Attn: weirdo in the ticket booth at Flinders Street Station who treated me to an outrageous display of spinning and sliding between a storage cupboard and the service counter today.

You are not Brian Flanagan and my 10 x 2 Hour Metcard is not a piña colada.

Further to Bridgit Gread’s excellent post demolishing the wingnuts’ desperate and infantile claim that the current financial crisis in the US is the Democrats’ fault, we have the Tardosphere’s most courageous defender of free speech, KG, indulging in some more shameless obfuscation:

The left — those wholly responsible for the subprime crisis — are complaining on every outlet that they “had a deal” that would have passed into law to allow the rescue of the financial industry but for the intercession of John McCain.
[...]

KG, who appears never to have hatched an original idea, is quoting here from fellow right-wing initialism GW of Wolf Howling, who helpfully illustrates his own execrable post with the following diagram:

Cute. But like so many wingtards, GW neglects to tell the whole story.

Here’s the second diagram from the educational Economix 4 Cockhedz series, which illustrates how free-market capitalists can socialise their losses when their avarice catches up with them (and the people they’ve exploited) and everything goes to shit:

See? Let no one say we’re not all about balance here at GrodsCorp.

UPDATE: The $US700 billion ($840 billion) “bailout” package has been approved. I hope you swallowed, free-market capitalism.

I get up really early for work these days. I’ve never been much of a morning person, and since my brain isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders first thing in the AM, the few minutes I spend getting ready to leave the house are fraught with danger.

Yesterday, while getting dressed in the semi-darkness, I reached for the last piece of my ensemble — this necklace I bought in India in 2003, which I’ve been in the habit of wearing almost daily ever since:

I picked it up, pulled it around my neck, then plugged the ends into my ears.

I blame mp3 players.

Step 1: Work yourself up into a mighty lather of ideological righteousness.

Step 2: Masturbate furiously.

Step 3: Write a post excoriating the Left (Dark Side) for its eeeeeeeevil tendencies, carefully casting the Right (Sugar, Spice and Condoleezza Rice) as the besieged movement representing truth, virtue and justice, and yourself as a fearless crusader beating off an enemy that threatens civilisation’s very survival:

Step 4: Notice a comment pointing out that you’ve been guilty of peddling exactly the same kind of brazen dishonesty you criticised in your post — and worse, that you were told what you posted had been completely debunked but did nothing to rectify it:

Step 5: Delete the comment.

Step 6: Ban the person who posted it:

Step 7: Wait until a sycophant comes along and agrees with your overall position:

Step 8: Reply as though nothing has happened and your integrity is intact:

Step 9: Celebrate yet another victory for the ethical Right by masturbating again.

Step 10: Don’t forget that getting around an IP ban is as simple as unplugging my modem, waiting 10 seconds, plugging it back in, then telling the blogosphere’s most despicable scumbag exactly what I think of him — and linking the comment back to all the evidence here at GrodsCorp:

UPDATE: The hilarity continues, after more childish editing and deletion of comments:

Andrew Bolt, from his liveblog of Sarah Palin’s Republican convention speech last week:

12.35pm: “As the mother of one of those troops [about to serve in Iraq], [McCain] is exactly the kind of man I want as Commander in Chief.” Ding! Fries are done Hit the bell.

Whose bell? The only Americans prepared to be consumed by patriotic zeal upon hearing a platitude like that are bound to be Republican voters anyway.

More importantly, I’m not convinced that reminding the rest of the voting public about their nation’s involvement in a vastly unpopular war, and tying John McCain into the narrative, is such a great idea — no matter how many times Andrew has shot his Bolt declared victory for the US and its allies.

Thought I’d better post the result of GroupThinkFC’s epic clash on Friday before we resume our losing ways tonight. We beat what turned out to be the most prophetically named team in history 14-1.

But what should have been a thoroughly enjoyable milestone victory over Target Practice turned out to be a drag for several reasons:

1. They were Emos.
2. They were violent.
3. There was a girl on the team, who got away with being the roughest of all of them because the referee clearly didn’t feel right about penalising a girl — and we didn’t feel right about decking her.
4. They were utterly humourless about their abilities (sic).
5. They pretty much conceded defeat in the first few minutes by deciding to defend for the entire match — an astonishing strategy, given how many goals we’ve had scored against us.
6. During the match, Testiclegate erupted, with one of their players accusing a GroupThinker of “grabbing his nuts”. Bullshit — we only ever do that to people in the bar afterwards, and almost always after buying them a house riesling.

Still, a win’s a win. Huzzah.

Toaf — who, to the eternal shame of every other GrodsCommenter*, was the only person to tip a GroupThinkFC victory — takes out the betting prize: a season pass with front-row tickets to our remaining matches, valued at $0.00.

But since he’s currently living in Nairobi, we’ll be auctioning it on GrodsBay … as soon as The Editor designs and gets it working.

* With the exception of EC, who declined to predict a result but — as always — declared her undying support for TehPeople’sFootballClub.

A mate of mine — who, like the GrodsTeam and many GrodsReaders, is a zealous adherent of the cult of Orthographic National Socialism — came across a clanger in a job ad at Seek.com.au today:

So he applied:

I’ll let you know how the interview goes.

The word Bertrand contains the letters R, E, T, A, R and D.

I’ll be damned.

A battle of epically mediocre proportions is looming at the Action Indoor Sports Stadium, with GroupThinkFC taking on fellow bottom-of-the-table-dweller Target Practice on Friday night in the ultimate quest for glory some semblance of dignity.

Neither of us has won a match this season (Target Practice’s “win” being the result of a now-defunct team’s forfeit).

GroupThinkFC has conceded two more goals than Target Practice but has also scored two more, which puts the aggregate slightly in our favour when the ratio of goals conceded to goals scored is taken into account.

TehPeople’sFootballClub is coming off a gallant 5-9 loss to the top-of-the-table Kectus last week, while Target Practice also found the back of the net five times in a slightly wider losing margin (5-11) to third-place Hennessy FC.

Both sides have clearly been salivating over this match for weeks — perhaps more profusely than all the other teams salivate over the prospect of playing either of us.

Let there be no doubt: if this were a prizefight, Don King himself would pull out all the stops to promote it.*

So I’m taking bets on the result in comments: correct result and closest to the score will win a prize so awesome in its awesomeness that they’ll be shocked into a seemingly underwhelmed stupor.

NB: An injury cloud hangs over The Editor, who dislocated his big toe during last week’s match. His absence on Friday night would be certain to have an impact on the result, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide what that impact might be.**

I’ve just finished reading Ned Curthoys’ thought-provoking article “Against the New Atheism” in the latest edition of the excellent Australian quarterly Overland. In it, he takes aim at several proponents of the “new atheism” — among them, bestselling authors Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything).

I won’t go into Curthoys’ piece in any significant detail*, but I would like to share a withering passage from it, on the increasingly laughable Hitchens — a prime target of whose fiery rhetoric (like that of many of the “new atheists”) Curthoys rightly identifies as “Islam and the Middle Eastern Semitic cultures of early monotheism”:

Hitchens, these days, is all about lurid performance for quick returns. Straining for a culminating flourish in the war on religion, he reaches for a classic trope of anti-Semitism: the Semite as mimic and hostile infiltrator of a superior culture. The technologically adept [September 11] hijackers, he fumes, are ‘continuing [Islam's] long history of plagiarism’ for the purposes of negation and destruction. By the end of his diatribe, Hitchens becomes a ludicrous Crusader wannabe, searching for light and right amongst atavistic barbarians. What is at stake is nothing less than the struggle ‘to transcend our prehistory’, to fight the ultimate battle against that ‘enemy’ who, with their ‘gnarled hands’, would ‘drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars’. Sounds like a case for pre-emptive war.

Hitchens is the thinking man’s KG!

* First, because the piece in question isn’t available online and I can’t be hammered typing out any more of it; and second, because someone of my limited intellect and lack of patience is unlikely to do it much justice.

The denizens of the Rightardsphere have been busy rubbing several layers of skin off themselves since Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate in the forthcoming US election — but perhaps none so vigorously as GrodsCorp’s favourite rhyming doctor, John “TingTong” Ray.

After reproducing a fawning post by US blogger Dick McDonald — in which he declares, among things, “My first impression is that we may have found our Margaret Thatcher”! — das gut Herr Doktor yesterday took the adulation one teensy-weensy step further:

I predict that she will one day be President of the United States.

Level-headed, insightful and well researched — as usual. Who could possibly argue?

I’d make this one a GrodsCaptionComp, but I’m fairly sure I’ve nailed it in the headline.

Attaboy, David Kirk … you just carry on slashing your workforce and delivering Fairfax shareholders short-term dividends on an organisation whose reputation and long-term prospects you’re flushing down the shitter.

In the meantime, we’ll enjoy seeing more of this and this:

Cockhead.

Received an astonishing SMS this afternoon from a number I don’t recognise, making reference to a supermarket chain that doesn’t exist in Victoria:

Some poor interstate bastard isn’t getting a root when he gets home tonight.