A Slight Delay

I received an email a couple of days ago. The message in this disturbing missive: “Only YOU can save Christmas!”

Dammit. It was bad enough when only I could prevent forest fires.

The email comes courtesy of an outfit calling itself Heading to Heaven. They’ve nicked a page out of the Bill O’Reilly playbook and decided that Christmas is under attack by secularists, or progressives, or JC Penney or someone. And how do you save Christmas? By spending a buck ninety-eight on a cheap pin that says, “Keeping Christ in Christmas.” This is a rare opportunity since, according to their website, “Unfortunately, we only ordered a limited print of 1 million buttons.” So, only a million buttons at $1.98 a pop. Only two million bucks. They apparently asked themselves, “WWJD?” and come back with the answer that Jesus would’ve turned the situation into an opportunity for monetary gain, camels and needles’ eyes be damned.

(more…)

Yet again, I’m going to be fashionably late getting this out, but it’s been sticking in my craw for a little while now, so here goes nothing.

For all the attention paid to the back-and-forth over healthcare, our ongoing difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy that’s still apparently built on feet of clay, and a myriad of other issues, the one thing that’s really beginning to piss me off is the lack of anything resembling intelligent debate coming from the Right. It isn’t as though the proposals currently being floated to resolve any of these problems are so perfect as to not need, or deserve, thorough debate. But what we’ve gotten instead is more smoke than substance. Rather than disrupting, trying to pre-empt, or attempting to shut down, the debate, I would much sooner see something approaching concrete and realistic proposals.

What we’ve gotten instead is… this: Glenn Beck informing people that “Obama has a hatred of white people, of white culture.”

The question is, what “white culture”? I think it’s idiotic to talk about a singular, monolithic “white culture” in the same way I think it’s pretty dumb to put a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton out front as a “black leader.” For all the complaints from the right about multiculturalism, the plain truth is that the United States has, from its earliest times, been multicultural. It isn’t just differences in skin color that create identity; even people who self-identify as Americans without any kind of hyphenated modifier being involved will generally acknowledge that they’re not rooted in some nebulous white-ness, but in a specific set of identifiers. Their ancestry comes from Ireland, Poland, Germany, what-have-you, and while people leave the physical geography behind them, they invariably bring something of the psychological geography—language, cuisine, customs, folkways—with them when they emigrate. (more…)

Those of you who contributed so generously last year to the floating hospital have probably wondered what became of the money. I was speaking on this subject only last week at our up-town branch, and, after the meeting, a dear little old lady, dressed all in lavendar, came up on the platform, and, laying her hand on my arm, said: “Mr. So-and-so (calling me by name) Mr. So-and-so, what the hell did you do with all the money we gave you last year?” Well, I just laughed and pushed her off the platform, but it has occurred to the committee that perhaps some of you, like that little old lady, would be interested in knowing the disposition of the funds. –Robert Benchley, from “The Treasurer’s Report,” 1928.

Every time someone mentions the bailout lately, this quotation’s the first thing that comes to mind. I can’t help it, especially since nobody knows where in the hell the money’s gone, or is going.

Could we try asking our bankers? I’m not talking about the teller at your local CitiBank; what I’d love to do, instead, is to sit the CEO, CFO, and whatever other CO’s we can muster down in front of a town hall meeting. Or better still, a series of town hall meetings, from one end of the country to the other. Let anyone who’d like to do so grill the living hell out of their banker of choice. It’d make for great television, and would probably also be the first time PollStar showed a group of wayward businessmen selling more tickets than Bruce Springsteen.

I bring this up for a simple reason. Since the first disbursement of Federal aid went to the banks, various and sundry media outlets have tried to figure out where the money’s going. It’s been hard going, since nobody who’s received funds seems to want to say what, exactly, they’ve done with all that money. We’ve heard of AIG’s cries of poverty drowned out by the shouts of joy at their company party, plus the usual round of bonus payouts, mergers, and acquisitions. Before long, we’ll need a bailout from the bailout…

On November 4, voters across the country elected Barack Obama president by a margin that, if not overwhelming, was very nearly so. The crowning irony of that occasion–seen by many (rightly, I think) as a vindication of the long struggle for civil rights in this country–is that many of those same voters chose to disenfranchise one part of the population at precisely the same time they were elevating another.

And it’s not as though you could conceivably argue that they didn’t know what they were doing. Unlike the 2000 election fiasco, where Florida voters who intended to vote for Al Gore may instead have ended up voting for Pat Buchanan, there was no chance that anyone who voted Yes on 8 in California could have missed the measure’s intent. First, there was the wording of the proposed constitutional amendment itself, consisting of two sentence-long Sections:

Section One: This measure shall be known and may be cited as the “California Marriage Protection Act.”
Section Two: Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Then there was the summary of the measure, written by the State Attorney General, which was no less succint:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME–SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
*Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.
*Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

And, by the way, we’ve been here before. (more…)

If you’re reading this, you may not be an American. If you’re an Obama supporter, you most certainly–at least by some people’s reckoning–are not. And the top man on the Democratic presidential ticket? Nope, not an American either.

Ignoring the television (and with it, the noise coming from both campaigns at the moment), I’m still hearing plenty of the aforementioned crap. I’ve been informed by someone, in all earnestness and without a trace of irony, that Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian; that he’s a Socialist; and that he’s a very, very dangerous individual who will set the United States down a sure road to ruin. Another friend sends an email that calls Obama “the enemy from within,” and asserts that Obama’s record-breaking election fundraising is coming not from American citizens, but from the Middle East (and no, they don’t mean Ohio).

The commentariat hasn’t helped matters any, asserting repeatedly that Obama is not an American citizen, having been born on foreign soil; he wasn’t, and besides, by that logic, John McCain would not be either. Rush Limbaugh went so far as to suggest that Obama’s visit last week to his grandmother was part of a larger conspiracy to cover up the facts surrounding his birth, and hinted darkly that Obama would silence her, or have her silenced. The bullshit, needless to say, doesn’t stop there. (more…)

“The economy is fundamentally sound.” –Herbert Hoover, 1931
“The fundamentals of our economy are strong.” –John McCain, 2008 
“The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” –John McCain, 2008

Economic box score:

• Unemployment: 6.1%
• Deficit: $502 billion dollars
• United States rate of borrowing: $2 billion per day.
• National debt: $9.6 trillion

Then there’re the casualties: AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns… the list goes on, and that isn’t even to mention the impact on 300+ million Americans. The economy, if it’s not quite down the drain, is clearly circling it.

Or is it? It depends, apparently, on who you ask. An informal poll (that is to say, talking to friends and coworkers; we’re not Zogby over here), or a quick skim of the newspapers, magazines, and television, would seem to indicate to the average person that all isn’t sunshine and roses. But then, John McCain isn’t your average person. (more…)

Here’s a quick way to date yourself: do you remember when MTV actually played music? Like, all day? And from different genres?

Boy, are you old.

I was flipping through the channels last night looking for something to watch, and also wanting to see what channels we actually have now. We just switched from Comcast from DirecTV, so now we can actually watch TV when it rains (we’re moving up in the world, apparently). Anyway, I saw MTV3, and was temporarily filled with joy.

See, MTV3 (or MTV Tres), the last time I saw it, reminded me of MTV as it was back in the day. They played music, and a halfway decent variety of it, at that, provided you didn’t mind it in Spanish (which I don’t). You could turn on the TV and be serenaded by the likes of Maná, Gustavo Cerati, Kinky, Daddy Yankee, Ivy Queen, Julieta Venegas, Cafe Tacuba, and untold numbers of others, some of which I’d never heard of… which, let’s face it, is the best reason to listen to the radio or watch MTV in the first place.

But then my enthusiasm vanished like steam from a bathroom mirror. (more…)

CNN and other outlets are projecting an Iraqi budget surplus of $80 billion dollars over the next four years. A snapshot of things closer to home:

• 482 billion dollar deficit
• 10.6 trillion dollar national debt
• 4,133 dead and 30,490 wounded military personnel
• Average cost of a gallon of gas (regular): $3.90
• Average cost of Iraq/Afghan wars, per day (dollars): 410 million

What’s wrong with this picture? 

Every once in a great while someone accidentally tells the truth in Washington, and that person’s compatriots/handlers then spend the next few news cycles feverishly trying to stuff the cat back in the bag. So it’s hard to feel bad for Charlie Black, who made the simple mistake of speaking the truth on record.

Black, you’ll recall, recently told a reporter that another terrorist attack would materially help John McCain’s chances in the 2008 presidential election. About the only thing that could be said in Black’s defense is that he didn’t say he wished for the attack. The prospect of an attack is chilling enough, though, and the fact that some would see political gain where the rest of us would see a far more grisly aftermath speaks volumes. (more…)

Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, and sometimes a scarf is just a damned scarf.

As if to prove her egalitarian bona fides, Michelle Malkin has added Dunkin Donuts to the list of proposed boycotts of chains for purely idiotic reasons.* Not content with mudslinging over the left and immigration (the columnist, born in the States to parents who were here on visas, believes that children born to noncitizen parents don’t deserve citizenship; when’s she going to revoke hers?) she’s now turned her attention to the purveyor of starchy goodness and cheap, high-octane coffee. She called for like-minded Americans (pause here and let that thought sink in… terrified? Good, let’s continue) to boycott the chain because to her, it appeared as though they decked Rachel Ray out in a black and white scarf that looked like something that Yasir Arafat would wear on casual Fridays.

Call me silly, but I don’t think that Dunkin Donuts is a hotbed of jihadi fervor. I could be wrong here, but it strikes me as difficult to sneak subliminal messages into an Old Fashioned. Or to hide an ayatollah in a jelly donut. I’ve seen scarves like that on mannequins, old ladies, and the occasional snowman. Unless Al-Qaeda is getting very desperate, I don’t think we have anything to fear here. I just can’t see them recruiting Frosty. I hear those Afghan summers are pretty brutal, besides…

Anyway. Perhaps the best response to this whole thing would be to drink Dunkin Donuts coffee by the gallon, and stuff your face with Boston Creme donuts ’til you puke. Better still, the French Crullers. That’d really piss her off.

Postscript: The story’s unhappy ending: the chain caved and pulled the ad.

*see also the Starbucks Mermaid story…