Men being idiots

It's spring again, so expect the usual bump in catcalls and public perverts. CNN has an article, which, while largely fluff, does include a comments section ripe with prime idiocy.

The one upside is that the story led me to Holla Back NYC, a great example of collective blog action.

Delicious Irony

Neighborhood blighted by overcrowding? In today's housing market, regulating that will likely yield abandoned homes. Thanks, subprime lending!

But on a new color-coded map created by the county to plot foreclosures in Fairfax from January 2007 though the end of last month, two bright orange spots dominate. Both also happen to be the focus of intensive efforts to curb overcrowding: the Springfield neighborhoods that include the Hanover Avenue house, and portions of Herndon. In Herndon's case, the regulatory push has been led by the town government, which has instituted multiple policies aimed at making the community less hospitable to illegal immigrants.

No hard numbers are available to quantify the correlation between overcrowding enforcement and foreclosures. But Supervisor Jeff C. McKay (D-Lee) said the evidence he has seen leaves him with little doubt. Owners unable to subsidize their mortgage payments with illegal numbers of occupants have been unable to keep their houses.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Chris Matthews is a tool

And seems to be in 7th grade. Media Matters takes him on:

Chris Matthews has been treating female guests as sexual objects for years. He has been judging women -- senators, presidential candidates, the speaker of the House -- on their clothes and their voices and their appearance for years. He has been referring to women as "castrating" for years. He has been applying double standards to male and female candidates for years.

This is who Chris Matthews is. He is a man who thinks that men who support women politicians are "eunuchs."

He isn't going to stop unless you make him stop. Chris Matthews uses his voice to marginalize women. Use yours to tell MSNBC you've had enough.

There's a long list of transgressions in the linked article, and I'm sure it's only a partial one. Matthews is the sort of talking head i find most grating, not only because he's such a backwards idiot, but because he's so self-assured in his oppressive behavior. Time to give the good old boy the boot.

Irony

All those mcmansions the suburbanites built seem not to keep the undesirables out, but actually, due to their outsized capacity, have become all the more attractive for many-person occupancy.  How delicious.

technorati tags:development, mcmansion, ironic

Jambo sana

Very hello from Kenya. I don't have much that makes sense to blog, especially in this forum since I haven't been paying attention to the non-local news. Yeah, Nairobi doesn't have a beltway, so it's weird to watch coverage of the happenings there and care about it, but it is the closest thing to political gossip that they show on the local TV. Party politics sound much more complicated when it isn't a two-party system, but I don't really have to understand much for conversation because all anyone here asks about is Kenyan homeboy Obama anyway.

I've escaped the noise and cold and dust and crime (ok, only some of the dust and crime) of Nairobi for the tropical beach paradise that is Mombasa. Our hotel is the best bargain around, perhaps because it is just past the back lot of the Nakumatt (think Walmart but with furniture and an attached mall). The beach is beautiful, and aside from the sunburn I'm sporting I have no complaints. Well, that's not quite true - internet here is universally slow, and the driving on the left thing is bound to kill me sometime as I fail to look in the right direction. But otherwise, hakuna matata.

Geek break

Blogging this from an iphone, which prooves to be rather awkward. The keyboard has no carrots, so html would be difficult.

Lousy Democrats, doing what the people want

James Gilmore in the Post:

I reject the Democrats' policy of an immediate withdrawal or a withdrawal on a timetable. Unfortunately, they are playing to the polls to obtain political advantage at home, to the detriment of the United States.

What exactly are the democratically elected representatives of a people supposed to do but respond to the pressures of the majority that placed them in office? Reacting to what the public seems to want is what politicians do, or they quickly cease to be employed as politicians. And it isn't like scheming Democratic politicians invented the idea of a withdrawal from Iraq - that's been a very popular sentiment for years now, and Democrats just finally wised up sooner than their Republican colleagues have. If Glimore's looking for a scapegoat for anti-war sentiment, he'll have to blame all the people who oppose it (or perhaps just the combination of empirical fact and reason) rather than some evil Democrats.

I think this is one of the more frustrating things about politics right now - we're told very often that we should oppose a policy not on its demerits, but because our partisan opposition supports it. Party platforms might be a quick guideline for which way you're likely to come down on an issue, but they shouldn't serve as evidence in reasoned debate of a policy's appropriateness.

technorati tags:Gilmore, democracy, Iraq