Army of Dog

This guy:

All the medical technology in the world, and we remove a nail from a guy’s head with a claw hammer? I have my suspicions about that aspect, but it’s damn funny. Unless you’re the one with the nail.

Well, it’s been about a week since I last posted and I have to offer my sincerest apologies for the lack of activity.  I’ve been going through the mildly hellish task of moving the official Army of Dog headquarters.  Furniture looks nice when it’s sitting around, but every time I move, I suddenly feel the need to go back to the days of bean-bag chairs and futons.  I should also note that, as of this week, there is once again a canine member of the household.  He’s eight months old and full of enough energy on any given morning to power a small car for about six weeks.  Pics to follow as soon as I remember which damn box I put the camera in.

Today’s Arabic insult:

#8. “A thousand dicks in your religion” (Elif air ab dinikh)

Taken from Cracked’s The 9 Most Devastating Insults From Around the World  (fair warning: #4 is accompanied by some very disturbing imagery)

Plan on hearing many of these on this site in the coming months, I’m running out of insults for the Obamaphiles.

(Found via EHOWA (NSFW))

Okay, now he’s just starting to feel like a stalker.  I got another email from Barack this morning.  It’s the same intro where he flatters me with all of the bullshit about how important I am, and how he can’t do this without me, but now he’s trying to buy my affection on the cheap. 

Brett –

Next week, we have the opportunity to close out this race and secure the nomination for Barack — but there’s another deadline coming up even sooner.

Financial reports for April will be filed this Wednesday at midnight. The media pundits and Washington insiders will be watching the results and judging the strength of our campaign by the money we raise.

But what’s most impressive about our movement is that our funding has come from grassroots supporters like you. We’ve never accepted donations from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. Instead, more than 1,500,000 ordinary people have stepped up to own a piece of this campaign.

To meet this deadline and celebrate our grassroots donors, we’ve created a special gift.

Make a donation of $15 or more before midnight on Wednesday, April 30th, and receive a limited edition Vote for Change car magnet:

https://donate.barackobama.com/magnet

The crucial North Carolina and Indiana primaries will require unprecedented resources. But we also need to start preparing for the general election.

We’re building a powerful grassroots movement in all 50 states — organizing communities, registering voters, and bringing new voices into the political process.

We have accomplished so much, but we need your support today — to finish this contest, and to get ready to take on Senator McCain.

Yesterday, he was trying to give me t-shirts with his name on them and a DVD of him giving some speech, but today it’s car magnets.  Is that what our friendship comes down to?  “Hey Brett, give me a few bucks, I gotta go win North Carolina.  Oh, and here, have a car magnet buddy.”  Yeah, how’d that $50 for the contest in Pennsylvania work out?  He keeps begging me for money, meanwhile he doesn’t show up for his job, he sends his wife out to drum up money for him, and he jet-sets around the country partying with people he don’t even know and wants me to fund it.  This is getting really old, I mean I’m willing to help out a friend here and there, but this constant demand for money is really damaging my trust.

So it seems that Hannah Montana did a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and at least one picture contained implied nudity. Yes, I think that photographs involving 15-year-olds should avoid even implied nudity, yes I think that goes double when the 15-year-old is a near demi-goddess to tweeners everywhere, but please forgive me if I can’t manufacture outrage. Really, the idea that any parent of a preteen girl has the right to be surprised at this is laughable.

Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan, is any of this starting to seem familiar. Frankly, Miley Cyrus will be doing well by those standards if she isn’t appearing three times a night at the Spearmint Rhino in five years. We’ve turned teen stardom into a proving ground for oversexed, alcoholic, twenty-something disasters. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news here, but that seemingly innocent teenage girl that your 11-year-old daughter wants to emulate is going to be naked on film somewhere in the next three to five years. It’s pretty much a certainty. She’s going to reach an age where being pigeonholed as an innocent teenage girl is going to interfere with her plans for her future career. When that happens, someone is going to convince her that getting naked on screen or in a photo session will break her out of that mold. One day Anne Hathaway is doing Ella Enchanted and The Princess Diaries, the next she’s topless in the backseat of a convertible blowing some douchebag. You have no right to be surprised at this by now. I’ve seen dogs figure out a pattern with less repetition.

Just in case you need a more visual demonstration of the express lane to whoredom that is the modern teen pop superstar, follow me below the fold for a pictorial journey through time.

*** Fair Warning, the pictures below are Not Safe for Work.***

(more…)

Senator Obama, or Barry as I call him when we talk, sent me another email this morning asking me to travel to North Carolina and campaign for him.  It’s asking a lot, but he was pretty cool about it.

Brett —

I’ve just landed in North Carolina, and I wanted to let you know about where we stand in this battleground state.

All across North Carolina, I’ve spoken to veterans, students, and factory workers about the challenges small-town America is facing — and about how we’re going to start solving them.

I see the excitement on the ground, and I truly believe North Carolina is ready to stand up for a different kind of politics. But only if people like you get involved and take ownership of this effort.

In the coming days, supporters across the country will be coming to North Carolina to knock on doors, make phone calls, and Get Out The Vote for Primary Day on May 6th — and they need your help.

I know this is a big decision. But what’s brought our campaign where we are today is that so many people — including many who never thought they’d get involved in politics in their lifetime — have taken that leap to help us succeed.

We need to finish strong in the Tar Heel State, so I hope you’ll sign up to take the trip this weekend.

I’m trying to imagine what will be descending on the good people of North Carolina in the coming days.  The influx of Trans-gender Unionized Healthcare Workers for Obama alone will make Sherman’s March seem like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by comparison.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve been lurking on HuffPo again.  I know, but I can’t help it.  David Sirota is whining about the fact that Congressional Democrats are coming to the reality that the socialist pipe dream of universal, government-run healthcare won’t be happening anytime soon.  It’s the usual bullshit about how there’s really a massive swell of popular support for pseudo-communist state-run "healthcare."  The post itself is pretty damn boring, but the comments are a real hoot.  Evidently, the fact that Democrat politicians are putting their political aspirations ahead of fealty to left-wing ideology is just a shock.

One portion of a comment stood out among all of the whining, however.  In a sea of misinformed stupidity Phoenixfire089 managed to distinguish himself.  Here’s the first paragraph of his comment (emphasis is mine):

Schumer’s quotes illustrate the gap between politicians and regular people. This morning I woke up to a guest on a tv program speaking about how American’s average lifespan has stagnated and that 20% of women will not make it to that average. Further, the United States is 24th in a ranking of infant mortality…lower than Cuba. According to recent studies, there is a statistically significant relationship between wealth and life expectancy.

I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t take a college-level understanding of statistics to grasp the idea that a certain percentage of any data set will fall short of the average.  Hence the term average.  So we’ve established that Phoenixfire089 is an idiot, but the statistics cited in that paragraph present an interesting, and common, argument for universal healthcare.

Virtually every discussion with a left-wing nationalized healthcare advocate will eventually lead to a lecture about America’s dismal performances in the areas of infant mortality and life expectancy.  Naturally, they’ve picked two of the worst possible indicators of the quality of a healthcare system.  Why are they such bad indicators?  Because the results are contaminated by too many factors that are outside the control of any healthcare system, much less a government-run one.

But don’t take my word for it.  David Hogberg has an article on this issue that gives a number of reasons why these two statistics are poor indicators of the quality of a healthcare system.  It’s a couple of years old, but I found it particularly informative.  If you find yourself having this debate with someone and need to respond to those statistics, this article is an excellent resource. 

I’m bored on Saturday so here’s a little Bob Newhart audio from way back. If you’re not familiar with Newhart’s old stand-up routines, do the search thing on YouTube and set aside a couple hours.

Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Ave

God’s whereabouts are unknown at this time. Police in Terre Haute are calling Him a “person of interest.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/11/fire-destroys-clinton-cam_n_96215.html

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Fire destroyed a campaign office of presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in western Indiana early Friday.

Two people were inside when the fire broke out but escaped without injuries, said Terre Haute Fire Department spokesman John Gardner.

Gardner said nothing so far had indicated the fire was arson.

“But we’re doing a full investigation on it like any other commercial structure fire,” he said.

Given the sheer amount of it on the Left, whiny-little-bitchiness is going to need a much more succinct term going forward. From now on I’ll refer to a whiny little bitch as simply “a Voinovich.” For example, Nathaniel Bach is such a Voinovich. I was reading through my daily briefing from The Huffington Post when I came across an article titled “Obama’s ‘Big Tent’ Campaign Cuts Out The Little People In California.” Now the title alone practically screams Voinvovichness, so I clicked on it and lo I was not disappointed.

I’ve spent the past few weeks excitedly sending emails, making phone calls, and explaining the technicalities of Democratic party registration to my family and friends in the Los Angeles area. You see, I am running to be an Obama delegate representing California’s 30th District at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Or at least, I was running until the Obama campaign cut me from the list.

After completing the application process and finding my name on the official list of registered candidates, I received an email from the California Democratic Party today (Wednesday) at 4:48 p.m. informing me that the final approved lists of delegate candidates had been posted and that I should check the website. (I assume the same email went out to all the delegate candidates.) I clicked over to the website and found that, lo and behold, what had been a list of 90 candidates had been eviscerated down to only 17, and that my name was gone. I immediately checked the Obama candidate list for the 33rd District, where a friend and fellow Obama die-hard was also running for a delegate spot. His name was gone, too, and a list that formerly contained 83 names was down to a mere 20.

Evidently, our hero was dismayed by the fact that a totally legal paring down of candidates resulted in the Obama campaign failing to recognize just how important he was. This unforgivable slight was committed to prevent “Trojan horse” candidates from successfully inserting themselves into the delegate race and wreaking havoc at the convention. This is, of course, an unsatisfactory explanation because it fails again to recognize how important he is. So he called the number on the website and was told that the 40:1 delegate-to-slot ratio was too large and the campaign decided to pare down the number considerably to avoid chaos. Such practical considerations do not soothe the egos of self-aggrandizing lefties.

The real tragedy is that our young protagonist was forced to realize the cold, hard reality of politics.

It’s hard not to be cynical. Remaining on the list of approved candidates is the slate of candidates (longtime campaign volunteers) that the Obama campaign has officially endorsed, as well as several names recognizable from local politics. These delegate candidates aren’t to be faulted for being longtime political activists, but the cynic in me wonders why those names remained while the “nobodies” on the list disappeared. The Obama campaign owes those of us who were cut a fuller explanation of the decision process. The sweeping explanation that they were simply too overwhelmed just isn’t credible. There were clearly other factors at work. Even a brief apology email to those of us destined for the cutting room floor expressing regret in advance would have been logical– a seemingly establishment move from a campaign that has portrayed itself as anything but.

My God! The list of remaining candidates is full of important people and cronies!!!! But the Obamessiah is all about the little guy! He’s here to deliver us from all the greedy corporations and rednecks and SUV drivers! How could he betray us and do something so worthy of BushHitler and Haliburton!!!!!!

He concludes:

Luckily, the Obama campaign still has time to right this wrong. A campaign so masterful at organization can surely find a way to accommodate the original number of candidates and allow each to make the 1-minute speech to which she/he is entitled. I will continue to support and cheer Senator Obama (probably on this website) as he continues his campaign for the presidency, but his campaign has disappointed me today, and its shiny, peopled-powered machinery has lost some luster.

I for one am incredibly disappointed that a Chicago Democrat who’s been mentored by an angry, America-hating racist, hung out with a leftist terrorist, and done business with a corrupt bagman could choose rewarding cronies and people who can do something for him instead of championing the little guy. It’s going to color my perception of politicians forever.