X-Tra Rant

I’m officially getting behind a new candidate for president. A candidate who understand the real issues. A candidate who doesn’t hate America.

American Flag Lapel Pin is patriotism you can count on!!!

LapelPin08.com is the home of the most patriotic candidate in the race for the White House.

I can’t even begin to write coherently about the Democratic debate last night. I didn’t watch it because I’d figure it was going to be more of the same blandness: semi-important policy questions and a whole lot of nothing said. Instead it was apparently an before any actual policy question was asked. The rest was about bullshit GOP talking points.

I’ll let Masson sum it up on a more coherent manner than I can:

I didn’t watch the ABC Debate. I hear the moderators were awful. The following topics apparently did not figure prominently:

The financial crisis
The collapse of housing values in the US and around the world
Afghanistan
Health care
Torture
The declining value of the US Dollar
Education
Trade
Pakistan
Energy
Immigration
The decline of American manufacturing
The Supreme Court
The burgeoning world food crisis.
Global warming
China
The attacks on organized labor and the working class
Terrorism and al Qaeda
Civil liberties and constraints on government surveillance

Flag pins, on the other hand, were deemed significant. Our media is just truly, truly horrible.

Our bullshit media is ruining this country. To steal a line from CJ, if you truly think that the question of a candidate wearing a lapel pin is more important than god damned policy you don’t deserve to vote.

More debate dumb-assery summaries:

• Charlie Gibson’s Cocktail Napkin Economics [Wonk Room]
  
• I just complained to ABC [Sadly, No!]
• Lee Atwater Lives!!! [dailyKos: DHinMI]
• Clinton-Obama Debate: ABC Decides Top Issues Facing Americans Are Gaffes, Flag Pins and ’60s Radicals [Editor & Publisher]
• Gibson, Stephanapoulos outrage! [Philly.com]

That’s all I can write or even stand to read at this point before I have a stroke and/or get really stabbity.

After reading this piece on Politico, I can only come to one conclusion - we need to turn the election of our President into a drinking contest of some sorts.

When I saw a video of Hillary Clinton downing a shot of Crown Royal whiskey in Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., on Saturday night, I was delighted to see that she has finally learned what campaigning for president is all about.

Some potential ideas for Drinking Games to decide our president:

• Quarters: Hey there’s a president on the quarter. It seems perfect but will it resonate with the Real Americans or just college frat boys?
• Beer Pong: Ditto, but this is something I could see making Spike TV into our election coverage leader.
• Speed Drinking: This could be especially important in the primary as the last World Record Holder (before the category being dropped from the Guinness Book) was from Pennsylvania. Have Steven Petrosino officiate.
• SOTU Drinking Game: Candidates are forced to watch all of George W. Bush’s SOTU speeches and follow the drinking game rules for those speeches. Last candidate to pass out wins.
• Old School Drink Them Under The Table: Easy. The candidates all sit around a table and start drinking shots. Rotate the shots so that all parts of America feel “connected with”. Bourbon, whiskey, vodka, jello shots, the whole gamut. Last candidate standing is the Rootenist Tootenist Connectitiest With Real Americans President 2008!!!

Hillary Prepares for Drink Off To The White House 2008

Think about it - no annoying advertising. No canvassers at your door during dinner. No stupid talking heads. Just the candidates being like “Real Americans” and drowning their pain in alcohol - for the good of our nation. And all we have to worry about is the alcohol lobby and undue influence from foreign spirits.

Thank you Roger Simon. You’ve transformed our electoral process.

Barack Obama has lost my vote.

Why you ask? I’ll tell you why. Because Barack Obama hates cats and cat owners.

That’s a harsh thing to say, I know. But he’s only just now done his first interview with national magazine Cat Fancy. He has yet to do an interview with ANY local cat-enthusiast press. The Charlotte Cat Lover? Nope. The Indianapolis Cat Times? Nope. The Philadelphia Cat Enthusiast? Not even after repeated attempts by their journalists to line up an interview. Oh sure, Obama has done “open letters’ to the cat loving community on a few cat-centric blogs and national cat press. But his snubbing of the local feline lover press is a slap in the face of cat lovers everywhere!

But this isn’t the only problem. Barack Obama has a long history of association with not only dog lovers, but cat haters. His former Sunday school teacher once said “I hate cats. They are lay about no good animals who do nothing but puke on your carpet and get their fur everywhere!” The early stages of his campaign saw association with an adviser who was an avowed cat hater.

Even when Obama tries to pretend like he loves cats and cat lovers, he belies his true intentions. Take this quote from his only (and recent) interview in Cat Fancy:

Let me tell you a story. When I was in college, I had this professor I loved. Belvedere Higgins. I think that was his name. Anyway, I found out through the course of my class with him that Mr. Higgins was a cat lover. This was amazing to me - here was a cat lover who wasn’t out there proselytizing his views. He just WAS a cat lover and was so comfortable with it.

Now, you may read that as Barack Obama having been raised and brought up in a culture where cat lovers were always seen as .. pushy about it, trying to convert you to their cat loving lifestyle. That it was a moment where he realized that, unlike the cultural perceptions he had been raised in, cat lovers were just like everyone else and deserved to be treated as such. But the cat loving community out there - we know what it really means. It really means that Barack Obama STILL THINKS that cat lovers are just overly pushy freaks who want to make every dog lover a cat lover and turn Fido into Wittle Fuzzy Wuzzy the cutest little kitty. To read anything more benign into that statement is to be a cat hater yourself.

Oh sure, Brack Obama SAYS he has no problem with cats. He SAYS that he wants cat lovers and dog lovers to be equal in the eyes of the government. He even supports fully repealing the Defense Of Man’s Best Friend Act. But whatever, those snubbed interviews say more than that. Busy schedule? Pah! A likely excuse.

Sure, Hillary doesn’t support a full roll back of the Defense Of Man’s Best Friend Act, only partial. But her interviews with local feline publications show her true dedication to the cat fanciers of America. She tells stories about her many friends who love cats. It’s really heartwarming. Some will say she is just pandering to the cat loving community in a final attempt to drive a wedge in Obama’s support and wrest the nomination from him. Whatever - we know Hillary really loves cats and Obama obviously hates them. Obviously. Really.

Stop looking at me like that.

Read this for your daily requirement of outrage.

From one of the linked articles in that post:

A study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University shows turnout in 2004 was about 4% lower in states that required voters to sign their name or produce documentation. Hispanic turnout was 10% lower; the difference was about 6% for blacks and Asian-Americans.

The post goes on to quite Kevin Drum using some Indiana statistics in 2006 that highlight the fact that the people most likely (by an 8% margin) to have ID at the polls were Republicans - the white, high income, middle aged bread and butter of the GOP.

Fuck Todd Rokita. Fuck the Indiana GOP. Fuck the GOP nationally who uses the boogeyman of ‘voter fraud’ which just doesn’t happen (and certainly not on a scale to justify a program that suppresses turnout among registered law abiding voters), to supress the vote of their political enemies.

Jeebus Xenu, I’m pissed.

Alright, I’m going to poke a giant* because this has been bugging me since I read this in my RSS feed. I respect the work at Shakespeare’s Sister immensely, and Melissa McEwan is a very talented blogger, but sometimes I just don’t get it.

Apparently this ad (above) for HBO’s The Tudors implies that rape and strangulation of women is awesome. Oh, and the wine glass represents vaginal bleeding.

Really.

Alright. I guess I’ll have to do this in handy bullet form or otherwise I’ll start rambling.

• Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a goblet of wine is just a goblet of wine
• The poster is for a show called The Tudors and the characters in it are of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Of course there is violence implied. Henry VIII eventually has Anne Boleyn EXECUTED.
• If the issue is that there are some people that would find that image ’sexy’,fine.Those people are freaks and should be called out. But that doesn’t mean that the creators of that poster/show think it is sexy or fine or awesome. It means the show deals with violent themes, and that a teaser poster for the show depicts allusions to those violent themes in the context of a royal marriage. OH NOES! DEPICTING THINGS THAT HAPPEN!
• “What I find amazing is that none of the nearly hundred commenters at Feministing appear to have come to the same conclusion..” Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe the nearly hundred commenters at Feministing understand the concept of context and that sometimes art reflects violent themes without putting a stamp of approval on those violent themes.
• Alright, so McEwan admits to not understanding the context at first. But then goes on to make the same arguments with the context not being used to explain them. Even IF the spilling goblet of wine represents lost (and forcibly taken) virginity, Henry VIII was obviously not a nice man and treated his women with violence and disrespect. The show is obviously going to reflect that. That’s not an endorsement. That’s dramatization of historical fact. Should they have remade Henry VIII to be a swell modern man? Should no teaser images for the show ever dare imply the innate terribleness of Henry VIII towards women?

To follow:

And, naturally, no thinly veiled rape imagery used to promote a TV show or film would be complete if it didn’t also portray the symbolic rape as totally hot.

Umm, I don’t know about you but I don’t find it totally hot at all. I don’t see it being depicted as totally hot. I don’t know why YOU see it as totally hot. I see it as a thinly veiled expression of Henry VIII’s treatment of Anne Boleyn and an allusion to his eventual execution of her.

That many women and men will look at that image and think it’s sexy, without ever considering the disturbing implications of that tipped goblet and spilling wine, no less his hands ominously poised to choke her and force apart her legs, exposes the profundity of the rape culture more certainly and shockingly than anything I write about the image ever could.

That many men and women will look at it and think it’s sexy says a lot about THOSE men and women. It also says a lot about YOU that whenever you see an image like this you assume that “many women and men” will think it is sexy. I sure as hell don’t. And given the context of the show this image is specifically for, I just don’t see how this applies.

In summary:

• Henry VIII was a violent bastard
• Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn after initial resistance from her meaning the wedding was probably against her will in some way anyway.
• Given that Henry VIII was a violent bastard and pursued and got women against their will, it can be deduced without much thought that Henry VIII was a violent bastard towards women
• The Tudors is in no small part about Henry VIII
• Naturally, The Tudors will include his violent bastardness towards women, specifically that he HAD ANNE BOLEYN EXECUTED.
• THEREFORE: A teaser poster for this show will reflect these themes. That does not mean the creators of, watchers of, nor anyone else who looks at this poster of the show condones the actions of Henry VIII nor the actions of anyone who thinks that rape is sexy.

I thought about dipping my toe into the comments on Shakespeare’s Sister, but on posts like this they usually end up as one of two flavors: “me too!!” or “I didn’t notice that at first but now that you pointed it out to me I am OUTRAGED!!!111!eleven!!1″. Anyone who points out things like context or the fact that sometimes, as I said before, a cigar is a cigar is ripped for being a misogynistic woman hating cretin.

But hey, this is the same feminist site that has Project Runway open threads, for a tv reality show about an industry that is one of the most degrading of women on the planet. So maybe I don’t understand context afterall?

*By ‘giant’, I don’t mean a slur against large women, I mean that your site is large and well trafficked**
**By ‘large and well trafficked’ I don’t mean you are a big slut. Please. I’m just trying to construct an honest to Xenu simple sentence here!
Update: Alright I REALLY, SWEAR I didn’t mean that to be an attack of any sort. It was one of those cases where my love of pun/play on word based humor trumped thought and I sort of rationalized it as a play off of how these sorts of debatuments (debate + argument) usually play out, with insult and no actual debate. Anyone who knows me knows that I really truly am not that sort. But looking at it a third time (and with anxiety-ridden eyes) I can see how that can be taken in another way. I am Jason’s stupid humor that doesn’t think before making a joke sometimes. usually it’s harmless and pun based, sometimes it’s not.

Alright so I decided to get my girlfriend hooked up with a wireless router. Ended up getting a simple Netgear wireless-g router, perfect for someone who just needs to get online and doesn’t need much in the way of fancy stuff. All set to install, which is when I started to wonder if Netgear’s router installation process is well thought out…

1. Okay so there’s no paper documentation to do a manual setup. I just want the default IP, username and password. I can set the rest up myself. WHy won’t you give me that, Netgear?
2. Fine, I’ll use the fucking ‘wizard’.
3. Alright wizard is working pretty well. Even asking me what sort of security I want on the wireless.
4. Wait… shouldn’t it ask me to change the router’s default admin password?
5. Shouldn’t it at least tell me what the default admin password is so I can, you know, log into the damn thing?
6. Alright, time to dig through the documentation ont eh CD and there it is… page two of the “manual setup” section contains the default router username and password.
7. I finally am able to login to the router and change the default password for the admin account.

That entire time, the router was insecure. If someone going through the install declines to set up WPA or WEP security on the wireless access, taking over the router and seriously fucking things up would be child’s play. Even a retarded “1337 hax0r” could do it.

And I wondered why so many wireless access points I run across are unsecured and using default passwords. One of the major players doesn’t even prompt users to change the password!

if you use or buy Netgear routers, make sure to change your password. Apparently they don’t think it’s all that important.