Tuesday Open Comments

Poor_Me_Magazine_Issue_2_Zakaria


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63 responses to “Tuesday Open Comments”

  1. Tedtam Avatar

    Love the pic! I’m actually related to a potential cover model or two.

  2. El Gordo Avatar

    We actually had a storm blow through here a few minutes ago. Looks to be all clear now, but the wind was swirling, good lightening, and there was enough rain to create standing puddles. I’ll go out in a little bit and do a walk around.

  3. squawkbox Avatar
    squawkbox

    Good Tuesday morning.

    Let’s talk about cars. The Venus made here in Houston. Well sorta made in Houston. The fiberglass body was fit on a Ford frame/chassis.

  4. Tedtam Avatar

    Been there, done that.

    So many times. /sigh

  5. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    Breaking News Headlines from The People’s Cube:

    Susan Sarandon: “I don’t vote with my vagina.” Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer

    Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court ‘New Black Panties’ vote

    New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to “Live FOR Free or Die”

    Martin O’Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president

    Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two

    Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence

    Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, “The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats”

    ‘Wear hijab to school day’ ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break

    ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood

  6. Tedtam Avatar

    Okay, I’ll admit it.

    I love their show. They’re hot. They seem genuinely nice, and the contractor brother has more patience than I would with their customers.

    And they sing, too.

  7. Super Dave Avatar
    Super Dave

    Mornin’ Gang
    I was commenting over yonder about my Bride is going to see Loretta Lynn live @ the Arena Theater, on May 14. She has always wanted to see her at least once, and figures she doesn’t have many more chances. Who knew Loretta Lynn was still around, let alone doing live performances?
    Anyhow, I stumbled across a very good piece on Loretta Lynn, especially coming from a rag like “Houston Press”.

  8. Adee Avatar
    Adee

    Good morning Hamsters. Watching the radar with great interest, but so far all we’ve had is a light mist then a lull then brief light rain probably from one cloud passing through then another lull. We can manage that, ‘cept of course that won’t be all.

    Love that cover. The sad part is it likely applies to more deluded folks than we think who are loose outside college campi.

  9. Tedtam Avatar

    Hubby’s hurrying to get his meter in before the weather gets bad.

    He’s also supposed to get a new battery in my car. I had to find a man with jumper cables last night – because I couldn’t get to mine! When the battery died, I couldn’t open the back hatch to my car. I need to rethink that and study how I can access them if necessary. Hoping he can get it done before the nasty stuff arrives. I was going to see Mom this morning, but I certainly don’t want to get stranded en route. I also need to make a deposit. It can wait, I suppose, but I’d prefer to get it in the bank.

  10. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    3 Squawk

    Great find. One thing that grabbed my attention was the Texas license plate on the car in the color photo. Yellow plate with black lettering – you haven’t seen that in Texas since the 1950s and I’m probably the only one around here who remembers it.

    New York state changed their plates to yellow and black last year and they really are pretty ugly. I remember now when they changed to the old white background in Texas and it was a big improvement. TxDoT says it was 1957. I was 5 years old and already a critic.

  11. squawkbox Avatar
    squawkbox

    Texpat

    I really expected you to say you owned one………. considering the businesses you were in, that would have not been so far fetched……….no snarkiness intended.

  12. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    11 Squawk

    I never heard of the Venus until this morning. My first car was a 1954 model though – a black VW beetle convertible – that I bought for $275 in 1968.

    According to the original owners, it was the very first VW beetle convertible imported into the US. They bought it in Europe and brought it back.

  13. mharper42 Avatar
    mharper42

    Google has an extremely sappy video doodle today. Apparently it commemorates International Women’s Day. Yeah, that will help in muslim countries. Heck, it will help in the EU now overrun from muslim countries.

  14. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    Why promoting tariffs and duties on imports is a sucker scam used by populist con artists to buy votes from people who don’t understand economics or how the trade actually works.

    After pressure from trade unions (no mention is made of whether manufacturers also complained or just let the unions do their dirty work), the White House…

    In September of that year, Obama approved relief for domestic producers by increasing tariffs on most new tire imports for three years.

    and this is what you get…

    Economists Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Sean Lowry note that the number of Americans employed in tire manufacturing increased from 50,800 in September 2009 to 52,000 in September 2011. If all 1,200 jobs were attributed to the tariff — an exceedingly generous assumption — they calculate that Obama’s move could be credited with saving or creating $48 million of additional worker income and purchasing power.

    But the tariff also forced consumers to spend $1.1 billion more on tires than they otherwise would have — or roughly $900,000 per U.S. tire industry job created. And retaliatory tariffs imposed by the Chinese further hurt our economy. In early 2010, China’s Ministry of Commerce imposed tariffs ranging from 50.3 to 105.4 percent on American poultry imports, which “reduced exports by $1 billion as U.S. poultry firms experienced a 90 percent collapse in their exports of chicken parts to China,” according to Hufbauer and Lowry.

  15. Hamous Avatar

    MFAH has an exhibition through May called Sculpted in Steel: Art Deco Automobiles and Motorcycles, 1929-1940. I’m going to try and get down there.

  16. El Gordo Avatar

    SD – back in the good old college days we used ot sneak off to the Esquire Ballroom out on 290 which would feature country music artists every week or so. Loretta Lynn was a frequent guest, as were Ernest Tubb, George Jones (when he would decide to show), Ray Price, etc. I remember once when Loretta brought her little sister out to do a couple of numbers – little sister turned out to have a good career on her own under the name of Crystal Gayle. When the entertainers would take a break we would often go out back and visit with them, and to a person, they were always nice folks and seemed to enjoy conversation with the plain people.

  17. Adee Avatar
    Adee

    #15 Hamous

    I understand that is very popular, likely more than the museum folks had expected.

  18. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    International Women’s Day?? I thought it was International Pancake Day!

    IHOP is offering free pancakes today, where do I go to get my free woman?

  19. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    Evidently the 290 lady is Indian, turns out her tribe name is ‘Severalbelly‘.

  20. squawkbox Avatar
    squawkbox

    GJT

    where do I go to get my free woman?

    Man ain’t no free wimminz (as in cost). Took me 3 marriages to figure that out.

    By the time you get through
    Looking that judge in the face
    You’re gonna wanna cuss
    The whole human race

    That’s why
    It’s cheaper to keep her

    Johnny Taylor

  21. Hamous Avatar

    I thought we were supposed to go out and get us an International woman. No?

  22. mharper42 Avatar
    mharper42

    #19 GJT
    What kind of an Indian?

  23. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    Free wimmins are akin to a free printer that takes $100 ink cartridges.

  24. Hamous Avatar

    19 – red dot or American?

  25. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    #22

    Kookoo Tribe

  26. mharper42 Avatar
    mharper42

    A gusty rain has just reached Chez Harp. Need rain, but please don’t blow my fence over.

  27. Tedtam Avatar

    Chuck Norris is campaigning for Cruz.

    Guess the election is over.

    Y’know, cuz………………CHUCK NORRIS! 😉

  28. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    Wow.

    Katrina Vanden Heuvel and the limousine fascistically-minded liberals at The Nation have come out full bore on the Clinton Legacy.

    A major driver here was Wall Street’s craze for Internet start-ups. In 1999, for example, AOL’s market value eclipsed that of Disney and Time Warner combined, and Priceline.com’s value was double that of United Airlines. The Clinton team created the environment that encouraged such absurd valuations. Throughout the bubble years, Clinton’s policy advisers, led by Rubin and his then protégé Larry Summers, maintained that regulating Wall Street was an outmoded relic from the 1930s. They used this argument to push through the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall financial regulatory system that had been operating since the New Deal. The Clinton team thus set the stage for the collapse of the Dot.com bubble and ensuing recession in March 2001, only two months after Clinton left office. They also created the conditions that enabled the even more severe bubble that produced the 2008 global financial crisis and Great Recession.

    It’s amazing how the Left all the sudden discovers the truth when it’s convenient to get their pet communist elected.

  29. El Gordo Avatar

    Has it never rained before in Houston? I listen to Houston radio on iHeart, and I don’t think those harrycanes get as much coverage as this rain. Hope there are a few survivors, but according to news reports, that’s not very likely.

  30. Super Dave Avatar
    Super Dave

    #16 El Gordo, man those were the days, huh? The good old days, definitely different times. I had an older cousin that met Hank Williams in a dive near Montgomery once, he always talked about that.

  31. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    16 El Gordo

    The Esquire was a jumping place when I was in high school, but I never was able to get in the door past the ID check. The Texas Liquor Control Board rode them pretty hard back then.

    Now, a little drive out to Cypress to Tin Hall was a different story.

  32. Tedtam Avatar

    Lovely Daughter is now an aunt!

    Aggie Beau’s brother and wife just welcomed a new little boy into the world!

    Babies rule!

  33. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    Patrick Deneen at Front Porch Republic is a professor of political theory at Notre Dame:

    Res Idiotica

    Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is to understand themselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions. Ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica – a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first res idiotica – from the Greek word idiotes, meaning “private individual.” Our education system excels at producing solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions. They have been taught to care passionately about their indifference, and to denounce the presence of actual diversity that threatens the security of their cocoon. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.

  34. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    #35

    lol, I’m surprised she wasn’t driving in circles continually trying to avoid the upcoming tree!

  35. Texpat Avatar
    Texpat

    Ben Shapiro lays it out very clearly:

    The 2016 Venn Diagram of the Right or…

    Establishment vs. Anti-Establishment vs. Conservatives: The Three Way Split That Could End The Republican Party

    Conservatives believe in Constitutional checks and balances, small government, and individual liberty. During this cycle, they’ve largely aligned with Cruz, and their strong dislike for establishment concessions to Democrats has pushed them into the anti-establishment camp. But Trump’s movement to the populist left has separated conservatives from anti-establishment. At the same time, the more that establishment voices attempt to ally with conservatives, the more conservatives react by moving into the disestablishment camp.

    This is how the establishment and anti-establishment wings of the party have torn conservatives apart: Trump on the one side, playing off conservative hatred for the establishment while chopping away at conservatism itself; David Brooks and company on the other side, ripping on the wildly inappropriate Trump while chopping away at conservatism itself. Whoever wins in the battle between establishment and anti-establishment, conservatives lose.

  36. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    I thought we were supposed to go out and get us an International woman

    This year, I’ll have a Russian with a Flipino on the side, please.

  37. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    In the first of two analyses, Crichton, along with Elias and Ala’a Alkerwi, an epidemiologist at the Luxembourg Institute of Health, compared the mean scores on various cognitive tests of participants who reported eating chocolate less than once a week and those who reported eating it at least once a week. They found “significant positive associations” between chocolate intake and cognitive performance, associations which held even after adjusting for various variables that might have skewed the results, including age, education, cardiovascular risk factors, and dietary habits.

    In scientific terms, eating chocolate was significantly associated with superior “visual-spatial memory and [organization], working memory, scanning and tracking, abstract reasoning, and the mini-mental state examination.”

    But as Crichton explained, these functions translate to every day tasks, “such as remembering a phone number, or your shopping list, or being able to do two things at once, like talking and driving at the same time.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/the-magical-thing-eating-chocolate-does-to-your-brain/?tid=pm_business_pop_b

  38. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    39 Attn Texpat:

    “like talking and driving at the same time.”

  39. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    A short break in the rain.

    Summer has his humid, still, and ugly nose under the edge of the tent.

  40. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    It’s time to head off to my Colorado chateau for nine months.

  41. Super Dave Avatar
    Super Dave

    #35 & #36 I was going to post that but then I noticed that one of our couch critters had made a comment, so I figured it had already been posted here.

  42. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    Does the Flipino do tricks? And is it a White Russian?

  43. Super Dave Avatar
    Super Dave

    And is it a White Russian?

    Brown hair, olive skin and green eyes. 😉

  44. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    Stereotypist

  45. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    The longest article you’ll ever read about the potential “Big One” slamming the Houston/Galveston area.

    Increase Ike’s winds by 15mph and Clear Lake would be gone.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/hell-and-high-water/472134/?utm_source=SFTwitter

  46. Sarge Avatar

    The topline number is just the beginning of bad news for Trump — on all the key metrics (honesty, etc.) Cruz beats him by fifteen or more points.

  47. Hamous Avatar

    #37 Texpat

    I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. The standard frame of reference touted by the squishy middle is that conservatives have moved drastically right while “progressives” have moved drastically left. That’s hogwash. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that “progressives” have dragged the entire country leftward. Republicans have moved with them and now occupy the spot formerly occupied by Democrats. Even conservatives have moved slightly leftward. No one has moved drastically right.

    I have an old WSJ article from about 15 years ago somewhere full of quotes from the likes of Gore, Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, etc. preaching a pro-life message. I’ve always wanted to meet some of those duplicitous ghouls and remind them of those positions and ask them if they considered themselves right wing nut jobs.

  48. Darren Avatar
    Darren

    Stephen H. Webb abbed so much to the general theological discussion among Christian intellects, particularly with Mormonism. He will be missed by many people I know of. Rest in peace my brother. Go with God. We’ll meet some day.

    http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/stephen-h-webb-1961-2016/

  49. Hamous Avatar

    What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth. — Jesse Jackson

    Welcome to the Hell you created, Jesse.

  50. squawkbox Avatar
    squawkbox

    TexHamPatous

    #37 #50

    Here is a little factoid for you. The Republican Party. corporately speaking, has never been a “conservative” party. What we are seeing is the perfect storm of the Republican party’s own making. I do not think that conservatives have moved any more right than they have ever been. I believe that is a fabrication by the party to distance themselves from what used to be known as the moral majority.

    I think the very people that put the Republicans into the majority have had enough. “We” got lied to basically two elections in a row and the revolt has stated. I only wish this had happened 2 or even 3 elections ago.

  51. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    #53
    Mester Squawk

    Yessir, after we put Republicans in control of congress the first time in 40 years, we shoulda stood up and hollered when they got squishy and Dole was our man. Well we was all hollerin but nobody would listen. Then ‘The Iraq’ happened and made it it all a moot point.

    Anyway Hammy, I see it as you see it, like a tug-a-war game, us knuckle draggers holdin on to the rope for dear life not making any ground but ever so slowly getting drawn into the mud pit all the while getting slammed for taking our country to extremes.

  52. Hamous Avatar

    In retrospect, we should have seen מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסיןt after Tom Delay pronounced “there’s simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget” and thrown in the towel.

  53. Adee Avatar
    Adee

    The Tea Party Movement is the successor to the Silent Majority and the Moral Majority movements of yore. Its members are legion; it is mainstream now, way past the rally stage that birthed it in 2009. That is what scares the daylights out of the Socialistas the Dems have devolved into and the GOPe wing, both DC bubble dwellers. It is conservative, no longer Republican; it has attracted those blessed and sainted (in the Establishment GOP imaginations) Independents, many of whom left the GOP and many of whom also left the Dems, disgusted with each organization’s failures to listen to We The People. The Reagan Democrats live again.

    Rush correctly characterizes The Donald as the reflection of the great righteous anger creating his candidacy; he is not the cause of it. He is unwittingly a stalking horse who might actually be nominated. Likewise Ted Cruz reflects this anger very well but with far more depth of knowledge of how Constitutional government is designed to work for We The People, by whose consent that government was created. And by whose strenuous discontent it will be rescued by them. Every pathetic move the GOPe faction makes to stifle this merely piles up more support for an Article V Convention of the States, placing it outside the grasp of DC. But that will take time, and the election is far closer at hand. Tinker with the Republican Convention rules some more, Establishment, and see what Hell results.

  54. GJT Avatar
    GJT

    Hear, hear Ms Adee. Well said!

    Tom Delay said that in ’05, WE and many knew we were way into circling the drain but not enough of us.

  55. Hamous Avatar

    A couple of things could happen that would give me hope:

    1. Abolish the IRS.
    2. Ban morons and non-taxpayers from voting.

    Neither will ever happen.

  56. phil Avatar
    phil

    Heard Ted Tell-Tale Poe on KSeV on the way home and listening to him strongly reinforced why I loathe the Preserve-the-Con party and the Halloween con-serv-artists.

    After he said there is just no will in guvmint to secure the border I had to shut off the radio.

    No will? The Hell? What about your sworn oath and doing your job?

    Oh, that’s right Ted, you voted to fund King Hussein’s illegal actions.

    Total losers.

  57. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    I’ll never forget that day. I heard the audio of Delay saying it and – I swear – an involuntary roar came out of my mouth.

  58. squawkbox Avatar
    squawkbox

    Brother Phil
    #59

    Sworn oaths like the Constitution are only as good as the men doing the swearin.

    Combine that with years of political expediency as the number one reason to keep electing the dead wood”……………..well here we are. Remember all my arguments about nothing is going to change because well we had to elect the most electable. Nice.

    So I. Still resist saying I told ya so to so many folks but ahemmm

  59. phil Avatar
    phil

    You should go ahead and tell em Brother Squawk. (:-)

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