Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Books are my comfort food!

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

So many bastards, so little time.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

This fight is for everything.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Consistently wrong since 2002

When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

Come on, man.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

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Archives for August 2014

Hooptie Do (Early Morning Open Thread)

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I’ve become a regular customer at the DMV. As faithful readers know, my teenage daughter recently got her driver’s license (after two attempts). This afternoon, she and I will appear at the DMV for the third time this week in an attempt to register her car, a hand-me-down Jeep that is several years older than she is.

The Jeep was bought new by my sister, who drove it for several years and then mostly parked it for use as a second car. It’s fun for cruising around the beach on a nice day, but it’s not the most comfortable ride. There’s no air conditioning, and if it rains, plan on getting wet.

My sister gave the Jeep to our mom a few years ago for use on the backcountry trails when mom retired and moved out to the boonies. After Mom died earlier this year, my brother, sister and I figured she’d want my daughter to have the Jeep. We searched everywhere for the title but could not find it.

Mom was always pretty disorganized; the title is probably folded up in an Altoids tin tucked inside an old purse or something. (While we were searching, I could imagine her saying, “No, not THERE, stupids! It’s in the saffron envelope behind the spice rack!” Or wherever the hell it actually is…)

So I had to go to the DMV to get a new title. On my first trip, they gave me a stack of forms to fill out, including an affidavit that my sister, brother and I had to sign to waive our rights as the heirs to this fabulous vehicle, which would fetch the princely sum of $1,000 on the open market.

Then I went back yesterday with the forms to get the title, which I had to have to get an insurance binder, which is a necessary precondition for the vehicle registration. I’m going back today for that. Between the insurance, fees and wasted time, I’m spending twice as much as the vehicle is worth to get this clunker street legal.

But it will be nice to have MY car back. My daughter appropriated my car for her own exclusive use when she got her license earlier this month, and she has insisted on driving me everywhere I go and also invents the most flimsy excuses to drive herself places.

To celebrate my car’s restoration to its rightful owner, I’m taking a solo road trip this coming weekend to Ala-gottdamn-bama to see my ailing granny, and then swinging back through the Florida Panhandle to see my other old grandma. I just hope I still remember how to drive.

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Bitter Irony

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Here’s the facebook page of Charles Vacca, the range instructor who was killed by a 9 year old with an UZI that we mentioned earlier. Here are some of the pictures he posted to Facebook:

a fool and his gun2

a fool and his gun3

Manly men like guns. Fags don’t. And now, for the pièce de résistance:

a fool and his gun

Hard to argue with him since he went out and proved it. Looks like there is one less tea party member in Lake Havasu City.

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Open Sports Thread: Is There No Field MBAs Can’t Spoil?

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Literally spoilt fields, per SB Nation‘s David Roth, “Cubs operate like a fast-food franchise, and that’s a problem“:

On August 19, 15 members of the Wrigley Field grounds crew attempted to cover the infield with a tarp during a sudden rainstorm, in a game the Cubs were winning. They, ah, did not necessarily do that, and after four-and-a-half hours of tarp-related slapstick and over 100 bags of Diamond Dry, the umpires mercifully called the game. This is not the end of the story…

If the Cubs proved definitively that Tuesday night that 15 grounds- keepers was not a sufficient number of groundskeepers to put a tarp on a field, that Thursday brought the news that the Cubs had earlier sent 10 groundskeepers home early. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Gordon Wittenmyer writes that the team did this not because head groundskeeper Roger Baird requested it — and, perhaps, without even consulting him — but because the front office is dedicated to keeping seasonal employees like groundskeepers under 130 hours of work per month.

If those groundskeepers had worked more hours than that, the Cubs would be on the hook for their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act’s standards. If they didn’t — say, if those employees in question were at home and off the clock, watching 15 of their co-workers put a tarp on a baseball field as if trying to fit a child’s turtleneck onto an irritated rhinoceros — then they wouldn’t…

But let’s consider what else this was, which is one of the most profitable organizations in (the also very profitable) Major League Baseball running one of the sport’s iconic ballparks like a dang Dollar General. This raises the question of whether scrimping, shaving and saving on game day counts as an Efficiency worth the Gaining, and the sub-question of whether Efficiency without Effectiveness is anything more than a management-class word for cheaping out…

Much more at the link. Of course, I’m told SB Nation is a leftist DFH outlet, but still.

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You Deserve to be Dead, You Moron

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Sorry, but no sympathy whatsoever for this jackass:

An instructor who was shot by a 9-year-old girl who fired an Uzi at a northwestern Arizona shooting range died Monday night at University Medical Center in Las Vegas.

The girl fired the weapon at the outdoor range that caters to heavy tourism traffic along U.S. Highway 93 between Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

Highway signage and Internet advertising beckons visitors to stop in, fire a machine gun and enjoy a meal at the Bullets and Burgers enterprise at the Last Stop, about 25 miles south of Las Vegas.

The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said the accidental shooting occurred about 10 a.m. Spokeswoman Trish Carter said the girl, who was vacationing from New Jersey with her parents, was standing next to the instructor at the time.

Mohave County Sheriff Jim McCabe said the girl safely and successfully fired the 9 mm weapon several times when it was set in the “single-shot” mode.

He said the weapon was put into the “fully-automatic” mode before the girl fired again with the instructor standing off to her left. The weapon recoiled and drifted left as the girl squeezed off an undetermined number of rounds as she maintained possession but lost control of the Uzi as it raised up above her head.

“The guy just dropped,” McCabe said of shooting instructor Charles Vacca, 39, of Lake Havasu City, who suffered at least one gunshot to the head.

Jeff Frichette, director of training for The Range 702 in Las Vegas, said the incident in Arizona would never occur at his business. He credited this to how continuously shooting range’s safety officers are trained.

“Hypothetically” a 9-year-old would be able to shoot a fully-automatic weapon, but it’s a discretionary decision, he said.

That decision is based on physical and safety guidelines, he said.

Here’s a safety guideline. Don’t give a fucking nine year old a loaded fully automatic weapon. The only shame here is that he wasn’t alive long enough to suffer from his stupidity.

Seriously, I’m sure his family loved him and he was especially kind to critters, but there is just no excuse for this kind of idiocy. And if he hadn’t died this way, he probably would have died prematurely sticking forks into toasters.

Or mopping naked and braining himself in a toilet. It could happen.

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And Another Day in Paradise

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I went to physical therapy today for the left shoulder (the “good” shoulder that I dislocated last Saturday), and she refused to treat me because she thinks I have been misdiagnosed and have a labral tear. So no rehab on it until I get an MRI on the left shoulder. I see the shoulder doctor on Friday to discuss the CT scan and bone spurs in the right shoulder. Meanwhile, my General Practitioner is apparently far more concerned with me becoming addicted to pain pills than he is in pain management, so I am pointlessly taking ultram (which does nothing but make my fingers numb) and meloxicam (which, as far as I can tell, does nothing). I actually didn’t take them for two days and nothing changed, so I am not sure why I am still taking them. At this point, I’m just resigned to be in pain except for the hour every night when I use my cold therapy machine.

The pain itself is annoying enough, but what really pisses me off is that I am just being a cranky asshole to everyone around me. I’m usually blunt, but honestly, I’m not a dick to people most of the time. Not so recently. I’m just being jerkish and an asshole and snapping at people for no reason. People try to talk to me and I just give them a dismissive glare. Everything about me is emanating “I am so not in the mood for your bullshit right now.” Then, later on, I feel guilty for being crappy to someone.

I’m still walking a lot, because even though the girls tugging on the leash causes pain and sometimes my arm hurts just from walking, if I walk far enough and then use the exercise bike, I loosen up and get the endorphins flowing. Followed by a hot shower, that’s pretty nice. I’ve been burning lavender essential oils, and that relaxes me a little, too.

I just wish there was a way they could inject something into my shoulders and block the pain. All I want is to not hurt, FFS. I have no idea how people deal with chronic pain, but I am afraid I am going to get a first hand lesson over the rest of my life.

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch moan piss whine. Shawn is heading home to see his family for a couple days, so I think I am going to just have a True Blood binge tonight and catch up on the last six episodes (he hates the show) while using my Bledsoe.

And no, I have not found an accupuncture clinic. I’m honestly not sure I want someone sticking pins in me and my shoulders until I know exactly what is going on with them. And since my shoulders are painful to the touch, massage therapy is a no go, as well.

*** Update ***

BTW- I am not completely insensitive to my GP’s position. All doctors have the DEA breathing down their necks, there is a pain pill epidemic in WV (although more down state- google “hillbilly heroin”), and I am an admitted alcoholic with only a month of sobriety under my belt. He doesn’t know that I have a really high pain threshold and wouldn’t bullshit him, and he doesn’t know that when I had my shoulder surgery I stopped taking the pills a month before the doctor wanted me to because I hated the damned things. So I understand his position and concern, I just think it is misplaced. Hell, prescribe me something and give the damned pills to my NAZI father and I’ll walk down the street twice a day. Give them to the damned town cop. Just do something so one wrong movement doesn’t put me on the verge of tears.

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Tuesday Evening Television Open Thread

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Game of Thrones watchers can skip forward to the 1:40 mark. Which reminds me, NYMag reported earlier:

Turns out that amid all the wild, far-fetched fan theories about how Game of Thrones will end, one or two may have hit the nail right on the severed head. “So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories and while some of those theories were amusing bulls — and creative — some of the theories are right,” author George R.R. Martin confessed during a talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. “At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I’d planted in the books and came to the right solution.”…

On the other hand, this happened:

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