An Unmistakable Statement
Think what you will about Barack Obama’s presidency. You’re entirely welcome to piss and moan that he’s a failed president, that his policies are leading us toward socialism, and/or that we’ll be paying through the nose for his programs for generations to come. Wags, “journalists,” and even entire “news” organizations have grown up shrieking such things. That’s okay; this is Murrica and we have the right to say what in the hell ever we want, so long as we don’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. We can even lie from sunrise through sunset, so long as we don’t fudge our résumés or cheat on our taxes.
So the Right can keep on peddling its slop. But those who didn’t show up at Selma Alabama, yesterday for the 50th anniversary remembrance of Bloody Sunday, are being more honest with that one single act than with all the facts, figures, interpretations, and innuendos they’ve mouthed and keyboard-spewed for the so-far six-plus years of the Obama reign.
Obama Embraces John Lewis At The Edmund Pettus Bridge
[Saul Loeb photo/Getty Images]
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They’re saying:
- Civil rights don’t matter;
- Black human beings don’t matter;
- Voting doesn’t matter;
- The rule of law doesn’t matter.
They’re saying a lot for being so uncharacteristically silent.
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Kyle Watch
Is Kyle Schwarber single? Does he go out with anybody?
Aw, what am I saying? He’s not my type.
The burly and supremely talented former Indiana University catcher came to the plate Thursday in sunny Arizona. It was his first at bat as a professional baseball player in Spring Training. He promptly hit a grand slam home run. On top of that, it was his birthday. The kid is only 22.
Sigh.
Schwarber
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If he keeps this remarkable hitting up — he’s been tearing up the minor leagues since he was drafted out of IU by the Chicago Cubs last June — he’ll be smashing baseballs onto Waveland Avenue outside Wrigley Field by the end of the 2016 season.
Maybe he is my type after all.
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Rules & Regs
Now, this may be a silly thing to make an issue of but, well, I gotta. I was in the restroom at my local Subway yesterday afternoon. After I finished my primary business therein, I stood at the sink and washed my hands. And there, right next to the sink was the sign, “Wash Your Hands.”
I doubt if there’s a restaurant or other food service establishment in this holy land that doesn’t have that sign or a similar one in its rest rooms, most of them reading, in fine print, something on the order of By order of your local health dept.
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I’m willing to bet a bushel-full of cash that all those health depts. also mandate that the sign must be within a certain few inches of the sink. Which is the worst place for it to be.
If you’re standing at the sink, you’re washing your hands, right?
The sign should be right above the urinal. Or next to the flush lever in the stall. That’s when whatever king or queen of slobs who needs to be prodded into washing their mitts should be, y’know, prodded.
There. I feel better now.
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Political Science
I’ll sigh again here in today’s post, but for a different reason.
A story in this AM’s Herald Times (paywall) tells us that there’ll be a Bigfoot investigation campout at Monroe-Morgan State Forest the first weekend in May. Yep, a gang of people who fancy themselves scientific researchers will be on the lookout for the famous wraith that has purportedly appeared, fleetingly, before the eyes of yahoos all around the backwaters of this holy land for decades.
Apparently, credulous souls have glimpsed the reputed giant in the woods just north of this thriving, throbbing megalopolis. And despite the fact that Bloomington is home to rational thinkers, reputable scientists, and dogged investigative types, only a select few have gazed upon the decidedly non-glabrous, towering, hermetic figure. A guy named LeRoy Nail of Martinsville, the leader of the local chapter of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, says his group has investigated three confirmed sasquatch sightings in Morgan County. The national BFRO lists 76 sightings of the beast in Indiana over the years.
Sigh. Again.
Bigfoot Footprint In Morgan County
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To think there are scads of us who passionately believe that if only we can calmly and patiently lay out well-reasoned arguments, all the people of this great nation will happily accept certain scientific truths. Such a liberal way of thinking.
Which, itself, is highly un-scientific. Researchers have shown, time and again, that well-reasoned arguments — far from being convincing or persuasive — actually steel the resolve of non-believers.
For instance, I know a guy who believes the following:
- Communist infiltrators have run vast swaths of the United States government since at least the end of World War II
- Bobby Kennedy smothered Marilyn Monroe to death with a pillow because she’d heard JFK blab some state secrets while in flagrante delicto with her
- The JFK assassination was a Mafia hit
- A spaceship from another planet crashed into the Earth and the bodies of its occupants were operated on in a secret facility in Nevada
- The moon landings were hoaxes
- Homosexuals are engaged in a systematic plot to take over the public school teaching profession
- Hillary Clinton ordered the murder of Vince Foster
- The US government employs high-altitude airplanes to spray mind-control drugs over heavily populated areas
“Chemtrails”
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- Barack Obama was trained from childhood to be a Muslim plant whose job was to take over America and destroy it
This fellow is otherwise a respectable, seemingly reasonable chap. He runs his own successful business. You wouldn’t consider him a wild-eyed lunatic at first glance.
Yet he firmly rejects any suggestion that global warming or climate change threatens us.
And, yes, he believes there are sasquatches or Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) running around all corners of this globe. “There’s all kinds of scientific evidence for it,” he says.
He is impossible to talk to.
To liberals, he’s simply misguided, in need only of enlightenment. To the Right, he’s the key to the White House in 2016.
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My Pal Foot Foot
A “classic” by The Shaggs, who inexplicably were resurrected from a well-deserved obscurity back in the 1990s by musicians and critics who should have known better.
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