Sorry, but I just couldn't resist that headline.

Paula Deen's cooking show is not one I usually watch on Food Network. The few times I've seen parts of it, the food she was making was so nauseating I simply had to turn it off. As soon as the Crisco or the Cool Whip starts coming out, I'm done. It isn't that I'm only willing to use hand-rolled, hand-shaped macaroni and three types of reduced-fat artisanal cheese and truffle oil to make MY macaroni and cheese, but chemical-laden frankenfood just doesn't do it for me. That isn't to say that I won't eat anything that doesn't come from an organic garden in a pastoral landscape tended by golden-tressed earth mothers singing Big Yellow Taxi, but I do recognize the difficulties of being someone who has to be in a large building for eight-to-ten hours a day combined with a commute that can be an hour or more, and that unless you want to have dinner at eight PM and then go to bed an hour later, your weekday dinners are going to often consist of heating up something from Trader Joe's.

And then there's Paula Deen, who has made a fortune giving the people what they want -- dishes laden with butter and chocolate and sugar and shortening -- the kinds of food that perhaps were acceptable when everyone did hard physical labor on the farm all day but that are deadly in today's sedentary desk-job world. It's not surprising that people in the TV chef world such as Anthony Bourdain would get their high dudgeon on about the kind of crap Deen whips up on her cooking show. But let's not claim that haute cuisine chefs completely eschew the artery-clogging stuff either, not after the episode of Chopped I saw the other night in which the centerpiece of an appetizer was marrow bones.

Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer is drooling over a commercial that advertises something like "Two full pounds of ground beef, soaked in rich creamery butter. Topped with bacon, ham, cheese, and a fried egg"? Well, meet the "Lady's Brunch Burger."

The legitimate beef (so to speak) with Paula Deen is about the frankenfood more than even the fat content. Let's face it, folks -- anyone watching television who thinks that a cheeseburger topped with bacon and a fried egg and served on a glazed doughnut is a great idea has bigger problems than Paula Deen.

What's surprising is the schadenfreude coming from so-called progressives. At a time when discrimination on the basis of health risks is increasing, that a side of the political spectrum that's often (Dan Savage notwithstanding) associated with fighting discrimination based solely on girth. How can you attack the right for saying that women who get raped deserve it because they dressed provocatively and then say that Paula Deen deserves to be trashed because she ate a high-fat diet and developed Type 2 diabetes?

It seems to be at least somewhat about the diabetes drug endorsement deal she's received:

Deen knew she had diabetes for three years and still pushed doughnut burgers on her fans. Then she waited to tell people until she had an endorsement deal with a drug company. It’s hard to see that choice as anything but shabby. Deen could have spent three years talking about “moderation” without making any money off a pharmaceutical company. Like Bill Clinton, who slimmed down on a mostly vegan regimen, she had the potential as a Southerner and a food lover to teach her fans new strategies for eating and living — and she could have done it without shilling for the pharmaceutical industry. She looks like a calculated opportunist today — when, she could have, for those millions of fellow Americans with diabetes, been simply sweet.

First of all, how often do you hear Bill Clinton talk about veganism? Almost never. Bill Clinton doesn't travel the country talking about veganism, and nowhere in the mission statement of the Clinton Global Initiative does it talk about diabetes. It's something he did, and good for him. (It also helps that he can no doubt afford a spectacular vegan chef to prepare delicious vegan meals for him.) But the biggest problem with the paragraph above is its implication that there is no gray area at all between the Lady's Brunch Burger and a vegan diet, when in fact there's a great deal of gray area. To imply otherwise is enough to make your average overweight person just decide "The hell with it."

Amanda Marcotte, who blogs for a living and so doesn't have to sit in an office for eight-to-ten hours a day and then sit in traffic for an hour, joins the pile-on, though she makes some valid points about managing diseases after we have them rather than preventing them in the first place.

The problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules about prevention. I come from two fat parents. Both have lost a bit of weight recently, but are still overweight by any objective standard. Both have health problems, one related to lifestyle (smoking), the other unrelated to lifestyle. Mom is 84 and Dad is 86. Neither one has diabetes, despite being overweight for as long as I can remember. I have a friend whose husband has high cholesterol, despite a diet of lean meats, fish, grains, and vegetables, and a two-mile run every morning. Sometimes smokers don't get lung cancer and nonsmokers do. Sometimes thin people get Type 2 diabetes and fat people don't. Christopher Hitchens smoked cigarettes and drank like a fish and died of esophageal cancer. Winston Churchill started each day with a cigar and a snifter of brandy and lived to be ninety. Julia Child was the queen of butter and was similarly bashed (NYT link) -- and lived to be ninety-two.

Look, I recognize that people who eat crap, and those, like Paula Deen, who glorify crap food make it more difficult for those of us who try to eat right to convince people that we don't sit around eating doughnuts and Chicken McNuggets (or Lady's Brunch Burgers, for that matter); that we eat egg white vegetable omelets with just a sprinkling of cheese (non-artisanal, alas) for breakfast and vegetable-laden soups with salad for lunch and a small bowl of chili for dinner -- and we're still fat. Tonight I am going to dinner with some colleagues who are in town from overseas. They love, love, love Cheesecake Factory. I hate, hate, hate chain restaurants like this because it's so difficult to find something to eat that isn't fried or covered with cheese. Yesterday I spent a full fifteen minutes perusing the menu in advance to try and find something I can eat that isn't huge, fried, covered with cheese, or drowning in dressing. This is what life is like every single fucking day for Your Humble Blogger, who is a 4'10" size sixteen anyway. And it doesn't involve doughnuts, fast food, or these days even chocolate, as I've mostly lost my taste for sweet stuff. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, who wrote the Salon article excerpted above, is battling Stage IV melanoma that started on her scalp. This happened despite wearing sunscreen all these years because who puts sunscreen on her scalp? So I suppose we should cut her a cetain amount of slack and not say she brought it on herself by spending too much time in the sun without a hat. Because even though lifestyle factors might bring on a serious disease, blaming sick people for their own plight after they're sick seems a little bit like blaming rape victims for being assaulted.

None of us is perfect, and there's no one in this country who hasn't deluded him/herself at one point or another that s/he is immortal and will never get sick and never die. Those of us who have seen parents live to what is old age by any measure are especially susceptible to this delusion. But you can do everything right and still get cancer. You can do everything right and get wiped out on the highway tomorrow. You can do everything wrong and outlive everyone you know. The universe is random like that. Of course it's better to eat a moderate portion of chicken sauteed with fresh organic vegetables over a bit of brown rice than it is to eat a Big Mac. I don't think even the most ardent red-stater would deny that.

Now, I'm not a Paula Deen fan, so I can't say for sure. But I can't imagine that she has been out there advocating eating two pounds of fried macaroni and cheese topped with butter at every meal, every day, for your entire life. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. But I suspect that Paula Deen is not that much different from most of us -- she never believed it would happen to her. So-called progressives who would never advocate discriminating against the 22-year-old who's paraplegic because he drank a six-pack and then drove his car into a tree because his disability is "lifestyle-related" have no business being selective about who they'll bash for having a life-threatening illness. Even if it did come from Velveeta and doughnuts.

Labels: double standards, Fast Food Nation, pop culture, weight

Throughout the Republican primary season, we've heard about "hard work." You know, the hard work that black people living in poverty don't do and their children should. They sit in a pile of their own inherited money and that gained through putting others out of work and talk about "a merit-based opportunity society." They give lip service to the long-standing American illusion that if you Just Work Hard Enough™, you too can sit at the club overlooking the 18th green with to Mitt and Shrub and Poppy and ponder over what the rabble are doing. We've heard that if you're not rich you have only yourself to blame. We've heard that a candidate worth a quarter of a billion dollars is "middle class" and "unemployed" just like you and advocate tax cuts .

Middle-class Republicans like those in the audience at the Republican debate the other night have fully bought into the myth of Just Work Hard Enough™. It's why they applaud Newt Gingrich when he talks about food stamps, even though their neighbors (or perhaps even they themselves) are on the SNAP program. They applaud the talk about Fannie and Freddie when they themselves are sitting in a house that's worth half what they paid for it and unable to pay a balloon mortgage because they themselves listened to the mortgage broker explain that they can afford it because real estate always appreciates in value. They applaud this kind of talk because as long as they can believe that the decline and fall of the middle class is due to the personal failings of someone else, they don't have to look at how they too are getting screwed. They believe Mexicans are taking their manufacturing jobs, instead of at executives with eight-figure pay packages sending them to the cheapest overseas sweatshop they can find. They believe black people who are having entirely too much sex are driving Cadillacs (sic) and eating steak on their tax dollars. They believe that if we could just get rid of abortion and birth control, our society would magically look like this:



The Just Work Hard Enough myth dies hard. We've always believed that hard work inevitably leads to success, and that the U.S. is the most socially mobile country in the world. Recent trends have shown this to be no longer the case. My father rose out of poverty into the middle class because of the G.I. bill and free tuition at CUNY. My mother's parents joined many other immigrant Jews and attained the middle class through the retail garment business. Today tuition is out of raech for most American families without saddling their children with six figures of debt by the time they graduate. The mom and pop dress shop no longer exists, except at the very high end. Today's veterans face mass unemployment. Social mobility is limited at best.

I would hope that Mitt Romney's disclosure that he pays a lower tax rate than most working Americans because his earnings come from dividend checks rather than as reward for hard work. serves to wake people up to the reality in this country that it's not about hard work, it's about who you know and who you're willing to screw over in order to make a buck. But it probably won't, because I've seen comments on news sites that because Mitt Romney has to hire people to expand his California house, it means he's a "job creator." That this is temporary work much of which is probably being done by day laborers picked up from a street corner and put to work with no benefits, no guarantee of their safety, and sometimes no pay escapes them. Because if the people in that South Carolina audience don't believe that hard work gets rewarded, they might just have to start fighting back.

Labels: greed, Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney, right-wing economic terrorism

Gregorio Borgia/AP


I don't know what it is about shipwrecks that we find so compelling. Our age is one of air travel, not sea travel. When planes crash, we are horrified, but the horror seems somehow mundane. Yes, we were all appalled when Air France Flight 447 crashed, and when EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed, and TWA Flight 800 crashed. But for those of us who didn't know anyone on those doomed flights, life returned to normal in a matter of days, and we stopped thinking about it.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be the case with the wreck of the Costa Concordia. And that's where James Cameron comes in.

The only thing that would have made this better for Cameron would be if this wreck had occurred next March, because his billion dollar shipwreck epic, Titanic, has been re-engineered for 3-D and re-released next April, just in time for the 100the anniversary of the most famous shipwreck in history.

The Concordia was no Titanic. No one made claims that it was the most luxurious cruise ship in the world, that it was some kind of quantum leap forward in technology. It didn't usher in a new age and mark the end of one. On the plus side, it didn't hide its lower-income passengers in the bowels of the ship, dining on lamb stew and rough bread while the toffs feast on aspic and quail. Today, steerage-type travel is reserved for air passengers.

Looking at photos of the Concordia in happier days, it was your pretty standard small city-at-sea, with pools, a glitzy lobby, and ornate dining rooms. And yet, the ghosts of the great White Star and Cunard liners pervade the design of all of these monuments to ongepotchket. Giant ships are now about vacationing, rather than getting from one place to another, but no one boards one of these behemoths without standing on deck thinking of all those passengers who came before them, and no one arrives in New York Harbor at seven in the morning, with the sun gleaming down on the Statue of Liberty as she beckons, "Come on in, there's plenty of room here" without thinking of the teeming hordes of people, some of them our own relatives, who saw that very same view a hundred years ago (give or take a few) and were filled with hope. Despite the relentless pop music and the 24-hour soft-serve and the neon lights and the open seating, there's still a sense of glamour about being on one of these giant ships.

Perhaps that's why when something like this happen, we can't tear ourselves away from it. And of course the granddaddy of all shipwrecks, the one the memory of which pervades everything, is still that giant White Star liner that hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The Titanic itself, but more vividly, and even more oddly, Cameron's film, hover over the Concordia wreck like an accusatory finger, invoked consistently by the survivors of the Concordia wreck.

Jonathan Paturi, a chef on the Concordia:

Looking back to that traumatic Friday evening, I wonder how much like the Titanic disaster it was. Just like the Titanic, the Costa Concordia was a luxury liner. We were hosting 4,200 holiday makers. And just like the Titanic, we were serving dinner to our guests when disaster struck. Only, the Titanic struck an iceberg and we ran into a reef.

It was 9.30 p.m. Friday evening. Friday, the 13th, I’m now told. Five of my mates -- chefs, all from Hyderabad -- and I were cooking dinner for the passengers. Suddenly we felt the ship tilt over. Such moments do occur on a ship, so we thought it was one of them. Then the crew-only alarm went off: Delta X-Ray. It meant the ship was taking in water. Then another alarm was sounded: India Victor. It meant there was a fire in the ship and that passengers had to be moved to safety.

The ship began to list even more, and I saw food sliding down the counter. Yes, just like in the Titanic movie. Then there was a complete blackout. I fought down the panic rising within me. I called my cousin and told him about the situation. He told me to be brave. I told him, “I’ll call you if I’m alive.” Tears welled up in my eyes as I felt that I might never see my loved ones again.

Photos taken of the evacuation and of huddled passengers on shore add to the eerie parallel effect, as do the reactions of passengers:

“We were having dinner aboard when we heard a loud noise, like that of the keel dragged over something. There were scenes of panic, glasses falling to the floor.” -- passenger Luciano Castro

We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side.

“We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.” -- passenger Mike van Dijk

"Have you seen 'Titanic'? That's exactly what it was," -- passenger Valeria Ananias (link)

Look hard enough, and you can find as many parallels as you want.

Of course there are differences. The class differences that made it perfectly acceptable for third-class passengers to have less access to lifeboats have largely been levelled, with inexpensive cabins now located on the same hallways as more expensive ones. And this time the villian role of Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line executive who hopped aboard a Titanic lifeboat in the midst of chaos is being played by Concordia captain himself, Francesco Schettino, who abandoned ship instead of standing nobly on the bridge as his ship sinks. The Concordia seems no have had no quasi-military men like Charles Lightoller, portrayed as brave and noble by Kenneth More in the 1956 film A Night to Remember and as a blithering idiot in Cameron's film. (Lightoller later recounted to family that a steering error by Quartermaster Robert Hitchins, similar to that which probably brought the Concordia aground, led to the Titanic's collision with the iceberg that took it to the bottom of the sea.) But the relentless comparisons to the wreck of the Titanic, despite the fortunately much smaller death toll, persist.

And all this just a little under three months before Titanic 3-D opens in theatres. You can't BUY that kind of publicity.

Labels: movies, pop culture

"Did you see them? I mean, they looked like guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club." - David Letterman on the 2008 GOP presidential field.

If there's any one consistent failure plaguing liberals, it's the inability to hold the jackbooted feet of Republicans to the fire of their consistent shunning and skeeving of minorities even on Martin Luther King Day.

It wasn't too long ago that the NAACP, bizarrely, agreed to host a Republican debate during their annual meeting and the turnout (Professional Xenophobe Rep. Steve King, of all people) was even more pathetic than the proposed clown show that would've taken place if Donald Trump had followed through on his promise to hold his own debate. A lot of hemming, hawing and throat-clearing had ensued about "scheduling conflicts" and the like.

But the fact is, Republicans are barely smart enough to know they have nothing to offer the most august assemblage of African Americans (Aside from Michael Moore loitering outside their offices or George Soros giving even a dime to a Democrat, do Republicans fear anything more than educated African Americans?). This was exactly the reason why George W. Bush waited until near the end of his "presidency" to address the NAACP and his boilerplate speech reminded everyone in attendance why he'd skeeved the NAACP all those years.

This year, they have even less to offer minorities and it's obvious that they've regressed. Not too long ago, Rick Santorum said to an all white audience in Iowa that he had no intention of making black peoples' lives easier while speaking of welfare reform (and don't even get me started on Santorum's risible insistence that he said "plives" and "blah people."). And yet Santorum finished just 8 votes behind Romney in the caucus despite not knowing that in Iowa, nine out of ten people on welfare are white and that the percentage nationwide isn't much different.

Both Rand and Ron Paul would love nothing more than to see the 1964 Civil Rights Act repealed under the equally risible rubric of fairness toward businesses and Ron Paul's old racist newsletters from the 80's and 90's are now pursuing him like the Hounds of the Baskervilles. And the closest any Republican has gotten to embracing the Civil Rights movement was in 2008 when Romney disingenuously insisted that he and his father marched with Dr. King when Mitt was more likely in France living in a palace on a Mormon missionary deferment during Vietnam.

And, in a direct subversion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there's a resurgent movement in the GOP machine to cage votes under the, once again, risible rubric of voter fraud, despite the fact that James O'Keefe in NH had committed more acts of voter fraud by accepting ballots under false names than all other cases of vote fraud combined that'd been prosecuted in the last several decades.

The Republican Party would love to forget that the Civil Rights Movement ever existed. Republicans seem to be as clueless as Ronald Reagan, who tactlessly kicked off his "states' rights"/racist dog whistle candidacy in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi where three civil rights workers were murdered just 16 years prior.

The Southern Strategy engineered by Nixon and his CREEP creeps was based as much on racism as economic hardship, a strategy that was completely predicated on tearing down the record and credibility of the Other Guys without even coming close to offering real solutions to alleviate Appalachian misery (and it's safe to say they still haven't).

So when Republicans like Romney start mealy-mouthing Dr. King's legacy while others openly shun and target minorities while making racist statements, we really ought to be holding their cloven hooves to the fire and ripping the invisible hoods off their heads.

This is all kinds of win:

Labels: 2012 election, hack journalism, Stephen Colbert, Teh Funny

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

"The reason is simple: Romney is not a conservative. He's not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn't. What he has going for him is that he's not Obama..." - Unconvicted child molester and drug addict Rush Limbaugh on Bain Capital-owned Clear Channel.

It would be understandable if liberals were tempted to take a break this winter or at least until Newt Gingrich finally gets smart and drops out of the race. After all, the 28+ minute-long movie unofficially made for and by Newt Gingrich through his SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, is seamlessly indistinguishable from what liberal icon Robert Greenwald would produce through his production company (in fact, it's virtually impossible to imagine the people Winning Our Future had hired to produce the spot not looking to Greenwald's Brave New Films for cues, if the thorough research replete with touching music is any indication.).

In fact, as long as the former House Speaker is in the race, he'll be doing a lot of President Obama's heavy lifting.

Yet while proper due and attention is being paid to Mr. Gingrich's unofficial spot, it's notable that other prominent conservatives such as Sarah Palin have piled on. Uniting with Winning Our Future, the former Alaska Governor and failed Vice Presidential nominee and proven tax cheat has demanded that Romney to release his tax records, which he has staunchly refused to do (at the end of the video, you'll see why: Most of Romney's estimated quarter of a billion dollar fortune that was hoarded at the expense of American jobs and companies has long since been squirreled away in not-so-blind trusts and offshore bank accounts far from the apathetic reach of the IRS.).

The entire video would be an indelibly searing indictment on any candidate with Mitt Romney's history of financial predation at Bain Capital were it not for the fact that among other conservative voters, Barack Obama, a man whose middling stimulus bill still created 3,000,000 jobs, is even more loathed and feared than Mitt Romney.


While the president's entire agenda on job creation has been underwhelming at best these past 35+ months, it's hard to imagine why and how even rock-ribbed Republicans primarily worried about the economy and job creation would fear Mr. Obama more than the elitist Romney, a mannequin of a game show host who'd cost America countless tens of thousands of jobs in his 17 years helming Bain (or created about 100,000 for communist China, depending on how one chooses to look at it).

Perhaps Limbaugh in my epigraph succinctly explained it all. As with Romney's repugnance among Republican voters until late, his newfound if middling appeal can be summed up as, "He's not Obama." When dealing with the one-dimensional, reactionarily reptilian Republican brain, one cannot introduce more complex logic than that without subjecting oneself to endless head banging on the brick wall of racially-motivated "reasoning."

But Romney's so-called appeal, much of which was bought prior to getting endorsements from federal, state and local right wing politicians, is more a direct benefit from running in a weak field of Republican contenders than anything else. Romney, like McCain before him, is like the 83 game-winning 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (who went on to win the World Series.): A mediocre entity that vultures a berth more through process of attrition than anything else.

But as ill-informed and reactionary as conservative voters tend to be, the repugnance to Romney that still almost cost him the Iowa caucus to one term Senator Rick Santorum can perhaps also be ascribed to reptilian reactivism. Say what you want about George W. Bush and John McCain and many Republican presidential candidates before them but at least those men had human traits and could resonate with voters across a broad spectrum of the electorate (McCain, despite his age and clearly incipient dementia, still got almost 60,000,000 people to vote for him against Obama).

Mitt Romney, even on those mercifully rare occasions when he tries to connect with the grass roots, cannot help but show what an elitist scum he truly is, whether it's telling largely out of work Floridians "I'm unemployed, too," betting Texas Governor Rick Perry $10,000 over a minor squabble over a book passage during a nationally televised debate, telling hecklers at the Iowa State Fair that corporations are people, that income inequality should be spoken of only in "quiet rooms" or four years ago seeking out a reporter for special abuse when he rightly called out Romney's lobbyist Ron Kaufman as running his campaign.

In fact, the only time one can get a human reaction from Romney is when someone accuses him of being a flip-flopper, insists that corporations are not, in fact, people or calling him out for his long history of vulturism with Bain Capital. Even then, Romney, will break into the most plastic and disingenuous grin since Ken and Barbie or what Charles Pierce at Esquire calls his "Flog the Butler" face.

Mitt Romney, scion of a wealthy family who escaped the Vietnam draft and instead spent a year at a palace in France during a Mormon mission, far from being a cool, even-tempered customer, is one of the most viciously defensive Republicans on the map on the rare occasions when someone from a crowd or the mainstream media calls him on his lies and constantly shifting positions. Even the mere suggestion that Romney may have come by his quarter billion dollar fortune under less than honorable means is enough to make him scramble for his emotional launch codes, if his shameful speech in Iowa last summer is any indication.

Much of Romney's divorce from reality and the facts can be gleaned from his very perversion of the definition of what Bain Capital's primary mission was. Bain, a world-eating entity that has created one weed-clogged parking lot after another from coast to coast, is a venture capital firm. Ask anyone at a venture capital firm who doesn't have a current or former alumnus running for president if their number one goal is job creation and they'll laugh you clear into the street.

The mission statement of a venture capital firm is to make money and if any jobs are created it's merely incidental. In nearly 25% of the cases in which Bain Capital bought a business, it filed for bankruptcy and was parted out like an old Chevy while hundreds got thrown out into the cold.


This is the picture that Mitt Romney would like you to forget, one that seems to perfectly illustrate the entire philosophy and agenda of the universally-despised Wall Street. Does that look like a portrait of people who are primarily interested in job creation or one of cash-stuffed scarecrow psychopaths in the heady 80's of Oliver Stone's Wall Street rubbing their unseemly wealth in our faces?

RomneyCare here in Massachusetts is but a mere microcosm of what he'd do to this country if he was ever allowed to sit behind the Resolute Desk. That abominable mutation of MassHealth, which used to provide for the health care needs of those on welfare and other public assistance, was co-opted by the half dozen largest health providers in the Commonwealth. The rechristened MassHealth Connector now offers rates too high for any unemployed or underemployed person to pay unless they meet a stringent hardship guideline. And if you're not that indigent but still too indigent to pay the premiums these HMOs demand, you'll wind up owing Massachusetts your $900+ personal exemption.

It's impossible to imagine anyone not on Wall Street or who doesn't work for Bain Capital or who hasn't been paid off by Romney ever voting for him except out of a reptilian revulsion toward a man of African American heritage running our country. It's quite obvious that prominent conservatives such as Mr. Gingrich and Ms. Palin are trying to take down Romney simply because they know that he's unelectable or because they themselves are revolted by the cult to which he belongs.

Whatever their motives, we should welcome their opposition to a Romney presidency because it marks the first time in a while that well-monied Republicans have ever gotten their facts straight.

Can you smell the Te-mentum? Tonight is the big night, when Captain America goes up against the Second Coming of the Baby Jesus in a no-holds-barred steel cage match at Corporate Shill Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, just outside the Birthplace of the American Revolution, where our Founding Fathers, evangelical Christians all, set forth a new kind of country, one steeped in superstition, mandatory religious worship of one particular flavor, to be done as flamboyantly and in-your-face as possible.

Wait. You mean they didn't?

Here at Casa la Brilliant, it's FOOTBALL!!! this weekend, what with the Battle for America's Soul And Tim Tebow's Endorsement Value going on tonight amidst the cacophony of B.J. Raji, Green Bay nose tackle, Famous Local Kid Who Isn't James O'Keefe, and presumed financier of one Giant Bigass House to replace his childhood home on a through street barely a stones throw from Casa la Brilliant itself, trash-talking our own Giants, who go up against the Packers at Lambeau Field tomorrow.

Poor Eli Manning can't seem to get a break, this soft-spoken guy who looks like the Head Projector Geek on the high school Audio/Visual Squad and has played in the shadow of his now-injured and possible next-Jets-quarterback brother. The Giants haven't been great this year, but they're here -- in the second round of the playoffs, and hey, you never know.

And that's precisely the problem. The line on tonight's game is New England by 13-1/2, but if by some chance Denver does win, the 43 percent of people polled who think that the Great White Alpha Male in the Sky is personally coaching the Denver Broncos are going to believe their delusion has been vindicated, and they'll become even more insufferable than they are now. And that's not taking into account that there are actually people who believe that Tebow is the literal Second Coming. And there, my friends, is the problem with Tim Tebow. It isn't that he has strong religious beliefs, though why he feels he has to constantly and publicly trumpet them is a mystery to me. It's that his willingness to go along with such nonsense, instead of having the humility to tell these nimrods that his life is about proving worthy to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, not claiming that he IS Jesus Christ, and that they should knock it off already, shows me that all this humility crap is just that -- crap.

But between Juicebox Jesus (™ Tbogg) and Rick Santorum, the U.S. is starting to look less like the beacon for the world, and more like some strange, backward third-world country where they worship fiddler crabs and lob coconuts at anyone who invades their land.

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: Heh.

This calls for a song:


This too.

And this.

And let's not forget this.

Labels: faux piety, football

I can't believe that the Public Editor of the New York Times even feels he has to ASK this:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

Reading that made me want to stick an icepick in my own forehead. What Arthur Brisbane is asking is for validation of the idea that everything is spin, that nothing is demonstrable, and what Republicans and Fox News have done for the last decade -- demand that demonstrable facts and utter horseshit be given equal weight -- is the way respected news organizations should behave.

It tells you a great deal about the New York Times when its public editor even feels that this is a question that needs to be asked -- whether newspapers have an obligation to fact-check or to just regurgitate whatever crap is fed to them. Of course, this is the newspaper that employs Jodi Kantor, a loathsome woman whose obsession with the Obama's marriage goes back to the 2008 campaign and has reached fruition with a "tell-all" book in which she "recounts" the views of a bunch of unidentified third parties and sells it as fact. This is the newspaper that let Judith Miller spout Bush Administration lies until it became demonstrably untenable to do so. And who can forget the halcyon days of another Jodi, this one last-named Wilgoren, whose job it was to hack Howard Dean to bits in 2004?

The Times can't have it both ways. Either it's going to be the newspaper of record, the great Grey Lady, the last bastion of factual news in this country, or it's going to be just another Murdochian tabloid. That Brisbane saw fit to ask readers this question tells us what decision has already been made.

And kudos to the paper's readers for giving this horsepuckey the smackdown it deserves.

Labels: epic fail, hack journalism, icepick meet forehead, You can't make this shit up

Gay guys nothing. I do this too:



The truly coffee-spitting moment is at 1:43. That's where I completely lost it. (Hint for the uninitiated.)

Labels: cat blogging, pop culture, Teh Funny

I heard him say this and the first thing that went through my mind was "Did he just call Barack Obama a lazy n-----r?"

You decide:

President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our Party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique -- We are One Nation, Under God.

Make no mistake, in this campaign, I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

Here's what "economic freedom" is under Mitt "Oh Dear God No Not Another Republican President Trying To Prove That His Dick Is Bigger Than His Daddy's" Romney:

At Dade Behring Inc., a medical-testing company based in Deerfield, Illinois, Bain cut at least 1,600 jobs during a series of acquisitions before the firm entered into bankruptcy in 2002. Romney foreshadowed those cuts in a speech to employees shortly after Bain acquired the firm.

DDi Corp., an electronics company in Anaheim, California, filed for bankruptcy in 2003 after Bain sold shares in the company generating at least $85.5 million and billed $10 million in management fees.

GS Industries Inc., a steel company in Charlotte, North Carolina, filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after workers said a chief executive hired under Bain made missteps, including installing managers who lacked industry expertise, former employees said.

When some politicians make promises, they mean them, even if they know in their hearts that they can't deliver. But when a guy like Mitt Romney, who was born at least on SECOND base and thinks he hit a double, whose "summer house" is over 6500 square feet, whose already $12 million home in La Jolla just isn't bit enough (the man DOES have an obsession with size, doesn't he?), who thinks that you can just fire your insurance company if they don't cover your cancer treatments, conveniently forgetting about those pesky pre-existing conditions exceptions, tells you that he's concerned about your job, just look at his record. The man is flat-out lying.

From 1989-1993 we had a president who made clear that he regarded the world as a fiefdom for his family and friends to plunder as they saw fit. From 2001-January 2009 we had another one. Why on earth would we give the keys to yet another soulless bastard for whom no amount of money can fill the black hole in his soul?

I just got home from yet another 12-hour day. I dare Mitt Romney to tell me he works harder than I do.

Charles Pierce. Also. Read. Now.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney

Mr. Bittman addresses the choir:

We’re Eating Less Meat. Why?

I love him, but he writes this column once a month.

Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we’re less than one-twentieth of the population.

But that’s changing.

...

...we spend a smaller percentage of our money on food than any other country, and much of that goes toward the roughly half-pound of meat each of us eats, on average, every day.

But that’s changing...

I fear change. And vending machines. And meat-filled vending machines.

...[The Daily Livestock Report] blames the decline on growing exports, which make less meat available for Americans to buy. It blames it on ethanol, which has caused feed costs to rise, production to drop and prices to go up so producers can cover their increasing costs. It blames drought. It doesn’t blame recession, which is surprising, because that’s a factor also.

All of which makes some sense.

This is not Mr. Bittman's finest moment in prose. I suspect scriptwriters for David Caruso, enemy of all things word-based, hijacked this column and are perpetuating a vegetarian Malkovich Malkovich on the New York Times. No? Okay.

No. It’s not the non-existent federal War on Meat that’s making a difference. And even if availability is down, it’s not as if we’re going to the supermarket and finding empty meat cases and deli counters filled with coleslaw.

Note: deli coleslaw is icky. That is a technical term. Continuing -

The flaw in the report is that it treats American consumers as passive actors who are victims of diminishing supplies, rising costs and government bias against the meat industry. Nowhere does it mention that we’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.

Yet conscious decisions are being made by consumers. Even buying less meat because prices are high and times are tough is a choice; other "sacrifices" could be made. We could cut back on junk food, or shirts or iPhones, which have a very high meat-equivalent, to coin a term. Yet even though excess supply kept chicken prices lower than the year before, demand dropped.

Another note: Xcez Chikn Supli would make a great band name. In Iceland.

I can add, anecdotally, that when I ask audiences I speak to, “How many of you are eating less meat than you were 10 years ago?” at least two-thirds raise their hands. A self-selecting group to be sure, but nevertheless one that exists.

In fact, let’s ask this: is anyone in this country eating more meat than they used to?

Assuming we're not talking to teenage boys and Survivor contestants, Mr. Bittman is still talking to people who read Mr. Bittman.

I love him, but in America, we now have Man v. Food Nation problem. Anecdotally, my friend's friend just had visitors from Italy, where I assure you people can cook, who wanted to visit places in which Adam Richman had punished his gullet and the food supply system. The whole idea is disgusting in a time when food pantries are struggling and soup kitchens can't keep up. Perhaps Mr. Bittman could take his pulpit to the Travel Channel, where his message of moderation has yet to take root.

Especially those who think theocracy is a bad thing unless it involves worship of Tim Tebow Jesus.

Rick Santorum, yesterday, about why Iran is such a threat:

They're, they're a theocracy. They're a theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that the, the afterlife is better than this life. President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the principal virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is martyrdom. So when your principal virtue is to die for your--for Allah, then it's not a deterrent to have a nuclear threat if they would use a nuclear weapon. It is, in fact, an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon, and that's why there's a difference between the Soviet Union and China and others and Iran.

Deeply held beliefs that the afterlife is better than this life? You mean like this?

"God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" (Eph 2:4-7).

That's from the New Testament. You know, the one that Christians like Rick Santorum regard as a holy book.

A principal virtue being to die for your deity? You mean like this:

According to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the official martyrology contains the names of 132 Catholics who have died for the faith since 2001. But this is not a complete list. Its 2005 report acknowledges that there are “many more possible ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in remote corners of the planet whose deaths may never be reported.”

Dying for Christ seems almost surreal to most Westerners. We live in a part of the world where Christianity rarely makes the news unless it is to be mocked or defamed. Otherwise, the media is strangely silent about modern Christian martyrdom. “Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world,” said Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “First, it’s ugly. Second, it’s growing. And third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity.”

The denizens of wingnuttia say that Iran's top leaders believe "that the end of days has come" and this makes Iran more likely to deploy a nuclear weapon against the United States. Rick Santorum is one of them. And yet, the US has nuclear weapons and also a sizable number of people who believe the end of days has come. So why is it OK for us? Because our religious nutballs worship someone different?

Labels: batshit crazies, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, double standards, nukes, Rick Santorum