Beautiful Horizons

Your Tax Dollars Funding NASCAR and the NHRA

As all of you know, I am a fan of FC Barcelona, the Spanish futbol team. In 2006, the team entered into a five year deal with UNICEF in which they wore the UNICEF logo on their jerseys and donated 1.5 million Euros per year to UNICEF.

So when I read that the Department of Defense pays a combined $19.3 million per year to sponsor a car at NASCAR, recruiting programs done in conjunction with NASCAR and sponsorships with the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA), I was gobsmacked. This is in addition to $45 million in tax earmarks that NASCAR receives. When I read that Congresswoman Betsy McCollum received some nasty hate mail for proposing an end to this waste, I was repulsed.

If NASCAR and the NHRA are truly patriotic, then they should follow FC Barcelona's lead and perhaps pay for carrying the US Army logo or at minimum carry it for free. The stench of hypocrisy from the right on this is rank to the point of asphyxiating. This from a congress that just voted to cut funding for public broadcasting.

A Jesus for Our Times

Oldy but goody from Al Franken and cartoonist Don Simpson:

The rest of  Supply Side Jesus is HERE - courtesy of Buzzflash.

Via commenter "kate_bee" at Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic blog.

Is It Possible to Use the Word Wanker to Describe a Woman?

If it is, I would certainly apply it to the rapper, Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., who comes off rather poorly in this profile in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. I believe that a lot of the criticism regarding her position on the Tamil Tigers in her parents' native Sri Lanka is merited. This part stands out strongly to me:

In the press, Maya was labeled a terrorist sympathizer by some; others charged her with being unsophisticated about the politics of Sri Lanka. “People in exile tend to be more nationalistic,” Kadirgamar said. “And Maya took a very simplistic explanation of the problems between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese government and the Tamils. It’s very unfair when you condemn one side of this conflict. The Tigers were killing people, and the government was killing people. It was a brutal war, and M.I.A. had a role in putting the Tigers on the map. She doesn’t seem to know the complexity of what these groups do.”

Maybe dilettante is a better word than wanker.

The Madness Continues

As the media could not get enough of Bill Clegg's masturbatory (in some cases literally) memoir, the New York Times Sunday Style Section decided to devote far more coverage than deserved as I wrote about here.

What really annoys me is this:

And magnifying those secrets, at least in his mind, were deep-seated insecurities about making it in a city where everyone seemed richer, Ivy-educated and better bred. “I never got the handbook,” says Mr. Clegg, who grew up in rural Connecticut the son of a TWA pilot and enrolled at, he reluctantly admits, Washington College, a small institution in Maryland. “Everybody’s godfather was like some famous editor. Or they spent summers in Maine with famous writers.”

Boo-frigging hoo. Then there's this:

He recalls visiting New York City a few times in his early 20s and feeling out of his league. “We were so unsophisticated,” he says. “We would eat Chinese food in like Murray Hill and think it was the most glamorous thing that had ever happened to us.”

I have a friend who's from Brazil. Her great-grandfather was a slave. She is in her forties and has lost both parents, her stepmother, her only sibling (a brother), a cousin who was practically a sister to her. The worst came for her when she lost her husband eight and a half years ago with no life insurance and a three-year-old son to raise. She came to this country with fair English, which she worked hard to improve, got an education and has an excellent career in the financial services industry. She has dealt with far more genuine adversity than this guy has and done a much better job of handling it.

I'm glad that Bill Clegg has turned his life around. I'm just sorry to see that he's making himself very wealthy by showing the world that he was a monstrous ass for a long time.

Who Cares?

Honestly, who cares other than his friends and family? This clown had a great career, lots of money and his life ahead of him. His raging id could not be controlled, however, and he ended up blowing his career and his relationships through the end of a crack pipe.

Meanwhile, millions of people have been going to work every day, living on significantly less than this man, raising families and being productive and not getting the attention of this drug-addled, self-absorbed cretin. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.