Sadly, No!

One of the more tiresome arguments to come out during the primary battle is whenever someone says that “so-and-so can’t win against McCain in the fall.” Uh, people, look at this:

At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.

In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP — the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats could run a Pauly Shore/Gallagher ticket and still crush the GOP. Either Clinton or Obama will run roughshod over St. BBQ, peeps. Mark me words.

Well, Power Tool regular Paul (“Deacon”) Mirengoff has decided to emulate his fellow Power Tool blogger Ass Rocket by bending over, grabbing his ankles, pointing his butt towards the heavens and launching another projectile of teh stupid into the blogosphere:

I wrote here about Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, “a former Guantanamo detainee who carried out a recent suicide bombing in Mosul.” There are two main theories as to why he did this: (1) he was a terrorist all along and naturally reverted to terrorism upon his release or (2) he was not a terrorist before and conditions at Gitmo drove him into being one.

It’s pretty clear which theory the Washington Post favors. … :

A Kuwaiti man who complained about maltreatment during a three-year stay in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was involved in a deadly suicide bombing in northern Iraq last month, the U.S. military confirmed yesterday.

In the Post’s telling, the man’s complaint gets first billing. In fact, he’s not even referred to as a detainee … he’s just a Kuwaiti man on a “stay.”

So you won’t have to click through the link to the WaPo story, here is where Ajmi is “not even referred to as a detainee”:

Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack

That would be just the headline of the story. And here they don’t call him a detainee again:

The suicide bombing is the first such attack in Iraq linked to a former Guantanamo detainee.

Go to the article yourself and count the number of times it uses the word “detainee,” and you’ll discover that Mirengoff apparently can’t read, or count, or both.

But the stupidity has only started:

The thesis that abusive conditions at Gitmo are turning peaceable men into suicide bombers strikes me as dubious. But suppose conditions there really have been that bad. In that scenario, if we’re still serious about fighting terrorism and saving innocent lives we’d be crazy to release any of the detainees, regardless of whether we have evidence of prior involvement with terrorism … .

If someone was a terrorist before he went into Gitmo, we can’t release him. And if he wasn’t, he still can’t be released because, well, we’ve probably turned him into one. Heads we win; tails they lose — the perfect wingnut wager.

ABOVE: Iain Murray

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America’s Shittiest Website™ is, of course, the blogging home to America’s Shittiest Global Warming Denier™ Iain Murray, who faxed in this piece of nonsense:

Even the American homeless emit twice as much carbon dioxide as the world average, the wastrels.  That’s the finding of a new report from MIT:

[T]he “floor” below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter a person’s energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the emissions calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.

As our own Steve Hayward pointed out in his recent WSJ piece, to reduce American emissions by 80 percent by 2050 with a reasonable guess at population of 400 million, that would mean an individual emission limit of 2.5 tons.  And you know what?  Switching over to twisty lightbulbs and driving Priuses isn’t likely to acheive [sic] that for the homeless…

Effing homeless. If I’d known they were causing so much global warming, I’d stop giving them my spare quarters!

Of course, 8.5 tons per homeless person does seem like a figure that’s, well, a teensy bit large. After all, if you live in an average size apartment in California and drive around a mid-size car, you would be emitting 7.22 tons of carbon annually. (Calculate that here). Or perhaps the average homeless guy has a better lifestyle than any of us knew about. The reason that we aren’t seeing a line of Hummers parked in front of the Central Union Mission is apparently because the homeless are smart enough to park their gas-guzzlers several blocks away and then walk to the soup kitchen.

Let’s just follow Murray’s link and find out what’s really up with all those megatons of carbon dioxide being spewed out of soup kitchens. First, we have the issue of a “report from MIT.” Er, no:

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology class has studied the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles and estimated that people in the United States contribute much more than the global average.

Not to be overly critical of undergraduates or anything but a class project isn’t really conclusive of much of anything other than the grades that the students received.

Not only isn’t this really an MIT report but also it wasn’t really a study of what homeless people actually “emit” but rather what they emit plus an allocation of a large part of the carbon output of state, federal and local governments:

While it may seem surprising that even people whose lifestyles don’t appear extravagant–the homeless, monks, children–are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, one major factor is the array of government services that are available to everyone in the United States. These basic services–including police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military–were allocated equally to everyone in the country in this study.

Only a bunch of engineering students could imagine that military carbon emissions should be allocated to the homeless, I suppose because the homeless are so grateful for having their way of life preserved by our troops. And only America’s Shittiest Global Warming Denier™ could think that this undergraduate class project proves anything at all.

Mr. Murray, there’s a call on line 3. Exxon-Mobil wants its money back.

GAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!! MCAIN’S ROBO-LOVE FOR HIS MOM FRIGHTENS MEEEEEEE!!!!!!

This is, quite honestly, something no mother should have to go through. Mrs. St. BBQ, you have my sympathies.

I think I pissed off Lambert and the Corrente crowd over the Ramengate post. I’m pretty sure I made my new pal Shystee uncomfortable. For that I apologize – it’s just that all the stuff about Obama supporters being the ‘creative class’ and ‘Obama fan boys’ and ‘elitists’ who don’t care about poor people started getting under my skin. Plus Lambert’s whole re-enactment of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch was funny to me. And the latte-sipping insults were very much an outing into wingnut territory.

I also want to thank Leah and Shystee for sticking up for S,N! over at Corrente. I tried to register to comment over there, but it didn’t take.

I do support Obama, as I’ve said before. Just not very zealously — I would very-very-with-a-grin-on-my-face-happy-happy-fun-time pull the lever for Clinton if she gets the nomination. As I’ve also said before. I literally made my choice for Obama on the morning of the California primary. Not because I’m an out-of-touch idiot who didn’t do his homework, although I am often that. Rather, it was because I liked both of them enough against the Rethugs in the general election that I couldn’t pick between them. Also, I had a good friend who I knew was voting for Hillary, so I figured I’d toss my vote Barack’s way to even things out.

Amazingly, my opinion back then hasn’t really changed much. I like Obama’s chances against McCain a little better, but I think both could clean the floor with him. I would be happy to have either as president.

This blog, unlike Corrente, has not been particularly fervent in its partisanship for either candidate, although my guess is the majority of the regular posters support Obama. I actually don’t know who Clif or Jillian or Travis endorses. Seb supports the Oktoberfest Party for all I know. HTML Mencken could be writing in Gore Vidal. Sadly, No! Research Labs is for a straight falsifiability ticket, barring the unlikely appearance on the national scene of a strong anti-kerning crusader. The point being, primary stumping is not precisely our preferred wicket in these parts, though comment threads do tilt very strongly, almost exclusively to Obama.

We have two very strong candidates to end the nightmare of the Bush years. And that makes me happy. At the same time, I have no illusions that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is a particularly progressive candidate. I’m not such a naif that I think most of the policies I would prefer under either of them wouldn’t get watered down and centrist-ized to the point where I would grumble and moan and start attacking them from the left. I have no doubt, for instance, that either Obama or Clinton would find some way to drag us into a new war. It’s what American presidents do and it ain’t gonna change. Their main advantage over McCain is that he would drag us into two wars.

As HTML Mencken says, ‘both candidates are corporate whores.’ That’s just the facts. On the other hand, I’m getting too old and tired, and I’ve been around the election block enough times, to really put a whole lot of energy into trumpeting that depressing reality to the high heavens anymore. We’re getting a centrist who tacks to the right as our presidential nominee. It’s just the way this country works. The progressive, game-changing stuff will trickle up to the political class from the grassroots, not the other way around. I no longer think that’s as terrible a thing as I used to, because the stuff worth doing gets means-tested at the local level, in the neighborhoods and towns and cities, weeding out the crap and bringing the cream to the national theater. It could be worse. We could live under the Burmese junta.

The other point worth noting is that the Dems may give us a centrist waffler, but the GOP will give us an insane person with one hand on the lever to the bomb bay doors and the other jamming the maxed-out credit card of our national debt into Corporate America slots that give worse odds than an arcade claw machine and charge a thousand-point vig.

There are areas where I think Clinton and Obama have advantages over the other. I like Hillary’s health care plan. I like Barack’s pledge of $10 billion a year for five years to bring the health care information systems and records in line with existing standards. I like Hillary’s plans to expand National Science Foundation funding and grants. I like Barack’s commitment to network neutrality and ideas for transparent government. I like Hillary’s toughness and practical nature. I like Barack’s charisma and ability to bring new voters into the process. I like Clinton’s experience and I like Obama’s freshness.

It’s like an old politician once asked me, ‘Why do I have to pick between the Israelis and the Palestinians? I like them both. I want them both to have peace.’

I want peace, or a relative facsimile thereof, for our country. I want a competent technocrat as president who will appoint Roe-supporting justices, fill the bureaucracy with competent people who never had Bob Jones University as their first, second, third or 10,000th college choice, who will not shit on the Constitution too runnily or gather Straussians in underground star chambers to trade the latest torture porn hot off the presses. Obama and Clinton are our sole shots at that.

Have Obama and his supporters fucked up and been nasty and divisive and shitty at times? Yeah. So has she and so have hers. Both deserve to be raked over the coals when they sling Rovian mud at each other or blatantly and unconstructively break the 11th commandment or fling race and gender cards around or talk about obliterating Iran or invading Pakistan.

But here’s what I don’t get and maybe Lambert et. al. can help me out. On the one hand, you guys notice every wart on Obama’s face, which, again, is perfectly fine. And yet you are stunningly blind to any on Hillary’s. And really, they’re not hard to miss.

It’s like you project the entire long history of progressive discontent with centrist, party hack Democrats onto Barack Obama, again, fine, but then you turn around and somehow project Dennis Kucinich onto your own candidate. Who is Hillary Clinton. I repeat, Hillary-fucking-Clinton. Who is a real person, with a real legislative record, not some doll you can put overalls on and call Working Class Hero Hills! Now with Gas Tax Holiday Grip!

So I have to ask: why are you doing this? And really, I want to know, because it looks very much like Obama is going to be the nominee and I hope you all come home to support him. Or to turn things out and attempt to be a little more gracious, what do Obama and his supporters need to do today to get you into this car?

UPDATE: I’m glad I got most of the above stuff off my chest. But I also think my apology to Lambert and Corrente will be read as more than a little back-handed, and they’d be right. It’s hard to completely unsnark oneself. But I really do want to mend fences and I want to be clearer about this, so I’ll just ask: What is it about Barack Obama that is such a deal-breaker for so many of you? I honestly want to know, because I just don’t get it.

Clif adds: For the record, I am for the candidate that has the best chance of beating St. Bar-BQ. At times the polls have given that edge to Hillary; at times, to Obama. One thing, however, is certain: I will be voting for the Democratic nominee in the November elections. I have, it seems, posted more things here ridiculing attacks on Obama than on Clinton, but that is only because Obama seems to have the wingnut-o-sphere so exercised that every time you turn around somebody is saying something preposterous about Obama. It’s hard not to take a hit on that “comedy crack” pipe as somebody said over at Corrente.

I’m really busy corrupting the morals of our once-great nation as Niko Bellic, but the right-wing blogosphere never stops being stupid, so here’s a few fool du fa fas from some of our favorite gasbags:

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Over at The Darkies Are Coming, Lady Lymph Node provides us with this awesome map of what Europe will look like 50 years from now after the moon-worshiping dusk-devils take over her beloved Europe:

I’m sure we can all agree that’s very useful and sensible, but unfortunately, it neglects to inform us as to which territories will be held by the Eastasians, the Klingons and the Latverian Doombots.

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The Man From Fuddles, after making the frankly pitiful confession that he collects airport baggage claim bar codes, delivers this withering character assessment:

Downbeat, resentful, insular, tone-deaf and peevish

Oddly, he is describing Michelle Obama, not James Lileks.

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Ramesh Punani over at the Corner says that Obama is positioning himself as the candidate of optimism vs. McCain’s Gloomy Grandpa image. Well, two can play that game:

McCain says we should empower patients with free-market health care. Obama says it’s a pipe dream.

“Gosh! As dictated by free market principles, I cannot afford quality health care and am thus suffering horribly from a number of treatable diseases! I feel so…empowered!”

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Stalkin’ Malkin has jumped on the new conservameme of declaring Obama unelectable because of his shrewish harridan of a wife. Saith the Naughty Girl:

So get over yourself already, haughty spirit. Pride doesn’t photograph well. And bitterness leaves frown lines. Which means Botox bills. Which “struggling folks” like you and your husband simply cannot afford. Try smiling for once. It’s cheaper.

So, to recap, Michelle Malkin, the world’s angriest anchor baby, who is literally professionally outraged, a woman whose natural state is somewhere between indignant and incensed, who takes offense if she wakes up laying on her left side, is counseling someone else to relax, stop frowning, get over herself, and smile. RHETORICIAN HEAL THYSELF!

Above: good luck with no fuckin’ soul

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Finally, in case you were wondering, Crazy Pammy is still out of her goddamn mind.

“Why can’t all of them be polite and happy like
these two?”

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I generally think of Mormons as fundamentally decent people who simply hold some weird beliefs about how you get your own planet when you die if you were good and didn’t drink Coca-Cola while you were alive. Of course, Mitt Romney doesn’t just break the “fundamentally decent” stereotype; he throws it to the ground, stomps it into a million pieces and spits on the shattered remains. And I was certainly reminded of that this morning when he showed up on CNN and called Obama “well-spoken and articulate.”

Romney, like his church, which has about 4 black members and still has a hard time shaking its racist past, is breathtakingly clueless on issues of race, if not downright racist. While Romney was running for President, I used to scour his campaign site for pictures of black folks. Suffice it to say that you were more likely to find a picture of three guys smoking crack and having sex in a sling than a picture with an African American in it. Even in his post-campaign website, the former candidate appears to be drowning in a sea of white people.

The “well-spoken and articulate” business is, I think, employed with a great deal of calculation by Romney and his ilk. The word “well-spoken” not so subtly reinforces the incorrect notion that most African Americans speak some crude dialect rather than English. And, although the phrase distances Obama from that stereotype, it nonetheless is intended to remind people that the “well-spoken” fella is is still one of a group that, the speaker suggests, are just too stupid and too shiftless to speak acceptable English. So even if he is “well-spoken,” he’s just as shiftless as the rest of them. Best (or worst) of all, when you call someone out on making this remark, they just clutch their pearls, like this putz, and say “My goodness, I was just trying to pay him a compliment!” It’s not a compliment any more than it would be a compliment to describe Obama as a “drug free man with a steady job and no criminal record who hasn’t abandoned his wife and kids.”

Big Tent Democrat has done his fair share to piss me off over the past few months, but I think he’s basically correct here:

What Clinton Should Do

Whatever she feels is right. She has earned that.

My own view is she should run her campaign against John McCain. She will win West Virginia and Kentucky by huge margins.

She might even challenge Obama in Oregon.

What she should not do, imo, is run against Barack Obama. If there is a path to the nomination for her, and I doubt there is, it won’t come from attacking Obama now.

My two cents.

It looks at this point like Obama will be the nominee. However, this has been a very close and bruising primary campaign throughout. Things have gotten way too emotional and a lot of people just aren’t reacting logically anymore (i.e., “IF MY CANDIDATE DOESN’T WIN I’M VOTIN’ FOR ST. BBQ WAAAAAAAAH!!!“).

Put another way, people need to calm the hell down. The best way to get them to calm down will be for the presumptive nominee to at some point offer the second-place finisher the vice-presidency. Since both candidates have enormous egos, this might be tough to pull off. But if you could work out some kind of power-sharing arrangement where the Veep gets to lead on major policy initiatives – think about a non-evil version of the Dick Cheney energy task force – then it might just work out.

And yes, I know that everyone will hate me for suggesting this. At this point, I don’t care: this was a very close race and both candidates have millions of dedicated and passionate supporters. Neither side should be summarily dismissed just because their preferred candidate didn’t get the nomination. As BTD would say, my two cents.

UPDATE: OY:

I think Clinton and Edwards should quit this sham of a democratic party and run as a 3rd party. I am sure most of her base will follow her. and with Edwards as her running mate, they do have a shot. democratic party is no longer the party I believe in. I started having doubts when lieberman said the part has been hijacked by extreme liberels with an agenda.. this whole Obama candidacy is an orchstrated event right down to the choreographed efforts of MSM’s and SD’s.

No, dude, I don’t think Hillary and Edwards want their legacy to be Nader ’08.

Jeebus, the stupid needs to stop.

Christ, am I sick of stuff like this:

Stuck pig squeals

[…] Not everyone who has been anti-Bush is also a progressive – or even a liberal. Plenty of conservatives and libertarians have turned against Bush, and many of them are enamored of Obama. Not on a political basis, but because backing him allows them to feel good about themselves.

Lambert caused them discomfort, and there’s nothing a latte-swilling creative elitist hates more than being uncomfortable. So they squeal.

No, dude, Lambert caused us to roll our eyes because Lambert endorsed bogus faux-populist economics as if that they were the genuine face of populism, and claimed that Obama supporters simply don’t want the reg’lar folk to git $30 because they’re too busy slamming their dicks into Starbucks pastries to pay attention to what Real Americans believe.

Above: Brad-flavored ramen

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See, the actual reason I oppose the gas tax holiday is because it won’t work. It just won’t. You’re talking about lowering the gas tax during a time when there is peak demand for gasoline and a limited overall output. While prices might initially go down because people have been moderating their behavior to lessen their demand, prices will eventually shoot back up once people start driving more — e.g., on their summer vacations. This isn’t bloody elitism, dude; it’s basic economics. See also Dr. Atrios, who can explain it like a real economist.

Now look: In the long run, this is not a big deal. If HRC wants to institute a gas tax holiday while putting a windfall tax on oil companies to make up for lost revenue, I say fine. But recognize that it probably won’t do a lot to help people out. That — and not because I have my penis lodged within a Starbuck’s pastry — is why I’m generally opposed to it, and why I think other measures, such as investing more in public transportation or delivering actual national health insurance (much like the kind that HRC wants to deliver, not the crappier version concocted by the Obama camp), would be far more productive.

Finally: I’d like to state once and for all that I do not give a shit who wins this godforsaken primary. Yes, I voted for Obama because I thought he was marginally better on foreign policy, despite his weaknesses on domestic policy. Neither candidate is perfect, both are vastly better than McCain. Too many Obama and Clinton supporters need to step back, take a deep breath and realize that this election is far more important than their individual candidates. I’ve seen entirely too much stupid bullshit over the past few months, such as Kos summarily excommunicating Hillary from the Democratic Party or this nonsense about how opposing Hillary’s gas tax plan means that you “don’t acknowledge that there are poor people in America.” Stop the stupid bullshit, people. It’s not doing any of us any good, because we all have far more in common than Hillary and Obama have differences. People shouldn’t be kicked out of the damn Democratic Party because they didn’t vote for your damn candidate.

Update: Incidentally, I make $40,000 a year, I drive a used Ford Taurus, and the price of gas is killing me on my morning commute. So please, spare me the damn lectures about how out of touch I am.

Gavin adds: Meanwhile, in reference to the pig-squeal quote above, here’s the latest from Pam Spaulding on the strange and inexplicable attempt by the Republican Party in North Carolina to weaken Obama in the Democratic primary contest.

Why, if we didn’t know better, we’d suspect that there’s some kind of ongoing and organized campaign of interference going on…

The Democratic nomination process has become surreal. To the point where I really can’t tell if this post from Lambert of Corrente is a joke:

$30 from a gas tax holiday buys one person food for a month, but do “Creative class” [cough] Obama Fan Boys care? Guess…

As alert reader gqmartinez points out, $30 is a month’s worth of food, if you need to live on ramen noodles. And as alert reader BDBlue points out, it’s 15 weeks worth of school lunches for one of your kids.

Above: Also 15 weeks of breakfasts and suppers, it would seem

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Has it really come to this? Is the desperation of Lambert to defend Hillary’s Roman gas tax holiday as part of her increasingly scattershot campaign strategy really so acute? This let-them-eat-Ramen stuff is normally Chicagoboyz territory. If the great distinction between Clinton and Obama is the latter’s unwillingness to let us all have a few extra syrup sandwiches this summer … well, really. I’m at a loss for words. But then I am a bit parched, no thanks to Barack Obama and his elitist no-free-sip-of-Mountain-Dew-every-other-month policy. Fucking robber baron.

Look, forget about the usefulness or uselessness of the gas tax holiday for a moment. Put aside the fact that Obama, unlike Clinton and McCain, is clearly in cahoots with Chevron executives to hoard all the extra ketchup packets that could be feeding working families throughout the Rust Belt for decades to come. Is it not abundantly clear that both Democrats’ plans for phased troop withdrawals from Iraq will save taxpayers orders-of-magnitude more Ramen packets than thirty bucks’ worth? Important as it is to keep the noodle-wolf at bay, is this not the issue upon which we should be judging these candidates?

I’ve done that math, because after the dot com bubble burst, that was the situation I was faced with, and I was lucky, because my situation only lasted for months. Except I can top gqmartinez: My survival formula was dollar store spaghetti sauce. You can get two days out of a jar, and even with spaghetti, I could still get change back from my thirty! That was before things got really bad, and I went to the cans of generic pork and beans, 4 for a dollar. Plus, since by that time the gas and the electricity were off, I could heat the beans with the hotplate after stringing an extension cord out into the hall and plugging it into a socket I’d screwed into the light for the purpose. Too risky to boil water that way, I felt. What if I heard someone on the stairs and had to cut the power when the spaghetti was only half boiled?

Above: Sunday dinner for a family of twelve

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You were lucky to have stairs! I had to get up at 10’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, regurgitate six fluid ounces of generic pork and beans for resale to the dollar store, strangle myself with the extension cord and salvage loose parts from the broken hot plate to boil in subsidized ethanol to prepare a weak cup of tea that Barack Obama would throw in my face each evening before ritually mutilating my genitals with a razor-sharp Kusha knife while ululating wildly to savage songs celebrating the enslavement of American heartlanders!

Now, to Stoller, $30 is what? Seven vente lattes and a croissant? I’d say. Though maybe he goes for the pumps of vanilla syrup instead of the croissant. I really wouldn’t know.

Good point, friend Ludd, but when is the next peasant revolt against our faggot coffee overlords taking place? I have my own pitchfork and I hate mechanical looms and espresso contraptions with unnatural gears and steam vents and such.

Jesus Christ.

Brad adds: Incidentally, I love how Lambert and Armando have taken to referring to all Obama supporters as “the creative class,” as if millions of voters around the country are all a bunch of fruity Yanni-loving wimps. Meanwhile, the pro-Hillary bloggers are apparently a bunch of rough blue-collar lawyers or something. Who knows! I’m getting bloody sick of people being idiots over this primary, though.

Gavin adds: Say, while the gas tax holiday is subsidizing Mr. Moneyclip and his V-12 Jaguar, can people who don’t own cars — e.g. poor families, specifically in urban locales — have a tax holiday on something too? I’m thinking perhaps income. Let’s get together on this, kthx?

Gavin also adds: I can’t help mentioning: On the topic of dollar-store spaghetti sauce and domestic economy, I’m simply dazzled by the extravagance. Sauce from a store! From a store!

What the practical man or woman does in a low-money situation is to snap into what they now call the Mediterranean Diet, by getting acquainted with the wild, edible plants in the area. The cost is zero cents per pound — or less than that, even, if you charge a few bucks for weeding people’s yards or gardens. Many are unaware, for instance, that the common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, was brought to North America on purpose, as a food plant. At the local Whole Foods, they sell dandelion greens for $3.50 a pound. And yet, look outside and what do you see but dandelions every ding-dang place you look? Furthermore, if it’s packaged spaghetti that’s for dinner, Alliaria petiolata, or garlic mustard, makes a darn good pesto and is also available literally by the freaking hundred-pound sack — i.e., people will pay you to get rid of it. There are many dozens of other plants like this. And, you know, I’ve never claimed not to be a strange person.

Honestly and in real life, I admit to a stash of foraged sumac (Rhus typhina) in the kitchen, which I sometimes use for drinks and as a spice. The stuff costs $6.50 a pound at the local Middle Eastern market, but cost me about 650 cents less than that at a roadside near Concord. Let the diamond-studded plutocrats sip their boughten Kool-Aid.