were allowed to carry concealed weapons.

Because that’s what you want: A campus full of wanna-be heroes and bullets flying every which way. Joe Sophomore takes a shot at the crazy Korean kid, Tom Freshman hears the report and takes a shot at Joe Sophomore, and Bob Junior, who’s been holding a grudge ever since Tom spilled beer on him at the Phi Psi kegger, seizes the opportunity to save the college from the beer-spillin’, random-shootin’ freshman. Ker-pow.

But, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, that’s not what I came to talk to you about. I came to talk to you about the Burma Shave-style signs you’ll find on I-74 between Champaign, Illinois and the Indiana state line.

The signs are posted by the Champaign County Rifle Association, and they’re just like the old Burma Shave signs that appeared on American highways from 1929-1963. Each set of five signs has a bit of doggerel in the abab rhyme scheme, and the final sign points you to a website where you can learn more about how guns are your friends.

I have no issue with gun safety education or roadside poetry either one. I don’t begrudge anyone a spirited defense of the Second Amendment, at least until they start dipping into gun nuttery as described in the second paragraph. My problem with these verses is that they suggest utterly simplistic and unrealistic solutions to real problems.

Which makes them fair game here at the Runes.

Here’s a verse I saw recently:

Police don’t always
Arrive in time
What protects you
During the crime?

Now, what they want you to think is “Aha, a gun! A gun would protect me during the crime! If I only had a gun, I could avoid being robbed, raped, murdered, etc.” But unless you’re a quick-draw artist on a par with Billy the Kid, you’re no match for someone who’s got the drop on you. That’s the thing about bad guys. If they’re mugging you or robbing your house, they’ve got a plan. If you’ve been taken by surprise, you don’t.

If you’re being physically assaulted, it only makes sense to fight back. But if someone’s after your money, it seems to me that what protects you during the crime is keeping your damn mouth shut.

Here’s another one:

Terrorists love
Gun control
Unarmed victims
Are their goal

Wow, it’s really too bad there wasn’t an armed security guard in the World Trade Center that day. “You just turn that plane right around, Mister.”

I’m sure the guy who came up with that poem patted himself on the back for a long time, but honestly—is he even aware of the definition of terrorism? To borrow a phrase from Batman, terrorists are a cowardly lot. They operate on the sly, planting bombs and then getting the hell away from them (except for the suicide bombers, to whom a gun would be a laughable deterrent).

I suspect the “terrorists” poem was just an attempt to link terrorism and gun control, which in rural Illinois might well be code for “Democrats.” Either way, I don’t think terrorists particularly care whether their victims are armed or not.

(And by the way, when I say terrorists I’m talking about people trying to achieve a political advantage through the use of violence. I’m not using the George W. Bush definition, which is essentially “Anyone who gets in my way” or “Anyone I can fool my remaining supporters into believing is out to get them.”)

Next time I travel to Indiana I’ll write down some more of these gems. In the meantime, here’s one of my own:

Violets are blue
Roses are red
I woke up and found a burglar in my home and tried to be a hero by pulling a gun on him
Now I’m dead

Man Was Nice Before He Was Religious

2007-05-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Jerry Falwell once said Billy Graham was Satan’s servant on earth?

I don’t know what Graham’s reaction was (I hope he turned the other cheek, cause Falwell would have hated that), nor have I done enough Googling to find out the reason for the insult. Maybe they were fighting over a parking spot or something.

In any event, though he hasn’t been relevant in my life for several years, I’ve always thought Billy Graham was one of the more sincere and least offensive evangelical types. I respect the fact that he isn’t always getting his mug on TV to demonize the gays and the liberals, which is probably exactly why a Pharisee like Falwell didn’t care for him.

Anyway. Billy Graham has a syndicated column in which he dispenses advice to the sort of people who see some value in asking Billy Graham for advice, and in today’s column (discovered through a link at someone else’s blog), he answers a thought-provoking but profoundly sad question from a Mrs S.G.

The headline:
HOW CAN NICE NEIGHBOR BE NON-BELIEVER?

The letter:
DEAR DR. GRAHAM: My neighbor is the nicest person I know, and she’ll do anything for anyone who needs help. And yet she isn’t at all religious, and says she’s never found any need for God. How do you explain this? I thought only religious people were supposed to know what it means to love others. -- Mrs. S.G.

I don’t know how old this Mrs S.G. is, but it sounds to me like she’s been around a while—which makes her last line one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. How sad to be so sheltered, so insulated from the real world that you think only religious people are capable of love.

Doubly sad if that’s what she’s been indoctrinated to believe her whole life.

If Mrs S.G. had written to me, I’d have been surprised because I don’t have a syndicated advice column. But hypothetically speaking, my answer would have been something simple, something like “Mankind knew how to love long before religion was invented.”

A similar answer from Billy Graham, of course, would have been career suicide. So he went with the safe reply:

DEAR MRS. S.G.: Your neighbor's concern for others is commendable—but if she had Christ in her heart, I believe she'd be an even more loving and compassionate person.

No, Billy, you’re either loving and compassionate or you’re not, and as Mrs S.G. said, her neighbor is the nicest person she knows, one who will “do anything for anyone who needs help.” The neighbor has attained a state of loving compassion. She’s a 10 on the loving compassion scale, which doesn’t go to 11.

I think Billy Graham knows this. I think he knows that a world of loving compassionate people would be utopia, whether they were believers or not. He also knows which side his bread is buttered on, so he goes on to cast aspersions on the neighbor woman’s heart:

But something has happened to us—and that “something” is sin. Yes, we can love—but all too often our love becomes twisted and selfish. It may even become so dim that evil overtakes us. Like a deadly cancer, sin has dulled our ability to love the way we should.

Is he suggesting Christians have a monopoly on selfless love? Is he suggesting the neighbor’s behavior masks something twisted, selfish, and sinful?

Or is he just changing the subject?

His final advice to Mrs S.G. is to pray for her neighbor so that she’ll come to understand God’s love, etc etc. But whether Mrs S.G. takes that advice or not, I hope she’ll open her eyes and see for herself that people are good, and that it isn’t religion that makes them that way.

Tragedy Made Trivial

2007-05-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

I was among the thousands of St Louis Cardinals fans—and baseball fans in general—saddened last April 29 by the death of relief pitcher Josh Hancock in an alcohol-related traffic accident. Hancock was legally drunk and talking on a cell phone when his SUV ran into the back of a tow truck that had stopped to help a motorist on US 40 in St Louis. He was killed instantly; the tow truck operator and the driver of the stalled car weren’t hurt.

The saddest part of the story for me was that the Cardinals won the World Series last October, and Hancock, a key member of the bullpen, only got to bask in that glory for a few short months. This kid—just 28 when he died—only had from October to April to tell people he was a member of the world championship team.

That was the saddest part of the story up until a couple of days ago, when the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Hancock’s father is filing a wrongful death lawsuit seeking damages “over $25,000.” And here’s where it gets goofy: The defendants in the suit are the restaurant where Josh had been drinking, the owner and driver of the tow truck, and—get this—the driver of the stranded vehicle.

Mr Hancock’s suit alleges that “The intoxication of Joshua Morgan Hancock on said occasion was involuntary.” According to the Post-Dispatch, one of Hancock’s lawyers said “It's understood that for the entire three hours that Josh Hancock was there, that he was handed drinks. It's our understanding that from the moment Josh Hancock entered Mike Shannon's that night that he was never without a drink.”

Wow. Apparently when Josh Hancock walked into Mike Shannon’s restaurant that night, they jammed a funnel in his mouth and emptied several bottles into his protesting gullet. They couldn’t hear him saying “No, stop, two’s my limit,” because the funnel was in the way.

I’m just speculating, of course. I don’t know how else to explain the term “involuntary intoxication.”

It seems to me that a person has a number of choices when he’s handed drinks for three hours. He can say No at some point, or he can accept and enjoy them all. If he chooses the latter, he can find an alternate ride home or he can hop drunkenly his SUV and go barreling down US 40 while chatting on a cell phone.

Hancock made the wrong choice. But it was his.

Missouri’s dram shop law was repealed in 1934, but there are still statutes that allow someone to file a suit if an establishment knowingly serves “intoxicating liquor to a visibly intoxicated person.” I don’t know enough about law to speculate if there’s a case here. I do know that the manager of the restaurant offered to call a cab for Hancock, but he told her he was heading to a hotel three blocks away.

I can understand Mr Hancock’s pain. But I can’t understand the desperation, the grasping, the greed that would cause him to name the tow truck operator and the motorist in this lawsuit. “The guy should have known not to drive a car that might stall while my son was being forced at gunpoint to drink too much—and the tow truck operator should have known better than to stop and help.”

Hell, as long as you’re throwing defendants in right and left, why not include whoever makes the schedules for major league baseball? If the Cardinals hadn’t played in St Louis that night, this tragedy wouldn’t have happened.

Josh Hancock made a bad mistake. But this lawsuit trivializes his memory, and I hope a judge dismisses it quickly.

* * *

This is a poem I wrote a few years back.

On the Old Mill Road

On the Old Mill Road the trees squeeze you in on both sides
And the curves surprise you with impossible angles
From a time when life didn’t move so recklessly fast

Deer and rabbits wander up and eat the memorial flowers
Freshened weekly by the survivors
Who write their congressmen and demand
A wider road running straight through the woods

The message being that the state is responsible
For providing safer roads
For our drunken children to drive on

Death of Falwell

2007-05-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

I guess I’m not all that broken up about the death of Jerry Falwell. I mean, I’m sure he was well loved by his family and friends, but for those of us who never bought into the idea that Christianity is the exclusive province of well-to-do warmongering Republicans, he was kind of a douche.

And here’s the thing. I wasn’t always a liberal, and I wasn’t always a non-believer. But Jerry Falwell came into prominence way back when I was a faithful churchgoin’ boy, and I remember thinking he was a creep then, too.

Not sure why, exactly. Maybe it was the smug look on his piggy little face. Maybe it was the arrogance of the term “Moral Majority,” which went against everything I believed about Christian humility. I was never much of a Bible scholar, but I had always taken to heart the verse “He who exalts himself will be humbled.” And Falwell loved exalting himself.

Falwell and people like him helped me decide which camp I wanted to be in, and it sure wasn’t the camp of the self-righteous, the camp of the arrogant, the camp of the people whose superstitions keep them from opening their eyes and seeing the real world.

By the time Falwell made his idiotic pronouncement that part of the blame for 9/11 belonged to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for an American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America,” I’d long recognized him for what he was: a glutton for the spotlight and a hero of authority-loving Americans who won’t think for themselves.

And sadly, those folks will find someone else now to do their thinking for them.

Hate Crime Bill Hatas

2007-05-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been a big fan of the phrase “Don’t get your panties in a wad” (or its more assonant cousin “Don’t get your undies in a bunch”), but every once in a while I run across something that makes it obvious why the phrase was coined in the first place. Today it happens to be the people who oppose the Hate Crimes Bill.

These folks definitely need to unclench a little bit.

I refer you to a letter I found in the online version of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, a letter from a Mr Jim Hassinger of St Charles, Missouri, who says the Hate Crimes Bill is unfair and possibly unconstitutional. According to Jim, the bill “allows our federal government to punish perpetrators of crimes against some selected citizens more severely than perpetrators of crimes against unselected citizens.”

Technically, he’s not far off. The bill essentially adds “sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, and disability” to a list of categories that are already covered by federal hate crimes legislation—race, religion, color, and national origin. So if you commit a crime against a black person, a Muslim, or an Irishman because you hate black people, Muslims, or the Irish, then yes, the punishment will be more severe.

That doesn’t mean you won’t be punished otherwise. If the crime is assault and battery, you’re going to pay the price for assault and battery. If Jim Hassinger isn’t planning on committing any hate crimes, why is he so worried about a perpetrator getting a little extra punishment?

Jim goes on to completely miss the mark (and to misuse the word “explicitly”):

Citizens explicitly less protected under this law include: senior citizens, pregnant women, unborn children, military personnel and the homeless.

That just isn’t true. The existing laws are still in effect. It’s still illegal to hit a senior citizen in the head, to run over military personnel, and to embezzle from pregnant women. The Hate Crimes Bill doesn’t make anyone “explicitly” less protected, and in fact doesn’t make anyone less protected at all. Sure, the bill doesn’t mention senior citizens and pregnant women, but neither does it mention dentists, left-handers, first basemen, and people with googly eyes.

By and large, people don’t hate dentists for being dentists. But there sure are a lot who hate black people and gay people for being black and gay—and they’re willing to express it with chains and iron pipes.

But maybe Jim isn’t aware of such things. Maybe he’s never done a Google search for James Byrd Jr or Matthew Shepherd.

Of course, it’s too early to let Jim off the hook entirely. Because what really has his BVDs in a bundle is the concern that his church isn’t going to be allowed to preach against the gays anymore. In fact, says Jim:

…the greatest jeopardy is that under this law it is entirely conceivable that persons who read the Bible, you know, the parts pertaining to homosexuality…especially to another person, could be convicted of a hate crime. It has already happened in other countries.

Yeah, you read that correctly. Jim’s under the impression that reading the Bible is going to be classified as a hate crime—especially if one reads it to another person.

Of course, I suppose we could just cut those parts out of the Bible.

Gee, Jim, what you do in your spare time is no concern of ours. In any event, he’s not alone. According to a story on the CBN website, the director of a group called Repent America is urging Christians to contact their legislators and express their opposition to the bill. “Together,” he said, “as one loud voice, we must urge our lawmakers to vote against the legislation that seeks to silence us.” And the always quotable media whore James Dobson said “Pastors preaching from Scripture on homosexuality could be threatened with persecution and prosecution.”

Easy, fellas. Readjust your briefs. Stop pretending you’re being persecuted. There has to be a crime committed before it can be a hate crime, so try not to get all hysterical. Follow the example of Jason Rantz, a contributing editor at Family Security Matters, who takes a calmer, more reasoned approach:

But where I disagree is with the urgency of many on the Right when it comes to this bill. It is indeed possible that this bill may lead to restrictions on speech. If and when that happens, I will join the fight against the restrictions, as the First Amendment is easily the most important amendment of the Constitution. But is it probable that this bill will lead to restrictions on protected speech? Not at this juncture.

I guess I’m suspicious of any pastor who’s so worried about losing his right to condemn alleged sinners that he values it more than the right of another human being to live without the fear of being beaten up.

Ah well. Let’s go back to Jim Hassinger of St Charles and see what bit of wisdom he’s going to leave us with:

I wish I felt bold enough to ask God’s blessing upon our country. But now, with great fear and trepidation, I humbly beg that God simply have mercy upon our nation.

Great fear and trepidation. Man, how can you pull yourself out of bed every morning?

Random Thoughts From the Hoosier State

2007-05-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

I’m writing this from my folks’ house in rural Indiana, but I won’t get to post until I return to the Des Moines metro. My mom’s internet service provider is a guy named Merle, who comes to your house when you’re online and loads each pixel by hand. Mom’s still waiting for Merle to load the page with the 2004 election results, and I don’t have the heart to tell her.

* * *

There is no platitude so banal that pseudopatriotic Pharisees won’t put it on a bumper sticker. On the way here I was passed by a late-model car with one of those “Freedom Isn’t Free” stickers on the trunk. You know the one I mean: big bold font, eagle head, flag waving in the background. That sticker reminded me of a major difference between liberals and the sort of people who elected President Poor Dope: Liberals would be happy with a sticker that simply said “Freedom.” The people who sport “Freedom Isn’t Free” bumper stickers are really saying “I’ll define what freedom is for you.”

I think we’re all aware that eternal vigilance is included in the price of freedom, and that military service and sacrifice are certainly necessary when various forces conspire to take it away. But despite what the poor dope and these bumper sticker owners might want you to believe, the events of 9/11 were not an attack on freedom. They were cold-blooded murder by a number of religious fanatics, at least one of whom is still at large. Americans did not become less free when the World Trade Center went down; we became less free when Bush and Cheney decided to take a long pee on the Constitution.

So yes, I agree that freedom isn’t free. If we want to stay free, we have to be on constant guard against stupid people with stupid bumper stickers who keep voting for stupid warmongers.

* * *

I was reading one of my dad’s back issues of Sports Illustrated and found a little sidebar where various sports figures explained why they chose their uniform number. Some NBA player said he wore number 7 because it was “God’s number.” Asked to elaborate, he said seven was God’s number because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

Using that logic, I want to wear the number “umpteen billion” because that seems to be how many consecutive days this alleged world-creator has been resting ever since.

* * *

Actually, no one has ever asked, but I wear the number 56 in coed softball in honor of Jim Bouton.

* * *

I wish I’d waited a few more days before posting the goofy Nigerian scam post, mainly because the Leonard Peltier post was more indicative of what I want this blog to be. On the other hand, does anyone really care?

Casting Pearls Before Swine: Fun With Spam Scams

2007-05-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

The rule of thumb for spam email is to delete each offending piece immediately, no matter how tempting it is to reply and ask to be taken off the spammers’ mailing list. Replying to spam, as we all know, confirms that there’s someone at your email address, which will then be sold to other spammers as “a live one.”

I have a Yahoo email account I never use, but since there’s a slim chance that someone might see me playing online Scrabble and want to contact me there, I go in and check it out every once in a while. Every time I do, I find that Yahoo has diverted about 10,000 spams into the junk drawer. Occasionally, though, a bit of spam flops into my regular inbox, where it promptly gets disposed of without a read.

Except that sometimes I can’t resist reading the Nigerian scam letters. They’re persistent, those Nigerians (or those pseudo-Nigerians—they might be from Kansas, for all I know). They’re persistent and creative, but the basic story is always the same: Somebody has died in a tragic accident, leaving upwards of $10 million in a Nigerian bank. If the sender can’t find someone to make a legitimate claim for it, the government will take it and use it for some sort of shady military operation. And if I make the claim, the sender will keep a certain percentage for himself as a finder’s fee.

By my estimate, I have right around a trillion dollars waiting for me in various Nigerian banks. Furthermore, there are only about 14 people left alive in Nigeria, as the entire rest of the population has been killed in a tragic car accident.

I have, at times, replied to the spammer and suggested he take my share of the money and invest it in Nigerian road improvements.

I only reply to the spam that comes to my Yahoo account, figuring that account is a lost cause anyway, and the only reason I do it then is to amuse myself. Last night I accidentally came up with a reply I’m happy to share with all twos of my readers, in case they’re ever in a similar mood.

The spam that got my attention was from a guy with the unlikely name of Goodness Egobiaram. The subject was “Hello Donovan” (which I couldn’t help reading in a snide Jerry Seinfeld voice) and here’s what Goodness had to say (verbatim):

Dear Donovan:

I am a senior Accountant in my Bank and Accounting officer to Mr. Arthur Donovan who was a contractor with the Federal government of Nigeria. On the 21st of April 2001, my customer, his wife and their two children were involved in auto-crash along the ever busy Sagumu-Ibadan Highway. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost their lives. Since then, the Board of Directors of my Bank have made several enquires to their embassy to locate any of my customer’s extended relations but to no avail. Hence the need to contact you since you share the same family name.

I have contacted you to assist in repatriating the money and Property left behind by my client before they get Confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this Huge deposits of US$10M was lodged.

The Bank has published several Notice for the Next of Kin of the deceased to apply for collection of this Funds or have the account confiscated within a shot Period of time.

Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over 2 years now I seek your consent to present you as the Next of kin of the deceased, so that the proceeds of this Account valued at US 10 million dollars can be paid to you and Then you and me can share the money, 60% to me and 40% to you.

I have all necessary legal documents that can be used to backup any claim we may make. All I require is your honest cooperation to enable this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate Arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the Law. Please get in touch with my email and send to me your Telephone and fax numbers to enable us further about this Transaction.

Best regards,
Mr Goodness Egobiaram
Senior Accountant
Intercontinental Bank, PLC
Lagos, Nigeria

Now, as comforting as it to know that this arrangement will protect me from any breach of the law (if not from random capital letters), I decided to decline Mr Egobiaram’s kind offer. But because I was in the mood to have some fun, I wrote him back so he wouldn’t feel bad about my ingratitude.

Dear Goodness—

I have great news for you. Are you sitting down? Arthur Donovan is still alive!

Despite what the newspaper accounts said, Arthur survived the car crash and crawled to a nearby farmhouse for help. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking that there were four bodies in the car, and you’re right. But the victim identified as Arthur was in reality his long-lost twin brother Albert!

That’s right. Everybody believes Albert was killed in that tragic plane crash in 1998 (the one that prompted his solicitor, a Mr Goodness Gracious, to offer me the cool $5 million in Albert’s secret bank account). The truth, however, is that Albert wasn’t actually aboard the plane! He paid a homeless man $25 to board that flight (for reasons I think we’re both well aware of), and then of course the pilot—actually Arthur’s trusted valet, Steven Mogumbo—ejected with his parachute right before the plane crashed into that mountain.

Anyway—Arthur survived the car wreck, but I should warn you that his face was badly burned. He’s had plastic surgery, but now instead of looking like the Arthur Donovan you loved so well, he now resembles a young Elton John. I’ve informed him about the money, so you can be expecting him to show up and claim it himself within the week. Please be discreet. If You-Know-Who and his minions find out Arthur is alive, they'll stop at nothing to get their hands on that cash. If only Arthur had resisted the temptation to get involved in the Johannesburg Affair--but of course, he always did have an eye for the long-legged diamond smugglers.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It makes me happy to know that the money will soon be in the hands of its rightful owner!

Yours truly,
Donovan

PS—If funds are available, I’m pretty sure Arthur would be amenable to renaming that fatal stretch of the Sagumu-Ibadan Highway after his late brother. If it causes just one of the few remaining Nigerians to drive a little safer on that road, it’ll be worth it.

Hoping Against Hope and the Dead Dog

2007-05-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Like if he stood there long enough that dog’d get up and run
--Bruce Springsteen, “Reason to Believe”

Leonard Peltier is serving back-to-back life sentences in Leavenworth for the murder of two FBI agents during the 1975 shootout at the Jumping Bull ranch on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. A leader of the American Indian Movement and a citizen of the Anishinabe and Lakota nations, Peltier continues to maintain his innocence.

Amnesty International considers Peltier a political prisoner. According to the website The Case of Leonard Peltier, he is nine years overdue for a parole hearing. There’s ample reason to believe that the government both withheld and falsified evidence in their case against Peltier, and there’s nothing that ties him to the murders beyond the fact that he was one of 30 people on the Jumping Bull ranch that day. Even the US prosecutor on the case has said “We can’t prove who shot those agents.”

The whole sad story is covered in Peter Mathiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and in Michael Apted's documentary “Incident at Oglala.” But in surfing around the internet last night I ran across something that took the sadness to a whole new depth.

It was a simple thing, but heartbreakingly sad. It was an online petition asking George W. Bush to look into the case of Leonard Peltier.

The group behind the petition is called Kola, which happens to be the Lakota word for “friend.” Their website describes them as a grassroots human rights organization whose objectives include spreading “correct information on every issue concerning American, Canadian, and Australian indigenous peoples.”

I applaud their efforts. I wish them the best. I hope Leonard Peltier gets to experience freedom again someday.

But asking George W. Bush to look into something that will have no immediate political benefit for him and his sycophants is like taking a stick and poking the dead dog in that Springsteen song. The dog’s not going to run.

The petition assumes George W. Bush has a conscience. It assumes he has the mental capacity to understand the facts of the Peltier case. It assumes he’s a serious, thoughtful person who’s dedicated to justice.

Those are three assumptions for which no evidence exists.

Kola is trying to appeal to the humanity of a person whose response to Hurricane Katrina was to yuk it up and pretend to play a guitar. There’s nothing there, folks. There’s nothing to grab onto.

Can’t you imagine that petition crossing the poor dope’s desk? Can’t you just see the smirk? “Free who? Lenny Pelter, who’s that? An Indian? What is he, an outfielder?”

Even if Bush had the reading comprehension required to understand phrases like “falsified evidence” and “coerced affidavits,” and even if he were to make some statement about the Peltier case at all, I’d lay odds that his comment would be something like “Well, if the court found him guilty, he must be guilty.”

I’d love to be proven wrong about this. But Bush showed his true colors early on and hasn’t wavered once in the last six shameful years. Sad to say, but poking him with a stick at this late date isn’t going to accomplish anything.

Another Wacky Judge Named Roy

2007-05-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

Not every post here at the Runes relates directly to exposing the self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and willful ignorance mentioned in the banner above. Sometimes the subject is just plain old batshit insanity.

I don’t know what it is about judges named Roy, but if you thought Judge Roy Moore of Alabama was a contemptible asshat you’re going to love Judge Roy Pearson of Washington DC. According to an AP story on MSNBC.com, this paragon of justice is suing his dry cleaner for losing a pair of pants.

For $65 million.

Back in 2005, Pearson, an administrative hearings judge, stopped in at Custom Cleaners and dropped off a number of suits to be altered. When he returned a couple of days later, a pair of pants was missing. He asked the shop owners, Mr and Mrs Chung, for the full price of the suit: $1000.

The Chungs refused to pay the thousand bucks, and one week later, the original pair of pants turned up. But by then the good judge had decided to sue. He demanded $15,000 for the cost of renting a car and driving to a different dry cleaner every weekend for the next ten years. But $15,000 is small potatoes in the extortion game: Look what else he wants:

(From the AP story)
But the bulk of the $65 million comes from Pearson's strict interpretation of D.C.'s consumer protection law, which fines violators $1,500 per violation, per day. According to court papers, Pearson added up 12 violations over 1,200 days, and then multiplied that by three defendants.

Now, the thing I always want to know in stories like this is what the judge’s family thinks. Is he married? Isn’t his wife telling him to stop making an ass of himself? Aren’t his kids saying “Dad, you’re really, really embarrassing us.” How can they live with such a dickhead?

And how does this guy sleep at night? Does he climb into bed thinking “I am such a good fellow, suing those working-class Korean immigants for $65 million”?

(I would be very disheartened to learn that Pearson’s family is behind him all the way on this—“Gosh, Dad, all the other judges’ kids have 65 million dollars, so why don’t we?”—so I’m going to assume the best about them.)

The good news is that the president of the American Tort Association has written to the board that oversees Pearson’s court, asking them to reconsider his appointment at the end of his term. In addition, the former chief administrative law judge of the National Labor Relations Board is recommending Pearson be disbarred.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Maybe the Chungs could hire him to make deliveries.

You and Your Fancy-Schmancy Slogans

2007-05-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

Local radio commercials tend to be fairly horrible, for a number of reasons. One is that when a radio sales rep sells a package of spots, copywriting is included free in the package. Why charge for a professional copywriter when you have a disk jockey on staff? Yes, sir, we’ll just have our morning guy write those spots for you.

Yeah, that’s the morning guy with the fart sound effects cued up at all times.

Another reason is that a lot of local radio talents have the notion you have to sound like an announcer, even when you’re playing a character. Of course, maybe that’s because the disk jockeys are writing spots in which the characters sound like radio announcers.

Another reason relating to talent is that just having a cousin who wants to voice radio spots doesn’t mean she should be allowed to.

I mention all this because I heard a spot this morning that summed up everything that’s bad about local radio commercials. (Yes, this means I switched from the local NPR station. Honestly, hearing President Poor Dope’s voice every morning was making me lose the will to live.) The spot was for a used car dealership and featured two guys who were either employees of the dealership or the worst actors in the Des Moines metro. The gist of the spot is that one guy is making some advertising suggestions and the other is saying that none of them are necessary. The first guy says that maybe they need a slogan, and the other replies “We don’t need a fancy slogan. All we need to do is sell good used cars.”

It was the “fancy slogan” line that got me. “We don’t need a fancy slogan.”

Think of all the advertising you see and hear in a given day. Think of all the taglines (or “slogans,” for you laymen). Did you ever think a company was being elite, or haughty, or worse, hoity-toity for employing a tagline?

TV Anncr: Sponsored by Michelin—because a lot’s riding on your tires.
Car Guy 1: Oh, did you hear that? “Because a lot’s riding on your tires.” La-de-freakin-da!
Car Guy 2: Oh, look at me! I’m Michelin! I have a fancy slogan that makes me better than you!
Car Guy 1: Elitist pigs!

You’ve got to be extremely distrustful of advertising to think that using one of its most common conventions might somehow give the impression that you’re putting on airs.

Either that, or you have the lowest self-esteem on the planet.

* * *

One More Thing

I know this post was better suited for The Rat Race Choir, but I suspect the Choir is on permanent hiatus. I wanted to keep what passes for momentum going here at the Runes, and I didn’t feel like commenting on the dumbass and his veto of the military funding/troop withdrawal bill. I mean, honestly, what more needs to be said? The poor dope’s attempt to go down in history as the big macho war president is entering its fifth year of failure, and as long as there are people like Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice massaging his prostate, he’s not going to change his little excuse for a mind.

Your Only Choices Are Fear and Paranoia

2007-04-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

I’m glad my job doesn’t involve updating online content.

Because apparently, updating online content is a high-pressure occupation where you don’t have time to think about what you’re doing or if it even makes sense. Apparently there’s an online content supervisor riding your ass constantly, screaming “If you can’t make that survey go live in five seconds, I’ll find someone who can!”

That’s the only explanation I can think of for the survey I just saw at MSNBC.com.

The survey accompanies a story about 18-year-old Allen Lee, a high school senior in Cary, Illinois. Lee carried a 4.2 GPA and had never been in trouble before, but when he wrote an essay for his English class that his teacher and principal considered too violent, he was charged with disorderly conduct.

Yeah. They turned his essay over to the police and the police turned it over to the McHenry County DA, and the McHenry County DA—who must not have a lot to do—decided they’d better bring charges against this dangerous writer. Lee now faces the possibility of a $1500 fine and 30 days in jail.

Folks, the thought-police are here. You missed the announcement because there wasn’t one.

According to the AP story, the teacher who assigned the essay told her students to “be creative,” and that there wouldn’t be any judgment or censorship. She might have forgotten to tell the class that she reserved the right to freak the hell out and have people arrested, but, you know, jeez, you can’t remember everything. There’s a paragraph from Lee’s essay in the news story, and yeah, it contains some violent images. But if the whole thing is as obviously tongue-in-cheek as the sample paragraph, there are some extremely unqualified judges of both creative writing and human psychology in the Cary-Grove School District.

In any event, Lee was a Marine recruit who was looking forward to joining the Corps after graduation, but after his arrest, the Marines released him from his contract. They didn’t want him writing anything naughty about our enemies.

The teacher and the principal weren’t the only ones getting off on their paranoid adrenaline rush. Tom Carroll, an assistant DA for McHenry County, said that “in light of recent events…that makes the reaction all the more reasonable.”

Note to Mr Carroll: The reaction was not reasonable in any sense of the word. Even if Lee had exhibited the same psychoses as the Virginia Tech shooter (which he didn’t), the reasonable reaction would be to prescribe some counseling and some rather intense observation. Writing is not disorderly conduct in any context.

Now, back to the harried online survey writer I mentioned at the beginning of this post. This is the exact wording of the MSNBC.com survey:

Should students face legal action for submitting violent writings in class?
• Yes, such writings must be dealt with severely, especially after the Virginia Tech massacre.
• No, students who submit such writings need help, not jail time.

Those were the only choices! No option for “No, creative writing is never against the law,” or “No, you can’t assume a correlation between violent writing and violent behavior,” or “No, this is a dumbass question that assumes the respondents have bought in to the very culture of fear and paranoia that mass media outlets have been instrumental in propagating.”

Idiots.

The Sensitive Mr Rove

2007-04-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

By now everyone’s heard about Karl Rove’s boorish behavior toward Sheryl Crow and Laurie David after they attempted to engage him in a conversation about global warming at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I don’t know what part of Rove’s public persona had accidentally given Crow and David the impression that he was accessible and open-minded, but I suppose it was worth a shot.

According to Laurie David, Rove “immediately got combative [and] launched into a series of illogical arguments.” Later, when Crow touched Rove’s arm to get his attention and continue the conversation, he snapped at her: “Don’t touch me!” And when she said “You can’t talk to us like that—you work for us,” he snarled “I don’t work for you—I work for the American people.” (How out-of-touch is an administration that thinks the American people it works for are part of some sort of abstract theory and not actual people?)

Anyway, I get a kick out of any story that shows Rove to be a rotten human being as well as a worthless public servant. Every little bit helps.

* * *

I was going to try to work the phrase “Machiavellian mofo” into this post, but it didn’t work. Feel free to use it.

Conditional Omnipresence

2007-04-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

This is the expanded version of a comment I posted at another blog. It’s based on a t-shirt that’s popular with people who want desperately to believe they’re being persecuted.

Dear God,
Why is there so much violence in schools?
Concerned Student

Dear Concerned Student,
I’m not allowed in school.
God

Dear God,
I thought you were all omnipotent and omnipresent and whatnot.
Student

Dear Student,
Oh, I’m one all-powerful mofo when the Dobsons and the Falwells and the Hovinds of the world need somebody to create an entire freakin universe in less than a week. But when they go into “poor persecuted us” mode, I’m a wimpy little deity who can’t get past a second-grade hall monitor.
God

Dear God,
Now I’m confused.
Student

Dear Student,
Sorry. I should have made it more clear that I was joking in my first letter. You think anybody tells me where I can and can’t go? As if! I’m everywhere, man! I’m in the schools, I’m in your house, I’m in the emergency box of condoms in Newt Gingrich’s glove compartment! Nobody gives me permission to go anywhere, baby, because I’m already there.
The G

Dear God,
So why IS there so much violence in schools?
Student

Dear Student,
Well, not to get all philosophical on you, but you’re arguing from a false premise. Anytime some armed-to-the-teeth headcase snaps is one time too many, but if you look at the percentages, you can see it’s still a very rare occurrence. Of course, it’s easy to be misled by the round-the-clock news coverage. I think those people must really get off on scaring people.
God

Dear God,
Then maybe the question should be “Why don’t you do something to prevent the admittedly rare instances of violence in schools?”
Student

Dear Student,
Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not the question at all. First off, it’s too long to put on a t-shirt. Second, these self-important so-called religious leaders don’t want you to think about that question because they don’t like the answer. They don’t like to admit that I’m just here to observe. I’m auditing this universe, taking it pass/fail, as it were. I just wanted to see what would happen if I squeezed a bunch of atoms together and let ‘em explode. The results have been fascinating, but I’ve taken a hands-off approach from Day One. If people want to say that means I work in mysterious ways, well—whatever gets you through the night, you know?
God

Dear God,
So it sounds like I’m being manipulated by—

Dear Student,
Sorry to interrupt your letter, but yeah, you’re being manipulated by people who are clinging to the childish notion that because school-sponsored prayer is unconstitutional, it’s somehow illegal for kids to pray in school. Hell, we’re both being manipulated, kid. Believe me, if I cared at all, the only prayer I’d care about was a sincere one.
G

Dear God,
Thanks for the correspondence. Do you have any final words of wisdom for me?
Student

Dear Student,
Pay attention in school, keep a clean nose, and don’t believe everything you read on a t-shirt.
G

Bad Vibrations From John McCain

2007-04-20T23:15:00.000-07:00

Well, good old Tissue-in-the-Wind McCain pulled a pretty juvenile move the other day. Addressing an audience of veterans, McCain put new lyrics to the old Beach Boys tune “Barbara Ann” and sang “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran...”

The next day he came out and said that anyone who criticized his little joke should “Get a life.”

Well, because I didn’t have time to post about McCain’s song at the time, and because I already have a life, I’m going to go ahead and criticize his little joke anyway.

1. John McCain has all the sensitivity, maturity, and parody songwriting skills of a pre-teenager. Just because the words “Bomb Iran” sound a little like “Barbara Ann” doesn’t mean you have to put it to music.

2. Why would McCain think it’s funny to make jokes about dropping bombs on a country—even in song? Does he not remember that time we bombed Iraq and killed a few hundred thousand people? Or did he think that was funny?

3. Ronald Reagan once made an equally stupid remark in a very similar vein. Unaware he was in front of a live mike, Reagan said “I’m pleased to announce I’ve signed legislation outlawing Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Not only is this an irresponsible and flippant thing for the leader of the free world to say, it’s not even a good joke. How could he sign legislation that outlaws another country? Good humor requires verisimilitude, so if he’d wanted to be insensitive, arrogant, and yet somewhat funny, he could have said “I’m pleased to announce I’ve signed legislation that will solve our problems with Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” See? If Reagan had said that, people would have known he was just joking around. He still would have been a dumbass, but gee, being funny will only take you so far.

4. At the risk of throwing up in my mouth a bit, I have to evoke the image of one of the ugliest and most pathetic presidential attempts at humor ever: President Poor Dope "looking" for weapons of mass destruction. That moment--coupled with his fooling around on guitar while people were drowning in the streets of New Orleans--tells you everything you need to know about that smirking dickweed.

5. Anyone who thinks John McCain was just making a harmless joke is hereby forbidden from using the phrase “Culture of Death” in their efforts to disparage progressives. It was already a ridiculous strawman phrase, but now that your boy is singing songs about dropping bombs on Iranian civilians, I’d say he’s fully embraced a real Culture of Death.

John Cox News Flash

2007-04-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

Holy mother of pearl, I got a comment on that last post. It was a good one, too. Referring to my observation that the media would soon ignore Republican candidate John Cox into oblivion, a reader named Anonymous (that’s Greek, I believe) said “The media are ignoring Cox because he can’t raise more than $3000 in three months, and because he’s a loon.”

That’s the second time since posting that I’ve seen a reference to Cox’s lack of funds, so maybe there’s something to it. And I didn’t know anything about him at all until I read the article in the Register, so I can’t attest to his looniness.

Anyway, poor old loony strapped-for-cash John Cox notwithstanding, my point was that it’s too early in the game to anoint the front-runners as if they’re the only choice voters are allowed to have. On the Democratic side, my political beliefs match up pretty closely with those of Dennis Kucinich—but you generally don’t see his name mentioned in the press unless someone’s making a joke about him.

That’s not good journalism, in my opinion. Want another example? January 2004. Howard Dean gets excited at a post-caucus rally at the Val Air Ballroom. He starts listing the states he’s taking the fight to next. He tries for a war cry and falls short.

The media decides to call this “the Dean scream,” and from that point on his campaign is treated like a joke.

I’m still pissed about that. Howard Dean’s strangled war cry didn’t cost him the nomination, but the incessant coverage of such a trivial bit of nothing sure didn’t help.

I don’t think John Cox is going to get anywhere close to a position where he can croak out an enthusiastic shriek. But at this point in the long, long campaign, no idea is a bad idea. Let us know who’s out there, and like my commenting friend Anonymous, we’ll figure out on our own who the loons are.

Nine Angry Men

2007-04-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

Well, the Republican presidential candidates invaded Des Moines and spoke at the Lincoln Day Dinner last Saturday night, nine of them in all, each one brimming with fresh new ideas about how to wrest the GOP out of the hands of the warmongers, religious fanatics, and the rest of the Bush crime gang.

Nah, not really. Despite the fact that voters last November made it clear that we don’t want any more American lives lost or American dollars wasted in Iraq, these brave mavericks pretty much toed the Bush line and agreed that the best way to fight worldwide terrorism is to keep a large chunk of our military resources in one central location. Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t see the logic, either.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s hilarious that the Republican Party can’t find one person with the nuts to stand up and denounce Bush as the worst threat to the Constitution in US history. Hell, I think it’s hilarious that they aren’t even looking for someone with the aforementioned nuts.

Anyway.

On Sunday the Des Moines Register printed a page with concise descriptions of each candidate and what he had to say at the dinner. What am I gonna pass that up?

Sam Brownback, US Senator from Kansas
Here’s a quote from the Register: “[Brownback] also said America must focus on things like good manners and courtesy and should go after recording artists and companies that teach children such things as degradation of women.”

Seriously, that’s what it says in the paper. What does he mean, “America should ‘go after’ recording artists”? On what grounds? Is he going to send the National Guard into recording studios? Brownback also has quite a reputation as a fervent pro-lifer, so he knows that women should not be degraded, but rather forced to bear unwanted children.

Also, it was funny enough when Bush said he wanted to be the education president, but here’s a guy who wants to be the good manners president. Glad to see you’re taking it seriously there, Sam.

John Cox, a businessman from Chicago
This guy actually said “We want principles back in our government. We want true fiscal discipline. We want more effective government in Washington, D.C.,” which, I have to admit, is the exact opposite of what’s going on there now. Listen to what John Cox has to say now, because in about six weeks the media will have ignored him into oblivion.

Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia
This guy had the scariest picture of the nine, and that’s saying something. According to the Register, Gilmore says America must support troops [see previous post, “A Quick Plug”] and stand by them, adding that “Withdrawing troops is not an option because religious extremists in the Middle East will not give up.”

Gilmore knows the way to a Republican audience’s heart is the scary quote. Of course, he knows scary quotes are most effective when you have to fill in the blank yourself. Here he wants us to believe that religious extremists won’t give up until they’ve conquered the free world. I think he’s talking out his ass and suspect most rational people do too.

Rudy Giuliani, whose name I often misspell
Giuliani is one of the most embarrassing Bush suck-ups on the circuit, having adopted the poor dope’s tendency to say things that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny in a junior high debate. Here in Des Moines he said the Republicans are the party that realizes “energy independence is a matter of national security.”

So we’ve completely destabilized Iraq in order to keep sucking out their oil, which makes us independent how? I suppose it’s possible that Rudy meant we’re just going to keep overthrowing Middle Eastern governments until all the oil is ours. Bingo! Energy independence!

Rudy also said “How could it make sense to give a schedule for removing troops from Iraq just when you’re going to deplete your forces to your enemy?” proving yet again that the complete disregard for syntax is another fine example of the Bush legacy.

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas
The Register page neglected to give Huckabee’s position on Iraq, but since it quoted him as saying “I believe life begins at conception and we ought to protect human life,” I can only assume that he’s angry about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and strongly opposed to keeping American men and women in harm’s way. You read it here first, folks.

John McCain, tissue in the wind
More scary quotes from the man with no soul. He admits the war has been mismanaged but just can’t remember where he left the cojones required to go the extra mile and say it was mismanaged by a smirking asswipe who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him in the flightsuit. McCain says that if American troops leave Iraq, terrorists will follow them home. I’ve heard this argument more than once, but I don’t see the logic. If I were a terrorist, why the hell would I want to follow a bunch of heavily armed people? And if they really want to invade America, why wouldn’t they do it while our military is bogged down a million miles away?

Do they not know how to get here? Is that why they have to follow us home?

McCain also asked “Where is the intellectual honesty if you think that you’re sending young Americans into harm’s way in a futile effort?” Jesus H. Load of Brickbats, McCain, at some point you have to look around and try to figure out what the effort is. What’s the mission? What are we still doing occupying this place after four freakin years? Grow some intellectual honesty and ask yourself that.

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts
Romney says we need to send 100,000 more troops to Iraq and increase spending to make sure they have the proper tools and technology. Tsk tsk—another one of those tax-and-spend conservatives.

Can you tell I’m growing bored with this post? Can you blame me for not getting excited about a bunch of guys whose ideas aren’t going to benefit the average American in the least? Ah well. Two to go.

Tom Tancredo, US Representative from Colorado
Tancredo’s pet issue is illegal immigration, and he says illegal immigrants are overcrowding our schools, overcrowding our prisons, and driving our hospitals out of business. Frankly, as long as Tom DeLay’s free to walk the streets I don’t think anyone can complain about prison overcrowding, but that’s another story. Here’s the key with Tancredo: He says “American and Western civilization is in a crisis,” which translates, of course, into “Save us white folk from the Mexican hordes.”

Tancredo equates abortion with “embracing the culture of death,” a meaningless line he copped from Bush or the pope or Scary Quote of the Day dot com.

Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin
Tommy says he has a common-sense plan to help stabilize the Middle East: Allow territories in Iraq to govern themselves. Then, of course, if they don’t govern themselves the way we want them to, we can always bomb the hell out of them.

Here’s a pretty laughable quote from Thompson: “I am so sick of those pessimists in Congress, those liberal Democrats who get up in the morning and eat grapefruit and suck lemons all day. I want a party with people with…humor and ideas and ideals and that’s the Republican Party.”

The Republicans are the humor party now?! Tell you what, I bet Tommy’ll wish he’d had some lemons and grapefruit when all the Republicans come down with scurvy.

If these are the nine best candidates the Republicans have to offer, can you imagine who didn't make the cut? Ah well. With three pages about these creepy Republicans behind me, I have to go shower.

A Quick Plug

2007-04-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

If you get a chance, swing on over to The People’s Republic of Seabrook and read this post called “Hey, Libtard—How About Rooting For America For A Change?” Don’t worry—the title is an ironic poke at the pretend-patriotic ravings of those stubborn dickwits who still think President Poor Dope has a brain and a conscience.

Seabrook blogger Jack Cluth has written an outstanding post suggesting that the phrase “Support the troops” be retired because it’s been rendered “completely and utterly meaningless.”

He’s right. It’s become one of those Pavlovian clichés that Republicans use to stir up their gullible flock—but go check out Seabrook and read for yourself.

Sucking Up To Power: The Dennis Miller Story

2007-04-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

Well, all week long it’s been Don Imus this and Don Imus that, and beyond the fact that I think CBS was right to fire a guy whose idea of humor is cruel, sleazy, racist jokes about the appearance of some young athletes who had never done him any harm, I don’t have a whole lot to say about Don Imus right now. It’s worth a post down the line, but for now I’m turning my attention to Dennis Miller.

Dennis Miller was a breath of fresh air when he moved into the Weekend Update chair on SNL all those years ago. He brought with him a good sense of wit and snark, and he was a master of drawing out whatever absurdities might have been lurking about in the issues of the day. His sciolistic hipness was easily and forgivably construed as deep thought, but hey, he was funny.

That was then, this is now, and now that he’s a Bush apologist he’s not nearly as funny. There’s something sad about anyone who sucks up to power, but it’s even sadder when the ones you’re sucking up to are so criminally incompetent and proud of it to boot. The St Louis Post-Dispatch recently published part of a phone interview with Miller in its online edition, and some of his comments are truly mind-boggling:

Post-Dispatch: Why has your humor taken a turn toward the conservative?
Miller: They bombed those two buildings, remember?

This would be an idiotic comment even if he’d phrased it in a more mature and less patronizing manner. Miller’s assumption—that a terrorist attack should cause all of us to stop thinking and abandon our sense of right and wrong—is bad enough, but his flip, arrogant expression of it is guaranteed to appeal only to those hangers-on who still think President Poor Dope is winning the war on terra. In Miller’s mind, cause and effect are purely random, so when radical Islamic crazies attack, your liberal convictions suddenly become invalid.

Miller again:

I woke up the next day and had an epiphany. I want our guy to go kill terrorists. It's that simple. People think it's some big shift. I can't believe that a good portion of my country doesn't believe that as well.

Millions of people up woke on September 12 with a whole new set of feelings. Watching a bunch of religious freaks commit mass murder in such dramatic fashion has a way of putting things in perspective. It reminded some people that life is fragile. It made people angry and it made people afraid, and it inspired a lot of men and women to enlist in the military. It stirred up feelings of revenge, though for some of us those feelings were tempered by the need for justice.

And that’s where Miller went off course. He says he wants “our guy” to go kill terrorists. But either he forgot that the poor dope gave up the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, or he’s hoping that the rest of us did. Miller wants our guy to go kill terrorists so bad that he can’t see the big picture. He doesn’t care how many non-terrorists get killed in the process. He doesn’t care how many new terrorists are inspired to join the fight, and like the poor dope himself he doesn’t seem to realize that people aren’t born terrorists. You have to give them a freakin reason to adopt this line of work.

Even liberals agreed that hunting down and capturing Bin Laden was the appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks. Actions do have consequences, you know. But when Bush abandoned that effort and focused instead on his pet project of toppling Saddam Hussein, he lost the support of anyone who believes American foreign policy should be grounded in reality. From the non-existent WMDs to the yellowcake memo to Dick Cheney Goebbels’ insistence that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda, this administration did nothing but lie about its reasons for invading and occupying a sovereign nation—and apparently that’s just peachy with Dennis Miller.

Post-Dispatch: In a sense, does your career mirror Winston Churchill's notion that if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain?
Miller: That's exactly the process I've gone through. I'm 53, and I'm a pragmatist. We watched punks blow up our buildings and, what, I'm now supposed to sit around and think about how we wronged the punks? Things get cut and dried as you get older. And what about the people who never, ever change the way they think about things? Those are the people I slide away from at cocktail parties.

Well, Dennis, try looking at it this way: If some punks burned down your garage, I’d expect you to find out who the punks were—not to go around killing every punk in a different neighborhood. And no, you don’t have to sit around and think about how you wronged the punks, Dennis. You can go on assuming you’re the most angelic holy guilt-free curmudgeon on the block.

And by the way, the line “Things get cut and dried as you get older”? That’s absolute bullshit. That’s intellectual laziness. If at the age of 53 you’re too old and feeble to think rationally and make informed decisions and recognize the difference between smart and dumb, between legal and illegal, between Constitutional and unconstitutional, between leadership and megalomania, then get your ass to the Old Comics Home right now.

There was a time when I thought it’d be nice if Dennis Miller would come back over from the dark side, but nah—they can have him.

Random Thoughts on a Tuesday

2007-04-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that the ever-lovable rat bastard Newt Gingrich is on the side of the angels when it comes to calling for the resignation of Alberto Gonzales, but this quote from Newt strikes me as a little disingenuous:

“This is the most mishandled, artificial, self-created mess that I can remember in the years I've been active in public life.”

Really? He’s never seen anything more artificial? I could have sworn Gingrich was alive when Ken Starr and the Republican piranha were trying desperately to bring down Bill Clinton.

* * *

Dick Cheney is on record as recently as this past weekend, still insisting that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Proving, alas, that there’s no fool like an old fool.

* * *

To the mentally challenged bloggers and trolls who insist that certain Democratic presidential candidates are cowards for not participating in a debate sponsored by the Bush/Cheney shills at Fox News, I offer this helpful language tip:

The word “coward” would only be appropriate if a candidate refused a direct challenge to debate. The current crop of candidates has a number of “debates” already scheduled, so it’s not like anyone’s scared of stating his or her position in public. I applaud any public figure who chooses not to legitimize the Republican Public Relations Network.

That said, I assume all the major networks will cover whatever political debates occur between now and the next election. But as lazy as the mainstream media is, and as much as they’re trying to reduce American politics to a contest between front-runners (CBS News has already begun to refer to Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Guiliani, and Romney as the Big Six), I wouldn’t be surprised to see them cut to a commercial when it’s time for someone like Dennis Kucinich to speak.

If they even to deign to acknowledge him at all.

Maybe They’ll Get Pat Boone To Do Their Theme Song

2007-04-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

Are you familiar with the Christian Exodus movement? It’s an organized effort to persuade Christians to relocate to specific legislative districts in South Carolina in order to take over the government. They feel the current federal government has unjustly usurped its powers, and say they want to “return to the model of governance of a constitutional republic.”

A lofty goal. And on the surface, given the autocratic machinations of the Bush regime, one we all might feel a bit of empathy with.

The C-Exers also take a strong stand against religious persecution, noting that “people of all faiths must have the same rights and freedoms guaranteed to them under law.” Neither will they tolerate any racial discrimination in their Brave New South Carolina.

Right on, right?

Not so much. It pretty much goes down the tubes right after that.

Because when you take a close look at the Christian Exodus website, you’ll see that what it boils down to is this: “We need our own sovereign nation because this big mean one refuses to let us force Christian prayers on non-Christian students in school. Oh, and because we need a place where homos aren’t protected by laws.”

Honestly. That’s the gist of it.

They just aren’t into that “liberty and justice for all” thing.

The website is an interesting read, depending on your level of tolerance for unmitigated bullshit. They have a whole list of alleged ways in which the current government infringes on their liberties, so let’s start there:

• Abortion continues against the wishes of many States and in violation of the reserved powers of the States under the 10th Amendment.

This is the first item in their list, and it’s a perfect example of the movement’s rather bizarre definition of liberty, to wit: “We have the liberty to force you to bear children.”

• Christians are denied their rights to free speech, freedom of the press, the display of religious monuments, and other expressions of faith in the public sphere.

Boy, they’re still honked off about Crazy Roy Moore, aren’t they? Dammit, they want the liberty to use everyone’s tax dollars to promote their religion, even if it means taking over South Carolina and turning it into the 5000-Pound Ten Commandments Monument Capital of the World.

• Men, women, and children are involuntarily exposed to the corrupting influences of homosexuality, pornography, and other perversities protected and financed by the national government.

What, we have socialized porn now? What perversities are being financed by the national government? This is a case where some links to actual examples would be helpful, particularly if you’re trying to avoid ridicule. I have no idea what they mean here. In a free society, you’re going to run across some corrupting influences now and again. Whether you choose to be corrupted by them is your business.

That said, I don’t think children should be exposed to pornography, either—but I suspect the C-Exers’ definition is far more inclusive than mine, and that it includes Playboy, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and the MacNeil-Lehrer Report.

Either way, if you’re keeping score, none of the items covered so far actually infringe on the liberties of the members of the Christian Exodus movement.

• Sodomy is now legal and celebrated as "diversity" by order of the U.S. Supreme Court rather than condemned as perversion.

Aside from the rather hysterical notions that a sexual position can be “celebrated” as diversity and that the Supreme Court has ordered it so, and aside from the fact that decriminalizing sodomy in no way infringes on the liberties of those who choose not to perform it (bringing the total of infringed liberties to a solid zero), this item is a classic example of something these people spend way too much time thinking about. Have you noticed that? They’re obsessed with sodomy. They’re obsessed with other men’s rear ends. I’ll bet they have secret copies of Naked Lunch with their favorite sections dog-eared and highlighted. Hell, I’ll bet I don’t spend as much time thinking about women as these moral crusaders do thinking about men (and yes, the board of directors of the Christian Exodus movement, the ones who presumably wrote their creed, are all men). Folks, it’s none of your business. Grow up.

• Children who pray in public schools are subject to prosecution.

The nice thing about the internet is that when you have a point to prove, a point that might require some sort of evidence, you can just link directly to it. In this case, the Christian Exodudes could have linked to that famous story about the police busting up the big school prayer ring and the DA indicting all those kids on prayer charges.

Of course, maybe there’s no link because there’s no such story. And maybe there’s no such story because children who pray in public schools are not subject to prosecution.

I think the Christian Exodus movement is counting on the fact that the audience they’re trying to reach aren’t exactly known for their critical thinking skills.

• Our schools continue to teach the discredited theory of Darwinian evolution.

It’s worth pointing out that the only people even trying to discredit the theory of evolution also believe there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. And that there was such a thing as Noah’s Ark.

Now, the Christian Exodus website also says that if they can’t achieve their goals within the United States (in other words, if the law gets in the way), they’d consider seceding from the union as a last resort.

Well, if you must, you must. Don’t let the Constitution hit you in the ass on the way out.

Some Final Thoughts

I don’t have the capital to pull this off, but if these people manage to secede from the US and have their own little Aren’t-We-Holy Land, I have a feeling that some entrepreneur could make a tremendous fortune by setting up booze-and-porn emporiums all around the borders in North Carolina and Georgia.

And by the way, even though they say on their website that they have no desire to establish a theocracy, you can find evidence to the contrary just a few paragraphs away. I found this a bit confusing, so I called the CE headquarters to see if they could enlighten me.

Runes: Hello there. It says on your website that the Christian Exodus movement is not interested in forming a theocracy—
CE Guy: That is correct. No interest at all. No theocracy for us.
Runes: But it also states your intention to rewrite the state constitution to include such things as recognizing the Ten Commandments as the foundation of law.
CE Guy: You bet.
Runes: Doesn’t that sound like a theocracy to you?
CE Guy: A theocracy? No! That’s crazy! Wait—a theocracy is slices of ham, turkey, and bacon between two slices of bread, isn’t it?
Runes: No, that’s a club sandwich.
CE Guy: Oh. Well, maybe we do want a theocracy.

Won't Someone Please Think of the Nylon?

2007-04-04T06:23:00.000-07:00

I was all set to lambaste Iowa Republicans this morning, but after exploring the issue further I learned that both parties deserve the razzberries. Pardon my strong language.

Last week a U.S. district judge ruled that Iowa’s flag-desecration laws are too vague to enforce and thus unconstitutional. That made sense. Obviously no one should be allowed to take someone else’s flag and “deface, defile, mutilate, or trample” it, but if you pay your hard-earned money for a flag it’s yours to do whatever you want with—and that includes using it to make political statements.

So this morning in my groggy state of barely-awakeness, I heard on the radio that some Republican state representative had introduced a bill to clarify the law and make it easier to enforce. Typical, I thought—leave it to the Money Party to spend their time protecting pieces of nylon.

But later I checked out the story on the Des Moines Register website and found that I’d misheard the story. What actually happened was that the house had voted 95-0 to add an amendment clarifying the flag law to a bill that establishes a counseling program for veterans. So instead of moving to just repeal the law and standing up for the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, Iowa Democrats joined the GOP in treating the flag like a human being—a delicate, fragile human being.

Faux What It’s Worth

2007-03-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

By and large, conservative pundits spend a lot of time pretending to misinterpret things that anyone with common sense has already interpreted correctly. I understand that they have to do this try to fool the people who aren’t paying close attention (and to validate the don’t-confuse-me-with-facts mindset of the staunch Bush supporters), but it’s still dishonest, and they know it.

One of the dumbest examples is the flap last October over John Kerry’s poorly told joke about staying in school. Did these hacks really think Kerry was disparaging the intelligence of American troops? Of course they didn’t. But if they’d reported the story honestly, they couldn’t have stirred up the ignorant faithful.

I found a new example yesterday in a column by Kathleen Parker. In it she discusses John Edwards’ hair and a YouTube video that sets footage of Edwards being prepped for a TV appearance to the song “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story. Parker says this video could have a “potentially devastating effect” on Edwards and presumably his campaign, but that’s either an extreme overreaction or wishful thinking. It’s a two-minute video: Edwards brushes his hair for about a minute, then the makeup technician fixes him up with some spray, and then he examines himself in a mirror—which I interpret as wanting to look good for the appearance but which the person who added the music wants us to believe has some dark meaning about vanity and unmanliness.

Either way, it’s a goof. I suspect Edwards might think it’s pretty funny. Parker goes on to say that she has, in the past, defended Edwards “for being cute,” but then adds this:

…It’s not his fault that he’s rich. At least it’s not un-American, even if his populist “Two Americas” message rings a little faux as he builds a 28,000-square-foot monument to Ego. I mean, a house.

Could this be an example of someone pretending to misinterpret Edwards’ “Two Americas” concept? Golly whiz, it sure could.

Edwards’ populist message would only “ring faux” if he had never demonstrated any awareness of the growing gap between rich and poor, or empathy toward the latter. It would ring faux coming from the mouth of someone like Barbara Bush. It would ring faux if he purchased a company and then moved all the manufacturing jobs overseas, or if he reincorporated it in Bermuda to cheat the government out of some tax revenue and line the pockets of shareholders.

But here’s a man who’s campaigning for a position in which he could directly address the issue. The square footage of his home has no bearing on his ability to see a problem and try to fix it. I don’t think he has to pass out five-dollar bills on the street or invite the homeless to live with him to prove his sincerity.

You don’t forfeit your right to see the big picture just because you have money.

Starting the Morning Off Wrong

2007-03-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

My clock-radio is set to the local NPR station, and I know I’ve mentioned this before but I can’t freakin stand to hear George Bush’s voice in the morning. It just starts my day off wrong and makes me angry because I know that whatever he says is either going to be a lie or some sort of jingoistic throw-up.

I suppose it’s unrealistic to think that the media might stop putting him on the air until he has something important or intelligent to say.

Anyway, this morning the radio came on and what did I hear but the poor dope blathering on about a “partisan fishing expedition,” which of course is his clever way of describing the Congressional investigation into the politically-based firings of eight federal prosecutors by the Bush flunky Alberto Gonzales. It’s not partisan to terminate qualified prosecutors based on their lack of loyalty to an incompetent president, but it is partisan to investigate those terminations. Got it.

The poor dope also said he’d fight any attempt to subpoena his staff members, but would allow his henchmen Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to be interviewed in private, without a transcript, and not under oath. In other words, you can talk to them, but they have license to lie through their teeth.

What else could we expect from an administration of such fine moral character?

Bigotry That Stands the Test of Time

2007-03-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

I’m a daily reader of a blog called Dispatches From the Culture Wars, by a guy named Ed Brayton up in Michigan. Good commentary, day after day. Ed is a common-sense guy and a staunch defender of freedom of speech, among other things. I heartily recommend this blog to all two of my regular readers.

One of Ed’s blog entries this morning directed my attention to some commentary by former presidential candidate and Angry White Man™ Pat Buchanan, who weighed in on General Peter Pace’s opinion equating homosexuality with such immoral behavior as adultery.

I’m going to keep my definition of immorality short and sweet, and say that for something to be truly immoral, someone has to get hurt. Murder, rape, assault, robbery, adultery, wars of aggression, etc and so on. I don’t believe there’s a victim when consenting adults commit homosexual acts.

And that brings us to Buchanan, who writes:

On Pace’s side, that homosexuality is immoral, we have the Bible and Quran, 2,000 years of Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and natural law, the moral beliefs of virtually every society to the present, and the laws of every state before the 1960s. Up to 1973, psychiatrists treated it as a disorder. Nations where homosexuality is rampant have been regarded as “decadent.”

I don’t want to accuse Pat Buchanan of talking out his ass, but that’s pretty much what he’s doing. He lazily hides behind “the moral beliefs of virtually every society” and the “laws of every state” without questioning whether those beliefs and laws might have originated from superstition and misunderstanding. He brings up the outdated psychiatric classification of homosexuality-as-mental-disorder, and even correctly notes that that line of thinking was abandoned more than 30 years ago—but won’t dare let himself think the next logical thought: The medical community no longer classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder because it isn’t one.

You don’t get to have grandfather laws for bigotry and intolerance, Pat Buchanan. Maybe people have been harassing, victimizing, and discriminating against homosexuals for 2000 years, or for 5000 years, or since the beginning of time. No matter how long it’s been, it’s the oppressors who are wrong, not the oppressed.

When your beliefs run counter to reality, the burden of change is on you.

Fladdap!

2007-03-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

This happened a month ago, but it took me that long to think up a good joke for it.

Is there anyone who hasn't heard of Eve Ensler's one-woman play, The Vagina Monologues? More to the point, is there anyone who hasn't heard the word “vagina”?

Last February a production of The Vagina Monologues was being staged at the Atlantic Theater in Atlantic Beach, Florida. In a shocking move, the theater actually put the name of the play on their marquee in a brazen attempt to attract the ticket-buying public.

But they failed to take into consideration that some people do not choose to acknowledge the existence of certain body parts. The theater received a phone call. Someone had taken offense.

The caller was a woman who said she was upset that her niece (three or four years old, depending on various online accounts) had seen the word and asked what it meant. And instead of taking the straightforward road and giving her a simple definition, instead of taking the safe road and clearing it with the girl’s parents first, instead of taking the comical road and saying “Well, sweetie, a monologue is a speech delivered by a single actor alone on stage,” this woman—apparently related to the Iowa dillrod* who got his panties in a knot about the “F NADER” license plate—decided it would be best to raise a ruckus.

As a result—and by the way, I’m getting very near the joke I promised in the first paragraph—the theater changed the marquee to read “The Hoohah Monologues.”

To their credit, they changed it back to the proper name of the play not long after. But it occurred to me just now that if I bought a ticket for The Hoohah Monologues, I’d have every right to expect to see a stage adaptation of the best of Mad magazine, starring Melvin Fonebone and Roger Kaputnik.

Thank you! Good night, everyone!

* * * *

*If you’re unfamiliar with the Iowa dillrod story, you can find it in the Runes archive, August 2006: Brought To You By the Letter F.

An Exclusive Interview with Pope Benedict XVI

2007-03-10T21:37:00.000-08:00

You don’t even want to know what kind of red tape I had to go through to get this interview, or, hell, maybe you do. Let’s just say that I had 24 visitors to this site last week, and for those two who weren’t me, I’ll go to any lengths to provide something you can’t get at any other blog. Something besides my little caricature up there.

Transcript of my interview with Pope Benedict XVI:

Runes: Thanks for meeting with me, Pope. Now, it was reported this week—
Pope: Please—call me Your Holiness.
Runes: (laughing) You’re kidding, right?
Pope: It’s customary.
Runes: Ennh. Tell you what. I’ll do what I used to do when I needed to talk to my old girlfriends’ parents and couldn’t bring myself to call them by their first names: I’ll look directly at you when I want to ask you a question.
Pope: Fair enough.
Runes: Of course, it’s a one-on-one interview, so who else would I be talking to? Now, it was reported last week that you were unhappy about your predecessor, Pope John Paul II, attending a 1997 concert at which Bob Dylan performed. You, in fact, tried to talk him out of it.
Pope: That is correct.
Runes: What were you afraid of? Did you think Bob was going to change some of his songs around to make them more appropriate for the Vatican? Did you think he was going to sing “Lay, Laity, Lay”?
Pope: No, of course not—
Runes: “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Pope Hat”?
Pope: No, no—
Runes: “Changing of the Swiss Guards”?
Pope: I don’t even know the song that’s based on.
Runes: Yeah, it’s from Street-Legal.
Pope: No wonder.
Runes: Did you think he was going to do “Desolation Rome”?
Pope: What?
Runes: How about “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Talk Out My Ass About Birth Control”?
Pope: Now you’re just being rude.
Runes: Well, that’s also all the parody song titles I can come up with off the top of my head. Back to the question. Why didn’t you like the idea of Dylan singing for John Paul II?
Pope: Because rock music is a tool of Satan.
Runes: A tool of Satan.
Pope: That’s what I said.
Runes: (calling to an assistant) Could you check a calendar and see what year this is? 2007? No, yes, that’s what I thought, but I had a moment of doubt there. (turning back to the Pope) In a way, I agree with you—you should see the way this Elvis Presley character gyrates his hips onstage. It’s obscene, I tell you.
Pope: I was under the impression he died.
Runes: (scoffs) OK, you just keep telling yourself that. But seriously. Rock is a tool of Satan? Cite your sources, please.
Pope: I’ve long held the belief that electric guitars have no place in a house of worship.
Runes: Because—?
Pope: Well, when you think of the word “sacred,” do you think of loud music? Do you think of “waka-ja-wow-wow-weeeeeoooooww-deedily-deedily-deedily-deedily-deedily-deedily-waa-waa-wampa-ka-wow”?
Runes: Honestly, no. But may I just say that was a very impressive air guitar riff.
Pope: That’s off the record.
Runes: Right, right. Anyway. I and other Dylan fans would contend that his music has a positive message, even if it isn’t necessarily sacred—
Pope: Doesn’t matter. Tool of Satan.
Runes: It doesn’t matter what the message is?
Pope: Nope.
Runes: Even if it’s “Love your neighbor”?
Pope: Even if it’s “Love your neighbor.”
Runes: Even if it’s “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”?
Pope: Even if it’s “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”
Runes: Even if it’s “Think for yourself”?
Pope: Even if it’s—especially not “Think for yourself”!
Runes: Yeah, I didn’t think you’d like that one. How about if the message is “Jesus is just all right with me”?
Pope: Was that Dylan?
Runes: No, it was the Doobie Brothers.
Pope: Tools of Satan. They’ve got “doobie” in their name.
Runes: So pretty much any rock or pop act of the last 50 years is a tool of Satan, according to you.
Pope: Try naming one that isn’t.
Runes: Elvis?
Pope: Tool of Satan.
Runes: Jimi Hendrix.
Pope: Tool of Satan.
Runes: Janis.
Pope: From “The Muppet Show”?
Runes: No, Janis Joplin.
Pope: Tool of Satan.
Runes: OK, how about Janis from “The Muppet Show”?
Pope: Tool of Satan.
Runes: The Who.
Pope: T-t-t-t-t-t-tool of Satan.
Runes: Cyndi Lauper.
Pope: Tools of Satan just wanna have fun.
Runes: Devo.
Pope: Are we not men? We’re tools of Satan.
Runes: You’re having fun with this, aren’t you?
Pope: I’m just callin’ ‘em like I see ‘em.
Runes: The Beatles.
Pope: Tools of Satan.
Runes: Queen.
Pope: Tools of Satan.
Runes: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Pope: Pretentious neoclassical prog-rock with impenetrable lyrics and overblown production. And tools of Satan.
Runes: Is there any pop or rock artist or group I could mention who isn’t, in your mind, a tool of Satan?
Pope: Yes. There is one.
Runes: You’re kidding. Are you going to make me guess it?
Pope: No, I’ll come right out and tell you. I always enjoyed Musical Youth.
Runes: Musical Youth.
Pope: (tape runs out just as he begins singing “Pass the Duchy” and boogieing out of the room like the guy on the “Keep on Truckin’” t-shirt)

Random Thoughts on a Friday in Des Moines

2007-03-09T09:51:00.000-08:00

I just caught a glimpse of this Yahoo News headline: “Bush hails biofuels pact in Brazil.”

Well, good for him. Hail away, dumbass. Take a tour of South America and pretend to give a damn about alternate fuels while the blood of Americans and Iraqis is still drying on your hands.

* * *

Wednesday’s Des Moines Register reported that a bill banning discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender people has made it out of committee and will proceed to the Iowa Senate.

The story quotes Republican state senator Jerry Behn of Boone, who said “I don't think it's necessary.”

Let’s see. There are a couple of ways to interpret that statement, Jerry. Do you mean “It’s not necessary because I’ll fight to the death to prevent discrimination against any human beings under the laws we already have!”?

Or do you mean “It’s not necessary because I think good Christian folks should be allowed to discriminate against anyone who offends their narrow little minds”?

I’m just asking. The good news is that both houses of the Iowa legislature are controlled by people with a little more on the ball than those who favor discrimination, so this bill should become law easily.

* * *

The Register website has a place for people to post comments anonymously, and while most of the comments on the above story were fairly supportive, there were some half-baked thoughts from a handful of homophobes, including this one:

Ain't it great that something that was classified as a mental illness is now gaining normal status? Funny what $$$, mainstream media, and pandering politicians can get you today.

I’m amazed that someone with that little going on upstairs has the wherewithal to use the serial comma, but that’s where my amazement ends. It’s been 30-odd years since homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, and an infinite number of years since it actually was one, but here’s a guy who thinks that bribery—as opposed to common sense and empathy—is the reason for the growing acceptance of gay men and women.

Quite a reach you got there, Sport.

Living Together in North Dakota

2007-03-04T11:37:00.000-08:00

As further proof that you don’t have to be all that bright to be elected to your state’s house of representatives, the North Dakota house has just tossed out a 116-year-old law that prohibited unmarried couples from living together—by a vote of 48-41.

48-41!

The law had been in place since North Dakota became a state, and according to the AP story it made living together without being married a sex crime. And 41 North Dakota legislators looked deep in their hearts in the year 2007 and thought “Yes, that makes sense.”

Rumor has it that these 41 are desperately trying to drum up support for a new law that would prohibit the mixing of male and female clothing in any given load of laundry—along with open-mouthed kissing, foot massages, and the use of the word “moist.”

The North Dakota Family Alliance wanted the law left on the books because they’re vehemently opposed to the idea of people saving money by splitting the cost of rent and utilities. No, not really—I’m just messing with you. The words “family alliance” gave it away: They don’t want you to have sex unless you get it authorized by the county clerk and have the forms submitted to God. Then it’s okay.

Congratulations to the North Dakota legislators who realized that it’s none of the government’s business who lives where and with whom. To the other 41 and the constituents they represent, take heart: This won’t affect you in the least.

* * * *

This marks the second straight post that contains the phrase “won’t affect you in the least.” Seems to be a recurring theme here at the Runes--as well it should be. As Hank Williams put it, “Mind your own business and you won’t be minding mine.”

Who Would Jesus Fire?

2007-03-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Here’s the story in a nutshell: Steve Stanton had been city manager of Largo, Florida for 14 years, and his performance reviews were good. However, after he announced his intention to have a sex-change operation, all hell broke loose. A few hundred of the local yahoos descended on the next city commission meeting to express their outrage, and as a result, the commission voted 5-2 to terminate Stanton’s contract.

The loudmouths who felt compelled to protest did so on the usual grounds: Bible Bible Jesus Bible blabbidy blabbidy blah. Peggy Schaefer of the First Baptist Church of Indian Rocks said “I don’t want that man in office…We don’t believe in sex changes or lesbianism. They have their rights, but we do, too.”

How was he doing as city manager, Peggy? Or were you even aware there was such a position before you decided to haul your self-righteous ass down to the city commission meeting?

And by the way, Pegster, I’m trying to figure out how the rights you allude to supersede the right of another human being to be employed.

Rather than devote this entry to every hateful example of bigotry that came out of that February meeting, I’m going to focus on one quote, this from Pastor Ron Sanders of the Lighthouse Baptist Church of Largo. Pastor Ron said “If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he’d want [Stanton] terminated. Make no mistake about it.”

Wow. Guess we don’t need to discuss it any further, now that we have a personal guarantee from—well, not exactly from Jesus, but from a guy who certainly considers himself authorized to speak for him. If it didn’t require getting inside the festering ooze of Pastor Ron’s mind, I’d be curious to know the thought-process a guy goes through before making a guarantee in the name of Jesus.

Think about what that means. Sanders wants us to believe that Jesus would agree with terminating Steve Stanton’s contract.

That’s Jesus “Love Your Neighbor” Christ.

The guy who kicked out the moneylenders.

The guy who stopped the crowd from stoning the prostitute.

Above all, the guy who said “Whatsoever you do unto the least of my brothers, this you do unto me.”

Pastor Ron might have balls the size of Pharisees, but unless the New Testament has changed from the time I was a churchgoin’ fellow, he’s wrong, wrong, wrong. I can’t guarantee it, but I’ve got a pretty good feeling—and I think people who aren’t blinded by irrational hate would agree with me, believers or not.

Imagine what a small sad life Pastor Ron must lead. Imagine getting all worked up about something that doesn’t affect you in the least, to the point where you believe it’s your place to send someone to the unemployment line. And imagine being deluded enough to think Jesus would back you up on it.

Whatsoever you do, Pastor Ron. Whatsoever you do.

* * * *

By the way, kudos to Largo mayor Pat Gerard and commissioner Rodney Woods for casting the votes to keep Stanton on board. Rock on. Also kudos to the bloggers at Pandagon and Alas, A Blog, where I first heard about this story. Their accounts are well worth reading and someday I'll figure out how to link there.

Sky Valley Elegy

2007-03-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

They’re closing down the golf course in my hometown.

It was a little nine-hole course built on one cow pasture and bordered by another, a course with some rolling hills and a ball-eating drainage ditch and a couple of birdieable par-fives. The #2 and #6 holes shared entirely too much fairway for my taste: One went north, one went south, and in my high school days I lived in constant fear of taking a ball in the face on my way to the second hole.

The little course had a couple of tempting par-threes, too, and one early morning before the dew burned off I emptied my bag and hit a good two dozen balls off the #3 tee, hoping for a hole-in-one. Fruitlessly, it turned out. My dad and brother scored their holes-in-one the legitimate way—in the middle of a round—and Dad even managed to do it twice.

My dad was a hell of a golfer: consistent, patient, and a good straight hitter. He taught me to play and hoped I’d love it as much as he did—though that, I believe, was impossible. He was our high school golf coach, too, and each spring from 1975 through 1978 I was out on our little hometown course every afternoon after school, trying to lower my average score enough to qualify for the varsity matches and succeeding only rarely. Dad would send us out in random foursomes and we’d walk the former pasture carrying our clubs, shooting the breeze, discussing girls and school and life, praising each other’s best shots, occasionally bending Dad’s rules and awarding a gimme if the situation called for it. While the baseball players were doing conditioning drills and the track team were running their lungs out, we were enjoying a stroll on a sweet cool spring afternoon, pausing occasionally to hit a ball a little closer to the hole.

The name of the course was Sky Valley back then, and it was generally the smallest and scrubbiest of all the courses the golf team played on. The fairways were far from lush and the greens sometimes got rubbed down to dirt in places, but that never bothered me. I liked the fact that it was ours. There were only two places in the county with courses, and my little hometown was one of them. We traveled to some much nicer facilities over the course of each season, but the bigger and better cared-for they were, the more they intimidated me. Sky Valley felt like home.

I stopped playing regularly after I moved away in 1985. Seven years after that, the entire Sky Valley complex—golf course, campground, lodge, and restaurant—was purchased by the Indiana Regular Baptist Youth Camp, which changed the name of the place to Twin Lakes Camp and Conference Center, closed the restaurant, and converted everything but the golf course into a church camp. After reversing their original decision to close the course on Sundays, the Baptists bravely entered the world of golf course management.

The change of ownership didn’t affect my dad’s love of the game. By the time the Baptists took over, he’d turned my mom into an avid golfer, and ever since then the course has been the hub of their social life. When they were both retired, they were free to go out in the middle of a weekday and play a round or two—and since they had a family membership they could tack on an extra four holes before going home. They golfed with couples their own age and couples who were younger, and if none of their friends were around they golfed by themselves.

One of the younger couples ostensibly adopted Mom and Dad and soon the four of them were going out for pizza after their Friday-night rounds. On Saturday afternoons it was common to see 20 or more of these regulars lining up on the first tee and dividing into foursomes, and then at the end the round switching into new teams and playing again. Whenever I was home for Mother’s Day weekend, I’d join this motley crew and experience firsthand the camaraderie and competition of people who truly enjoyed each other’s company.

My dad has been in declining health for the last few years. He’s on oxygen full-time now, and last year he only felt well enough to play golf four times, a number exponentially lower than his average. Most days, though, he went out anyway and rode in the cart with Mom, taking pleasure in the warm weather and the warm presence of his friends.

This past winter, when they were looking into course membership for 2007, Mom and Dad decided it made sense to buy only a single membership for her.

I can hardly imagine a summer without my dad golfing. Until last summer, I’m sure he couldn’t either. I’m sure it hurt for him to see Mom mail that check for just one membership, and to know he’d be limited to a summer of being the golf cart chauffeur.

But even that was taken from him—from both of them—when Mom opened the mail one day last month and found a refund check for her membership. According to their website, Twin Lakes has decided to use the golf course land for “sports fields, bike trails, disc golf, a hydra course, and a nature/welcome center in the former pro shop.”

I don’t think the Baptists were ever all that gung-ho about managing a golf course, and I don’t know why they couldn’t have sold it to investors who would have been. But it’s not important now. What’s important is that something unique to my little hometown is gone. Something good, something fun, something that was important to quite a few people.

Sure, there are other golf courses within a 20-minute drive, and maybe the younger golfers will gravitate to one of them. Maybe the older golfers will head there too when they feel like a round, and maybe they’ll invite Mom and maybe Dad will go along for the ride.

But it’ll never feel like it used to. It’ll never feel like home.

Please Strap Your Explosives Somewhere Else

2007-02-26T09:41:00.000-08:00

I really should just devote this blog to some of the silly comments I run across online. I can’t think of a better way to ensure daily updates.

Case in point: There’s a story on Time.com today about an upcoming documentary produced by James Cameron and making the claim that construction workers in Jerusalem have uncovered a burial vault containing Jesus and his family. Yeah, that Jesus. Cameron says his evidence for this claim includes DNA tests, which is pretty silly in its own right. (“Your honor, I intend to prove that the DNA taken from the corpse’s shoulder matches the DNA taken from the same corpse’s foot.”)

Anyway. There was a comments section following the story, and I only made it about a tenth of the way through before realizing that it was just going turn into a shoving match between believers and non-believers. However, I read long enough to find this gem (quoted here verbatim, spelling and all), from a reader named John:

I’ve already advised the Discovery Channel that if they air this I will cancel my subscription....they should be lucky that I don’t strap explosives around my waste.

This gives new meaning to the phrase “a shitstorm of controversy,” doesn’t it?

A Bit of Doggerel

2007-02-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

O sing a song of Britney Spears
Who took a pair of barber’s shears
And trimmed the hair above her ears
For reasons hard to say

With new tattoos upon her back
She launched her major hair attack
The scissor-blade went snicker-snack
And chopped it all away

We don’t know why she shaved her head
At least I’ve never heard it said
Perhaps the former Mrs Fed
Was having a bad day

But now the one-time Mouseketeer
Has only skin from ear to ear
The hair she used to hold so dear
Is selling on eBay.

* * *

I'm not sure why I was so compelled to write a poem about this non-subject. I was going to do an essay on celebrities who get to be celebrities without much in the way of discernible talent, but this came out instead.

Strike One, Mitt

2007-02-22T06:40:00.000-08:00

The best thing I can think to say about Mitt Romney is that he’s the most prominent politician named after a piece of baseball equipment since Spikes Washington and Protective Cup Roosevelt.

I guess the next best thing would be that he’s not George W. Bush.

And I guess it doesn’t matter because I won’t be voting for a Republican presidential candidate in 2008 under any circumstances, but Romney said something this week that didn’t sit well with me. Speaking to an audience of retirees in Florida, he said “One of the great things about this land is that we have people of different faiths and different religions, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.”

Why is that, Mitt?

Why would you say that?

I would argue that we need to have a person of intelligence lead the country: a well-read student of history with a lifelong thirst for knowledge and an understanding of cultures other than his or her own. Someone, say, with more than a cursory knowledge of economics.

I would argue that a person of compassion would also be a good leader. This person would understand the old bumper sticker message that no one is free while others are oppressed. He or she would stand up for the unfortunate and reject policies that make life worse for those who don’t have it that good to begin with.

A person of conscience would be nice, too. This leader would make thoughtful decisions and have no hidden agenda. The rest of us could feel certain that our trust in this leader wouldn’t be betrayed.

I could go on and on, substituting all sorts of positive attributes: a person of justice, a person of respect, a person of not-batshit-insanity. The point is, when I think of the qualities that make a good leader, I think of actions, not beliefs.

I think of qualities that translate into benefits for everyone.

If a person of faith has these other characteristics, fine. Be intelligent, compassionate, accountable, just, respectful, and not insane, and I won’t care who or what you worship behind closed doors.

And by the same token, Mitt Romney, don’t pretend that a person of faith automatically has those qualities, and don’t pretend that a skeptic automatically doesn’t.

Fetch, Boehner, Fetch!

2007-02-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

Funny thing about dogs. They’ll stand by you even if you’re the most despicable person on earth. A dog doesn’t care if you’re a racist, or if you’re a pervert, or if your incompetence caused a fire at the nursing home—he’ll act like you’re the lord of the universe.

But the same kind of loyalty that’s so admirable in a dog is less so in an elected official. Yet “party before country” is the watchword for those Republican senators and representatives who either refuse to believe Bush started the nursing-home fire or are proud that he did.

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio is opposed to the nonbinding resolution expressing disapproval of the troop escalation in Iraq, and yesterday he had this to say:

“This battle is the most visible part of a global war against terrorists. If we leave, they will follow us home. It's that simple.”

Wow. That is simple. It’s simple-minded, too, though I’m not sure it’s as simple-minded as thinking you can conduct a global war on anything by committing a huge chunk of your military to a single place, especially when that place had a negligible connection to terrorism (if any) to begin with.

Boehner’s remark sure makes it sound like Bush is using American soldiers as bait for new terrorists. I find this too reprehensible for words, but maybe it’s perfectly acceptable for Boehner and Bush’s other family pets. (I can’t remember the exact quote, but Immanuel Kant, who might have been a little smarter than John Boehner, once wrote that when the old men who make the wars have to fight them too, then that would be the end of war.)

If Boehner thinks terrorists are going to follow Americans home from Iraq, then I have a solution. On the way back to America, we stop off at a rest area to go to the restroom, and then when the terrorists are over by the vending machines getting corn chips and pop and pretending not to follow us, we sneak out the back window. It’s that simple!

Sigh. Ever since the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has been hammering us with the same two messages: “Be afraid” and “We know what’s best for you.” The good news is that more and more people are beginning to see through this horseshit. John Boehner isn’t one of them.

Not Ready For Prime Time

2007-02-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

What do Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have in common? No, no, rancid ideology isn’t the answer I’m looking for.

Actually, they’ve both hosted “Saturday Night Live.”

McCain’s appearance was in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, before he became Bush’s shoeshine boy, before he started pandering to Falwell and Dobson and others of that ilk. As I recall, he was relaxed and funny on the show, but I think I’d have a tough time watching it in reruns, knowing that he’s out there beating the drums for troop escalation and the nebulous “victory in Iraq.”

I don’t remember anything at all about Giuliani’s SNL appearance, and it’s quite possible I missed it. However, the Los Angeles Times had a story today in which Giuliani seems to be auditioning for another guest-hosting gig.

How else can you explain comparing Bush to Abraham Lincoln (and favorably, to boot)? Assuming he did so with a straight face, Giuliani must surely rival Bob Newhart and Steven Wright as a master of the deadpan.

How else can you explain such wry quips as “America is very fortunate to have President Bush”?

Giuliani told a convention of California Republicans on Saturday that he wants to be the kind of president who makes decisions that move the country forward. He admires Bush’s leadership and apparently agrees that the president should be a decider.

Which is fine if the president isn’t making his deciderings unilaterally, if he’s weighing all the sides of an issue and then doing the right thing based on his sworn oath to uphold the Constitution. Right now we have a president who’s ignoring the will of his constituents, dismissing the advice of military experts, abandoning his oath, and flying in the face of common sense.

As a result, he has further destabilized the Middle East, created more terrorists, lined his cronies’ pockets, and done a pretty good impression of the angel of death.

This is Giuliani's role model?

I used to think Giuliani wasn’t a bad guy for a Republican. His reasonable stance on abortion and gay rights made him seem somewhat human. But anyone who thinks America is fortunate to have this president can only harbor a serious hatred of America.

And thus shouldn't be allowed to host SNL again.

If Only They Were Afraid To Talk To Anyone At All

2007-02-09T17:52:00.000-08:00

I promised in an earlier post that I’d write about what those intellectual heavyweights Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck had to say about Joe Biden and his awkward semi-compliment to Barack Obama, and as you might have already guessed it was pretty entertaining—if the idea of grown men saying things that would embarrass a seventh-grader strikes you as entertaining.

As reported on the Think Progress website, in the process of leading a discussion about Biden’s remarks, O’Reilly said this to one of his guests, whose name I didn’t catch:

“Now you got to feel sorry for us white folks here, because I’m telling you now I’m afraid to say anything. You know, you’re an articulate guy, doctor, but I’m never going to say that. You’re a smart guy. Is that bad if I say you’re a smart guy? … Yes, absolutely, instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They’re terrified. Now we can’t even say you’re articulate? We can’t even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?”

Yeah, I know. Where to begin?

O’Reilly is guilty of pretend-indignation. He pretends he doesn’t understand the difference between condescension (expressing amazement that a black person is articulate) and a genuine compliment. “Is it bad if I say you’re a smart guy?”

Come on, Bill. It’s all about context, and stop acting like you don’t know it. The times when it’s okay to tell a black person he’s a smart guy are exactly the same times when it’s okay to tell anyone the same thing.

“Hey, Bob, you’re a smart guy—settle this bet for us.”

“You bought Microsoft at $5? You’re a genius!”

“Say, Ted—brilliant work on the Henderson account.”

Otherwise, the subject isn’t going to come up very often. Yet judging from his words, O’Reilly is constantly having this internal struggle: “Oh, no—this guy’s black and I’m white. Must…resist…Tourette’s Condescending Compliment Syndrome…”

Most people are just content to have normal grown-up conversation. That includes the “white people” O’Reilly presumptuously claims to speak for. (Honestly—suggesting that anyone should “feel sorry for white folks” because he's a case of arrested development?)

But let’s get Glenn Beck’s two half-cents in here, too. In the course of a similar discussion on his CNN program, he said

“I don’t have a lot of African-American friends, and I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare. Am I alone in feeling that?”

Well, Glenn, I’m pretty sure you’re not alone. But I don’t think there are a whole lot of mature, rational, intelligent people in the boat with you.

Cracker Barrel Isn't Sending Out $50 Gift Certificates, Either

2007-02-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, back in high school I was somewhat conservative. I mean, not in the modern-day Evil Dick Cheney sort of way, but in the sense that I tried to err on the side of what I believed to be the biblically right thing to do. I remember in senior English taking the anti-abortion side in a class debate, and later that year listing “atheist scientists” as my pet peeve in the senior edition of the school paper.

Then I grew up. Although, admittedly, it took me a while.

Anyway, a high school friend of mine died recently, a victim of breast cancer. She was the yearbook editor when I was the newspaper editor, and, like many high school friends, we didn’t keep in touch after graduation. I heard about it from one of the few friends I do keep in touch with, and because he sent his email to several of my classmates at once, I suddenly began hearing from guys I hadn’t heard from for years.

We had one of those “Reply All” mailfests going one morning. Goofy stuff, mostly, bulletin-board style wit. Then one of the guys attached that bogus Andy Rooney column that’s been floating around the internet for years, the one where all manner of reactionary right-wing horseshit is attributed to the “60 Minutes” curmudgeon. To be fair, my classmate included the line “If you don’t like this, feel free to delete it.”

Well, sure, I could have just deleted it, but I thought it’d be a good opportunity to set the record straight. I went to Snopes.com, found the page debunking the bogus story in about 20 seconds (I don’t know why I’m the only person capable of doing this), and sent the link out as a Reply All to my classmates.

And that was the last I’ve heard from any of them.

Could Have Been Brighter

2007-02-09T15:23:00.000-08:00

Some people never learn, and some people learn the hard way. The lesson, of course, is that unless there’s a damn good reason to refer to a person’s race (or, more accurately, racial classification, since the concept itself is of interest mainly to compulsive categorizers), then one shouldn’t refer to it at all.

Especially if one wants to have one’s presidential campaign taken seriously.

A few weeks ago Joe Biden decided he would pay Barack Obama this bizarre compliment: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Wow, the first one, huh? Articulate, is he? Bright, too? And clean? I expected him to follow up with “And he doesn’t wear those baggy jeans that slide halfway down his drawers.”

You don’t have to be all that articulate or bright either one to read between those lines. Either Biden doesn’t consider past presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to be mainstream African-Americans, or he doesn’t think much of their brightness, articulateness, and cleanliness. (Sharpton’s bemused response to Biden’s remark was “I take a bath every day.”)

This has been covered from every angle all over the blogs, but the fact is that Biden’s remark made him seem surprised that an African-American (who happens to be serving in the United States Senate) can be bright and articulate. To avoid coming off like such a doofus, he could have said something like this: “I think Barack has articulated his position on Iraq very clearly” or “I think Barack is one of the brightest young senators serving today.”

I’m not sure it’s possible to salvage the “clean” remark. Maybe “Barack never skimps on the Irish Spring” or something.

Tough lesson, Joe. But if you want to pay someone a compliment, “articulate” doesn’t cut it. Articulate is the default, the current pretend-emperor notwithstanding.

* * *

Coming soon: intellectual heavyweights and self-appointed Caucasian spokespersons Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck weigh in with their cogent insights.

Five Months Later

2007-02-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

September 2?!

My last entry was on September 2?!

Fortunately, nothing much noteworthy has happened since then, except the Democrats took back both houses of Congress, a Republican representative from Florida got caught pursuing a young page, a woman became Speaker of the House, John Kerry flubbed a joke that GOP nutbars and the mainstream media pretended not to understand, a Colorado evangelist was forced out of the closet and then forced back in, 363 tons of our tax dollars disappeared because some genius decided to send it to Iraq in the form of cash, and George W. Bush continued to position himself as the emperor of America—a delusional, evil emperor hell-bent on turning the entire Middle East into a gigantic graveyard with oil pumps among the tombstones.

Yeah, nothing to write about there.

On the other hand, no one’s expressed any curiosity about where I’ve been, so it might be some time before anyone notices I’m back.

Shorter and more frequent entries—that’s the ticket. And with that, it’s time to relaunch the Runes.

Christmas in September

2006-09-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

Some people will believe anything.

And the sad part is, believing anything often makes them do silly things.

For instance: Word is going around that the American Civil Liberties Union “hates Christmas” and is trying to “get rid” of the holiday. This came as a surprise to me, since I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU and I try to stay up on all the things we allegedly hate, but there it was in black and white, at the bottom of one of those multi-forwarded emails that I normally trash without opening. But the subject line was “Christmas Card List,” so I thought maybe someone was collecting names of people who might need some cheering up during the holiday season.

Which is still almost four months away, but you know, it’s never too early to do something nice.

But no, this email had entirely different motives. Someone thought it would be hilarious if all the email recipients were to send the ACLU a Christmas card. Here’s the relevant text from the email:

Want to have some fun this CHRISTMAS ? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD! Be sure to add them to your list! As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN, card to brighten up their nasty, dark, sad, little world. Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.

Now, again, as an ACLU member, I wasn’t aware I lived a nasty, dark, sad little world—or at least I wasn’t aware that the dark sad parts of it were a direct result of belonging to the ACLU. But you don’t even need much more than grade-school reading skills to see that the motivation behind this letter is not to brighten up anyone’s world. No, the motivation is revealed in the next to last paragraph:

Two tons of Christmas cards will freeze their operations because they won't know if any are regular mail containing contributions. So spend 39 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone.

Ah, so that’s their fiendish plan! I almost hate to break it to the Christmas Card Guerillas that most of us use the pre-addressed envelopes when we’re making our contributions, though I suppose it’s possible that some first-timer might send a thousand dollars cash in a red envelope with sparkly silver ink. Seems like a long shot, though.

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. Anything you’ve heard about the ACLU “hating Christmas” is an example of the Straw Man Fallacy, which occurs when someone deliberately misrepresents someone else’s position in order to argue against that fictional position. In this case, someone (probably someone of the Rush Limbaugh ilk) has created the “Christmas-hating ACLU” straw man in order to get people riled up (and, continuing the metaphor, to burn down the straw man).

Let’s look at it rationally. Christmas is a tradition celebrated all across the country. For some people, it’s strictly a religious observance. For others, it’s a secular celebration. For most, it’s a combination of the two. The ACLU neither has the power, nor would want the power, to prevent anyone from celebrating Christmas.

Celebrating Christmas, you might say, is one of the civil liberties the ACLU would be interested in protecting. If the government tried to tell you you couldn’t celebrate Christmas, for instance, the ACLU would defend you.

I’m going to quote Fran Quigley, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana, who has an excellent essay about this very subject on the national website. Says Mr Quigley:

For example, the Alliance Defense Fund celebrates the season with an "It's OK to say Merry Christmas" campaign, implying that the ACLU has challenged such holiday greetings…The website WorldNetDaily touts a book claiming "a thorough and virulent anti-Christmas campaign is being waged today by liberal activists and ACLU fanatics." The site's magazine has suggested there will be ACLU efforts to remove "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency, fire military chaplains, and expunge all references to God in America's founding documents. Of course, there is no "Merry Christmas" lawsuit, nor is there any ACLU litigation about U.S. currency, military chaplains, etc. But the facts are not important to these groups, because their real message is this: By protecting the freedom of Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christians through preventing government entanglement with religion, the ACLU is somehow infringing on the rights of those with majority religious beliefs.

Here’s my favorite part of Mr Quigley’s essay, mainly because there’s another straw man out there that would have you believe the ACLU is somehow an anti-Christian organization:

As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.

So—if you’ve received the “Christmas Card List” and have been tempted to do your part to freeze ACLU operations, please consider this instead. No one is trying to do away with Christmas. No one has the power to do away with Christmas. And yes, the ACLU defends some causes that are highly unpopular, but keep in mind that their guide is the United States Constitution, and that someday you might be the one who needs your liberties defended.

And, I don’t know—instead of spending 39 cents on postage for an ACLU Christmas card, maybe you could give it to a Salvation Army bellringer. Maybe you could hand it to a homeless person who asks you for change. Maybe you could send it to your favorite charity.

Any of those ideas would actually make a more positive impact on the world.

Brought To You By The Letter F

2006-08-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

There are too many assclowns in positions of authority in this country, and believe it or not this time I’m not even talking about the rat bastards in the Bush administration. This time I’m talking about two separate incidents involving the people in charge of personalized license plates, one here in Iowa, the other in Ohio.

Here in Iowa, the Department of Transportation is in the process of revoking a license plate it originally awarded in 2001 because one man found it offensive.

Even if you didn’t hear the rest of the story, you’d think that was absurd, right? A guy requests the vanity plates, IDOT awards them, the guy drives around for five years (presumably not just up and down his driveway), and then suddenly, magically, his vanity message becomes offensive enough to warrant revocation.

Not because hundreds of people deluged IDOT with complaints, mind you. Because one person took offense.

John Miller of Boone owns the car in question. He drives a 1966 Corvair, which was featured rather prominently in Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Miller’s license plate reads “F NADER.”

You can look at that a couple of ways. You can look at it as a playful swat at Nader: “Hey, Ralph, I’m still driving your ‘unsafe’ Corvair 40 years later.” You could also look at it as a not-so-playful message to the candidate who siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore in 2000 to throw the election into chaos. I don’t know John Miller’s politics, but since his hobby is restoring old Corvairs I suspect it’s the first reason.

Either way, Joel Paulson of Ames caught a glimpse of Miller’s car one day, and promptly complained to IDOT that the license plate was in poor taste. When this story first came out, Paulson reportedly said he shouldn’t have to explain to a child what F NADER means.

In the first place, if the kid’s old enough, he already knows what F NADER means. If he’s younger, there’s nothing about the license plate that would make him curious enough to ask. And if he asked anyway and Joel Paulson didn’t want to explain that F is sometimes used as an abbreviation for a word “you’re not old enough to hear,” then the proper answer—listen up, Joel—would have been “Why, I’ll bet that means Fred Nader. Or maybe Frank. How many F-names can you think of, sport?”

But no, that would have been too easy. You don’t get your name in the paper that way.

Paulson had this little gem of a quote in the Des Moines Register this week: “I wonder how he’d like it if someone drove around Boone with a license plate that said ‘F JOHN MILLER?”

Good question. Of course, it would mean that somebody at IDOT approved a license plate that’s five or six letters over the limit—which is feasible considering that so much of the department’s resources are devoted to making the world safe from the letter F.

John Miller plans to appeal the revocation, as he should, and will be represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Randall Wilson of the ACLU told the Register “The license plate isn’t obscene or vulgar by any modern standard.” Bingo. A Joel Paulson would have to take the extra step in his imagination to make it obscene, which he obviously did. And when you have government agencies trying to protect us from our own imaginations, you’ve got government agencies with entirely too much power.

The Ohio case is similar. A 74-year-old woman named Pat Niple has had her personalized license plate for ten years (no, it doesn’t say NIPLE—jeez, don’t jump to conclusions), and now the state is saying it’s obscene.

Her plate reads NWTF, because she and her late husband owned Northwood Tree Farm.

But because a generation of IMers and text messagers use it to mean something else, Ohio says Ms Niple’s plates have to go.

WTF?

I’ve never seen “NWTF” in an online conversation. I assume the N stands for “Now,” although I can’t be sure. In any event, once again, the reader has to take the extra step. If he already knows what it means, he can chuckle or be offended or whatever he wants—but he can’t blame someone else for his own interpretation.

I’m not sure civil servants should be put in a position of trying to determine what’s obscene, what’s acceptable, what won’t offend the self-righteous prigs of the world. But if they’re going to uphold people like Joel Paulson as the standard of sensitivity, maybe we should just go back to random numbers and letters.

Fighting Them In London

2006-08-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

Apparently another terrorist plot has been foiled by British authorities. Today Scotland Yard diligently rooted out 21 suspects who were planning to use liquid explosives to bring down a number of planes flying from Great Britain to the US.

Good for them.

I'm not sure how our occupation of Iraq helped uncover this plot and save hundreds of lives, but I'm sure the rat bastards in the Bush administration will be able to explain it for us.

Hey Joe, Where You Goin' With That Petition In Your Hand?

2006-08-09T07:23:00.000-07:00

The people have spoken, and Joe Lieberman isn’t listening.

I’ve stayed away from this subject just because it’s been covered in depth all over the internet, and also because this is the blog that’s updated so infrequently it’s hardly like a blog at all. I’ve been tempted. I was tempted every time some Bush apologist opened his mouth and claimed that by not supporting Lieberman, the Democratic Party was trying to stifle dissent.

Let me get this straight. We have a Republican-controlled Congress that isn’t likely to propose ending the occupation of Iraq anytime soon. We have a grass roots movement to end the occupation, a movement made up primarily of the more progressive elements of the Democrats. We have Joe Lieberman distancing himself from the grass roots and cozying up to the party in power. He’s not dissenting—he’s assimilating! He’s supporting the people who the real dissenters are dissenting against!

That isn’t dissent. But of course, right-leaning writers know perfectly well that it isn’t.

Naturally, the right loves Joe Lieberman. He’s on their side for reasons I can’t fathom, especially when I think about what happened in 2000.

Let’s say you’re running for dog catcher (and by the way, where would comedy be without the time-honored dog catcher elections?). You’re running because you believe you can be a better dog catcher than your opponent. You’re running because you believe the people deserve the best dog catcher available.

So even if you’re personal friends with the opposing dog catcher candidate, you clearly think the people would not be well served if he wins. There’s an ideological divide between you.

But the other guy wins. And then the news comes out that he won by shady means. Under those circumstances, could you even imagine embracing your opponent and what he stands for?

I’m going to change metaphors before I end up with dogs fighting in Baghdad, but the point is, after the 2000 election, why didn’t Joe Lieberman swear eternal opposition to the Bush machine? Why didn’t he say “I opposed you before, but after the slippery way you landed in office, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure your stay is a short one”?

Instead he bought into the whole 9/11 panic attack, failed to call Bush out on his lies, and decided he’d look tough if he kept hammering on national security during his Senate campaign. I can only attribute this to Short Man Syndrome, but maybe that’s just me.

Lieberman lost the Connecticut primary because the people want real dissent. They want someone who will stand up to the liars and rat bastards that comprise the Bush administration. The fact that he’s planning to run as an independent makes it clear that he’s a Bush lapdog.

I wouldn’t vote for him if he were running for dog catcher. Unless, of course, I were a Republican.

Hey, Look, It's $550,000

2006-08-02T07:20:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else wonder what will become of the $550,000 fine that CBS paid for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction”?

Seriously—where does that money go? Do they write a check to the FCC? And if so, what does the FCC do with it?

Does it go toward the national debt? Does it get placed into a fund that will be used to educate the public about the dangers of exposing one’s breasts on national television? Does it go toward the FCC operating budget or does it go to their year-end holiday party?

I sent an email to the FCC asking this very question, without the snarkiness. I simply said “I’m curious—where does that money go?”

I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m sure they’re busy up there, fielding complaints from people who can’t tear themselves away from the shows that offend them most. But I want to know where the money goes because I want to know who benefits from this fine.

More specifically, who has the right to benefit from this fine?

Let’s face it: In a live broadcast, anything can happen. CBS had no idea what Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson had cooked up for the grand finale of their lame-ass halftime extravaganza. CBS didn’t replay the wardrobe malfunction over and over, didn’t call undue attention to it, didn’t pat themselves on the back for finding a way to show a tit on TV. I don’t see how the broadcasters of a live event can possibly be held liable for the actions of people over whom they have no control.

And that’s why I wonder where the money goes. The FCC is saying “You owe us $550,000 for not preventing something you didn’t anticipate and couldn’t have prevented.” On the streets this is known as a shakedown. It’s theft. And even though CBS is a gigantic media conglomerate with deep pockets, I hate to see them or anyone else get hosed by a government agency flying the flag of “decency.”

Oh Wait, There's More

+ I have no idea why I was watching that particular Super Bowl halftime show. The remote must have been just out of reach or something, because history shows that if you try counting the number of entertaining Super Bowl halftime shows, you’ll be lucky to find IV of them. But yeah, I saw it happen, and though I’ll admit that the incident was indecent in the strictest sense of the word, that’s not the word that came to mind. I thought creepy described it better.

Apparently Sleeping With Connie Chung Is The Equivalent Of Having A Clear Conscience

2006-07-08T19:18:00.000-07:00

Before I start this essay, let me take a moment to reflect, to look back at my life and see if I’ve ever profited from exploiting stupid people.

Thinking. Thinking. Trying to remember big sums of money rolling in at the expense of people who don’t know any better.

Nope. Looks like I’m good. I’ll continue with a clear conscience.

And with a clear conscience, I want to ask people like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich and the rest of their ilk how they sleep at night. How do you go home at the end of the day and pretend you’ve made some contribution to society?

I wouldn’t have any idea what goes on on daytime television if I didn’t occasionally go pick up my 15-year-old daughter on a weekday afternoon. Her taste in art, entertainment, and leisure time is still in its formative stage, so many times when I’m over there one of these horrific shows is blaring across three rooms. (Yeah, she could use a job, but that’s another story.)

What amazes me is that these shows always seem to be about someone denying that he’s the father of someone else’s baby. The wronged teenage mother yells at the baby’s father, he yells back, the audience yells at both of them, someone gets called a ho, four out of every five words are bleeped out, the young man’s girlfriend runs on from backstage and tries to attack the baby’s mother, and Messrs. Springer and Povich act surprised that this is happening despite the fact that from what I can tell it’s the only thing that ever happens on their stupid-ass shows.

I’m curious.

I’m curious about the audition/selection process. I’m curious about how they find people stupid enough to believe that going on television to tell the same story that’s being told on every other channel is somehow going to make their lives better. What are they promising these people? Do they get paid? If they aren’t getting paid as much as Maury Povich, then they’re being used. Thrown to the wolves. Exploited for someone else’s gain.

I’m curious about how the guests on these shows act when they get back home. Do their friends treat them like TV stars? Or do their friends say “Yeah, I always knew you weren’t very bright and that you sleep around with other morons—but now the whole country knows it. Congratulations”?

Maybe they just want their fifteen minutes of fame and don’t expect their lives to be altered one way or the other when it’s over. Maybe they’re just happy with a free trip to wherever these shows are taped.

Maybe—and here’s where the word exploitation gets its capital E—maybe Povich and Springer and their producers encourage their guests to be as vulgar as possible. Maybe they encourage the surprise guest girlfriend to come on stage ready to throw a punch. “And there’s an extra $50 in it if you can rip the other girl’s top off at some point.”

I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, nor do I know why these shows exist. But I do know that putting economically disadvantaged, poorly educated people on display for profit is about as low as it gets.

One Vote Away From Insanity

2006-06-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

The fact that 66 United States senators voted to add a flag protection amendment to the Constitution ought to scare the hell out of anyone who still holds the slightest shred of hope that our elected officials are actually concerned about upholding their oath of office.

That would be the oath to support the Constitution. The oath has no codicil, no loophole along the lines of “unless I need to appease the superstitious yahoos who might vote against me in the next election.”

And yet 66 Senators--66 out of 100!--voted to start dismantling the document they’ve sworn to protect. Are they intellectually incapable of doing so, or are they just terrified of the yahoos?

Now, in today’s dishonest, cutthroat, and superficial campaign climate, it’s entirely possible that they’re terrified of some future political opponent twisting their “Nay” votes into a campaign issue. But there’s also a good counter-argument to that sort of sensationalism, if you can pull it off. Let’s say Senator Bob Fudknuckler of Iowa finds himself opposed in the next election by Candidate Steve Jingo, whose entire campaign is built on questioning the incumbent’s patriotism. Candidate Jingo might run a TV spot that says “My opponent Bob Fudknuckler voted against protecting Old Glory from the flag-burners. Why does he hate the flag? Does he want to see America burn, too?”

Fudknuckler’s response, then, would be something like this: “I voted to repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy in order to help fight our growing deficit and make taxation fair for all Americans. I voted to raise the minimum wage so working families can have a fighting chance to get out of poverty and live the American dream. I voted for measures that would prevent corporations from sending jobs overseas and screwing the working man while lining their own pockets with the increased profits. I would ask my opponent which is more important to the future of this country: its people, or a symbol?”

Yeah, I’m an idealist. And I get a kick out of the name Fudknuckler.

But moving on. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah sponsored the flag amendment, and actually had the nerve to say the Senate had nothing more important to be concerned about. This is one of the most mind-bogglingly stupid things I’ve ever heard come out of someone’s mouth. You’re an elected official, Orrin, and you’ve been elected to make the country a better place than it was when you took office. If you consider protecting the flag more important than the economic well-being of your constituents, if you consider it more important than finding a way out of the quagmire in Iraq, if you consider it more important than protecting freedom itself, then in my opinion you aren’t qualified to do your job. I don’t believe you have the smarts.

Speaking of not having the smarts, the ever-quotable Bill Frist said the flag “is the single symbol that protects our liberty and freedom.” Really. I enjoy a good bit of anthropomorphizing now and then, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a flag enlist in the army. I’d like to know how a mere symbol protects anything at all.

One vote away, folks. I can’t imagine being so terrified every election year that you throw common sense to the wayside and spend a single minute on time-wasters like these.

Oh Wait, There’s More

+ By the way, it’s a little disingenuous for them to constantly refer to “the” flag, as if there were just the one in existence instead of the millions flying all over the place--most of them mass-produced in China, as I understand it.

+ Hillary Clinton, who just a few months ago sponsored legislation to criminalize flag-burning, voted against the amendment. I don’t know what to make of that, but I’ll give her probationary kudos.

Fighting Them In Miami

2006-06-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the FBI agents and local police officials who uncovered the terrorist cell in Miami and thwarted a plan to bomb the Sears Tower and other locations.

And our occupation of Iraq helped this how, exactly?

The report on CNN.com said an undercover operative was used to infiltrate the gang, leading to the arrest of seven people described in the story as "al Qaeda wannabes." Hey, wait a minute--an undercover operative? That's a great idea! Since your standard terrorist yahoos operate as a sneaky, shadowy organization, let's approach them in a sneaky, shadowy manner. Not only would that be more cost-effective than using thousands of troops to occupy some godforsaken hellhole in the Middle East, it might actually help prevent future acts of terrorism from occurring.

Which any president who wasn't mentally defective would already understand.

Beware the Marauding Judges!

2006-06-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

My clock-radio is set to come on at 5:30 every morning, right at the beginning of the NPR news. For the last two mornings I’ve been treated to the stupid Texas twang of acting president Bush, delivering a speech in support of a federal marriage amendment. The good thing is that it gets me out of bed fast, because as I’ve mentioned before, any time that guy speaks I know it’s either going to be a lie or something intended to stir up the flag-worshipers.

But today he said something so absolutely moronic that I knew it was time to fire up the Runes again. Today he said this:

“When activist judges insist on imposing their arbitrary will on the people, the only alternative left to the people is an amendment to the Constitution, the only law a court cannot overturn.”

Oh, where to begin.

How does one become president of the United States without the simplest understanding of how the judicial system works? In Bush’s fanciful world, bands of marauding judges are roaming the land imposing their arbitrary will on the people. It’s like he has no idea what judges do or where they come from, which might in fact be true but in no way diminishes the reality that judges don’t make laws, they interpret them.

And their guide to interpreting laws is, say it with me, the U.S. Constitution.

Bush knows just enough about the Constitution to be dangerous, which can also be said for how much he knows about economics and foreign policy. He’s correct that an amendment to the Constitution can’t be overturned by a court, but he’s overstating the case when he says “the only alternative left to the people” is a Constitutional amendment.

The only alternative to whom? Who are these people so desperately turning from place to place, looking for a solution to the problem of gay marriage?

Why, they’re bigots, that’s who. People who aren’t affected by gay marriage in the least, except to the extent that it doesn’t fit into their narrow view of the world. They’re people who can’t see the difference between marriage as a legal partnership and marriage as a union of blessed souls. Sadly, though, they’re people who don’t pay a damn bit of attention to what a mess this president has been making until he gets them all fired up with some non-existent bogeyman.

In an election year, of course. And people call me a cynic.

Whose Side Is She On?

2005-12-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

There was a time when I would have enthusiastically supported Hillary Clinton for president, but no longer.

She has provided no leadership in getting us out of an illegal, immoral, stupid occupation of a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11. Of course, she's not alone there, but with a majority of Americans now in support of withdrawal (vindicating those of us who said three years ago that going in was a mistake), we need elected officials who can stand up and do the right thing. Men like John Murtha. Women like Nancy Pelosi. Someone has to stand up to this administration of corrupt chickenhawks, and I don't see Ms Clinton doing it.

The last straw was her sponsorship of a bill to make flag-burning illegal. This is insane. Why pander to the superstitious know-nothings? Not only is flag-burning an extremely rare and victimless act, but to even think about it while we're in Iraq, and while the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, is grossly irresponsible for an elected official.

Ms Clinton either needs to stand up on the side of reason, humanity, and liberty, or just join the Republicans.

Watch Your Backs, Dover!

2005-11-11T22:21:00.000-08:00

It looks like Pat Robertson just blew his chances of ever being named grand marshal of the Dover, Pennsylvania Christmas Parade. Earlier this week, the citizens of Dover wisely voted out a school board that had been leaning toward introducing intelligent design as a alternative to the theory of evolution, and Robertson took the opportunity to cast judgment on them. “If there’s a disaster in Dover, don’t turn to God,” he said. “You’ve just rejected him from your city.”

(To which I would add “Don’t turn to FEMA, either, because it’ll take them three weeks to respond and they’ll probably go to Dover, Delaware first.” Or not, since FEMA jokes are pretty much outdated by now.)

Robertson went on to recommend that if the citizens of Dover run into any future problems, they should call on Charles Darwin. “Maybe he can help them,” he said. I’m sure he thought that was a clever quip, and I have no doubt that he had a shit-eating smirk worthy of George W. Bush on his face when he said it, but let’s face it, if a disaster were to hit Dover, nobody would be calling on Charles Darwin, because, well, he’s not alive. They’d call the Red Cross, and they’d call the local rescue squads, and they’d pitch in and help each other out, just the way human beings do whenever a disaster hits anywhere.

And if a miracle happened and someone claiming to be God showed up to help, I’m pretty sure his first words would be “Pat Robertson doesn’t speak for me.”

Who does Pat Robertson speak for? One would hope the number of deadheads who believe everything this guy says would be declining steadily, for a couple of reasons, the cynical being that he’s conned them out of so much money that they can no longer afford the ramen noodles and Alpo they were using for sustenance, and the optimistic being that even the most sheeplike fundamentalists have the wherewithal to recognize that when their “religious” leader starts calling for the CIA to assassinate foreign presidents (as Robertson did a few months ago), then maybe, just maybe, he’s crossed the border into Kookyland.

Pat Robertson is worlds apart from the Christianity I grew up with, and I’m betting he’s worlds apart from the Christianity followed by sincere believers today (this would not include the George Bushes of the world). Robertson is a self-worshiping fame whore who absolutely will not pass up a chance to call attention to himself, especially when it gives him a chance to pretend to be an Old Testament prophet: “Yea, verily, the Doverites have sinned against the Lord, and lo, they’d better watch their backs.”

But Pat, what about the people who voted to keep the superstitious school board members in office? Surely God would pluck them out of a disaster, right? “Yea, verily. I’m pretty sure.”

Robertson’s little tirade served no purpose other than to get his mug in the newspapers again. At one point he said the citizens of Dover had “voted God out of the city,” which is the sort of thing zealots trot out every so often to scare people who haven’t had an original thought since the first time they set foot in Sunday School. But, honestly, Pat, which the hell is it? Is your gravy train omnipotent or not? What kind of deity lets himself get voted off the island?

Kudos to the people of Dover for standing up to the backwards thinkers who want the magical theory of creation taught as science. And kudos to the media who reported Robertson’s latest nonsensical outburst. The more you can expose this charlatan as a crazy old coot, the sooner he can wither away.

Congratulations on Your Use of the Language, George

2005-10-31T10:12:00.000-08:00

Normally when I hear George W. Bush’s voice on the radio I just turn it off, on the assumption that whatever he says is either going to be (a) hyperpatriotic mush or (b) patently untrue. This morning, however, I was in the process of dressing and couldn’t get to the snooze button in time to avoid hearing him announce Samuel Alito as his latest Supreme Court nomination.

The fact that some people are calling Alito “Scalia Lite” is probably enough reason to devote an essay to him, but that’s not the topic here. What I want to discuss is what Bush said at the end of his speech this morning. He turned to Alito and said “Congratulations on your nomination.”

And I thought: “Did this dumbass forget he was the one who nominated him?”

You don’t congratulate someone for something that wouldn’t have happened to him if you hadn’t made it happen. Other people can come up to Alito and congratulate him on his nomination, but it makes absolutely no sense for Bush to do it. Bush can congratulate himself if he wants to.

This would be like a baseball player hitting a grand slam and then congratulating the runners who were on base: “Way to go, guys—way to score those runs!”

You know, it’s not that hard to use the language in a thoughtful, logical way. The alternative is to do what Bush does and repeat stuff he’s overheard in other conversations and hope it’s appropriate.

And by the way, how would you like to be the second choice behind Harriet Miers?

Now That's What I Call Rapture

2005-10-24T23:51:00.000-07:00

Back when I was a churchgoin’ sort of fellow, there was a pretty catchy hymn I liked that contained the lyric “When we all get to heaven/What a day of rejoicing that will be.”

That sounded pretty good to me at the time: all your old friends and relatives gathered around, praising God, whooping it up, looking forward to an eternity of more praising God and whooping it up. It seemed to me that anyone who had the opportunity to get in on something that sounded like so much fun would be crazy to take a pass on it.

Yes, sir, after praising God for a billion years, you’re just getting warmed up for the next trillion.

Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these days I take a more rational view of the world. There are enough solvable problems on this planet that everyone ought to be able to find a niche in one of three categories: (1) people trying to solve the problems, (2) people trying to entertain the people trying to solve the problems, and (3) people who have sense enough to stay out of the way of the people trying to solve the problems.

But the way I see it, there’s a fourth category of people who want you to believe that it doesn’t matter if anyone solves these problems or not, because in just a few years it’ll all be over anyhow and several million people will be taken up to heaven in something called the rapture.

What a day of rejoicing that will be—particularly if you have any inclination toward looting. But I digress.

Sad to say, there’s a lot of energy diverted from problem-solving into rapture-preparedness. I refer you now to a website known as Rapture Letters (www.raptureletters.com), a site for people who are convinced they’ll be among the raptured. These people are encouraged to submit the names and email addresses of people they’re pretty sure won’t be raptured, so that when the big day comes, an automatic email will be sent to these people, explaining that their friends and neighbors have been taken up to heaven and offering them an opportunity to get on the right track, too, for whatever comes next. The post-rapture, maybe, or the rapture wrap-up.

Now, call me a cynic, but I think they’re collecting those email addresses for a whole ‘nother reason. I think they’re just trying to build the world’s largest database of heathens and free thinkers. If you read the site carefully, nowhere does it say “We will not spam the person whose email address you send us.”

If you haven’t checked out the site yet, here’s how it’s supposed to work: You send in the name and email address of your unbelieving buddy. That address is added to the database of people scheduled to get the “rapture letter,” which begins “This message has been sent to you by a friend or a relative who has recently disappeared along with millions and millions of people around the world. The reason they chose to send you this letter is because they cared about you and would like you to know the truth about where they went. This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been takenup to heaven,” etc etc.

Now, the superpowered mainframe computer at Rapture Letters Headquarters has been programmed to send the rapture letter to the entire database every Friday—unless the head man in charge manually resets it before then. Naturally, the man in charge has no doubt he’s going to be raptured, so if he’s not around to hit the reset button, there can be no other explanation: It’s rapture time.

(The website says that the mailing list will receive the rapture letter on the first Friday after the rapture. So if the rapture happens on a Saturday, it’ll be six days before you get your letter. You could drop a note in the corner mailbox on your way up to heaven, and it'll get there faster than the email.)

The website doesn’t indicate whose brilliant idea this was, but I just imagine that someday, many years from now, the programmer on his deathbed will call his firstborn son to his side: “Son—I’ve been pressing the reset button on the rapture letters program every Friday for the last 57 years. I’d like you to take over for me, son.”

“I promise, Dad.”

And then two hours after the funeral, delete goes the database and Dad’s old computer gets tossed in the landfill.

It’s free to have a name added to the database, but there’s also a section of the website that says they accept “love offerings.” They assure us that only 10 percent of donations are used for administrative costs, while 90 percent are used to “further the kingdom of God.”

I suspect that furthering the kingdom of God covers about as much ground for these people as it does for charlatans like Pat Robertson.

If you think a rapture is going to occur in your lifetime (and it would pretty much have to, if they don’t want all those emails to bounce back), by all means, send the folks at Rapture Letters a name or two and pat yourself on the back. But once you’re done doing that, take a look around and see if there’s something helpful you can do now.

Grasping For A Harriet Miers Analogy

2005-10-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

To help you fully understand my position on George W. Bush’s nomination of his personal legal counsel Harriet Miers to a seat on the Supreme Court, I have to take a paragraph or two to discuss a game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

Strat-O-Matic, or Strato, is a simulated baseball game using one red die, two white dice, charts for fielding and baserunning, and individual cards that reflect each player’s statistics for the previous year. There are three columns on each card: The hitters’ columns are numbered 1, 2, and 3; the pitchers’ 4, 5, and 6. Under each column is a list of 11 possible baseball results (strikeout, single, groundout, etc) numbered 2-12. Let’s say Bob Gibson is pitching to Carl Yastrzemski, and you roll a 4 on your red die and a total of 7 on the two white dice. You look under Gibson’s 4 column, find the 7, and note that Yaz has struck out.

That’s Strato in a nutshell. Every year you can buy all the major league teams from the previous year, replay the whole season or part of it, trade players between teams without hurting anyone’s feelings, and jot it all down in a notebook—or, if you played as much as I did, in dozens of notebooks.

Basically, playing Strato is how I spent a great deal of my time from eighth grade on through college. I was the manager of 24 big-league teams, and even though I had unlimited power to throw games, make lopsided trades, or shred the cards of players I didn’t like, I maintained the integrity of the game by keeping it as realistic as possible. There were no light-hitting shortstops batting cleanup in my leagues, no iron-horse pitchers throwing all four games of a series.

It was a clean game, by golly. I wouldn’t let myself play favorites.

But usually, somewhere late in the season, I’d get the urge to do something a little strange—and usually it involved giving some lame middle reliever a spot start, even though he had a horrendous ERA, an embarrassing strikeout-to-walk ratio, and a tendency to give up a couple of home runs every time he pitched. We’ll call this incredibly luckless pitcher Harry Myers.

Harry would spend most of the season in the bullpen, only coming in to get some mop-up work in games his team was leading or trailing by ten runs or so. I wouldn’t put him in a close game because it’d look like I was throwing the game to the other side. He was just there to fill out the 25-man roster.

But then once in a blue moon, just to see what would happen, I’d let Harry Myers start a game. The imaginary fans would go berserk: What’s Myers doing in there? What’s the manager thinking? Who in their freaking right mind thinks this weenie-armed righthander deserves a start?!

At no time did Harry Myers ever reward my confidence—he always got shelled. There was a possibility, of course, that the dice could have fallen the right way every time and he could have defied the odds by twirling a three-hit shutout. But he never did. In the whole league, there were dozens of middle relievers who would have performed better in a spot start—but in my more impish moments, I decided to start the worst possible pitcher.

So I don’t know if Harriet Miers would be a good Supreme Court justice or not. She’s been quoted as saying George W. Bush is the smartest man she’s ever met, which would seem to indicate she’s not that bright herself (that or she’s carrying one hell of a torch). All I know is that this nomination is the work of a complete dingleberry, a guy who’s just screwing around, a guy who won’t put out the slightest mental effort to do the right thing. From Iraq to the Supreme Court, he’s like a kid who starts playing with a chemistry set without reading the instructions: “Let’s see what I happens when I do this!”

You think there might be a handful of brilliant, experienced jurists with slightly better qualifications than Harriet Miers? Two or three, maybe? It doesn’t matter to this president. At least when I started a goofball pitcher in a game of Strato, it had no effect on the other 250 million Americans.

One Nation Under Whatever

2005-09-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Last week a federal court in San Francisco declared the phrase “under God” unconstitutional in the pledge of allegiance. This prompted the usual suspects to put up their usual clamor, as in “This is another example of the persecution of Christians!” and “We’re playing right into the Soviet Union’s hands!” (Seriously—everyone raise a hand who knows someone who thinks the Soviet Union still exists. I have a family member who said, when the Berlin Wall came down, “It’s a trick.”)

In the midst of all the clamor, I don’t see anyone stating the obvious, which is the fact that complaining about “under God” in the pledge of allegiance is like complaining about finding a fishhook in your tainted salmon. The pledge is a ridiculous waste of schoolchildren’s time, whether it’s two words shorter or not.

As a reminder, here it is: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Now, surely I’m not the only person who realizes that everything after the word “stands” is fluff. It’s irrelevant. It’s nothing more than a description of the republic for which the flag stands, and as such it’s unnecessary. You’ve already pledged allegiance to the flag and the republic, so there’s no need for a commercial at the end. It might as well say I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, the land of the free and the home of the brave, a place with 50 states, and the birthplace of jazz, professional baseball, and David Letterman.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a believer or not: “Under God” has nothing to do with what you’ve pledged allegiance to. It’s fluff, and it’s fluff that was crammed into the pledge in the 1950s to show the Russians that we were just as good at indoctrinating kids as they were. I'll assume there were protests at the time, protests that they should be taking stuff out of the pledge instead of putting stuff in, although now that I think of it I’m sure that would have prompted a visit from HUAC.

So now for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the fluff is gone, and that the pledge is down to its bare bones: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. Now what do we do with it?

Do we make people say it every day? Well, that seems silly. It’s a pledge. Once you’ve pledged something, you’ve pledged it. If someone comes along and tries to make you pledge it a second time, your reaction should be “No, thanks, I’m good—I already pledged that.”

That’s especially true of allegiance. Unless you see a second-grader sneaking off to pledge allegiance to Great Britain or Antarctica or the “Soviet Union,” I think we can safely assume that his or her allegiance still lies with the country it was pledged to yesterday.

And that brings me to my final point. Does anyone believe that even the smartest kindergartener has the slightest idea what he’s doing when he says the pledge of allegiance? Good lord, no. When I was in fourth grade, we had to write a one-page paper on what the pledge meant to us. As I placed my essay on the teacher’s desk, I noticed that the kid ahead of me had titled his “The Pledge of the Legions.”

So here was a guy who thought he’d been saying the Pledge of the Legions every day for the last five years—which had to mean he thought he was saying “I pledge of the legions to the flag…,” which isn’t exactly common English syntax, which means he didn’t have a clue what he was saying.

Just like the rest of us.

All the energy expended on pursuing a court case to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance seems misguided to me. It’s aiming at the wrong target. Take out “under God” and you’re still left with a pointless exercise, because no pledge is valid if someone makes you stand up and say it.

If the goal is to create loyal Americans, I suggest discarding the pledge and using that time to study the Constitution. The short-term benefit of that is less wasted classroom time. The long-term benefit is a more conscientious electorate.

One Additional Thought on Pointless Exercises

+ I’ll never forget that time in grade school when that KGB agent disguised as a set of monkey bars offered me five bucks for a map of the locations of Defense Department missile silos. I told him I’d have to ask my mom and dad, but heck, now I know I should have said “Sorry, man, I just pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands—for the 387th straight school day.”

Profiles in Leadership, or Not

2005-09-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

I blame George W. Bush for the atmospheric conditions that caused Hurricane Katrina.

OK, not really. I’m kidding. I figured I might as well say it, because any criticism of Bush’s performance in the hurricane’s aftermath tends to draw out devoted Bush-lovers with one absurd comment after another: “Leave it to you liberals to blame Bush for a natural disaster.”

So let’s get it out in the open. If you hear any rabid Bushie accuse liberals of blaming the hurricane on Bush, just pat him on the head and remind him that you were young and your opinions uninformed once, too.

There’s plenty of blame to go around—not for the hurricane, but for the slow response, the inability to get food and water to stranded people, the bureaucratic foul-ups, etc. I’m not going to cover that here. What I want to talk about is leadership, and what passes for it these days.

Anyone with internet access knew what was going on in New Orleans when the 17th Street levee was breached. We knew the streets were filling with water, we knew people were heading to the Superdome, and we knew that some people didn’t make it. We knew people were tying dead bodies to utility poles to keep them from drifting too far from their homes. We knew something tragic was happening on a historical scale.

And the president of the United States flew into action—if by flying into action you mean flying into San Diego to get his picture taken strumming a guitar. Look at the picture up there: He’s got his trademark smirk on, he’s acting like the Singing Cowboy and yukking it up for the crowd, and he doesn’t have a care in the world.

This to me is the most damning photograph of this bonehead’s presidency. I never thought anything could top his deer-in-the-headlights look during the reading of “My Pet Goat,” but this one nails it. It helps to know the context, which is why so many websites have juxtaposed this photograph with shots of the horror going on simultaneously in New Orleans, but when you do, this picture screams “I have let this country down and will continue to do so again and again.”

You know, there was a big flood in New Madrid, Missouri in 1790, but then-President George Washington had an excuse for not making immediate comment on it: His cell phone wasn’t charged. There’s no excuse for Bush not knowing. His handlers had to know. His handlers—who seem to be penisheads in their own right but at least cognizant of what constitutes both good and devastating PR—should have insisted that Bush cancel this appearance and act like a president.

When you look at that picture, you see a man who’s either clueless or uncaring and probably both. You see a man, a leader in name only, who is not responding to the destruction of a major American seaport.

No one expected Bush to go to New Orleans and plug the breach himself, or distribute food and water, or take charge of a triage unit. All he had to do was put down the goddamned guitar and take something seriously.

He didn’t. And I’m not sure he’s knows he’s supposed to. He does have to get on with his life, after all.

Bill Shanks and the Cosmic Finger of Death

2005-09-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the fanatics were out in full force. A Louisiana pastor named Bill Shanks said the devastation in New Orleans was God’s way of wiping out the rampant sin in the city, including but not limited to abortion, Mardi Gras, voodoo, and a six-day gay pride event called Southern Decadence. The Columbia Christians for Life claimed that a satellite photo of Katrina resembled a six-week-old fetus, and drew the logical conclusion that God was wreaking vengeance on New Orleans’ abortion clinics. And, of course, numerous folks have thanked God for his mercy in sparing them while their neighbors down the road got whacked.

Come to think of it, there’s one thing all these people have in common. They’re alive.

The people who lost their lives in the hurricane and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans had no response. Were they in a position to comment, I suspect they might say “But I’ve never had an abortion,” “But I don’t practice voodoo,” or “But I’ve never attended a six-day gay pride event.”

I doubt if that’s even crossed Bill Shanks’ little mind. To Bill and his self-righteous brethren, if you happen to get caught in God’s crossfire, then it’s tough luck, amigo. I’m still amazed that the same people who believe in an omniscient, omnipotent god don’t see how incompetent he is when it comes to wiping out these alleged sinners. Where are the lightning bolts? Where is the cosmic finger of death? Where’s the planning?

If Bill Shanks’ god was so upset at Southern Decadence, he could have dropped a meteor on New Orleans in the middle of that event. But no, the supreme all-knowing master of the universe instead decides to kill 10,000 poor people and hope the sinful survivors get the message. This is truly an example of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. “I killed who?” said Katrina/God in a rare interview. “Well, shoot, that wasn’t the idea at all.”

The Columbia Christians for Life are every bit as delusional as Shanks, but in a different way. Their god is a surrealist artist who takes the time to shape invisible atmospheric elements so they’ll sort of appear to sort of look sort of like a six-week-old fetus in satellite photos. This is truly a god that needs a hobby, a god that doesn’t see the value in keeping it simple.

Let’s face it. You know why the Joker kept getting caught by Batman? Because he was too damn concerned about decorating his hideout and providing matching sweatshirts for his henchmen. He’d have been a much more successful criminal if he had lost the clown makeup and the pink suit and started committing his crimes on the sly. Same deal with the Columbia Christians’ god. If he’s got something to say, let him say it without fancying it up.

I'm not holding my breath on that one.

And by the way, I saw the satellite photo in question, and I didn’t see a six-week-old fetus. I did, however, see Pac-Man and that little dog from the Pooch Café comic strip.

Basically, I wish people like Bill Shanks and his ilk would stop seeing every destructive force of nature as divine vengeance. We know what causes hurricanes, and we know they don’t chase down gay people and voodoo practitioners. They do leave people homeless and hungry, though, so if Shanks wants to do some good in the world, maybe he can organize a food and clothing drive. Crazy idea, huh?

Throw On Another Blanket Generalization

2005-08-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I was surfing around at HuffingtonPost.com, a relatively new site that combines news items, liberal columnists, and the unmoderated commentary of any knucklehead with a keyboard (though of course that last feature is, frankly, sort of what makes the internet the internet), and I fell into a debate about who had the greater claim to morality, Republicans or Democrats.

A poster calling himself The Christian Right summed up his feelings about those of us on the left, to wit: "You must come to the realization that you are irresponsible, you have no self discipline, you have no shame, you have no moral compass, you have no objectivity, you have no plan, you are not forward thinking, you have little value in a civilized society, you reside on the lunatic fringe, and you cannot legitimately defend that position."

Golly. What bad people we must be. (But you know, as misguided as this person is, at least he used the serial comma.)

I couldn't help responding to this Christian Right person, because I think part of the problem we liberals have right now is that we don't make enough effort to counter such lunacy. Even when we're maligned by people like this, people who are blinded by ideology, people who feel marginalized, we should still let others know that his opinions and the truth are miles apart.

Here's how I responded.

* * *

The Christian Right is not right at all.

He says "you're irresponsible," but I'll bet he hates Planned Parenthood, which teaches people how to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

He says "you have no self-discipline," but fails to notice that his blanket generalization is a classic example of undisciplined, immature thought.

He says "you have no shame," but supports the most shameful leader in our country's history, a president who openly lies about his reasons for sending young Americans to their death.

He says "you have no moral compass," but pridefully believes his moral compass is good enough for everyone to use.

He says "you have no objectivity," yet he can justify one president's lies over another's, because that president believes the way he does.

He says "you have no plan," but has no interest in considering a plan that would improve living conditions for the poor and middle-class, no interest in considering a plan that doesn't conform to his exceedingly narrow and superstitious worldview.

He says "you're not forward-thinking," simply because our thinking is aimed at avoiding Armageddon, not inviting it.

He says "you have little value in a civilized society," without regard to the fact that progressive thinkers are the ones that advanced the cause of civil rights, ended slavery, enfranchised women, and guaranteed his right to practice the religion of his choice.

He says "you reside on the lunatic fringe," which, whether it's true or not, is a far more moral place to reside than among the self-righteous and narrow-minded.

He says "you cannot legitimately defend that position," but I can, and I have, and so can everyone in this blog who believes in American ideals. There's room for everyone in our tent, Christian Right, but you cannot in good conscience say the same.

* * *

I might have gotten a little heavy-handed toward the end, but hey, the good news is that I suddenly remembered I have a blog. Perhaps I won't go five months between posts next time.