Craven Gun Fetishist Refuses to Rename Talk “Why Weren’t the Librarians Armed?”

Overlooked – the shooter is dead, kilt by an armed civilian.

The talks is rescheduled for an off campus site: “the John Lott event will be held at 6pm tonight at Brave New Books 1904 Guadalupe which is just off campus.”

Lott took calls on KLBJ today to say “see – that’s what I’m talking about.” Others speculate shooter was trying to invoke a suicide by cop by randomly shooting at buildings and the ground.

Mmmm, Objectivists.

I canny be fashed wi yon.

I’m going to go watch my fave musical film ever: Alexander’s Ragtime Band. In fact, Don Ameche is just playing Alice Faye the swell he just composed that’s about to become a big hit. Bye.

@Benedick Arnuldsson Manpants: Is that the reggae patois?

@redmanlaw: Scottish for ‘I can’t be bothered with that.’

@Benedick Arnuldsson Manpants: My Dad called the telephone “the Ameche.” I find myself doing that occasionally and no one has the slightest fucking idea what I’m talking about.

TJ for my fellow Californians: David Brooks is such a simpleton. So many people I know on the East Coast sent me his column today on why California sucks that I finally broke down and read it. Yet another reminder of why I don’t read him or Tom “Have I Mentioned Yet in this Column that the World is Flat?” Friedman. Simplistic tools.

Funny, my folks couldn’t wait to get out of the San Fernando Valley in the ’60s because it was so smog-choked and crowded, he makes it sound like this amazing wonderland of swimming pools until the tree-huggers and unions came along. Only took him nine paragraphs to get to Prop. 13, and no mention of Saint Ronnie’s starve-the-beast attitude.

ADD: And never mind that he refers multiple times to The Grapes of Wrath, which is a scathing indictment of unfettered corporate greed that destroys the poor working man whose only hope is banding together in some sort of unionization…I don’t think your literary reference means what you think it means, Brooks…

@SanFranLefty: I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, left when I was 17, and try my best never to go back.

@SanFranLefty: Friedman should talk to a few cabdrivers in NYC instead of the ones in India. They just might tell him that supporting a trillion dollar illegal war wasn’t such a good idea.

What, no Brown/Whitman liveblog?

@Dodgerblue: At least these days in the San Fernando Valley the smog parts and you can see the mountains more than twice a year, which was the case in the ’60s per my mom. She says the only place she’s ever been with worse air pollution than the Valley in the ’60s was Mexico City. She’s never been to Beijing but visitors/former residents I know have said that Beijing is worse than el D. Efe.

@Tommmcatt Thinks Masturbation Can Also Involve The Mainstream Media: No liveblogging that clusterfuck for me, I’m going out, but I’m wanting to do a post on “What Else Can You Buy for $119 Million” – y’all should email me suggestions at sanfranlefty [at] stinque [dot] com and I’ll post the list (and my suggestions) tomorrow.

@SanFranLefty: The GF went to Beijing on business before they cleaned up the air for Olympics – when she got home, I took her shirts to the (Chinese) laundry – dark gray at the collar and where her jacket left uncovered (chest and cuffs). Guy told me it took 2 washings to clean them.

@SanFranLefty: Watching that beisbol thingie. They on the 96 HR race and andro now, with a nod to Clinton.

Levi on O’Donnell’s new show: Kid’s learning; doesn’t mumble as much as he used to.

@SanFranLefty: If you think Beijing is a nightmare, Zhengzhou is like something out of a science fiction movie. The smog hugs the crowd and is fortified by the dust from the Gobi. You can’t see across the 10-lane highway that cuts through the city and is filled with donkey carts, buses, old cars, tricycle carts and crazy pedestrians crossing while chain smoking and talking on their cells phones.

@FlyingChainSaw: I saw peechers from there last summer. Nasty. Also, fucking Australia looked like Mars with their dust storms.

/fan of the Gobi because of Roy Chapman Andrews books.

@SanFranLefty: David Brooks, Tom Friedman, and don’t forget the Holy Ghost that rounds out the Trinity of Pulitizer-Prize-Winning fucktards at the NYT (WTF?): Maureen Dowd.

It’s rare that I bother to read any of them, yes occasionally Frank Rich or Bob Herbert, but I usually suffer through at least part of the Friday afternoon NPR wank-fest where they get the fair-and-balanced “right” and “left” views of Brooks and some other guy (Celine Dion?), because it happens to be on the car radio on the commute home.

I like Taibbi’s take-downs of both Brooks and Friedman. They deserve no mercy. And who can ever forget Tom Tomorrow’s Friedman hate-fuck: Dial M for Moustache!

Don’t even get me started on Ross Douche-hat…

@SanFranLefty: What could I buy for $119M? Like to think that I’d donate at least $100M of that to worthy causes (very much OTHER than my own run for office). One thing’s for sure, it could buy a hell of an Ark.

So did any of my fellow Californians watch the debate? Anything fun happen?

TJ: Attention Jamie Sommers: Holy Fucking Shit, Nolan Ryan is in a Lowe’s commercial – when did he become an old fat guy?

@SanFranLefty: I’ll wait for the attack ads.

Oh, and my voter guide arrived the other day. Ballot propositions look even more convoluted than usual.

Woot! Sports TJ:

Giants win (we must discuss the closer Wilson’s ridiculous beard), Padres lose, and now Ess Eff is up by 2 in the National League West.

In other Sport news, thanks to the state budget crisis, Cal had to cut a bunch of varsity sports including men’s baseball and rugby, and women’s gymnastics and lacrosse. Better than cutting classes any more, but still sad.

@nojo: Yes on 19 (Legalize it, dude!), No on 23 (Fuck Texas oil companies). What are the other ones?

@SanFranLefty, nojo: OK, so don’t totally rag on me for shifting into the gear marked “political disengagement” whilst parking my feel-green hybrid automobile. (Just kidding — I don’t have a hybrid, but I do get pretty much the same MPG.)

I half-heartedly told myself on the way home from work, “Oh, there’s a debate tonight – maybe I’ll watch or listen to that.” Then I got home, poured a glass of wine, fired up the iPorn and completely forgot about it.

In fact, I’m too lazy and disinterested right now to verify whether it’s already on YouTube.

@SanFranLefty: Honestly, my eyes glaze. Even my cheap trick of looking at who signs which arguments is failing me.

@PedonatorUSA: No ragging here. The moment I heard it was on, I knew I wasn’t watching it.

@PedonatorUSA: Dude, I was as far away as possible from a teevee or radio. I was hoping that you or WalkingStill would give me the Cliff Notes’ version – I knew that Dodger and Nojo were running away as quickly as I was.

And I came home and watched el beisbol. It will be fun when the Pedo/Nojo Padres come up here later this week.

@nojo, SanFranLefty: Guess we’ll probably have Gov’nuh Meganator. Maybe she’ll bring her billionaire-CEO superpowers to the table when the next budget negotiations are due.

(Since in the folklore-osophy of US American politics the super-rich represent all we aspire to, it only stands to reason that we invest them with goddess-like gifts of intelligence predation which reinforce our own sense of helplessness and dependency upon the crumbs of their philanthropy.)

Probably we won’t have a budget for this year by then anyway. If anyone deserves to inherit that mess it’s good ole’ Meg.

Meanwhile I wonder how the fight for the minuscule sales-tax hike in Sandy Eggo will go? I suspect it will fail, and then the same people who voted against it will flood civil service hot lines with complaints about potholes in the roads, sloppy garbage pick-up, late receipt of civil-service pension checks, and lax enforcement of gated community / “covenant” decorum violations.

@PedonatorUSA: Being from Orygun, I’m allergic to sales taxes. Then again, in practice, I rarely buy anything that requires them.

and then the same people who voted against it will flood civil service hot lines

Well, there’s the first thing to cut.

@PedonatorUSA and nojo: Holy shite, I think I saw a pig whiz by in the Harvest Moon, right-wing crank Debra Saunders who is normally drinking the Newt Gingrich Kool-Aid and singing from the right winger hymnbook says that Moonbeam was the clear winner in the debate.

Too bad that RINO Maldonado came off like a kooky pants in his debate with Mayor McDreamy. I’m torn on this race. I really want to slap Newsom.

@nojo: I know sales taxes are traditionally regarded as regressive, but really, when they aren’t applied to food and a few other things, who notices?

Not that I wouldn’t rather tax the super-rich to hell, and especially treat “capital gains” as regular income tax-wise, which would probably solve a huge portion of the budgetary conundra, but…

If we don’t get more from taxes, we have to cut services. Unfortunately, I think most US Americans believe we can get improved services by cutting taxes. I guess we just need to ship all those “cushy” government jobs off to maquiladoras in Mexico and call centers in India. Then everything will be golden. But then we’d lose jobs!

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

Who even cares if most of our jobs serve to redistribute wealth from the many to the few? Not the teabaggers, apparently. And really, not anyone who doesn’t have a job.

The whole premise of our economy (eternal growth) is just fucked, and until I see some rational discussion about that in the MSM, I’m not sure what anyone can do.

I admire the squatters, punks, foragers, etc. But they don’t seem to be convincing any significant portion of the economically-displaced, angry, mostly-white former-middle-class that fuels the Party of Tea.

Which is really the Republicans’ master-stroke of co-option of populist rage. Which could have been the Demrats’ fuel, if they really believed some of that, but they don’t and so they refuse to take advantage of it.

Not that I care a flying fuck about the Democrats as a party. Just looking for some politicians in power who have the ovaries/gonads to speak truth to people.

@PedonatorUSA: We need a few good plagues on this planet, or birth control pumped into the water. Seven billion miracles are enough.

@PedonatorUSA: the Republicans’ master-stroke of co-option of populist rage

Which started, oh, let’s say 1965. There is no “populist rage”, now that I think about it — just racism pretending it’s something else.

@SanFranLefty: We don’t need human intervention to correct the population, unless we’re talking about rational policies that promote contraception, and frankly, abortion-on-demand (no woman should have to carry a parasite unless she wants a child).

Fact is, we are headed for a correction. We can voluntarily induce it or we can have it visited upon us like some God-given Plague or Armageddon (which as an atheist I believe would just be nature’s way).

Meanwhile, my co-workers and I were having shits and giggles the other day at the prospect of President Santorum!

Actually, I think a Palin/Santorum ticket would be fantastic. If they won, it would be exactly what US America deserves. Plus, it would give progressive bloggers a less awkward way to sustain credible attacks on politicians who aggressively implement anti-progressive policies whilst whining about the lack of support from their progressive “base”.

@SanFranLefty: So to clarify my “What Else Can You Buy for $119 Million” contest, you don’t have to just send me things that equal approximately 120 million bucks. Pick your favorite cause (school lunch, cost of immunizations, keeping Yosemite National Park open, etc.) and figure out how many times that dollar amount goes into 119 million (i.e. X thousand inner city kids could get free rides to Harvard, school lunch for a million kids for three years, etc.).

Operators are standing by…

@nojo: Ah, the good old days before ’65 or so (?), when the terms liberal and conservative actually meant something other than loyalty to a particular political party! (?)

@PedonatorUSA: I think we’re all supposed to be classical liberals. Except for royalists.

@SanFranLefty: My wife wanted to see it so I kept her company and did something useful at the same time — worked on my crossword puzzle. I thought neither said anything of substance whatsoever but Megs impressed me because she is not batshit crazy and indeed is as articulate as Gov. Moonbeam.

@SanFranLefty: I can’t do the math, but couldn’t Megs just use her money to balance the state budget?

@SanFranLefty: No on 26. Didn’t Prop 13 do enough damage?

@Walking Still: Jerry bragged last night about how well he implemented Prop. 13. What a putz.

@SanFranLefty: Sorry, I couldn’t handle the debate: the Stepford Corporate Clone v. Prop 13 Weasel.

Jerry will get my vote, but I’m not going to watch or listen to him voluntarily.

@PedonatorUSA: This chart explains why we don’t see any rational discussion of the fucked up premise of our economy.