The Poor Man Institute

This is pretty typical:

With his 10-minute statement to the media on Monday, Milledgeville (Ga.) District Attorney Fred Bright just made it painfully clear what must happen to Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

Roethlisberger must be punished swiftly. He must be disciplined in a way that makes sense to anybody who heard Bright recount details of the alleged sexual encounter with a 20-year-old college student in March. You simply couldn’t listen to this story and expect Roethlisberger to walk away unscathed even now that Bright has decided not to charge him with sexual assault. [...]

He laid as much of the story out there as he could, presumably so everybody could know this wasn’t merely a case of an aspiring gold digger missing out on a big payday from a reckless star athlete. The most revealing details involved Roethlisberger’s allegedly buying an already inebriated girl (and her friends) shots, then meeting her in a bathroom. Even without knowing what happened next, Bright’s detailed account had to make the hairs on the back of Goodell’s neck snap to attention.

You can read Bright’s detailed account here, including this chilling part guaranteed to get yer neck-hairs snappin’:

Everybody, I think, could be criticized for their actions that night. I hate to use this pun but I’m not trying to be a Monday morning quarterback. But there was too much drinking going on. If he were my son, the best way I can answer that is, ‘Ben, grow up. Come on, you’re supposed to stand for something. I mean, you’re the leader. You should be a role model. You don’t need to put yourself in this position anymore.’

Whatever that means.

Fuck Ben Roethlotsletters.  He’s way overrated, he’s super boring to watch, he plays for a degenerate football team, his name is an overturned Scrabble board, and, even among pro football players, he stands out as an unlikable moron.  Now we know his drinking habits offend the DA of Hicksville, GA, and that he is a shameless toilet tramp.  These are certainly not the sorts of qualities a young gentleman should seek to cultivate, but none of them are really remotely comparable to rape or assault, nor do they require swift and sure retribution.  (None of them are really comparable to lying about felonies, either*.)  If someone goes around raping people, that person should be put in jail.  Rapists don’t need to “grow up”, “be better leaders”, or “not put themselves in these positions”, they need to go to prison and stop raping people, and rape isn’t a situation where you can criticize everyone for their actions that night.  If, on the other hand, someone just goes around getting hammered in nasty Georgia skank bars and touching drunk girls with his trick-ass pee-pee in the piss-stained bathroom, A) do not ever, ever, ever talk to me about this and say it is “sports” “news”, and B) don’t offer it up like it’s the next best thing to proving a rape.  ”Whether he’s guilty or a victim, we know he’s guilty” makes as much sense put that way as when you pad it out to column-length.

There are obviously bigger victims in the world than millionaire whore/athletes like Tiger Woods, or millionaire whore/fat people like Ben R.  I certainly don’t think America’s impressionable young gentlemen need any extra encouragement in pursuing their dreams of being disgusting sluts – it seems that most of America’s young gentlemen are limited in their sluttishness and skankery only by their ability to get someone to indulge them in it, and that rumors of a so-called “Whore Gap” are nothing more than that – rumors.  And I am sensitive to the fact that not all of us can have fulfilling adult relationships with sophisticated Latin lovelies and save the Earth with our fugly purple fleeces like me and Tom Brady.  Maybe I should become a fan of something where everybody is a virgin who collects vintage Star Wars figurines and goes to bed sucking their thumb at 8:30 on Saturdays, but I already read a lot of political blogs.  I just hate feeling at all sorry for meathead hos like Roethlisberger.

* I actually spent 10 entire minutes thinking about it, and while these are both very bad things, I think on the whole I would prefer being falsely accused of rape to being actually raped myself.  People say I’m hard to shop for, so hopefully this helps.

This is sad.

I bet you’re feeling pretty low Mickey.  But before you give up your dream of doing whatever it is you think you are doing, I think you should listen to some very special friends of mine:

What I’m saying is that even if you can’t get into the CDP, there may be other groups which would welcome your talents.

I learned on the news today that Tiger Woods has been putting his pee-pee in very many ladies.  I am outraged!!!!   Tiger how could you?!?!  I am so outraged, I will never play, or watch, or pay any attention to  golf ever again.  Or, come to think of it, ever before.  I believe that moral values are eternal, and so must be defended in a time-invariant manner.

Added bonus of having a baby: better music!

To answer the obvious question: Greg is my favorite, although I like Murray’s early stuff, too.  The Wiggle’s George Martin is whoever the lady is in the Henry Octopus costume.  A sour note: Jeff’s “hilarious” habit of nodding off during concerts.  Johnny Thunders obviously had his failings, and I’m not making excuses for him, but I don’t think he ever reached the point of actually snoring in front of 10,000 screaming toddlers.  Seriously, dude – not cool.  Get help.

Dee Dee = Cap’n Feathersword.

Gotta agree with Doug E Fresh and the Juicers, this Tea Party breakdown is a thing of beauty:

“You know when I was a little boy, there was an old negro farmer that lived down the road from us, named Monroe. He was … (subtle laugh), I guess he was just a little more luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule.

It was a big deal in round that town. Now my daddy hated that mule. Cause, his friends were always kidding him about, “They saw Monroe out plowing with his new mule and Monroe is going to rent another field now he had a mule.”

One morning that mule showed up dead. They poisoned the water. After that, there wasn’t any mention about that mule around my daddy. It just never came up. One time we were driving down that road and we passed Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He just packed up and left, I guess, he must of went up north or something.

I looked over at my daddy’s face, I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and said, “If you ain’t better than a nigger son, who are you better than?”" – Agent Anderson, Mississippi Burning

And welcome to the Tea-hadist mindset. With Barack Obama in charge…who are you going to be better than?

And don’t think some of us recognize the symptom because we are a pack of condescending know-it-all asshats. We are…but that has fuck-all to do with the observation.

It’s just that we have seen this before. Up North…in our so-called “enlightened” neck of the woods.

Want to know the difference between North and South? Well, a man once told me that up North, it is OK to have a Black as your boss, but you will be damned if you will have one for a neighbor. Down South, it is OK to have a Black neighbor…but you will damned if you will have one as a boss.

So we went through all this Tea Party nonsense up North, about 20-30 years ago. And the reaction was just as vehement, inarticulate, and dumb as what is being spewed now. If you want to see hate and spittle, you should have seen how South Boston reacted to school integration.

But you would not have seen it 24/7 as you do today. It happened…but not in a perpetual echo chamber. And thank Christ for that.

And if you think the enlightened liberal North embraced integrated housing with open hearts, think again, It was called “white flight” and it damn near emptied some cities. “Sure, we support integration…now excuse us while we move to the suburbs where those Zulus won’t be able to spear us with their assegais.”

But white flight was a safety valve. It kept the pressure at reasonable levels. It also prolonged it and led to new levels of stupidity, but you could, after all, vote with your feet. Many did. Many still do.

OK, the job front was a bit stickier. Northern Industry has always been (at least since the 1950′s) largely integrated. Steel Mill owners don’t give a fuck what your skin color is. Besides, you could only tell on the way into work, on the way out everybody pretty much looked the same.

But you always knew what hand you were playing, because the cards were mostly dealt face up. Your boss was still white. Your union steward was still white. Your mayor and your chief of police were still white. And, as much as it pains me to tell you this, Michael Steele did not run the GOP. And even if he did, at least up north, you went home at the end of the day to your own private Idaho in the suburbs, and played golf on the weekends at a club where Michael Steele was never going to get in. Well, not the front door.

Do go read the rest…

PS: I told you so.

I did not know that:

Our study shows that the 124 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 28 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 875 and 1,291 individuals, of whom around 586 to 921 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent. [...]

Estimated Total Deaths from U.S. Predator Strikes in Pakistan, 2004 – 2010

	Deaths (low)	Deaths (high)
2010*	141	240
2009	372	632
2008	275	310
2004-2007	87	109
Total	875	1,291

*Through March 31, 2010

That’s more than I would have guessed.  Again, this is reported drone strikes in the single, nominally friendly country of Pakistan.  Current thinking is that Pakistan pretends to deplore these violations, while secretly loving them, and one suspects that this is true, considering that dropping even a single bomb on one’s ally without clear invitation is generally considered a rather serious no-no.  I certainly don’t mean to spoil everyone’s good time with my prudish, bourgeois notions of international morality – what goes on between consenting nation-states within the privacy of their own borders is their own business, and this is just as healthy and loving and beautiful as any diplomatic arrangement, etc.  I just hope nobody forgets the safe word.