I don't have a title for this

Netflix just added season 2 of "The Killing," so I may be incommunicado for a while.




Meanwhile, speaking of AMC shows. . .

A town in Georgia has decided to become a real-life Woodbury

 

Meet your new Mayor!

 

Late Monday, Nelson, Georgia passed a law called the “Family Protection Ordinance” that requires every adult in the 1,300-person town to own a gun “for purposes of emergency management and general safety of the city.”

 

 

How exactly is arming everyone in town going to contribute to "general safety?"

 

The town’s Police Chief, Heath Mitchell, told the AP that he hopes “having a gun would help residents take their protection into their own hands,” since the town has an understaffed police department and slow response time to 911 calls.

 

What?

The chief of police wants people to take things into their own hands? What kind of a law enforcement official wants citizens to take the law into their own hands?

 

 

 

 



One councilman even used the National Rifle Association’s call for arming all Americans to defend the law, saying “I really felt like this ordinance was a security sign for our city. Basically it was a deterrent ordinance to tell potential criminals they might want to go on down the road a little bit.”

 

 

Also anyone who does not enjoy being shot all the time. They might also want to go down the road a bit.

 

You know, seems like this ordinance might be a bit difficult to enforce.

 

Councilman Duane Cronic, who sponsored the measure, said he knows the ordinance won’t be enforced but he still believes it will make the town safer

 

 

 

It won't be enforced, but somehow this non-enforced law will still. . . what?

 

 

The city council’s agenda says another purpose of the measure is “opposition of any future attempt by the federal government to confiscate personal firearms.”

 

 



 





Ohhhhh, now I get it. It's an imaginary law to protect against an imaginary threat! Now it makes perfect sense!

Now you see why we rarely venture outside the city limits of Atlanta.

 

 

 

They call 285 "the Perimeter." We call it "the Moat."

Jillian Micheals is Coming to the Fabulous Fox Theater

Which seems sort of odd, because , being only vaguely aware of her existence, I wasn't aware of her having any sort of marketable talent other than being remarkably physically fit. And as far as I know, no one is going to pay $40 to watch someone be physically fit.

 

 

Check out these fuckin' abs!

That'll be 40 bucks, please! 

 

For those of you not familiar with the Fox theater, it is this:

 

 

 

 

One of the last of the great old movie palaces of the 1930's.

 

Over the years, the Fox has hosted luminaries from Jack Benny to Liberace, to Tom Waits to Leonard Cohen. Although it is mostly famous for being the theater that most people think hosted the premiere of Gone With The Wind. (It actually debuted at the Lowes Atlanta)

 

 

Holy fuck! Sixteen Bucks?

 

 

So what is Jillian Micheals going to do at the Fox? Does she fancy herself a singer? An actress? A stand-up comic? No. She's doing this:

 

Are You Ready?

Jillian Michaels is hitting the road with her first-ever “MAXIMIZE YOUR LIFE” tour, a unique LIVE experience designed to help you build the life of your dreams.

 

 

 

Which couldn't possibly be a scam! Apparently, she's banking on their being enough gullible boobs in each city who are just that eager to be parted from their money.

 

You’ve watched her on TV and witnessed the powerful life transformations Jillian Michaels has helped so many achieve. Now, it’s your turn! Don't miss this intimate and uniquely personal LIVE experience coming to 34 cities in the United States and Canada this spring. Let Jillian show YOU how to harness your potential, kick-start your goals, and live the exceptional life that you’ve always wanted, but thought wasn’t possible.

 

 

 Hmm, sound like a lot of hype and empty promises to me. Probably no results, either.

 

No hype, no false promises: just results.

 

So how does she accomplish this life transformation process? She doesn't say. I guess you have to pay your 40 bucks to find out, although I'll wager it has something to do with weight loss?

 

 

 

You too can transform yourself from an attractive young woman into someone who could be mistaken for a man!

 

 

Because all I know about her is that she's part of the "Biggest Loser" show, a show in which morbidly obese people are screamed at while performing the kinds of exercise that could give a fit person a heart attack.

 

 

 

 



 Seriously, it's only a matter of time until they kill someone on that show.

 

 

Let's have this guy drag a sled uphill! What could possibly go wrong?

 

Although, I suppose it's to be expected in a society wherein being dead is preferable to being overweight to a lot of folks. I guess what I'm saying is that Jillian Micheals is a perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with our modern culture. A culture obsessed with physical attractiveness. A culture that rewards the famous merely for being famous, not because of any actual accomplishments. And a culture where an alarming number of people will tune in to television shows just to watch someone be mean and rude to someone weaker than they are.

 

 

 

At least Ramsay doesn't scream at little girls.

 

I should probably add for the record that I am probably about 20 lbs overweight and I get winded watching televised sports. But still, Jillian Micheals? At the Fox? Ugh!







A brief hiatus with kittens

We will be offline for a few days while we head West to inspect our operations in the Pacific Northwest. There should be fairly frequent Twitter updates here: https://twitter.com/@akaprofessorcha if you miss the smart-aleckry.

Meanwhile, here are kittens:

A couple minor little disagreements

People have been giving bizarrely-named rodent boy Reince Priebus a certain amount of shit the last few days for referencing his hetero-marriage while half-assedly reaching out to gay voters. But that's not really even the stupidest part of his statement:

 

STEIN: On the issue of inconclusivity. What would you tell an independent minded gay man who believes the right to marry is a civil right? What would you tell him about why he should vote Republican?

 

 

 

 

 

PRIEBUS: I would tell him, look, we might not agree on every single issue but, for the most part, if you look at where we are at in our economy and look at where we are with educational choice and our military positions and positions on a strong defense in our party for the most part, we agree on almost everything and doesn’t make someone a bad Republican. It means we are good Republicans and disagree on one or two things

One or two .things

Come on, gay voter! So we have a couple of minor little disagreements, like, oh I don't know, whether or not you are a human being deserving of the full rights of American citizenship. What's the big deal?




I mean, just because we think you should be second-class citizens is no reason not to vote for us. I mean, it's not like we want to kill you or something!

GOP-linked punk rock ministry says executing gays is ‘moral’

By Andy Birkey
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 6:00 am

 

Yeah, but it's not like this weird punk-rock-Republican group is part of the GOP mainstream or anything, right?

 You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit ministry that brings its hard rock gospel into public schools, has been deepening its long-running ties to the Republican Party of Minnesota. Long a cause célèbre for Rep. Michele Bachmann, who has twice lent her name to the group’s fundraising efforts, You Can Run (YCR) had a booth at the GOP convention in April, and the group’s frontman, Bradlee Dean, reports that gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer recently accepted an invitation to visit with him at Dean’s home.

“Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America,” Dean said on YCR’s May 15 radio show on AM 1280 the Patriot. “This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.”
“If America won’t enforce the laws, God will raise up a foreign enemy to do just that,” Dean continued. “That is what you are seeing in America.”
“The bottom line is this… they [homosexuals] play the victim when they are, in fact, the predator,” Dean said, before going on to make a claim that has no basis in fact: “On average, they molest 117 people before they’re found out. How many kids have been destroyed, how many adults have been destroyed because of crimes against nature?”





Oh my God!
Is there maybe someone else in your party you could recommend to have a more sane, rational discussion about LGBT tolerance?

Priebus cited former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas as an example of someone who could be “a model for a lot of people in our party” in terms of discussing issues like marriage and abortion. “I always tell people: Listen to Governor Mike Huckabee,” he said. “I don’t know anyone that talks about them any better.”





Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee is the model for discussing social issues?

Mike Huckabee, the guy who says shit like this:

Huckabee told the interviewer that not every group’s interests deserve to be accommodated, if their lifestyle is outside of what he called “the ideal.”
“That would be like saying, well there’s there are a lot of people who like to use drugs so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, should we accommodate them?” he said, according to a transcript of the interview.

and this:

“I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle,” he wrote, in response to a question about gays in the military.

You know, that's just one of the little things on which we disagree! We think that you people are aberrant, unnatural, and sinful, you probably think that you have loving relationships just like everyone else. But we can agree on other things!


Great job with the outreach, there Reince!

Next week "Why won't those filthy, thieving Mexicans vote for us?"

Headline of the Day

I saw this headline on Yahoo!

3/21/2013 @ 12:47PM |110,643 views

You Won't Believe The Stupidity Of The Latest Attack On Walmart

So already you can tell this is going to be good, solid objective journalism!

If you thought Mayor Bloomberg’s failed assault on certain large sodas sold in certain kinds of stores was arbitrary and capricious, get ready for a similarly bizarre attempt to punish large retailers.

I thought it was frivolous and whimsical, but do go on, Mr. Roget!

The salvo is called the Large Retailer Accountability Act (LRAA), but just think of it as yet another effort from the DGDP: the Department of Good Deeds Punishment

.

Yes, because if Wal*Mart is known for anything it's for having done so many good deeds. . . wait, Wal*Mart? What good deeds are we talking about?

 

 

Available now at Wal*Mart!

For its sin of providing millions of working class Americans with good service, broad selection and low prices, Walmart might as well have painted a (Target-style) bullseye on itself among progressives.

Good service? Good service? I mean, I'll give you low prices, and I guess I could go along with broad selection since that implies quantity and not quality

 

 

 

But good service? In a Wal*Mart? I'm not complaining, I think for what the Wal*Mart employees are paid, customers are lucky to get any service at all, it's like adding insult to injury to tell someone that have to work for Wal*Mart wages AND be good at their job and have any enthusiasm. I know I don't have any and I get paid a lot more than that. But anyway, I guess my point is Good Service?

 



In order to punish this good deed, though, the rebarbative chairman of the D.C. City Council, Phil Mendelson, has been pushing an extraordinary new law that would apply only to large national retailers, with more than $1 billion in sales, who open D.C. stores of greater than 75,000 square feet.

Ooh, "rebarbative!" You know, nothing screams "I'm afraid that people will figure out that I'm not all that smart" like casually dropping a word like "rebarbative" into a sentence. And before you say anything, yes, I admit that I often go to Thesaurus.com to find a five-dollar word to express my two-bit meaning, but I usually do that to find a funnier-sounding word. I assume most of the readers have already figured out that I'm not the sharpest bulb in the drawer. So what is this horrible rebarbative new law? (see what I did there? Funny word.)

Such firms would be required to pay a “living wage” of at least $11.75 an hour to all employees

. . .  a “living wage” of at least $11.75 an hour to all employees — a 62 percent premium over the federal minimum wage. D.C. already has its own super-minimum wage of $8.25 an hour (set by law at $1 above the federal minimum).

 I like how you put "living wage" in quothes, there, because I don't really think $11.75/hr really is a living wage either. It comes out to about $24,400 per year, gross. You try living on that! I know that's not why you used the quotes, you were trying to imply that $11.75 per hour is an exorbitant amount of pay that would bankrupt poor little Wal*Mart while its employees reclined in the lap of luxury, but we both know that if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be a little over $22/hour. So, $11.75 hardly seems excessive.

So the LRAA is a super-duper minimum wage proposed mainly to punish a single company, which is why wags in the press are calling it the Walmart Living Wage Bill.

First of all, paying your employees a halfway decent wage is hardly being "punished." It's behaving like a decent human being. Secondly, it seems that this law would also apply to Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Costco, etc. although at least two of those companies wouldn't be affected because they already pay their employees halfway decently.


You may well ask why Walmart allowed the matter to get this far: When it comes to breaking into northern urban markets, can’t one of America’s largest and greatest companies steamroll a few local-yokel pols? Can’t it grease the right palms?

Yeah, what the hell is wrong with this city? Won't anyone accept a bribe? It may surprise you to learn that Wal*Mart does not get to decide how far the matter goes. Shockingly, this is still a democracy, and our elected officials make the laws, and they actually aren't supposed to make them to cater to the Walton Family.

And the answer is: Walmart is way ahead of you. In its D.C. push, which has been underway since at least 2002, Walmart has thoughtfully gone around making the kinds of “donations” to politically-connected figures that wedding guests gave the Corleone family.

You do remember that you're trying to make Wal*Mart the Good Guy in this story, right?

It put on its payroll the treasurer and campaign manager of a key city council member, Yvette Alexander. It invited neighborhood activists to a focus group that paid $100 and dinner. It spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on local charities like the Greater Washington Urban League and D.C. Hunger Solutions. It arranged a healthy-foods photo-op with Michelle Obama. And it spent in the “eight-figure range” (in the estimate of one journalist) to sponsor a traveling exhibition on the African-American experience that was led by NPR host Tavis Smiley, who proceeded to praise Walmart at the swanky opening-night party amid many influential black leaders

.

Really, Tavis? Goddammit, must EVERYONE be a disappointment to me?

Michelle Shocked Draws Fire for Anti-Gay Remarks

 

 



You’d think a business that not only plays by the rules (without asking for tax and zoning breaks)

 

What?!?!? Since when?

 a business that not only plays by the rules (without asking for tax and zoning breaks) but is a beloved icon for the working class and goes to considerable lengths to be a good corporate citizen

A good corporate citizen? Even Wal*Mart doesn't pretend to be a good corporate citizen! They don't deny forcing manufacturing jobs to China, they make no bones about the taxpayers having to subsidize their employees' meager wages with food stamps. What the hell is your definition of a good corporate citizen?


Okay, I'm just going to skip ahead to the end. . .
.

And even in statist D.C., there is recognition that an efficient free market, unlike the city’s sclerotic bureaucracies, is a near-miraculous method for lifting people up.

Really.

People are going to be "lifted up" by a company that would rather spend millions greasing influential palms than pay it's workers a lousy $12 bucks an hour? How does that work, exactly?

 

Yeah, that's what I thought.