Funniest Thing I've Heard All Year

My daughter started up a softball team to compete in OSU intramurals this year. Yesterday was her first game and I was talking to her a couple hours before the game. And here's what she said .....


"You know, Dad, I haven't competed athletically in quite awhile. I'm really pretty nervous if I've still got it .... I mean, I'm not 17 anymore."


I laughed all day long over that one.

We Told You So

there's a great scene in We Were Soldiers Once - there is a consciencious objector/photographer tagging along with American GI's in the first big battle of Vietnam. The American forces are heavily outnumbered and in serious serious danger of being overrun. The hard grizzled sargeant throws a rifle to the photographer, pulls his .45 auto and says "Son, there are no consciencious objectors today." The photographer's eyes get wide as he realizes that his conjectured moral haughtiness isn't going to exclude him from being part and parcel of the slaughter of GI's and he turns and starts shooting at the VC.
When I see that scene, I always get a slight vicious chuckle from watching the dreamy attitude of the adolescent give way to a recognition of cold hard reality.

And so did I get the same vicious chuckle when I read about Chris Matthews - he of the infamous "I'm getting a leg tingle from listening to Obama speak" - becoming pissed and angry at Obama and the Dem team ... I'll admit I'm not too big to say to him "We told you so, you idiot" ...


Meltdown on MSNBC: The Leg Tingle Is Gone?

I can hardly believe what I'm watching on MSNBC right now. Chris Matthews is almost critical ­ no, not even almost, he's flat-out critical of President Obama on the economic front. He mentions an earlier conversation with CNBC's manic stock analyst Jim Cramer and a University of Maryland professor (Peter Morici?) knocking Obama for several economic decisions ­ that the stimulus bill needed more real infrastructure and less pork, that the housing bill isn't inspiring confidence and doesn't look like it will work, and that no one has faith in Tim Geithner's solution for the banks.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek says Obama has been "grim and a little distant at the same time . . . Tim Geithner hasn't inspired any confidence anywhere, as far as I can tell."

Matthews: "He seems like Barney Fife to me."

Eugene Robinson: "I actually referred to him as Doogie Howser, Treasury Secretary, and I think it's a little unfair." Much laughter ensues.

More Fineman: "Despite his high approval rating and obvious intellect and goodwill, he hasn't quite yet seemed to convey the sense that he knows the way forward and that he can get us there . . . I thought the first fifteen minutes of this show were devastating. Not that Jim Cramer is the only person they have to convince, but they have to convince people that they know what they're doing, that they're not just feeling their way forward." Robinson points out that they are feeling their way forward.

Matthews: "I thought 8,000 was the floor, and it looks like 6,000 is the floor. People are angry, I'm getting angry."

Fauxbama the Narcissist

I had read this analysis of Obama last Fall. I totally agree with it. With his faux Martin Luther King accent (I'm going to call him Fauxbama), his thousand yard stare over the right shoulder of the camera, his 'ball-less' actions to vote "present" (or the White House equivalent), his screaming about impending doom if we don't pass this bill right this minute!!!!! (no matter that no one's actually read it, or that most of the borrowed money won't be spent till 2010), and then he waits 4 days to sign it so that his 'team' can get an event planned in Denver (where he signs the bill by himself - no Democratic legislators around, no signing in the White House or the Rose Garden ... just him (Me! Me! Me!)), he's like the little Caesar that slipped the knife in Russell Crowe's kidney in Gladiator during what was supposed to be a 'friendship' embrace, and slowly bled Crowe out. So too is this Emperor with no clothes or clues going to do the same thing to this fabulous country. The legacy of our Founding Fathers - our inheritance! - teeters on the brink.

More from Peggy

"...Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded of what’s important, and the greatest of these will be our faith, it’s what is going to hold us together as a country. "

Peggy, you're wrong - what you cite is what held us together during the past crises. But it's a different country, and the party in power - by and large - is populated by people who have no faith in God. Indeed, many of them deny the very existence of God. And so their 'faith' is misplaced into government institutions - and those ain't gonna save us, sister. As your former boss, Ronald Reagan, famously said, "Government can't solve the problem ... government is the problem."

Baseball, Steroids, and - once again- Union Idiocy

1) the extremely powerful major league players' union - by refusing to acknowledge or announce results or allow punishments for steroid use - prevented the steroid 'phase' from being nipped in the bud. As is always the case with union mentality, they can never 'see' beyond the tips of their outstretched and grasping greedy finger tips.

2) These baseball player pricks (Bonds, A-Rod, McGuire, Sosa, Giambi, Clements, et. al.) have made a major, long-lasting stain on baseball for a generation of players and fans. No way - imo - can they be considered or mentioned in any discussion of baseball greats, career achievements, season achievements, etc. Their numbers are dead to me, and to any real historical fan of baseball. They have severed the continuous 140 year thread between us and the fans of the 1800's who watched and cheered the same game that we have watched and cheered in much of our lifetime.
The practical downside is that even if it can be guaranteed that the players just starting out won't use steroids (or its ilk), it'll be a dozen years before some of these guys have the time to put together a career of excellence to deserve mentioning in the same sentences with Mays and Clemente and Ryan and Maddux and Mantle and Ruth and Gehrig and Carew and Henderson. In the meantime, all of these steroid guys - who were supposedly showing us a reflection of the greatness of the players we never got to see - have instead distracted us while a dozen years was stolen from our collective baseball historical community.

3) I'd even go so far as to say there's a metaphor here between baseball (current cheaters and pretenders and not-in-it-for-the-noble-reasons, versus the old school players of baseball's golden era - the 30's, 40's, 50's, and even 60's) and modern America versus old school America and the greatest generation.

Gass, you can send that first 'union' paragraph to your advertising buddy and tell him to stick it in his union-loving underwear

Note to Peggy - If It Walks Like a Duck...

Peggy Noonan writes in her latest column, in part, "...That’s how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis. Our hopeful, compelling new president shouldn’t have gone with this bill. He made
news this week by going to the House to meet with Republicans. He could have made history by listening to them."

She acts like she's a little mystified by Obama's failure to 'to the prudent thing', his 'missed opportunity to be reasoned and equitable'.

Two things:
1) the "Democratic establishment in the House looks like people who are using a crisis" because THEY ARE BY NATURE THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO USE A CRISIS. It's not a 'fluke' that they're acting this way!
2) When is even a single instance in Obama's past behaviour where he acted or conceded anything that wasn't way over on his side of the playing field? Reminder: HE WAS THE MOST LIBERAL SENATOR IN THE U.S. SENATE FOR TWO YEARS ... what?, was that a fluke, too? Wake up and smell the coffee, we're watching the ultimate 'Amateur Hour Reality Show' - starring Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.

Peggy, don't you get it? No matter how much you want it to not be so - if it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, and when it opens its big flat-billed mouth it sounds like a duck, well Honey, you better believe it IS a duck.