Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The Koch brothers are characters. They fund almost any (and maybe every) libertarian influence group. On the whole, politically, I think they're equal parts wealthy suckers and corporate malefactors. They do appear to be sincere about their opposition to nightstick fetishism. On the other hand, they definitely have no objection to private power and privatized use of the state's power. The Republicans milk them shamelessly. So does the DLC, which is amusing, given the The Nation's obsequious commitment to carrying DLC water. Maybe KvdH should start pandering to the Cato crew and see if the Kochs will pony up for her vanity paper.

Ames and Levine were once gonzo-wannabes. Their old 'zine, the eXile, was often good for a cynical laugh.

No shit, libertarians are 'enemies of the state'. I thought that was a virtue...?

Ahhh, yeah. Ames and Levine.

I have to admit to being a bit of a fan of theirs; they've done some good stuff at The eXiled about the Kochs and the Teabaggers, and the privatized water situation in California, and such.

Still, their hit piece on the outcry over the latest round of TSA abuses was pretty amazing, considering A&L were supposed to be so down on the State abusing citizens, and seeing as how badly they were treated by Da Rooskies.

What's even more gob-smacking -- but somehow not surprising -- is that this kneecapping appeared in The Nation. It's one thing for outfits like the Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times and MSNBC to be piling aboard the Sit The Fuck Down And Shut The Fuck Up Bandwagon, but I was guessing that The Nation would have something vaguely resembling a pair of cajones regarding popular resistance to abuse by State goons.

Granted, I'd known that The Nation was aboard the Lame Train for a number of years, but this joining in the rest of the boss media in slagging people who show the balls to push back at the TSA was astounding.

(Btw, y'all catch the cover of The Nation this past week? "Red Dawn"? P'wahh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hahh.)

This guy's just a Berkeley frat boy. Smart enough to worm his way into that school, but obviously way too big a defective fratboy fuckhead to pay attention to anything that mattered whilst there. Here's this incredible admission of being a willful and complete reactionary hipster dipshit, from this clown's own self-quoting self-post on Wikipedia:

"I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all. We'd ridicule the boring lefties, our enemies. We'd drop all sorts of drugs and go to the underground shows: Scratch Acid, Husker Du, Sonic Youth. It felt like something might happen, and soon."

There are so many things wrong in this passage.

Suffice to say The Nation must be really hemorrhaging readers now, if it is turning in this desperate direction. This half-baked hash of suburban fascism and gonzo-with-zero-talent horseshit makes Harris-Perry (no longer Harris-Lacewell: http://melissaharrisperry.com/) look good. At least she tries.

Dude should've just gone with "a MORE perfect union," to avoid looking like an evil character played by Tim Roth in a bad Orwell-aping B movie.

And I thought Communists were all about union-building? I know it kind of didn't work out that way in three dimensions and all, but lumping Communism together with libertarianism is kind of like sticking Greenpeace in the same category as the Teabaggers. If we're, you know, into sticking things into categories in the first place.

"I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all. We'd ridicule the boring lefties, our enemies. We'd drop all sorts of drugs and go to the underground shows: Scratch Acid, Husker Du, Sonic Youth. It felt like something might happen, and soon."

This is the scaries thing I have ever fucking seen in my whole entire life. I thought it was going to turn into satire in the home stretch. Nope! Homegirl clearly thinks he's the second coming of P.J. O'Rourke. (I wasn't that into the first coming.)

Mark Ames is an American who lived in Russia for 15 years, where he watched the theft of the country's resources by the gangster oligarchy.

He came away with the idea that almost everything in politics can be explained by the idea of a criminal conspiracy. For example, he believed the guy behind the "Ground Zero Mosque" was a CIA operative who deliberately triggered the "controversy" in order to hurt the Democrats.

Looking at everything as a criminal conspiracy is a bit like looking at the world through a telephoto lens. If you point it in the right direction at the right object, you come away with a clarity that most people don't have. But most of the time you just miss what's standing outside of your frame of reference.

So for Ames, it probably made sense that the current uproar over the TSA pat downs was simply a push for racial profiling by the Koch brothers and assorted Tea Party racists.

On the other hand, Greenwald is a lawyer. He has a much stricter standard of evidence. He looked at Ames' "proof" that Tyner was a Tea Party plant and concluded that his article was an obvious smear job, instead of just a boneheaded misfire.

"In fact it goes to the very core of the liberal mentality, which as I have argued elsewhere, is in fact intensely authoritarian, and much given to groping people for their own good."

Liberal Fascism strikes again? That's one reason why I prefer "pwog" to "liberal". It makes no sense at all to anyone outside of the USA, and even in the USA the only consistent meaning of "liberal" seems to be "things that coastal latte drinking apple customers are thought to believe". Pwog at least makes sense. Semantics, I know, but still...

"Looking at everything as a criminal conspiracy is a bit like looking at the world through a telephoto lens. If you point it in the right direction at the right object, you come away with a clarity that most people don't have. But most of the time you just miss what's standing outside of your frame of reference"

i like that

conspiracy as a prefect of the state of
overtly conciously intentional collective action

makes for great metaphor
but too often
counter productive
analysis

then again
emergent causation seems to be a difficult
puppy to hangle "as is "
what with all the compexity fragility and path dependent aspects that can simulate noise
while being far from noise
as is demonstrated by the final emergence

so "on with the metaphors "i say

this crops up ofen with our dark sceptic anti statists here
its as if you have a barren choice between "believing " hobbes
or rejecting hobbes

to be breezy about it
rejection can be a stage of sublation
alas if the self organizing seeker
gets hung up on the rejection...

stage hang ups
often get confused metaphorically
with "normal " youthful behaviour
unforyunately
such willful persistence of course ultimately suggests deeper
unfaced and perhaps unfaceable ..."conflicts "

example:

around here i often feel
like i'm sitting on the stoop outside
a sweet 16 party
over hearing a claque of partiers
now outside for a sarcastic smoke session

coastal latte drinking apple customers

What happened to the Volvo? Where did the Volvo go?

Oh that old thing? Jonathan took it to Oberlin with him. We drive a Prius now.

I won't tell you why I went -- I'll let you guess for yourself -- but I went to a large event at Oberlin in May 2006. Every second car in the lot was a Prius.

On second thought, hey... how'd you know?

"...We'd drop all sorts of drugs and go to the underground shows: Scratch Acid, Husker Du, Sonic Youth..."

Well, at least Ames got to hear some decent bands while at Berkeley, so it wasn't a total waste of time. Still, if he didn't dig the Lefties, what the hell was he doing at Berkeley. Sure, I can see why he'd be bored with them -- hell, I've been a Leftie since I was eighteen and the number one problem for me wasn't factionalism, but their tendency towards being humorless and boring -- but, still...

One thing I have to give A&L credit for, though, is their headline writing in their right-column news links at The eXiled. It's as if they take the staid, dry headlines actually appearing over the stories and rewrite them in plain English, profanities and all. I also like how, in the news links, he writes headlines about shit that's happening that has the fingerprints of manipulative corporatists and politicians all over it, and prefaces it with something like "now, if I were a conspiracy nut..."

.

Oh, and btw, what's this about Melissa Harris-Lacewell not being Harris-Lacewell anymore? Jeezus, why am I always the last to find out about this shit? I suppose I'd be in the loop more if I nabbed my wife's copy of The Nation when she was done with it, but I just don't have the stomach to even open the goddamn' thing anymore. Oh, well; at least on the upside, Melissa still has herself a nice double-barreled hyphenated surname. I'm guessing it was part of a pre-nuptial agreement with her new spousal unit.

The Oberlin people are everywhere. The last big party I went to have about half a dozen of them; drinking the good stuff on their Koch expense accounts, laughing about coaxing the DLC nerds into anal sex.

Believe it or not, gang, I read that Ames piece in The eXiled on the Jon Stewart mass circle-jerk. Afterwards, I felt like the guy in that old Alka-Seltzer commercial: I can't believe I read the whooo-oolllle thing.

I was actually pretty disappointed with it, too. Now, I certainly enjoyed a good sound slagging of that useless-assed event as much as anyone, but the Ames article -- besides its desperate need of an editor -- totally missed the point about where the true lameness of that event lay. (BIG FAT HINT: It didn't lie with a bunch of hipsters trying too hard to be ironic.)

Michael Dawson sez on 11.27.10 @03:46:
This half-baked hash of suburban fascism and gonzo-with-zero-talent horseshit makes Harris-Perry (no longer Harris-Lacewell: http://melissaharrisperry.com ) look good. At least she tries.

I couldn't help myself: I just had to check out that URL, and -- aaaaauuuugggghhh! Out, my eyes! Why is it that in almost every foto of her on that page, she's got that silly-assed plastered-on smile on her face?

Thanks a shit-ton, Dawson. Do you know how many Guinnesses I'm going to have to drink to kill off the brain cells storing the memory of that image?

gluelicker sez on 11.27.10 @08:44:
I won't tell you why I went -- I'll let you guess for yourself -- but I went to a large event at Oberlin in May 2006. Every second car in the lot was a Prius.

In my college hippie days (as opposed to my current middle-aged irascible hippie days) "treading lightly on the Earth" -- at least, car-wise -- involved finding a vehicle that could be bought cheaply, was easy and cheap to maintain, and used as little gas as possible. This car usually ended up being either a VW Beetle, VW Microbus, or an old Volvo wagon.

So, all the rich old Pwogs are driving Priuses (Priuii?) now, huh? Instead of driving a cheap, easily maintainable old IC-engine car, they're driving some exotic, bland machine that cost almost as much as what my parents paid for a house in 1971? Suckers. P'wah ha ha ha ha hah.

i looked at ames 5k corker

taking a swing at jon stewart fans
in general and little miss hanks in particular strikes me as in itself
"understandable" from several perspectives

on the other hand
the fact ames message
looks like a call
to get back up on the hoss...

stick to the toxic coalition
with the ohbummers...???

"i never said it would be easy"
"don't be a brat"
that's
a shameless con's reframing ...

"the Dems might not be the struggle org
we'd choose but them itz the struggle org
we got .."

the Democrat party ???

the pub sec unions i'd give a maybe
but the jack asses ???

just keep poking their ribs
just keep code pinking ???

what is this

the tom hayden posse rides again ??

then comes the soft soap
towards the power class
u hippies were better
then us e lame o phobic x/y geners

mr and ms gen next

i doubt it !!!
i'll not reherse my generations
box canyon escape by means of yuppy morph

obviously
the claims and counter claims
to the title
" biggest generation of ultra swine "
"the leastest generation "
who's the biggest crap pile
among "our various epigone generations"
and particularly if sorted out
among sets of each gens
god damn ex college kidz ???

here we go another journey back inside our own heads... eh .. this time
despite a loud surface claim
to heading in exactly the opposite direction
posing as a call to collective action
this screed is yet another exercise
in projected self loathing
which
like introjected self mocking
is need less to say just another bummer

the antedote to cocaine is not heroin

and to suggest to gen x/y
'you best put on a dunce cap bite your genteel assand rejoin "the system's "
existing "social change " iinstitutions

yikes
the ones that just burned your spirit
what a none starter that is

re-submerge your delicate souls
in a machine made of rotten hu-meat ??

submerge what our lower orders might call
your self appointed "specialness "
in viciously compromised hackocratic
cess pools ???

this is meant as a taunt of course
as much as a feel good shout out to
those heavily sullied
still climbing strivers
thos still inside the tenters
calling them the future stars of true grit II
........Saints preserve us !!!

is this what happens
when the best and brightest of a generation
don't grasp the value of
...........a vanguard party ???

tell me how wrong i am compadres

"On second thought, hey... how'd you know?"

I suppose that's one of the fringe benefits of having been privy to Jonathan Franzen's latest grope'n'scan. Thanks to his detailed rendering of the life and times of his representative sample, the Berglunds, I now feel as though my own hand has been placed on the scrotum of America.

Ames went a little off the rails when he started talking about Tom Hanks' daughter.

Perhaps she reminded him of the cute hipster girl who turned him down at Berkeley?

He made me curious enough about her to do some Googling. And I found she made a short film satirizing a Park Slope couple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW5V_uzl1so

emma
speaking of unions
koch et al
are trying to chop block
the unionization of the TSA
by that i mean unions of the job site kind

btw
i almost posted on this
but we just had a little burst of anti union
blithering
based on a think tank "study"
based the latest edition of a poll
based on assine questions
that show

public support for "job site unions "
in decline

Delta election loss being ONE hook
and TSA being ANOTHER

this grope phobia fest
seems in itself creepy to me

i'll agree the top management looks like it
might get off groping drowned bathers
and surely order a mass grope in
at every airport might up johnson
any flesh starved bureaucrat
and needless to add
i love anything that creates
anti corporate state sparks
no matter the section of the citizenry
involved
so i'll go with it

but ...

this sort of " my body is a sacred temple gig "
even if secularized into human rights
meta-ethics
well .......

i doubt
without a a good deal of publicized experience
and i few friends and family for instances
the raw public will pre emptively
buy deeply into
a "close the grope portals "movement

sure like police abuse of power
let alone violence and brutality
once the citizenry gets enough of it
thrown at em...they'll react
i contend even if its aimed
at "another community "

bully boy rough stuff protected by a badge
isn't kool
even to homer and jethro
let alone cheesed up groping

in addition

i doubt
the intensification
of the airport frisk is more
jobsmurf conditioning
at least by main intention

i think its mainly meant to dramatize
to middle class travellers
the seriousness of
"the rag head terror threat"
co opting this passion play
for the politics of violation
seems dubious to me

but from this arm chair
most anything horrible
can appear to be small spuds
so hit the siren bessie
i'll join the rush to outrage
so long as its not self isolating
so long as the braod masses aren't moving contrary
cause if they are
i prefer mock the gwot
to wet hen indignation

Melissa's got a new hyphen-hubby?

I found she made a short film satirizing a Park Slope couple.

And what an artless, witless piece of shit it is. Poor child. It was inevitable that any progeny of the most perfectly socialized and conformist actor in Hollywood would pursue a life of complete dipshittery.

I checked out John Tyner's blog.

He's definitely not a Teabagger. He's against torture, the occupation of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

No Teabagger would talk like this:

http://tinyurl.com/2dtclbb

But they attacked us first, on 9/11, you say. Why do you suppose that was? No, they don't hate our freedom. They hate our unqualified support of Israel and implicit backing of their treatment of their Palestinian neighbors. They hate the fact that we set up military bases around the world including on what they believe to be holy land. Look at it another way.

I have to say the more I read his blog, the more I think that Ames and whoever green lighted that article in The Nation should be fired.

digging up us old half-decomposed Communists to draw and quarter

Why is everyone acting like this is something new? Have you forgotten Hitchens on Chomsky? Alterman/Cooper/Corn on all the reds in the anti-war movement?

This is what they fucking do. It's a Democratic Party front for chrissake. Look at their laughable front-page poll on Nancy Pelosi. Pathetic.

It pisses me off that worthy people like Scahill stay on board to give them cred, and that Greenwald's otherwise excellent piece suggested that this hack job was some kind of incredible lapse.

The only thing unique here is the crudeness of their methods. They got caught with their pants down but still the Koch Bros/racial profiling talking points got out and they're not going back in.

Where message discipline is concerned, the official liberals are firing on all cylinders these days.

I've got news for you "radicals": No one cares about the TSA scans. No one. People would rather be safe than have their planes blow up. And the ones who are all worried about getting groped, and having their (rather eloquently charactertized) "junk" violated, are just projecting their sexual fanatasies.

I saw a rather chunky, goth-looking thing pictured in the Times, bearing a sign that protested her possibly being molested. In her dreams! As HW Bush once said of a fatty bearing a placard at one of his speeches saying, "Keep your hands off my body!" ---- "Not a problem!"

I know you SMBIVA types are all panting over the possibility of some actual fascism to oppose. Helpful little airport scans by friendly minimum-wage worker bees ain't it.

Sorry, Flug, about that MHP/MHL re-hyphenation link. Couldn't resist, and kind of hoped MJS might parse out the intended logic of the choo-choo train name swapping involved. Myself, I can't summon the mental energy to actually ponder it, though it just has to be a redoubling of the hyphen inanity.

As to this Ames dude, take a look at the images of him that pop up on Google. Looks like a lifelong roofie dealer, plain and simple.

As to the groping issue raised by Milt Marx, I tend to grant that point. I can't get very excited about the issue, which strikes me as a very minor but entirely predictable part and parcel of the GWOT. I also kind of like the idea of outraging "fliers." Not that I grant any of Biff Ames' stupid defenses, either, but such is the bed "we" have made for ourselves.

I also kind of like the idea of outraging "fliers."

I would not have expected this comment thread to get more inane than Milton up there, but then along comes Dawson. . .

Milton Marx sez on 11.27.10 @15:37:
I've got news for you "radicals": No one cares about the TSA scans. No one.

Let me guess... you're an intern from The Nation -- or, perhaps, the Washington Post or the New York Times -- assigned to post to this thread as part of some kind of damage control/perception management plan along the lines of that suggested by a certain White House flack (whose name slips my mind at the moment) who caused a bit of buzz by suggesting that CIA/NSA types keep an eye on the blogozone for any rumblings of discontent among the proles and take steps to keep things from getting out of hand -- except, in your case, you seem to be doing a really piss-poor job of it.

I think if you scan the newswires, or take a look at the number of eyewitness accounts and horror stories flooding the ACLU's inbox, you'll see that there's a huge buttload of people who do care, and who'd say that you're full of shit. I know my wife and I care; we've been traveling out of the country regularly since at least 1994, and have been subjected to increasingly invasive and humiliating security theater at the airport since 9/11™ -- and this doesn't even include the invasive demands for identification inflicted on us by the Clinton Regime after Oklahoma City.

I saw a rather chunky, goth-looking thing pictured in the Times, bearing a sign that protested her possibly being molested. In her dreams! As HW Bush once said of a fatty bearing a placard at one of his speeches saying, "Keep your hands off my body!" ---- "Not a problem!"

Not that it's of much consequence, but I still on general principle take offense to that "fatty" crack, speaking as a guy who's quite attracted to women who are, shall we say, "healthy" or, as I prefer to say, "curvy" or "zaftig" -- not "obese" or "bloated", but... you know, "zaftig". In fact, I married one, smartass. Never mind that your remark also shows a crass cultural-affiliation bias towards people who aren't "normal" -- speaking as an old hippie, who's also come in for some slagging in his lifetime for not being "normal".

I know you SMBIVA types are all panting over the possibility of some actual fascism to oppose. Helpful little airport scans by friendly minimum-wage worker bees ain't it.

The helpful little airport scans involve doses of radiation which are potentially unhealthy, and create nude images of peoples' bodies which are being saved and passed around among lecherous TSA thugs. People who refuse to have naked photos taken of themselves are instead subject to invasive prodding and groping by the very same TSA thugs. As far as the "worker bees" just doing their jobs goes, I seem to have heard similarly lame excuses at the Nuremburg Trials.

Y'know, sonny, the infamously abusive regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia didn't arise overnight; they were built slowly but surely. Certainly, you've heard the old story about how to boil a frog to death, haven't you?

Troll much?

It's always funny and unpredictable where people's sticking points are. For me, it was a horrific humiliation to take off my shoes at the airport. For others, it's having their "junk" felt up.

Sailors have mutinied ere now over bad food, and the great Indian Mutiny seems to have been set off by the wrong kind of grease on a rifle cartridge.

Personally, I don't care what makes people dig in their heels. I just like to see 'em do it.

Oh, and by the way, welcome, Milton. Haven't had one of y'all here in some time, and it's always a treat.

You big on air travel and its present distribution within the class structure, miguel? Sorry I upset your sense of solidarity and reason.

i have developed a certain
mild ill humored dislike
of comments by puff fish commenters
that reflex a the follow up comments
by the posters
b4 beginning the ankle nip session

example ????

Al's odd new e- friend
mr milty
seems to have missed
a gibberish encrusted
hickapoo haiku
comment by the prez
of the prose club for men

america's leading
masked essayist for hire outfit

put up
at 11/27 11:44 am

that suggests to me at least
this canine avenger bow wow milty
is perhaps a bit too eager to bite

--------------
i'll not wave at anyone
paddling up dawson's ...creek
11/27 6:02 pm
accept to say

i agree obviously and on both counts

love of travellers' humiliation
and the "ain't no big whoop " reaction

let alone mjs
on the beauty of just any old
borge wah cue insurection

"I know you SMBIVA types are all panting over the possibility of some actual fascism to oppose."

suggests i certain selective reading here eh ??

to give the dust devil its due
this is certainly correct
" Helpful little airport scans by friendly minimum-wage worker bees ain't it."

i hope the union cause rectifies the hourly wage rate stoop wages

but to be clear here
the TSA already mostly pays
better then minimum

read and weep babbitoids !!!
http://www.tsa.gov/join/careers/pay_scales.shtm

lowest pay grade looks to start
at around 8 bucks and climb up from there
ahh these pub sec feather beds...

just goes to show ya
there's always a reason for privitization

"The helpful little airport scans involve doses of radiation which are potentially unhealthy, and create nude images of peoples' bodies which are being saved and passed around among lecherous TSA thugs."

Don't flatter yourself, Mike. And keep your perverse, bourgeois fantasies between yourself and your shrink.

By the way, Mike, congratulations: You brought it all back to the Third Reich in five paragraphs, though you'd have achieved reductio ad Hitlerum much faster had you cut the flab from your prior prose euphemizing the flabby.

The remarkable thing about unreconstructed hippies is your self-aggrandizing self-involement. You imagine that The Power is out to get you and that the brown shirts lurk just around the corner, waiting to round you up. I've got news for you: The Power doesn't care about you. They don't even know who you are. You pose no threat whatsoever.

"mr milty
seems to have missed
a gibberish encrusted
hickapoo haiku
comment by the prez
of the prose club for men"

I did miss it
My eye passed right over it

print version of white noise,
or Kenny in South Park.

I hadn't heard this story about Bush Sr. I suppose it's just another reason to dislike the man.

I saw a rather chunky, goth-looking thing pictured in the Times, bearing a sign that protested her possibly being molested. In her dreams! As HW Bush once said of a fatty bearing a placard at one of his speeches saying, "Keep your hands off my body!" ---- "Not a problem!"

I wish he had kept his hands off his wife's 9 months before July 6, 1946.

You know, when you think about it, Bush Sr. and Clinton had a lot in common.

Clinton picked on unknown black female rappers. Bush Sr. picked on random chunky goth girls.

It's all about powerful men choosing easy targets to flatter their base.

The Nation has been decomposing for awhile. I remember an embarrassing piece a few years by some academic claiming that Venezuelan upper class university kids protesting Chavez were actually inspired by Hannah Arendt! Resentment over losing their privileges and social status had nothing to do with it. If The Nation closed tomorrow, it would be about 6 months before I noticed it.

Trail Of Tears sez on 11.27.10 @21:48:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW5V_uzl1so

Y'know, when I went to that URL I was licking my chops for a good sound hipster-bashing. Granted, it was only about two and a half minutes of my life wasted, but about two or three shots into it, I was supremely disappointed. Young Ms. Hanks had a supreme-choice cut of raw red meat to tear into for subject matter, and she played fucking patty-cake with it. How unbelievably lame. You'd think she'd have done a better job, seeing as how her Dad to learn the ropes from. Christ.

Michael Dawson sez on 11.28.10 @01:24:
You big on air travel and its present distribution within the class structure, miguel? Sorry I upset your sense of solidarity and reason.

This isn't just about people who travel by air; it's about the basic Constitutional liberties and personal dignity of everyone, not just airline passengers. Don't forget that the nude-scanner crowd wants to expand this indignity to bus and subway passengers as well.

I'd also encourage you to come to DC and talk to anyone in the Trinidad neighborhood who, a year or two ago, found their neighborhood arbitrarily locked down, Gaza-style, by the DC Police under the pretense of "stopping gang violence". Yeah, they've always got a good excuse for inflicting this shit on us; I'm sure that the arrest of that incompetent Somali kid out West after being lured into trying to bomb a Christmas tree by the FBI has the nude-scanner crowd's nipples exploding with delight.

You big on air travel and its present distribution within the class structure, miguel?

Hey, why stop with air travel? Perhaps the TSA can set up checkpoints on the interstates. It would be worth it to outrage all those 'drivers.'

What better way to can penalize anyone who doesn't use America's fast, clean, efficient, affordable rail system and its extensive network of bike paths. Oh wait...

As to the class system, I am pretty sure I got more cred on that score than you do, not that it matters to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, which, sadly, doesn't seem to be you.
I can recall you're saying the occasional very smart thing. That was a while ago.

This isn't just about people who travel by air

And what if it did? Taking a plane makes me 'The Man?' No one here flies? Are you fucking kidding me?

mighoul

i fly strictly by black helicopter

i fly strictly by black helicopter

You're an asshole.

mighoul

you are too limited to be so serious

you are too limited to be so serious

Agreed. Chalk it up to my bad education (public the whole way) and bad genes (one generation from Appalachian white trash). It's amazing that I muscled my way into the flying oligarchs, but only in coach, sadly.

I am not nearly as clever as you, Harvard guy. I sure don't have the imagination for even a third of your affectations and, class-wise, I actually only hate the people above me, which makes me better than you.

mighoul u make me feel like byron's prometheus

"thy god like crime was to be kind
to render with thy precepts less
the sum of human wretchedness "

miguel -- "affectations" is a misplaced criticism. In fact OP and I are just what we appear to be, and we don't have to work at it at all.