Friday, November 10, 2006

Now That's What You Call Some REAL Redneck Noir

Yahoo! News:

A Georgia man was charged Monday with plotting a murder-for-hire scheme after he allegedly recruited a hit man to kill a teen who gave birth to his child.

Authorities say they are considering more charges against Roy Holt, 50, who is accused of offering a hit man a mobile home to kill the 16-year-old girl.

Prosecutors claim Holt agreed to transfer ownership "of one or more mobile homes or real property located in Georgia" to a hit man in exchange for carrying out the slaying.


Perry County Sheriff Keith Kellerman said a tip from an unidentified source last week led to Holt's arrest Friday in the Du Quoin, Ill., home of his sister-in-law.

Kellerman said Holt, who celebrated his 50th birthday in jail Saturday, fled from Georgia to Illinois last week to establish an alibi for when the alleged hit was to occur.

"We received the information that he was trying to hire a hit man last Thursday, and we were able to independently corroborate those allegations," said Kellerman, who claims the unidentified girl was 14 when the sexual relationship began.

"We believe she was going to report the relationship to authorities in Georgia, and that is why he attempted to hire the hit man," he said.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

And Now the Best News of All

I'll admit, Democrats taking the House, the Senate, a bunch of governorships, and nine Statehouses is pretty damn sweet.

But the best news of all is: I finally broke a creative logjam on my novel-after-the-next-one, BREAKING COVER. I was worried for a bit there. It's been a bit like driving in Durham, North Carolina: I could see where I wanted to go, but all the streets seemed to be one way in the wrong direction. (Terrenoire'll know what I mean).

But as always, the words come. Eventually.

Life is good.

Now watch some asshole come along and fuck things up.

R.I.P. Ed Bradley

60 Minutes Correspendent Ed Bradley Dead at 65: Washingtonpost.com:

Damn. I always liked his reports. He was very likable onscreen but knew when to call "bullshit" on someone when they needed it (except for actors and singers, but that's a problem all the 60 Minutes crew seem to have).

Wingnuts Unhinged IV: The Right Wing Hates America

From freerepublic.com

The morbidly obese American people put down their spoons for 5 minutes and hauled their huge butts into voting booth and sacrificed the rest of us to the domination of the sleazy, corrupt, slimy democrats

AND:

Yes, and go to shopping malls to buy sneakers with lights in them.


AND:

You hit it right on the head my friend . The majority of Americans are moron [SIC] in my book . TV watching , basketball brained , lunkheads. They believe the 5:00 news is real . You would NOT believe how dumb most people are here in the NY metro area when it comes to politics and history .

AND:

This country is insane . People we would have hung as traitors at one time are now elected to office.


The Right: they only love America if we vote correctly. Otherwise, they hope we all get nuked.


Rush Limbaugh: I Never Really Liked Those Guys Anyway

Admitted prescription drug abuser Rush Limbaugh, quoted in The Huffington Post:

The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I'm going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don't think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, 'Well, why have you been doing it?' Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country's than the Democrat [sic] Party does and liberalism.

Well, it's easy to scream hypocrisy about this. But let's fess up...isn't this the way a lot of us felt about John Kerry? "He supported the war, and he was a terrible campaigner, but he's all we've got against Bush."


Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Wingnuts Unhinged III

Stop The ACLU:

From this day forward, every soldier that perishes in SW Asia is blood on the hands of Speaker Pelosi until every soldier comes home.

So let me get this straight...none of the deaths up to now has been Bush's fault. However, every combat death from now on is Pelosi's, even though she hasn't even been sworn in.

Right wingers are stupid.

Hmmm.....

November 1, 2006--President Bush says he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency.

November 8. 2006: Rumsfeld resigns. No one's seen Cheney today.

My friend Steve just noted, "well, he said to the end of his presidency..."

So will Bush resign?

Wingnuts Unhinged II

From the right wing blog Little Green Footballs:


I quit. I not going to vote again. It's time I gave up on this political bullshit. I just hope the nuke attack comes soon. Let it be on the East Coast where it belongs.

AND:

expect the next attack

this will be a big one with many casualties

only good news from it is President Pelosi will have to deal with a whole order of magnitude more casualties than Katrina

AND:

I only hope I wake up to Washington a glowing hole in the morning.


That's that right wing "Love for America" talking.

Wingnuts Unhinged

Jonah Goldberg--National Review Online: I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then fly back to Washington in Marine 1. His torso still scratched from the bear's claws, his face bloodied and steaming in the November chill, he should immediately give a press conference at which he throws the bearskin on the front row of the press corps, completely enveloping Helen Thomas, declaring, 'I'm not going anywhere.'

This is it. They've let rage drive them completely insane. Honey, get my gun.

Remember When?

So, George W. Bush won. And he’s done so by a solid margin. The Democrats’ attempted coup managed to last all of eight hours. Not only is the President the first candidate to win a majority of the vote in a Presidential Election since 1988, but he also won more popular votes than any other candidate in history. The Democrats spent months telling us that high voter turnout would equal a win for them but, as it turns out, when 60% of the electorate showed up at the polls it translated into a Bush lead of nearly four million votes. In short: take that, you sons of bitches.

The Democrats are now talking about how this is a signal that Bush should “bring the country together”. Translated into American, this means “now that you’ve won, you should surrender to us.” The hell with that. We’ve won. Winning means not having to say you’re sorry. Bush already brought a majority of Americans together: they voted for him. He doesn’t need to reach out to them: they need to reach out to him.

If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.

That’s the future of the Democratic Party: providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women.

Let’s face a hard truth: this was the bitterest Presidential campaign in living memory. The Democrats and their allies staked everything on the defeat of this President. All of the resources they had accumulated over a generation of struggle were thrown into this battle: and they have failed. Despite all of their tricks, despite all of their lies, the people have rejected them. They mean nothing. They are worth nothing. There’s no point in trying to reach out to them because they won’t be reached out to. We’ve got their teeth clutching the sidewalk and out boot above their head. Now’s the time to curb-stomp the bastards.

Those words were penned by a Republican blogger on November 3d, 2004.

And that's why the arrogant sunsabitches lost, because that is EXACTLY the way they "governed."

"Screw you, we're the majority, sit down and STFU, we'll do whatever we want."

While the urge for payback is going to be powerful, I hope the Dems can learn from that mistake.

28

Holy shit...

More later.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Vote!

Voting is one of the things that sets us apart from the animals. Hedgehogs don't vote. Horses don't vote. Even the Mountain Gorillas, our hairy cousins in the deep forests...do you think they vote? They do not.

Vote. It's the human thing to do.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Jagshemash!

Latest Newspaper Column

Look out, America. Borat's here, spreading controversy in his wake.

In case you're not familiar, "Borat Sagdiyev" is a character played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. "Borat" is supposedly the foremost TV journalist from Kazakhstan, sent here by his country to find out about America.

"Borat" got his start as part of Cohen's HBO series "Da Ali G. Show" in which Cohen, with an absolutely straight face, pays three bizarre characters. In addition to Borat, Cohen plays Ali G., a gold-chain- and-Adidas-wearing British wannabe gangsta rapper of uncertain ethnicity, with probably the weirdest accent ever heard on television. There's also Bruno, the outrageously gay German fashion designer, a guy so far out of the closet that he's out of the house and standing in the driveway.

All three of Cohen's characters share a common thread: They conduct outrageously off-the-wall interviews with people who often don't seem to realize that they're being put on. Ali G's just clueless: He once asked Pat Buchanan about whether Saddam Hussein "ever was able to make dem weapons of mass destruction, or as dey is called, BLTs?"

Another segment had him quizzing a baffled older gentleman about "thousands of Vietnam veterinarians." "Is dere a lot of sick animals in Vietnam?" Ali persisted in asking, as the increasingly exasperated man tried to explain that what he had heard about were Vietnam veterans.

For his part, "Borat" is not only clueless, he's also antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, and generally just a horrible person. The humor, paradoxically, comes from his total innocence in saying really awful things. The relentlessly friendly and outgoing "Borat" doesn't even seem to notice that the smiles on people's faces have suddenly turned frozen.

In one segment, he regaled a nightclub full of baffled cowboys with a "traditional Kazakh folk song" called "Throw the Jew Down the Well." In others, he's told an interviewer from a dating service he was seeking a woman with "plow experience" and led a meeting of Oklahoma City officials in a 10-minute "moment of silence" for the victims of the (fictitious) Tishnik Sheep Massacre.

Obviously, not everyone finds this sort of thing funny. The Kazakh people, for example, seem to have taken umbrage at their portrayal in Cohen's new feature film, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." They seem to be a bit perturbed that Cohen, in character as Borat, lists the national hobbies as "disco dancing, archery, rape, and table tennis."

"I'd kill this impostor on the spot," said Eltai Muptekeyev, a Kazakh interviewed in an Associated Press "man on the street" interview. Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, leader of the opposition National Social-Democratic Party, assured the AP that "Our way of thinking is mostly European," before asserting "If I see [Cohen] I'll hit him in the face." (And this guy's one of the liberals.)

Yes, nothing's better calculated to dispel the impression that you're a nation of violent, ignorant thugs than statements like that. I hear that the Kazakh deputy foreign minister, Rakhat Aliyev, recently invited Sacha Baron Cohen to come and see what Kazakhstan is really like. "He can discover a lot of things," Aliyez promises. Yeah, I'll bet. Considering Kazakshtan's lousy human rights record, I think the safe money is on Cohen declining the invite.

Also jumping on the anti-Borat bandwagon is a human-rights group in Germany called the European Center for Antiziganism Research. The ECAR, as we'll call them, filed a suit in German courts against Cohen for slander and inciting violence against gypsies, since Borat describes himself in the film as a former "gypsy catcher." I fail to understand how this is a slur against gypsies rather than Kazakhs, but then I have no idea what "Antiziganism" is, so what do I know?

One group that really doesn't seem to get it is the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which has also condemned the Borat movie for antisemitism. It apparently means nothing to them that Cohen, an observant Jew himself, is lampooning antisemites by placing the offensive words into the mouth of this absurd buffoon. "The irony may have been lost on some of the audience," the ADL says.

Well, yeah, maybe some of the stupid ones. But I've never found it particularly useful to base my condemnation of a piece of entertainment around the potential reaction of the stupidest person in the room.

Fortunately, some people aren't total idiots. Aigul Abysheva, a student at Almaty University in Kazakhstan, originally was "disgusted" by Borat's attitude toward women. "But then," she said, "I realized he was making fun of ignorant people, no matter where they come from."

Hallelujah. She gets it.

There's an old saying that "the devil cannot abide to be mocked," and that's exactly what the best satire does. It fights humanity's worst impulses by making those who give in to them look stupid and silly.

No one really wants to be a racist buffoon like Borat. Well, maybe George Allen. (Hey, you knew I had to get in at least one dig before the election).

And if Cohen's Borat act goes way over the top -- well, you kind of have to be over the top if you're doing satire these days. Otherwise, people think you're the real thing.