I’m uncharacteristically at a loss here. I simply don’t have the resources for the news aggregating tasks it takes to sum up the outrageous offensive against American citizens we’re seeing from our government.

It’s not a perfect storm. It’s a perfect hurricane. Terrible revelations in every aspect of this misbegotten administration’s performance in office. Counterpointed by childish presidential tantrums in which the self-proclaimed post-partisan American messiah prefers to call his opposition hostage takers and extortionists rather than take the step of negotiating with them for the first time EVER in his five years in office.

Help me out here, guys. Stories about despotic shutdown theatrics, state by state ObamaCare screw-ups, continued foreign policy disasters, ongoing leaks and discoveries of felonious behavior by the IRS and NSA, and media complicity in the burying of all these are to be found at Hotair.

Stories about the near instantaneous conversion of the federal bureaucracy into a metastasizing Patrician-proletarian tyranny, as well as specification of the extent of the ObamaCare lies, incompetencies, and threats to constitutional liberties are best found at National Review Online. Look for pieces by Charles Cook, David French, Mark Steyn, and David Auerbach.

An excellent hitting on all the media bases is located at the Rush Limbaugh Show, today’s edition. I have an ipad app called “Listen Now” which should enable you to hear today’s show even after it’s done. Do it, even if you never listen to him. His tone is more equable than mine would be. Which, to be sure, isn’t saying much.

But he led with the most buried lede in recent MSM history, Obama’s 37 percent approval rating. Which he contrasted with an extended clip from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the night he announced GWB’s 36 percent approval rating. Wolf could barely contain his joy that evening, and the number was repeated half a dozen times. Exuberantly. Obama’s similar rating was buried halfway through an AP story whose headline announced that polls show people blame Republicans for the shutdown. Rush went on from there… And he said much I would say too. But he has his stack of stuff, and I have only my quiet Internet tinkering of a morning. Sometimes you have to defer to the bigger stack of stuff.

Dig with your own shovels and share. Here’s the one link I will offer of my own, from Breitbart’s Conversation site.

I was at a dinner recently where I happened to be seated at a table with new acquaintances of the liberal political persuasion.

We went around the table introducing ourselves. As I said that I work for a “conservative website,” a man at the far end of the table made his displeasure known by booing. He wasn’t kidding.

These were professional, accomplished, senior members of the community. They had never met a conservative before. Their first reaction was hostile. No one chided the man who booed, or apologized on his behalf for his rudeness, or laughed to break the tension.

Instead, I began to face questions: you really support what Boehner is doing?

Yes, I replied. He’s doing the right thing by standing up to the president. Gasps.

Look, I said, trying to be diplomatic. I understand how Democrats see this. Democrats believe that these extremists have taken over the Republican Party, and they don’t like government much anyway, and–
“They can’t stand the fact that a black man is in the White House!” someone interjected.

That’s not true, I said. Oh, yes it is, they said.

Ok. Why don’t we put that thought in a box for now–we’ll come back to it, I offered. Let me finish. From a conservative Republican perspective, it’s necessary to stand up to Obama because he is doing things that no president should do, not just in policy terms but also in violating the constitutional separation of powers.

That stunned them. “What? You really believe that? Like what?”
Delaying the employer mandate under Obamacare, for instance, without statutory authority.

Oh, you Republicans and your business friends should like that.
No, actually, I don’t. And it’s just the start…

The conversation was cut short by the sound of a glass tapping at the next table, for a toast. We never did come back to the question of whether I was a racist who could not stand a black man as president.

I doubt these folks thought of themselves as mean people. But I am certain many other conservatives have had similar interactions among liberals in elite, polite society. Worldly as they are, they have no clue.

Uh, why does he care to remain civil with them? Scorch their asses. They’re braindead as zombies. But that’s the great conservative delusion, isn’t it? Try to appear reasonable and dead things that subsist by eating living things might somehow stop reaching for your working brain with carnivorous intent. Oh well. I’ve said my say on this point multiple times. No one listens. It’s better to get along with your enemy than pursue him into the wasteland he’s chosen for a home and cut off his last retreat. I’ll stop now.

Never mind.

This is a president, a government, a nation out of control. There is so much horrifying stuff going on that it’s almost impossible to hold it in mind at the same time. Why, perhaps, the MSM has shut down so completely. There are ironies within ironies, insults wrapped inside insults, corruptions nested like Russian dolls, and the only thread through the maze is the base realization that absolutely everything the president, the White House, and his factotums and party say is a deliberate lie.

Bald, outrageous, shameless, contemptible, cynical, viciously minded, and ultimately stupid lies. What they’re counting on is that we’re too stupid and gullible to keep track or hold them accountable.

I fear we are.

On the other hand, Raebert sat with me while I listened to Limbaugh this afternoon. He said not a thing.

Okay. Sometimes he’s just a Great White with hair.

Don’t laugh. He’s cooler than you think.

Sometimes, even when you’re seeking distractions, dark is the way to go.

Yesterday I happened on “Dredd,” a remake of perhaps the silliest Sylvester Stallone movie ever. But my wife was away and what the hell.

Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason why you find good things. Dredd is a good thing. Forget Stallone. This one is a well crafted triumph among action flicks. We never even see the face of the hero (is it a spoiler to reveal that Judge Dredd is Kiefer Sutherland’s sidekick from 24?) The movie is hypnotic, intense, and wonderful. I almost never watch movies more than once. Today I’m taking time out from my second viewing in 24 hours to tell you about it.

Watched just enough the second time to confirm that it’s all deliberate, incredibly well thought out, and working toward its end from Scene 1.

Cheap comparisons won’t do. Road Warrior in a high rise. Dirty Harry in an incredibly bleak future. Robocop but much much darker and less political. The Crow with a helmet. Die Hard with no laughs. Joss Wheedon’s Serenity without space travel but a kickass chick to die for. All slightly right but thoroughly wrong.

This is its own thing. Good versus evil. And evil for once rightly conceived as a destructive force that can’t be contained or mitigated or appeased with good intentions. It poisons what it touches, in this case quite literally. Society is not to blame. Human nature is. Without the rule of law, without absolutes, human life becomes an inferno. In Dante’s model, there are nine levels of hell. In Dredd there are two hundred, as many as there are stories in one Megablock of one Megacity.

Judge Dredd and his unexpectedly talented apprentice are sucked into a doomed situation. Ultimate spoiler: they win.

Why I’m watching again. The first time, all the film’s, uh, body language seemed to suggest we’d get one more bleak advertisement for the death of everything virtuous. That’s the real victory of this movie. It exploits all the dark conventions — from music to hyper violence to betrayal within sacrosanct institutions — and still permits good to prevail. Over a villainess you can’t stop hoping will die from minute one.

I have to get back to it now. I suggest you get to it soon. Judge Dredd is no vigilante. He’s a soldier. One who never ever gives up. Glorious to see.

P.S. Just finished my second viewing. I loved this movie. How many times do you watch to the end of the closing credits? I did this time. How about you?

…this hurtling through an upstairs hallway aimed at YOU. What I experience every night as Raebert returns from his pre-bedtime outing to me. It is so swift, so violent, so thundering, that I haven’t managed yet to capture it on video. I promise to try harder. His brakes are as instantaneous as his acceleration. He comes to a halt an inch from my face, gives me a kiss, and then goes for a drink of water.

This post is, to be honest, a placeholder. So I’ll always know where to find this treasure trove so thoughtfully provided by Lake.

I say “imagine,” but I doubt it’s possible. Living with a deerhound is truly a life-changing experience. You can’t know what that’s like without doing it. Not a challenge or a boast, just a humbling fact. Well, I feel humbled anyway.

Some of you are starting to get it. Deerhounds are special.

Thank you. They’re ferocious, greyhound fast, unstoppable, and determined. And too smart for our own good.

He was unhappy that his mommy had to go to work today due to the government shutdown and its shuddering implications to the military. But when I told him she was coming home at last he smiled.

Yes. He smiled.

You think Rae couldn’t run with those guys above? He’d run them down and eat them. He’s faster, stronger, and more intent than all of them. He also has more hair. The missus wants to clip him back to racehorse trim. I think he’s fine the way he is. A shaggy knight whose clouded brows give him expressiveness, fine and lovely. When he moves he’s like greased lightning, a horse with the bit in his teeth. Except that he likes marinara sauce. And he understands English. Start to see the problem?

Da Bearz. Really?

Am I the only one? Maybe not. But I’m one of the few who’s willing to be honest about it.

I think it’s ridiculous, tiresome, esthetically offensive, weirdly lewd, and hypocritical to boot.

I’m talking about breast cancer awareness month in the NFL. Pink shoes, pink sleeves, pink gloves, pink crotch towels, pink pacifiers*(?), pink helmet decorations. Stop it.

Why pink? Because pink is appropriately girlish? Or because nipples are pink? You decide.

I don’t doubt that NFL football players have a great devotion to the female breast. Otherwise they wouldn’t be continually arrested for sexual assaults in strip clubs and jealous violence against their girlfriends.

But what’s this October Pink thing all about, really? It’s a PR stunt, an incredibly forced and long-running one that detracts from the game without doing a scintilla of good.

Women in the NFL audience are unaware of breast cancer. They see Brian Urlacher wearing pink shoes and they think, “Hmmm, maybe I should get a mammogram.” Or their husband Chet sees Michael Vick’s pink sleeves and he thinks, “Hmmm. Maybe Marge needs a mammogram.”

Bullshit. It accomplishes nothing. The media are jam packed with stories about breast cancer. You can’t get through a normal day without hearing some story about sufferers, survivors, or even preemptive mastectomies.

But guess what? Prostate cancer kills almost as many men as breast cancer does women. Nobody talks about it but Don Imus, which is why nobody watches him anymore. Men are the prime audience for NFL football. Men are far less likely to go to doctors at all, get screened for prostate issues, or urge other people to do the same. But we don’t have a calendar month of bright blue shoes and big blue ribbons on the lapels of every sportscaster on TV. And I don’t want one. My prostate is my business. As a woman’s breasts are her business. (Who could think they enjoy pink NFL accessories that cause everyone in the room to stare at her bosom with a giant question mark on their face? That’s helpful? How exactly?)

Before you get offended, think about it. Of all the causes in the world, breasts are the single easiest one to get behind. Women want to keep them and men want to see and touch them. Being for them is a win/win. Unless you’re not a gullible idiot about the silliest things done in the name of breast health.

So? The NFL cares about breast cancer and literally nothing else. If it were just a stunt, as it so obviously is, I’d leave it alone. But I don’t watch the Chicago Bears or the Pittsburgh Steelers to see them dolled up in pink tights and pumps. I expect them to look like men playing a man’s game.

And I can’t get over the suspicion that a bunch of twenty-something men are acting out a coarse joke and laughing about it in their locker rooms. Pink is a porn term, you know. Or didn’t you?

Sick of the whole thing. I know a LOT of you agree with me. I understand if you don’t have the guts to admit it. Just know that I know that you’re out there.

*Yes. The Giants’ Victor Cruz is wearing a pink mouthpiece that looks exactly like a baby’s pacifier. Who’s he laughing at? The Giants generally are wearing enough pink to be hawking for a Vegas brothel. Think that’ll help them beat the flailing Eagles?

P.S. The NFL just ran a commercial featuring a woman claiming she hadn’t thought of checking herself until she saw the pink accessories. I don’t know about you, but my bullshit meter is pinned on 11.

Greatest two point conversion ever.

Sorry to keep stressing the fun factor, but we all need it with the country and the world going completely to hell day by day.

Many, many close games, overtimes, and dazzling plays. We’ll begin with the important games.

Harvard played frequent Nemesis Holy Cross, who insisted on remaining tied with the Crimson, touchdown for touchdown, throughout the regulation 60 minutes. So they started playing overtime. Unfortunately, the Harvard field goal kicker, Thurston Howell IV, was back in Cambridge nursing a painful gouty toe, so their strategy had to be touchdowns, one of which they scored in each of the three overtime periods. Holy Cross did the same for two of the three. It wasn’t enough. Must have been kind of thrilling to watch. (Side note. Penn-Dartmouth played out exactly the same way. No one has field goal kickers anymore?)

Rutgers played the SMU Mustangs and twice opened up three touchdown leads. But head coach Kyle Flood, like Greg Schiano before him, is smarter than the average bear. When you have a three touchdown lead in the middle of the third quarter, what you do is sit on that lead, no matter what. Run the ball, run the ball, and when it’s third and long, run the ball. When the other team scores, you stick to your guns and run the ball. Why SMU managed to tie the game in the closing seconds of regulation with the greatest two-point conversion in the history of college football: two yards gained on a desperation 40 yard pass to a truly gifted wide receiver. After that it was just a repeat of the Harvard-Holy Cross game. Touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, field goal, touchdown. The Rutgers Scarlet Knights overcame their abysmal coaching to win in the end. It was too nerve wracking to watch except on the ESPN zipper.

Ohio State played Northwestern. The Wildcats were inspired. My wife loved their new helmets. Me not so much. I have nothing against Northwestern but Michael Wilbon, although I resented having to stay up way past my bedtime for the Buckeyes to rally late in the fourth quarter for a win that was way closer than the final score. A great football game. I agree with what the Wildcat coach said after the game. “Those guys getting on the bus back to Columbus know they were in a fight tonight with my guys.”

In less important games, Georgia squeaked by a valiant Tennessee team in overtime, when a too ardent running back trying to push the ball past the goal line fumbled it into the end zone for a touchback. Georgia field goal. Game over.

Indiana beat Penn State for the first time EVER. Doesn’t seem possible such a record could still exist. Well, it doesn’t any longer.

Notre Dame, wearing the cheapest, tartiest uniforms in their once dignified history, defeated the team that annihilated USC last week. They didn’t even need overtime to do it. Hmmmmph. Credit where credit is due. But the bright green shoes and the helmets with mirror shamrocks got to go.

And Navy and The Air Force defied Obama by playing a game, thanks to a special dispensation granted by the SecDef. I think Navy won.

All I’m saying is that in the constant hunt for distractions, college football is still a winning proposition. People actually trying, risking life and limb for something as intangible as victory. If you think about it, it’s kind of inspiring.

btw, if you’ve been daunted by all the “danger” talk about football, this is required reading. I’ll give you one teaser paragraph, but by all means read it all. Should adjust your perspective.

One thousand times more Americans die from swimming than from football hits. Last year, skateboarding collisions killed 15 times as many Americans as football collisions did. About twelve times as many people die annually from crashes on the ski slopes than die from crashes on the gridiron. If you’re wearing a Riddell or Schutt helmet when you die, the Drudge Report surely will highlight your passing. If you’re not wearing a helmet in a fatal riding or skiing crash, Matt Drudge probably won’t notice. The war on football is as much a clash between perception and reality as anything else.

I dunno. Sometimes you just roll with it and laugh.

It’s a two-episode miniseries called Cat8. I love it for so many reasons. I heartily recommend it to all our readers.

First, are Matthew Modine and Ed Begley Junior the same person? What do you think?

Green boy.

So incredibly earnest. And quietly sanctimonious.

Sandy haired, weak, soft-headed, prematurely wrinkled, and ultimately dim, they’re both poster boys for green phantasms and ill begotten leftist causes.

What’s so funny about this three hours of nonsense. The premise is absurd. The plot is absurd. The characters are absurd. And it’s all just perfect entertainment.

Matthew Modine is a scientist who wanted to deter global warming. He invented a technology that tapped into the power of the sun. But the evil Bush-era Republicans weaponized it. Of course. He tried to destroy his research, but all he destroyed was his own career. Irony One.

The president, who is obviously Bush, and the Secretary of Defense, who is obviously Cheney, push ahead with a premature test of the weaponized technology which obviously pisses the sun off big time. Irony Two.

Typical SyFy soap opera follows. Modine saves the entire earth and its inhabitants not once but twice. With the Cheney character gunning for him the whole time, beating him in a Guantanamo situation even though he’s the only one who might have a clue how to save the earth, and sending special forces against him with kill orders throughout, even when it’s clear that earth itself is about to break apart (cat8). The movie is a leftist political masturbation orgy. Irony 3.

Oh. The Bush stand-in dies humiliatingly. The Vice President is mysteriously Hillary like. What you expect is that she will know immediately who the villain is. But she doesn’t. It takes her to the final five minutes of Episode 2. Oh shucks. Irony 4.

No, I’m not going to do a matching game. I’m just going to talk sense. The whole purpose of the script is to bash Bush and Cheney. But being ill educated idiots, actors like Modine don’t realize that the premise is more damaging than the target. Hubris is believing we can deal with earth factors we don’t fully understand without creating unintended consequences. The movie is 100 percent about unintended consequences.

Evidence increasingly suggests that the sun is a huge part of the climate effects we think we see. Did somebody sneak that idea in, past the physics geniuses of folks like Matthew Modine?

The only president we’ve had who would have punished Americans for just being Americans is Obama. The idea that the whole planet imploding wouldn’t change the equation recalls nothing so much as the current administration’s desire to punish ordinary citizens for nothing but wanting to visit the nation’s heritage sites. America is dying. Obama is sitting for a portrait and playing more golf.

I know. Nobody wants to blame Obama for anything. Cipher. Geek on the golf course. Intellectual. Right. Tiny little creep of a vicious halfwit who thought he was something he clearly isn’t. And a world of morons who are determined to sustain him in his fantasy.

IRS audit to come.

He’s happy. Are you?

Yes you are.

In big time football programs, they pretend they play a 12 game season, but they don’t really, because the first three or four are played against schools they know they can beat. This is what we call the doormat season. For example, in today’s exciting gridiron contests, Penn State edged Kent State 34-0, Maryland outlasted West Virginia 37-0, Virginia nipped VMI 49-0, Louisville finally overcame a game Florida International team 72-0, and Ohio State came back from a dead even 0-0 score at the opening kickoff to prevail over Florida A&M 76-0.

Which is to say that most of the big college programs actually play about an eight game season. The doormat charade pads their records, but it’s kind of disgusting when you think about it. It doesn’t even really qualify as a pre-season. What do you learn by scrimmaging with teams whose players are about three quarters your size and two thirds your speed? Anything?

This is one of the last areas where the Ivy League has anything to offer, what with being pretty much nothing anymore but left wing propaganda factories for the permanently spoiled narcissist progeny of federal government officials. But they don’t play a doormat season in the Ivy League.

I admit they used to. There were a bunch of colleges and universities that were actually founded for this purpose and located near Ivy League schools. Places with strange names like Bucknell, Colgate, Lafayette, Lehigh, Holy Cross, UMass, and the University of New Hampshire(!?), they existed to provide easy wins for Harvard, Yale, and whatever the other ivy schools call themselves.

But this has long since ceased to be the reality. These days, most of them frequently drub the ivy teams they play early in their schedules, which go on to include numerous college names nobody has ever heard spoken aloud.

When you think about it, it’s kind of nice, a sort of proof of the victory of egalitarian ideals over obsolete notions of aristocracy and meritocracy. And people say there’s no progress.

But, as usual, the next step into the future is being pioneered by Harvard, whose relentless search for social justice in football has caused the Crimson to schedule for the past two years as its opening game none of the traditional local doormats. Who wants to start the season with a 42-30 loss to Holy Cross? I mean, it’s so much more global of spirit to leave New England altogether and fly out to the lovely lower left hand corner of the country and play with the University of San Diego, whose team even has a Spanish name, the Toreros (loosely translated in English as ‘barristas.’).

The University of San Diego has a very distinguished history. It was founded just 300 and some years after Harvard, in 1949, as the San Diego College for Women. Cool.

And, yes, men are now allowed to enroll, 40 or 50 of them per year, a number which is expected to grow through time until it may one day reach a critical mass that will inspire Harvard to look elsewhere for a brand new pigskin peak of aspiration, maybe Mount Holyoke.

Today, though, the Crimson triumphed, 42-20, despite being severely yelled at by the opposing defense.

Where was I? This whole doormat thing should stop. Why can’t the big-time programs learn from the example set by the schools that invented football in the first place and were better at commandeering all the early national championships than anyone has proven able to do since?

Why?

Oh. And in late breaking news, former ivy doormat Rutgers thumped the Arkansas Razorbacks in what looked very much like a real college football game.

R. RRRRR. Sorry. I missed Talk Like a Pirate Day by one day. I can live with that. Better a day late than a touchdown short. Yo ho, me hearties.

The Winning Thing

Couldn’t sleep. Wound up tuning in to this movie. Which I had seen before, but as sometimes happens, it struck me differently this time.

If you don’t know the history, West Virginia’s Marshall University lost its football team in a 1970 plane crash. The movie, with some liberties taken, is about what happened in the next year. A coach from tiny Wooster, Ohio, accepts the job of rebuilding the football team from scratch. He has three surviving varsity players, a traumatized assistant coach, a university president in over his head, and a college town scorched by grief. He succeeds in winning one game. End of movie.

Several things I found riveting this time around, in no particular order.

The traumatized assistant quits after a humiliating first game blowout. He tells the new coach, “We are not honoring the dead players or [coach]. He said ‘winning is everything,’ and all we’re doing is disgracing him and them.”

When the new coach responds, it’s in a chapel, just the two of them. The newbie says, “He was right. Winning is everything. Every coach in every sport forever has always believed that. I’ve said it more times than I can count. I’ve always believed it until I got here.

“But that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about winning or losing or even how we play the game. Right here, right now, it’s about suiting up and getting on the field every week. We may not win tomorrow, next week, or any game this season. But if we keep playing, we make it possible for our teams to win again in the future. If we do our job today, we’ll get back to a day when winning can be everything again.”

Beautifully said. It took more than a dozen years, but Marshall returned not only to winning but to three national championships in their division.

On the other hand, something else I noticed. The big speech occurred, as I said, in a chapel, and there was a camera cut or two to the cross. Without Hollywood’s aversion to religion, a simpler argument might have been to nod at the cross and say, “He lost. He suffered through death. If his brethren had quit, we’d never have heard of him. But they didn’t quit, and he ultimately won two-thirds of the earth.”

Can’t do that in Hollywood scripts, though. Take a look at the critics’ reviews at imdb.com. Cliched, superficial, weak. Really? This is a story that actually happened. The acting wasn’t over the top. The production and editing were up to standard. The script was clever throughout. What’s so bad about the movie? That the critics don’t want to hear about a positive story with Christian overtones that really did happen. Period.

All that aside. What stays with me is the part of the big speech that says we have to keep suiting up and getting on the field. We may not win today or tomorrow.

But if we keep playing, we may one day get our country back. Otherwise, we fall back to being badminton and beach volleyball players, while the big guys romp in the Division I political class.

We are Marshall. As many of us as have the guts.

It’s been a rough week. Time to give your mind some different nourishment. Dig in. Most are in the form of galleries, but patience is rewarded.

The 25 smartest players in NFl history.

A Murmuration of Starlings (scroll or click on photo for gallery format)

Creepy Abandoned Churches

The Ruins of Detroit (wait for it; loads slowly)

5 Ways Dogs Can Read Your Mind

8 Simple Questions Science Can’t Answer

26 Dogs Having the Best Day Ever (wait for it)

Make that 27…

It’s Friday. Mommy will be home soon. For now I have her sweatshirt to nuzzle.

Why he has happy feet. Trees of life. Or, if you’re watching the new series Sleepy Hollow, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.