Quickies: the Choom edition

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.



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From ABC News:

Maraniss portrays the teenage Obama as not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.

“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.”

The first Obama-inspired trend: “Total Absorption” or “TA”.

“TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled,” explains Maraniss. Here’s how it worked: If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, “you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around.”…

Maraniss also says Obama was known for his “Interceptions”: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”

The Choom Wagon

Good lord. Far from being the blank canvass upon which we could project all our hopes or something, who knew the President's formative years were a combination of That 70s Show and Dazed and Confused?

Too bad he's still quite comfortable with throwing people in jail for an activity he pursued with the zeal of an Olympic demonstration sport athlete.




And speaking of Bill Clinton...

... quote of the week:

“I hope this doesn’t hurt his re-election or whatever he’s trying to run for."

Adult film actress, Tasha Reign, upon meeting and getting a photo-op with Bubba at a fund-raising event in Monaco.



Here endeth the People magazine portion of this edition of Quickies.








Our buddy Max lamented to us that management at Hoffer's simply refuses to hire any "hot chicks" to work behind the bar. We informed Max that it's just not his management getting in the way of the desired hiring opportunities.

The Obama Administration, which harps on its “War on Women” meme, has a war on women of its own: the EEOC is now investigating the coffee chain Marylou’s because the chain hires pretty young women dressed in pink to hawk its product. The investigators have been asking the female clerks about their co-workers’ gender, age, race and body type for over a year.

The company’s founder, Marylou Sandry wrote state Sen. John F. Keenan (D-Quincy): “We have never had a complaint against us for age discrimination or any kind of discrimination. We feel that the EEOC is on a witch hunt.” Keenan said he wouldn’t get involved, and EEOC officials would not comment.

(itlalics, ours)

Body type..? Completely inappropriate and quite possiblby akin to harassment if we understand the workplace rules correctly.

(Max was thinking purely from a business model standpoint as he is currently dating a beautiful young lady. We swear.)







And speaking of a solution in search of a problem...

House lawmakers will consider an international proposal next week to give the United Nations more control over the Internet.

The proposal is backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members, and would give the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) more control over the governance of the Internet.

It’s an unpopular idea with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and officials with the Obama administration have also criticized it.
“We're quite concerned,” Larry Strickling, the head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in an interview with The Hill earlier this year.

He said the measure would expose the Internet to “top-down regulation where it's really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders aren't.”

Normally, this amount of bi-partisanship is cause for skepticism (they're all too chummy up there on the Hill, wonder what they're up to?)

But considering the subject matter and the fact that both China and Russia are in favor of it, this is a wrap-yourself-in-the-flag All-American no-brainer.






Mark Steyn, once again, hits it out of the ballpark:

So how's that old Arab Spring going? You remember – the "Facebook Revolution." As I write, they're counting the votes in Egypt's presidential election, so by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed somewhat. But currently in first place is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi, who in an inspiring stump speech before the students of Cairo University the other night told them, "Death in the name of Allah is our goal."

Like!

Later on in the article:

But it is also a sign of desperation to talk up amiable diversions for pampered solipsistic Westerners as an irresistible force of modernity. One of the basic defects of the Bush administration's designation of a "war on terror" was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They're not. If you know your Tocqueville, they sound awfully like his prediction of a world in which "an innumerable crowd of like and equal men ...revolve on themselves without repose," a phrase which nicely distills the unending busyness of our gaudy novelties.

(italics, ours)

Back at Seminary, this was referred to as a "circle jerk".





Here's B-Daddy on prejudice, bigotry, racism, diversity and the ultimate dangers of suppression, speech codes and "acceptable thought."

Our society is creating a climate of persecution and victimization that diversity bullies use to impose their own agenda. Racial prejudice is certainly ugly, but the answer is not speech codes and racial quotas, which do harm to our freedoms and threaten our progress in insidious ways. Diversity is in fact a good thing, but by imposing only one kind of diversity, that of race, we exclude real diversity from our colleges and universities.

Later...

If America's universities are to remain the center of intellectual achievement for which they were once known, this false pretense of diversity has to end. The imposition of speech codes and all the Marxist-Orwellian claptrap regarding acceptable thought must end. The existence of racists, will be met, not with intolerance, but ridicule and well crafted argument. Ultimately, suppression of speech is incompatible with a free society. Suppression does not persuade, it only intimidates and drives behavior underground. Better to have the debate in the open and allow prejudice to sink or swim on its own merits.

Wasn't it Rosalynd Carter who said of Reagan: "He makes us comfortable with our prejudices."?

We're not sure what that meant but after reading B-Daddy's piece, was she possibly saying that Reagan didn't approach racism and bigotry in the normally-accepted Beltway/establishment manner. Reagan, as a defender of freedom probably felt, no, no, no...let the fools say their piece so there will be no doubt as to their foolishness.

Carter probably thought this was a form of tacit approval rather than allowing bigots, racists and their ilk to hoist themselves upon their own pitards.






KT: asking the questions that need to be asked:

Do you still use Microsoft Word?

Us: not so much.


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OK, gang. Time to grill. Hope everyone is enjoying their Labor Day Sunday!

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