Category: Feckin’ eejits

Fiesta or fiasco?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
The Kona Sutra at Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, which sits right on the North Diversion Channel trail (from Feb. 2014).

It seems the best way to get to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is … by balloon.

Or is it?

Motorists and park-and-riders have suffered mightily this year, getting stuck in traffic and/or at bus stops, reports The Albuquerque Journal. With a record 21,000 park-and-ride tickets sold, the problem was “sheer volume,” according to Dennis Christiansen, Fiesta coordinator of traffic and P&R.

Added Fiesta executive director Paul Smith: “We have a limited number of access points to and from the park. We are kind of landlocked here. We have a reservation (Sandia) to the north, a neighborhood to the west, and AMAFCA (flood control) channels on two sides.”

’Tis a puzzler, to be sure. Until one considers that a bike path parallels one of those channels — the North Diversion Channel Trail, which runs straight into Balloon Fiesta Park, where a bike valet service awaits.

Neither the Journal nor the Fiesta mentions this transportation option, though I was riding that trail to that park before I even lived here. I tell ya, we don’t get no respect. …

Checks and imbalances

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Speaking as an angry white man, all these angry white men are starting to piss me off.

That eternal sense of entitlement was on full peacock display in yesterday’s Cirque du SoWhat? over whether the mendacious and elusive Bart O’Kavanaugh can stand erect long enough to make it to the Supreme Court.

The well of privilege seems bottomless from the top, and these angry white men will continue to draw from it until the bucket finally comes up filled with their obituaries.

Then, I suppose, their angry white sons will inherit the family business.

That business is bankrupt, but failure is for lesser men, and women. The angry white man picks himself up using our bootstraps and plows forward, like the dolt who, when told that he’s penniless, broke, flat busted, says, “That can’t be true. I still have checks in my checkbook.”

Actually, it’s our checkbook. And one of these days the angry white man’s mouth is going to use it to write a check his ass can’t cash.

But I don’t think we’re there yet.

The angry white man still has that big orange credit card we gave him back in 2016. And he’s gonna use that to buy shit the country doesn’t need and can’t afford until we take it away from him.

Remember your Martin Luther King: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

 

Just. One. Senator.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
One senator could make a difference? What a Capitol idea.

That’s all it would take, given the present composition of the Senate, for that august body to do its fucking job for a change.

As James Fallows notes:

Every one of them swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not simply their own careerist comfort. And not a one of them, yet, has been willing to risk comfort, career, or fund-raising to defend the constitutional check-and-balance prerogatives of their legislative branch. …

In any circumstances, the Senate’s arcane procedures mean that lone senators, determined to make a stand, can hold up business or block nominees to get their way. When the ruling party holds only 51 seats, or for the moment 50, the power of any one or two members goes up astronomically. With great power comes great responsibility—a responsibility that 50 men and women are choosing to shirk.