Old Glory
04/07/21 14:45
It's going to be another hot one. I don't mind the heat but the humidity is tough to take. You just don't want to do anything outside. It takes too much effort and it's uncomfortable to boot. That said, I feel the need to hit the gym today to move my body. I won't be hitting it hard but a little treadmill activity and a few weights might be just what the doctor ordered. I'm not even sure about biking as I sit here at 7:21 in the morning. A bridge too far?
The missus is up early today and she's running circles around me and distracting me to no end. It's hard for me to hold a thought in my head long enough to do anything with it much less put it down on paper. Whenever I think I'm starting to get some traction she says something or does something that reminds me that my time is not my own. Not even a little Joni Mitchell will bring me around to where I think I need to be to get on with this task of mine.
I'm sure I wanted to say something about the woman competing in the hammer throw competition in order to qualify for the summer Olympics in Japan this summer. Did I think it was un-American of her to scowl and turn her back when they played our national anthem? You bet your ass I did. She's a Black Lives Matter activist and she makes no bones about it. Everybody is looking for a payday these days. They all think that going full Colin Kaepernick is going to get their faces on a box of cereal, endorsements from this or that woke organization, and wealth beyond their wildest dreams. I'm not sure they're wrong.
I guess I'll do my part by not watching the Olympics. I can only hope that other god-fearing and similar-minded Americans will do the same. We vote with our feet when and where necessary to express our collective displeasure at what our fellow Americans are doing or not doing. You better believe that had one or more of the winning competitors worn a "Trump Won" tee-shirt, they would have been summarily dismissed and banished for maybe years to come. But, for now, we fight back. We're in it to win it.
The persistent theme of systemic racism we see being pushed day in and day out by the media and on the front pages of this or that leftist newspaper in America is just getting old. It's wearing thin, as they say. If we're willing to admit to being a racist country, that opens the door for all kinds of folderol. I'm not sure where it ends but I can be confident of one thing. It won't end well.
Just ask the white farmers in South Africa how that turned out for them. When they forced them off their farms that have passed down from generation to generation, how did that make them feel? How did that fix anything? Did that make them more or less intolerant at the end of the day? That policy is akin to Biden's plan to address racial disparity in our neighborhoods. They plan to federalize local zoning laws across the nation to construct high-rise low-income housing in single-family neighborhoods. What could go wrong?
This demented old fuck is running across the country selling a pig in a poke and the Republican Party better damn well not bend over for this so-called infrastructure bill with a price tag north of $10 trillion. The republicans negotiated in good faith for an infrastructure bill that came in around a trillion only to have bumbling Joe Biden come in and say that if they didn't buy into the two infrastructure bills, he wasn't signing off on anything. Two bills? What the fuck are you chattering about, demented Joe? This isn't what we (Republicans) discussed.
Speaking of crusty old fucks, what the hell is this business about letting Bill Cosby out of jail? It looks like his lawyers found an empathetic ear or two on Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, so he's leaving prison today after serving some two plus years of a 3-10 year sentence. It's a travesty. Then, he has the audacity to go on Twitter and profess his innocence. It was refreshing to see the left-wing media in an uproar about this latest development and, as I sit here thinking about it, maybe there is some life left in the #MeToo movement yet.
Maybe his comeuppance will come in the form of his being ostracized by those who once sung his praises. Is there an audience out there on radio or television who gives a whit about what an 80-plus-year-old sex offender has to say? He may have been "America''s Dad" in his heyday but that horse has left the barn. His slow old-man shuffle isn't going to fool anyone, and any attempts at staging a comeback are likely to fall flat. The many women he once drugged and raped will likely follow him around like the hounds of hell and rightly so.
That condo collapse in Surfside, Florida, in the last week was something else. Here we are just a week out, and there are still some 145 people missing. It's so tragic that it's hard to get your head around it. Most people living in the building had gone to bed for the night and were likely fast asleep when the building collapsed on top of them. One thing that surprised me was the number of people living in the building with Spanish surnames. I know Southern Florida has become something of an international community over the years, but I might have expected to see a Jane and John Doe or two on the list of the missing. Not so much.
It doesn't make the lives lost any less significant or noteworthy, so there's that. The big surprise is that this sort of thing happened at all. Time and time again, I would hear people on the telly say, "this sort of thing doesn't happen in America." If this sort of thing happens in third-world countries, I can't recall ever hearing about it. And shame on certain talking heads of CNN who seemed to want to lay blame wherever they could when interviewing people on the ground in Surfside. Chris Cuomo tried desperately to run with this or that narrative that never took hold because the people he interviewed were on to him. (Interviewee) Not on my watch, you mother fucker. Stick to the facts.
It's a bit like 911 in that the only thing that resonates after all is said and done is the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you see the pictures of the people who lost their lives. The smiling faces of the children who likely spent the day at the beach across the street from the condo building with their little shovels and pails and without a worry in the world. The optimistic expressions on the faces of their parents in the photos who never in a million years saw this coming. The faces in the images of the senior citizens whose lives were on autopilot and who looked forward to doing what they always did on that otherwise fateful day.
You never know quite how to apportion your not-endless reservoir of empathy at times like this but whatever you're able to muster is probably never quite enough to go around. Most of it goes to the children, then their parents, then younger people, and so forth and so on until you get to the old folks. They had good lives and even now in the twilight of their years, they were enjoying every day as though it might be their last. You can easily imagine older people thinking these very thoughts to themselves from time to time. Little did they know that that particular day would be the day.
Bumbling Joe Biden made his way down to the building collapse site in Surfside, Florida to meet with the families and pay his respects to the dead. When he started rambling on and on about climate change as a possible cause or maybe one of many contributing factors of the collapse, and then went on to tie in the events in Surfside to bolster his arguments for passing his albatross of an infrastructure bill, it was just a hot fucking mess. Who uses a human disaster to push their political agenda at a time when bodies, or what's left of them, are still being scraped out of the debris by recovery specialists working day and night on their hands and knees under klieg lights with chisels and claw hammers?
We'll be popping over to see Mrs. G today to celebrate her 91st birthday. We're a day late due to some other commitments but we'll be there with bells on today. The missus wants to stop by Whole Foods first to see if there isn't a small cake that Mrs. G might fancy. That store opened up recently so it will be the first time the missus is paying a visit. I expect she'll want to do a bit of looking around while we're there. I thought Mrs G might like to have a small box of assorted cookies from Whole Foods so it's good to have other options if the cake thing doesn't work out. Do we even know what kind of cake Mrs. G might prefer? Carrot? Chocolate?
The missus put the birthday card for Mrs G in the mail a good week ago so she's put her best foot forward as usual. She bought a lovely scarf at a store a week or so ago and we're pretty sure it's something Mrs. G will take a shine to. Scarves are all the rage these days so why not? In looking at my e-mail today, I see that Mrs. G sent us a picture of herself and a few friends celebrating what appeared to be her birthday party. I wouldn't say that Mrs G was the one wearing the lampshade on her head at the end of the night but she was right up there if the picture she sent to us was an accurate depiction of what went down at the "party."
Just because there were no spent candles, cakes, or balloons in the picture doesn't mean that they weren't celebrating like it was 1999. Come to think of it, I don't think I saw any bottles, cans, or any other adult beverages in the picture. The image might've passed for a reunion of her nursing class of 1952 if I didn't know better. There was a notable absence of chumminess as she and her friends assembled for the picture. The participants body language was slightly stand-offish but maybe par for the course as the pandemic itself is barely in the rearview mirror a year and a half after it began. Even in the best of times, you maintain a stiff upper lip and keep your composure. After all, these are The Woods don't you know.
There was wall-to-wall coverage of the indictment of Allen Weisselberg in the news yesterday. He is the current CFO of the Trump Organization. Who doesn't like a good political persecution? Right? The AG in New York ran for the position promising to indict Trump if she won and she's delighting liberals from coast to coast who would like nothing better than to see Trump in an orange jumpsuit. I've always maintained that the media's vitriolic and irrational hatred of Trump comes from the non-stop vilification in the liberal media of everything Trump since he came down the escalator back in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency. How else do you explain that he was a veritable darling of the media before he ran for president?
I guess the libs thought that Obama had put the democrat party on a glide path to never losing another election and that Hillary Clinton would put yet another nail in the coffin of the Republican Party when elected to replace Obama. Trump put an end to that nightmare scenario when he was elected in 2016. One of the complaints about Trump when he was running was that he was a limousine liberal and just a Republican in name only. When a more conservative Trump started to take shape early in his administration, the bastards on the left and their praetorian guard in the media went after him hammer and tong. Endlessly, ceaselessly, rabidly.
Anyways, the libs have jailed any number of Trump associates over time for crimes alleged, some of whom Trump has pardoned or commuted their sentences. They were imprisoned with the expectation that they would flip Trump and the feds would then have the case they longed for that would put Trump in jail for good. It's one thing to go after one's target or associates when they're in power and quite another to do so after leaving office. This targeting of Weisselberg is clearly an attempt to get something on Trump and to stop him from running for president in 2024. Everyone knows it and only the liberals condone it.
Conservatives have to be pleased with a couple of cases decided by the Supreme Court last week regarding voting rights and reining in government power. The decision was 6-3, with the three liberals on the Court offering their usual hysterical dissent having to do with disproportionally burdening minority voters. On the other hand, the conservatives rightly upheld laws implemented in Arizona having to do with barring ballot harvesting and "out of precinct" ballot casting. It's good to see the conservatives stepping up to the plate for a change. Where the hell were they when Trump and his legal team raised their issues about fraud in the 2020 election?
With legislators across the country implementing new laws to protect the vote in advance of the 2022 and 2024 elections, Steve Bannon (Warroom) seems to think that the republicans can get back some 40 to 50 seats in the House and a couple of seats in the Senate in 2022. Just enough here and there to render Biden useless in the second half of his four-year term. It will set up 2024 just perfectly for Trump to re-enter the race and run away with the nomination. After all, those 40-50 seats are only getting filled because Trump has personally signed off on the individual candidates. That's what you do when you're a force of nature like Trump.
In an open and televised forum with Trump and Sean Hannity, Hannity asked Trump if he had decided about running in 2024. Trump answered, "yes." Bannon, reading between the lines as Trump's former campaign manager who took him into the White House in 2016, took this response as an affirmation that he was indeed running. Besides, Trump has not denied that he's running so that may be the tell. He has a rally tonight (July 3rd), his second since leaving the White House, tonight in Sarasota, Fla, so maybe he'll have more to say on the subject. Who wouldn't rather celebrate the Fourth of July with a real President? I thought so.
Do you know who else I like? I like Herschel Walker running for Warlock's seat in Georgia. He is one stand-up mother fucker. I'm talking about Herschel, not the Warlock. Both Warlock and the other democrat who took the senate seats in Georgia in 2020 are there because they could steal the seats. The election auditors will get around to Georgia soon enough still, there is already sufficient evidence that the fraud was rampant and the laws were changed without input from the legislators which tells you all you need to know. I'm thinking J.D. Vance, who declared he's running just this week in Ohio for Portman's seat, will also get the nod from Trump and those are just two of maybe a half dozen that are considered low hanging fruit. We can only hope. Right?
Lastly, I wish the missus would listen when the Ev man tells her that he doesn't need a new pair of shoes. C'mon, she says. Let's go on Zappo's and we'll see if we can't find you a nice new pair of shoes. This came from a woman who just went back and forth with Zappo's and finally finagled a few pairs of free shoes due to Zappo's shortcomings in delivering the goods. I think her heart is in the right place but, by his own admission, he'd rather shop the discount aisle and try a few pairs on before he makes a decision. Looking at shoes online isn't for everybody. Even if they do turn out to be free, what good are they if they don't fit? Asking for a friend.
The missus is up early today and she's running circles around me and distracting me to no end. It's hard for me to hold a thought in my head long enough to do anything with it much less put it down on paper. Whenever I think I'm starting to get some traction she says something or does something that reminds me that my time is not my own. Not even a little Joni Mitchell will bring me around to where I think I need to be to get on with this task of mine.
I'm sure I wanted to say something about the woman competing in the hammer throw competition in order to qualify for the summer Olympics in Japan this summer. Did I think it was un-American of her to scowl and turn her back when they played our national anthem? You bet your ass I did. She's a Black Lives Matter activist and she makes no bones about it. Everybody is looking for a payday these days. They all think that going full Colin Kaepernick is going to get their faces on a box of cereal, endorsements from this or that woke organization, and wealth beyond their wildest dreams. I'm not sure they're wrong.
I guess I'll do my part by not watching the Olympics. I can only hope that other god-fearing and similar-minded Americans will do the same. We vote with our feet when and where necessary to express our collective displeasure at what our fellow Americans are doing or not doing. You better believe that had one or more of the winning competitors worn a "Trump Won" tee-shirt, they would have been summarily dismissed and banished for maybe years to come. But, for now, we fight back. We're in it to win it.
The persistent theme of systemic racism we see being pushed day in and day out by the media and on the front pages of this or that leftist newspaper in America is just getting old. It's wearing thin, as they say. If we're willing to admit to being a racist country, that opens the door for all kinds of folderol. I'm not sure where it ends but I can be confident of one thing. It won't end well.
Just ask the white farmers in South Africa how that turned out for them. When they forced them off their farms that have passed down from generation to generation, how did that make them feel? How did that fix anything? Did that make them more or less intolerant at the end of the day? That policy is akin to Biden's plan to address racial disparity in our neighborhoods. They plan to federalize local zoning laws across the nation to construct high-rise low-income housing in single-family neighborhoods. What could go wrong?
This demented old fuck is running across the country selling a pig in a poke and the Republican Party better damn well not bend over for this so-called infrastructure bill with a price tag north of $10 trillion. The republicans negotiated in good faith for an infrastructure bill that came in around a trillion only to have bumbling Joe Biden come in and say that if they didn't buy into the two infrastructure bills, he wasn't signing off on anything. Two bills? What the fuck are you chattering about, demented Joe? This isn't what we (Republicans) discussed.
Speaking of crusty old fucks, what the hell is this business about letting Bill Cosby out of jail? It looks like his lawyers found an empathetic ear or two on Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, so he's leaving prison today after serving some two plus years of a 3-10 year sentence. It's a travesty. Then, he has the audacity to go on Twitter and profess his innocence. It was refreshing to see the left-wing media in an uproar about this latest development and, as I sit here thinking about it, maybe there is some life left in the #MeToo movement yet.
Maybe his comeuppance will come in the form of his being ostracized by those who once sung his praises. Is there an audience out there on radio or television who gives a whit about what an 80-plus-year-old sex offender has to say? He may have been "America''s Dad" in his heyday but that horse has left the barn. His slow old-man shuffle isn't going to fool anyone, and any attempts at staging a comeback are likely to fall flat. The many women he once drugged and raped will likely follow him around like the hounds of hell and rightly so.
That condo collapse in Surfside, Florida, in the last week was something else. Here we are just a week out, and there are still some 145 people missing. It's so tragic that it's hard to get your head around it. Most people living in the building had gone to bed for the night and were likely fast asleep when the building collapsed on top of them. One thing that surprised me was the number of people living in the building with Spanish surnames. I know Southern Florida has become something of an international community over the years, but I might have expected to see a Jane and John Doe or two on the list of the missing. Not so much.
It doesn't make the lives lost any less significant or noteworthy, so there's that. The big surprise is that this sort of thing happened at all. Time and time again, I would hear people on the telly say, "this sort of thing doesn't happen in America." If this sort of thing happens in third-world countries, I can't recall ever hearing about it. And shame on certain talking heads of CNN who seemed to want to lay blame wherever they could when interviewing people on the ground in Surfside. Chris Cuomo tried desperately to run with this or that narrative that never took hold because the people he interviewed were on to him. (Interviewee) Not on my watch, you mother fucker. Stick to the facts.
It's a bit like 911 in that the only thing that resonates after all is said and done is the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you see the pictures of the people who lost their lives. The smiling faces of the children who likely spent the day at the beach across the street from the condo building with their little shovels and pails and without a worry in the world. The optimistic expressions on the faces of their parents in the photos who never in a million years saw this coming. The faces in the images of the senior citizens whose lives were on autopilot and who looked forward to doing what they always did on that otherwise fateful day.
You never know quite how to apportion your not-endless reservoir of empathy at times like this but whatever you're able to muster is probably never quite enough to go around. Most of it goes to the children, then their parents, then younger people, and so forth and so on until you get to the old folks. They had good lives and even now in the twilight of their years, they were enjoying every day as though it might be their last. You can easily imagine older people thinking these very thoughts to themselves from time to time. Little did they know that that particular day would be the day.
Bumbling Joe Biden made his way down to the building collapse site in Surfside, Florida to meet with the families and pay his respects to the dead. When he started rambling on and on about climate change as a possible cause or maybe one of many contributing factors of the collapse, and then went on to tie in the events in Surfside to bolster his arguments for passing his albatross of an infrastructure bill, it was just a hot fucking mess. Who uses a human disaster to push their political agenda at a time when bodies, or what's left of them, are still being scraped out of the debris by recovery specialists working day and night on their hands and knees under klieg lights with chisels and claw hammers?
We'll be popping over to see Mrs. G today to celebrate her 91st birthday. We're a day late due to some other commitments but we'll be there with bells on today. The missus wants to stop by Whole Foods first to see if there isn't a small cake that Mrs. G might fancy. That store opened up recently so it will be the first time the missus is paying a visit. I expect she'll want to do a bit of looking around while we're there. I thought Mrs G might like to have a small box of assorted cookies from Whole Foods so it's good to have other options if the cake thing doesn't work out. Do we even know what kind of cake Mrs. G might prefer? Carrot? Chocolate?
The missus put the birthday card for Mrs G in the mail a good week ago so she's put her best foot forward as usual. She bought a lovely scarf at a store a week or so ago and we're pretty sure it's something Mrs. G will take a shine to. Scarves are all the rage these days so why not? In looking at my e-mail today, I see that Mrs. G sent us a picture of herself and a few friends celebrating what appeared to be her birthday party. I wouldn't say that Mrs G was the one wearing the lampshade on her head at the end of the night but she was right up there if the picture she sent to us was an accurate depiction of what went down at the "party."
Just because there were no spent candles, cakes, or balloons in the picture doesn't mean that they weren't celebrating like it was 1999. Come to think of it, I don't think I saw any bottles, cans, or any other adult beverages in the picture. The image might've passed for a reunion of her nursing class of 1952 if I didn't know better. There was a notable absence of chumminess as she and her friends assembled for the picture. The participants body language was slightly stand-offish but maybe par for the course as the pandemic itself is barely in the rearview mirror a year and a half after it began. Even in the best of times, you maintain a stiff upper lip and keep your composure. After all, these are The Woods don't you know.
There was wall-to-wall coverage of the indictment of Allen Weisselberg in the news yesterday. He is the current CFO of the Trump Organization. Who doesn't like a good political persecution? Right? The AG in New York ran for the position promising to indict Trump if she won and she's delighting liberals from coast to coast who would like nothing better than to see Trump in an orange jumpsuit. I've always maintained that the media's vitriolic and irrational hatred of Trump comes from the non-stop vilification in the liberal media of everything Trump since he came down the escalator back in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency. How else do you explain that he was a veritable darling of the media before he ran for president?
I guess the libs thought that Obama had put the democrat party on a glide path to never losing another election and that Hillary Clinton would put yet another nail in the coffin of the Republican Party when elected to replace Obama. Trump put an end to that nightmare scenario when he was elected in 2016. One of the complaints about Trump when he was running was that he was a limousine liberal and just a Republican in name only. When a more conservative Trump started to take shape early in his administration, the bastards on the left and their praetorian guard in the media went after him hammer and tong. Endlessly, ceaselessly, rabidly.
Anyways, the libs have jailed any number of Trump associates over time for crimes alleged, some of whom Trump has pardoned or commuted their sentences. They were imprisoned with the expectation that they would flip Trump and the feds would then have the case they longed for that would put Trump in jail for good. It's one thing to go after one's target or associates when they're in power and quite another to do so after leaving office. This targeting of Weisselberg is clearly an attempt to get something on Trump and to stop him from running for president in 2024. Everyone knows it and only the liberals condone it.
Conservatives have to be pleased with a couple of cases decided by the Supreme Court last week regarding voting rights and reining in government power. The decision was 6-3, with the three liberals on the Court offering their usual hysterical dissent having to do with disproportionally burdening minority voters. On the other hand, the conservatives rightly upheld laws implemented in Arizona having to do with barring ballot harvesting and "out of precinct" ballot casting. It's good to see the conservatives stepping up to the plate for a change. Where the hell were they when Trump and his legal team raised their issues about fraud in the 2020 election?
With legislators across the country implementing new laws to protect the vote in advance of the 2022 and 2024 elections, Steve Bannon (Warroom) seems to think that the republicans can get back some 40 to 50 seats in the House and a couple of seats in the Senate in 2022. Just enough here and there to render Biden useless in the second half of his four-year term. It will set up 2024 just perfectly for Trump to re-enter the race and run away with the nomination. After all, those 40-50 seats are only getting filled because Trump has personally signed off on the individual candidates. That's what you do when you're a force of nature like Trump.
In an open and televised forum with Trump and Sean Hannity, Hannity asked Trump if he had decided about running in 2024. Trump answered, "yes." Bannon, reading between the lines as Trump's former campaign manager who took him into the White House in 2016, took this response as an affirmation that he was indeed running. Besides, Trump has not denied that he's running so that may be the tell. He has a rally tonight (July 3rd), his second since leaving the White House, tonight in Sarasota, Fla, so maybe he'll have more to say on the subject. Who wouldn't rather celebrate the Fourth of July with a real President? I thought so.
Do you know who else I like? I like Herschel Walker running for Warlock's seat in Georgia. He is one stand-up mother fucker. I'm talking about Herschel, not the Warlock. Both Warlock and the other democrat who took the senate seats in Georgia in 2020 are there because they could steal the seats. The election auditors will get around to Georgia soon enough still, there is already sufficient evidence that the fraud was rampant and the laws were changed without input from the legislators which tells you all you need to know. I'm thinking J.D. Vance, who declared he's running just this week in Ohio for Portman's seat, will also get the nod from Trump and those are just two of maybe a half dozen that are considered low hanging fruit. We can only hope. Right?
Lastly, I wish the missus would listen when the Ev man tells her that he doesn't need a new pair of shoes. C'mon, she says. Let's go on Zappo's and we'll see if we can't find you a nice new pair of shoes. This came from a woman who just went back and forth with Zappo's and finally finagled a few pairs of free shoes due to Zappo's shortcomings in delivering the goods. I think her heart is in the right place but, by his own admission, he'd rather shop the discount aisle and try a few pairs on before he makes a decision. Looking at shoes online isn't for everybody. Even if they do turn out to be free, what good are they if they don't fit? Asking for a friend.