Christmastime in Washington

December 23, 2025December 23, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Well, I see Admiral Palsy wants some new toys to sail round his salty dog while he frolics in the tub (Gulf of America™).

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic has a few thoughts about this vanity fleet:

Trump announced that the new Trump-class ships will be “battleships,” but they seem to be supersize versions of the existing workhorse of the Navy, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. … The Navy has also announced the development of a new class of frigates. Destroyers and frigates, as the Navy knows (and as the commander in chief should know) are not battleships. Battleships are huge and powerful, and are meant to dish out — and withstand — serious punishment. Destroyers and frigates are less rugged, and perform missions that require more speed and agility than battleships can muster. But none of that matters: The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.

Jesus H. Christ on a tugboat. Swear to Dog, this egomaniac would put his name on his dingus if he could find a sharp-eyed tattoo artist used to a small canvas.

“Sorry, dude, I’ll be lucky to get a ‘T’ on this thing. Yeah, right, gold, I heard you the first three or four times.”

The only thing I want to see his name on is a tombstone, after the profligate sonofabitch chokes on a mummified Filet-O-Fish that did too much hard time in the Mickey D’s storage cabinet (bad food, unlike bad presidents, doesn’t get good lawyers on the taxpayers’ dime).

And on that glorious day I plan to be well hydrated, with a little Steve Earle on the headphones.

Come back, Woody Guthrie. …

Resistance training

December 22, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Thanks to His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered, Despoiler of Poorboxes and Underage Girls, it is now possible for a 71-year-old cyclist with zero upper body to grip $150 worth of groceries in the left hand — yes, the one with the two dislocated digits — while opening the hatch of the Forester with the right.

Small wonder he croaked all the offshore wind farms. We have all the ill wind we need and then some.

If I’d known how my Golden Years would turn out, I’d have acquired more gold.

Worst. Garage sale. Ever.

December 20, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

This is the first thing one learns in law school. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

And it dollars up on the hoof right smart, too.

You may think of Jeffrey as just another wrinkled weenie on the roller grill in the Devil’s 7-Eleven, but lawyers have been dining out on him for years, and the feast ain’t over yet.

The lawyers in Congress have demanded that his files be released, and the lawyers in the Justice Department have been (and still are) cherry-picking them with a liberal application of the black Magic Marker, which means the elected ambulance-chasers may bring obstruction-of-justice charges, contempt charges, or even impeachments, which would cause the executive shysters to hire top-shelf mouthpieces of their own, and you didn’t exactly have to be brilliant to see this bullshit coming, though you do have to foot the bill.

Merry Christmas. No, don’t unwrap that box. We’ve got the receipts, but they won’t take it back.

‘Genocide’

December 15, 2025December 15, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

“What’s in a name? that which we call a hose / By any other name would smell as sour.” *Apologies to The Bard.*

Man, did I ever have to take the scenic route to this post.

This morning as I scanned the news, I noticed a headline at The New Mexican‘s website:

“Delays, bankruptcy let nursing-home chain avoid paying settlements for injuries, deaths.”

This sort of revelation is always of interest to me, as I am of a certain age, Herself’s patience is not without limits, and I have seen my mother, her mother, and an old friend renting rooms in such places.

But I don’t subscribe to The New Mex, and didn’t bother trying to hurdle their paywall.

And then, in a sidebar beneath the main story, I saw the name of the nursing-home chain: Genesis.

Aha! As it happens we know someone who had a family member installed in one of their Duck! City facilities. This person failed to thrive, and the tales told did not recommend the joint as a comfy bench upon which to await the Greydog to the Hereafter, though it seemed a stint there might have made good training for a triathlon featuring Cormac McCarthy’s Road and Dante’s Sea of Excrement.

Our source called the outfit “Genocide.”

So I launched a quick search and hey presto: Turns out the piece by Jordan Rau was not by a New Mex scribe. It came from KFF Health News, the news arm of KFF, an endowed national nonprofit that calls itself “the leading health policy organization in the U.S.” (You may remember it as the Kaiser Family Foundation.) They have a very liberal reprint policy, but I’m just gonna give you the links and a free taste:

Once the nation’s largest nursing home chain, Genesis says it was spending $8 million a month defending and settling lawsuits over resident injuries and deaths in recent years. But the company is now poised to wipe the liability slate clean by seeking refuge in the most protective corner of the legal system for the nursing home industry: bankruptcy court. The Genesis case, one of 11 large senior care bankruptcies this year, illustrates how health care companies can dodge public and financial accountability for alleged negligence through delays, confidentiality clauses, and bankruptcy maneuvers, a KFF Health News investigation found.

It seems a bankruptcy judge has declined to sign off on one typical evasive maneuver (the sale of its nursing-home business, reportedly to an insider). Everything I was able to find on that was paywalled.

In other news, though the story mentioned three incidents in Duck!Burg facilities (Genesis has 10 of them here), and despite the ease of reprinting or citing KFF’s heavy lifting in this matter, I’ve seen nothing about this in the Albuquerque Journal, which has been otherwise occupied trying to make its grotesque website easier to look at and navigate.

A “Local” drop-down under “News” would be a plus. Recaps of gruesome murders in California and Australia I can get elsewhere.

And if I were a working editor instead of just another doddering old ink-stained wretch in queue for the Soylent Green treatment I might bookmark KFF Health News, too. The Genesis locations I visited today had full parking lots. Surely the visitors can’t all be personal-injury attorneys. Some might be subscribers visiting loved ones.

Horseshit and gunfire

November 28, 2025November 28, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Black Friday? Not entirely. As long as you avert your eyes from the news, that is.

And from your email in-box, too. Jaysis H., etc. Everybody and his bookkeeper is trying to sell me something. Take a break, f’chrissakes. I’m still digesting last night’s feast.

Well … truth be told, as feasts go it was fairly light dining. Green chile stew, salad, freshly baked cornbread, and raspberry cobbler with whipped cream. Fake beer for me, real beer for Herself.

While feasting we watched a couple episodes of the old HBO series “Deadwood,” a tale of unfettered capitalism ascendant in which much of the dialogue sounds like Pestilence Piggy addressing the press.

In one episode a gambler and whoremonger growing fat on fear of and hatred for the government ordered the newspaper office ransacked, its machinery vandalized and shat upon.

So, yeah, ripped straight from today’s headlines. Art imitating life; horseshit and gunfire.

Before we sat down to eat I slipped out for a bracing 90 minutes on the Soma Double Cross, tooling around the Elena Gallegos Open Space and a few of its neighboring trails. Lots of folks out, hoofers and rollers, either working up an appetite for Thanksgiving dinner or sweating out the gravy. And no wonder, with temps in the low 50s, though there was still a bit of mud in the shady spots after last Thursday’s rain.

The DC is a good choice for EG: 42mm Soma Cazadero tires at 30/35 psi, a low end of 24x34T, and grippy IRD Cafam cantis for when shit gets real. Eight-speed bar-cons and XT/Ultegra derailleurs. The 54cm frame is small for me, but has a longish top tube, so I don’t look like a frog trying to hump a helmet when I’m in the saddle. The little sucker is really frisky in the swoopy, twisty bits.

I enjoyed myself so much that I went right back out and did it again today. One more thing to be thankful for. Like leftovers.