I heard more than a few people booing as I watched via streaming Innertubes video and wondered idly whether they were (a) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar getting a call-up; (2) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar being there at all, or (iii) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar being a rat-fink tweetie-boid stool pigeon and a Friend of Cancer.
The field wasn’t as deep as last year’s, with Big Tex and his sidekicks having a previous engagement, but there was still some muscle there — Bissell’s Ian Boswell and Paul Mach, who went one-two in the finale, and 2005 champ Burke Swindlehurst (Team Give-Blackbottoms).
And Landis was a player, helping reel in what looked to be the race-winning move by Swindlehurst and finishing just off the podium in fourth. Don’t s’pose they dope-tested him or nothin’ afterward to see whether he was getting his testosterone from his balls instead of a bottle these days.
We have a new champion in the Upperclass Twit of the Year Show, and it ain't Nigel Incubator-Jones.
Meanwhile, from our You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up Department comes this item about British Petroleum’s Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward pissing off to the southern coast of England to watch his yacht compete in the (wait for it) J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, which circumnavigates the Isle of Wight. It sounds like a Monty Python skit.
On the one hand, it’s almost refreshing to watch a capitalist who really and truly does not give one runny shit about the proles with whom he is condemned to share a planet.
Looks like the comments done went and shut theyselfs off again, dagnabbit. All this new-fangled technology ain’t worth a warm bucket ‘a spit, you ask me. It’s a helluva world when the damn’ software makes the meatware’s decisions without so much as a by-your-leave.
A casual search through the WordPress forums finds many references to this issue, but no solutions. And since VeloNews.com is also a WordPress construct and has many of its own interesting gremlins, I’m not certain that upgrading to v3.0 of the software will solve my problem.
Anyway, the yak factory should be back in business, for recent posts, anyway. When this happens the only way to re-enable comments — which are supposed to be permanently enabled for everyone who has had one previous observation approved by the Sultan of the Sandbox, to wit, Your Humble Narrator — is to go into every post, click the comments-permitted box, save the post, rinse and repeat. Life, short, etc.
You can plant these on my grave if Palmer Park ever succeeds in killing me.
Another scorcher today, with plenty of wind and a big-ass fire to the southwest of us (my man Hal Walter at Hardscrabble Times has a pic).
With 90s in the forecast and a long shift in the Velo-barrel tomorrow I decided to get out early for another of my patented weirdo cyclo-cross rides, a two-hour blend of asphalt, concrete, pulverized-granite paths and moderately technical, powdery single-track that took me into Palmer Park, where the cacti and Indian paintbrush are in bloom.
I love riding a ’cross bike in this park, especially when it’s windy, because you can hide from the breeze in its miniature canyons, where the trails are well screened with foliage this time of year. This is both a blessing and a curse, as it dramatically shortens your line of sight, and the park is popular with a wide variety of outdoorsy types — runners, joggers, dog-walkers, equestrians, bird-watchers, stoners, boners and mountain bikers.
So I’m not exactly rippin’ the trails on my Nobilette, is what I’m saying. Life is already plenty short enough, and if I merely get laid up instead of laid out, well, free-lancers don’t get sick days. “A day of no work is a day of no eating,” said Huai-hai. And as you know, I dearly love to eat.
Still, I did manage to clean one section of trail that has had stymied me for the better part of quite some time. And I almost got a second bit, a rock garden that has defied me for as long as I can remember. I had it dicked but spazzed out just at the end, nearly T-boning a trailside tree.
“Damn it!” I barked, just as a couple grinning mountain bikers appeared, headed in the opposite direction. “Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to kill myself here,” I explained, and off they went, effortlessly navigating the rockpile that tried to feed me to a tree.
We have a fine crop of commie-pinko roses coming up in the back yard.
Speaking of the brain-dead, the Senate Repuglicants — aided and abetted by Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson — have once again resorted to the filibuster to croak a package of jobless benefits and state aid, ostensibly because its costs are not offset by cuts in other programs. Yeah, right.
Notes Steve Benen at Political Animal: “Because the Senate is ridiculous, 40 votes trumps 56. In real-world terms, this means more than a million unemployed Americans will stop receiving assistance next week, and aid states are counting to prevent massive layoffs won’t arrive.”
Lovely. Where were these self-styled fiscal conservatives when the Daffy-Fudd administration was running two wars off the budget and flushing the Clinton surplus down the gold-plated, diamond-studded loo of tax cuts for the rich? The shameless dingbat Orrin Hatch has stated for the public record that during the previous administration “it was standard practice not to pay for things.”
He added: “We were concerned about it, because it certainly added to the deficit, no question.” Just not concerned enough to actually, y’know, like, do anything about it — like put the brakes on your own “conservative” cabal’s reckless spending and givebacks to the wealthy.
Jim Hightower made an excellent point recently. American politics is not about left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal, red vs. blue — it’s about top vs. bottom. Now cover the kiddies’ ears, ’cause we’re gonna talk a little class warfare here. Notes Hightower:
“As I’ve rambled through life, I’ve observed that the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom. This is how America’s economic and political systems really shake out, with each of us located somewhere up or down that spectrum, mostly down. Right to left is political theory; top to bottom is the reality we actually experience in our lives every day — and the vast majority of Americans know that they’re not even within shouting distance of the moneyed powers that rule from the top of both systems, whether those elites call themselves conservatives or liberals.
Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but true nonetheless. Those durned federales in DeeCee will start giving a shit about the po’ folk when they are po’ themselves, and not before. The question is: How do we junk-shot their money pipeline? The two parties have effectively rigged the game so it’s impossible for an honest player to even get a seat at the table.
Hightower preaches populism, which he describes as “the continuation of America’s democratic revolution.”
“It encompasses and extends the creation of a government that is us,” he continues. “Instead of a ‘trickle down’ approach to public policy, populism is solidly grounded in a ‘percolate up’ philosophy that springs directly from America’s founding principle of the Common Good.”
“The Common Good.” E pluribus unum. Do these concepts find a home in Americans’ hearts and minds anymore? Or should we change the national motto to, “I’ve Got Mine, Get Yours!”?
Mad Blog Media 