Sweet Medicine
Whatever you do the next few days, make sure you get yourself down to Lake Monroe and catch the sunset. It’s been brilliant — jaw-droopingly so — since, oh, Sunday evening.
A Priceless Show
●
Steve the Dog and I have been taking it in all this week. It’s an especially effective tonic if you’ve been feeling the world has gone mad of late. Hell, who hasn’t been wondering if ebola, ISIS, Putin and the Ukraine, and even the very existence of Sen. Ted Cruz are omens of humanity’s coming suicide. (Memo from Big Mike: They’re not; the world is no madder than it’s ever been.)
Anyway, S the D and I usually make one pass over the lake going southbound on SR 446, turn around in Cutright, and then backtrack north, just to catch the sky show from the causeway. Then we turn into Paynetown and park in the lot on the point past the beaches and the Interpretive Center and just gawk from there. (Well, I gawk; Steve sniffs stuff.)
Honest, I almost wish I believed in god so I could thank somebody for the display.
▼
Felon
One of the bestselling “authors” in this holy land today is a fellow by the name of Dinesh D’Souza, whose “writing” is comprised mostly of inventing canards against the worst president we’ve ever had. In fact, Barack Hussein Obama is the worst leader any civilization on this planet or any other world in the known Universe has had to endure.
Plus, a young Obama had the gall to grow up with an absentee father, acc’d’g to D’Souza’s documentary 2016: Obama’s America, and that’s why the worst prez in history hates our blessed and exceptional nation.
D’Souza’s book, America: Imagine a World without Her, has been loitering near the top of the New York Times hardcover non-fiction (teehee) best seller list since its release in June. Those on the Far Right have eaten it up like a pack of dung beetles consuming a steaming mound of elephant shit.
●
Some who prance about (joylessly, of course) in the ultra-conservative echo chamber have even openly wished that D’Souza could run for president in 2016, even though he’s never held public office, has never done an executive’s job, and is a loon. Not only that, he is Constitutionally barred from running for C-in-C because he was born in India. That part of our founding document is not spelled out in the Second Amendment so some Right-wingers may be unfamiliar with it.
Looks like they’ll have to stash those Dinesh for President buttons in their junk drawers now. The man who actually blamed liberals for 9/11 (swear to god) has been sentenced to an eight-month stay in a halfway house, a $30,000 fine, five years probation, and 2080 hours of community service time for violating federal campaign finance laws.
The specific laws, prohibiting wealthy donors from laundering campaign contributions through third parties, also is not part of the Second Amendment so it’s no wonder D’Souza might have been unaware he was committing a felony. He’d recruited two people, an employee and the woman he was cheating on his wife with, to donate $10,000 each to an opponent of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the 2008 election. He made the arrangements with the promise to pay both people back, thereby skirting individual campaign donation limits.
D’Souza: Convict
●
Apparently, D’Souza viewed Gillibrand as the worst future senator the state of New York has ever had to endure. It’s interesting to note both Obama and Gillibrand are Right-leaning Centrists so imagine how felonious and canard-ing he’d be had he ever set his sights on a real Liberal.
I doubt his felony conviction and sentencing will sway the Wingnut Right away from loving him up. He is not, after all, a black man.
▼
High School Hijinks
Have you seen the excerpts from the Twitter account of one of the nice little former Catholic school kids who beat a gay couple in Philly bloody not long ago? Alright, alright — allegedly.
What a pig.
What a gang of pigs. Apparently, the lot of them who’d attended the same high school had gotten together at a local restaurant for a sort of alumni dinner on September 11th. Afterward a dozen of them, well fortified with alcohol, went for a walk at which time the beating occurred. Attorneys for the three people charged so far say the gay couple attacked the group.
Which seems credible; the problem of gay couples attacking large groups of drunken homophobes is becoming epidemic these days.
Alumni Fun
●
Anyway, it seems this one accused gay-basher, a young woman who also happens to be the daughter of an area police chief, is obsessed with gays, dykes, and whiskey.
Let us hope and pray she eschews the use of contraceptives; otherwise her Catholic high school education would have been for naught.
▼
The Real Sin
The whole Ray Rice kayo-ing his then-fiancé scandal produces more and more healthy piles of equine feces seemingly every day.
ESPN has suspended reporter/commentator Bill Simmons for his angry outburst condemning the NFL’s hypocritical stonewalling in the Rice case. Simmons now has three weeks to sit in a corner and ponder his no-no. That would be one week more than the suspension Ray Rice originally got from the NFL for clocking the love of his life.
Simmons — clearly a bad, bad man, worse, even, that a spousal abuser — is now, it is hoped, atoning from the bottom of his black heart.
Bill Simmons: Reprobate
●
Here’s how the Washington Post describes Simmons’ mortal sin:
On Simmons’s podcast, “The B.S. Report,” which was posted on Monday, he launched into a profanity-laced tirade in which he repeatedly called Goodell a “liar.” That podcast appears to have been removed from ESPN’s Web site.
Goodell, of course, is NFL czar Roger Goodell, who for some six months really didn’t give a good goddamn about Rice’s criminal assault and battering upon his one and only and her subsequent involuntary snooze. It was only after security video of the incident was released this month that Goodell came to the realization that Rice’s wrist must be slapped harder.
ESPN and Grantland have removed the offending podcast because, god forbid, some little kid might hear it and conclude that Reichsmarschall Goodell is something less than a saint and a credit to his race. Also, Simmons drops the F-bomb twice which, as we all know, is ten jillion times worse than punching the woman you hope to spend the rest of your life with into unconsciousness.
It took a little digging but I did find audio of the podcast, via Business Insider. Here’s a taste in case you don’t feeling like listening to the whole thing:
I just think not enough is being made out of the fact that they knew about the tape and they knew what was on it. Goodell, if he didn’t know what was on that tape, he’s a liar. I’m just saying it. He is lying. I think that dude is lying. If you put him up on a lie detector test that guy would fail. For all these people to pretend they didn’t know is such fucking bullshit. It really is — it’s such fucking bullshit. And for him to go in that press conference and pretend otherwise, I was so insulted. I really was.
You see? What reasonable soul wouldn’t condone and forgive ten vicious beatings before that?
This whole thing is playing out like Watergate. You know, where the clueless bosses keep digging a deeper hole for themselves as each day passes. My guess is Goodell et al still don’t grasp how evil Rice’s act of knocking his fiancé into dreamland was.
▲
