Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader presents the awful truth…

Thanks to the Kerry Sloganator at Wizbang.

And thanks to Robert who inspired your Maximum Leader to finally use it.

Carry on.

I like Bush.
I think he is doing just about as good as anybody (or any president) could do under the circumstances.
9-11 Fkd’ us up in a lot of ways. The economy, stock market, oil prices you name it. I am just surprised that we are not worse off than we are right now.

I like the fact that Bush is an early to bed early to rise kind of guy.
I like that he has a quasi-sordid past but has turned himself around.
I like that he is a religious guy, not just when the cameras are rolling or that the sound bite calls for it.
I like the fact that knows he is not the smartest guy in the room, but that he surrounds himself with smart people.
I like the fact that he is the poorest of the 4 people running for president or vice president. (Really its true… I think the order is K man>Cheney>Edwards>Bush.
The way politics is played now, no matter who is in they are the Anti-Christ. Its a shame but that is the way it is.

I am hoping he is going to win…

Back to the trenches

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has spent many enjoyable hours in the company of friends eating in restaurants. Sometimes your Maximum Leader goes with a large group to a restaurant. He has always been dismayed by restaurants that automatically add a 15-20% gratuity to the bill of larger parties.

(Aside: Dismayed because if the service is good, your Maximum Leader tends to be a good tipper. And if the service is good, and the waitress is a hottie; then your Maximum Leader is a very good tipper. Of course, when your Maximum Leader and the Foreign Minister go out to eat - they are inevitably given the table with the server-in-training, or the only waiter in a restaurant full of hot waitresses.)

Now your Maximum Leader understands why an eating establishment should do this. Generally a server (waiter/waitress) will work a single large party table (room) and not work multiple small party tables. The automatic gratuity is a means by which the server is assured of making a significant tip for sacraficing his chance to earn mulitple smaller ones.

But then again… What to do when you are with a large party and your service sucks?

Your Maximum Leader is mindful of the fact that the term “tips” comes from the coffee houses of Georgian England. During the 18th century, London was rife with non-Starbucks coffee houses. Businessmen would frequently sit at a booth for hours on end meeting with other businessmen and making capitalism work. The waiters at these coffee houses wouldn’t want to waste their time on customers who would order one cup of coffee and sit for hours. So they put little coin boxes on the ends of the tables and labeled them “To Insure Prompt Service.” When customers put money in the box, the waiter would serve them. The more money you put in the box, the better service you got. Your Maximum Leader isn’t certain when the TIPS were moved to the end of the visit, but he likes to think it was some enterprising young capitalist trying to gague the market before shelling out his hard-won cash.

So, what to do if you are in a large party, your service sucks, and you are faced with an automatically generated 20% tip charge?

Don’t pay.

Of course, you might be sued by the restaurant for theft.

But then again you might go to court and win. Your Maximum Leader applauds Humberto Taveras who recently won his court case for not paying that automatically added gratuity.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader found this Washington Post article rather interesting.

Interesting in that your Maximum Leader completely agrees with the court’s decison in the case. Judge James Robertson ruled that just because the Federal Election Commission doesn’t move quickly in its investigations and determinations doesn’t give a federal court the authority to force them (the FEC) to move faster.

This means, as you may have guessed, that all of the various 527 organizations will have free reign of the radio and airwaves through the election (and possibly beyond if required).

The judge, oddly enough, expidited his decision so that the Bush Campaign might seek an appeal decision before the election.

If Kerry wanted to limit the power and influence of the 527s (which he has no reason to do in point of fact) he would join up with the Bush Campaign on this - otherwise frivolous - lawsuit.

And a final (related) note…

The FEC is one of the most useless groups set up by our federal government. They are given symbolic statutory authority over so many federal election spending regulations; then cronically underfunded to prevent them from doing their job in a timely manner.

Don’t expect a 527 ruling from the FEC before March 2005.

And by the way, your Maximum Leader predicts that the ruling will say that everything the 527’s did during the ‘04 campaign was fine and legal. Furthermore, your Maximum Leader believes that Congress will not modify campaign finance law to curtail 527 activities.

Carry on.

When I returned from the wilderness, I wrote an essay describing my summer blog reading. If you did not find my obsequious fawning over the brilliance of Vonnegut’s fictional character compelling, skip this post.

No, really.

Scroll down and become enraged at the Yankee presumption of my discussion of the causes of the Civil War.

You can also read my poetictribute to the peccadilloes of our Maximum Leader.

You could also scroll down and look at the pretty graphics posted by the Air Marshal.

I assume the Air Marshal is feeling very cheery right now.

It’s not so bad, Dave. You can find your post in the archives.

Yes, I am going to hell. I’ve got a lease-option on a Styx-front condo just down the street from the Minister of Propaganda’s ski-lodge.

Summer Reading:

I checked Enjoy Every Sandwich every day, even though the odds were better than even that his stupid happy bun logo would overload the feeble memory of my antiquated PC and crash the whole system. I just made sure to check during my daughter’s nap so she wouldn’t hear me swearing while the machine rebooted.

Skippy’s political commentary is awesome. His well-crafted prose skewers both presidential campaigns with bipartisan glee. You won’t find weak apologia for his party (a la Analphilosopher and our own Maximum Leader, Minister of Propaganda, and Foreign Minister). His essays are such a good example of building a reasoned argument on the foundation of apt historical analogy that I would love to send my students to read his site. I would love to put a big “Enjoy Every Sandwich” link on my class blog.

But I’d get fired, tenure or no tenure.

Because Skippy isn’t just a political junkie.

He is also a deeply disturbed, highly profane, individual who is obsessed with his own penis, harbors dark fantasies about Hollywood starlet Lindsay Lohan (who is, I observe, not Jaime Pressly - what is wrong with this freak?), and seeks to emulate the grooming techniques of a deposed Iraqi caudillo.

If the lowly Minister of Agriculture had any real power in the MWO, I would elevate Skippy to the status of Loyal Minion. But the Maximum Leader seems to require an e-mail offering a sniveling oath of fealty before he grants that title to outsiders. And Skippy, while actually quite depraved, doesn’t strike me as the groveling type.

So, if you are up for some hard-hitting political analysis, visit Skippy. Or, if you are a sick, sick person (Like the BigHo), visit for the dirty stuff.

Speaking of the BigHo, I have to confess that, although I enjoy hanging with him socially, his blog drifted off my radar this summer. The graphics-rich environment pretty much guaranteed a crash. But I found that even when I had access to DSL, visiting was pretty much for old times sake.

Big Hominid’s interests have changed over time. Two summers ago, his blog led me into a blog-surfing addiction. I became fascinated with the intricacies of peninsular diplomacy. But as the Hominid has had to bend his nose to the grindstone to pay the rent, posts on North Korean provocation have become few and fart between. No, the second to last word in the previous sentence is not a typo. Those of you who visit the Hominid’s site are well aware of our Poet Laureate’s fascination with bodily emissions, expulsions, and secretions. Not exactly my cup of tea, but different strokes make the world go round.

Please, Big Ho, give me less scatology humor and more scatological smackdowns of the delusions of the Dear Leader.

More summer reading reports will follow.

Keep on the edge of your seat.

“Oooh, the historical juices are flowin’,” crooned Smallholder, “I know it will push the AirMarshal’s post down the blog, but I jest caint t’hep miself.”

Speaking of states’ rights:

Don’t you just love Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? Most people think he was extolling the virtues of democracy - and he was - but he was also sticking a big, long, rail-splitting middle finger in the eye of the state compact theory. “Of the people, by the people, for the people” is an explicit reference to Madison’s ratification plan and a general spanking to the whole theory of the right of secession. Heh. Ha. Hee.

Speaking of states’ rights some more:

I think we have a more recent historical argument about states’ rights than the Civil War.

Remember “Massive Resistance?”

Pop Quiz:

What was the motivation behind the vitriolic, vehement, and violent embrace Southernors gave to Massive Resistance in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education?

a) A scholarly, intellectual, and nuanced interpretation of the proper balance of the relative power of states and the federal government.

b) Keep dem black people outta mah kid’s skool!

Hint: Eisenhower knew the right answer and had the right response.

Memento Moron has asked for a discussion about the causes of the Civil War. I wrote a resonse for his comment section, but since I am an unregistered commenter, I was unable to post a response of more than 1000 characters.

Our regular readers are chortling. The Smallholder answering an historical question in 1000 characters? In the words of Ralph Wiggum, “unpossible!”

So I beg Memento’s pardon, but here is my response:

First of all, the issue is NOT a source of great debate between historians. I am unaware of a single professional, peer-reviewed historian working today who challenges the contention that the war was against slavery. There were some historans writing after the war — “The Lost Cause” school who focused on other issues and there were several historians who wrote about the provocations of the North when viewing the world in a post-World War One light.

Many Sons of the Confederacy would like to obscure the issue because it is hard to realize that grandpappy fought for an evil cause. But the circumlocutions of the amateurs don’t unmake the reality of history.

The states rights issue is not the real issue; states’ rights, except perhaps for George Mason, has rarely been an end in itself; American history is replete with examples of the states’ relationship to the federal government being used as a fig-leaf to hide real motivations.

James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution insisted on ratification by conventions of the PEOPLE of the states rather than ratification by state legislatures precisely to avoid the use of state prerogative to void the will of the national government - they met in Philadelphia to replace a government rendered impotent by state prerogative.

But James Madison and his mentor Tom Jefferson were more than willing to revive the corpse of states’ rights when the Alien and Sedition Acts threatened their political party. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which awakened states rights, were very much a partisan political calculation. That partisanship can also be seen as sectional since the South heavily supported the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists were supported by Northern mercantile interests.

The Democratic-Republican support of states’ rights bit them in the rear when the Northern states came to believe that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the war of 1812 and threatened (vaguely) secession at the Hartford Convention.

The issue of states rights popped up again when Georgia (with a wink and a nod from President Jackson) refused to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision on Cherokee removal. President Jackson wasn’t so indulgent when South Carolina nullified the Tariff of 1832, threatening military enforcement.

As the calls for abolition began to gather momentum in the North and the South’s peculiar institution became more and more entrenched socially, politically, and religiously, the South did try to use the concept of state’s rights to protect African enslavement. But it was a means, not an end. When federal power seemed likely to promote slavery, the South was eager to renounce the concept of states rights.

Examples of Southern support of federal supremacy can be seen at the outrage generated when Northern governors were reluctant to send funds and state militiamen to prosecute the Slavocracy’s land grab against Mexico in 1846.

Southerners certainly supported federal supremacy when Roger Taney ruled that states did not have the right to outlaw slavery within their own boundaries, opening the entire union to legal slavery in the Dred Scott decision.

Southerners certainly supported federal supremacy when many Northern states sought to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law.

So states’ rights, while certainly discussed - and I know the Southern partisans are turning to old Army of Northern Virginia Newsletters to find quotes about their heroes’ dedication to abstract legal principle - were used only with the intent of advancing the South’s real cause: the protection of perpetual bondage.

But I’m unlikely to convince anyone who proudly flies the Confederate flag with these examples. They will say a farmer out of Wisconsin is only trying to blacken the reputation of the noble antebellum South.

To which I respond:

Perhaps we should ask the leaders of the noble antebellum and South - and the secession movement - what they thought was the cause of the war. A quick review of the primary sources created by the state legislatures of the time finds that the people who led the Confederacy had a very clear idea of what they were fighting for.

South Carolina’s Secession Ordinance is one long litany about the wrongs of the abolitionists - a conscious emulation of the Declaration of Independence’sindictment of the George III. Read it yourself.

South Carolina was not unique. Other ordinances of secession, while not as longwinded, also indicate that slavery was the central cause of the war. Georgia’s declaration of the reasons for secession says:

“The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”

Mississippi concurred:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.”

Texas also knew what the war was about, starting their diatribe against abolitionist “incitement” with:

“She (Texas) was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery– the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits– a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?”

If the primary documents are so clear, why are we still having this discussion?

The Maximum Leader is offended by my concern for my good friend (see here).

If the line has been crossed, well hell, I might as well enjoy myself.

I have composed haikus in my beloved leader’s honor:

Maximum Leader
Pretends to be offended
Secretly intrigued

Necrophilia
Sounds nasty to you and me
ML’s cup of tea

Gov Schwartzenegger
Thinks the Maximum Leader’s
Hobby offensive

Feel free to chime in, BigHo!

UPDATE FROM YOUR MAXIMUM LEADER: Heh.

If the documents are forgeries (and it appears that they may well be), why hasn’t the White House issued a blanket denial of the contents of the memo?

a) Bush’s operatives are smart enough to realize that any response will become part of the news cycle and are allowing the forgery stories unimpeded play on the airwaves.

b) Bush is too busy protecting us from terrorists to respond to cheap shots.

c) Bush’s campaign is afraid that the contents of the memo may be accurate.

Just wonderin’.

I think it is probably a. But I don’t know if I could keep myself from setting the record straight if someone blatantly, verifiably lied about my guard service.

Perhaps the MOP has not delivered a sheep-related witticism because he is in the slammer.

Hat tip to Skippy.

UPDATE FROM YOUR MAXIMUM LEADER: Ick. Your Maximum Leader thinks this crosses some sort of line… But he will let others decide.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader promises that this will be his last football post of today.

Read Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on NFL.com. And be sure to check out the part (about halfway down) entitled “Best Purist Quarter.”

Easterbrook’s TMQ column is the best football column out there. (It is now linked in the new Villainous Sports section on the sidebar.) It is a shame that he stopped blogging on the New Republic site.

Carry on.

Who knows if the Bush National Guard documents are forgeries or not. I certainly don’t know.

However, in the mid 70s, we had a ball typewriter at home that had a bunch of different fonts available, including non proportional ones. I hated those fonts, because they made it extremely difficult to correct and go back and erase. I used this typewriter a decade later for college applications, and it became apparant to me that I had to use proportional fonts to be able to exploit the “erase” feature. What’s more is that there were dozens of fonts available for this typewriter. At home we had three. Pica, Elite and something else that wasn’t proportional.

So if some are arguing that the documents are fake because of the fonts, that’s bullshit. Typewriters could do that by the mid 70s, and it’s not hard to find out that government quality typewriters could do this in the 60s.

It might still turn out that the Bush docs are forgeries. The real ones were probably “accidentally” destroyed at some point. But saying they are forgeries based on the font is bullshit. Fonts existed prior to MS Word, and some electric typewriters were pretty damn good.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has a small book of cartoons entitled “Unpleasant Ways to Die.” Whenever he needs a little uplifting, he takes it off the shelf and thumbs through it. In that vien…

Unpleasant way to die Sept. 13th edition.

Crushed by flying boiler.

Unpleasant way to die Sept. 14th edition.

Inhaling toxic manure gasses. NB to the Minister of Agriculture: Beware of this one!

And we should add, given the spate of news concerning the Bush National Guard documents…

Death by pajama-wearing bloggers.

Carry on.

Elie Wiesel writes a great Op Ed piece on the tone of this campaign. I think most of us here fall into the categories that Wiesel writes about.

I don’t consider, nor have I ever considered, myself a Democrat, yet when I look at Bush2, he inspires a flood of negative emotions in me that no political candidate has before. I have categorically refused to stand behind Kerry, because I don’t really think he’s a great candidate, and I don’t think he’ll be a great President. For me, the election is a referendum on Bush, and Bush has already failed. I find Kerry disappointing, yet only mildly offensive, so he’ll do for the “anti-Bush”.

I have yet to hear a defense of Bush that doesn’t turn into either Clinton bashing or Kerry bashing. I’ve even heard Bush justified in that a second Bush term would hurt Hillary’s chances in ‘08. My wifes uncle lives in mortal fear of a Hillary Presidency to the point that it is the overriding issue in determining who he votes for.

I respect that Foreign Minister feels otherwise than I do. Sometimes it seems that you could reverse the names above, and that would give you the basic Conservative voters feelings. My Father in Law is a combat veteran of Vietnam, and his hatred of Kerry knows no bounds. He will parrot the latest internet rumors as reasons Kerry is loathsome, and when those rumors prove false, it doesn’t matter. He’ll move on to the next rumor. When I question Bush’s ability in front of him, I get a blank stare, then profanity directed at Kerry. I find it amusing that a native of Massachusetts who lives in Maryland can be so conservative. At least he has a sense f humor about that.

But both candidates are extremely deficient in their handling of the campaign. The US economy is not doing well, unemployment is too high, we have domestic issues that need addressing, the War against Terror has stalled, and Iraq is turning into a mess. I want to hear these issues addressed, not just questioning each others patriotism. Bush’s defense of his record is absurd, and Kerry has pretty much told us jack about what he would do.

The Boomer generation has given us Clinton, Bush2, Gore, Kerry, Cheney etc. Bill Mahr said that in ‘96 he voted for Dole over Clinton because he felt that a Boomer he agreed with was worse than a WWII vet he disagreed with, and he felt it was the last chance we had to get a member of the Greatest Generation to lead us. He expressed fear over the capabilities of Boomers to lead, and fear that the ideology over pragmatism that marks that generation would lead to venomous partisanship. I guess he was right.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader knows the Slant is often called a Post play. He just likes calling it a Slant. Hey! Madden and Al Michaels both called it a Slant last night. (And your Maximum Leader thinks that as recently as the Madden Football 2001 game the play was stil called a Slant.) We all knew what they were talking about.

And your Maximum Leader will agree with the AirMarshal that running between the tackles is critical to establishing the ground game. If you can’t run up the middle you likely can’t run at all. Your Maximum Leader was just offering up that he really likes the Sweep. It is a fun play to watch as it matriculates on the field.

And speaking of running up the middle… Your Maximum Leader was pleasantly amused at the shock that Mrs. Villain had last night upon hearing Madden declare that Packers DT Grady Jackson’s replacement, Cullen Jenkins, was undersized. Jackson weighs about 340lbs; Jenkins a mere 292lbs. Mrs. Villain could hardly imagine a 6′3″ 292lb man being called “undersized.” (FYI, your Maximum Leader is 6′3″ and about 235ish.) Your Maximum Leader tried to remember when the various offensive/defensive linesmen regularly started to top 300lbs? Was it around 1991?

Anyway, Jenkins played a good game. Even if he is undersized. Give that boy some more power-shakes and a few steak dinners and he’ll be okay.

Carry on.