SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE: I wonder how those tree-huggers around here would like it if we shot their cats.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: What you liberals see as our hypocrisy is rendered null and void by our religious exemption, activated by a professed awareness of original sin. So spare me your accusations -- see, they bounce right off! Focus rather on the Communists who pretend their bullet wounds were caused by someone trying to shoot them.

BLOGOSPHERIC PRESSURE DROP. Chuck Schumer's been fighting hard, as mentioned here earlier, but the fortifications against the Bankruptcy Bill are crumbling:

Republicans pushed aside the final obstacle to passage Tuesday when they defeated an abortion-related amendment to the bankruptcy bill that had impeded it from becoming law in the past... The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was voted down, 53-46.

In 2000, Schumer's amendment passed the Senate 80 to 17, with 35 Republicans voting in its favor. This time, only four Republicans backed the change. The dramatic turnaround on the abortion amendment reflected the Republican Senate gain of four seats in last year's elections, giving them 55 seats and a more conservative outlook...

Finally procedural delays against the Bill were ended by a 69-31 vote. 14 Democrats (including Republican favorite Joe Lieberman) joined the majority. Zero Republicans voted no.

The Perfesser's response is a reader's quote and an indeed:

It has occured to me that the bankruptcy bill (which I detest for the same reasons that you have mentioned) would be an interesting test of blogospheric power. Here's a situation where the Democrats are planning to make a major issue out of Bolton's appointment to the UN -- where is crime is merely speaking out loud what most Americans already feel about that place -- while rolling over to the corporate lobby on something most Americans would want some opposition to. If the blogosphere could mount an effective campaign for people to write to their senators, it would mark its emergence as a genuinely independent force in US politics.

The Perfesser's schtick is to talk, if not a good game, then at least a vaguely-populist, plausibly-deniable one -- and then, when the shit starts to fly, blame the only people who did anything to keep it from flying. He did it with gay marriage, even suggesting that Bush's fierce opposition would be good for it in the long run, albeit in a kind of "whee, I'm being counter-intuitive" sort of way.

He's doing it again now. And when the dunning notices and crushed hopes start tumbling out, he'll swing the camera around to some reporter who just got fired and hail the mighty power of the blogosphere. In-fucking-deed.

THE ELEPHANT, THE BLIND MAN SAID, IS VERY LIKE A RACE-KILLING SOCIALISTIC FALLACY. Well, with Stanley Kurtz providing the link, I sorta had a feeling this guy'd be trouble. Like classic Kurtz, Pavel Kohout is on about the withering white race, and how social security schemes are to blame.

But I stood up and took notice when Kohout quoted a citizen who recounts the declining standards of American middle-class life in the late 20th Century:

I am the son of a Pittsburgh steelworks worker. I was born at the end of the Second World War. I have three sisters. Our mother never went to work... yet they could afford to own a house, and our father used to buy a new car once every three or four years. My parents paid for my university education and bought me my first car when I was twenty. We were by all standards part of the middle class, and I was proud of my parents' achievement. (...) Today both my parents have to go to work in order to maintain a middle-class living standard, due to the increase in taxation that has occurred in the past half-century...

And I said, "Hell yeah! Of course the little guy used to get a bigger piece of the pie; unions (of the sort a "Pittsburgh steelworks worker" would know) were strong; America had enough money to accommodate them, and enough left over to keep making the best stuff in the world, and to make it available to a broad range of its citizens. And to help keep it all humming, the rich were heavily taxed.

"Now America is grotesquely in debt; we make crap and import everything; we work, man and wife, like dogs just to keep up; and the rich contribute hardly at all, on the theory that the freeing of their capital leads to 'economic growth' -- and there has indeed been growth in their pesonal and corporate budgets, real estate holdings, and general ability to escape economic responsibilities and leave them to everyone else. So the rest of us get less and less of the pie, and more and more of the bite."

Well, that's what it stirred in me. Here's what it stirred in Kohout:

The tax burden in the United Stated has indeed grown significantly over the past 50 years. The birth rate has been falling proportionately, although not to the critical level that is now current in Europe. The birth rate in the US is nearing the replacement level...

I am fast approaching the point where the expression "What planet are they from?" is no longer figurative.

THINGS ARE GETTING COYOTE UGLY! Pro-Assad forces are fighting back -- and with the blogosphere's own weapons!

Quick, Perfesser -- call the Suicide Girls!

SHORTER JIM LILEKS. I really, really, really, really like it when Cagney shoves that grapefruit into that bitch's face.

WORTH REPEATING. You probably already seen this, but a few bloggers have pointed out that if the scourge of Kansas abortion clinics, Phil Kline, were really looking for abused minors, he might try checking out the live births in his jurisdiction to mothers between the ages of 10 and 16 (!!), instead of fishing through the clinics' files in hopes of finding a crime. While the clowns wring their hands over TV treatments of abortion, the shock-troopers do whatever it takes, including misuse of office, to get what they want.

OLD SCHOOL. Scott of Lawyers, Gun & Money, who is smart and deserves a patient hearing, appears to think my complaints about the changes New York City has experienced in recent years are "snobbery" with "a very strong class element," and, worse, "hipster." I assure him that I have not been hip in many years, if I ever was. I'm so unhip, when you say Dylan, I think you're talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was.

In my own fanciful account, I pointed out that there is something lost as well as something gained by the social alterations of the past few decades. Since everyone usually concentrates on how great things are -- look, Madame Tussaud's has replaced porno! The genius of the marketplace (enriched with eminent domain seizures) rules! -- being a contrary sort I focused on the downside.

I like low crime rates and low, low prices, too. But let me point something out: Just because I like old-fashioned New York neighborhoods, and am a snob, does not mean that I only like old-fashioned New York neighborhoods because I am a snob.

If I point out, for example, that the real-estate land-rush has made it hard for dancers, directors etc. to establish theatre spaces anymore in New York, it is not necesarily because I am a whining hippie whose opposition to "creative destruction" is fueled by Marxism and marijuana. It may be because when the City's contribution to American culture is reduced to that which is funded by its most powerful forces -- when the sort of cheap rent in which the Aileys and Ramones of yesteryear flourished goes away -- you get fewer opportunities, more safe decisions, and crummier art. (Compare the arts scene of our times to just about any other since the Second World War. Don't we suck?)

Since I was just talking about art, maybe a lot of you still imagine us in whiny hippieland. Okay, how about this: runaway rents make it tough for people of all sorts to put down roots in neighborhoods. What do you think is better for yourself and your family: a neighborhood of transients, or a neighborhood where people get to know and look out for one another?

None of this means I want to keep indigenous New Yorkers from reaping the rewards of the strip-mall. If anything, I should think the present circumstances would be less attractive to regular citizens than to the shallowly hip: it provides them with a never-closed playground where there are no community standards because there is no community, that will keep entertaining them so long as they or their parents have enough money to keep the ride going.

PEOPLE POWER, CHICOS! Tyrants fall around the world! All hail another glorious victory for the common people as they shake off the oppressive rule of foreign masters, this time in... Bolivia!

Hey, how come no one's clapping?

Quick! Send some cute chicks and cameramen to La Paz!

UPDATE. The International Freedom-Loving Blog Community has answered my prayers! Word reaches alicublog that Miss Bolivia 2004, the impressively polynomial Maria Nuvia Montenegro Apuri, has joined the protestors in an official capacity!

Senorita Apuri is no stranger to controversy. At the Miss World competition, Apuri* said the most common misconception about her people was that they were all "very short people and Indian people" -- what David Wells might have called "little squatty-body motherfuckers" -- whereas on her side of the country, "we are tall and we are white people." They ought to love her at Powerline!

Apuri has also shown a commitment to public service, telling interviewers, "It was when I was 14, when I decided to help people, who were losing their houses because of fire. The fire almost destroyed half of the town. I feel proud to have been useful in that critical moment." In the heady days to come, Miss Bolivia surely will not let dowm her companeros! Even if there is fire!

Is there nothing the blogosphere cannot achieve with its high technology and low credibility standards?

* UPDATE. Reader Ts informs me that I have my Misses Bolivia mixed up. Gabriela Oviedo actually made those comments, and at the Miss Universe competition. Apologies to La Apuri! I'm really more of a Miss Earth fan myself.

WHO PUT THE DOGS IN? I would like to commend the Perfesser on his opposition to the wretched Bankruptcy Bill. Nonetheless, he still manages to piss me off:

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Blue Dog Democrats have endorsed the bill, and Zywicki observes: "In an era of Washington partisanship, one would be hard-pressed to find many major pieces of legislation with such broad-based bipartisan support." Why am I not surprised . . .?

"Broad-based support"? 35 relatively conservative Democrats of the sort sometimes proposed as a sane alternative to the "shrill Deaniacs and Moore-Ons" of the Party comprise the Blue Dog Coalition, who sent the letter linked by the Perfesser. How is the rest of the Party reacting to the Bill? With "killer amendments," of the sort skillfully used by Chuck Schumer to quash previous versions of the Bill. Here's what the Senate Dems tried last week:

Mostly along party lines, the Senate voted 59-40 Wednesday to reject a Democratic amendment that would have allowed older people to get special homestead exemptions to keep their homes when they file for bankruptcy. Currently, such exemptions are determined by the states.

Also rebuffed, 58-39, were two proposals focused on people whose significant medical expenses for illness force them to file for bankruptcy...

By another 59-40 tally, the Senate defeated a Democratic proposal to require that credit card statements show how long it would take the consumer to pay off his or her debt by making only the minimum monthly payment, and what the total interest charges would be.

Considering there are 44 Democrats (and one Jeffords) in the Senate, it looks like the Party in that House is much more strongly against the Bill than the Perfesser indicates. Maybe there's a secret deal afoot by which they'll cave if their Republican colleagues put a giant, jobs-generating National Bankuptcy Act Compliance Center in Robert Byrd's district.

God knows the Dems aren't always so good on the issues, but why portray them as close to the Republicans in this spectacularly inapposite case? Probably because the futility of the Democratic Party is the Perfesser's most well-ridden hobby-horse. When the Dems stand up even for causes that he endorses, something in the Perfesser forces him to dismiss their efforts. If they're useful for anything good, I guess, they can't be so easily remade into something a little more Perublican.

If the Bill gets through, expect a wave of blame issuing from Indeed, TN and falling on Ted Kennedy.

AN IDIOT AND HIS USEFULNESS. The L.A. Times runs a story that's pretty much a couple of North Koreans talking to a Times reporter about how things back home aren't so bad, really. It's risible and pretty dull, because these Der-Fuhrer-was-a-terrific-dancer narratives all tend to resemble one another, with the subjects taking on that defensive, dismissive tone common to totalitarian apologists:

He said as North Korea worked to change its state-run economy, it would look to China as an example and seek to change gradually. He didn't use the word "reform" — anathema to some trained under the socialist system.

"In the past, we were revolutionaries. But now we prefer evolution to revolution," he said. "We will try to learn from China's successes and failures"...

The North Korean criticized some Japanese politicians' efforts to link the nuclear talks to the question of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.

"This was something done by a few overly enthusiastic people long ago," he said. "We tried to make amends."

"A few overly enthusiastic people"! Yeah, there are guys like that at every party.

I don't think much of the story, but I certainly never had the idea that it was meant to convince me that the North Koreans are a bunch of nice guys. The subjects are from North Korea, and presumably plan to return there, so I didn't expect them to say, "Hello, we are totally evil." Being an adult of normal intelligence, I weigh their words against what I already knew about their country from magazines like The New Yorker ("one of the most brutal governments on earth").

Who doesn't know this? Well, Hugh Hewitt apparently thinks the nature of North Korea's government is a big secret and that the Times is trying to pull a fast one on its readers. He throws a two-day fit about it, raving that the Times is "lost in a hall of ideological mirrors and deep, deep left-wing ideology," "a west coast tip sheet for the Democratic Party" that "can't distinguish between news and propaganda." He calls the paper "The Pyongyang Times of Los Angeles." He calls the reporter "Barbara Demick-Duranty." I mean, the guy basically craps his pants and rolls around in it.

That Hewitt, over-excitable on his best days, would behave like this is not surprising. For a nanosecond, though, I was surprised that the Ole Perfesser actually called attention to this spectacle. Isn't he embarrassed to associate his smoother, heh-indeedy repertoire of right-wing moves with this craziness? But then I remembered: you can't build a movement just on intellectuals and rentiers; you have to suck in some proles, too. If your own style is too cool for the cheap-seaters, find a frother with a megaphone and see if he doesn't get them pounding the tables.

GI JOE FUBAR. I knew the Bankruptcy Bill was bad, but this just piss-gilds the turd-blossom:

You may have read of the hardship on the families of those who have been called to fight in Iraq, including, of course, severe financial stress leading to many bankruptcies. Democrats in the Senate tried to put an amendment on this bill exempting military personnel, and the Republicans voted it down.

Now, you might imagine the Soldiers' and Sailors' Relief Bill of 1940 still limits the servicemen's interest rates on prior debt to 6 percent during active duty. Congress even revised that bill about a year ago to strengthen its protections: per the American Forces Press Service, "The new relief act also makes it clear the 6-percent limitation on interest rates for pre-service debts requires a reduction in monthly payments, and any interest in excess of 6 percent is forgiven, not deferred..."

But I see lots of military sites like this one and this one warning GIs about high rates. What gives?

My guess is that military families whose breadwinners have had their service extended by the infamous stop-loss orders are finding it necessary to take on new debt. Which debts are not covered by the law. Of which the Senators' banking-industry masters must be aware.

As I give the forces of evil heaps of credit (at no interest!) for Machiavellian chutzpah, I expect they'll hash this one out in a very public way so that the folks in the armed forces catch a small break, leaving us civilians suckers in a (literally) compromised position. That would be a twofer in a way. We did the right thing by our fighting men. Now, you drains-on-society, pony up!

Or maybe they'll just soak the soldiers and sailors too. They have a mandate. They can do whatever they want.

PLAY DUMB FOR LIFE. The Kansas DA who is digging through local abortion clinic files says he's looking for statutory rape victims. Of course, smart people suspect it's really an example of the harass-and-hound strategy commonly used by the anti-abortion movement thereabouts.

Give AG Kline and his Operation Rescue allies credit -- as Zoll points out in his abovelinked Pandagon post, they've learned that this sort of thing works more efficiently when coupled with public relations. Doing her part today is National Review Online's K. Lo:

There is a very interesting piece in the Wichita Eagle today: “Investigators -- trying to hide from Dennis Rader that they were zeroing in on him as a BTK suspect -- obtained DNA before his arrest through a tissue sample linked to his daughter's medical records, sources say.” Interesting, most especially, in light of the outrage over the Kansas attorney general trying to obtain medical records from abortion clinics in seeking to prosecute crimes.

In one case, the authorities are investigating actual crimes using DNA from a suspect's family member. In another, they are digging through the medical files of hundreds of non-suspects in hopes that a crime will turn up. K.-Lo affects to think these amount to the same thing. I have read enough of Lopez' work to form a suitably low opinion of her intelligence, but no one is that dumb. Well, if Jesus can ask you to die for him, he can certainly ask you to commit intellectual fraud.

UPDATE. I have been well informed that Zoll, like God and the Devil, is a woman.

GO FORTH AND STULTIFY. (Psst, veteran alicublog readers. Play along with me. We're going to have a laugh on the rookies.)

The Ole Perfesser, today:

UPDATE: A while back, some people were upset that I identified Ward Churchill with the current state of the Left. But the Left certainly seems to be identifying with Ward Churchill.

The Perfesser's link is so stupidly inapposite to his charge that I don't even recommend you look at it. Normally I'm more or less daring you to, but in this case it's such a waste of time -- not to mention an outrage to reason -- that I can't even pretend. In fact I'm thinking of disabling the link. That's how dumb it is.

0 crudely faked comments link

OH MY GOD. You fell for it. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Hey kid. I have incontrovertible proof that Bush wants what's worst for everyone. Here it is. Indeed!

CAUSALITY FOR DUMMIES. I found five bucks on the sidewalk, which proves that the President's Mideast policy is having even farther-reaching effects than the Ole Perfesser thinks.

Actually, from this and the follow-ups, the Perfesser affects to believe that Lebanon is turning because Lebanese resistance chicks are so hot and Syrian symps are so not. Perhaps our leaders are testing their psyops externally before putting them to work on Social Security reform ("I never thought that gay-wedding thing was going to work. Showing how much hotter our protestors are than some old, money-grubbing granny -- that's comedy gold!")

(DISCLAIMER FOR THE HARD OF THINKING: I think freedom is good and the Lebanese people should have the government they want.)

SERVICE ADVISORY -- COMMENTS DOWN. Our IT consultants are probably tied up in some Masonic ritual so, as always, they'll get here when they get here.

Till then, discharge whatever frustration this may cause by sending me death threats.

(Comments are ordered for this post so that when they do return this will be an Escheresque joke folding in on itself.)

I MAY NOT KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE LAW BUT I KNOW WHAT'S RIGHT AND WRONG AND WHAT YOU'RE DOING IS WRONG. No sooner does the SCOTUS ban child executions than conservatives begin the drumbeat of accusations of judicial overreach:

Roper and Atkins tell capital defense litigators to delay their cases for as many years as possible. Drag out the appeals for a long, long time. During that period, have activists try to encourage legislators in a few select states to enact new legislative restrictions on the death penalty. It doesn't matter if those restrictions have any actual effect on how cases are charged; bans in states that do not actually bring any death penalty cases are fine, as the real audience is the Supreme Court.

As if what was decided were a judicial chess match, rather than the fate of adolescents on death row. And as if "cruel and unusual punishment" were a phrase without meaning.

Of course, the author is "not sure about the juvenile death penalty as a matter of policy." But, but, but.

Maybe I'm projecting, or penumbrating. I've always tried, with varying levels of success, to be a nice guy, and I imagine my politics grow out of that rather than vice-versa; that is to say, I want to see the greatest good for the greatest number because that's how I was raised, not because I've read Jeremy Bentham and find the felicific calculus a sound instrument.

As my upbringing has also instilled in me a large capacity for self-doubt, I am willing to entertain arguments that, in trying to do right I have miscalculated and advocated a path that will lead to more rather than less harm. This seems to me an indispensible prerequisite of adult decision-making.

Still, if my gut tells me that the electrocution of 12-year-olds*, however depraved the child, is not a good thing, then I start from that admittedly emotional reaction and put the honus of proving otherwise on those who contend that the indefinite incarceration of lads, as opposed to their elimination, is justice denied. This is an unavoidable prejudice, but one I believe my faith in the system (our Founders', not any other) and in reason may help me to overcome.

So I am not unsusceptible to counterintuitive Constitutional arguments -- which is why I give more slack to gun-rights enthusiasts than my gut tells me to give them. But over the years I've heard lots of people whose fair-mindedness is by no means a settled matter argue that Roe v. Wade was judicial overreach, that Lawrence v. Texas was judicial overreach, that prohibitions of school prayer are judicial overreach, etc., and thought: Why, in these arguments, are you guys always on the side of less personal freedom? Where did you get the idea that the Constitution is more about restrictions to liberty than it is about the maintenance of liberty's necessary conditions? And why do I get this feeling (again, in my gut) that you are not so incensed at a violation of our founding documents as you are incensed that the freedoms guaranteed therein have led to a social condition that offends your gut feelings?

When these guys finally wrench the Court far enough in their desired direction, then we will have their kind of state, with all the child excecutions, forced childbirth, madatory prayer, and other such horrors of which they dream. Till then let us enjoy the blessings of liberty, howsoever they are bestowed.

(UPDATED with a few modest stylistic changes to make it more rabid.)

*UPDATE II. As the Times and Bull point out, the execution of offenders who were under 16 at the time of their crimes was already precluded by Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988. Was that as much an "overreach" as the current case? Tony Scalia seemed to think so: in his Thompson dissent, he cited many precedents for executing 15-year-old killers, and argued that the Court had failed to prove the punishment was cruel and unusual (accent on the "unusual"), or even reflected "evolving standards of decency," and thus the plurality was "hoist[ing] on to the deck of our Eighth Amendment jurisprudence the loose cannon of a brand new principle" with its decision. Further:

The concurrence's approach is a solomonic solution to the problem of how to prevent execution in the present case, while at the same time not holding that the execution of those under 16 when they commit murder is categorically unconstitutional. Solomon, however, was not subject to the constitutional constraints of the judicial department of a national government in a federal, democratic system.

Scalia's position might remind one of that of Starry Vere in Billy Budd. Vere also had a point -- nearly the same one. But Vere, of course, feared mutiny were he less than strict on the law. What was to be feared of the "loose cannon" in this case? Perhaps that someday someone would be emboldened by it to do... what was done yesterday. Which was not mutiny, I think, but mercy.

Take heart, those who decry this "assault on judicial restraint," as if it were to judicial restraint that you addressed your prayers at night and your thanks in moments of joy: after a few new appointments, you'll get a chance to show your devotion to judicial restraint by overturning a buttload of decisions and stripping us of a whole lot of freedoms.

FREE SPEECH FOR NEITHER ME NOR THEE. Andrew McCarthy reprises the no-free-speech-for-terrorists argument, in that dreary yet terrifying manner which is the right-wing Constitutional scholars' version of nuclear scientists' "megadeath" talk:

[Author Geoffrey R.] Stone buys wholly into Justice Hugo Black’s absolute conviction that Communists could safely be permitted to preach the need for violent overthrow of the government because (in Black’s words) “free speech will preserve, not destroy, the nation” (emphasis in the original).

Taking a proper historical view, however, one might state the proposition differently: doctrinaire civil libertarians can always be relied on, no matter what the crisis, to minimize the danger faced by the nation. In the real world, moreover, free speech can only produce its vaunted corrective effects if it has both the inclination and the time to work. The problem is that it often does not.

Today’s marketplace of ideas, for example, has been notably reluctant to engage even the subject of Islamofascism and the threat it poses to our institutions and our liberties. Nor does that marketplace strike one as a very effective weapon for bringing suicide murderers to heel, let alone for militating against electronically beamed fatwas capable of unleashing weapons of untold destructive power before other ideas have a meaningful opportunity to compete and persuade.

Clearly the First Amendment is not holding up its end in the War on Whatever. There are plenty of juicy soundbytes to go with -- "Without security, there is no liberty at all," "(Learned) Hand did not figure on militant Islam," etc. -- if you take pleasure in that sort of thing.

One may wonder why so many pages were needed to explicate what at first blush looks like a reiteration of the "provocation to unlawful action" of which Hand spoke as exempt from First Amendment protection. Maybe McCarthy was counting on an incantatory effect; his lengthy diatribe does not convince so much as lull. Conservatives of a certain stripe may introduce it to ennervate free-speech discussions, much as The Riddler used sleeping gas against Batman.

And the ideas will challenge even some conservatives. McCarthy offers several examples from American history of government limitations on free speech, and none of them trouble him much; he seems capable of accepting any number of extra restraints in the interest of national security. No First Amendment worship for him -- If the damn old thing gets in the way, kick it out.

I wonder how many conservatives will go along. We keep hearing about the alleged libertarian component of modern conservatism -- well, there sure ain't a place for that in McCarthy's vision. Cleverly, he lays some bait for the less hardcore but still red-blooded conservatives, including invocations of the Communist menace (and William O. Douglas and others' alleged underestimation of same, followed of course by the challenge, "One also wonders what Douglas would have made of militant Islam"), "moral clarity," and Michael Moore. Thus wavering types might be lured near enough to snatch: I hate Michael Moore! My heroes say "moral clarity" a lot! Maybe I've got this free-speech thing all wrong!

I cannot find anything McCarthy has written about the Second Amendment, but considering how easy it is for him to regulate mere words on security grounds, I would be very interested to know if he is more or less tolerant of instruments that can actually blow one's head off.

DUDE, THAT'S HARSH! I didn't like "The Gates" much, either, but check out Alan Bromley, heretofore best known as the right wing's preeminent dramatic fantasist:

But this day, I realized that Christo and his wife had hoodwinked us all and forced us into their monotone vision, one that is anti-American...

Anti-American! Will Christo and Jean-Claude be spirited to Gitmo? If he is as skilled at voices as he is at dialogue, perhaps Bromley can pass the Feds an incrimating tape.

I note also that Bromley objects to the color of the curtains: "...saffron, the color of the Hare Krishnas? New York is a city of Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims, of people who are black, white, brown and yellow, and variations of all of the above, and we relish it, benefit from it, and, at our best, learn from it."

So not only are the artists anti-Americans, they're also anti-Catholic, -Jewish, etc. Or pro-Krishna. Same diff, I guess.

I stick with my original, scholarly judgement: "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick."

SHORTER ROGER L. SIMON: Like my asshole fans, I say fooey to Hollyweird and their ridiculous Oscars. (several hours later) Well, here we are at the Oscars! (And I brought my asshole fans with me!) He's good, she's not, she's good, he's bad, etc. Why is Chris Rock going on about black stuff? Doesn't he know I wrote for Richard Pryor?