“You can borrow my Kwanzaa cds.”

I really do like Rick Perry, but man, was this funny.

“…and saaaave a pretzel for the gas jeeeets!”

Once again, Leonard Pitts talks out of his fourth point of contact.

And once again, crap comes out:

(Tea partiers) are the true believers: virulently anti-government, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-tax, anti-facts and, most of all, anti-the coming demographic changes represented by a dark-skinned president with an African name.

Translation? Tea partiers hate black people, of course. As Sabra says, tea partiers hate black people so much that they might even vote for another one to be president.

Still a joke.

More evidence that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has no credibility surfaced today, as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Donna Summer showed up on the 2012 ballot…and still no Rush or Bad Company. One of my Facebook friends said Rush should have been inducted years ago, and I would have said as much even when I was not a fan. Talented bunch of guys who influenced quite a few bands, at least one of whom (Metallica) is in the Hall now. I realize it may be expecting too much for Megadeth, Queensryche or Iron Maiden (another band that Rush influenced) ever to be inducted, but I don’t understand why so many of the seminal bands of the 1970s have yet to get in.

On the other hand, Guns’n’Roses also showed up on the 2012 ballot, which means that bastard Kurt Cobain is probably spinning in his grave. So at least there’s that.

Overheard earlier this afternoon…

…in the truck, as we were headed to the Randolph Park & Ride…

Sabra: “Charter schools get as much money from the state as every other school. It makes me wonder what that money’s going towards.”

Me: “Strippers and champagne.”

Sabra: “Considering the school’s run by a church, they’re probably young male strippers.”

Me: “HAHAHAHAAAA!”

I am not seeing what’s so objectionable here.

In today’s letters to the editor of the San Antonio Express-News:

I see where both Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh complained about proposed tax hikes to lower the deficit. O’Reilly threatened to quit his TV show since the tax would be too big a burden on his $10 million-plus salary.

These are the same guys who a few months ago challenged the integrity, patriotism and salaries of teachers and firefighters of Wisconsin when they objected to the benefits reduction by Gov. Scott Walker in order to help balance Wisconsin’s budget.

Talk about class warfare!

No, actually, it isn’t class warfare at all. Why? Because we’re talking about cutting public-sector spending. What O’Reilly and Limbaugh were doing, albeit perhaps ham-handedly, was what they’ve always done: comment against more taxes and spending. I am quite sure that both Limbaugh and O’Reilly pay more in taxes in two or three years than that letter-writer will in a lifetime.

That sound you hear?

It’s anti-gunners’ heads everywhere goin’ all ‘splodey.

Heh. Between the “guns are bad news for women” crowd and the “keep guns away from kids” crowd, that would take care of a bunch of ’em…

(No one sent me this, by the way. I took it a few minutes ago, across from the Walmart on FM 78. God bless Texas!)

The disintegration of the San Antonio Express-News?

It would seem that’s what we’re seeing, before our very eyes.

First up, there’s this:

For the second time in as many days, a top editor of the San Antonio Express-News announced he is leaving the newspaper.

Brett Thacker, a longtime journalist at the Express-News who started as a sports copy editor and rose through the ranks to become the No. 2 editor at the newspaper, sent an email to the newsroom Wednesday evening bidding his colleagues farewell.

You might be thinking, No big deal, editors leave for new positions all the time, right? Well,as you see if you read the story, it was just basic public-relations stuff — nothing about why things went down like that. And come on, two top editors leaving the paper in two days, well, that is a pretty big deal. One of the commenters asked why the story didn’t go any deeper than that — and in the first instance of this that I have ever seen, Express-News reporter John Tedesco, who got the byline here, had this to say:

In today’s newsroom meeting, we were told the newspaper is profitable and there were no lay offs planned. In their emails to the newsroom, Brett and Bob did not give their reasons for leaving.

At this point no one is answering the most important question about these resignations: Why?

And in a later comment, Tedesco said this:

We’ve asked the same questions you have, but the simply (sic) truth is only a handful of people know what really happened, and they’re not giving detailed answers. If I knew more, I’d write it.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I’m betting it’s a lot worse than anyone’s letting on. As for the “this newspaper is profitable” bullshit…it strikes me that the head honchos always say something to that effect when the subject of layoffs and furloughs comes up.

And today, via Albatross, we have this:

In what has been a bizarre week for the San Antonio’s only major newspaper, Friday saw more shake-ups at the San Antonio Express-News.

Just days after Editor Bob Rivard and Managing Editor Brett Thacker left the newspaper, sources at the paper confirmed that two of San Antonio’s most recognized columnists are leaving.

Cary Clack has been with the newspaper for 17 years; Scott Stroud has been with the paper since 2004.

Add that to the departures of Jan Jarboe Russell and Veronica Flores-Paniagua earlier in the year, and it makes you wonder what the hell’s going on down at 301 East Third. Four metro columnists gone in the last year?! (And really, to be honest, I don’t see O. Ricardo Pimentel as a net addition.) Albatross again:

I’ve heard the Houston Chronicle has a hand in this, and that the Express-News will be reduced to a shell of itself, a Southwest Texas extension of the Houston paper. Perhaps that’s hyperbole, but these recent losses of major figures suggest that it’s not.

Yep. Not only that, but the way things have been going suggests as much also. As Sabra notes in comments, a lot of Chronicle content runs in the Express-News, and the S.A. Life and Taste sections are produced in Houston. You can even tell as much because most of the week the S.A. Life section is laid out using the same font as the Houston Chronicle. (I seem to remember reading that the new font the Chronicle uses was designed especially for it. In fact, the font is actually called Houston.) And I can’t speak for the production side of things in Beaumont (home of the Beaumont Enterprise, another Hearst paper), but I do know that they run a lot of Chronicle content as well — and that their website is updated from Houston. It’ll be interesting to see if all of that comes to pass — and how it’ll affect operations at Hearst’s other papers.

More rock music musings…

Hector Saldana of the San Antonio Express-News, speaking of Michael Morales and the latter’s opinion on Def Leppard:

Morales, who shared a label with Def Leppard (Mercury), considers them a supergroup.

If indeed he does consider Def Leppard that, Morales is wrong — because that term has a very specific definition. Yeah, people do use the term as Morales does, and it makes them look ignorant when they do.

I do like Def Leppard, though. I always thought their music was a lot of fun and that, like the music of Guns ‘n’ Roses, it rose above the typical glam band dreck that was so popular in the ’80s.

Speaking of G’n’R, I clicked on one of the links at the bottom of that mySA.com story, which took me to another link, which led me to this:

19. Kurt Cobain on Guns N’ Roses
“They’re really talentless people, and they write crap music, and they’re the most popular rock band on the earth right now. I can’t believe it.”

And the only thing I could say was,WOW. Sure, it wasn’t Metallica or Iron Maiden, but the notion that Guns’n’Roses’ music was crap, or that they’re “really talentless people,” is just so self-evidently ridiculous that it defies words. I could very well be wrong, but I get the feeling that after “they’re the most popular rock band on the earth right now” was an unspoken “and we’re not and that blows.” That’s pretty much the only explanation that makes sense to me.

Of course, what gets me about the Cobain quote is that it goes hand-in-hand with what I talked about here, the notion that everything that came in the decade before grunge was crap. I never would have thought Cobain actually believed that, but it sounds like he did.

Which makes him sound even dumber than he does on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

As for Van Halen vs. Van Hagar musings, I shall reprise my comment here:

The first four tracks on Van Halen’s eponymous 1978 debut pretty much pwn everything else the band ever did, with Roth OR Hagar. “Runnin’ With the Devil,” “Eruption,” “You Really Got Me,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” oh, hell yeah. BTW, I thought for the longest time that “Eruption” was just the intro to “You Really Got Me” as opposed to a free-standing song. It always pissed me off when they’d cut it, because those two work SO much better in tandem.

Does anyone else besides me see what the difference is…

…here?

(Rick Perry) strongly defended his decisions to grant in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants and to oppose a fence along the entire Texas-Mexico border.

“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. Otherwise, he said, “they will become a drag on our society.”

Romney didn’t buy it. Giving “illegal aliens” a tuition discount, he said, is a magnet that “draws people into this country to get that education, to get the $100,000 break. It makes no sense.”

…

Romney, who spent four years as Massachusetts governor, again had to defend his initiative that required residents to buy health insurance or pay a fine. Perry called it a model for “Obamacare,” the 2010 federal health care overhaul that all the GOP candidates oppose.

Romney said his position all along was “this is a state plan for a state, it is not a national plan.”

I might not agree with Perry’s decision to allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Texas colleges and universities, but I can see where he was coming from there. I also see where Mitt Romney’s coming from when he says such draws more illegals into the country.

However, vis-a-vis this part of Perry’s record, he has one big advantage over Mitt Romney and RomneyCare — at least Perry can defend in-state tuition for illegals on a pragmatic basis. Mitt Romney apparently can’t defend his socialized medicine program on that basis. If he could you’d see him doing it. As I’ve said before, regarding a certain “conservative” pundit,

“I really don’t understand where the one-state-versus-the-whole-country or ‘states’ rights’ thing comes in here. So many people advocate the very thing conservatives decry — a big, strong central government — to protect certain groups of people from the depredations of the state, and here (Mitt Romney) comes, saying certain depredations of the state are perfectly okay just because they’re on the state level. One wonders what (Romney) would have said if certain states voted to tax people based on their religions. Hey, as long as it’s on the state level and the folks in those states approved such, it’s peachy-keen, no? Sorry, but I don’t think a little consistency is too much to ask.”

There they go again…

…the old reliably anti-liberty Washington Post, that is.

Sorry, but I don’t think states should get to choose the level at which they want to respect what is perhaps the most fundamental right of them all. And I’d be interested to see which misdemeanors disqualify one for a carry permit in New York. I would wager that absolutely none of them rise to the level of making the misdemeanant a danger to society.

And why should I or anyone else give a damn about what the police organizations think? I’m sure their jobs would be made much easier and safer by any number of laws that violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments as well, but does that make those laws worthy of support? Of course not. Why should it be any different for the Second Amendment?