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Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum talks about Essential Cinema. Sat 9/25, 3 PM, Barnes & Noble, 1441 W. Webster.
This man is so heroic to me that if an eagle was to majestically land on his forearm while he was giving his lecture I wouldn't even miss a beat.
"Corporate lobbyists are writing the rules for the EPA under the Bush administration." When I've made that statement in the past, I've never meant it literally – I've only meant that the EPA are supporting corporations in a way that makes it look like the corporations are telling them what to do.
Well, it turns out I was wrong there. Lobbyists are actually writing for the EPA. On Wednesday the Washington Post found that EPA's report for Mecury regulation was nearly identical to a lobbyist's proposal, the third such instance they have uncovered:
The Aug. 5, 2002, memo from Latham & Watkins, submitted during the public comment period on the rule, said hazardous air pollutants other than mercury did not need to be regulated.
…
The EPA used nearly identical language in its rule, changing just eight words. In a separate section, the agency used the same italics Latham lawyers used in their memo, saying the EPA is required to regulate only the pollutants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act "after considering the results of the study required by this paragraph." The memo uses the word "subparagraph" instead of paragraph but is otherwise identical.
Eight word! They didn't even change the italics! Two of our staff are grad students given to grading undergrad papers, and though I don't do it myself, I could only assume that they are disappointed at the poor levels of plagarism displayed by our appointed officials.
So there you have it. Regulating chromium, lead and arsenic pollution levels in our drinking water is a matter left to the market. Granted it's possible that the lawyers at Latham & Watkins have people's best interests at heart, but just seeing their webpage makes my skin crawl. There's a point where President Bush is just rubbing our face in it. I understand that you've sold out the people's faith in an independently run government agency protecting the environment, but could you not be so, ummm, obvious about it?
Police in Wabasha, Minnesota issued a motorcyclist a ticket this week for driving 205 miles per hour on an interstate highway. That's 140 miles over, or 2.15 times, the speed limit.
Being a man who feels prepared to engage in intense driving when necessary, I am compelled to lavish such awards as the Ginandtacos Foundation for Highway Safety will allow on this gentleman.
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His honorarium will consist of a Tom Collins toast in his honor, a bronze plaque of his speedometer at the velocity in question, and a bound and gilded set of MapQuest maps.
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Being the type of driver that he clearly is, he will of course discard the latter, understanding that maps are for pussies and rules of the road are for the God-fearing.
Funny how, in 2000, the absentee ballots of military personnel serving overseas were widely hailed as being important in determining the narrow electoral outcomes of military-heavy states like New Mexico and Florida.
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Funny how Bush was so adamant about waiting until all those (Republican) ballots got counted before declaring any winners.
Funny how, 4 years later, the absentee balloting of the 160,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is in chaos and many of them will not end up being able to vote. Funny how no one in the Department of Defense or military seems too terribly concerned that these people – who, after 18 months of getting blown up, shot full of holes, burned, beheaded and reviled, might not be so Republican anymore – won't be casting ballots.
It is truly an amazing coincidence, and you would be a fool and a terrorist to assert otherwise.
epic – Long narrative poem employing elevated language and telling of the deeds of a legendary or historical hero. Epics often involve complex sequences of adventures as well as an underlying philosophical understanding of human actions, choices, fate, and the course of events.
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Every so often, mankind is forced to deal with a set of circumstances so large, so important, so laden with digital pictures that he has no choice but to create a special blog page to contain it all.
The word for this is epic, and these things happen to our own Erik Martin every four months or so. As such, he is forced to try and describe these events as only he can, in a new quarterly feature called "Erik's Epics.
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"
Before, in the Spring/Summer of 2004, Erik's Epic was the Competetive Mustache Growth. In case you haven't, go back and read the trials and struggles of men growing facial hair with a level of determination that could only be described as heroic.
Now, Fall 2004, brings you a new level of epicness that will test all the members of the ginandtacos.com staff:
Enjoy!
It's being hailed as a "Harry Potter" for adults. This strikes me, and people who have read the book already, as a marketing ploy. Granted it is about magic as a gentlemen's scholarly pursuit in early 19th century England, but it reads as a homage to, and slight parody of, British social comedy novels. I've enjoyed the Harry Potter books but I'm not a nut about them. I generally eschew historical novels along with fantasy and/or sci-fi but I'm digging this book so far. I'll have more to say as I continue.
Side note: As a person who grew up with comics and the Sandman saga, it always amazes me the reverence our culture has for Neil Gaiman. The way Sandman was able to hit a massive audience was probably one of the high-water marks for DC Comics. There are only two back quotes to this book and one of them by Gaiman. He never does quotes, and this one is huge and imposing ("best English novel in seventy years…."). So if you like Gaiman at least check this out. It's on the Long List for the Booker Prize as well.
Ginandtacos feels compelled to note the passing of Aaron Hawkins, the 34 year-old U of I graduate who was the mind behind Uppity-Negro.com.
Better writers and closer friends have said more than we could say, so we will content ourselves with stating the obvious: Hawkins and his website will be missed.
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A lot.
Loyal readers of ginandtacos.com may be thinking "The election is nearly upon us, yet your recent articles have not made clear how you feel about the electoral college….it's a good thing, right?"
Bitch, I will disabuse you of that misinformed notion.
How many Americans realize that the way in which we elect the President is largely a matter of custom and not law? The Constitution lays the framework for the electoral college in a minimalist manner. Each state has electors equal to its number of Congressmen and Senators. The manner of selecting electors is left to the Legislatures of each respective state. There is no emoticon or HTML tag of which I am aware that allows me to emphasize that enough.
That's it. It's up to the states, period. South Carolina, for example, selected electors in its legislature until 1840. If states want to appoint electors by order of the Governor, majority vote of the Legislature, or proportional representation they have every right to do so. If they feel like appointing electors by cock size, random selection, or ability to play Slayer's "Angel of Death" while riding a gay horse through a trench filled with pudding, they may also do so.
Here's a little-known (actually, just "little-reported") gem from 2000. When Florida was in the midst of its recount crisis, the state legislature (Republican-controlled) convened a special session for the purpose of altering the state's method of selecting electors. The popular vote was just too inconclusive and controversial, they said. We need to go ahead and make that decision for you, good citizens.
See, most people have absolutely no idea that there is nothing in the Constitution that says we get to vote for the President. And this, my friends, is what some in the field of Political Science call "the electoral time bomb". If a state decides that it will no longer pick electors based on popular vote, they have every right to do so.
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If Kerry wins 55% of the vote in Florida but the Legislature convenes (even after the election, as no timeframe for settling the selection process is specified) and decides that it will choose electors itself, there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Short of, of course, rioting in the streets, which I heartily endorse.
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Before you write it off as a crazy conspiracy theory, they were very willing to do this in 2000 under the pretext of the election being "inconclusive". And it's not a "republicans vs democrats" issue. The real horror of it is that whichever party were to strike first, the other would return the favor in a different state.
And pretty soon we'd have a large number of states – maybe all of them – in which the rabidly partisan legislatures selected the electors, and we'd have one less thing to (not) vote for as a nation.
Congratulations, America! I hope you enjoy the next phase of the end-justifies-the-means, illiterate, corrupt politics you've rubber-stamped into existence. With partisanship in government empirically at an all-time high, I hope you're prepared for the final ludicrous chapter in the 1994 Republican Revolution's brand of "Fuck you" vs. "Oh yeah? Well fuck you" politics.
OK. Grab a pen and paper, assault weapon fans, it's time for some logic games.
The fact that some people can drive perfectly fine when drunk does not mean drunk driving should be legal.
The fact that most people who would carry a pocketknife onto an airplane would not use it to hijack the airplane does not mean that knives should be allowed on airplanes.
The fact that some people who buy fake passports really would use them "for novelty purposes only" does not mean that fake passports should be legal, ignoring the fact that most people who buy one would use it for a decidedly non-novelty purpose.
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The fact that the NRA population (totalling 3 million people out of the 280,000,000 in this great land) can manage to own an Uzi with a 30-round magazine without using it to out-firepower the police in the commission of a crime does not allow us to logically deduce that assault weapons should be legal (and thereby subject to market forces which will bring their prices down). It furthermore does not allow us to appropriately conclude that the other 277,000,000 people in this great land will similarly use the weapons in a legitimate, safe manner or that the freedom of 3 million responsible gun owners to own submachine guns is worth the consequences to the rest of the society.
Yes, gun ownership is a right. But for varities of reasons, varities of rights – ranging from the right to blare music at 150 dB at all hours of the night to the right to purchase Uranium-235 (which has thousands of positive uses) – are curtailed when one lives in a civil society.
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The same individuals who will use assault weapons only in a safe, legitimate manner would no doubt use shoulder-launched SAMs, hand grenades, and M1 Abrams tanks in a safe, legitimate manner (imagine how much fun a weekend at the gun club would be with all that firepower – the clay discs wouldn't know what hit'em). If, then, you are willing to make the claim that assault weapons (as defined by the expiring statute) can be used legitimately and therefore should be legal, the same logic would apply to the three aforementioned weapons. And if you're willing to argue that shoulder-launched missiles should be legalized, you are simply a dolt, utterly beyond reason, who lives in his or her own fantasy world, and you may step forward and put your tongue up my ass.
Dismissed.
It must really suck to be a deer in today's world. With sprawl, pollution and ecosystems in disarray life must be hard on poor Bambi. And at 12:01am Monday, it's about to get even worse – because that's when the Clinton passed Assult Rifle Ban is set to be repealed.
I mention deer only because while doing research about the topic I came across this post by user JesusCyborg on a gun board: "You don't think guns are awesome? Well to each their own. I do. I can't wait to get my hands on an assault rifle so I can pump some deer full of lead."
So maybe that is that. Maybe a bunch of rednecks will take uzis and AK-47s into the woods and hunt nature the way we conduct our foreign policy: with overwhelming unilateral military force (will the deer will have to wage an asymmetrical war, kidnapping journalists and getting box cutters that fit in hooves?). Maybe there is nothing to really fear here.
But the police, who probably have more of an expertise than 'jesuscyborg' in these matters, disagree. There is talk of a more 'militaristic' approach to policing. Armored vehicles will become more prevalent among law enforcement. AV's will have to become standard for simple robbery cases. As anyone who has been around law enforcement or guns knows, there is a world of difference from a deer rifle and an uzi, if only for the mental state of the person holding it. As the man points out above, guns are 'awesome', and bigger assult rifles in your hands are the equivalent of a hit of PCP in the "I can take on 6 cops" department.
Will the government step in? "I think the will of the American people is consistent with letting it expire, so it will expire" said majority leader Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee. "If the president asked me, it would still be no," chirped in Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. President Bush said he supports a renewal and would sign it, but he hasn't pushed very hard. Or at all for that matter. Great job having it both ways; I hope no crackheads jump you with an Uzi on the way to cash all those NRA checks.
"But Mike, even with the ban criminals already have access to these guns if they want them." Maybe my formal background in math logic is working against me, but doesn't then repealing the ban mean even more criminals will have access to them? And worse, with the market flooded won't prices drop, allowing your more broke, desperate and likely to shoot you for a Social Security check variety of criminals larger access to these weapons? And isn't that a bad thing? There is only so much you can argue the tautology "more access will result in more access."
"But Mike, with the weapon ban repealed I can purchase assult rifles to protect my wife, children and three-step ranch home." That is an excellent point, and ginandtacos.com would love to help you out. Now for various PR reasons, the gun industry is keeping it's mouth shut with how much it is salivating at the idea of expanding this market come Monday, so it is hard (and techinically still illegal) to find places online where you can order these guns. And legally (damn Clinton!) guns of this nature that are produced before Monday have to be 'marked' with law enforcement stickering, reducing their sales worth, so we have a few more days before actual production. But come the time, we will have a running list of online ordering sites for the new weapons with which you can "shock and awe" the deer, cheating spouses and late-night gas station attendees of America.
Until then, here are the semi-automatic fruits of what is to come:
I'm not a hunter, but do people ever bayonet deer? more to come.