Intravenous Caffeine

Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

First, an earthquake, then, a hurricane, then, a Deluge …

The author after the Deluge.

Damn, that iBook works underwater (don't try this at home)

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am sharing my studio/office with three industrial blowers and a matching dehumidifier. My wife is trying to say something to me from the stairway … WAYYYYYYY over there … I can barely hear a word. HUH? I yell. She takes a few steps closer. Now I can actually hear a stream of unintelligible wife sounds. HUH? Finally, she gets next to me and I can finally hear her question. I just can’t understand it because there’s too much @#$%^&*( noise to THINK!

Ahhhh, the last few weeks. An earthquake, a hurricane–and then a deluge. The earthquake was relatively fun for me. I’d never been in one before and I was taking a nap for a headache on a bed with one of those memory foam mattress pads. Suddenly, I awoke to find myself on a huge square of Jell-O. As consciousness seeped into my brain, I wondered if it was an explosion–nope, lasting too long, OMG is THIS what an earthquake feels like? Should I get up and stand under a doorwa…whoops, it’s over. I understand it was scary if you were in one of the highrises in the area or one of the areas with a nuclear plant, but from my vantage, it was a very brief theme park ride. Whheeeeee!

The hurricane was more serious for more people, but again, we had it easy this far inland. Over-prepared. Took more time to undo the storm preparations than the storm actually lasted. But last Sunday, the start of the Deluge from the storm in the Gulf. FOUR DAYS of torrential rain and on Wednesday night, the drain in the back stairs silted up and the water started coming into my basement–where my office is. It’s Nowell’s flood. Whose?? You’ve heard of Noe’s flood–well, this one’s Nowell’s.

Now, some people will tell you that I am all wet anyway. And I don’t wish to dampen any opinions of my work, but this week I will throw a sop to my critics and admit that my wit is not very dry at the moment. The plumber came quickly and re-opened the drain, but my new roommates have been going full blast all weekend. It sounds like an airplane hangar.

Obama gave a speech about doing something to create jobs. I’m afraid I didn’t listen because I was in the middle of flood recovery at the time. Not to worry, Eric Cantor said they would only pass the parts that our corporate overlords liked. That should really help things. That is, if you really want an unemployment rate above 10%–which the Republican party wants because they think it will all be blamed on the Democrats–and especially Obama–and more people will be willing to take jobs at ridiculously low wages–which they won’t get because those have all been sent to India. This is because the Republican Party loves America.

Speaking of loving America, we’ve just had the 10th anniversary of the horrible event that caused ten years of national insanity. For a week, everyone wrote about 9/11. We’re still fighting two wars, neither of which were particularly useful in solving the cause of 9/11. And both of which actually made our reputation worse. We’ll probably be throwing money away on both of them for the next decade. We’re still taking our shoes off to get on an airplane. Which means we’re still #$%^&*( insane.

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Almost Immoral

Obama and Boehner hold secret White House meetings on the debt ceiling.

Boehner and Obama incognito

I have to run up to Wilmington today for business so I’m keeping this short, but the train trip to Delaware reminds me of SENATOR Joe Biden’s commute back and forth to his home and home state before he became Vice President. Joe was holding meetings with Eric Cantor and John Boehner on the debt ceiling–you know, the ones that Cantor walked out of–and of course, the two evil twins insisted on paying for more tax cuts for the rich by dumping so-called entitlements for the not very rich. You know, Grandma. To quote the AP article: “To ask senior citizens receiving Medicare to pay more in taxes when people earning more than $1 million a year receive a substantial tax cut ‘borders on immoral,’ the vice president said.”

BORDERS ON IMMORAL? That’s kind of like saying the decision to award the burglar damages because he knocked over the candle you’d negligently left burning right where he could run into in on his way to the family silver and sustained injuries WHEN YOUR HOUSE BURNED DOWN “bordered on unjust.” If that’s what “borders on immoral”, I’d hate to find out what actually qualifies as immoral. Besides Weiner’s Wiener.

Let’s see. How about “starting a war against a virtually defenseless country that has been impoverished by economic sanctions because we said they might be thinking about making nuclear weapons in order to get the oil they’re sitting on.” Immoral? Nope–perfectly moral in the 21 century. How about, “selling the oil to China instead of using it to help American industry.” Perfectly moral! “Protesting the war and accusing its proponents of war crimes?” Now THAT’S immoral–AND unpatriotic!

How about “doping yourself with growth hormones so you can win–oh, say, the Tour de France?” Perfectly moral–especially if you’re a cancer survivor. Unless you’re NOT on our team. Then it’s downright flagrant cheating!

“Frequenting a prostitute while holding office?” Fine–as long as you’re not a Democrat–after all, you EXPECT Republicans to be hypocrites. “Holding secret meetings with the Speaker of the House to achieve a compromise on the debt ceiling?” Well, we’ll see how moral THAT one turns out.

Morality is an awful fluid thing where money, politics and sports are involved. Would that it were so in other matters like sex or abortion. And speaking of sex–congratulations to the gay couples of New York State. Now you can go through messy divorces just like the rest of us!

See you next week!

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Congratulations on the Health Care Bill–99 and 54/100 % Pure. Republican Blogosphere: You Traitor, Cao!

The lone Republican who voted FOR the House Health Care Bill discovers that loyalty in the Republican Party does not mean to the United States.

Joseph Cao discovers the consequences of voting your conscience

Back when I was a kid, good sportsmanship was something you expected of everyone in the game. The losers were supposed to take their loss without whining or rancor, the winners weren’t supposed to **** them up the ***. That hasn’t been the Republican way for some time now. Good sportsmanship is something to be demanded … of the OTHER guy. Remember the Bush years? The Republicans said, “We won–deal with it”. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, are the Republicans dealing with it in the good sportsman-like manner they expected of the Democrats? If you call doing everything in your power to try to make the winners regret being alive–I guess you could say they are! Remember how they called the Democrats obstructionist for not rubberstamping 100% of Bush’s judicial appointees without question? I think the Democrats had held up maybe a dozen out of over 100 appointments. HORRORS! How can we get anything done with these bullies holding up ALL our appointments! But twe sure are getting models of cooperation NOW!
Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party are to be congratulated on passing SOME kind of Health Care Reform. It’s nowhere near perfect–we are told that it is to be a platform for more improvements–but frankly, since none of it is going to take effect until 2013 and it won’t be fully operational until 2019, I don’t really see how any substantial improvements are going to be made for another 10 years. After all, we’ll have to give it a chance, first. In the meantime, the health insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry have five years to squeeze every nickel out of the American people so hard, Thomas Jefferson will get acne scars–and if the credit card companies are any indication, we’ll be seeing rate hikes and deductible rises the second the Senate passes its own bill–provided a Senate bill DOES get passed.
Will Rogers once said, “I don’t belong to an organized political party–I’m a Democrat.” Considering how much Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have had to fight their own party members to get this one thing done that everyone in the country said was REALLY REALLY important, I suspect even old Will would be surprised at how dysfunctional the Democrats are today. I mean, with a 50 seat majority, how this bill managed to get passed by only 5 votes–if three people had changed votes, it would have failed–it just boggles the mind. They even had to tack anti-abortion idiocy on it to make sure they got even those five votes. WTF does abortion have to do with it???
Back to the Republicans–despite claiming NOT to be the party of NO, their strategy was to present a unified block of negativity in an effort to make Health Care Reform an epic fail for the Obama team. They needn’t have bothered–the Democrats were doing fine on that score alone. But, after the bill had gotten the requisite 218 votes, one lone Republican–Joseph Cao from a mostly Democratic district in Louisiana–decided to cast a Yea. Minority Leader Cantor stormed from the chambers and a torrent of invective was let loose by the right wing blogosphere and Twitterati. TRAITOR! HOW NOW, MAO CAO? You’d think that Republicans were the only true Americans and that taking away profits from the parasitical health insurance companies was unAmerican! On that note, don’t think it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Cao emigrated from Vietnam and only “became” an American citizen instead of being born here. He isn’t “a real American”. He’s a “gook” who should go back to Vietnam–if he likes COMMUNISM that much. My personal favorite was calling him “cat-eater”–HA! everyone knows the Vietnamese outlawed cat-eating a few years ago to cure the rat problem! Michelle Malkin asked rhetorically what Obama gave him to change his vote and said he was bought cheap by the promise of help for Katrina victims–who as we all know don’t deserve it (IRONY ALERT). And of course, impeachment threats and promises that he will lose his seat next election season the unsavory mix. I’m not sure Cao was quite ready for it all. BTW-how much have we heard about any of this? Not a thing unless you were looking for it, not just from the MSM, but not even the liberal blogs have been paying it much attention –has it reached the point when Republicans do something so completely racist and partisan, it’s no longer news?
Anyway, I wouldn’t be patting myself on the back for having crafted a bipartisan bill. Like I say in the title, 99 and 54/100s per cent pure Democratic vote does not equal bi-partisan in anyone’s books. The best you can say is that it wasn’t unanimously rejected by Republicans, thanks to Joseph Cao. Alas, he may not be in Congress more than another year.
On to the Senate!

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Stop the Presses, Census Worker Murdered–TWO WEEKS AGO???

As a hanged man dangles from a tree, a sheriff explains they think it's probably a suicide, the only question remaining if he wrote OK, I can see how local law enforcement might think the death of Bill Sparkman could be a suicide. After all, with what Michele Bachmann and other wingnuts have been saying about the census, poor Bill could have been so depressed at the thought that he was contributing to the downfall of Western Democracy, Christianity and all that we hold dear so that Kenya could dominate the world in something other than Olympic running, that he scrawled FED on his own chest and hanged himself. That’s one theory. Another theory, just possibly a little more probable, is that Bill was mistaken for a revenooer or a DEA agent or just saw the wrong thing and was eliminated as a witness–with FED scrawled over his chest to alert the FBI that a gang of drug and/or illegal whisky purveyors were hiding out in this vicinity…they obviously wanted the publicity. Or it could have been a result of all the spew from the right wing at how the census will turn these United Statesl into a socialist worker’s paradise, aided by the pimp=and-prostitute loving, false voter registering ACORN. Maybe Glenn Beck even thinks this is crazy stuff, but they don’t think that over on CLEAR CHANNEL where they are advising people not to fill out the census–thus ensuring that their state will not get the representation that its population will deserve.
What gets to me is that with all this talk about the census in the news, the Associated Press really jumped on this story…and buried it for 10 days! Granted that since the days of Ronny Raygun, AP has been drifting starboard (and it’s fascinating to watch how individual stories become more “balanced” as different levels of editors get their hands on an issue to the point where in a recent story birther protests were equated with protests against torture at Abu Ghraib), but what did they think suppressing a story like this was going to achieve? Were they hoping that they could release it at a time when no one would notice? Myself, I’m of the opinion that it took 10 days to find out whether or not Michele Bachmann had an alibi for the date in question–they have such a great research department! But I’d better quit talking about this if I don’t want to get slapped with a plagiarism charge and get sued for violation of copyright because it IS an AP story–and their legal department’s position is that you cannot even CITE an AP story without stepping over the borders of their vast intellectual property domain.
Nancy Pelosi recently invoked the ridicule of the right by suggesting that America was at risk from politics erupting into violence, with House Minority Whip Eric Cantor returning his own opinion that Speaker Pelosi was living in another world. Nancy was either prescient (if she had to wait for the AP story to appear) or better-informed than Cantor who is living in a bubble of mythical America where assassinations, lynchings and mob violence only happen–to someone else. But even POLITICO has discovered that there might be reason to be worried–at least in the opinion of several former CIA, FBI and Secret Service officers. Myself, I HOPE this terrible crime was the fault of drug or alcohol miscreants. But seriously–I have me doubts. Even Bachmann evidently has her doubts, considering the way she cut a reporter who asked for her comment. Michele should realize that those who play with guns sometimes get shot–in their own foot by their own finger. In the meantime, being a census worker has been declared a hazardous occupation and is grounds for cancellation of your health insurance policy. Have a nice day 🙂
(My condolences to Bill Sparkman’s family–my cartoon is not meant to belittle his unfortunate death but to ridicule the competency with which it is being investigated.)

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