That cab driver shit was supposed to go to the grave with ...Herb Caen.

jesse, did you know you can block specific sites, such as nationalreview.com, from your browser? If you like to read obscure low circulation magazines, there’s always Tikkun.

I’m sure that convention time also means plenty of escort service stories as well.

Hmm - Denver is real America and New York isn’t?

Annnnnnnnnd - who says?

“Hey, turn it to Hannity, I’m missing the talking points!”
“SHUDDUP AND MOVE YOUR BUTT!”

I’v thought up a new definition of “conservative”: Someone who doesn’t understand that most of the time, a picture of a mountain is just a picture of a mountain.

Conservative: someone who thinks that talking trash about their opponents is a good way to choose leaders, and who also simultaneously think their opponents:
a) are making outrageous slurs if they respond in kind; and.
b) are too weak to lead if they don’t respond in kind
c) lack humor for failing to see how the Republicans’ trash-talking, however vile, are “just jokes.”

The point about the picture of the mountains wasn’t the mountains at all; it was the single, huge star in the sky. The way it’s rendered really does bring to mind the manger story, and it was kind of clueless for the set designer to do it that way.

About that first NR link: Can you imagine the calls of “elitist” and worse that would come from the right if left-wing intellectuals routinely referred to, say, New York as “the real America”?

Except they kind of are Teh Rull America.

I’m not from New York, or California, or any other similar liberal enclave

but 1 in 4 Americans live in either New York or California.

Imagine your immediate family. it’s likely a family of four, give or take.

The whole “dismiss New York and California as unamerican” thing is mathematically identical as saying “you aren’t really part of your family.”

It gets even stupider than that, though, with the insistance that City Dwellers are somehow not real americans, and America’s true nature is in the small towns of Leave it to Beaver.

80 percent of Americans live in Metro areas.

I don’t really have much of a point here, other than how much the “Real America” rhetoric irritates me. Every experience any american has is part of THE REAL AMERICA. America is the land of Off Broadway productions, working for Best Buy, racing recumbent bicycles, building sandcastles, getting arrested for back alley gambling, graduating from MIT with a History degree, and smoking pot for 20 years without legal trouble. It’s the land of Collectible Card Games, Hot Air Balloons, and Stolen Cable.

And anyone who says otherwise isn’t American. I can tell, because they aren’t even wearing a flag on their head. In America.

The way it’s rendered really does bring to mind the manger story

No, it really doesn’t.

I know it can sometimes be sort of hard not to see biblical imagery in everything, all the time, if you are a crazy fundamentalist Christian who is only allowed to participate in art/culture that is based on the bible.  But I think most of us Real Americans can agree that, no, really, it’s just a ‘drop of some mountains at sunset, with a rising evening star. 

The only part that’s bugging me is that the star looks wrong.  It shouldn’t be a pentagram style abstracted star shape, it should be a point-of-light naturalistic star.  And it should actually look like it’s rising, up in the sky, not sort of hovering in the foreground at about the same height as the mountains.  It looks like some random bit of decor that someone stuck on there as a joke, not like it belongs in the picture.  In fact, if I wanted to get malicious, I’d say it was ‘shopped in.

I think the star and the stripes in the mountain below it are supposed to be suggestive of the flag.

BTW, just to cover my ass—I realize it’s not a ‘shop.  The photo comes from the Chicago Sun-Times, and no “overly messianic!” commentary accompanies it (well, there are some in the comments section, but that’s hardly their fault).  It’s clear that I just don’t like/understand the art, or possibly that we’re not seeing it as it’s meant to be seen.

I’m sure the idiotic “Messiah” meme is only going to get louder Thursday night when the traditional balloons are replaced by a sky filled with fireworks after Obama delivers his speech from the 50 yard line of Invesco Field before 75,000 people on the 45th Anniversay of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

Personally, I think it’s pretty cool.

McCain should deliver his convention speech from inside a makeshift North Vietnamese prison cell on the stage, since apparantly being a POW fully qualifies someone to be the President of the United States.

I think it is yet another example of East Coast People not knowing what a REAL MOUNTAIN looks like.

I guarantee you this is the histrionic attack that comes out of the convention - Obama’s step over the line from media Messianism to literal Messianism.

Well, that and the “grassroots insurgent” pro-Hillary movement—showing a couple dozen protestors standing outside Invesco Field and telling the viewers “ZOMG all these Dem wimmins is gonna vote for McCain!!”

The evening star does not rise. Venus sets after the sun when it is the evening star and rises before the sun as the morning star, based on where in it’s orbit it is, and where we are. To be technical, because I’m a bit fussy about getting astronomy right.

But other than that, yes, the evening star will often be the first visible.

the evening star will often be the first visible.

Well, that’s all I really meant in the first place, but thanks for the astronomy lesson.

GAAH!

You CANNOT look to the east of Denver and see the Rockies…east of Denver is one long downhill run to the Mississippi.

So like the R’s usually are they would have to do thing EXACTLY WRONG to ‘follow the star into the East’...

Morons.

+1 respect for the Crazy Taxi reference. What’s your high score, Jesse?

New York City is more American than Denver. Period.

Jimbo: WUT?

ferrarimanf355: Dunno about Jesse, but mine is somewhere around $23K.  I could dig my Dreamcast out and give you the exact number, but all that bending over is bad for my old bones.