Scott Walker, by some accounts the foremost of the 2,375,296 Republicans running for that party’s 2016 presidential nomination, is going after working folks again with “right to work” legislation. He professed no interest in reviving this anti-union measure while campaigning to keep his present job, but that was so 15 minutes ago. A tricornered hat full of Tea Bagger gold is all he cares about now.
Elsewhere, Bill O’Reilly is flailing around like a big dumb mutt in the dogcatcher’s truck, trying to convince the suckers that he was a double Ernie Pyle with a side of Ed Murrow back in the day, doing it hand-to-hand with the bad guys in the Falklands when he was actually boffing a sheep in his suite at the Hilton Buenos Aires.
He’ll be successful, of course, for the same reason that Walker will get his latest union-busting tool. Larry’s wife can tell you why.
At left, fresh vinyl in the laundry room; at right, new tile in the crapper (though still no crapper).
Yesterday was a perfect day for a bike ride. The temperatures peaked somewhere in the upper 70s, I had a tailwind for most of the uphill bits, and it even rained a bit during the homebound stretch. I didn’t have a rain jacket, but I didn’t care, because it felt great. Plus the bike had fenders.
Good thing I made time for cycling, too. Because today, after nearly three months of not much happening as regards restoration of the basement following The Shit Monsoon of Memorial Day Weekend, not one but two crews showed up to lay tile and vinyl. Tomorrow comes the carpet, and later this week, the toilet and vanity. Good times.
The downside — and there always is one — is that it is another beautiful day for cycling, yet here I sit, enjoying a symphony of jackhammers and saws, because Herself has pissed off to Denver for a meeting and there is no one else to mind the store. The cats are notoriously unreliable in such matters, and Mister Boo would be down there happily eating adhesive and grout because he thinks everything is food. Swear to God. He’d scarf down a bowl of cat piss and sawdust as though it were steak tartare.
Speaking of folks who will swallow anything, David Stockman isn’t one of them — not when it comes to Paul Ryan and his alleged budget “plan.” Ronnie Raygun’s OMB chief ripped Ryan a new one in The New York Times, and Ed Kilgore of Political Animal adds his personal touch to the bits and pieces he quotes.
Over at The Nation, meanwhile. John Nichols takes the opportunity to contrast Ryan’s Randite vision with Wisconsin’s progressive tradition.
And at The Maddow Blog, Steve Benen calls out Ryan for hypocrisy, noting that while he was raising against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Ryan was right there with his hand out like everyone else.
Well, so much for that Friday morning ride. Regular readers will recall the Shit Monsoon and the clusterfuckery that ensued immediately thereafter — it continues this week with the delivery of a second wrongly sized bathroom door. As in No. 2. Hey, it’s a cheap joke, but that’s all I can afford.
These things are custom-built, and take about six weeks to arrive, so when the second botched door shows up all a guy can do is laugh. Rage is absolutely useless. Trust me, I’ve tried both, and I like laughter a lot more.
So instead of going for a pleasant road ride with my boys Big Bill McBeef and Dennis the Menace, I’m sitting on the back deck with a laptop, watching Mia Sopaipilla tear around the yard and waiting to hear whether the second door can be made to fit. I expect Jim Morrison will rejoin The Doors for a Back From the Dead Tour before that happens.
Seven weeks after the shit monsoon, the basement is 99 percent finished. Drywall, carpet, vinyl and tile all have been installed and Herself’s office and bathroom resurrected. All we’re waiting on is a special-order door for the loo. Until it arrives, Herself will have to endure visitations from Turkish and Mia Sopaipilla while she is perched atop the throne, thumbing though Vogue.
Upstairs, the dishwasher, which blew up at about the same time as the basement, has been repaired. Everything removed from downstairs has been returned to its rightful place or disposed of, and now a guy can walk from room to room without twisting an ankle or barking a shin.
Seven weeks ago, this crapper was a shithouse.
While the basement was undergoing its restoration, every square inch of upstairs storage in this place was filled to overflowing, and I went through it like Sherman did Georgia.
The oldest Macs and various accessories went to the recycler — the Quadra 650, the Power Computing PowerBase 200MT, the PowerBook 2300c with MiniDock, a Tandy laptop, a UMAX SCSI scanner and an HP inkjet printer. The office G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac, two MacBooks, two iBooks, a G3 500MHz “Pismo” PowerBook and an Asus Eee PC survived the purge, so we’re not exactly back to chisels and tablets here.
Meanwhile, the Sawtooth has been enhanced with a 250GB FireWire drive, so I can finally back up its internal drives, one of which has been making some dire noises of late (it’s only 10 years old, f’chrissakes). That will have to wait for tomorrow, however. Today I’m in the barrel at VeloNews.com, where the chamois-sniffers will soon be congregating, desperate for news about Lance Armstrong’s collarbone surgery.
I never got surgery for either of mine, probably because my health insurance sucked. And I could have used a little savvy knifework on the second break, which was nasty. Says my doc: “The good news is, as long as all the fragments show up on the same bit of X-ray film, the break will heal. Eventually.”
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