Shine + meth = this

Back when I was a little bitty boy down on the bayou, my daddy gave me some advice I've always tried to live by, lo, these many years.

"Son," he says to me -- that's what he always called me, "Son" -- "now don't you go mixin' no corn liquor with no crystal meth." And I remember asking "How come, Daddy?" You know how 4-year-olds are . . . a bottomless font of questions.

Right then, though, Daddy backhanded me right across the chops.

"Because mixin' corn liquor and crystal meth is bad sh*t, that's why!" 

Message received. 

A lot of folks in Kentucky never got that message, I'm sad to have to tell you. I mean, look at this YouTube video by some poor soul with chemically induced Swiss cheese for brains.

APPARENTLY, he's calling himself the Blue Nation Clown, and given a certain resemblance as noted on the Dr. Saturday blog, if I were he, I'd avoid midnight movies for fear of nervous types with concealed-carry permits. Or, this being the South, steel magnolias who don't need no stinkin' concealed-carry permits to keep "jes' the cutest little .22" in their purses. 

But back to the video . . . ewwwwww. Can you imagine anyone getting into such a state over Kentucky football? Geez, if Kentucky basketball ever starts to stink up Rupp Arena, this guy will be legion.  

And the Dynamic Duo will have their work cut out for them.

Because, son, mixin' corn liquor and crystal meth is bad s***.

Have fun the last month? Just wait.

4:48.

That's where you need to go in the above video.

At 4:48, we find Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., confirming that, yes, congressional Republicans are, too, a bunch of extortionists and political terrorists.

4:48. That's the point, at the end of Monday's interview with CNBC's Larry Kudlow, where McConnell vows there never again will be a "clean" debt-ceiling bill.

IN OTHER WORDS, Republican legislative policy now is to hold the government and the economy hostage -- just like what we've witnessed the last excruciating month or so -- in order to ram savage spending cuts down Americans' throats while ensuring tax rates increase not a whit for the rich or big business.

"What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order."

WHEN YOU TELL an entire nation that you are perfectly willing to let the government default in 2013 as a means of getting your fiscal way (because if you aren't, you don't have a bargaining chip), you are announcing you are a terrorist. Or, to be polite about it, an extortionist on a global scale.

If a group makes demands, then plants a nuclear bomb in an American city, then announces that if the United States doesn't commit to policies X, Y and Z, there will be a mushroom cloud to pay, no one would hesitate to use the T-word to describe what was going on.

Likewise, if a political party makes demands, then says that if the United States doesn't commit to policies X, Y and Z, it will make sure the country defaults, thereby blowing up the stock market, shutting down most of the government and causing all manner of economic carnage . . . how exactly would that not be political terrorism? This is what a top GOP officeholder has just publicly stated will happen if his party still holds a majority in at least one house of Congress in a year and a half.

History is showing signs of repeating itself. Last time, it took a mountain of corpses -- nearly 700,000 of them -- to finally crush the life out of an earlier era's extortionist politics and moral and political dysfunction.

St. George Santayana, pray for us.

Unction Junction, what's your function?

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The Good Book says there is a time for everything:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. . . ."

When Rachel Maddow was laying into Birther Nation, a doctor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., rightly had other things on his mind.

Dr. David Hinson was working at the hospital when the tornado hit. He and his wife had to walk several blocks to get to their house, which was destroyed. Several houses down, he helped pull three students from the rubble. One was dead and two were badly injured. He and others used pieces of debris as makeshift stretchers to carry them to an ambulance.

"We just did the best we could to get them out and get them stabilized and get them to help," he said. "I don't know what happened to them."

WHEN the Rachel Maddow Show took to the air Wednesday night, scenes like this were playing out all over Alabama and Mississippi. They would be playing out shortly in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.

None of this registers, however, in a special place where politicos and ideologues can rage against the machine unmolested by real life or real people. I call it Unction Junction.

Yes, we need to speak out against the birthers, not that anyone's mind will be changed at this point. But "there is a season and a time unto every purpose under the heaven," and last night wasn't the time for that.

Another thing we need to worry about -- and this might be as good a time as any to do it -- is an ideologically obsessed and hyperventilating media culture that doesn't know its Ecclesiastes.

While we were otherwise occupied. . . .

Wednesday evening, all the cable-news chatterers were chattering away about President Obama, birthers, evil Republicans and evil Democrats.

They were losing their minds over Donald Trump losing his mind.

Well, not Piers Morgan, it must be said. Cable News Network's resident Brit was giddy over the someday-heir to the throne's impending marriage to a commoner way too good looking for Himself.

As far as we know (and the ranks are growing by the minute), 269 would-be viewers in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky were otherwise occupied. They were dying -- being bludgeoned, sliced, impaled or crushed as massive tornadoes turned the world around them into rubble.

Of course, you would have been hard pressed to notice if you were watching CNN, MSNBC or the Fox News Channel. Lawrence, Rachel, Eliot, Ed, Bill and Sean had bigger fish to fry, better "Others" to hate on than to focus on a bunch of Bubbas being ground up in the worst tornado outbreak since 1974.

SEE, to the media elite -- and to Washington . . . and to the think tanks . . . and to the entertainment industry . . . and to the eternally outraged activists whose continued existence depends upon staying eternally outraged (and making sure Lawrence, Rachel, Eliot, Ed, Bill and Sean do, too) -- we're all The Other, pretty much.

We don't matter, just our money or our votes. And if we're dead, there's no percentage in noticing that 269 of us just got bludgeoned, sliced, impaled or crushed to Kingdom Come.


ON THE other hand, video like this is da bomb. Pretty dramatic stuff here. Stuff's getting blowed up good, and you can cut the dramatic tension with a knife as the meteorologists' voices grow ever more urgent as the milewide Swirling Wall of Death (TM) approaches.

Yeah, with video like this, and with daylight views of all this rubble, 269 dead Bubbas might be worth a second look. Cable "news" might have an opening between the more urgent political contretemps Wednesday and the more pressing royal wedding Friday. Let's see whether CNN, MSNBC and Fox can shoehorn it in.

Rachel can blame it on global warming and the GOP. Sean can blame it on an angry God who's had it with the godless Democrats.

And Anderson can keep the tornadic supercells honest. Might work.

Videotape at 5:30, analysis at 8.

Bubba made a funny

You know how people are always asking "What were they thinking?" when something incredibly stupid happens somewhere?

In this case, I think we know exactly what the chyron operator at Louisville's WLKY television was thinking when he -- or she -- did the sports graphics Sunday night. And that, friends, is the problem.

I admit, I bust a gut over this one, though the sentiment that would prompt some alleged television professional to type in "Jew York Jets" isn't funny at all. The ROTFLMAO factor in this probably has something to do with a) it's Kentucky, b) the responsible party's name is Bubba, isn't it? and c) picturing, in your mind's eye, the aftermath of this one.

But the more I think about this thing, the madder I get.

FOR ONE THING, it's 2011. "Jew York Jets"? Really?

For another thing, it's 2011 -- do you realize how many people there are out there flat-ass out of work? Do you realize how broadcasting has been shedding jobs like it's the newspaper industry or something?

Do you realize how lucky the jackwagon idiot responsible for "Jew York Jets" was to have the job he (or, again, she) used to have (one hopes) and so cavalierly threw away (again, one hopes)?

You know how parents of a bygone era used to tell their kids to think of the starving children in China and clean their plates? In other words, be grateful for what you have and don't waste it.

Well, some jackass at WLKY never got told that by his or her parents. And a lot of "starving kids in China" probably aren't amused . . . except, perhaps, about the position that might be opening up at a TV station in Louisville.


P.S.: Do you think this thing just might cost WLKY a sponsor? Just wondering.

Politics today

Don't listen to them lib'ruls in the lamestream media -- it wasn't as bad as it looks.

Oh, OK.

The volunteer with Rand Paul's Republican U.S. Senate campaign who stepped on the head of a liberal activist and pinned her face to the concrete said Tuesday the scuffle was not as bad as it looked on video and blamed police for not intervening.

"I'm sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand's safety," Tim Profitt told The Associated Press.

A judge will decide whether Profitt should face criminal charges.

YOU HEARD the Rand Paul militia. Everybody move along; nothing to see here.

By January, we'll probably witness the caning of lawmakers on the Senate floor. Again.

Don't bite the hand that . . . strangles you?

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"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. . . .

"And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen."

-- Tea-party asshat and GOP
Senate candidate Rand Paul

Accidents will happen? Oops.

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"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. . . .

"And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen."

-- Tea-party asshat and GOP
Senate candidate Rand Paul

A-hole ideologue of the universe

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'" Rand [Paul] said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." ''I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."

Paul appeared two days after a landslide primary victory over the Republican establishment's candidate, Trey Grayson. He had spent most of the time since his win laboring to explain remarks suggesting businesses be allowed to deny service to blacks without fear of federal interference. On Friday said he wouldn't seek to repeal civil rights legislation.

On the oil spill, Paul, a libertarian and tea party darling, said he had heard nothing from BP indicating it wouldn't pay for the spill that threatens devastating environmental damage along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

"And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen," Paul said.

The senate candidate referred to a Kentucky coal mine accident that killed two men, saying he had met with the families and he admired the coal miners' courage.

"We had a mining accident that was very tragic. ... Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen," he said.

-- The Associated Press

When nuts vote as a bloc. . . .

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Can we agree that basing an entire political "movement" on the mere fact that you're pissed is a supremely bad idea, and is likely to end with voters doing supremely stupid things?

Exhibit A is what happened Tuesday, when tea-party Republican voters sent Ron Paul's baby libertarian boy to the general election for U.S. Senate. As we all know, Satan is a libertarian, and it was probably him who told Rand Paul (Nut-Ky.) that there's a problem with the Civil Rights Act.

Thus, we have the spectacle of Paul telling Rachel Maddow that he hates racism, that segregation is wrong, but the federal government still has no business telling private businesses they cannot refuse, for example, to serve African-Americans.

THE THING IS, while Bubba's Lunch Counter is indeed a "private business," so is Exxon.

And if Exxon doesn't have to serve you, Exxon doesn't have to hire you. either. Neither does anybody except for -- at least one presumes in the weird, weird world of Rand Paul -- government agencies.


RAND PAUL can wrap himself in the First Amendment all he wants -- just as he can lament the all-powerful state's assault on liberty all he wants -- but despite all his protestations about how much he hates discrimination and racism, he's still in bed with people like those above.

See, the red necks and dark hearts of Poolesville, Md., in 1956 really wouldn't have cared much whether Rand Paul personally was a "nigger lover," just so long as he preserved their right to discriminate against them with impunity. Libertarian Satan would have been so proud.

When the subject is abortion, we know when a politician is trying to have it both ways -- he starts waxing eloquent about how he's personally opposed to abortion, but. . . . This is called, if one is feeling charitable, wanting to feel right without actually having to do right.

On his campaign website, Paul says he's "100% pro life." Or would that be 100-percent pro-life, except when a woman goes to a private abortion clinic, because God forbid the state infringe on the rights of private businesses?

After all, "we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that's one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized. . . ."

A tale of two Kentuckies

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It's a hard-knock life. Unless you're a big-time athletic program.

Then you get to tell a nation in the middle of the worst hard times since the Great Depression. . . . Well, let's just say you get to rub big money and f***ed-up priorities in folks' faces.

We act like life is a game and a game is life. No, and hell no.