First Cuppa Coffee – March 14th, 2012 : Grime, Crime & No Sex for You Edition

The Grime Wave sweeps the nation….You know this story is breaking big as local TV news stations have picked up on it. Crooks everywhere are stealing massive amounts of Tide laundry detergent. It was on TV so it must be true, right?  I was certainly roused from my delirium by seeing grainy footage of black guys filling shopping carts with Tide. I was told by the whiney voice in the background that the bad guys are swapping the detergent for drugs or selling it to unwitting consumers for $5-$10 a jug. Personally I think there’s more going on here than the lamestream media is willing to report… Could it be that meth dealers have discovered a secret ingredient that keeps their labs from getting stinky?

Privatize the Parks… Rep. Cliff Steans (R-FL) is the kind of guy who doesn’t make many splashes in the media—except when he’s propagating ‘birther’ stories about how the President was actually born…somewhere.  So it was surprising recently when he came all out for telling constituents at a town hall meeting that “we don’t need any more national parks in this country” and that we need to “actually sell off some of our national parks”:

Money quote:

I got attacked in a previous town meeting for not supporting another national park in this country, a 200-mile trailway.  And I told the man that we don’t need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks, and try and do what a normal family would do is — they wouldn’t ask Uncle Joe for a loan, they would sell their Cadillac, or they would take their kids out of private schools and put them into public schools to save to money instead of asking for their credit card to increase their debt ceiling.

 The No-Sex for You faction… of the Liberal Ladies for Lunch  organization is proposing for women to withhold sex from their partners between April 28 and May 5.  A press release for the group goes on to say; “Once congress and insurance agencies agree to cover contraception, we will then resume having sex. Until then men will have to be content with their left hand.”  The movement may have also gotten some recent, if unofficial, support from the wife of Virginia State Del. David Albo (R-Fairfax Station). Albo says she turned him down in the bedroom due to his support for the state’s transvaginal ultrasound bill.  There is no truth to the rumor that OBRagBlog staffers are selling “Get out of sex-jail, Free” cards.

Note: never drink coffee sitting that close to a monitor while reading SDRostra… After I’d recovered my dignity from seeing the “Grime Wave” story on TV last night, I had another, almost dream-like sequence that featured NBC’s Gene Cubbison acting like a real political reporter… Seems as though Rik Hauptfeld, a candidate in the 7^th District contest for City Council went public with a story about how mayoral wanna-be and would-be king-maker Carl DeMaio tried to talk him into dropping out of the race.  Rik says he was offered the opportunity to run for school board (this was back when the GOP had hired placard holders begging people to run) or an unspecified “political job”. When he refused those offers, candidate Hauptfeld got to see the nasty side of was DeMaio: “He talked about me being branded with a scarlet `S’ for ‘spoiler,’ he went on to say that they would make sure I never hold public office in San Diego” if his name appeared on the ballot.  As it turns out, this wasn’t original reporting: Cubbison went on to credit conserv blog SDRostra as the source for the story. My visit to that blog this morning revealed comments about how Hauptfeld wasn’t a real Republican and how he was certainly guilty of being unemployed. At any rate, congrats to NBC for actually covering a non-press release story and for giving credit to Rostra for the original lead.

Killing’em dead won’t stop the spread…The Military is discovering that assassination is not a viable strategy for taking on the leadership of the Mexican drug cartels, says our reliable informant over at Wired’s Danger Room.  Of course, it’s the Mexican military that’s not been involved in the not for attribution hits aimed at the Cartels. Gen. Charles Jacoby, commander of U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that: “The decapitation strategy — they’ve been successful at that. Twenty-two out of the top 37 trafficking figures that the Mexican government has gone after have been taken off the board,” Then, a caveat: “But it has not had an appreciable effect — an appreciable, positive effect.”