The Goat Pen

I always had problems with Dubya invoking God in his speeches talking about us going after Muslims.

this isn't intended to invoke Confederate sympathies

I've never been much of a Civil War buff but I'm addicted to the PBS series American Experience. Last week was Jesse James and a big part of who he was when he died was tied to him riding with William T. Anderson (Bloody Bill), who made his bones with Quantrill on the Kansas/Missouri border wars.

I decided to order a couple of books from Amazon on the border war and it has a fascinating corollary to the Middle East.

Missouri was made up of mostly Southern sympathizers, at least in the rural areas, but had very little Confederate presence. Union occupiers (and these are words the PBS series used, not me) came in and to say they mistreated Missouri natives doesn't do it justice. They murdered and robbed anyone they thought was a Southern sympathizer and these people were mostly simple farmers attempting to squeak out a living and saw slaves as property they bought and paid for, for which their government had no right to take away from them.

As misguided as that belief may have been in regards to slavery, it cuts to the core of why an insurgency thrives. Bloody Bill was generally a nuisance robber/horse thief with a loose adherence to a code of only going after Northern occupiers until the Union Army gathered up his family in an attempt to smoke him out and a building collapsed on his sister.

Then he went from William T. Anderson to Bloody Bill, a man dedicated to doing nothing in life but killing the occupiers thru guerrilla warfare, even going as far as taking the uniforms of Union Soldiers and infiltrating their camps to kill them. The Union in response, had entire counties emptied and razed in an attempt to cut off his supply lines from sympathizers. People who did nothing against the Occupiers were removed from their land and stripped of all they owned in an attempt to kill one man.

Even Quantrill had to cut ties with him because he had taken to scalping the Union Soldiers , keeping a necklace of body souvenirs of slain enemies and was willing to risk heavy casualties on his group in an effort to kill the enemy. In a story too detailed to type here, he killed a family friend and then raped his housekeepers over the self defense death of his father.

He died at the hands of the bumbling incompetent Captain who by luck just happened to surprise Bloody Bill and had him outgunned. The man was hailed as a hero to the North.

and hence the rivalry between Kansas and Missouri was born.

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is that Rowen Atkinson?

Apparently a dude in a car chase just blew his own head off live on Fox News.

Right at the end of the video


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That's how im going out but don't forget, im taking you all with me.

Of course I can't even wire a doorbell so you shouldn't be worried. But I will fuck up your cable feed!

Bklyn wrote:

hedge wrote: I prefer fatwa...

So does DS.

You just know he's waiting for honey boo boo to hit 18.

LOL

"You just know he's waiting for honey boo boo to hit 18."

More like 14...

Obama has a 47% commercial. I think I've seen it 5 times during the football game.

not surprising

You'll see things die down in a few weeks. Romney is about to give up on Ohio unless the debates go big his way. The ad money will go someplace else, if it plays out the way it seems to be.

There is not an election I've seen in which the media (both conservative and liberal) not report that the polls are narrowing before the election. This was the report in the Mondale/Reagan election even though Mondale's aides informed him that he was going to lose in a landslide. The news is a business (yes, for you conservatives, so is FoxNews). It is in their best interest to say the challenger won the debate. 5 out of the last 6 challengers have been declared the winner of the first debate (only 2 apparently went on to win). Each outlet has a powerful incentive to give some credibility to the Romney candidacy. I'd put the chances at 20% that Obama is declared the winner of this debate. Still think he'll win the election though, but the polls will narrow.

It is difficult for me to imagine a scenario where Obama clearly loses the debates. He's too polished and on-message to deliver a crushing flub in the normal order of business, and too quick on his feet to miss an opportunity to score points when the opportunity presents itself, and too smart to say anything that would give Romney the opportunity to do it to him, although I'm not sure Romney is capable of delivering a true zinger in response to anything Obama might say. At worst (as far as Obama is concerned), I can't see how the debates could end in anything worse than a draw. And, considering that Romney is the one who needs to move the needle at this point, a draw ain't going to get it for him...

OTOH, I can easily see Romney flubbing badly...

I'm not sure why so many Romney faithful see him as the great orator. Whenever he ad-hocs a statement, its usually the wrong one.

His ad libs are even worse.