Category: Dollars and nonsense

Fuelishness 2: $3.89 for all my friends!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Valero: $3.89
Circle K: $3.89
Speedway: $3.89
DK: $3.89

Everyone’s on the same page along Tramway Boulevard.

Way back in the Glory Days of Monday — remember that fabulous Monday? — a happy Duck! City motorist could gas up for $3.39 or $3.59 per gallon, depending on his/her choice of station.

On Saturday … not so much.

The going rate for a gallon of go-juice on Tramway today is $3.89, from Lomas to San Bernardino. Affordability is on the march, and soon the American public will be legging it around and about, too.

Just wait until Addled Hitler sinks Kharg Island, a small coral island off Iran’s coast that according to The Associated Press is “the primary terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass.” The Guardian has a nifty explainer, too.

Petras Katinas, an energy researcher at the Royal United Services Institute who calls Kharg “the main node” of the Iranian economy, said that if Iran were to lose control of the island, it would be difficult for the country to function, even though the island isn’t a military or nuclear target.

“It doesn’t matter which regime is in power — new or old,” Katinas said.

Oh, good. This is like blowing up a 7-Eleven and replacing it with a Circle K, only the Circle K has empty shelves, fuel pumps that don’t work, no employees, and an angry mob forming in the cratered parking lot with weapons in various calibers and configurations, craving a word with management.

Send Whiskey Pete Kegsbreath out to restore order. He can show them his tats. They can show him their rat-a-tat-tats.

Avis rara legalis

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“The State? Yeah, that’s me. What of it? What?”

A rare bird indeed — a 6-3 majority of the Supremes — just took a dump on His Excremency’s tariff scheme.

Ho boy. Iran best be bracing for the inevitable dick-punch. You just know he’s gonna tell Kegsbreath to have at it now.

Meanwhile, I want a refund for the $32 ransom I had to pay on that Selle Italia 1990 Flite saddle I bought last October. Insert your own “up the butt” joke here.

• Update: Some deets from the smarties at Scotusblog. And some most excellent snark from Betty Cracker at Balloon-Juice, who opines thusly:

You know he’s going to shit a cat. Ms. Wiles will have to surge housekeeping assets to the TV room to sponge the ketchup off the walls. 

• Another update: No More Mister Nice Blog has some thoughts on war, tariffs and Trump’s brain, including informative links to pieces in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other outfits a tad better equipped for heavy duty than Your Humble Narrator..

Christmastime in Washington

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“Frigate? Frig it, I wanna battleship.”

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

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Those ain’t Santa’s bags, yo.

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.

A quack in our armor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Pat Oliphant has examined the Pentagon’s procurement practices over the years … 1982 being one of them.

The New York Times editorial board marches on with its “Overmatched” series. Today’s installment: “The Pentagon’s Gilded Fortress.”

An excerpt:

In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.

Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives are part of the problem:

As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Jaysis. Planes that can’t fly. $13 billion sitting ducks. Millions for retrofitting Vietnam-era helicopters to carry and launch drones. For Ike’s fabled Military-Industrial Complex it’s like robbing the same bank, over and over and over again, because you have a guy on the inside. You don’t even need to bring that pistol you can’t seem to acquire for some mysterious reason.