I’m really not supposed to eat pizza

…but if I do sin, Pizza Hut will be my brothel.

A new Pizza Hut ad (see YouTube video above) that uses slices of presidential debate commentary to tout a cut-rate pizza deal has angered backers of Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

“Are people seeing lower prices now?” the announcer in the ad asks before cutting to a debate segment where Kucinich says: “More people in this country have seen UFOs.”

When the vegan congressman disappears from the screen, his image is replaced by meat-covered pizzas.

Hey, girlz, you want some cheese (pizza) with that whine? If they really wanted to mock Dennis, they’d have replaced his face with a pizza with a pepperoni mouth, and a strip of bacon wriggling obscenely as he spoke.

Spiderman’s real name

…is apparently Vidkun Quisling. He’s working with the UN now.

I don’t know what Marvel was thinking. During WW II Captain America was beating on Hitler because everyone wanted to beat on Hitler. But they’re releasing this because nobody takes the UN seriously, and the Government Youth Indoctrination Camps need material for Socialist Studies classes. It’s propaganda, pure and simple.

I’m a Western Civ kind of guy, and when (not if) the Blue Helmets come here, it’s going to pain me to kill Jaap, Jacques and Uwe, almost as much as it would to kill Hank and Bubba…which is why it will be Europeans and not Africans. But a guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, in America just as in Iraq.

UPDATE: Ha! I scooped WND…which is quoting bloggers, but not the right one.

Little Green Snotballs after Paul again

…for blaming the Bhutto murder on the US.

But Bhutto’s position on US involvement with Musharraf is the same as Paul’s:

Despite the corrosion of her reputation by corruption and compromise, Bhutto appears to be America’s strongest anchor in the effort to turn back the extremist Islamic tide threatening to engulf Pakistan. What would you like to tell President Bush? I ask this riddle of a woman.

She would tell him, she replies, that propping up Musharraf’s government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. “I would say, ‘Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.’ I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.”

Vox Day and his commentors do a righteous job of cleanup, including this VD update:

UPDATE – this comment at LGF tells you all you need to know about the attachment of LGF and media “conservatives” to human liberty:

“I’d vote for Hillary before I would Ron Paul.”

Hmmm, and I see lgf’s new bosom buddy is a New York Times blogger, Virginia Heffernan, who trusts them because of the Rathergate thing. Too bad she had to retract virtually the whole content of the hit piece.

Whole Foods a little, um, touchy

The fishmonger of Whole Foods in Ann Arbor had just punched out on break when he responded to a commotion involving a manager and a shoplifter. He finally caught the shoplifter, but the manager let him go…the shoplifter, I mean. The employee, John Schultz, was “let go” the next day, Christmas Eve. Why? Because he had “physical contact with a customer.” Never mind that he was on his own time and on somebody else’s property (or that a shoplifter is by definition not a customer); touch is a terminal offense at America’s organic food giant — even, I suppose, if it involves CPR or doing the Heimlich on somebody choking on a sample from the smokehouse bar. Gee, Mr. Mackey, that’s not very New Age, is it? Or was it the violence? Should we all circle around criminals and sing “Kum-bye-a” until they collapse in agony?

Dudes, I love your cheese, but there’s the Co-op, Nature’s Bin, Mustard Seed (no longer Wild Oats, alas). If you want to punish somebody for refusing to cooperate with evil, then I guess it’s OK with you if I punish you for cooperating with evil.

Poor Mikey!

Mayor Bloomberg has taken out ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. No, he’s not running, thank God, but he’s chiding the other candidates for their lack-of-stand on his gun control agenda.

It asks “Where do the presidential candidates stand on illegal guns?” and features excerpts from a questionnaire that the gun coalition released on Dec. 9, asking for the candidates’ responses by Jan. 2.

None have been turned in so far.

Not one?! Well heck, there are 4 days yet. Maybe he’ll get one in the mail with FOAD written in red magic marker. Which is about what his organization deserves.

Cuyahoga Falls: loan shark city

CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio (AP) — A new law in the northeast Ohio city of Cuyahoga Falls places a limit on the number of payday loan businesses.The law restricts cash-advance stores to one for every 10,000 people. That would limit the city to five loan stores, but existing ones will be allowed to stay open.

Mayor Don Robart says the number of payday lenders was hurting the city’s image.

OK, I can see this. That a town the size of Cuy Falls can support more than five loan sharks proves that there are way too many stupid people living there, and that is bad for their image. Of course, the fact that they elected Don Robart says the same thing, so maybe he should resign. Seriously, by what right does a city government make such a law? If their “service” (in the animal husbandry sense) is not wanted, they’ll go out of business. It’s not like they’re tearing down perfectly good gas stations and multi-story buildings to construct drugstores, after all; they’re just filling slots in strip malls.

NAACP does something for freedom

Be still, my heart! Instead of just doing identity politics, the Cincinnati chapter has taken up a cause of benefit to all races: stopping Cincy from installing red light cameras.

Chapter president Christopher Smitherman says the cameras are part of an expansion of government into people’s private lives. He says it’s “very concerning.”

It’s probably too much to expect him to connect that expansion of government with the issue of freedom of association, but I’m more than grateful for what’s here. Libertarian tendencies should always be encouraged in political pressure groups.

Too stupid for college

Two young Ohio men ran into financial aid troubles, so they took up armed robbery to pay for their classes.

If they think tuition is high now, they should see it in 20 years … which will be their next opportunity to get a college education.

Ron Paul: dead man walking?

Beck asks, quite reasonably:

if Ron Paul is elected, what exactly is going to keep congress — not to mention the whole administrative commissariat — from spending four straight years laughing right in his face?

Nothing, of course. No more than anything will keep Paul from vetoing every damn piece of unconstitutional legislation (which is to say: all of it) that passes his desk. And Congress will likely win that one, with the passive collusion of the Secret Service; if Paul’s own personal Lee Harvey Oswald isn’t out there already, he soon will be. Which means that not only does one have Billy’s own principled objections to voting, but the very real likelihood that a vote for Paul is a vote to send him to his death. The little green footballs nonsense shows how low they’ll go, and if that low, why not lower?

The cultural trauma that we’re going to have to go through, at this point, in order to make our way back through the whole bureaubotic crusture will not endear any of it to your average dolt in the street. They’d take about one round of it — maybe — before they’re on their knees and begging for the whip. The reversal of decades on end of economic distortion alone would half kill ‘em.

A big part of that cultural trauma will be the abandonment of the whole myth of American democracy, and that isn’t going to happen until we see the thing blow up in 3D Technicolor. There’s always going to be the belief that “the right guy can fix it”, and that’s not going to end until we get “the right guy” in office. Ron Paul is the closest we’ve had to “right guy” in almost a century, at least, and if he is elected and then neutralized, a lot of idealistic people are going to take the youthful passion they’ve put into the Paul campaign and put it to better use. That’s why I believe that voting on principle is so important, because it’s so futile. Voting for principled losers is the pacifist’s version of “propaganda by deed”, demonstrating that the system is incapable of supporting change.
The open question is, once we get “the right guy” in there, will he stay right? The Russert interview was a bit disgusting on both sides, with Tim playing “gotcha” with Paul’s ‘88 campaign statements, and Paul saying, “I’m not running on that now.” He’s running as Republican now, not a Libertarian; the kite tail of the party platform drags in a different direction. I can’t imagine Paul ever being a total sellout, but at some point, he’s going to settle for incremental change, just to get something done. And if he does, he’ll be lionized like that miserable coward Reagan, with the same net effect on the course of the country. Does that mean that Beck is right, that voting is not only unprincipled but useless? Yes, in terms of direct political action. But not, I think, in terms of changing the culture. To extend Chodorov’s metaphor, having johns proves it’s a whorehouse; else it’s just a sexual charity. And people aren’t going to close the whorehouse down until they realize what the sex has been costing them.

Oscar Peterson is dead

…at 82, of kidney failure

I’m not a jazzer, much, but I always appreciated Oscar’s work. I have his Christmas album here; it seems like a good time to play it.

Tip o’ hat to Katharine Chandler (Free Library of Philadelphia) on MLA-List