With no apologies to Catalano, the Cardinals nation wants Yankee meat.
Don’t wuss out and lose to the Boston Red Sox to avoid your destiny, pinstripers. You have an appointment in Samarra Busch Stadium.
Cardinals Coalition Update
Buy My Books!
Fill In Your Own Conspiracy Blanks
From various sources including Associated Press and the New York Times (links courtesy of Boots and Sabers and Little Green Footballs respectively), we get the dramatic fevered imaginings of a few:
What was that bulge in the back of President Bush’s suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week?
According to rumors racing across the Internet this week, the rectangular bulge visible between Mr. Bush’s shoulder blades was a radio receiver, getting answers from an offstage counselor into a hidden presidential earpiece. The prime suspect was Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s powerful political adviser.
In the hopes of elevating this line of thought from the absurd to the….well, there’s really nowhere more absurd to go as a serious story. So I will do my best to mock it.
The real reasons for the bulge under Bush’s jacket:
- It’s the wind-up key. Because President Bush, unlike other candidates in this particular race, actually shows up for the job for which taxpayers pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he had to send his wind-up body double to the debate. And it didn’t do to badly. It certainly looked less mechanical than, say, Al Gore.
- Missouri is a right to carry state. Since Bush can’t feel the comfort of cold steel in leather in Washington DC, which he frequently visits on the people’s business unlike his opponent, Bush wore a piece to the debate. He wore it McClane-style so as to not frighten the undecideds in the audience nor to stir controversy with the press should his jacket fall open to display it. Undoubtedly, they would say he was trying to intimidate Kerry and pander to the NRA.
- It’s where the mechanical arms attach.
To manipulate oil prices, to violate the civil rights of every man, woman, and child in the world, to start wars just to watch them burn, and to conduct his other maniacal schemes, Dr. Octobush has devised a set of extra chimp arms to help him do all the evil that he does more easily. They attach via a special clip wired directly into his brain.
- Man, who knew how small devil wings folded up?
Hey, feel free to add your own. We’re on the Internet for crying out loud. It’s all tRuth.
(Note: Capital R truth does in fact differ from capital T truth, but it’s more accommodating to those whose personal feelings differ from the real world, so it’s capital E bEtter.)
Buy My Books!
Dang, You’re Old
As a reminder, Chuck Norris becomes eligible for Social Security next year.
Now, to quote the eminently quotable Eliza, “How do you feel about that?”
Buy My Books!
Talking About My Vaccination
Michelle Malkin asks a question about vaccines:
Why on earth does the U.S. get virtually all of its flu vaccine supply from just two manufacturers?
Short answer: Because the government hasn’t nationalized it yet and left us with a single inefficient source.
Sure, some people might accuse me of wanting children to die; this is not the case. I do, however, not want the remote federal government to use its vast bureaucratic power to do its best to employee middle managers with poli-sci degrees whose goal is to perpetuate their own employment and budgets and save the children, only one of which they’re really good at.
Buy My Books!
No Live Blogging Here
Ladies and gentlemen, I am not live blogging the second presidential debate, although I have watched about twenty minutes of it too much (which, oddly enough, was about twenty minutes). I am voting for Bush, and every time Kerry opens his mouth, I start spitting and cursing and quite frankly, I cannot afford the bib cleaning bills.
I don’t dislike Kerry as a person, because I don’t know him. And although I can snark a bit here among friends, I don’t think he’s necessarily a lying, conniving coward. I have no way of knowing. He’s never started a bar fight and run off while I got pounded.
I do know that almost everything I hear him attack George Bush for, particularly in domestic agenda, blurs the division of government powers laid out by our Constitution and sometimes even blurs the line between government and private life, and if we elect someone who thinks that the President, not the Congress led by the House of Representatives, spends tax dollars or that the only the George Bush’s obstinance and not understanding of economic and human nature principals holds up drug reimportation schemes, well, I guess we’ll be ready to elect someone who’s willing to nationalize industries to protect the children and are ready to dismiss the Congress to save money better spent on unelected bureaucracies run by appointees of Our Glorious Leader.
Some people impugn Bush and his administration for their simple devotion to protecting the country from threats abroad and for enforcing the ill-conceived lawa passed on by the too-comfortable and too-protected-from-the-consequences-of-their-actions legislators. But I, almost alone it seems, recognize that the executive branch of the government, including the President, only has those powers granted by the legislature.
And when I hear a legislator, or an alleged legislator whose absence from the legislature has not matched the legislator’s willingness to forego pay that we taxpayers like to give to practicing members of that hallowed profession, when I hear that pseudo legislator bloviating about the president spending money, or running a deficit, or cutting anything, I….well, I’ve explained what I do.
Hasn’t it occurred to any other voter but me that the entire reason John F. Kerry enjoys his $200,000 income tax bracket is because he’s supposed to be a Senator? Come on, the really rich in America aren’t paying income taxes, they’re paying capital gains, if anything at all. Oh, but Senator Kerry as Supreme Leader would exercise powers not granted to the Constitution to repeal the tax cuts granted to the “richest” Americans, and at the same time he’s lambasting that these people get tax cuts while President Bush hasn’t single-handedly created five million jobs.
Pardon my misunderstanding of economics as a small business owner, but galdern, “Senator” Kerry, but when you’re wanting to soak those who make two hundred thousand dollars a year and “Big Corporations,” who’s going to hire the unemployed? Last I looked in the want ads, I didn’t find many $30,000 a year junior technical writers or $25,000 printers looking to hire five million people. Not even two and a half miillion each. So where do you think the capital is going to come from to keep the economy going?
Oh, I forget, the government will have us all working in its Bureau of Pharmacology, where we can work ten hours a day turning the manual pill-presses to grind out some acetylsalicylic acid to cure any ailment our citizens–who’ll return to the time-honored tradition of dying before they’re sixty–have.
I’d say a pox on ya, Senator Kerry and his idealogical counterparts, but I am still trying real hard to merely pity you instead.
Buy My Books!
I Don’t Think That Will Help
With a story like this one, you knew the misplaced modifiers would be fun. And so they are:
Los Angeles County health officials have sent letters urging producers and directors to use condoms during filming, and vaccinate actors for hepatitis A and B.
Buy My Books!
My Senator, Hard At Work
Looks like Jim Talent, R. MO, is putting his, erm, talents to work on issues of national importance: lighting the Gateway Memorial Arch pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month:
108th CONGRESS 2d Session
AN ACT
To authorize the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, to be illuminated by pink lights in honor of breast cancer awareness month.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. ILLUMINATION OF GATEWAY ARCH IN HONOR OF BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH.
In honor of breast cancer awareness month, the Secretary of the Interior shall authorize the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, to be illuminated by pink lights for a certain period of time in October, to be designated by the Secretary of the Interior.
Passed the Senate October 5, 2004.
Swell. One of my two Senate representatives, purportedly of the small-government party, has wasted his time, his staff’s time, and other taxpayer-funded time not to mention sundry expenses to turn this idea into law.
And that’s before we get to purchasing a large number of pink light bulbs or pink cells and paying maintenance people to implement them…..
But that Jim Talent, he’s sensitive.
Buy My Books!
Truer Words Were Never Spoken
Lileks, from his Newhouse News column yesterday:
The next time America is attacked, people will not want someone who can calculate pi to the 48th digit while reciting Latin maxims on the nature of war. They will want someone who says, “Hulk smash.” Inelegant as the sentiment might be, Hulk-thought works better than Captain Nuance striding into the United Nations waving resolutions and chastening editorials from Le Monde.
I feel clever in likening the purpose of a robust military in foreign policy as the same for criminal punishment:
- Deterrence. Opposing states are afraid to attack, because if they do, they will suffer consequences.
- Retribution. Oh, yes, Hulk smash.
- Rehabilitation. After Hulk smash, Hulk elevate people’s standard of living in the defeated country and leave behind something akin to a republic.
Perhaps I am too simplistic; after all, we’re talking about nation states and not individuals. But one would have to argue that nations are more than the sum of their rulers, and some rulers would disagree, even though Louis XIV’s time has passed. Some rulers just don’t know it yet.
Buy My Books!
Make the Connection
Another internal consistency pointed out, courtesy MfBJN:
Remember this nugget in the first debate between Kerry and Bush?
I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they werenât willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.
How about someone directly contrast this with 1994’s Agreed Framework, wherein the Clinton administration exchanged fuel for promises that North Korea would scrap its nuclear program.
John Kerry wants to apply the unsuccessful Agreed Framework to Iran.
But at least that foreign policy type is consistent. Consistently bad.
But hopefully, perhaps to them, a Republican administration will come along after a short failed Kerry era to take the fall for Iran’s nuclear weapons.
Buy My Books!
We Need A Kitty Door
If only we put a kitty door on the shower enclosure, Ajax would not have to go over the top when he wants to take his daily shower:
Click for AUS (Ajax of Unusual Size)
Life is going to be a lot more interesting when he gets older and starts crashing into things as he tries to make those gravity-defying leaps to the highest points he can find.
Buy My Books!
Mishandled Metaphors
Meanwhile, back in the Seattle Post-Intelligence, columnist Thomas Shapley decries an ad from a candidate for Senate. George Nethercutt, the Republican challenger, includes in the advertisement Senator Patty Murray from this immortal exchange:
“He [Osama bin Laden]’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful,” Murray told them.
Shapley tut tuts the despicable practice of using someone’s words against her and opens a can of whoop metaphor:
By that standard, fighting crime by trying to figure out what drove Gary Ridgway to murder 48 women is excusing him of the crimes. Sorry, that Doberman won’t hunt.
Perhaps Shapely took a Doberman hunting when he went crawling through the brush with John Kerry and a trusty shotgun while deerhunting.
(Link via National Review‘s Kerry Spot.)
Buy My Books!
The Counterfeiting-Proof Fifties Work!
Apparently, the new design has made the fifty dollar bill impossible to counterfeit, so the counterfeiters have had to turn elsewhere.
Apparently, in Georgia, they’re now counterfeiting dimes.
Buy My Books!
Free PUNchline
Red Hair Ring.
Write your own joke around it. Jeez, do I have to do everything?
Buy My Books!
A Sincere Offer of an Honest Trade
Friends, Romans, and those with differing political philosophies: I offer a sincere, heartfelt trade to you.
I shall not extrapolate the vandalism and thuggery of a few criminals galvanized by their support of John Kerry as a property of the whole Democrat party or anyone with liberal sympathies if:
People on the left do not extrapolate the actions of a few vandals and thugs as being an insurgency of the entire populations of Iraq or Afghanistan.
Do we have a deal?
No? I didn’t think so.
Buy My Books!
Here’s a Slogan For You
Sam Adams Light: The taste of NA beer, but with alcohol in it!
Note to the fellows at Tap City: Last two of a sample twelve pack, I swear.
Buy My Books!
Steve Jobs and Michael Dell ARE IN MY HEAD!
Dell Computers and Apple Computers are trying to brainwash me. Here’s how:
In the course of my self-employed Pat-Verbeek-of-Software-Testingdom, I have cause to use an eMac computer and a Dell workstation to test the various and sundry applications that clients pay me innumerable (as I explain to the auditor) dollars to test. My main workstation has a standard keyboard, with the slight rise and the stadium keying layout, where each row rises a little above it. The kind I’ve used since I got my first Packard Bell in 1990. The natural shape one can even remember from Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, and probably even abacuses.
But the eMac has a concave keyboard; that is, it’s curved, with the tops of the keys actually turning toward your fingers like flowers to a star.
But the Dell workstation has a convex keyboard; that is, it’s bowed outward, like its keys are employing centrifugal force to fling my software-destroying fingers into space.
And you might think it’s nothing but some sort of Substance of Style-ing to be neat-o, but friends, I can tell you what they’re doing–they’re doing Pavlovian and Skinner tricks on you, and you’re the dog and chicken. Apple, dog, and Dell, chicken. Pay attention!
You see, if you use one of these freak keyboards as your primary interface with the greater intelligence that is the Internet, Blogosphere, and Return to Zork, you’ll grow accustomed to the unholy shape beneath your fingers. Then, when you’re forced to use a different computer, that is, not a Dell or not a Macintosh, you’ll think it weird, inconvenient, and slightly uncomfortable. All because you’ll have to use a normal keyboard.
So forget Bill Gates; he’s trying to rule the world in an honest, straightforward fashion. Dell and Jobs are conditioning you, man. Rise up! By an old keyboard at a yard sale for a buck and use it. Or you will be a lifelong customer lackey of one of these aforementioned diablolical geniuses.
I beg of you.
(Why, yes, another part of my s.e.P.V.S.T. lifestyle is drinking a lot of coffee, sometimes two or three pots a day. Why do you ask?)
Buy My Books!
The News Eric Mink Avoids
Courtesy of Allahpundit, we find this analysis of current events in Afghanistan courtesy to someone closer than Tucker Boulevard:
Three years after the Taliban were chased out, Kabul has returned to the real world. The streets are jammed with cars, the shops are full of goods. Last year Afghanistan’s economy grew by 30 per cent. The weirdest thing about Kabul under the Taliban used to be its unnatural silence. Now it’s as noisy as anywhere on earth.
This week, though, the move back towards teeming normality has received a perceptible check. The host of restaurants that have opened up here (I remember only three during the Taliban days, all disgusting and utterly predictable as to the menu) are empty.
And:
This is not Baghdad. The Americans and their allies are not unpopular here – except in the east and south of the country, where there has been fighting – and they are regarded as guarantors of Afghanistan’s stability. The West is seen as essentially benign. At the international donors’ conference in Berlin last April, $8 billion in aid and investment was pledged over the next three years: about as much as the Afghan economy can absorb.
There is no equivalent here of the stories you hear every day in Iraq, about people being insulted or mistreated by American soldiers; no suburbs, towns or cities are attacked with the latest American weaponry. If Afghanistan gets safely through this week, it will be a remarkable success story.
Eric Mink probably has enough cosmopolitan stuporhuman skill at seeing through reality to the fantasy beneath to ignore these hopeful signs. Still, I think he would waste even less of my time were he still in the clique that lauds Desperate Housewives for lifting a leg on the American Dream, wittily and intelligentsially, of course.
Buy My Books!
Speaking of Packer Partisanship
Packer Nation, note that St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jeff Gordon has spoken heresy about the most revered Favre:
How can doctors really tell if free-spirited Brett Favre has suffered a concussion?
Summon the Wisconsinquisitors!
Buy My Books!
When Television Critics Attack!
Former television critic and now the peter principled head of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page Eric Mink asks a vital question:
Why would anyone who is concerned about the safety of his family, the security of our country and the fight against Islamist terrorism favor Bush?
Because Bush is responsible for 9/11:
Speaking in Des Moines last month, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that electing the wrong person in November could increase the danger that “we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set. . . .” Bush owns nine months of that mind-set.
It’s not fair to blame Bush for those attacks, although six of the 10 “missed opportunities” to stop them identified by the 9/11 commission occurred on his watch. But it is fair to hold him responsible for the rigidity of his White House bureaucracy and the lackadaisical attitude toward al-Qaida, both of which made America more vulnerable before Sept. 11, 2001.
Is Mink admitting he’s unfair? He starts the second paragraph of that quote with “It’s not fair to blame Bush for those attacks” and puts that admission among:
- “Bush owns nine months of that [pre-9/11] mind-set.”
- “six of the 10 “missed opportunities” to stop them identified by the 9/11 commission occurred on his watch.”
- “it is fair to hold him responsible for the rigidity of his White House bureaucracy and the lackadaisical attitude toward al-Qaida, both of which made America more vulnerable”
In other words, Eric Mink is unfair.
Eric Mink must be a fat lady:
The U.S. military won a stellar victory in Afghanistan in 2001, but Bush failed to follow through on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and, much more important, failed to fulfill commitments to secure and rebuild the country.
Because apparently he feels our commitment to Afghanistan has ended and he’s writing the post-mortem. Notwithstanding the coming elections there, notwithstanding our continuing partnership with the Afghan people, and notwithstanding that Afghanistan will soon surpass its condition before the war if it hasn’t already. Perhaps Mink expected that, two years later, Afghanistan would be a trendy gentrified urban hotspot.
Ah, screw it. I don’t have the tolerance to refute Mink line by line.
Go read it yourself if you have the stomach. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go back to reading Emily Dickinson and demonstrating unabashed Packer partisanship.
Buy My Books!
I Meant Guinness Draught
Republican representatives have forced a vote on Chuck Rangel’s bill to reinstitute a draft and voted it down 402-2. Of course, activists who like the sound of that particular drum when they beat it disagree with what the legislative defeat really means:
But congressional Democrats and activists elsewhere denounced the vote as an empty exercise that trivialized what many Americans believe is a real possibility.
“They have used gamesmanship to give a false sense that there is not going to be a draft. Nobody wants a draft. But if you don’t have the manpower to confront the need, then there is no option,” said Bobby Muller, founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, an international organization that addresses the causes and consequences of war.
Some might think that these fellows are remarkably disingenuous (depending on what that word means–remind me to look it up later–suspect it’s a synonym for pelfiful).
I, on the other hand, applaud the intellectual consistency in the position. Namely, that a legislator’s vote or record of votes has no bearing or reflection on the secret plans or inclinations of that legislator. Especially when a legislator runs for a position in the executive branch.
Because that’s one of the arguments for a Kerry presidency featuring military strength and, you know, that archaic concept of I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States without the asterisk and footnote except where conflicts with the directives of the United Nations as formulated by France, Germany, Ghana, Syria, or China.
(Link seen on Ranting Profs.)
Buy My Books!