Rolling Thunder

This is from Rolling Thunder on Memorial Day, but that doesn't matter. Every day should be Veterans Day and Memorial Day. This video shows two of the things that matter to me most in life.

This is the last serious thing I will do today.

A solitary Marine holds vigil at full attention during the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in tribute to fallen comrades.

Thanks to hdcanvas.

Moonbeam in Arizona

Kind of a clever gimmicky tongue-in-cheek article about our Once-and-Future-Gubernador-Elect, who is on vacation for a last moment of sanity before plunging into the bottomless pit of trying to make sense of this place. This is a travel article with lotsa links to places to go in AZ, which despite its despicable politics is a terrific place to visit.

The details of this trip are hazy, and Brown’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests for clarification on Thursday and Friday morning. No doubt some people are perplexed that California’s new Democrat governor would take his holiday in a state that some liberal Californians are boycotting over its stance on undocumented immigrants.

But for many Californians and veteran Arizona visitors, there’s a simpler question here: You’re about to become head of a conflict-riven household that’s about $25 billion in debt. Shouldn’t you be in Las Vegas?

I'm sure they'd comp ya up one side and down the other if ya show up already $25B in the hole! A reverse whale. Heh.

But no. If it were still 1977, we’d suspect that the once-and-future governor was in Sedona, clinging to the back of a Pink Jeep as it rambles toward an alleged energy vortex (and that had better be clean energy). Or maybe he’d be in the hinterlands near Flagstaff, sprawled on the roof at one of those sky-watchers’ B&Bs, where the moonbeams come streaming down bright as day.

And come to think of it, doesn’t Linda Ronstadt have family in Arizona?

I think Linda lives in Frisco now, which already has a lotta Pink Everythings, but California could sure as shit use a few Clean Energy Spiritual-and-Otherwise Vortices! Available at the gift shop as you exit Sedona.

Very entertaining. Go read.

Oddball News of the Day

Protesters bomb police station with cart full of burning cannabis

In related news:

Local police appear to be the cause of a severe donut shortage and giggling epidemic in the vicinity of a police station bombed with burning cannabis

More Gamma Rays

We brought this to you first:

Did You See The Fire In The NYC Sky?

Preliminary chemical analysis of the residue indicates an otherworldy combination of five kinds of sausage, two kinds of kraut, and a tub o' Hofbrau...

Update:

Click to embiggen

Courageous investigator probes the innards of the apparently freshly scoured source of the emissions somewhere in Long Island.

Keep it classy, Texas. Yeesh.

Following up on yesterday's post about Manny Pacquiao, the relevant part of this clip starts at 1:50.

Kick his ass, Manny.

Note to Texas: Secede already.



Update:

Via 'comments', dar says:

Manny rules, win or lose
-daveR says - we might- be able to watch tonite via one of these:
http://www.sportsnmore.tv
http://www.sopcast.cn/download/
http://channelsurfing.net/watch-boxing.html
cheers

Thanks, dar.

Housekeeping ...

Again ...

Couple more adjustments made since last night (seems to me that the problem is limited to those to viewing the page in Google Chrome). Again I ask, for those who had problems with the page displaying properly, is it better now?

Feedback please.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou Blogging with a twist.

Catherine Britt (website) - Sweet Emmylou (Music Video). A tribute to the great Emmylou Harris. From the album "Catherine Britt" through ABC Music/Unviersal Music Australia. Produced by Rusty Gate Films.

Thanks to theresmoretocountry, Australia.

Housekeeping ...

A few of you have mentioned the page doesn't display correctly. I made some ... alterations. For those who were having problems; could you let me know if it's corrected? Everything looks fine on my machines so I'm guessing about what went wrong.

Special for us dirty old men

Victoria's Secret Fashion Show 2010

Damn, it's drafty in here...

LSD Museum

It's a museum of psychedelic art in Frisco, but it instantly brought this visual:

I walk in. There's nothing on the walls. I bring this up to the curator. He replies:

"There will be." He proffers a plate. "Have a sugar cube."

Why can't we have politicians like this one?

I've known about this guy for a while. Manny Pacquiao (website) is one ass-kickin' Flip! We need a few hundred like him in Congress.

LATimes

"I want to be a champion of public service," Pacquiao said Tuesday, after a workout for his Saturday night world junior-middleweight title fight against Mexico's Antonio Margarito at Cowboys Stadium.

Since taking political office this summer as a congressional representative of the Sarangani province, Pacquiao has focused on improving his countrymen's livelihoods, starting with improved medical care and education.

The causes are rooted in Pacquiao's childhood memories of surviving poverty, sleeping on dirt floors and selling cigarettes on the street.

"No money to buy food, hungry," Pacquiao said. "I'll always remember my past. When I was young, I had no one to help [me].

"I believe I'm supposed to be doing this."

I think I've got a new hero and role model. Get some, Manny!

Of course, the ruling elite in this country would never permit a MAN like that to make any headway in our political system. By being for the people he'd fuck up the gravy train. Maybe they'd let him mow their lawns.

Just as an aside, I'm not much of a fight fan. I don't care at all to see heavyweights shake the Earth while they pound the crap outta one another, but I like to see the smaller men, mostly Latinos and Filipinos (Asian Latinos, to my way of thinking) duke it out. They've got a lot of heart for the game. It's not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Quote of the Day

From a Paul Krugman column on The Cat Food Commission:

It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

Update:

Top Ten Suggestions From the Cat Food Commission

# 10) Cutting free movies when seniors volunteer for the Soylent Green Program.

# 9) Free toothpick in every tenth can of Friskies.

A hollow promise. Most seniors don't need toothpicks and they will only be able to afford the store brand anyway, not the premium brands like Friskies.

I like this one:

7) Presidential debates to be waged between the two nominees with a single broken pool cue in an alley.

Heh. Me'n Fixer've got a shot!

"Oh, the irony" Update:

Debt panel chairmen call for second look at the public option

Shorter: The rich will get richer and everybody else is gonna get screwed. Business as usual.

Arschloch ...

Tell us something we didn't know*:

...

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, of course, had a head start. After being ousted from office in 2005 by Angela Merkel, Schröder immediately set to work penning his memoirs, a document called " Decisions: My Life in Politics" which, when it came out in 2006, was not particularly complimentary towards US President George W. Bush.

He said Bush used "almost Biblical semantics" and, in reference to the US president's repeated mentions of his faith, wrote: "The problem begins when the impression is created that political decisions are a result of this conversation with God."

On Tuesday, the day that Bush's own presidential memoirs, "Decision Points," finally hit the shelves, Schröder went even further. "The former American president is not telling the truth," he said on Tuesday in Berlin.

...

Ya think?

...

Schröder isn't the only one this week to have cast doubt on the veracity of Bush's book. British officials have rejected the former president's assertion that waterboarding, an interrogation method considered to be torture, led to information which "helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States." The line is a reference to the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US. [my ems]

...

So, we have world leaders and statesmen calling him a liar and he admitted to being a war criminal in his book. Can we take him away now?

And on a related item: Fuck you, Jon Stewart.

Thanks to Chris for the link.

See what happens ...

When Gordon goes* to the All-You-Can-Eat-Burrito-Nite? Heh ...

*Either that or it was me during the night after my German "soul food" Veterans Day dinner with Mrs. F and the Widow Harrington.

Tip o' the Brain to Ol' Fez.

Today ...

Stays on top today. What Fixer said. - G

Remember the people who've put their lives on the line, past, present, and, with all certainty, future. Too many have left parts, or all, of themselves on battlefields around the world, doing what they do at the behest of politicians who respect neither their service nor their lives.

Whether the cause is just or not, it is not for them to judge. When you take an oath, especially in a volunteer army, to defend our nation, you agree to give your life to preserve the principles and ideals that made this country great and unique. You hope those above you will not waste or misuse it.

To my brothers and sisters in arms, who have served and are on the front lines now, I doff my cap and raise a toast. Thanks for being there with me when I did my thing, thanks to all those who came before, and a prayer for those who are looking over the barrels of their rifles now.

The flip side of Veterans Day

You hope those above you will not waste or misuse it. - Fixer

I appreciate thanks for my service from other Veterans and some other folks as well, but I come from a time when there were signs that said "Dogs and Marines keep off the lawn", when military service was reviled or at best ignored, and frankly I think the Repug militarism that has made people thank us now is a crock of shit. I have told people "Bullshit. Where were you forty years ago when thanks might have mattered?" and it shocks them, shocks them I say! Maybe I'm just an irascible old fart, or maybe I see hypocrisy under color of 'patriotism'.

Vietnam was less of a criminal act than Bush's War For Iraq's Oil. The difference now is that nobody blames the troopers for it or for going where their overlords send them. I suppose that's a good thing.

Here's the last coupla verses from Rudyard Kipling's "Tommy". He knew.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

You fuckin' well bet Tommy sees. He sees a country that begrudges him anything after he's no longer in service, that wants to privatize and charge him for medical care, that sees a vet living under a bridge from PTSD and claims he has a 'pre-existing personality defect' that his own service used to deny him benefits and help, that tries to rip off his death benefits from his family, that offers him a GI Bill and puts up obstacles to keep him from getting his lawful due, that employers think he's a mental case and won't hire him, that throws him away like so much trash when he's no longer of use to the Military Industrial Complex. In short, "no pull trigger, no get food".

Lip service. When all is said and done about Veterans, more's been said than done.

That said, I got my Veterans' benefits at a time when there was no concentrated demand for them and the VA was struggling to find enough Vets who needed them to stay in some other business besides geriatrics. Now that there's a huge surge in demand it's all about begrudging spending the money and our nation and Vets are the poorer for it.

DADT: Absurd from the Start

The Rude Pundit

Hey, kids, it's Veterans' Day, and what better way is there to celebrate than to fuck a soldier in the foxhole? Or at least that's the ongoing hilarious queer fear that's pervading the conversation over finally putting a bullet in the back of the skull of Don't Ask Don't Tell. The public and members of the military tell pollsters, in large majorities, either "Okey-dokey" or "Who gives a happy monkey fuck?" when asked if they think gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the armed services. So, of course, it looks like Democrats are gonna cave to the last people in America who still think Sgt. Joey Sissypants is gonna get rapey in the barracks with his troops or conjuring a lip-licking bull dyke who stands in the women's shower and thinks, "Smorgasbord."

An account of some Congressional lip-flapping that will make you shake your head at its ridiculousness ensues.

You know what would honor veterans today? To treat soldiers like grown-ups.

Unlike McCain and his ilk, who should be treated like the throwbacks they are. Perhaps it's just that their drool buckets and Depends need changing.

Dear Tea Party: You are hereby wonderfully, thoroughly screwed.

If it's Thursday, it musta been Morford yesterday:

To all of you who either flip-flopped your wishy-washy ideals and switched your vote from bluish to reddish this past election because Obama and the lukewarm Dems failed to solve all world problems in 700 days, or because you got yourself so emotionally riled up/mentally watered down by the sexy caveman grunts of the Tea Party that you actually bought the BS line about being "mad as hell" about nothing even remotely coherent.

Here is your grand message: You are hereby wonderfully, thoroughly screwed.

Oh darling, it's so very true. The fun-filled news is, despite all the bluster and rhetoric, thinly veiled racism and rampant Islamophobia on display, the new army of jittery, anti-everything GOP bobbleheads that you just voted into office doesn't care a single iota about you, or your haphazard values, or what you sometimes occasionally stand for. And what's more, deep down, you secretly know it.

You don't have to believe me. Just wait until nothing at all is done to service the Tea Party non-agenda, because it's ridiculous and impossible to service. Just wait until you note how there is no actual shrinking of government, no restoring some bogus sepia-toned idealism that never existed, no saving of your job. There is, of course, but one GOP agenda: furthering their personal stranglehold on all things powermad and avaricious.

But truly, the issues themselves don't matter. For what Boehner & Co value most is not so much making any sort of significant change in American culture, but rather, in keeping the anger, the dread, the paranoia alive.

In other words, they care most about keeping you in the lower, plebian castes all riled and blind as long as possible. This way, power lies. This way we find war and military expenditure and all manner of misprision, torture, environmental rape, WMD and homophobia, you name it. Just ask Karl Rove. Hey, it's a platform. It worked for Dubya. Well, sort of.

Let's be perfectly clear: The modern Republican party has one masterful, godlike skill unmatched by any other org in this century: Its leaders are geniuses at deceit, at leading throngs of blind believers into rabbit holes of war and fear and factual inaccuracy, often using an aggressively dumbed-down form of Christianity as a trump card. Sexual dread, mistrust of youth, of women, of gays, foreigners, of the ever-changing cultural landscape? It's in the DNA. And the Tea Party chugged it like Coors-flavored heroin.

And the Dems? The Dems wish they could be that masterful. Progressives are just terribly weak in fearmongering. There is something about the liberal spirit that values independent thought and self-determination, that defies screaming eye-glazed megachurch groupthink dread. This makes it tough to hold power for very long. It's so much easier to rally around sameness, conformity, institution, fear of the Other. Right, Karl?

Proof? Look no further than the GOP's leaders and mouthpieces: Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, O'Reilly and Fox News and even newly minted Senate demigod Mitch McConnell, et al. There are almost no liberal equivalents to these professional liars, warmongers, kingmakers and overlords. In the category of media and message manipulation, the libs have proven disastrous.

More.

Note to the teabaggers: You just shot your own foot off because you had an ingrown toenail. Fine. Trouble is, you shot everybody's foot off. Maybe you'll find out you were worked like a redheaded stepchild, maybe you won't, but we all have to live with your mistake, you fuckin' idiots.

Marine Corps Birthday...Ready...Two

Following up on the post just below this one, the Birthday dinner was terrific. I didn't know anyone when I got there, but I did when I left. One of my table mates was a Captain in 10th Marines (artillery). He was at Camp Lejeune when I was there and went on a Med cruise with my old outfit, 3/8, a year or so before I got there. Neither of us had met anybody else that had been to Vieques so we had a lot to talk about. That was brought home by Mrs. G when I noticed I was the last one eating - "Well of course you are! You haven't shut up since the food got here!". Heh.

Dinner was soup, salad, rolls, a humungoid ribeye done perfectly to my specs ("Tear off its horns, wipe its ass, and walk it through a warm room!"), baked potato (the finest butter/sour cream/chives delivery system known to man), and some veggies that were a little too al dente for my no dente. It was excellent. And of course, a piece of birthday cake.

Following tradition, the first and second piece of cake go to the oldest and youngest Marine present. Here they cut it together with a very nice cake knife:

Click to embiggen

The gent on the left enlisted in 1942 and spent WWII in the Solomon Islands (Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Vella Lavella, etc.) as a ground crew chief in the Marine Air Wing.

The younger gent enlisted in 2001 and did a tour each in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tradition was served. The older generation symbolically handed down the tribal memory to the younger.

Me 'n Mrs. G had a great time and will be back next year.

As an afterthought, I didn't notice the blonde in the blue dress until I downloaded the photo. I'll definitely be back next year!

Marine Corps Birthday

Today is the 235th birthday of the Marine Corps. I have decided I'm not going to be able to improve on the post I wrote in 2005. Please go read "The Birthday Ball".

This Message from the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen James F. Amos, and the Sergeant Major of The Marine Corps, SgtMaj Carlton W. Kent, marks the 235th birthday of the United States Marine Corps.

Please notice that the new Commandant (who has already tripped over his dick on DADT. Heh.) and the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps are delivering their message from our masthead photo at 1:37. You're welcome and it is our pleasure, gentlemen.

Of note in the video:

The custom is that a person is considered to be a Marine upon completion of boot camp. Pvt. Hector Cafferata was in a reserve unit which was activated and sent to Korea before he had a chance to do that. I think he qualifies as a Marine anyway.

Lt. Chew-Een Lee was just a fightin' m**********r who could yell at the Chinese in their own language.

Thanks to JMFiorato1986.

I'm going to a Birthday Dinner this evening at the Sierra Valley Lodge up in Calpine (ePodunk), which is where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of our Big City of 14,000 people. Sierra County has so few people that it doesn't even have its own jail.

If I'm back at this pop stand tomorrow, it went well.

Semper Fi.