I can haz sirrup ov eppacack now?

Also, is the whole flag illustration really meant to bring to mind those charts that show progression? Is this We Are Joe The Movement thing going to make people's heads get smaller and eventually turn red?

What kind of right-wing celebrity can't get a deal at Regnery?

I'm sure it's an equally good publisher, though!

Freedom Membership's just another word for you got cash to lose.

thingsforgottenbook.com

Registrant:
PearlGate Publishing
12 White Magnolia Cir
Austin, Texas 78734
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)

Domain Name: THINGSFORGOTTENBOOK.COM
Created on: 15-May-08
Expires on: 15-May-09
Last Updated on: 15-May-08

Administrative Contact:
Tabback, Tom tnt@pearlgatepublishing.com
PearlGate Publishing
12 White Magnolia Cir
Austin, Texas 78734
United States
(512) 906-0992 Fax --

Technical Contact:
Tabback, Tom tnt@pearlgatepublishing.com
PearlGate Publishing
12 White Magnolia Cir
Austin, Texas 78734
United States
(512) 906-0992 Fax --

pearlgatepublishing.com

Registrant:
Tom Tabback
7932 Park Ridge Dirve
Fort Worth, Texas 76137
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: PEARLGATEPUBLISHING.COM
Created on: 22-Dec-06
Expires on: 22-Dec-09
Last Updated on: 25-Jul-08

Administrative Contact:
Tabback, Tom medjite@sbcglobal.net
7932 Park Ridge Dirve
Fort Worth, Texas 76137
United States
+1.7208510450

Reading that two seconds after the description by Jim of a nudist colony of the dead has conjured strange images in my mind.

(There's got to be a smart comment I can make tying that observation in with #6 et seq., but it's not coming to me.)

Perhaps the book didn't pass Regnery's careful vetting procedures... :-)

However, we would like to remind him and all of our elected officials that they hold office to serve the American people.
May they hearken to our voice if ever we feel our basic freedoms are being threatened, for it will be loud and clear.

We will be watching. We will be listening. Together, we can and will hold them accountable.

His freedoms* weren't threatened then; ours were. Didn't you know that democracy is strengthened by denying left-wing pinkos their rights?

* The Four Freedoms:
 1. Freedom to have someone be inferior to you.
 2. Freedom to shop.
 3. Freedom to be immune to the consequences of your own choices.
 4. Freedom from thought.

Chaper 1 of Tabback's novel looks okay, although I'm not sure I'd have gone with the Biblical introduction.

Freedom Membership's just another word for something more to sell.

(O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?)

Paul A. #18:

'Free speech'? As In 'Free to imagine I can buy a company with no money in my wallet?'

(sarcasm intended, if not done well)

Looking a WHOIS, SecureOurDream.com has essentially the same registration info as ThingsForgotten.com except it was registered by Tabback on October 23, 2008.

Sounds suspiciously like Joe the Community Organizer to me.

I swear, everything is hitting me funny today. Some nit in a bright-red Miata tried to bull his way in front of me on the freeway earlier; normally that kind of behavior pisses me off, but there was just something about this itsy-bitsy toy car trying to do it that somehow made it funny instead. I wanted to pat the poor thing on the head and reassure it that someday it would grow up to be a real car!

Those "Four Freedoms" seem to be right on when dealing with a certain segment of the public, unfortunately. As long as you can buy all the crap you want at Wal-Mart, and have someone to p*ss on, life is good.

What idiocy.

Even some of the comments make want to find my brainwash.

Yikes.

I wonder what the next phony the Republithugs are going to plant and spring?!

It looks like some bog-standard boilerplate to me.

Usual failure to understand the publishing industry, of course.

("Courage, Mom!")

As usual, I have nothing to say everyone else hasn't already said. Thanks for the update.

The Beeb has the story now.

Usual failure to understand the publishing industry, of course.

I'm not so sure. The article says:

The deal is not likely to come close to the $7m (£4.65m) figure rumoured to be on offer for a book by the former Republican vice-presidential hopeful, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

So not complete failure.

How so? Do you mean "very American, unlike the behaviour of people from other countries, who hate making a buck"?

Mad Max and the Meltdown - WSJ.com

Apparently the financial crisis is because people aren't saying Merry Christmas to each other?

Amazing stuff.

1) There's a rabid right-wing pundit named Bill O'Reilly who, for the last 2 or 3 years, has been making good money off talking about a nonexistent "War on Christmas", whereby people are supposedly terrified to wish other people a Merry Christmas for fear of giving offense. The mustard seed of truth at the root of this ridiculous fantasy: over the past decade or so, a lot of retailers have become more aware that not all of their customers are Christians, and have gone over to using the more-generic "Happy Holidays" instead. (This includes Bill O'Reilly's host network, Fox News -- their website prominently features the phrase.) One common, and inevitably false, accusation is that some retail chain or other (I think Target was the last one attacked) has actually forbidden its employees to say "Merry Christmas" to customers.

The thing about this is that NO ONE EXCEPT O'REILLY AND HIS CULT actually believes such a thing is happening. Ordinary people in the US go around wishing each other a Merry Christmas on a regular basis. What the "War on Christmas" meme is really about is that some people would like to outlaw any recognition of religions other than Christianity. But O'Reilly and his nutcase assertion get a lot of traction in conservative media outlets, of which the WSJ is definitely one.

2) One of the common arguments by proponents of mandatory religion in public schools is that without religion (by which they mean ONLY Christianity) there is no morality. The idea that ethical behavior can come from an internal source, rather than an external Giant Overseer standing over you with a whip to make you behave, is anathema to them. This idea has wider acceptance than the "War on Christmas" meme, but it's just as inaccurate; most people would not in fact turn into conscienceless sociopaths if they followed a different religion, or none at all. Now go back and read the last few paragraphs of the WSJ article; you'll see the "no morality without Christianity" argument laid out pretty plainly.

The thing to remember is that this is a minority view even in America; the only people pushing it really hard are the same ones who want a religious takeover of our government... and the greedheads who find those people to be useful pawns in their own reach for unlimited power.

The whole "War on Christmas" meme has been one of the arrows in the Christianist/Dominionist quiver that's been employed for over a decade--I recall hearing rumbles of it in the late 1980s. A new favorite with that crowd the the US Mint's placement of "In God We Trust" on edge of the presidential dollar coins, instead of on the face of the coins.

It is all designed to heighten the sense of religious persecution that fuels that segment of believers, and tends to fuel itself--once people are "made aware" they start seeing all sorts of slights, assaults, and attacks where none were intended.

It is this part of the political-religious spectrum in the US that is cheering on the chances of Armageddon in the Middle East so that they can watch everyone who fails their litmus test (because surely they know who's really saved!) suffer in the Tribulations of the End Times and all that, while they arise to heaven in glory.

The totally classic War On Christmas story is Fafblog's Long Jolly Slog.

From the Milwaukee Magazine, Nov. 13, 2008, in "Secrets of Talk Radio", by the former news director of WTMJ, who reveals how talk show hosts ... work to get us angry.

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast. ]

And:

[ In the talk radio business, this concept, which must be mastered to be successful, is called “differentiating” yourself from the rest of the media. It is a brilliant marketing tactic that has also helped Fox News Channel thrive. “We report, you decide” and “Fair and Balanced” are more than just savvy slogans. They are code words signaling that only Fox will report the news in a way conservatives see as objective and truthful.

War on Christmas is perfect.

Love, C.

I would expect that real Niger spam would be written is French.

Up until now, the only such references I've seen have been in emails forwarded eight dozen times. Seeing it in the WSJ threw me.

The thing about this is that NO ONE EXCEPT O'REILLY AND HIS CULT actually believes such a thing is happening.

And my father. But he also believes that Cheeze Whiz is food so I've never given his views much credence.

I appreicate your taking the time to put me straight. My outlook has improved once again.

Jeb Clampett moved to Africa?

That's fascinating; the appeal of hero/victimization is obvious but I'd not seen that angle. I'm re-parsing a lot of broadcasts (not just right-wing, to be honest) in that light and seeing a number of scenarios where that's worked.

Ergh.

As for the whole Merry Christmas - I wonder how much of it is a result of political correctness gone apeshit - yeah, the right likes to beat its drums around the war on christmas, it makes good television

* Yes, you read that right. In this instance the label "political correctness" goes with the people who are INSISTING that saying anything else is Offensive and Must Not Be Done.

An its who'll slash ye now...

You mean they made the announcement while they were showing the fans? What did the fans do, rise up as a body and start throwing phones at the camera or the announcer?

(Yes, KRLU/N has done many clueless things in my lifetime, but I missed that one entirely; perhaps I was on some coast or other.)

(For those who don't get the joke, 1986 was the year of Confederation, the Atlanta Worldcon. Atlanta is only 2 hours away from Chattanooga; there wasn't going to be a fan in town when that event was due to happen.)

Of course, as lots of other people before me have pointed out, "Happy Holidays" for most people is a shorthand for "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" - you know, since "holidays" is plural and all that.

Stuff that everyone thought they could rely on (priests being trusted with children, government not spying on its citizens, manufacturing jobs providing a decent living for people of normal intelligence and diligence, the US being on top of the world by most any measure) have turned out to be false. Social rules and assumptions that were part of what everyone believed and expected have changed, too: Openly gay couples marrying and adopting/raising kids, interracial couples being nothing unusual, the election of a black president, all these are things that, for a lot of people, were pretty much unthinkable even 25 years ago.

There's a part of this cultural change that's regional, a part that differs by social/intellectual class, a part that really is more accepted by the "coastal elites" and big city folk than by everyone else. But only a part, and the main difference is in when it's accepted--the stuff that was an uncomfortable adjustment 20 years ago in Los Angeles is probably uncomfortably introducing changes in Pekin, IL and Rolla, MO now.

This speed and scale of social change is profoundly uncomfortable for a lot of people. That's true even when they have nothing at stake--few people are materially harmed by allowing people in their community to be openly gay, or by having to put up with mixed-race couples in their church or Spanish signs alongside the English ones at the drug store. It's the amount of change, which leads a lot of older people to comment that the US now seems almost like a foreign country, relative to the US in which they grew up.

That discomfort is there, ready to be exploited. Talk radio rabble-rousers exploit it. So do some politicians, some churches, some political movements. The discomfort is more acute in places where the changes have been slower, which means it's easier to rouse the rabble there. A good way to do this is to attribute the change to some outside force, to the coastal elites or the latte liberals or the Jews or the Mexicans or the blacks or the gays or someone else--that lets you get the us-vs-them circuitry in your listeners' brains fired up.

Much of the change we've faced is due to entirely impersonal forces playing themselves out. For example, the sexual revolution probably happened because of good birth control becoming available and increasing mobility. Increasing access to coarser/rauchier media has a lot to do with cable TV, satellite TV, and the internet, along with the logic of various court cases being decided. The erosion of manufacturing jobs as a way of getting solidly into the middle class is a result of market forces, immigration, free trade, and free movement of capital, among other things. And so on. But the stress caused, the discomfort, is much more easily exploited once it's attributed to some group of distant outsiders. Thus, it's media elites making our kids sleep around, activist judges legislating from the bench making us watch softcore porn on TV, scheming Wall-Street types outsourcing our jobs to China. It's hard to love or hate an abstraction, but you can love or hate an abstract group, even if (maybe especially if) you seldom interact with any of them.

I don't wonder if this isn't a backhanded "and let no one whine about a war on christmas" announcement. Never accuse someone of Political Correctness when it is merely actual Correctness they're striving for.

And tomorrow I can start playing the lot of them on my whistles (I am enjoined from practice until thanksgiving, though I insist on being allowed to play until Epiphany)

Because, y'know, it really is scheming Wall-Street types outsourcing our jobs to China. Who else has the power to do so?

Unless you're drawing a distinction between people who run brokerage houses and the CEOs of manufacturing companies -- in which case, while I still don't agree with the argument, I'll withdraw my objection to the phrasing.

Also, it really pisses me off that I'm probably not young enough to outlive the worst of the reactionaries and rabble-rousers. It feels like being cheated of my revenge.

Don't feel too sad about that- unfortunately, there's always enough replacements coming up. You might have had the same complaint if you had lived 50 years earlier.

I'm not sure just what to think about foot wings except in the context of Hermes.

I'm finishing up my first liturgical year, and have found advent/christmas distinction to be very helpful. My new rule is no holiday music until advent... except for rehearsing, of course. This year I get to be the only non-paid singer in the quartet portions of Haydn's St. Nicholas Mass, so I've had to practice rather more than usual just so I don't embarass myself. If I don't work on it, the Opera major grad student soprano is going to totally leave me in the dust. It will be interesting seeing the midnight mass from "backstage" this year.