I wish Joe Barton (R-TX) was my dad.

OK, maybe not my dad. My dad's not so bad. But maybe my granddad, because seriously, I bet Joe Barton's kids live like fricking kings.

I didn't do a lot of egregiously bad isht when I was a kid, but I did get in a heap of trouble when I was 18 for throwing a party while my parents were out of town, after having been explicitly instructed not to. The party was a real rager -- 50-something people, underage drinking, smoking, people running around naked in the backyard, a true suburban Columbus classic -- but it wasn't the party itself my parents were mad about. Hell, I cleaned up so well afterward that they didn't even find out about it until nearly a week after they'd gotten back. What they were mad about was that I'd lied about it, and lying being about the worst thing you could do in my family, they brought the hammer down on me: Lost the use of my car for the rest of the school year, grounded anytime I came home from UGA, probably forfeited my monthly allowance somewhere along the line. About the most severe punishment I got for anything I did as a teenager, now that I think about it.

If Joe Barton had been my granddad, though, he would've bitched my parents out and apologized on their behalf for being so mean to me.



Your eyes/ears do not deceive you -- Barton apologized to BP for mean nasty Obama making them pay for the damage they'd inflicted upon the Gulf coast. And while he claimed to be speaking only for himself and not the Republican Party, he wasn't the only one: The Republican Study Committee -- a caucus that comprises nearly two-thirds of the GOP's current House membership -- echoed Barton's sentiment that BP being instructed to set up a $20-billion escrow account to pay spill-related claims amounted to a "Chicago-style shakedown." All of the usual talk-radio suspects -- Limbaugh, Hannity, Oliver North -- are using suspiciously identical "slush fund" rhetoric to criticize the account. Tea Party hero Rand Paul, of course, said it was "un-American" for Obama to criticize BP at all.

Look, everyone has the right to criticize Obama (or any other president) to their hearts' content, but how craven do you have to be to plant your nose in BP's anus so that you can trash-talk him? Are they so confident in their ability to retake Congress this fall that they figure they can afford to throw a pity party for the most despised corporation in the country? Or as one of the few entities in America whose approval ratings are almost as low as BP's, is this their idea of "climbing down into the crevasse"?

I have no idea. All I know is, the next time I get stopped for speeding, I hope I've got Joe Barton in the car with me to wring an apology out of the cop for pulling me over.

(Yeah, the political stuff's back too, dorks. Drink it in.)

Monday Morning Cage Match XXII:City Slicker vs. Shitty Predictor.

After a moving/family-gathering-induced one-week hiatus, the Cage Match is back with a matchup I'm surprised I didn't think of before now: Actor/comedian Billy Crystal vs. commentator/editor Bill Kristol. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure Kristol has more "Daily Show" appearances under his belt, but it remains to be seen how well he'll hold his own in the other categories.

	Billy Crystal	Bill Kristol
Early years	Performed regularly at The Improv, then got the role of gay ventriloquist Jodie Dallas on "Soap"	Taught politics at a couple of Ivy League schools, then got the role of chief of staff to Reagan's secretary of education
WINNER: Crystal
Big break	Joined the cast of "Saturday Night Live" in 1984	Founded The Weekly Standard in 1994
WINNER: Crystal
Best known for	Repeated appearances as host of the Academy Awards	Repeated appearances on every political talk show you can think of
WINNER: Tie
Biggest mistake	"Fathers' Day"/"My Giant"	Full-throated support for the Iraq War
WINNER: Crystal (but not by much)
Attempt at a comeback	"Analyze This"/"Monsters, Inc."	Full-throated support for Sarah Palin as John McCain's 2008 running mate
WINNER: Crystal
How'd that work out?	Good reviews and more than $700 million in worldwide grosses	First Democratic president in eight years
WINNER: Kristol
Sage wisdom	"No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her."	"[Saddam Hussein]'s got weapons of mass destruction . . . Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world."
WINNER: Crystal

FINAL SCORE: Billy Crystal 6, Bill Kristol 2. Lesson: It is better to be unfunny some of the time than to be wrong all of the time.

Monday Morning Cage Match VI:Whores vs. just regular naked ladies.

As the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor were getting started this time last week, you heard a lot of folks make mention of the fact that the United States Senate is considered "the world's most exclusive club" due to the fact that it has only 100 people charged with deciding so many important things. And there's definitely some truth to that, but is it really the most exclusive club? I tried thinking of other groups that might have even fewer members, and you'll be shocked to discover that the first possibility I came up with was Playboy Playmates. (After all, in a given six-year stretch there will be at least 100 senators, but only 72 Playmates.)

Well, because I was laid out for most of this past week and had nothing better to do, I went combing back through Wikipedia to find the exact numbers, and it turns out that since Marilyn Monroe became Playboy's first centerfold in December of 1953, 670 different women have been Playmates, but only 476 different people have served any length of time in the U.S. Senate. So the Senate is, in absolute statistical terms, the more exclusive "club" here, but is it really the best club to be a member of? That's the subject of this week's Cage Match: Playmates vs. Senators.

	Playmates	Senators
Ruler of the roost	Hugh Hefner	Joe Biden
WINNER: Playmates
Method of selection	Hugh Hefner and photographers select from photos and bios sent by thousands of aspiring models	Popular vote
WINNER: Tie (Senate selection is more fair, but Playmate selection sounds way more fun)
Rewards/ privileges of selection	$25,000, virtually unlimited access to Playboy Mansion, C-list acting jobs	$174,000-$193,400/year, voting rights on legislation affecting the entire country, final approval of all Supreme Court nominees
WINNER: Senators
Most recent member(s)	Twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon	Comedian Al Franken
WINNER: Playmates (sorry, Al)
Hottest member(s)	All of 'em	Mary Landrieu (D-LA), obvs
WINNER: Playmates (sorry, Mary)
Most accomplished member(s)	Marilyn Monroe, who later became a world-famous actress	John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, who later became president
WINNER: Senators (sorry, Marilyn)
Spend large amounts of time with	Hugh Hefner, the Girls Next Door, Sugar Ray Leonard	Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Jim Bunning, Jeff Sessions
WINNER: Playmates

FINAL SCORE: Playmates 5, Senators 3 (and probably one of those cases where the actual competition wasn't even as close as the score indicates).

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Things to do in Denver when you're unemployed.

Doing nothing, and it's everything I thought it could be.

Recently downsized but don't feel like actually looking for another job yet? Me neither, working sucks. Here's some shit to distract you instead:

· First of all, I'm gonna have to go ahead and pimp some of my own work, should any paying blogs, Web sites, or sports journals be looking for writers: Here's my less-than-rosy take on George O'Leary's job security for Dr. Saturday (prithee excuse the character formatting, we're working on it), and here's MY EXCLUSIVE ALL-ACCESS INSIDE LOOK at Lane Kiffin and the Tennessee football program for EDSBS! Why did Kiffykins give such broad access to his deepest, most top-secret planning to a Georgia interloper like myself? He probably fucked up and forgot to check that I was a Bulldog fan, but like everything else, he'll say it was all part of his master plan.

· It has come to my attention that some people found this past week's Monday Morning Cage Match unfairly biased in favor of Lexus and against Texas. One or two people hinted that had a category along the lines of "End zones" been included, the Lone Star State would've cleaned up. OK, I'm an open-minded guy, let's compare rear ends:


Lexus SC430 . . .


. . . and Texas Longhorns.

OK, yeah, you know what, y'all were right and I was wrong. Game over, Texas wins. My decision is final.

· And now that I've pimped my own work, it's time to pimp some other people's: Platinum-level Friend of Holly (and therefore friend of Hey Jenny Slater) Livia drops Pat Buchanan with a knee to the balls and keeps on kicking, while over at Practically Harmless, Sister of Hey Jenny Slater does the same to the Twilight book series here and here.

What else do we know about Bella? We know that she's clumsy. Sooo clumsy. Clummy-clum-clumsy. You can hear "Yakety Sax" faintly in the background throughout the book. She falls down in the woods. She trips over her own feet at the beach. She trips over her own feet in class. She drops her books. She thwacks her classmates in the head with a volleyball. She thwacks herself in the head with a badminton racquet. She gets paper cuts. At one point, Meyer specifically describes her eating a bowl of cereal, "chewing each bite with care," as if a Lucky Charms-Mama Cass moment is an ever-looming threat. And in case you weren't able to pick up on it yourself, Bella is kind enough to tell you herself.

I'm absolutely ordinary - well, except for bad things like all the near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I'm almost disabled.

Oh, are you clumsy? I totes hadn't noticed.

· Back to Pat Buchanan for a moment, sort of: As blatant a bigot as Pat Buchanan is, he is completely, utterly sane compared to Glenn Beck, who did everything except audibly shit his pants when a caller somehow managed to get past what I'm sure was NORAD-tight call screening to disagree with him on health care:



Now, here's my question: You're a radio host. You're crazier than a Greyhound bus full of methed-up ferrets, but be that as it may, you've somehow developed a sincerely devoted following despite yourself. Who says "GET OFF MY PHONE"?!?!? You're the host, Miss DuBois, fuckin' drop the call if it's that upsetting to you! Why throw a literal howling hissy fit and make yourself look like even more of a twit than you already have? I refuse to believe that anyone, even his most ardent fans, are actually laboring under the delusion that Glenn Beck is sane at this point; I think his fans are actually hoping he's crazy enough to jump the White House fence with an Uzi in hand or something like that. Actually, in Beck's case it'd probably be more along the lines of a Super Soaker filled with ReaLemon, because that's just the kind of thing he'd come up with, but whatever.

· In other news of wingnuttery, some folks are apparently so determined to take Obama down that they're making up stories about Obama getting booed during the first pitch at the All-Star game last week. Hey, if that's all it takes to make something true, then I would like to announce here and now on this blog that Erin Andrews didn't spurn my advances in Tempe the weekend of last season's UGA-ASU game, she in fact came back to the house our group had rented and we polished off a '98 Dom in the hot tub. Salud, motherfuckers!


Oh, yeah, I got her number. It's OK, I know you want to touch me.

· Remember the Friday Random Ten+5 a couple months back in which the Mi-24/25/35 series attack helicopter received an induction into the Badass Hall of Fame? The "Hind" originally earned its badass reputation by laying waste to the Afghan resistance in the early 1980s, to the point that only a rapid influx of American-sourced surface-to-air missiles (as highly entertainingly dramatized in "Charlie Wilson's War") succeeded in turning the tide. Well, now that the Afghan military's forces are in the process of being rebuilt by coalition forces so that they can stand on their own two feet and defend themselves from the Taliban, the Afghan National Army Air Corps is being supplied with -- what else? -- Mi-35s. The irony here is so delicious and satisfying that I'm now substituting it for one meal each day.


The hunted become the hunters, or something like that.

· I would like to go on record as saying that Al Franken will one day go down in history as one of the better U.S. senators we've ever had. Unlike "Stuart Saves His Family," this statement is not intended as a joke.

· Finally, courtesy of Twitter pal and equally rabid Bulldog partisan Ally, here's the first solid, specific recommendation anyone's given me so far as to what I should be doing with myself while I'm unemployed. Soon as my folks leave their house for any length of time, I'm building something along the lines of this:


Rooftop Waterslide

· Actually, maybe this is what I need to be doing with myself:



Of course, pimping, as Big Daddy Kane warned us, isn't easy, and I should probably save this kind of work for when I really buckle down and get serious about holding down a regular job.

The Saga of Sarah.

I guess I don't have much to add to the continuing astonishment over Sarah Palin's decision to say "no mas" and vacate the Alaska governor's mansion except for this: I'm disappointed. I was seriously hoping that the Republican Party, in its current state, would continue to hold up Palin as their Great Oh-So-Very-White Hope for the next three years, just long enough to nominate her to go up against Obama in the 2012 presidential election, at which point she would flame out and put the GOP right back at square one in terms of rebuilding their national stature. God, what a fun ride that would've been. I was fully prepared to go deep cover and volunteer for Palin's 2012 Alabama primary campaign if it looked like that scenario might come to pass.

But it's not going to. My knee-jerk reaction to Palin's announcement the day before Independence Day, like a lot of people's, was that she was unloading her gubernatorial responsibilities so that she could devote herself full-time to the business of laying the groundwork for a balls-out 2012 presidential run. With her brand name beginning to take on some tarnish from Todd Purdum's unflattering Vanity Fair profile and the resulting infighting with McCain's people, she was going to metaphorically stomp off to her room in a huff, sulk for a few months until enough people in the Republican base came groveling to stroke her hair and tell her how pretty and awesome she was, and then burst forth in February 2011 (or earlier) with a recharged ego and a refreshed arsenal of lame down-home witticisms, determined to yank the reins away from President Hussein and reclaim America for the real Americans.

But if she really wanted to do that, why not just wait a few months and announce she wasn't going to be running for another term as governor? Why quit in the middle of her first term? If one of the big knocks on you as a vice-presidential candidate is that you have minimal political experience, why throw away the opportunity to gain any additional experience if you don't have to?

"Sarah Palin isn't smart in what we might call conventional ways," writes TBogg in a short but highly incisive post from earlier this week, "but she has grifter smarts" -- or, as Holly characterized it, "middle-school, mean-girl, locker-room smarts" -- and that elementary cunning was enough to lead her to a conclusion many of us arrived at months ago: There's no way she's ever going to get elected president. Her favorability ratings began tanking within a couple weeks of her acceptance speech on the floor of the Republican National Convention last September, and while dyed-in-the-wool religious conservatives thought she was the greatest thing since sliced bread (and still do), independents quickly decided they wanted nothing to do with her (and still don't). Reports say even her fellow Alaska Republicans had started to turn on her, to the point where she might not even have been able to win a primary challenge in a potential re-election bid -- and when you can't even hold together a Republican coalition in one of the reddest states in the country (Democrats haven't broken 40 percent in a presidential election in Alaska, much less won outright, since the 1960s), your prospects for building anything resembling an effective base of support nationally are in deep ka-ka.

So why'd she do it? Let's go back to TBogg:

. . . [Palin] knows that she can make a better living working the wingnut welfare circuit preaching to the already converted than she can in politics.

He also quotes Jill from Brilliant at Breakfast:

If she were about helping other working mothers and parents of special-needs children and health care for all and a stable job base, she could have been a credible contender for first female president. But alas, she is only an aging beauty queen, a Mean Grrrl who in politics has found a way to extend her reign as Prettiest Girl in High School to use people (or states) and then throw them away when they stop feeding her massive ego . . .

That description stops just short of summing up what I think is a central truth about Sarah Palin, a truth that clues us in to both why she quit her gubernatorial term in midstream and why she'll never be president. For all the talk about all the things that made Palin such a refreshing novelty on the national political scene over the past year or so -- her gender, her good looks, her unusual family, the exotic locale from whence she sprang -- she's not actually unique at all: She is George W. Bush, only female and cute. Like Bush, her most substantial political experience was a governorship of modest responsibilities, and whatever renown she'd acquired was primarily for superficial reasons (good looks = Bush's famous family name). Without much of an actual track record or stated policy slate to speak of, the neocon wing of the Republican Party decided on her as a blank slate upon which they could project their hopes and ideals, an assignment that she, like Dubya, tackled with gusto. But through it all she's expressed the same intellectual incuriosity that Dubya demonstrated throughout the entirety of his presidential term -- they both know what they feel about this issue or that issue, their minds are made up, and they're not interested in acquiring any additional information about it, especially not anything that would challenge the worldviews and prejudices they'd already spent so many years setting in stone.

Seriously, does a woman who can't come up with an answer better than "all of 'em" when asked a question as simple as "what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read" sound like she gives a flying fuck about becoming knowledgeable on the major issues of the day? Does she sound like someone interested in doing anything other than what Bush did as president -- i.e. bringing in "advisors" who will tell him/her exactly what he/she wants to hear and nothing more? Palin's legions of right-wing fans may not demand any more than that from her, because her willingness to "go with her gut" in the absence of any debate or time-consuming deliberation is one of the things they most admire in her, just as they admired it in Bush before her. But the rest of us, as evidenced by the 2008 election outcome, have come to our senses, and have started demanding a little more from the person who holds the most powerful title in the free world.

Evidently, even people in Alaska are starting to demand that as well, and that, as much as anything, is why she resigned so abruptly: The job got too hard, too many people didn't like her, she wasn't having fun anymore. So she quit, just like she quit a series of colleges and a position as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She's going to lay low for a while, then write a book (or have one ghost-written for her) and probably get a talk show on Fox News, re-establish her position as the spokesperson for the great not-so-silent not-quite-majority of aggrieved Tea-Party-throwing, Obama-hating ultraconservatives without actually having to get elected to anything, and thereby become the only thing she ever really wanted to be all along: a celebrity.

Is that an overly harsh assessment? Probably, but as hard as I try, I just can't find one shred of evidence that Palin has any stomach for the difficult and sometimes spirit-sapping work of actual policy-making, consensus-building, or governing. Leave out the sob stories about catty Vanity Fair articles or tasteless jokes late-night talk-show hosts have made about her kids; in the end, that stuff's got very little to do with actual politics. It's got more to do with the travails of simply being a celebrity, and while Sarah Palin may look like she's selflessly falling on her sword and giving up the limelight for the good of her family or her state or whoever, she'll be back. Only as a pricey lecture-circuit choir-preacher or Fox talking head, of course, not as someone poised to make any direct, tangible difference in what goes on in Washington.

But that just kind of makes the Saga of Sarah -- to the extent that there is one -- only that much more pointless and wasted in the end. You will have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore, sooner or later, but only if it's on her terms, and in a capacity where she doesn't actually have to put anything on the line. She'll say stupid things on big stages, people who should know better will give her more air time than she deserves, but in the end history won't remember her as anything even resembling a transformative figure; the Saga of Sarah won't end up being remembered as anything more than a year in its political life that America won't ever get back.

This week in extramarital booty.

A week after the initial revelation from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford that he'd been carrying on an extramarital affair with a woman in Argentina, the best tidbits are now coming out. Read this story and this one, and then let's go over the highlights:

· "As recently as this month," Sanford "begged his wife to let him go visit his Argentine hottie." When I first heard about that, I thought, man, the balls on that guy! But the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking maybe Sanford's actually a wuss: You think Sarkozy or Berlusconi ever gave a fuck about asking for permission?

· The debate between "ballsy" and "wussy" might be purely academic, though: Since Sanford asked his wife for permission -- implying that he did care a little about her feelings on the subject -- but went anyway even after she said no, I'm going to settle on "asshole" for the time being.

· In a cabinet meeting last week in which Sanford apologized to his staff, he compared himself to King David, who had an affair with a married woman, Bathsheba, yet managed to maintain control of his kingdom. Presumably this means that Sanford will be ordering the death of his mistress's husband and then marrying her himself.

· Sanford confessed that he "crossed the lines" with several other women over the years but hadn't had sex with any of them. That still leaves a lot of wiggle room, though, and can include everything from "making out" to "third base" to "naked baby-oil Twister with a group of Singapore Airlines flight attendants." Not that I, uh, spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that.

· Sanford is convinced that the woman from Argentina is his "soul mate," but he adds that he's "trying to fall back in love with his wife." So basically he's telling his wife, "Honey, this woman from Buenos Aires is my soul mate, but I'm TRYING to fall in love with you again." Wow, what woman wouldn't be made weak in the knees by an expression of romance like that? Not that you asked me, governor, but here's a tip: You "try" to lose a few pounds or get more organized at home. If you have to try to fall in love with someone, it ain't happening.

At this point, I have two pieces of advice for Gov. Sanford. First, shut the fuck up already. Your ratio of "words uttered in public" to "times looked stupid and/or like an asshole" is rapidly approaching 1:1. Second, bite the fucking bullet and get divorce proceedings started. It's obvious you don't particularly want to be married to your wife, she can't possibly want to be married to you all that much, and whatever benefit you think you'd be doing for your kids by staying together has probably already been negated by their knowing that you blew them off on Father's Day to go chase some South American strange.

But that's just one guy's opinion. At the end of the day, all I can really say is what a weird, weird dude. And kind of a tortured, conflicted one at that. But I will say this for him: I'm glad he's there, because compared to him even I look smooth with the ladies.

Then again, I've never managed to carry on a torrid affair with a woman from Argentina, either. Hey, anybody know what Yamila Diaz is doing these days?

Monday Morning Cage Match III:The cyborg hunter meets the moose hunter.

This week's Cage Match pits two very strong women against one another: the ripped matriarch of the "Terminator" series, Sarah Connor, versus the bespectacled matriarch of Alaska's first family, Sarah Palin. I would avoid, however, characterizing this as a catfight. A pejorative definition like that one no longer applies when there's this much ammunition involved.

	Sarah Connor	Sarah Palin
First job	Waitress	Wasilla, Alaska, city councilwoman
WINNER: Palin
Defining moment	Conceives John Connor whilst being chased by the Cyberdyne Systems model T-101	Chosen as John McCain's running mate
WINNER: Connor
How'd that work out?	Pretty well -- successfully destroyed both the T-101 and its successor, the shape-shifting T-1000	Not so great
WINNER: Connor
Hot?	Sorta	Yes
WINNER: Palin
Stance on gun owners' rights	Very pro-	Very pro-
WINNER: Tie
Child(ren)'s achievement(s)	Leading the resistance against Skynet	Impregnated by Levi Johnston
WINNER: Connor
Quote	"Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. . . . All you know how to create is death and destruction."	"As Putin rears his ugly head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska."
WINNER: Connor

FINAL SCORE: Sarah Connor 5, Sarah Palin 3. Maybe John McCain should've picked Connor as his running mate.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Illicit affairs, meth-cooking Vikings, and other examples of people being s%$#ty to one another.

· Courtesy of a Twitter (a Tweet? I've been doing Twitter since before Christmas and I still don't know what the fuck these things are called) from the illustrious Dawgter Feelgood (a/k/a DAve), World War III propaganda posters:



· EDSBS's Orson Swindle became Public Enemy No. 1 for a while in the greater Shreveport-Bossier City metropolitan area for this column on Shreveport and the Independence Bowl. (Seriously, peruse that comments thread for a spell. I'm pretty sure there are a couple thinly veiled death threats in there somewhere.) Today, though, he gets at least a small measure of vindication:

In a mother-daughter fight that included pushing, shoving, wrestling, biting and wielding a pan, a woman kicked her mother unconscious and then defecated on her while she was lying on the floor, Bossier Parish sheriff's deputies said.

"It was a donnybrook," Lt. Ed Baswell said of the Tuesday morning brawl at a residence on Chelsy Drive in Benton.

The women -- Destinie Rechelle Duvall, 37, of Willis, Texas, and Patricia Ann Hacker, 62, of Benton were treated at LSU Hospital and then booked into jail.

Sheriff's deputies went to the house after Hacker's 12-year-old granddaughter called 911.

Deputies said they weren't sure what started the fight, but they said the daughter knocked her mother out of a chair and then kicked her in the head, causing her to lose consciousness. While Hacker was unconscious, Duvall defecated on her back, Baswell said.

OK, on the one hand -- and clearly the bigger of the two hands in this situation -- that's unspeakably horrible. But on the other hand, it kind of makes sense as a strategic move. Go big or go home, right? I mean, you're committed enough to this fistfight that you know you're probably ending up in jail one way or the other, you might as well go in there with a story that lets the rest of the inmates know you're not to be trifled with. "What are you in for?" "Robbed a guy at knifepoint." "What are you in for?" "Broke into someone's car and stole a purse and an iPod." "How about you?" "Beat my mom unconscious and then took a shit on her." "Whooooaaaa." That's a woman who doesn't have to watch her back in the prison cafeteria line.

· Yours Truly has two contributions to Dr. Saturday this week: a new installment in the Better Know an Embattled Coach series, this one focusing on Colorado's Dan "GO PLAY INNERMURALS, BROTHER!" Hawkins, and a rumination on bowl games' cockroach-like ability to survive economic catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, what have you. But I don't think Holly will mind if I point out my contributions to her preview of the 2009 UAB Blazers. In particular, I would like to claim credit for directing the Dr. Saturday readership to our UAB Magazine feature on the strange, random history of UAB's mascot.

Personally, I think our dragon mascot is teh r0xx0rz -- the raging-ass fire-breathing helmet/midfield logo more so than the cuter, kid-friendlier fuzzy sideline version -- but even if you don't share that opinion, you have to admit it's a step up from Blaze the Viking:



Supposedly this iteration of the mascot got the ax because he scared little kids. I don't personally find him that frightening at first glance; I think he looks more like Burger King's ne'er-do-well younger brother who's been in and out of jail for a string of petty assaults and public-intoxication charges, finally got a steady job on a construction site but got hurt and has been cocooning in his trailer ever since, collecting workers' comp and brewing up the occasional batch of crystal meth with his good buddy Purdue Pete. In that sense, though, I guess there's a sense of incipient murderousness about him, like if you were taking a walk in the woods and stumbled across his meth lab he'd really fuck you up. Nevertheless, I think we're doing fine with the dragon right now, thanks.

· Finally, we have South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. This is the guy, you'll recall, whose most recent political claim to fame was wanting to refuse hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus money that had been tagged for his state. Now he admits an extramarital affair with a chick from Argentina, and it's been one full day since this revelation and nobody's made a "stimulus package" joke yet? Come on, people. You disappoint me.

For once, I have nothing to add.

Baby sis, putting me to shame, as usual.

Interesting point. I'm going to pronounce your last name "douchebag," because that's easier for me.

As with any Supreme Court nomination, there are any number of reasons one might oppose the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, and they might be legitimate reasons at that -- yet today's right wing, as has become their habit, seems to have settled on only the most outrageously stupid ones. "She's dumb" and "She's a racist" were bad enough, but one National Review Online whiner has managed, implausibly, to dig yet deeper: Sonia Sotomayor should not be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice because she's one of those uppity Latinas who thinks she should be able to determine how her own last name is pronounced.

Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent's simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to. . . .

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Internalize this, kids, and recall it the next time you hear someone carp about what a horrible racist Sonia Sotomayor is. Some conservative asshole just told her how to pronounce her own fucking name, but she's the racist, so screw her and any idea that she might have experienced oppression or discrimination in her life, because the real oppressed class in this country is white Republicans who simply want to go on about their business controlling everything without having their monopoly on political power interfered with by a bunch of brown people not knowing their place and running around with complicated, spiccy last names.

Then again, at least Mark Krikorian got her name right. Apparently Mike Huckabee watched "West Side Story" over the weekend and assumed that if you've seen one Puerto Rican, you've seen 'em all.

ADDED: Now they're even asking questions about what kind of effect all that OMG crazy Puerto Rican food will have on Sotomayor's judgin'. (Link from Washington Monthly via Mac G's ever-fascinating Twitter feed. Does this count as more stupid than the name-pronunciation thing, or is it still not quite as stupid? I look forward to the debate on that one.

A handy guide to participating in civilized, rational debate. (Or not being a wuss. Whichever.)

To an already staggering list of red-flag words and phrases deployed over the past few weeks to scare the bejeezus out of us and turn us into quivering lumps of Spam -- SOCIALISM! SWINE FLU! BRETT FAVRE RETURNING TO THE NFL! -- we can now add another: ORWELLIAN THOUGHT POLICE! Take it away, Andrew Breitbart:

The latest poster conservative for political-correctness-run-amok in a country careening downhill on left-wing, Democratic cruise control is Republican congresswoman Virginia Foxx.

Mrs. Foxx's impropriety: The thought crime of arguing against "hate crime" laws by pointing out that Matthew Shepard - the tragic icon attached to the legislation - represents a salient argument against enacting them.

Oh my God! What did Virginia Foxx do?

[T]he congresswoman is not buying the Hollywood hype. "The hate crimes bill was named for [Shepard], but it's really a hoax that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills," Mrs. Foxx said on the House floor last week.

Uh . . . that's it? OK, what did The Left do?

Immediately, Democrats sought out their unapologetic allies in the media to force Mrs. Foxx into a perfunctory, skin-saving apology. . . .

Mrs. Foxx has been "apologizing for semantics, but not her sentiment, her insensitivity or her ignorance," Mrs. Shepard told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

Uh . . . that's it?

First, let me express what may or may not be a popular position: I am completely opposed to hate-crimes legislation. They aim to add harsher penalties for certain crimes based on feelings or motivations the perpetrator might've had toward the victim, which I don't think would be constitutional even if we could ascertain beyond a shadow of a doubt what those feelings or motivations were. That said, this is one of those issues that reasonable people can disagree on, and a rational debate isn't something to be afraid of here.

But, separate from that, we have Virginia Foxx describing the hate-crime theory of the motive behind Matthew Shepard's murder as "a hoax," and Andrew Breitbart defending her. But not just defending her: pulling out the fainting couch and wielding accusations of fascism against Foxx's "politically correct" detractors.

What exactly happened to Rep. Foxx that was so terrible? Was she threatened by the FBI for her views? Was she fired? Was she assaulted? Not as far as I can tell. In fact, the worst thing that happened to Foxx -- at least as far as Breitbart is willing to tell us -- is that Matthew Shepard's mom called her "insensitive" and "ignorant." Again, I ask: That's it?

The Constitution guarantees us the right to free speech; however, it doesn't guarantee us the right to never be disagreed with. It doesn't even guarantee us the right to never be called names. Sometimes you're going to express opinions that are controversial or unpopular, and sometimes people are going to publicly disagree with them; sometimes they're even going to be mean about it. But that doesn't make them the "thought police."

And the thing is, once upon a time, the "anti-PC" movement on the right reveled in the angst they aroused, and the criticism they received, from bleeding-hearts on the left for expressing their bold or controversial viewpoints. They figured that if that many left-wing pantaloons were being wadded over what they said, they must be doing something right. Now, though, instead of relishing such reactions, the right wing are the ones getting their pantaloons in a wad themselves, shifting into sky-is-falling mode and invoking Orwell. They used to get a good chuckle when someone went ballistic about something they said; now they just whine about it.

But you know what? Sometimes people are going to call you insensitive and douchey, whether you think you deserve to be or not. Here's a friendly tip for all you eager anti-PCers out there: If you're going to say controversial things, you're going to have to deal with people disagreeing with you. If you want to say stuff knowing that it's going to piss someone off, you have to do so with the understanding that someone might piss you off right back. What Breitbart seems to want is for folks like Foxx to be able to express controversial opinions but not have anyone disagree with her or question her reasons for doing so -- and I'm sorry, Andrew, but that's not how it works.

And for God's sake, drop this "thought police" crap. Someone disagreeing with you and calling you "insensitive" is worse than torture? Man, what a sheltered childhood you must've had. By the time I was out of junior high, I'd suffered everything from being knocked down on the school bus to being rejected by girls to being told I had a tiny dick; instead of shrieking "ORWELL!", I picked myself up, developed a drinking problem, and grew the thick skin that turned me into the profane, self-effacing asshole I am today. It's fun; maybe you should try it.

The electorate who wasn't there.

I don't know if this qualifies as a Freudian slip per se on the part of National Review columnist Byron York, but it's pretty telling nonetheless:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Than they actually are. What, pray tell, could that mean? I mean, if African-Americans are people, and those people have opinions, then presumably their opinions matter just as much as everyone else's. But according to York, Obama's actual popularity, his white-people popularity, is actually a bit lower, and those black people -- who are invisible, or holograms, or are maybe just figments of the imagination of some all-powerful being, perhaps Oprah -- are just artificially pumping his numbers up with their non-actual approval.

You hear this from time to time, not just from conservative commentators but also from people in the media who should know better -- the whole "Well, if you take out the black vote" argument, as if black folks were somehow less than human and there's some alternate Earth where black people don't exist, McCain got elected, Bill Clinton never got any higher than governor of Arkansas, and everything is way better than it is here. Unless one of them finds a way to open an interdimensional portal to this alternate reality, though, all of these discussions about taking out the black vote from this thing or that thing seem kind of pointless. They're humans, they're American citizens, they vote just like the rest of us . . . why don't you ever hear anyone say stuff like "Well, Sharpton would've wrecked shop in the 2004 election if it weren't for all those white voters"?

Maybe what we need is a compromise, so that we count the black voters but not to the extent that they can all rush in and skew things the wrong way. What if their votes in elections and polls and whatnot only counted 3/5 worth? Would that make Byron York feel better?

(Hat tip: Mac G on Twitter)

What about syphilis? Does anyone know the favorability ratings for syphilis?

For the last few weeks we've been hearing solid citizens like Karl Rove dismiss Barack Obama as a divisive president because his disapproval numbers have been increasing among Republicans. There's just one problem: if Washington Post/ABC poll is any indication, nobody actually wants to admit they're a Republican anymore. Only 21 percent of the respondents to their poll saw fit to identify themselves as Republicans, compared to 35 percent for Democrats and 38 percent for independents.

So that got me to thinking: What kinds of things does that make the Republican Party less popular than? Here is but a sample:

· Gay marriage. Yup, as much as some people get their staunchly heterosexual pantaloons in a wad over gays settlin' down and gettin' hitched, fully one-third of the country thinks gay people should have the right to get straight-up married; 60 percent are OK with some form of civil unions.

· Marijuana legalization. Even at 31 percent in the most recent poll, legal wacky terbacky is still a good bit more popular than the GOP.

· Russia, China, Venezuela, and Cuba. Despite being run by dictators of varying degrees of autocracy and repressiveness, all four countries graded out with favorability ratings higher than 21% in Gallup's most recent World Affairs survey.

· Michael Richards at his lowest point. Less than two weeks removed from the former "Kramer" from Seinfeld's racist nutjobbery at the Laugh Factory in 2006, 41 percent of Americans (scroll about a third of the way down) still had a favorable opinion of him.

· George W. Bush at his lowest point. Right before the 2008 election, Bush clocked in with some of the lowest approval ratings ever recorded in the Gallup poll -- but he was still higher than 21%.

But take heart, Republican Party: You're still more popular than Iran, Paris Hilton, or the concept of O.J. Simpson's innocence.

No, no -- no need to thank me.

"We have become so politically correct that no one would even daaaare think about sending in the Marines to fight pirates . . . "

Well, Glenn Beck was right about one thing: We didn't send in the Marines. We sent in Navy SEALs.

If Beck (or Newt Gingrich, or Brit Hume, or any of those other Fox News dicklicks) are ever right about anything else, then by all means let me know. I wouldn't want to miss it.

In the meantime, hijack this, bitches. (Chart lovingly, painstakingly crafted over at Tiki Bar.)

The Friday Random Ten+5 reaches across the aisle.

In the course of discussing political topics on this blog of late, some people have implied that I never say anything bad about liberals and only say bad things about conservatives. Well, I don't want to come off as vulgar or needlessly confrontational here, but that is just a dirty motherfucking lie, and shame on you for saying something like that. I work with conservatives, I'm friends with conservatives, I've even dated some conservatives -- and took one or two of them on a voyage to ecstasy the likes of which they'd never before experienced, if I do say so myself. But anyway, the point is that I have great admiration for more than a few conservative-identified individuals even though I disagree with them on a whole host of things politically, and just to prove it, I thought I might take this opportunity to tell you about some of them. Step to the side, haters -- the left side or the right side, whatever your personal preference happens to be -- 'cause this week's +5 is Five Conservatives I Don't Have A Problem With And Actually Like:



Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)
Endorsed John McCain and voted in favor of the Iraq war, but also voted against the 2003 Bush tax cuts and supports gay rights. So if you think about it, she's kind of the maverick that McCain used to be. Either way, she gives the impression of being someone who bothers to think things through before she makes up her mind about something, which is the kind of attitude Washington has been sorely lacking for a while now.



Andrew Sullivan
All you conservatives who claimed you spoke out about your supposed displeasure with the Bush administration way back when? Sullivan actually did, and not as a wild-eyed commie pinko like yours truly but as an intelligent conservative who cares about fiscal sanity and civil liberties. Also a pretty good blogger, not to mention a Pet Shop Boys fan, which is an excellent way to weasel yourself into my good graces no matter what your political beliefs are.



Kent Williams
Kent Williams owns an Italian restaurant in Elizabethton, Tennessee, where I probably ate at least once when I was living down the road in Johnson City as a youngster. A couple of years ago, he ran for state legislature as a Republican -- which pretty much everyone in that part of the state is -- but voted to re-elect the Democratic speaker of the house, who was a shoo-in anyway, trying to build consensus and put himself in a position to get things done for his county. The House minority leader, Jason Mumpower, was cheesed off enough by this that he tried to get someone to run against Williams in the primary last year, but Williams was re-nominated, and re-elected, with ease. When the dust cleared on election night, Republicans had pieced together a 50-49 majority in the state House, their first since Reconstruction. Mumpower, who is thus in line to become the new speaker, has every House Republican swear an oath to only vote for a Republican for speaker.

When the new House convened for the first time in February, the Republican whip nominated Mumpower -- and his Democratic counterpart, now the minority whip, nominated Kent Williams. Forty-nine Republicans voted for Mumpower, forty-nine Democrats voted for Williams . . . and Williams, keeping his promise, voted for a Republican. Himself.

I don't care which party you're punking, Democratic or Republican, that's awesome. The longtime reader and Tennessee native who sent me that story last month summed it up best: "Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Obama combined have never played politics with the skill of a high school diplomaed lasagna cook from the most redneck place on earth."



Lucy Pinder
Sorry, I totally forgot what I was going to write here. Oh, yeah: British Page 3 legend and reality-TV star Pinder says she wants to work with Britain's Conservative Party and that she doesn't want to be lumped in with "bleeding-heart liberals." Aww, we're not all so bad.



T. Kyle King
I'll be honest, when I first started out at UGA and Kyle was a law student regularly writing for The Red & Black's opinion page, he annoyed the crap out of me. But having gotten to know the guy -- both through his blog and in person -- I've become a huge fan. And don't get into a debate with him, be it over football, politics, legal issues, history, or anything else, without actual evidence to back up what you're saying, 'cause that's bringing a knife to a gunfight, kid. Kyle will hit you with a barrage of arguments, statistics, and historical facts and bounce your ass back to grade school. And even when I don't agree with him -- which, unless he's talking about the Bulldogs, is regularly -- it's fun watching him do it to someone else.

Also: Meghan McCain, because I think she's cute, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), because dear sweet Lord that woman is entertaining. Palin/Bachmann 2012? I think I'd trade the Lego Taj Mahal for that.

See? Bipartisanship! And now the Ten:

1. Pete Heller, "Big Love" (extended mix)
2. Crowded House, "Walking on the Spot"
3. The Beatmasters, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
4. Billy Idol, "White Wedding"
5. Dr. Dre, "Bitches Ain't Shit"
6. Basement Jaxx, "Where's Your Head At"
7. My Bloody Valentine, "Soon"
8. Mo' Horizons, "Hit the Road Jack (Pe Ña Estrada)"
9. KRS-One, "Sound of Da Police"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "KDX 125"

Now it's time for you to show your own open-mindedness by putting your own Random Tens, along with names of people you like in spite of the fact that you can't stand their politics and/or parties, in the comments.

Get back here, dead horse! I'm not done with you yet.

Because I just don't know when to leave well enough alone, found this in the comments thread of the Fark.com post that linked to the Ayn Rand rant: an unauthorized sequel to Atlas Shrugged starring Bob the Angry Flower.


Click to enlarge.

Late to the party.

Andrew Sullivan says it more eloquently and concisely than I'm probably about to, but I'm gonna say it anyway 'cause I'm an asshole.

To all the folks now threatening to "Go John Galt," to all the folks attending the anti-Obama "tea parties" that are supposedly sweeping the nation, to the gloomy conservatives claiming to have been driven to clinical depression by the prospect of this country's supposed impending socialist tilt, to Glenn Beck and all the other folks brought to histrionic tears by how much they fear for their country, I got a question:

Where the hell you guys been the last eight years?

You're that upset about how much money the government is spending, huh? Well, we've spent nearly a trillion dollars on a dishonestly justified, indifferently planned war in Iraq, seems like that might've been something you could've spoken up about. We went from a surplus under Clinton to a 14-figure national debt, and that was even before Obama took office; you had eight whole years to get riled up about that. Creeping totalitarianism, you say? Yeah, we had the government sending folks off to Gitmo without even charging them with anything, we had the NSA rifling through our cell-phone records, but somehow that wasn't enough to gin up your righteous anger. We had a president who fooled around and played guitar at John McCain's birthday party while a city of half a million people got drowned by a hurricane, and instead of wondering why that president had put a career horse-show manager in charge of the relief efforts, you blamed the people of that city for not having gotten out fast enough.

So now we've got someone in office who's trying to steer those two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to a conclusion and fix the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression without nationalizing banks or major industries, and now you're outraged? Now you decide you're upset enough to take to the streets? Now you're worried about the loss of your rights and civil liberties and all that other stuff? Bush spent like a drunken sailor during what was supposedly a boom economy -- something even an idiot like me knows you're not supposed to do -- and now that somebody's spending in a shitty economy, trying to prop things back up again, now you're mad about how much money the government is burning through?

(And don't even get me started on how Republicans have all of a sudden determined it's OK to start criticizing sitting presidents again. So, Glenn Beck, I should "Believe in something, even if it's wrong," huh? Well, back in 2003 I believed that the Iraq war was unnecessary and would turn out to be a stain on our national conscience we'd need decades to live down -- and you called folks like me "liberal hippie communists" and "terrorist sympathizers." But I'm glad to know "believing in something" is cool with you now. I'll be sure to keep that in mind.)

Things have been going to hell for a while now -- the seeds of the crisis we're in now have been planted and cultivated over a period of years -- and you've only just now figured that out? Now that someone's actually sticking his neck out and trying to fix it? It's like you're parents who have come home from vacation to find that your children had a series of wild parties while you were gone, and instead of punishing your kids for having trashed the place, you're bitching at the cleaning crew.

Look, if you can find me a link or a letter to the editor or a blog post or a even a blog comment where you expressed outrage or concern over all this stuff while it was building under Bush, then I'll accept that you've got your head mounted squarely on your shoulders and I'll leave you alone. Otherwise, I'm calling this for what it is: You only decided to unleash your mad-as-hell inner Howard Beale once a Democrat got elected. Convenient, that.

Not that I'm telling you what to do, of course. You want to go on being outraged, crapping your pants with fear of creeping socialism, weeping about how much you love your country and how worried you are for its future, it's a free country. I'm just saying, maybe if you'd discovered your outrage button a few years ago, we could've started fixing this stuff sooner. Maybe we could work on our timing a little bit over the next decade or two? Think about it and get back to me.

Hey, that's great! I'm thinking about running for attorney general of pancakes.

Once a badass, Chuck Norris finally takes one too many roundhouse kicks to the head.

(Hat tip: Sullivan.)

Take me to your leader, whoever that is.

A little over a month ago, Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Republican from northwest Georgia, said that talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh were just "stand[ing] back and throw[ing] bricks" while Republicans in Congress had to try and get real work done; within 24 hours, he was on Limbaugh's show expressing "very sincere regret" for those harsh words. Last week, Republican National Committee chairman and former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele referred to Limbaugh as an "entertainer" and admitted that Limbaugh's rhetoric about "want[ing] Obama to fail" was "incendiary" and "ugly"; two days later, he, too, went groveling for Limbaugh's forgiveness. Yesterday, Limbaugh implied that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), despite statements seemingly to the contrary, agreed with him about wanting Obama to fail, and Cantor's office is remaining conspicuously silent about any clarifications.

So my honest, sincere question to the Republicans and small-c conservatives who stop by this site from time to time is: Is Rush Limbaugh really the guy you want as the spokesman for your party and/or ideology?

Yes, Limbaugh's show is, relatively speaking, extremely popular. Yes, he's a household name even amongst those who aren't fans. But let's not pretend that his 14,250,000 weekly listeners represent anything close to a majority of the American public. Even if I give him major benefit of the doubt and give him credit for having 14 million regular listeners -- ignoring the fact that some people might listen to his show more than once a week, or every single day -- that number is barely a fifth of the nearly 70 million people who voted for Obama in last year's election. You really want to make the American public choose between these two guys?



I'm not saying that Obama is pure as the driven snow, nor that there aren't legitimate criticisms with the way he and the Democrats are going about trying to turn the economy around. I'm not 100-percent comfortable with the idea of spending $800 billion on anything, whether it's a stimulus package, a space-based missile defense, a war in Iraq, or anything else. But I give Obama credit for sitting down with a very intelligent group of people, deciding on what they thought needed to be done to jump-start the economy, and then presenting it to the American public, controversy and all. For all their caterwauling about big spending and supposedly being cut out of the loop, have the Republicans -- whose approval ratings are currently as bad as Obama's are good -- bothered to pitch anything even resembling a tangible alternative? Not that I can see, and here again they appear to be taking their cues from El Rusbo, who at last week's CPAC convention openly mocked the idea that actually coming up with better policy proposals was a winning strategy for taking power back from the Dems.

I worked my ass off for more than a year leading up to the 2004 election, and I remember very vividly how few Democrats had any winning strategy that year other than complaining about how horrible George W. Bush was. Well, you saw how that worked out. Now you have a talk-radio shouter whose strategy is to do nothing more than that same kind of complaining -- and nobody in your party is willing to cross him. This is how you propose to get the American people to vote for you again? I think it's hilarious that these are the same folks who just a few years ago were boasting about how tough they were in being willing to take on Osama and Saddam and whoever else, but they apparently don't even have the balls to stand up to a talk-radio host.

Say what you want about Barack Obama, but you have to admit the guy's a pretty shrewd politician, and nearly every time someone's underestimated him in the past it's been to their own detriment. So if the Obama camp is trying to make Rush Limbaugh the face of the opposition -- which they are, pretty openly, in fact -- they've probably got a pretty good reason for it.

So I gotta ask, is that really the fight you want to pick? All those legitimate criticisms and concerns you supposedly have about Obama's policies, and you're just going to allow them to be routed through Limbaugh's sit-back-and-complain filter? You go do that if you want, but that's a briar patch the Democrats will play in all day long.

Switching gears: a serious question.

What's so great about owning a home?

I mean, "home ownership" is held up as this be-all, end-all goal of life in American society, but why? What's so great about "owning" a pile of bricks somewhere that you're probably never really going to "own" because it's gonna take you 15-30 years to pay it off and fewer and fewer people stay in one place for that long these days to begin with? Why do we use "home ownership" as an indicator of a strong economy, particularly when, as we've seen over the last few years, that statistic includes people who end up not being able to actually afford their homes at all and get foreclosed on and put the economy in worse shape down the road? And why in the world should someone like, say, a 30-year-old single male with a stable income have any interest whatsoever in dumping money into a house right now?

What's the difference between someone who takes out a mortgage on a $250,000 house that ends up getting foreclosed, and someone who puts a down payment on, say, a Bentley Continental Flying Spur that ends up getting repossessed because he can't make the payments? Somehow the latter individual would be ridiculed as a complete nutcase, but the former person is someone we're told we should feel sorry for because they were just trying to live the American dream. But aren't they both living wildly beyond their means? Why is one considered an extravagance and the other considered a necessity?

I know, I know, one's a ridiculous luxury car and the other's shelter, a basic human necessity, blah blah blah, but I've been paying rent on the same apartment for the last six and a half years and have done just fine in terms of maintaining a consistent roof over my head, thanks. And while I don't "own" any more of my little corner of heaven than I did when I plunked down my security deposit back in October 2002, nor have I had to watch a third (or more) of my "equity" (whatever the hell that is) disappear because real-estate prices went in the tank. I'm sure if I actually had bothered to buy a house in Birmingham back in 2002, rather than going straight to the apartment finder, I'd probably be opening a vein right now.

Yeah, one of these days I'll start a family and settle down in a place that I feel like staying in for a decade or two, and maybe then I'll look a little more deeply into this "home ownership" thing, but at the moment, my decision to remain feckless and untethered is looking smarter and smarter, even if it does mean wiping my ass with a rent check every month. Least I'm not getting my house taken back by a bank and having my possessions thrown out on the street. Seriously, though, what do y'all think? Am I completely missing something here?