Salt City Sinner

posted 10/31/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps the best political or literary take-down of my generation was penned by Matt Taibbi in response to Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat." In the review, Taibbi notes the peculiar quality that distinguishes Friedman from the usual beltway idiots ( link ): The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of one word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays...Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always  screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest detail without genius. in a like manner, Paul T. Mero, alpha brain at Salt Lake City's conservative Suth...

posted 10/23/2012  by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, wage slaves! If there are two things I love (there are a lot more than two things I love), they are breakfast and science fiction. In this very special edition of Salt City Sinner we will examine a few slightly more (or less) esoteric science fiction television programs in terms of what breakfast they represent. What were my criteria for picking this show instead of that? Don't ask any damned questions, just roll with it, and feel free to comment. First up! nice LaserDisc you have there Series: Any Star Trek Pros: Functioning positive example of Socialist government (oh wait, all of Europe before the Eurozone crisis also qualified/s) Cons: Ferengi ear-sex is mad creepy Breakfast: Two eggs fried over easy with bacon and white toast. Reliable, sensible, old-school. Series:  Any Star Wars Pros:  Seriously awesome set design and internal cohesion (pre-prequels) Cons: George Lucas Breakfast: ...

posted 8/20/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Everybody loves an underdog. Exhibit A: Now, even if you are not a sports fan, you might have seen and probably enjoyed the movie 'Rudy.' This enjoyment can be taken too far, of course - once upon a time I had a corporate gig where our incoming employee orientation included a screening of the above scene to get us "jazzed up" about locum tenens healthcare staffing. A very obnoxious trope that is found in a vast majority of American cinema is the "triumph of the underdog" - you know, every movie has to have the third act, where the hero loses everything and we suffer in agony with him as the odds stack up against him. Then, in Act Four - hey, presto! our hero triumphs over the vastly overwhelming forces of evil to win the day! This love of the underdog has a dark side that has metastasized most odiously in America. You see, not only does everybody love to see the underdog take down the uberdog - at this po...

posted 7/17/2012 by the Salt City Sinner I pointed out the other day that WND, or Big Joe Farah's Woodshed Of Racist Ultra-Christian Freaks (as I like to call it), has taken a few bold steps over the line that previously separated it from openly white supremacist operations like Stormfront. Now it seems that major establishment conservative magazine and website National Review has finally been driven over the edge as well. As Wonkette and Gawker have both pointed out, yesterday's Reagan-fellating column from prominent conservative pundit Jay Nordlinger contains an interesting slip of the tongue: Truth is, some conservatives lamented the fact that [Ronald Reagan] had indeed "grown" in office. He had gone out of his way to accommodate liberals and moderates, and to accommodate the Kremlin. He was raising taxes, spending like crazy, welcoming wetbacks , pursuing arms control. Jay Nordlinger, hero of Real (Really White) America "Welcoming wetback...

posted 7/13/2012 by the Salt City Sinner When I talk or write about far-right, extremist news site and aggregator WND, formerly "World Net Daily," I usually say that "it's the most far-right website this side of Stormfront." Since I won't be linking to Stormfront, suffice to say that it is a white supremacist / Christian Identity site where scary racist weirdos go to post weird scary racist nonsense. Well, the distinction between WND's ideology and outright white supremacy just got much blurrier. Meet Colin Flaherty, newly minted WND contributor and not-at-all-racist author of "White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return Of Racial Violence To America And How The Media Ignores It" (I won't be linking to that, either). A face for radio (and a best-selling racist screed) You know how they say that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Let's see what hammer Grand Cyclops Flaherty is wielding right now: Hmm,...

As the learned C Bernard recently noted , Senator Orrin Hatch has of late been Plen-T Plaining of religious persecution. Hatch joins a chorus of other religious leaders clamoring against a recent executive mandate. In a Fact Sheet published on February 10, the White House announced that, [u]nder the new policy to be announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works. The policy also ensures that if a woman works for a religious employer with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide, pay for or refer for contraception coverage, but her insurance company will be required to directly offer her contraceptive care free of charge. This issue has in the past three weeks been debated in Congress , twisted into taxpayer support for promiscuity (more on this vomit later), and spun as both the tapestry of our progressive future...

Jack Abramoff is sorry. He's sorry for what he did. Gosh, he didn't know it was wrong  when he did it, but now that he's had some time to think about it (federally subsidized time in a white-collar "minimum security prison camp" in Cumberland, MD), why, it was a crime , the way he behaved - taking all that money, rigging the system, bilking the rubes and living high on the hog during the Bad Old Years of Republican one-party rule during the high tide of the Bush Administration. I rock the Boris Badenov look much fresher than Abramoff Of course, everyone else was doing it. Don't get Abramoff wrong - he may be sorry for what he did, but he wants to make damn sure that everyone knows that his accusers are as guilty as he is. What Jack Abramoff did was wrong, sure, but what he was really guilty of was being good at the game, baby, going with the flow even though that flow washed him over the line of the law. Abramoff's new autobiography, idioticall...

A wise man once coined the maxim de mortuis, nil nisi bonum, and we here at RedState have always made an effort to let even the death of even the most contemptible of our political foes pass without a word of criticism. - RS Insider, RedState, 11:45 AM EDT *Pause for laughter* I can’t say that I’ll miss him. He, to me, represented all that is wrong with Washington — a kingdom of nepotism and worship at the alter of failed liberal policies that get repeated ad infinitum...John Kerry is now the senior [Massachusetts] senator. God help that state. - Erick Erickson, RedState, 8:43 AM EDT ...Ted Kennedy, a man whose personal life ranged from alcoholism to debauchery to sexual harrassment to (sadly, uncharged) second-degree murder, and whose public career entailed the embrace of nearly every foolish, ruinous and cruel political idea of the past five decades... - Dan McLaughlin, RedState, 11:12 AM EDT Insofar as he was a man of any religious faith at all, he was nominally a Catholic, a faith ...