We need government ...

And D-cap explains why:

...

We could argue the merits of a large and sprawling public works - managed by a large and sprawling bureaucracy. We can also argue the problems and pitfalls of the nanny state and an over-reaching legislature.

What we can't argue is that the underlying premise of government is to keep order,civility and provide for a safe and secure country. That safety and security is not limited to fighting useless wars and preventing those nasty turrorists from flattening buildings. It also includes the simple things like putting out fires and protecting citizens with adequate public health.

...

The folks who don't want government are the first to bitch when their house gets flooded, or when their beaches are polluted, or when the roads are impassible and want "somebody from the government there now". They wanna see the President come to share their pain and tell 'em "everything's gonna be all right". They just don't wanna pay for it.

I gotta ask my boss ...

If I run his business into the ground, force him to take loans and charity to get by, do I get a bonus at the end of the year?

And quite frankly, why not? Who has done more to help the global economy rebound than Wall Street? If ever there was a group of people who fully appreciated their role in a global crisis that will drag on for years, it's Big Finance.

...

Methinks I'm in the wrong business.

NY Nutz ...

Teabagger candidate for NY Governor, Carl Paladino, has spent the last 3 weeks saying stupid shit and then walking it back. This weekend didn't break his routine:

Is there some unspoken competition within the Teabagger candidates’ club for the title of “His/Her Royal Heinous”? Because if there is, I’m putting my money on New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino to walk off with the crown.

...

It was only a matter of minutes before Paladino had to explain away his latest outrageously offensive comments. He took to the broadcast airwaves this morning, where he tried to spin himself out of the hole he’d dug.

...

If Cuomo loses, it'll be his own fault.

Headline of the Day

Raw Story, with a video you should watch. Puke first to save your keyboard.

California shooter says he saw Glenn Beck as ‘schoolteacher’

An awful lot of Miss Becky's and the fringie wingnuts' True Believers are a taco short of a combination plate, but they're not short on ammo.

Marijuana, Once Divisive, Brings Some Families Closer

NYTimes

To the rites of middle-age passage, some families are adding another: buying marijuana for aging parents.

Florence, 89, an artist who lives in New York, smokes mainly for relief from her spinal stenosis — usually one or two puffs before going to sleep, she said. She buys her pipes through an online shop and gets her marijuana from her daughter, Loren, who is 65.

“A person brings it to me,” said Loren, who uses marijuana recreationally. “I’m not out on a street corner.” Florence said that she had told all of her doctors that she was using marijuana, and that none had ever discouraged her or warned of interactions with her prescription drugs, including painkillers.

“I think I’ve influenced my own physician on the subject,” she said. “She came to me and asked me for some for another patient.”

I knew some kids whose parents smoked weed, and they grew up thinking it was something old folks did so they didn't do it. They're grown now and have wised up.

I like to lump myself in with old folks who are smart. The circle has come around, and old folks vote. I think California is going to have legal weed come November.

Related: The view from Canuckistan.

Going its own way as only California can, an otherwise grumpy left-coast electorate is clearly tilted toward outright legalization on Nov. 2. But good luck sorting the yeas and nays.

On the Yes side you’ll find everyone from doctors to lawyers to Facebook founders to the state’s largest public service union. And plenty of retired drug warriors, who no longer see weed as a demon worthy of the fight. Even some Tea Partiers bidding to end prohibition in the spirit of government-shrinking libertarianism. For many, the argument that ‘if you can’t beat it, tax it’ is the glue that binds in a time of extreme budget crisis.

The Nos, meanwhile, are lined up in a mismatch worthy of Monty Python. Here you will find old-school Reefer Madness rejectionists shoulder to shoulder with ethically challenged pot farmers and the cops who would jail them — all agitating for the status quo of more war, albeit for starkly different reasons. Soccer moms, polls show, worry the ballot initiative known as Proposition 19 will bring proliferation. Beer breweries worry about market share. Small-time growers and cartels alike worry about the taxman.

Whatever happens, a substantial legal battle seems like in the event of a Yes vote — one which could involve the Obama administration, which has yet to signal how it will respond to California taking a legalized leap on what remains classified a Schedule 1 controlled substance under federal law.

“I don’t see the feds coming in with guns blazing. Even under George W. Bush there was only one single tokenistic raid in Humboldt County,” said Hoover, the Arcata publisher.

“But the fact right now is we’ve got these four sets of laws — federal, state, county and city — none of which agree. And if we can change to remove the faux medical mantle over it, great. When you have guys in leather baseball hats running around saying, ‘Yo, I’m a medical care provider, dude,’ you just shake your head. We can do better.”

Yes We Can! Wow, déjà vu all over again...

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

OBAMA INSTALLS SOLAR PANELS ON ROOF OF WHITE HOUSE
Despite fierce Republican opposiiton.

Iraq Says it Now Has World's 2nd Largest Oil Reserve
U.S. stops withdrawing troops.

Dow Over 11,000 for First Time Since May
Roll over and tell the guy in the next cardboard box.

Sex Survey: Most Women Fake Orgasm
But sincerely enjoy dinner that preceded it.

More disconnect ...

From Jill:

...

So let's see...they like Social Security and Medicare, but they want spending cut to the bone. They want Washington to be involved in schools, but they want Washington out of their schools. They want Washington to help reduce poverty, but they don't want social programs for "Those People."

...

We are so fucked in addition to it being Monday ...

This is how an empire dies. And we are going to be around to see it.

Unfortunately.

Disconnect ...

I don't get these people, but then, I don't get much about America in the 21st Century:

Toon stolen from our pal Creature. Click = Big.

Thanks ...

Sometime in the past couple days, we got our half-millionth hit. Thank you all very much. In the Big Scheme Of Things, it ain't much, but in our little scheme, it's a great milestone.

Thanks again.

Frisco Fleet Week

Article and photos in the EssEffChron.

Lt. Col. David Mayhan of Foster City brought his family up to get a look at the machinery he rarely gets to see as a Marine reservist stationed in San Bruno.

His 8-year-old daughter Megan peered into a high-tech sardine can that swims at a speed of 6 knots or travels on land with two dozen Marines wedged inside for hours at a time, knees interlocked, en route to combat.

After having a look, Megan decided she'd rather be a kindergarten teacher than a Marine.

"It smells weird, like oil," she said. "And it's dark."

Maybe it's just me, but dark and smelling like oil sounds like it beats the shit outta a roomful of kids who smell like, well, kids who are trying to give you a cold for nine months of the year. To each his own.

The photo gallery placed way too much emphasis on aviation. Some nice shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, and an inflatable Marine (aren't we all?).

The centerpiece of Fleet Week should arguably be USS Makin Island (LHD 8) so I went and scrounged a photo for you. Here she is transiting the Straits Of Magellan:

Sunday Homebrew Crazy Redneck Music Video Blogging

Tony and Larry Rice, Chris Hillman, and Herb Pedersen do "Hard Times" from their 1997 album "Out Of The Woodwork".

Chris Hillman on lead vocal. Some absolutely lovely flatpickin' and dobro work by Tony Rice and Jerry Douglas, two of the very best.

Video is northbound on CA SR 267 from Northstar Drive across Martis Valley to Truckee Airport Road. I was catchin' all the lights!

Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends

Daddy Frank on social networking in politics:

Sometimes I wonder if the most “real” candidate this year is the one most derided by Democrats, Republicans, the news media and late-night comics alike: Alvin Greene, a 33-year-old previously unknown military veteran who won the Democratic senatorial primary in South Carolina with 59 percent of the vote over a Charleston city councilman. Greene achieved his victory without giving any speeches, raising any money or stating any positions. As soon as he won, even South Carolina Democrats said his candidacy was a Republican prank. The most incriminating piece of evidence was the fact that he doesn’t own a computer.

As it turned out, Greene’s résumé actually is more authentic than those of O’Donnell, Blumenthal, Quayle and Kirk. He really is who he said he is — a genuine nobody with no apparent political views. That he drew 100,000 votes — more than three times O’Donnell’s tally in her Delaware victory — leaves you wondering if he’d have a shot at the presidency had he only been on Facebook.

Dingo Fence ...

They got one in Australia so I'm making my own.

The dogs sleep in my office, which adjoins our bedroom through an open arch. Over the past couple nights, the dingoes have decided they'd like to sleep in our bed with us. Not happening. So, since yesterday, I've been building a gate/fence to separate the rooms but still allowing sight lines, hence my absence here lately. Hopefully I'll be done this afternoon.

Update:

F-man's Dingo Fence w/Dingo:

Chooch: "Dad, I could begin to take this personally."

I got some detail work to do and then paint it, but it's operational as of now. Heh ...

Goin' Ridin'

I will ride this one in your honor, F-Man. Heh.

Update:

All went well. A good day. More at Fixer & Gordon soon.

Ohio teabagger candidate likes to dress up like a Nazi

TPM, with video.

The Atlantic's Josh Green reports that millionaire businessman Rich Iott, the Republican nominee challenging Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D) in Ohio's Ninth District, has an unusual hobby: He likes to pretend he's a Nazi.

Iott, a tea party-backed candidate, spent time fighting another battle before he hit the campaign trail against Kaptur as a member of the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division, a group of Ohio World War II reenactors.

According to their website, the Wikings strive to "salute" the "idealists" from occupied northern Europe who saw the Third Reich as "the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life" and signed up to fight for the Wermacht and "gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free."

You might be wondering why a politician would do something as objectively bad optics-wise as dress up like one of America's mortal enemies and shoot guns at stuff. Iott claims he became a pretend Nazi for the normal reasons.

He told Green it was "a father-son bonding thing."

Oy. Go read.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Live in Brussels in the forest National the 25th may 2006.

Emmylou Harris & Mark Knopfler ~ Right Now

Thanks to poupystar.

Friday Monster Blogging ...

Chooch looking like she just won Westminster and Ziva with a stick.

Click to see full-size dingoes.

Santa Maria-style BBQ

I'm going riding tomorrow and have a few screws loose* so I have to go work on my motorcycle a little.

*If there was ever a setup line...run with it!

I'll leave ya with this article in the EssEffChron that'll make yer mouth water. You carnivores, that is.

I believe I've posted before on the culinary delights in the area Mrs. G is from. The article is about the BBQ style there and covers several restaurants I've been to.

Enjoy. Caution: attach drool bucket before clicking on the link to avoid possible fireworks display from your keyboard!

We were just coming down from the bliss of our first bites of a barbecued fillet, jacketed with a crisp, microscopic crust of seared seasoning, when our waitress came by with the "how is everything" checkup. I declared it was just possibly the best steak I'd ever tasted, adding that I couldn't understand the rest of the country's obsession with barbecue sauce.

"Sauce?" She froze, a blank look on her face, as if the word were in Swahili.

"Where I come from, barbecue is all about the sauce," I said.

"Oh! I've never had ..." her voice trailed off as if she were trying to imagine a strange world in which barbecue was anything other than Santa Maria style.

Early rancheros who settled the Santa Maria Valley had no leisure to fuss with sauce. Their cowboy barbecue was pure: Cut off the best slab of meat you could find, season it and cook it to perfection over a red-oak fire. Serve it with a little salsa, a helping of the small, firm pinquito beans grown only in this valley, and some grilled French bread. Now you have the original California cuisine.

There you have it. 'California cuisine' ain't about overpriced small quantities of artfully arranged rabbit food on square plates.

From Guadalupe, it's a 15-minute drive through farm fields and up a coastal bluff to Nipomo, where Dorothea Lange took one of the most famous Great Depression photos, a portrait of a destitute pea picker titled "Migrant Mother."

This is also where Ralph "Jocko" Knotts turned one end of his service station into a saloon during Prohibition, later adding slot machines and a cardroom for a while. His renegade spirit lives on at Jocko's Restaurant, which moved to its current location in 1962 and is now run by Jocko's descendants.

Jocko's and The Hitching Post, also mentioned in the article, are the Gold Standard for the area's cuisine.

Again, enjoy.

Quote of the Day II

Brent Budowsky in a post at The Hill you should read:

Republicans are actually promising an abuse of power before they have power, if voters give them power!

The Dead End Quarter loves abuse of power if it's directed at 'The Other', meaning The Other 75% of us.

Headline of the Day

Leading Nevada Republican endorses Harry Reid

Bwahahahahahaha!