Quote of the Day

Ol' Fez:

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This desperate attempt to call anybody that doesn't look like, oh, Darren Rovell (or Lou Dobbs, or Glenn Beck) "un-American" is the most disgusting meme the right-wing has come up with yet.

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Heh ...

Indeed.

PSA*

The Rude Pundit doesn't have comments on his blog, but he sure as shit does on his Facebook page. Go make friends! You don't have to be particularly polite. Heh.

*Positively Snarky Advice

Money-Saving Tip

Today is me 'n Mrs. G's 36th wedding anniversary. Here's the tip:

Instead of buying each other cards, we went to the greeting card display at Safeway and each picked out cards for the other, presented them, read them, thanked each other appropriately, and put them back.

Saved eight bucks to go spend on dinner at Village Pizzeria, which is a nicer restaurant than it sounds.

Gotta keep our priorities straight, after all.

Headline of the Day

‘Victim in fatal car accident tragically not Glenn Beck’

Just as an aside, I got to thinkin' how much I'd like to slap the dogshit outta Miss Becky because he's such an embarrassment on so many levels to this country and his alleged gender, but then I realized just how wrong that would be.

I would have had to do it before his transgender procedures were completed, and it's way too late for that.

How the GOP is killing America

The post title might be considered part of an ongoing series. In this one, The Existentialist Cowboy goes off like one of Fixer's party favors on the right wing shills who are fearmongering and demagoguing about how them Meskins are comin' ta murder us in our beds as just part of the larger picture about trying to distract us from what's really going on.

The piddly amounts of drugs sold across the border are a strawman --peanuts compared to the heist of US wealth pulled off by just one percent of the US population!

The GOP is either nuts or crooked or both! I often wonder what the US might have been if right wing psychopaths had not demagogued every war or every so-called 'crisis' and in ways that enriched only their 'base'! The end result is that just one percent of the entire population owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined! Anyone not of that ruling elite still supporting the elitist GOP and complicit DINOs is nuts! And I have no sympathy for you!

And if Mexican drugs are sold in the US --what of it? Isn't that just good ol' laissez-faire, right wing, GOP 'free enterprise'. How long would that evil drug trade last if 'yankees' were not lined up to buy? And what percentage of the GOP is 'hooked' on cocaine? How long would the border traffic last if 'white shirted', clean shaven GOP faithful were not lined up to buy?

Let's talk about the stupid people who have taken over the US and the shill media which kisses up to them. Let's review the implications of a recent article in the Texas Observer.

On March 25, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° rolled into El Paso to report on Mexican drug-cartel violence. Cooper was one more in a recent wave of national news heavy hitters to parachute in, scare the pants off millions of viewers, then jet off to the next headline destination.
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By God, they’re coming to your neighborhood! Looking at another live feed from El Paso, listening to the breathless reports of violence and “expert” analysis about “spillover,” viewers could only assume that the city in which Cooper stood was under imminent assault.

That’s the reality these days for El Pasoans. Or rather, it’s the twisted perception created by border-warrior politicians and national news media, and foisted on Juarez’s relatively peaceful sister city. For El Pasoans and residents of nearby border towns, it might all be a mere oddity—maybe even worth a chuckle—if it didn’t mean the construction of 18-foot border walls, blustery talk about National Guard troop surges, and new resources for the disastrous war on drugs. While “troop surge,” “border wall,” and “drug war” might sound irresistibly sexy to politicians and pundits, it’s border residents who have to live with the fences and tanks and consequences.

Enough is enough!

A good start will consist of shutting up the right wing media. Turn off CNN, Fox and the bullshit peddlers all over the tube! Secondly, the people of the US must effect the complete and utter repudiation of right wing practices which have, in fact, enriched just one percent of the entire population as some 95 percent of the rest of us have gotten poorer, impoverished utterly.

Secondly, the GOP must be held to account for war policies that have, in fact, bankrupted the US.

Much, much more. I love this picture and hope the late Señor Bedoya is enjoying yet another parody of his classic line:


I wish I knew how to say "Fuckin' A!" in Spanish!

In the beginning...

I was reading the review and ad for R. Crumb's latest work of graphic fiction and thought the last paragraph might be apropos in light of Fixer's post:

But, as every student of the Bible knows, there’s no such thing as a reading without interpretation. A big challenge from the start: how should God be depicted? In an interview with Time, Crumb explains that he considered rendering God as a light emerging from a cloud, or coyly recontextualizing him as a black woman, but in the end settled on a more pedestrian bearded and robed figure that he says resembles his father: “if you actually read the Old Testament,” he told Time, “he’s just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch.”

The oldtimers who invented the God we're kinda stuck with had to go with what they know which wasn't much.

From Crumb's wiki on his new book:

It contains all 50 chapters of Genesis and comes with a warning on its cover: "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors."

When it comes to creation legends, I would recommend adult supervision for adults as well lest they take that shit literally and think it's really so.

As creation stories go, I'm kinda partial to the Navajo one. Very colorful and doesn't try to make you feel guilty for things that never happened.

Hmmmm. Musta been a cranky old Jewish mother influence on Genesis too...

We're alone ...

One of the reasons I can't get behind religion. This is an image of the Milky Way galaxy, the place where we live. Along with the Solar System (our sun and the planets that orbit it), there are a few hundred million others in this picture. In the known universe, there are several hundred million galaxies like the Milky Way (each containing hundreds of millions more stars (presumably some with planets orbiting them).



So tell me, in all this vastness (that God supposedly created, by the way), why we are so arrogant to believe we are the only ones out here? That God created us and no one else?

You must be kidding me.

Off to vote for my local criminals ...

Pic from here. Link thanks to Maru.

The End of Prohibition

Slate

Why gay marriage, getting high, and going to Cuba will soon be legal.

The trifecta! I can spot a '59 El Camino a mile away, high or not, and if me'n Fixer go to Cuba together, who's ta say we're not on our honeymoon?

Murphys

If yer one o' them wino-philes, here's some more California wine country you've never heard of. We have a lot of those.

Norton Buffalo 1951 - 2009

I won't be surprised if you've never heard of Norton Buffalo (wiki, website), but he's been huge out west here for many years. I've been to see him at a lot of small venues around here. At times, his show was the only live music for forty miles. He made his harp rock.

EssEffChron

(11-01) 21:11 PST PARADISE (BUTTE COUNTY) -- Norton Buffalo, harmonica virtuoso, one-of-a-kind performer and consummate accompanist to the stars, died Friday night from cancer in Feather River Hospital, near his home in Paradise (Butte County). He was 58.

Mr. Buffalo, who appeared on more than 180 albums and spent 33 years as a member of the Steve Miller Band, was diagnosed with cancer in September. His life will be celebrated Jan. 23 at the Fox Theater in Oakland in a benefit concert starring the Steve Miller Band and the Doobie Brothers, with special guests Huey Lewis, George Thorogood, Charlie Musselwhite and Bonnie Raitt.

"He was the antithesis of East Coast cynical," said Raitt, who spent Sunday morning watching Buffalo videos on YouTube. "He was always in funny mode without being too gooey about it. He's been that guy all this time. In one guy, you got all the hope and optimism of the '70s."

Take five and go read about him.

Adios, dude.

Oh., the irony...

Ironic Times

China Signs Huge Oil Deal With Iraq, Huge Copper Deal With Afghanistan
Your tax dollars at work.

World's Largest Cruise Ship Sets Sail on Maiden Voyage
Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas has 2700 cabins, 33 Olympic-sized swimming pools, 1200 restaurants, 114 discotheques, 11 supermarkets and two cemeteries.

Big City Newspapers' Circulation Down 25% in Last 6 Months
According to reliable blogs.

In related news:

Cruise Line to Retrace Voyage of Titanic on 100th Anniversary
On April 8, 2012, HM Balmoral will leave Southampton carrying over two thousand print journalists.

Quote of the Day

Our buddy Nucks:

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Go buy some food, winter is coming and the economy is being dragged on the ground behind some so called expert economists like toilet paper on yer ex wife's heel coming out of the bathroom.

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Going to work ...

Sorry ...

For the lack of posting lately. We're busy as hell at the shop and I've been working on the Mrs. office the rest of time, trying to get it finished in a minimum of time - hopefully by sometime next week. I'll be back in form soon.

Remember?

Remember a few years ago, when Bush and Congress decided the President needed broader surveillance powers (we can't keep you safe unless we listen to everything), wiretapping our phones and electronic activity? Remember how we jumped up and down and the Rethugs chalked it up to "Bush hatred"? Remember when we said we didn't want any President to have the power to basically ignore our privacy rights?

Well, seems the current White House has gotten used to having that capability and doesn't want to give it up either:

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the "state secrets" privilege -- which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) -- to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government's domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday -- just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead -- as predicted -- the DOJ continues to embrace the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration -- which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned -- and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

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Sorry, but when it comes to this, I don't trust this White House any more than I did the last one.

I hope the rest of yer day goes better...

Thanks to onaitsabes21.

Oasis of the Seas

Fixer, this one's FYI. Also here and here. Oh what the hell...

Marijuana growers upend hard-luck California town

Go read about growing pot in Hayfork in the LATimes.

This hardscrabble Northern California town has become a hotbed for medical marijuana farming. Kids stroll much of the year past pungent plants flourishing in gardens and alleys. The red-and-black clad Timberjacks football team moved its halftime huddle on a recent Friday night to avoid the odor of marijuana smoke wafting over the gridiron from nearby houses. Some students talk openly of farming pot after graduation, about the only opportunity in this depressed timber town.

How Trinity County, a sprawling, lightly populated area twice the size of Rhode Island, came to be dubbed "Northern California's pot paradise" by High Times magazine is a story of law, lawlessness and geography.

Just a little more than 14,000 residents are spread across its 3,000 square miles. People live as they like in its mountains thick with trees, separated from civilization by windy roads and "No Trespassing" signs. For decades, that's made it easy for some residents to grow marijuana without much interference.

That's no shit. I went to visit a friend of mine in Hayfork forty years ago. He had moved up there from pretty affluent circumstances in SoCal to live with his grandparents in a cabin 'out on the Hyampom road'. Those were hippie days and he helped the old folks out and grew dope.

Hayfork is so far out in the sticks that its zip code is eieio. I got there from the west via CA SR36 which wasn't paved at that time for the last twenty miles into town. It was uphill and winding, and my biggest memory is driving with my left ear out the window listening for the jake brakes of loaded logging trucks coming downhill in the opposite direction right at me!. The upside was that after the first big rig appeared outta nowhere around a blind turn, they couldn't scare the shit outta me. If I'da known then what I know now about the sometimes lackadaisical maintenance on backwoods big rigs...ah, the innocence of youth, ignorance really is bliss, fools rush in and all that. But I digress.

The parking space for the cabin was on the opposite side of the road. Walk across the road, then across a suspension foot bridge high enough over Hayfork Creek (a tributary of the South Fork Trinity River and pronounced 'crick') so as to be passable during the occasional high water, and then uphill a little ways to the cabin.

By modern standards, my buddy's grow was pretty modest, maybe twenty or so plants in amongst his grandparents' vegetable garden which he also took care of, but growing weed was a major felony back then, so he kept it quiet. Nobody up there gave a shit, and nobody came looking for it. The local culture was all about logging*, and my pal was enough of an oddity that he was 'that thar hippie grandson of the _________s'. They're pretty friendly folks up there and so was he and he got along fine.

*Q: Why do loggers have foreskins?
A: So they got a place to stash their chew at lunchtime.

He'd been up there a coupla years and had something I had never seen at that time: 2lb. coffee cans full of manicured weed. Many of them. I was there for three days and never drew a straight breath, and no reason to. Pretty laid back bucolic lifestyle. Heh. 'Lifestyle' wasn't even a word then.

He wasn't in it for the money and only needed enough of that to get by, and as far as I know his only cash customer was his brother in SoCal.

Those were simpler times. My friend was pretty pure at heart about growing weed as the answer to society's ills and not much interested in money.

These days, like almost everything else, it's all about the money. I can see growing weed to make a living in these post-logging depression days, but greed has gone way beyond that as usual and has fucked up even little out-of-the-way Hayfork. Seems like you can't get far enough out in the sticks these days to avoid it.

Such is progress sometimes, not always for the good. Sigh.

Quote of the Day

Mikhail Gorbachev

By the way, in 1987, after my first visit to the United States, Vice President Bush accompanied me to the airport, and told me: “Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him.”

Jesus fuckin' Christ, 41, why didn't you tell us that? Coulda saved this country a lotta grief, most especially from your idiot spawn.

G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

Daddy Frank's column today is about the congressional race in N(orthern)Y(okels)-23 and is 'do not miss', links at site.

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

Careful, Pop! That 'die on the cross' shit has implications. But...at least they'd be dead. I'll settle for that.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. [...]

Ah, the visual - toe on the trigger, their empty head on the Moon!

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

Ahhhhh.....and then:

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

Ya sure know how ta harsh a mellow, Pops.