Category: Small hat sizes

Who peed in the pool?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Pucker up, Jeanine. The Great Builder has a boo-boo that needs kissing, and since you put it there — you know where — you’ve got the duty. | AP photo by Jacquelyn Martin

Ho, ho. I needed a good laugh today and Jeanine Pinot Noir delivers:

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the [Lincoln Memorial Reflecting] Pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2. She said that she had “tremendous evidence” that Mr. Hearn had committed a felony, and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.

Except, uh, not so much.

But on Friday, Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.

Ms. Pirro said that the pool’s new blue coating had actually started to peel within two days of the project’s completion, and that the Interior Department kept that fact from prosecutors, telling them that “nearly all of the damage” was done by vandals.

Later, Ms. Pirro said, prosecutors visited the pool themselves and saw that could not be true. The lining was peeling in many places, some far from the edge where Mr. Hearn had stood. After that, she said, prosecutors had demanded more information from the Interior Department, which made clear that the pool’s problems had developed during the renovation itself.

Do tell. Polygraphs for everyone!

I guess Jeanine skipped the “Investigate Before Charging” seminar at Albany Law School. Bad case of brew flu, p’raps?

In any case, The Great Builder was not amused. Writing on “Truth” Social, he screeched:

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

Couldn’t agree more. Charge the senile old saboteur who peed in the pool!

And a word to the wise, fatso: Get yourself a real ambulance-chaser if you want this kind of shit to stick to someone other than you. This boozy bag of hot air couldn’t deliver a case of beer to a frat house if one of the brothers was driving. She’d probably drink it all before they got there.

Slinging in the rain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
New Mexico has the best clouds, swear to Dog.

Looks like I picked the right day to sleep in.

I woke up way too early — 3 a.m. — then rolled over and went back to sleep until 6. Miss Mia was not amused, and said so, loudly, otherwise I might still be asleep even now.

Except Herself would’ve thundered in eventually to kick me up the hole, because she is a working woman and has a full day ahead involving the making of money, the care and feeding of the 401(k), retention of health insurance, and like that there. Some slacker is in charge of breakfast, which clearly was not making itself.

So up, up, I got, and set about my morning chores, which do not dollar up on the hoof nearly as nicely.

The Morning Star Grocery, circa 2025

As I was emptying the litter box, making coffee, toasting bread, cooking oatmeal, brewing tea, medicating Miss Mia, and so on, I was thinking in terms of where to ride today. Forecast was for a slight chance of rain after noon, so I was considering a medium-long outing to the Morning Star Grocery and back. Haven’t been out there all year.

And then it started raining.

Well. Shit. Lucky me. If I hadn’t slept in, I’d have been out in that rain, dodging swings of Thor’s hammer instead of kicks from Herself’s tiny sandals.

• • •

Speaking of hard rains a-fallin’, I don’t expect there’s much that could go wrong — cough, cough, “Armageddon,” cough, cough — with helping Saudi Arabia plunge its bloody paws into Pandora’s nuclear box.

Writes Charles P. Pierce:

To the outside observer, there’s no reason to trust either end of this deal. The American side is being run by grifters and incompetents. The Saudi side is being run by people who have settled accounts with bone saws and beheadings and who also are sharper about money than the Americans ever will be. The idea that the current Saudi regime will be able to resist the temptations of enriching uranium without using it to build weapons feels laughable. I wouldn’t trust any government on earth that far, let alone an authoritarian theocracy with murder in its heart.

Alas, Babylon, etc. The Gospel according to Frederic Brown would seem germane here, if young Harry Graham were the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and not a bit slow. I take little solace from any headline that includes the null phrase, “Trump says. …”

Grasping at (red) straws

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
Say, is that a commie under the bed? Nope, just Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

OK, lemme see if I have this straight. …

A fascist “leadership” that has installed felons, eejits, bullies, tools, and fools in positions of authority, unleashed a small army of masked, murderous thugs on the population, opened and filled gulags, started a needless, ill-considered, economy-strangling war it can’t seem to conclude, raised the cost of everything save labor while hoovering up gazillions for itself, its enablers, underwriters, and collaborators, insulted and/or shaken down nearly every international partner it has, revived dormant diseases, and constructed a convoluted, comical, rub-and-tug cult of personality, is suddenly clutching its stolen pearls and squealing about the perils of … communism?

Gloriosky, tovarisch! The capitalists have reached the bottom of their red-white-and-blue bag of tricks!*

You never saw Karl Marx tweeting shit like, “From each according to his ability, to … me.” But then this is the same crowd that was screeching about “tyranny” because a half-Black centrist was in the White House, mostly not fucking it up.

As we know, FreeDumb® is the most expensive kind.

An early Eighties Halloween in Oregon
Fido Castro, Chairman Bao Wao Wao, Che Chihuahua … a red-arsed mutt by any other name, and so on.

We’ve never come within a gnat’s whisker of communism, not even when the Party was in its heyday. Neither has anyone else. That derned ol’ State just keeps refusing to wither away.

But we’ve gotten a pretty good look at actual tyranny. So, excuse the hell out of me for proclaiming myself a proud Groucho Marxist.

*Made in China.

Call of doody

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
To drain the swamp, one must become the swamp.
Or something like that.

Swamp Thing doesn’t want anyone (other than himself) peeing in “his” pool.

It wasn’t enough to flush $16 mil’ or so through the Lincoln Memorial Septic Tank and into some cronies’ wallets, only to see it mutate into a bubbling cauldron of goo that could dissolve Aquaman into a scattering of bleached bones.

Now he’s installed National Guardpersons, U.S. Marshals, and a couple of A.I. FinkBot 9000s™ to catch any passing “terrorists,” “antifa,” or “citizens” who happen to pause while passing the National Terlet to remark: “What is that hideous stench? Is there a dead raccoon on the premises or is Hair Füror dropping a deuce in his drawers behind one of those trees over there?”

Nope. Swamp Thing he does his doody in plain sight — it’s how he marks territory since he can’t win a war, not even the ones he starts — and then makes his knaves, varlets, henchmen, fluffers and fixers compose spontaneous poetry like “How shall we compare thy loaf-pinching to a spritz of Chanel No. 5 at Neiman Marcus?”

Reflect on that, if you feel so inclined. Me? I need some air.