Some hot three-way...

...from Osama's stash:

Thanks to sabiratree.

This could end badly...

...kickin' some major grass...

...idle hands are Lucifer's sex toy...Gotta put my new lawnmower together - Fixer

Uh-oh...

Thanks to hdav727, UK.

Or worse...

Thanks to ThePerihelion, US Minor Outlying Islands.

Yesterday ...

So, Blogger wouldn't let me do anything yesterday morning. As Gordon says, idle hands are Lucifer's sex toy or something like that.

The Kinks - Apeman

I'll explain later. Gotta put my new lawnmower together. Yes, the landscaper's history.

Update:

So I was swinging from the trees yesterday. Like I said, Blogger was borked so I drug the girls out and started the tree pruning I've been putting off for the last couple years.

I took about 8 limbs off the big pine in the left foreground.



And did the same to the pine on the right. I only took one big branch off the maple on the left.



I put the maple on the side to dry after cutting it up.



I stripped the pine branches down and built a "fence" along the back of my compost pile.



And now, for the mower. I was pissed last night after the landscaper didn't show up (this, after calling on Tuesday and saying he'd be here Wednesday), not the first instance of his unprofessionalism, so I was gonna call him and tell him to go fuck himself the Mrs. called and politely told him his services wouldn't be needed.

So then I thought about it, what I actually needed as opposed to what I wanted (thinking with the head on the shoulders instead of the little one), and what I could actually fit in the garage (1 car) alongside all my woodworking stuff, two big rollaway toolboxes the heating oil tank (300 gal), the Mrs.' chest freezer, lawn implements, work bench, and a whole buncha building materials.

I ended up with this. It's a 21" Honda with bag/mulch and variable speed transmission. Cut the lawn with it (1/2 acre) in about an hour and it did an excellent job. The variable speed is a great feature and it wasn't that big of a beast to manhandle. Got it in the garage but I can barely walk in there now. Gotta get a shed.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Elvis Costello & The Imposters ~ Wheels (With Emmylou Harris)

or (preferred, but I'm biased)

Emmylou Harris ~ Wheels (With Elvis Costello & The Imposters)

Thanks to Terrabyte007, Netherlands.

Blogger was caca-poopoo today

So we went shopping. Later.

Final thoughts on OBL

From Michael Moore.

We did exactly what bin Laden said he wanted us to do: Give up our freedoms (like the freedom to be assumed innocent until proven guilty), engage our military in Muslim countries so that we will be hated by Muslims, and wipe ourselves out financially in doing so. Done, done and done, Osama. You had our number. You somehow knew we would eagerly give up our constitutional rights and become more like the authoritarian state you dreamed of. You knew we would exhaust our military and willingly go into more debt in eight years than we had accumulated in the previous 200 years combined.

Maybe you knew us so well because you were once one of our mercenaries, funded and armed by us via our friends in Pakistan to fight the other Evil Empire in the last battle of the Cold War. Only, when the killing stopped, the trained killer, our "Frankenstein," couldn't. The monster, you, would soon turn on us.

If we really want to send bin Laden not just to his death, but also to his defeat, may I suggest that we reverse all of that right now. End the wars, bring the troops home, make the rich pay for this mess, and restore our privacy and due process rights that used to distinguish us from any other country. Right now, our democracy looks like Singapore and our economy has gone desperately Greek.

I know it will be hard to turn the clock back to before 9/11 when all we had to worry about were candidates stealing elections. A multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around "homeland security" and the terror wars. These war profiteers will not want to give up their booty so easily. They will want to keep us in fear so they can keep raking it in. We will have to stop them. But first we must stop believing them.

Some of us never believed them, Mike. Some of us have been in bar fights and know a sucker punch like 9/11 when we see one, giving or getting. You hit the guy back, but you don't burn the bar down. Or the one down the street because you've always wanted to because they 86ed you.

Un-Bushing this country will take years, even if the powers-that-be wanted to.

Bush didn't want to get bin Laden

Duh.

Raw Story, with video.

Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Wednesday that President George W. Bush wasn’t interested in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice.

“I don’t think they really wanted to get bin Laden,” Wilkerson said.

“You could be very cynical and say he didn’t want to get him because once they got him the war was over and that left all the political advantage gone,” he added. “Or you could say that they knew that it was almost an impossibility to get him given what they had done to the intelligence and other aspects of the government that you needed to get him. They just about ruined it.”

Thank you, Colonel. Finally someone with enough balls to say out loud what we've been saying for years.

The Battle for the Soul of the GOP

That's kinda like the battle over the Obama/Libruls' socialist/secular/gay/Kenyan/Islamist/sharia agenda - doesn't exist.

Robert Reich on the Teabaggers, Boehner, and the debt ceiling:

The Tea Partiers don’t care about the debt ceiling. To them, it’s a giant bargaining chit to shrink government. Nor do they worry about credit markets. If the full faith and credit of the U.S. government is no longer honored, so much the better.

You see, Tea Partiers hate government more than they hate the national debt. They refuse to reduce that debt with tax increases, even with tax increases on the wealthy, because a tax increase doesn’t reduce the size of government. The Tea Partiers’ real aim is to shrink the government.

But the Street and big business dislike the national debt more than they dislike government. [...]

Tea Partiers have almost as much contempt for big business and the Street as they do for government. After all, the Tea Party was born in anger over the Wall Street bailout.

This is the heart of the civil war in the GOP.

Boehner is siding with the Tea Partiers. Wall Street and big business hold the purse strings in the GOP but the Tea Partiers are now the ground troops. Boehner and his GOP colleagues figure Wall Street and big business will stake them in any event. They need Tea Partiers to get out the vote in 2012. And they’re afraid angry Tea Partiers will get out the vote against them in their own primaries.

But Boehner is playing with fire. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised and the financial system begins to collapse, the GOP loses not only Wall Street and big business. It loses everyone who’s still sane.

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby... You're a good economist and usually you're ahead of the curve on these deals, but 'sane' and 'Repugs'? That ship done sailed, son.

Florida Outlaws Sex

When they outlaw sex, only outlaws will have sex! They'll get mine when they pry it from my cold dead hand... You get the idea. This is what happens when Repugs try to legislate science.

Southern Fried Science

Question: If your elected officials fail basic taxonomy, promote anti-science curriculum, and consistently attempt to undermine the fundamental unpinning of all biology, what happens when they start trying to legislate from this flawed view of reality?

The answer is this poorly-worded miasma of a law recently passed in Florida, which presumably was designed to prevent bestiality and promote animal welfare, but which has actually made it illegal, effective October 1, 2011, for anyone to have sex in Florida.

Text of law and a chart showing humans in the pantheon of animals follows.

So if you’re living in Florida on October 1, 2011 and would like to have sexual intercourse with a consenting adult, please check with your veterinarian or local livestock breeder first to make sure you abide by ”accepted animal husbandry practices, conformation judging practices, or accepted veterinary medical practices.”

Here's a coupla 'comments':

Jenea: So, um, what has been going on in Florida that made them think this law was necessary?

Ethel's reply: It may have something to do with the literacy rate?

Ah, yep...

F**PAC Goes Froot Loops Again

In case you missed it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tone Def Poetry Jam
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Top-down 'voter fraud'

BradBlog

Clay County, KY Election Officials Sentenced to 156 Years in Election Rigging Case

The post is mostly about that and it's a good thing, but it relates to Wisconsin.

It is now officially impossible to know whether thousands of paper ballots being counted in the state of Wisconsin's Supreme Court election "recount" are the same ones actually cast on Election Day. It didn't have to be that way, unlike in Kentucky, where the voters never had a chance, and where high-ranking election officials have now been sentenced to more than 150 years in federal jail following "decades" of manipulated elections.

Thanks to serious chain of custody violations in Wisconsin --- such as ballot bags discovered to have been left "wide open" and unsealed in Waukesha County, and ballots left completely unsecured for weeks in the office of the Verona City Clerk in Dane County --- that now make it quite likely the real winner of the April 5th election for a 10-year term on the bench of that state's highest court will never be known for certain. That, even though thousands of votes have now been verified as having been miscounted during the state's partial hand-count, and even as the hotly-contested seat in question will determine the ideological balance of the court during one of the most contentious moments in Badger State history.

With results that will never be known for certain, the razor-thin contest has now become a fully "faith-based election", in contradiction to the checks and balances necessary for true self-governance.

It's "faith-based" all right - the WI Repugs have faith in their criminal election-rigging machine.

Election truism #1: It ain't the votes that count, it's who counts the votes.

I hope the WI miscreants get caught and go to jail like the Kentucky ones.

Heasline of the Day

Judges hand down the law with help from Bob Dylan

Good article. The last line:

"When Chief Justice Roberts quoted Dylan, I thought, 'Oh, no!'" said Lasnik. "Now it's not cool anymore."

No shit. Kinda makes ya wonder what music the judges forty years from now will be quoting.

The Mrs.' Gnome ...

Was installed this morning.

I asked Sam if he had one that was flipping the bird with a sign that said "Fuck Off" and he told me if he ever comes across one it's mine. Heh ...

Click pic and watch him grow.

The next bogeyman ...

Is Osama's son.

Heaven forbid we don't have some evil James Bond/Superman Villain to keep the wheels of the Military Industrial Complex turning. We gonna hunt this guy for the next 10 years now?

One of Osama bin Laden's sons went missing in the midst of the Navy SEAL raid that took the life of the al Qaeda leader more than a week ago, Pakistani security officials told ABC News today.

The officials said bin Laden's three wives, who are all in Pakistani custody, said that one of bin Laden's sons has not been seen since the raid. The son was not identified, but Pakistani investigators agreed that it appeared someone was missing from the sprawling compound, the officials said.

...

I wonder how many billions they'll squeeze out of this snipe hunt.

Headline of the Day

Senate Republicans Vow to Gut Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Nothing new, but it dawned on me that just that one headline, along with countless other similar headlines that we run across every single day, tells us all we need to know about the Repugs' class war on us and who they work for. Not their constitusheep, that's for sure.

It's a slow day...

...and an idle mind is the devil's sex toy. Or something. Until proven otherwise, I will ass-yoom the following to be satire, but you never know with these clowns.

DK

WASHINGTON---In a move that has enraged childrens groups and their supporters, House Republicans plan to introduce legislation that, if passed, would literally allow lawmakers to take candy from a baby.

The Juvenile Confection Freedom Enhancement Act would allow members of Congress to legally confiscate Tootsie Pops, Runts, Milk Duds, holiday candy, Everlasting Gobstoppers, Skittles, Razzles and other sweets that would appear on a new federal Yummy Watch List.

House Speaker John Boehner made the announcement yesterday. "We're bored to death talking about jobs, and we're not making much headway separating seniors from their Medicare," he said. "But it's pretty hard to screw up taking a lollipop from a two-year-old."

You'll figure out a way, Orange Man. Boehner could fuck up a junkyard with a rubber hammer.

The law would apply to all children up to age four, Boehner said, with exemptions for certain older children. "If a youngster appears capable of fighting back, either alone or by assembling a posse of pals brandishing dodgeballs, we'll look the other way out of self-preservation," he said.

Sounds about right.

Believe it or not, there's more.

Yawn.

Kill me ...

Please, just shoot me and get it over with quickly. Heh ...

Tourism ...

Since I haven't been in touch with what's going on, except for hearing about Osama being killed and checking the weather report, for close to a month, I actually caught the local news in full this morning.

Seems we have a new tourism angle here on Long Island. The serial killer demographic.

Indeed, if you're a serial killer, or somebody who just needs to get rid of a body, bring it to Long Island and get rid of them near the beach road.

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. (WABC) -- Suffolk DA Tom Spota announced this afternoon that the eight bodies discovered along Ocean Parkway since December were the victims of not one, not two, but at least THREE and possibly FOUR separate killers.

The new bodies found in Suffolk County are not connected to the first four found in Gilgo* Beach, Suffolk County investigators have concluded.

Some of the remains recently found were parts missing from victims initially discovered dumped in Manorville in 2000 and 2003.

...

Now, the Mrs. and I know this area well. It's on a barrier island between Robert Moses State Park (where I used to cut school as soon as the weather got warm) and Jones Beach State Park (where the Mrs. worked to put herself through college), both beaches connected by the Ocean Parkway.

It's the perfect place to get rid of bodies.

1) It's deserted. The little communities along the parkway are mainly summer camps (set back from the highway behind 50 - 100 yds of brambles and other pointy shit, plus shit that gives you a rash) and there's little activity in the winter.

2) Jurisdictional matters. It's fucked up where the NY State Police patrol Ocean Parkway, the NY State Park Police keep an eye on the parks themselves, all the little beach communities have their own constable or two, and the county line falls somewhere in between the two parks so either Nassau County PD or Suffolk County PD gets called for the bigger crimes. Ain't none of those organizations gonna go poking around in the brambles and poison ivy on the side of the parkway if they don't have to.

3) There are always cars parked on the grass on the side of the parkway because the Atlantic Ocean is on one side of the highway (300 yds) and a picturesque bay on the other (500 yds) and there are sections of the beach where people are allowed to go 4-wheeling (with a permit, of course) so a car on the side of the road goes relatively unnoticed, especially in the winter when it's bloody cold out there (wicked wind comes off the Atlantic).

So, all you serial killers, bring your body parts to Long Island and dump them where they go unnoticed for almost a decade. While you're at it, could you spend some money here too before you go back home?

Thanks.

*When we were kids, we thought we were so smart calling it "Dildo Beach".

Bill Maher to GOP: President Obama Just Ate Your Lunch

This is outstanding! Transcript here.

Thanks to dubbleplusgood.

Quote of the Day

From "The Circle of Life, the Takedown of Bin Laden, & Why Bush Didn't Return to the Scene of the Crime" at Words of Power which you should read:

The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It's like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk ... It's as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes "Jew" and "Gypsy."

I think I will name my revolver "Neocon".

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Pakistan Threatens U.S. on Cooperation if Any More Unilateral Attacks
Will unfriend us on Facebook.

Michele Bachmann Compares Tax Burden to Holocaust
Koch Brothers to Anne Frank.

12% of Australian Men 16 to 24 Want Less Sex
12% of American men 16 to 24 just booked flights to Australia.

Advice to that 12% of Australian men 16 to 24: Join the Army. Your troubles will be over...

Where I been ...

Vacation's over. See yas when I see yas.

Beard-on-veil action

Will Durst on bin Deaden:

The most-wanted man on the planet. Found. And you had to admire the way it was done; members of Navy SEAL Team Six firing two warning shots into the head. One for each tower. The target was totally unarmed and never had a chance. That's known as synchronicity. Live by the sneak attack, die by the sneak attack.

In a way, it's too bad we ditched him so soon. Mucho bucks could have been raised by touring the country giving ordinary folks a chance to pose with the corpse like they used to do in the Old West. "Get your picture taken with the Butcher of 9/11. 10 bucks." Could have carted the remains around in a refrigerated casket shoved onto the bed of a Ford F- 250 traveling to County Fairs and Tractor Pulls. Like what happened with the World Series trophy only with more punching. Eventually the cadaver would end up in Vegas with its own Cirque du Soleil show, or as one of the stiffer stiffs on "Dancing With the Stars."

We also managed to retrieve a sizable cache of computer disks, which hopefully will reveal a vast network of terrorist contacts and sleeper-cell structures, but we all know what's really on them. Porn. Hot stuff. Muslim women wearing see-through burqas. Beard-on-veil action.

But now, thank god, this whole thing is over and our troops can come home and we won't have to take off our shoes at the airport anymore and can turn our attention to hunting down the next-biggest threat to democracy: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Hear, hear!

Evil GOP Bastards

I just discovered a blog called Evil GOP Bastards. Kinda cuts through the shit, huh? Here's their masthead comment:

Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, equal rights, civil liberties, church- state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, campaign-finance reform, the environment and tax fairness. No political party could remain so consistently wrong by accident. The only rational conclusion is that, despite their cynical "family values" propaganda, the Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy to betray the interests of the American people in favor of plutocratic and corporate interests, and absolutist religious groups.

Why? Because they're evil GOP bastards!

That sums it up very succinctly, I think.