For your edification and amusement, our first sample.  It was very nice of someone to find appropriate imagery to accompany what once never had video…

Consider that there is an entire album of this, and then crawl into a closet to die.

It seems that good pals were rivals as well, for Leonard’s friend Bill had to release an album too…gods help us all.

Again, audio with someone’s later creative efforts to dull the impact of that voice…

This means war, Shatner!  Behold the power of Tolkien, wielded by Spock!

“Nice try, Leonard, but Taupin and I will destroy you and the go-go girls and hobbits!”

And once again, the devil Shatner proves his might, our eardrums and eyeballs bleeding in abject surrender.  Nimoy slinks off into that closet to join us all in curling up into slowly dying balls of flesh.

…the Greater Los Angeles Ministry of Nutrition knows what’s best.  After all, poor people are far too uneducated to know how to eat.

And you wonder how King George and his Court can get away with all that they do?  Look at how easily you’re duped.

What’s that?  Do I sound bitter?  Nahhhhhh…

Today’s Democrats and neo-conservatives are all cut from the same whole cloth: Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.  The nanny state is a direct descendant of those things that horrified us all so much in the middle of the last century.

And don’t let George Bush and his ilk fool you with claims of conservative values.  He’s as far from those as Queen Hillary.

Weep for the future.

Libertarian candidate (former Republican, enthusiastic Patriot Act pusher, and notorious about-facer) Bob Barr spoke before Netroots Nation this past week (spiritual successor to Yearly Kos), and uttered words which caused InDecision2008’s Cubby Chaser to wonder…

“What the fuck is wrong with the world when it turns out that the Libertarian candidate says the smartest thing of the past seven weeks?”

There’s a lot wrong with the world right now, a smattering of it found all over my infrequently updated blog here.

But perhaps a better question is “what the fuck is wrong with the world when the Libertarian candidate has been saying a lot of smart things over the last few months and no one is listening?”

“Good thing Barr is getting no press whatsoever.”

You can also add the legions of folk in this once-great nation who long ago lost the ability for critical thinking if they ever possessed it.  I could blame TV and various other forms of info-tainment, but it’s easy enough for many people to still view those and retain their faculties.  No, pure mental, philosophical, and political laziness are at the heart of it all.

As for those “smart” words of Barr?  Here is a smattering:

“I’m not sure. The term ‘conservative values’ means so many different things to so many different people. To me, what has utterly failed in the traditional conservative movement is any understanding of or respect for true individual liberty and our constitutional system of government, which was designed expressly to provide protection for individual liberty.

“We now have a government which calls itself conservative, yet believes it’s okay to spy on American citizens within their own country without a court order. We now have an administration which calls itself conservative and supports conservative values that believes it’s okay to detain a citizen or non-citizen in this country and never give them access to courts to determine under habeas corpus if they are being held properly.

“So if in fact respect for individual liberty, respect for the Constitution are conservative values, we certainly don’t have that in Washington nowadays.”

And a few more words to ruminate upon:

“For example, if the citizens of a particular state wish to legalize medicinal marijuana, or to change the definition of marriage in their state, why should the Federal government have any right, if in fact if it respects individual liberty and individual conservative values, have any power have any power to come in and override the position of the people of the state. Yet that’s what we have in Washington. That’s not conservatism. That’s big government.”

How many folks out there do you think would find the above words eminently reasonable, should they even bother to listen or look for them?  I would wager the same majority that opposes the destruction of reason and waste of human life that is our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Those still tied to the notion that the answers lie only with the “Demogogue” and “Republicrat” parties should look at the lessons of the last half century, and especially the last two decades.  There are no longer any answers coming from the big two, only a continually-accelerating descent into a singularity.

Seize the birthright so many fought for 230+ years ago.  If you want to retain your individual rights, don’t stand anymore for others trying to take them from you, allegedly in your name.

Mr. Barr again:

“The value that is most important to me, is that which is most important, for example, to the great 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand, and that is the value of individual privacy. As Ayn Rand said, the value of privacy, the notion of a person being freed from the interference of other people, is the essence of civilization.”

Ayn Rand is not a demon, merely another flawed human being, as we all are.  She said things those in power fear, some of them wrong to myself and others, but she was able to say them.  It is our choice whether or not we’ll bother to listen.

McQuaid can sit in his ivory UCI tower and hurl insults at the Spaniards, but no one at this point can believe that doping isn’t anything but rampant and endemic throughout the sport no matter your nationality.  As certain folks have pointed out, the UCI let these shenanigans go on for years with a nod and a wink and the occasional sacrificial lamb to the pretense of doing something about the doping.

Bob Roll and Paul Sherwen keep mentioning, during the pre-race chat on Versus’ live Tour coverage, that these “random” tests are everything but random, and are in fact targeted at riders whose pre-Tour blood tests were a bit…quirky.  That may be, but still it seems to me as if even more could be done to weed out the cheats.  Still waiting to see the first French rider get caught too, as I still don’t trust the ASO/French Cycling Federation combo’s other motives.

But even wider, constant testing may not have the desired effect of actually putting the fear of god into the dopers.  For that some have put forth other suggestions.  I am especially fond of Patrick O’Grady’s latest screed on VeloNews.

Well, we could bring back the guillotine — a few beheadings after the podium ceremonies just might open a few eyes (those that it did not close permanently) while bringing Versus’ bull-riding audience over to our side of the cultural divide.

There is a certain attraction to this solution, for as O’Grady says at the end of his article, Madame Guillotine is “the podium girl to end all podium girls.”  It has a certain sense of ironic closure.

A more measured response I heard bandied about was no more two-year bans but instead permanent pariah status.  At this point, that seems to be the least that should be done.

But something must be done.  It’s come to the point where I cannot believe in the skill or will or any rider, nor can anyone else.  Mark Cavendish appears to be too good to be true.  I am waiting for the hammer to fall upon him too, while at the same time hoping that he’s the real thing.  The hope is small, however.

Thanks, dopers.

But now Der Führer has something to say on the subject of bloody Democratic fisticuffs. I have never seen the kind of insight into Hillary’s mind from anyone before, and it’s so very surprising. Watch and be amazed, but remember…

…both of these videos are oh-so-not-safe-for-work:

The ironies of using Hitler to make this particular commentary are too savory for me to explain, so I shall let you all enjoy its fruits on your own, but I don’t think anything else on the subject of Hillary’s candidacy need be said after this.

At the very beginning of the interview, I could barely hear the man, and he seemed so very out of place on a show so rife with wit.  And then he had the temerity to whine about how he was disappointed that the Democratic Majority in the Senate and House couldn’t get anything done.

Is he completely oblivious to the fact that it’s no one’s fault but the Democrats?  Are he and his majority still stuck in the past where they were the whipping boys of Bush and his Republican sycophants?  I would say so, as he sure looked and sounded completely whipped.

Stewart tried gamely to energize Reid, but was ultimately unable to give life to the corpse.

See for yourselves:

By now most of my American readers will have heard the accusations leveled at Senator Obama for his alleged “elitism,” stemming from a comment he made about economics and the effects a long-term loss of opportunity have on those experiencing it:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Anyone not running for president and not living the high life can see immediately that Obama has touched on yet another truth: people with no money and no prospects get pissed off, and they need someone to get pissed off at. This isn’t exactly a revelation; we’ve all experienced this in ourselves to one degree or another.

And step back for a moment and think about this: can anyone imagine Senators Clinton and McCain having the cojones to confront an unpleasant truth like this and talk to their constituents about it like they have a modicum of intelligence?

I can’t, yet Obama did the same thing in his “More Perfect Union” speech on racial divisiveness in America (watch it if you haven’t, and see someone who hints at the courage of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin), and in many other speeches and comments. As Bitter Jon says at his site Bitter Voters for Obama:

One of the most refreshing things about Barack Obama is his fearlessness when it comes to voicing a hard truth. It’s an ice cold glass of unsweetened lemonade: hard to swallow, but unmistakably pure. The truth is, if you aren’t bitter, you’re probably voting for someone who is going to give us more of what we’ve been getting all along. And all Clinton and McCain seem to be saying is “Let them eat Lemons.”

I may not agree with Obama on everything, but there is an edge to him, unpolished and forthright, not unprincipled and smoothed over like other politicians who appear subject to the whims of voters and media.

Also, let us not overlook the blatant hypocrisy of two very well-heeled multimillionaires accusing someone of Obama’s modest income and bootstrapped origins of being out of touch with mainstream, working class Americans.

I applaud him for this, and I can see that come November, this race will boil down to one thing: whether people are so fed up with the direction of this country that they finally take a true interest in debating actual, important issues that hearken back to the debates of the Revolution and our very reason for sundering our ties to Great Britain all those years ago, or whether they lack the energy to rise up and break the hold that television and sound-bite pundits have over them, sinking us further into the moral, social, and economic quagmire in which we now reside.

I hope it’s the former, and I mean for my words here to push for that, but my hope remains dim.

As an aside, please enjoy Obama himself pointing out McCain and especially Hillary’s peacock feathers in this highly entertaining speech he gave on Sunday in Steelton, PA. Especially amusing is the reference to Hillary in a duck blind.

…I foolishly allowed this blog to get off the ground with barely any limits on viewer comments other than moderating all comments before they’re allowed to go live on the site.

Not long after I started the site and allowed search engines to crawl it, I began to get spambots trying to fill the comments of one particular post with utter gibberish. Interestingly, the only post to get spammed was my article on Astana being denied a Tour de France bid. A few of those spambot comments had usernames with Cyrillic characters. With the mention of Astana and Cyrillic lettering, I would assume Russian spambots are cruising my site.

But, speculation aside, in order not to have to moderate multitudes of spam comments every day, I now require that anyone wishing to comment register on the site. I’m sorry to have to do this, but it will also prevent other abuses of comments, like the aforementioned Dickwads trolling my more inflammatory posts.

So, for those of you beyond my family and friends (should you actually exist) who read my little opinion and newsbites, I apologize for the minor inconvenience, but I don’t tolerate bad behavior on any sites or forums under my care.

Now back to your regularly scheduled rants…