Sadly, No!

The Sox finally, finally clinch the damn AL East title. No 1978 this year. Phew.

And with that, I’m going out for a drink.

Followup singles that were maybe just a wee bit too similar to the original hit:

The Four Tops — ‘I Can’t Help Myself’ (0:40), 1965

The Four Tops — ‘It’s The Same Old Song’ (1:48), 1965
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There’s been kind of a lot going on with this story today. Not terribly unrepresentative is the following, from comments at SouthernBeale:

typical of leftist turds who want to discount the misery of Iranian women. This is NO actress you fuckwits. This was a woman in her 20’s in the city of Arok in Iran and the photo was taken in 1992 and the photographer GAVE IT to Tamizi.
Ban | 09.27.07 – 11:27 pm |

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You’re nothing but cultural imperialist westerners who have NO clue as to what goes on in the middle east and only want to scream about your own misery to drown out the sounds of the real pain around the world. SHAME ON YOU FASCISTS.Why don’t you move to Iran so the Mullahs can give you a taste of what your free speech will cost you.
Ban | 09.27.07 – 11:32 pm |

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Wow…you guys really believe your own lies. Tamizi was given the photo by the photographer you self-congradulatory American smart ass. What do you think? That Iranians are liars and we make this stuff up? Who died and made you such an expert on our part of the world Ms. Southern Belle?
Nasi | 09.27.07 – 11:37 pm |

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Oh yes, these silly entitled people sit on this side of the world nice and happy, fat, ignorant, arrogant and think that we have to lie about the filth of the Mullahs. Wait till they come and get you, because they are coming and by the time you wake up, it will be too late and then you will be wondering why you treated us like sand monkeys. Racist.
Somaya | 09.27.07 – 11:40 pm |

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Ban, don’t you think posting under five different names is a little disingenuous? Do you really think I don’t know how to look up an IP address?
Southern Beale | Homepage | 09.28.07 – 7:30 am |

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[…]

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Actually it wasn’t just me posting Madam. I contacted a group of my friends who all live in the US to show them what racists you people are and how much you want to support the Mullahs by acting like the Mullahs do not stone women to death in Iran. THAT is why you have people baragging you…because I told them to give them a piece of their mind. Just to show that you American leftists will do and say anything to support the Islamo-Imperialists.
ban | 09.28.07 – 11:16 am |

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[…]

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Well, Ban, you’re all living really close together because you all have the same IP address and it’s in Virginia, not the Middle East but whatEVER. Keep up the fairy tales.
Southern Beale | Homepage | 09.28.07 – 12:44 pm |

Uh-oh. John Tamny is at it again:

And no sir, you don’t know much about economics.

Because if you did, you would know that profits are what attract competition. So even if two, three or four firms colluded in some way that drove prices up past their normal market level, the consumer would ultimately win due to the market entrance of others eager to capture these economics.

But they wouldn’t, at least not in the short run. The major reason that airlines can successfully collude to drive up prices is because they operate in an oligopoly. One of the major traits of an oligopoly is that it has high barriers to entry; in other words, it’s not a lemonade stand that anyone can get up using only water and a packet of Country Time.

Above: Believe it or not, it takes fewer resources to set up one of these than it does to set up an airline.

Now: when oligopolistic firms collude to keep prices high, we the public have two options:

1.) We can let the Magic of the Free Market run its course in a market that has prohibitive barriers to entry and is (for people who need to travel long distances) rather inelastic.

-OR-

2.) We get the Big Mean Gubmint to come in, à la Moe from the Three Stooges, to say, “Knock it off, you knuckleheads!”

Having the gubmint knock the airlines’ heads together won’t stop prices from ever being increased EVAR, but it will stop firms from engaging in anti-competitive behavior to keep prices artificially high.

John Tamny, you’re fired.

Over at The American Spectator, one Lisa Fabrizio wants you (parents of college-age kids) to know that things have gotten very bad at America’s institutions of higher learning. The truth may shock you: college kids are having sex… with each other! And if you think that it’s only the students who have gotten easier, hold on:

In modern America, a college degree is now almost a given, a birthright for the nearly two-thirds of all high school graduates who go on to higher education.

A birthright… for the 51% (2002) of college students who actually complete their degree (within 5 years). Which is, in case one is wondering, 4.2% below the same figure for 1988. So pretty much as Lisa had predicted, except that the silly party won. I think this is largely due to the number of votes cast students who were too drunk to show up for class. (Giving everyone 6 years to finish doesn’t improve things by much).

And while binge drinking on college campuses has become almost an afterthought in the past few decades [!], it is the explosion of sexual activity on campus that should cause the most concern for parents.

Yes, the explosion. Probably one caused by an exploding kind of bomb:*
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Say, I wonder what’s been going on in Iraq. Let’s take a look:

–At least 50 die as new violence erupts in Iraq

–Blackwater besieged by more Iraq allegations

–Iraq PM rejects U.S. Congress call for federalism

–At least 18 killed, 20 wounded in latest attacks in Iraq

–Somalia, Myanmar, Iraq top corruption blacklist

–Draft report: Iraq government ‘not capable’ of fighting corruption

And so on.

But hey, our buddy Gateway Pundit isn’t down! The reason? Because the Kurds are (I’m not making this up) building a shiny new casino in Sulaimaniyah! Wow-wow-wee-wuh-wow! What better way to cap off a day of evading car bombers and snipers than by throwing your hard-earned dinar into a slot machine!

One of the strangest traits of Iraq wingnuts is their desire to believe that the Iraqis are actually grateful that the United States invaded their country. Can anyone tell me where this sort of lunacy comes from?

I am beginning to suspect that the greenhouse gases being released into the world by industrialized nations are having an adverse effect on the space-time continuum. There are days, based on the rhetoric I see coming from some of the loonier corners of the right wing batty brigade, that I can’t tell whether it’s 1932, 1919, or 1896.

See, Michael Medved wants to set us all straight about the so-called evils of American slavery.

Before we go on, I just want to stop and savor that line for a minute or two. Michael Medved. American slavery. Revisionist history.

At this point, I’m pretty much irrelevant, aren’t I? You just know this is going to be chock-a-block full of gibbering insanity.

Luckily for us, he’s broken his ravings down into numbered bullet-points – much like the leaflets you find stuck to telephone poles about how the head of the CIA is a mutant lizard person who performs religious/medical experiments on homeless people often are.

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation.

See what I mean? Aren’t we off to a rollicking good start?

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION. At the time of the founding of the Republic in 1776, slavery existed literally everywhere on earth and had been an accepted aspect of human history from the very beginning of organized societies. Current thinking suggests that human beings took a crucial leap toward civilization about 10,000 years ago with the submission, training and domestication of important animal species (cows, sheep, swine, goats, chickens, horses and so forth) and, at the same time, began the “domestication,” bestialization and ownership of fellow human beings captured as prisoners in primitive wars. In ancient Greece, the great philosopher Aristotle described the ox as “the poor man’s slave” while Xenophon likened the teaching of slaves “to the training of wild animals.” Aristotle further opined that “it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.”

And after so opining, Aristotle then got drunk on six-week-old wine and had unspeakable carnal relations with a sixteen-year old boy. For real!

Medved actually thinks an argument about how the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians practiced slavery are worth considering. Does he know anything at all about ancient Near Eastern ethical standards? You’d think someone who’s presumably read the Old Testament once or twice in his life would appreciate the progress that humans have made in applied ethics since then. By 1776, for instance, European civilizations had given up the practice of stoning disobedient children.

As sad as this particular argument is, it’s actually the best of the six that Medved manages to muster: It’s all downhill from here, I’m sorry to say.

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Tim Russert, you’ve just moderated a debate over who gets to be the President of Red Sox Nation:

So: you have any special plans now that you’ve hit rock bottom?

From Little Green Footballs, 9/21/07:

Above: Screen-capture of LGF post

That’s a reprinted press release from David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag. The text reads, “The photo accompanying this article, which shows a teenage girl buried before being stoned to death for alleged sexual offenses, will serve as the poster for the protest Week. The stoning took place in Iran.”

This photo turns up all over the right-wing media, but the ‘stoning’ actually takes place in a 1994 Dutch indie film called De Steen, directed by Mahnaz Tamizi. The ‘teenage girl’ is actress Smadar Monsinos.

Above: Press release retrieved from FrontPageMag, 9/24/07

Above: Press release retrieved from FrontPageMag, 9/27/07

Whoopsie. Looks like David Horowitz left a few people hanging out to dry.

The Week’s events will include speeches about Islamo-Fascism by prominent figures, including former Senator Rick Santorum (Penn State, Temple and UPenn), Sean Hannity (Columbia), Ann Coulter (Tulane and USC), Dennis Prager (UC Santa Barbara), Robert Spencer (Brown, Dartmouth, University of Rhode Island, and DePaul), Daniel Pipes (Northeastern and UPenn), David Horowitz (Columbia, Emory, Ohio State, Michigan and Wisconsin), Michael Ledeen (Maryland), Nonie Darwish (UCLA and Berkeley), Wafa Sultan (Stanford) and radio talk show hosts Melanie Morgan (San Francisco State), Michael Medved (University of Washington), Martha Zoeller (Georgia Tech), Alan Nathan (George Mason), Mark Larson (to be named) and many others.

Perhaps Confederate Yankee can do his usual thing and request, nay, demand that these people denounce the fraudulent fabulism with fake photo images racka-fracka boldly perpetrated in their names, hummana-hummana, etc — and that they do the decent thing and resign.
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They make crappy beer, but they offend Michelle Malkin, so I guess I’ll have to start drinking their stuff:

When last I wrote about Miller Beer, the company was cluelessly sponsoring illegal alien protests and spinning furiously. Doesn’t look like they learned to stay away from radical politics. Miller went ahead and sponsored the “Folsom Street Fair” in San Francisco…billed as the “world’s largest leather event.”

Here’s the Catholic-denigrating promotional poster for the Miller-backed fair via CNSNews.com, depicting the Last Supper as a gathering of S&M enthusiasts:

Please note the wonderful irony on display here. The same woman who lectured us on the importance of free speech during the Danish Mohammed cartoon fiasco is now calling for a jihad against Miller for sponsoring an event that offends Catholics’ religious sensibilities.

Also, this paragraph deserves to be placed on a marble plaque so that it may live for eternity:

The question isn’t whether the Folsom organizers should be allowed to promote their bacchanalia however they want. Go right ahead with your bullwhips, dildos, and chains. Knock yourselves out. Really.

And this, friends, is why I read Michelle’s site every day. In between the paranoid rants on illegal immigrants reconquistaing whitey’s land, pro-jihad 9/11 memorials and the New York Times travel section’s dastardly plot to kill Dick Cheney, you get some good drrrrrrrrty talk. Teh hottt.