Category Archives: William Bennett

The Pencil Today:

HotAirLogoFinal Monday

THE QUOTE

“People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.” — Temple Grandin

Grandin

FIRE WITH FIRE

From Rich Abdill in Wonkette:

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Sure, and Apache helicopters don’t kill people but we cannot have those either.”

He also points out the fallacy of the argument that good people with guns can defend themselves against crazies with guns:

“It sounds like a great argument, until you realize that the good people with guns are awful at defending society from bad people with guns. Mother Jones put together a big, terrible list of all the mass-murders of the last 30 years, and not a single one ends with, ‘And then a person with a concealed weapon killed the shooter before the shooter could inflict anymore damage.’ None. Zero.”

Concealed Weapon

I Got Somethin’ For Ya Right Here, Psycho!

Charlie Pierce in Esquire magazine’s politics blog quotes a Tweet from X-tian loon, the Rev. Bryan Fischer: “Shooters attack an elementary school in CT — another ‘gun-free zone.’ Makes children sitting ducks.”

Pierce answers in the only possible rational way: “Go fuck yourself, pal. Sometimes I dearly wish I believed more strongly in a hell.”

Fischer

Rev. Bryan Fischer, Security & Education Expert

Naturally, the babbling idiot of the US Congress, Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), has plenty to say. He referred to the Sandy Hook principal on — what else? — Fox News Sunday: “I wish to god she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.”

To borrow a quote from a very articulate man, Go fuck yourself, pal.

A-a-a-nd, former Reagan Secretary of Education, GHW Bush Drug Czar, self-appointed plaster saint, and degenerate gambler Bill Bennett wants an armed person patrolling the halls of every school.

Bennett

Bennett: “Do You Have Any Idea How Good I Am?”

Cool idea, huh? So, next time a psycho barges into a school, he pops the armed guy and then goes ahead and wipes out a few dozen kids and teachers.

You know what to do with yourself, Bill.

I’m gonna stop now. I’m getting depressed.

GOD THE EDUCATOR

Oh, by the way, the god who’s so enraged because we don’t allow public school kids to sing hosannas to him in the classroom that he sent an armed psychotic in to wipe a few dozen of them out? He’s hot for another reason these days, again having to do with public schools.

NPR reports that some Texas kid and her old man are suing a local San Antonio school district for forcing her to wear a radio frequency ID badge. See, these badges help school administrators keep track of students to make sure they’re not wandering off campus to do what teenagers like to do other than study mitosis.

The kid, who’s 15, told her daddy-0 that she was going to refuse to wear the ID tag when it was given her at the start of the school year because the Bible has something to say about it. “Daddy, I’m not going to do this,” she said. “Dad, That’s exactly what it talks about about in the Book of Revelation that you were teaching us about taking the mark of the beast. This is the exact same thing.”

Mark of the Beast

Not Only In Our Schools

The mark of the beast, in case you didn’t know (and I wish I didn’t), is mentioned in Revelation 13:15-18. It has to do with some evil being who comes down and pretends to be the Christ but is really the Anti-Christ and will somehow mark all people for some fercockter reason and then all hell will break loose. Or something. Look, I tried to figure it all out but it’s in the Bible, see, and if you want to get your head screwed completely around, try reading half a page of that thing.

Anyway, loads of folks believe in this stuff and are constantly on the lookout for the beast-mark. And this Texas kid, apparently, has put her finger on it and now she and daddy-o are making a federal case about it.

The local San Antonio school district told her she has to wear the ID badge and she responded by saying Whoa, Nilly, you’re violating my freedom of religion.

Now the whole affair is being played out this morning before the Federal district court in S.A.

Funny thing is, the school district has told the kid she can wear a badge without the radio frequency chip in it but she told them where they could stick that idea. She says she’ll only wear her old school ID from last year, which the Bible apparently approves of, although I was unable to find a reference therein for it.

The kicker is the kid and her old man are members of John Hagee‘s Cornerstone Church, headquartered in San Ant.

Hagee

Hagee

Hagee, you may recall, got presidential candidate John McCain in hot water back in 2008, after JM accepted the preacher’s endorsement. Hagee, it was learned, had written that the Catholic church is “a godless theology of hate”  and a “great whore.” He’d also stated that the goal of Islam was to “kill Christians and Jews.” He has stated that it was the Jews who were responsible for the Holocaust — and believe me, his “reasoning” behind this makes the Bible read like a kindergarten primer. He has stated that Hitler himself was an apostate Jew and that the Jews run the Federal Reserve System.

A-a-and the good Rev. Hagee is four-square in favor of a US preemptive strike on Iran using nuclear weapons. A real sweetheart, no?

Nuclear Explosion

Now Who’s The Boss, Iran?

All that said, Hagee calls himself a “Christian Zionist” and works tirelessly with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to support radical pro-Israel legislation.

Weird, huh?

You wanna know how weird? Pick up Matt Taibbi’s book, “The Great Derangement.” He goes undercover in Hagee’s church to find out who peoples his flock. Trust me, you’ll be torn between laughing out loud and wanting to slash your wrists.

In any case, this fellow, god, seems fixated on the goings on in our schools. Funny, no? You’d think he’d fix it so students would learn more and teachers wouldn’t burn out so quickly and legislators wouldn’t be so eager to cut education funding. Seems as though god’s priorities in education are about as screwed up as ours.

SCHOOL DAYS

The Pencil Today:

THE VELVET REVOLUTIONARY

“Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” — Vaclav Havel. The leader of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution died yesterday in his home at the age of 75.

WHITE OWLS IN SOUTH CENTRAL INDIANA

My old blogging partner, Benny Jay of The Third City website he and I founded, recently wrote about his wife seeing a white owl as she walked along Chicago’s lakefront. The gist of the post was that Benny couldn’t care less about the rare bird; he was busy reading about the Bulls as his bride gushed.

The soulless brute.

I saw a white owl at the lakefront on my birthday back in 1980. The bird was standing on one of those big four-spout concrete water fountains the Park District used to have everywhere. My girlfriend at the time and I saw the owl, stopped suddenly, and gaped. The bird then noticed us and took it on the lam. Swear to god, his (her?) wingspan had to be a three or four feet.

I’ve never forgotten that moment. And I’ve never seen another white owl.

Now, I may get another chance.

The Herald Times reports that Snowy Owls seem to be migrating as far south as these precincts this winter. The last such “irruption” (unusual migrating pattern) occurred fifteen years ago.

I’m grabbing my binoculars and bird book just as soon as I finish with this post.

NOW THAT’S DISGUSTING

I try to let very little disgust me.

I can think of only a few examples of things that have actually made me want to retch. I saw the body of a wayward juice loan collector who had his head blown clean off by shotgun blasts on North Nora Avenue back in 1975. I saw Divine eat dogshit in “Pink Flamingos.” And once at the Subway on North Walnut Street, I was forced to listen to Ke$ha’s collaboration with Li’l Wayne, Wiz Khalifa et al entitled “Sleazy Remix 2.0” while trying to eat my Veggie Delight sandwich.

Divine: Screenshot From Pink Flamingos

I remember that incident well. It took three Subway employees to pry out of my hand the pistol that I had pointed at my temple.

Anyway, while reading Michael K‘s indispensable celebrity gossip site, dlisted, yesterday, I nearly horked. (H/T to memoirist Mary Karr for the word.)

Michael K linked to a pep rally at Rosemount High School in Minnesota where — gack! — jocks and jockettes were blindfolded and then forced to make out with their parents!

Force yourself to look at the vid. Check out the mom who starts rolling around on the gym floor with — I remind you once again — her son. And watch another mom move — gluck! — her son’s hand onto her ass.

Sometimes I think I really don’t like kids. But then I realize it’s very often parents who turn my stomach.

And, by the way, should I by some weird chance learn that any of these parents vote Republican because this holy land is not living up to its “Christian ideals” I will personally drive up to Minnesota and kick them in their genitals.

WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

A spamily- and brattle-free zone.

John Spencer Bergman of Chicago was one of my earliest roommates, back in  the days when I had the maturity of an 11-month old. He taught himself how to play bass guitar and turned out to be a pretty good one, providing the rhythmic foundation for the late ’70s cute-boy band Clox. He used to work at a little corner grocery on Clybourn Avenue that sold pig’s ear sandwiches. No lie — the place actually had a big sign out front advertising them. Poor earless pigs.

Anyway, John takes on god’s personal emissary on Earth, the NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, who is beloved by, among others, the degenerate gambler Bill Bennett.