Category: Deep political thought

Here’s fish in your eye

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Fisheyed Front Strange
Acid flashback? Nope, just the wizards at Canon messing with our minds again.

I didn’t get out for a ride today until the afternoon thunderclouds were rolling in, and wasn’t but four blocks away from Chez Dog when the first raindrops began to fall.

Summoning my inner Belgian, I pressed on, and atop the Col du Austin Bluffs Parkway, by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, I stopped to snap this pic of the Front Range using the Canon PowerShot 300HS‘s fisheye-lens feature. This sort of effrontery must make real photographers feel the way I do when some mouth-breather with a netbook and a Twitter account proclaims himself a writer.

Meanwhile, the other day I cycle up to Grandview Overlook in Palmer Park and see another cyclist there. We start chatting, and he mentions that he used to live in California, and I ask why he left, expecting some tale about selling some shitbox condo for a bazillion dollars and buying the Broadmoor as a pied-a-terre until something of quality hits the market.

“Couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” he said. “The bank wouldn’t work with us, so we handed them the keys and said, ‘See you.'”

Now, I don’t know the backstory. But the dude went from “owning” a house in California to ranching the view from an apartment in a tough part of Bibleburg, and that’s got to sting, no matter how nifty the Front Range looks from the saddle of your bicycle.

Speaker of the Hose

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Eric Cantor is either an al-Qaeda sleeper agent hell-bent on destroying the U.S. economy or the dumbest pol to come down the pike in the better part of quite some time.*

He’s up to his tits in a hole and still digging, and Punkinhead is standing on the edge, watching him do it, sipping from a beaker of gin and just waiting for the proper moment to unzip, deploy the wonder worm and piss all over him.

This punk-ass chump will be Speaker of the House when Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin throw a three-way Wesson Oil fling on a giant red-white-and-blue plastic tarp emblazoned with the U.S. Constitution and the Ten Commandments.

* I almost forgot about Louie Gohmert, probably because he’s so forgettable. That numbnuts thinks we can clear up the red ink with a U-nited States of America garage sale. “You have land. You’ve got leases,” he told The Washington Post. “There are all kinds of assets.” Right. Let’s start by selling Gohmert’s bridge and banjo.

Through the roof

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

One of the lefty bloggers I follow, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, wrote recently: “We are ruled by charlatans and cowards.” And after watching this rope-a-dope chickenshit over what should be a strictly routine procedure — raising the debt ceiling — I couldn’t agree more.

The latest cynical gambit from the Repuglitards, who throughout the process have been focused not on paying the bills they’ve rung up, but rather on getting yet another American laid off (Barack Obama), appears to be to pass the buck now in hopes of getting to hammer the prez and his party in the run-up to the 2012 elections. Let him raise the ceiling now and we’ll knock him to the floor in the general, goes what passes for thinking among this lot.

Well, God knows whichever flag-pinned feeb winds up wearing their nomination like a scarlet “E” for “Eejit” will need all the help s/he can get. But this is despicable even for Turtleneck, Punkinhead and the rest of those smirking ward-heelers. Just ask Kevin, who weighs in with his own mighty snark here.

Last I looked there were a whole lot of folks out of work and an economy limping along like a three-legged sloth with the piles, and these assclowns think the smart thing to do is strive mightily to make matters even worse? Are there no pitchforks? No torches?

Voting with my feet

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Rock on
Make a great downhill course, wouldn't it?

Every now and then I get tired of being a vehicle and become a pedestrian instead. Today was one of those days, so I spent 90 minutes hiking various trails in Palmer Park.

I ride the park at least once a week, usually on one cyclo-cross bike or another, which limits my choices from the trails menu. There may very well be people who can ride the entire Templeton Trail on a ’cross bike, for example, but I am not one of them. So today I stomped around on a mess of trails my wheeled self generally gives a wide berth — the Templeton, the Kinnickinnick, the Cheyenne and the Edna Mae Bennet.

It was a nice change of pace, and also a reminder of the price Bibleburg is paying for the honor of serving as a pilot project for Grover Norquist’s wet dream of drowning a shrunken government in a libertarian bathtub. The park crappers are locked and the water faucets shut off, and I get the impression that a lot of the recent trail maintenance was the work not of parks staff but of volunteers, specifically the Guardians of Palmer Park.

Just outside the park sit empty bus benches bearing signs saying the bus doesn’t stop there anymore, and downtown an even hundred of the century-old trees that make the Old North End so homey are coming down because they are either dead or dying thanks to an extended drought and reduced watering by the city. Plenty of our once-green parks are in a similar woeful state.

Elections have consequences, as folks here and elsewhere are learning the hard way. At least I hope they are.

• Late update: Meanwhile, we’re pouring another $21,500 down the five-ringed loo at the U.S. Olympic Committee — which already cost us $42.3 million in taxpayer dollars — for a temporary mural featuring a local gold medalist in an ludicrous attempt to make ourselves look pretty. Once again, satire runs a very poor second to reality.

Newt-ered

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Imagine my dismay: Newt Gingrich’s brain trust spun on its collective heel and marched out the door after the alleged candidate for the GOP presidential nomination decided to go on a two-week vacation a few weeks after a series of miscues right out of the starting gate that would have The Three Stooges muttering, “C’mon, don’t you think that’s a little over the top?”

The inside chatter centers on who wears the boxers in Newt’s most recent marriage, and that would appear to be Callista Gingrich, who is said to have insisted on the vacation. Mama spank. Ouch.

Meanwhile, some folks think this gives impetus to the latest asshat to serve as governor of Texas, Rick “Goodhair” Perry, as the late, great Molly Ivins used to call him. The Texas Observer has had the 411 on this bozo for the better part of quite some time, and their Bob Moser would like nothing better than to see him run and get beat like a rented burro.

But it looks like we’ll have Newt to kick around for a while yet. According to Politico, he announced on Facebook that he was still in the race, “committed to running the substantive, solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier this spring.”

I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. After all, the Stooges have been absent from the national stage for decades.