Believe me hon, when guns turn you on this much, someone’s gonna have some fun with you.

Right on cue, Sigmund Spot returns with some spot-on observations. Voof!

Posted: May 25th, 2008 under Local characters, Wingnuttia.
Comments: 2

few nights ago, at the remote fortified family compound known as Tildebunkport….

“In a much less publicized special election yesterday, Kevin Dahle, a school teacher from Northfield, won the legislative seat held by Gov. Pawlenty’s former lawyer, who is now a state judge…”

~~~

“[Mike Brodkorb's] hard work spreading disinfo and knocking doors for the Republican candidate in what should have been the safe-as-houses GOP stronghold of Lonsdale has contributed to Kevin Dahle’s resounding win of state Senate District 25…”

~~~

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“The MNGOP tried to hold down turnout, again, by staging another Holiday election in a red district and it backfired.”

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“Pawlenty did everything possible to rig this one, holding off on calling the election as long as legally possible so it would fall during holiday break for the St. Olaf and Carleton students.”

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“THE FIRST-EVER MINNESOTA DEMOCRATS EXPOSED “MAN NOT IN THE ARENA” AWARD GOES TO…
Drew Emmer of the Wright County Republican. By his own admission, Drew did nothing to help out with the Republican effort in the SD 25 special election but he wasted no time this morning pointing out how everyone else stumbled…”

~~~

“Dahle’s victory has set off a string of recriminations among Republican Party activists, one side accusing the other of not helping enough…”
~~~

ÂÂ

(awesome SD 25 margin of victory graphic by Nick Benson!)

~~~

~

Posted: January 7th, 2008 under Local characters, Michael Brodkorb, Minnesota Democrats Exposed, Minnesota politics, Republicans, Special Election SD25, Tim Pawlenty.
Comments: 2

Tild sez: Damn! 2007 ended and I never did get around to all those witty and incisive posts I meant to put up.

Truth be told, I am a bad blogger. Well, a lackadaisical one at best, which is one of the many reasons why I’m so thankful for Spot, an intelligent and industrious pup whose prolific posts go a long way in the blogosphere towards offsetting the shame of my lazy-ass do-nothingness.

I just can’t let 2007 go without at least once mentioning Spot’s diligence all through the year, repeatedly nipping at the heels of prominent local prig Katherine Kersten. The latest contretemps, a few days before Christmas, was one of the all-time best.

It started out with Katie’s attempt to wittily skewer a newsletter article about office parties during the holidays  written by a couple of U of M staffers.   Oh the archness! The sarcasm!  

(Of course, as Katie well knows when attempting a witty skewer it helps a lot if you don’t provide a link to the original article so that your readers can ascertain for themselves whether your attacks are warranted, or accurate, or even make sense.)

Spot, in turn, wasted no time in illuminating for us all the true silliness of Kerten’s attack.      Good dog!  

I’ve been thinking that Katie was much too modest about her little “seasonal creep” bon mot.  As Spot has so ably pointed out in 2007, creepiness of Kersten’s caliber transcends the limits of a single season.  In actuality,  Katherine Kersten is….                

~

Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under Katherine Kersten, Local characters, Wingnuttia.
Comments: 1

I’m a little late writing about this, but remember: I’m old, and my time needed to recover from a bout of vigorous frivolity keeps getting longer and longer. 

It was a lot of fun hosting the baby shower for Powerliberals Robin and Steve last Thursday night.  The shower was held at the 331 Club in conjunction with the usual Drinking Liberally festivities, and I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it went pretty well, despite– or maybe because of the copious  amounts of Butt Paste amongst the many lovely gifts. 

I had promised a maximum of 3 “Stupid Shower Games” complete with “Wacky Prizes” for the winners, but initially had a difficult time finding prizes with sufficient wackiness.  Then I noticed a particular item on the expectant parents’ list of needed and desired baby supplies :  

Butt Paste!  What is it?  Well, besides being the hip, happening diaper rash ointment/skin protectant du jour,  the name “Butt Paste” itself, especially in combination with an actual physical product with that name,  that is actually for sale and can be purchased practically anywhere,  has a high level of inherent wackiness, therefore making this  wonder item both a shower present AND a wacky prize, doing double duty as it were.   Excuse me, I mean ‘doody’.  In  baby shower discussions the word ‘duty’ must ALWAYS be replaced with the prescribed, hilarious kiddie term ‘doody’.  It’s some kind of law, I think.

The women in attendance had all been to more than enough baby showers to know the routine by heart, but I was a bit surprised at how many of the guys came up to me afterwards to say “Thanks for doing this. You know, I’ve never been to a baby shower before.”

Oh my poor dears, what you’ve missed! 

There are  lots of online resources for planning baby showers, including the most important part of any baby shower:  the games.   After going through pages after pages of game ideas, I ultimately settled on 3 games that were not only stupid, and baby shower classics,  but also hopefully would lend themselves to being played successfully by a (cosmopolitan, argumentative, and somewhere between tipsy and hammered) Drinking Liberally crowd,  in a bar.   The results? =   hi-larious baby shower hijinx!  

If you thought those 3 games were stupid, folks –  trust me, I could have chosen some that are much, MUCH stupider. 

The wacky prizes ended up being three “weekend-getaway” gift packages:

(and many thanks to EB and prize-winner Mrs. EB for posting an illustrative photo)
 
First we had the Dick Cheney Weekender, complete with a Halliburton coffee mug,  assorted fun S&M  accessories- cum- office supplies,  butt paste,  stain removers and bandaids.  

Next was the Bill O’Reilly Weekender, including a high-end super premium loofah,  assorted fun S&M  accessories- cum- office supplies,  butt paste,  stain removers and bandaids.

Finally there was the Katherine Kersten Weekender, with everything you need to have a great weekend the KK way:  a game of Bible Bingo,  assorted fun S&M  accessories- cum- office supplies,  butt paste,  stain removers and bandaids.

Congrats to all of the lucky winners!

Most of all, I add my voice to Robin and Steve’s to say a big Thank You to everyone for bringing your good wishes and good cheer in celebration of the impending Powerliberal parenthood. 

  
And next time I think I might include a hangover remedy along with the other party favors.

 

~

 

Posted: October 16th, 2007 under Gift Ideas, I only drink Liberally, Local characters.
Comments: 1

How MoveOn.org’s General Petraeus/Gonna Betray Us! ad “crossed the line” with the righteously apoplectic Right — a “line” that they themselves feel fully entitled to cross with impunity whenever they feel like it. Glenn Greenwald explains:

For those who think — for some indiscernible reason — that it is important enough to spend the energy developing an opinion on the MoveOn ad, there are, I suppose, reasonable arguments that can be made on both sides as to whether the “betray us” rhyme was rhetorically excessive, counter-productive, etc. But the shrill hand-wringing it has triggered is just bizarre in light of the fact that accusing Americans, including military veterans, of being unpatriotic, anti-American and betraying the country has, for decades, been a mainstream staple of the political rhetoric from our country’s pro-war Right — invoked most aggressively by those, such as Klein, now claiming such profound offense over the MoveOn ad.

Here is Joseph Farah of World Net Daily in an October, 2004 column entitled “Questioning Kerry’s Patriotism”:

Think of what I am saying: A man who came to prominence and notoriety in American life, and who is now on the threshold of winning the White House, was actively aiding and abetting the enemy just 33 years ago. He was a tool. He was an agent. He was working for the other side.That’s why I say it is time to stop playing rhetorical games with respect to Kerry.

There is only one word in the English language that adequately describes what he was in 1971 — and what he remains today for capitalizing on the evil he perpetrated back then. That word is “traitor.”

The right-wing site “American Thinker” — proudly included on Fred Thompson’s short blogroll, among most other places on the Right — published an article in 2005 entitled “Is Jack Murtha a Coward and a Traitor?” (answer: “Any American who recommends retreat is injuring his own country and calling his own patriotism into question”). Here is John Hinderaker of Powerline — Time’s 2004 Blog of the Year — on our country’s 39th President (and, unlike the non-serving Hinderaker, a former Naval officer): “Jimmy Carter isn’t just misguided or ill-informed. He’s on the other side.”When Howard Dean pointed out (presciently) in December of 2005 that the Iraq War cannot be won, Michael Reagan called for Dean to “be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war,” and the next day, on Fox News, alongside an approving Sean Hannity, he said: “I have no problem at all, no problem at all, with what this guy is doing, taking him out and arresting him.” And here is Giuliani campaign advisor Norm Podhoretz on the Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday, as they explained how deeply anti-American “Democrats” are:

HH: Norman Podhoretz, before the last break, we were talking about the intellectual class in America that is so deeply anti-American from the Vietnam years, and how it did not take them long to find in America the cause for 9/11, and to begin what has been a very poisonous attack on America over the last six years. How can they be that successful?NP: Well, what I try to explain in my book is that a lot of these people were working out of the anti-war movement playbook of the Vietnam era. . . .

Well, what I think is that that is correct, and I think that the Democrats are committing political suicide, at least for the 2008 presidential election. I mean, you know, the Democrats suffered from the disability of the McGovern years, when they were rightly considered soft on national defense, not to be trusted to protect us against foreign threats. They worked very heard to overcome that reputation, especially under Clinton. And now what they’ve done is to resurrect it. And they’ve gone even further than they did under McGovern. I mean, embracing defeat, calling for American defeat, rooting for American defeat.

Insinuating that Democrats and/or other opponents of various American wars are “betraying” America — and worse — has been the central argumentative tactic on the Right for decades.

Read it all HERE. (You may have to view a short ad first)

All good points to consider. So, next time you encounter the neighborhood nutjob earnestly informing the public that anti-war protesters “hate America”, remember that altho he’d like you to believe that he came up with this brilliant rhetoric all by himself, the poor dumb pants-wetting schmuck is just regurgitating the same toxic bile that the Right has been spewing for decades.

09/15/2007: Swiftee lectures us about America-hatin’.

Wow — how’s that again, Swiftee? If anyone dares to question the administration’s Iraq policy that means that they hate America? And did you come up with that all by yourself, hon? Aww, for cute!

Posted: September 16th, 2007 under Iraq, Local characters, MoveOn.org, Republicans, War on Terra, Wingnut Mythology.
Comments: 2

(With apologies to Fred Pohl)

Echidne found a nifty thingy that counts the number of  pages on a blog that contain the word “he”  and the number of pages that contain the word “she” and then compares the two to arrive at a degree of “gender bias”.  

His Wegeness took note and proceeded to measure some local and national blogs by this yardstick, with mildly interesting results.  Case in point: 

Note the exquisite symmetry:   71% - 29%, 29% - 71%. 
In other late-breaking developments:  I say “po-TAT-o”, Mitch says “po-TAHT-o”.
But could we expect any less of the king of all feminists?

I wouldn’t call myself Mitch’s “accuser”, tho.  I mean, really — I never even looked at the guy’s blog until a couple days ago,  much less knew what a titan of feminism he is. Yes, incredible as it sounds, I managed to spend nearly 55 years living my life in total ignorance of the existence of Mitch Berg.  How thoughtless of me.  How selfish.  O the shameful wantonness of living a non-Mitch Berg-centric life.  Eheu!   

Anyway, I’ll bet it’d take some time to wade through the dense morass of his gimlet-eyed erudition* to find something decipherable enough to  “accuse” him of ,  if I were inclined to do that kind of thing, which I am not.  I’ll leave that to those lucky enough to be better acquainted with his legend than I.  
   
Meanwhile, if you mere mortals want to check your own blog’s gender bias, you can do that here.

 

* Ooh, check out this smackdown!  

“No, it was detailed explication of the philosophical underpinnings of feminism.”  

Now, that’s some studly wordslinging. Have a lot of success with that line, do ya, Mitch?

 

 

  
 

Posted: May 3rd, 2007 under Feminism, General, Local characters.
Comments: 2

And here we all thought Mitch was just being a pontificating putz as usual when he said:

“I am the most feminist person I know.”

O us of little faith… Check out the awesome truthiness of his claim, as also proven by this totally unretouched photo taken by BFF Camille Paglia.

Mitch, we hardly knew ye. (And I, for one, am quite happy to keep it that way.)

Oh, and don’t worry about all the girl germs you picked up from those other great feminists in the photo. All they can do is make you a better man, hon.

Posted: May 2nd, 2007 under Feminism, General, Local characters.
Comments: 3

Over the years people have often told me I’m funny. Yeah, well, I guess I have been able to crack funny occasionally, but at this juncture in the space-time continuum there is only one thing about me and funniness that I’m absolutely sure of : I am not funny now. Either I was in the past and I’ve lost it, or I never really was and just got lucky a couple times. ‘Ts okay; I’m not traumatised or anything. It just is what it is: I am not funny.

Thank goodness there are people who do NOT have that problem. For example, there’s the brilliant and very very very funny Jeff Fecke, proprietor of the Blog of the Moderate Left.

Jeff has been faithfully chronicling the adventures of the Superteam as they fight to achieve their objectives, those being: 1)to appear to be witty (no, not be witty, what are you, nuts?); and 2) to say ‘POOP’ a lot.
Yes, well, I for one always think of poop when I think of the Superteam, so: number #2 = Mission Accomplished, Superteam!

Let’s see what they’re up to now!:

Now that’s funny.

~~~

Posted: March 4th, 2007 under General, Local characters, Republicans, Wingnuttia.
Comments: none