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Archive for July, 2009

Amazon Puts The Firemen From Fahrenheit 451 Out Of Work

Posted by scott on July 17th, 2009

UPDATED below
Via Wil Wheaton’s Twitter feed (twitter.com/wilw), we get this news about the latest developments in digital book burning:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Yes, well, if ever a publisher needed to actually read his author’s books…

I don’t quite believe that in a battle between retailer and publisher, Amazon is the party which lacks leverage.  Still, I guess it was inevitable; just as they’ve made book buying ruinously easy, Amazon has now made book banning both effortless and instantaneous.  You don’t even have to light a match anymore, let alone dispatch firemen to hose down an unlucky bibliophile’s library with kerosene; all you have to do is hit Enter.

I bought a Kindle after I injured my back, and it’s a pleasant traveling companion.  Apparently, however, if I want to keep the books I buy for it I have no option but to memorize and recite them to myself as I wander around in the snow.  Thanks, Jeff Bezos.

UPDATE:
Endgadget has more from Amazon:

Drew Herdener, Amazon.com’s Director of Communications, pinged us directly with the following comment, and now things are starting to make a lot more sense. Seems as if the books were added initially by an outfit that didn’t have the rights to the material.

These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.

So, Amazon confesses to breaking into its customers’ Kindles and secretly activating the Memory Hole option, but they’re really sorry and promise never, ever to do it again, and you can totally trust them to resist enabling that previously unmentioned protocol that will cause your Kindle to self-destruct like those tape recorders at the beginning of Mission: Impossible.

That’s good enough for me.

A Plea For The Profane

Posted by scott on July 17th, 2009

As you know, we don’t usually rattle the tin cup around here, mostly because Chris Muir needs your support so much more, or he may have to stop supplying the world with cartoons about the wacky adventures of Cubist women with scoliosis.  But our old friend Anntichrist S. Coulter, who has been a fixture around Wo’C about as long as I have, is at a low point and could use a bit of help.

As some of you may know, she underwent surgery on her neck yesterday, which may finally restore some of her lost mobility and compromised dexterity, but she’s fairly helpless at the moment.  Her co-blogger Terrible explains:

[I]t’ll be a while before she’s back to being the Annti we all know and love. She won’t be able to get around on her own for a while and will have to be asking for rides etc. And will need to give something for gas etc to those she can get to help her. And as you all know Annti is on a very small fixed income and can’t afford a lot of the things many people take for granted much less come up with cash for a ride to get meds or groceries. SOOOOOO if you can PLEASE pitch in a little to help out by clicking on the PayPal Donate button to your right and down(labeled ‘Annti’s Feral Feline Food, Fuel, and First-Aid Fund’). Believe you me I know things are tight all way round for most of us these days but even a couple of bucks will help make a difference. Bad enough having to have neck surgery, worse still to have it when broke and unable to get about.

I’ve kicked things off with a small donation on behalf of the blog, but if you can help at all, I know Annti would appreciate it. And if we collect enough donations to reach our goal, I’ll promise not to sing “You Never Walk Alone.”

Click here, then scroll down.  The PayPal button is one the right.  Thanks very much, guys.

On a Wingnut and a Prayer

Posted by scott on July 14th, 2009

There’s been quite a bit of turnover at conservative journal of opinion RenewAmerica recently.  Savvy observers of online media suspect that Alan Keyes’ flagship site is taking a tip from the prefabricated boy bands of the 80s and 90s, and dismissing staffers who age beyond the ideal demographic (RA’s slogan: “Never Trust Anyone Over 73″).  The superannuated cranks are being replaced with younger, hipper, more attractive cranks, and if all goes according to plan, tomorrow’s RenewAmerica will be as popular and relevant as today’s Menudo.

Which brings us to New Face of ’09, Nanette Malher.

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Nanette’s biography isn’t as tender and confessional as Fred Hutchinson’s; but we do learn that she’s a private pilot and “the owner of Aviatrix Enterprises, a multimedia company in Nashville, TN, specializing in web, print, film, and music services.”  The company also specializes in ugly website design and glamour shots of the proprietor.  But perhaps the most interesting thing about Nanette is her vision of God as a cosmic 12-year old boy, and humanity as bunch of green plastic Army Men.

Pacifism kills more swiftly than bullets.

Which is why our soldiers and Marines are issued pacifism-proof vests.  However, some of the wilier, more insidious pacifists — your Quakers, say, or your Jainists — have learned to coat their non-violence with Teflon, making it even deadlier.

I have little respect for pacifists, who call themselves such, and then come out swinging with angry creeds that cut like knives.

I once espoused a creed that could cut a tomato so thin you could see through it, but it was confiscated by airport security.

I find it very interesting that pacifists can make hateful, radical arguments with a black-vs-white, cemented conviction and then sit back and pretend they’ve done nothing destructive.

“My mother was killed by pacifists!  Slowly I turned…!”

We live in the world where America is the last bastion of freedom. We need to fight the evil that wishes to destroy our nation of light and hope.

The European Union is like a gigantic gulag, except with good health care and hash cafés.

Today, I’m imagining what will happen if Americans do not wake up and understand that the latest enemy of God and American freedom lives in the White House.

Oh good, Obama Bingo!  Let me get my cards…

Our new and inexperienced president is ripe with hatred under his calm demeanor. He despises the very American principles for which our men and women have died.

I’ve got “his outward calm is a mask for anti-American rage,” so I’m gonna put a token on that…Let’s see, next…? Marxist?  Pinocchio?

He is Marxist and a puppet who is taking cues from known and unknown directors of evil.

Yes!  (I’m gonna need more tokens!)  Okay…Messiah?  Emperor’s New Clothes?  State-owned press?  Foreign-born sleeper agent of the transnational Caliphate who’s building a secret army to subvert the Constitution…?

He’s not the first emperor with no clothing in America, but he is, by far, the one we should fear the most, because for some unworldly reason, his lies are believed to be divine truths. The press will not question him; too many Americans will not oppose him, even if they do so in their own minds. Americans have become pacifists as they ignore the cold, hard facts concerning the swift actions now being taken by the current administration and all the appointed czars therein to undo what true defenders of the Republic hold dear: The Constitution of the United States.

Hold your cards, we have a Bingo!

Too many Americans are under the same evil spell, and we must stand up to them. They believe in concepts that are objectively false, completely opposite to our founding principles, and serve selfish purposes:

Oh good, another trademark RenewAmerica List o’ Shame…

  • The Muslim, who cannot live in a world with those who do not believe in his god.

I wondered why they all committed suicide the other day…

  • The right-wing, white supremacist, who does not want to live in a world with those who are not of his color.

Yeah.  Big Obama fans, those guys…

  • The thief, the rapist, the murderer.

The Baker.  The Candlestick Maker.  The Thief, the Cook, his Wife, and her Lover…

  • The pacifist, who will say and do nothing.

Which actually seems like kind of an attractive quality at the moment.

Shall we love the enemy while we watch him destroy us? Or shall we love the enemy, God and humanity enough to stop him (or her)? By denouncing pacifism, we are trying to save millions from a fate that is worse than death: Life without freedom.

Is there anyone in particular you want to bomb, Nan, or are you just spitballing here?

The enemy is out in the open and the enemy is hidden. He is ready to implement a “New World Order” and we are letting it happen. Whatever his face, he has broken into our home — America. A new holocaust is about to begin, and so many know it and feel it.

You know how when you get fixed up with a friend of a friend, and she’s very pretty and the date seems to be going really well, and then somewhere between the salad and the entree she starts sounding crazier and crazier, until by the time dessert comes you’re fairly certain she’s going to end the evening by inviting you up for a three-way with her imaginary friend, except her imaginary friend is a dude, and she just wants to watch?

The grand director of evil…

Wow, somebody got a promotion.  I remember when Satan was just a Regional Manager.

…wishes to confuse the difference between what is right and what is wrong — causing strife, even among believers, and ultimately causing the destruction of all Americans’ God-given right to be free.

So we need to bomb ourselves, is that it?  I just wanna know who to bomb!

My dear pacifist: When someone breaks into your home and threatens to kill your family, and you have a choice between doing nothing or doing something that might save your children, I pray that you will do something. I shudder to think what our world would be like today if God had done nothing to save His children from evil. He sent His own Son to die for us. Americans send their own children into battle to save humanity from the tyrants of the world.

On the downside, the children of Americans killed in battle don’t come back to life and crawl out of their tombs three days later.

Some would argue that Jesus himself was a pacifist — He did not strike his enemy as his enemy struck him down. On the contrary!

Jesus was a blade man, man!  He carried a 12-inch creed in his boot!

If you believe that God came to earth to live as a man, died for us, and rose from the dead to show us exactly WHO He IS and how much he loves us, then he was NEVER struck down!

The whole thing was done with mirrors and trick lighting.

He dealt the enemy the greatest and most destructive blow in the history of the universe! The enemy is dead already. He just doesn’t know it.

We should send him a text and let him know he’s dead, before he buys some non-refundable airline tickets or something.

He still thinks he can win. For those who would argue that God wants us to be pacifists, I argue that God wants us to stand for Him in the Great Battle that is to come, just as he stood for us . . . unto death.

Except he faked his own death for the insurance!

Jesus was the ultimate soldier

universal-soldier.jpg

Jesus, on the left, in undated file photo.

When I meet my Maker, I do not wish to have blank pages after my name in the Book of Life. I want it to be filled with the actions I took on behalf of the Name above all Names, even if those actions were condemned by the pacifists and non-believers of my day.

So you’d like to have a hefty body count.  Okey-doke, whatever you say, General Westmoreland.

God died for us, so my conviction, and my hope, is that while I am fervently praying for the salvation of the world and my country, I will have the strength to fight evil, even in the face of death, for the sake of the One and Only God and the freedom He gave us and wants us to enjoy!

I give it a week, tops, before she starts buzzing the Hickory Hollows Mall in her Cessna Skylane, and bombing the shit out of the shoppers with M-80s.

I Liked Blair Better When She Was More Bitchy Than Crazy

Posted by scott on July 14th, 2009

You may remember Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair on The Facts of Life, and went on to write some astoundingly creepy advice books on Christian Parenting.  S.z. first noticed Lisa’s “creative correction” methods back in 2004, when she was featured in the Washington Post (scroll down to item B):

Whelchel offers the following: “For lying or other offenses of the tongue, I ‘spank’ my kids’ tongues. I put a tiny drop of hot sauce on the end of my finger and dab it onto my child’s tongue. It stings for a while, but it abates. (It’s the memory that lingers!)”

Macing the kids will also create memories that linger.  In fact, any number of chemical weapons make great disciplinary aids, in that they require much less physical exertion on the parent’s part than do old-fashioned beatings.

A little later (scroll down to the 2nd post), s.z. noticed that Lisa was writing an advice column in Today’s Christian Woman, coming off like a combination of a dotty Ann Landers and an Old Testament prophet whose lunch of locusts really wasn’t agreeing with him.  In the excerpted column, Lisa offered foolproof tips on what to tell if your teen is gay, and how to stamp it out before it metastasizes through the while family.

Two common threads exist among those who struggle with homosexual tendencies. First, does your son exhibit any signs of childhood molestation or incest? If you suspect this is the case, seek help from a local Christian counselor.

Then look at the father/son (and for girls, the mother/daughter) relationship. Does your son feel accepted by his father? Is your husband a jock who rejects or even ridicules your son’s interest in the arts? Perhaps your son’s father isn’t even in the picture, either by divorce, absence, death, or passivity. The father holds the key to affirming a boy’s manhood. Without that blessing, a gaping hole is left in a young man’s life. Fortunately, a healing substitute often can be found in a strong father figure. If not, some young men attempt to “cannibalize” other men through homosexual actions to fill that void.

So, if your son wasn’t molested, has a father who doesn’t make make fun of him for being a sissy, and he isn’t a cannibal, then there’s no way he’s gay.

Now, Lisa tells us how to make sex so creepy that your kids will never be heterosexual either.

When each of our children turned ten, my husband, Steve, and I took them to a hotel for an overnighter, just the three of us. We would check in one early afternoon and spend the rest of the day doing something fun together.

Before heading out to dinner, we read the chapter “Male+Female+God’s Gift of Life=Baby,” from a book entitled How You Are Changing (Concordia), by Jane Graver. This was the moment when our son, Tucker, responded with, “I should have packed a barf bag!” and when our daughter, Haven, began with, “You mean our pastor did that?” then proceeded to ask the same question about every parent she knew.

So, the plan so far: never say anything at all about sex until the kid is ten.  Then, take him (or her) to a motel and read him the chapter of the book that tells him that the man puts his thing in the woman’s you-know-what, and God sends the woman a baby.  Reassure him that although this is disgusting and icky, that the pastor does it too — just not with Mrs. Pastor, ’cause she’s too spiritual for that kind of thing.

Over dinner, we answered any questions our children had (although at this point, Tucker never wanted to hear the word “sex” again!).

See, the plan works!  Tucker is now effectively asexual, and Lisa will never have to worry about him defiling his purity.

When we returned to the hotel, we read a few chapters from the book, What’s the Big Deal: Why God Cares About Sex (NavPress), by Stan and Brenna Jones. Steve and I like this book because it forthrightly answers so many questions from a godly perspective without giving more information than necessary. Before our son or daughter hit overload, we laid the book down for the evening, snuggled up in bed together, and rented a family movie.

Finish off your child’s sexuality by keeping him in the motel room as you read to him several chapters of a book on how sex is bad unless it’s to make babies — and then crawl into the motel bed with him.

The next morning was interspersed with a few more chapters, a lot more fun, a few more questions, and a lot more hugs, until we completed the book together.

And so, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, the Wechel children have been effectively conditioned.  But if Lisa finds out they weren’t, I’m sure she has some  for the occasion.  You know, like a clothespin on the body part that offended Christ.

Well, Lisa’s back, and The Bloggess has got her!  It seems Holly, Lisa’s hard-working PR rep, emailed The Bloggess asking if she’d like to interview the former Facts of Life star about her latest endeavor:

Lisa Whelchel is currently on tour with the Nation’s Largest Women’s Conference – “Women of Faith” which has attracted nearly 4 Million women since it launched in 1996.

The curious capitalization makes it sound as though it’s a conference of the Nation’s Largest Women — you know, Margo Dydek, Julie Strain, Allison Hayes from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman — but then Holly drives that image right out of my mind when she drops this bombshell of trivia:

Lisa Whelchel is so committed to living a downsized life as a mom that she even passed on JENNIFER ANISTON’s Role on “FRIENDS” which was offered to her. That role made Jennifer Aniston’s career and she earned $25 Million in 2008 and was ranked the #8 highest earning celebrity in Hollywood on FORBES 2009 Celebrity 100 List. It’s difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast to living on a pastor’s salary!

For “passed on” read “someone sent her agency the pilot script” or possibly even “she made an audition tape that the casting director’s assistant eventually got around to watching.”  But the important thing is that the former TV star is now living the  modest, humble, stay-at-home life of a pastor’s wife (a phrase Holly relentlessly repeats until one begins to suspect onomatomania), which is obvious from the way Lisa is touring the country and giving interviews.

The Bloggess obliged Holly by emailing a list of twelve probing questions for Blair.  Here’s a sample:

6. Your song, “ “, is very pretty but I think it would be more mainstream if it was something about getting shot at by radical non-Christians and you’re all “Cover me, Lord!” and he picks up a bazooka but in the end all the people he killed would be up in heaven with him because it’s a “Bazooka Of Salvation”. And then they’d all be like “Ah! You got me, Lord!” and point at him like those Mentos commercials. That would be awesome. This is less of a question than a suggestion, I guess.

Read the whole thing.  It’ll make your day.

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The Forced Perspective Edition

Posted by scott on July 11th, 2009

Here’s a shot that manages to capture each cat’s personality in a single frame.  In the foreground, of course, is Moondoggie, who hasn’t got a thought in his head or a mean bone in his body…

ForcedPerspectiveCats.jpg

While in the background we see Riley, who is, as usual, plotting the death of us all.

Random Scenes From Hollywood

Posted by scott on July 11th, 2009

I was playing around with the new iPhone camera as Mary and I walked home from dinner last night.  Below are the distinctive twin masts — originally the antennas for Sam Warner’s radio station, KFWB — atop the defunct Hollywood Pacific (formerly the Warner Theater) on Hollywood Boulevard.
WarnerMasts.jpg

Musso & Frank, oldest restaurant in Hollywood (established 1919).
Musso.jpg

The Dud From “Mystery Date” Sets Us Straight

Posted by scott on July 10th, 2009

I was surprised the other day to learn that RenewAmerica owed its existence to Alan Keyes, because I’d always assumed it was founded by P.T. Barnum.  Perhaps it was the warmth and unity I sensed among its contributors — a group of outcasts and misfits, united by their common differences, much like the family formed by the eponymous characters in Todd Browning’s Freaks.  But as much as I love each and every wingnutty one of them, there is no more endearingly demented oddball than Fred Hutchinson.

FredHutchinson.jpg

Fred, with his toothy smile, clip-on tie, and pink rosebud pinned by a proud and loving mother to his short-sleeved, polyester dress shirt from Sears, is a refreshingly goofy arbiter of moral justice.  It’s as if one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse favored pastels and resembled Napoleon Dynamite’s brother.

But even more darling is Fred’s bio, which is actually longer than his column.  It isn’t really a conventional, shorthand resumé so much as it is a heartfelt account of one man’s spiritual journey from confused, vision-questing adolescent to smug middle-aged dork:

During my teen years, I discovered a passion for truth in my heart and also discovered I was a political conservative. During my college years I joined the debate team, got active in politics and discovered that I enjoy a philosophical approach to learning. I was deeply convinced that truth exists and can be found by those who mean to have it. I devoted myself to the search for truth and stuck with that devotion for the rest of my life.

Yes, the search for Truth inevitably leads to RenewAmerica.  Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced of Fred’s bona fides.  Shall we get on with the column?   Oh, I’m sorry, Fred, you weren’t done with your bio?

At some point, I realized that to find truth one must go to the fountainhead of truth, namely God. I sought God during my last two years in college culminating in a traumatic and supernatural moment when I met Christ at the cross. From that moment to this, I have never doubted my eternal salvation.

‘Nuff said!  At this point, I’m more than ready for Fred to bust some Truth in our ass, but not only are we not done with his life story, we’re still two paragraphs away from the 1970s!  So I’m going to skip ahead to the end, where we discover that — I hope you’re sitting down — Fred is an unemployed CPA.  Anyway, let’s get on to his 400 word history of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia.

Liberal myths about the Vietnam War

Columnist Bob Herbert has historical amnesia about the Vietnam war but has total recall about the liberal myths of the anti-war movement. The central theme of his essay of 6/08/09 was that it was the Vietnam war was unwinnable and therefore a pointless waste of lives. It was not unwinnable but it lasted much longer than it should have because of the Johnson — Mc Namera rules of engagement and the micro-management of the war.

Like Alcoholics Anonymous members and the manufacturers of Hebrew National hot dogs, I’m going to pause here and defer to a Higher Power — Doghouse Riley:

“The political and military leadership of the North understood the war to be primarily political. We didn’t, and we still don’t. We never understood the Vietnamese, or how to fight an insurgency; our commanders tried to refight WWII. Our largely indiscriminate bombing program in the South, and ham-fisted relocation efforts, served to magnify Vietnamese resentment of the Western colonials and their corrupt Catholic puppets. And yet some of us are still trying to argue that if we’d only fought a little more WWII we’d have won. Like the tout sheet says we were supposed to.”

The Nixon-Kissinger team went China to give China what they wanted, namely prestige and world celebrity. In return, China agreed to allow America to bomb North Vietnam aggressively, with a Chinese promise not to come into the war as they did in Korea.

That’s some awesome truth-seeking Fred.  Of course, it might be worth mentioning — and correct me if I’m wrong — that by the time Nixon went to China in 1972, the People’s Republic had already withdrawn their forces from Vietnam, which by then was primarily a Soviet client, and begun backing the Khmer Rouge, who were involved in skirmishes with the North Vietnamese even before the fall of Saigon.  Then there was that little matter of the Vietnamese-Cambodian war beginning in 1975, and the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979.  But that’s all nitpicking.  The centuries-long history of relations between China and Vietnam probably wasn’t really all that complicated, and I’m sure Nixon and Kissinger knew exactly what they were doing.

Contrary to liberal myths, this bombing was very effective because it brought the North Vietnamese to the Paris Peace Talks (1973). The result was stalemate similar to the Korean War. In order to ensure that North Vietnam did not renege on the agreement, it was necessary to keep some American troops in Vietnam, give aid to South Vietnam and to retain the option of bombing. This was a win in terms of our goal to prevent the spread of Communism in South East Asia.

Yes, we had the North Vietnamese right where we wanted ‘em in 1973.

When Nixon was in Paris, enjoying the crowning triumph of his career, The Watergate burglars were captured. In the process of his downfall, the rage of the Democratic congress against Nixon reach a fever pitch. In this environment, the angry democrats in Congress were ready to swallow the all the myths of the antiwar movement. They cut off funds for the war, pulled out the troops and banned bombing.

Absolutely.  Except for a couple of minor points…

  1. Nixon wasn’t at the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973.
  2. The Watergate burglaries took place almost a year earlier, in 1972.
  3. The Nixon Administration began withdrawing troops from Vietnam in 1971.
  4. Congress didn’t “cut off funds for the war,” since the war was over.  They refused to allocate funds for renewed combat operations, and they cut aid to South Vietnam from $1 billion to $700 million.  The South Vietnamese were forced to economize by reusing Handi-Wipes and giving up some of their premium cable channels, but there was no shortage of leftover ordnance.

Historically, a blood purge follows the violent take-over of power by Communists of the Marxist- Leninist brand. The blood purge in Cambodia in involved in the murder of an estimated 2,000,000 people. 3,500,000 or one tenth of the men, women and children of South Vietnam died from political violence after the war and one third of these, or 1,250,000 were murdered. Bob Herbert puts the number at 2 or 3 million, not mentioning that most of these deaths were murders of communist blood purge and not civilian casualties of American military operations.

Actually, Herbert is talking about wartime casualties (“More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese”) which is why he didn’t mention your blood purge thing.  Now I think I see why you didn’t link to his column.

As a lefty, he wants to cover up the communist blood purge and make America look bad.

Is this like one of those viral ad campaigns on Twitter where you can win a MacBook Pro if you keep tweeting #bloodpurge?

The Paris Peace talks should have saved the lives of all those blood purge victims.

Guess so.  Well you’re working hard for it.  I hope you win.

The Democratic Congress who threw all those lives away.

(The Password is…Robert McNamara…)

They did it willfully even after they had been warned about blood purges. None of the Democratic congressmen who pulled the troops out and none of the anti-war leaders have ever apologized for engineering American defeat or for facilitating the blood purge.

Well.  I guess there’s nothing more to say then, except…Good-bye.
Oh, and…Blood Purge!

The Distinguished Gentleman From Nevada Is Grounded!

Posted by scott on July 10th, 2009

So the parents of Senator John Ensign (R-NV) wrote a check for $96,000 to get him out of trouble with a girl. Which would be bad enough, but only last week they had to pay to fix a neighbor’s window after the Senator hit a baseball through it.  Fortunately, Congress will be going on recess shortly, because Ensign’s going to have to mow a lot of lawns this summer to pay back his folks. (And you can just forget about that trip to Disney World, mister!)

I Come Not To Bury Caesar But To Rifle His Toga For Change

Posted by scott on July 10th, 2009

I’ve avoided commenting on Michael Jackson’s death, because life is short, which is exactly what Jackson seemed to be saying, so clearly I had nothing new to bring to the discussion.  But as we bid his Pharaonic funerary rites a hasty farewell, the Hoosier Sage, as he so usually does, pretty much says it all.  A sample:

I was also driven to distraction when, at some point, the question of how anyone would remake Sunset Boulevard got trapped in my head. Sheesh, Norma Desmond would have her own talk show these days. And does.

Read the whole thing.

Robert E. Lee, Hero of the Union

Posted by scott on July 9th, 2009

Iowa Republican Steve King got into a slap fight with history earlier this week, when he was the sole Representative to vote against a House resolution recognizing the contribution of slave labor to the construction of the U.S. Capitol.  At first, he tried to spin his Nay as a mere difference of opinion with the decorator — he didn’t want to hear about placing any silly plaques until they’d settled on where “In God We Trust” was going to be chiseled in the Congressional Visitors Center.  Yesterday, however, he told a radio interviewer that he objected to the resolution because it didn’t honor Jefferson Davis for fighting to free the slaves.  Or something.

KING: I would just add that there were about 645,000 slaves that were brought to the United States. And I’m with Martin Luther King, Jr. on this. His documents, his speeches – I’ve read most of them. And I agree with almost every word that came out of him. Slavery was abhorrent, but it was also a fact of life in those centuries where it existed.

And of the 645,000 Africans that were brought here to be forcibly put into slavery in the United States, there were over 600,000 people that gave their lives in the Civil War to put an end to slavery. And I don’t see the monument to that in the Congressional Visitor Center, and I think it’s important that we have a balanced depiction of history.

Think Progress notes the abundance of monuments paying tribute to the men and women who served on behalf of the Union during the Civil War, but I think it would ease Representative King’s mind if someone pointed out that only about 360,000 of the approximately 618,000 casualties “gave their lives…to put an end to slavery.”  The remaining 258,000 actually died to defend slavery.

So there you go, Congressman; there’s a more “balanced depiction of history” for you.  All better?