really? you mean he doesn't want to tax his freshly infused tremendous family wealth? who would have thought. god forbid the government try to take in more money to slow the hemmoraging economy.
are the neo-cons the most fiscally irresponsible lawmakers ever to hold power in the united states? well with the exception of andrew " 'mater sack" wilkinson from the fictional tennessee district of hog holler county, who actually burned the tax revenues from his constituents before buying a wagon large enough to transport the entire hog holler county seat (he claimed it was a way to avoid property taxes, and won every subsequent election in a landslide, even though it never worked. what can i say, my people aren't always the brightest.), the answer is unequivocally and somewhat confusingly, yes.
tax-and-spend is considered a bad word when applied to liberals, but where does tax-cut-and-spend-anyway fall in the spectrum? this is really going to suck in about ten years (not that it's a picnic now).
dipshits.

ok, a little more on this whole attempted popularity-saver push from dubya...

opening up the federal oil reserve is a too little/too late prospect. while it is already paid for, it amounts to a drop in the bucket when compared to our nationwide thirst for fossil fuel. the trickle from the federal reserve might just cover this weekend's nascar race at talladega. now, before you think i give a damn about nascar, think about this: my warehouse manager is driving (roughly 500 miles) to alabama to see this parade of fuel waste. average nascar events are attended by 100,000+ spectators. even if most of them aren't traveling quite so far, just try to imagine how much gas that amounts to for one "sporting event." we might as well just be pouring the stuff on the ground.

as for record oil company profits, here's what our fearless leader has to say:
"Americans understand, by and large, that the price of crude oil is going up and that the prices are going up, but what they don't want and will not accept is manipulation of the market. And neither will I."
i'm sure he conducted a thorough poll to determine what americans will accept. i'm sure said poll was conducted at gas stations, and was not limited to drivers of luxury vehicles, but rather a representative segment of the population. no way those of us in the lower 90% would ever want government intervention to keep us from spending rent/insurance/food money on gasoline. no fucking way.

ethanol: not a solution if it requires more fossil fuel energy to make than it produces. period. if we can use renewable energy to make ethanol, then we can talk.

that's our president. that's a man with his finger on the pulse of the nation.

goddamn, fuck bush

who would have thought an oil man would try to solve our energy woes via gasoline deregulation? it's so simple, a (hideously self-serving and greedy) monkey could come up with it...

sickening

another good night for jack. we got to sleep for three hour stretches, and he wasn't fussy until this morning when i had to get up anyway. it's amazing to me that a two week old baby could have so much personality. i don't get to go home for lunch today (well, i could, but siouxs! and jack won't be there), so today is going to be something of a drag.
on the plus side, here are some more pictures. what can i say, the boy likes to sleep (mostly in the mornings, just like his old man).

good weekend. jack has more personality everyday. yesterday, we barbecued the stuff we bought the day before he was born (purchased in an effort to get him going... obviously, it worked). i broke the landlady's birdfeeder, we invented a new sport (tongball), siouxs! picky sister ate shrimp. a good time was had by all.
i'm sure i have voiced my distaste for wal-mart at some point on this blog. i'm not alone in hating the monoculture bohemoth, but it seems that our dear friends in organized labor are standing up to fight. on the whole, i am pro-union (at least when they are actually fighting for their members, and not just to keep union brass salaries high), so needless to say, i'm right behind them in this one.
do we really need to be funding the chinese economy to the extent that wal-mart is? i have nothing against china, but in our quest for ever lower prices, we're managing to tank our own economy. at the rate we're going now, at least by the time jack has kids of his own, he may be the one doing the "outsourced" job (eventually, americans will be forced to do jobs at less than the going rate for the indians and chinese who are getting them now.) if this sounds paranoid, so be it. i'm strongly against pure capitalism, and i'm sure it comes out in these rants.
stop sam walton's monster or pay the consequences!

oh yeah, i'm a whore

i almost forgot... i'm selling cafepress stuff now as the ideas come to me.  rudegear, cheap!

god bless those magnetic ribbons. they're doing so much for us as a nation, and helping our armed forces know we support them to boot. did you know that each and every magnetic "support our troops" ribbon has a tiny camera embedded in it with a satellite uplink, so that the troops we're doing so much to support get to see the smiling faces of those they are fighting for every day? it's really remarkable how much money and effort the government and the private sector are willing to put into our troops comfort.

wait a minute. the proceeds from those ribbons don't go to the troops at all, do they? they go into some clever bastard's pocket (and the pockets of all the less clever bastards who followed his lead). putting a ribbon on your car doesn't really support our troops at all, does it? even flying your flag high won't help the war effort, will it? the ribbon on my car says "support the magnetic ribbon industry," and my brother the marine thinks that's hilarious. we as americans (i said we, so me too) are great at making a show of our patriotism, but not so good at actually acting on it. we'll spend seven dollars on a ribbon that says we support our troops that does no good at all, but if the truth be told, our troops would be better served if each of us sent them seven dollars so they could start saving for some proper body armor. true, rumsfeld won't allow them to wear non-military supplied body armor (or spend enough to get them the official gear), but it would be a start. perhaps they wouldn't have to spend their spare time welding plates to humvees if we really did support them.
the senate might as well have one enormous magnetic ribbon on it that says "we're rooting for you guys!" god damn, i hate (most) politicians, the self serving bastards.

but at least i have jack.

i just realized that there were as yet no pictures on the blog of jackie boy. here's a few for your viewing pleasure (please note, the mullet on gthedaddy was a one weekend only thing; we all got the chance to laugh our asses off, and now it's all thoroughly short).

jackie boy goes in to see the pediatrician for the first time since the hospital today, and i'll bet he's really rather quiet for her. this is because last night he never slept in bed for more than an hour at a stretch, demanding the rest of the time that one of us be holding him, not in bed. on the plus side, he really seems to like reggae and traditional ska, siouxs!'s and my favorite musical genres of late. true, you have to bounce him in time with the beat for it to work, but the island music does seem to work better than other types. it also helps if you sing along, which can be a bit tricky if the singer's jamaican accent is strong enough. though my imitation of vowel sounds is pretty spot on, i don't always know what i'm saying.
needless to say, i'm freakin' tired today. perhaps i'll post again later.

iran so far away, redux

jack made sure we knew his lungs were working well last night, so no one gets a free pass today.

 

after a week's absence, i almost have my stuff reorganized the way it's supposed to be.  i hate it when other people do my job, if only because they'll do it differently and i won't be able to find anything.

 

how is it that we haven't had a massive backlash against the president yet?  that bastard needs impeachment (i'd suggest burning at the stake, but that might constitute a threat), and yet we're letting him and his buddies whisper about nuking iran?  the best part is that we want to drop a nuclear weapon on them to stop them from advancing their nuclear (we're still not sure if it involves weapons) program.  we're still the only country that's ever nuked anyone, and look how popular it made us then.  god forbid we let a country in the oil producin'-est region in the world exist without fucking with them.

 

oh, yeah, and all this while the price of oil and therefore gas continues to skyrocket.  god, i wish i had massive oil holdings right now; profits would be through the roof.  maybe if we go to war in another oil producing country, they can go even higher, but surely no one would be in a position to endanger american lives for a greater profit margin.  that's why we never let the wealthy elite into the government, right?

 

sometimes i wonder if the people in this country want to be lied to.  it sure seems that way sometimes.

 

remember, socioeconomic strata only exist to scare those on the plane above (until you get to the can't-possibly-get-rid-of-it-all wealthy, who aren't scared of anything) and to keep minorities from gaining a foothold in politics.  fuck those greedy bastards.

welcome to the world, jackie boy

for those of you readers who didn't already guess as much, bootsy has made his entrance into the world.  Jack Everett Judd was born april 10th at 1:34pm in st. louis, mo.  he weighed 8lbs 9oz, and measured 22in.  he is utterly amazing, and well worth the thirty plus hours of labor (don't take my word for it; his mother says so too).  he's unbelievable, and here i sit, at work for the first time in ten days, missing him after only being gone an hour.

some highlights of my week off from blogging:

- jack.  what an amazing baby.  he isn't fussy, he sleeps pretty well for a newborn.  there were a few times in the hospital we had to send him to the nursery to get a little sleep, but on the whole, he was good about sleeping for goodly little stretches.

- siouxs!  a woman i have more love and respect for every day.  she dealt with the 34 hours of labor, and then, after three hours of pushing, went ahead with the c-section she had been dreading, just to make sure our little jack was ok.  since then, she has been progressing well, healing from major surgery at an unimaginable rate.

- st mary's.  the majority of the nurses were great, but those that weren't were vile.  i'm just sayin'.

- siouxs!'s family.  her sister tee was our doula (something like a midwife, for the uninitiated), and she was fantastic.  another pillar of strength in that family.  since jack's birth, her sister jeni has been absolutely amazing.  she has done several major favors for us every day, and all just to get the chance to see jack.  i hope that it is us that eventually get to return all of her love and help.

- the baseball.  i mean, did you see that game yesterday?

- the kaktabulz.  the eleven year reunion was this weekend (we somehow forgot about the ten year), so a few great old friends came to see our little jack and catch up.  it was only a few hours for me, but it was great.

- diapers.  in the hospital, jack seemed like he was never going to need a new diaper.  he went almost two days without pooping.  since then, it's been virtually nonstop.  i don't know how, but he seems to be able to bend space in order to pee on things he isn't even touching while wearing a supposedly super-absorbent diaper.  oh, and last night, while i was changing him, he managed to pee on his face.

 

i'll add more when there's less work to do, or when i'm home and can't sleep at seven pm.

at the drive in

non politics for a moment.

siouxs! and i recently purchased poison's greatest hits (which only has five great songs on it, but we're still not used to the whole i-tunes etc. thing).  needless to say, i have now listened to the song "talk dirty to me" more times in the last month than i did when it was on the radio, and in this time i have made a few observations.

just before the instrumental break, singer brett michaels urges guitarist cc deville (best porn afficionado/guitarist name ever) to "pick up that guitar and talk to me."  however, since it is in the middle of a rock song, one would assume that cc already had picked up that guitar, perhaps as much as a few minutes before.  i suppose it is also possible that he had briefly put down that guitar.  secondly, in a song called "talk dirty to me," one would think that a band trying to look as manly as possible would not ask one another to talk (dirty, we can only presume) to them.  admittedly, most hard rock/metal bands of the day were not the most masculine of folks, but they were mostly so vehement in their homophobia (see: rob halford), that such an exhortation in some bands would instigate a fistfight.  i don't know.  perhaps the guys in poison were cooler about such things (see: randy rhodes).

my last issue is with the guitar solo itself.  while any instrumental break can be metaphorically taken as "talk[ing] to me" (with the posible exception of certain bass lines, which are more appropriately "walking to me"), talking dirty is another matter.  the guitar solo in "talk dirty to me" is, at best, "talk [reassuringly] to me."  the closest thing to talking dirty is the little riff at the end, which could feasibly translate to "i'll let you see me naked, maybe."  cc deville should have taken a lesson from (perish the thought) joe perry of aerosmith, whose riff describing "just a little kiss, like this" in "walk this way" accurately describes a girl putting her whole tongue in your ear (you decide if that's pleasant, but it's definitely dirty).  for that matter, cc himself has done better in other songs (see: "unskinny bop").

so really, all i'm saying is this: "talk dirty to me" is a rock song about underaged sex.  it is not a ballad (see: "night moves", bob segar), and the solo should reflect as much.  cc, pick up that guitar and write me a new solo.

...short for scooter pie

never thought i'd say this, but bless you, scooter libby.  good lord, keep pushing, fellow progressives (it seems that's what people who used to be called liberals are now).  keep talking, scooter.  expose the crimes of the powerful.  see how they like their hour a day in the exercise yard.

there is a light at the end of this darkness!  think of it... a time when the most hawkish republikkkans will have to hang their sheepish heads when reminded of the corruption and evil perpetrated in the name of "conservative values."

no bootsy yet, but i'm thrilled at the thought of the vast improvements to the world s/he will be born into if this all pans out.

these are a few...

just because i'm always so negative, here's a few things that make me happy (in no particular order).

 

-feeling bootsy kick when i'm talking

-the smile on siouxs!'s face during the same

-reggae music and jamaican ska

-tony hawk licensed video games

-great plays in baseball, especially the cardinals

-wings and beer (fucking yay!)

-some of the modern drunkard chat board posters

-finding a five dollar bill in just washed and dried jeans

-ska and punk covers of terrible eighties songs

-other people's babies that smile at me

-kids playing outside

-great pinball tables

-making duct tape wallets

-halloween costumes in the spring and summer

-rockabilly radio

-cold beer, hot day, and a rack of ribs

-fixing things around the house

-soul music that falls in my vocal range

-the last half hour of a drive home to tennessee

-writing successfully

-clean baby smell

-the end of a good run

-breathing cold, dry air out of the freezer

-making my army men sculptures

-shooting pool with my grandfather

-real letters, either postal or electronic, from friends

-good stand up comedy

-walking the dogs on a pleasant day

 

that's enough positive mental attitude for one day.  if i'm not careful, i'll go all hippy or something.

 

impeach bush.

 

 

ding, dong, delay's reign of terror is dead

much like i didn't see the final score of the fla/ucla game last night, i didn't find out about tom delay stepping down until this morning, and what a smile it brought to my face.  the fact that he's voluntarily stepping down now means he needs to do something to keep from hurting the whole party, which is great.  i don't think getting rid of one of the most corrupt majority leaders in american history will do too much to help the republikkkan party's image (after all, they did make hime majority leader), but they think it will help, which is perfect (nothing will help at this point but razing the whole power structure).

we're winning, people.  we're showing the corrupt, the wealth protectors, and the religious zealots that they cannot keep us in check with a dismissive word or by branding us traitors for disputing the government's false claims.  everything that is great about this country is about to come back into focus (it may take a few years, less if we can impeach that bastard).  what a reward for living through the dark age this could be...

 

oh, and the redbirds showed the phillies who's boss, and scott rolen made them regret trading him away, so all is good with the world.

 

according to the cardboard wheel, today was supposed to be bootsy's birthday.  we'll see...

 

fuck bush.

opening day

the baseball begins in four hours.  dear god, how i've waited.

 

still no bootsy, for those who are interested.  siouxs! has a doctor's appointment today, so hopefully we'll know a little better what the time frame is from that.

 

on the off chance that you read this blog, lw, thanks for the phone call.  it's nice to know people are thinking about us right about now.

 

no politics today, as all those republikkkans seem determined to dig their own graves.

 

busy weekend, especially to have a pregnant wife.  my sister-in-law's birthday was saturday, so we went to eat a lot, then sang karaoke until it got too smoky at talanya's for the baby.  all in all, it was a lot of fun (and perhaps the last karaoke for me for a long time).

 

go cards.  fuck bush.