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Wee! New icon from my sis, divine_debris, and I'm in the perfect mood for it after watching last night's repeat with the Anderson Cooper interview. Holy god that was funny. Stephen really does have the egotistical, opinion-oriented, right-wing banter down to a "t", and I adore him for it. I just hope that someday O'Reilly, Hannity and the others are self aware enough to appreciate his parody of them, but I wouldn't put money on it.

In other news I'm in project/meeting hell today. Although it occurred to me while listening to the radio this morning that in reality my hell wouldn't involve meetings. No, it would involve the phrase, "From the mind of Anne Rice, and the musical genius of Elton John..." Yes, my true hell would be the musical "Lestat", I realized this while hearing some musical selections from said production. I'm now ashamed, deeply ashamed to admit that I once liked her books. Well, the first two anyway. Now I think she's gone into Anne McCaffrey territory. Any day now I expect to see a cover reading "Vampire Dolphins of New Orleans".

Right, I have 117 pages of text to edit, gods help me...

Edit: Whoops, have to post a link to a pic of us losing our shit at a game on the official Sharks site!

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No More Mister Nice Blog tackles the question, why is immigration such a big deal right now?

Why is this such a hot-button issue right now? To some extent, after 9/11, we worry about who's coming across the borders (even though the 9/11 hijackers didn't cross the border on the run in the dead of night). Also, there's a lot of economic anxiety in America, and, obviously, people direct it at "the other" even when "the other" is doing a job the anxious people wouldn't take. (We've been carefully trained not to direct our anxiety and anger toward employers who'd rather hire non-American workers -- overseas or here -- than hire us.)

But I think a big reason for the recent rise in anti-immigrant feeling is conservatives' burning need to be self-righteously, all-consumingly angry at someone -- anyone. Now that overt bigotry is less socially acceptable, conservatives have a harder time blaming everything that's wrong in the country on an entire group of people. Oh, they can bypass bigotry and turn liberals into the new niggers/spics/kikes, but a lot of conservatives know some liberals -- we aren't other enough. But if they blame everything on immigrants, it's almost as satisfying as racism (they're bashing mysterious dark-skinned others who don't really even speak their language), but they get to say they're criticizing behavior, not race. It's as close as they can get to the good old days.

I can't really argue with that, though I suspect part of my cynicism today is a certain melancholy over the fact that this is the twenty fifth anniversary of John Lennon's death.

So to lighten the mood a little, I point you towards Media Matters for the latest on General Falafel's War for Christmas Against Secularist Commie Bastards:

On the December 2 broadcast of Fox News' The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, host Bill O'Reilly stated that he would "use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people" who "diminish and denigrate the [Christmas] holiday."
[...]
He later added: "There is no reason on this earth that all of us can not celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together," cautioning that "anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me."

"Yeah, me and my baseball bat, Ol' Painless." Part of me is kind of looking forward to an O'Reilly unleashing of horror, I mean what exactly would that entail? What's he going to do? Start another boycott? Call for another Inquisition? All I can say is, bring it, loofah boy.

via World o' Crap