Santa Barbara Freaks 4 Peace, or SBF4P

After 6 P.M. Tuesday night the City Council reconvened and finally put forth agenda item number 20, which I referred to in my post from December 18. Holy moly what a show! Probably the only thing they were missing in that room were midgets, jugglers, and transvestites.

I jotted down some notes so I could give you folks some of the lowlights from this debacle. First the mayor took the mic and explained a little about the recommedation before she handed it over to Das. To his credit both the Mayor and Mr. Williams spoke openly and passionately about why they were endorsing this resolution. There is no doubt that they actually believe all of the things they uttered last night. In a room full of boisterous anti-war activists (and a few sweet, solemn old ladies), there wasn't a dissenting opinion to be found, which is why Mayor Blum never had to enforce her warning at the outset not to clap or boo or hiss so as not to intimidate any speakers. Noone was to be intimidated last night, as every speaker was on the same page... sort of. So when the mayor handed off the mic to the concerned citizenry, the circus began.

The first to the plate, a Phillip Martinee (sp?), was probably the least coherent of all the speakers. In his two minute mumbling diatribe he called "George Bush Senior... an accomplice to murder" and said that "Bush came in (to Iraq) with his bombs and killed everyones mother and brother and friend." Probably the best bit was one I didn't quite understand: "(George Bush) wants to put a laptop on every Iraqi childrens' stomach, or whatever he said, and then ugh, mentioned (incoherent) ugh low income children taken from the tobacco industry." What? George Bush wants to put a Quato-style robot on every Iraqi kid, and he's kidnapping deconomically isadavantaged children from JR Morris like the bad guy in the second Indiana Jones movie? I don't get it.

The second speaker was Paul Berenson. He basically re-stated all the numbers from the resolution document itself before dropping this gem of a quote: "Americans don't care about the human cost of the war." Well I am an American and I do care about the human cost of the war. Who is this guy to say what I or any other American cares about, especially when he's talking about a subject so dear to so many Americans hearts? What a jackass!

Later in the program Dinah Mason spoke. she was wearing a garish "Code Pink" jacket that Tammy Faye Baker would find over the top. At one point in her story about her military daughter's broken marriage to a Bolivian she mentioned that she herself was mis-diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. Uhhhhh, Dinah, the doctor didn't mis-diagnose you. You are crazy.

The most controversial comments came from a man named Mark McGinnes. The names of the speakers were not displayed, so having never met the Mark McGinnes from UCSB I referenced in a previous post, I can't confirm that this was the same guy. He had some strong indictments of the Bush administration and the President personally, calling for "George Bush (to be) apprehended in Baghdad tomorrow and hung by the neck for his crimes." Sedition? You decide. He also foisted his personal brand of communism on the crowd when he denounced democracy and capitalism by saying "consumption breeds terrorism." Nice, Mark. Where did you go to eat after the meeting, Mark? Did you go out to consume your dinner, you jihadist?

The citizen speakers concluded with a grandmotherly lady named Nancy Lynch. She seemed nice enough, but exhibited a misunderstanding of the chain of governmental command when she concluded by telling the council that "the President cannot veto your vote." That's probably true, Nancy, since there are about 47 levels of command between the mayor and the President.

After all of the civilians had had their say, the Councilmembers all had theirs. Here are some snippets:

"Look out for us!" - Marty Blum, to raging applause that she had declared at the beginning of the meeting would be disallowed.

"I'm a child of the 60's."
"We've become pigs."
"We can never patch up the horror of what we've done (in Iraq)." - all Brian Barnwell. To respond to the first, I wonder if Mr. Barnwell is still taking the hallucinogens he was taking in the 60's. Exactly who the pigs are I'm not sure. And to his final quote I would say this: Mr. Barnwell, we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians to end the war in the Pacific theater. That was a pretty horrible thing to do, much worse in my estimation than deposing Saddam Hussein and liberating a country yearning for democracy, but wouldn't you agree that relations between America and the Japanese are pretty good right now? We buy Sony products from them and they buy used womens underwear on EBay, it's all good.

"I understand why we didn't go to the United Nations; we were too greedy going for oil." - Marty Blum. The mayor shows her basic misunderstanding of the impetus for the conflict with this ridiculous statement. If we were going for the oil, would gas prices in Santa Barbara county be near $4 a gallon right now? Using this argument I think I could swing the momentum of this whole Council Crusade right around and say that by staying in Iraq to fight Al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups it could only help us here, at least at the pumps, if that oil should ever come through.

Probably most disappointing to me was the fact that Helene Schneider jumped on this bandwagon, probably right about the time of the third round of applause when she realized that if she dissented from this group they might take her outside and draw and quarter her immediately following adjournment. Shame on you Helene.

And thus the show was over, and the loony lefties had felt they won this small battle against the imperialist administration we all suffer under. Just by watching this video, available on demand through the city website, confirms the very idea behind the name of this blog. There are way more crazy people in Santa Barbara than sane people, therefore we, my faithful readers, are in the minority.

Stay tuned: at the next City Council meeting they're going to put forth a resolution to stop the crisis in Darfur, right after they debate about how to turn down the heat that emanates from the sun.

Goodnight now.

You Say You Want a Resolution

You might have been driving around town by yourself in your Hummer and thought to yourself, wow there are sure alot of homeless people out today; or maybe you saw a piece of graffiti gracing a wall that wasn't there yesterday; perhaps you were even privileged enough to witness a gang fight in front of one of the myriad marijuana dispensaries in town. But all of these decidedly minor local annoyances are today eclipsed by the uber-significant issue of the effect of the current conflict in the middle east on our (usually) sunny community by the beach.

That's right. The War on Terror DOES affect you here in our corner of paradise. The same people that don't believe that we here in Santa Barbara are at risk to the dangers of terrorism will now have you believe that it's kicking us in the softest spot on our collective person: the City's pocketbook.

Today Mayor Marty Blum and Councilman Das Williams will be proposing to the City Council a "Resolution Urging Cessation of Combat Operations in Iraq and the Return of U.S. Troops." That's right, folks. The Blue Line is back and it's bigger and badder than ever.

Whether this is a ploy to divide the Council or a plea for the recollection of federal funds that they claim war spending is infringing upon, or neither, it sure looks like an attention grabber. In fact this might be the biggest "look at me" stunt I've seen since Britney Spears did her best Sharon Stone Basic Instinct impression for the paparazzi. Terrel Owens pulling a sharpie out of his sock after a touchdown grab thinks these people are narcissistic.


I am of the opinion that this may be nothing more than something for the electeds to brag about when they hit the next National Aldermanic Association meeting in Backwater, USA. You saw it when Mayor Blum was caught sounding like a high school student errrrr misquoted in Variety Magazine about how they were "gonna paint a blue line" and this could be another one of their garden variety progressive Santa Barbara ploys to get more attention for how wonderful a job we're doing here in SB. If that's the case, congratulations electeds. With respect to President Bush, Mission Accomplished!


I'm happy to see that I'm not coming out of left field on this one, since they're chirping about it elsewhere, but do we really need another Blue Line? What exactly is the role, if any, of local government in regards to international foreign policy? Let's hear it readers. Proffer your opinions here on whether this is Mayor Blum's way of plopping a cease and desist order on the folks that spend four hours setting up Arlington West every Sunday, or if it's Das Williams' way of making up for the fact that he got up late this morning and only had 37 minutes to look at himself in the mirror.

Me Me ME!

911 Is a Joke in Your Town

The SBPD can't save your life, especially if your situation requires immediate attention.

Think back to David Klotz, who last year was murdered by a couple of grossly overweight bouncers at that place on Yanonali where naked sluts dance on poles, The Spearmint Rhino. While it was the fat-assed bouncers that called the police in the first place, to respond to a minor altercation at their den of debauchery, it took over 20 minutes for Santa Barbara's finest to respond. It was around three o'clock in the morning and Winchell's wasn't open, so I don't know where the coppers were or what they were doing, but I'm sure they weren't busy fighting gang violence. You know the end of the story. When they finally did arrive they found Klotz underneath 800 pounds of blubber and possessing a weak pulse. EMTs arrived and carted him off to the hospital, where he laid unconscious for a day before his parents could come down from the Bay area to make the call to take him off of life support. He was brain dead, and then he was dead. It's a sad story, but one that the SBPD doesn't want you to think about anymore, since they swept it all under the rug very neatly. No charges were filed against the club, its owners, or the two obese thugs, primarily because to do so would be to keep in the spotlight the PD's failure to arrive before the bouncers could effectively squeeze the life out of an innocent kid. Protect and Serve my ass.

Fast forward to yesterday. I work in the Community Development building on Garden Street, across from where they are constructing a giant, brand new mental health facility. Right next door is the Alano Club, which is where you go if you've been drunk most of your life and you'd like to make the change from suicide by alcohol to suicide by smoking nine packs of cigarettes a day right next to a massive, dust generating construction site that spews dirt out of its 30 foot hole for ten hours a day. My parents and brother are visiting from the east coast this week and they came by in the afternoon to check out my office digs and to meet my supervisor and co-workers. It was a nice enough visit that ended with a 50 yard stroll back out to the visitors parking lot. On our way out there I noticed a guy sprawled out on the edge of the parking lot with his head on the curb and his body looking like he just got dropped from an airplane.

I thought for sure he was dead, but upon further inspection I noticed his chest moving up and down, a sure sign of breathing function. He did have a half eaten piece of bread near his head and some brown vomitous looking fluid trailing from his mouth, but otherwise he looked like your regular, run of the mill homeless drunk passed out in a park, except he was here, in the city building parking lot! My Mother mentioned that the guy was there when they walked in and looked as if he hadn't moved an inch since they saw him 30 minutes prior. So let's call it about four o'clock the first time the police were called to come and rouse this vagrant.

Come 4:25 still no units of Santa Barbara's finest had arrived on the scene. A second call revealed that indeed the boys and girls in blue were on a shift change. Good thing there were no gang stabbings between four and five yesterday!


A resourceful employee of the city of SB then decided to call a contact she had in the Fire Department. In about four minutes we had a representative of the boys and girls in the red trucks on scene to rouse the bum from his deep, puke filled slumber. Thank you to the Santa Barbara Fire Department for your service!

The police showed up at about 4:45, but of course they didn't find anything because the guy was long gone by the time they made the four block journey from headquarters on Figueroa. So much for Mayor Blum's latest set of declarations about what a good job she's doing with the homeless problem.

The moral of the story is the same as the title, with respect to Flava Flav. Don't count on the PD to get to your emergency in a shorter amount of time than it would take any normal quadriplegic to complete the Boston Marathon.

You've Got to Rowowoll With the Punches to Get to What's Real

You thought 12 grand to paint a blue line was crazy; how about a million bucks for a guard rail?

It sounds nuts, but there was already excessive back patting in May of 2006 when the Mental Health Association of Santa Barbara and the county Search and Rescue publicly endorsed a CalTrans committee's plans to install a suicide prevention barrier along both sides of the Cold Spring Canyon Arch Bridge. Right off the bat the issue generated controversy. Thanks to the bureaucracy of entities such as CalTrans, these types of things take alot of time to flesh out. Here we are 18 months later and the debate is finally getting some serious media play. A group calling itself Friends of the Bridge has submitted an alternative proposal to CalTrans, forcing them to consider something other than a million dollar barricade. CalTrans being a public entity, by law it must review all measures proposed to it before it makes its determination about how to use the one million dollars that has already been allocated for a "traffic safety improvement project" on or around the bridge. Let the battle begin!

The Friends of the Bridge, mouthpieced by a man named Marc McGinnes, released their proposal last week countering the original CalTrans plan, forcing it into a review process that could take months, if not years. McGinnes is a retired UCSB Environmental Studies Senior Lecturer Emeritus with loose ties to the author of a study published in October of 2007, Garret Glasgow. Glasgow argued in his study against the barriers, placing him in the same camp as the Allies of the Arch, but for different reasons. Both McGinnes and Glasgow have been slammed in the local blogs this past week, the former for his insensitivity to victims of suicide and the latter for publishing a non-commissioned study that has yet to garner any peer review. The Supporters of the Span seem to have an aesthetic motivation against the barriers. Arguing that the bridge affords the best views of the Santa Ynez Valley that the County enjoys, they believe that installing a million buck balustrade will ruin the panorama that none of us should be enjoying as we drive across that overpass (safety first!). Glasgow argues that rails do not deter suicides, that other methods of suicide prevention are more effective and much cheaper, and the cost does not justify deterring what amounts to an average of one suicide attempt by high dive per year.

Of course my opinion of the situation is that everybody involved is (ahem) jumping to conclusions.

I know it was a long time ago but maybe my readers can enlighten me: when exactly did America decide that it knew best when an individual should depart this planet? I can tie in religion, Jack Kevorkian, Aaron Burr, and the War on Terror here but I'll spare you because I can simplify. I believe in an individuals right to choose. Whether it's a terminal cancer patient in severe pain or a guy who can't get over the fact that his girlfriend is banging his best friend, who am I to say that the individual has no right to expedite his quest to see what's on the other side of mortality? Why does the government have the right to legislate and allocate the ideology of self-immolation?

Unless that suicide is a murder-suicide, as in the case of the 19 hijackers or the roided up wrestler, we would be better served to allow these people to exercise their free will to take their leap of faith, slash their wrists in the bathtub, or gobble a bottle of tranquilizers. The federal money granted to mental health associations could be used for so many other reasons than to anesthetize errrrr rehabilitate people that just want to check out early. Population control is a weak argument for allowing suicide to be legal in that the frequency of suicide related deaths is so low, but it doesn't hurt the overall assertion that we've already got too many unstable people on the planet. Factor in the inevitability of a CalTrans project going over time and way over budget, and the initial proposal is even more worthy of euthanization.

Given the choice between a million dollars for an idea that may not even work, or a couple hundred bucks for a few National Forest guys with some shovels and some trash bags to visit the bottom of the ravine once a year, which would you choose? I'll take the Park Rangers. If this kind of cradle to the grave oversight by the government gets passed, then what is the next logical step? Will we stake police out by the train tracks to stop drug addled homeless guys from jumping in front of the Amtrak? Let's just repeal the Second Amendment now so we can stop the throngs of people who decide that Bud Dwyer is their idol, and while we're at it we can officially censor out the end of The Shawshank Redemption when the warden eats a bullet.

The people that believe the government should control when and how you die are the same hypocrites that cry and whine about The Patriot Act infringing upon their civil liberties. That's why Schopenhauer and Hume would never be members of the ACLU. But if the proponents of the parapet get their way, CalTrans' next steps might be to roll back the speed limits on the 101 to 25 m.p.h., or to legislate penalties for Starbucks intake inside of a moving vehicle.

Hopefully the powers that be will do the only right thing to do in this situation: nothing.

Santa Barbara Centrist Report

I was doing some light reading this afternoon and came across this interesting website, http://www.politicalcompass.org/. It's a ten minute, six page test that generates a blip on a graphic like you see above. According to my test results, I'm a slightly authoritarian centrist, or basically a moderate. Who the hell knew that? Even as I was taking the test I was thinking to myself, "shoot, my blip is going to end up right next to Hitler," whose blip is uncomfortably close to George W. Bush. Instead I'm in the same neighborhood as Pope Benedict XVI and Mahmoud Abbas, although I have no idea what that means.

Still, compared to the political ideology of most of the local folks I argue with on the internets on a daily basis, I believe I would have to weigh a thousand pounds to tip the compass in my favor. Therefore, the title of this blog shall remain the Santa Barbara Minority Report, as in true conservatives are still in the minority in this lovely gang and homeless infested beach community.

Yeah, Right

Saw this nifty tool over at George's blog and I was actually afraid to try it lest I end up with a Junior High School rating. It probably carries as much weight as those spam emails that give you the IQ test. I always get a 154; I think it's a sham.

I'm at least a 158.

Goodnight now.

A Clarification

So perhaps I went too far in my last post. Yes I stooped to the level of my detractors, and certain people close to me have pointed out that my stooping takes away from the legitimacy of my posts. I absolutely agree. However, while I won't fully retract what I wrote yesterday, I have edited the end a bit to reflect the truth about transvestites. Someone close to me in the know (ahem, RAYMOND) tutored me in the ways of trannies, specifically that trannies don't cruise other trannies. No, trannies are almost always men dressed as women looking for men (who are not dressed as women). I had incorrectly suggested that a certain blog flamer was a tranny cruising for trannies on Haley St., so thankyou to Ray-Ray for pointing out that my suggestion was not very realistic. So to be clear, in a future post I may or may not write that JQB is a closet homosexual (not a tranny himself) who cruises Haley St. on Saturday nights looking to score some NSA sex from an actual tranny, and does so without informing said tranny that he is HIV positive, which of course is a crime. My apologies for the confusion.

Until next time,

GOODNIGHT NOW.

Sticks and Stones

Sorry for the break in the action, folks. The truth is I have not had the energy to post over the last month. There has been plenty of things out there to cover, what with the City Council elections and the gang violence, fires and dirty air, TRAVISty at the News-Mess, housing bubbles, Sustainable Santa Barbara and traffic congestion, and let us not forget all the Bush bashing occurring on a daily basis in our myopic errrr representative media.

All of these things have been covered by my bloghorts, and dare I say that a lack of creative juice left me thirsty for something else, probably beer. I have not been completely absent. In fact I have been bouncing around enough for posters and commenters to run the gamut of the schoolyard name-calling slate on the local liberal sites, where I appear often (probably too often if you ask them). Not in any particular order, I have been called an "amoral monster" (JQB), a sophist (GEORGE), dishonest (JQB), that I "get (my) facts from Rush Limbaugh" (TREKKINGLEFT, and I can't see how that's true - I don't listen to Limbaugh), an insane fearmongerer (COOKIEJILL), a "bohemian" with a lack of scruples (AHAB), a "garden variety misogynist" (GEORGE), "very, very stupid" (JQB), a "sick fuck" (JQB), a "coward... afraid to face the truth" (JQB), "MCBlowjob" (COOKIEJILL), "MCShrinkyDink" (COOKIEJILL, my personal favorite), "MCLittleDickSmallerBrain" (COOKIEJILL), "tortureboy" (AHAB) and finally (for now) a "fucking authoritarian moron" (AHAB).

Now THAT is a lovely collection of quotes from my favorite firebrand opinionators, and these are only from the last couple of weeks! Of course it does not bother me. I merely reprint their adolescent exhortations to show them how infantile they can be. Far be it from me to be bothered by such nonsense, but I have to admit that after reading Cookie Jill call me MCShrinkyDink I fell for it and called her a "fat whore." I probably should not have written that, but it is merely an inference derived from her screen name.

So I have fallen off the posting wagon, but I promise to get back up on it. I know you are out there waiting with bated breath to swallow the next tidbit of genius to come from MCLittleDickSmallerBrain and the SBMR, and I will not leave you hanging. I am right now concocting a strategy to help my favorite little man Dennis Kucinich prove that what he saw actually was a UFO. After that I plan to prove how the Pantsuit is not fit to run the country if she can't handle "the boys" ganging up on her. And after that I will write about how my favorite commenter JQB is a closet homosexual who cruises Haley Street on Saturday nights, the significance being that he knows he has the HIV but engages in NSA intercourse in public without telling his tranny "victims" the truth about his infection.



Goodnight now.

Birthday!

I know there are plenty of readers out there that would love to spank me 35 times today, but alas I remain pseudo-anonymous, known only by the gloss bestowed upon me in college for my freestyle rap skills (which have subsequently eroded with age). To celebrate my wife is taking me for the bleu cheese reduction steak at Holdren's, then leaving me in the tender care of my friends for some beverages at EOS. My pal Rob Malanca will be strumming and singing there tonight, and the boys have promised the wife that I won't get in trouble despite the fact that I have a three tequila shot minimum during these kinds of affairs. History proves that only one can harm me, but hey, I'm 35.

Cheers!

The Littleman Cometh

The South Coast was graced yet again by a Democratic Presidential candidate this past weekend when all five feet of Dennis Kucinich made an appearance (amongst many in the area) at Arlington West on Sunday. Kucinich, the self-glossed peace candidate, spoke to an estimated crowd of 250 people at the shrine by the wharf. Reports said it was a much more personal visit than that of Barack Obama earlier this month, where around 5000 people turned out to cheer on the guy with no real platform. More personal? That's an understatement. You would think that if he knew that B. Hussein Obama drew maybe 20 times as many people that it might discourage him from spending another dime on his campaign, but alas he drives on. He even followed up his Santa Barbara visit with an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Congratulations to the former mayor of the Mistake by the Lake errrrrrrr Cleveland. You know you've really made it when you appear on a television program right after Jay talks to former pro wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. In case you were interested, Jay has Jennifer Love Hewitt on his program tonight, so set those tivos.

I have several problems with Dennis Kucinich. First and foremost, it's his slogan, "Strength through Peace." This is the only Democrat in the race who voted against the resolution granting the President the power to wage the war on terror. This passage appears on his website:

The Cold War belief that peace comes through strength is as obsolete as the Edsel. In an interconnected world of trading partners afloat with nuclear weapons, war is unthinkable. The Europeans have turned away from the catastrophic wars of the last century which took over 100 million lives to embrace a new understanding of diplomacy and dialogue as well as a new understanding of patriotism. So must the United States. The world depends on it.

Forget for a moment that in the last 1000 years no peace has emerged from any major conflict where one of the warring factions has pledged weakness errrrrr peace. It was in fact our very own weaknesses, in intelligence, operational safety, and lack of resolve, that led to the events of 9/11. It is weakness that our present enemies seize on. And for Kucinich to point to the Europeans as a model for foreign policy is an egregious moral error. Was it not the French and the Russians that were involved in the UN Oil for Food scandal? Didn't the Spaniards cow to the terrorists by electing a socialist administration very shortly after their trains were bombed by the terrorists? Aren't European countries being overrun with Muslim immigrants whose birthrates quadruple those of native Euros in some nations? Kucinich has pledged to engage with all nations, whether they disagree with US policy or not. So he's willing to lend an ear to the Iranian Hitler Mahmoud Ahmedenijad. I'm sure that the Kucinich policy of laying down would have furthered the progress with North Korea in trying to get them to abandon their nuclear programs. And Dennis Kucinich screaming "Peace! Peace! Peace!" is going to get the Sudanese to stop killing each other. Right. Strength through Peace only works if you're living in H.G. Wells' far flung future from The Time Machine, where the people ignored history. And even that was a relative peace, for weren't those monsters living just a few hundred feet below them, underground, ready to strike at any time? We are fighting a war right now that Dennis Kucinich would not fight if he were president. His campaign slogan is an affront to our men and women serving overseas right now. I believe he gives aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war with his foreign policy platform. The fact that he voted against the Patriot Act shows how ignorant he is of the threat we face today. Doesn't he know how many terrorist plots have been thwarted by that piece of legislation? This is the wrong guy at the wrong time, and he's got to know this. Only 200 people showed up to hear him speak in public on a Sunday. You don't have to be a soothsayer to see that his future does not contain the American Presidency.

To go along with his defeatist platform he's got all the bells and whistles of a liberal campaign: Universal Health Care for All, the End of World Poverty, Global Warming Legislation, Manned Flights to the Sun, you name it and it's on there. The one piece of credit that I will give the little guy: he's no Barack Obama. He's not all hot air. If you go to his website, it's pretty chock full of his platforms and how he would accomplish what he proposes. And for a little guy, he's got a pretty big set of balls to have voted how he has over the past six years. Unfortunately for him, the other horses in the race are bigger and stronger, like the black cocaine user and the pantsuit wearing lesbian. There's not a Napoleon Complex in the world that could overcome those two, and the sooner the little guy realizes that the quicker he can get back to bashing Bush and meandering down the path of less relevance.

Thanks for coming Dennis!

Never Forget

It has been six years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and for the first time the anniversary falls on a Tuesday. This morning the murdered were honored in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Shanksville, PA. As the years pass the cry gets more and more quiet, as they say that time heals all wounds. I sincerely hope that is only true in this instance only when we have defeated our enemies, and even then I hope the cry remains, however blunted. If folks are still traveling to Hawaii to visit the site of the submerged Arizona, then shall they be visiting Ground Zero sixty years hence. A Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, thankfully only comes around once in a generation, but these happenings should be remembered forever. With that in mind on this six year anniversary, I am going to lay out for the readers my own personal connection to the World Trade Center and 9/11.

My then fiancé and I moved to Santa Barbara in the middle of August, 2001, from West Orange, NJ. She was a schoolteacher in northwest Jersey and I worked as an administrator in the Athletic Department of Pace University in downtown Manhattan. We both loved our jobs, but I had been living in NJ for 11 years and she had been there nine. Realizing we were not getting any younger, and that with age comes the reluctance to uproot, we decided to drop everything, pack up the cars, and migrate west to our little paradise here in Santa Barbara. We started driving the 3000 plus miles on August 13 and arrived here August 21, precisely two weeks prior to the attacks.

A little context helps here: I had commuted through the WTC every day for three years by the time I quit my job at the University. Getting that job at Pace University was the legitimizing moment of my career. Having moved from New Hampshire to New Jersey after graduating high school, getting work in the city was my number one goal, and I had achieved it. I walked amongst the Wall Street elite and the corner booksellers on Nassau and Park Row. I drank 19 thousand beers at the Blarney Stone on Fulton. I ate lunch in the park in front of City Hall and wandered amongst the 300 year old tombstones at the Trinity Church. I was certainly part of the culture of the melting pot that is New York City, and I loved it. I even loved the commute, via Path train from Harrison, New Jersey (where many of the scenes of the opening credits of the Sopranos were filmed). Along the way you could watch the skyline from across the river as you approached the city, a skyline dominated by the twin towers. Walk beneath them and you were in awe. So many times I said to myself on that commute, “you made it, man.” I was proud of those buildings, proud of my city. As a Yankee fan, I can tell you there is nothing like standing in the shadows of the towers, in the Canyon of Heroes, as the triumphant Yankees march up Broadway to City Hall in the years they win the World Series. Another image comes to mind, from Tim Levitch’s film “The Cruise,” where he says if you stand in the middle of the courtyard between the towers, look up, and spin around until you get a little dizzy, then lie down on the ground looking up, the towers will twist and intertwine themselves in your vision. It’s very trippy, and it works; I’ve tried it.

Fast forward: when we got here to SB we were put up by a friend for a couple of months until we secured our own housing. So it was that I was awoken that fateful morning by a roommate in time to see the second plane impact. Unemployed, I was glued to the news channels interminably. Unable to get any phone calls through to the area for weeks was devastating. The cell towers were on top of the trade center, so wireless was definitely out. They had no power in the neighborhood for weeks, so I couldn’t get through to anybody at Pace for awhile. I had 25 work-study employees and the entire men’s basketball team and coaching staff housed down there, and I couldn’t find out for weeks if anyone had survived the collapses. I didn’t know if Dave Butler the Irish bartender at the Blarney Stone, or Bernard the giant black guy that was my friend and partner-in-beer, had made it. The bar was two blocks from 5 WTC. There’s video of the collapse clouds blasting down Fulton St. right in front of the place. My stomach clenches every time I see that clip. I didn’t know if Frenchy the bookseller, with his simple “Any book a dollar” sign on cardboard, had set up his table on the corner of Broadway and Park Row yet. The Italian guy behind the counter at Ray Bari’s on Nassau, who served me my daily slice: did he step outside to take a look just before it all came down? The Korean kids that ran the video game shop right next door to Ray’s: how many of those kids who I had mashed buttons with on the house Soul Calibur machine were outside in the street when all the air got sucked out of the sky? During all this time of confusion I was tormented with nightmares of where I would have been at the time of the attacks. If I had not been on one of the Path trains on it’s way to the basement of the WTC at the very moments of the first impact, I would certainly have been standing right underneath the towers as they came crashing down. So my bullet missed me by two weeks precisely. Others were not so lucky.

I’ve spent hours upon hours of scouring the lists of the dead online over the course of the last six years. There are some very comprehensive databases out there with pictures of the victims. Click, load the next profile, don’t know him; click, load the next profile, don’t know her; click, load the next profile, it’s Jemal DeSantis. Jemal was just one of the guys I recognized as killed in the attacks. He and three full basketball teams of Cantor Fitzgerald employees perished. We ran a corporate basketball league out of our gym, and I would officiate the games. The bulk of the people I knew that died on 9/11 would come from this group.

When it was all said and done, I locked down 36 names. There could be more but I haven’t pored over those sites for years. I lost no Pace employees, and nobody from our basketball team was killed or injured. My friend Jeff Ruggiero worked up high in the Trade Center, but he decided to stay home from work that day to take care of his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time. Small miracles like that buoy me when I feel down about 9/11.

Whenever I go back to the tri-state I go to Ground Zero. I shed a few tears at the site, thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t there that day, and head over to Ray Bari’s for a slice. From there I proceed to Frenchy’s table and pick up a paperback for the train ride back, for which he never charges me that dollar. He knows he’s going to get it from me when I buy him a beer or three at the Blarney Stone after the lunch hour rush has subsided. If it’s before noon, Bernard is almost definitely going to be in there to quaff a pre-lunch beer with his old buddy.

When it’s time to leave, it’s a round of hugs and back on the train for another ride back to Jersey. These days it’s a cathartic ride, and I don’t get to do it very often, but when I do it’s really easy for me to look back on the city as I’m hurtling across the river back toward the Garden State. A part of me will always reside there, 9/11 or not.

This American will never forget his generation’s Pearl Harbor.

All Temps Are Not Created Equally

Jack the Temp is leaving us, and I’m kind of sad about it. Some people would look down upon the temps that they are forced to endure in their workplace. They’re usually under-skilled, fleeting, socially deprived individuals that working folk won’t allow into their tight knit office cliques. In Vietnam, guys grunting through the second half of their tours wouldn’t even talk to the fellows freshly in country. They even had a name for them: FNG’s. They didn’t want to get to know them because there was a good chance the new guy wasn’t going to last very long out in the bush, so why bother? This is kind of the way I feel about temps.

Rambo probably wouldn't even talk to a temp.

The City of Santa Barbara has got to be one of the slowest operating bureaucracies around. It can take months to process a request for a list of viable candidates to fill even the most menial of clerical positions (such as mine). One of the lowest positions on the municipal ladder, yet one of the most imperative, is the Administrative Specialist. I am going to estimate that there are probably 50 AS professionals working for the city. They fill myriad roles for each of the 12 departments and are filtered through a hiring process that includes testing, list placement, and multiple interviews. My own effort at securing the position I hold took nearly five months. For this reason, the city utilizes several temporary employees to fill gaps when AS people move up or out of their roles. Jack the Temp is one of those guys. He’s been here for six months.

We all knew that Jack the Temp was only going to be here temporarily, yet I think none of us thought about what life would be like at work without Jack the Temp. On this his last day, I am forced to think of a future without my favorite prank pulling partner. Yes we liked to play jokes on our unsuspecting colleagues. Jack the Temp spearheaded the effort to steal all of the (flowers that are) pens from the other side of our lobby. The plan checkers could never figure out where the heck their pens were going. They painstakingly turned their ball point pens into flowers and potted them on the counter to try to keep the public from stealing or otherwise walking off with them. It works; that is until Jack the Temp came along. They were so confounded over there and it was hilarious when we’d hear them asking each other “where the heck did all the pens go?”

Jack also figured out how by using just a couple of keystrokes he could turn a person’s desktop display upside down. I forget what keystrokes he used, but I had never heard of it and when he turned my screen upside down I couldn’t figure out how to turn it right side up again. A great trick!

Jack always laughed at me when I would reply to an open chat window on an unsuspecting co-workers workstation with something like “My butt hurts” or “That burrito is giving me the worst farts!” Not a lot of people would laugh with me on those, but Jack did.

While he never got to go to the meetings that our division is forced to endure, I think people really thought of Jack the Temp as their colleague, and not just a temp. In fact I know that a certain fraction of our division was jealous that he didn’t have to go to the meetings. I know I was. But that is another matter. This post is about Jack the Temp. Don’t get me off topic.

Some of the things that I’ve learned about Jack the Temp since we’ve worked together:

• He likes to practice his left handed penmanship, even though he is right handed.
• He eats very healthy foods and even runs an Ethiopian catering service. I tease him about it by pretending to order “fried housefly” and then he calls me an asshole. He’s right, of course.
• Jack usually wears all black. He’s into the whole fashion thing, and he wears some pretty hip stuff, but I never figured out why fashionistas always wear the least expressive color. It’s okay, it’s his thing not mine.
• Jack likes to sing out “I like pizza, YAY!” but I’ve never seen him eat a slice.
• He’s prone to studying the names of world capitals when he’s not busy, and in fact will be visiting some during his European Oddyssey beginning next week. I think he’s hitting something like ten countries in three months, which is impressive.
• Jack has an affinity for the homeless lady that hangs out around our building. She’s a total regular in this neighborhood, and she showers in the sink of our ladies room. He likes her so much we started calling her “Jack’s Girlfriend” and that lasted for a little while until one time someone referred to her as “Jack’s Girlfriend” and he refuted that statement saying that in fact she was his long lost Mother. Now she’s known as “Jack’s Mother” and he spins intricately detailed falsehoods about what they did for dinner last night or how she reacted during his acting up period during his upbringing. Jack is hilarious when he is ad-libbing. Larry David would be proud of him.
  

So I wanted to memorialize my co-worker Jack the Temp, who is leaving us today, by saying that he is the tip-top of the list of the temporary toilers, and I will miss him. Au revoir, Auf wiedersehen, and Adios my friend.

Scorched Earth

Thanks to Chris Clervi of the USFS for these aerial shots taken August 23 of various burned out sections of the Los Padres National Forest.

Check Your Head

my name is D yall, and i dont play, and i can rock a house party til your hair turns grey
so watcha sayin?
i explode on sight, im like jimmie walker, im DYNOMITE.

I explained to my wife that in my dwindling years, the twilight of the life that was my former self, certain experiences were remarked upon at the coffee shop of my consciousness. Some things just leave a mark on you. Like that time I hurdled over the hockey boards at a Beasties show at Madison Square Garden and fell eight feet to a concrete subfloor, landed on my hip, and had to scurry into the crowd lest the evil fascist security pigs got me. Or that time during a Rage show where I nearly suffocated at the middle front, fought my way out with the very last of my strength and oxygen to get pulled out the side by the security guys and hustled to the EMTs for water and O2. Three songs later I was right back in the same spot for Bullet in the Head, surfing and moshing. How about the time I saw Public Enemy open for Run DMC, and in the hallways around the Providence Civic Center it was mayhem. We were maybe six strong but there were fools running around all over the place screaming and whooping. I was in the back of our group and about ten guys come sprinting past us like they were running from a liquor store robbery and one of them just clocked me in the grill as he ran past. Nobody saw it but me, and I didn't even see it. No knockdown, though. I lived to fight (the power) another day. These are the experiences you remember. These are the things that you will not tell your grandchildren one day.

And so upon you are placed the burdens of everyday life, and your existence is a smattering of similar days and nights, all melding into an image of normalcy and contentment and age. At 35 you start to think that maybe those great days, those visceral experiences of your youth, are truly finally behind you. You may not rock it like that ever again. You get nostalgic about the last ten years before the last ten years have passed. But then in the night a small light appears. Announcements are made and tickets are sold. The date is far off on the horizon but when it arrives you are ready. Call it reincarnation or rebirth or any other existential tag; you are alive again in America if even for only one truly vivid moment.

Last week I Rocked the Bells and was reborn to "Here I Come" by The Roots. Tonight my epiphany will occur during the first few riffs of "The Maestro." Or "Tough Guy." I've always despised Bill Laimbeer.

At what point will you return to the time when your whole life is in front of you? On what note will you accept the clarity of the present moment? "Live at PJ's"?? "Paul Revere"?? I hope you don't wait until "Sabotage." They always close with "Sabotage."

By the way I need a ticket. Any extras? I'll be scouring craigslist until I get one. See you at Noel's.

MC Confrontation

Gone

A rough month. I know it’s not a sentence, but it is what it is. A break from the madness into another madness. This is my life. My emasculation was completed Wednesday, August 1, when by spousal mandate I returned the Dude to the shelter from whence he came. The debate was over something about what evil he was capable of doing to our new child, our close friend’s children, and a plethora of deliverymen. Not one to put supertight canine-human connection above human paternal responsibilities, I relegated the Dude to a shelter in Fillmore, where we got him. It was the most difficult action I have ever undertaken; it was really tough. But it’s done, and I must move on. Posts to come; I’m climbing back up on it.

The Light Blue Lie

Only in Santa Barbara. No, really. No other city has a Light Blue Line.

Only here could a guy get twelve grand to paint one line. Granted it's a long, jagged line, but it's just a line, and a suspect one at that. Professor Gore and his cohorts would have you believe that there is no debate on global warming, that it's riding on the horizon like the four horsemen of the apocalypse and all but a done deal. But one needs to only look at the frequency and rapidity of new articles and theories on the issue to see that the debate is far from over. Indeed, millions if not billions will be spent over the next several years to study the impact of humans on the earth and our climate. I guess somebody's got to pay the salaries of the academics that are sure to argue and counter each other for the next 20 years. But here in Santa Barbara, you can get the city to pay you for your theories, and it pays pretty well.

The Light Blue Line folks applied for and received a grant from our city for $12,000 American dollars to paint a blue line across streets and sidewalks that purports to delineate where the waterline would be if global warming melts all the ice on Greenland (if all the ice on Greenland was in danger of melting).

Twelve grand! For a line! I love the idea. In fact it has inspired in me several new ideas for lines across our city. The front runner would be what I call the Amnesty line. Here we would draw a line around the middle of Montecito, effectively shrinking the size of that burg. The line would show what would happen if the Bush/Kennedy Amnesty bill went through, or if it ever came up again. Hispanic presence in the city of Santa Barbara would grow, their neighborhoods on the east side would expand, and the areas of town affected by gang violence would begin to encroach into the peaceful streets of the town that Oprah calls home. Scary, isn't it? I should note this is a two-color line, half green and half red, and the extra color is probably going to run the city another six grand, so let's call it 18 all day.



I know Santa Barbara has gone very green; I've commented on it here. But trying to do what seems right (paper or, uh, paper sir?) is different than taking a definitive political stance on an incomplete science. Public money for political art crosses a line akin to the mix of church and state. Let's hope that that line never gets blurred.

1984 and Your Media

The American people have spoken, your senators have listened, and yesterday the Bush/Kennedy immigration plan was shot down. The masses apparently don’t like the idea of amnesty for 12 million illegals before we fortify our (open) borders. Lest you believe I am merely a Bush honk, I want to openly state that I was very much against this bill. The whole thing stunk of a backroom deal, and clearly Americans did not want it, as they blew up the House phone lines and shut the whole system down with their telephone campaign. This is a good thing; it’s democracy in action. We speak, they listen. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But wouldn’t you know it, as soon as the final score was posted it was on to the next item in the liberal agenda: to silence the masses with a new fairness doctrine as it regards to talk radio. Congratulations Harry Reid; Joe Stalin would be proud.

Fairness in the media is a hot topic these days. You’ve got righties whining about the alphabet networks and their liberal slant. You’ve got lefties crying about the lack of a liberal voice on the radio. As soon as the gavel dropped on the immigration issue, Dianne Feinstein
was talking about the domination of talk radio by conservative voices. She blamed the death of the immigration bill on the likes of Rush and Sean, who urged their audience of millions to speak up on this legislation of disaster. Guess what: she was right. We can probably give 90% of the credit to these two guys for imploring Americans to voice their opinions on this shady deal, because they did. And now America is better off in that this bill is dead. Of course it only means that the immigration issue gets put onto the back burner as we gear up for the 2008 elections, and that is not a good thing, but it’s better than a bad fix to a worse problem. Now that that looming disaster is out of the way, you’d think our representatives would turn to pressing issues such as the war in Iraq or the European missile defense proposals or even Universal Health Care. No, all of these issues are trumped by the fact that Sean Hannity is more popular than Al Franken. That’s the big deal now. Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are running the country, according to some pols. Scary thought? Yes. True? No.

What it all boils down to is that Dems are mired in failure yet again, and they cannot get over it. It’s the 2000 election all over again, and we’ll never hear the end of it. George Soros’ billion bucks can’t buy him Larry Elder’s audience, so the Dems are going to legislate the right right off the air. Or they’re going to try it at least. Because more people like Laura Ingraham than NPR, we need more fairness. The whole thing is so ridiculous it’s laughable. How does Hillary Clinton get to decide what I listen to? Where are we going with this? In town here we’ve got 1490 with Dr. Laura and 1340 with…. whoever they air on that station. Isn’t that fair enough? It's always someone else's fault with the left, and I'm hard pressed to figure out whose fault it is that Air America sucks so bad. Wait I remember now. It's because Janeane Garofalo is a complete loser and nobody likes her.

LOSER

Drivel

When the first few minutes of down time at work hit me each day, I do one of three things. I'll check the email, or set my rotisserie baseball lineup for the day, or lastly troll the local liberal blogger sites to see what kind of drivel they're spewing about the state of affairs. This morning my inbox was pretty thin; there's only five baseball games today; the lefties in town are going OFF! Excellent!

Target acquisition systems honed, I zeroed in for the kill and banged out a couple of comments. One was on George's blog over all the Presidential namecalling I saw this morning. Another was on Trekking Left's site where he was saying he'd decline an invite from the President to the White House because he despises the man. In the comments there Queen Whackamole said she'd like to fart on him. Yes, she did. Now that might seem a little juvenile, but I want to say this: it is juvenile. I think it's hilarious. These people are a train wreck on the scale of the Howard Dean scream. They've hit the wall and reverted back to the fourth grade; Billy Madison would be proud.

Anyway the purpose of this post is to remind the people reading here that it doesn't start and end here. Support your local bloggers by reading their drivel ERRRRRR sites. Think of it as wanting to watch your favorite baseball player's at bats while he's on the road, because I'm representing there. That is, I'm representing there when they want to pitch to me. I would never want to compare myself to Barry Bonds, but sometimes I feel like Barry Bonds when I post a comment and it never sees the internets because I've been censored by these loudmouths. Sometimes it's too tough for them, so they pitch around me.

That won't happen here though. Anything goes. It's why I allow anonymous posters to call me an asshole in the comments sections of my posts. I won't censor.

Y'all come back now!

Green Is Good

Front page story in today's Santa Barbara Daily Sound trumpets "City finalist for climate award." Apparently we here in SB qualify to be listed amongst the meccas of Fayetteville, AR, and Northbrook, IL, to name a couple of other finalists. That's great news. Our city has long been a major innovator in the attempt to keep things nice, that's for sure.

For instance, the trash guy that picks up at my house: he's always there bright and early in the morning. Okay, maybe not bright but early. I'm talking before 6:30 A.M. I want to kill this guy. He pulls in, the Dude starts barking his head off, the eight week old starts wailing; lights start popping on up and down the row and now everyone's dog is barking; it's a freaking nightmare. But hey he's just doing his job.

So climate protection is like a mandate here. I can get with that. I can see that we're definitely putting forth the resources in the studies and the time spent discussing what we can do better, etc. Keeping the sand clean on East and West beach has always been a priority. We certainly can't have those guys outside the post office on Milpas Street approaching with the muddied appearance that would suggest that the sand that they slept on the night before was anything but the purest Pacific pebble.

How about when you walk down Hendry's beach? My wife and I have special shoes we use when we decide to stroll that oil slick. If you don't use them you can end up back at the house with your feet covered in tar. You need to scrub them with vegetable oil to get the tar off; if you don't act quick the black gets over everything. There's a creek that runs behind my house that goes straight into the ocean at Hendry's. Recently they've redeveloped the area at the end of Las Positas where this creek hits the lagoon that turns into the slough that runs into the ocean. It looks really pretty as you're driving by. It smells the same, though, and that's not a good thing. I won't swim there. Maybe it has to do with the half dozen or so dead animals that the Dude has happened upon on that beach and decided to roll in. Picture me sprinting in from 50 yards out while the Dude is simply giddy to root in the stink of carcass, the "Noooooooooooooo!" hanging in the morbid sea air that the offshore wind cannot blow out of that place.

Been up to Elings Park lately? It's a beautiful spot, especially at the end of the day as the sun goes down behind the hill opposite. It's a great dog park too. The Dude loves to run up there with his pals, and we're up there all the time. Maybe you didn't know that Elings Park is built on the site of the old city landfill. It used to be a dump! It's an excellent testament to the efforts of local citizens to green up their city. You would never know it used to be a dump if you walked it and didn't know its history. That is, unless you were the Dude. He was rooting around up there in the gully behind one of the softball fields, and when he came out of the woods his whole head and neck were covered in this brackish blackness the consistency of meconium. It smelled worse than death. It smelled worse than poop. I know the Dude, so I know those smells, and this was different. It was an old trash toxic battery acid rancidness that I am really struggling to explain here; just know it was bad. I went over to check out what he had been rolling in, and it looked like the La Brea tar pits: oozing blackness coming up from the ground that I could only imagine was fifty year old toxic waste rising from the dead. It was kind of scary. I later read that during rains, a yellow ooze seeps down the street from the park on it's Northeast side. Not green, mind you, yellow.

The moral of my post, I guess, is that it's nice to be recognized for trying to do the right thing. Stir fry that with a little don't judge a book by its cover and we're good. And Mayor Blum, if you want to know what issues to tackle next on the green front, come on over to my house and meet the Dude. He's got a handle on all of the hotspots.

Sicko Shows on YouTube

Michael Moore is growing on me.

While I don't believe nearly a shred of his alarmist faux-documentary Farenheit 911, I have enjoyed his other films. Upcoming we will get his new film, Sicko, which by all accounts is a scathing representation of our health care industry. I will pay to see this film, unlike his last effort, which I borrowed from someone else that patronized this fat Bush basher. But alas I wake this morning to find that I don't have to pay to see Sicko. It's up on YouTube right now in something like 19 segments. As of an early Monday, June 18 article on Reuters, it was still up there, breaking every copyright law ever imagined.

Here's the kicker: Michael Moore doesn't care that we're stealing his movie. In his own words he said "I do well enough already," and says that the more people that see his movie, and get his message, the better. I like that. While I don't think that it's right to disseminate copyrighted material without the correct people getting paid for their work, the fact that the guy that stands to lose the most from this crime would rather you steal this movie instead of not paying for it and never seeing it at all validates Moore's passion for his work. He believes in what he does. It's weird to write this, but we need the Michael Moore's of the world to keep it fair, to keep it balanced. Even if you don't buy what he's selling you have to agree that he is a compelling voice, and a good lefty tit for my righty tat. See Sicko, whether it's online or in your local theater. Michael Moore doesn't care where.

Invasion USA

The endearing image of Chuck Norris on a hoverboat in the Everglades, shooting it out with the Russian terrorists, has never left me. Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen kicked ass when the Reds and the Cubans teamed up and nuked most of the major targets in America. Bittersweet, though, when the Russian gunship mows down C. Thomas Howell and the movie ends with Jed Eckert carrying his dead brother to the frozen playground. Cold war terrorism was a big theme for post adolescents like myself in the mid 80's. I used to lose sleep to dreams of Jason Robards' slowly melting face. But that was then, and this is now.

Now Americans don't fear any kind of conventional invasion of our shores. In fact they don't seem to fear any kind of invasion; but we have already been violated. They've been throwing this figure of 12 million around the past couple of weeks, but who counted? I would figure it at a much higher number than that. We're holding a half a million in our prison system. I forget how much it costs to house an inmate but it's something on par with what I clear in a year of full-time toiling for our local government. Who are these people? They're largely Mexican and other South American Hispanic peoples who cross on our southern border. They come here to pick strawberries, work construction, operate the car wash, congest emergency rooms, overrun public schools, and provide authentic cuisine (not in that order). Mostly uneducated, mostly unskilled, and mostly hardworking and friendly, these folks have spun themselves into a pretty good niche in our society. It's a good enough niche that they feel entitled to certain rights that have never been granted to non-citizens, at least not officially. The pols are arguing right now about how to make it official.

While I'm not happy with the immigration issue and how our elected officials have dealt with it since the last major legislation in the mid 80's, it's not even the river of thousands of Hispanic people that flows into California, Arizona, and Texas every day that truly worries me. It's the small trickle of men that look like them that has me on the edge of my seat. You know who I'm talking about: the real bad guys. It's the chink in our armor that will allow these Mexican look-alikes representing the medievalists to carry out another 9/11. They are here right now plotting to kill you and your family. I don't care what Mike Bloomberg has to say about it, I'm freaking worried. Why shouldn't I be? There's no wall, there's noone watching, and they're free to come over here and set up camp like a bunch of squatters under the overpass.

How can we, in the midst of a war, not have our borders secured to protect against these people who would kill you and your family at the mall? It befuddles me. We're literally begging for it to happen again until we do something about it. Build the wall. No amnesty. Identify as many of them as we can and process them. Fill the labor void with our teenagers. I worked when I was 15, why can't that annoying kid next door who just rides around the parking lot on his skateboard irritating my dog get a job? The legislation needs to stop talking amnesty and start talking about stiffer penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants. The Patriot Act can help us identify the bad elements of this mess, but first we need to stanch the flow at the source. Recognize that the real threat of illegal immigration is about the flow of Islamic fundamentalists into our country and use that issue to attempt to correct the problem of the millions of undocumented workers who just want to come here to provide a better life for their families.

Save the 'Roos

I woke up this morning and it was weird but I knew I had missed something. A quick perusal of my daily Edhat confirmed that I did indeed fail to attend the local PETA rally downtown yesterday. I cannot explain to you folks how completely empty I feel this morning. Did you ever get to work and hang around the coffeemaker in the morning and learn from a co-worker that you missed the latest episode of The Office the night before because your tivo failed to recognize the fact that NBC ran it on a different night to non-compete with American Idol? That's me times ten.

PETA rallies are fun for so many reasons. You get crazy Howard Dean type shrill in any number of different chants. You might get some folks dressing up as the animals they're trying to defend. If you're really lucky you can get a B-list celebrity getting doused with red paint a la Carrie. So try to imagine an amalgamation of these attractions and you've pretty much got Disneyland's Main St. USA, on acid.

So yesterday at the PETA rally I did not attend they were railing against overturned legislation that now allows Californians to import non-endangered kangaroo skins into the country. The PETA folks are hopping mad about this (sorry), obviously, but at least one group is cheering. You guessed it: soccer players. You might have thought that the proponents of the world's most popular sport would be an inviting group of globalists, offering free orange slices to anyone who might venture near the sidelines, but this is an apparent ruse. Soccer players everywhere are being implicated in the mass extermination of Australia's kangaroos, and it won't be long, but mark my words, sooner or later they'll be implicating our greatest sports heroes in this massive conspiracy.

Just remember that you read it here first. If PETA is successful in its bid to save the 'roos, we may have seen the last of these undeniably convenient wheels.

Wha?

The strangest news story I've seen in some time.

Do They Know What Country They Are In?

I'm not certain when these pictures were taken but I'm guessing it was during the local immigration protests. These are students at Montebello High School in California. They're hoisting the Mexican flag. No big deal right? Except that they are hoisting the American flag underneath the Mexican flag. That's a blatant display of Anti-American sentiment. But it's worse than you think! In a move that would make Zack de la Rocha proud, the American flag is being raised upside-down. For the uninitiated, that is a statement that is equal to the Islamic chants of "Death to America." And these are our own students. Do they know what country they are in? This is California, not Mexifornia. Who doesn't think we need some immigration reform now?

The Dude Abides

But not always. I'm glad to report that my former Alpha Dog is doing well adjusting to his new role as Beta Dog. Sure he still gets his daily runs at Hendry's or Elings, but no longer is he doted on as he was in the past. Baby Emma, the new Alpha of my abode, has taken over the Dude's role of House Ruler. But don't try and mess with her, or you could feel the wrath of the Dude.

Defending Dr. Laura

Apparently the lefties in town don't like Dr. Laura. I'm not sure if it's their love for abortion, their affinity for promiscuity, their deep rooted hate for their own children, or a combination of the three, but it's there. What sane person would be surprised that The Average Man and his cohorts would take the opportunity of an unfounded news story to put Dr. Laura to the screws? I thought it was innocent until proven guilty in this country, but not in their world. Not unless we're talking about Bill Clinton getting orally stimulated in the oval office or some democrat stuffing classified documents down his pants. They hate Dr. Laura for the same reason they love Whoopi Goldberg. They are attracted to filth.

Now I'm no angel, and I'm not wearing a sign around my neck that says I'm a perfect person, but I know the difference between wrong and right, good and evil. Dr. Laura, while she may appear hypocritical considering her history, is by all accounts a good person. So she sounds mean when she's biting off a caller's head for asking if it's okay to leave her nine year old kid unsupervised while she goes shopping for new shoes, but the gist of her program is that we should all "go do the right thing." What's wrong with that, you ask? I don't know, ask my local lefties. They're blasting a lady who preaches monogamy. They slam a girl who believes that a Mother's direct care for their infant is better than a day care provider. I think that they think that Dr. Laura thinks she is infallible, but I never saw her wear the Pope's hat. Because she let some guy take some nudies of her twenty years ago she's not fit to preach ethics. I'm not going to begrudge them their choice of porn. So the pictures weren't the most attractive things I've seen on the internet, I agree. But just because she stripped for the camera she's the biggest hypocrite alive? Give me a break. At least they were, well, artsy.

So it all boils down to this: the left loves their porn, just as long as it's not Dr. Laura in the latest issue of Hustler. It's a hypocrite calling someone else a hypocrite. How shocking. Here's a piece of advice for The Average Man, Trekking Left, Lie_Machine, and even George: in the afternoons from three until six, don't listen to AM 1490. It's really that easy! And even though you all despise the News-Press (but still read it all the time), just don't look for her column when she returns. You don't have to listen and you don't have to read it.