SO MUCH FOR "MINNESOTA NICE:" J.D. Power and Associates has announced that MSP International Airport ranks dead last in their annual customer-satisfaction survey of the major airports across the country in such areas as convenience of facilities and amenities.

Is it any wonder Governor Pawlenty line-item vetoed funding for further study of expanding the possibilities for Amtrak service in the CHI-MKE-MSP corridor based on "taxpayer value" arguments straight out of the Club For Growth's playbook (as in "low taxes=jobs=social stability"?)

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MEIN INNKEEPER FRIEND HAS LONG BEEN OF THE OPINION THAT MANY OF THE HOMOPHOBIC ATTACKS IN THE MEDIA FROM THE RELIGIOPOLITICAL RIGHT may actually be the result of confusing homosexuality with transvestism, transsexualism and hermaphroditism.

But that's nothing to the Religiopolitical Right's attacks on the California Supreme Court's decision of last week as struck down a ballot plebiscite from a few years back holding marriage to be the sole and exclusive monopoly of a male-female relationship, after Right Wing Watch:

Not surprisingly, the Right's reaction to last week's ruling by the California Supreme Court in favor of equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians was swift and negative.

Former Rep. Ernest Istook, now of the Heritage Foundation, evoked Nazi metaphors to blame those who supported civil unions as a compromise: "By trying to appease homosexual rights activists, those who have refused to stand up for traditional marriage helped to create this court ruling.  They are the Neville Chamberlains of the cultural wars."

Barrett Duke of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission said he was "saddened for the people of California" but "especially for the children of that state."

"The California Supreme Court ruling not only overruled the very clear will of the people, it also proposes to overrule God's design," Duke said. "These judges may think they know more about marriage than the rest of us, but I am confident they don't know more about marriage than God. Marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Children need that environment to give them their best chance to fulfill their great potential. That's not only my opinion and the opinion of most of the people in this country, it's God's opinion, and His opinion overrules the opinion of any judges.

Indeed, the Right emphasized this "activist judges" angle; Gary Bauer, attacking the "four unelected robed radicals," wrote:

It was an egregious exercise in judicial activism – of judges wielding raw political power to redefine our most basic values. But that is how the Left has succeeded. It cannot achieve its goals through the democratic process via the elected legislatures, so it ignores the people and goes to the courts, where it relies on political activists cloaked in black who answer to no one. The Left succeeds by using the most undemocratic methods possible.

Of course, Bauer may not realize that, while appointed at first, justices on California's Supreme Court face voters at the next general election; each of the justices in the majority for this case has been retained by voters at least once. Bauer is probably aware, though, that the "elected legislature" in California passed marriage equality in 2005 and 2007, only to have it vetoed both times by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Nevertheless, right-wing activists hoped the decision would energize opponents of gay rights into action. "The good news is that I believe this will re-ignite the debate over a federal constitutional amendment," according to Concerned Women for America's Matt Barber. Jan LaRue called on Californians to recall members of the state's Supreme Court in the way they recalled the governor several years ago. "Are you going to sit by and do nothing while four black-robed despots take away your right to govern yourselves?"

Meanwhile, the effort to put on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the California ballot continues—now, apparently, with more funding.

And, in spite of a beleaguered GOP's effort to keep a low profile on social wedge issues during this election cycle, the Right is hoping the decision will push John McCain to "speak out more strongly in support of defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman," as Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council put it.

(And remember, folks, the Family Research Council, as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition previously, is neither. More than likely, it's probably nothing short of rehashing apartheid South African propaganda about White Christian Values being one with the defence of apartheid--much of it published only in Afrikaans.)

As if that weren't enough, The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang's Co-"Spiritual Advisor," Pastor John Hagee, could probably be considered a latent homosexual wih tendencies towards nostalgically-maudlin idealism judging by the following video (again, per Right Wing Watch):

(But then again, in Pastor Hagee's idealised pre-penicillin past, those who had Certain Loathsome Diseases went down to Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs, Arkansas for hydrotherapeusis--even when it came to veneral diseases as were deemed beyond Salvarsan, the then-preferred treatment for syphillis notwithstanding arsenic being its active ingredient.

(Those with limited means could receive their treatments @ the Public Health Service's Free Bath House, just off Bathhouse Row ... and you also had the Army and Navy Hospital for such servicemen with disorders as could benefit from hydrotherapy.)

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SO MUCH FOR HIS FRAUDULENCY'S FLAWED ARGUMENT BEFORE THE KNESSET LAST WEEK suggesting that anyone foolish enough to open discussions with weird and unwholesome elements was supporting appeasement:

It's emerged that Israel is opening serious, yet @ once informal, peace talks with the Syrians, using Turkey as an intermediary.

How can such be considered "appeasement"?

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AND SOMETHING TO KEEP THE OLD QUE VIVE OUT FOR WHEN IT COMES TO CAMPAIGN APPEARENCES by The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang of Indecision 2008:

His lapsing suddenly and spontaneously into Bad Words, in effect straying from prepared and nuanced remarks--especially so the infamous Seven Dirty Words, and variants thereof.

Not to mention the usual ethno-racial and ethno-religious slurs common to the Archie Bunker/Alf Garnett element, and then for "dog-whistle" effect more than serious politiking.

Hopefully, such will wind up on YouTube and, in the process, wind up turning the electoral tide.

Especially considering where about the only ones still trusting the Mainstream Media are those among the Lower Classes with no or limited Information Stuporbahn access; as Right Wing Watch put it in a sidebar devoted to the latest in Right Wing newsflashes:

Various right-wing groups held a press conference and protest earlier this week and nobody cared, so now Morality in Media is complaining about bias: "But when prominent pro-decency and pro-family organizations that expected great things from President Bush in the war against obscenity gather together at the National Press Club to protest the failure of the Justice Department to vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws, followed by a demonstration at the Department, the secular media ignore these events. How can this be??"

(One possible answer: About the only news outlet the Joe Sixpack crowd considers trusted and reliable is Fox Prolefeed, which is basically nothing but prolefeed. Distractionary prolefeed, @ that, featuring nothing in the way of what could be called "healthy" news.)

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ONE THING MORE: Expect racist and white-supremacist appeals for financial and moral support towards the "evacuation" of the "once-proud Afrikaner peoples of South Africa" as refugees based on what may turn out being less than "clear and compelling evidence" of "fear of persecution" exploiting the current ultraviolence against foreigners, especially Zimbabwean refugees.

Said ulraviolence having now flared up in Durban after having been limited largely to Johannesburg and surrounding townships, with 20 dead.  

more cat pictures

ONE OF THE REASONS OFT CITED FOR THE DEMISE OF CLASSIC ROLLER DERBY IN THE MID-1970'S AS A STAPLE OF TELEVISION was the changing socioeconomic paradigm of the viewing audience, making it more difficult for its producers to attract the sort of advertisers.

As one social historian quoted in Wikipedia's entry on the history of Roller Derby notes, howbeit in a footnote:

Below golf comes baseball, and below that, football. Then ice hockey. Then boxing, stock-car racing, bowling, and, at the bottom, Roller Derby, once popular with advertisers until they discovered that the people watching it were so low-prole or even destitute that they constituted an entirely wasted audience for the commercials: they couldn't buy anything at all, not even detergents, antacids, and beer. "Low-Reach Undesirables," the Roller Derby audience became known in the trade, and the event that had attracted them was soon removed from television.

In turn making you wonder who would be the most likely to advertise on Roller Derby if it were still on the air, howbeit on slow weekends over mostly UHF stations attracting a mostly Kanker Sisters-type audience:

• Wally World (no doubt)
• "Sub-prime" mortgage lenders
• "Guaranteed approval" loan and credit card offers, third-party for the most part
• Morris Plan-type loan companies
• Tackier "tourist traps" of the sort traditionally appealing to Low-Reach Undesirables, especially so:
  • Branson
  • Lake of the Ozarks
  • Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge
  • Wisconsin Dells
  • Panama City Beach
  • Ocean City, Maryland
  • Las Vegas
  • South Padre Island
  • Atlantic City
  • Seaside Heights
• Disreputable satellite-TV dealers
• Buffet-type restaurants of questionable repute, especially the kind as serve starchy, high-fat food
• Malt liquor and beer
• Used-car dealers offering liberal terms "even with bad credit"
• Direct-selling offers of questionable repute or merit
• Dollar stores

You probably get the idea of who would likely advertise on Roller Derby more than anything....

EVEN WITH GASOLINE PRICES CLOSE TO $3.50/GALLON ERE YOU READ THIS, WE "MORALLY SUPERIOR" AMERICANS STILL PREFER DRIVING over other means of transport--and excuse such as one with "freedom."

Still, though, studies throughout the world have shown that driver fatigue can be a dangerous thing, and then some, on long drives we are still fond of taking.

With that in mind, something which we ought to think of embracing from our Australian brethren:

Over extended holiday periods (especially the Christmas/New Year's, Easter and ANZAC Day such), and during the school holidays, Australian motorists are encouraged to have a complimentary cuppa tea or coffee and some sweet biscuits (what we would call "cookies") @ rest stops staffed by volunteers on behalf of the Bushell's Driver Reviver initiative to promote road safety through regular rest breaks.

(In general, 15-minute or so breaks are recommended after 2-3 hours' continuous driving to combat fatigue and stay alert.)

So what stands in the way of embracing such initiatives here Up Over?

"TO TRAVEL IS TO POSSESS THE WORLD," as the great travelogue producer Burton Holmes said on many occasions.

And to many among the Lower Classes, such will more than likely mean some of the tackier "tourist trap" spots such as:

• Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge
• Myrtle Beach
• Panama City Beach
• South Padre Island
• Branson
• Lake of the Ozarks
• Lake Winnipesaukee
• Niagara Falls
• Wisconsin Dells
• Okoboji/Spirit Lake
• the Black Hills region of South Dakota
• Lake Havasu City
• Santa Catalina Island

Where, inevitably, some of the adventures likely to be experienced will tend to be of the kind common to tourists--howbeit scaled down for the benefit of their looseness of taste.

Even when it comes to dining out.

But when all is said and done, who could expect to find "encounter cafés" in shoobie-trap places? (Refer, readers, to the following "WaiWai" item per the Mainichi Daily News, authenticity and credibility not guaranteed under any circumstances):

"Encounter cafes," manga shops where men and women--or more likely, girls, can meet and satisfy their mutual needs are rapidly increasing across Japan, according to AERA (5/19).

The women's weekly visits a Nagoya "deai kissa," literally an "encounter café," where a man was arrested last month for breaking the law banning child pornography for allegedly performing indecent acts on a 16-year-old.

The reporter is there to see how the system works, discovering that membership for men costs a one-time fee of ¥5,000 and another ¥1,000 per visit, for which the entrant receives a membership card that can be in any name they like.

The café has a passageway with a room on each side.

"This one is for 18s and over, and that one is for 16s to 18s," an employee tells AERA's reporter, pointing to the respective rooms and referring to the ages of their inhabitants. "Please take a look around."

A two-way mirror encloses the room so those in the passageway can see what's happening inside while the occupants are unable to look out and learn who's peering at them. Inside the rooms are numerous young women occupied with such tasks as fiddling with their mobile phones or doing their faces. If the member sees a woman he likes, he lets a café employee know and a private room meeting is arranged. The weekly's hack picks a 16-year-old girl called Miyuki whose most notable feature is a face filled with piercings.

Miyuki soon agrees to go out for a bite to eat. There's more payments to the café involved here, with a ¥1,000 charge for talking to one of the girls, another ¥3,000 for taking the girl outside the establishment and then a ¥5,000 charge handed over directly to Miyuki for "transport fees." The member also pays for whatever expenses are to be incurred.

Miyuki says she has a boyfriend, refuses to engage in prostitution and only leaves the café with guys she thinks can be trusted, usually the weaker-looking types.

"There's no way I'd ever work as a nightclub hostess or in a soapland (brothel)," she tells AERA. "With this caper, I don't have to treat the guy like a customer and it's not really dangerous. There are some guys out there who'll even pay ¥10,000 just for the chance to have a chat to a young girl. There are loads of schoolgirls who go to the cafes."

While Miyuki may not be prepared to sell her body, plenty who frequent the encounter cafes have few such qualms. Many say encounter cafes are serving to encourage illicit prostitution. But crimefighters say there's little in the Law Regulating Adult Entertainment Businesses that allows them to prosecute encounter cafes because they are on the surface acting only as places where the opposite sexes can meet.

"If we can prove that the cafes are paying these women to go there, or that prostitution is occurring, we can get them under the Prostitution Prevention Law, but that's about it," a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department says.

Women who go to the encounter cafes are unified in their rapidity to deny being employed there. And the operators back them up.

"We're nothing more than manga cafes that women can use for free," one owner says.

Experts on the netherworld say encounter cafes got their break from around 2004 as authorities began cleaning up adult entertainment districts like Tokyo's Kabukicho, which has made it more difficult for traditional sex businesses to operate as openly as they used to. There are now over 100 encounter cafes across Japan, including 10 in Kabukicho alone.

There are alarming trends evident in the cafes, too, according to adult entertainment expert Fumio Iwanaga.

"It's a bit shocking to see just how many ordinary women are going to these places. They're most average women of a type you wouldn't normally associate with the adult entertainment business as it has existed until now," Iwanaga says.

Encounter cafes appeal to women because there is no need for them to butter up men because they're paying customers, which is also the appeal for males because they can go to the establishments thinking they're chatting up ordinary women they have a chance with and not seasoned professionals.

Ryoko, a 23-year-old regular at Tokyo encounter cafes, sure has no problems with making use of them.

"Most of the girls coming here are sellers (prostitutes)," she tells AERA. "The going rate is about ¥30,000 a shot. It's pretty easy: you go out for a while with some sleazy guy, get a bit of spare change and it's over."

SOME RAIN SHOWERS LAST EVENING GIVING WAY TO SUNSHINE THIS MORNING as I produce this latest edition of my own comments in lapidary weblog form ... and the holiday long weekend forecast is calling for generally nice weather, with maybe a rumble of thunder to round off the weekend on the holiday Monday.

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THE SO-CALLED "UNION OF MYANMAR" AND ITS XENOPHOBICALLY-WARPED REGIME MUST BE ON THE BRINK OF COLLECTIVE PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIA as they observe three days of nationwide mourning for the victims of Cyclone Nargis nearly a fortnight ago--never mind the local authorities failing to issue proper and timely warnings beforehand, let alone prepare evacuations to safety.

Making the schizophrenia even worse is the news that the World Bank will be unable to release reconstruction funds to the Myanmari regime in view of their having been in arrears on repayments for some ten years previous ... in the process forcing the regime's "inside of the inside" to seek out weird and unwholesome financial circles such as the triads from Hong Kong and/or Macau or even the Japanese yakuza to obtain reconstruction funds which, even then, the regime is unlikely to repay in view of such elements charging arbitrarily higher interest rates on the tightest of repayment schedules.

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BLAME IT ON HIS FRAUDULENCY'S ONGOING MADNESS FOR JUSTIFYING UR-RAHOWA AGAINST INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM and its justifying subtle and discreet harrassment of harmless residents stateside ... but the "morally superior" United States was able to only score 97th on the Global Peace Index of 140 soverign nations.

Of which Iceland, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Japan make up the top five.

Iraq, obviously, takes the "wooden spoon."

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AND CAN YOU JUST IMAGINE THE MOST XENOPHOBICALLY DEPRAVED AND PERVERTED ELEMENTS OF AMERICA'S "MORALLY SUPERIOR" SOCIETY being especially interested (and then some) in the online coverage of the ongoing ultraviolence across South Africa against Zimbabwean refugees and migrants--and for weird and unwholesome reasons?

(As in finding ideas and inspiration for cheap and cheerful tactics to whip up the old ultraviolence in culturally-deprived environments having significant and measurable populations of "chronic and habitual" welfare cases, "illegal" immigrants and National Minorities in general which--so they hope--will flare up into full-on RAHOWA.

(Especially interested: Not just the usual suspects of the Klan, neo-Nazis and other white-supremacist types, but also super-secretive "dirty tricks" squads with connexions to the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and their associates weird and unwholesome. And more than likely using coded messages on their radio programmes playing the agent provocateur role, let alone avoid attracting suspicions from "meddling Secular-Progressive bloggers.")

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AND TALK ABOUT THE GOP BEING THE DEFENDERS AND GUARDIANS OF TRADITIONAL MORAL VALUES, DECENCY AND COMMON SENSE, or so their official propaganda insists:

Congressman Vito Fossella (GOP/NY) will announce his resignation today in the wake of ongoing scandals further revealing the depths of depraved GOP hypocrisy--in Fossella's case, being arrested for DUI and same indirectly revealing where he was engaging in les liasons dangeruses with another woman while still "happily married."

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RECENT "WINNING OF HEARTS AND MINDS" COMMERCIALS FROM THE AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE CALLING FOR FURTHER ENERGY SELF-SUFFICENCY which you may or may not have seen on the ilk of CNN, MSNBC and Fox Prolefeed may be omitting a material fact which you and I ought to know about:

Videlicet, that the policies being thus advocated are based all the more on "wise use" strategems which turn out being wasteful, counterproductive and inefficent to the point of fraud, waste, corruption and mismanagement holding high carnival @ the expense of the masses.

Come to think of it, isn't the concept of "wise use," as in the Wise Use Movement, rather oxymoronic to the point of perverted? 

TODAY, THE 20TH OF MAY, MARKS SOMETHING OF AN IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARY to Your Correspondent.

Because it was on this day 15 years back, 20 May 1993, that my father passed away @ 78 years of age, brought about by emphysema and heart failure aggravated by years of tobacco use on his part.

I still recall him smoking unfiltered Pall Malls wholesale when I was growing up ... only to be forced to quit around 1971-2, whereupon he started turning to chewing tobacco just to kill time.

But he had to quit that, too.

And for his last 2½ years or so, he had to be on oxygen to help with his breathing. Not just oxygen bottles, but also an oxygen concentrator (as converts ordinary air into pure oxygen, the process of which Mein Innkeeper Friend was unable to understand).

And it was largely because of dad's smoking, and the toll it was taking on him, that I have chosen (and wisely) never to take up smoking, even with my mental condition and the stereotype suggesting that "mental defectives" need to smoke all the more so their medications can work more efficently "by providing a synergistic action" as opposed to a mere catalytic such.

(The truth of the matter is that such is not the case; "tars" in cigarette smoke actually absorb the active compounds of many anti-psychotics and anti-depressants--known pharmacologically as monoamine oxidase inhibitors, MAOI's for short--in the bloodstream, rendering such all the more ineffective among mental cases who smoke. Besides, how many psychiatrists and Community Mental Health Workers actually advise their clients to smoke just so their "meds" can work more efficently in the face of established medical evidence that smoking carries serious health risks?)

Meanwhile, Motherdear (herself set to turn 87 in June, G-d willing) is hanging in there in her widowed state, even considering all manner of health problems ensuing in her widowed state as have included:

• episodes of gout;
• loss of liver and pancreatic function to crystallisation, with onset of Type II diabetes;
• surgery to remove some growths in her throat (non-cancerous, in case you're wondering), the scar tissue therefrom known to flare up from time to time;
• surgery on her back to correct spinal problems;
• hip-implant surgery as still shows its effects, thanks to the poor quality of physical therapy she was given post-surgery;
• cataract-removal surgery in one eye as didn't quite heal properly, what with the cataract thus removed being larger than average; and
• emergency surgery to reopen her bowels as were blocked by scar tissue from past internal surgery, recovering in hospital for nearly two months (the which has somehow weakened her since).

Fortunately, though, a Home Health Aide calls on her every weekday except Wednesdays to check up on her and help with household tasks (Wednesdays being left open for medical checkups and other appointments); shopping is left to a brother who lives nearby.

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AND AS WAS THE CASE WITH A MAJOR REUNION ON THE FATHER'S DAY WEEKEND OF 1992, which was the last chance many of us in the family had to see Mom and Dad together (as was her wish all along), this Labour Day weekend will see another reunion of the greater Reed family.

As was the case in '92, the venue will be Camp Winnebago near Caledonia, a facility providing summer camping opportunities for the developmentally challenged.

And if past precedent is anything, many of us are probably wondering if this may be the last opportunity we may see Motherdear ere she passes away....

CERTAIN COMPANIES WHO OPERATE UNDER THE DELUSION OF BEING SOMEHOW "ESSENTIAL" OR OTHERWISE "PROTECTED" FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER must have this fondness for whipping up climates of paranoia and fear among employees, acting all along in the fear that someone might actually undermine their organisaton from within to the point of "causing scandal or disgrace***undermining public confidence and trust" all the more.

Especially if the "essential" or "protected" claim is designed solely for keeping employees in line and to scare them out of complaining outside of administrative channels without "exhausting administrative powers" beforehand--complete with all manner of stalling tactics which could be cover for manipulating or otherwise perverting the enquiries.

Likewise with weird and unwholesome religiopolitical elements, especially considering Indecision 2008.

With that in mind, the following "WaiWai" item per the Mainichi Daily News from out Tokyo way (even if questions exist about the credibility or authenticity thereof) may offer some insight on how one can wreck things from within:

A pair of pub operators in suburban Tokyo have been collared by the cops for allegedly employing a handful of 14-year-old girls to work as nightclub hostesses, according to Nikkan Gendai (5/12).

Hiroshi Asada, 36, the owner of the Peach Girl pub in Tokyo's Kasai, and Hiroshi Yasuda, 29, the establishment's manager, were arrested for breaking the Child Welfare Law, and police accuse the pair of employing junior high schoolgirls to toy with the bar's male clientele--with at least four of the 10 girls believed to be no older than 14.

"The junior high hostesses were paid ¥3,000 an hour and worked three to four days a week, getting there at opening time and finishing around 1 in the morning," a police investigation insider tells Nikkan Gendai.

Peach Girl was located in a building not far from Kasai Station on the Tozai Line subway, and at first glance appeared little different to any of the thousands of other hostess clubs in cities across the country.

"There were only ever about six or seven hostesses working at any one time, so it wasn't that big. And most of the hostesses were pretty homely, none of them were top-class beauties," an employee at another hostess bar in the same building tells the lowbrow afternoon tabloid.

"From about the summer of last year, though, there were whispers going around that Peach Girl had the youngest hostesses of anywhere around. Some customers deliberately headed to the bar because they knew there were junior high schoolgirl hostesses working there. The pub boasted of its young hostesses to get more regulars."

Indeed, the child cheesecake service worked wonders for Peach Girl's books, with the club estimated to have raked in as much as ¥5 million a month, a phenomenal amount for a small suburban pub.

The schoolgirl exploitation finally ended when cops picked one of the young children up on the streets as she staggered around drunk one night after a hostessing shift.

"When officers questioned the drunken schoolgirl, she told them she had a part-time job working as a nightclub hostess," the police insider tells Nikkan Gendai. "She'd spent most of the night drinking so hard she was nearly off her face."

It just goes to show that one careless slip can do plenty of damage....