I don’t know if he touched kids the way the prosecution alleged, but I’m pretty sure he’s been 9 different kinds of nuts for at least the past 10-years. Nobody ever wants to see kids lose their parents, but part of me thinks Jackson’s passing might be the single greatest assurance of anything resembling a normal life for his children. Anyone else remember how he used to dress them? The baby-dangling incident? I’m not saying he was a bad father, how would I know? I just think parents’ ways tend to rub off on their kids, and his “ways” looked like they pretty much guaranteed an abnormal life for his kids.

Without seeming too callous, I think these two twits best sum up my feeling on M.J.’s death:

From Michael Ian Black: Upset about Michael Jackson. The 13 yr. old in me still loved him. The 37 yr. old me wanted to see him complete his transformation.

From Rob Corddry: I wish it had been Michael Jackson that broke the story of TMZ dying. I can almost hear the high-fives.

Finally, I saw a little bit of CNN before going to bed last night. Right as the van with Jackson’s body was backing up to the helicopter. While I didn’t want to see whether they actually showed the “money shot” of Jackson’s body being moved from the van to the chopper, I was told later they had. Apparently that was “BREAKING NEWS”. You people should be ashamed of yourselves. But then again, why am I surprised? The major media outlets (there are few NEWS outlets remaining) would have a camera over the slab for the autopsy if they were allowed.

Call it cynicism, sexism, racism, ism, ism, ism… All I’m saying is there might not be enough people to affect an election outcome, but I certainly think there are enough to make a dent. Add to that people for whom voting is some knee-jerk reaction rather than a conscious decision: “Vote for the (older/wealthier) White Guy”, “Vote for the (Democrat/Republican)” I know there are people like this out there. Hell, I know people like this! Why then does it always get to me when I see stuff like this?

One thing I’ve noticed about McCain’s public speaking is that he always seems so calm. Not real calmness; when he’s debating someone he disagrees with it’s like every sentence is preceded by an imperceptible deep breath. I get the feeling there’s anger under there, intense anger. I don’t know if it’s the look on his face, tone of his voice or what. It’s something in his overall demeanor that makes me think he would just assume throw something large and heavy and massive-head-wound-inducing, but instead he swallows it and talks in much the same voice teacher or parent might use with a mid-tantrum child who won’t listen to anything rather than throwing something large and heavy and massive-head-wound-, long-prison-sentence- as well as cocktail-party-punchline-inducing. As I found on Wonkette today, I may not be alone:

• McCain “often insults people and flies off the handle,” the New York Times reported.
• The Arizona Republic was writing about his “volcanic temper” the last time he ran for president, in 1896 1999.
• His former colleague in the Senate, Republican Bob Smith, says McCain is a nutter: “I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues … He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We’ve all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I’ve never seen anyone act like that.”
• Former Congressman John LeBoutillier, another Republican, says this: “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”
• Basically everyone on Capitol Hill has been the victim of McCain’s sociopathic tirades, and many have the apology letters from McCain to prove it.
• “Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the Senate, where McCain has few friends or supporters. In fact, when McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, only four Republican senators endorsed him,” writes the conservative website NewsMax.
• When two Arizona medical doctors met with McCain to discuss a local endangered squirrel, “He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room …. He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us.”
• Says another GOP colleague in the Senate, “I Didn’t Want This Guy Anywhere Near A Trigger.”
• A furious McCain regularly throws F-bombs at his colleagues for no apparent reason.
• In 1995, at the Capitol, McCain had a “scuffle” with 92-year-old Republican Senator Strom Thurmond. That’s right, McCain tried to beat up the one person who was even older than McCain himself.
• “It was election night 1986, and John McCain had just been elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time. Even so, he was not in a good mood. McCain was yelling at the top of his lungs and poking the chest of a young Republican volunteer who had set up a lectern that was too tall for the 5-foot-9 politician to be seen to advantage, according to a witness to the outburst.”
• “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Republican Senator Thad Cochran said about McCain. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

Or, is that the difference between an “escort” and a “hooker”?

Anyway, like I said that’s mildly amusing in it’s own right. It gets better: it was originally reported that he was arrested in Big Beaver, MI. Yeah, yeah, beaver jokes. Funny, but still mildly funny. Then it was revealed that Big Beaver is a road, not a town. No real addition to the humor quotient there…

… Except for this:

This was sent by the person who noted the city/road mistake. Stuff like this just can’t be made up, right? No way this is Photoshoppery, right?

From Wonkette: Nation of Cheapskates

Two days ago, DT sent Engadget Mobile a cease & desist letter regarding the use of magenta in the logo for their sister site, Engadget Mobile. Yesterday Engadget’s editor, Ryan Block, announced a tweaked Engadget Mobile logo and a sort of magenta-wash campaign to protest this obvious abuse of copyright law (it’s obvious when you read the link at the beginning of this paragraph – lays out why this isn’t copyright infringement).

I understand that companies are required to protect their trademarks, copyrights, patents & trade secrets – if they didn’t, such protections would carry no weight. From a legal standpoint, (And obviously my many years in the legal profession, right? Right?) I see where they’re coming from. From a realistic perspective, maybe claiming to own magenta was kind of dumb in the first place. Perhaps if DT invented a color, but magenta is a pretty widely used color. It’s a base color for the CMYK color model (Hello? M == Magenta). While I am a T-Mobile subscriber, I’m not a big fan of magenta on its own, but Ryan’s actually taken to time to comment on this site before. Being the comment-/attention-whore that I am, I feel kind of obligated to give his cause some love. Plus, I agree with him.* So, grab your Che t-shirt & beret, link to the image above, spread the word, fight the power, down w/ the man and all that – you know the rhetoric!

* Block has said many times that this is not an April Fool’s joke. If it is color me, and most of the ‘tubes, gotten. Well played, sir(s).

Just make sure that when you get that check, you spend it immediately so the housing market, and overall economy will do a 180 and everything will be all better again right before W leaves office so we can all remember him as the guy who turned around the economy and saved us from the terrorists.

Remember, spend money for freedom. When you save money, the terrorists win.

Dick.

Awhile back I posted somewhere (can’t find it) that , in the aftermath of 9/11, folks tied to the Pentagon attack must have felt like the forgotten step-children of the whole 9/11 whirlwind. Everything dealt with the World Trade Center. Sure more people died when the towers fell, but are we so callous a society that body count dictates whether we memorialize something? Or is it just based on the shear sensationalism of the event. I mean, that plane only took out one section of the Pentagon. The destruction and carnage in DC was nothing compared to the absolute horror of downtown Manhattan.

I’m really not trying to be mean. I just despise this kind of blind nationalism. Not only is it embarrassing to me as an American, but this kind of thing can be dangerous. Here is a state encouraging its inhabitants to celebrate war! Not only that, but celebrate one of the most divisive and controversial wars since Vietnam. Bad Idea™.

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Tags: oklahoma, licenseplate, vanity, war, terrorism, 911