Staunch

Not only did Omar refuse to back down and insisted on continuing with her meeting, but as the thug assaulted her she looked like she was ready to land a few blows herself.

Mick Foley is a Hero

Mick Foley is a legendary wrestler (Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love). He's famous for taking the hardest knocks in the business. 

He forged a respectable post wrestling career as a writer. His memoir of his wrestling days - Have a Nice Day: a Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks - is a joyous, bizarre ride through one of the strangest parts of the entertainment industry. 

"I no longer wish to represent a company that coddles a man so seemingly void of compassion."

A lot of his peers - who  won't name because fuck 'em - have publicly supported Trump. But Foley is a hero and does things his way. 

Always.

As Atticus Finch almost said, a hero isn't a man with a gun.  Sometimes it's a guy with a chair.  Or in this case, a guy who regularly got whacked over the head with a chair but is still more cogent than the 47th President.

There are sane conservatives

It's just that their political representatives are ideological fanatics, in thrall to the Fox News / News Max / Breitbart demographic, bought by big business or just willing to say and do anything to advance their careers.

They wouldn't be allowed to write it if it wasn't true.

From the Guardian's coverage of the less-than-thrilling debate between De Santis and Haley:

A question about climate change, and what each candidate is willing to do about it, has – as expected – yielded little useful information. 

DeSantis promised to tear up the “Biden’s green new deal” while Haley said she opposed “extremes” in policy and transitioned the conversation over to the topic of crime. 

Last summer, during the first Republican presidential debate, a pointed question from a young activist elicited slightly more interesting results. Alexander Diaz, a young conservative who is part of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a youth conservative group that pushes for action on the climate crisis, asked candidates what they would do to improve the party’s standing on climate policy. None of the candidates at that time raised their hands to affirm that climate change was real.

So, there you go.  Even though 2023 was just declared the hottest year on the instrumental record AND all the top ten years are the last ten years, one candidate wants to nix climate action just because a Democrat did it, and the other can't actually talk about it at all.  And neither is actually willing to say they think it is happening.

And the terrifying thing is they are both infinitely better options than the goon who (unless the courts save the Republican Party from its membership's atavistic urges) is back to his favourite trick of implying people he doesn't like aren't proper Americans.

Trump: "Where's my favourite dictator?"

From the Wall Street Journal:

Inside a room of the ornately decorated Hotel du Palais during last month’s Group of Seven summit in Biarritz, France, President Trump awaited a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

Mr. Trump looked over a gathering of American and Egyptian officials and called out in a loud voice: ‘Where’s my favorite dictator?’ Several people who were in the room at the time said they heard the question.

The report DOES NOT continue:

At least half a dozen dictators put their hands up, provoking angry and occasionally tearful scenes as the assembled autocrats realised Mr Trump had been seeing them all behind their various totalitarian backs.

"I thought he only loved me!" wailed Xi Jinping, who had just emerged victorious from a scrap with love rival Kim Jong-Un.  "He always told me I was his only dictator."

 Tearful Kim pledged that he still loved his "Donny" in spite of the the President's disloyalty.

"He's a hard dog to keep on the porch," complained Kim.

 "But he'll always be my favourite dictator, even if I am not his."

When it was pointed out to Mr Kim that Mr Trump was not actually a dictator but a more-or-less democratically elected leader, he replied, "Just you wait and see." 

I made that up.  But it could almost be true in these strange and perverted times.

Hang out the stars in Alabama!

Well done, Albanians, or whatever you are.

Who ever thought The Great Fightback would start in Alabama?

Seriously, well done.

Nothing on the Orange One's twitter feed for five hours ... Looks like he's been given a sedative and well wrapped up in his favourite blankie.

Hopefully, they've taken his mobile away and buried it somewhere (alongside Roy Moore's political ambitions?!) because once he wakes up, he'll break Twitter with his bellyaching.

Twitter down?

Must be why Donald Trump hasn't been bragging about his job approval numbers.

Trump

Asked to comment on George W. Bush's victory in the 2000 presidential election, the economist J.K. Galbraith said, "I never thought I would ever long for Ronald Reagan."

I suspect in 4 years time we will be saying, "I never thought we would ever long for George W. Bush."

The Republican barrel is a sort of ghastly reversal of Pandora's Box - just when you think all the horror and misery has come out of it, you find Donald Trump slithering around the bottom of it.

This isn't funny any more

Looks like the USA is going to have the Presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate all under Republican control. That means Trump can actually DO STUFF. This never was funny. But now it is really not funny any more.

Thank you, America

For putting this chump in the White House:

We should be focused on clean and beautiful air-not expensive and business closing GLOBAL WARMING-a total hoax! -Donald J. Trump, 2013

This is why we should be very angry with Americans. All of them. Especially the deomcrats, who must have searched long and hard to actually find a candidate who could actually lose to Trump.

Though that is perhaps unfair. Clinton didn't lose to Trump. Clinton lost to Clinton. Her twenty five years of baggage, and twenty five years of smears, doomed her.

If anything, it should be the other way round. The Republicans should be congratulated on finding a candidate in Trump who almost managed to lose to Clinton.

America, what are you doing?

Looks like three very tight races in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. 58 college votes up for grabs across those states, enough to win it for either candidate. Though Trump is ahead, marginally, in three.

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, have we told you lately how much we love you?

Come on, Michigan the WORLD expects - nay, requires - you to do the right thing.

The ghost of Warren G Harding will be lookin on with interest, to see if here at last is the candidate who will nudge him off the bottom of the rankings of American presidents.

Kasich-Cruz?

So when are KAsich and Cruz going to come clean and announce a unity ticket, with Kasich as the candidate and an Cruz as potential VP?

the 'logic' being that Kasich's supports will not vote for Cruz as the nominee.  They'll probably sit out the election or defect to the Democrats rather than vote for Cruz or Trump.  Cruz's supports might vote for Kasich, especially with Cruz on board and making scary rightwing faces from behind Kasich's shoulder.  But I doubt Cruz's supporters will vote for Trump in great numbers.  If there were inclined to jump to the good ship Trumptanic, they would probably have done so by now.

Kasich is also the only nominee who is polling ahead of Clinton and Sanders.  While there might be a bit of "Who he?" factor at play, it looks like the Republicans have to stop bein silly and nominate somone capable of winning, and there is only one candidate who looks likely to do that, and probably only one combination with a realistic chance of stopping the Trump Self Immolation Juggernaught of Doom.

Evilracistflaggate

It has been brought to my attention that the all powerful, many tentacled Doom Hydra of the Left has - rather than claiming complete eternal power - decided to make kids toys politically correct

Why the hive-minded hordes of left-wing attack drones (of which hordes I am a proud member in good standing) have decided to do this, rather than seizing the levers of power and sending our enemies to the guillotine is not made clear; but I am sure our leaders know what they are doing.  The battle for the future starts now, and it seems the battlefield will be the appearance of little toy cars.

Obviously, our opponents will not expect this and will swiftly be outflanked by this deft thrust, a daring assault comparable to Lee's march to Gettysburg.  And we all know how that ended.

An appropriate comparison, for I am thinking about what can only be called Evilracistflaggate, the huge fuss that has blown up around the use of the 'Confederate' flag, following the horrid events in South Carolina.  'Confederate' in inverted commas used because flag we commonly think of as the Confederate flag - the Starry Cross - was never the flag of the Confederacy.  It was used by General Lee's Army of North Virginia, but the design most of us recognise as the 'confederate flag' is just a detail from the second and third flags adopted by the Confederacy. The second one had a big white bit as well as the 'starry cross' and the third one had a red stripe.

(One wonders if things might have gone better for the Confederates if they had spent less time worrying about the best bit of cloth to die under, and more about winning wars.  Probably not.)

The Starry Cross, it seems, has suddenly become as socially unacceptable as anti-Semitism and owning people.  Totally reliable and unbiased sites like kotaku.com assure us that America is losing its mind in a rush to remove the flag from absolutely everything, ever, even things it might actually be appropriately displayed on:

Today, Apple decided to start yanking games that use the Confederate flag in any way (via TouchArcade). For example, you can now no longer buy the strategy iOS games Civil War: 1862, Civil War: 1863, Civil War: 1864, and Civil War: Gettysburg, which, as you might guess, use the Confederate flag because they’re video games about the Civil War.

Meanwhile. it seems, the evil liberals and PC leftists (is there any other kind?) are busy trying to take toys from children and re-write pop culture history by deleting the Starry Cross from General Lee - no, not the real general Lee, things haven't got that bad yet - but the car in The Dukes of Hazard:

Warner Bros, which owns the licensing rights to the 80s series, announced Wednesday it will no longer manufacture miniature replicas of the souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger, which featured a giant Confederate battle flag painted on the roof. ‘Warner Bros. 

Consumer Products has one licensee producing die-cast replicas and vehicle model kits featuring the General Lee with the confederate flag on its roof — as it was seen in the TV series,’ the company told Vulture. ‘We have elected to cease the licensing of these product categories.’

The snag here is that neither Apple nor Warner Bros are actually far left revolutionary communist-gay rights-environmentalist-PC-feminNAZI collectives that the howling madpots of the right seem to think.

They ARE capitalist enterprises intent on making a profit. If they decide to drop or change a product, its down to their desire to protect their brand and maximise their profits. The forces driving these decisions are profit related, and nothing to do with 'the left' or some supposed politically correct agenda. If you want to blame anything, blame market forces, which are all about shifting product and profit. I guess there is no profit to be made from sanity and accuracy.

Which tells you everything you need to know about capitalism.

(For what it is worth, I'd agree the Apple decision to remove the Confederate flag from civil war computer games IF it would have been correct to show it there (i.e. for Lee's army) is barmy. But I think it often gets used inaccurately, as a symbol many of us associate with the Confederacy.  I doubt many people would recognise the first flag of the Confederacy, the historical 'Stars and Bars' and the other two would only be recognisable because they contain the 'Starry Cross' as a element.  So changing it might actually just be making things a bit more accurate and correcting the assumption that the 'Starry Cross' was the flag of the Confederacy. Surely we're all in favour of historical accuracy?)

And it seems that the vile liberal-communists aren't just intent on banning cars and pixels, but films a well.  Truly, first they came for the General Lee, then they came for Scarlett and Rhett:

When it comes to the Left, it is always only a matter of time before they show their fascist colors. We’re seeing it all over the place in a media frenzy that began with a cause I agree with (removing Confederate Flags from state capitols) into what is now a full-blown mob waging a bullying witch hunt to completely memory-hole the flag. 

Wednesday, the thing that you believe could never happen, did happen: a New York film critic has called for the banning of The Greatest Movie Ever Made. 

In just three days, the left’s mob mentality took us from removing the Rebel Flag from a state capitol to banning “Gone with the Wind.”

Only, of course, it is not as simple as Breitbart would like to make out.

The critic in question, Lou Lumenick, is not actually calling for Gone With The Wind to be banned. He is simply wondering if audiences should pay more attention to the racism and slavery that underpins the movie, rather than venerating it as a quaint and charming piece of romantic melodrama.

Of course, the howling hate mob of the right - the true enemies of rationality, sanity and reason - deliberately misrepresent this, because truth is poison to them.  The tragedy of South Carolina has prompted some people to wake up to the hatefulness of some of the things too often taken for granted.  That's progress.  The right doesn't like progress and stirs up a vicious cauldron of lies about it, blaming everything on this cabal of leftist witches and demons; witches and demons who seem to be all-powerful, but mysteriously interested only in using this power to achieve petty ends.  No flags on cars - that'll teach the Right!

A part of me wonders if this is a deliberate ploy to move the debate away from where it really should be - the easy availability of guns - onto something (anything) else.  Because flags, sanity and honesty are far less important to the right than every racist lunatic being able to get his hands on a firearm.

Chasing the Green Light

Over on the Standard, the rather pretentiously named mickeysavage highlights the National Party's favourite unicorn - the balanced budget that appears to be eternally receding before us, always just slipping through our fingers:

John Key and National have placed a huge amount of political capital in returning the country’s books to surplus.  Back in 2008 they campaigned heavily on how Labour was going to deliver “a decade of deficits” and it really was the slogan de jour.  According to them Labour’s mismanagement of the economy as the cause of the global financial crisis and not the pure unadulterated greed of a bunch of merchant bankers like Key seeking never ending wealth.

He then provides a list of quotations that illustrate his point very nicely.   Back in 2011 we were assured surplus would be achieved in three years.  That would mean 2014.  But in 2014, we were told “The Government is focused on returning to surplus," and earlier this year, we were promised that “The Government is working towards a surplus and repaying debt,” both of which would rather suggest we had not got there yet.

This from the party, remember, who warned us about the risks of electing Labour in 2008 would lead to a 'decade of deficits.' Nice sound bite, John. It might also do as a summation of your contribution to New Zealand.

Those of us with litereary pretensions might feel this is all a bit reminiscent of the final lines of The Great Gatsby:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. 

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning - 

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It should be remembered that Gatsby was a gangster who ended up dead in his swimming pool, and the narrator, Nick Carraway, a naive fool who couldn't see which he for what he was.

I'll charitably assume John Key and Bill English are more like Nick than Gatsby; I'm sure they believe, really believe, in the green light as well, and they believe that if we just cut a little further, reduce a little more, we'll catch it at last.  Their green light is the surplus, and if it is eluding us now it just means more austerity, until finally, one fine morning ...

The annoying thing (or tragic, if it directly affects you) is that this was all fore-warned. Even I managed to see ho Bungling Bill's ideologically driven austerity drive would be self defeating, all the way back in 2009 when Bll English delivered his first budget (here, here and here).

It isn't just in New Zealand that the right win lie continually about their own economic confidence.  In Britain, George Osborne has signally failed to deliver on any of his annual promises to eliminate the deficit.  Yet he feels we should listen to him when he promises us that he'll boost NHS funding by £8 billion - by 2020. And (sotto voce) if the NHS can find 'efficiencies' (that means nurses and doctors and operations and things like that - trivial and unimportant things in a modern health service). Cast your mind back, dear reader, to the Emergency Budget of 2010, when Osborne told us:

In order to place our fiscal credibility beyond doubt, this mandate will be supplemented by a fixed target for debt, which in this Parliament is to ensure that debt is falling as a share of GDP by 2015-16. I can confirm that, on the basis of the measures to be announced in this Budget, the judgement of the Office for Budget Responsibility published today, is that we are on track to meet these goals. Indeed, I can tell the House that because we have taken a cautious approach, we are set to meet them one year earlier - in 2014-15. Or to put it another way, we are on track to have debt falling and a balanced structural current budget by the end of this Parliament.

Debt, you will note, is not falling. Britain's public debt has, in fact, exceeded 90% - the level we were warned would have a catastrophic impact on growth. At least it would, the Tory argument would go, if Labour were in power.

Meanwhile, the sane argument goes that it would have a catastrophic impact on growth if Reinhart and Rogoff could get their sums right.

Nor has Britain achieved "a balanced structural current budget".  The deficit is still running at 5.8% as of 2013-14.  That is nowhere near a balanced budget.  It is, however, pretty much where Labour's Alaistair Darling wanted it to be at this stage - while Osborne wanted to eliminate the structural deficit in a single term, Darling sought to halve it (Well, to be pedantic - halve the overall deficit and reduce the structural deficit by 2/3rds).  And Darling's goal has almost been accomplished, almost by accident, in spite of the Conservative mania for growth stangling austerity.

And, insanely, the coalition boast about this.  They even make posters about  it:

"The deficit halved."  Not quite the same as "a balanced structural current budget by the end of this Parliament".

And elsewhere, as Paul Krugman points out, the right proffer the same nonsense, time after time:

The 90 percent claim was cited as the decisive argument for austerity by figures ranging from Paul Ryan, the former vice-presidential candidate who chairs the House budget committee, to Olli Rehn, the top economic official at the European Commission, to the editorial board of The Washington Post. So the revelation that the supposed 90 percent threshold was an artifact of programming mistakes, data omissions, and peculiar statistical techniques suddenly made a remarkable number of prominent people look foolish. The real mystery, however, was why Reinhart-Rogoff was ever taken seriously, let alone canonized, in the first place. Right from the beginning, critics raised strong concerns about the paper’s methodology and conclusions, concerns that should have been enough to give everyone pause. 

Moreover, Reinhart-Rogoff was actually the second example of a paper seized on as decisive evidence in favor of austerity economics, only to fall apart on careful scrutiny. Much the same thing happened, albeit less spectacularly, after austerians became infatuated with a paper by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna purporting to show that slashing government spending would have little adverse impact on economic growth and might even be expansionary.

And, worryingly, what the right sell, the public seems to buy.  I suppose austerity must tap into some self-flagellating instinct in people, the need to be punished for revelling in luxury.  And of course, it is handy when the politicians are  quick to point out that it will be Other People who endure the worst of it.

Astonishingly, with this seems to be the only argument they can offer.  There's nothing beyond the "Reduce spending" mantra.  Keynes, it seemed, never existed in their world - though he's been around so long he surely counts as some sort of a conservative by now.

Which is the real issue here.  The Conservative party - and its analogues in other parts of the world - has been colonised by people who are fundamentally anti-Conservative, and whose intent is a complete neo-liberal reformation.  Some people rather dimly follow their mantra because they are bamboozled by the arguments - I put Bill English in this category.  Others understand it more fully and recognise it as the desired goal.  Their green light is not a balanced budget, but the effective eradication of the state.  And so they lie, consciously, wittingly, saying things they know are untrue and making promises they know are impossible.  Because like fanatics everywhere, they know it is the end, not the means, that is important.  They aren't interested in conservation versus reform - the point of argument between conservatives and progressives - but in destruction. Their bible is Atlas Shrugged, the story of how people with an overwhelming sense of mission and justification destroyed the world for the rest of us.

And as a reward for reading lll that, here's one of the best songs ever written on the subject of green lights:

Target Obama! Any Obama!

Does the American right have a problem with women?  That's sort of a rhetorical question, of course.  It is pretty obvious that they do.

Not all parts of the right, perhaps, and not all women.  But enough of them to make the question valid.

Some parts of the right.  Real conservatives, who may be slightly fuddyduddy and myopic (they may need a new prescription for their rose-tinted glasses) but are blessed with a certain chivalrous attitude, which may be rather old fashioned (positively ante-bellum) but which at least embodies a basic courtesy and decency.  They know what is on, and what is not on.  And while they may think hemlines exposing ankles, non-gingham dresses and VOTING are terrible, their sense of decorum prevents them from doing more than looking slightly pained.

A large swathe of what might be loosely called the right, however, knows no such restraint.  Here I am thinking primarily about the more modern, economically right wing section.  Which is strange, because you would have thought that modern market liberals would be inclined towards social liberalism as well - at least, you'd have thought they don't hate women who dare to do things like be successful at things other than cake baking and child making.  But there is plenty of evidence that they do.

Oddly, it seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon.  Ronald Reagan managed to be both ferociously right wing economically while still embodying some sort of olde-world courtesy.  As long as you weren't an air traffic controller, he would treat you with respect and decency.  If you were unlucky enough to come from a socially disadvantaged minority, he might cut funding for programmes designed to help you - but at least he wouldn't be rude about it.  And he was always polite to Margaret Thatcher, which must have strained even his reserves of charm.  But the adherents of Reaganism only seemed to have inherited the slash-and-burn free market mentality, and ditched the chivalry.

Since the 90s at least, this section of the right has been vitriolic in its attacks on women.  In his book, Blinded By The Right, David Brock recounts being commissioned to do hatchet jobs first on Anita Hill and then on Hilary Rodham Clinton when he was the "rightwing Bob Woodward" (only without Woodward's ethical sense or commitment to fact checking).  In his memoir about his disillusionment with the right, he notes that Clinton was "easily the most reviled figure on the national scene, even more so than her husband ... Critics [sic] compared Hilary to Leona Helmsley, Ma Barker, Eva Braun, and minister Louis Farrakhan."  He also quotes speculation about her sexuality, and Anne Coulter referring to Hilary Clinton as a "Prostitute."

Bear in mind, this is the mid 90s, when Hilary was not manifesting presidential ambitions of her own.  Since when did political wives become fair game in this way? I don't recall Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush or Laura Bush being subjected to this hatred.  Hell, the only reason I could recall Barbara Bush's name was because the Beach Boys sang Barbara-Anne at her husband's inauguration.

Of course, these ladies kept very much in the background, doing little more as First Lady than providing a wholesome backdrop for their husbands.  Hilary was unashamedly ambitious and - to be fair - the rank Clinton marital situation warranted some investigation.  But to argue Bill's endless skirt-chasing justified attacks on Hillary is tenuous, to put it mildly.  There is something deeper here, some sort of issue with successful, public, confident women who don't conform to idealised images of feminine behaviour and - horror of horrors - are left wing (by American standards).  And it is down right creepy.  Think of the seedy fantasies peddled around the right about just what went on in the Clinton bedroom (can anyone recall similar speculation about the marital relations between George W and Laura Bush?  I can't.)

It isn't just Hilary Clinton, of course, though her case stands as a grim illustration of just how far the right will go.  Brock also infamously savaged Anita Hill and cites plenty of other examples of ramapnt misogyny, often tinged with a bit of racial hate as well - Clint Bolick's campaign against Clinton's nominee, Lani Guiner, featured the racially tinged epithet "quota queen".  You can't help wondering if the continual stream of misogynistic ranting helped frame Jared Lee Loughner's madness, and focused his wrath on Gabrielle Giffords.  He expressed the 'opinion' that women shouldn't be in positions of power, and referred to her as a bitch.  Which is bad enough.  And then he shot her.

Which brings me to the Obamas.  It's hard to imagine a nicer couple in the white house, regardless of your opinion of their politics.  He's handsome and clean living, she's attractive and successful in her own right.  They have two lovely daughters.  Oh yes, you might have heard about them, recently, being described as ungracious tarts and tramps ...unsurprisingly, a right wing commentator.  That's right folks, it isn't enough to attack a man in power, or smear his woman, his children are now fair game.

(For the record, I can't even recall if Reagan or Bush I or II had children.  I know Clinton did, because the right wing media liked to focus on her and show unflattering pictures and Rush Limbaugh referred to her as a 'dog'.  Nice going, Rush.)

Michelle has also come in for negative attention.  I argue a lot on the interweb, and recall a discussion with a British right winger in which he speculated with just a bit too much interest in what might happen in the Obama bedroom.  Slightly more significantly, we have a yarn doing the rounds, concerning about how Michelle has twisted an anecdote she told as a positive experience two years ago, into an example of everyday racism, post Michael Brown.

Basically, in the first version of the story, Michelle describes going to Target in disguise and how a woman asks her to get something from a shelf:

No one knew that was me because a woman actually walked up to me, right? I was in the detergent aisle, and she said — I kid you not — she said, ‘Excuse me, I just have to ask you something,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, cover’s blown.’ She said, ‘Can you reach on that shelf and hand me the detergent?’ I kid you not…And the only thing she said — I reached up, ’cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down — she said, ‘Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy.’ That was my interaction. I felt so good. … She had no idea who I was.

So she 'felt so good' and wasn't it cute and heartwarming and yaddah yaddah yaddah.  Thn, two year later, according to the right wing narrative, she's re-telling the same story, but with a different spin on it:

I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn’t anything new.

See the difference?  The heartwarming has been transmogrified into the harrowing.  The first lady is being mistaken for a shop assistant!  Because she is black!

That's the right wing spin on it, of course.  Don't take my word for it.  Here's the lad himself, the chap responsible for highlighting this glaring example of hypocrisy - the not at all worryingly named 'Allahpundit':

Are there any Targets in the metro D.C. area where the employees don’t wear red polo shirts with Target logos on them? They do in every one I’ve ever been to. Which means, unless FLOTUS was disguised as a Target employee, the odds that anyone shopping there thought she was “the help” are small. I myself have been asked in the grocery store by a fellow customer to help them get something off the top shelf. You know why? It’s not because they thought I worked there; I had a cart just like they did. It’s because they were short and I was tall enough to reach — just like FLOTUS, who stands almost six feet. That’s her “racism” story at Target.

Only, alas, Allahpundit is so blinded by his own hating he can't see what the story is actually about.  The issue Michelle is raising is not that someone asked her for help - that's still presented as a sweet encounter ("she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her") but the way that she felt she was being ignored by the staff - "the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her".  The point she is trying to make is that the stores salespeople were not interested in her, presumably because she was black and so viewed as low value - a phenomenon that has been commented on by many minority ethnic groups.

(It is worth noting that Michelle doesn't tell us the ethnicity of the woman asking her for help - Allahpundit simply assumes she is white.  Big assumption, and rather revealing about his/her attitude.  Or perhaps his/her knowledge that the story only works if this person is white.)

But Allahpundit, blinded by his right wing hate, can't see it.  Because no power on Earth exceeds the power of the right ... to delude and bamboozle itself.

Save us from Ebola, Muslims but not guns!

For some reason, Americans are terrified about the threat of Ebola, the dangers of Muslim terrorists, but not gunzzzzzzzzzzz.

Meanwhile:

At least three people have been hospitalised after a student reportedly carried out a shooting at a high school north of Seattle on Friday morning (PDT).

Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Marysville is currently in lockdown as police attend the scene, according to officials.

The suspect is thought to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, two police officers told the Seattle Times.

The Marysville School District said in a statement that "Marysville Pilchuck High School is currently in lock down due to an emergency situation. Police and emergency services have responded."

Live video footage from the scene shows students being evacuated from the school in the state of Washington.

The New York doctor may have behaved irresponsibly; quarantining people who might have dreadful diseases makes sense. There are crackpots out there who want to maim and kill in the name of their diseased perception of religious duty. The population at large needs to be protected from them.

But lots of other people other than doctors and Muslims can be irresponsible or insane.

But yeah, I get it. The fundamental rights must be protected. But only when it comes to gunzzzzzzzzzzz.

Random angry post

Haven't been blogging over the last couple of weeks as I have been Not Well so I have missed two events I never thought would happen (The death of Margaret Thatcher and the NZ Labour party coming up with a good sound policy) and one that was sadly predictable (A terrorist attack in the USA).

But I break radio  silence, briefly, just to comment on the latter, how it is insane - utterly insane - that something like the Boston Bombing leads to junking of basic rights and safeguards but an atrocity like Sand Hook provokes shrill demands to Keep Your Hands Off Our Guns and Our Rights Are Sacrosanct. Tells you everything that is wrong with the USA (well, not everything, there's Bon Jovi as well) in a nutshell. A two faced, hypocritical, self deluding arse-about-tit nutshell.

Am I reading this right?

From Paul Ryan's speech to the Republican convention:

"Without a change in leadership, why should the next four years be any different from the last four years?"

Are Republicans really running on a platform of recession and more war?

Pity the Mitty

I actually feel sorry for Mitt Romney.

He's worked so hard for the nomination, after getting rejected in favour of a cripple last time around. This time, he's (finally) going to get it, even though 70% of his own party have consistently indicated they want someone - anyone - else, and only the plethora of anyone elses (and their unbearable awfulness) has prevented him being dumped.

And now - having finally seen off Santorum, and Gingrich, several times over (because he's sucha lightweight he can't put them down, definitively) - he's going to get hammered, absolutely hammered, by Obama's team.

Shakespeare could do justice to this modern tragedy. I can't.

Only in America

Crikey, there's polls out putting Gingrich in front in Florida. Might be a post South Carolina bubble, but if Romney can't win Florida, he's in big trouble. Same poll shows Santorum trailing Paul. Surely Santorum knows it is over?

I suppose Romney's only chance is to hang on a bit longer and hope people wake up and realise they're on the verge of making Newt Gingrich - NEWT GINGRICH - their presidential candidate. The flaw in this strategy is that it relies on them deciding Mitt Romney is a better option. Which is like saying you prefer cold piss to warm shit.

Send in the clowns

In an interesting twist, Mitten Romney has been told he didn't win Iowa after all:

The Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney has suffered a setback when the party stripped him of his victory in Iowa after a final tally of votes.

His rival, the socially conservative former senator Rick Santorum, emerged with the most votes, a majority of 34.

Funny how Romney kept declaring how he'd won Iowa when he was eight votes ahead of Santorum - but now Santourm is a whopping 34 votes ahead, Romney it is all "A virtual tie". Twat.

In the long run, this may actually play into Romney's hands, as it will keep Santorum in the race a bit longer, and thus keep the anti-Romney vote coalescing around Gingrich.

The real winner, of course, is Barak Obama, for whom things are working out brilliantly. Romney and Gingrich are ripping chunks out of each other. Gingrich looks like he's going to win South Carolina, and Romney has been stripped of Iowa. This could drag on for months, draining resources, enthusiasm and authority from whichever one of these clowns is eventually chosen.

Wonder if it is too late for some 'Bolt from the blue' candidate to join the race and win the nomination on a 'Thank fuck it isn't one of those repulsant jokers' ticket?

Still, there is something to be said for the AMerican process - it really exposes candidates to scrutiny. Our leaders just seem to appear and tell us they are king. Whichever one of the Republican nominiees wins the privilege of getting trounced by Obama, they will have earned it.