CalJunket

The end? Yes... really? No...

2006-02-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

Just kidding. Yes. This is the end for Caljunket. Or it is almost. I promised Rebecca the last post. The blog of course hasn't been doing much for a while but the blogging goes on for me over at my non-political personal site and at the political team blog the party line. I hope everyone had as good a time reading my political opinions which range from half-baked to boring. I make no pretense to understanding politics better than the average person, just better than BAD.

God bless America, and everywhere else.

The weird thing about misconceptions

2006-01-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

It's a common misconception among conservatives that liberals are for "tolerance" meaning that people should tolerate anything annoying or not just becuase tolerance is a value in and of itself. In fact, when liberals use the word tolerance they almost always mean it in a legal sense: If you want to pass a law stopping something, you have show that there is causes actual harm to you or to some third party.

So when redstate publishes this it really makes you wonder what the hell they think liberals believe. Do they honestly think that liberals aren't supposed to get angry at a violation of their right to privacy? And when they get angry, are they not allowed to make poorly thought out mean spirited jokes which they then write on to protest signs?

Surely we liberals have similar misconceptions about conservatives (though I'm probably not in a very good spot to recognize what they are) but come on: this is a no-brainer.

RedState: Like Mike Savage, but with pictures.

Universal healthcare and my useless hip

2006-01-04T16:42:00.000-08:00

Let me just echo this sarcastic complaint over at Obsidian Wings: I waited 3 months for my operation and filled out enough paperwork to make an Italian bureaucrat proud. Also, my company paid more for the health insurance than it would have paid in taxes for a nationalized system. Universal Health Care is *cheaper* and more efficient than what we have here in the US.

The free-market is much more efficient than government at delivering goods and services in the vast majority of cases. However, a very limited number of goods (like national defense and national health) are more efficiently administered by the government. I know that’s difficult for some people to appreciate, but it’s the truth.

Creepiness from Berkeley's own Yoo

2005-12-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

Via Crooks and Liars, this creepy quote is just creepy. See, it's not the illegal wiretaps per-se, it's the logic being used to justify them.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

When people start argueing that the president can set aside congressional law well... let's just say I start dusting off the word "fascist" and get ready to use it.

Merry Christmas (or Merry Sunday)

2005-12-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

For those readers who celebrate the birth of Jesus during this time, let me wish you all a merry Christmas. Yes, even the conservatives. Its easy to dehumanize and discount those with whom you disagree but we should remember that most everyone involved in politics is so becuase they honestly want to make the world better. Yes, even Bush and Cheny.

As for those who don't celebrate Christmas: I hope your year has been good and that next year is better.

So in general, though my online persona tends to be complainy, let me recognize what I'm greatful for: that we all live in indisputably the best time ever, in the best country ever, and that we have the opportunity to make it better - in personal and public ways.

Should Bush be Impeached?

2005-12-22T22:33:00.000-08:00

I want to tackle this question separate from the question of whether Democrats should push for impeachment in the house and senate. Clearly they should not. Politically, they could hardly go wrong by trying to mainstream the idea. The question of whether Bush *should* be impeached for his actions. Now, as best I can tell, Bush pretty much has no defense for his illegal wire-tapping besides "we told congress we were doing it" which is less a legal defense than a punch line. Personally, if members of congress were sufficiently informed and yet failed to act, they should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Some would argue that an impeachment hearing would be seen as a partisan witch-hunt and would contribute to heightened partisanship. They’re probably right. But that’s the fundamental adversarial basis of our government. Of course a president is going to be impeached by people who are doing it for political gain. Who else is going to do it? Centrists? Moderates?

Ok, now that we’ve all stopped laughing I can continue.

Impeaching George W. Bush would certainly do a lot to reassert the rule of law in our country. Had Bush backed down after being caught it might have been sufficient to censure him, but he has decided to shoot-the-moon and promises to continue breaking the law in the future. How can we accept that? How can we accept the illegal wiretaps going forward? The answer is we can’t. Our elected officials can certainly hold their tongues in acceptance of their limited power in the senate, but liberals should be able to say honestly and without moral ambiguity that when a president abuses the powers given to him, that president is not above the law.

In defense of hating

2005-12-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

(also posted at partyline)

Conservatives have been pretty good about attacking anyone who suggests that Bush is unlikable or a bad person. “Bush hater” is thrown around like a four-letter word. Even when his administration accuses critics of treason or accuses McCain of having an illegitimate child or tries to dismantle the Social Security which keeps millions of old people out of poverty, critics are expected to act as if Bush is personally a nice guy with whom we just happen to have a policy disagreement with.

At the same time, it is respectable to hate Clinton. Hell, I’ve even had liberals look me straight in the eye and say they hated Clinton and found that he was an immoral person. Why? Well, not because Clinton abused his powers as president to illegally spy on citizens, not because he tried to impoverish millions with loaded tax cuts, no, that would be forgivable. Instead of lying about wiretapping citizens Clinton lied about cheating on his wife. And quite honestly, it’s clear which one is more serious and worthy of our scorn.

I do think that conservatives have a better media game that liberals do. It’s not because the “media” is conservatively biased (giving conservatives the awesome power to insert six or seven biased words into a New York Times article which get edited out), it’s because they’ve set up a parallel media with their own radio and television stations. Overtly conservatives, they present people who are willing to attack the opposition in personal ways, thus Kerry is unlikable and stiff. His wife is overbearing and power-hungry. Mrs. Clinton is a Machiavellian and personally dislikable. You get to hear all these on talk radio and to find out that Bush is a jerk who wants dictatorial powers you have to switch over to Air America (and of course, they’re all nut-balls, I know because I heard it on Hannity).

Now, this may not seem like a big deal but I think it is because personal animosity is a great political motivator. Many Americans have no idea of Bush’s policies, they just “know” he’s a nice guy. They have no idea where democrats stand on Iraq but they “know” Democrats are happy when things go bad there. They have no idea what Senator Clinton’s positions are, but they “know” she is conniving and mean. It’s bad enough when conservatives start internalizing this, its even worse when I have to hear liberals complain that “Sadly, I’ll just have to work for Hillary’s election in ‘08”.

It’s important to be *able* to argue honestly that Bush and other popular conservatives are not a nice people. In Bush’s case it’s not just true, it’s politically wise. With Bush’s popularity at an all time low it’s important to start engaging conservatives in the character debate. If we’re lucky we can turn disenchantment with Bush’s policies and leadership ability into an appreciation for the character flaws (and warped sense of morality) that gave rise to them.

Good Cheer

2005-12-09T18:42:00.000-08:00

As part of my de-extremification regimen, I've been reading redstate.org becuase apparently it has a good reputation. A a sign of their goodwill they have even asked their readers to send the ACLU wishings of Merry Christmas!

It's time to wish the ACLU a Merry Christmas! No, not "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" or even "Kabbala Kwanzaa." And certainly not "Xmas." We're talking actual "Merry Christmas" here.

You can now send several E-cards a day to the ACLU as well as send your actual physical Christmas card to their national offices.
Send them some e-Cards. And don't forget to send an actual Christmas card to:

ACLU
"Wishing You Merry Christmas"
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004

With all the acrimony on the blogs today it’s really heartwarming to see people on the right extending a hearty handshake to the left on the issues we can all agree on: The right to proselytize whatever religion we want so long as we don’t use government funds to do it. Sure, the Christians at redstate (for indeed, they seem to assume their readers do not include any Jews, Muslims, Atheists or Agnostics) could have highlighted their disagreement with the ACLU by suggesting their readers entrusted with tax dollars use them to send these messages, but it is Christmas after all.

The Perils of Withdrawal (from Reality)

2005-12-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

(This is being cross-posted from thepartyline)

The problem with Christopher Hitchens’ article is illustrated in its title: “The Perils of Withdrawal”. It contains the deceit that the perils he mentions belong only to the plan advocated by Murtha and those who believe that the American military have done pretty much all they can in Iraq. Since the US will have to withdraw from Iraq within the next two or three years (for political and logistical reasons) the real question is why does Hitchens expect the military headed by Bush and Rumsfeld to mitigate these perils in the time remaining, and is what little we can achieve in Iraq worth the extra risk. An interesting pro-staying-the-course essay would delve into these topics but for the most part this essay is an exercise in name-calling and avoiding the point.

First he asks why those who favor a shorter timeline for Iraq don’t also advocate one for Afghanistan. For one, Afghanistan is much smaller than Iraq so if we managed to get out of Iraq we would have plenty of troops free to continue multilateral defense of Afghanistan. More generally, they are two different countries and I find it is a gross oversimplification to say that the same logic apply to both. Also of course, the nation (especially the media) has a small attention span. If things are going as badly in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq its certainly not making the front page and thus there isn't popular support for a resolution. I have no problem with Democrats choosing their battles.

He then gets to Murtha.

If, as Murtha says, the presence of American troops is the cause not the cure for Islamist "insurgency," then the logic would be the same in all cases: withdrawal at least to a more distant point where (presumably) their presence would not incite mayhem. Leaving aside the question of what geographical point that would be (U.S. ships were targeted in Yemen before 9/11 and in the Jordanian Gulf of Aqaba after it), this argument does have its attractions.

This is flawed logic. Murtha argues that American troops are *a* cause of the insurgency. This is just one of many arguments Murtha makes for his timeline (the main one being that we’ve accomplished all we can). Here Hitchens is implicitly saying that Murtha believes the case for his timeline can rest entirely on this argument.

But there is another deceit here. This whole foray into an Afghan/Iraq metaphor is not argument against Murtha’s logic. Rather, it's just a charge of hypocrisy. There is value in exposing hypocrisy but here it serves to let Hitchens avoid making the negative case against t. (I’ve given up on seeing a positive case by now).

He then throws in some more insult our intelligence:

It was said even then that the attack would fail, because (remember?) if you killed Osama Bin Laden, then a thousand more would rise up to take his place. This line soon mutated into, "No war on Iraq: It's a distraction from the hunt for Bin Laden."

Look at the arguments he pulls to fabricate a charge of hypocrisy. The first “thousand more” argument would be advocated by an anti-Afghan war crazy. The second “distraction” argument is a mainstream one which even I have used. He offers no proof that any individual has actually held both of these positions, much less that many have.*

Finally we get back to Murtha:

There is some evidence that Murtha is wrong and that the Baathists and Bin Ladenists in Iraq are increasingly targeting civilian Iraqis—especially Kurds and Shiites—rather than those coalition forces who enjoy the benefits of "force protection."

This does not contradict Murtha’s claim that the insurgency is fueled in part by US presence. It merely underlines the horrible tragedy which is life in modern Iraq and that the situation is not improving even with US troops there. It is important to note here Hitchens is disagreeing not just with Murtha, but with General Casey who said in a September 2005 Hearing, “the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency.” To me, there is a heavy burden of proof which Hitchens makes no serious attempt to overcome.

The rest of the piece is just a wish list of what Iraq could be without any explanation of why he thinks we are going to get it. He says we should stay till asked by the Iraqi government to go but ignores their request for a timeline.** Murtha has a timeline. Is it to short? Should we pull out in one year or two? I don't really know. The factions in the Iraqi government haven't come to an agreement on the issue either. But instead of choosing and defending a timeline, Hitchens attacks those who have. Not with facts and logic, but with sloppy invective and caricature.

*Another deceit that jumped out at me here was this smear against MoveOn.org:

In spite of furious opposition from the MoveOn left and the Lindbergh right, and endless talk about a "quagmire" from many liberals, most Americans did back the intervention in Afghanistan because of the self-evident link between al-Qaida and the Taliban.

MoveOn did not oppose the war in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t be a member if they did. There has been a strong push by the right and to demonize MoveOn as being radical despite the fact that it focuses on popular liberal causes and explicitly stays out of intra-party disputes. MoveOn does a really good job raising money to counter the right though they may be a little inexperienced at running contests and protests (see the Hitler commercial which MoveOn did not produce but got tarred with anyways). It and groups like it are vital if liberals are ever going to be elected in this country.

** This technically isn't a contrdiction though I find it difficult to see why would should trust Iraq to tell us when to leave but not when they tell us to set a timetable.

Update: I've made some changes to since my first posting but I don't want to keep fiddeling with it. I could modify it endlessly but let me add only that I realize that Hitchens isn't obliged to argue about what I want him to. Still though, I feel my other arguments are valid.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

I'm thankful for many things:

I'm thankful that I get to live in such a great country. I may nitpick the USA from time to time, but that's just how I show my love. Maybe I get that from my mom.
I'm thankful for my good health (a little torn cartilage may literally slow me down but metaphorically I'm still going strong). My operation is in January.
I'm thankful for the fact that I live in an age where expressing my half-baked political views for everyone to see can be accomplished with a few clicks instead of involving ink-stained presses and typesetting.
I'm thankful that I have a job that doesn't bore me to tears. Whenever I get to employ a design pattern, my day is made. More broadly I'm thankful that I am in a position to participate in the economy in a way that doesn't leave me screwed over. (My girl-friend's a public school teacher.)
I'm thankful for everyone fighting for us in Iraq and around the world.
Lastly, I'm thankful to all my friends for putting up with my over the top political views. I mean, come on: Am I for real?

I like Coit tower

2005-11-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

[I]f I'm the president of the United States, ... I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

Bill O'Rielly

My cubicle at work happens to have a great view of Coit Tower and I’m sure that if it blew up I’d have a great view of that too. But I think it’s fair to say it wouldn’t be in favor of any terrorist attack on San Francisco for all the normal reasons and for the reason that my great view of Coit tower is from a building next to the Transamerica Pyramid.

But I didn’t post so I could reiterate my disapproval of terrorism, nor to recap what a jack-ass Bill O’Rielly is, instead I wanted to talk about opposition to military recruitment. The official rational (and the legal basis upon which military recruitment can be limited in schools) is that schools don’t have to allow groups which discriminate on campus and that the Army discriminates unfairly against homosexuals. But lets be honest, this is probably only part of the story.

Personally, I favor allowing military recruitment on campus. But there is a fair amount of hostility toward recruitment from certain (small) sectors on the left. I’m no expert but I assume the bulk of these bans are on college campuses and are supported mostly by wide-eyed college activists. College is wonderful time to experiment. For most politically minded kids, experimenting leads to good old-fashioned idealism; the idea that one cannot possibly contribute to anything which is not 100% pure. This goes for lefties and righties alike though for obvious reasons there are more lefty kids on campus.

Usually idealism just leads to wasting one’s time. I remember learning about how the students of UC Berkeley NOW were going to protest a statue honoring women. According to them, the statue (which was a collage of various women throughout history) objectified women. Similarly, some college Republicans will patiently explain whenever you care to hear how Social Security, Medicare, and the Department of Education, are all actually unconstitutional.

I guess in the eyes of idealists, military recruitment is doubly splotched: one for discriminating, two for having done some not so good things in the past (even if they were under orders). This last one is particularly precient now as the Iraq war wasn’t such a good idea and the more soldiers we recruit for it, the worse it gets. I think it accounts for the banning of recruitment in ideological cities like San Francisco.

There are some other arguments I hear against recruitment. Some say it’s unfair to the poor since it sends them out to die while the rich stay behind. I don’t think that argument is operative since the average soldier is actually wealthier than the average American (probably due to the entry tests which filter out those who went to schools in poor areas).

This post is too long. In conclusion: O’Reilly is an idiot. Anti-recruitment people should get of their high-horse.

Update: BAD (and Rebecca outside the blog) explains that the "ban" isn't a band so much as a statement of intent to ban. I think the arguments still apply since it's still clear that many don't look on recruiting favorably.

Only punks don't vote

2005-11-07T23:06:00.000-08:00

And by "punk" I don't mean a person who listens to a certain genre of edgy rock 'n' roll. I mean a person who's a big loser who wets his bed and lives with his mommy 'til he's 43 years old.

Tuesday is voting day. You have 8 referrenda on which to vote Yay or Nay. Don't know what they are? Look 'em up! Don't know where to vote? Look that up too!

Here's how I'm voting, in case my political persuasions were a mysterious enigma shrouded in a thick cloak of curiosity:

73-78: No
79-80: Yes

That wasn't so hard, was it?

I feel most adamently about 73. Unfortunately, I flew in from DC about an hour ago, and it's 2:14am to me right now, and I'm too tired and grumpy to write a tretise on how the passage of 73 helps no one and only promises to endanger girls' health.

On the bright side, I saw Tim Russert walk back from his lunch break last week! And I got to hang out in the C-SPAN control room and watch "Washington Journal" be produced!

By the way, DC is run by tools. More later.

The Anti-Tax Revolt

2005-11-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

Or should it be called the Anti "Tax revolt" revolt? I don't know. What I do know is that the conservative tax "revolts" of the 70's and 80's which lead to travesties like prop 13 here in California are finally now being re-examined by citizens who appreciate that society costs money. Specifically, Colorado has finally done away with TABOR, an insidious little piece of legislation which limited the amount people could vote to invest in their public infrastructure. That's liberal-speak for limiting taxes.

Of course, the whole idea that the original tax "revolt" was anything other than a plot by Big Business to slip out from their obligations while making America less competitive is kind of silly. I realize that conservatives like to pooh-pooh framing when our side does it but you've got hand it to them for doing such a good job framing the issue. Calling it a "revolt" makes it sound like Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist stormed the Bastille instead of just pushing a plan with tons of money from special business interests.

Sure, when they passed prop 13 they talked a lot about little old ladies not being able to afford their property tax but the end result was that government shifted property taxes from business to people, specifically new home buyers. Since Prop 13 ensured that property taxes could never go up (more than a certain small percentage) once you bought the house, the only way to invest in California was to raise beginning tax rates. And since owning your own home is one of the greatest ways to get out of poverty you can imagine what that's done to our economy. Meanwhile, business unlike people could move out of a building in fractions (first moving out a third of your people, then another third etc) so as to not set off the property reassessment in Prop 13. The end result is the businesses in California don't pay nearly as much property tax as do people.

Hopefully, California can follow Colorado's lead.

A response to RepBast1984 on Fascism

2005-10-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

This response got too big for the comments section:

“why was fascism considered right wing? Because they opposed socialism?”

True, it’s not enough to simply point out that the fascists dismantled unions or opposed socialism. There are many reasons why Fascism is understood to be right-wing. They actively opposed liberalism and communism while forming coalition government with conservatives. Fascists (like Mussolini) were financially supported by wealthy industrialists and landowners. They did so for the same reason that they supported other conservatives: because fascists made were against progressive reforms and were better for the bottom line. The Fascists often had support from the religious community. They did so for the same reasons religious groups support other conservatives: Fascists believed in “traditional values”, and in strengthening the role of faith in the public sphere. Mussolini in particular had the support of the Vatican (which was even more conservatives at the time).

On a more basic level, if you look at the Lakoffian “frames” used by fascists, it’s clear that they were using a “strict father” frame in governing. The believed in strongly in reward and punishment to the exclusion of nurturance. They believed that strength came from the strong leader at the top (one of the more obvious trait of fascism). They idealized the past and framed their goals in those terms. I could go on but I think the analysis is clear.

“If you want to talk Italy, yes Italy was not industrialized untilt he 1930's”

Italy was industrialized as of 1930 at least in the north which is where the fascists had more power. Though it was still poor, industry and trade unions were a powerful political force. In the south (where my family lives) there was little industry and little support for fascism since the rich needed no protection against socialists.

“Italian Fascism is different from Nazism because of the focus on national unity as opposed to racial unity. Racial unity is not Fascism.”

This is just weird. Why is racial unity/ national unity a meaningful distinction when the nations in question are mostly racially homogenous? The Italian fascists were also against Jews and Roma, even the ones that had lived in Italy all their lives. German fascists identified a “greater Germany” which included places like Austria where ethnic Germans lived. Italy identified a “greater Italy” which included lands outside Italy where ethnic Italians lived. This is a distinction without a difference - and I don’t see why you are trying to make it.

“Stability was destroyed, their businesses were confiscated by the state and the fascists brought wars to their countries.”

True, but they hardly campaigned on this. I mean, by that standard, communism is right wing since it didn’t really help the poor.

“Interesting, communism was supposed to be a movement that did not include the agricultural poor.”

You are right in a sense. It is a great historical irony that Marx (and most other communists) assumed that their system would come about because industrialized workers would become exploited and overthrow the existing order. Instead, Communism took hold only in unindustrialized countries like Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam through agricultural peasant revolts.

“As we've found out from this year's electiont he agricultural poor are conservative reactionaries guided by religion.”

This is wrong on a couple levels. 1. Due to mechanization, the US doesn’t really have an agricultural poor anymore. 2. The poor vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. 3. Are you seriously trying to extrapolating the mindset of Chinese peasants from modern day election results? 4. Read a history book, bud. The communists came to power in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam with a powerbase of peasants. Not being industrialized, there was no other political base to launch a revolution from.

“The communists knew that no peasants were going to be involved in a revolution that would provide equity and abolish capital. Peasants who were poor (petty bourgeoisie), just wanted more money. this is why communist regimes fell. They never adhered to Marxist theory, mainly because Marxist theory would work nowhere.”

I have no idea what you are arguing here. Let’s get back to the Fascism.

Update: David Neiwert hits this issue hard in this post:

Of course, as I just got done explaining a little bit ago, the conservative charge that fascism was a leftist phenomenon is a rightist attempt at David Irvingesque historical revisionism. There is not a single serious historian of either fascism or World War II who does not consider it a right-wing phenomenon: its anti-liberalism and anti-socialism were its defining characteristics, regardless of the rhetoric adopted by early adherents and leaders.

This quote really doesn't do him justice though. Read the whole thing.

Liberal Fascism... as opposed to the regular kind

2005-10-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg has come out with a new "book" called Liberal Fascism. To me it indicates the lack of ideas on the right, but more importantly, the lack of intellectual seriousness more than anything else. I mean, how divorced from reality do you have to be to compare Fascism – the international enemy of left-of-center movements of all types, from liberal to socialist to communist, universal friend of conservative movements (for that is who they invariably formed coalition governments with) – to liberalism, the ideology of pluralism? Answer: all the way divorced. That’s how much.

Author David Neiwert explains:

Mussolini was indeed an active socialist at the beginning of his political career. But he was remarkable for shifting his alliances and adjusting his ideology accordingly as he climbed the ladder of power; and by the time he had completed his climb, he was an outspoken and lethal anti-socialist.
Hitler's fascists, somewhat in contrast, only adopted a limited socialist rhetoric as a sop to its efforts to recruit from the working class. Hitler quickly jettisoned these aspects of the party as he obtained power, particularly in forming a ruling coalition with conservative corporatists. There was little doubt that Hitler and the Nazis were devoutly anti-leftist: their Brownshirts made a career of physically attacking socialists and communists wherever they gathered, and the first people sent to the concentration camp at Dachau in 1933-34 were socialist and communist political leaders.

Structurally, the fascists had to be anti-left. Their base was not the unionized workers and intellectual middle class. The Nazis disbanded unions the second they got the chance. They terrorized universities and destroyed the modern art and modern science that they gave rise to. Politically, their reason for being was that the left was a dual threat to society: Communists and Socialists were attacking society, and the flabby liberal government couldn’t keep people safe. This same line played itself out over and over again; in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and even the US (though thankfully the silver shirts didn’t get far in the US). Again and again the fascists came to power in coalition governments with other conservatives. Again and again they were bankrolled by the same corporatists that bankrolled other conservative movements. Again and again they instituted the same policies which left the rich richer and the poor poorer. Again and again they attacked liberal pluralism as “relativism” and tried to replace it with one true faith.

The left has often been accused of comparing Republicans to Fascists. Besides a few stoned out radicals from the 60s, I'm happy to say this is generally false. What’s true is that no respected liberal thinkers have made this accusation seriously (although of course we keep an open mind on the subject if new facts come to light). With this book, Jonah Goldberg, nationally syndicated columnist and an editor-at-large for the National Review, has stepped over the line. If he earnestly made this accusation, then he - and the conservative movement that backs him - is intellectually bankrupt; if he made it dishonestly, then he guilty of the worst kind of smear-campaign. Either way it does not bode well for the seriousness of the conservative movement.

Why are feminists so hot?

2005-10-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

I like to read the feminists blogs becuase well... because I like lefty blogs in general, but also becuase it's great fun to read their rightous ire at popular right-wing mysogynists. Case in point, Amanda Marcotte riffing on Leon Kaas and Harvey Mansfield:

The first and most obvious bit of misogyny is the assertion that the only reason men would get married is because they can't get sex otherwise. In other words, women better fall down on our knees and thank the lord for the pussy or else we'd have no bargaining chip to keep our social superiors from ignoring our foul, disgusting selves completely. To put it bluntly. Truly, the argument that a man has to be bribed into marriage assumes that men cannot find anything else about women to like enough to want to be with women, and on the flip side, it assumes that women are so debased and lowly that we are dying to touch the robes of the sex that would kick us out in the snow if we didn't bribe them with pussy. How the hell love factors into the cold transaction of men tolerating the presence of debased females in their lives in exchange for sex, I couldn't tell you.

The Mansfield/Kass argument is misogynistic on another level as well. O'Rourke characterizes their supposed concern for the well-being of young women as a cover story for them to wring their hands about the evil sluttitude out there, and I definitely think she's right but I also think there's something else going on there, something more sincere. I think on a certain level, these two men cannot conceive that women might have subjective inner lives that would create conflict between them snapping easily into the Mansfield/Kass sexual fantasy of the virginal bride and living their own lives. In other words, since they tend to think of women as objects to project their fantasies onto and nothing much else, they don't see why it would actually be unfulfilling for a woman to live out the fantasies being projected on her.

What's really weird is that men like Kaas and Mansfield manage to exist in our culture at all. I know that there are some pretty conservative areas out there but honestly, who hasn't internalized the idea that premarital sex should be a personal choice for women just like it has always been for men?

I realize that conservatives have been working on vilifying feminists since they started this whole "equality" thing but seriously, who can argue with the basic tenets of Feminism today? Who can argue with equal work for equal pay? Who can argue against sharing parenting duties (or dividing them in some other mutually agreed upon way)? Who can argue against letting women have control over their own sexuality? Who can argue against the idea that guys are responsible for their own sexual behavior and that they don't have to be tricked into marriage with promises of sex? The basic idea of feminism has already been absorbed into our culture (except in parts of Utah), the best conservatives have managed is to try and disassociate feminist social progress from the feminists who made it happen and co-opt it with idiotic anti-feminists like Ann Coulter.

Feminism isn't some PC crap foisted upon America by big brother, it's a choice made by our culture at large by men and women everywhere. Those who think themselves part of some anti-feminist cultural elite vanguard, well... They're free to argue their case if they want, but we've been there, done that, and we've decided we like this much better.

Also, check out the bloggers at Feministe and Feministing. They are very entertaining... and also
hot.

Update: Bonus story! Last time I was in San Diego I was driving somewhere with my little old aunt who grew up in Sicily and immigrated to the US in the 1950's (with two kids in tow). We were talking about women and divorce and she was lamenting her daughter's divorce years earlier. She said something like the following:

You know, in my day, we didn't have divorce... but you know… women also got treated pretty badly too. I hear people complain today saying "Oh I'm tired I've been doing the laundry today". Tired? The machine did it! When I was a girl we had to do it by hand and you had to take the clothes to the town fountain to do it. My dad and brother worked hard every day. Every single day. But when they got home, they were treated like kings! We had to keep working. No, things are better today...

Harriet Miers Withdraws

2005-10-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

Like a mormon having unprotected sex, Harrient Miers has prematurly withdrawn today leaving room for bush to nominate someone else to have a go. I want to write more but really I just wanted to use that metephor.

So will bush nominate a far-right crazy or play the safe course?

John Edwards at UC Berkeley

2005-10-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

From a e-mail by MoveOn.org:

This Tuesday, Senator John Edwards will be at University of Californoa—Berkeley continuing his whirlwind national tour to galvanize young people in the fight against poverty. The last few events have been smash hits, and momentum continues to build.
The Senator has asked us to invite MoveOn members to join him when the "Opportunity Rocks" tour hits Berkeley. Here are the details:
WHO: John Edwards, UC Berkeley students, and MoveOn members from the community
WHERE: UC Berkeley -, Union Ballroom, Pauley Ballroom, Martin Luther King Student Union
WHEN: Tuesday, October 25th. Doors open at 5:30 pm
Seating is limited, so please reserve tickets today at:
http://www.opportunityrocks.org/tour-2005/tickets/moveon/

I have my tickets. See ya there.

Update: Just got back from the speach. John Edwards is certainly a good speaker and what he had to say about poverty in America was very insightful. I may have more thoughts on it later.

Update:I was certainly a good speach. I didn't have a good seat so I couldn't see his face most of the time but I feel like that let me concentrate on his words more.

What was interesting to me was that the whole speech was about increasing opportunity and the idea that we could help. But when he went to list the ways we could alleviate poverty his solutions were things like extending the EITC, mixed income housing, extending Medicare and Medicaid benefits (presumably leading the way for some kind of universal healthcare) and other things which are pretty much things politicians can only do.

Personally I think this is correct. But then that means the best we can do is work in the Democratic party to get people elected *and* try to convince people to join our cause through things like liberal blogs and think tanks. (Hey, like this one!) I don’t know what groups were there after the speech to recruit, but I’m glad liberals are getting away from the hippy-dippy flower power idea that we can fix systematic problems with what basically amounts to non-governmental charity programs.

Blogging spree! (DDT Lies)

2005-10-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

Via Crooked Timber I find this link to a page debunking yet another common anti-liberal myth. This one claims that liberals and environmentalists made DDT illegal and thus contributed to malaria world-wide.

What about the ban on using DDT to fight malaria? There is no such ban. DDT is banned from agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. JTFCSS pretends that there is a ban so they can hang malaria deaths around the neck of environmentalists.

…

Yes, the mosquitoes in Sri Lanka have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn’t work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn’t because of any ban—it was because it stopped being effective. [Members of The World Health Organization] are sending malathion, which will actually be able to kill the mosquitoes there.

This slur plays right to the biases that conservatives have. Namely, it’s the common conservative belief that environmentalists want us to choose between the environment and man. As this story proves, the opposite is true: Environmentalists (like me) want to use our resources wisely so as to not squander long term economic health for short term gain. Environmentalists helped phase out the use of DDT as an agricultural pesticide in the developing world because the environmental damage it caused was unnecessary and so its use as an anti-malarial pesticide could be maintained.

It’s a pity that, having failed to find true arguments, anti-environmentalists have to resort to fake ones. Or maybe it’s not.

Hack

2005-10-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

You know, I don't ussually double post like this but jesus: Could Glenn McCoy be any more of a hack? Look, if you think that Bush is so awesome that he can do no wrong, fine. Ignore the wrong he does. But does this comic even make sense if you think about it? Yes, newscasters also use scripts. Newscaster's however, generally write their own scripts since they *do* report.

Hate Crime laws: Anti-Terror legislation, not Thought Crimes

2005-10-14T19:14:00.000-07:00

Consider the following scenarios:

A man you do not know kills you just to watch you die.
A man you do not know kills you for your money.
A man you do not know kills you accidentally while in a drug-induced haze.
A person kills you accidentally because they a knife slipped from their hand and flew across the room.
A person assists your suicide.
A person kills you with the intent of intimidating people who are like you.

The outcomes of each of these cases are the same: you are dead. And yet because the motivation is different, our criminal justice system recognizes them as different and may assign different punishments to each. This is why we have first and second degree manslaughter. This is why lawyers spend months proving intent and premeditation. The idea, as floated by some conservative writers, that a law that judges intent is equal to the legislation of a “thought crime” is unserious. Intent is obviously important.

So what of the hate crime? Does it actually warrant different treatment from the criminal justice system? I say it does. A person who commits a regular crime does not necessarily intend to terrorize the general population. A hate criminal doesn’t just commit a crime against a specific person – he commits the extra crime of purposely terrorizing a specific population.

Terror *is* what we’re talking about here. To commit a hate crime it’s not sufficient to merely kill a gay person or other minority. You have to pick out that group in your mind, go to where you can find members of that group, and purposefully bypass others as you head toward your goal. (That's the thing about minorities. They're harder to find.) Oh sure, some criminals may have decided to commit a crime already and figure that while they’re at it they might as well pick a member of some group they hate. Call it “killing two birds with one stone”. Well then, I say let them serve time for both birds when they come home to roost.

Of course we shouldn’t let recognizing the extra terror component of hate crimes lead us to extra penalties on just any crime against a minority. If someone beats up a lesbian without caring about her orientation that person would be an asshole, but I wouldn't call him a homophobe asshole without other information.

Update: changed "knowing" to "caring about" becuase that's what I really meant.

Conservative tax plans

2005-10-12T09:56:00.000-07:00

While engaging in all this artsy fartsy talk about taxes and all it's good to keep in mind what representatives voted in by actual real life conservatives do with tax code. Via Daily Kos we find a report that Republicans are eliminating the AMT, a tax that the rich can never get out of paying no matter how many lawyers they have. Granted, this tax will start affecting regular people (re: people who *earn* their money) soon so it should be reformed so it goes back to working how it should. But I guess Republicans know that they can use this opportunity to help the rich sneak out of their taxes yet again and the conservatives back home will keep voting for them. Aren’t conservatives grand!

But wait. Its gets better.

Apparently, the Republican congress has been reading DTI’s posts here on Caljunket because they’re going to offset the money lost from the AMT by simplifying the tax code! That’s right; they’re getting rid of deductions on mortgage interest and health insurance! You know, deductions that are small for rich people but which are a godsend for the middle class. Thank god conservatives managed to get their congressmen elected so that they could cut taxes on the wealthy and raise them on the middle class – oh wait – did I say that? I meant to say “get us closer to a flat tax”.

Congrats, DTI!

Nowhere to go but up

2005-10-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

Linked to from Andrew Sullivan today is this startling news: Adopting a flat tax (i.e. raising taxes on regular people and lowering them on the rich) leads to explosive growth!

I believe this is one of the biggest pieces of economic news ever. Milton Friedman's single-postcard flat-tax idea has finally started catching on (ten Eastern European countries, with four more in Europe close to adoption). 2004 GDP growth rates there averaged a staggering 8%, well over twice the industrialized nations' average of 3.4%. Of course these flat-tax rates vary widely, from 12-33%. Among the six lowest-taxed countries, growth rates are the highest: 8.6%. The lowest-taxed three have 9.5% growth.

Wow, that really is amazing! Clearly this person has not only discovered something about economics but he has also discovered that correlation equals causation. How else to explain the wild leaps of faith required to come to his conclusion. Poor countries, especially those joining the capitalist world for the first time, are due for high growth regardless of what silly tax policies they adopt. Just look at India and China.

Ah the flat tax. You know, the rich are always the eternal enemies of capitalism. They not only stand to gain personally from its disruption, but unlike stoned-out hippies, they have the means to affect it. The flat tax is the latest attack on the American capitalistic system. It’s yet another way to shift tax responsibilities from the rich onto regular folk while simultaneously eroding the funding for the governmental structures which keep capitalism alive. Sometimes I wish the flat tax would actually be implemented for a month. The public revulsion would be so strong and so immediate that whole elitist Libertarian structure would be overturned in a fortnight like shaking off a bad dream.

Now I’m just getting dark.

Update: Via Brad Plumber comes more information on the "Flat Earth Flat Tax". I think he's being unfair: Flat Earthers' beliefs are inconsequential. Flat Taxer's would pretty much ruin America.

Update: The orignal poster has retracted a bit of what he said here. Hat's off to him I say. If his tax preferences are a little eccentric, he is at least honest about the facts on the ground.

It's not his fault if he's overrated

2005-10-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Berkeley's own George Lakoff pens this piece in my favorite Magazine today. It does a lot to cut through the mumbo-jumbo framing crap people keep misunderstanding Lakoff as saying and applies his ideas to the real life case of Hurricane Katrina: A tragedy that proves the necessity of effective liberal government and the bankruptcy of the conservative governing ideology.

The tragedy of Katrina was a matter of values and principles. The heart of progressive values is straightforward and clear: empathy (caring about and for people), responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy), and fairness (providing opportunities for all and a level playing field from which to start). These values translate into a simple proposition: The common wealth of all Americans should be used for the common good and betterment of all Americans. In short, promoting the common good so that we can all benefit -- and focusing on the public interest rather than narrow individual gain -- is the central role of government. These are not just progressive values. They are America’s values.

Katrina shines a light not only on the failure of conservative values but especially on their fundamentally un-American character. Since the days of the colonies, when the commonwealths of Massachusetts and Virginia were formed, Americans have pooled their common wealth for individual aspirations.

Lakoff's framing ideas will only take us so far but it's important for liberals and progressives to recognize that the failures of the recent congress and administration are *not* caused by personal incompetence. Rather, a fundamentally unworkable hard-right governing ideology is setting us up for failure regardless of how competent any individual Republican is.

You Could Have it Moderately Better

2005-10-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

The new Franz Ferdinand EP (released today!) is more enjoyable than their debut album from last year, which is a significant accomplishment. You should go listen to it. Then, if you like it, you should buy it. Help the brothers out. The Scottish economy needs it.

Goddamn those guys are good.

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” syndrome

2005-09-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

Ballon Juice is generally an enjoyable blog but today John Cole writes something that just makes me mad.

I am not so sure about the end of the ‘revolution,’ considering I don’t think [Tom Delay and other Republicans] have been behaving like Republicans for a while now.

Isn’t that great? To Cole, the definition of “Republicans behavior” is divorced from “the behavior that Republicans exhibit”. I think that’s pretty much sums up the standard line I keep hearing from Republicans: Don’t judge us by what we do, Judge us by our slogans.

Hopefully, this kind of denial is a stage in long trip to accepting that the conservative god has failed. A commenter on the post above made the parallel between communism and American Conservatism thusly: It looks good on paper, but it doesn’t account for actual human nature.

Sure, you can make a coalition between the Social Security haters and the tax dues haters and the fag haters and the worker’s rights haters and the diplomacy haters and the any-government-unlesss-its-usefull-to-me haters but you know what? When they get their guy elected it turns out that there’s nothing the conservative coalition can do without destroying itself. You can’t cut Social Security without upsetting the bigots, you can’t cut Medicare without upsetting the grannies (in fact you have to make it bigger though in the least efficient way possible!), you can’t cut farm subsidies without upsetting big business, you can’t actually pass a anti-gay-family bill without making the libertarians nervous that they may have to lift a finger to protect the rights of people who aren’t rich.

This isn’t something that’s going to be hashed out in some back room somewhere: Major parts of the coalition are going to have to be cut lose for the other ones to get what they want and that would cause them to lose elections. The Republicans were able to buy time with massive deficit spending but unsustainable borrowing can’t be sustained, nor can they fix it without destroying their coalition.

You know, we Democrats can be feckless at times, but damn, the Republicans bring new meaning to “ineffective”. This isn't a broken party: it's a party that never worked in the first place and can't be fixed.

Let me add that the whole idea of basing your coalition ideology on “government should be small” is silly. I might as well form a coalition to further the ideology of “the economy should be good”. If you don't have an agreement on how to achieve it, it means absolutley nothing. Both liberals and conservatives want to make government smaller, all things being equal. Both have government programs that they love and can’t live without. It’s just that conservatives have been duped by people like DeLay into thinking there’s a party that can provide what they want.

Just don’t get into the specifics.

Update: Matt Yglesias has a post with much the same theme. The Republicans are a party permenetly without an agenda... besides complaining about liberals that is.

I'm a Liberal American: a Democrat!

2005-09-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

You are a
Social Liberal
(76% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(33% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Ignorance, Intellegence, and the Bell Curve

2005-09-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

Check out FAIR on The Bell Curve.

JAMA can be forgiven for misunderstanding the point I was trying to make about the Bell Curve. He has probably listened to too many fools try to discredit SAT and standardized tests altogether. He probably assumed that when I said tests don’t measure innate intelligence that I meant that it doesn’t measure intelligence. So let’s go over this slowly so that if JAMA still doesn’t understand, we can be sure that it’s because he is dumb.

Standardized tests work. They are good at testing people’s intelligence. What they can’t do however, is measure how much of that intelligence is due to genetic factors, and how much is do to culture and upbringing. After all, if I took the world’s red-headed population and whacked them on the back of the head with a baseball bat, they might do more poorly on standardized tests than average, too.

Blacks in general do more poorly on standardized tests. But then, according to FAIR: “sociologist Jane Mercer has shown that supposed racial differences in IQ vanish if one controls for a variety of socio-economic variables”. (Have you read Jane Mercer’s work, JAMA? No?)

So let’s recap. If you take the average poor black person, and compare her to an average white person with the same income, they magically turn out to have the same IQ on average.

You are an intelligent person, JAMA. So you will point out like the authors of the book* that if you assume our society is perfectly fair than of course people of the same income will be equally intelligent. As a corollary, we can add that Black people are dumb and the proof is that they’re poor. QED. In return, I will point out that if your racial “logic” is based on that *assumption* there really isn’t much to separate you from a simple racist. And I’m not saying that to shut down the conversation. I’m saying that because I think it’s true and I look forward to hashing out this issue with you.

I have a personal connection to this old racist line because my great-grandfather, Gioacchino Sciortino, was a poor Italian immigrant and at the time Italian immigrants didn’t test so well on the standardized tests either. Neither were they rich. And the men who owned everything explained that since the standardized tests showed Italians were less intelligent, then it must be because Italians were genetically inferior. You should head down to the main stacks and check out the newspaper clipping of the time.

The punch-line is that as Italian-Americans got more opportunities (in part through things like turn of the century Affirmative Action in police hiring) and became more successful, their IQ’s went up. And it wasn’t because of some kind of amazing natural selection pressure - it was because good schooling, a stable home life, and good pre-natal care can do a lot to raise standardized test scores. I suspect that once Blacks get out of the poverty trap, you will find their test scores shoot up as well, just like the scores of those Blacks who have already succeeded. But there’s no hard proof one way or the other with the current information, so any book that claims to do so (unless they introduce some amazing new research) is clearly wrong.

I'm finishing up Harry Potter right now, but when I'm done I will be checking out The Bell Curve and I'll be going over it on my site. Many other sites have done so, but apparently, every one in the whole world will have to do it to satisfy JAMA.

* FAIR: “the authors [of the Bell Curve] reject her method because their theories assume that low IQ causes people to be poor, rather than poverty causing low IQs”

I'll blog when I FEEL like it!

2005-09-17T19:53:00.000-07:00

[Stomps foot. Pouts lower lip.]

Yes, I've been off in my own little world as of late, and for some inexplicable reason haven't felt like posting or giving the internet any confirmation that I exist in the past many weeks. I'm healthy and mostly happy, but I'm still adjusting to the life of the full-time-working, food-and-wine-talking-about, college-existence-ignoring proto-yuppie.

The primary reason for my absence has been that I in fact do work at work these days. I've been integrated into my organization as a bona fide full-time employee, replete with benefits (that I've waived because I get better ones through my mommy), monthly business trips, and 5 weeks' paid vacation every year. I've also been saddled with what we in the industry call "responsibility," meaning that I have to remain self-motivated, and also meaning that I have very little free time while enjoying my office's T3 line to rant about whatever's on my mind.

I've also been increasingly turned off by internet-bound political discussion lately. It's fairly repetitive, and usually devolves into "liberals do this, whereas conservatives do this!" rather quickly. I'm not impressed with the few main characters who dominate the Berkeley blog comments, and recently have been favoring face-to-face political debates over cyber arguments.

This too shall pass, and by next week I will undoubtedly be spewing my wacky leftist claptrap all over the web for my colleagues to make fun of again.

When I do get back into the groove, however, I can promise you that I will almost never write about campus issues. The hibernation period of my interest in my alma mater hasn't passed yet, and for now I'm just annoyed at college students who dress cooler than I do and jaywalk across Telegraph when I'm trying to drive my shitty car. I haven't read CalStuff in ages, and the last time I tried to read the comments on that site I think my brain turned into chewy delicious nugat.

I don't care what CNN tries to convince me when they have nothing else to report on; blogging is not an amazingly wonderful medium that everyone should shit his or her pants over. Not yet at least. There are too many losers and ineloquent morons dominating it right now to make it my main source of entertainment.

Instead, as of late, I've become addicted to weekly advice columns and nerve.com.

I look forward to writing more productively as soon as I get my head out of my ass and remember what it's like to care about the rest of the world. I miss you guys.

Student Newspaper Articles BAD doesn't have time for

2005-09-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd help BAD out by picking a newspaper article to make fun of. This one comes from The Daily Tar Heal and seems to revolve around the idea that, if only everybody would talk about racial profiling, surely we would all agree with her when she says:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

Now, let's not get into the fact that she seemed to misrepresent herself to the Arabs she "quotes" as supporting her views. And let's not mention how she seems to conflate Arab foreigners, who already face higher security restrictions, and Arab-Americans. Let's actually talk about racial profiling and whether it provides any defense. I think Yglesias pretty much sums up my thinking on the subject:

Someone probably knows how to tell a Chechen from an Armenian, or a Malaysian from a Thai on sight, but it sure isn't me, and it almost certainly isn't your local cop, either. And if you can't see why the idea of law-enforcement personnel spending their times consulting old phrenology texts to pick up on the fine-grained differences, you must be brain-dead. Leaving 8-year-olds out of strip searches is probably a good idea, but in my experience, airport security personnel, at a minimum, do this to anyone.

You see, the problem isn't that we Americans have some kind of Victorian aversion to discussing race (Conservatives sure don't and some Liberals talk about it even when it doesn't make sense) the problem is that it's just an unworkable idea. Conservatives have done a great job pushing their ideas into the mainstream. Hell, thanks to Michelle Malkin we've discussed it to death. We've even discussed internment! (But of course Malkin would never suggest that for Arabs, she just wants to defend it in general for no good reason).

Bad Arguement / Good Argument

2005-09-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

A good argument requires that you understand your opponents views. Here we can learn from nagative example:

RepBast1984 says:

...
#2, for all you liberals out there not only is society objectifying a woman’s body but they’re making money on it in a very VERY capitalist way. It caters not to an indidvidual’s sense of beauty but what a male-driven capitalist’s view of beauty should be. If you’re any sort of progressive this should bother you just a tad bit.

You may be surprised to know that Capitalism doesn't bother Liberals one bit. It's an awesome way of distributing goods and services and though it oft doesn't work perfectly, there's certainly nothing inherintly wrong with it. That's why American liberals saved Capitalism under FDR.

And what's wrong with something being driven by "male capitalism's" view of beauty. Don't males want to look at porn? Why should we stop them? And unlike most of advertising which is also driven by capitalistic male impulses, pornography is honest about what's it's selling. There's certainly a lot of bad porn out there that is degrading to women, but it does no more to objectify women than football does to animalize men.

Did you mean to address this argument to communists perhaps? I have the phone number of the last one in the United States. He lived next door to me in the Co-ops.

Propaganda vs. getting the message out

2005-09-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

I wanted to respond to something the Thinker said in passing about why Republicans have had an edge in the last couple elections. I don't think it's useful to call the right-wing noise machine a purely propaganda outfit. Though there's certainly a lot of lying and misdirecting going on at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, that's not the reason why they've achieved so much. In short: they have done a good job of arguing for their conservative goals and ideals.

I don't mean to imply that they have good arguments - far from it- but there is something persuasive to having someone on the radio or television arguing for a policy or perspective every single day. People can relate to it and even if they don't agree with every little thing Hannity says, they tend to appreciate his perspective and subconsciously pick up the prejudices of the host.

From radio and television, people get a sense for that conservatism is cohesive and makes sense even if they don’t agree with it. This is especially important when you compare it to the Democrats main way of getting the message out: Candidates and office holders. While I appreciate Obama just as much as the next guy, politicians doesn’t have the freedom to take an unpopular stance just to be intellectually honest like a talk show host does.

I suppose this is all a roundabout way of touting liberal blogs, Air America, and vast Left-wing conspiracy. That’s one of the reasons I blog: to help people understand that liberals aren’t want Rush Limbaugh says we are, that liberals have an honest cohesive set of ideals and morals, and that we have a real plan for America.

Where's Rebecca at?

2005-09-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

As someone has asked Rebecca's taking some time off from the blog. I assume this is to focus on her job. I don't know when she will return.

Conservatism isn’t innately bad

2005-09-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communist Russia) I would be myself. Hell, if I was alive during the mid 70’s even I would try to distance myself from the soldier hating hippies that seemed to have been ubiquitous.

Now, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.

And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.

So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in Europe) find themselves in the awkward position of saying: Yes we want to be in power (of course) but no we don’t want to do it like the Republicans. This is like saying “Yes we want to drive off a cliff. No, we don’t want to hit the ground.”

Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.

Self-fulfilling ideology

2005-09-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.

Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)

Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!

At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.

Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?

Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.

Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act

2005-09-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.

(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)

Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.

Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.

Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.

The "Blame America First" Crowd

2005-09-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

They just make me sick.

Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.

Terrorists at UC Berkeley

2005-08-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

This article details how the mother of Cal's very own student group everyone loves to hate has in fact been labeled a terrorist organization. Now, let me be clear that Bamn in is ineffectual at best and creepy at worst, but unless Bamn has been up to something I don't know about they are most certainly not a terrorist organization.

This is a waste of law enforcement time. Here's a hint: if they're trying to get their pictures in the newspaper they probably aren't terrorists.

Beat you again, Calstuff!

Update: Tightening up my original post.

UC Berkeley rejects scientific relativism

2005-08-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

From the LA Times comes this article detailing how our very own UC is standing up to those who believe that biologists should get their knowledge from scientific process and not divine inspiration. (Which is not to knock divine inspiration, just to identify it with its proper sphere).

Basically, some religious right schools are trying to make-believe that students who took a “biology” class using an evolution denying textbook should get as much credit as students who attended bio classes that taught them facts that might actually help them make scientific advancements some day. The UC is putting its foot down and setting firm standards for what students need to know to succeed in biology. The Christian schools are taking the UC to court.

If only the left had a media machine as good as the right stuff like this would get more attention. Bill O’Reilly could stretch an issue like this out for months. Some day… some day.

*snark*I wonder if I this story will get a link from calstuff or if I they only link to stories from the cal patriot nowadays. *snark* Just kidding. I’ll always love calstuff.

Update: Via The Questionable Authority comes these exerpts from one of the books in question:

The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second...If...at any point God's Word is not put first, the authors apologize.

And this gem:

The same encyclopedia article may state that the grasshopper evolved 300 million years ago. You may find a description of some insect that the grasshopper supposedly evolved from and a description of the insects that scientists say evolved from the grasshopper. You may even find a "scientific" explanation of the biblical locust (grasshopper) plague in Egypt. These statements are conclusions based on "supposed science." If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.

Italics mine. I think I may have been hasty with the calls of scientific relativism. These people just seem to oppose the main tenets of science all together.

Global warming consequences

2005-08-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

A while back during a discussion on Environmentalism, BAD took the brave and original position that global warming wasn’t a big deal even if it did happen. He even argued that it could be beneficial because as certain places became to hot for productive farming, other places would be thawing out. So brave and different from the conservative orthodoxy was this that no less than Dennis Miller took a similar “Hey, if it gets 1 degree warmer every 50 years, big deal” position on the daily show while conservative New York Times editorialist John Tierney argued that global warming could help polar bears.

We really do have to hand it to these brave souls fighting against the evil liberal hierarchy while respectfully disagreeing with the conservative spin. Sure, they end up supporting the same policies as Republicans but they do so not with the same old crap we’re fed everyday on TV and radio, but with all new, different crap, which is so stupid that no one has bothered to refute it yet. This allows me to be the very first person to try to debunk the “replacement farms” argument. It’s not a very good argument, but I get to debunk it all on my own.

Forget for a second that the world is spherical and not tube-shaped. Forget for a moment the actual distribution of land on the surface of that spherical earth and how a lot more of it lies where we farm now than where we would be able to farm when it got hotter. Let’s focus merely on the portion of the earth where our country lies. America has been blessed with a wonderful farm belt that runs right through the middle of it. Now, let’s say that certain studies show that due to global warming “conditions for producing crops such as grain corn and wheat may become more favorable in Canada, Northern Europe, and in the USSR” while opportunities “in the midlatitude regions of the USA and Western Europe may diminish.”

Wouldn’t that be bad for our national interests? Would BAD really want to have to buy wheat from Russia and (awk!) those socialist Northern European states? What response would BAD give to those American farmers who, having worked the land their grandparents worked, now find it too hot and too dry? What do we suggest China and India do when rice becomes more difficult to farm? How about when it becomes hot enough in the south for malaria to spread up from the tropics?

Of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but why is BAD willing to risk the employment and industries of his fellow Americans? I can guess at an answer: The only other option is to agree with a liberal. And that is worse than all the beetles eating all the forests in all of Alaska (which they have an opportunity to do now that the winter frosts that kill them are much rarer).

I think that’s what South Park Republicanism is all about: You don’t have to adopt the Republican position to be accepted, you just have to be hate Liberals. If you absolutely must hold a position similar to that of a liberal like accepting gays, pretend it’s a libertarian position even if they don’t really care too much about it.

The McDonald's Coffee Lady

2005-08-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

Howdy y'all! Just got back from italy and boy are my arms not tired! Also, the rest of my isn't tired either becuase I have jet lag so I hope you all enjoy my 3 in the morning post.

Via Ezra Klien comes this article about how a lot of "wacky jury" court stories are really just urban myths. I say this as a starry-eyed defender of the jury system and a person who has personally argued for the the verdict of Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's against a bunch of Orange county conservatives on their own turf. These jury award tall tales are often used by conservative pundits to push objectivley bad policy. You always find these stories butressing conservative anti-jury anti-patient's rights policy proposals like capping jury awards. These in turn are often put forward as means to bring down medical costs.

No seriously, stop laughing, it's true.

I guess I can see how a political movement might grasp at that straw if their ideology prevents them from contemplating the same solution used in just about every other developed country in the world. That the premium spent on medical insurance doesn't really account for the inefficiencies in the system and that studies show that american malpractice insurance costs don't really go down when such caps are put in place should be enough to convince anyone of the stupidity of capping the amount given to people who have proved in a court of law that a doctor has been neglegent.

And just so we don't have argue with any trolls on this point: I don't think healthcare is a "right". I think we should implement it becuase it's more efficient.

Let that be a lesson to the residents of Freeborn Hall

2005-08-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it's the way he would have wanted to go:

A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday. ... Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.

People like this make reading the news worthwhile. Oh, yeah, and people like the president or whatever. Shit, Peter Jennings' lung cancer is the biggest story in the papers right now, and Bush is on vacation, so can you blame me for gravitating toward novelty stories?

We have more old people, but not more really old people

2005-08-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

When I complain that Americans' fattening diets and sedentary lifestyles are giving us cancer and heart disease, I'm often countered, even by incredibly knowledgable and intelligent people like my mother, that people get these ailments more often these days because people are simply living longer, and thus have a larger window of opportunity to become sick. My intuition of course told me that eating more processed foods and sitting at desks all day makes people unhealthy is quantifiable ways, manifested in, for example, cardiovascular disease rates over time.

So today I actually bothered to do some research on life expectancy and age distribution in the United States in the past century, and naturally I found what I was looking for. Thanks, Google.

This chart contains fascinating data (page 77 of the document, in case the permalink isn't working). Indeed, the US life expectancy at birth has shot up consistently since the McKinley administration. In one century, the aveage lifespan of Americans doubled, from 47.3 years in 1900 to 77.0 in 2000. No surprise there. Simple medicine - antibiotics, fewer deaths during childbirth, less life-threatening disease among children - makes people live longer.

But look down at the life expectancy after the age of 65, and then after the age of 75. From 1950 to 2002, the life expectancy at birth picked up nearly 10 years. In that same timespan, the life expectancy if you made it past 65 went up less than 5 years.

From 1980 to 2002, life expectancy at birth increased 3.6 years; after 65 years old that number is 1.8; and after 75 years old that number drops to 1.1 years.

The point of all this is that as time progresses and technology does too, the medical community is most talented at lowering mortality rates among pre-retirees. There have always been individuals in populations who live to be really old, and everyone past a certain very old age ends up living to about the same age, no matter how spectacular medicine is in their generation. (Hell, Plato lived to be 80; Archimedes croaked at 75.) The top end isn't going up that much over time.

This is relevant to the disease/age argument because most cases of those persistently deadly afflictions like cancer and heart disease occur after the age of 60. Check out page 14 of this report, or page 16 of this one. Cancer and heart disease rates take a massive jump at 60 and 50 years old.

Given that the percentage of the population over the age of 60 remains fairly consistent over the decades, any increase in these diseases among the entire American population is attributable only to environmental factors, and not the fact that there are more old people hanging around. Of course the aging Baby Boomers throw a wrench in this model.

But that blip is not applicable to the mind-blowingly massive increase in heart disease over the last century. Look at the first graph on page 8 of this report. Heart disease deaths go from almost zero in 1900 to roughly the current rate in about 1970, back when Baby Boomers were still hip grad students, but long after processed foods had invaded our diets.

I've never taken a course in statistics, so undoubtedly my analysis of these data contains some errors, but I think at the very least people who claim that more old people are suddenly cropping up in our population should re-examine the evidence.

That's right, Beetle, I'm talking to you.

See, ladies? Cuddling KILLS!

2005-08-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Alright, so this guy is a nut shit.

A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.
...
Christopher Offord wanted to watch SportsCenter to see clips of a Mike Tyson boxing match.

To be fair, Stuart Scott is really witty.

The irony now (besides the fact that Mike Tyson is also a maniac with no respect for women) is that Offord will have no choice but to cuddle after sex with his cellmates during his tenure in prison. This guy is totally bitch material.

Anyhow, as always, Florida's favorite pasttime of killing murderers solves nothing, nor does it anything to prevent crimes. But it makes people feel like something resembling justice exists, so who cares.

Droooool...

2005-08-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

What's the feminine analog to "boner fuel"?

Chopping wood is so hot.

(My apologies to any grandparents of mine who just read that.)

Busy at work, but obviously not too busy.

2005-07-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

The National Park Service website has proved yet again to be incredibly fun and informative. Yesterday I discovered that I can spy on the Grand Canyon 24 hours a day. There's also a shot of Washington, DC, Teddy Roosevelt National Park, Point Reyes, and many more.

Best. Two. Weeks. EVER.

2005-07-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

I got back from my Epic Journey across two-thirds of the country last night, and though I don't have time to write about it now (for some reason my bosses expect me to actually work at work), I can safely say that it was the best vacation I've ever taken.

I will tell you about one fantastic stop, though. Next time you're in Mitchell, South Dakota, make sure to check out the Corn Palace. It's a-maize-ing.

Did I miss any news while I was gone?

Going to Italy

2005-07-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

I'll be going to Italy for a coulple weeks so I won't be able to post much. I will be trying to talk politics with my relatives in Sicily though. For that reason I've been trying to bone up on Italian politics and language of politics. One thing I have learned, the italian language scrimps on words a lot. "Politics" is "politico". "Politicial" is "politico". "Poitician" is "uomo politico".

Roberto Benigni is not a big fan of Burlusconi. Burlusconi owns a lot of media channels in Italy (condencing the Rupert Murdoch / Bush arrangment to one man). Burlusconi's political party ("partita politico") is named "Forza Italia" which means "Go Italy!" or "Italy Rocks". Other parties include everything from anti-immagrant northerners to full frontal communists. The communists apparently busy themselves with anti-corruption and anti-mafia stuff and don't harp on the "getting rid of all capitalism" stuff too much so that's good. I have seen no references to Italian Libertairans. Perhaps it would do the US and Italy good if we can export a few of ours their.

Lastly, Sicily will be hot this time of year. Boy-o-boy, will it be hot.

Let's keep the playground politics to a minimum

2005-07-11T00:09:00.000-07:00

The love of my life, bless his adorable little heart, likes listening to Air America whenever he's in his car or bedroom. Given that he and I spend a good amount of time together, and given that I'm not the kind of woman who insists upon getting her way, that means that I have to suffer through talk radio many, many hours a week as well. I have bad news, liberals: Air America talk radio is still talk radio. The hosts still fail to substantiate their claims most the time, they still repeat themselves endlessly for the entirety of their slots, they still surround themselves almost exclusively with like-minded guests and callers and thus foster no exciting discussion, and they're still mostly boring. Jerry Springer is my favorite because he is usually the most insightful and least repetitive and least likely to resort to baseless emotional appeals. If only he had been born in this fine country, he might one day make an excellent president.

Anyhow, one argument that I hear/read often on Air America and from the mouths/keyboards of lefties these days is that the Bush administration's unsavory anti-terror policies are deplorable in part because they provide terrorists more fodder for hating us. For example, breaking Geneva Convention rules at Guantanamo Bay is especially nasty because it gives terrorists more reason to attack us, thus further endangering the safety of Americans. In other words, not only is mistreating prisoners bad because it's evil, it's also bad because it lets evil-doers feel more justified in their evil-doing. This argument, I believe, though it's difficult to substantiate, is probably sound.

So why does it make me so uncomfortable to go along with it?

I've figured out that I'm not a fan of what I categorize as playground politics. The above argument basically states to some degree, You shouldn't abuse prisoners because that'll just make them hate us more. It's akin to, You shouldn't beat up the nerdy kid because one day he could grow up and be rich and powerful like Bill Gates. It's also analogous to, Billy hit Jimmy first, so it's understandable that Jimmy would then hit Billy. Lastly, it's also similar to, Breaking the rules is wrong because when I break the rules I get in trouble. Children are expected to grow out of these interpersonal misconceptions by the time they get to fourth grade.

I haven't heard any liberal, no matter how wacky in the head, say that terrorists are justified in committing violence because of the way America has conducted itself, which is a relief. Those people are jerkoffs.

But I wish, in my magical mystical gilded unicorn land where violence is wrong in and of itself, that it was convincing enough to simply say, Abusing prisoners like this is bad because it's inhumane. You'd think that abuse was bad enough that we wouldn't have to re-direct the argument to how the abuse will eventually come around and hurt us. I guess that's why I've never really been into kharma; I'd like to think that I'm a conscientious person because that's the right thing to do, not because if I'm a turd then people will be mean to me. Same goes for that whole threat of Hell thing.

Again, it's a completely valid argument to say that defiling the Koran is a shitty thing to do because it gives Muslims more reason to hate dirty Americans. But even making that statement detracts from the more basic but more important point, which is that defiling the Koran is just a shitty thing to do, plain and simple.

The moral of the story is that Air America is really boring most of the time. Air America sometimes has the same problem that Berkeley has in that it's predictable and rarely challenged. Also like Berkeley, Air America is smug. And loud. And way less cool than listening to a CD in the car or having a fricken' conversation.

P.S. My good buddy Paul and I are scooting out for a 13-day road trip to Chicago and back starting Tuesday, so hopefully in my absence Tommaso will keep you entertained. In part the point of the trip for me is for me to see parts of America that I probably will never have the chance or reason to see again (i.e., Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico). It's easy to just conceive of that entire section of the country as an amorphous blob of "red states," and forget that real-life people actually live there and carry on normal lives. I'm also looking forward to meeting Paul's parents, who, if they are anything like their son, must be really awesome. Keep the Bay Area warm for me while I'm gone!

Love the Liberalism, Hate the Lib

2005-07-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted to The Party Line)

It’s a common theme in the liberal blogs that nowadays it isn’t enough that conservatives and liberals disagree on how to interpret facts; they disagree on the facts themselves. We’re all familiar with how listeners of Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly might come to inhabit startlingly factual universes (one more or less factual, the other where Ward Churchill is important) but more subtly, with “Shape of the Earth, views differ” journalism, liberals and conservatives can confirm diametrically opposed, ideological sanitized, understandings of the facts on the ground even if they read the same newspaper.

There’s a lot to say about this but I want to talk about one part of this set-up that’s been bugging me like nobody’s business: The way certain “contrarian” thinkers are in fact, not contrarian at all. Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan come to mind. Here we have two people who pull the simple trick of amalgamating philosophies from one camp with the factual landscape of the other. It certainly looks like original though, but the great part is it doesn’t require any original thinking.

Hitchens is an old lefty, but yeah, it makes total sense to invade Iraq before finding and punishing Bin Laden. Why? Well, because the neo-conservative “reverse domino-theory” plan to remake Iraq was sound. Those conservatives: always coming up with the plans that work. Why can’t liberals do that?

Let’s take a look at his endorsement of Bush from, yes, this last election:

"Anybody But Bush"--and this from those who decry simple-mindedness--is now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right. The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. Actually, it's nihilism at best. If it isn't treason to the country--let us by all means not go there--it is certainly treason to the principles of the left.

I have no idea which left Hitchens is referring to. I live in Berkeley and work in San Fransisco and have yet to meet someone who would vote for a terrorist* over Bush (even online!) Hell, I’ve even been student democrat functions. No. These “facts” are the kind you’d find in an unpublished Ann Coulter polemic and in that form they’d be laughed off the stage as they should. Pair up these “facts” with a guy who still claims to believe in progressive taxation and they make for a kind of buddy-cop movie of political opinion** that contrasts with the rest of the thinkers out there. It’s different, I suppose, but it’s the intellectual equivalent of switching the couch with the bed: In the end, you still have a room full of Ikea furniture.

Well, now I’ve gone and written too much. I want to talk about Andrew Sullivan next but that’ll have to wait. Here’s a brain-teaser for you: How is McCain’s “anti-abortion except for rape and incest” more conservative than Sullivans total anti-abortion stance? It’s easy if you know why.

*Especially one who does not reflect America’s pro-choice views.

**This metephor doesn't actually mean anything.

I think I may have found my calling as a sex advice columnist

2005-07-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly enough, my column from last week, which discussed some of the finer points of pornographic politics, was a big hit with the readers. I received a record number of e-mails, all of which priased me for my talents, and most of which recommended some sites for me to visit in the further pursuit of good porn. Thanks, dedicated readers!

Also, from now on, my title is no longer "campus personality Rebecca C. Brown." It's "campus personality and globally-appreciated author Rebecca C. Brown." I got an e-mail from Finland on Monday, and something from a law student in London last week. Though, according to The Man at the Daily Cal office, I'm not allowed to publish the e-mails that I receive in my DC inbox on my blog, I can tell you (I think) that he was essentially thanking me for being a sexually enlightened female voice, and that he forwarded my column to a few of his "girl friends" who didn't like being filmed having sex with him. I'm probably also not allowed, according to my contract, to publish my responses to these e-mails, but I'm going to do it anyway. Enjoy

T-

Glad to be of service! I hope you were Googling "cock slap" when you found
my article. That would put a ray of sunshine in my day.

Allow me to play sex advice columnist for a moment. No, sir, you are not
sick or demented or even that unusual in your desire to create homemade
porn. Homespun sex videos are a popular alternative to regular porn
because they allow the producers to dictate their own "plot" and pacing
and moves and, of course, porn stars. They are also (usually) less sullied
by silicone and stupid stage names and bad acting. And who doesn't enjoy
getting filmed naked with a gentleman who could potentially later release
that video on the internet without his co-star's authorization?

Oh, wait. Yeah. See why your girlfriends might not be so eager to strip
down and be filmed having sex?

Undoubtedly you are a very trustworthy and respectful fellow, but in this
century it's difficult for a woman who does not want to make porn her
livelihood to have sex on camera without some reservations about the
eventual home of the footage.

There are also social and personal issues at play when a woman declines to
be taped. You said "girl friends" (plural), implying that you are not in
an exclusive long-term relationship, which might prove to be a road block
in your quest for cottage industry porn. I'm a fairly outgoing and
confident woman, and it was months and months before I would allow my
boyfriend to take nude pictures of me. Even to the most self-assured
women, the camera's lens can be pretty intimidating, and it's more
intimidating when the man behind the camera isn't someone with whom you
have an exclusive and serious relationship predicated on trust and
honesty.

The women you ask to film might also feel that, by introducing a camera
into the situation, you/she/both of you will feel obligated to perform
unnaturally and/or attempt to replicate what you've seen in professional
pornography, rather than "acting naturally." This would defeat the whole
point of homemade porn, and would be enjoyable for nobody.

There are thousands of women in Britain alone who would be pleased as
punch to have sex with you in front of your camcorder, and with the help
of the internet these women should not be hard to find. But if a
girlfriend hesitates to get down and dirty with you on tape, don't cajole.
Be considerate, and try to be sensitive to the issues I mentioned above.
Some women will NEVER be convinced that amateur porn is their cup of tea;
other women will discover, with the help of a kind and considerate and in
no way pushy guy, that they actually like having sex on tape; other
women will fuck your brains out on video faster than you can say
"crumpets."

Good luck finding a willing film lab partner! It's a healthy and
potentially beautiful use of modern technology, if executed correctly and
sensitively.

Have a splendid Independence Day weekend. You should be glad that America
won that war. You're better off without us.

Thanks for reading!

For the sake of full disclosure, I have to reveal that I've never done anything even vaguely sexual on camera, but it's not like I said otherwise in the e-mail, and as long as I write with a tone of authority I think I sound like I know what I'm doing. Isn't that what all good advice columnists do? Pretend to know more than they actually do? Dude, they should let me do Sex on Tuesday next semester, even though I graduated in May and know nothing about sex and disobey Daily Cal rules.

Also, sorry for the light posting this past week. I was in SoCal for five days, livin' it up in my new (er, new to me) car.

Yay independence!

2005-07-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

Happy 4^th of July, ya’ll. In addition to the barbecuing and excessive drinking today, let’s remember the patriots who fought from our country’s independence and for those service men and women fighting for us right now*. Also, let’s remember that the promise of American liberty, though incomplete and tarnished has been a positive example to the world.

My parents did not come to America to escape political oppression. Though I enjoy participating in a government relatively free of corruption (when compared to Palermo Sicily in the 70’s) they were not political people. Nor did they come to escape simple economic oppression; though I think Sicily has some bad labor laws it’s no Communist state. Instead, they came to the United States for economic opportunity: for better options, not just additional crappy ones.

To me, these positive freedoms: freedom from want, freedom from fear, aside the negative ones: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, set the promise of America apart. People aren’t happy to just act independently – the freedom of Robison Crusoe alone on his island – they want meaningful opportunities to act. They don’t just want to eliminate the corruption of government funds; they want their taxes to make their community and their selves better off. In short, people the world over want a government for the people, of the people, and by the people. That’s why the come to our country and it’s what makes America great.

* I don’t recommend thanking their civilian politician leadership however.

Survey: Most Americans Depressingly Ignorant of Basic Science

2005-06-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

Hey look! Americans don't know very much about cancer. This survey says so. Though I tend to think that surveys like these are about as interesting or useful as pit bull media hysteria, I trust the good people who design them to have selected a fairly accurate slice of American opinion. These people went to college to learn how to make surveys, after all.

The cutest part of the survey results:

The most prevalent misconception, 'Treating cancer with surgery can cause it to spread throughout the body,' was endorsed as true by 41 percent of the respondents.

No one entity is responsible for making our nation's goodly citizens not ignorant. I guess you could claim that public schools should feel obligated to inform students about the truths of cancer, but to an extent they already do that. Kids are already taught in health class that one's health is determined for the most part by one's lifestyle choices. Usually this precept is used to let children know that if they have sex before marriage then they will suffer the unavoidable consequences of gonorrhea and pregnancy. But sometimes the wild concept that actions=results is employed to taut the benefits of a good diet and excercize. See? Text books aren't all bad.

I'm of the opinion that the public will adopt whatever veiwpoint is most consistent with their preexisting beliefs and which places the least blame on themselves as individuals for any harm that befalls them. They will then reinterpret/misinterpret/twist scientific research to substantiate their ideas. By biggest complaint about the current American attitude toward cancer is that people think that the disease is mostly brought on by genetics. Genetics are this century's answer to witches/Jews/evil moon spirits/whatever it's trendy to blame stuff on at the moment. The most conservative studies I've read about say that four-fifths of cancer cases are preventable.

But, of course, ours is a culture of treatment rather than prevention. Such is the plight of a ridiculously wealthy nation of lazy people. So, though there is no conspiracy by drug companies to stifle research into the causes of cancer, there seems to be little commercially-funded vanture to educate the public about the very simple and easy ways individuals can prevent many types of cancer to begin with.

But I'm not a fancy scientist, so I can't expound with any more detail about this topic. Though I may not know what, beyond those lame-ass free-radicals, causes cancer, I do know this: Jesus loves vegans more than regular people.

And gambling in temples is carcinogous.

Like Orgasming Twice While Riding Big Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain ... at the Same Time!

2005-06-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

Two of the best things in life - Wikipedia and Homestar Runner - have finally coagulated into a single cyber-entity. I love you, the Internet. I think I can now blissfully pass away with the comforting knowledge that humanity, despite its many shortcomings, is indeed blessed with a few wonderful anomalies of excellence.

In keeping with the theme of almost sexualized adulation for an inanimate collection of data and servers and hosts and code, I should also remind you that in Firefox if you type "wiki [thing]" into the URL field, our handy-dandy little browser will automatically look up said [thing] in Wikipedia for you and send you to that page. Genius! The same goes for "google [thing]." (If you do not have Firefox yet, and you don't have the guts to slice off your own hand in shame for this oversight, please download it now. Then evangelize about Firefox to all of your friends. That is, unless your friends actually like viruses and pop-ups and being lame and giving Bill Gates handjobs in the Red Robin parking lot after dark. But honestly, what kind of friends are those?)

Any other cool tricks you've discovered about Firefox that you'd like to share with me?

Stuff I wrote for the Smart Ass

2005-06-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Check me out in the contributing writers section. The cut a lot from my social security piece, but I write pieces too long anyhow.

New/Old site feed

2005-06-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

Just in case you want to see this site through an rss feed, the url is in the sidebar now. caljunket.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Update: I discovered that the rss feed isn't showing up in the corner becuase of some html code that needs to go into the head. Other bloggers (i.e. Cal Patriot Watch, Facts machine, I'm looking at you) should add:

[start carrot]link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="*your name here*" href="atom.xml"[end carrot]

Aging is a beautiful thing

2005-06-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

I'm headed to my very first business trip tomorrow morning. My flight for Denver leaves at 7:00am. I'm looking forward to the excursion (a) for the sake of travel, (b) because all my food for the next four days will be subsidized by federal tax payers, (c) because I enjoy the company of my coworkers, and (d) because I'll be earning overtime pay on Saturday. I think this trip will officially herald my ascention into grown-upness, or at least speed it along. Or at least I can pretend that it will.

When I get back from my trip I'm going to begin looking in earnest for a vehicle to purchase. I'm in the market for a 1995 or later Golf of Jetta 9preferably the former), 5-speed manual transmission, under 160,000 miles, recent brake, tire, or transmission replacements a plus, for between $2000 and $4000. Any leads? And don't tell me that Jettas are chick cars.

The desire to purchase a car has necessitated getting a modest bank loan. I've been pre-approved for a 36-month $3000 loan at about 4.6APR, which will be finalized once I provide a VIN and do some more paperwork. Filing the application was simple enough, but speaking on the phone to a creditor was stressful. It was like being on a date and trying really really hard to paint yourself in a positive light, except instead sex you ultimate goal is money. And whereas I know for a fact that I'm hot, I'm not sure if I'm the most qualified candidate for a loan.

My first big trip with my new car, once I get it, will be to Long Beach for Independence Day. In my family we don't celebrate Fourth of July; we go to Fourth of July. Fourth of July is the thre- dacades-plus-old annual gathering of my mother's paternal side of the family at Uncle Art's large ranch-style home in Tarzana. The focal point of the event, for the children at least, is Unlce Art's swimming pool and, in the last ten years, hot tub. He also has a koy pond and aviary. He also brews his own beer. This appeals less to the children than it does to the several alcoholics and teenagers in our family. Those two groups do not have a large intersection yet. Fourth of July is also a chance for the old folks to catch up with the last 52 weeks of happenings. They hang out in the shade. I'm in the transition between the pool and the shade at this point.

In other news, this guy in Boise, Idaho needs a date to the Loggins and Messina concert. I love you, Craig's List.

2005-06-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

Coke Head

Small is the new big, at least when it comes to carbonated beverages. In case you haven't visited a grocery store or backyard barbeque in recent weeks, it seems that the major soft drink companies (including Coca Cola, PepsiCo, and even Hansen's) have begun selling their most popular products in six packs of stubby 8oz cans. Never fear, twelve packs of the familiar and proportionally attractive 12oz cans are still available. But the last time I went to Safeway to get beverages for my post-graduation ceremony get-together I was forced to purchase the midget cans.

Though undoubtedly these diminutive servings are a marketing ploy, and though I usually frown upon food and beverage producers re-packaging the exact same product as if it were a brand new [!!!] item (see below), the 33% reduction in can size pleases me. In theory at least, smaller cans means people will be drinking less of this product, and less product means that people might be consuming fewer completely unnecessary calories. For many Americans struggling with their weight, a 35-calorie difference once or twice a day can accumulative make a substantial difference over a goodly period of time.

David Duman and I have deemed these new cans "chodas," combining the product name (soda) with the name of the humorous penile anomoly it resembles (chode). Please spread the good word.

When perusing the interweb for some information on the choda can, I came across the most absurd reification of fizzy water and food coloring that our generation has seen. I introduce you to Coca-Cola Zero, which is in every way identical to Diet Coke save for its target consumer market. I shit you not. It's Diet Coke with a new coat of paint, and the good people at Coke aren't even attempting to conceal this fact.

Coke has jumped the shark in a big way.

Go ahead and click on the "News" link of the Coca-Cola Zero homepage to learn all about this fantastically new-esque product and how it's exactly like Diet Coke except that the reinvention has a new "personality." You'll also find out that people our age don't like to compromise on flavor. Whew! That's a relief. And all this time I thought diet sodas tasted bad.

Aw, cute. They even have quotes from the Coke Director of Marketing as if it were a real news story. "Coca-Cola Zero's personality will be different from any of our other brands, and our marketing will reflect that with some fresh ideas we haven't tried before."

I can't wait. To quote my favorite columnist, "This could be big ... Crystal Pepsi big!"

Oddly enough, as ridiculous as the concept of Coca-Cola Zero may be, I guess I can't really find anything substantial to complain about. You're not going to find me subscribing to AdBusters or sheltering my children from advertising culture, and on a micro-level you won't catch me boycotting products just because they're useless and redundant. There's nothing inherently wrong with ads, so long as they don't lie, and there's nothing inherently wrong with telling stupid Gen-Y'ers and Tweens that they're drinking a new product when they're actually not.

But as long as we're repackaging tired consumer goods for the sake of selling them to a not as of yet saturated market, I can think of a few more products that deserve a makeover. How about the 401(kool), the X-treme retirement savings plan? Any other ideas?

Added!

2005-06-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

Just add Paul Bruno's new blog. Check it out if you haven't already. His old blog was one of the first ones I ever read regularly and helped me form my horrible horrible addiction to blogs that continues to this day. Yeah!

Environmentalism is all about profit

2005-06-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with a girl who told me that she wanted to be a liberal but was too selfish. She, like many people, somehow believed that Liberalism is all about selfless giving in the face of logic and economics. In reality, being a good liberal can be just another way of looking out for number one.

Let’s take environmentalism. Conservatives often pose the question as if environmental concerns should be balanced against lost productivity. Wrong. We shouldn’t be looking at the harm done to those who have to comply; we should be looking at the harm done to us (me).

X$ of environmental damage should require X$ of payment. End of story. If you let a moneyed elite slip out on their obligation you’re not only encouraging more attacks on public property, your just hurting the economy more since someone has to pay for the damage. If you let a hog farm spew pig shit into public rivers because “it wouldn’t be economical any other way” then the fisherman pay with their jobs. There’s no two ways about it. Maybe the fisherman don’t have as much political clout as a single centralized hog farm but it still harms the economy.

And that’s what it comes down to. Anti-environmentalism as practiced by conservatives (there’s a fitting play on words) basically comes down to special interest politics of the worst types. The corporation dumping mercury into the air has a unified centralized Republican lobby effort and the people whose kids get leukemia don’t; their employers don’t, their customers don’t. The harm is spread out and the benefits are centralized.

And that’s what good old-fashioned self-interested Liberalism is about. The polluters have to be kept in line because it harms everybody and that means me. The monopolies have to be kept in line because they harm everybody and that means me. The public education system has to work for everybody’s child and that means mine to.

So please spare me the bleeding heart liberal crap. Maybe you see keeping mercury out of tap water as some kind of extravagant luxury but I see it as looking out for me.

Extreme Economics

2005-06-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

So I think it's about time I did a substantive post. Last night I watched Independence Day on network television. Although it had been edited for TV it still entertained delightfully. Indeed, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith can't help but make a movie great. Don't believe me? Too bad.

The film did get me thinking though. What would the world economy look like after the failed alien take-over attempted depicted in ID4? Most major cities had been eradicated so a good chunk of the economy would be gone right off the bat. A great number of people were killed in the first act (sorry vice-president!) but since a lot of people had evacuated before the cities blew up you’d have a greater decrease in supply than in demand.

That's just dealing with the first couple days. What would be worse is the loss of random production sectors. It does the world no good if the bicycle tire, bicycle seat, and bicycle handle bar factory were spared by alien invasion if bicycle chain production was centered in Houston (destroyed by alien blast and a nuclear bomb). And of course, there's the problem of government. After debonair mayor Gavin Newsom gets blown up along with the San Francisco board of supervisors, who's going to keep the Bart running? The looting would be horrible.

There are the enormous crashed alien space-ships to think about though. Once everything is more or less back to normal, the economic windfall of all that technology would probably make the dot com boom look like the boom that resulted when 12th century Europe farmers upgraded the horse plows from choke harness to a horse collar.

2005-05-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

Hey

Why don't we just turn on Blogger comments? All I have to do is flip a switch in the settings.

2005-05-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

I have an idea.

How about you start spelling my name correctly, Tommaso? Other than that, I have no idea what's up with the comments. They just disappeared. The Etenation code is still in the template. I've given you (Tom) access to the template, so maybe you can use your handsome Sicilian skillz to fix it. Thanks, homeslice.

2005-05-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

What the heck is with the lack of comments?

Rebecca, any ideas?

Also, happy graduation.

(corrected for bad spelling skills)

2005-05-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, so I'm a college graduate now.

As of today, I have been a college graduate for a week. Needing to pack/move all of my belongings into a shoebox-sized room in Oakland by Monday has kept me mentally preoccupied since then, and the first five weekdays of my new life were anticlimactically spent working in an office from nine to five, so I haven't had time yet to fully comprehend the fact that the thick chapter of undergradom has hastily come to a close. If I chose to actively reflect on this life transition in anything other than a jocular format, I'd probably start crying.

There are innumerable experiences I had at Cal that I would like to describe and people I met here that I would like to acknowledge in greater detail later, but for now rather than focus on the past I'll clue y'all into my future. Luckilly for me, my future is only a vague sketch, like something you'd scramble to draw on a restaurant napkin after a moment of genius during lunch alone at Denny's. My future may also be as lonely as eating lunch alone at Denny's. Like I said, rough sketch. I'm not really sure.

I'm going to continue my employment the National Writing Project, earning a comfortable wage for doing comfortable work, for at least another year. The prospect of nine-to-fiving it in a drab cubicle for twelve months is enough to make me want to buy a car and take the world's longest road trip and possibly never come back. So to stave off any office-induced depression this summer, I plan on writing (for the Daily Cal, for this website, and for my personal edification) several times a week, rediscovering my skills as a photographer, picking up paintbrush and canvas as often as I can, going on a lot of long walks, and reading a couple books. I also plan on buying a car and going on a few road trips of reasonable length.

I'm trying to accumulate experiences worth writing about at this stage of my life. As unoriginal and naive as it seems, I'd like to thrust myself into any adventure I can undertake without compromising my safety and my cushy office gig. There is a large part of America (more or less everything east of Denver) that I've never seen, and I'd like to use this year off from school to see some of it. If I want to be a writer when I grow up, I need to do two things first: (a) grow up, and (b) make mistakes. The two usually go hand in hand.

This isn't to say that going to college isn't worth writing about. A student's life in and around the Bay Area is no less interesting than any other person's life in any other location. But it's just interesting to me right now. Undoubtedly the novelty of novelty will wear thin very quickly, and when my VW Golf and I are stranded on the side of the 40 somewhere in Oklahoma I'll wonder what I ever found appealing about spontaneously hitting the road and discovering America. In the meantime, however, I'd like to toy with the dual life of office monkey and Alan Ginsburgian adventure whore. (I should probably read some Alan Ginsburg first, huh?)

After I've gotten all the post-graduation "finding myself" cliches out of the way, I'd like to get my PhD in ... uh, something. I'm not sure what yet. I'm mostly interested in American consumers' relationship to food, so I'd like to pursue research/publishing about food policy, environmental sustainability and agriculture, consumerism, food advertising, etc. And, with any luck, I'll save the world while I'm at it.

Wish me luck.

2005-05-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

Best. E-mail. Ever.

Thank you, G.B., for this touching message, in response to my most recent Daily Cal column:

I lived in Oakland during part of my undergraduate years at Cal (1970-73). You sound
just like the rich white trash liberals I knew back then. Bored and filled with
self-loathing. After years of pimping off your parents should be prime bait for the
welfare culture. With one big exception. For you moving to Oakland it is a two way
street. You can move out at anytime. But when the going gets rough--and it will,
when one of your heroic "pimps" tries to put you on the block outside that liquor
store (which sounds like where you belong anyway)—you have the option to move out.
As a campus street cunt hustler you think you’re tough. Try teaching in the Oakland
public schools for a few years. Then we will see what you have to say. Right now you
are just a bored white chick looking for a few cheap thrills in the ghetto.

He's probably correct on most accounts (i.e., me being bored and white), but the claim that I'm rich, trashy, or pimping off my parents is amusing. (I especailly like the part where he calls me a cunt. Classy.) Nevermind the fact that I did live in the ghetto with my parents until I was eight years old, during which time we didn't have the option of moving out, and nevermind the fact that my own personal budget makes living in Oakland the only reasonable housing option for me right now.

E-mails like these are the reason I want to write for a living.

Now out of my way! I've got cheap thrills to seek!

2005-05-19T00:17:00.000-07:00

Clarissa explains nothing. Fuck Clarissa. Bend Clarissa over a sink and fuck her.

That's my funny way of saying that the first season of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" came out of DVD Tuesday. Color me now slightly less depressed about graduating college.

(Oh, by the way, I graduate on Friday. I'll post an official and tearful farewell to Cal over the weekend.)

2005-05-16T19:49:00.000-07:00

Yet Another New Version of the ASUC Tabulator (v3.6)

So I completed some minor fixes to the ASUC Tabulation program in response to some issues that were raised during the tabulation on Friday. Specifically, I fixed up one of the error messages (to actually name candidate numbers in the ballot file that do not correspond to any candidate) and added control keys for all the menu items. Also, I fixed up the readme file in html and added some notes on formatting. I sent word to the election council so the new version (v3.6) should show up on election.asuc.org soon.

**Update from Rebecca: The new version of the tabulator has been posted to election.asuc.org, along with some poorly-written instructions on how to use said tabulator. No thanks to Varoon. Grumble.**

2005-05-13T16:03:00.000-07:00

Who's taking bets?

Manny Buenrostro: 2.5:1
Justine Lazaro: 2.8:1
Rebecca C. Brown: 12:1
Zach Liberman: 15:1
Ronald Cruz: 20:1
Alfred Twu: 25:1

Manny celebrating victory by slightly changing his facial expression, maybe: 3:1
Rebecca taking her shirt off: 1.3:1
Angel Brewer crying: 5:1
Andy Ratto bugging the shit out of Rebecca: 1:1
Bret Manly telling Rebecca how awesome he is in bed: 3.4:1
Rebecca being repulsed by yet strangely attracted to Bret Manly: 87:1
Zach showing up dressed as the Hamburglar: 53:1

See you in the Senate Chambers at 5:00pm. Results will be posted as instantaneously as possible on election.asuc.org. Can I get a hold of that tabulation application, Tommaso?

2005-05-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Atlas Sucked

So I'm still batting around a Smart Ass article idea involving that dreaded menace: The Pseudotarians. That is, those people who call themselves libertarians when they really just mean they hate liberals and they want to reduce the powers of the liberal parts of the government. George Bush's desire to strip people of their citizenship and send them off to jail without judicial over site or habeas corpus barely registers their interest. Pseudotarians will tell you "I'm a libertarian, but oh no, I don't want to do away with the Federal reserve system or any crazy thing like that! I just prefer the free market and want government out of our personal lives". Jeese, that sounds a lot like liberalism to me. I mean, hell, if we didn't prefer free markets we'd call ourselves socialists, right? I don't know what compels people to become Pseudotarians. Maybe it's just a defense against the cognitive dissonance of being a non-rich non-religious Republican (I had no problem since, being a first generation American and a mainstream catholic I was pretty preordained to be a Democrat).

I'm so unfair! How dare I make such generalization about your deeply held belief system! Save it for the comments thread, bub.

Anyhow, this article presents problems since both Pseudotarians and actual libertarians are pretty much fools of the highest order. Libertarians for joining socialists and communists in making how we distribute goods a moral choice instead of a pragmatic one. Pseudotarians for not having the balls to admit that they want to protect us anti-trust legislation and environmental laws, not a police state.

The trouble with any article is coming up with a good name for it. Fortunately, I've already done a little work on that front because of a joking suggestion by Paul Bruno that we join forces on a anti-libertarian website. I said we better wait till we get a good name for it and I suggested "Atlas Sucked" and "Firefighters and public roads". Kevin Deenihan suggested "Randy".

I think I might go for "Invasion of the ideological name snatchers!".

update: it looks like comments are going haywire. Rebecca, could you take a look at it with your magical comments password?

2005-05-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

It's coming along.

Sometime all you really wanna do is get lectured at.

Here are the two completed sections of my thesis, replete with pictures!

2005-05-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

Musing.

Is the phrase "Marxist hard-on for the value inherent in physical labor" legitimate academic writing?

It will be if I have my way.

2005-05-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

Thesis.

Thirty to forty pages of writing, seventy pages of editing, dozens of images to collect and edit, plus a little last-minute reasearch over the next five days. Oh yeah.

Consider me incapacitated until then.

2005-05-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm little more than a piece of meat.

But it's all for the little bald kids in Oakland, so it's okay.

Tonight, tonight, TONIGHT is the ASUC Summer Love Date Auction, and I'll be for sale, along with a dozen or so other cool kids on campus like student group leaders, ASUC types, Greeks (like frats and sororities, not like George Stephanopoulos - unfortunately), and even some athletes.

Be at the Bear's Lair at around 7:00pm, and bring wads of cash. If you're trying to buy me and you're getting out-bid by a handsome bespectacled man with a faux hawk and a witty t-shirt, don't be alarmed ... he's my backup.

For more information, and to see the other hot peeps on the block, visit asuc.org/auction.

2005-04-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

Let's get outraged for no reason. It's the ~~American~~ Mexican way.

From World Net Daily (an always reliable source of unbiased news) via RIL:

L.A. now in Mexico?
Billboard for TV newscast has 'CA' crossed out, nation's named added

An immigration activist group is drawing attention to a photograph showing a billboard ad for a Spanish-language TV newscast in L.A. on which the "CA" abbreviation after "Los Angeles" has been crossed out and the word "Mexico" added in its place.

Even Arnie is putting in his two pesos:

"I think they should take it down immediately," Schwarzenegger said. He called it "divisive" and "unnecessary" and said it promoted illegal immigration.

Uh, the fuck? Promotes illegal immigration? Explain that one to me, por favor.

Or maybe they're just honing in on their target audience, many of whom are from Mexico. It's a fucking marketing technique.

What ever happened to free enterprise, conservative America? Calm down.

Perhaps the concern is that images like these promote a compromised American culture, as if culture in California weren't based as heavily on Mexican influences as on any non-Spanish European influences. It's amazing how such blatant racism is acceptable if it's in the name of cultural integrity.

The most hilarious part of the outrage is the fact that, hey, guess what, Los Angeles used to be in Mexico! "L.A. Now in Mexico?"? How about "L.A. Back in Mexico?" Yeah, isn't strange how things change over time? Crazy.

2005-04-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

No elections results for at least another week. Boo!

The lamest e-mail I've gotten in a long time:

This morning, Mr. Liberman informed the Judicial Council that he in fact plans to contest the following three charges filed by the Attorney General:

1. Violation of By-Laws 4.13.6.2
2. Violation of By-Laws 4.13.6.6
3. Violation of By-Laws 4.13.6.8

Because the defendant was notified of these charges on Monday, April 18, he has had an appropriate amount of time to prepare his defense. We will be hearing AG v. Liberman (1,2,3) this Sunday, May 1, at 7pm. Mr. Liberman requested a postponement of several weeks due to medical problems, but in light of the time-sensitive nature of these cases and the fact that Mr. Liberman can send a proxy representative if he is not in Berkeley this weekend, we are not granting this request.

Furthermore, because there is election litigation pending, the tabulation of votes will be delayed until this matter is resolved and the appeals period has expired.

RD Gregg

I hate it when people take advantage of their right to appeal, especially if it inconveniences me.

2005-04-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

Got nothing else better to do on a Wenesday night?

Then come watch Mike Davis sue the pants off of me at 9:30pm in the Senate Lounge!

Davis v Brown: Deathmatch 2005

Actually, I'm less likely to have my pants removed by any judicial procedures than I am by the handle of cheap vodka that might be accompanying me.

A good time will be had by all.

2005-04-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

Posturing is half of doing

Inspired by the recent realizations that (a) I am brilliant, (b) I have a very poor memory, despite the fact that I have never smoked pot or huffed glue, and (c) many of my brilliant thoughts are forever lost in the recesses of my brain, never to be published or appreciated by a future audience of eager undergraduate students who cling to every word their brilliant (and attractive) professor Dr. R. Brown utters, I decided to purchase a quartet of handsome 3" X 5" spiral-bound notepads from the Cal Student Store today. Thus from here on out, whenever I am struck with insight, genius, verbal creativity, or a really good cock joke, I can lunge for my back pocket, whip out a Bic Roundstick, and capture my thoughts on paper.

Indeed, the three most creative and talented writers whom I consider my good friends (David, Sean, Matt) never leave home without their notepads. They also never leave home without their penises. This leads me to believe one of two things: either only men are capable of being excellent writers, or maybe I need a penis. Er, no. Maybe I need a notepad.

I figure that adopting all the behaviors of good writers will in turn make me a good writer. So in addition to my new notepads, I'll always be armed with a pencil tucked over my ear, an inquisitive furrow on my brow, and a tumbler of whiskey in my palm. Did I mention that David, Sean, and Matt all also drink a lot?

So as I hammer through the last forty pages of my thesis in the next seventeen days, look for me on campus dutifully scrawling in my little notepad while I walk through Sproul Plaza or sit through lecture. But please don't actually look at what I'm writing; it'll probably just be pictures of stick figures doing each other in the butt. Which is awesome.

2005-04-22T17:02:00.000-07:00

Fuck Yeah I'm Hot and You Want to Buy Me Woo Hoo!

That's right, party people. The ASUC is having a date auction wherein student group leaders, Greeks, and athletes will be sold like slabs of meat to a salivating student body. But it's all for the children, so the objectification is justified.

Yours truly, Rebecca C. Brown (aka Campus Personality Rebecca C. Brown) will be among those on the block. I'm planning on duping one of my friends into buying me for $50 of my own money. But hopefully, my inherent hotness will speak for itself and I won't have to shell out any cash to rescue myself from embarassment.

How hot am I, you ask? Hotter than your mom's crack pipe after she takes a fat hit. That's how hot. Not just hot, but hawt. Maybe even haugt. Boiling. Definitely worth the money.

And if short blond girls aren't your thing, there should be some other hot people up for sale, too. I for one am coming armed with some dough of my own to spend on my fellow ASUC-ites. If I can get two dates out of one event, all the better.

It's at the Bear's Lair...I'm hoping the presence of alcohol will increase my commodification potential.

Summer Love: A Date Charity Auction
Tuesday, May 3, 7:30pm
Bear's Lair
Proceeds go to Children’s Hospital and Research Center of Oakland

For more information, to submit an application to be pawned off, and to view the profiles of all the participants (as they submit them), please visit asuc.org/auction.

(Speaking of which - does anyone out there have any good pictures of me to submit for my profile? All the pictures I currently have of myself depict me being very drunk or very young. And only one of those traits is hot. I'll let you guess which one.)

2005-04-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

I hate Libertarians

(clipped from comments to "patr" made on calpatriotwatch)

Now, in this respect (it's ok for government to stop people from harming each other) liberals and libertarians are on exactly the same page. The problem is that libertarians try to create a phony distinction between harming through action and harming through inaction. If a man decides not to swerve around me with his car he is as guilty of hurting me as had he decided to swerve into me. Libertarian would argue against Universal Health Care even if it was proven that it is more efficient than the system we have (and it has been shown!). They would say that the thousands who die needlessly each year, and more importantly, the thousands who spend more then they have to have no right to ask the minority who would not benefit to agree to the system.

Libertarians are a strange breed. I like to view them as the last in the old-form ideologies that held that economic organization shouldn’t be a question of efficiency, but one of morality. In that regard they are more like communists than anything else out there today. I think they lasted so long because their ideas haven’t actually been implemented anywhere except where they were done so half-assedly by the business interests that feed them. (I’m thinking of Thatcher and Reagan here.) As such, they haven’t had any high-visibility failures like the Soviet Union. Of course, it’s crazy to think that such a marginal ideology would ever get any real power but I sure wish we had a “confederate libertarian republic of Botswana” or something like that to point to and laugh at whenever someone starts waving Ayn Rand about.

~ ~ ~ ~

(this is my new rsponse to "patr" that was too long to post in the comment section)

Free markets and free trade are indeed awesome ways to create goods and services. They are almost always more efficient than any other system. I myself am a firm supporter of free trade in general (although many “free trade” agreements are problematic) and have argued for it against Lou Dobbsian conservatives many times. The question is: what do we do in that tiny minority of cases where the free market is not an efficient market? What do we do when a market is so inefficient that even government can do a better job? Liberals answer that the social contract justifies government action (though we should be wary of the inefficiencies inherit to it). This is why Liberals support anti-trust laws, consumer protections, environmental protections and Jeese, basic things like public transportation (where appropriate). These things cannot be justified by any coherent version of libertarianism I know of. And yet they are absolutely necessary to maintaining our standard of living.

I want to make this very clear, because if the markets were always the best way to provide services, liberals and libertarians would never disagree.

It’s interesting to compare our nation’s healthcare system (the system by which we protect people from being harmed by virus and the like) and our national security system (the system by which we protect people by being harmed by guns and knives and things). It's obvious that free market can't provide security against invading armies as efficiently as a government can. Unless you are typing from a militia in Montana, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s ok for the government to force people to pay their share of the national security budget even if they don’t want to. And yet, if we accept that Universal healthcare is more efficient than what we have now (no stretch of the imagination) I can’t see how you can escape the conclusion that the United States would be justified in instituting healthcare reform of that type. That’s really the limits of libertarianism.

The greatest mistake is to confuse libertarianism with an economic philosophy. It is a moral philosophy that uses half-assed economic theory to try and justify itself.

2005-04-19T19:15:00.000-07:00

Lamezors, Daily Californian

I see that Ben has already invested his two cents about today's edition of the Daily Cal, but I have my own bone to pick with my employer. I demand to have my name in the paper more, damnit!

Now don't get me wrong; I love the Daily Cal. They give me $15 a week to saw whatever I'm feeling at the moment, their review section is pretty good, and their women's golf coverage rocks!

But, seemingly for lack of anything better to print, today's opinion page was tarnished by three really lame letters to the editor.

As you can see, those last three letters each address page three columns from the previous two days, and while I don't oppose running letters about columns, I do oppose wasting that space with letters about columns besides my own.

Thus I must publish my own fan mail. The next few paragraphs are verbatim selections that I have received in my inbox over the last coupla weeks.

Just wanted to join a zillion other yahoos who've probably also done this
and tell you I think your column is brilliant. When I read the Daily Cal, I
sort of tend to skip the Op-Ed unless I see your name and a pair of
oversized sunglasses.

As I reader, I'd just like to say thank you for writing a readable (and actually enjoyable) column. You're the only Daily Cal columnist in the last three years who hasn't made me want to stab myself (or preferably them) in the eye. I hope you'll continue writing next semester, as that way I might some day no longer hate myself for reading the Daily Cal.

rebecca, you fucking rule

dear rebecca,
i wuv you.
i wuv you becuz:
a. i'm an older white man with no life other than berkeley cafes and fox news.
b. you get it.
...
ps. coud you send me a nude attachment of yourself?

If I lived in California, I would try to date you. You have an excellent sense of humor

See, that's the voice of the people!

2005-04-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

Best Fucking Idea of All Time

***UPDATE***
So I've decided that my idea was, in fact, very stupid. Thank you, my fine readers, for your consultation.
***UPDATE***

So I was at the Charter Banquet (where President Dynes, Chance B, Misha, and a thousand of our closest friends got our collective party on), and we were watching this cheesey Cal video montage about how awesome our university is, and it hit me like a ton of bricks:

I need to get the Cal logo tattooed on my ass!

That way, until the day I day, anyone who sees me naked will know where I got my undergraduate education. I'm a genius. That's how fucking much I fucking love Cal.

To help me envision this little idea, I threw something together in Photoshop:

For the record, my bottom is much more attractive than that. The bad tan line, however, is entirely accurate.

My only source of trepidation is that, like piercings, I'm sure tattoos can turn into an addiction. My older sister as of this moment has the familial monopoly on ink, whereas I'm the sole owner of any non-lobe piercings. Perhaps our failure to manifest a sibling rivalry in the last 21 years will now be remedied as we compete to give our mother the most serious heart attack.

Tell me what you think about my bright idea.

2005-04-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

Chance B is Doper than Dope

There really are only two highlights to this 90-minute webcast of today's Chancellor inaguration, but they're both well worth the watch. First, at about 32 minutes, catch President Misha Leybovich's rocking speech (including a lengthy discussion of the Birge's facebook profile). Then, in the last 30 minutes or so, actually listen to what Bobby has to say. He's intelligent, pragmatic, likable, and uses concrete language. I especially appreciate his recognition of the fact that we need to cultivate education for both social and economic reasons. And he's so handsome!

Now I just really look forward to the Charter Banquet tomorrow night, at which "fine wines" will be served as an included benefit of attendance. Who'll give me ten bucks if I flash the chancellor?

2005-04-15T17:48:00.000-07:00

2005-2006 Budget Proposal Posted Online

Hey check it out. ASUC student group budgets are up here! The Heuristic Squelch has been allotted $12,075 this year, thus making it yet again the best-funded ASUC publication on campus. I don't think there's a need to question the Squelch's status as most endowed pub, especially given the effort the team has invested this year into soliciting advertisers to complement ASUC funding.

The webmaster has yet again been budgeted for just a $1000 stipend, which I think is ridiculous. It's no wonder that we can't manage to find actual computer science students to fill this duty. This isn't to say that our current webmaster, Varoon, who is a Political Science major, hasn't done an awesome job; but unfortunately, by his own admission, his skills are limited. Luckilly we've been able to do everything we wanted with the website this year (at least from a programming standpoint), but in the long run the versatility and popularity of the website is going to be diminished if we can't hire students with more extensive coding capabilities. Sigh.

2005-04-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

Get Your Nerd On

I try not to invest any value into stereotypes, but shit are engineers nerdy. Don't believe me? Just take a look at all the hawt fellas to be bought off tonight at 7pm at the EJC/SWE Engineering Date Auction. You could slice the dweebiness with a dull butter knife.

I personally won't be attending, choosing instead to geek it up humanities style in front of my computer tonight. (I'm still struggling to get started on that essay about closets.)

If Interdisciplinary Studies Field tried to put on a date auction, it would probably be cancelled once we realized that we couldn't agree on a time or location, or on whether or not exchanging social interaction for money was morally tenable. Just think, though...someone could buy me, Mike Davis, or Christine Lee for a tiny sum. Gee, I wonder which one of us would nab the highest bidder?

If I were to participate in tonight's engineer auction, however, I would double my fun with Chris Abad and Igor Tregub. Nothing gets me going like awkward stares and inscrutable accents.

2005-04-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry, adoring fans.

Rebecca C. Brown hasn't been rocking too hard as of late, so she wants to apologize for not posting for the last week. Please excuse her while she gets her proverbial shit together.

In the meantime, entertain yourselves with the image of our author writing an extensive cultural analysis of Americas from the 1920s to the 1940s using evidence from articles about closets. I don't know about you, but I'm laughing.

2005-04-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

It's Official: The Daily Californian is High

Vote for me, not because the Daily Cal told you, but because I have man hands, no eyebrows, and eyes that don't open all the way. I hate getting my picture taken.

Congratulations to fellow SQUELCH!er Ben Narodick for his well-deserved endorsement.

2005-04-03T23:11:00.000-07:00

VOTERS' GUIDE NOW ONLINE

Hey party people, come read what all us loser ASUC election candidates had to say about ourselves. My vote for best candidate statements goes to...wait for it...ME! Find me under #22 for President, and #120 for Senate.

Find the .pdf at election.asuc.org, or just click here. It's a huge-ass file (over 5MB), so it might take a while to download.

On another note involving me uploading files to a server, check out the complete introduction to my thesis here. Almost as impressive as this 11-page document about cows is the fact that I finally figured out how to publicly share files from my webdisk. Anyhow, this text represents one sixth of what will eventually be my entire honors thesis. I have had the last 34 days to write 20 of the 35 pages that are due at 4:00pm tomorrow, and I chose to wait until last night to begin that task. Whoops! I'm now living to regret it. I currently have 10 new pages and 16 hours in front of me before I finally suffer from my own procrastination. The end product will be at least 60 pages long (I predict closer to 80), and is due on May 10.

If you find yourself short on sedatives, please read my introduction and give me any feedback. Mostly I'm wondering if those little cow head outlines are cool or cheesey.

I look forward to sleeping on Wednesday.

2005-04-03T01:28:00.000-08:00

No need to thank me. I'm self-satisfied enough as it is.

Thanks to this post, the phrase "Go go Gadget testicles" now appears on the entire World Wide Web a total of two times.

My work is done.

2005-04-01T03:05:00.000-08:00

I'm the biggest fucking idiot on the planet.

So much for my awesome journalism skills. I can't even read.

I got this charge sheet to post on asuc.org that was filed by my buddy Mike Liberman against Vikram Aiyer, but I was not paying attention and thought that Zack Liberman was filing charges, so I wrote a news story for the website with completely wrong information in it. It was up for five hours. It is now past 3 in the morning, and I hope my mistake didn't hurt anyone.

While I'm at it, though: Dude, Mike. What the fuck? This is worth filing charges over?

Again, my sincerest apologies to Zach. I'll have to find some other way to get your name on the front page, my friend, besides making shit up. This was a mistake and I feel terrible for it.

Speaking of the election, see y'all tomorrow at 5pm in 159 Mulford. That's the Daily Californian endorsement forum. Be there or be square. Or doing something else. But there's no way that it's cooler than the forum.

2005-03-31T21:15:00.000-08:00

These are the emails I get.

I occasionally get some swell emails in response to my weekly columns in the Daily Californian. Some are so good, that I think I should share them with you.

Here's what I got for this most recent column.

I go to high school in Los Altos in northern California and I stumbled upon your column on the Internet and I thought it was absolutely hilarious, you have inspired me to apply to Berkley. Thanks.

Aw, glad to do my part for society. Who needs recruitment and retention centers? Maybe if you make it in you'll learn how to spell the name of the city.

You are the most talented writer of the column with a fascinating wit. You must receive several anonymous propositions a week. I'm in my 30's. Honestly, I woulld like to see your two best features, and the eyes behind the funny glasses.

Mmm, classy. Thanks for the compliment. My step-dad is also in his 30s, except he's not a loser.

What's up Rebecca, just took a look around the lab and guess what: no New Balances! We've got Nike, Adidas, Reef (me, oh yeah), and a really swell pair of Johnston & Murphys. Better think twice before throwing those stereotypes around all willy-nilly. Seriously though everybody down in the Microgravity Combustion Lab digs your column, it's really the only one I've seen worth reading since what's-her-name did 'Sex on Tuesday' a couple years back (Rachael something?). Your description of Berkeley during spring break really took the edge off my own spring break aliment: a cell-phone inflicted deep calf contusion. For real, the sage-like doc at the tang said it was the first one he'd ever seen, I guess they're normally caused by football helmets. Call Guinness, and if you're ever in the neighborhood stop by 60 Hesse Hall and show us your boobs!

See, now that's a cool email. The author is obviously intelligent and interesting, and has a first name of ambiguous gender, which means I can't e-hit on him or her, which is probably a good thing. I love science nerds.

I think I'll make this a regular feature, and maybe go back through the past nine weeks and share some more of my old favorite Daily Cal emails.

Feel free to trounce through my archives using the links I've included on the sidebar under "Flagrant Autofellatio."

2005-03-31T15:14:00.000-08:00

Mitch Hedberg Dead.

Shit.

"Well that's a fresher. I'm going on break."

God speed to one of the most original stand-up comics I've heard. This is a blow to the entire industry, which, save for gems like Mitch or David Cross or Patton Oswalt, is a mire of mediocrity and hackneyed jokes. If you haven't heard either of CDs, you are a sadder individual for it.

2005-03-30T16:03:00.000-08:00

Whoopsies.

Hey, it turns out that libel and slander aren't prohibited in the election by-laws anymore. Sucks to that. Nobody tells me anything.

This effectively makes the main motivation behind my campaign (to get sued and disqualified) thus far unfulfilled. My secondary motivation for running the "Slander and Libel" campaign (to have a reason to make up lies about my opponents), however, remains untinged.

Thus I need to find a different way to get sued. Let's see what I come up with.

Also, even if Zach Liberman is dropping out of the race, he still likes to put tampons in his asshole.

2005-03-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

That's some fancy reporting, Rebecca C. Brown

Check out this super-awesome new story I wrote up about Misha's not-quite-yet-finalized Executive Order that would allow EAP students to vote via mail via paper ballot via the inernet.

Look, I even used quotes and everything. I think I may have found my calling as a drab journalist.

Don't bother asking me to join your staff, Daily Californian. I'm too cool to work for you. Oh, wait, no I'm not.

2005-03-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

Federal court? What federal court?

Where's a properly functioning rumor mill when you need it? Let's just hope it invovles Zach Liberman crying some more.

Pussy.

2005-03-24T20:35:00.000-08:00

Another example of a campus Republican being startlingly competent

Two cheers, at the very least, to Election Council Chair Angel Brewer for not doing anything stupid yet.

Excerpt #1 from an e-mail to all candidates, written by Angel:

Your candidate statement - You have up to 100 words to write whatever you would like. Your statement will NOT be edited or proofread; I am only going to be making sure that you have 100 or fewer words.
Compare this to the (in my opinion and the opinion of a certain former Judicial Council Chair) unnecessary and illegal actions taken by last year's Election Council Publicity Coordinator, who took it upon herself to censor the content of three SQULECH! Party candidate statements (Holohan v. Simon, 2004). As if the word "cunt" wasn't protected speech.

Needless to say, both my candidate statements this year (for president and senator) were riddled with profanity, and I've yet to encounter objections from any Election Council members.

Excerpt #2 from an email sent to those involved with the weeky ASUC ad in the Daily Cal, written by Angel:

The ASUC Voters' Guide that runs in the Daily Cal is part of the election publicity budget. Last year WAY too much $$ was spent on it when it ran as part of the Daily Cal. This year we are doing the layout & printing ourselves (the same printer as the Daily Cal) and just paying for the insert costs. We'll save AT LEAST $2,500.SO AWESOME!

She's also been pretty helpful so far with keeping the website updated and complete. Though, to my credit, I've been working my ass off for asuc.org and election.asuc.org. Fuck, I even learned how to do lists in html.

Speaking of which, please use both those sites (especially the election one) as helpful tools during this election season. I like to run a tight ship. As always, your input about both sites is very appreciated and actually influences the way I develop the sites.

Alright, I'm done verbally blowing Angel and myself.

2005-03-22T19:20:00.000-08:00

I am Kilroy!

At some point in one's youth one realizes that one is physically, mentally, and emotionally incomplete, and that many of the conundrums of existence will never be solved. However, this morning I unlocked the single greatest mystery in life. It took courage, strength, and about a liter of ketchup, but I've figured it out:

"Mr. Roboto" is the best song of all time.

2005-03-21T14:14:00.000-08:00

Why you should vote for me, Point 1: I'm not a douchebag

Election season is just two weeks away from reaching its boiling point (which, much like peanut oil, has a significantly higher boiling point than olive oil - which is why you shouldn't fry with olive oil), and it's about time that I started my presidential campaign in earnest. I would have started my presidential campaign in Ernest, but I'm pretty sure that Christmas has already been saved several times over.

Anyhow, I've noticed as of late that most ASUC candidates are like skeezey men: they only talk to me if they think I can give them something they want. For many candidates, they talk to me because they want (a) an official second-place endorsement, (b) my second-place vote, (c) me to extoll their virtues to my friends/readership/interested voters in general, or (d) a nice firm handjob.

I will give none of those things, nor will I ever ask for any of those things from any of my opponents. I will not ask my opponents or any non-SQUELCH! Party candidates for any favors, nor will I scheme behind their backs, nor will I pretend to enjoy the company of people whom I genuinely dislike. If you catch me on Sproul during campaign season, I will talk to you as a person and not a potential voter. I'm confident that my unquestionable charm and rock-hard abs speak for themselves.

That's the SQULECH! Party difference: we don't politic. (We do, however, turn adjectives into intransitive verbs.)

The same cannot be said for a certain Zach Liberman, who happens to be a registered sex offender.

So, in short, you should vote for me because I'm not a phoney douchebag. Or you can not vote for me at all. It's the American way. With any luck more ASUC candidates will follow my lead and adopt a more genuine, friendly approach to garnering supporters.

Many thanks to my opponents who join me in my quest for sincerity. Undoubtedly fellow presidential candidates Alfred Twu and Ronald Cruz will be my greatest allies in this journey. In fact, they would both be ideal candidates if not for their respective penchants for embezzlement and public nudity. So sad.

2005-03-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

They're like characatures of themselves

Sometimes I question my perception of Republicans as "...scheming, homophobic, baby-seal-clubbing, civil-liberty-repressing conservatives sitting around a mahogany table giving hand jobs to Fortune 500 CEOs...," but maybe that's not much of an exaggeration after all.

That's right. We're finally gonna start drilling for oil in Alaska. Because the internal cumbustion engine is the wave of the future! Hydrogen, nuclear-generated electricity, corn alcohol, driving less...Not in the USA, my friends.

It's as if Bush and the Republicans in Congress are attempting to enact legislation so eggregiously evil that the headlines look like they're ripped from the Onion. "Bush Proposes Burning Orphaned Puppies to Fuel Rocket to Mars." "Congressional Republicans Take Turns Raping Your Grandmother." "Condoleeza Rice: 'Fuck Iraqi Children.'" "Reps Support Drilling in Alaskan Frontier to Leach the Land that Might Not Have Much Oil in It, Even if Doing So Destroys Hundreds of Native Species."

Congratulations, team. You've outdone yourselves.

2005-03-15T22:32:00.000-08:00

Und meine nummer es:

TWENTY TWO

That's my presidential candidate ballot number. Now I need to think of things that rhyme with 22. Like...Vote for me, I'll vote for you. Big brown shoe. Smells like poo. Get the flu. Kinda blue.

Anyhow, now I just need to get a "2" tattooed on each buttcheek.

Word.