to: jack
from: daddy

regarding your mothers favorite lullaby, "hush little baby," i have a few observations that it would be to your financial benefit to hear.
first of all, disregard the opening lines completely. you are still only one month old, little baby, and if you want to say a word, please do. it would be thrilling, and we could probably make some good investments off of all the infant product endorsements. if you have a particular word in mind, go with that, but if not, i'll bet we could make a lot of money with "similac." practice it in your spare time.
secondly, this mockingbird that is alluded to, i will assume is trained to sing a little snippet of a tune. i would hope so, as mockingbird song is not so pretty when they aren't imitating. if we're going to have to be cleaning up bird shit off the carpets, we'd better at least get a pleasing jingle out of the deal. however, we might actually hope for the mockingbird to be tone-deaf, as the replacement has far greater value. should the mockingbird be songless, your mother has agreed to buy you a diamond ring. i know this seems dangerous, and in fact, it is, but we will most certainly be putting said ring into a safety deposit box for you. before doing so, i will be taking the ring to a reputable jeweler, as your mother has a tendency to buy products as advertised, without further inquiry as to the quality of the workmanship. i will take her condition "if that diamond ring turns brass" to be an oversight, and not some sort of wealth reducing alchemy, for we both know (even you at such a young age) that metals cannot be transmuted into other metals. therefore, we will assume that your mother is only concerned with the diamond itself, which we will snatch out before she tries to trade it in on a looking glass. frankly, the diamond is the real bargain here. i'll buy you a looking glass, jack. we'll not be trading diamond rings for mirrors, not matter the composition of the ring. take my advice. i may not be an investment banker, but i know a ripoff when i see one.
i don't know if your mom expects the mirror to have some kind of preternatural glow or what, but if it proves not to "shine" (perhaps it just needs a good cleaning), you're getting a bottle of wine out of the deal. even considering our relatively lax views on underage drinking, i would assume that she's looking for a bottle with some aging potential. one would hope that she would at least consult me on this one, as i do work in the wine business. i'll try to get you a good vintage of bordeaux, but it'll take some doing, and frankly, you might be better off keeping your investments in something more stable, like perhaps, diamonds. this is also where things start to go way downhill for you in terms of profit potential. your mom, on the condition that the bottle of wine "gets broke" (a painful misuse of grammar, and from an english teacher, no less), will buy you a billy goat. now, i'm not saying that there is no money in a goat, but to make a real income from them, you'll need several milking goats (therefore nanny goats, not billy goats), and some cheese making facilities, neither of which is possible in our apartment.
"if that billy goat runs away, mama's gonna buy you another day." this is puzzling to me, as i can't figure if it means that you're out of luck and will have to start afresh tomorrow in this whirlwind commodities trading, or if someone has a contract on your life, and she has been wiring the assassin funds to stave off your execution. either way, tomorrow, let's see if we can get another diamond. if we keep stockpiling them for a few weeks, i know a guy. we can go live out our days in the Caribbean. as long as she learns a little about exchange rates first, your mom can come too.

what do you want to bet that if you're reading this blog, you're a target of the nsa phone record collection? it does make you highly suspicious after all. this blog contains subversive materials/writings, and its author is not a blind flag-waving screamingly zealous pseudo-patriot, so, by association, you are a terrorist.
i realize that this must come as a shock to you, but i have a few tips to make coming to grips with your obvious emnity towards the united states a little easier.

- when making phone calls to your terrorist buddies, be sure to use a clever code. for example, when you mean "we're going to set off a roadside bomb along the entire length of i-70 to strike at the heartland" you could say "we're just going to sit around the house and watch a few movies."

- change your e-mail signature to "yours in terror."

- whenever speaking outdoors, aim your head skyward. how else are the satellite lip-readers supposed to figure out your evil machinations?

- be sure to speak ill of our dear president when in public to identify yourself as a terrorist.

- when booking a plane ticket, try not to give away too much info. for example, try not to say "i'd like a one way ticket through the wall of the oval office, i mean, to the dallas/fort worth airport."

if you follow these steps, your transition from being a terrorist (secretly, unbeknownst, even to you) into a fully functional terrorist (as broadcast by the nrc and the nsa) will be smooth as can be.

go ahead and cut those capital gains taxes again. go ahead and cut the taxes on dividends again. it ain't gonna matter after the poor and middle class revolt.

and oh yeah, you mean jack abramhoff wasn't the only crooked lobbyist in washington?

burn, fundies, burn.

so let me get this straight. dubya wants to put the head of the nsa, perpetrators of the illegal and frankly terrifying wiretap scandal in charge of the cia? i know they're all seperate organizations, but i'm pretty sure cia chief trumps head of the nsa. so either the guy is the mastermind behind, was complicit in, or was totally unaware that this wrongdoing was taking place, and he's getting a promotion?

let's try a comparison. you are a cashier for a family owned restaurant. one day, the cash register turns up empty. the managers try to put up a smokescreen, explaining to the owner that the till needed to be emptied to pay the insurance premium, but the fact remains that the money is missing, almost definitely by illegal means. now, you are the person in charge of the cash register. only you and the managers ever have access to the drawer, and you are the one who stands by it all day long. if you sat there and let the till be stolen, you deserve to be fired for negligence of your duties. if you used your key to open the drawer, and then waled away, letting one of the managers take the money, you deserve to be fired for being a part of the conspiracy to steal. if you had the idea in the first place, you're probably going to jail. but amazingly, after one manager quits to avoid a big fuss over the whole thing, the owner decides to make you manager in his place.

apply this to the situation we're seeing, and get back to me.

and here i thought dubya was so tight with vincente fox because of his proficiency en la lingua español...
good god, the man can't even speak english properly, scott, why would he be able to speak a second language fluently? the funniest part is that his ignorance is being used as a protective measure here (and not in a "i have no reccollection of that, senator" kind of way).

and according to this headline, he can't count either.

god, i only wish this excerpt meant what i thought it did...
Republicans fear an Election Day massacre.
see the full article here

this is downright scary on multiple levels. sure. lots of people in the country (and the rest of the world) pray. that's no excuse for a theocratic regime like dubya's. also, i think it's funny that he thinks the average citizen would be asking him about potholes.

and finally, this is a few days old, but is perhaps the most frightening of all. i'm not saying there shouldn't be any check on the supreme court's power, but the lawmaking body shouldn't have oversight of the law checking body. period. especially not the highest court in the land.

republikkkans are scary when they're cornered...

thank god for our brilliant lawmakers. they're talking about passing a law that would place penalties on energy price gouging. how revolutionary. does anyone believe that there will be a single corporate bandit taken down with such a law? this law would make a nationwide standard for price-gouging (likely at the expense of states with a lower cost of living), but it won' t address the real problem. oil companies are currently taking a certain percentage of the price of oil as their profit. this percentage has remained the same even thought the price of oil has skyrocketed, pulling the profits through the roof as well. when the price of oil goes this high, the oil companies need to lower the percentage to take some of the pain out of filling up.
but i guess that makes me a communist.
fucking republikkkans.

bolivia has nationalized its natural gas industry in an attempt to avoid being exploited by the energy gobbling united states, adding another latin american country to the list of "people who are tired of being exploited by the united states." another major component of this group is "most americans."
even most of the democrats don't really care about the little guy. (one of) the problem(s) with representative democracy is that too much effort is expended trying to be reelected. we need to cut their salaries down to a living wage; maybe then, we could get some leaders who were actually in it to be the voice of their constituents. i'll bet they'd fight a lot harder for universal health care if they were uninsured.

yeah, i'm trying to pick a class fight. rich political bastards.

today marks the three year anniversary of the flightsuit aircraft carrier "mission accomplished" speech. three years ago, our president tried to claim that major combat operations in iraq were over. in that three years vast numbers more american soldiers have died than during the official war itself. every day, thanks to dubya, rumsfeld, cheney, etc., we create new terrorists (and though it was hardly true when it was a talking point, now there are lots of foreign fighters using iraq as a great place to hurt the people of united states on pennies a day). can we really continue to believe that this man has the best interests of our troops in mind? are there any remaining military families who are glad they voted for him instead of kerry? as only a man who has never risked his own life can do, george w bush is wasting the lives of our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, and a disproportionately large percentage of our working class and poor teenagers. does this man care about anything but his own personal wealth (and the wealth of those close to him, so they can be there to bail him out as his dad had to on more than one occasion due to his business incompetence).
he doesn't care about any of the lives lost in the name of "freedom." he profanes the names of the september eleventh victims by using them the create more useless death and to perpetuate the fear that makes everyone else willing to give up their rights. he casually spends the lives of our troops to fight a meaningless war, and now is talking about the possibility of doing it all again in iran, which is much larger than iraq, and would be infinitely more dangerous for our already weary military.
happy anniversary, you vile bastard. i'd wish you to taste the acid that should come from your contemptible deeds, but you'd probably have something from your pharmabuddies for that already.
fuck bush.

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.

random friday stuff

i'm back in this moment to moment mentality... i can't concentrate on anything today.  people are pissing me off without meaning to.

 

baseball is about to start for real, and i'm excited about that, though i doubt i'll be able to follow it as much because of the baby.  we'll see.

 

i had a dream about bootsy last night.  s/he spill kool-whip on me.  i wish i had a read on that one.

 

republikkkans... bastards

 

demokkkrats... innefectual bastards

 

i've been so busy at work lately, i haven't had time for these flighty spells.  at least today is friday.  i need a drink.

 

perhaps more later.

fuck bush.

vaffanculo

antonin scalia, aka tactmaster flash, is a real dick.

we all knew this anyway, but now, we have it on camera.  and i quote, "to my critics, i say, ?vaffanculo."  let's break that down, shall we?

"to my critics" - by whom, tony can only mean every american who doesn't want to  torture the brown people.  those bastards.  how can any good red-blooded american not find it in their heart to attach alligator clamps to the nipples of any afghani/arab we can get our hands on (and if he/she is a terrorist, bonus!)? 

who else might be a critic of antonin scalia?  those terrible people who think every woman is a hostage to her own uterus?  those people who don't value human life so much that they'll kill for it?

critics of antonin scalia: the gays and gay sympathizers.  in fact, anyone who thinks that anything other than missionary position vanilla sex is ok must be a critic of scalia.

 

i guess that's why he told us all to "go get fucked up the ass" in that cute sicilian accent of his.  sorry tony, but i don't swing that way.  if there was any real justice in the world, you'd be hearing that every night in sing sing (but not just in italian).

 

pardon my (possibly misspelled) french, but "vas tous fait foutre en cul, antonin."

 

or "chinga tu culo."  whichever works better for you.

rah! rah! rah!

the demokkkrats have a plan!  it may not be much, but it's a start, and it's something we can all get behind.  that's right, five years after the terrorists attacked us, let's actually go get osama bin laden, the guy responsible!  who'd have thought?  after careful searching, we have determined that he is not in iraq (where he was never even rumored to be, but wouldn't that have been clever of him?).  all of our intelligence leads us to believe that he is in afghanistan or (more likely) pakistan, some of the toughest country on the planet.  fortunately for us, the area is largely populated by afghanis, some of the toughest people on the planet!  someone over there can probably point to the right cave, or perhaps to the dialysis machine that he has to get to on a pretty regular basis.  justice will be served!

and then, we can stop making things worse in iraq.  we'll need to pull back on our troops there, though not all at once.  in all likelyhood, we're going to be paying for that mess for years to come.  hopefully it's a problem we can help with "aid" as opposed to one that will have to be paid in "blood" collected by all the "people who never in a million years would have been terrorists had we not pissed them off so much in the last three years."

stand together, demokkkrats.  you might just be onto something.

 

fuck bush.

la migra

ok, frankly, i think it's a political dodge at a time when republikkkans need to take some heat off of themselves and dubya, but here it is: immigration. 

 

there's a sign on the statue of liberty that basically says we want to add all of the world's strivers and seekers to our mix.  some of the greatest achievers throughout american history have been immigrants.  with the exception of the native americans, we are all immigrants.

 

blah blah blah, you've heard all of that before.

 

i say open that shit up.  let 'em all in.  yes, quarantine the diseased, background check if necessary, but open the borders.  worried about illegal immigrants taking american jobs?  if everyone is legal, no one can pay an immigrant a dollar an hour to bust his ass all day long.  we would even be creating jobs, as we'd have to get a lot more immigration officials to handle the increased flow.

 

if you take the "keep them out" mentality that most conservatives have towards non-white immigrants and combine it with the christian fanatics wanting to outlaw abortion and gay adoption, it all becomes clear.  they want to have our very own home-bred underclass.  let the bottom rung speak english they say in their xenophobic shrieks.

 

(here's hoping an el salvadorian) fuck(s both of the) bush (twins).

anticipation

still no bootsy yet, but it's looming closer.

 

slow weekend, busy monday.  we have a container-load of wine coming in today, and as i have been for the past week or so, i am trying to ready things for my absence.  i spent the weekend fixing things, installing a baby gate (mostly for the dogs), figuring out how to put the car seat in, and other such preparatory stuff.  i feel like i need to be done preparing now and just wait for the baby, but every time i try to sit down, i think of something else that really would be easier to do now.  modern drunkards have told me to sleep, but that isn't so easy right now either.

 

sometimes recently i have been thinking about bringing a baby into this corrupt and dangerous world.  i refuse to teach this baby that fear is a way of life like the republikkkans are trying to sell us, but at the same time, there are so many things that i will have to fear for my child that my mother didn't have to worry about when i was growing up.  despite my patent refusal to fear the arab world, dubya is creating tomorrow's america-hating terrorists today.  according to the online database, there are dozens of registered sex offenders living in a two mile radius of my house.  christian fundamentalists are worming their way into greater levels of power in an attempt at a christian theocracy in which i don't want my child to grow up.

 

i refuse to live in fear.  call me a sci-fi nerd if you must but "fear is the mind killer."

 

fuck you, dubya.  i'm not afraid of you.

kill 'em all, and let the devil shake their hands

i'm a few hours late in seeing it, but i just read an americablog post about left wing loonies versus right wing loonies.  the basic premise was that we left wingers don't have the same level of hatred and fear that the right wing psychos do.  i would have to ammend that statement somewhat.  as anyone who has read more than one post of mine knows, i am quite full of anger.  invective spews forth from my mouth and fingertips any time i hear of the latest atrocity.  i seeth every time i see a neo-con bastard lying to the populace on tv, and bubble over with hatred every time i hear republikkkan talking points reported as fact by "objective" news sources.

 

the difference is that mine is righteous anger.  likely due to my literalist nature, i have an overdeveloped sense of fair play.  i never did fully come to terms with "well, the world is unfair" and as a result, i am a liberal.  fair play also explains to some large extent my belief that not everyone deserves to live.  in my opinion, if a murderer can be proven to have killed another person maliciously, their life is forfeit.  or, on a broader scale, if an administration official sends people off to die with callous disregard for their lives (and on evidence known to be flawed), their lives are equally worthless.

 

that's right, i am am really saying that.  bush, cheney, rumsfeld, etc. deserve the chair, the gas chamber, lethal injection, hanging, or beheading for the iraq war.  afghanistan is another story; at least we had some reason for being there (though regime change was not it).

 

i guess my usual fuck bush isn't strong enough today.

"bar" = twat

just in case anyone thought i missed it, barbera bush is a twat.  i'm usually inclined to give the matriarch of a family the benefit of the doubt, but seriously, to make a tax deductible donation to her son and herself?  when our baby is born, can we make a tax deductible to the baby?  well, let's see,  if we channel it through a legitimate non-profit organization, then earmark the enourmous sum for use with a specific company that the baby will run and we have invested in...  i think we can pull this off.

 

fuck all them bushes...

don't fear the irony

conservatives are a bunch of whiny little brats, according to a study at uc berkeley.  ok, perhaps every study coming out of berkeley is a little suspect, but it brings up an interesting point.  fear makes people conservative.  fear makes people look to traditions for the answers rather than seeking them in the here and now.  fear of foreigners makes them tighten border security, even as the fear of having to scrub a toilet makes them then pass guest worker legislation.  fear of arabs is beaten into the population to alleviate the elite's fear that the oil is going to run out, then this raises the price of crude, thus alleviating the wealth monsters' fear that profit margins might fall.  fear of biological warfare is parlayed into increased duct tape profits.  fear of change gets an incompetent reelected, almost every time.

 

fuck bush

question for the two person multitudes

i really hate it when someone else does my job.  yesterday, my immediate boss got into a twenty minute phone call that i had already taken care of.  the whole thing could have been taken care of with a quick "did you do x already?," but instead turned into a twenty minute phone call and a passive aggressive hint that someone else has to do part of my job for me.  i hate people sometimes, and passive aggressive people all the time. 

 

i've been thinking about splitting this blog into two.  one would be my political rants, one would be everything else.  my four readers, what do you think?  do you mind the mixed-up-never-know-what-he's-gonna-post-next nature of this blog, or (perhaps more to the point) do you even care?  i so rarely get comments that i wonder if anyone actually reads this stuff.  i'd continue anyway, because it serves as a semi-diary for me, but that's me.

 

check out the new annotated rant.  very informative and funny.

 

fuck bush

can't believe...

dear god, i spoke too soon in my last post.  dubya announced today that troops will stay in iraq until the end of his presidency.  i thought that him still being president for three more years was punishment enough, but now he's just letting us know directly that the poor and their children mean nothing to him.  let's see, 2300 american dead in the first three years, so by extrapolation, 4600 during his reign of terror (and god knows how many iraqis)?  how many deaths can one being take weighing on one's soul?

tuesday afternoon ennui

i think i'm suffering from outrage overload.  true, i am still capable of high moments of passion, but these days, our government pisses me off so much every day that i feel like i can't retain new grievances (that is, unless i drop one of the existing ones).

 

the cardinals need a quality second baseman.  how i wish i could play second base.  or baseball.  or sports.

 

still no baby, but the prospect looms ever closer.

 

the status quo seems to be pretty damned static right now.  i'm saving bottles and kerosene to change that.

 

fuck bush.

 

 

monday afternoon tired ass tired

that dirty bastard son of a bitch prez is trying to use his own failures and idiocy to get his wealthy folks tax cut/education funding slash passed.  please, both of my readers, tell two someones about this.  if we continue spreading the news, maybe something will be done.

 

i've been breaking my ass in the warehouse all day, so today will be a short post, unless they manage to make me angry enough to post again.

 

fuck bush.

and iran so far away

what will it take to take down this dangerously powerful monster?

who can stop the runaway freight train loaded with evil?

what can we, as americans, do to stop these religious zealots from destoying our way of life?

 

as no doubt my astute reader(s) have already guessed, i don't think that iran is a danger to us, theocracy or no theocracy (us or them).  i believe the head of the joint chiefs of staff when he told us that iran was not responsible for creating ied's for the iraqi insurgency.  true, they are seeking nuclear weapons, but pakistan and north korea already have them, and you don't see us fucking with them, now do you?  if something isn't done soon, we're going to fight another wrongful and meaningless war.  someone needs to explain to dubya that the crusades were over hundreds of years ago, and they were largely unsuccessful and wasteful of materials and human lives (not that he cares about the lives).  at one point i felt like we as a nation needed to stop policing the world.  now i feel that we need to stop bullying the non-nuclear powers of the world.  why do we pretend to care about african genocides when we continue to tyrannically subdue populations ourselves (or, at the very least, propping up dictators to do the job for us)?

 

i know you can't talk to a "christian," (well, i can't anyway) but we need to reclarify that the teachings of christ say that it is never appropriate to kill people.  or hate people.  or harm people.  or even hurt their feelings.  time for some cheek turning, you "christians."

 

jesus would be so disappointed.

 

fuck bush.

short thoughts

happy st patrick's day.  if you don't drink some jameson or guiness today, you're un-american.

 

the baby is getting really close.  it's hard for me to believe that soon i will be responsible for the life of another human being.  i'm so excited and scared to death at the same time.

 

some marketing company tried to figure out how best to advertise using my site (or so statcounter tells me).  that's pretty funny.  is there an anticapitalist magazine out there, or some other patently ironic thing that wants to advertise with me?  if so, drop a line, and i'll think about it.

 

short post.  readership has fallen off from a peak of double digit hits a day, so my motivation is less than spectacular.

 

fuck bush

pre-emptive rant

dubya's white house released a document today that defends the strategy of pre-emptive war.  it is based on the assumption that no one else in the world is capable of making their own responsible defense decisions.  it implies that democracy is the only form of government we as a nation will tolerate for other nations (though history shows that that is not at all true). 

nuclear non-proliferation is a joke anyway.  the number of countries that probably have the technology at this point to build at least a small nuclear weapon probably numbers in the dozens.  the idea that "countries who didn't have it by this point in time can't have it at all" is foolish, as evidenced by the fact that multiple countries (like u.s. ally israel) just ignored it and got the bombs anyway.  meanwhile, we who were allowed to retain our weapons built more and more and more in readiness for a statistical impossibility.

how many time can you kill a person, anyway?

let's get those terrorists before they get us.  hell, let's get 'em before they become terrorists.  let's just gas all the arab children.  yee-ha.

 

i really hate being american sometimes.

 

fuck bush.

gthedamanifesto (now brief enough for american attention spans!)

making a quick referal to americablog, one of my favorite sources for info about those bastards.  check out the longer post about the washington post's mislabelling bloggers as the "liberal base" of the democratic party.

 

a few words on that topic myself.  i am pretty liberal on the whole, as the profile stuff to the right would attest.  i do believe in big government as the only possible alternative to the (infinitely preferable but virtually impossible) no government option.  though my liberalism isn't pure, neither do i consider it an inappropriate or even scathing label.  i'm proud to be pretty damned liberal.

 

that said, i am not a part of the democratic party's "base."  i am essentially pragmatic in this regard.  the democratic party represents a shift toward my side.  i do not think that a third party can win real influence until one of the two currently in power goes down in flames.  of the two, i'm hoping that's the one with a wing currently on fire.  basically, i want the republikkkans out because they're so good at playing politics, even when they're openly evil, they get support.  the democrats are essentially weak due to their pandering to the "centrist majority," and as such my angry liberal people's party would be able to gain a foothold.

 

until then, vote democrat: they're not strong enough to be (genuinely) evil

 

and fuck bush.

short attention spa... hey, a bird!

i can't concentrate on anything these days, as i'm too eagerly anticipating the babay, but here are a few short bursts of rant for those who care.

 

hell yes, russell feingold, i want to see the president censured, but not just for the wiretapping.  too bad it didn't really stick, because all politicians are inherently a bunch of pussies, too afraid to actually take a stand and risk pissing off some mythical centrist in their electorate.

 

mad cow wouldn't exist if we didn't feed cows to cows.  as long as it's cannibalism we're going for, we should be practicing it ourselves, not forcing it on other unsuspecting species.

 

the next republikkkan who wants to claim that iraq is not in a state of civil war needs to go there.  there aren't minimum body counts to call it a civil war, it just is.  look who's fighting who, and you'll see (and our troops, god bless 'em, are pretty much shooting anyone who looks scary, which is to say at this point, defiant and iraqi).

 

how long till we go to war with iran?  the bastards in the white house only have three more years, if we're going to let our religious extremists get into a fight with thier religious extremists, they need to work fast.  actually, here's a better plan.  send james dobson, pat robertson, bill frist, that kansas bastard who likes to picket funerals, and anyone else screaming about jesus and trampling on his teachings to alienate and destroy everyone who's different from their boring asses.  fucking xenophobe/homophobe/muslimphobe sons of bitches.

 

tom delay is going to end up getting a promotion, firm handshake, and a blowjob for his fine service and (lack of) ethics.  lets not pretend anymore.

 

fuck bush with an i.e.d.

rediscovered: rant-squirrel

we put together the baby's room yesterday afternoon, and then i had a complete kitchen meltdown.  i tried to make a roast with potatoes, carrots and onions, but there wasn't enough liquid to cook the vegetables in, and they just dried out.  let me assure you, you cannot boil predried potatoes or carrots until they become tender.  i have tried.  it sucked.

 

one of the dogs picked up a squirrel corpse last week, and since then, i have to hold them away from the place it has been decomposing away.  now it's supposed to get cold again after a weekend of shorts weather.  this squirrel's going to be here till june.

 

that bastard's down to 30% approval.  30%!  russ feingold wants to "censure" the president; i say we ride his ass out of town on a rail.  thirty percent is a failing grade, period.  given the partisan state of the union these days, fifty-one seems pretty damned good, but thirty is still piss-poor.

 

can we get some lobbying reform already?  it sure seemed like a big deal for a minute there, but now that they've managed to shut abramhoff up, no one remembers.  again, we're stymied on making any real and meaningful change by the shortness of the american attention span and the willingness to sweep all evil deeds under the rug that runs rampant in the republikkkan party.

 

my coffee tastes like soap.  i haven't washed my mug in a week.  i blame the religious right, trying to clean up my language.  fuckin' assholes.

 

fuck frist.  (that looks really dirty.)

no, sony jim, this here is a bar

behold, the rare saturday morning blog post.  note the variant plumage...

 

our dvd player is fucked up.  no bother, we've got a playstation 2 that serves as a dvd player.  the playstation, however, has a child lock (hint: if you hit (x) five times in a row, you've figured out my code) which gives a level rating to each film you might attempt to watch.  it doesn't do this with video games, which i find a little odd, as modern video games are among the most disturbingly violent things i've ever seen (not that i'm complaining, just pointing out the fact).  anyway, out of nine, last night we put in "domino," which warrants a six.  it begins with "adult language" and a severed arm (we didn't get any farther than that, as siouxs! can't watch such graphic things around dinner time).  "can't buy me love" (i think, my eighties movie knowledge is lacking) which was rated pg-13 was an 8.  to the best of my recollection, there were no severed arms in "can't buy me love," not even so much as a finger.  there couldn't have been too much foul language, because pg-13 movies are only allowed one "fuck" per flick.  what evil, greater than maiming, shooting, and swearing gives this movie its high parental control level?  drinking.  drinking to the good people at sony, is worse than violence.  drinking may not be for everyone, sure, but chopping off people's arms is not for anyone.  booze is made to have a good time (though some people overuse the good time).  big fucking guns are made to put large holes in people (though some people never put big fucking holes in people).  which do you rate as more corrupting to our children?

 

fuck madd and the neo-prohibition movement, you killjoy bastards.

paradise city

this second post may prove to be a disappointment, as i've spent some of my writing juices on the re-instated company newsletter.

 

i've been listening to all the old 80's metal all afternoon, and man, is my neck sore.

 

so the dubai port management deal seems to have fallen through, but aren't the people who were trying so hard to push it through (ie darth and dubya) considered to be pretty good at shady business dealings (or at least wont to engage in them)?  and if not them, shouldn't someone they know be able to make the deal work through puppet companies and shadow corporations, and possibly some kind of shadow-puppet sorcery?

 

it's about seventy degrees out in st. louis, so i'll be getting outside now.

 

fuck bush.

quick updates

bootsy update: i'm not giving exact numbers so as not to influence the bootsygame, but we've got a big one on our hands, people. long-tall, like his/her old man. we're getting really close now. i'm sure i'll post pictures like a stupid new dad as soon as i can.

dubya's approval rating continues to drop... can we say impeachment? open revolt? ok, scratch that last. i don't need any more surveillance.

my home state is the latest in the fight against women (new south dakota state motto: back to the kitchen, gash). (wow, i even offended myself.)

according to statcounter, yesterday, gthedamned had its 1500th hit. thanks, all four of you readers, for coming back again and again.

perhaps i'll post again later. for now, fuck bush.

pained

last night was an exercise in pain.  i went for my first real run in months, and my back did not like me afterwards at all.  following, we went to eat wings and salads.  i opted for the hottest available sauce.  the first one was pretty hot, but easily bearable.  the second one was tough, but that was the one that wore my tastebuds out, so it was a blessing in disguise.  i ate the remaining ten wings without incident (other than my nose pouring like a faucet), but this morning, my innards aren't all that fond of me, and my back still hurts.

 

dubya's in nawlins.  would that he could feel guilt at all.  if only he could respond with some kind of genuine emotion and not that stupid smirk he modifies to show "deep thoughts."  can he meet some of the multitudes whose lives he's ruined?  how about someone who lost their home in katrina and their child in iraq?  surely there's one.  may the weight of thousands of american dead sit in his black heart forevermore (and countless more iraqi dead, but we know he doesn't think of them as human beings).

 

fuck bush

more republikkkan chicanery

i hate bullies.  look at this or this.

 

liddy dole, you bitch.  the people of this country actually respected you.

 

fuck dole (man, it feels good to say that again!)

elephant memories

i'm continuing to shout at the top of my cyberlungs about the domestic spying issue.  goddamned television, we have such short attention spans in this country.  if a scandal doesn't involve sex, we can't talk about it for more than a week or two before 95% of americans are bored and change the channel.

 

don't forget, america, that your president feels that he can spy on you without legal authority.

 

don't forget, america, that your president told you we were going to war to stop "terrorist-linked iraq" and their "weapons of mass destruction"

later downgraded to "weapons of mass destruction related program activities," which is easliy enough words to diffuse any real meaning.  oh, and there are terrorists in iraq.  at least there are now.  perhaps that was a prediction, not a statement of fact.

 

don't forget, america, that your vice president shot a man in the face, and didn't even apologize for days.

 

don't forget, america, that none of these bastards commanding our army and sending your children to war has ever been in harm's way serving their country.

 

don't forget, america, that both your president and vice president are making quite a tidy profit off of their own policies (between defense and oil, it's a good time to be unshamefully weathy).

 

don't forget, america, that the current administration reversed a budget surplus, turning it into the biggest budget deficit in american history, dooming our children to near perpetual recession.

this is due to a tax cut by and for, who else, the obscenely wealthy while simultaneously causing military spending to skyrocket (i would say defense spending, but we've actually cut spending on most things that can be considered actual defense of the country).

 

don't forget, america, that seventeen of nineteen september 11th hijackers were from saudi arabia, our best authoritarian regime friend in the middle east

 

and the other two were from the u.a.e., to whom we're selling control of our ports because they're such good friends (to our filthy oil baron president).

 

don't forget, america, that you've been lied to since the 2000 campaign trail.

republikkkans don't like you.  you're not wealthy enough.

 

don't forget, america, that it is we the people who make this country strong (and fight its wars), not the rich elite.

 

fuck bush.

thus sayeth the lord

i saw a link to a "christian news-source." they call us "pro-aborts." i'm not sure that even makes sense.

an apology to the people of iraq

how civil can a war be, anyway?  the iraqi people are finding out the hard way right about now that the answer is "not goddamned very."  and guess who's to blame?  that's right, it's us.  i'll personally shoulder my share of the responsibility.  when bush stole the white house in 2000, i didn't fight tooth and nail to stop the machinations of evil.  i mean, i railed against him, but i didn't do enough.  in 2002, when congress determined that the government can do pretty much whatever it wants to do, i didn't raise nearly enough hell.  oh, i'd like to think that i swayed the opinions of at least a very few people with my liberal rants, but we were all (myself included) still too stunned by september 11th to fight so hard, and the threat of more terrorist attacks seemed to dull the outrage at being scrutinized at every turn and all but stripsearched at every airport (for some reason, though i'm pretty pale with a whitebread last name, i used to be stopped at every "extra security" check in the airport.  i think they have a problem with goatees.).

when "operation iraqi freedom" began, i was incensed, but i didn't protest every day, or even most days.  i went to a few peace rallies, but, i didn't do enough.  i can see that now.  when that asshole gave his "mission accomplished" speech, i foamed at the mouth, but not in the right locale.  for the past two plus years, i have spoken out in conversations and in cyberspace about how evil and wrong this war is, but to no avail, because it wasn't enough.  at this point, i wonder if an armed insurrection would be enough.  sure, dubya's approval numbers are rapidly approaching single digits, but even with him out, that doesn't take care of the full problem.  there's still cheney, rove, rice, rumsfeld, gonzales, mcclellan, alito, frist, delay, boehner, blunt, hastert, bill o'reilly, chris matthews, sean hannity, ann coulter, rush limbaugh, and any number of other cockroaches ready to eat the bodies of their dead and take their place spewing invective and fooling the american people into thinking that xenophobia, homophobia, and a basic inherent all-pervading fear are patriotism.

 

i'm sorry, iraq.  i tried, but not hard enough.  please join me, as i'm sure you do every day, in a resounding fuck bush.

throw out the baby bell with the bathwater

i was compared to grizzly adams this morning for what i call my "devil-redneck" facial hair look and as yet unshorn locks.  in short, i have a lot of hair right now.  as perhaps i've blogged before, in lieu of a religion, i tend to make up superstitions, and then follow them until they bore me.  this time, shortly before siouxs! learned she was pregnant, i decided i wasn't going to cut my hair until we had a baby.  the extra facial hair is a recent addition that won't be summarily removed when the baby is born.  it will last until siouxs! can't stand the moustache anymore, and then perhaps another two days while i pretend "it's my face, and i'll do what i want."

 

south dakota, you bastards.  well, it's a fight now, isn't it?  seven out of nine justices on the supreme court vote republikkkan, but not every republican is a republikkkan, so i guess we'll see if any of them have the integrity to stand on the precedent rather than bow and scrape to the "conservative base" (after all, though it's a lifetime appointment for them, it's an election year for lots of their buddies...).

 

at&t was forced to split into many smaller companies, one of which (sbc, formerly southwestern bell) is all groweds-up and now is buying the old at&t remnant and name, making it as big as it was before.  who would have thought that an industry once chided for its monopoly might regain it under the bush "fuck the little guy" administration?  i smell bad things for the little guy.

 

fuck bush.

non-golden shower

welcome back from the weekend, ladies and gentlemen.  siouxs! had her family-thrown baby shower yesterday, and we got a shit-ton of baby stuff, including infant sized cardinals gear.

we're at t-minus one month (roughly).  i'm still scared to death, though i'm also thrilled at the idea. 

i have way too many cases to unload today, so i'm cutting this short.  i'll try to post again later today.

fuck bush.

outsourcing: thinking bigger

ok, look.  i have nothing against india at all.  i like them, in fact.  however, i don't like the fact that they pursued and acquired nuclear weapons despite the world-wide non-proliferation treaty (i have the same beef with israel).  what i do want to know is what changed in our relations with india on this presidential visit.  let's see, they agreed to accept help with their non-military atomic energy programs, to change nothing at all about their nuclear weapons programs, and what else, exactly?

dubya also talked about india's role as a trade partner with the u.s., saying that some americans focus only on outsourcing.  my question to him isn't why are american companies (owned by billionaires) doing so much outsourcing, but rather, why aren't we doing more?  sure, tech support and manufacturing, those are the obvious jobs to send away, but what about upper management?  the average ceo in the states makes hundreds of times what the average employee makes... if we outsourced that job too, that could be merely a few grand!  think of the savings!

outsource our whole freakin' economy while you're at it.  eventually, you rich bastards will require enough servants to employ all of us who aren't in jail, right?

take me online to the ballgame

though it isn't regular season, baseball starts in twenty minutes.  today's first spring training game is against the mets, and i won't be able to do more than watch the score change online, because i'm not paying for a full season to hear one broadcast.  it's on xm, but i like my radio local.

 

so now there's video about the katrina response, and what do you want to bet the white house is going to spin bush's silence as something along the lines of "well, he wasn't actively causing problems to arise."

 

short post today.  i need to get ready for baseball.

 

fuck bush

rash wednesday

there are no catholics in my office, which is good, not because i don't like catholics, but because today is the day when i accidentally tell one of them "you've got some shit on your forehead" every year without fail. 

went to the downtown mardi gras parade last night, and was as usual disappointed in the float quality level, but had a good time nonetheless.  amazingly enough, i did not drink, though not from lack of desire.  it seems that the actual fat tuesday parade in the stl is the "family" version, with far less beer and boobs to enliven the festivities.  the kids are cute, but it's still just a six block parade.

i have and will always continue to be a skeptic about st louis's mardi gras.  since nawlins is something of an adopted home for me, i can't get over how uptight my current city of residence gets about everything.  the cops turn to complete dicks (not that there's that far for them to go), and the local businesses act as though the floods of fools are a burden rather than a revenue increase.  at least they lowered the fines for public urination this year...

 

why i can never run for public office (part one)

conservative opponent: the american people think that baby killing is wrong.

gthedamned for congress: duly noted, but what's their policy on me tearing your head off with my bare hands, drink the blood mixed with overproof rum from your head, and then vomit on your remains?  and a followup question, how's this evening look for you?

 

i just get too passionate about political things, but sometimes i really think i should run for something.  mind, i don't even know where i'd start.  my thought is, though, i'll lay my shit out there before they try to dig up too much dirt on me.  i drink.  i used to do drugs.  i'm something of a radical.  here's what i stand for, and if you don't like it, we can talk about it, but i may start screaming at you.  a kinder, gentler gthedamned, who looks to the future and hopes it doesn't have a bunch of neo-con assholes, otherwise, lock and load, it's revolution time.

laissez les bons temps goulet

translation: let the good times [robert] goulet

 

happy mardi gras.  we'll be attending the parade tonight, as it's going to be seventy fucking degrees in february, because there is no such thing as global warming.  (by the way, i do understand that global warming has nothing to do with individual day/location temperatures, but the average person doesn't, so i'll keep to the populist spirit with which this blog was founded.)

 

give me the motherfucking gun, trey.  or failing that, another phone call attempt.  just not tonight, because...

 

happy birthday, mom, who hopefully doesn't read this foul-mouthed blog

 

actually, it's not her real birthday, as she was born on leap year day, but, try not calling her this time of year for three years out of four, and see how she likes it (answer: not at all).

 

34% approval rating for baby dub, 18% for Darth Cheney... lets get those impeachment wheels a'turnin'!  can't anyone make a good effigy these days?  excuse me, a good american made effigy.  they're pretty good at it in all those countries that "hate freedom." 

 

speaking of hating freedom, when's the last time anyone heard anything about osama bin laden, huh?  i get the feeling we're going to see him on a vh1 "where are they now?" special before this administration gets around to catching that bastard.  i think they're using him as a potential political chip.  they have him located (within a four inch margin of error), and are going to break him out in 2008, right about the time the supreme court determines that the two term limit on the presidency is unconstitutional.

 

strike while the iron has low approval ratings, people!

fuck that remaining 34%/18%.

welcome to the lou, hurricane girl

skip and krobar, happy housewarming.  get back onto a normal sleep schedule before mardi gras.

on the topic of mardi gras, this year was the first in several that we didn't attend the festivities in soulard, and i really can't say i was disappointed.  while i do usually have fun when we go to "the country's second largest mardi gras celebration," i'm fairly certain that i would have a good time being drunk before noon any time of year, not just in the pre-lenten season.  i've been to nawlins' too many times to be all that impressed with soulard.  no offense, but midwesterners will never be able to throw that kind of bash, even if our cops weren't such tightasses about the whole thing.

i haven't posted anything about baseball yet, largely because it's not that kind of weblog, but for a little change of pace, here we go.  i am really looking forward to this year's baseball season.  my cardinals have been through a lot of turmoil through the offseason, but i feel the makings of a great year.  in fact, i see a good baseball year in general, for a lot of teams (and i see a few of them crashing and burning, like the overspending blue jays and the underspending marlins).  i am something of a recent convert to the redbird nation, having only paid them close attention for about three years, but baseball has long been my favorite sport to watch.  that said, i really didn't watch anything but the world series for several years.  that has changed, and now i watch as much baseball as i can without breaking down and getting cable (still holding strong ten years in!) and listen to the radio for those games i can't see.

go cards

fuck bush

a non-believer's prayer

still no word from those bastards on the supreme court (which is better than a regular court, because it's got pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, and mushrooms).

 

dear god i have trouble believing in, please give me the strength to push through these turbulent times we're living in.  if the rest of the country, nay, world is patient enough, those warmongering neo-cons are going to self destruct very soon.  i know it won't take away all of the problems that they will leave behind, but at least there's some chance they won't add to them too much.

in your infinite (and dubious to me personally) wisdom, i know you will be able to help the people of iraq out of a near certain civil war.  i know that you will watch over us (as much as a probably fictional entity can) to protect us from evildoers trying to ship weapons through our frighteningly under-prepared ports.  and someday, with your help and (purely hypothetical) guidance, we may see the light at the end of the tunnel.  my (doubting) prayer is that some time in the relatively near future, we can go back to arguing about big government vs little government or other saner (and safer) things to worry about, as opposed to arguing about whether gays should count as three-fifths of a person, and other such religion-beating folderol that does an excellent job of keeping the poor looking the other way while the rich fuck them (sorry about the language, but i assume you have bigger things to worry about).

and if it's not too much to ask, coming from a pretty serious agnostic, could you make sure siouxs! and bootsy are healthy while we're in the home stretch here?  i might just change my tune on the whole "is there a you" question once bootsy is born and we need some help.

thanks for reading my blog, and i guess the reason you don't show up on my statcounter is that you're bigger than the internet.

fuck bush.

amen

abort the red states

i've determined why it's hard to be a liberal from a conservative region.  i have all of these feelings of social responsibility, yet none of the abhorrence of violence that we left wingers are supposed to have.  while i myself am not that violent a person, i'd love to see the bush administration lawyer i heard on the radio this morning (dancing around the point that the executive branch could make any decision it wanted to in "wartime") have his throat ripped out by wild dogs.  or me.  whichever.

 

and south dakota, lovely state that it is, is doing everything it can to bring us back to the seventies.  while disco and godawful clothing might still be the rage up there, what they've really done is outlaw abortion, forcing the newly minted neocon supreme court to make a ruling on the laws constituionality.  can't we just give both of the dakotas to canada?  we'll give puerto rico and d.c. statehood, just to stay at an even fifty.

 

i would be all for this plan, but there are way too many states i would want to get rid of.  hell, i live in one of them.

 

for the record, i'm done with stupid baby class.  there's twelve plus hours i'll never get back, but at least it's over.

 

fuck south dakota.

just one more push

you know those "bulldozer" machines they have at some arcades?  they've got an ostensibly flat tray with a big pile of quarters being pushed toward the edge.  you drop your own quarter in at what you think is an appropriate time, and hopefully, some quarters drop and you get either a bunch of quarters (if it's cool) or a bunch of tickets (if it's lame).

that's what the neocons' situation feels like to me right now.  if we can just drop the right thing into the right place, it all comes tumbling down.  the fallout would be enormous, and those who've put themselves most on the line (ie bush, cheney, rove, rumsfeld, rice, mcclellan, etc.) will fall the hardest.

i got an urge this morning to run for some office on the "full disclosure" ticket.  i could be relatively immune to scandals if i air my own dirty laundry first, then point out that theirs' is still worse...

 

fuck bush, cheney, rove, rumsfeld, rice, mcclellan, etc.

another cry for sanity

can someone please explain to me why we've been holding afghan "suspected terrorists" in guantanamo for years now (who are in reality probably only people who pissed off their neighbors) and torturing them, but now we're letting the united arab emirates, a country with more easily defined ties to terrorism, run our ports?  i mean, i guess we were only checking about one out of one hundred containers that came into the country anyway, so let's just let the u.a.e. and their billions in oil money jump right in there.

here's a thought... why don't we put iraq in charge of the ports?  i mean, the current iraqi administration is pretty friendly to us on the whole (wink, wink), and i bet we could weed out the insurgents with a careful applicant screening process (question 1: how many i.e.d.'s have you made in the last three years?).  it might also help them make some money to get out of the staggering debt they're in.

i've got another idea.  let's put the saudis in charge of our airlines!  17 of 19 hijackers agree that saudi extremists keep their heads under pressure better than other fundamentalists.

what about yemen for our merchant marines?

north korea for our border patrol?

 

outsourcing... the (oppressor's) wave of the future.

 

fuck bush.

 

let it all hang over and out

i woke up this morning still drunk.  this has got to stop happening.  my liver took the night off again, as it seems to do pretty frequently when i get into the rum.  i really, really like rum, but i'm afraid last night represented a kind of last hurrah for a while.  i don't want to get out of drinking shape, and it's not like i'm quitting, i just need to keep it within certain limits for a while, like for example sticking to beer.  rum is real good, though.

on a lighter note, i threatened to commit double homicide this morning because my two co-workers kept taunting me with thoughts of bacon.  i finally got to fill this hangover stomach, and i'm feeling better, but not great.

fuck bush.

geekdom complete?

siouxs! has pointed out to me that i'm gettign older, a fact of which i was delightfully unaware for far too long.  my hearing has been less than great for most of my life, and i'm too afraid to get a hearing aid and hear the loud ass world i've been missing.  i long ago resolved to be damned near deaf before i'd get a hearing aid.  i mean, my grandfather was always such a source of family comedy, how could i deprive my children and grandchildren of so much entertainment.

no, siouxs! is half deaf too.  it wasn't that.  we'll just continue to turn our movies up loud as hell and disturbing the neighbors.

what she pointed out to me was the i might need to have my eyes checked. 

i can't remember the first time she said as much, but it was only a few weeks ago.  the second time was more emphatic, and i can remember it a lot better.  last week at stupid baby class, i couldn't read something on the teacher's big flip pad.  in my defense, it was written in red marker, but she could read it just fine, so i conceded that i may at least need to go see what the professionals have to say.

now, don't think i have a problem with wearing glasses (and not contacts, unless i have to for an acting role i'm too lazy to audition for).  as a matter of fact, i wore glasses (with clear lenses) for a while because i thought they made me look smarter (jackass vanity, i know).  i just have a problem with needing glasses.  i would feel dependant on something.  anything.  i hate feeling dependant on anyone or anything, and have since i was a teenager.  wearing glasses to me is like constantly having to borrow money from my mom.  neither one is desireable.

whatever, i haven't even made the appointment yet.  i'll hold out while i can...

fuck bush.

a cool 40

i just chatted with my sister-in-law in boston while she was on break.  don't worry, i've already made fun of her for chatting with me on break when there should be any number of more interesting things to do.  she asked if i thought she should be drinking a 40 oz in the parking lot, which brought to mind one of my least favorite things about the stl: no forties.  for some inane reason (i.e. serious ignorance/racism running to the core), it is illegal to sell 40 oz. bottles of malt beverage in st. louis city or county.  when i need some mickey's or o.e. 800, i have to drive to illinois.  how am i supposed to get my buzz jump started without forty ounces of sweet, sweet malt liquor?  moreover, when i go to the doctor, i want to truthfully be able to say i usually have three or four drinks a night. 

 

fuck bush, but fuck francis slay, mayor of st. louis as well.

christmas in february

while i was home yesterday for the plumber and furnace guy, the mail came.  it included a present for siouxs! and bootsy, my modern drunkard magazine, and baseball tickets.  this means yesterday was the best the postal service has ever been to me in one day.

and on another uplifting note, the house should be back to a normal temperature by the time i get home today.  though we had a few fairly amusing moments with the space heaters and the circuit breakers, i prefer a more uniform warmth.

***************************************************

the asterisks represent my trip with the warehouse manager to an account, where he took our delivery van from our backup driver.  it seems his child has a fever, so he needed to get here to the hospital.  not that i'm doubting, but it does largely suck from everyone else's perspective.

 

fuck bush.

 

 

cheney shoots a guy directly, instead of sending in the armed forces

this is becoming laughable.

dubya is being raked over the coals by both sides of the pass the buck katrina debacle, and neither of his two appointees, brown or chertoff, is looking better for it either.

those abramhoff pictures are a real hoot, george.  way to convince people you don't know the guy at all.

demokkkrats and republikkkans alike are still asking questions about the domestic spying thing, and no one (including the public, who are sadly already bored with it) is satisfied with the "it's legal because we say it's legal" defense anymore.

dick "vader" cheney (thanks to liberal bloggers everywhere for that gem) told scooter to break the law and threaten national security by leaking about valerie.

and now he fucking shoots a guy.  this is great.  if we can't do something about these bozos now, we truly are too apathetic to deserve liberty.

 

on a more personal note, my pilot light is out on the furnace at the house, so it's cold as balls there.  the dogs will be fine, but it really needs to get fixed today.  my wife and fetus were freezing last night.

 

fuck bush, laclede gas, and my postman, who still hasn't brought my modern drunkard magazine. 

the return of sly

ok, i watched a few minutes of the grammys last night.  i had heard a rumor that sly stone was going to perform for the first time in years.  indeed, he did (for those who didn't see it), and it was amazing to see.  he was only on stage for a minute or two, though, and i for one, think it might have had something to do with the various jackasses butchering his music up until that point.  the man is a legend, and you put a bullshit american idol winner up there to do his music?  what was up with the black eyed peas frontman freestyling?  that was supposed to be a tribute, you shit.  the least he could've done was rhyme about sly stone.  anyway, i hope that isn't the last time we hear from sly.  seeing him on stage was spectacular.

 

tom delay has a new job on the appropriations committee.  great place for a guy with ethical deficiencies.  way to go, congress.

 

fuck bush.  and joe perry.

stupid baby class

we're in the home stretch regarding childbirth class (not exactly lamaze, but a close facsimile).  two more long fucking classes with sandra who i'm nt exactly fond of, but does at least provide a little unwitting comedy for us every class.  this week it was "booty-pressure," quickly translated to "butt pressure" for those of us who had never heard the term booty referring to anythining but pirate treasure before (ok, perhaps tetsuya and kaoru never had, but i can't be sure how much of the non-idiom english they're actually getting... thank god they have that pocket translator).  there was also the classic "ok, dads, you can be either in front of her or behind her for this one.  i prefer... either one."  it's good she specified, as i intended to try something wholly different, perhaps laying right on siouxs! and the baby-belly.

 

bootsy is laying sideways we think.  there's still plenty of time for turnin', but we're hoping sooner rather than later to lessen the number of things to worry about.  sandra says we can chase "him" around with frozen vegetables, but why set up pickiness so early in (pre-)life?

 

pitchers and catchers start spring training next friday.  i'm too excited for baseball again to even explain about it.

 

i know i've said it before, and then it didn't amount to much, but the republikkkans seem to be on the ropes, awaiting the knockout blow from whatever progressive willing to deliver it.  get in there, demokkkrats!  when you become the new conservative party, real liberals will stand a chance of forming a more effective party in your wake.

 

fuck alberto gonzales.

 

 

critter issues

yesterday, while standing in my kitchen, my dog elektra made a leap at the ceiling at what i assumed would turn out to be one of the two flies that have taken up winter residence in our house to provide the dogs with entertainment.  when i looked up at the stupid flourescent light in our stupid drop-tile ceiling, i saw the very distinct outline of a mouse scurrying across the light.

it wasn't in our food, so that's good.  however, i hate mice.  the revulsion i have towards mice is only marginally smaller than my problems with rats (which thankfully have never been inside of any house i lived in to my knowledge).  to see one over my head makes me think of the fact that one could fall on my head, and that's not a thought i can fully deal with.

mice outside are fine.  mice inside my space (especially the kitchen) not so much.

please, all you rodent lovers out there, this applies to gerbils, hamsters, and countless other foul little paddy-footed beasts people try to pass off as pets.  keep the little fuckers out of my house.

superbowl was fun, but some of the worst officiating i've seen in a game i had no personal stake in.

somehow, it was a republikkkan thing.  fuck them sons of bitches.

crisis averted

i received a message from a fellow member of the modern drunkard magazine message board yesterday.  it seems my questions for our fearless leader sparked  quite a conservative backlash from one person, which officially qualifies me as being "contraversial." 

 

i'd like to point out that i am happy to read any criticism or questions about the opinions expressed in this blog.  there's a link at the top of the page to e-mail me (questions?  comments?  death threats?).

 

i'd also like to point out that, though this person was toeing the republikkkan party line, i have no less respect for (i'll assume gender here) him.  it won't stop me from having a drink with anyone, i'll just refuse to talk politics with them.  my politics bring out my passions, and anytime i don't want to get into a screaming match, i try to keep them to myself (ex. the last time i talked politics with my aunt).  i don't kid myself into thinking i could ever run for office, because when confronted with neo-con dogma, the profanity that spews forth from me makes sailors and my aunt jerry blush.

 

that said, x, feel free to express your opinions to me again sometime, as i'll feel quite free to say fuck that bastard motherfucker bush and everyone in his administration whose name i know (and probably some i don't, but i'll wait to pass judgement until i hear them lie to me).

it's in their blood

rigging elections, that is.

 

http://rollcall.com/issues/1_1/breakingnews/12015-1.html

 

the republican vote today for the new house majority leader didn't exactly go off without a hitch.  first go round, there were more votes than there were republikkkans present...