Playoffs!?!?

Early this morning I had a dream that three Colts defensive players died of injuries incurred during a football game conducted in a post-apocalyptic setting. Metaphor or prediction? I'm not sure I want to know. Given the sad state of national security, it's entirely possible...

Anyone following me on Twitter (and you should, because I'm funny) may be aware that the Colts' season ended halfway through the game against the Jets during Week 16, when the front office made it known they have no interest in winning football games (Attention "I believe made-up quotes" Irsay: call Barack Obama, he still has an opening for a "not interested in victory" czar). You may remember 2005, when they gave the starters four weeks off and subsequently played like a junior high team in January. I'd like to thank the league for scheduling this year's ignominous defeat for late on a Saturday night so I can be comfortably numb before kickoff, with a full 24 hours before I need to sober up for work.

So here is my Game With the Name You Can't Use Lest the NFL Sue You for Trademark Infringement prediction: Chargers and Vikings, in a game I won't bother to watch because Phillip Rivers is an even bigger jackass than Bert Faver.

Get the popcorn...

Janeane Garofalo, call your office:

A group of Hispanic religious leaders is planning an anti-gay marriage rally on Sunday outside the Manhattan office of Gov. David Paterson.

...I assume they're doing it on Sunday so they can go directly from church and/or won't have to miss work, but I'm pretty sure a) Paterson won't be there and b) the real fight is in the Assembly.

Me, I'm sick of the whole damn thing. I'd almost say give it to 'em, if I thought it would shut the !$&! bigot gay activists up, but they don't actually want to be married* (other than to mooch health and retirement benefits, which they could accomplish with a civil union, and to join the privileged class of "married people" without having to go through the hassle of convincing your beard it's a good idea). They just want to force everyone to admire and approve of them, probably because their parents don't, and when that doesn't fill the holes in their souls they'll be back throwing hate-filled tantrums for some new "right" we haven't imagined. Why settle for "equality under the law" when you can get money and privilege?

"Equality under the law" is for chumps like myself.

Tangent: Hispanic population of NYC by origin (pdf). I was pretty sure Puerto Ricans were the largest group, and now I know. Dominicans are a strong second. Although wouldn't it be nice if it didn't matter?

* I'm not sure I believe the "it will destroy marriage" argument, since civil marriage has already been destroyed by no-fault divorce and government subsidy of illegitimacy (more fatherless babies = more money, more programs, more attention...). But I agree with the "Canada and the EU ended up getting polygamy based on gay marriage, and polygamy is a feature of totalitarian Third World hellholes" argument, and the "even ancient Greece, where homosexuality was a celebrated part of public life and heterosexual sex was a household chore, held that marriage was between a man and a woman" arguments, and I especially like the "government can't force churches to do things that go against their beliefs" argument. I realize the government won't get out of marriage altogether and allow me equal status under the law, so avoiding Third World societies with state-mandated churches is the next best thing.

Well this is interesting...

The Obama administration is again delaying implementation of a rule that would require government contractors to verify the immigration status of their employees. Contractors won’t have to use the Homeland Security Department’s E-Verify system until June 30, according to a Federal Register notice published Friday.

The really interesting part is there were only six results when I searched Google News for "Obama e-verify", and they were publications dealing solely in government or HR news (I learned about it from an e-mail from NumbersUSA). Either the MSM hasn't picked it up--note it was released on a Friday, for maximum disinterest--or no one thinks it's worth reporting. I'll check back tomorrow.

Plaintiffs in the court case, which includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argue the rule violates the law by requiring government contractors to use a system that is voluntary for other employers.

Haven't we already seen this with TARP? If you want that sweet gubbament money, you gotta dance for it. Granted, these businesses are provided actual products or services for their money, but I'm sure they make custom arrangements to please customers every day.

Plaintiffs also claim the rule is too vague and will force contractors to verify all employees to avoid potential suspension and debarment, which would be a financial hardship.

I'm not sure where they pulled that from, as the law says very plainly that only new hires after the date--now June 30--should be verified. Sneak 'em in now, boys. Businesses shouldn't have to enforce the laws, the laws should be enforced at the border and by police at all levels--but I don't believe this is a real motivation.

Quasi-related, here's a sob story from a mainstream newspaper about a citizen "forced" to seek welfare after her illegally-resident Haitian husband was deported, 16 years after entry. I'm having a hard time mustering up sympathy--she had a choice whether or not she married and had babies with this specific man, she chose to not work while knowing her husband could be deported, etc.

OTOH, I want to know when he "applied for asylum" because if it's taking 16 years to decide asylum cases, that's too long. Since the guy left Haiti, Clinton deposed Aristide, then he came back, then he was permanently exiled, then his friend was elected...the outcome could have been different at any point. I suspect he only applied after an earlier investigation into his status.

"Deportation is no different than any law enforcement action,'' said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. "If people are not self-sufficient as a consequence of a spouse breaking the law, that's not a good reason not to enforce the law.''

(I was going to imagine what our cities would be like if it was, but they're mostly not married...nevermind.)

And finally--Ace writes up this sort of phenomenon as "government program works as designed, media outraged":

Recently, the mother of two [a different mother] went to Family Central to get state assistance for child care. She was denied, she said, because the agency determined she earns too much as a medical assistant.

Yeah, damn shame you can't take advantage of a program designed for people less able to help themselves than you are. She then goes on to bitch about student loans and credit card debt. I can be sympathetic about the loans to a point--Did she take out extra to buy a cool laptop? Did she go to the local community college or a swank private school? Did she really need the degree for her job? If the loans are through the feds, did she ask for a hardship deferment?--but credit cards? That's all on you, honey. You used the items or enjoyed the meals or whatever with the understanding that you'd be expected to pay for them at some point...and now you want other people to pay for your childcare so you can make those payments? Grow up.

Further, note the article doesn't mention any men who can't function after their wives are deported. It would be interesting to know why this is--could they find none? Does the public not feel the same sympathy for men who make dumb choices?

(Full disclosure: I racked up five figures of CC debt traveling and buying stuff when I was in grad school, then spent the next five years being broke and trapped and bored to tears while every spare penny went to paying it off. So I understand how CC debt is crippling, but I also understand it's a choice people make. And my student loans were about the size of a house downpayment--but again, that was my stupid choice. You'll notice I don't complain about repayment, only about the ways government wants to manipulate the housing market and the economy, and tax my wages, ensuring I'll never be able in the future to save up a down payment or find a monthly repayment I can afford on my one--when I have a job, I'm seriously exploring fields that can't be offshored--income. Sigh.)

Yeah, this grinds...

Victor Davis Hanson, on Obama bad-mouthing America to the European heads of state:

A modest suggestion: from now on, every president who wishes to go abroad and review all his lesser citizens' collective past and present sins, with accompanying apologies — to applause from foreigners — must first, in the spirit of New Testament atonement, review his own regrettable transgressions.

...although I have no idea why he thinks America is uniquely "guilty", besides his sheer ignorance (Heather hat Schadenfreude weil sie kann mehr Österreichish sprechen dann Barry*). I guess they don't teach European history in America anymore, but you'd think in the time he was growing up in Indonesia, someone might have mentioned the Dutch.

It's the 21st Century...no one alive in the U.S. today has been a slave, with the following exceptions that "progressives" do not care about: women and children smuggled over the border to work in the sex trade, illegal immigrants trapped in sweatshops to "pay off" their smugglers, and children forced to perform "mandatory volunteerism" to obtain the junior high or high school diploma formerly seen as their free right. So let's get on with it already.

* I make no claims to proper grammar/word order. My respect for people who learn English as an adult--especially if their native language wasn't in the same Indo-European family--has soared since I started trying to learn Deutsch. It physically hurts trying to figure out where to put prepositions when you've done it a different way your whole life...

Yeah, he's a puppet...

I swear, there is no hobby or leisure activity I enjoy that is uninfested by cult followers.

I liked the idea of taking 100 photos of a single object--it's an exercise in seeing the world in fresh ways. This seemed like a simple, escapist, non-Obama way to kill some time and stretch my brain.

Ha! I'm going to have to look at 100 pictures of a !(%*!#! Obama puppet. He's even wagging his finger, Michelle-style. All rights are reserved, or I would totally be using that photo as an illustration...

(I'm doing a tequila bottle I bought four, maybe even five years ago. I like the shape and the color.)

Quilts--no one blogs about quilts anymore, they blog about Obama. Travel--Obama wants to make it prohibitively expensive to Save Teh Planet™. Food--between ObamaCare and the Planetoids, all we're going to be allowed to eat is locally-grown manure-fertilized sprouts. And when baseball starts, guess who's going to be up on jumbotrons across the country on Memorial Day weekend, pretending to give a rat's ass about veterans?

I'm going to stop now before I bust into that bottle and am left with nothing to photograph.

Speaking of hating people

Scheiße! Several of my friends (former friends, more and more--do I really need these people?) are mocking Bush for the following. Now, I hate "compassionate conservatism" as much as anyone--it's not conservatism, to start--but of course they're not poking holes in that, they're still making jokes about Bushitler and Republicans as the soulless offspring of Genghis Khan and Cthulu. As opposed to themselves, bathed in the light of Saint Obama and yet, compassionate as they consider themselves, unwilling to let detainees from Gitmo bunk down on their couch until they can find a job. Hypocrites.

President Bush called for a "compassionate" Republican Party and warned against the GOP becoming "anti-immigrant" in one of his last interviews as president, defending his vision of the party, which has become unpopular among some Republicans.

I'm not "anti-immigrant", I'm anti-illegal alien. I'm also anti-"importing people who can't speak or read English" because we've got cities full of those people already--how is it compassionate to continue to let them sit around collecting checks in squaloriferous subsidized housing while people who weren't born here come in to work and move up in the world? Not very.

What recession?

It was raining when I woke up, so I spent a boring day making various purchases I've been delaying because I hate shopping. I hate Brookfield, but the fabric store there has the biggest selection in the area...so off I went.

Did anyone out there NOT go shopping?? Rush-hour style traffic. Cars lined up to get in the mall, which was packed. Ugh. The parking lot of every restaurant was full. I stopped in the Linens-n-Things to see if I could score a good deal on sheets (the answer was no, only 10% off) and it was packed full of people with carts full of crap*. Then, I had to wait 45 minutes in the line at the cutting table--and they had five women cutting. Mostly Halloween costumes (good luck, ladies!) but a lot of $20/yd stuff for home dec projects...

(I am making a Spider-Man cape for my nephew's birthday. Yes, I know Spider-Man doesn't wear a cape. YOU tell a four-year-old he shouldn't want a Spider-Man cape...)

Oh yeah, the economy's shot and everyone's scared.

I need to replace my 19" tube TV or get a converter box, and I dread even going out looking. Maybe I can put it off until football next year...

(Then I read stuff like this, and...bah. I feel sorry for the 3-year-old, because her parents are jerks, but that's it. I'll give you $100 for the HDTV...)

* I'm not sure what's sadder, that someone manufactures a special bowl to put your garbage in, or that people buy them. How am I supposed to believe the government needs to pay for everybody's HIV tests and abortions and toenail fungus cream when they can afford to buy that sort of crap??

How stupid do they think we are??

Oh, come ON:

Some worry that if Barack Obama loses and there is suspicion of foul play in the election, violence could ensue in cities with large black populations.

There's already suspicion of foul play! And no one with an IQ above room temperature believes those stupid college kids and others bussed into Ohio to vote illegally are casting a ballot for John McCain.

And this just pisses me off:

Shelton, of the NAACP, said he understands the need for police to maintain order. But he is also concerned that some political partisans may point their finger at black voters as potential troublemakers because the Democratic nominee is black.

Shelton said any racial or ethnic group would get angry if they felt disenfranchised because of voting irregularities.

Fair enough. Can non-blacks now be allowed to get angry about real documented "voting irregularities" without being accused of racism and hatred and suppression??

Oh, and in addition to the vote fraud, Barry's taking illegal money. If that bothers you, you're a racist. *insert Dr. Pepper jingle*

WTF!

Brewers play 2 p.m. Wednesday. I have to work ('cause I'm all brainwashed by consumerism--remember, no woman actually works to put a roof over her own head! *mutter*). And the IT dept blocked the play-by-play feed in August.

Thursday looks better; Brewers at 5 and VP debate at 8.



Is it just me, or does it look like Wash U scheduled Bob Uecker's stunt double to fill in for Joe Biden?

Let's just get this election over with

I'm so tired of seeing this catshit (this is the least offensive example, trust me) everytime I read quilt blogs and friends' personal journals and every other email with "FWD:" in the subject line. Can we just move on to the gloating (and/or race riots) and stop the snide crass self-congratulation-on-how-smarter-we-are-than-people-who-go-to-church? It's like water torture, and I'm only two "Sarah Palin is an evil bitch!" conversations away from going Towanda the Avenger.

Full disclosure: I do laugh any time Gary Varvel draws Obama's ears, but that sort of thing is a) a tradition of political cartooning and b) doesn't co-opt, politicize, and vulgarize any treasured American icon. And half the time I still think McCain looks like Statler and Waldorf's long lost brother. Heh.

(I might start asking them how they think Sarah Palin is going to go about impregnating every American woman after she takes the oath of office. Some of these women I'm convinced there's some Oprah-esque wish-fulfillment fantasy going on here. The liberal ideal of government-as-husband, 35-year-old educated white woman version.)

Semi-related, I attended a birthday dinner last night and at my end of the table conversation centered how how much the Midwest sucks. Too much "sprawl", unlike Portland and Seattle which are awesome because no one's allowed to build so it's pretty and you don't have stupid poor people from the small towns trying to move in (I think I outed myself as an evil baby-polar-bear-starving Neanderthal conversative asshole when I accidentally mentioned out loud that building restrictions are a classic example of how government over-regulation hurts poor people). People from small towns are so..."limited." (guilty) Milwaukee has no progressive culture, just backwards mass-commercial crap (really? There's a one-man play about an East German transvestite going on right now at the Rep....). Lake Michigan is small and boring (!!!). And four distinct seasons? That's for unenlightened boors. You have to be seriously unevolved and classless to like winter.

I LOVE winter. And like the Midwest. And enjoy life in Milwaukee (except for the driving down to the inner city and having to swerve to avoid the people who stand in the middle of the street and stare me down, but I'm thinking you get some of that in the poor parts of any major city, no matter how progressive and cultured it is). Stupid, limit, uncultured, unenlightened, boring, worthless small town hick that I am...I can't help wonder why these people are here instead of someplace more to their liking. I suspect its because it costs a lot of money to live in those places...

I don't think I'll be invited to any more dinners after my friend Andy, who organized it, moves to The Cities next month.

(Two of my favorite writers are Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell, can you tell?)

Five kids

I'm increasingly bothered by "Palin can't be VP and raise five kids." Her oldest son is not a kid at home needing to be tucked in every night--he's been in the U.S. Army for a year. He's raised. He's a full-fledged adult. I know it's fashionable for lefties and other bleeding heads to cry that American soldiers are poor frightened children who need to be brought home and covered in bubble wrap, but they're freakin' MEN and WOMEN. This "five kids at home" meme disrespects a lot more people than just working mothers.

I'm sure she'll be thinking about him constantly when he's in Iraq, but other mothers hold down jobs just fine when their sons and daughters are deployed.

I further note that no one told Nancy Pelosi to quit Congress in 2006 when her daughter was pregnant for the first time--they told her to run for Speaker.

Unrelated: I've been trying to wear lipstick, just to see what it's like, but my hair keeps getting caught in it. Then the lipstick goes from my hair to my shirt. Sigh.

Misogynist rant

OK, twice in the past two days I've gotten the same chain e-mail about how Sarah Palin is going to force all pre-menopausal women to get pregnant and give birth if she's the Vice-President. I wish I'd kept the chain e-mails I got in 2000 and 2004 about how George Bush was going to force us all to get pregnant and give birth, just so I could send them as a reply. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now, and their totalitarian fantasies are showing...

For the purposes of "can't we all just get along" I'm assuming the e-mailers are just ignorant of how federal legislation is created and passed, and not knowingly lying to whip up FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) among women who don't actually know how the federal government works. The more I think about it, the more I believe it's the latter. C'mon; the vice-president's duties are to bang the gavel on the first day of the Senate and to go to funerals the president doesn't feel like going to. No one in Congress is going to introduce any bills to outlaw abortion or contraceptives ever; if they do, they won't pass a massively Dem-majority Congress. The "worst" outcome is the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a challenge to Roe v. Wade and deciding that states should be allowed to make their own laws.

You have to be seriously delusional to believe that equates to "forced child-bearing." No one's going to tie you down and shoot you full of sperm unless you ask nicely (and maybe not even then).

I'm annoyed that women who are educated and "smart" and held up as an ideal are either a) really fucking stupid, and/or b) believe other women are really fucking stupid. They act like women aren't capable of making decisions or controlling their own behaviors. It's a sick irony--to "empower" women, you have to believe women are weak and stupid. I'm getting sick of "sharing a chromosome" with these bitches.

OTOH...vicious slander, gossip, and backstabbing to enforce acceptable groupthink is totally a chick thing. If you don't believe me, try disagreeing with a group of women sometime. ;)

Huh?

Some people have said Obama has a "thin résumé." But "thin" is another word for "skinny," which is a slur for "black." Or so it is according to Slate's Timothy Noah, who has found invidious racism in the pages of the venerable Wall Street Journal.

Timothy Noah needs to spend an afternoon sipping his latte at Mayfair Mall...or even spend some time in a room full of white women on diets.

But this, this is the stupidest thing I've read yet:

When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin.

The first and last and most common thing I think about O's appearance is his stupid Dumbo ears. Man's head looks like the "before" section of Howdy Doody or Alfred P. Neuman's cosmetic surgeon's portfolio (please send me to a re-education camp with lots of snow). Mr. Noah, you're projecting your racism on the rest of us, and you need to stop.

And if O doesn't want us to think about his skin, why the bloody hell does he keep talking about it??

Ms. Mellon: Bart, what other paradoxes affect our lives?
Bart: Well... you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.

(...when you say "look at McCain" the first thing I think of are his stupid grin and his stupid white tufts of Statler and Waldorf hair. If the AARP would like to denounce me, I'll be here all week.)

So, the O-man is embarrassed that Americans don't know the language of every country to which they may travel (nevermind that English is the international language of business), and yet he's going to give a speech in Berlin in Englisch. Give me a break.

I'm still trying to figure out how to continue learning German--I was able to buy stamps and order off a menu as long as the responses followed the script in my head--but it really wasn't necessary for a week in Bavaria. Roland, mein Deutsche Freund, says it's pointless to try to become fluent unless I plan to move there, which doesn't interest me, but I enjoy learning stuff (I'd also like to learn how to knit and how to drive a standard transmission, neither of which is necessary to live in the 21st century).

This whole insistance that we should all be learning Spanish instead of continuing to use English as a common language, though, annoys me:

It is profoundly selfish of him to profit from his excellent English, and then to suggest that young Hispanics and other immigrants who have difficulty with English remain in their linguistic ghetto.

Well, yeah. As much as I like to wax faux-indignant about members of my ethnic background being forced to Anglocize and forbidden to publish German newspapers during WWI, I'm so much better off that my actual ancestors learned to speak and write English (imagine how cool I'd be if they'd shown any interest in my education instead of dumping me off at the daycare in my hometown for ten years.). So why wouldn't I want other people to learn English and succeed as well? Seems kinda racist to me to insist they shouldn't...

So where do people who already have high school diplomas go to learn German? Bah.

While I'm ranting: "Normal" Snowfall ISN'T

I can't STAND this sort of shoddy misinformation:

So far this winter Milwaukee has notched 65.7 inches of snow. That's a wee bit over the normal of 33.9 inches.

THERE IS NO NORMAL. "Normal" precipitation as labeled by meterology forecasting companies is merely the average of a sliding 30-year period. So the "normal 33.9 inches" they speak of is the AVERAGE snowfall of years between 1971 and 2000. 5.5 feet very well could be statistically normal for Milwaukee. Yes, it's above an artificially-constrained average, but it's probably not statistically aberrant, especially if you include years before 1971.

Mostly I'm tired of people bitching about it, like they expect Wisconsin to be Alabama in February. It's still a free country for a few months, feel free to leave...