Back to Ohio.

Well, Oberlin was splendid. It better be, for tuition, room, board and fees adding up to 60 grand a year. I wish I were kidding. Yes, I know only Chinese nationals pay full retail, but that is one hard swallow to even contemplate. One of my friends has a freshman at Michigan, and is getting no, zero, zip, nada discount of any sort, because their family income is over $100,000. While that’s certainly in the comfort zone, that’s two adults working, and the university thinks it’s enough that they should be able to swing a $25,000 annual expenditure with no help from the institution. Just think about that a while.

But the school was great. Small classes, wonderful facilities, impressive alumni. It wasn’t as gothic and grand as the University of Chicago, not in as lively a location as Tulane, but it had plenty of grandeur of its own, and then there’s the matter of the “E system” for designating bathrooms in the co-ed dorms. Signing up for the tour, in the basic information, Kate was allowed to indicate her gender as M, F or Other. If you’re transgender, you will find no fluffier nest, I bet.

Well, I wanted her to get a sense of what life might be like at a small, progressive liberal-arts school. Now she knows. (Expensive.)

And now it’s back to the grind. As I mentioned in yesterday’s comments, I have been relishing the Cliven Bundy news of the past few days; most of the story transpired without me — I’m paying attention to Michigan news more often these days — but it doesn’t take much to get caught up. So, it turns out this guy is less an embattled symbol of Western pluck than a welfare mooch? Noted. Loved this understated graf in the NYT:

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

And then he launched into his “let me tell you what I know about the Negro” speech, and I think that will be that for the rancher with the big ol’ hat.

These sorts of nasty jerks are thick as thieves in Real America, especially in the wide open spaces. A normal person looks at southern Nevada, land so dry and scrubby you wouldn’t think it could support a prairie dog, and wonders what the hell people are thinking, running cows across it. The fact they’re doing so free of charge, or at below-market rates, merely rankles, until someone like Bundy or the National Review brings up the “government land” thing. As Dave Weigel points out, Bundy’s “cause” of transferring federal land to private hands has been dealt a setback by their accidental Palinesque spokesman. Good. It’s not “government land,” it’s public land, and let me remind you, the same people pushing for a selloff were the ones who were saying logging Yellowstone National Park would have have prevented the severe fires of 1988. Screw them. This land is your land, this land is my land. And I’m not selling, and Cliven Bundy ought to pay his damn bills and shut his stupid mouth.

No, he shouldn’t. Keep giving press conferences and sharing your colorful opinions, Cliven.

So, a quick bit of bloggage before we all pop off for the weekend, eh? As I think I’ve mentioned before, a particular local attorney has carpet-bombed the billboard and bus-sign market sector with advertising, and what advertising it is, featuring her platinum-blonde, Photoshopped-mouth self. She’s a Lebanese Christian immigrant, and specializes in personal injury, but also handles immigration affairs, and I can only imagine how her cupid-bow mouth and Muppet-like eye makeup is seen in the Arab community here, but boy, does she make serious bank. The Metro Times finally did the first serious profile of her I’ve yet read, and it’s pretty good. Apparently she’s a lovely person. Who knew?

Have a lovely weekend, then. Hope it’s warm where you are.

Posted at 12:30 am in Current events, Same ol' same ol' |
 

100 responses to “Back to Ohio.”

  1. Joe Kobiela said on April 25, 2014 at 2:53 am

    I still think Kate needs to take a strong look at Hillsdale!
    Pilot Joe

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  2. Deborah said on April 25, 2014 at 6:31 am

    I’m waiting for the shuttle to pick me up to go to the airport, it’s tricking 4:30am, was up at 3:30. Too early to be out and about.

    I loved visiting colleges with my daughter and my husband’s two daughters. I think I got more joy out of it than the girls.

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  3. David C. said on April 25, 2014 at 6:44 am

    If Kate looks at Hillsdale remind her that it’s not polite to point and laugh.

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  4. Linda said on April 25, 2014 at 6:58 am

    The whole push to sell public land is one those faux populist ideas that conservative multimillionaires dream up to drain everybody else. The land wouldn’t go to people running middling sized ranches, such as we saw in old Western movies but snapped up by a tiny number of land barons who could then charge market rates (big fat ones) for grazing. But in conservativeland, nothing is worth doing unless it concentrates wealth even further.

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  5. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 25, 2014 at 7:06 am

    Nancy, did you two hit the art museum? That’s one of Oberlin’s great gems. That and the candy store on the south side of Tappan Square.

    Bundys are not just open space creatures; they cluster around the cups of Golden Buckeye coffee at every McDonald’s morning time and evening time all around Nerk, Ahia. And they talk about the gift of slavery and the blessing of the occasional wife smacking and that sort of charming conversation.

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  6. nancy said on April 25, 2014 at 7:13 am

    Museum, no. (No time.) Candy store? Why, I’m dieting. But you say these are chocolate-covered blueberries? Well, they *are* a superfood…

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  7. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 7:26 am

    The land wouldn’t go to people running middling sized ranches, such as we saw in old Western movies but snapped up by a tiny number of land barons

    Exactly. It’s a way off selling off everything that isn’t nailed down, and those properties will eventually go to the foreign nationals who have the cash. Our own oligarchs are too busy gaming the political system in order to preserve the value of their current assets. We’ll be selling federal land to the Saudis, Chinese and Russians.

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  8. alex said on April 25, 2014 at 7:47 am

    $60K a year for Oberlin? Do you get a tube of K-Y with that?

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  9. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 7:58 am

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/cliven-bundy-wants-to-tell-you-all-about-the-negro/361152/

    Whites are easily persuaded that slavery was an innocuous, even kindly system. You can see echoes of these sentiments in virtually every Republican interaction with minorities and women. But slavery turned whites into slobbering monsters, who in turn selected other monsters for breeding.

    The revenants of breeding for plantation ownership are still scattered throughout the south. A lot of them aren’t even that far from their old plantation seats. They will always run South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama.

    We lived next door to a woman from the Blackwell family in Oxford, NC and were looking through some of their family photographs with them one Christmas, when we found a small photo of around forty blacks in a field (I can’t recall if it was cotton or if they were priming tobacco). Despite it being in a sort of brownie camera format, and likely dating from the early part of the twentieth century, the Blackwell descendant said “I din’ know we had that many slaves”.

    The notion that the Civil war ended systems of forced labor, and vicious ones at that, is one I quickly learned was false. Forms of it were still going strong in Granville County in the late eighties and early nineties. The (nee)Blackwell woman, in particular, was a caterwauling, sadistic, racist bitch, as likely to turn on a family member as she was to have her husband punch out an old black man raking the leaves in her yard. She was bred to it.

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  10. Julie Robinson said on April 25, 2014 at 9:16 am

    David C, thank you for saying that with humor.

    I sincerely hope that Cliven Bundy’s slave remarks will help open the eyes of even one Fox “News” viewer. Yes, this is what they’re pushing, not a return to the 1950’s, as I’ve often thought, but a return to the 1850’s, the last time when white men were truly the masters of their kingdom.

    No it is not warm here and not going to be for at least the next week. We had two glorious nights of riding our bikes after dinner before the cold came back. Deborah, you will not enjoy Chicago!

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  11. Mark P said on April 25, 2014 at 9:27 am

    I think the idea of selling of public property to private individuals is in the same league as selling of public works departments to private companies. There are several counties in Georgia that are considering selling virtually all their public works departments to private companies. The idea that it will save money is, of course absurd. Around here, public employees are not what you would call overpaid. If a private company runs the department, they will have to either cut services or reduce pay even more. They have to make room for profit, you know.

    And, speaking of Georgia, how about that new guns-everywhere law? A TV reporter surprised me by asking the governor a pertinent question: why doesn’t the state allow gun carry on the statehouse grounds? The governor hemmed and hawed but never gave the right answer: if we let people carry guns at the statehouse, one of us is going to get shot. Just like in the bars, churches and non-secure (you can say that again) parts of the Atlanta airport, where carrying is now legal.

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  12. BigHank53 said on April 25, 2014 at 9:34 am

    http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119

    I have recently been listening to David Blight’s lectures on the Civil War and Reconstruction (part of their open courses)and the South tried to paper over slavery about forty seconds after they lost. He describes Jefferson Davis’ memoir as “twelve hundred pages of whiny self-justification”, and that guy was nowhere near alone. The whole “states’ rights” argument didn’t become widespread until after the war.

    The South loved slavery. It made a few of them very, very rich: Blight described a slave trader in Columbia who was doing a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of business a week–in 1859 dollars, mind you. And it gave every single white person the firm and secure knowledge that no matter how much of fuckup they were, they were still better off than any black.

    A couple years ago, I read a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay in which he talked about American conservatism spending the last sixty years angrily searching for a new underclass, since Jim Crow went away. They’ve tried communists and hippies and feminists and homosexuals, none of which have had a whole lot of staying power. Mr. Bundy appears to prefer the classics.

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  13. Danny said on April 25, 2014 at 10:06 am

    If you’re transgender, you will find no fluffier nest, I bet.

    I had to do a double take. It looked like you wrote that they had fluffers in the restrooms for transgenders and thought, “Man, that is pretty damn progressive!”

    I wouldn’t get too excited about the racist rancher. It’s an outlier. Using skewed data points to argue from specific to general isn’t smart. A few years ago, Harry Reid was referring to then-candidate Obama as “clean and articulate” and, as you might see, that idiot wouldn’t fit nicely into supporting some your worldview hypotheses.

    Does Coates only write about “the man trying to keep a brother down?” Whenever he’s making news, that seems to be the theme. Guess it pays the bills, eh? And seriously, any discussion of a political party exploiting an underclass has to start first and foremost with the Democrats.

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  14. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 10:19 am

    Hey! it’s the diversity squad.

    Welcome back, nutter.

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  15. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 10:23 am

    Does Coates only write about “the man trying to keep a brother down?”

    Stay calm folks,Danny is an “outlier”.

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  16. Charlotte said on April 25, 2014 at 10:27 am

    The one sector of the real estate market here in Montana that is booming is huge ranches. The rich fucks are putting their money in land, lots of land, in advance of the climate change disaster they’ve wrought, so yeah, if they can get idiots like Clive Bundy to open up even more of it, more the better.

    And TNC has been terrific on the race part of this story, especially slavery-denial (which he’s been researching for a couple of years now). There’s a crazy meme out there on the far Christian right that “there were more white slaves than black ones” — which I love. Oh really? Anyhow, here’s TNC’s whole scroll: http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/

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  17. Jeff Borden said on April 25, 2014 at 10:29 am

    Ah, yes, Danny. The Democrats were indeed the party of racial injustice well into the 1960s, when a man of more character than Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush combined and multiplied into infinity –Lyndon B. Johnson– pushed and pulled and bullied and cajoled his own party to enact the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. LBJ lamented that he would cost the party the South for a generation, a theory made real by Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” Reagan launching is presidential campaign in the Mississippi town where four Freedom Riders were slaughtered by the Klan and Daddy Bush beating the drums on Willie Horton.

    There’s plenty of shame to go around, but these days, it is conservatives who work most diligently at “keeping the brothers down,” as you have so colorfully suggested. You clearly don’t read Coates very regularly or you’d know he has a wide-ranging intellect and a deep interest in American history, particularly the Civil War period.

    Let us all hope that bastards like Cliven Bundy indeed are outliers –I personally believe you are dead wrong– but that becomes harder and harder when so many states are obsessed with making it more difficult for people of color to vote. In point of fact, Texas, North Carolina and several others are indeed making race-based decision to prevent a constituency they need like nor accept from exercising its Constitutional rights.

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  18. jcburns said on April 25, 2014 at 10:45 am

    Just for perspective, here’s an infobox for a fine institution not so far from Oberlin.

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  19. Bitter Scribe said on April 25, 2014 at 10:48 am

    What kills me is that Bundy now is apparently an unperson at Fox News. The old Soviet Politburo would have blushed at this kind of blatant top-down media dictatorship.

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  20. Snarkworth said on April 25, 2014 at 10:49 am

    Does Coates only write about “the man trying to keep a brother down?”

    No, Danny. He also writes about, among other topics, philosophy, linguistics, cold war history, and Edith Wharton. He has a wide-ranging curiosity and an open mind.

    You?

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  21. brian stouder said on April 25, 2014 at 10:50 am

    See – the Kenyan usurper in the White House fouled up the whole narrative, when he didn’t unleash the jack-booted thugs on ol’ Clive’s ass.

    Hellfire! Ol’ Clive could be a saintly martyr right now, if he’d a been ventilated last week, the way shit-for-brains-Sean Hannity (et al) was clearly hoping he would be.

    But, dammit-to-hell-anyway, if ol Clive’s not only still kickin’, but also flappin’ his jaws and removing all doubt as to how self-serving, racist, and hateful that he really is.

    Things would just be so much cleaner if only that had been a GRAND FINALE…errr – terrible tragedy, with lots of dead women and maybe some dead childrens, and plenty of blood and….errr – uhhh…

    oh to hell with it!

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  22. jcburns said on April 25, 2014 at 10:57 am

    And black helicopters, Brian.

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  23. Danny said on April 25, 2014 at 11:02 am

    Welcome back, nutter.

    That doesn’t carry much weight coming from the guy who calls everyone who doesn’t completely agree with him a racist, Nazi or asshole.

    How’s it hanging Derrick? I see you are still working through your “Daddy” issues in public forums. Let’s have a poem!

    It was an honest question Snarksworth. The guy seems to make a lot of hay “researching” the issue. The comments section had a whole lot of folks asking how they could help and he directed them to buy newspaper subscriptions.

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  24. Kirk said on April 25, 2014 at 11:21 am

    A dilemma for a voter in Franklin County, Ohio: For decades, we have paid a property tax to support the Columbus Zoo, which isn’t even in Franklin County. (The folks in Delaware County, where it is, don’t pay anything but reap plenty of benefits.) It’s a great zoo, and I always have voted for the tax.

    Now, the zoo has decided to build some sort of “zoo attraction” downtown as part of a new Veterans Memorial complex. (I guess someone believes that the scent of elephant shit is a proper way to remember those who gave all.) To pay for that, the zoo is asking voters to virtually double the zoo tax. The arrogance of this offends me enough that my plan has been to vote no, in spite of the fact that it’s going to pass easily.

    Now, though, the Koch brothers have decided to take some thousand-dollar bills out of the pile they use to light their cigars and spend them on sticking their nose in and opposing the zoo levy, I guess because tax bad. If those slimy bastards are agin’ it, do I still want to be? I have 11 days to decide.

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  25. brian stouder said on April 25, 2014 at 11:24 am

    hmmm….trolling early (California-time) on a Friday…

    well, whatever.

    I’ll say this much on the subject of TNC, Danny, and it dovetails with Nancy’s college-quest (a little).

    TNC (et al) answers back the “American Exceptionalism” religion, that our rightward friends have a crack-like addiction to.

    Every nation is unique – and possibly therefore can claim their own ‘exceptionalism’; but it would be a mistake to think the United States is God’s own little flower garden in an otherwise dingy world.

    Reading history will quickly show this, but who reads history?(present company excluded)

    So TNC hits a point that more people need to understand – regarding American history – before they arrive at an opinion (that they will base their votes upon) about public schools, or affirmative action,n or marriage rights, or the role of the United States in the world.

    Eh?

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  26. alex said on April 25, 2014 at 11:30 am

    Good question, Kirk. Why is it that Delaware County residents don’t have to pay anything? I’m sure the Fort Wayne City Council would love to figure out a way to tax those outside its municipal boundaries for the wear and tear they place on the city’s infrastructure and public facilities.

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  27. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 11:46 am

    How’s it hanging Derrick? I see you are still working through your “Daddy” issues in public forums. Let’s have a poem!

    You’re raving now. Deeply, perhaps irretrievably, fucked up.

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  28. alex said on April 25, 2014 at 12:15 pm

    So Danny…

    Have you gotten graphic with your children yet about male-on-male sex? You said you’d be forced to do so if gay marriage ever became legal. Your pastor told you so.

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  29. Little Bird said on April 25, 2014 at 12:28 pm

    Sometimes I wish this site would auto-refresh and the comments would just stream. I could sit and watch them unfold and eat popcorn, it’d be better than TV!

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  30. Julie Robinson said on April 25, 2014 at 12:35 pm

    Alex, they did: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130930/LOCAL/309309955. The COIT was raised to 1.35%, with the additional .35% going to the City.

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  31. Julie Robinson said on April 25, 2014 at 12:37 pm

    And I don’t understand the Columbus Zoo tax reach, but the excellent zoo here in the Fort is completely self-supporting. Doesn’t take a dime of anyone’s taxes, and manages to be the #1 tourist attraction year after year.

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  32. Kirk said on April 25, 2014 at 12:38 pm

    Alex@26: Don’t know why the tax is collected as it is. Probably had something to do with it being the Columbus Zoo and Franklin County having a much huger tax base.

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  33. Kirk said on April 25, 2014 at 12:40 pm

    Julie@31: They probably need a lot to keep paying a pile of money to Jack Hanna, who, though he has done a terrific job with the zoo, is one of the most obnoxious publicity hounds of all time.

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  34. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 12:45 pm

    The RNC is trying to compare Neil Steinberg to Cliven Bundy.

    Spicer went on to accuse the media of ignoring incidents that involved Democratic politics.

    “When similar incidents happen time and time again on the left,” he said, “there is zero coverage. Absolutely zero.”

    Spicer said there had barely been any coverage of the fact that Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s (D) campaign had tweeted a Chicago Sun-Times column that some found offensive. The column compared blacks who supported a GOP gubernatorial candidate to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

    The Republicans are hemorrhaging raw shit now. All because they have to embrace every anti-government head case who makes it to the news. And their dependence on Fox News just bit them on the ass.
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cliven-bundy-cnn-sean-spicer-gop

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  35. Deborah said on April 25, 2014 at 12:46 pm

    I’m waiting at the airport in Houston, waiting for my flight to Charlotte, NC. I sure wish I had a Wendy Davis button to wear.

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  36. Connie said on April 25, 2014 at 12:48 pm

    In the Detroit metro area there are three counties that pay a property tax millage to the Detroit Zoo and the Detroit Institute of Art. DIA lets us in free, zoo doesn’t. The citizens in those three counties voted to tax themselves. The fact that some of that money was getting “tax-captured” by local municipal TIFs and DDAs became a big enough issue that the state leg passed a law against. Other municipal units still get “tax-captured.” 10% of my library’s property tax revenue goes to a downtown development authority.

    And while the Detroit Zoo doesn’t let us in free, most of the metro area library libraries have zoo discount coupons hidden on their web pages. We’re not allowed to put them on our front page.

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  37. Joe Kobiela said on April 25, 2014 at 1:14 pm

    Hang in there Danny
    Remember the liberal mantra,
    Ignore the message, kill the messenger,
    All for free speech as long as it what I believe.
    Billionaires are bad, unless they’re liberal,
    When all else fails,
    Blame Bush.
    Pilot Joe

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  38. Jason T. said on April 25, 2014 at 1:28 pm

    Y’know, there aren’t that many transgender people (like 5 in 1,000 or so), but they do need to pee. If allowing them to use the bathroom is some kind of special privilege, I guess I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, too.

    I guess I’m not sure why this grinds your gears, Nance.

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  39. nancy said on April 25, 2014 at 1:33 pm

    It doesn’t grind my gears at all. I just find it amusing.

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  40. Jason T. said on April 25, 2014 at 1:40 pm

    One of the student government leaders here has actually made it a campaign topic. I asked him, “I understand gender-neutral bathrooms” (the stalls have doors) “but I’m not sure about gender-neutral showers.” He didn’t understand why that might be a problem.

    Maybe I’m an old fogey? I remember when our freshman dorms had group shower areas, with only a curtain and a half-partition wall between the showers. I found that creepy and off-putting, even if it was gender-segregated.

    Dorms have gotten a lot fancier since then, so I suppose the shower stalls have doors, too?

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  41. Charlotte said on April 25, 2014 at 1:45 pm

    Colbert — “The Ballad of Cliven Bundy” — http://gawker.com/stephen-colbert-sings-the-ballad-of-cliven-bundy-1567555542/all

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  42. Danny said on April 25, 2014 at 2:07 pm

    Interesting to look at the fuller comments of this Bundy fellow:

    http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/unedited-tape-bundy-emerges-sheds-light-racist-remarks

    Were any of you aware of this? The added context paints him in a slightly more sympathetic light.

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  43. Maggie Jochild said on April 25, 2014 at 2:12 pm

    Speaking as a radical lesbian feminist, I don’t want transgender folk to face possible violence or crappy attitude when they need to use the facilities. But I don’t want that provided at the expense of women and girls having public penis-free environments in which they can be partially unclothed and vulnerable. Pitting one oppressed group against another is a beloved tactic of the patriarchy. Sex-neutral bathrooms (it’s about sex, not gender — the two terms are not interchangeable, one is immutable biology) are a fair fix as long as there remains a female-only safety zone for females who need that.

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  44. coozledad said on April 25, 2014 at 2:12 pm

    The liberal “mantra”?
    Goes like this.
    1. Learn your goddamn language. It’s a sacred birthright.
    2. Get that mental health care if and when you need it.
    3. Be a good person. Life is too short for you to spend it being a swaggering, stupid racist prick.
    4.Get outside of your ugly ass self and empathize.
    5.You are going to die. Go out with common decency.

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  45. Bitter Scribe said on April 25, 2014 at 3:18 pm

    OK, so Bundy said some things that were not as offensive as some of the other things he said. I’m not sure what Danny thinks that’s supposed to prove.

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  46. Bob (not Greene) said on April 25, 2014 at 3:36 pm

    Gee, I wonder how many of “The Spanish” Bundy employs. Does he pay them market rates for their work on his ranch? And what’s all this “our Constitution” stuff? Guy says he doesn’t recognize the federal government, which was created by “our Constitution.” Get your story straight, man!

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  47. Jeff Borden said on April 25, 2014 at 3:46 pm

    Kirk,

    I think it is safe to say that if the Koch Brothers are against something, you ought to be for it.

    It’s a drop in the bucket, but we avoid all products associated with these libertarian assswipes. If you’re using anything produced by Georgia-Pacific, you’re helping these plutocrats transform America into an oligarchy, which Princeton University revealed last week already has largely occurred.

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  48. Dexter said on April 25, 2014 at 4:01 pm

    The school I went to was built in 1939 and had a group shower stall, six high-pressure shower heads , mandatory shower after gym class and of course after basketball games and practice we all crammed in there ( 🙂 ) for a soap and rinse. One kid named Eddie was slow to mature and had no pubic hair when the rest of us had reached that milestone. And the little fucker always got a boner in the shower. We only had a couple gay kids on the team and they never showed this behavior, and Eddie was straight, but he couldn’t help himself, and he showered quickly and scurried back to the lockers to cover up. I felt sorry for the little shithead,and I hated him as well because he was little smart-ass. However, I never came back at him for his little hard problem. Oh, and those two gay kids on our team, I never realized they were gay back then, only when I was around more gays as my own worldview expanded did I realize, hey, Jonny and Stevie were queer as two three dollar bills back then, as was the vernacular 50 years ago.

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  49. Sherri said on April 25, 2014 at 4:52 pm

    They’re all just outliers: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/25/republicans-are-racists-no-it-s-just-all-a-big-coincidence.html

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  50. Jeff Borden said on April 25, 2014 at 5:28 pm

    Maybe we should start referring to right-wingers the way they refer to Muslims. I wish I had a dime for every time I heard someone say, ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” Perhaps we can counter, “Not all Republicans are racists, but all racists are Republicans.”

    I know, I know.

    There are racist Democrats, right Danny? It’s just that they don’t regularly get their balls fluffed by a national news (?) organization.

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  51. Danny said on April 25, 2014 at 5:46 pm

    Harry Reid got a pass after his comments, Jeff. The “book was closed” very quickly.

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  52. Deborah said on April 25, 2014 at 6:37 pm

    In Charlotte, every time I turn around I think I’m having a Rielle Hunter sighting, then I go around the corner and there she is again, only dressed slightly differently. Odd.

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  53. beb said on April 25, 2014 at 6:41 pm

    The absolutely worst thing about old Tiger’s Stadium were the mens rest-rooms. They didn’t have urinals as such, just these 8 foot long porcelain troughs. No modesty barriers or anything. You had to stand there in front of God and man have hope your sphincter relaxed long enough to empty your bladder.

    And I remember the group gym class showers at school. It didn’t matter whether you had public hair or not, it was just mega embarrassing. A coed group shower… no way. I’ll stink first.

    Here’s food for thought — the ten best sentences from literture.
    http://theamericanscholar.org/ten-best-sentences/#.U1qtNuZdV0F

    Aside from Jane Austin, Hemingway and Dickens I’d call the others candidates for the Bulwer-Lytton contest. Obviously your mileage will vary.

    Little Bird @29: Hear! Hear!

    Ialways thought the “Liberal agenda” was “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” which I believe is (c) Jesus Christ. Never undeerstood why conservatives have so much trouble with that.

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  54. Danny said on April 25, 2014 at 7:39 pm

    Okay, this story just keeps getting weirder and weirder:

    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/04/25/black_bundy_bodyguard_hes_not_a_racist_id_take_a_bullet_for_that_man.html

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  55. Deborah said on April 25, 2014 at 8:11 pm

    Hmmm, do you think Bundy’s black bodyguard is a volunteer?

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  56. Charlotte said on April 25, 2014 at 9:22 pm

    I’d add to the best 1st sentences, my favorite from Jim Harrison: “Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone.”

    Iambic pentameter. From “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” — middle story in the Legends of the Fall volume. Often overlooked because Legends, and Revenge are both so packed with incident. One of Harrison’s perfect little quiet stories.

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  57. alex said on April 25, 2014 at 9:39 pm

    And Bundy has had a bodyguard for how long? Since he became a media sensation and freak magnet about a week ago? I’m surprised Camille Paglia hasn’t shown up yet to bask in his limelight and tell us we’re all nuts for not recognizing what a feminist folk hero he is in addition to being Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara and Rosa Parks all rolled into one.

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  58. Sue said on April 25, 2014 at 10:31 pm

    Beb @53 – obviously they’ve never heard of Terry Pratchett.
    1. And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.
    2. Ripples of paradox spread out across the sea of causality.
    3. You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.
    4. There was a thoughtful pause in the conversation as the assembled Brethren mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side.
    5.Asking someone to repeat a phrase you’d not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.
    6. It takes a very special and strong-minded atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, ‘Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!’ or ‘Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!’
    7. He was not, by the standard definitions, a bad man; in the same way a plague-bearing rat is not, from a dispassionate point of view, a bad animal.
    8. Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, ‘What happens if I do this?’
    9. After you’d known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way.
    And my personal favorite…
    10. The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

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  59. Sue said on April 25, 2014 at 10:35 pm

    And while I’m at it:
    Pride and Prejudice not only has the best first sentence of the first chapter, it has a pretty awesome first sentence of the last one:
    “Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennett got rid of her two most deserving daughters.”

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  60. brian stouder said on April 25, 2014 at 11:21 pm

    Harry Reid got a pass after his comments, Jeff. The “book was closed” very quickly.

    Harry Reid “got a pass” because what he said about those heavily armed maroons that Bundy drew are American terrorists.

    Ol’ Clive is a racist, free-loading, “subsidized” hypocrite who says that the United States government does not legitimately exist, even as he theatrically rides his horse and literally wraps himself in an over-sized flag of the (nonexistent?) United States, as he pretends to be a cowboy.

    The guy speaks stream-of-consciousness ignorance and intolerance, as more and more armed misfits come to him, like flies to a dung-heap…. and the woman or man who issued the “stand-down” orders to the BLM should win a Congressional Medal of Honor, since denying Bundy (et al) martyrdom was the single most effective and utterly devastating thing they could have done to that guy.

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  61. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 26, 2014 at 12:59 am

    Jeff B., thanks for your shout-out to Lyndon. He’s a fascinating character to whom history, I think, will be kinder than we have been to date. A pretty or admirable person, not at all, but as a politician, he’s . . . interesting. And was emphatically more right than wrong. And as a creature of his times, he stands out. Maybe he’s the one-eyed man in a realm of blind men who spent some time as king, then poked his own eye out in frustration.

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  62. Dexter said on April 26, 2014 at 3:45 am

    beb, on your words @ #53, all those old ballparks had those troughs. Michigan Stadium is totally different. You crowd in and take a hot piss against a wall which has a horizontal water pipe with little holes dripping a drop of water every so often.
    The sickening piss smell makes a queasy person throw up once in a while in there. I am sure the system was designed in 1926, probably by old Fielding Yost himself, the year before the place opened.
    Anyone who was in the US Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s spent time in the old wooden WWII-built barracks. The crappers were close to each other in a totally open bay latrine. You sat by another soldier in the morning and after a few days you got used to it, you had absolutely no options.
    Years later my foreman in the factory told me how the sailors on the ship he was on in the US Navy amused themselves at times. The way he told it, the men sat on a bench with holes for seats and a stream of sea water was pumped up and kept moving through carrying the product along to the ocean. So as a joke these sailors lit newspapers on fire and sailed them along the stream , burning the hell out of the unsuspecting sitter. I guess they got bored easily. He’d tell that story about every six months. I always thought “WTFF?”

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  63. alex said on April 26, 2014 at 7:07 am

    It wasn’t until one time at Wrigley when I was wearing shorts that I felt warm splatters emanating from those adjacent to me and had an epiphany (and at the same time a major gross-out) about how my slacks and jeans had been keeping me in the dark all of my life and filthier than I would ever have guessed.

    And Dex, as regards public showers, they had them at the Howe Military Lower School, all the better for the pederastic personnel to do their window shopping. Most memorable were the late bloomers, the mini micros and the low-hangin’ bananas. As for the cadets…

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  64. Minnie said on April 26, 2014 at 8:08 am

    Terry Pratchett! Just a few more:

    “The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

    “It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.”

    “It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.”

    “Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It’s the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.”

    “What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.”

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  65. alex said on April 26, 2014 at 8:41 am

    Jonathan Swift:

    The system of the Gospel, after the fate of other systems, is generally antiquated and exploded, and the mass or body of the common people, among whom it seems to have had its latest credit, are now grown as much ashamed of it as their betters; opinions, like fashions, always descending from those of quality to the middle sort, and thence to the vulgar, where at length they are dropped and vanish.

    Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and even Barbara Ehrenreich have never said it as artfully, much less as snarkily.

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  66. Laura said on April 26, 2014 at 11:26 am

    Just a heads up on college from the mom of a soon-to-be-graduating HS kid. Because so many schools use Common Ap, and everyone does college applications online, the average number of schools any given student applies to has spiked from 2-3 to 10-12. This means that all schools are selective now; there are no safety schools. It’s fairly insane. Buckle up!

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/education/17admissions.html

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  67. coozledad said on April 26, 2014 at 11:49 am

    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2014/04/cliven-bundys-slavery-delusion.html

    It is bizarre that a man who has ranted about his own freedom for weeks can speak so contemptuously about the freedom of others. Given his grand claims regarding what American freedom means, it is inadequate to call him historically illiterate or misinformed about the conditions of slavery—the constant, brutal violence that reinforced it and the way it robbed people of the ability to make the most basic choices about their lives. At the very least, he must know that slaves could not move where they wanted to, and could not vote. For him to muse about black Americans having less freedom now is to find their voices and their volition valueless—to not equate their participation in the democratic process as contributing to everyone’s freedom. The other alternative is that he has such a degraded view of the souls of black people that he doesn’t think these freedoms express anything in them. It suggests that his idea of “more freedom” for black people is similar to his notion of freedom for his cattle: productive, but under private control and private guns, with the absent acquiescence of the federal government.

    Once again, The Republican Party in its raw sociopathic essence.

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  68. Danny said on April 26, 2014 at 12:01 pm

    Brian, the comment about Harry Ried getting a pass referred to my earlier coment at 13:

    “A few years ago, Harry Reid was referring to then-candidate Obama as “clean and articulate” and, as you might see, that idiot wouldn’t fit nicely into supporting some your worldview hypotheses.”

    Supposedly, you read a lot of history. Would it be asking too much of you to require you to read a little recent history (like the present fucking thread in fucking context) before shooting off your mouth. Man, you do this all the time. What an idiot.

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  69. coozledad said on April 26, 2014 at 12:10 pm

    Danny, the “clean and articulate” comment wasn’t made by Harry Reid. It was made by Joe Biden, whom Obama selected as his running mate.

    You’re an idiot.

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  70. coozledad said on April 26, 2014 at 12:18 pm

    Once again, the amazing thing about this blog is that people would be willing to overlook your childish effrontery if it were couched in any thing other than malign ignorance, a stunning moral illiteracy coupled with matching aggrieved stupidity.

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  71. Danny said on April 26, 2014 at 12:25 pm

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/09/harry-reid-negro-comment-_n_417406.html

    Actually, now that I looked it up, what Reid said at the time was much worse. He called Obama “light-skinned” and “with no Negro dialect.” Which was basically code for saying that (wink wink) “Even though Obama is a ‘Negro’, he’s one of them light-skinned ones who doesn’t speak all ghetto.”

    And this is you Senate majority leader

    Glad to see Biden the VP did it too. Your both idiots and so are they.

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  72. brian stouder said on April 26, 2014 at 12:40 pm

    My wife would LEAP to agree that I’m an idiot – so there’s that.

    President Obama is quite different from his predecessors, it is true; and possibly our next president will be even MORE different (from all her predecessors) – and people will make clunky references to how she handles international relations, and/or to her “First Gentleman”‘s social initiatives.

    But aside from all that – I present to you the following thing, which made me laugh out loud. Skip the article, and just look at the photo – and tell me what you see. (mind you, this was published on the front page above the fold on this morning’s paper)

    http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20140426/LOCAL/304269987/1006/NEWS

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  73. coozledad said on April 26, 2014 at 12:50 pm

    No. You misattributed a quote, and didn’t look it up until you were called on it. This is the failure you were accusing Brian of. In addition to being an idiot, you are incapable of embarrassment, self-reflection, or shame.

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  74. David C. said on April 26, 2014 at 12:58 pm

    And now for the lighter side. I was attacked by a suicide squirrel squad this morning on my bike ride. Two were trying to distract me and the third tried to jump into my front wheel. Luckily, he bounced off the spokes instead of getting caught inside. If he had, it would have been a bad day for the both of us.

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  75. Danny said on April 26, 2014 at 1:00 pm

    Still flailing about to win an argument, Derrick.

    Clearly both Biden and Reid said reprehensible things that were not only close in nature, but close in wording. And these are the senate majority leader and VP, which doesn’t fit well into your constant narrative, “four-legs ‘always’ good.”

    Cheer up, some other idiot will be along shortly to declare you are a “thread winner!”

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  76. Dexter said on April 26, 2014 at 2:48 pm

    Guess what movie I have been watching over and over? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10ldVRHRSw

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  77. alex said on April 26, 2014 at 3:30 pm

    Danny, fuck off. What Reid and Biden said may have been awkward and cringeworthy, but it wasn’t flat out malicious. Like you.

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  78. Bob (not Greene) said on April 26, 2014 at 3:51 pm

    Danny, Derrick isn’t arguing with you. He’s calling you a fucking idiot, you fucking idiot.

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  79. Linda said on April 26, 2014 at 3:53 pm

    Very cool map in the NYTimes of major league baseball allegiances. Since moving to northern Ohio, and having a bro in law from northeast Ohio, I have found them…interesting:

    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-upshot-baseball.html?_r=0

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  80. brian stouder said on April 26, 2014 at 3:56 pm

    The Big Lebowski, eh? I’ve never see that one, but I’ll add it to the list

    We were out lawn-mower shopping; every 6 or 8 years, I have to get one. We go to one of the big-box stores and buy the cheapest one we can find with a B&S engine…currently the cheapest I’ve seen = $144.

    A month ago we took a page from Alex’s book, and were refrigerator shopping. I started out wanting stainless steel finish, and Pam wanted black. As soon as we hit the first store, I saw that she was right and I was wrong: those stainless steel finished things all looked TERRIBLE! They all had more fingerprints and smudges and clouds of smears on them that I could just see how it would always look, in our kitchen.

    We ended up with a black Whirlpool with side-by-side refrigerator doors, and a pull-out freezer drawer.

    And I’ll just say, if I were in San Diego this morning, I’d be on the way to their zoo – which is almost as nice as our is. The Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo opens today, and our 9 year old (almost 10) is all set to go see Bill and Ina (et al)

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  81. Deborah said on April 26, 2014 at 4:11 pm

    Brian, I see a photo of Pence waving, I must be missing something.

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  82. brian stouder said on April 26, 2014 at 4:38 pm

    Deborah – with all apologies to anyone who likes our Bobby Knight look-alike governor – that guy standing at that podium with the overly-proud “NRA” emblazoned upon it, and with his right hand raised (it looked to me like he was delivering a speech at that moment) brought to mind other rallies at other times and places in history….but I suppose that, at that moment, I was indeed indulging in hyperbolic partisanship.

    Leaving that aside – I thought of you today! Grant and I were running errands, and rolled past an exotic car lot, where one routinely sees Ferraris and Porches and other European car nameplates that end in vowels (Sweet Rides on West Jefferson, run by the fellow who owns Sweetwater Sound – a genuine pillar of our community), and what was right up front? A Delorean with the gull-wing doors open!

    If I did the Facebook thing, we’d a had to do the Selfie thing over there!

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  83. Dexter said on April 26, 2014 at 5:16 pm

    brian, “The Big Lebowski” was a flop at the box office and has since become a huge cult favorite. John Turturro’s portrayal of the pederast bowler Jesus Quintana is worth taking time to watch the movie. By now I have every line memorized and I still watch it. The first time through, pay very close attention to everything going on or you will quickly get lost. By the third time through you will have picked everything up. John Goodman and Jeff Bridges are outstanding.

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  84. Danny said on April 26, 2014 at 5:32 pm

    Um, we did the San Diego Art Walk downtown, now we are heading to the Zoo Safari Park.

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  85. brian stouder said on April 26, 2014 at 5:34 pm

    There ya’ go!

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  86. Kirk said on April 26, 2014 at 6:25 pm

    A shortened version of The Big Lebowski (F-bombs only). Definitely not safe for sensitive ears.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmACDeyYmBg

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  87. Kirk said on April 26, 2014 at 6:27 pm

    My favorite line: “I hate the fucking Eagles.”

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  88. Dexter said on April 26, 2014 at 7:14 pm

    Kirk: “Fuck you man you don’t like my fuckin’ music get your own fuckin’ cab!” “Out! Out!”

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  89. Dexter said on April 26, 2014 at 7:32 pm

    Well, if you can stand the broken audio, here’s the whole sordid Donald Sterling conversation with his “mix” girlfriend in which the owner of the LA Clippers is fighting verbally with his girlfriend over her choice to Instagram photos of herself with “minorities”. He doesn’t like it. Well, he does give the freedom to bring them home and fuck her, so there’s that….
    http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2014/04/26/clippers-owner-donald-sterling-reportedly-makes-racist-comments-to-his-girlfriend/

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  90. Dave said on April 27, 2014 at 12:56 am

    Idiot is 78 years old, if he didn’t have all that money, well, no girlfriend, either. At least not that girlfriend. You’d think he’d know enough to keep his mouth shut, after all, he was content to own the worst team in the NBA for years, didn’t care at all. What happened?

    Sorry, afraid I’m one who has made myself watch “The Big Lebowski” twice and thought it an awful waste of time. I was hoping it’d get better the second time but I don’t get its cult status. I can cuss with the best of them, if I want, I had nearly forty years of RR training, but that’s about all that movie sounds like to me.

    Some things, I just don’t get.

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  91. basset said on April 27, 2014 at 11:46 am

    Meanwhile, a… clever… approach to urban growth in Winston-Salem:

    http://youtu.be/6Vuo0ZgRTSI

    Cooz, be nice.

    I’m afraid we’ll have to do one of these for Nashville, the bar is rather higher here though… about half the bartenders, waiters, etc. around here were the hottest guitar player in town back home and most of the rest of them were singers, songwriters, or something. Our copier repairman had two CDs out when I got here.

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  92. coozledad said on April 27, 2014 at 1:49 pm

    I don’t owe no racist no nice.

    Actually, the whole country doesn’t owe them anything but a boot in the ass to some hellhole where they can camp out with other paste-eating proto-hominids- maybe some place in Russia suitable for that pink, plump, ass where they can run their piss-flaps in an arctic void and no one has to listen to their mouthtrash anymore because it only comes out as piss cubes; where it’s cold enough to somewhat justify the complete absence of a human spark in them; where they can do their goddamn Dunning-Kruger shake all damn day if they want but it’s too cold for them to even shift molecules around enough to cause much damage.

    Fuck nice.

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  93. brian stouder said on April 27, 2014 at 3:08 pm

    Another note about race, and gun violence.

    A few months ago I got afoul of mark with regards to a case where a kiddo gut hold of a gun and someone ended up dead. I thought mom or dad (or both) needed to be arrested, while he thought the situation was clearly more complex than that.

    And now we have –

    http://wane.com/news/local/police-7-year-old-from-noble-county-killed-in-accidental-shooting/

    Police said a young boy is dead after an accidental shooting Saturday afternoon. The Noble County Sheriff’s Department received a 911 call to a shooting at 12:26 p.m. off 5211 W CR 1100 in North Ligonier. When officers arrived on the scene, they found Jaylin Miller, 7, had been hit and killed by a single gunshot.

    Police said Jaylin and his brother were out in the yard with a gun, trying to kill ground moles when the gun accidentally discharged, according to police. The Noble County Sheriff’s Department and the Noble County Coroner ruled the shooting as accidental.

    That’s the whole article.

    And I’m sorry, but I simply do not believe – not for one nanosecond – that if this exact same set of circumstances occurred in an urban (rather than rural) setting, that mom or dad or Auntie (or all of the above) wouldn’t have been shoved into the back of police cars and taken downtown, and probably arrested and charged by now.

    Bonus points opportunity for anyone who wants to attack me: I don’t know whether the people involved are white or black. I am assuming they’re white, and my theory is that this would be different if they were black. I could be WRONG on every single point, but that’s what I believe

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  94. Danny said on April 27, 2014 at 4:08 pm

    Brian, you DO realize that no one attacked you for deploring racism, right?

    If you review up, you’ll see that my first post indicated quite clearly that I agreed the rancher was racist.. hence “racist rancher.” That was then followed by the usual aggressive and inane spewings from Derrick which I responded to and then followed by your tart little “troll” comment which I did not respond to. It wasn’t until you continued in a further post to completely miss the point on the Harry Reid comment which was ALSO in my original post, that I unloaded on you.

    And I am not sympathetic in the least towards Clive Bundy. He is obviously a racist who has said very offensive things. I do however marvel that the NYT decided to quote him somewhat out of context and that he has a black bodyguard who apparently has no problems with his comments, says he treats him like a son and would take a bullet for him. A very weird story all in all.

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  95. coozledad said on April 27, 2014 at 4:50 pm

    Old fascist piece of sloppy skank:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sarah-palin-waterboarding

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  96. Joe K said on April 27, 2014 at 9:35 pm

    Komets tied 1-1 going into the 2nd overtime. Getting my moneys worth tonight.
    Pilot Joe

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  97. Kirk said on April 27, 2014 at 9:44 pm

    What does a Komets playoff ticket go for?

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  98. basset said on April 27, 2014 at 10:46 pm

    Been over thirty years since I’ve been to a Komets game – remember seeing them play the Grand Rapids Owls in some falling-down arena up on the north side of town which had previously been a discount store or something. The Komets’ goalie had a profile in the program which described how he kept the team’s books and also drove a Pepsi truck in the offseason.

    Cooz, “be nice” referred to the stream of your usual that I thought we’d get at the mention of anywhere in North Carolina. Good not to have it for a change but I suppose now we’ll hear some more new names for people you don’t like.

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  99. Joe Kobiela said on April 27, 2014 at 11:45 pm

    My ticket was $24,
    Basset the k’s have played in the colusiem for 50 years, it is nice place to watch a game.
    They won, defeating the #1 seed, the Komets were # 8
    Pilot Joe

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  100. Basset said on April 28, 2014 at 6:51 am

    North side of Grand Rapids, i should have said.

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