I am Jack’s Self Loathing
By Chris McDonald

Am I the only one that remembers the old Reader’s Digest I Am Joe’s….series? Most people associate the “I am…” educational series with the movie “Fight Club”, as in “I am Jack’s Raging Bile Duct” or “I am Jack’s Cold Sweat” and so on. I am willing to bet that almost everyone who watched that movie would be surprised to learn there really was a monthly series of articles from Reader’s Digest usually having some catchy title like “I am Joe’s Heart”. Or “Liver”. Or “Epiglottis”. You get the idea. I mention this because (1) Fight Club is one of the all time best sports movies (2) I had a title for this article and needed to segue to my real thoughts (3) I love trivia and I like to educate the masses (“ I am Jack’s Over Inflated Sense of Self Importance”).

Anyway, why is Jack full of self loathing? Because Jack is so starved for anything football related. It is pathetic. Placing bets on the local peewee leagues and the high school spring practice games. Do you know how creepy that is? The local police and those nazis at the mom’s club can tell you. I can’t help it. It is summer and I am starved for any news, any rumor, any whiff of faux pigskin that I constantly cruise BOFZ, refreshing the browser every few seconds watching for a new comment or post that might give me my fix. “Hey man, hear anything lately?” “You mean in the last five minutes that you last asked? Yeah, okay, I heard that Gilbert isn’t solid for Texas, he is looking at Notre Dame, how does that float your boat?”. Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff… Now I can post on my blog or mass email the relatives in Idaho the Gilbert rumor and I can, in the internet world, be a demi god of information, one in the know, inflating that already over inflated sense of self importance, you know; a geek. Running through the house in my sweat stained wife beater and jockeys yelling “Honey, honey! Gilbert may not be as locked down as we thought!” Eye rolls…. “I am Jack’s Pathetic Life”.

Well, no more. “I am Jack’s Newly found Sense of Purpose”. No more fingers raw and bleeding from searching the stats of every Eight grade Adonis who might be a projected top 100 in 2014. No more looking for every edge my Horns might have in landing this potential stud. His uncle was once seen wearing a Longhorn T shirt….His dad bought him a pair of white and sort of burnt orange shoes once…His coach attended a Longhorn coaching camp back in ‘’99.…I am done. I am going to go be a productive member of society. Get some sun, work in my overgrown jungle of a yard. Walk with my kids, Vince and what’s her name? Earlene, everyday. Actually talk to my wife about important things. Feed my starving dog. Volunteer at a shelter. Good things. Important things.

And I am starting today. Right now. Right after I check the recruiting forum just one last time….

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You will have to excuse my objection to being talked down to about civility when this clarion call comes from one person who derisively dismisses the concerns of a large segment of his constituency….

this from an “Inside the Beltway” article about a new book about Obama from Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter:

The term “tea-bagger” is like uttering the “n” word, some say. Though he aspires to promote civility, evidence has surfaced that President Obama has added “tea-bagger” to his public lexicon, though it’s considered a cheap and tawdry insult by “tea party” activists. Watchdogs at Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) barked when they saw the proof, tucked in a sneak peak of Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter’s new book, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” to be released May 18. Indeed, it appears the president joined certain partisan critics and the liberal media, and took the tea-bag plunge.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/05/strong-brew/

….and from a hack journalist that right under the banner of this glorious call for decorum and respect the editors note states: John P. Avlon is a CNN contributor and a senior political columnist for The Daily Beast. He is the author of the new book, “Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America.”

Obama’s plea for civility is exactly right
By John P. Avlon, CNN Contributor
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor’s note: John P. Avlon is a CNN contributor and a senior political columnist for The Daily Beast. He is the author of the new book, “Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America.”

New York (CNN) — We don’t listen to each other anymore.

It’s not just a complaint in relationships — it’s a fair characterization of the state of our national political debate. The bond between fellow American citizens is being weakened by screaming and suspicion.

That’s why President Obama’s commencement address at the University of Michigan this past weekend is worth contemplating.

It was a call for civility rooted in American history; a challenge to the bitter and predictable partisanship that is afflicting our country. It was a timely reminder that the success of the American experiment depends on every generation being able to reason together in the pursuit of solving our common problems.

“We can’t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it. You can question somebody’s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism. Throwing around phrases like ’socialists’ and ‘Soviet-style takeover’ and ‘fascist’ and ‘right-wing nut’ — that may grab headlines, but it also has the effect of comparing our government, our political opponents, to authoritarian, even murderous regimes.

The hypocrisy is deafening.

Right now, even a speech by the president of the United States is considered suspect by committed partisans — actually listening is not as satisfying as reinforcing a play-to-the-base political narrative.

uh, sorry, Mr. Avlon, this is not a new occurrence as you would have us believe. It is not only happening “right now”, it happened all eight years of the Bush presidency. Remember “Bush lied, people died”? or all the jokes about his speaking ability and intelligence? And the lengths that the media went to to dig up suspect story lines? Remember the non story from Dan Rather that cost Rather his job? Where were you then with your call for civility and respect?

So you can keep your sudden found dismay at the partisanship that seems only to you and the President to have formed since 2008, because America is going to begin to set this ship right come November 2010 and will continue to repair the damage in 2012 and where she will institute real hope and change.

Full article can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/04/avlon.obama.civility/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

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What I Believe

1. I believe In Jesus Christ as my savior. I won’t force Him on anyone as He never forced Himself on anyone and I should do no more. That said, I would hope that everyone that truly reads His words with an open mind and open heart would see the truth of His words and would come to believe.

2. Everyone, I don’t care what your gender, age, creed, color, religion (or non religion), sexual orientation, etc. and so forth is, deserves respect , love and freedom from discrimination. I am a sinner and therefore no better than anyone else.

3. I may not always agree with you, but I respect and defend you right to say it, within reason. Death threats and violence notwithstanding.

4. I don’t believe in capital punishment. I think there are too many, and one is too many, folks in jail or on death row that are innocent. Too many people have been exonerated of their crimes through DNA testing lately, leading me to what I consider an obvious and logical conclusion.

5. I believe in a child’s right to life, no if ands or buts, rape and if the death of mother AND baby are certain excepted. Adoption is the price we pay for our mistakes.

6. I believe in being good stewards of the earth. I don’t believe in AGW, but I do believe that we should all do our part to decrease our dependence on foreign oil and we should take care of our little corner of the world. If you see trash on the ground, pick it up and don’t put any on the ground for someone else to pick up. Use common sense, recycle what you can and educate others without the hyperbole and chicken little scenarios.

7. Women deserve to be treated with respect and deserve equal pay for an equal job done. Anyone who strikes or attacks a woman should be dealt with harshly.

8. Pedophiles should get life without parole, no exceptions. I am not talking about the 19 yr old who has sex with his 16 yr old girlfriend.

9. I believe in the United States and its Constitution. I think everyone should read the Constitution and understand what it means at least once a year, especially those running for President and congress. I do NOT believe it is a “living breathing document” or that it is subject to “interpretation”. The founding fathers left plenty of evidence as to what they meant, the discussion should be over.

10. I believe in the sanctity of marriage, Marriage is a Holy covenant between a man a woman and God.

11. I believe in civil ceremonies for those who would seek union with each other outside of my admittedly narrow definition of marriage. What you do in a legal, civil sense is your business and no one else’s.

12. I believe that homosexual partners who have contracted with each other should have all the rights afforded to them by law as anyone else would including but not limited to inheritance, adoption, housing, healthcare benefits, etc. I do NOT believe any group should receive special consideration that any other group does not receive.

13. I believe in the truth of the bible. You can argue literal interpretation until you are blue in the face but no matter what, the truth is in there, you just have to be open to it.

14. I believe fiscal responsibility. Especially in our government. Spending, corruption and big government are out of control. It is every Americans right and responsibility to protest our displeasure with our government and to vote out everyone who does not uphold core moral values and honesty.

15. I believe that we should dismantle the IRS. I believe that we should go to a flat tax or a national sales tax. Tax should then only be raised by a 2/3 rd approval by the states.

16. I believe that corporations and corporate officers that abuse their positions should have to forfeit those positions.

17. I believe everyone has a right to try, not a guarantee to succeed.

18. I believe that all immigrants should be welcome, legally. Not 100% sure how it is supposed to work now but I know whatever it is, it’s NOT working. Secure our borders, streamline the process to get temporary access to work in this country right up through citizenship. Temporary work visas that require a stay of no more than 3 months to 2 years shouldn’t take 3 years to obtain. Background checks should be a no brainer and anyone with criminal history should not be allowed in. A working knowledge of English should be mandatory for citizenship. If caught in the country illegally, immediate deportation, no appeal, and no reentry to the United States for a minimum of two years. No exceptions. If you are here illegally already you get a choice; stay, pay a sizable fine, and apply for a green card or go back to your country of origin and get in the back of the line to come in legally.

19. Stop using business as a tax collector. Payroll, FICA, Medicare, etc. taxes should be billed directly to the employee. When the American worker has to sit down and write a check to the government for taxes, I believe that he/she will have a greater understanding of how much they actually pay in taxes and will demand much more accountability from his representatives.

20. Do away with all lobbyists. It is time to stop our representatives being bought and paid for by special interests.

21. Term limits. We have one for the President of the United States, why not congress. Stop making a career out of politics; it is an invitation to corruption and abuse of power.

22. Fiscal conservancy should be demanded of congress. Don’t spend more than you have and spend only on what you are authorized to spend as spelled out by the Constitution.

23. Anyone running for Congress, Supreme Court, or President of the United States must exhibit a detailed knowledge of the Constitution.

24. Decriminalize marijuana, it’s a stupid law. Regulate it, tax it, and enforce the laws already on the books regarding abuse (i.e. DUI).

25. Freedom OF religion not freedom FROM religion.

26. Stop the stupid debate on the 2nd amendment. We had this debate in 1787, enough already.

27. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your business, not mine. As long as you are not harming another human being or animal I don’t have any interest.

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This is hilarious, and all too true…

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So common sense, studious research, and gut feeling is finally rewarded and confirmation comes from the self serving same scientific community that walked lockstep with the UN Panel.

The team, recruited by the climate-change skeptics behind the website NoConsensus.org, found that 5,600 of the 18,500 sources in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report were not peer reviewed.

“We’ve been told this report is the gold standard,” said Canadian global-warming skeptic Donna Laframboise, who runs the NoConsensus.org site and who organized the online effort to examine the U.N.’s references in the report, commonly known as the AR4.

The cover of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report to the U.N., “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report,” more frequently referred to as AR4.

“We’ve been told it’s 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have been nowhere near a scientific journal.”

According to Lafromboise, much of the scientific research published by the U.N. cited press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, student theses, newsletters, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups. Such material is often called “gray literature,” she said, and it stands in stark contrast to the U.N.’s claims about the study’s sources.

and OUCH:

But other policy experts were unsurprised by the report. Dan Miller, a spokesman for the Heartland Institute, a non-profit think tank that is hosting a global warming conference next month in Chicago, said the bad grades given to the U.N. were apt.

“The IPCC deserves every stroke of its ‘F’ grade,” Miller told FoxNews.com. “Not only is the data used in the report flawed and suspect, but even more egregiously, the IPCC authors — very few of whom indeed are scientists — refused to consult with scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC’s defining hypothesis: that the Earth faces a crisis from rising global temperatures and that human activity played a significant role.”

“The authors’ closed minds are a trait typical of propagandists, not scientists,” he added.

Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax Revealed

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Just like Jean Valjean, I stole this from Henry Jennings to feed my family….

http://www.tinyminds.net/2010/04/03/best-movie-line-ever/

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Is Twitter inviting competition by ignoring it’s customers? Some twitters think so. There has been a disturbing trend of cyberbullying or even outright cyberterrorism by a small percentage of twitter abusers.

In recent months, a disturbing trend has been emerging where a small percentage of users have grown increasingly bold in their attacks on other users. These attacks may include outright slander, libel and defamation. At times, the attacks contain overt references to sexual or other bodily function activity in the most graphic and vulgar of terms. The attackers will also resort to posting links within messages appearing to be news and opinion tweets in which the links go to graphic pornographic or scatalogic images. Finally, the last method of attack so to create faked retweets of messages from users in which overtly racial (including use of the “N” word), pornographic, or graphic sexual activity is falsely attributed to the target of the attack.

Twitter does not have any stated minimum age for users in its Terms of Service, unlike Facebook and other services. Therefore, not only are the attacks being seen by all users of Twitter, they are being seen in many cases by users under the age of 18. Video games and movies contain ratings that bar inappropriate material to minors. Twitter has become a free-fire zone where nearly anything goes. It should be rated NC-17 based on the content that is appearing more and more frequently. Users of Twitter may expect to see the “N” word used with disturbing regularity as a means to attack another. Users should also prepare themselves to hear discussions and see images of explosive diarrhea, images of gay orgies imbedded in tweets supposedly about White House Easter egg hunts, see open and graphically vulgar sexual activity being offered or used as abuse, and anything else that may come to mind of the cyberbullies.

Twitter has a hands off policy of non response to these claims that could be its eventual downfall and fall victim of a downward spiral making it about as felicitous as “chatroulette”.

Greg W. Howard has written an excellent article on this growing trend HERE.

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This is getting so tiresome. It seems we can’t go one day without some new Climategate scandal. This one is to ambitious to pass up though. 60 Billion (with a B) in a carbon credit deal, much like the ones that Obama would have us back in his next piece of crown jewel legislation to remake America in his image, only this one is proven to be an outright scam. Oh, and the other “shocking” aspect of this story? It is being proposed by so-called widely respected scientific institution Woods Hole Research Institute and the World Wildlife Fund. Woods Hole is one of those “widely respected institutes” that’s research is touted by many climate scientists as impartial proof of AGW.

It was nothing of the kind. Despite the best efforts of Woods Hole’s leading advocate on the Amazon to promote fears that global warming might pose a threat to the rainforest, these were only based on now discredited computer modelling. Various papers from the wider scientific community suggest a very different, much less alarming picture. But if Woods Hole and the WWF fail to promote a concern over a climatic threat to the Amazon, they might miss a chance to share in that $60 billion prize (a figure worked out by Woods Hole itself) for keeping parts of the rainforest just as they are – in what would amount to the most lucrative set-aside scheme that human ingenuity has ever devised.

You can find the rest of this disgusting story here: The Telegraph

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or should I say bigots, and quite succinctly I might add. Please go to the Dallas Morning News to read how Mr. Davis responds to the hatred and vitriol poured on to this movement. Here is a sample:

Some people with some very loud media megaphones believe that I will be conducting the equivalent of a Klan rally. This is a lie, and their slanders – driven by their political bigotry – cannot stand.

I don’t particularly care if some idiot on the street misreads the Tea Party vigor and invents in it a fictional sinister motivation. But when a succession of people who analyze things for a living weave such vast falsehoods, it is simultaneously sad and infuriating.

Frank Rich of The New York Times and Colbert King of The Washington Post are among the columnists willingly checking their honesty – or their brains – at the door to throw political mud. Either these people are too ignorant to know their charges or false, or they don’t care and spit their bile anyway.

King wrote last week of looking at “angry faces” at Tea Party rallies and finding them “eerily familiar,” resembling protesters seeking to prevent a black University of Alabama enrollee in 1956.

Rich peppered his column with Third Reich imagery, eventually backing up his claim of racism with comparisons to those who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Leaving aside for the moment that much opposition to that measure came from Democrats, it cannot be said plainly enough today: These men and their numerous partners in this smear should be ashamed – if nothing else, for logical flaws beneath a fifth-grader.

Their argument is: (A) This movement is filled with vocal people displeased with the way things are going; (B) I can find examples in history of people whose vocal displeasure was fueled by racism. Hence, (C) these people must be fueled by racism.

OK, boys, let’s see how you like it: (A) You are fans of ObamaCare; (B) Castro is a fan of ObamaCare, so, (C) you are communists.

Logic and basic human decency prevent me from making that connection seriously. I would like to believe that if these craven critics actually attended a Tea Party event, their testimony would change. But I doubt it. Theirs is a screeching born of panic, the need to demonize a movement rather than debate it.

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At least according to Political cartoonist Tom Toles.

Health Care, the newborn

Tommy boy needs to get his facts straight, it wasn’t the Republicans that said this:

What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”

National Review

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