Category: Quick Hits

I have a special place in my heart for "Hey dumbass! I bet you forgot Valentine's Day! Buy this for your wife/girlfriend!
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" advertising on male-oriented TV shows, websites, and magazines. While it's not good to perpetuate the idea of obligatory gift-giving (Won't She be mad if you don't get anything?) I find most of this advertising hilarious and harmless. That is, it advises men to buy such ludicrously awful gifts – things that no woman on Earth would ever want like Pajamagrams or things involving teddy bears – that I can't get angry because I'm laughing so hard at the idea of anyone falling for it.

Now. Two snapshots of where we're at as a society in 2012 and where we've taken the "Buy her this crap, she'll love it!
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" concept.

1. This was a very expensive Super Bowl ad for something called Teleflora, a 1-800-FLOWERS knockoff:

For those of you unable to watch and listen, the ad features beer commercial variety closeups of a hot woman in skimpy clothing and it ends with the line "Give, and you shall receive."

HEY GUYS, DO YOU GET IT? ORAL SEX. BUY HER FLOWERS AND SHE'S GONNA BLOW YOU. WITH HER MOUTH. ON YOUR PRIVATES. YOU WILL RECEIVE A BLOWIE. THAT'S WHAT THIS COMMERCIAL MEANS. TELEFLORA IS THE MIDDLEMAN IN A STANDARD FLOWERS-FOR-B.J. TRANSACTION.

2. I can't find the video, but there is a staggeringly offensive commercial for the latest Twilight film on DVD.

It instructs male viewers to purchase said DVDs and watch them on Valentine's Day. That seems reasonable enough, I guess. If one's special lady likes Twilight, she would probably enjoy spending the evening that way. But the ad also reminds us that we should watch this film because "afterwards, it'll be Valentine's Day for you."

THAT MEANS SHE'LL DO THINGS TO YOUR WIENER! GET IT? WINK WINK WINK!

Bear in mind that the target audience for Twilight is tweens and high school girls. It takes a special kind of boldness to advertise one's product as an effective way to get a 14 year old to have sex with you.

Well, it looks like satire and reality have finally intersected:

In the past I have been accused, with justification, of being less attentive to cultural misogyny than I should be. If it's going to be this obvious, it looks like I won't have to look very closely after all.

I have minimal time tonight so I apologize for not giving this topic the attention it deserves. From Lincoln's famous "house divided" speech:

In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand.

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" I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States; old as well as new, North as well as South.

Abe is referring to the various attempts to compartmentalize, minimize, or otherwise make the issue of slavery conveniently recede into the background so politicians would not have to deal with it. Of course they all failed and ultimately the nation had to confront the question directly and decide it definitively.

For years now the Supreme Court has been doing its damnedest to pass the hot potato on gay marriage.

Different states have passed different laws regarding it and different federal courts have issued conflicting decisions. Because the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution requires things like marriage licenses issued in one state to be recognized as valid by others, it simply is untenable for this patchwork, confusing approach to continue. Now that one federal district court has ruled California's Prop 8 unconstitutional we have reached the decision point. Gay marriage bans cannot be unconstitutional in one state or one federal court district but constitutional in others.

We have kicked the can down the road for too long already.

It is time to decide whether we will become all one thing or all the other. Is this legal or is it not? Will all states recognize legal gay marriages or will none? The Supreme Court appears to be painted into a corner. An appeal of this decision is a certainty and it is unimaginable that the Court would be so derelict in its responsibilities that it would not accept the case. My confidence in the current Court to make the correct decision here is shaky, but regardless we need this issue to come to a head. The status quo is untenable and it is time for the Supreme Court to do its job.

As an aside, if the dissenting opinion in the Perry case is any indication we are in for some disastrously poor legal reasoning from the gay marriage opponents on the Supreme Court.

1. Even though it was just a speech and he'll probably go back to being the Great Compromiser tomorrow morning, it was pleasing to see Angry Populist Man tonight…
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although he just couldn't help himself with the constant, appeasing references to debt reduction, reduced spending, and the like.

2. To quote Chief Wiggum, "Maybe lay off the Asians, Lou." He got quite a bit of mileage out of bashing China, no? I half expected him to bring kindly old Mr.
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Wong who owns the dry cleaners around the corner onto the podium so the assembled legislators could pelt him with tomatoes.
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3. "OK, pan to Camera 2. Now back to Camera 1. Good. Let's switch to a wide shot of the presidential box in a few seconds….OH CRAP, HE MENTIONED ISRAEL! QUICK! LOCATE AND ZOOM IN ON A JEW! HURRY, BEFORE THE MOMENT IS GONE!
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"

4. I have no idea what speech Mitch Daniels or Ari Fleischer (who was bellyaching on CNN immediately afterward) watched, but it sounds like it was full of crazy ideas and un-American rhetoric.

5. Mitch McConnell might just be the worst person on Earth, and that's saying something on a planet inhabited by Newt Gingrich and the people who created True Blood.

Three things that aren't long enough to justify a full post on their own can, if taken together, reasonably sum to one post.

1. I just finished my taxes. My effective federal tax rate, due to some divorce-related shenanigans, reached a personal all-time high: 9%. I usually clock in between 5 and 7 percent. I earn about 80% of the U.S. median income for an individual male taxpayer, and at 33 I've never hit 10% with my effective tax rate. Mitt Romney, the multimillionaire, has revealed an effective tax rate of about 15% (comparable, as the folks at Fox are all too eager to point out, to multimillionaire John Kerry's 13%). Remind me again where all of this tax rage comes from? I do not speak from experience, but I find it hard to believe that everyone who makes an amount of money between Romney (Assloads) and Ed (Dick) is paying 30%-plus in effective taxes.
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Yeah, yeah, Social Security and Medicare too – which are a great deal if you're a high earner (since they're capped) and for the rest of us they pay out far more than we will ever pay in. Property taxes? Kindly blow it out your ass; nobody forced you to buy a house, and owning a home entitles you to about 1000 different writeoffs and loophole deductions. I wonder how many of these 15% Flat Tax advocates realize that most Americans are paying that share or less already. The actual numbers in the tax code are irrelevant.

2. The Republicans in favor of Voter ID laws have finally found a clear-cut case of widespread fraud on which to hang their rhetoric: it appears that 953 dead people managed to vote in the South Carolina GOP Primary.

3. The best of the Gingrich jokes so far:

– Maybe America should say it has cancer so Gingrich will leave it.
– If Republicans are so uncomfortable with Mormonism, why did they vote for the guy with three wives?
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– Every time he seems like he's down Gingrich rises up again, which is fitting for a man who appears to be made of dough.

Here's something I wrote almost four years ago to the day for the Martin Luther King holiday. Seeing as how the election of a black President did not in fact end race as an issue (as right-wing commentators predicted) I see little need to update it. Instead I will quote myself liberally:

Martin Luther King, like "the Holocaust" or "the Founding Fathers", has become a perfunctory public relations tool. White America has the annoying tendency to bring him up as a form of tokenism, a la "And to show you how I'm down with the colored folk, I will now talk about how great I think MLK was." He's a backdrop for cheesy advertising, motivational speeches, and sidebars in textbooks. We bring him up a lot on our patronizing photo-op Trips into Harlem ("I support Dr. King…..and mandatory minimum sentencing!"). He's lauded for his "peaceful" and dignified approach (unlike that nasty Malcom X, who doesn't make white people feel quite so good about themselves). We remember and talk about, in essence, everything except what he actually stood for.
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We go as far as to innocuously call the holiday "Human Rights Day" just to completely de-contextualize and water down any potential discussion of the racial elephant in the room.

Let's not talk about how there are now more black men in prison than college – and that the black prison population has risen from 150,000 (in 1980) to 800,000 (today). A 350% increase in 25 years seems reasonable. Like many white Americans, I was raised to believe that there are more black people in the justice system because more black people commit crimes. I guess no one thought it strange that they apparently started committing all of these crimes in 1980. Maybe they had a national meeting and decided to go on a spree. We can't talk about that, because that would entail talking about how the entire "War on Drugs" is little more than a thinly-disguised War on the People We Don't Want In Our Neighborhoods. Of the black men born between 1978 and 1982, 16% are either dead or in prison. Think about that for a second.

Let's not talk about black/white income inequality, or the torrent of race-baiting we see from the media, talk radio, and elected officials, or the white hysteria about "reverse racism" and "racial quotas.
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" Instead let's just warmly applaud a 45-second news story about that likeable man who had some sort of dream, a dream that, whatever it was, apparently worked out OK.
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We live in a country in which intelligent people still raise their kids to roll up the windows in "black neighborhoods," to believe that everyone on welfare is black (and they're on it because they're too lazy to work), to think that the ignorant black people are going to unfairly take the law school spots that are rightly Ours, and to think that one can believe all of these things and somehow Not be a Racist. We live in a country where we don't debate racial issues, we debate Free Republic propaganda about how MLK, if alive today, would be rubbing elbows with Trent Lott in the GOP caucus. Can't blame the right wing for trying to claim him, since he and his message have been reduced entirely to Dalai Lama-esque mascot status.

Hard to believe that was four years ago, and hard to imagine how many years from now we will still be having this same conversation.

As 2011 rolls to a close, Gin and Tacos celebrates eight (!!!!) years of providing commentary, useful information, intriguing facts, lively discussion, and dick jokes every weekday with few exceptions. Even though traffic has increased consistently over the years, the site remains and will remain free of advertisements. If you have to ask why, you must be new.

Sticking to that policy based on principle has a downside that becomes apparent in late December when the annual hosting bill arrives. So here is where I give you a number of options.

1. You can do nothing and continue to enjoy the site for free. This is called "free riding", and it's an entirely rational behavior. Follow me on Facebook if you'd like an extra daily dose of absurd humor and penetrating insight.

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2. You can use this tip jar / donation link to contribute an amount of your choosing to defray the costs of this site. If you happen to be saddled with extra cash and feel like donating fifty bucks, I will be extremely grateful. However, if donating fifty cents is more in line with your current budget, my gratitude will be no less. If every reader chipped in a buck it would cover the site costs for years. And if the Queen had a dick, she'd be the king.

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Two vignettes.

1. Barack Obama – Democrat, man of color, and frequent recipient of the title "most liberal Senator" before his run for the White House – signs a law explicitly permitting indefinite detention of American citizens. For those of you who believe that criticism of the National Defense Authorization Act is overstated, read this thorough explanation of the provisions in the bill that make this possible. Proponents will argue that detention without due process can be applied only to suspected terrorists (According to whom?

Based on what standard of evidence? Aren't these quite literally the exact same questions we had to ask under Bush?) and hey, trust us! We'd never use it for anything else.

Many down-in-the-bunker type Obama defenders cling to the 11th-degree chess theory of his presidency, that his seeming preferences for neoliberalism, neoconservative foreign policy, and Unitary Executive Theory are actually a series of strategic decisions – so complex and layered that our pedestrian minds could never understand it – engineered to produce liberal policy outcomes. The only way his decision to sign the NDAA could fit that explanation is that he and his Justice Dept.

realize that this is so patently unconstitutional that the Supreme Court will reject it summarily while Obama scores some political points for being Tough on Terror.

Do you trust the Supreme Court?
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Does anyone? Can someone remind me one more time why I should care which moderate Republican wins in the titanic struggle between Romney and Obama?

2. Campaign Mode Obama^tm announces that each state can choose which parts of his health care reform legislation they will enforce. While some types of coverage are mandatory, states are able to define and set limits during the implementation – for example, pharmacy benefits are mandatory but states get to decide what level of benefits will be offered. Let's all guess what Mississippi's going to provide its residents. Under this "mandate".

Essentially, then, due to pressure from Republican governors and attorneys general he has backed down…on his signature legislation, and possibly his only substantial accomplishment during his first term.

Hey, at least the Iraq War is over!
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As long as replacing troops with tens of thousands of unaccountable, legally immune private contractors meets one's definition of "over".

Front-running presidential candidate Newt Gingrich knows a good idea when he sees one, particularly when it originates in his adopted home state of Georgia:

Speaking to about 200 employees at Insight Technology, a defense contractor in New Hampshire, the former U.S. House Speaker called for funds workers pay into unemployment insurance to be diverted to training programs.

"I am willing to continue unemployment compensation, but I would attach to it a training requirement," the Georgia Republican explained. "So if you sign up for unemployment compensation, you would also sign up for a business to get trained to learn a new skill. Because by definition, the reason you're signing up for unemployment compensation is you're not finding a job at your current skill level."

"Now if you took all the money we spent in the last five years for unemployment compensation, if that had been a worker training fund, you'd have a dramatically better-trained work force. We have thousands of jobs available that people can't fill. You have people over here that want a job, but they don't have the skill. You have jobs over here that requires a skill that's not currently available," he added.

"I don't want to pay people 99 weeks to do nothing."

The former House Speaker was most like referring to a program called "Georgia Works" where companies are provided unemployed trainees for free. The state provides a $240 stipend — cut back from $600 last fall — to the trainee each week for up to eight weeks.

So let's review the mechanics of Georgia Works. Businesses can take unemployed people, get eight weeks of work out of them train them on the public dime, and then decide whether to hire them at the conclusion of eight weeks. From the perspective of the unemployed, this program offers…well, eight weeks of work at a sub-minimum wage pay rate. Oh, plus "training."

If this sounds like a publicly-funded temp agency to anyone, that isn't quite the case. Temp labor can be employed for extended periods of time whereas Georgia Works expires in about two months. Sure, it could be used as a long term source of free labor if an employer decided to keep bringing people in for eight weeks of – *cough* – training before letting them go and replacing them with another Georgia Works recruit. But that would never happen. Unless of course there was a large, permanent population of the desperate and unemployed.

Yeah, this is the plutocrat approved post-New Deal vision of the social safety net. I mean, it stands to reason that the most effective way to get businesses to hire the unemployed is to set up a state-subsidized program that gives businesses free labor. Ideas like this make me thankful that we still have a robust two party system.

Democratic President Barack Obama has also praised the program.

"There is a smart program in Georgia," Obama said during an August bus tour. "You're essentially earning a salary and getting your foot in the door into that company."

Jesus titty-fucking christ…