South Carolina used to be so gay!

Not any more.

Strange crime of the day

This will make no sense, but here goes: Be on the lookout for an attractive woman named Patches who travels with three large black men and sprays perfume that makes men pass out.

She sort of sounds like a supervillain that Batman would fight.

Want some free Chick-fil-A?

No problem. Except it's today only, so you have to find one. Not easy in Chicago.

Also, you have to dress like a cow.

Everyone should have the DirecTV sports pack

After ESPN SportsCenter's "Who's Now?" fiasco last summer, I swore off the show. It had become bloated with commentary and slim of actual highlights, along with spending too much time on crap that no one cares about (Olympics, NASCAR, WNBA, NHL, etc.). Then there are all of the human interest stories, interviews, and various Salisbury-laced analysis segments. All I want are highlights of the prior night and straight news of trades, you fools! Do you think I give two poops about John Kruk thinks about a free-agent signing? I know more about baseball transaction analysis than he does.

All of that isn't even getting into how self-congratulatory the show had become. The anchors were all about themselves and the network. And the show is 1 hour long, 1.5 hours on Sunday night/Monday morning. That's just not necessary, and it leads to much of the bloat.

Anyway, I quickly found ESPN News as a nice alternative last summer. It is kind of SportsCenter light since they only have a half-hour to work with. As a result, they just don't have time to unload most of the useless stuff on us. It still has its flaws (such as spending too much time on sports no one cares about and analysis), but it is good enough. Plus, I can wrap it up in half an hour without missing anything.

The flaw in the channel is that they still have too much of the junk in the show, so there are whole baseball games (keep in mind there is NOTHING ELSE GOING ON right now) they completely ignore. Since the White Sox aren't exactly a media darling, they often are in those games. I can only imagine being a Royals fan...

I guess ESPN management has gotten pissed about people bailing on SportsCenter (the network's flagship show, mind you) in the morning to watch ESPN News, because they have started showing a live video broadcast of their ESPN Radio show Mike and Mike.

Setting aside the merits of the show, which I have never heard, why would they possibly do a video broadcast of it? Everyone in the country gets it on the radio, and people are free to listen to it at home. Anyone can do so with an old AM radio stolen from one's grandparents' house. My only guess (as I wrote above) is that the ratings differential between SportsCenter and ESPN News in the morning has become embarrassing. (I have not seen any ratings, so it's just conjecture.)

What was I to do? Watching 2 minutes of SportsCenter reminded me why I hated it. We do have Comcast Sports Channel here, but since they have no national affiliation the sports highlight show is all Chicago stuff. Jeez, I don't need 15 minutes of highlights, interviews, and analysis of a Sox game I watched half of the night before. So that was out. A solution appeared before me...

Last spring I purchased the sports pack on DirecTV, which gives access to all of the regional sports channels (blacking out games on the MLB, NBA, and NHL packages, of course). I always thought most of the channels were useless other than having ESPNU for college basketball and Fox Soccer Channel for EPL games.

Given my dilemma a few weeks ago, I hoped that the array of local Fox Sports Channels had a national highlight show. And it did! It's called The Final Score. Here are my favorite things about it:

It's only a half hour long.

They show highlights to every game.

There is NO analysis by so-called "experts".

Interviews clips are brief.

There is a crawler on screen showing what the next few topics are.

There are TWO score crawlers at the bottom. One is just scores (and it moves fast) and the other has some news mixed in, like Bobby Jenks going on the DL yesterday.

There is only one anchor, at a time, so there is no stupid banter between them.

They only show things that a regular sports fan cares about. NASCAR, golf, tennis, Olympics, and whatnot are all brief. They know the reason for their existence is to show highlights of games we care about.

Here are the downsides:

I am nitpicking here, but I could do without the highlight of the day at the end of the show, or whatever it's called. But that only takes about 10 seconds, so it's no big deal.

That's it. No other negatives!

Best of all, they actually showed a WNBA highlight today, and the anchor was making fun of it! First, it was the last highlight of the show (which is good because NO ONE CARES). Second, he starts off with saying, "How about a WNBA highlight?" is a fake serious voice. Third, he said something about the game and followed it with, "in front of dozens!" with the camera showing a sea of empty seats behind the court.

(Now, as a digression, this is fantastic. The mainstream sports media is as liberal as any other aspect of the media. [A cursory viewing of SportsCenter would make this clear to anyone.] They are deathly afraid of making fun of the WNBA, even though it is clearly deserving of ridicule. No one attends the games, the ratings are horrible, and the action sucks. Example #1: Check out how newspaper articles/columns will rip MLS or NHL TV ratings, without ever mentioning that the WNBA does even worse. Example #2: Remember the XFL? The MSM hates Vince McMahon, so they loved hammering him and the league for any failing of it, be it ratings, level of play, etc. Some of that was brought on by Vince himself, but how come the WNBA never faces that kind of scrutiny? Why does the media never make fun of David Stern for standing behind it so ferociously?)

Clearly, this show is for regular sports fans. They aren't out to win any reporting awards for their lame-ass stories about blind cyclists or whatever, and they certainly aren't full of political-correctness.

I highly recommend this show to every sports fan tired of the ESPN culture. If you can, order the sports pack. If you don't have DirecTV, I am sorry. No joke.

(Here's an article mentioning everything above! It's too bad we are stuck here in Chicago without FSN, though it may be on cable.)

UPDATE: I see that Comcast Chicago does show it, but only the live version at 12:30 AM. Since I need it in the morning, I always use MSG+, which is channel 624 on DirecTV.

Black politicians in Dallas don't know anything about astromony

What other conclusion can we draw from this? Oh yeah, they are also ridiculously sensitive. Maybe the NAACP can just shut down if this is the kind of "racism" that exists nowadays:

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term.

I love how the writer threw this in at the end just to completely humiliate these two clowns and point out to science-dopes what the phrase means:

A black hole, according to Webster's, is perhaps "the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape."

Obama wants everyone to speak Spanish

Anybody who thinks he's not left-wing (as opposed to merely liberal) needs to follow Barack Obama more closely:

Obama starts off this clip by opposing English as an official language, seems to emphasize that teaching kids Spanish is more important than teaching them English, and then says Americans are an embarrassment because they only know one language when they go to Europe. It may be the one of the most grotesquely arrogant, out of touch displays that I have seen from someone running for President in the last decade.

The video shows it all.

UPDATE: Transcript:

You know, I don't understand when people are going around worrying about, "We need to have English- only." They want to pass a law, "We want English-only."

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this.

Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they'll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

You know, it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], "Merci beaucoup." Right?

You know, no, I'm serious about this. We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job. You are so much more employable.

So, not only does he want everyone here to know English (and for what purpose? So we can tell illegals how to mow our lawns? Spanish isn't exactly useful in international commerce.), but who gives a crap what Europeans think of us? If it wasn't for us they would have been overrun by the Soviets. If they don't like us maybe they could build the biggest and baddest economy and military in the world like we did.

More, more, more!

Because I find this topic so rife for posting, here is more on Helms, Republicans, Democrats, etc. from Jonah Goldberg (who was not a huge Helms fan):

But here's the thing. The reader who ticked me off yesterday cited no evidence that Helms was a "stain on conservatism," he merely took it as a given. Others cite Helms' opposition to the Martin Luther King holiday and his 1990 ad with the white hands. I don't consider either of these things racist in and of themselves. Indeed, like the Willie Horton ad, I consider them examples that liberals cite over and over again as racist as if doing so will simply make it true. Now, as for other Helm's positions and comments, I think it is very hard indeed to defend the man. In other words, I'm not sure the "stain" spreads nearly so far as the left insists. If having men with racist pasts on your team is, in and of itself, a stain, where are the liberal washerwomen going after Bill Clinton's mentor William Fulbright, Robert Byrd or for that matter Jeremiah Wright? In short, these things are more complicated than the simplistic morality tale in which conservatives are evil and liberals are good (hey, I think someone wrote a book about this).

Indeed, I grow weary at the constant liberal browbeating administered to conservatives to not only apologize for the racist skeletons in our closet but the insistence that those skeletons define modern conservatism, particularly when liberals insist that liberalism has no skeletons whatsoever (which is, simply, a Big Lie). That's what I took to be going on in that e-mail. But, again, I was wrong. Or rather, that's not all that was going on.

Still, after thinking about it. I think the conservative celebration of Helms has been too hagiographic, just as I think the left’s demonization has been too two-dimensional. Helms was the product of his times and upbringing, just as Fulbright and Byrd were. The difference is that liberals think it’s childish to point such things out about Democrats, but it’s all you need to know about Helms – and the GOP.

McCain's running mate

Here's an e-mail to KJL at The Corner on why McCain should pick Bill Bennett as the Republican VP nominee.

Lots of good reasons are given, and I think he'd make one the top few choices possible. (I think disaffected social conservatives would flock to McCain if Bennett was with him.) I'd like to see Mitt Romney picked, but then I have a bit of an irrational politi-crush on him. Voters just don't really like him very much, which is a hindrance. I do wonder if he would be a better VP candidate than presidential candidate, though, as he would be able to focus on his core strengths that McCain would want him for, such as economic experience.

On the other hand, Amnesty John isn't getting my vote anyway, and I'd hate to see Romney's political career destroyed by having to back McCain's immigration plans.

On a final note, I think Obama's VP pick is going to be a much more interesting decision, as he's kind of blank slate to many people beyond the "hope/change" stuff.

More good immigration news

The headline from USA Today says it all:

Illegal immigrants face threat of no college

It's amazing that they could go in the first place. Some of the story:

Josh Bernstein of the National Immigration Law Center, an illegal-immigrants advocate, says sweeping anti-immigration bills are "a very serious threat" to the overall illegal population.

Good! What use is it making them "illegal" if they can just walk around and do whatever they want, including getting in-state tuition for schools when they aren't even authorized to be in the country? Why not get in-state tuition everywhere?

More on Helms, Republicans, and civil rights

From an excellent post by Kevin D. Williamson on Nation Review Online:

Helms and Thurmond were contemporaries in that their careers overlapped, but Thurmond had been in the Senate for decades before Helms ever held office, and Thurmond had — again, let's point it out, since the AP surely won't, as a Democrat — staged the longest filibuster in Senate history to block the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was proposed by a Republican president, Eisenhower, and passed on Republican support in Congress. How a reporter can write about Helms and Thurmond and the civil rights era without at least noting the institutional hostility of the Democratic party toward these bills is mysterious. (Someday, somebody will figure out that Republicans have been responsible for the most important civil rights actions, starting with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Klan Act, the 1957 and 1960 acts, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But this isn't the place for that discussion.) And why isn't Helm's precessor as alleged "standard-bearer for civil rights opponents" Sen. Robert K. Byrd, a Democrat who is still in the Senate and who was launched into his political career by serving as Exhalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan?

The whole post is worth reading to fight through the contemporary spin that Republicans have been traditionally against civil rights. Also note this a little earlier:

On the subject of Helm's life before the Senate, you'd be hard pressed to take away from Margasak's piece anything about Helms's career as a Democratic operative or the role of the Democratic party in trying to block the civil rights acts that were passed, after all, on Republican support. Instead, we get this:

No to civil rights. No to abortion. No to communism. No to the United Nations. No to gay rights. No to arts funding with nakedness. No to school busing. No to the U.S. giving up the Panama Canal. No to a nuclear arms reduction treaty called Salt II.

One of these things is not like the others, no? Helms wasn't even in the Senate until 1973, after the major civil rights legislation had been passed. It is true that Helms worked against those bills — as a supporter of Democrats such as Beverly Lake. On the issues where Helms actually had a Senate vote — the NEA, the abortion, school busing, &c. — Helms's record is pretty good. But Helms was a conservative and a Southerner, so it is essential that he be tarred as an unreconstructed racist.

UPDATE: Here is an interesting counterargument (of sorts) made by a liberal e-mailer to Jonah Goldberg. Here's his conclusion:

Many of us liberals have discussions with conservatives all the time, respect them, and don't assume conservatives are racists, but this circle the wagons defense of Helms is just odd. I realize that times are tough for Republicans at the moment, but I think it is counterproductive to take this line on Helms, as well as intellectually specious, craven even. It wouldn't be throwing him under the bus to make a differentiated argument about the good and bad (from a conservative point of view) that he has done. I'm sorry you don't see that.

What if Obama was a Republican?

Good question!

Could you imagine the horror if it was the Republican party swooning over an oratory candidate in massive rallies with messianic overtones? The comparison to Hitler would be immediate and relentless. MSNBC would have a constant split screen showing how it was the 1930s all over again.

Shhh! Don't tell the health Nazis!

Second-hand smoke is no danger. What a surprise! (Not to me, I mean.) I could see that old people, people with respiratory problems, and small children shouldn't be exposed to all kinds of it. For normal adults, though, the nanny-staters who want to ban indoor smoking just had their main rationale (the health of workers in bars and restaurants) destroyed.

Oh well, it was never really about the health of workers. If it was, why is smoking banned in beer gardens of bars in Chicago? Once again, facts become inconvenient to those who want to take away freedom.

Good thing he's retiring

Virginia Senator (a Republican!) John Warner is asking the Energy Secretary to look into reinstating a national speed limit.

For those who are too young to remember, there used to be a speed limit of 55 mph everywhere. Yeah, it sucked all right. If I recall correctly, it came into existence during the 1970's because the nanny-staters wanted everyone to slow down to supposedly save lives (where do you think the old expression "Speed kills" comes from?). In fact, it did just the opposite for a few reasons, but mainly because there was a larger differential in speeds of vehicles on the same road.

When Republicans took control of Congress following the 1994 elections, they repealed the national speed limit. I think pretty much everyone (again, except for the nanny-staters) loves it, as it allows states to set their own speed limits. Now along comes Warner wanting to bring it back, ostensibly to force people to save gas. I'm glad the old fart is retiring this year.

Jesse Helms, RIP

I just saw the news that former NC Senator Jesse Helms died. I know he wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I consider him an American icon. He wasn't perfect, but on a lot of big issues I thought he was great (like the military, for example). He was 86.

UPDATE: More on helms from John Fund:

The issue of race will always cast a shadow on Helms's legacy. He could never understand why he was viewed by many as a bigot, having run one of the most integrated TV stations in the South and often hiring blacks on his staff. His criticisms of affirmative action and forced busing were on the mark. But as conservative scholar John Hood notes, "he failed to marry every criticism of government overreaching with calls for the South's social and moral transformation and clear denunciations of racist business owners."

Indeed, the mainstream media rarely put Helms's career in context the way they did, for example, with Sam Ervin, a Democrat who served with Helms in the Senate from North Carolina before retiring in 1975. Ervin was the leading legal strategist against Civil Rights legislation, and he largely crafted the Southern Manifesto against Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. But Ervin was the man who chaired the Watergate hearings that helped bring down Richard Nixon, and his views on civil rights were almost never mentioned. Both Helms and Ervin were courtly, principled conservatives. Only one became a cartoon media villain.

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia season 4

Just saw a promo. Premieres September 18!

Fear Itself review

I gots a little A-How in me, but I finished the first four episodes of the new NBC show Fear Itself last night. Since this post is going up an hour before the next episode, I know it does no good for this week. Anyway, here goes.

Good show! It's pretty much what I hoped for. It's got a lot of Tales from the Crypt in it, which is a good thing. Three of the four episodes were very good, while one was meh. Hey, that's a pretty good average.

Anyway, I recommend it if you are a fan of mostly horror/little bit of sci-fi stuff. They also throw in a little classic Twilight Zone at you with the twists, including a breathtaking one in the fourth episode. (Sure, I can usually be sucker for them since I don't like to think when I watch TV, but it was still hard to predict.)

Happy Independence Day

Let's not forget about what our day off of drinking beer and blowing off our fingers is really about.

The Declaration of Independence is a great document to read. It starts off like everyone remembers, then goes off on all of the things the king of Great Britain was doing to the colonists. Here are some of my favorites. Note the hyperbole and awesome 18th century language:

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

and

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

After all that, we get the huge finale. It still kicks ass 232 years later:

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

After that, they all signed it. Think about what that meant at the time. These were the bright lights of the colonies, many of whom went on to write the Constitution and become founding fathers, putting their names down as traitors against the biggest and baddest empire the world had ever seen. If Britain had put down the rebellion, they all would have been executed. Now THAT'S courage.

Finally, let's not forget what followed: a war that annoyed the British enough to finally leave us alone. Yes! USA! USA!

D-Bag of the holiday weekend

I knew I wouldn't have to search too hard for a post today. These things just fall to me. Here is the winner of my D-Bag of the Week award:

Put the fireworks in storage.

Cancel the parade.

Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time.

This year, America doesn't deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

He deserves a punch in the baby-maker. And by that, I mean his ovaries.

Speaking of D-Bags, here is a fun website I found researching this post.

Go Rays! Boo M's!

Searching for a post today, I came up blank. Here's something:

The best team in baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays, need to go at least 26-53 the rest of the way for me to win some money on their over/under on wins for the season. I took the over, obviously.

The worst team in baseball, the Seattle Mariners, need to finish the rest of the way no better than 52-27 for me to win some money on their under.

Both look pretty safe right now. Thanks to BP (for their computer projections) and my co-conspirator on these wagers.

Think twice before buying something

Today the new giant sales tax in Chicago (and the rest of Cook County) begins, thanks to political lightweight Tood Stroger:

The tax is estimated to bring in more than $440 million in new revenue.

I doubt it. Enough people like me are pissed off about it that they will make as many purchases as possible outside the county.

I've written it before and I'll write it again: when you elect liberal Democrats, you can't complain when they raise taxes. It's what they do.