"Dear Scott Walker" : Two responses to my letter, 1 from the left and 1 from the "right?"

The other day, I wrote my own Dear Scott Walker letter, in which I set out how Gov. Patsy's first year in office had personally affected me and my family, and urged people to do the same.

And I got a response.

Then, yesterday, I mentioned that one prominent supporter of Gov. Patsy's was trying hard to put in place a tax plan in Illinois whereby taxes would be increased regressively on the poor and middle class and some of those tax proceeds would be diverted to provided income for a billionaire sports team owner.

And I got a response to THAT, too!

Let's compare the responses and see what each side's supporters are like, shall we?  This'll be fun!

First, here's an anonymous response comment to my own letter to Scott Walker; one commenter posted:

Very nice letter. i truly understand. i am one of those overpaid state employees pulling in 28k after 11 years.

I stuck with it to provide insurance for my daughters seeing their father abandoned us fir his drug problem. I've woken up at 4am for all these years and put in 40 +hrs a week...so I could be home in time for them to get off the bus...no daycare expenses.

all these years I have not needed help....do to Walker I have had to apply for a food card, energy assistance And I qualify to have my daughters covered by Badgercare. 

I don't know how to verify that.  It's just a post on the Internet, after all, and the person didn't provide her name or identifying information (perhaps rightfully, given that a professor who posted stories about ALEC saw his emails demanded and a government worker was fired for an email that protested the Voter ID policy .)

But that comment was a lot nicer and more thoughtful than the few anonymous ones that took me to task over my Dear Scott Walker letter.  Here are the three comments that preceded the government worker's letter:

 Anonymous said... TLDR Version: We are WIunion, and we are a bucket of failure. 

Anonymous said... Anonymous posts are cowardly. That's why I stand with criminal defense fund Governor. 

Anonymous said... wiunion morons are moronic

I especially like that the WIunion opponent who posted first and began by noting that the post was too long for him (?) to bother reading.   Remember when I commented on the many interesting ways "conservatives" think these days? This is another rule of "Conservative" "Thought": if your post is too long, it's certainly wrong!

But that maybe is just because "conservatives" don't want to be confronted with facts and ideas and stuff and junk, as was demonstrated by "Conservative" "Thinker" Natasha Lazzeroni. 

Natasha, who is (according to her Twitter bio) a "small town country girl" who follows @scottkwalker, and yesterday was one of the people on Twitter whom I asked to comment on whether they supported Gov. Patsy's support by a billionaire who wants to use tax money to line his pocket.  Specifically, what I asked was this:

Hey, @natashakay What does Walker think about donor's plans to raise taxes and pocket some of the money? #recall

I had picked Natashakay off the list of publicly-available followers of Scott Walker.   Seems fair to me to say You follow Scott Walker and support him, why don't I ask you about some of his positions?

Natashakay didn't think so.  She responded to me:

It's true.  Natashakay didn't ask my opinion.  She only went publicly on the Internet and supported Scott K Walker and made public comments about him and his policies and her support for them.

So I followed up with a second tweet to her:

So your opinion, @natashakay, is that it's ok to take campaign $ from a billionaire who wants to raise taxes to fund his business?

But remember: Natashakay did not ask my opinion.  So maybe I was out of line in asking her opinion, and maybe I deserved this:

My favorite... of that second set... so far, was everyone who thinks people who argue with you... etc etc.  I mean, I'm always happy to have people swear at me for asking them a political question after they've gone public with their political views, but I especially appreciate being blocked by people who want to express a political viewpoint but never ever ever have it challenged.

I, unlike Natashakay, don't hate it when people tell me who I should or shouldn't vote for.  Which is what Natashakay was not doing when she tweeted this:

No, no, not the whiskey girl one.  The one where Natashakay says We all stand with... Scott K. Walker.

Don't you hate it when you get exposed as a hypocrite who wants to express unchallenged political opinions?  Some people hate that almost as much as they hate religion.  Right, Natashakay?

Don't get the idea that Natashakay, simple country girl who loves huntin' and fishin' and Scott K Walker is just going around bashing only religion, grandmas, and Camero (sic) owners, though:  she takes on the secular humanists of the world, too:

That hurts.  That really hurts.  "Recall Santa Clause?" What'd Tim Allen ever do to you, Natasha Kay?

 

Plus, I don't mean to bring up a sore point here, but you kinda told me who I should vote for and I thought we agreed we hated that.

Anyway, there is a snapshot of the people who are for Gov. Patsy or against them.

 In this corner, an anonymous government worker who's been getting up at 4 a.m. every day for years and now has to rely on food stamps to make ends meet.

And in this corner, a Camero-hatin', Santa-Clause-recallin', whiskey girl.  Choose your sides!

Recall Walker! And meet the supporters who want him to increase taxes to fund billionaires' hobbies.

Pictured: Scott Walker Campaign HQ

I said yesterday I'd do anything I legally could do to try to Recall Scott ("Patsy") Walker, and I'm going to do my part. 

So first, Jenni Dye, who most people know as @legaleagle, is asking people to make at least 10 phone calls from the online phone banks, reminding people to Vote for Barrett in the recall election. Find her post here, with links to the phone banks.

Second, as I did for autism research, we can speak directly to people who follow Gov. Patsy online; his ScottKWalker twitter feed has some 18,000 followers; tweeting to them about problems Gov. Patsy has may help the effort, too.  Education never hurts, and it's possible to educate people even at this late date.

Third, I'm going to post what I can to help that education, like today's post on Walker's meeting (?) with Joe Ricketts.  The Ed Show site reports, via John Nichols of The Nation and The Capitol Times, that Joe Ricketts gave $100,000 to Walker after a personal meeting with him.

I'm not in favor of campaign finance limits; I don't care if Ricketts gave $100,000,000 or more.  I'm in favor of information, though, about who's giving what, so here's some information about Ricketts, who wants Gov. Patsy to stay in power.

Ricketts made his money as the founder and CEO of Ameritrade, an online discount brokerage.  He also sold Bison meat and produced films, and eventually bought the Chicago Cubs.  Ricketts retired from Ameritrade in 2011 to be a "philanthropist," and the two highest-profile moves he's made in that regard so far were funding a Nebraska candidate in a Republican primary and a recently-announced campaign to spend millions to try to link Obama to Jeremiah Wright.  Ricketts had to distance himself from that latter campaign almost immediately. It's not clear whether the plan will still be tried.  It was commissioned by Rickett's group but apparently rejected.

Rickett also wants government money to pay 1/2 the cost -- or $150,000,000 -- for a new stadium for his Chicago Cubs, and part of his proposal for that payment is that the "amusement tax" he would increase would be shared, in perpetuity, with Rickett. 

That is: A billionaire who owns a sports team and has money to spend on hateful campaigns wants a cut of government tax revenue.

I wonder what Gov. Patsy thinks about increasing taxes and giving some of the swag to billionaires? Has anyone asked him?

I wonder, too, what Rickett would do with the extra money he siphons off from increased government taxes to fund his hobbies? Probably not pay the Cubs' debts -- he's been noted by Major League Baseball to be in violation of league rules regarding debts, and that's true even though the Cubs had the highest average ticket price in baseball in 2010.  (Does Rickett, who is worth more than $1,000,000,000, enjoy soaking the middle class to fund his lifestyle? Only he knows!)

"Dear Scott Walker..."

As much as I'm against open letters, I find myself resorting to that tired tactic and suggesting that others do so as well.  Wisconsin Governor Scott ("Patsy") Walker has been going around the state claiming fictitious jobs among other fake accomplishments as he tries to keep the job he barely won in the first place.  

To help counteract this, I'm starting Dear Scott Walker, and urging everyone to take to their blogs, their Twitters, their Tumblrs, and more, to write a letter to Scott Walker and tell him just how his year in office has affected them.

And don't just post them:  Email them to info@scottwalker.org and Tweet links to them to @scottkwalker : those are his campaign addresses, so taxpayers won't pay to review them and he'll have something to do with his money besides pay criminal defense attorneys.

Here's mine:

Dear Scott Walker,

   When you first were elected, in November 2010, I was a consumer litigator who had recently decided to run for circuit court judge.  I watched nervously between your election and your swearing-in as you outlined your plans for the state.  Just 56 hours into your official term, you had created a redundant "commission" designed to root out "fraud," with some of your soon-to-be-public goals already laid out in your command that the commission go after government workers getting paid overtime. That commitment to avoiding government waste didn't include limiting frivolous expenditures on experts from Michigan coming to light the Capitol dome to promote the Packers.  But it did help you convince the legislature to make itself largely irrelevant by voting to give you oversight over all administrative rules. 

Despite the average salary of government workers in Wisconsin being under $50,000 (while your salary, with state-provided SUV and benefits topped $161,000), and faced with protests over that, you decided to post armed guards at the doors to the Capitol I used to walk through on my way to the Dane County Courthouse.

That's all the public stuff, of course.  That all affected me, both directly -- I couldn't walk through the Capitol anymore, for a while-- and indirectly.  But there was more to come.

Your changes, via Act 10, to how public employees are compensated led me to question whether becoming a circuit court judge was a viable option for me, given that I couldn't be sure whether additional cuts were coming. My candidacy for judge was made even more questionable given your and your administration's attitudes towards health insurance, made clear with the appointment of Secretary of Death Dennis Smith, who demonstrated an open hostility towards health care and families with special needs.  With two young boys receiving 20 hours a week of insurance-covered therapy for their autism, I simply could not risk changing jobs and insurance carriers, and had to withdraw from the campaign.

While I went on working as a consumer litigator, I saw numerous circuit court judges resign or retire abruptly from their positions, including longtime judges in Dane County, Green Lake County, Richland County, and others.  It's possible that some of these were planned retirements, and it's possible that some had nothing to do with you and Act 10, but in 14 years of practicing law I never saw such a large number of departures from the bench.  This has led to a great deal of uncertainty in many areas of practice, as reserve judges sit temporarily on some cases and, as in Dane County, your appointed judge in one branch served for only a few months before being defeated for election.  I have cases pending in that branch, and those clients have now have four different judges ruling on their cases in less than one year.

At home, my children suffered from continued overturning of therapists.  One special-ed teacher saw her pay cut with the commencement of Act 10 and had to put her house up for sale.  While she managed to not let it distract her from helping my children, it was distressing to see such a dedicated professional -- someone who works 8-10 hours per day, even in the summer, with special needs children -- have to give up her home just to keep her important job.  Other therapists worked two jobs so that they could make ends meet, spending 8 hours a day working with children, including ours, and then working other jobs at night and on the weekends.  Most of the therapists do not have health insurance provided by their employer, and your Attorney General openly fought imposition of the Affordable Care Act while your administration seemingly rebuffed every opportunity and returned every dollar it could to avoid helping people get health care and health insurance.

While they worried about getting paid and paying their insurance, our family had to worry that you would repeal laws that allowed for the children to get therapy.  In the past, our health insurance provided six hours of in-home therapy... per year.  We would have had to cover the cost of the remaining 1,034 hours each boy needs out of our own pocket.  I already pay, through my law firm and my own contributions, nearly $1600 per month for health insurance coverage, and could not have afforded the $100,000 per year it costs to provide the therapy our youngest need.

That therapy was provided, instead, by our insurance company's payments, after the law was passed under former Governor Jim Doyle.  The increase in therapy has allowed our boys, now nearly 6 years old, to progress from being non-verbal, sheltered little children to being fully engaged in the classroom and in public.  They can talk to us and interact with people and are learning, all thanks to the passage of that law requiring our insurer to provide coverage for in-home therapy.

But once you took office, not a single day went by that I didn't worry that you would manage to get that law repealed, and I still worry -- because if you take that law away, you will take away my boys' chance at a life they would not otherwise have had.

And you have been repealing laws left and right -- protections for tenants in foreclosure: gone -- so people call me and report that they have been named as defendants in lawsuits against their landlords and they must incur attorney's fees to clear their name and their credit records.  Laws protecting leases entered into before foreclosure: gone, so tenants must worry that the bank won't let them stay there.

Then you tried to limit people's access to lawyers like me, lawyers who defend people from wrongful foreclosures and who try to keep landlords from stealing security deposits and who sue companies that wreck people's cars due to faulty mechanical work and who defend homeowners from companies that charge them $34,000 to repair fire damage and leave a hole in the side of the house, you tried to keep people from being able to hire lawyers by trying to limit fees we could charge, doing so solely to please big business contributors of yours.  That hasn't worked -- I'm still working and still representing the little people -- but you've made it harder for them to realize it's okay to call me.

And to top it all off, you and your cronies took money that was supposed to go to homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed and used it to balance your budget -- a budget that allowed you to buy iPads for your pals but wouldn't let you help people who'd been kicked out of their houses.

Your first year has been a nightmare for me, for my family, and for my clients.  I'm tired of worrying about what you'll do next.  I can't find it in me to believe that you actually think what you've done and what you're planning to do are actually for the good of the State of Wisconsin, where I've lived all my life.  I want you out of office, and I will do whatever I legally can to see that happen.

Signed,

Briane Pagel
Middleton, Wisconsin.

Thursday Scramble!

On Thursday Scramble! I take a post from one of my blogs and put it on all of them.  This post appeared this week on Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!, the sports blog for people who like sports but hate sports blogs.

I Dreamt Of Pole Vaulting is a new idea I'm trying out here:  essays about my own personal experiences with sports, whether as a fan or participant.  We'll see if it lasts.  Don't get too attached -- like avocados and fate, I can be fickle.)

I have always wanted to be a pole-vaulter.

Honestly.

Well, okay, maybe not always.  There was a time when I didn't dream of pole-vaulting, at all, but that time was when I was very young and had other dreams, like the dream of becoming an oceanographer.

Admittedly, I was not the coolest of little kids.

The dream of pole-vaulting first came to me sometime in the beginning stages of high school.  High school, and pole-vaulting for that matter, were not things that I was suited for.  As far as I can tell in my life, I am more or less perfectly suited to be a middle-aged man, in that the things I do either seem normal for a middle-aged man to do (reading The New Yorker, not even just for the cartoons, having a receding hair line) or are things about which I no longer care if society approves of (wearing blue Crocs in public, writing sentences like "about which I no longer care").  But I was not suited for high school, where sustained happiness can be hard to come by if you are not rich, good-looking, or both.  Of the two, rich is better:  You could be, in my high school, rich and not good-looking, and still be part of the popular crowd, while there were good-looking people (some, anyway) who were not part of the popular crowd because they could not keep up, clothing- and car-having-wise.

(There were only a few of the good-looking who were not also popular, because part of what makes you good-looking is being popular; once you are popular people judge others' looks by you, or so I assume, having never been popular.)

And once you were popular, everything was open to you:  girls, parties, girls, and I'm sure there were other things that people cared about in high school.

In actuality, everything really was open to you once you were popular, while nothing was open to you if you were not popular, and that includes sports, but not just sports.  Unlike many high schools*

*Note: I only attended one high school and have no information about other real high schools, because my own kids limited the amount of information they shared about their own high school experiences to three categories:  1: How much their teachers hated students, in general, 2: How much their teachers hated them in particular which was why they were getting such bad grades, and 3: a category I can only refer to as "I don't want to talk about it," which was their answer to every other question I asked, including questions like "Do you think your teacher would like you more if you turned in the homework when it was due, rather than long after?"  The point is, my information about high schools in general comes from watching John Hughes movies.  Picture Ally Sheedy liberally throughout this story.  She was kind of hot, back then.

my own high school did not break into cliques based on activities, so much.  Instead, activities were the province of the popular kids who got to choose what they would do and whether the unpopular or barely-noticed (I was more of the latter than the former) would get to take part at all.

So Student Council, which is only supposed to be a kind-of popularity based thing: reserved for popular kids like Dave Weber, who ran for student council president against me and who won and who then organized a boycott of the hot lunches.  Student newspaper: even though nominally run by the journalism class, which I took, was reserved for popular kids.  Unpopulars got to write things like "movie reviews," which never got published.

Even the plays and Swing Choir were reserved for the popular, something that makes me snicker when I watch Glee, which I never do anymore because honestly that musical gimmick gets old after a while.  I'm as fond of fake high schoolers singing covers of songs I never heard of as the next guy is, which is not very.  In our high school, the glee club was called swing choir and you could only get on it if you were already popular, as I found out the time I tried out for it by singing a version of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go (this was 1986, after all) and never got a call back.

"Trying standing still while you're singing it," the choir director told me, because apparently I had shifted my feet.  I didn't make the cut.  They must not have needed a fat guy with a lazy eye and a vocal range of three notes.  But I wouldn't have made it anyway even if I was a better singer, because we were not rich and I was not popular. (See, e.g., "lazy eye," and "fat.")(Also, I played Dungeons and Dragons.)

The really odd thing is that sports were reserved (mostly) for the popular at my high school, too, a weird twist on the traditional route to popularity -- get good at sports, movies and TV shows and books tell us -- and you can become popular, or at least accepted.  Or so I've gathered from my muddled memories of sports in pop culture.  Didn't that dirtbike-riding kid in The Bad News Bears become popular because he could play baseball?  Didn't people like Englebert after he could play baseball, too, in that same movie?  Didn't they make any other movies about kids playing sports besides The Bad News Bears?

All good questions that deserve investigation.

At our school, football and baseball and soccer and basketball were the province of the cool, and you tried out for them at your peril, literally:  I tried out for the baseball team and I was actually pretty good in the tryouts: my lazy eye made me terrible as a fielder but I was okay as a batter and the kid who was trying out for pitcher wasn't very good at all, so in batting practice on day one I was up to bat and got about 7 hits in a row, hitting them pretty well out to the outfield, too.

That should have at least gotten me a shout-out from the coach and maybe one or two potential teammates, because who doesn't want a good hitter on their team?  But the practice was really quiet as pitch number 8 came in and I hit that one, too.

Then pitch number 9 came straight at my head.  Straight. At. It.

I tried to duck away but not in time and got caught on the temple, just at the edge of the helmet, and it didn't do much other than really rattle me and make my head ache just a bit because it made the helmet hit my head hard.  So I stepped out of the box for a second, and the coach said "Get back in there!" and I had to step back in and before I even raised my bat the pitch number 10 hit me in the leg.

"Next batter!" the coach yelled.  I waited for him to tell me where to go stand in the field, to shag flies, but he didn't say anything.

"Where should I go?" I asked.

"Better shake off those pitches," he said.

The pitcher looked at me and shook his head.  I sat around until tryouts ended and didn't go back the next day.

I can't prove that it was all intentional and done because I wasn't cool but I can't not prove it, either, and that's more or less the same thing, right?

The exception to the coolness requirement in sports was track: you could get on the track team even if you weren't cool, because nobody much wanted to be on the track team and also the track team needed lots of people and so if you were on the track team you were not taking a spot away from a cool kid, you were just on the team.  I'm sure that if you were not cool and you were on the track team and you beat a cool kid, there might be repercussions, but I never found out what those were as there was no chance that I might beat a cool kid.

That accessibility might have been part of why I wanted to be a pole vaulter, but only part.  I wanted to be an athlete in high school, for obvious reasons: athletes are cool.  Even for a kid like me, who read comic books and Doonesbury and listened to the Violent Femmes and wrote short stories and liked the book Childhood's End when we read it in high school and once got a 108 on his British Literature essay exam, getting 8 points' extra credit when he hadn't even done the homework, even for that kid, sports held the allure of society's adulation and accomplishment.  Already, by ninth grade I'd been inculcated with how much people love athletes and how little they care for oceanographers: I'd seen my Mom, who hates sports, watching the Super Bowl, and we'd been dragged to the Little League All Star Game the year my older brother played in it, under the lights on the big baseball diamond at Nixon Park in Hartland, and all the kids played T-ball, even me, and the T-ball and Little League teams marched in the 4th of July parade, and our middle-school gym teacher, Mr Fry, was rumored to have once gotten a tryout as a kicker for the Denver Broncos, a legend that I was never able to verify but which shows just how little athletic accomplishment is necessary to elevate you above the pack.  I look back now and think:  Tryout? I think:  Kicker?  I think: DENVER BRONCOS? and I wonder why that was even worth repeating but repeated it was, year after year, as kids passed on the all-important information.

Sports trophies are displayed front and center in high schools.  You drive into towns and the Welcome signs have the local accomplishments on them, and those local accomplishments are always "Girls Volleyball Champions, 1991", and they never put on there "Three State Senators and a guy who started his own veterinary supply business lived here, back in the day."  The other day, listening to a story about some kids who took place in Mock Federal Reserve competition, which apparently is a thing, I heard the winner talk about the trophy they got to take back to their high school.  It would be displayed in the economics room, she said, because nobody else would probably care.

Imagine if you saw a sign that said Welcome to Middleton, Wisconsin -- home of the 2012 Mock Federal Reserve Champions!  You'd probably turn around.  The only thing that's not athletic at all but which regularly gets attention in a sort-of-comparable way to athletics is the spelling bee, which ESPN televises, now, but ESPN will put anything on the air to give the Sportscenter hosts a break to try to think up more stupid synonyms for home run ("Ryan Braun of the Brewers hits his third humdinger of the week, giving him 14 gnocchi-makers on the season and putting him on a pace to beat Hank Aaron's record for lifetime Breakin'2 Electric Boogaloos").

Study hard and get good grades, we're told as kids.  Brush your teeth and eat your vegetables, we're reminded.  But nobody gets put in the 4th of July parade for having finished off their broccoli and Hartland Meats, my old T-ball team, didn't sponsor kids' flossing.  Sports is where it's at, and especially when I was a kid, you were expected to be in sports.

Which, again: lazy eye.  Fat.  Comic books.  See where the problem might lie?

Which leads me to pole vaulting, and specifically how it fits into my life of sports, or sports attempts.  To reiterate:  the track team was at least potentially accessible to me, as a high school student -- I could try out for track without worrying about sustaining brain damage, or having to run against Dave Weber, or even having to think about not moving while I sang a song.

And I had three friends on the track team:  Fred, Bob, and Eric, all skinny guys who were able to run, and so run they did: sprints and longer runs, and I think even hurdles, and Fred and Bob and Eric bonded over their track events, taking the bus to track meets and talking about practice and, I don't know, being skinny, which was a big allure for me, too, and so I decided that I would try out for the track team.

And I hit on pole vaulting as my event.

To this day, I can't exactly describe why pole vaulting.  Here is what I think of when I think of pole vaulting:  I imagine me, in track shorts and a tank top and cool track shoes and wristbands and a headband, holding a pole.

That song from Chariots of Fire starts.  (I think it's called Chariots of Fire.)

I grimace.  I know what a grimace is because (a) I looked up once why the Grimace was called the Grimace and (b) I wanted to grimace in this imagining, but I wasn't sure what to call it.

After grimacing, I begin to run.  (That music is still playing.)

I run for a really long time, pole in hand, probably in slow motion.  This entire time, you are looking at me from the front, head-on, and I am determined.  Also, I look really cool in that headband, so shut up.

The pole plants, at a part where the music is dramatic. (I don't actually remember the song Chariots of Fire all that well and sometimes get it confused with Music Box Dancer.)

Then you see me from below, and I am soaring, rising up and over the pole, which in my imagination is something like 30 feet in the air.  I let go of the pole. (Music Box Dancer gets more dramatic, still, probably with a tympani).

I fall into the big mat, and people cheer.  Do people cheer pole vaulting? They do when a suddenly-skinny guy with lazy eye sets a world record and brings it, probably saving the town from an oil baron or something.

Then I get a date for the prom, too.

So I decided to try out for the track team.

I begin to ramble a bit here, but you'll get the point.

Is there anything better in life than getting free stuff?

Well, probably, I mean, you could cure cancer or develop cool superpowers or maybe just have an easy commute to work but no matter how you look at it, free stuff is awesome and so this site that I know of, All Free Samples, is awesome by extension because it collects up all the free stuff you can ever want, and links to the sites where you can get it.

So you can find how to get freebies by mail, and every day could be like a party for you, with free things just arriving at your house, or you can use the site to get free online dating services in case you need someone to share all that free stuff with, and then, assuming that things go really well, you'll bookmark All Free Samples to get some free baby stuff which, if you have a baby, you'll know: you need free stuff!  And lots of it.  Because babies are expensive, see.

See how that works? Go to All Free Samples, get free stuff, end up happily married with a little bundle of joy.*  (*Results not guaranteed.)  So that moves Free Stuff up the great ladder of life above "easier commute" to just below "Superpowers," right?  I mean, we all agree curing cancer would be number one, so that stays.  But just imagine if you were a happily married father with superpowers.  You'd probably have an easy commute at that point, so your life would be just about perfect, and it would only get better if one of your superpowers was curing cancer.  And flying. 

A man can dream, and until dreams come true, at least a man can get free stuff online.

It's a THREEFER! Star Wars, sports, and politics, all together at once. (If only there was some sexy way to refer to such a thing...)

One show, one clip, relevant to three of my blogs in one day.  I love/am insanely jealous of Stephen Colbert.  But I'm also indebted to him, because he did this:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I don't like to just post stuff without having something to say about it; I don't just spit back pop culture at you for no reason and call it a day.  I also try to sell you products and get paid through the advertising...  I mean, I try to comment intelligently on the subject of the post.

So here are some comments:

1.  (Politics) Why are Republican women so stereotypically ditzy?  I used to be a Republican, and I know some women who are extremely conservative and yet are smart.  Despite that, whenever you see a Republican woman in public -- Michelle Bachmann, Wisconsin's for-now-Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, "Dee Dee" the Republican commentator in that clip -- she appears to be a Barbie doll, only slightly dumber/more lobotomized.

I think it's indicative of the attitudes of today's Republicans that they and FOX continue to put forth a slightly-less-sexualized June Cleaver as their ideal woman.  But why do women put up with that? As Jon Stewart has pointed out, that particularly stupid-seeming Gretchen woman on Fox has a degree from Stanford, but she insists on acting like an NFL Today weathergirl.  Are they that desperate to be on TV, that they'd hide their intelligence?

For the life of me, I will never understand anyone backing a group, party, or political movement that openly denigrates them and forces them to be something they're not really.  (Gay Republicans, I am also looking at you in that sentence.)

2.  Sports:  It's kind of sad that if Notre Dame-USC was ever a truly great rivalry (was it? I don't know) it no longer is.  Notre Dame hasn't mattered to football since... I'll say 1972, when they still played football in black and white (in my mind, that is.)  USC hasn't mattered to football since Pete Carroll decided he wanted to openly be able to pay players for their performance. 

(USC's lack of mattering is indicative of the general weakness of the PAC-10 which is one of the reasons I think Andrew Luck may not actually be St. Peyton 2.0; everytime I say to someone what kind of competition did Luck face in college? Which good teams did he play? they look at me blankly and then mutter "Well he's really good," but what are you measuring that against?)

3.  Star Wars References:  Just to be clear: The Star Wars Reference category exists because Star Wars is the root of all Western culture and this clip shows that.  When he had to go to a film reference, Colbert immediately went for Star Wars; yes, there were other sci-fi shows mixed in, but the entire reference was built around Star Wars, because just as we all spring from DNA, or something, whatever, I'm not a scientist, culture all springs from Star Wars.

This is a joint post shared between Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!, The Best Of Everything, and Publicus Proventus.