Faced with two candidates who both fail to really trip my trigger much, I had given up on the election this year. I have no preference of one over the other - I dislike them both equally. The late George Carlin’s wisdom on political candidates rings in my ears: “This is the best we can do, folks.” I still didn’t give two shits when I heard this morning that McCain had appointed some Alaskan lady as his Veep. Congrats, John, you made what was obviously the best strategic choice. I still wasn’t interested. Please, enough election news, already I thought as I browsed my Google Reader feeds. Alas, I reluctantly gave in to the madness, and navigated to Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page. I admit, as I read I became mildly impressed - she killed the “Bridge to Nowhere” and she’s against energy subsidies - plus, let’s face it, she’s… kinda hot.

Then, a thought struck me: Holy crap, she could be president! Many have speculated that McCain’s advanced age means he could kick off while in office, giving his VP a generous promotion. What would this mean? The first female president of the United States would not be Hillary Clinton!!

I make no secret of my distaste for Hillary. It goes beyond her policies; I just can’t stand her. The vast array of colorful, homely pantsuits, the executive-mom haircut, the phony smile… not to mention the collectivist “we’re all in this together” rhetoric - barf. I admit, the sadist in me would thoroughly enjoy seeing Sarah’s name - and not Hillary’s - in the history books as the First Vagina to Ascend to the Highest Elected Office of America.

I don’t know if Mrs. Palin will be enough to motivate me to drag my ass out of the bar and into the voting booth on November 4th, but I’ll leave you with one final observation: having a former beauty queen as our president will bring us one step closer to a true Idiocracy.

Comments Off
Filed under: Mock the Vote, Daily Rant

I can only imagine the pitch for this in the marketing department for this:

Via Daily Dish.

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Sexxx, Pop! Goes the Culture

Try out this little imagination exercise:

It’s primary election time, and your party’s incumbent senator has recently been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of failing to disclose nearly $250,000 worth of gifts from a large oil services company. The senator’s trial is scheduled to begin in late September of this election year, and is expected to last for weeks, tying the Senator up in court during what’s typically the prime campaign season. There are six additional candidates for whom you can cast your vote, none of whom, to your knowledge, have ever been indicted by a grand jury. You’re standing in the voting booth. What do you do?

Why, you vote for the crooked old incumbent and hand him the primary, of course!

(To his credit, crooked though he may be, Senator Stevens did de-mystify the internet, after all.)

Comments Off
Filed under: Profiles in Governance

Not as I failed to do…

Author of 100 Things To Do Before You Die has died before completing his list

Helluva try tho.

R.I.P.

Comments Off
Filed under: Freedom Meets Darwin

Comments Off
Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party, Mock the Vote

In the quest to keep al-Qaeda from flying the otherwise friendly skies, the Transportation Safety Authority is making sure that large-breasted women are thoroughly screened before allowed onto airplanes:

OAKLAND — When Berkeley resident Nancy Kates arrived at Oakland International Airport to board JetBlue flight 472, she thought she was heading off on a routine journey to visit her mother in Boston. Instead she ended up in a standoff with Transportation Safety Administration officials over her bra.

In the post-Sept. 11 world of heightened airport scrutiny, Kates, like most travelers, is familiar with the drill: Take off shoes and belts, open the laptop, carry shampoo in 3-ounce bottles.

For Kates, on Sunday, though, the security check got too invasive. A big-busted woman wearing a large underwire bra, she set off the metal detector. She was pulled aside and checked by a female TSA agent with a metal-sensitive wand.

“The woman touched my breast. I said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” Kates said. “She said, ‘We have to pat you down.’ I said, ‘You can’t treat me as a criminal for wearing a bra.’ ”

Kates asked to see a supervisor and then the supervisor’s supervisor. He told her that underwire bras were the leading item that set off the metal detectors, Kates said.

…

The supervisor told her she had the choice of submitting to a pat-down in a private room or not flying. Kates offered a third alternative, to take off her bra and try again, which the TSA accepted.

“They tried to humiliate me and I was not going to be humiliated over this,” Kates said. “If I was carrying nail clippers and forgot about them, I wouldn’t have gotten so upset. But here I was just wearing my underwear.”

So she went to the rest room, then through the security line a second time. Walking through the airport braless can be embarrassing for a large-chested woman, not to mention uncomfortable. The metal detector didn’t beep on the second time through, but then officials decided to go through Kates’ carry-on luggage, she said.

Ok. Making her get out of line and walk to the bathroom–probably shoeless, ew– is bad enough. But then making her wait again (as she has missed her flight because of TSA imbecility) as they rifle through her possessions? What, was the otherwise sufficient X-ray conveyor suddenly no longer capable to detect any metal (or other) contraband in it? (You know, just in case she was carrying a Tech-9 in her bountiful bosom.)

Thankfully, not all of the TSA is as ridiculous across the board:

Kates said that although she flies about once a month, the only other time her bra has set off alarms in an airport was while she was being “wanded” in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. When she explained to the security agent that the wand was picking up the metal in her bra, she said, that was the end of the matter and she was allowed to go on her way.

Next time, just make her jump up and down and let the woman catch her flight.

Via Boing Boing.

1 Comment »
Filed under: The Homeland

You got no woman and there you are:

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Afternoon Dance Party

FEMA is the United States’ federal disaster management agency. True to form, where there is FEMA, disaster follows:

WASHINGTON - A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.

The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voicemail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.

Who could have possibly seen this coming?

FEMA is part of Homeland Security, which in 2003 put out a warning about this very vulnerability.

But this had to take some extraordinary skill to corrupt a system for such a ::ahem:: vital government agency, right?

This type of hacking is very low-tech and “old school,” said John Jackson, a St. Louis-based security consultant. It was popular 10 to 15 years ago. Telecommunications security administrators now know to configure security settings, such as having individual users create unique passwords and not continue to use the password assigned to users in the initial setup.

I have better security on my cell phone.

Ok, so it was the FBI or NSA that found out this was going on, right?

Sprint caught the fraud over the weekend and halted all outgoing long-distance calls from FEMA’s National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg.

I wouldn’t trust DHS to protect the recipe for the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices, let alone keep me safe from terrorists.

And now, a word from the enemy:

2 Comments »
Filed under: Profiles in Governance, The Homeland

An 85-year-old Pennsylvanian woman is in the news this week for being the most bad-ass old lady ever to walk the earth (aside from Margaret Thatcher, of course). After a 17-year-old whippersnapper broke into her home, Leda Smith retrieved her .22-caliber gun and, in a move that would have made Dick Heller proud, ordered the little hooligan - at gunpoint - to call the police on himself.

“I said ‘What are you doing in my house?’ He just kept saying he didn’t do it,” Smith said.

After the 17-year-old boy called 911, Smith kept holding the gun on him until state police arrived at her home in Springhill Township, about 45 miles south of Pittsburgh.

It is still unclear whether or not Ms. Smith’s firearm was unloaded and disassembled at the time of the break-in.

The young punk-ass, whose name has not been released due to his age, will be charged in juvenile court for attempted burglary. The youngster’s friends, upon hearing the story, were overheard describing their friend’s foiled burglary as an “epic fail.”

1 Comment »
Filed under: Pop! Goes the Culture

Dead in a room in America

Given my post yesterday, I couldn’t get this song out of my head this morning.

Comments Off
Filed under: Freedom on Film, Consumerism Rulez, Afternoon Dance Party