Tea Partiers Motivated by Race; Sun Sets in West

In a follow-up to last week’s “Obese Kids More Likely to Get Bullied,” the Scientific Community has given us this gem: “Tea Partiers Motived by Race.”

For all of us who had a hunch that all those older white people with signs thanking Fox News for being so balanced might have a problem with minorities, there is finally some data to back it up, thanks in part to Christopher Parker of the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality (UWISERS for short).  UWISERS says that “people who are Tea Party supporters have a higher probability —25 percent, to be exact— of being racially resentful than those who are not Tea Party supporters.”

On the campaign against Obama and his Islamo-Marxist agenda

UWISERS adds that the average Tea Partier is “just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good.”  And here I thought the Tea Party consisted of the actual downtrodden, middle- and lower-class whites who have something to be pissed off about, like being taken for a ride by Republicans and other hypocrites who preach about family values but have flings with male prostitutes on the side, all the while blaming the country’s supposed moral decline on Democrats because they won’t allow compulsory Christian prayer in public schools.  Does this mean that people with real problems who don’t fall for empty moralizing or “us and them” gimmicks never vote with Republicans or Tea Party candidates?  I sure hope UWISERS looks into it!

In the meantime, look out for “Manga obsession linked to acute social anxiety.”

Prune Juice

Hello again, league of fans.  I’ve decided to revive this blog once again just so I can talk about a new love in my life.  It cannot hold a conversation, it isn’t pretty, and it barely tastes good, but it’s making me feel a whole lot better.  It’s prune juice, and I’m a living testament to its awesome power.  Just eight ounces a day will turn your lower intestine into a well-oiled machine– forget Jiffy Lube!  I’ve shed a few pounds in the past couple weeks and I think most of the credit goes to this miracle juice (how do they get juice out of a dried plum?).  Try it.

In other news, boycott Arizona.  That means no Diamondbacks games, no Arizona Tea, and a big celebration for the Phoenix Coyotes’ game 7 loss to Detroit in the NHL playoffs.  Take that, racial profiling police-state assholes!

Also, I’ve come to realize that I don’t believe anyone is evil, not even Bin Laden or Dick Cheney.  Does that mean I don’t think anyone is actually good, either?  No, because Jonathan Mattox exists.  Oh well.

And thus begins the new Slapdash Period for the Examiner.  Tell your friends!

Parents Want Resegregation– Let’s Give it to ‘Em!

Raleigh, NC– In a major victory for Cary moms and users Gia, LTKilling, and ProjectLily on fuckfrance.com, the Board of Education in Wake County, where I spent every one of my K-12 years, voted 5-4 to scrap the policy that in effect ended segregation of schools in the area.  That’s right, the mommies turned out in record numbers to prove that what’s more important than white kids ever interacting with black kids as equals is the driving distance required to achieve it– never mind that by and large, it’s the black kids who ride from the city center to the suburbs to be with the white kids rather than the other way around.  Finally, the rush to the suburbs to get away from you-know-who is complete!

The perfect compromise!

Proponents of change in this case are in effect resegregationists, and the troubling thing is that they know it.  I think it’s fine to want your kid to be able to walk or bike to school, that makes sense to me.  What doesn’t make sense is that you would be OK with returning to complete resegregation of Wake County (and probably the rest of the state and the rest of the south by proxy) into resource-rich white schools and depressed black schools.  And each mommy pleading for change in Cary knows exactly what will happen, but can sleep at night because she only has to have a tiny little slice of perspective on the situation– she just wants her son to be able to bike to school, is that so racist!?

From the Low-Crime Capital of the South comes the Cary News with this insightful article.  In it, the mayor from Apex (New Cary) says,

We have the best schools in Wake County because we have the best teachers, not because of the policies or diversity goals of social engineers.

Wow, she even said “social”, as in “socialist”, as in Obama and his Chicago Socialist Party criminal underground!  What a woman!  I just wish she had mentioned that Wake County is also one of the richest counties in North Carolina and attracts the best teachers because it has thousands more people moving into it than, say, Bertie County each year, and that the same thing that gives Wake County such great schools by comparison to other counties is the same thing that helps Daniels Middle School against Carnage– resources.  Also, she forgot to mention that Wake County has been such a great place to live, work and go to school even with the dreaded diversity policy for all these years.  Maybe it’s better to go by the way of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools:

At Beverly Woods Elementary, just north of the Quail Hollow Country Club that hosts a namesake PGA Tour event, 79 percent of the students are white. A few miles up the road, at Montclaire Elementary, only 4 percent of the students — just 19 out of 450 — are white. (AP)

Doesn’t that amount to segregated schools all over again?  Even if it’s not all one person’s doing, and even if it is an effect of the sensible desire to have your kid walk to school rather than ride a bus, it isn’t worth it.  Without this policy, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, just like with everything else.  We’ve got country clubs, volunteer organizations, churches, the Y, Masonic temples– plenty of places to hide from each other– can’t we be together as children for 6 hours a day, 180 days per year?  Won’t at least some good come from poor black kids seeing that not all whites are bigots, landlords, klansmen or Junior Leaguers?  Won’t some good come from white kids seeing black kids as worthy classmates, friends and colleagues rather than aspiring gangsters, entertainers, and career service-industry workers?  Can’t the upper and middle classes see that a good education is the best investment your property taxes could ever make?  Can’t the upper and middle classes care about something other than convenience for a change?  And if not, why not?  I have a bad feeling Gia sums it up best for the loudest of the anti-busing crowd:

We don’t have busing here in the east but they should, bus whites back to white schools that are paid for by whites. Taxes from surburbia go to inner cities to support non-tax paying leeches. In lieu of “busing” affordable housing, a/k/a public housing buildings placed by the government, run by the government, paid by….yours truly is plopped smack in the middle of Main Street America, so a nice neighborhood turns into a crime riddled ghetto and property values plummet…but hey, the criminal bums all vote for democrats (lower case “d” because they are worthless pieces of shit) and when the census is counted guess which neighborhoods get all da monies?

Miracle Drug Brings Dying Blog Back to Life

Finding work at the pharmacy in November has been part blessing, part pain-in-the-ass.  The blessing*: I have grown wildly interested in pharmacology (I’m talkin’ flashcards on my own time, son!) and have decided to pursue a career in the field, although retail pharmacy is losing its appeal, fast, which leads to the pain-in-the-ass part (instill 3 suppositories 6 times a day for half a year): my job, which I could have gotten directly after dropping out of high school the day I turned 16 in North Carolina, is unusually stressful.  In the past couple of months, I have experienced indigestion and hives, neither of which I could have described to you before this recent period; my head has felt as though it was filling with blood as it used to when I dangled from monkey bars, you know, back when I was having fun; and I have just generally been worn out and felt like doing not much else, physically or mentally, when I’m off the dreaded clock (which explains the near-death of this cherished online newspaper).

The required shallow-focus, make-you-reflect-on-our-over-medicated-society pic

What makes it so stressful?

First, the general public is an over-medicated monster who lives to be agitated (You’re going to have to call my doctor because I need that filled today because I’m going out of town for three years and my life depends on that medication and I know it’s your fault that I can’t get it.); the huge drugstores are way too hard on their pharmacists and, by extension, their techs (Get that order out in 15 minutes, even if they have thirteen medications and you’ve got two people working and you’ve been 25 minutes behind all day because one old lady took 35 minutes to counsel!); insurance companies live to agitate patients and pharmacists alike (Sorry, we heard that we could technically say that twenty Ambien could last thirty days and still be considered a sufficient quantity, so we won’t cover it or bother to tell the patient that we won’t cover it, and the copay has gone up, too– this will surely enrage her!); and drug companies kick back and watch it unfold, that is, until a generic hits the market (How could a just God let them sell oxycodone next to OxyContin?!  Doesn’t He know that we’ll lose money for our…uhh…the thing…what’s it…RESEARCH?!).  And all of this just happens, day in and day out, without ceasing, sometimes 10 days in a row because I have to work at two locations and be available all the time to make enough hours for myself, and it is exhausting.  The people who should have the power in the situation– the doctors and the pharmacists– are just caught up in the whirlwind of sick enterprise and it all just kind of makes me nauseous.

You may be thinking, Rob, how can see through all those awful tears in your innocent little baby eyes, and I would tell you it’s only because I can see an end to (or at least an easing of) my suffering.  In May when I begin grinding up the hill (that is, taking some prerequisite courses so that I can apply for pharmacy school) toward doing what I really want to do and earning a salary for doing it, I will have already started doing what I want to do– that’s the good kind of grind, the grind that gets you somewhere.  Plus, if I couldn’t whine about it all so half-heartedly on this dumb page, it would only indicate that I was hopeless and stuck in a place that I couldn’t talk about.

Thank you for reading.  This has been most therapeutic.

* I was going to put something like “take once a day as needed for pain” but it made me feel sick.

Finally: an Evangelical who Acts like a Christian

When I first discussed Obama’s inaction on gay rights last week, I had no idea that the House bill (discussed here), which finally protects gay people from hate crimes, was soon to be passed; likewise, when I discussed that House bill, I had no idea that its passage came on the eve of this weekend’s National Equality March, a march to raise awareness of the second-class treatment of homosexual citizens here in the U.S.  Obama spoke to a crowd of about 2,000 on Saturday night, expressing the usual platitudes in better-than-average language, and promised to do something about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”…whenever he gets around to it.

Today, I read something that gave me real hope: the story of an evangelical Christian who used to spew forth all your average “Christian” hate-speech when it came to homosexuality (homosexuals in particular), but who has since seen the error of his ways through a little honest self-reflection and has repented by joining the cause for equal rights for gay Americans so enthusiastically that he’s marching this weekend.  His story gives me hope in Christians, who for the most part take only a name from Christ and reject any of his humble, loving commandments in order that the tenets of faith in America can be based on feel-good, best-selling crap like The Prayer of Jabez (“I can have a McMansion and worry about accumulating wealth because an obscure figure in the Old Testament prayed for God to improve his lot and God did it!”).  Yes, these tenets can magically replace anything humanistic or difficult in the teachings of Christ and make “Christians” feel like the glaring contradictions in their own lives and the life of Jesus are excusable– a true miracle of God!  So it is with great satisfaction that I witness someone stepping out of a meaningless Joel Osteen lifestyle and into something more akin to the compassionate, non-judgmental, ever-understanding, ever-unafraid lifestyle of the guy who showed us all how to live back in the first century.  Read “A Step in Faith”:

Every person coming to Washington—whether they are religious or not—does share one faith, and that is faith in America. We can and must do better. As the progress of history has shown, Americans will prove themselves able to see beyond religion-based bigotry to the promises of equal treatment for all. Those who use religion-based bigotry to persecute and discriminate against LGBT people are on the wrong side of history, just as they were with slavery, interracial marriage, the treatment of women, and so many other issues.

Obama Wins Nobel Peaceful Promises Prize

President Obama awoke this morning to the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize and, just like everybody else, he was surprised and didn’t feel like he deserved to be among the likes of other winners in years past.  He did a good job putting it into perspective, and since rejecting the award was not an option, I think he handled his new blessing/curse very well.  Here’s what he had to say:

This piece from Joe Klein says what I want to say far better than I ever could:

Well, I’m as relieved as anybody that the Bushian gunslingers have been given the gate and, as regular readers know, I’m a big fan of patient, rigorous diplomacy–and there’s a certain lovely irony to any prize that brings the Taliban and the neoconservative Commentary crowd together in high dudgeon–but let’s face it: this prize is premature to the point of ridiculousness. It continues a pattern that holds some peril for Obama: he is celebrated for who he is not, and for who he might potentially be, rather than for what he has actually done. If he doesn’t provide results that justify the award, this Nobel will prove a millstone come election time.

There are two bad things about this: 1) Obama won out over people like Greg Mortenson, who has committed his life to setting up schools for women in places hostile to outsiders, women, and education alike; 2) this admittedly undeserved award will work to delegitimize any praise Obama receives, earned or otherwise, from here on.

Gays Finally Acknowledged as Hated Group

Congress has finally stepped up and done something pro-gay, pro-human, pro-democracy: the House passed a bill making it a federal crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, which is expected to make it through the Senate sometime later, and so the U.S. is finally admitting that people are abused, beaten, and even killed solely for being gay!  This is a baby step toward complete legal equality of gay citizens with their straight counterparts.  What’s not to like about this?  The Republicans, of course, have the answer:

“This is radical social policy that is being put on the defense authorization bill, on the backs of our soldiers, because they probably can’t pass it on its own,” House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said.

Translation:

Woe unto you, White Christian America: you are under attack!  These anti-American, anti-Christian, Communist Democrat perverts are making our blessed, freedom-loving troops (never mind that a lot of troops are gay) carry the disgusting weight of this terrible, horrible, sodomite legislation!  They are busy trying to fight for your freedom, not gay freedom!  Yea verily, this day shall live in infamy!

Rep. John Boehner

Remind me how it’s okay to keep denying equal protection to gay Americans.  Please tell me why being gay is wrong and deserves only intermittent civil liberties, and try not to use any ancient divine command or your own aversion to “kissing another guy (or girl)” as a solid argument.

Obama Weak on Yet Another Issue

With this month’s offering from his “Weak On…” series, President Obama had a hard act to follow: last month’s health care reform episode earned sky-high ratings; everyone was talking “death panels” and “señor citizens”; it featured A-list guest appearances from the likes of Max Baucus and Chuck Schumer; and it even earned him a one-man cheer (actually, jeer) from Congress!

Alas, real health reform and a national conscience that doesn’t resemble a turd flung against a wall will have to wait another few years (and another few thousand preventable deaths) to take shape.  For his next non-act, Obama will (not) tackle gay rights issues– human rights issues– in this country, and will put off acknowledging homosexuals as first-class citizens until at least 2010, when he may finally stand up to the bigoted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that the military employs.  His Department of Justice has already decided that the Defense of Marriage Act that denies same-sex couples some 1100 federal benefits afforded to “traditional” couples is perfectly constitutional.  On overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, Obama’s national security adviser James Jones had this to say:

He has an awful lot on his desk. I know this is an issue that he intends to take on at the appropriate time. And he has already signaled that to the Defense Department. The Defense Department is doing the things it has to do to prepare, but at the right time, I’m sure the president will take it on.

I guess the “appropriate time” is sometime after January 20, 2017, when it will be impossible for Obama to be so distracted by being President that he can’t do anything about the rights of at least 10% of Americans; in the meantime he can take on Aghanistan and the closing of Guatánamo prison camp!  On second thought, look for those issues and more in the coming episodes of  “Weak On…”

Not to Dwell on Roman “the Rapist” Polanski, but…

This piece from HuffPost is part of a series of backlashes against defenders of Roman Polanski, the child rapist.  It is a particularly scathing (appropriate) criticism of Polanski and the people kissing his ass.

Maybe [Polanski’s supporters] believed the child rapist was a worthy cause to rally around. But a child rapist is not a political prisoner. Political prisoners tend to be brave and selfless. A middle-aged man who treats a 13-year-old girl like an inflatable sex doll, and who then flees justice, is a degenerate and a coward.

Where's Jack Ruby when you need him?

I only update about this because the defense of Roman Polanski– the belief that somehow he’s exempt from justice because he’s an artist or had a hard life (who cares?)– is something that feels like a shotgun blast to my brain.  I’m not a bloodthirsty, death-penalty-for-pedophiles kind of guy– the rights of the accused, in particular the presumption of innocence, are what makes democracy work, and I love democracy– but the rights of the convicted do not include a pass to escape to Europe and keep working on movies until you’re an old man, when your arrest will be framed as a “sabotage” or a “political stunt” by the people who worship you.   I don’t know how to argue when the argument itself is so obvious that it should be useless to even talk about it.  Something misfires in my brain when the other side (why is there even another side to this?) has thrown out all the assumptions that I thought humans took for granted.

Evil Atheist Christopher Hitchens Hits Nail on Head

Christopher Hitchens, and a man so atheist that he’s devoted his life to the cause, wrote a short op-ed for Slate today and proved more than anything that the English have a God-given talent for making prose sound like poetry.  Hitchens, who kind of looks like Tim Curry, comments on Roman Polanski’s evasion of the law after committing child-rape, the inexplicable support Polanski is receiving from Hollywood, and some of the other sick doctrines (besides celebrity exceptionalism) that allow sick things to be done to children around the world.

Christopher Hitchens

It is, rather, quite astonishing that Polanski has been able to caper about on the run for so long, thumbing his nose, even collecting damages, flourishing a “Get Out of Jail Free” and a lucrative “Pass Go” card, and constantly reminding the law of its impotence.

For another excellent opinion piece written by someone who has a vague idea of what the rule of law means, read this piece from Salon.com:

Roman Polanski raped a child. Let’s just start right there, because that’s the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in “exile” (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never — poor baby — being able to return to the U.S.).

This Polanski story makes my head hurt.  I cannot understand what is going on in the world when people who I assumed weren’t justice-hating rape apologists are dying for a chance to show support for Polanski because, well… that’s just it—  I don’t know why the hell anyone is complaining that he was arrested!  The best these people can come up with is that he’s a Holocaust survivor; he’s a genius filmmaker; it happened so long ago; the victim doesn’t want to press the issue; they arrested him on the way to a lifetime achievement award; blah blah blah this SUCKS!!!  I can’t believe it but my head actually hurts to think about it.  My head doesn’t hurt like this when I think about the people who buy seasons of crappy sitcoms like “Two and a Half Men” on DVD; or when I hear someone saying that maybe old black people were discriminated against but younger black people don’t really face discrimination; or even when I see that Nickelback went triple-platinum: nothing sucks as much as people making excuses for themselves and their friends based on nothing, especially when the rule of law or common decency is being subverted.