You’ll notice that the $3.58 clearance sticker is the third in a series of markdowns. In many ways, this reflects what the Jets went through on draft day when they tried to unload Timmy and found no takers.

I should note that Sean said the Drew Brees action figure was still at full price almost five months after the season ended. I should also note that the L&T Casey said that, when Target ends a price on a clearance item with an ’8″, that means that it is subject to further markdowns.

So, Canadian dollars?

A quads worth of Harvard students, whose parents paid top dollar to hush up youthful “indiscretions” so that they could get into a Good School guaranteeing them a legitimate shot at becoming either a Supreme Court Justice, President of The United States, or an editor at Breitbart.com, are plenty pissed because their school has been giving out advanced degrees like they’re those breath mints in the bowl at the hostess station. And not the good Andes ones. In this case it would be the doctoral thesis written by Fantastic Sam’s “Before” model Jason Richwine entitled “Messicans is Teh Dumbz LOL, or: Why Juanny Can’t Read“:

Over 1,000 Harvard students delivered a petition to Harvard University’s JFK School on Saturday, demanding an investigation into how and why the school approved a 2009 doctoral thesis arguing that Hispanics have lower IQs. The thesis was written by Jason Richwine, a co-author of a paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation that argued immigration reform would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The discovery of Richwine’s paper by the Washington Post sparked a firestorm around the Heritage study, and several days later Richwine resigned from the think tank.

Now Harvard students want to know how a thesis built on those views and assumptions was able to make it through the approval process in the first place. “Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community,’’ the petition read. “However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.”

Several days ago, 24 student groups at Harvard wrote a letter condeming the university’s approval of Richwine’s dissertation, saying it “debases” all their degrees.

Now all of the other schools are laughing at Harvard except for Goucher because they gave a degree to Jonah Goldberg who wrote this and they don’t want to talk about it so shut up and, besides, your kid goes to Art Institute so neener neener…

(Disclaimer: I am not Mexican, did not go to Harvard, and have never had my hair cut at Fantastic Sams, so I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post about this)

Don’t tell me not to fly, I simply got to
If someone takes a spill, it’s me and not you
Who told you you’re allowed to rain on my parade   -Merrill/Styne

As part of my continuing series on “why we can’t have nice things”…

I have previously expressed my, well, let’s call it “displeasure” with the so-called “progressive wing” of whatever this side of ours is called these days over message discipline. As pointed out here,  a Very Good Thing Called Occupy withered away  in part because the message became muddled when various groups with a motley assortment of agendas and obsessions latched onto the Occupy movement like grievance lampreys in a feeding frenzy. Thus a message about social and income inequality in America creaked and groaned to a stop in no small part because of the baggage of PETA, Code Pink, veganism, anti-GMO food, Free Tibet, the death penalty, gender rights, torture, and whatever  flavor of the month happened to show up with a tent and a cook-pot. Also, the drum circles. Fuck those guys.

Not that these agendas weren’t worthy of discussion (PETA excepted because they’re lunatics) but, what should have been a single simple understandable message got lost in a Babel of voices, each crying out for attention. But this is what happens when factions whose feel their own agenda isn’t getting the attention it deserves ( in some cases for a good reason) crashes someone else’s party believing that the crowd validates their beliefs. In such circumstances, entropy is born.

Which brings us to the San Francisco Pride Parade and Bradley Manning:

Following reports in late April that Manning would serve as one of the honorary grand marshals for San Francisco’s annual Pride Parade in June, with Ellsberg attending in his stead, a firestorm broke out on social media. Criticism immediately came from a number of gay servicemembers outraged that Manning, who remains on trial for violating his duties as a soldier, would be honored in such a high-profile way.

Air Force 1st Lt. Josh Seefried, co-chairman of the board of directors of OutServe-SLDN, tweeted that San Francisco Pride’s move was a “complete insult” to those currently serving and said he was “[a]bsolutely ashamed.”

“@SFPride’s decision to choose Bradley Manning as Grand Marshall is a direct insult to the thousands of LGBT servicemembers and vets. #nohero,” Seefried added.

A petition was quickly launched and Sean Sala, a Navy veteran and activist, vowed to call for a national boycott of the Pride celebration. Coming less than a year after activists successfully won a battle to permit active-duty servicemembers to march in the San Diego Pride Parade in full uniform, critics also argued the Manning pick could rankle a Pentagon still implementing the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Within hours San Francisco Pride had backpedalled, announcing Manning would not be a grand marshal, that his nomination by the organization’s electoral college was a mistake and that a staffer prematurely made the announcement without authorization.

And then the shit hit the Rainbow flag:

Since Williams announced that Manning would not be honored as a grand marshal at this year’s Pride Parade, the backlash from Manning supporters has been feverish. San Francisco Pride’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been inundated with calls for him to be reinstated. Last week, Manning supporters filed a complaint against San Francisco Pride with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, alleging the board illegally invalidated a democratic vote. A meeting scheduled for May 14 to address the controversy has been postponed until a larger venue can be found. Organizers stipulated, however, “SF Pride’s decision concerning the election process of Bradley Manning as Grand Marshal being consistent with SF Pride’s long standing Grand Marshal election policy is firm. Thus, the discussion of that matter is closed for this year.”

Let’s be entirely honest here. The attempt to force the organizers to honor Bradley Manning as the grand marshal, even if it is only symbolic, is nothing short of a cynical attempt to hijack what is arguably one of the biggest pride parades in world, particularly in a year in which such great strides have been made in LGBQT equality.  Although the treatment of Manning by the US government is nothing short of criminal, his prosecution has nothing to do with his gayness (Alan Turing, he is not) and everything to do with his actions while serving in the military. Whether Manning is a hero or a traitor or something in-between is open to debate, but trying to pass him off as a hero to, or as representative of, the gay community is the height of blatant opportunism by Manning supporters. Obviously I don’t speak for the gay community, but I’d find it highly disrespectful that some people would try and use my movement as a delivery device for their message. In other words; don’t piss on my leg and call it a rainbow.

If you want to support Bradley Manning, get your own damn parade.

Nothing more pleasurable than having 150 plus pounds of absolute dead weight cutting off circulation to your legs. At least they weren’t my legs…

As you may have noticed over the past few days this blog, as part of the FDL mothership, was being held internet-incommunicado because technology sucks. As a result, we were not able to hold President NObama accountable for all of his 2.6 million federal employees and now America is doomed and the Canadians will probably invade us because those wiley folks from America’s hat can smell weakness like it was a skunky beer.

I welcome our Beiber-spawning overlords.

The good news is that, while we were out of the loop, the only people who matter (the High Dudgeon High Broderites who do not like people who don’t know their place and just show up unannounced and “trash the place“) are banding together to (finally!)  fight the Kenyan interloper, as reported by the Lord Varys of the Beltway, Vandeallenhei:

Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.

Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a good old-fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and public scolding to pile up.

They are the stakeholders of DC, and thus the world, and you’re just living there and cluttering up the place.

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system.

Translation: Obama wears earth tones. Impeach.

Republican outrage is predictable, maybe even manageable. Democratic outrage is not.

The dam of solid Democratic solidarity has collapsed, starting with….

Wait for it. Here it comes. This is going to be devastating….

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s weekend scolding of the White House over Benghazi, then gushing with the news the Justice Department had sucked up an absurdly broad swath of Associated Press phone records.

Because, if you’ve lost Maureen Dowd, you’ve lost Peggy Noonan without the alcoholism and the Reagan-leg humping.

And now we get to watch the “stakeholders” whip up the-scandals-that-aren’t into a frothy brew that is all filler and no killer because of such things, reputations are made.

Dear Canadians: Please take us. Now.

Dear fellow Patriot,

Gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.

You see, only hours after re-election, Barack Obama immediately made a move for gun control…

On November 7th, his administration gleefully voted at the UN for a renewed effort to pass the “Small Arms Treaty.”

But after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut — and anti-gun hysteria in the national media reaching a fever pitch — there’s no doubt President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel.

I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.

This Spring, the United Nations went back into session to finalize their radical so-called “Small Arms Treaty.”

With the treaty finalized, a full U.S. Senate ratification showdown could come any time President Obama chooses and there will be very little time to fight back.

If we’re to succeed, we must fight back now.

That’s why I’m helping lead the fight to defeat the UN “Small Arms Treaty” in the United States Senate.

And it’s why I need your help today.

Will you join me by taking a public stand against the UN “Small Arms Treaty” and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey right away?

Ultimately, UN bureaucrats will stop at nothing to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU.

To be honest, I wasn’t sold until that all-caps ‘YOU’ at which point it became personal for me.

You want some more of this truth-telling? CAN YOU HANDLE IT?

Of course you can:

You can bet the UN is working to FORCE the U.S. to implement every single one of these anti-gun policies:***  Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

***  CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

***  BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;

***  Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION.

Somewhere, Wayne LaPierre, is going “…that guy seems a little high-strung“.

I found the brief progressive flirtation with Rand Paul – because he is anti-drone (but not really) and pro-hemp – to be fascinating. Because, while he seemed intriguing in that brief speed-dating interview that was his filibuster, eventually after a few dates you know he’s going to want to invite you back to his bachelor pad so that you can check out his bitchin’ collection of back-road Kentucky hitchhiker’s heads in jars and then maybe followed by a light poop.

Also to listen to Enya, which is even worse….

The IRS was taking a good hard look at some of our finer  Hoverround-Gadsden Flag ‘Muricans:

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

For the life of me I can’t imagine why the IRS would pay special attention to groups comprised of common-sense moms with no non-profit experience and various other grifters who know an easy mark when they see one, particularly when the whole basis of the Tea Party is to get out of paying taxes for fear that those tax dollars might be spent on Poors and Blahs and Youngs.

Next thing you know, the ATF will start throwing shade at rural sovereign man-forts….

Gabriel Gomez, who is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Massachusetts and is also an actual brown Scott Brown, has a very lovely house in Cohasset which he could have totally screwed-up with a ginormous mural of ghost Ronald Reagan dressed as Uncle Sam strangling Mother Communist Russia but he didn’t because the government gave him some sweet house hostage money:

Republican US Senate nominee Gabriel E. Gomez claimed a $281,500 income tax deduction in 2005 for pledging not to make any visible changes to the facade of his 112-year-old Cohasset home, a concession so valuable that it is classified as a charitable contribution under a federal law designed to protect historic homes.

That is a large amount of dollars, you may be saying to yourself from your sixth-floor walk-up utility closet/efficiency apartment. In child deduction dollars $281K would be equivalent to approximately 74 Duggars (get’er done, JimBob) but you can’t put a price on neighborhood comity, can you?

Except when you don’t have to:

But Gomez and his wife, Sarah, were already barred from making any changes to the exterior of their home under the bylaws of the local Historical Commission, raising the question as to whether their donation — the price of which is based on the loss of value in their real estate — had any monetary worth.

The Gomezes, whose 59 Highland Ave. home is located within the Cohasset Common Historic District, gave the historical easement to the National Architectural Trust, a Washington-based organization whose marketing of tax-deductible easements to homeowners has been targeted by the US Department of Justice.

Five weeks after the Gomezes claimed the deduction, the Internal Revenue Service listed programs such as this — that involve the “contribution of a historic facade easement to a tax-exempt conservation organization” — as one of its “Dirty Dozen tax scams.”

On a scandal scale of one to ten, with one being “Watergate” and ten being “Benghazi!” this is probably a six, meaning it is slightly less than a Presidential blowjob and slightly more than selling armaments to Iran and then using the money to fund South American death squads, so please adjust your outrage settings accordingly.

Well, yeah, I think this goes without saying….