Winky and The Wad in 2012 ?

Holy mother Mary, I knew something like this would eventually get into circulation. This country's in an ungodly mess, but if we ever have Palin and Beck running the show, these will be remembered as The Good Old Days. Republicans... can't live with 'em, can't squash 'em like cockroaches.

Ace McCain on the record

Former GOP presidential contender Ace McCain goes on the record. The shootings at Fort Hood were terrorist acts and that's all there is to it.

During the last year of W's reign of error, when the wheels were coming off, his conservative defenders always argued that after 9/11 there had been no further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. That was their standard defense: He kept us safe, and nothing else mattered to them.

Some of the same conservatives who defended W are now determined to establish that Hasan is an Islamic terrorist, the shootings were acts of terrorism, and Obama hasn't kept us safe (i.e., Obama isn't up to W's standard).

Republicans understand that if you repeat something often enough on television, it'll eventually be accepted as truth by most people. I'd be less skeptical about the Hasan story if I didn't suspect Republicans were using it to score easy political points.

Added 11:10 am:

A lot of the conservative bitching about the Fort Hood case includes disgusted references to political correctness, as in, "If it weren't for PC, it wouldn't have happened."

I think a lot of conservatives resent political correctness because it makes it harder for them to use the word they really want to use when talking about Obama.

Duck and Cover

High unemployment and economic insecurity are combining to keep a lot of people nervous and edgy, even grumpy from time to time. So the general mood in the country is fairly negative. But then, making matters worse, we have to deal with the 30-percenters. Those are the people who thought W did a great job every day of his eight years in office, and defended every one of his fuckups. All of a sudden there's a semi-liberal N in W's old office, and the same 30 percent who rationalized and justified everything W did are going crazy. Even if the economic picture was fairly rosy, these dipshits would be in a frenzy.

Things would be tough enough if all we had to do was cope with the economy and the usual array of international complications. I mean, that would be a plateful of hard right there. But on top of everything else, we have to put up with this relentless stream of misguided horseshit from the lunatics who turn to Limbaugh, Palin, Beck and Fox News for leadership. These freaks are beginning to fantasize about themselves as freedom fighters, and I have a feeling something bad is eventually going to happen.

All this makes me recall the old civil defense films teaching school kids to duck and cover. Get under your desk, curl up in the fetal position, and try to ride out the initial blast and the shock waves. Not a bad plan for the next few years, either. The new Stephen King book came out today. It's called Under The Dome, is 1072 pages long and weighs nearly four pounds. King's books are practically the only ones I buy new --- a longstanding personal tradition that has survived years of change. Maybe I'll curl up with this monster, and by the time I've finished reading it, things will have calmed down a little bit.

Cooper and Clarkson

Sometimes we'll watch a movie for no reason other than that we really like the actors in the lead roles, which is how my wife and I ended up seeing Married Life on TV last night. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson play a married couple, middle-aged and upper middle class, in the late 1940s. Cooper and Clarkson are character actors who are strong enough to carry a movie, and they do it again in this one. Married Life is not quite a heavy drama, a comedy, or a suspense thriller, but has traces of each of those genres. The plot revolves around the issue of marital infidelity, and how people who've been married a long time may not know each other as well as they think they do. A quiet film constructed to interest older, mature audiences like the bees, and recommended.

Teabagzzzzzzzz...

There are apparently a lot of Republicans with free time on their hands, because several thousand showed up for the teabag event in Washington D.C. today. You know how Republicans are --- any time more than a dozen conservatives get together in one place for an hour or so, they consider themselves a movement which will change the course of history. At the risk of repeating myself, the biggest problem facing America today is that Republicans are convincing themselves the road back to power requires getting crazier by the minute. Sooner or later, they'll be the majority party again and the results will not be pretty.

Meanwhile, an army officer with an Arabic-sounding name went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood today. Anyone making side bets on how long it'll take the teabagger dog-and-pony show to connect him with Obama ?

Certitude, Part III

There are things in this world that I can't prove scientifically but know in my heart are true. For example, I'm certain that people who are afraid of the world and bitter about their lives are most likely to be both conservative and Republican. I can't prove it, but I'm sure I'm right.

I've recently become certain about something else I can't prove: It's better for your knees to walk wearing running shoes than to run wearing walking shoes.

Last May, I developed an enthusiasm for a routine known as high intensity interval training, which I wrote about at Hot Water Sandwich. It involved alternating short intervals of running with longer cool-down walking intervals. After a few weeks, I began to have pain in my left knee, which wasn't too troublesome as long as I was standing or walking, but was a real problem when I stood up after sitting for longer than ten minutes. The pain when I straightened my left leg and put weight on the knee was enough to make me wince. After a minute or so, the ache would subside. At any rate, as the weather grew warmer, the combination of summer heat and a sore knee led me to give up the running part of my routine.

Last week we got the first noticeable cool weather of autumn, and I realized I'd probably want to start running a little, particularly on chilly days. I decided to invest in my very first pair of running shoes, thinking that might prevent the hurt in my knee (which had diminished significantly after I stopped running this summer). I went to Academy and bought the least expensive running shoes on their shelves.

The first time I laced 'em up and started walking around, it was like bouncing on tiny trampolines. There was literally a spring in my step that I couldn't recall previously experiencing. Hmmm, I thought, maybe I shoulda tried this a long time ago.

In my neighborhood, the city recently opened a pair of trails through the wooded areas, and I enjoy the shade so much that I reconfigured my walking routes to include them. Since I couldn't measure the new routes with my car odometer, I began a series of measurements using stopwatches and pedometers, then calculating the distance based on averages and known quantities.

One of my most commonly-walked routes is 3.10 miles and requires an average of 6138 steps to complete. The first time I walked the route in the new shoes, it only took 5914 steps. WTF ? --- I knew for a fact the trail hadn't gotten shorter. Over the next few days, I started comparing the steps recorded on my pedometers to the averages I had calculated for each route when determining their distances, and in every instance, I was covering the same ground with fewer steps. I pulled out the calculator again and established that my stride had lengthened by roughly 0.6 inches, and the only thing that had changed was the shoes I was wearing. It'll take me more mileage to reach 10,000 steps, but that's a minor drawback to gain a knee that feels like it's only 35 years old again.