As I toured some of the asshat right wing blogs today, I noticed that the asshats pundits on the right side of the aisle have been crowing about how the Liberal side will no longer be able to argue against the popularity of the Iraq war. Americans are now stepping up to the plate and the U.S. Army after 5 consecutive months of missing its recruitment goals, exceeded its June Goal of 5, 650 by 507 recruits.

Woo…hoo!!! We did it! But doesn’t that seem a little strange folks? I mean, the war is at an all time high in unpopularity, many Americans are questioning whether we should have gone there at all, and the majority of Americans are finally realizing that the Preznit couldn’t figure out how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the bottom. Why the sudden turn around in recruiting??

Shoot…….easy…..nothing to it. If you are not meeting your goal……lower it!! Note that the Army exceeded the June goal of 5,650 by 507 recruits……….but if it hadn’t have lowered the original goal which was 6,700, it would have missed its goal again by 545. Are these guys smart or what?

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Booo.

The Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates this afternoon, the ninth increase in a row and almost certainly not the last.

As investors had already assumed, the central bank raised the federal funds rate on overnight loans between banks by a quarter point, to 3.25 percent.

I’ve so got to get out of this HELOC, but quick. Nothing like stagnant wages and rising costs (energy, consumer, mortgage, whatever) to really drive home the This-Life-Sucks vibe. That and no sleep and no endorphins for a few weeks. Boooo! Boo, I say. Knew this was coming, but still… boooooo.

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by donating all of his proceeds from his book to Fisher house. That single action by that liberal has done a lot more for the troops than the preznit or the 101st Fighting Keyboard have done to date.

Trudeau is anti-war, not anti-soldier. It’s not a difficult distinction to make, but it is one that many on the right are incapable of making.

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Oops

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Hooray for love, pt. 2. Hooray for rationality.

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You know, Claria. Formerly known as Gator, also formerly known as “those fucking scum of the earth shitnuggets formerly known as Gator”

If there were such a thing as a toxic company, Gator would be a superstar.

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Mexican Stamps Racist, Civil Rights Leaders Say

The Mexican government issued a series of stamps yesterday depicting a dark-skinned Jim Crow-era cartoon character with greatly exaggerated eyes and lips, infuriating black and Hispanic civil rights leaders for the second time in weeks.

Mexican postal officials said the five-stamp series features Memin Pinguin, a character from a comic book created in the 1940s, because he is beloved in Mexico. A spokesman for the Mexican Embassy described the depiction as a cultural image that has no meaning and is not intended to offend.

The images (here) are, or would be in America, obvious racist stereotypes common from the era in which they were created. Think: Sambo or the early WB cartoons. While I don’t think Mexico has the same kind of cultural shame and foundational problems with race that America does, I can’t imagine this character being regarded warmly by black latinos. I’m looking forward to the upcoming 5-piece stamp collection release featuring “Hymie the Jew” followed by a Charlie Chan retrospective.

Update: here’s an image for you

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Given the FEC’s new definitions of who deserves First Amendment protection and who does not, this site is no longer a blog, but a web-based periodic publication, with commentary. I will be joining the ranks of Eschaton and a whole host of other former bloggers as new entrants into the whacky world of publishing (I hope the parties are better now that I’m a member of the cultural elit). This should firmly place me squarely in the “protected media” column and keep me away from those nasty, nasty unprotected (”bareback”) bloggers.

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A California man, angry over a U.S. Supreme Court decision expanding government power to take private property, says he will try to use the ruling to seize the New Hampshire home of Justice David Souter and convert it into a hotel to be named the Lost Liberty Hotel.

Souter voted with the 5-4 majority last week when the Supreme Court ruled a Connecticut city could use its powers of eminent domain to take private homes to make way for a riverfront hotel, health club and offices

He said the hotel would be called the Lost Liberty Hotel and would include a restaurant called the Just Desserts Cafe and a museum with a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America.

He said instead of a Gideon’s Bible, each room would include a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” which many people embrace as a treatise on liberty and self-determination.

“This is not a prank,” he said. “The town of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land (from Justice Souter) we can begin our hotel development.”.

Wake up call for the Supreme Court, can’t think of a more fitting first case.

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Poor, poor Stella

Author Terry McMillan has filed for divorce from the man who inspired the 1996 novel “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” which chronicled the romantic adventures of a 40-something woman who falls for a guy half her age.

In papers filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, McMillan, 53, says she decided to end her 6 1/2-year marriage to Jonathan Plummer, 30, …

… are you sitting down? Are you ready for the kicker?

…after learning he is gay.

hahahahahaha. The divorce sounds nasty (Plummer signed a prenup the little golddigger’s trying to get out of and she’s trying for annullment rather than divorce), but still… hahahaha. I may be a mean, vicious, low-down man, but I love seeing bullshit feelgood “revelation” myths busted.

I’m all for people finding their happiness however they may, but when someone finds it through self-delusion and then makes a mint off of said self-delusion which has the consequences of deluding a large host of people with a chimerical hope that it can happen to them too, then I have very little sympathy when it blows up in the snake oil/revival preacher’s face. I can understand the temptation to feel like your alive again when you’re in your midlife crisis, but to actually delude yourself to the extent that you believe a homosexual of an opposite gender is in love with you, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame. In this case, Plummer’s your garden-variety sleazy con artist and McMillan’s your garden-variety old rich person who lets themselves be bamboozled. I’m sure Stella can find another groove. Who knows?, maybe this time it will be real.

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So Oprah (Miss Winfrey, if you’re nasty) decides to do some after-hours shopping in Paris. You know, after-hours. Like after-the-store-has-closed hourse. The people closing up the shop refuse to open their doors for her.

Therefore, obviously, .

And double fuck Oprah for turning this into some racist bullshit. People in the service industry? They have lives too. They’d like to go home to their lovers and spouses and children after the rich aliens buy their trinkets, and just because one of these aliens can’t be bothered to abide by the human normative concept of “time” does not mean that these service people are racist.

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Newseum.org has one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Flash-scrollable map of the world with highlighted cities. You hover over the cities, and you get a scanned image of the front page of that city’s newspaper.

It’s a fabulous way to see what - and how - different parts of the world are talking about.

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Today’s above the fold headline on the Seattle Times: “Bush on Iraq War: Don’t forget 9/11″

That’s, like, straight out of the Onion.

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Nothing new. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. Stay the course, stay the course. 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Thank you.

Well, OK, one slight new wrinkle - we’re selling out the Iraqis.

I agree with billmon; the language shift from “terrorists”, “dead enders”, and “criminals” to “terrorists and insurgents” is a watershed moment. See, this way, the bright line rule of never negotiating with terrorists is still in full effect… because we’re negotiating with insurgents, baby! What? They’re totally not terrorists. You shut up! They are not! Why do you hate America?

Don’t you see?!? They’re entirely different groups of people… all intermingled… trying to blow us up.

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hooray for rationality! Hooray for love!

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