| 10 (and a half) |
[08 Dec 2009|10:50am] |
According to the sign, I'm going to hell.... at least 10 and a half times.
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[23 Nov 2009|09:59am] |
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[22 Oct 2009|11:22am] |
Isn't it about time for the final heart attack?
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| Snowdam |
[15 Oct 2009|10:58am] |
Other than the inexplicable need for some Democrats to pacify this woman... I knew there was something bothering me about Olympia Snowe.
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[04 Oct 2009|12:49pm] |
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| Bizarro - August 20, 2009 |
[20 Aug 2009|11:24am] |
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[18 Aug 2009|10:27am] |
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| It's Never About the Guns |
[10 Apr 2009|10:13am] |
It has been on my mind to post something about my frustration with gun violence since three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down last Saturday responding to a "domestic" between a mother and son. The weapon above is an AK-47. A similar weapon was used by the shooter in Pittsburgh as he sat in his living room window exchanging fire with officers and SWAT team members. FOR FOUR FUCKING HOURS one man held an entire neighborhood and a large metropolitan police department in terror with his “right to bear assault rifles.”
High Schools, College Campuses, Nursing Homes, Post Offices, Fast Food Restaurants, Office Parks, Civic Centers, Family Bedrooms. Everywhere and anywhere has become ground zero for mass gun murders in America. "Going Postal" was long ago accepted into our vocabulary as just another yuk-yuk cliche instead of an alarming and terrifying wake-up call. These mass murders have become the norm in America. When these things happen, it's just another news item met with a big collective yawn. The complacency and acceptance of "well, it's just the price we have to pay so that uhmerikinz can has their guns" is sickening to me.
The following op-ed from yesterday's New York Times captures a lot of what I've been thinking in the Spring of 2009.
The Guns of Spring
by Tim Egan for the New York Times
Bam, bam, bam. Three dead in Pittsburgh, cops, all of them, murdered by a man with an AK-47 who thought President Obama was going to take away his guns.
Bam, bam, bam, bam. Four dead in Oakland, also police officers, their lives ended by a convict with an assault rifle.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Five dead in Washington State, kids mowed down in a trailer park by their own dad, a wife-abusing coward with a gun.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Thirteen dead in Binghamton, N.Y., immigrants and their teachers slaughtered by a shut-in with a Glock and Beretta. He sent a delusional note, in fractured English but for the sendoff: “And you have a nice day.”
American life in the spring of 2009 is full of hope, peril, and then this: the cancer at the core of our democracy.
In a month of violence gruesome even by our own standards, 57 people have lost their lives in eight mass shootings. The killing grounds include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child’s bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center.
We hear about these sketches of carnage between market updates and basketball scores — and shrug. We’re the frogs slow-boiling in the pot, taking it all in incrementally until we can’t feel a thing. We shrug because that’s the deal, right? That’s the pact we made, the price of Amendment number two to the Constitution, right after freedom of speech.
As a Westerner, I’m sensitive to the argument that when politicians reflexively move to ban guns every after a high-profile slaughter, they often target law-abiding gun owners. Guns in the West are heritage, “a sacred part of being a Montanan and something that we will always fight to protect,” as Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus, both Democrats from the Big Sky state, wrote in a recent letter to the Justice Department.
But as someone who lost a nephew to gun violence, I can only take these arguments so far. They are not abstractions, one side versus the other. I can’t help seeing faces, parents who no longer have a child to hold, hearts broken, lives destroyed when I hear bam, bam, bam.
A mother and her little girl, gunned down along with eight others in Samson, Ala., last month, were buried in each other’s arms — the still life of that second amendment.
In the aftermath of one of these atrocities, nothing is more chilling than a gun advocate racing before a camera to embrace a lunatic’s right to carry and kill.
If it was peanut butter or pistachio nuts taking down people by the dozens every week, we’d be all over it. Witness the recent recalls. But Glocks and AKs — can’t touch ‘em. So we’re awash in guns: 280 million.
Live with it, gun owners say, and if our murder rate is three times that of the United Kingdom and Canada, five times that of Germany, that’s the deal. The price. For consolation, I guess, there is the fact that the homicide rate has been flat for some time, down from the highs of the 1980s. Still, nearly 17,000 Americans are murdered each year — about 70 percent by guns — and 594,276 lost their lives betweens 1976 and 2005.
The recent twists involve Mexican drug cartels, who get their firepower from American retailers, and the mass killings this spring by shooters who appear to have acquired their weapons legally. Assault rifles figured prominently in the murders of seven police officers.
The Pittsburgh shooter picked up his AK-47 through an online company that passed the sale through to a licensed firearms dealer, as required. He was apparently legal for these guns despite the fact that he’d been booted from the Marines for assaulting his drill sergeant and had a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend.
All a citizen can do is ask for some common sense around the Second Amendment. The assault weapons ban, outlawing 19 military style guns that no hunter with sense of fair play would ever use, should be reinstated. President Bush and Congress let it expire in 2004, even though it was a godsend for police officers and supported by a majority of gun owners.
To the senators who back assault rifles while speaking of the “sacred part of being a Montanan,” you don’t want this kind of heritage. It demeans you as Westerners to allow easy access to weapons that kill innocents, and it does a disservice to history.
Heritage? Old West towns like Dodge City had strict gun control, making people check their weapons at the city doorstep.
And the gun dealers, they should be hammered for selling to drug cartels or through loopholes to convicts. Throw federal racketeering laws at them. Make it as hard for a wife-beater or a felon to get an AK as it is to get a driver’s license.
The rest of us can only mourn and shrug, marking grim anniversaries: Virginia Tech, Columbine, and on, and on, and on.
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[26 Mar 2009|11:13pm] |
FROM fivethirtyeight.com
The Real Republican Road to Recovery
by Nate Silver
The Republican "Road to Recovery" budget alternative, rolled out today by John Boehner, has been criticized by left and right for its lack of specificity and its promise to eliminate the national debt while significantly cutting taxes. FiveThirtyEight.com, however, has received an advance copy of additional details prepared by the Minority Leader's office. Although some elements of the proposal are still under discussion -- Eric Cantor is said to want to eliminate North Dakota rather than Idaho, while Thaddeus McCotter has suggested using the balance of TARP funds to purchase scratch-off tickets -- the final plan can be expected to contain most or all of these components.
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| March 27-28 |
[24 Mar 2009|10:30am] |
This weekend should be fun at The Pittsburgh Eagle. We (Three Rivers Leather Club) are welcoming the guys from ICON Detroit to town for 2 bar nights. They are a great group of guys and I'm looking forward to seeing them. The weekend would be even better if you joined us for one or both nights. There is also a new bondage club emerging here and this weekend will be a good time to learn more about that too.
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| I want this on a t-shirt |
[14 Mar 2009|01:22pm] |
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| New view at WVU |
[06 Mar 2009|09:11pm] |
Meet James P. Clements, the new president of WVU.
Clements comes to WVU from Towson University on the heels of a scandal that resulted in the resignation of previous WVU president Mike Garrison (and others) after the improper granting of an MBA to Heather Bresch, daughter of West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin. It's a long, sordid tale but the end result is new, chewy, bald, daddy hotness at WVU.
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| CD duplication |
[02 Mar 2009|12:59pm] |
Does anyone reading this know of a good CD duplication service provider?
Let me be more specific.
I have a client that wants to produce 1,000 DATA CDs. The CDs would simply contain a couple of PDFs and maybe a Word document or two. I need a service provider that can do the duplication, print the face plate with logo and basic title information, and place them in paper sleeves. If you have direct experience with a company that does this well, please let me know. THANKS.
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| The Real Culprit |
[28 Feb 2009|02:32pm] |
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| Why don't you ask me what's going on? |
[27 Feb 2009|10:46am] |
The weekend is just about here and for me the highlight will surely be the opening show of the Fleetwood Mac tour here in Pittsburgh Sunday night. This will be my 8th Mac show since I first saw them in July 1978 when they were in their second year of touring with Rumours.
I had noticed that there were no hockey games, tractor pulls, or skating Muppets on the Mellon Arena schedule this weekend, and it was confirmed yesterday that the band has set up shop here for a few days of rehearsal. This is the first time in the history of the band that they are touring without a new album to support, so they are simply calling it a greatest hits tour. It's always a good thing to catch Fleetwood Mac at the beginning of a tour as they usually are more adventurous with their set list. They tend to trim a couple of songs from the set a few weeks into each tour. I'll be enjoying the show from a 12th row center seat.
The rest of the weekend is completely unstructured and I like it that way. Last month I learned that a magazine project I work on has been scaled back from 6 issues to 4 issues a year. It's an uncomfortable income hit, but I am truly grateful for the large volume of other work that continues to come my way, so I will likely be tending to various work projects on Saturday and Sunday.
And I've been on the Atkins diet again for about 4 weeks and as of today I've lost 15 pounds. My goal is 10 more. I think it helps that I've been forcing myself to do a lot of walking lately, and not just relying on low carbs and low sugar. I did this Atkins thing about 6 years ago and lost 22 pounds that I kept off for a long time. Then I rediscovered the joy of pasta and pancakes. For now it's lots of eggs, meat and salad.
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| Dirty |
[26 Feb 2009|02:46pm] |
A new ad, courtesy of the Coen Brothers
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| MORE: jacketless thugs |
[06 Feb 2009|11:15am] |
Add Reagan and Kennedy to the list of "dress code" violators who dared to enter the Oval Office without a jacket.
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| No Jacket Required |
[06 Feb 2009|12:59am] |
Look. It's presidents doing presidential things in the Oval Office... without jackets! This will come as a shock to former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who found time to grant an interview to Inside Edition to complain: "there should be a dress code of respect....I wish that [Obama] would wear a suit coat and tie."
Too bad W., Clinton, Carter and Ford didn't get the memo about a "dress code of respect."
Below is Bush, early in his first term, with then staff secretary Harriet Miers in the Oval Office without a jacket.
So begins the republican drumbeat to start smearing the Obama image as not presidential. They'll have to do better than this.
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