I hope everyone finds a way to enjoy breaking the law over the next three weekends.
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ironically this is the 1st year in decades that i have NO money on my brackets….and for that reason i expect to hit some 50 winners this year
ironically this is the 1st year in decades that i have NO money on my brackets….and for that reason i expect to hit some 50 winners this year
Administrator: Please delete #3, (off topic).
thank you.
go dawgs…
Obama was bitch-slapped by one of the greatest Coaches in NCAA History!
Amen to that…right sarge?
Obama has shown the past 2 months that he is incapable of SINGLE-tasking…much less multi-tasking.
So sarge…How about Chris “LIAR, LIAR, LIAR” Dodd? Too embarrassing?
My point is, the Final 4 sideshow gets folks to look somewhere else while the DEMOCRATS are destroying our economy and our country.
Coach ‘K’ obviously agrees…much to your LEFTIST PINHEADED chagrin.
Obama obviously knows waaaaay more about Basketball than anything he was elected to deal with. Therein lies the problem.
Everything Obama says & does is under a microscope for the 1st time in his life.
PS–I actually agree with most of his BB picks!
About the ONLY THING I agree with him on.
Yet Obama hurts himself by showing he is distracted from critical problems which have caused major oversights & the stench of corruption. He also pisses off schools he says will lose! Only 1 winner! 63 losers!
One happy state. The rest pissed off.
Smooth Move!
@ Cynical. I’ll be at Joey’s South Lake Union 2:00 for hoops. Come on by, I’ll buy you a beer. (This isn’t a setup, and I’m not dangerous).
I’m wearing a dark power suit, lavender (or maybe it’s periwinkle) shirt, no tie.
@3 Thanks for letting us know your Bush admin. buddies coerced Sen. Dodd into sheltering their corporate pals’ taxpayer-funded bonuses, Cyn! I wondered why the hell Sen. Dodd did that. Now we know — it was the Repugs playing by their Lucy’s Football Rules again.
@5 er, have you forgotten who got Obama and the rest of us into this mess in the first place?
And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that it was the GOP-sponsored Enron fraud that tripled our electricity rates …
@6 May you continue to enjoy the stock portfolio you voted for. Me, I personally don’t mind buying GE shares for 6 bucks a share, and I’d like to thank you Republican idiots for giving me this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do that …
@8 He’s doing outreach to your kind.
Hey Cyn! You still suck!
So Coach K, one of the best but also whiniest coaches in the NCAA, throws a hissy fit that The President doens’t think Duke will win it all.
Who gives a rats…
Pittsburgh is getting the best odds in Vegas and Duke plays them in the regional final if Duke even gets that far. I have Duke losing in the round of eight.
Kerrjeewooski is just bitter that he has a sub-par team this year.
(Wow, totally on topic, imagine that. Did Dodd fill out a bracket?)
@6, Distracted? It took President Obama less time to fill out a bracket than it took President Bush to finish reading “My pet Goat.” And a hell of a lot less time to put down the guitar in San Diego and deal with a drowning city…
Oooooooo! It’s only 10:30 AM and I’ve already made $1,200 in the stock market today! That works out to $150 an hour, and I didn’t have to sit in traffic idling away $2.50 gas, or pay 20 bucks for parking! Plus, I get preferential tax treatment!
Speaking of $2.50 gas, my oil stocks are doing great this morning, because crude has jumped over $50 a barrel and you can bet your sweet bippy they’re going higher! That’s because the oil producers shut off the valves on the expensive, hard-to-get, crude we now rely on for part of global supplies when market prices fall below production costs. Sure, they found billions of barrels off the coast of Brazil, but that stuff costs 60 bucks a barrel to get out of the seabed, so you’d better plan on paying at least $3 for gas this summer. K-ching! Roger Rabbit is singing merrily on his way to the bank to make another deposit!
@13 I’m putting my money on National Oilwell Varco. They can’t dribble or shoot for shit, but they have a near-monopoly on offshore platform tool setups. Cashing my tax-favored capital gains and dividends sure beats working for some hornet-up-his-ass employer!
@15
Pretty Clever! Well Played!
Don’t forget that today is ELECTION DAY for King Conservation District (sic; not King County Conservation District). Go to your local library and write in MARK SOLLITTO. Oh, and did you know that voter-rejected wingnut David “Motherbeater” Irons was APPOINTED to this board? That’s right, a notorious mother-beater who can’t get elected to anything is an un-elected member of the KCD board … I’ll bet you didn’t know that, huh? We need to REFORM the way conservative district board members are selected — complain to your legislator today!
Wow! It’s only 11:37 AM and I’ve already made $1,600 in the stock market today! I’m getting paid $200 an hour for NOT WORKING! I did absolutely nothing to earn this money! Plus, I get a nifty Republican tax break!! I don’t understand why anyone would want a job in this economy or tax system.
Capitalism is great! The labor aspect of it sucks, but I get around that by being a capitalist instead of a worker. Everyone should do that! If nobody works, capitalism will work for everyone.
Hatred of workers has deep roots in southern, and especially Texas, conservative political culture. Journalist Bryan Burroughs wrote in his book The Big Rich: The Rise And Fall Of The Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes:
“One of the most important, and most overlooked, legacies of Texas Oil has been its contribution to the growth of right-wing policies and politicians … the state’s oil millionaires would … bankroll … everything from … Republican thinktanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s redbaiting campaigns of the 1950s to extremist groups that openly espoused racism and anti-Semitism; later, oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right. In a very real sense, the influence of Texas conservatives in America today — the ‘Texanization’ of right-wing politics that brought figures such as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to national prominence — can be traced to forces set in motion by restive Texas oilmen during the 1930s.
“Modern Texas conservatism sprang from the intersection of two disparate events: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Depression-era oild discoveries, especially those in East Texas. The New Deal outraged many Texas oilmen and East Texas gave them the money to fight it. … [I]n general, conservative fury was fueled by a fear of … ‘big government,’ the New Deal’s introduction of a modern welfare state and deep-seated southern racism. …
“Before oil the greatest Texas fortunes were made in ranching and … lumber, where success depended on exploiting the labor of blacks, Latinos, and poor whites …. The men who ran Texas oversaw a hierarchical, plantation-style culture, ruled by a southern aristocracy dedicated to harvesting the earth while keeping its workers subservient and poorly educated.”
(Quoted from pp. 126-127 under fair use.)
And there you have it — the philosophical underpinning of modern-day conservatism is the idea of getting rich from the subservient labor of oppressed workers. The reason conservatives hate workers is because workers usually don’t cooperate with being exploited and kept poor so people who don’t work can be rich. Burroughs continues, at p. 127:
“Texas oilmen shared a deep loathing of taxes, labor organizers, and anyone who looked to change their ways.”
And, I would add, this handful of fabulously wealthy, supremely selfish, and grossly dysfunctional men succeeded transplanting their social pathologies into the minds of millions of gullible American hicks, who today are collectively known as Republicans.
None of these vicious, grasping, deranged man was more dysfunctional than H. L. Hunt, the richest of them all. Hunt was a grade-school dropout whose fortune was created from dirty dealing, double crossing his partners, and lawbreaking. His personal life was shaped by a limitless appetite for sex and a craven disregard for laws and social conventions — he was a bigamist who continually cheated on his three wives. He spawned the likes of Herbert, Lamar, and Bunker Hunt, a band of sophomoric fools who managed to destroy the family fortune in the process of trying to be as odious as their dad. This is the sort of man that today’s Republican Party, and its army of conservative idiots, looked to for its intellectual inspiration.
As the late Paul Harvey would have said, “Now you know the rest of the story!”
It was another southern conservative, Sam Walton, who figured out how to harness the welfare state for his own profit. The basic concept of Wal-Mart is to work people 35 hours but pay them for 28 hours, keep wage rates low fighting minimum wage laws and operating a corporate Gestapo to ferret out union sympathizers, and making taxpayers pay for the company workforce’s health care and food stamps. Old H. L. Hunt would have been proud of Sam; if you can’t defeat New Dealism, then turn it into a profit center!
Go Dawgs!
Old H.L. paid his oil rig workers with food, not money. All the Texas oilmen did that. Most of them didn’t have a dime of their own money invested in their ventures; they hit up banks for loans, sold watered shares to friends and relatives, used borrowed equipment, and paid their workers with beans (literally) to bring in their wells.
I was exposed to the cheap labor culture as a young rabbit trying to work his way through a southern college. I once worked in a cafeteria where they paid us with food scraps from the customers’ plates instead of cash. That’s how I got used to eating garbage. The main problem with this job, besides its unhealthy aspects, was I couldn’t pay my tuition with garbage because the college payment office wouldn’t accept spoiled food. All of my college jobs were minimum wage, except for a government job sorting mail in the post office, which paid double the minimum wage — pretty good for a southern college town where jobs were so scarce that employers could pay workers with garbage instead of money.
This is how I realized working for Big Government beats hell out of working for Cheap Labor Conservatives. The government paid me with cash instead of garbage, and that was great! So I stayed in government, saved my money to raise a nest egg, and now I’m a fucking capitalist with more children than H. L. Hunt. And my kids are smarter than his kids, too! Only a few hundred of them have been run over by cars, and they didn’t blow my fortune like his kids did. The GOP blew my fortune by wrecking the economy and screwing up the stock market, but under President Obama I’m starting to make it back.
Half an hour before the market’s close, I’ve made $1100 today from flipping stocks! That sure beats working for garbage! Now that I don’t work anymore, I get paid in tax-favored capital gains and dividends, which are much easier to convert into cash than the garbage that cheap labor conservatives paid me with. Nobody wants garbage, although given how the Republican Economy is going right now, a lot of people are eating out of dumpsters these days.
Without comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03.....8PANE.html
From the NY Times, March 2004:
Sarge@6, not paying attention lately have you.
Where has Cynical been lately? And I thought you were one of the “special ones”.
with one comment:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat.....30,00.html
SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word “terrorism.” Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?
Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word “terrorism,” I referred to “man-caused” disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.
I guess female suicide bombers need not apply huh Janet?
Pelletizer@18
See ya!
Great game by the Dawgs. North kicks South, blue swamps red, urban embarrasses rural. Hard to not like this win from every perspective.
Nice work Huskies. Good to see the Pac-10 administer a beat-down.
Go Bruins!
@25:
And GWB stopped using the word bin Laden and used the trrrrerist to try and scare people.
And GWB started to torture people.
And GWB started Gitmo and tortured people there illegally.
And GWB let some Trrorists go – and one is now the head of al qiada in Afghanistan.
And GWB kep a bunch of supposed trresrists locked up at gitmo – and now an ex-Bush official says many of them are innocent.
Yup – GWB let the largest attack since Pearl Harbor happen on his “watch” (or should I say sleep and vacation) ’cause he didn’t pay attention.
Do I feel safer now?
Much safer than when the idiot Bush was running things with the Cheney hiding out in undisclosed places. Hey, the bush “policies” on Irqn and North Korea worked sooo well and Putin…well bush could look in his eyes and tell he was an ally – Bush got suckered again.
Have you noticed the stupid “color alert” system is not going off at strangely political times anymore?
Oh, this is about hoops: Go Huskies. Love that agressive D. Next up: Purdue.
I would dunk one for you, but I can’t soar like I used to do.
Screw the NCAA. Good on the Huskies, but the real madness is at Qwest Field.
Right.
Now.
Sounders FC 2-0 Red Bull NY at the half.
And with Portland and Vancouver entering MLS in 2011, it’s only gonna get crazier.
You’ll get a lot farther in this world if you learn to distrust everything Fox News (sic) puts out. Here’s former Republican John Cole on the Coach K thing:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=18836