Oh and Boston Globe columnista Jeff Jacoby

agrees with our Junior Senator that poor people should not be encouraged to vote.

Well, one of Jeff's notable intellectual failings is a desperate desire to suck up tyrant's table in the Great Cafeteria of the USA High School.
Of course he has no such comparable qualms about the queasy mixture of God and raw electioneering that eructates from our Evangelical Churches these days....No No No, those people are persecuted for their beliefs, they must vote to save their very lives, cryeth Jeff.
Poor people not so much it isn't as if they have anything at stake sniffeth Jeff.
Another month or so, and Jeff will likely come out banging the pots for a poll tax and a literacy test to keep the riff raff at bay.
Thanks again Bush v. Gore.

Jacoby Pranged...

Jeff Jacoby's the Globe's resident Conservative Pundit, comes in for some hard use over on the Mass Political Profs blog.

I admit a complicated mindset where Jeff is concerned, he is a terribly earnest wingnut and he routinely distorts the facts in a wild rush to sink his claws into some democrat he dislikes...on the other hand being Morrissey Blvd's pet freeper can't be a fun gig. Not when you can see how far and how high some of the ranters and blusterers at the Herald go.
That lot come in for cush radio and cable gigs and get all sorts of push on the Front Page, and there is Jeff moldering away on the Globe's op ed page manfully defending the Augusta National's "right" to exclude skirts-n-frails.
In all a disheartening experience.

About two years ago or so

Jeff Jacoby served up a column in the Sunday Globe insisting the Apollo 8 spacecraft got to the moon essentially via divine dispensation.
Today he weirdly backs up that foray into sheer superstition by insisting that achieving energy independence is economically and technologically impossible.
Mind you, he is much more confident in American power and inventiveness whenever some shitkicker book worshipping GOP mook infests the White House, when the democrats are in the Oval Office Jeff turns into a pathetic declinist.
But then annihilationism is really the GOP's favored platform for 2012,look what happened last week, they'll see the country ruined as long as they can rule.
This is all Jeff's way of gettin' along to go along.

Jeff Jacoby Hearts Referendums

today's column in the Sunday Globe is a keeper as Jeff Jacoby that laughing young senescence marks out hard for the public referendum, particularly California's brand wherein the state legislature cannot over-ride the outcome of a ballot initiative.
This makes California a sort of berserker paradise wherein werewolves are proclaimed an endangered species and silver edged weapons are taxed at 10.5 percent.
My question is this, when the state legislature screws up and the subtle bond of representation are sundered betwixt the electorate and the elected, legislators lose their jobs. The mighty are humbled and are forced to slink back into their phony baloney law practice or store front insurance brokerage.
When the public screws up and bankrupts the state via referenda fiat, what measures can be brought to bear against them?
You can't throw out the electorate and put in a new constituency....
Under one scenario there is the basic accountability of the voting booth, under the other, the voting booth is the potential path to anarchy sans recourse.
Right now in California the public has voted themselves a plethora of tax breaks along with a long list of additional and expensive mandates relating to education, the environment, public works etc etc. Less money is coming in to cover an ever expanding list of publicly mandated initiatives.
Y'see there is a reason why the founding fathers set up a representative democracy, the act of representation is a nigh ethereal thing but thanks to frequent elections there is also very real element of public accountability. Humble Elias isn't against ballot questions per se but getting them on the ballot ought to be only half a difficult as getting a bill approved by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Jeff Jacoby is questioning the RCC's priestly celibacy policy....

Someone might wanna tell the Vatican that one of it's most fervent enablers is having second thoughts.

Fine, all well and good there ought to be spirited but aboveboard debate from within and without the Catholic Church.

But I wonder, what would Jeff make of trangendered rabbis..that are willing to marry up all comers?

Okay that was mean...and uncalled for on a Sunday.

I feel shame...really.

Whither the Boston Globe?

The news is not good...the Times is leveraging the Globe's unions with threats of an imminent closure if concessions aren't made.
Meanwhile the rest of us have to wrap our minds around the notion that an outhouse rag like the Herald might be the last man standing in this market, however long that lasts.
Well, one of the things we have to assimilate quickly is that the whole US economy is rigging itself pell-mell for efficiency, hence the declining payrolls, the wholesale flight to the cheap environs of the internet, the nigh extinction of black box stores, the fall in consumer spending...if you don't have money you can't spend it, if you do, you are saving it.
Revenues are down, circulation is down, the readership is greying...and bigger US institutions than the Boston Globe will vanish like the velociraptor before this recession is over.
Frankly the newspaper business with it's dependence on huge printing presses and a house to house distribution system is an archaic faith based bet at best.
Do we need rigorously edited news?
Yes.
Will be delivered on paper every morning...maybe not.
I'm gonna miss that morning ritual, I'd like to think another publication could rise and take the Globe's place, something liberal in politics, independent in spirit and of a Jacksonian tone...something scaled to meet the resources at hand...but that might be sheer fantasy at best.
Of course some will say, what'll happen to the Chimes at Midnight without Joan Vennochi and Jeff Jacoby to kick around?
My answer is simple, Humble Elias has been swimming in rough waters for a few years now, and those guys will need to take fresh dog paddle lessons...quick.
Here is hoping all and sundry can come to terms.

Oh and by the way...

according to Jeff Jacoby, we have WON the war in IRaq.
We are 1.5 trillion dollars in debt...
The WMD were illusions if not outright lies...
The US is diplomatically isolated, to say nothing of the purdah Israel is in...
The Shi'ites have used the surge to effect their own purge of the south...

But hey we won this is, sez Jeff that laughing young senescence, "victory".

I'd hate to see what defeat looked like quite frankly.

Ahh but all that money and all that blood all so Jeff and seemingly Jeff alone can feel all tuff and manly.

This is just sad...

Word is on the street that the Boston Globe is hemorrhaging money...

Much as I like to snark at certain columnists thereon the news is akin to discovering that a maddeningly eccentric old uncle is headed back to the hospital for the last time...aged crazy but the only relation that was worth cultivating back in the day.

On the other hand, if it all does go to smash...what will become of Jeff Jacoby? $25.00 a week to blog on Freerepublic.com? He can always sing in the subways, the Red Line can use some new voices.

Layoffs at the Globe part II

Or maybe the Globe will toss that laughing young senescence Jeff Jacoby over the side?
I mean, the man can't even reconcile himself to daylight savings time...a notion so laughably idiotic that it surges right past the partisan divide into pure 19th century yokel-dom.
Maybe it is time to wipe the slate clean and start over with a new house conservative...although who they could get that wouldn't be contaminated by power worship, hypocrisy or fraud is an open question.
To imagine a world without Jeff Jacoby's column, one has to imagine a world without the Boston Globe...and right now it looks like we are gonna get both whether we like it or not.

Jeff Jacoby

decries the "bloated" stimulus package in today's globe in a tone that certifies his own personal emotional investment in failure. As usual he marks out hard for the chimera of "small government" and low taxes, in short the very Randian brew that has brought the republic to the brink of annihilation.
This would be the very definition of insanity, i.e. replicating the same act over and over again with the expectation of a different result. However, speculating on the mental health of conservatism or individual conservatives like Jeff Jacoby is a matter for board certified experts and not "sarcastic rant drive blowhards" like Humble Elias.
No, what Jeff offers us today is nothing less sensible than a homeopathic approach to the economy, a bigger dose of the poison that put us in the intensive care ward is somehow gonna improve our prospects and restore health!
Nothing else quite illustrates so well the sheer intellectual bankruptcy of movement conservatism, they haven't got idea one as to how to save the country...and they know it too.
Too much power for too long has emptied their minds and rendered the lot of them pathetic in a grim shopworn sort of a way.
So for the moment, the argument isn't between liberals and conservatives, the conflict is between the governing coalition assembled by the democrats and the very crisis itself. The GOP and movement conservatism is watching from a wheelchair on the sidelines.

Jeff Jacoby luvs firearms so today's column reads

in the Boston Sunday Globe.
He just loves them, he especially loves the discomfort they allegedly cause democrats. I'm idly curious though, just how many firearms does this second amendment zealot Jeff Jacoby actually own?
I'll bet he doesn't own a single one and wouldn't permit one in the house what with children underfoot and all...course' ah don't know that for a fact but it seems likely.
And you can bet if Jeff found out his next door neighbor had a huge collection of semi-automatics, shotguns and a selection of quality pistols he'd be just a wee bit anxious.
Maybe this neighbor is single, maybe he doesn't talk much, maybe he has sued the town once spuriously, comes and goes late and night and can be seen cleaning his firearms out on the patio in broad daylight.
I'll bet Jeff would feel really really safe with all that going.
Okay Okay I KID I tease I'm sure Jeff's neighbors are all paragons of firearmly virtue in every way whether they own or not.
And I'm sure Jeff is a dead shot...with a glue gun that is.
:D

Oh and Jeff Jacoby apparently thinks

that global depopulation is real threat to humanity's survival.

It occurs to me (again) that to be a movement conservative these days one has to ardently believe a whole series of childish ideations, that global warming is a myth, that the US economy is in great shape or that we are winning the war in Iraq.
Now Jeff adds global depopulation to the slushpile, right up their with abstinence education and the brain busting properties of pop-rocks.

All of it very gaudy and all of it straight out of an elementary school recess...and yet it is guiding policy and nigh holy writ for thousands of pundits and high level decision makers within and without the US Government.
With any luck the children's crusade comes to an end this year...it has cost us all a pretty penny though hasn't it?

Another day late and another dollar short....

A mere twenty four hours after Jeff Jacoby blithely proclaimed all the "good news" from Iraq the Iraqis celebrated the occasion by shooting the eleven relatives of a Baghdad journalist.

If I didn't know better, I'd say the sonsabitches read the Boston Globe.

"Heady days for those of us in the War Party"

opined Jeff Jacoby, once, not too long ago.

Heady days indeed.

A couple of days ago I was lazing around the Friendly's

in Lenox Massachusetts, digesting my three humungous buttermilk pancakes when I saw a Jeff Jacoby column in the Globe decrying the Commonwealth's ticket scalping laws.
Fair enough, you can make an argument against these pettifogging statutes, that this is a venal transgression too miniscule to invite consistent enforcement....and that is a bad thing generally.
Jeff was making the usual dog-days of late summer libertarian argument, pretty unremarkable stuff...I wonder though where his highminded freemarketeering ends?
Does this mean that Jeff is gonna come out for rescinding the Commonwealth's puritanical public solicitation laws? Or maybe just maybe he'll demand the State Legislature strike down that false invasive 1913 anti-miscegenation statute, the one that prevents out of state gay couples from gettin' hitched hyar?
Or is he justing making easy libertarian hay without downing any heavy lifting?

Whenever things go wrong for U.S. Conservatives

in the democratic arena they almost invariable compensate their battered egos by raising up the blood cry for radical privatization.
Such is the case today with Jeff Jacoby in the Sunday Globe who is astonished to discover that thanks to the Parker versus Hurkey decision public school curriculum is set by elected school boards and not by pettish parents incited by columnist to mob rule.
Class size in the Commonwealth is what? twenty three pupils per teacher, imagine trying tot each to such an unruly cohort and reach some accord with twenty three sets of parents on what shall be taught?
No, there is a reason why democratic bodies constrained by law and tradition control schools...anything else is sheer chaos.
If Jeff and his friends wanna opt out then there are hundreds of private schools out there to choose from.
Let them set up a scholarship program for junior conservatives or stop whining and start their own damn school.
Well of course, then the cry goes up as to why they should be taxed for schools they don't use and often revile?
Wa-al shit there I have no answer, other than to say trillions in public debt has been authorized in my name on behalf of a war I consider useless...so there is plenty of pain to go around.

Glaring Omission in today's column from Jeff Jacoby

Whenever wingnuts start immodestly praising Harry Truman, sensible people are advised to hold onto their wallets and hunker down, the BS will blow like a hurricane I assure you.
Today Jeff goes to great lengths to laud the simplicity of Harry Truman's post presidential rectitude with the exorbitant speaking fees and lavish money-grubbing of the current crop of Ex-Presidents.
Well it is true that Truman turned down a lot of lucrative deals on the grounds that they would diminish the office of the Presidency. However Jeff declines to note that Former President Truman lobbied then House Speaker Sam Rayburn for a Federal pension, he requested such on grounds that he might have to take some undignified offers down the road owing to his own lack of resources.
That is the little know origin of the current presidential pension system, it is quite literally "keep-em'-out-of-trouble" money.

Fabulous tantrum from Jeff Jacoby today...

all the democrats in congress were cowards and traitors and they stink and are meanies and so on as the Boston Globe's Laughing Young Senescence snarled on for some 650 words, much like a spent toddler's pre-bedtime fury.
Thisis a far cry from Jeff's whole "these are heady days for those of us in the war party" phase of a mere two years ago.
Ah but that is blood under the bridge now, even a fantasist like Jeff Jacoby has to admit things are going wrong at a breathtaking clip in Iraq, all he can hope for now is to blame the whole mishaugas on liberal democrats...which is the last refuge of monolithic conservatism whenever things go really really wrong.

It occurs to Humble Elias that since US Conservatism is less a doctrine and more a serious of interlocking myths loaded up with sheer fantasy, that the United States is paying a huge tribute in other people's blood and money so that Jeff Jacoby and the thirty percent of the lectorate who back Bush to the hilt can go on living in a political Candyland for a few more precious years.

Note to Jeff Jacoby

the next time you wanna whip off a easy-ass column decrying the nigh eternal wait at the RMV, you might wanna note in passing that said agency has been in the hands of your pals in the GOP for some sixteen years now.
And IF after all that time and all that missionary work on behalf of rugged individualism, the sanctity of marriage and free markets the Registry is still pokin' along...well then either your premise is flawed, the missionaries were knuckleheads or the agency is beyond hope.
I'm inclined towards the whole missionaries, knuckleheads notion myself.

Just for the record, I've renewed my license at the RMV branch in the Galleria mall many times and never encountered the delay as described by Jeff, I'm NOT saying said wait didn't happen, only that it has yet to happen to me in that particular office.

Should we have better faster on-line renewal options?
Hell yes, drop a note to Governor Patrick, stuff like this seems to interest him.