Peace out Suckers!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be away for a while. I was recently contacted by a woman from Benin with an offer that is difficult to refuse. Here it is:

CONGRATULATION!!!

Good day, how are you today? I am writing to inform you that I have paid the fee for your Draft. And I went to the bank to confirm if the draft has expired or getting near to expire and Mr. Ahmed Zafa the Director of the Bank told me that before the draft will get to your hand that it will expire.

So I told him to cash the $2,650,000.00 USD to cash payment to avoid losing this funds. However, all the necessary arrangement of delivering the $2,650,000.00 USD in cash was made with UNIVERSAL SECURITY COURIER COMPANY here in Benin Republic.

Mr. Ahmed Zafa the Director of the Bank here has to package the sum of $2,650,000.00 USD in cash for me. Then he also agreed to help me to register the Consignment with THE COURIER COMPANY. Infact I thank God very much for all the movement I made, every thing goes normally.

As for our agreement with the Courier Company they promised that your consignment will leave this Country on next week, But the Director of the COURIER COMPANY said that they need your contacts information’s to enable them meet up with you immediately the Diplomat Agent arrives to your Country. Please write a letter of application to the given address below.

ATTN: Mr. Moses Nwachukwu
HIS DIRECT EMAIL: ( mnwachukwu@sify.com )
Please, Send them your contacts information to enable them locate you immediately they arrived in your country with your BOX. This is what they need from you.

1. YOUR FULL NAME
2. YOUR HOME ADDRESS.
3. YOUR CURRENT HOME TELEPHONE NUMBER.
4. YOUR CURRENT OFFICE TELEPHONE.
5. A COPY OF YOUR PICTURE

Please make sure you send this needed information to the Director General of Universal Security Courier Company Mr.Moses Nwachukwu with the address given to you.

Note. courier company doesn’t know the contents of the Box. It was registered as a BOX containing Film Materials. They don't know it contains money. This is to avoid them delaying with the BOX. Don’t let them know that is money that is in that Box.

Thanks and Remain Blessed.

Yours sister,
Ms. Mary Kitzman

There are really people that fall for this?

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Your Obligatory Nobel Prize Discussion

Well this fucking sucks. I was all primed to kick off my tenure here at ATK with a delightfully irreverent piece about NASA’s moon bombing scheme complete with a photoshopped image of Charlton Heston kneeling before an exploded moon screaming “you maniacs! You blew it up!”, and then what happens? Thorbjorn Jagland and his fellow Norse lunatics in Oslow go and award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. Well, shit. You Maniacs! You blew it up! You blew up Rickey's post! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

And so I am now compelled to engage in the vacant beard stroking and quasi knowledgeable wankery that has become the hallmark trait of Around the Keg (by the way, thanks for having me guys!).

Now I live in an area about an hour north of NYC, and while you’d suspect that proximity to that bastion of liberal decadence would yield a more forwardthinking populace in my neck of the woods, this unfortunately is not the case. No less than ten times already today I’ve been subjected to the “what has he done to deserve this?” query about the Nobel Prize story. And my answer is this: when’s the last time you were elected to be the first black President of the Harvard Law review? (Hell, the only one of us who’s got a decent shot at it is Bob, and he’d still need a flux capacitor to pull it off).

They may claim otherwise, but the Norwegian Nobel Committee obviously isn’t awarding Obama the prize for his accomplishments as President. This has been coming for a year now. This award was already signed, sealed, and postmarked in November of 2008. Is the award premature? No, it’s overdue. What Obama’s Presidential victory symbolized to the U.S. and the world at large is too great to gloss over, even a year after the fact.

Yes, it’s a big splashy political statement, and as any naysayer will gleefully point out, it’s coming from an institution that awarded the same prize to Henry Kissinger, Yassir Arafat, and Jimmy Carter (oh how the right loves to demonize Jimmy Carter).

I, for one, welcome the conclusions of our Norwegian overlords and look forward to the shot in the arm this will hopefully provide the Obama Administration. And on one thing I think we can all agree: Michelle Obama will be receiving a deep dicking tonight. Discuss amongst yourselves.

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Weirdest Statement Ever

H/T to John Scalzi for posting this. I agree with his sentiments. I am not really sure who this is for.

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Don't laugh at Al.

Laugh all you want people, but Al Franken is no slouch of a Senator. Recently, he sponsored an amendment to insert boilerplate into a defense appropriations bill that will hold defense contractors more accountable for the way they treat their employees. Specifically preventing employees from signing away their right to go to court when they experience a sexual assault at work.

The amazing thing is 30 male, Republican Senators voted against the amendment.

What were they thinking? This is getting too easy.


Source: Think Progress via Balloon-Juice.

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Where's Rickey?

We here at Around the Keg are big fans of “Riding with Ricky.”

It has been a month or so since last we saw a post over at RwR. Visitors to the site are now greeted by a page stating that it has gone private. None of us would be shocked if the honeymoon picks got a little too risqué for the public, but frankly, we here at ATK are a little concerned. (And with no traffic at RwR, traffic is halved here at ATK.)

Despite the fact that recently Rickey threw off his alter ego and revealed that in fact he was NOT a black baseball hall of famer, we at ATK got over our shock and still love and appreciate the musings at RwR.

With that, we ask our readers: Where is Rickey? If someone knows, please have him contact us.

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The Decline of Conservative Intellectualism

Steven Hayward had a good op-ed in the Washington Post, Is Conservatism Brain-Dead? This is certainly not the only article to address this issue and I could probably find many who would say that it has always been brain dead. Partisanship aside, I have been troubled by what is happening within the Conservative movement. It has been harder for me to defend it and I wondered if it was because my beliefs were shifting or was their something else at work. While my beliefs have changed, sometimes radically, I still think that there are many good conservative positions on a variety of issues.

So, what is wrong? According to Hayward, the balance between populism and intellectualism amond conservatives is skewed towards populism:

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We've traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

I agree that this isn't a good thing. I am not a complete snob and enjoy some level of populism, but the voices from the Right are overwhlemingly populist.

Yet it was not enough just to expose liberalism's weakness; it was also necessary to offer robust alternatives for both foreign and domestic policy, ideas that came to fruition in the Reagan years. Today, it is not clear that conservative thinkers have compelling alternatives to Obama's economic or foreign policy. At best, the right is badly divided over how to fix the economy and handle Iran and Afghanistan. So for the time being, the populists alone have the spotlight.

This can be seen in the health care debate, too. It is not enough to just sit there and yell about Big Government. You need to offer some constructive alternatives. I am certainly not going to argue that Conservative priciples are the ones we should follow (I don't even agree with all of them), but I would argue that a vigorous debate, that is characterized with reason and logic, is something that benefits us all. We are not getting enough of that from the Right.

As a kind of post script, I don't want to give the impression that the Left hasn't made the same mistake in the past, but they are far more balanced right now.

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For The Sake of Curiosity

I offer you:

Fox's 2010 Great American Conservative Women calendar.

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