Weekend Update - July 24th

(Welcome back. I know it's been a while since the last posting and I have little to report except random house painting, garden tending, and lemonade stand tending. Remember lemonade stands? I opened one up one summer in front of our house when I was probably the boy's age. Mom made up a batch of her special lemonade, called for boiling lemons for hours, I think. I water-colored a couple of signs and sat out by the street for several hours and ended up with a small fortune of probably $2. Times haven't changed much in the lemonade stand business in 50 years. Jonathan and his friend Mason threw a stand up on our corner and sat in 90 degree heat for almost an hour before one of the neighbor ladies took pity on them and came over and bought 2 cupfuls. The pity factor is always good for a sale or two. She gave them $4 and told them to keep the change, and after she left they promptly closed up shop and high-tailed it to the corner market on a candy and pop run. My son, the Capitalist. But I digress ...)

• We knew it all along: Dick (we-call-him-Dick) Cheney has no pulse! And Mark Morford wants us to take a test. "Former Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has undergone surgery to install a small pump to help his heart work, as the 69-year-old enters a new phase of what he called 'increasing congestive heart failure.'" -- Associated Press. The first knee-jerk response to the Great Dick Cheney Empathy Test (GDCET) is, of course, the easiest, and the most obvious, the most available to your giddy puppydog consciousness, and my guess is it shot through you like a fast and wonderful lightning bolt of OH MY SWEET JESUS YES the instant you read the story above. Read more.


• From Arthur: "Wow. Poor, poor Sarah Palin just got blindsided by her own daughter, who says she believes her pending marriage was derailed by her Mom's run for Vice President. I can readily believe that, politics is lethal for the family members. I will be happy to take odds that the next thing to happen will be that Todd will leave Sarah for a particularly perky waitress in the Wasilla Diner. How do I know? Because all who become Republicans are cursed to do stupid things. It is simply a law of nature. Think about it. Eerie how true that is, isn't it?"


• Now here's a little story that originally appeared in Mother Jones and it's titled "Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP’s Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle." I'd comment on it, but after reading it I'm practically speechless. Read it yourself, if you dare.


• They claim to be able to raise the dead and cause miracles, such as the multiplication of Thanksgiving turkey dinners. They burn "witchcraft items" and "idols." They hold mass exorcisms to cast out alleged evil spirits they say cause lust, pornography, addiction, homosexuality, bisexuality, and perversion. They claim to be able to heal HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis C, Glaucoma, and cancer, and to break "generational curses" and "witchcraft curses." Who are they? None other than the radical, right-wing charismatic evangelical movement, that's who. And they're taking over entire states. Be afraid, be very afraid.


• By now you've all heard the story about Shirley Sherrod. But you know you must be doing all right if people like Willie Nelson, yes THE Willie Nelson, jump up to defend you.


• William Rivers Pitt writes a great column on the Tea Party Idiots: It is all too tempting to dismiss the far-right Teabagger legions and their idiot media allies as nothing more than a band of brain-addled yahoos who regularly make solar flare-sized fools of themselves in ways undreamed of by the Founders. I've mocked them a time or three myself; it's almost impossible not to. When a Tea Party web forum goes into paroxysms of fear and loathing about an Obama-led fascist takeover of America because they read a 2007 satirical article from the Onion and thought it was real, all you can do is put your head in your hands and thank God for showing us His sublime sense of humor. Click here to read more.

Weekend Update - July 10th

(The Boy played his final KidSport baseball game Thursday evening. The Lancers, as they were called, failed to win a game this season, including this one played in just shy of 100 degree heat. But the boys one and all played with heart and determination and a certain 11 year old bravado that seemed to be judged by how dirty they could get their uniforms. They were, of course, disappointed by finishing in the cellar, but only mildly so. Jonathan mentioned earlier that he was considering not playing again next year, but thanks to KidSport policy, he changed his mind. Apparently all participants in this summer adventure end up with an individual trophy, complete with etched name. I'm sure the winners of this thing got larger trophies, but each of the sweating, dirty, sunburned Lancers got their own foot tall trophy to take home, along with a team photograph. Oh, and near the last inning of the final game, Jonathan scored a run. It was his finest moment, and as he trotted back to the Lancer dugout slapping high-fives with his teammates, all I could see was an enormous grin. That night he went to bed early, exhausted, scrubbed clean in the shower under strict orders of his mother. I went in later to turn out his light and kiss him goodnight, but he was already asleep, the shiny baseball trophy clenched tightly in his hand. It was one of those untaken pictures I will save forever. But I digress ...)

• Okay, let's start off with something really interesting here. You know how we "guys" have the option of taking the little blue pill, this Viagra thing, for our lack of sexual drive, or whatever? Well, what if, I mean, what if we take this magic pill and get all ready, you know, and our "gal" isn't interested. Why don't they have a "female Viagra?" what? They're working on it? BUT, you do not rise up from the watery depths too rapidly, lest you go quickly insane. You do not drink five cups of coffee and three shots of absinthe and then attempt delicate brain surgery, blindfolded. You do not drill for oil a mile down in the pristine seas and have no reliable backup systems should something go horribly, horribly wrong. You do not mock Mother Nature. But above all else, for absolute certain, one thing you really, really do not do: You do not mess around with the female sexual response. At least that's according to Mark Morford.


• Have you watched any of the World Cup? We call it soccer, they call it football, or futbal, and it's sometimes exciting to watch when there's absolutely nothing else on, including the farm channel, and would undoubtedly be a hell of lot more popular in the United States if it wasn't for those damn horns. You know them if you've watched the Cup this year, the horns, the vuvuzela as they're called. These horns have to be one of the most irritating musical instruments in the world. Some people even object to them being called "musical instruments." But those people haven't seen THIS.


• Even George Will has called for President Obama to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan. But all we seems to get out of the Obama Administration is Bush-Orwell-style "Newspeak." What the hell's going on? Here's a fascinating and highly important excerpt from The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's by Tom Engelhardt. Click HERE. Oh, and speaking of depressing, General George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the Army, said today the United States could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've been there for nine years already. Are you ready for another 10 "or so?"


• "Whoa boy, easy big fella ..." Want to buy a horse? Want to buy a famous horse? Want to buy a famous stuffed horse? While this may only interest Roy Roger's fans who have a couple hundred thousand dollars they need to get rid of in a hurry, this little news item made the little buckaroo in me crawl back under the bed. They're gonna auction off Trigger! And what's worse, it's in New York City!

Robert Byrd and the Surprises of Change

(We're catching up here at Bad Hat Headquarters, and here's a comment by Arthur In Marin County on the recent demise of Senator Robert Byrd, and he adds a gentle diss of our fair city for which he shall have to pay.)


I had not known much about Byrd's earlier beliefs, except through allusions that he belonged to the Klan for a period of time. Eugene Robinson does a good job of tracing his career. It should be noted that there was a period during the teen and twenties when I had heard that the local Klan used to burn crosses on Skinner's Butte. It gives a rather different context to the lighted cross we grew up with, doesn't it? I doubt that the citizens of that bygone Eugene would recognize the one of today, just as the Robert Byrd toward the end of his long career hardly seems like the same man he was in his earlier life. He was, by the way, also an accomplished fiddle player and bluegrass musician. Again, who knew?

Here is a paper someone wrote on Oregon's checkered history of racial attitudes, which seemed to rely upon keeping African-Americans out of the state, whenever possible. I had never heard about blacks being excluded from living in Eugene until quite recently. Can that be true? It raises another question; when one was so unwelcome, why on earth would they have wanted to live in Eugene?

Arthur

Some Facts for a Change

By Arthur In Marin County

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over taxes and "takings" and the terrible profligate spending of the current administration. Helpfully, someone took the trouble to sit down and make a useful chart that shows where our deficit is coming from. And where it isn't. It turns out (surprise, surprise) that Bush did it, again. And again.

The main culprit appears to be his unfunded tax cut to the very wealthy, those he referred to as "his base". Things have gone well for them, less well for the economy. It will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to just roll back the key tax and spending policies of the Bush era. Powerful forces like things just as they are, thanks anyhow. Deficits? Pesky things. The demise of the middle class. Tsk, tsk, they were nice, those "small people", weren't they?

Ah well, time marches on, doesn't it? Nations rise, nations fall, but the truly wealthy tend to muddle through somehow.

I like that the current administration is talking about cutting back on the Defense budget. There are a lot of vested interests who are in the habit of feeding regularly at the trough of the Defense budget, often for cutting edge projects that spiral into huge cost-overruns and delays, all of which are bad for the budget and great for corporate income. This is not to say that there are not very real challenges out there in the big bad world, but that blowing things up is not always the most economical solution.

Arthur