Bill Maher  wants Obama to be a “Real Black” President:

Bill Maher: “I thought when we elected a black president, we were going to get a black president. You know, this [BP oil spill] is where I want a real black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so you can see the gun in his pants. That’s — (in black man voice) ‘we’ve got a motherfu**ing problem here?’ Shoot somebody in the foot.”

Shall we chalk this up to racism?

Or maybe he was just falling-over drunk, like a “real Irish” comic?

Because they claim they want to bag any reconstruction at Fort Snelling.

Oh, yeah – there’s going to be a leftist romp and play fest at Fort Snelling tomorrow, as the usual plethora of lefty shrieking groups protest dog’s breakfast of issues, from the money spent on restoring the ageing Fort to the Arizona Illegal Immigration law.

Just remember, the next time some lefty gets the victorian vapours about Tea Party rhetoric, to ask your lefty friends what they think of this:

I’m trying to think of the whinging that would ensue if any Tea Partier showed an armed party storming, say, the Department of Health and Human Services.

And I’m pondering the irony of lefties and pro-illegal-immigration ninnies protesting in league with the Dakota, who would know the dangers of allowing illegal immigration more than most.

I shoot because shooting is fun; it’s the best stress relief one can get alone; it’s the best way there is to ensure ones’ safety from violent crime.

But why am I a Second Amendment activist?  The honest truth – it’s exactly, precisely because of displays like this (safe for work, albeit crude and deeply stupid); it’s Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who was asked whether his city, ravaged by gang gun violence, is benefitting from having the strictest gun controls in the US:

Is Chicago’s idiotic (and possibly soon-to-be-unconstitutional) gun ban effective?

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

I am a second amendment activist because it’s a thumb in the eye of authoritarian scumbags like Richard Daley.

(Via Ed)

Perhaps Woody was just merely testing a plot to the sequel?

Woody Allen has a strange take on the democracy that allowed him to become rich and famous.

The “Scoop” director said it would be a cool idea for President Barack Obama to be dictator for for a few years.

Why?

So he could get things done without all the hassle of opposing views getting in the way.

In an interview published by Spanish language newspaper La Vanguardia (that we translated), Allen says “I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him.”

But wait – there’s more!

The director said “it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

In other news, Allen revealed that he has redubbed Obama’s inaugural address and centered it around a secret egg salad recipe.

President refers to Tea Partiers as “Tea-Baggers”:

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

I guess this means calling half of America “bitter gun-clinging Jesus Freaks” wasn’t an out-of-context mis-step?

Question for my liberal readers:  Does that fact that I’m writing about this make me racist, seditionary, or merely extremist?

Florida’s political version of Hernán Cortés burns his last ship back to the GOP as he tries to chart an independent path to Washington.

It was barely more than 12 months ago that Florida Governor Charlie Crist found himself basking the media limelight.  The politically-saavy governor of a swing state, Crist quickly positioned himself not only as the prohibitive frontrunner for Florida’s open U.S. Senate seat but as a presidential dark horse.  That one year later Crist is bolting the GOP while the party’s Senate leadership that had once backed him are now suing to drain his campaign coffers speaks volumes of how fickle political fortunes can be.

Much has been already written of Crist’s numerous campaign missteps and penchent to spend his dwindling political capital faster than a crack addict with a gold card.  Whether it was Crist’s ill-advised embrace of Obama and the stimulus (both literally and figuratively), his veto of a Republican-backed education reform bill or his Roger Muddesque inability to state why he was running for Senate, Crist’s once-famous campaign aptitude seemed to disappear into a Brigadoon-like political mist.  As NRO‘s Jim Geraghty notes:

You don’t get to be governor of Florida without a halfway decent sense of political judgment, and in fact that’s supposed to be one of Crist’s best qualities: He may not be the boldest or most principled politician, but he’s always been popular and displayed a knack for staying on the right side of Florida voters…

Yet during this election cycle, Crist’s keen judgment disappeared and was replaced with the bumbling instincts of some of our most legendary modern political blunderers…Almost every key decision made by Crist and his campaign since entering the Senate race has backfired.

Less has been written about Crist’s path forward.  While a few polls have shown Crist leading within the margin of error in an electoral ménage à trois with Marco Rubio and Kendrick Meeks, the political math remains at a calculus level of difficultly.  Crist would need a bare majority of independents plus nearly 1/3rd of all Republicans and Democrats to secure a plurality.  Just a political combination isn’t impossible but nevertheless rare among candidates not prone to wearing spandex and feather boas.  Nor is Crist aided when 52% of independents claim to be unwilling to vote for him under any circumstances, despite a 60% approval rating among the unaffiliated.

Undoubtably, an independent bid was Charlie Crist’s best chance of being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010.  Unwilling or believing himself to be unable to seek the Republican nomination in 2012 against Sen. Bill Nelson, Crist has bet his once rising star on an all-or-noting Cortés-like strategy.  But left unanswered in his decision is how Crist believes he’ll be welcomed in Washington should he win. 

Should Republicans win the Senate seats they lead in current polling, the GOP would pick up 8 seats this November.  With California and Washington creeping into contention as well, one seat could easily tip the balance of power come January 2011.  Such narrow margins will bring tremendous political advantage to any independent Senate candidate.  Indeed, should the GOP come up one seat short, expect massive political pressure to be applied to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to switch caucus allegiances.  Unable to afford a credible candidate to his right in what will likely be an incredibly bitter general election against a well-funded Democratic opponent, Lieberman might be tempted to caucus with the GOP even if his party affiliation remains unchanged.

Crist has little such luxury.  While if victorious he’ll be courted by both left and right given 2010’s likely outcome, neither is likely to embrace him come 2016.  And should control of the Senate shift sharply away from a narrow divide, Crist almost certainly would be discarded, his political leverage gone.  Thus it would appear that Charlie Crist has gambled his entire political career on trying to acheive a single – and perhaps very lonely – term as Florida’s senator.

The story itself  is dog bites man:

Three men who showed up in full Nazi regalia to a hardcore punk show at an Old City bar Friday night were attacked by as many as 50 people on the streets after leaving the venue, according to witnesses and club management…

…

“I guess being on 2nd Street in SS uniforms on a Friday night is a way to incite a semi-riot,” [the club owner] said.

But the headline was worth it…:

Concertgoers show the Reich stuff, are beaten by crowd

…as was the lede…:

How did they Nazi this coming?

I mean, I got a yuk over it.

Drunk driver  Mpls. slams into a lightpole outside a Minneapolis police precinct:

The perilous scene took place just outside the department’s Fifth Precinct headquarters at Nicollet Avenue S. and W. 31st Street. A driver slammed into the light pole outside the precinct office at 3:45 a.m.

A second driver – perhaps gawking, perhaps too stewed to know better – happens on the scene:

Sgt. Dudgeon and another officer left their office to investigate the crash, but as Dudgeon circled around the car to see if it contained any passengers, a second driver veered over and hit her.

Sgt. Dudgeon had minor injuries, but was left in a state of high dud…no.  Too easy.

Both drivers are arrested for suspicion of drunk driving, and a grab bag of other charges.

The Twin Cities AFSCME office has not yet issued on a statement on whether the incidents constituted a threat to them.

Ask any parent; teenagers are morons.  Even the supposedly-smart valedictorian ones supposedly bound for the Ivy League; indeed, if teenagers don’t get their stupidity out of the way, they wind up as Robert Gibbs.

But I digress; another group of teenage bobbleheads has incited a racial incident in Jersey:

For the second time in less than a month, a New Jersey teenager has been arrested for allegedly making a racist announcement over a store’s public address system.

The latest incident happened over the weekend at the Whole Foods Market on River Road in Edgewater, according to the Bergen Record.

A 14-year-old girl reportedly grabbed the microphone at the store’s courtesy desk and said, “All blacks leave the store.”

Now, let’s be clear; duh.  Duuuu-uuuuuu-uuuuuh.  If either of my kids did this, I’d kick their asses, and never stop kicking.

Which would, indeed, be a better idea than what actually did happen:

A store employee immediately called the police, according to the Record, and the girl and a 14-year-old boy who was with her were taken into custody moments later.

The girl is reportedly charged with bias intimidation and harassment.

“Intimidation”?  An idiot 14 year old girl?

I’m trying to think if there’s anything about this incident that couldn’t have been better handled by a couple of irate black customers pinning the little scumbags to the wall by their hair and giving them what-for until they were ready to slink away beneath their own shadows.

Now, I’ve never bought into the “the media made me do it” defense – but if you’re a not very bright teenager, you’ve literally spent much of your cognitive life in a society where Eric Cartman and Chris Rock say exactly that kind of thing, and it’s considered edgy comedy.

“But it’s just common sense…” is the response I expect – from people who don’t have teenagers.

At any rate – what does it say about our society that “a couple of kids saying something stupid and racist on an intercom” is “intimidation”?   It’s audible vandalism, of course, and it should be the sort of thing a store could sue the kids over; it damaged the image of WalMart and Whole Foods. 

But am I the only one wondering who would actually call it “indimidation?”

Oprah?  A diva?  Who’da thunk it?

On the appointed day and time, two limos pulled up and Oprah went into Deborah Gore Dean’s shop across Wisconsin Avenue. After waiting 30 minutes, Colasante walked over and found his famous client berating Dean. He told Oprah and her entourage (secretary, pilot, hairdresser, makeup man, guards) that he had other appointments scheduled and she needed to honor her timetable.

“Oprah does not walk,” she told him, referring to herself in the third person. “Who is this guy?” Then she started screaming at her staff, but finally agreed to cross the street and come through his front door.

“I just don’t feel it,” she told him. “The vibrations aren’t right.”

“You’ll feel them once you see the paintings we’ve assembled for you,” he said, pointing up the stairs where Court’s art was hanging.

“Oprah does not do stairs,” she said.

Things went rapidly downhill from there: Colasante’s partner hissed that maybe Oprah could use the exercise (unclear who heard), and she stormed out in a huff without buying anything.

It’s from Kitty Kelley’s new book on Oprah, by the way.  It’s the book you might not be hearing about, because everyone’s scared of Oprah:

No telling what else Kelley has unearthed or who gets to hear it: Her book has an initial printing of 500,000 copies, but she said some major news organizations have refused to schedule interviews for fear of Oprah’s power and displeasure.

Ms. Kelley – obviously, you need to come to the one media organization in America that won’t chicken out in the face of Oprah and her masses of droogs.  Come on the Northern Aliance.  I booked you 26 years ago for your book on Sinatra, so you know perfectly well I’m up for it.

By the way; while I’m sure it’s not a complete reflection of their own characters, much less of larger social trends, I think it’s interesting to note that while the babbling diva and top-flight Obama supporter Oprah acts like 18th-century French royalty, refers to herself in the third person and tramples people, especially “servants”, like crabgrass, Rush Limbaugh leaves 1000% tips and is apparently renowned by waitstaff as the best customer there is.

Again, not drawing broad conclusions.

Honest.

Found in the comments for a Facebook page story about someone someone who intended to, um, evacuate into his ex-girlfriend’s car, but, er, left it in the wrong one:

Sounds like an urban legend. Or possibly a new strategy for Tea Baggers! Throw your soiled Depends diaper into the offices of a Democratic congressman! (And hope you have his real address, not his brother’s!) Then skeedattle post haste on your Rascal (TM) mobility scooter, paid for by Medicare!

 Er, yeah.

With enemies this stupid, who needs friends?

Remember when Republicans were the “dumb” party?

I’m feeling better about November every day.

(more…)

…SITD wasn’t the first to take notice, but we smelled this a mile away.

A federal safety investigation of the Toyota Prius that was involved in a dramatic incident on a California highway last week found a particular pattern of wear on the car’s brakes that raises questions about the driver’s version of the event, three people familiar with the investigation said.

On Monday James Sikes, 61 years old, called 911 and told the operator his blue 2008 Toyota Prius had sped up to more than 90 miles per hour on its own on Interstate 8 near San Diego. He eventually brought the vehicle to a stop after a California Highway patrolman pulled alongside Mr. Sikes and offered help.

During and after the incident, Mr. Sikes said he was using heavy pressure on his brake pedal at high speeds.

But the investigation of the vehicle, carried out jointly by safety officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota engineers, didn’t find signs the brakes had been applied at full force at high speeds over a sustained period of time, the three people familiar with the investigation said.

Multiple sites (ex. Fox News, courtesy Bill C.) are reporting Mr. Sikes is in financial trouble and my have simply been looking to get out of his obligations on the Toyota Prius.

Toyota’s unintended acceleration issue may be real, or it may be a combination of factors which probably include opportunism, a litigious society, and the fact that some people have big feet.

Who knows – it’s probably all of the above. One thing I do know is that if I were behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius (I know, I know, just try to imagine it if you can) and the accelerator seemed to be stuck, the first thing I would do is…

…call 911?

“I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car, and it just did something kind of funny … and it just stuck there,” he said at a news conference outside a Highway Patrol office. “As I was going, I was trying the brakes … and it just kept speeding up.”

[Jim] Sikes said he called 911 for help, and dispatchers talked him through instructions on how he might be able to stop the car. But nothing worked.

…or so he says.

Mr. Sikes, with all due respect, are you trying to tell us that you couldn’t put the car in Neutral, or Park, or turn off the ignition? …but you could pick up your phone and dial 911?

Calling 911 in this situation affords the citizen a calm, cool professional, at the ready to tell you what you already should know, but it also affords said citizen the opportunity to convert what should have been a thirty-second emergency (assuming it was real) into a matter of public record and with a little added drama, a spectacle. On a slow news day, you might find video of your melodrama on every channel and across the interweb.

Bing!

Alerted by emergency dispatchers, a California Highway Patrol officer was able to catch up to Sikes’ Prius and used the patrol car’s public address system to instruct Sikes to apply the brakes and the emergency brake at the same time.

The trooper said after the incident that he could smell the Prius’s brakes burning, even at that high speed.

I smell something too, but it’s not burning brakes.

…when I pee.

Authorities believe Wash. man electrocuted by urinating on downed power line after car crash

Roger Ebert tweeted:

@ebertchicago: How did this Obama/Telepromoter meme get started? Have many Presidents been in less need of one?

I’ll leave the responses to you, gentle reader.  It’s a rare open thread.

Today’s “Worst Olberman In The World” award goes to Keith Olberman.

I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid…

Olberman alone makes Berg’s Seventh Law settled science.

Okay, so I’m not going to make a habit of defending the President but…uhhh, Senator Reid, it already is.

I mean c’mon!

Read that quote.

Las Vegas is the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money…by design!

A city whose mantra is “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas^TM” isn’t aiming to be the wholesome venue where Pa Ingalls brings Ma, Half-Pint and the rest of the clan for a family vacation.

During the president’s town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, he discussed the need to curb spending during tough economic times.  “When times are tough, you tighten your belts,” the president said.

True.

“You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage.

True.

You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

True.

The president’s comments come nearly a year after he criticized companies that received federal money for taking corporate junkets to Las Vegas.

Should Americans not have a problem with that?

“You can’t go take that trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on taxpayers’ dime,

(unless your name is Nancy Pelosi)

” he said at the time. Local business leaders say Nevada tourism suffered last year in part because companies canceled trips to Las Vegas in the wake of the president’s comments.

Or I might respectfully offer another theory…maybe…just maybe…it was because….of a recession…that occurred…oh…give and take…all of last year?!

Not to worry: I think America has figured out that there is a very low correlation between reality and whatever the President says.

Besides…

President Obama is scheduled to visit Las Vegas this month.

…to apologize and find someone to bow to.

UPDATE:

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said during a hastily called news conference that Obama is no friend to Las Vegas and would not be welcomed here if he visits.

“I’ll do everything I can to give him the boot,” Goodman said. “This president is a real slow learner.”

Ed Schulz – who actually is as dumb as the lefty caricature of conservative talk radio – on the importance of fair elections and working together to build a better, more civil society:

“I, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I dunno – if I lived in Massachusetts, I’d trah to vote ten tahms.  I dunno if they’d let me, but I’d chee-yut to keep those bastahds out.  Because that’s exactly what they are”.

No, Ed.  You might have to cheat to win a debate with a lobotomy patient, but I’m afraid it’s possible even Massachusetts Democrats might be more ethical than you.

And Ed?  You are living, breathing proof of Berg’s Seventh Law.

And there’s evidence even you know it:

A stopped clock is right twice a day – and Schultz may see some advantage in looking like the first libtalker to be seen to publicly spit up the koolaid.

…the left would have to invent him.

That is all.

Vegetarians choose not to eat meat for a variety of reasons. Some cite the lower fat and cholesterol and higher fiber on their plates. Others for more emotional reasons: they don’t want to eat anything that smiles back at them. Hypothetically at least.

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham.

George Clooney’s political bent certainly qualifies him as a pig, but I hardly think he looks like one.  Or vice versa.

If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make ’em smell so good when they’re cookin’?

Now scientists (possibly those furlowed in the recent Global Warming controversy) are telling us that vegetables should be off the table too.

we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.

Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.

It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

Sorry, what? I couldn’t hear you, I was trying to bite off a chunk of my laptop battery. I think I chipped a tooth.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

Maybe so, but can they dance?

Plants can scream though. Sort of.

Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication [that means chewing gutter-huggers-JR] — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

So dragon flies can eat delicious caterpillar meat but I can’t?

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive.

If that’s not a bumper sticker yet, it should be.

Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

Well then, why didn’t the Democrats include plants in the health care bill? Don’t they care?

So as you sit down to your bountiful (hopefully) table later this week, have compassion. Remember: you can’t eat animals; you can’t eat plants. Merry Christmas!

While I’ve spent much of the last eight years bagging on former (?) Strib columnist Nick Coleman, it’s not been an unalloyed thing.  When he’s focused on being a city columnist, as opposed to a not-overbright pundit, he writes good stuff; at his best, he’s sort of a “made in Singapore” Studs Terkel. 

Of course, he was rarely at his best; less and less so as the years unwound.  He hit his nadir during the 35W Bridge collapse; he got downsized from the columnist stable shortly thereafter. 

He’s apparently found some sort of work with some sort of think tank.  But I suspect his “downsizing” was more than tad Potemkin; he still appears in the Strib.  Lots.

And it’s just not the same Nick.  I busted him over the summer, parroting MN2020 shrieking points, and not very well at that.  It’s almost like he gets copies of press releases, and just writes in condescending and not very literate insults between the lines.

So what’s Nick up to now?  Well, you be the judge (emphasis added), a week or so ago he turned his keen journalistic senses to what he apparently thought was the key conservative issue of the past few weeks- Obama pre-empting “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”:

I also heard a “Tea Party” supporter on radio claiming that you can tell Obama hates America just by looking at him. All I can tell by looking at him is that his skin color is different than that of every other president. Maybe that’s what the Tea Party person meant.

Ah.  The old “Wing Nutz Are Teh Racist!, based on the off-handed and ill-considered (at best) remark by one person dragged out of context and immortalized by whomever  controls the edit suite” bit.  I hate to say it, but Coleman is making that whole “parrotting MN2020 without thinking” thing look pretty good in retrospect.  He’s now down to parrotting…Keith Olbermann?  Fast Eddie Schultz?  Rachel Maddow?

I was going to leave it at that.  Because I’ve long since learned that any effort I spend fisking Coleman is effort I could have spent…I dunno, itching my elbow?

But this is rich – where by “rich” I really mean “depressing that someone gets paid for writing the kind of duckspeak that’d get ignored on a fourth-rate leftyblog”.

We’ve heard the socialist slur repeatedly from such brilliant students of history as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann (Minnesota’s Poster Girl for Why We Need High School Civics Classes)

Says the guy who is a case study in how badly our system fails our students at science, logic and empirical reasoning.

and that pinnacle of wit and wisdom, Sean Hannity, who is the kind of Irishman my people used to refer to as “Blueshirts.”

“…my people…”

“Your people”, Mr. Coleman, came to America so that they could at long last leave their squalid anscestral squabbling back in the Old Country.  Like most of “our people”, they came to this country so they could escape, transcend and eventually forget the bigotries, hatreds and jealousies of their caste-ridden, incompetent homelands.

So do “your people” proud, and leave your callow IRA references at Ellis Island; “your people” are now a bunch of plush-bottom yahoos who have been “the man” in this country for generations; Among “his people” his father, the former Speaker of the Minnesota House; his little brother Chris is the King George III of Saint Paul; Nick himself is the very Charles Townsend-esque embodiment of “the status quo” in the Twin Cities media.

Blueshirt this.

I’m not sure if it’s really a “barometer” measuring howPresident Obama is doing on the far left – but h if the President is losing Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, it could be fairly said he’s got a problem among the friendlies.

Pallmeyer starts by repeating what is to us on the right the absurdly obvious:

“The Nobel Committee gambled and lost,” says Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, assistant professor of justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas. President Obama’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was “a defense of war and militarism. … With this speech the Nobel Committee’s gamble became an embarrassment.”

Pallmeyer’s right – although the embarassment really happened the moment they picked a brand new president for the “peace” prize simply for not being George W. Bush.

But Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer isn’t one for such distinctions.  He’s a professor at Saint Thomas, in the “peace studies” department; if there’s an academic discipline with less actual rigor or merit than “peace studies”, I’m at a loss to think of it.

Nelson-Pallmeyer speculated that “when [members of the Nobel Committee] made their decision they recognized how the stars had alligned in one of those rare moments in history in which crises converge with opportunities.”

I was going to write something here, but it’d just repeat my previous paragraph.

I’ve long had a theory:  In the 1980’s, the CIA infiltrated the gangs of Los Angeles and New York, and convinced them that holding handguns and even bigger arms sideways was not just “cool”, but proper shooting technique:

It must have worked much better than most government conspiracies; by 1985, a Minneapolis cop told me that the safest place to be in a gang fight was the target; unfortunately, the most dangerous place was 45 degrees off the line of fire, in your living room, watching TV.  This was grimly true, of course; there’d just been a gangbanger shootout in North Minneapolis where a half dozen urban yoots stood on each side of the street and blazed away at each other, hurting none of their enemies but paralyzing a boy in a second-floor apartment half a block off the line of fire.

Anyway – the John Woo grip has saved the life of a policeman, albeit at the cost of the Woo-gripping gunman:

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

When scam artist Raymond “Ready” Martinez held the MAC-10-style gun parallel to the ground, it caused the ejecting shells to “stovepipe,” or get caught vertically in the chamber, the sources said. The gun is designed to be fired only in a vertical position.

If he had fired the weapon — which had another 27 rounds in the clip — properly, Martinez, 25, could have killed the hero cop pursuing him and countless others walking through the swarming tourist mecca Thursday morning.

The NYPD owes at least one life to rap videos, and John Woo’s oeuvre.

A toast…

Wonder if this conspiracy is going to get on the Jesse Ventura show?

To:  Twenty-Something Pantload

From: Mitch Berg – Bike Sympathizer

Re:  Next Time, You Get An Elbow In The Choppers

You know who you are.  You’re a twentysomething hYpStR.  You ride one of those trendy retro three-speed bikes with the cargo racks, in which you’d stuffed your backpack, some books, and (I have no doubt) your IPhone.

You were riding up Wabasha last night.

Now, I’m sympathetic; I usually ride up Wabasha at the end of the day, when I’m biking home.  It’s that existential near-death experience that kicks off my ride home by making me appreciate life so much more.

But there’s a difference, here.  I ride on the street.

I first saw you as I was walking up the sidewalk to the bus stop, as the cold was settling in.  I heard a voice behind me, curtly demanding “excuse me”.  I turned around; you were whisking past someone walking on the sidewalk behind me. You sailed past me, crowding me toward the wall just a little bit.  You pedalled up the sidewalk, brushing a lady who was carrying a baby, as you tried to thread the needle between people getting on the 3 bus.  You seemed – by your speed, as well as your “arrogant enough to have been a Loring Cafe waiter during their heyday” – to think it was our job to get out of your way.

Just saying; next time you try that, make sure Dadders is still paying your dental insurance.

That is all.

Michael Moore descends into madness in this open letter to the President re his Afganistan speech tonight:

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point [at 8PM this evening] and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you.

In other words, “we elected you for the pork; forget about all that “defending the nation” BS, Mr. President.

Of course, Moore is being just as disingenuous and selective and context-challenged here as he’s been in every single one of his movies.  And who’s busted him on it?  That noted right-wing tool Crooks and Liars:

In an open letter to President Obama, Moore on Monday seems to have forgotten candidate Obama’s aggressive stance towards Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

But at almost every turn in the 2008 campaign (for example, starting at about the 17:30 mark in the video above), it was Barack Obama who pledged to “finish the fight in Afghanistan.”

In August 2007, as you’ll recall, Senator Obama received a hellstorm of criticism for his statements regarding attacking Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. As part of a broad – and forceful – foreign policy speech on August 1, Obama rightly took the Bush administration to task for the failure of its “no safe havens” doctrine in Pakistan. Regarding the Al Qaeda sanctuary safely nestled along the Afghan border, Obama declared:

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

In other words, Obama has always – at least, in front of politically-mixed crowds – parroted the lefty conventional wisdom that while Iraq was wrong wrong wrong, Afghanistan, the “Real War”, was right right right.

But facts have always been stupid things to Michael Moore.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do.

Put another way, Moore would have Obama fire the guy who he hired to replace the first guy he fired. 

Which may be is the way the prima-donna Moore runs his production company, but it’s really not good leadership.

Of course, everything Moore doesn’t know about leadership is matched by his ignorance of history:

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

It wasn’t “the Soviet generals’ idea”, and it wasn’t anywhere close to a dispositive nail in the USSR’s coffin; they absorbed 25 million dead in World War Two, and murdered at least 40 million of their own on top of that, and that led them to the peak, not nadir, of their power.  It wasn’t Afghanistan that led to the USSR’s fall; it was contemporaneous political changes the regime had to adopt to try, and eventually fail, to survive in the face of Reagan’s aggressive containment.

Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number.

[MOORE’S LEGIONS OF FORMER EMPLOYEES:  “Then you must have his Yahoo IM Chat handle, you tyrannical jagoff”]

But the Soviet reference is fully appropriate – because although this fisking has gone on a bit already, it’s really just a tangent.  The real meat – or, given the subject matter, suet – of this post follows. 

Moore:

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

“The haters”.

My high school history teacher, a Vietnam-era veteran, noted that one of the most important things he learned in basic and infantry training was that the enemy was not, in fact, human.  He was a “Gook”, a “Slope”, or whatever it took to believe that you weren’t really shooting, bayonetting, grenading or shelling a human, but a not-quite-human caricature embodying everything you were trying to fight.

In the thirties, when Stalin wanted to soften society up for a purge, his PR minions – sort of the 1930’s versions of “Media Matters” and the “Center for “Independent” Media” – would popularize a simple, 1-2 syllable, endlessly-repeatable terms to refer to those to be purged.  Not specifically, as a very general rule, although Stalin did purge plenty of specific people and groups. 

But during the purges of the ’30s, when Stalin’s paranoid imagination told him that his economic plans were being sabotaged, he sent his minions far and wide denouncing “wreckers” – people who were ostensibly sabotaging the Soviet economy in ways big and small.  The idea, of course, wasn’t to actually find people who were throwing monkey-wrenches into turbine assemblies or pouring sugar into diesel tanks.  The idea was to have an instant, memorable, chantable term to use as a cover for every abuse they were ready to inflict.  And so Stalin and his minions denounced as “wreckers” everyone who got in his way; it wasn’t that he needed help dehumanizing his opponents – but it certainly made it easier for the rest of society to go along with it.

Moore is onto the same thing, here (emphasis added):

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

Leaving aside that the independents – who were the ones that elected him – will be re-hristened as “haters” for commiting the apostasy of forsaking “The One”, do you see what Moore is doing here?

One facile, hate-enabling, defamatory catch phrase after another.  Those of us who dissent from Obama aren’t people who disagree; we “hate” him. 

So overwrought with hatred for “haters” is Jabba The Mike that he forgets exactly who he, himself, is:

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights,

Really, Jabba?  You endured this?  Your “rights” were “suspended?”

As bad as things were for the GOP from 2004 through Obama’s election, I could always give thanks for one thing; Michael Moore was not on my side.