I’m with Charlie Pierce and David Graham on this one.
We have legitimate constitutional tools for removing an unfit president from office. Anonymous preening chickenshittery is not one of them. It’s a little late to try selling us on the notion that you’re just the piano player in this whorehouse.
“A very principled position,” me arse. Sack up and speak up — in the daylight — or shut up.
Ordinarily we don’t expect much when flipping to the next page in the calendar, any more than we do when crossing a state line, unless we’re driving a hot car wearing the wrong plates with an old enemy bound and gagged in the trunk next to a suitcase full of cash, cocaine, and at least one unregistered firearm while the underage runaway in the passenger seat passes us a fat spliff soaked in hash oil, pulls off her tube top, and asks if she can pretty please have a pull on our fifth of Jameson.
But it rained a good deal of the first day of September, and we opened most of the windows at El Rancho Pendejo to let the cool breeze blow through, and that sort of felt like the end of summer to me.
I rearranged my office for no good reason, playing a selection of weather-appropriate Irish tunes on the stereo, while Herself vacuumed the house.
Today I vacuumed the lawn, which is more fun, because you can do it outside in the fresh air and there is no stopping to empty the bag, because our lawn is a cannibal and enjoys eating its own clippings.
After chores we poured ourselves a couple of cold beverages and sprawled on the patio for a spell, listening to some Miles Davis, enjoying some more of that cool breeze, and watching a pair of hummingbirds battle each other and the bees for a short snort from the feeder as a pacifist two-tailed swallowtail stealthily worked a bush along the back wall.
Tomorrow is Labor Day, and labor we shall not. Something in a bike ride, I think, clad in red.
Drop bars stayed off the menu this week.
After savoring a Jones SWB on the rocks both Tuesday and Wednesday, I broke out my own Jones on Thursday for purposes of comparison.
The SWB is a 27.5+ bike, with a 1×10 Deore/Zoom drivetrain and 3-inch Maxxis Chronicle rubber, while mine is a 29er that rolls with 10-speed, triple-ring XT and 2.4-inch Maxxis Ardents.
I’d be happy with either of ’em given our trail conditions. The SWB serves up a bit more flotation in deep sand and over rough stuff with its 50mm rims and 3-inch squishies, but my 29er sort of expands my practice of riding rigid steel cyclocross bikes everywhere. On the Jones I can just gorilla my way over obstacles I have to finesse on a Steelman.
The triple drivetrain gives me a lower low end for the steep bits, too.
Yesterday, just ’cause I could, I pulled down the 1995 DBR Axis TT hardtail and took that out for a spin. This shout out to days gone by rolls on 26×2.0 Hutchinson Pythons, sports an 8-speed, triple-ring, twist-shifter XT/Sachs/GripShift drivetrain, and is the only rim-brake bike of the three (XT linear pulls).
The lads at Sandia Cycles resolved some irksome headset and braking issues for me a while back and the old beast proved surprisingly fun to ride. After a while I remembered that I had a suspension fork and quit trying to tiptoe around things, but the rear wheel wanted to hold onto rocks after the rest of the bike was done with them.
Today is looking like a day for running, or even staying indoors. The skies erupted sometime around stupid-thirty this morning — the full rooster, with thunder, lightning and rain — and at the moment they’re still blacker than six yards up Satan’s colon.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they say.
I had every intention of shooting a bunch of video of the Jones SWB for Adventure Cyclist today. But there was a veritable horde of nimrods tramping around and about on my trails, cluttering up the background, so as I was about to continue my usual southward swing along Trail 365, in a snit, I abruptly veered north onto a rocky stretch that I was pretty sure I couldn’t ride.
And I was right. But it was a giggle anyway, and a pleasant change of pace, not least because I had always let that northbound trail buffalo me into turning around. This time I went All! The! Way!
I am not much for technical trails, and absolutely worthless in rock gardens, but I managed to ride quite a bit of Trail 365 between Elena Gallegos and the water tank above the Sandia Tram. It’s not preposterously difficult for anyone who isn’t me, and as I came to understand that I could either do a lot of walking or sack up and ride, well, I managed to surprise myself a time or two on the lumpy bits. The 27.5+x3.0 Maxxis Chronicle tires sure helped, especially at around 15 psi.
And I saw exactly one other lunatic out there, riding the trail in the opposite direction. I yielded trail, we traded greetings, and that was that.
I saw exactly one big-ass rattlesnake, too. We did not pause in our travels to exchange compliments.
But the hell of it is I got so focused on trying to clean rocky sections that I only shot one short snippet of video. Now I gotta go ride the sonofabitch again.
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.
Mad Blog Media 
