Month: August 2013

The bomb’s in your court, Congress

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Everything's coming up roses.
Everything’s coming up roses.

Well played by the wily Kenyan Mooslim socialist usurper. He dumped the whole Syria mess smack dab into the lap of Congress. If the situation weren’t so serious, I’d be laughing my ass off.

But asking Congress for permission to do something stupid is like shooting puppies at the pound — to wit, not exactly sporting. A guy can hardly miss. It’s harder to squeeze shit out of a colostomy bag.

This is going to be a living lesson in civics, a real physical (and mental) exam for the American body politic. The early smart money seems to think that the prez eventually gets the green light for this dumb idea, but I’m not so sure. The Rethugs hate his ass so much that they might just deny themselves the pleasure of sending a few other folks’ kids to the boneyard this time around. But hey, I’ve been wrong before.

Late updates

• Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog says Congress is like a dog that chases and catches a car, then has no idea what to do with it, calling Obama’s move “one of those terrific examples of good politics and good policy.”

• John Nichols at The Nation says: “This is as the founders intended when they wrote a Constitution that gives the power to declare war not to an all-powerful commander-in-chief but to an unwieldy Congress.”

• Kevin Drum at Mother Jones says: “Not only is this the right thing to do, but it also forces Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibilities, something they should spend more time doing and less time constantly squawking about.”

‘Limited’ warfare, my ass

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments

Call me a knee-jerk pacifist, but where the hell is the upside in this?

The probability of a lot of the wrong people getting croaked seems high to me, as does the price tag for a nation that can’t seem to budget for much that doesn’t involve blowing shit up. The odds that a few cruise missiles will deter Syria’s further use of chemical weapons, meanwhile, strike me as poor.

As for such an attack shoring up our “credibility,” I’m not certain we still have any of that in this particular neck of the woods. And I’m getting a little tired of presidents dragging us into these things while the Congress plays with its pud.

The Nation‘s editors make their case against military intervention. The New York Times editorial board says Obama hasn’t made his case for such an attack. So far I’m with the naysayers on this one.

Thoughts?

Never wash your car

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
refugees
The Chez Dog Refugee Center, which is to say, my office.

Herself had the Subaru detailed today and the results were predictable — if there’s anything Yahweh hates, it’s a clean car. You will recall from your Bible that His people mostly walked everywhere, unless a donkey happened to be available.

Slow-moving storms briefly closed Interstate 25; Highway 24 remains closed. Hail north and east, mostly rain south and west. We hadn’t gotten much of anything at Chez Dog as of 9 p.m. Bibleburg time, though the Boo’s evening walk was more of a dog-paddle.

But those poor folks in Manitou Springs appear to be facing another beating. The flood sirens are sounding, and the Gazette says they ain’t kiddin’.

• Late note: Maybe I spoke too soon. It’s raining pretty steadily, with enough thunder to send the Boo scurrying under my drawing board. Nice night to have a new roof on the garage — if you’re a bicycle, anyway. The cars are in the driveway where they belong.

Hot time in the old town

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments
Fountain Creek Trail
In the trees at the southern end of the Fountain Creek Trail.

We missed a temperature record today, but not by much — the official high was 89, just a few degrees short of 2003’s record of 93. I can hear Patrick chuckling (“You call that hot?”) all the way from Arizona.

Naturally, being a sluggard and a knucklehead, this mad dog was out in the noonday sun with the Englishmen, riding the Voodoo Nakisi down and back along the Fountain Creek Trail. One of these days I’ll start rolling out of the sack bright and early, like Herself, who is up and at ’em at the crack of dawn.

Yeah, right.

The recent heavy weather has done something of a number on the trail surface in spots. Ordinarily it’s no big thing to ride a cyclo-cross bike on the Fountain Creek Trail — hell, most days you could handle the 37-mile round trip on a road bike — but the recent rains have scoured it pretty good in places, stripping the trail down to hardpan gullies here and piling sand up there. Happily, I was riding 700×43 Bruce Gordon Rock N’ Roads, which could smooth out the bumps on the highway to Hell.

And the greenery! You never see Colorado this green, not this time of year. The far end of the trail, where it peters out near some dude’s hayburner hotel just west of Fountain, was strangled half to death with the same weeds that have been clogging snotlockers here at Chez Dog. The irrigation ditch at trailside by Fountain Creek Regional Park was running high, too, the water nearly level with the trail.

Up north, meanwhile, the big boys were riding the Tour of the Northern Colorado Ski Ghettos, but I wasn’t paying attention. I dislike ski towns so much I won’t even visit one to ski, much less to watch someone else ride their bikes.

It’s a shame the race won’t visit some lesser hamlets, burgs and whistle stops that could really do with a tourism bump, but then the organizers don’t put these things on out of the goodness of their hearts, eh? Them that’s got shall get, as the old song goes.

Weeds and grass roots

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
The front yard
The House Back East™ gets a front-yard makeover.

The rain has abated for the moment and the home-improvement projects have resumed with a vengeance.

The deluge reminded us of just how badly the garage roof leaks — it had become less of a garage and more of a free car wash — and so the roof got replaced yesterday.

The back yard
The back yard looked like a scene from “Platoon” before Herself and I spent an afternoon defoliating it by hand.

Also ongoing is landscaping at The House Back East™, which had developed a bumper crop of noxious weeds during our extended monsoon season. The front yard has gotten a colorful layer of mulch, and the much larger back yard is awaiting similar treatment.

You want a reminder of how feeble you have become in your dotage, spend an afternoon doing squats while pulling a metric shit-ton of weeds. The next morning, assess the plummeting property value of your crumbling temple of the soul. Comparables from the immediate vicinity probably won’t help much, if your wife is seven years younger than you, lifts weights and does yoga.

Speaking of things getting fixed up, a group of local investors has transformed the old Ivywild School, shuttered due to declining enrollment, into a mixed-use development that houses Bristol Brewing, Old School Bakery, the Meat Locker deli and any number of other worthwhile operations.

“This is a celebration that says, hey, if people work together, this is what can happen,” partner Mike Bristol told The Gazette. “We can do this again. Not me personally, but as a community. We can do other things like this.”

Yes, please. And thank you.