More shit soufflé? Of course we accept food stamps. Ha! Just kidding!
When you send whores to church, you should not be surprised to find them turning tricks in the pews.
Charlie Pierce says this more eloquently, and at greater length. The incomprehensible and unread tax bill that cleared the Senate in the wee hours this morning was larded with “conservative fetish objects” and the process “shot through with a contempt for democracy,” because of course they were.
And after this infernal hound comes howling out of the conference committee, and King Donald the Short-fingered gives it his blessing, and it begins devouring everyone who chose his or her parents poorly, and the MAGApies find that their health bennies don’t cover Tegaderm for the ouchy rug burns on their knees and elbows, to say nothing of that famous “burning, itching sensation,” well, you may be certain of one thing:
They will blame the black guy and the woman, not The Turtle and the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver.
Trail 366, if memory serves. You can ride this sucker on a road bike, and I have.
After another morning spent cranking away on the Fuji Touring for review purposes I devoted the afternoon to tooling around the Elena Gallegos trails on my trusty, dusty old Voodoo Nakisi MonsterCrosser®.
There were a half-dozen deer to the left of me and about the same to the right. Don’t want to hit one of these dudes at speed on the old MonsterCrosser®. It will end badly.
As I was motoring along, enjoying the ridiculously warm weather (68, a degree shy of the record), I caught a glimpse of a big gray booty ambling through the scrub and hit the binders.
Sure enough, a sizable herd of mule deer was cruising the ’hood. So I stopped and snapped a couple pix with the battered Canon 300 HS, which has decided to start working again, kinda, sorta.
Mule deer are not nature’s geniuses. Back in Weirdcliffe we used to joke that you could hunt them with a Twinkie and a ball-peen hammer.
But they look serene, majestic and brilliant when compared to the ruminants grazing the nation down to the bedrock in DeeCee. There is nary a problem in the world that a Republican legislature cannot make worse.
The Mud Stud is not exactly the most enlightened of males. In fact, he’s a pretty dim bulb on most matters.
Some of the lads wandered a bit off topic in the previous post, toward the cascade of revelations about just how many of us appear to be dicks.
The sheer number of recent revelations feels overwhelming, until you consider how long women have been enduring a thumping of one kind or another.
In this country women didn’t get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 (it was Tennessee, presently home to Herself the Elder and Herself’s younger sister, that tipped the scale).
Inequities remained and continued, of course. Today, women still earn less than men. Forbes says the Fortune 500 has more women CEOs than ever before, but that’s not saying much (32). Women hold just 8 percent of the top corporate spots in the U.S., according to CNBC.
In government, we find all of 21 women in the Senate and 84 in the House.
And of course, if you’re talking about simple condescension, or a good old-fashioned beatdown, men have the edge there too.
Then there’s sexual harassment.
I’m willing to bet that we all know at least one person who’s been the unwilling target of unwanted attention. In my newspaper days I knew two people — one woman, one man — who were stalked by their supervisors. To management’s credit, both perpetrators were disciplined, one by a swift sacking.
These creeps were creating toxic environments for at least two employees and had to go. But newsrooms, like cop shops, are rough-and-rowdy places, with an us-against-them atmosphere, frequent booze-addled socializing outside the workplace, and a lot of raw language. Plenty of torrid romances bloomed — editors with reporters, reporters with photographers, and ad salespersons with their clients.
And of course the publisher was boinking all of us.
So where do we draw the lines between acceptable, frisky, risky and abusive behavior, especially at the workplace? What merits a “Oh, go fuck yourself, Ed, you’re drunk” and what mandates a pink slip?
I look at Al Franken and I see a comedian who made a stupid joke. I look at King Donald the Short-fingered and I see a self-confessed serial abuser. Plenty of built-in bias in that evaluation, to be sure, but there it is.
Am I wrong? If so, what’s right? I’m particularly interested in hearing from the women in the audience on this one, because I’ve never been sexually harassed, on the job or anywhere else.
Unless you count the time the giant African-American crossdresser in the red miniskirt hooted at me as I was cycling through Denver’s Cheesman Park back in the Eighties.
“Oh, honey, let me ride it, let me ride it!” s/he squealed. I don’t think s/he was talking about my bike.
The old man in one of his earliest temporary billets, in New Guinea during World War II.
Today being Veterans Day, please allow me to tip the Mad Dog garrison cap to all of yis who served.
Most of the media rah-rah was yesterday, which was the officially designated Federal Shopping Holiday; I went looking for a new commander-in-chief but nobody had one in stock. “Come back in November 2020,” they said. And I shall.
The individual who currently holds the position finally made it to Vietnam, I see. Boy, golf must do wonders for bone spurs. I hear it’s the new cycling.
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