Say, this reminds me.

Concerned American, at Western Rifle Shooters Association:

Tomorrow, try this experiment – ask five people the same two questions:

1) Who won the best actress Oscar Sunday night?

2) What is the current level of Federal government debt, according to US Treasury figures?

Before I go on, it’s only fair that I answer the questions myself.

1. Don’t know. I didn’t even click on any stories about the Oscars as I was reading my normal news sources.

2. I figured before reading further to find the answer that it was somewhere north of 12 trillion, so there’s that.

I was reminded as I read this, of some of the statuses I saw on my Facebook news feed last night.

• trent reznor just won an oscars. wow.

• I guess I don’t get the humor of the speakers/winners on the Oscars….. They need scripts!

• Loves Gwenth (sic) Paltrow’s dress!

Now, I have nothing against my FB friends. They’re all lovely people who would give you the shirts off their backs if you needed them. But reading those statuses I thought, does any of that shit really matter? Why do people go on about this as if it had any consequence on their lives? This citizen complacency and concentrating on the bread and circuses really is going to be the death of us all.

What kinds of topics are forbidden, again?

Something tells me Chris DuBois is really not as familiar with country music as he should be:

There are no topics that are forbidden, unless they are risqué.

So what did Mr. DuBois think Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” was about? I mean, come on, the character in the song was more or less telling her man, among other things, “So you’re worried about more baybehs? Dude, I got it covered with this newfangled pill. Let’s fuck like bunnies!” And yes, I know the main message of the song was “I don’t want any more baybehs, hoss.” But there was that other message, peripheral as it might have been. And then there were the songs in which the message was more central to the song, like, for example, Haggard’s “Living With the Shades Pulled Down”:

“Nobody knows what all we’re doin’ livin’ with the shades pulled down.”

Whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t, say, playing tiddlywinks.

Or how about the Dixie Chicks’ “Sin Wagon”:

“Feel like Delilah lookin’ for Samson, do a little mattress dancin’.”

Even with more innocuous lyrics, it should’ve been obvious what the people in the song were doing:

“Well, here we are again, tonight alone, just us two, where the lights are dim and true love is coming through. There’s no one else in this whole world as far as we’re concerned. We built ourselves a fire, so let it burn.”

(George Jones, “Loving You Could Never Be Better”)

Somehow I doubt they were just cuddling. Oh, they very well might have been; but you knew it was going to lead to other things.

I suppose there’s always the chance that DuBois was talking about modern country music, but then how does one explain something like “Brown Chicken Brown Cow” or “Rain Is a Good Thing” (a song about, as Dan Milliken described it, “drunken hootenannies and rain-soaked barn sex”)? I don’t get it…

(h/t Country California)

The sun rises, and another hoplophobe shows his ignorance.

This time it’s one R.B. Walker, in the letters to the editor of the San Antonio Express-News:

Edward J. Nofer (Letters, Feb. 24) tells us for the millionth time that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Cute but untrue. Countries that have gun control still pay to protect themselves with an armed military and an armed police force.

Yes, but what do you do when police and military personnel join forces WITH the criminals? You see what he’s doing here, right? He’s starting off with a premise that has already been proven to be false: that the police and military in the countries with gun control are immune to temptation from the criminals. And that’s not even true in the United States; even a cursory glance at David Codrea’s “Only Ones” files will show that. Why would anyone with half a brain think it was true anywhere else?

What a bunch of poseurs.

…or, Oh, the irony!

So yesterday afternoon at lunch, Sabra and I were talking and the subject of Texas music came up. She mentioned that KJ97 had a Texas music show every night from 10 to midnight; for some strange reason I thought it was just on Saturday night. So I tuned in on my ride home from work later and they played this little promo slogan or whatever you call it: “You won’t see no carrot top drinkin’ out of a sippy cup here!”

Yeah, nice…now if you jerkwads didn’t play that shit the rest of the week, that might actually mean something.

(And no, Scott, I don’t listen the rest of the week! The only thing I listen to in the truck — beyond some talk radio now and then and a little bit of KKYX — is either the Sirius satellite radio or the iPod. In the house it’s mainly various & sundry Internet stations…)

What does one have to do with the other?

Nothing, which is why this makes no sense at all:

Does that mean we will be eliminating campus and other police because students can handle things themselves — a bad grade, a fight at a frat party — by pulling out their six-shooter and blowing someone’s head off?

University of Texas President William Powers opposes the handguns on campus bill saying, “The mix of students, guns and campus parties is too volatile.” I’m more inclined to stand behind him than a governor who packs a pistol when he jogs….

Ahhh, so this is where the pants-shitting hysteria is! Not to mention rampant nonsense. Students can handle bad grades and fights by “blowing someone’s head off” as opposed to getting the cops to handle it for them? The cops would shoot students for bad grades and fights? That’s the way I read this…

And considering that pistol Rick Perry carries ended up being quite useful to him, Kim Hauser looks like even more of a blithering fucking idiot than most of the folks who oppose bearing arms. And that’s no small feat. My (figurative) hat is off to her!

Somehow I doubt this.

Esther J. Cepeda, in the San Antonio Express-News:

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it: Latinos don’t vote based on ethnicity or on the immigration stance of any given candidate.

To an extent I suppose this is true. I know well that not all Latinos vote the same way. But let’s take a look at a few items here.

Item 1:

Richard V. Sanchez was once called “the poor man’s Republican.”…

“I don’t like the word ‘chicano,’” Sanchez said in a San Antonio Express-News feature article, “but I love the word ‘Mexicano.’ Mexican means a lot to me.”

According to the article, some Latinos referred to him as a “coconut,” (i.e., brown on the outside but white on the inside — ed.) but he countered such critics quickly by declaring them “pecans” — “brown on the outside and nutty on the inside.”

Item 2:

When Rep. Aaron Peña became the second Democrat in a week to switch to the GOP, the reaction from his former party went beyond disappointed.

One Hispanic colleague said he didn’t believe Peña was motivated by public service. A Twitter account called “Aaron Sellout Peña” was set up. Blogger Mean Rachel touted “Call Out Aaron Pena Day,” which asked people to remove him as a Facebook friend, block him on Twitter and ask for their money back if they’d donated to him. (That’s the way she wrote his name, calling him “hereby tilde-less and using his cleansed, conservative Republican namesake.”)

Item 3 (previously mentioned here):

“The legacy of the Raza Unida Party is the concept of independent thought and that we can speak for ourselves,” (party co-founder Jose Angel Gutierrez) said. “No ventriloquist needed.”…
These days, Gutierrez’s hobbies include tweaking nativists with comments about how Anglos are losing sleep over the browning of the United States.
“They think this is a white country,” he said. “And when someone says the opposite, then that’s the demon.”

If Latinos as a group don’t vote based on ethnicity, why do so many Latino pundits and politicians resort to playing the race card in the myriad ways they do? Food for thought…

This is not a surprise either…

…but it’s still disheartening:

University of Texas System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa says he is worried that a proposal to allow concealedhandguns on college campuses could make schools potentially unsafe….

Cigarroa says parents, faculty and campus law enforcement agencies have expressed concern that the law could lead to an increase in campus violence.

Yep, because as we all know that’s exactly what has happened ever since Texas started issunig licenses to carry. Why, I have to hose my shoes off every time I come back in my house so I don’t track blood and entrails everywhere….

…oh, wait, no I don’t. There are those who lament the alleged surge of anti-intellectualism in America lately. You know why this surge is happening, don’t you? (To whatever extent it is, anyway.) In addition to the people getting tired of having their self-appointed intellectual & social betters telling them what’s best for them, there’s also the fact that said intellectuals keep going back to the same arguments that have been proven wrong only God knows how many times. They keep saying there’s going to be increased violence, but time and time and time again this is shown not to be true. More to this particular point, in his letter Cigarroa says, “The University of Texas has worked diligently to make our campuses safer, through the use of emergency notification systems and other measures.” Yes, indeed, because the police will always get there in time and students will always have time to find a safe haven. I’m sure the 30 people killed at Virginia Tech before the cops got on the scene will be glad to know that.

I’ve said it before about others, and I’ll say it here: For him to be so allegedly smart, Francisco Cigarroa certainly is stupid.

Here are your answers…

…David Atwood:

Regarding “Houstonian executed for killing son” (Page B2, Wednesday), was Timothy Wayne Adams the worst of the worst? Was he a continuing threat to society?

Yes, and it’s very likely he would be, family and clergy’s opinion notwithstanding. If he would kill someone so innocent as a child, then we as a society would be derelict in not considering him a future threat to society. Timothy Wayne Adams’ case was a perfect illustration of why we have the death penalty. And as a Texan I for one am quite glad there’s one fewer child-killer sucking up valuable state resources in Huntsville.

I would hope Huck stays right where he is…

…as opposed to running for president again. I won’t deny my Christianity, but Huckabee’s saying “we need to…amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards” offends me greatly; I didn’t really think God would have been offended by the Constitution, especially considering it protects the rights He bestowed upon us. I really, really hope that Republican voters see him for what he is, just another big-government (with a side of Jesus) liberal.

I blame easy access to knives…

…for this:

One man was hospitalized for treatment of stab wounds following what police called a road rage incident Wednesday night.

 

Come on, you know it’s true. They really need to institute background checks for knives. We’ll get to licensing and registration later…