“Sarah Palin is a great friend to the bowling industry and we’re so proud and honored to welcome her as our keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010,” said Steven Johnson, executive director of the BPAA.

A bowling columnist writes:

Politicians don’t seem to give a hoot about championing the great sport of bowling and that bothers me when politicians who know nothing about bowling are invited to speak at a bowling convention and barely mention the sport. I would venture a guess that a keynote speaker at Bowl Expo earns between $25,000 and $50,000 for maybe 25 minutes of jokes and their beliefs about what is happening in the country…views they probably have expressed numerous times on numerous cable and network TV shows.

And that’s the point.  The convention brings her in for the publicity and she’s there for the payoff and to reread her lines.  

(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend)

Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist.  Really.

Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I’ve never heard of Czar Brezhnev.

…also, there’s no ‘czars’ in the US federal government, except in the pens and imaginations of press writers who deemed some person a ‘czar’, just like there was no ‘Star Wars’ DOD program by that name – headline writers thought that the namess were cool.

I will admit that a ‘abstinence czar’ is indeed a funky title, and I don’t know what the punishments would be for breaking his rules.   (Though the one that Dubya appointed resigned over his hookers…dude, just say no, OK?)

Lesson #3: Inflating the numbers of a rally by a factor of 25-30 (making 50-60 thousand marchers become 2 million) and lying about the source of the information is right up there with declaring to the ladies that your tallywhacker is 53 inches long, and that Obama wants to kill your grandma.  Wait…

Stupid thief of the day: Dayton, Ohio cops catch man outside barbeque joint, reeking of grease while the burglar alarm was going off (yes, I know the newspaper’s writers say wreaking; I can’t help the fall of journalistic standards) – he claimed he was dumpster diving for leftovers, but the cops found that he’d broken in through the roof and chimney to get at the cash register inside.

I am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby with the connivance of Moo-slims, Africans and atheists to bring our nation to socialism, that Hillary murdered Vince Foster, or how the Queen of England is a drug dealer just get me to a point of saying: you guys are passing over the real conspiracies for this crap?

It’s Calvinball, folks, where the rules change with a whim.   If you argue with the flat-earthers, they just call you part of the conspiracy, or deluded fools, or slaves of the Megatron, and screw on their aluminum foil hats all the tighter.  When is someone going to deliver an original Moon rock to my door so that I can verify it with my home chemical test kit?

And it’s usually motivated by ignorance and fear.   People who are afraid of the idea of the moon landing and the notion of space travel as such will hop on the ‘it’s all made up’ bandwagon.  People who can’t openly say that the notion of a African-American president  is alien and horrifying to them will look to Birther stuff because they feel in their guts that he *can’t* be a legitimate President; he’s the wrong color.

Not to mention that Democrats could not have legitimately won any election without trickery and fraud, etc.   Any concept otherwise would have to accept the fact that somone in the GOP messed up bad enough that they lost an election on the basis of policy issues, and that’s not acceptable in the place where the sky is paisley-colored.

Of course, this also feeds things racial and cultural on the Republican side of a similar nature with their own people: Bobby Jindal’s South Asian ethnicity and citizenship and Romney’s Mormon faith seen as cultism.   My own connection to Unity would be seen as some whacko cult, I’m sure, let alone that I’m a race traitor and Mere is a hanjian.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that they should put in an Amendment to the Constitution that says something like: …and naturalized citizens who have been resident in the USA for 30 years can be President or VP. That way, Meredith can be President and you all can face her mighty wrath.  Bwahahaha.

One blog commenter wrote:

These people didn’t need a black president to make them crazy, they were crazy when he got here. They’ve been told for almost thirty years now that God’s plan for America is a permanent Republican majority, for the last fifteen years that Democrats are “congenital liars” dragging the country into the depths of degradation through [Clinton], and for the last seven that we are now locked in a multi-planar existential conflict and our only hope is a strong Godly deciderer who will protect us all from our enemies. The birthers picked up with Obama pretty much where they left off with a Bubba from Arkansas. Remember, Clinton was accused of rape and serial murder because it was politically convenient to accuse him.

Or this one:

I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.

Being that the only two states that I have never been in are Hawaii and Arizona, I can get behind that notion completely. 

• I had to look up the meaning of hoon for this one (wild, stupid and reckless driver in a criminal sense) – 79 year old man doing 160 k in a 100k zone
• Best man claims he was raped by a stripper as part of the show at the bachelor party.

Big jump in the rates of teen cases of STDs and syphilis and teen pregnancies during the Bush administration, according to the CDC.    A different sort of ‘don’t ask, and we won’t tell you’.

I don’t take my Kindle everywhere, but it has gotten a lot of use, especially when i know I’m going to have to sit and wait somewhere.    (Like at the hospital.)    Susan and Meredith have used it a little, as has my niece Kay and my mother-in-law, and it looks like we’re getting another Kindle in the family.

In short, Susan is getting a large chunk of back pay that she got whoopsied out of by the office, enough to pay for a bunch of things-that-would-really-be-good-to-have, and on that list is a *new* Kindle DX for me, and then I hand over the Kindle 1 to the ladies of the house.

Which is fine.  I regularly back up the contents of my Kindle to my PC and then burn a disk for the ultimate backup.    I’m also aware of the Memory Hole incident, where the publishers of Orwell’s books pulled them off the Kindle store, and Amazon went back in and deleted the copies of 1984 and Animal Farm remotely. Doubleplus Ungood.

I’m not sure how I shift the books or subscriptions over to the DX, but I have a little time to figure it out.

ORPHAN: My readers quietly passed along some information on this still-yet-to-open movie that I trashed earlier…and a little more information on a personal note.

Susan talked to Mere, and she got the impression from Meredith that the sheer scariness of the poster got to Mere more than anything else.

Arthur passed along this article from the Daily Beast about one adoptive mother’s upset over the film, and why it’s wildly *wrong* about the adoption experience, et cetera, and perpetuates a lot of damn fool notions about it. it’s worth a read.

Another reader who has been  connected into the film world wrote in and said:

Anyway, I checked my mailbox yesterday, and what did I find? Not just a preview pass, but a postcard exhorting me to “register for free preview screenings of and great prizes from” Orphan. If they’re being that lazy, then we’re talking a dog that’s probably going to bomb on DVD. I thought you’d want to know, because a little schadenfreude goes a long way.

I hope the producers lose their shirts on it.

New blasphemy criminalization law passed by the Irish Parliament. “Under the changes, the maximum fine for blasphemy will be cut from €100,000 to €25,000.” Gee, thanks.

John Ensign has decided that he’s not resigning his seat, he’s running for re-election and he’s expecting the voters to forget it as soon after Britney Spears is killed in a love-suicide pact with Lindsey Lohan and CNN spends a week of coverage on the aftermath as possible.    Well, whatever keeps his dad’s and the RNSC’s pockets empty as they try to defend the seat in the next election is fine with me and another example on shining levels of morality.

The short version seems to be that it’s unlikely without further explosions that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina will be forced to quit his job over the whole affair-affair, but it’s pretty certain that his political future is totally destroyed.   This review from the South Carolina paper The State puts it in a nutshell, without mentioning the reluctance many GOP types felt about elevating the Lietenant Governor to the job.  Allegedy, he’s a not-very-head-screwed-on-tight sort who is ambitious without ability, and has a bunch of his own personal skeletons rattling around.

Then again, I was on the road today, and heard a snatch of a couple of conservative talk dudes rolling on the floor over Senator Ensign having to get his parents to payoff the family of the woman he was having an affair with.   As in they thought it was freaking pathetic – which it was.  No way Ensign comes back from that politically, either.

And then there’s the whole Sarah Palin thing, which is beyond anyone’s understanding.

Locally in Illinois, the next set of statewide races for the Senate seat and Governor’s chair are suddenly defined by all of the people who are stating that they don’t want the jobs.

From a new WaPo article about details on how Governor Sanford elaborately jerry-rigged up an Official Trip To Argentina to see his ’soulmate’ in Buenos Aires, we have a new euphemism to go along with ‘hiking the appalachian trail‘ – to ‘go Dove Hunting‘.

Like nobody had ever heard of Russians using hookers to lure Western diplomats into compromising positions.    Sheesh.

The more I hear about the whole Senator Ensign story, the more I think that sex aside, the man should resign his office because he’s a crook and an idiot.    Getting your bazillionaire parents to pay off your mistress and her family?  Inviting the mistress’s family into your house after their house was ransacked by burglers, and proceeding to ‘comfort’ the wife all over your own house that weekend?  The mind reels with every new item.   Speaking of items, you too can buy your John Ensign for President boxer shorts at this location!

And finally, a high and horny Ohio couple are parked and busy in the front seat, and the cops find them in the act – with her two little kids in the back seat of the car.   Bleah….

Michael Lewis, one of my all-time favorite writers on Wall Street and high-end finance, has a Vanity Fair article on the fall of AIG that I thoroughly recommend.

And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.

Also check out Felix Salmon at Reuters,  Bonddad, Robert Reich, the Epicurean Dealmaker, Barry Ritholtz, Paul Krugman in the NYT op-ed area and his NYT blog for other voices worth listening to on high finance and economics.

Betting ring on an Australian Navy ship alleged where one could win points/money on having sex with female sailors, with bonuses for daring locations and less attainable women (including gay women).

Some people do not learn.   Disgusting.

No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.

I am singularly uninterested in the Jackson story.  I’ve seen enough oddball celebrity circuses, and the really interesting and truly weird stuff will not come out for a while for most people.   I expect more news circuses repeated endlessly on the news, and I will ignore them all.

Finally, someone sems to be doing something about rescuing Antioch College, which the alums will have to tell me if it meets their requirements.   I just love Yellow Springs, and want it to remain whole.

Sanford: there’s just no end to the dumb on this; obviously, the man forgot what the color of the sky was in the rest of our world.  Somewhere in South Carolina, a divorce lawyer is going to be very well off in the near future.

Exit question: Show of hands, ladies. How many of you would be willing to take back a guy who told you, “I’ve met this other woman and she’s totally my soulmate, but I’m going to try real hard to fall back in love with you”?

Chicago: In the past Mayor Daley has always survived his tough spots by letting his critics lose their nerve, get distracted, or simply self-destruct. The difference this time is that there are a whole lot more of them, and each day thousands are reminded of why they’re pissed off when they pull into a public parking space. No doubt.

This weekend, Meredith, her cousin Kay and I got out on a rare outing to a movie, and saw STAR TREK on the big screen; the kids were ‘I-dunno-about-this’ until they got sucked into the story, and they want MORE.    I thought for a re-boot of the original series, it was actually darn decent.

The problem was that Meredith was flipping out over a poster on the wall as we went into the theater at the multiplex; I’d heard of this movie vaguely, from online groups I’m connected with, but I didn’t expect her to spot it and be totally flipped out about it.  (possibly triggering movie poster for Adoptive kids after the cut and some spoilers about the movie ORPHAN.)

(Buy it now here!)

What do you get,
When you open the top,
And look inside,
And smack your lips,
And turn it over,
And spill it out?
What do you get?

Lip-smacking’
Whipcrackin’
Paddywhackin’
Olagazackin’
Infolackin’
Alliganackin’
Crackerjackin’
Cracker Jack!

Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize…
That’s what you get in Cracker Jack!

Rush Limbaugh: Sanford was probably driven in desperation to cheat on his wife and get some small pleasure out of life by Barack Obama’s efforts to destroy America, as in what-the-heck-it’s-all-over-I’m-just-going-to-have-fun.

Full quotes at the link.   At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to use Census information to round people up that it doesn’t like, and cites the Japanese-Americans rounded up during WW2 and taken to internment camps.

So I guess it’s probably really my fault for voting for Obama and plunging us all into a deep, dark gay socialist hell on earth.  Sorry, Governor Sanford, I just had no idea as to what I was doing.    I was only follwing the instructions of Comrade  Jiang Yu Cai as she was directed by the ChiCom Politburo, too, so they’re involved in the heinous plot.