So how many Hockey Moms, do you think...

has President Obama eaten/tasted?
(Because if you think it through fully, that's kinda the other part of the equation, no?)

President Obama, at last night's Washington correspondents' dinner:

"What's the difference between a hockey mom & a pit bull?
A pit bull is delicious."

Plus... how with this play in Bogota?

"I have a lot of Secret Service jokes," Kimmel said. "I told them for $800 I wouldn't tell them, but they only offered 30."

Kimmel pointed to Sofia Vergara, one of a swarm of celebrities in attendance.

"This is what women look like in Colombia," Kimmel said. "What's the Secret Service supposed to do?"

It will be nice to have a non-adolescent in the White House -- after 5 terms of this type -- I think the majority of us will agree...
-----------------------------------
Happy Sunday.
Day will come...


Added:
Personally, I would have liked to see less joking at the expense of the ladies, and more of the self-deprecating humor, beyond the mild "I ate dog as a boy" stuff...

How about the president strutting into the party with VP Biden -- after the crowd is regaled, once again, with the story of who shot Osama -- a'la Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in Stir Crazy?

That's right... We bad. We bad.

Man, that would have been funny, fool.

This is not how we do it, baby...

Poor Dan Savage. The professional gay victim, and sex-columnist writer, is at it again, it seems...

He's simply not content with the unexpected boost he gave to Rick Santorum's campaign by trying to forward a viral bullying meme online. (Making fun -- vulgar fun? -- of a guy's name? How very third grade. Luckily, most grow up, get educated, and figure out more educated -- not to mention effective -- ways of communicating displeasure at a politician's policy stands. The bullying has simply got to go, because the backlash conveniently trickles down on innocent/non-vulgar students.)

Savage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thought the speech was one thing – but it turned into something else.

“I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

Tuttle said a number of his students were offended by Savage’s remarks – and some decided to leave the auditorium.

“It became hostile,” he said. “It felt hostile as we were sitting in the audience – especially towards Christians who espouse beliefs that he was literally taking on.”

Tuttle said the speech was laced with vulgarities and “sexual innuendo not appropriate for this age group.” At one point, he said Savage told the teenagers about how good his partner looked in a speedo.

The conservative website CitizenLink was the first to report about the controversy. They interviewed a 17-year-old girl who was one of students who walked out of the auditorium.

“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”

As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them pansy-assed.

“You can tell the Bible guys in the hall they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible,” Savage said as other students hollered and cheered. “It’s funny as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”

The executive director of the National Scholastic Press Association provided Fox News with joint statement from the Journalism Education Association that was sent to members – after a number of people complained about Savage’s remarks.

“We appreciate the level of thoughtfulness and deliberation regarding Dan Savage’s keynote address,” the NSPA wrote. “some audience members who felt hurt by his words and tone decided to leave in the middle of his speech, and to this, we want to make our point very clear: While as a journalist it’s important to be able to listen to speech that offends you, these students and advisers had simply reached their tolerance level for what they were willing to hear.”

The NSPA said they did not have a prior transcript of Savage’s speech and that wish “he had stayed more on target for the audience of teen journalists.”

He's politically connected too.

Savage, and his husband, were also guests at the White House for President Obama’s 2011 LGBT Pride Month reception. He was also invited to a White House anti-bullying conference.

Games People Play.

So Elizabeth Warren is Native American, eh?
Enough to count herself as a minority professor in the affirmative-action identification game, it seems. Who knew?

David Bernstein at Volokh reports:

My contribution to this controversy is that there seems to be some disingenuousness going on. Warren says that she could not “recall” ever listing her Native American background when applying for college or a job.

The old AALS Directory of Faculty guides are online (through academic libraries) at Hein Online. The directories starting listing minority faculty in an appendix in 1986. There’s Elizabeth Warren, listed as a professor at Texas. I spot-checked three additional directories from when she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, including 1995-96, the year Harvard offered her a position. Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren.

So, we know one thing with almost 100% certainty: Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor. We know something else with 90%+ certainty: (at least some) folks at Harvard were almost certainly aware that she identified as a minority law professor, though they may not have known which ethnic group she claimed to be belong to, and it may not have played any role in her hiring.

But it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty. Now that’s passing strange. When the AALS directory form came around before Warren arrived at Harvard, she was proud enough of her Native American ancestry to ask that she be listed among the minority law professors. (Or, in the unlikely even that she just allowed law school administrators to fill out the forms for her without reviewing them, they were aware that she claimed such ancestry, and she didn’t object when she was listed.) Once she arrived at Harvard, however, she no longer chose to be listed as a minority law professor.

Hmmm.

Busy, busy, busy...

Remember when I told you that less here means more happening in my real life? 'Tis true...

The boss let me go at the little weekly newspaper in mid-February soon after complaining I brought him "two pages of anti-mining comments" and nothing positive from the County Board of Adjustments hearings setting conditions on the 24-hour frac sand mining wet plant set to operate in a township previously zoned rural and surreptitiously rezoned (with the county board, but not the township's blessing) to permit the plant, estimated to draw down thousands of gallons of water per minute to achieve their needs...

"But Jim..." said I.* "Everyone speaking at that meeting was against the plant locating there."

I forgot. In a small town, a publisher without a college degree who inherited his papers from papa, and a son who is the sports editor ("publisher" in name only) with a business, not a journalism, degree care more about scoring points with advertisers than accurate reporting...

Soon after I left, dontchaknow? They simply stopped covering the township meetings, and began publishing full-page color ads reassuring folks that frac sand mining is beneficial to all, despite the water drawdowns and expected truck traffic clogging two-lane rural roads... "Think of the jobs" becomes the misleading mantra; just ignore the towhship comprehensive growth plans that spell out residents' desire to remain rural and essentially a "bedroom" township. Plenty built out in the country relying on the rural zoning, never expecting an industrial plant as a new neighbor, with their outsized needs.)

Naturally, a lawsuit was filed (my county sure gets sued a lot; nevermind soliciting good legal advice in the first place -- the taxpayers will pick up the tab, win or lose...) The paper will give that cursory coverage though, because the corporation counsel just happens to be the son of the biggest butcher in the county...

Relationships matter most, dontchaknow? In small towns especially, you don't want to do too good a job rooting out honest facts, or have too much legal/document-reading knowledge to strongly question county administrators and staff... They're not used to a reporter not simply printing their puff, it seems, instead wondering why things are happening the way they are. (Especially when the questioner comes in the person of an intelligent, financially secure, single woman -- trust me, in a small town, some alleged "leader" men don't like to be topped by young[er] women in the smarts department...)

Accountability doesn't count so much as bringing in those ad dollars, and if scoring the full-pager in color means calling off the aggressive reporting dog, well -- some people have to make their money that way, sadly. God bless 'em...

Moving on, though -- naturally, I qualified for the unemployment as my firing was due to "communication style differences" (his words) and not a lack of ability to perform on my part, nor any neglect of my duties...

My new gig is working in the Cities, at a full-time temporary job grading the standardized tests the schoolkids these days have to take. What an eye opener. Many of my colleagues are retired teachers, a fun group, and like I said, the work is enjoyable in the short-term anyway. I'll get done at the end of May, which opens up the summer work opportunities up here...

I'm commuting over the famous Stillwater, Minn. lift bridge. (Do a Google search for the recent political ... coming together this decades-long project has inspired. One of the few Kumbaya political moments in recent days, it seems...) Start at 7:30 a.m. so my mornings are brisk...

What else? The flowering trees have finally come into their own up here. The sights, scents and their delicacy are beautiful, until the first wind/rain storm comes to humble them... perhaps tonight.

Our community garden in Rice Lake is tilled and ready. We're expecting a dry summer since we're so down on snow/rainfall this past season. Still, hope blooms eternal, and if you see gardening as a shared cooperative effort -- instead of just another way of competing with your neighbor -- it's something so inherently enjoyable to me... Let's see how I feel after Sunday's workday, fencing, spot tilling and plotting out who gets what where. Just kidding, I'm relatively young/flexible and don't expect so much soreness to set in after Sunday's efforts.

Well, that's about it here... How are things with you? (I'll blog more when I'm able.)

-----------------

* I recently read True Grit (what a treat), and seem to have picked up a bit on Portis' style... If only.

Reading Between the Lines.

Susan Estrich, like Kathleen Parker, is -- to me -- a "clean up" columnist. Not a must-read stand alone, as there is rarely "new" material covered. Usually, it's just a wrap up of other writers -- they seem to look to see what material other writers are working, then chime in with a "woman's perspective". Feeding a market need in a mainstream world with too few unique woman's voices, it seems.

Nice work if you can find it...

Today, Estrich loses me. She worked for Ted Kennedy. Supported Bill Clinton. Was raped herself, which affected her career path... You'd think somewhere in there, there might be some acknowledgment that -- whether legal or not, whether taxpayer funded or not -- the Secret Service hooker scandal damages America's reputation abroad, not to mention forwards the notion that many Western men still view women's flesh merely as marketable commodities, despite all our purple-fingered assurances that education, respect and rights need to be accorded to women worldwide.

Instead, with her prominent political platform, Estrich offers up this:

I went to a strip club once. OK, maybe it was twice. The guys were going; I was curious. It reminded me of the first time I walked into a casino, in a hotel in Reno where I was staying on business. I expected glamour, James Bond look-alikes in dashing tuxedos. I found sad-looking seniors throwing away their Social Security money and standing in line for cheap buffets. Even "high-end" strip clubs are full of sorry women. Having taken gym at a public school, shared communal bathrooms at a women's college and belonged to endless health clubs in my never-ending efforts to shape up, the sight of an unclothed female body doesn't do anything for me.

?????
What exactly is she saying there?
Public school gym class cured her of potential lesbianism by revealing flabby flesh? That it's ok to go to strip clubs with the fellas, so long as you're doing ... "research" and not appreciating the talent?

I've never been to a strip club either, Ms. Estrich. Never knowingly worked for men who exploited women, all the while publicly professing their innocence whilst consuming their flesh (or having their flesh consumed, is it ...?)

Being a rape victim, surely Estrich understands this is not about meeting natural or "normal" needs, but about buddying up, bonding, and using the power of money to pay poorer women to perform for one's personal non-private pleasures. (Or not pay, as the sad case here might be...)

Estrich's lockerroom observations, like her strip club observations, mean little. Her inability to understand how the world perceives these men, her former bosses too, shouts loud.

Surely I was not the only one wondering, since the scandal so nicely broke during mid-April tax time -- exactly how much of my tax money went to fund these ... benefits for our Homeland Security workers. Even if it was only .76 percent of one cent, that's simply too much to me...

Plus please, don't tell me these people were paying for their pleasures out of their own pockets. We fund this, we working American taxpayers, and the entitlements simply continue and continue ... unchecked, even for those female hangers on, not for their own excitement of course, simply to satisfy their natural ... curiosity.

And,
Just a time or two, at that...

Clear Lake, after work.

"Peace be with you."

"Why do you seek the living among the dead?"

"I have seen the Lord."

"Blessed are those who have not yet seen, but believe." *


Make it a good week out there...


-----------------------------

* For their patience shall be rewarded one day.

Easter.

God's New Beginning For You.

"It Just Takes Some Time..."

Shorter David Brooks:

Just do your best.
Do everything you can.
And don't you worry about what their bitter hearts are gonna say.

It just takes some time...

Here We Go ...

"All right, let's kick it into high gear here."

Love to hear her passion. Oye!

Frayed.

No, not Kansas.

Chris Chase:

Congratulations, The Fray; you're off the hook for worst performance of the NCAA championship. That honor belongs to the Superdome's scoreboard operator.

During Monday's game, the rotating message board on the sideline advertised tickets to next year's Final Four in "Alanta," the mythical, misspelled capital of Georgia. At least he got the year correct.

Kentucy defeated Kanas in the title game in New Oleans, 67-59.

Happy Tuesday, whatever you're up to...
Let's keep our heads in the game out there, shall we?