The Second-Shortest Commentary Ever

This is becoming a trend, but here we go: the second shortest commentary ever.  Again, it does not require any preface.

IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!  IT’S NOT LIKE HE SHOT AN ENTIRE BUS OF RETARDED SCHOOL CHILDREN!  IT’S A GUY HE’S KNOWN FOR 30 YEARS, AND HE’S NOT GOING TO DIE!  WHO CARES WHEN HE TOLD US?!?  SHUT UP ALREADY, YOU MORONS!

If the press keeps latching onto these non-stories, I swear, I’m never going to have the need to blog much at all again.  Not that anyone is actually reading this.

The most concise and direct commentary I'll ever write

I'm known for the length of my writing. Well, here's the most concise commentary I'll ever write.

THEY ARE CARTOONS! GET OVER IT!

I think that says everything that needs to be said here.

Here we go again

Take…three?

Yeah, yeah, I know, this whole reinvention thing is only really appealing the first couple of times.  All I can say is, my life hasn’t exactly been reliably calm and my creative mind has been downright turbulent.  Life is good, don’t get me wrong, but what I want and what I’m getting out of this blog have continued to be different things.

I really wanted this to be a creative outlet, a place to write something decidedly different from the standard political blog.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, mostly because being decidedly different takes a lot of time I just don’t have.  There’s a reason why 99% of political blogs are made of brief entries commenting on a single news item: bloggers (mostly) work for a living and don’t have three hours a day to write out lengthy, detailed, structured creative works.  That certainly describes my life, and so every day I’d pass by several things I’d love to comment on, but ignore them because ‘I’ll wait till I have more time.’  

It is my firm conviction that ‘more time’ will come a few minutes after I assume room temperature, and I imagine blogging will be a mite more difficult by then.  

I’ve tried to create material that makes it worth people subscribing to the feed, building a readership.  I may have succeeded, but only updating once every few months certainly trumps that, and then some.  

Once again, we’re back at the point where I set your expectations.  And, to some extent, mine.  

You’re going to see a lot more traditional blogging.  You’ll either enjoy my commentary or you won’t.  If you do, hey, hit the site every once in awhile or subscribe to the RSS.  Comment, when the mood strikes you.  (A reminder to LJ folks: commenting to the LJ feed will likely miss me entirely, as I won’t receive any of those comments in e-mail. Comments need to be here, in the Almanac.)  

You will also, on occasion, see a longer piece with more depth and creativity than usual.  It won’t happen often, and it may come in spurts, but it will happen.  When it does, I’d ask that you’d give those pieces a chance by reading them all the way through, even when I get tedious.  That’s a big request, but hey, you’re great people, right?

My Winamp playlist has a great sense of humor, as I’m about to make this last comment, it pulls up ‘Lunatic Fringe’ by Red Rider.  Yes, that’s the last thing, you’ll still see a lunatic fringe to all of this.  I still love the absurd, the bizarre, and my writing will still take that twist. You’ll see plenty of standard political commentary and analysis, but it may just get a little odd or silly at time.  If that’s not up your alley, you’ll have to speak to the penguins, as I’m only doing what I’m told.

Get ready for a lot of frequent, if small, posts here.  It may be mirrored in several other blogs, but maybe I’ll say it in a way that amuses you.  I hope so, because those penguins are really demanding little bastards.

Feeding Meiers

Feeding Meiers

It’s been awhile, and I apologize for that. Been waiting to update until I had time to do some technical upgrading, and that’s done.

I assume everyone will be expecting me to talk about Dubya’s extremely weak and disappointing nomination to replace O’Connor on the SCOTUS. You probably expect me to wax eloquently about her lack of experience as anything but a political appointee, and her apparent complete lack of constitutional scholarship that not only places her well below Scalia and Thomas, but also likely below the people that bring Scalia and Thomas their morning coffee in the SCOTUS break room.

No, I’m here to tell you that I finally set up a nifty RSS feed for the Almanac here. I present you with the link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PoorJustinsAlmanac

You can now add me via any RSS reader software. If you’re a LiveJournal user, this feed is syndicated there as poorjustinsalm so feel free to add it to find out when the blog is updated. Due to the length of my entries, the feed just gives you the title, but I’m sure that’s fine with you. Click through, read my hypnotic, mesmerizing words and drift into a soft, gentle sleep where I can brainwash you and turn you into mindless neocon drones.

You’ll also notice that there are Google ads on the site. I am a capitalist, this should be expected. I don’t want them to be intrusive, but if I can make a dime or two, wunderbar. Give ‘em a click every now and then, make an old man happy.

That’s all for now. More to come around 2-3 times a week. Promise.

2,000 Buses?

Not much traction with the abuse�-�Nation/Politics�-�The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

That's Washington Times Editor Wesley Pruden on the New Orleans subject. He says TWO THOUSAND buses sit unused in four feet of water in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool.

You figure, even if you only cram 50 people on a bus and only make one trip, that's 100,000 people...pretty much the exact count of how many stayed behind. As for the question of who would drive them, in my youth we had a church bus in our tiny town, and a school bus for the tiny Fascist School I attended. (I refuse to call it a Christian school, as Christ had very little to do with it and doesn't deserve the blame.) In both cases, people with no more experience than driving a pickup truck handled the buses just fine on the open road.

The path to rescuing every person left in New Orleans sat at Ray Nagin's feet...and he chose to ignore them, waiting for the feds to bail him out.

Fear & Loathing In New Orleans

Fear & Loathing In New Orleans

They were somewhere around Baton Rouge, on the edge of the swamp…

…hey, wait a second, that’s not how it goes.

But it could, if good old Mayor Ray Nagin gets his way. See, his long-suffering police force is really stressed out. You know, the ones abandoning their posts, looting, etc. To reward them, he’s giving many of them (as well as firefighters and EMTs) five-day vacations to Las Vegas. Effective immediately. As in, today.

I’ll pause while the sheer intellectual weight of that comes to bear on your astonished mind.

It’s all right here, in black and white. Yes, the good Mayor says they’ve been under a lot of stress in the last week, so he wants to ‘cater to them.’ He says there are enough national guard units now that they can take a break.

While I don’t want to malign those civil servants who actually did their jobs in the last week, I think that may be the most repugnant thing I’ve ever read. It’s been a week. One week. Seven days. These men were asked to do their jobs, and only their jobs, under extreme duress for one week, and a big portion of them couldn’t even manage to do that. Current reports have over 500 (that’s something like 1/3) walking off the job. We have the chief of police complaining they had to work in wet shoes, and without proper bathroom facilities.

That chief had this to say on the subject of the trips:

‘His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process."
The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.
They said that they were trying to get the first officers on their way on Monday and that the first stop would be Baton Rouge, about 75 miles from here.’

Jump-start the healing process. Well, it’s good to know the fine city of New Orleans is in such capable hands. I think it’s important that a chief of police knows that his job when his city is in complete civil unrest and a total state of destruction is to make certain his law officers are well rested and ‘healed’ from their trauma.

He’s so sure of this plan, he plans to take a vacation as well! So does the head of Homeland Security for the city, the man in charge of the recovery effort. Check this out, and I defy you to do it without gagging on a sudden rise of bile.

‘Colonel Ebbert, the senior official running the recovery and rescue operation, and Mr. Compass both said that they planned to take a break as well, but probably for less than five days, and that they would continue to direct the recovery by telephone.
Officials said they expected the military, with much greater resources, to expand rescue work, begin cleaning up the city and take the first steps toward reconstruction.’

Well, it’s good to know they won’t take the whole five days. I mean, after all, they’re just leading the rescue and recovery effort of their entire city, I hope that only three or four days of rest and relaxation in Las Vegas will jump-start their personal healing process. We can’t have our vital civic leaders stressed out or unrested! No sir!

Of course, all of this shores up every single thing I’ve been saying. They make it clear with their own words: they fully expect the feds to do EVERYTHING. The military will do the rescue and recovery, they will begin cleaning the city, they’ll police the city, they’ll fight fires and perform medical response service, they’ll even start the reconstruction!

I think the good Mr. Nagin should be forced to spend his five day vacation in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool (name stolen from the brilliant Bill Whittle), personally cleaning and restoring every single one of the reportedly 400-500 busses he failed to use to evacuate his own people, enough to EMPTY the Superdome before it became the Thunderdome minus Mad Max and Tina Turner.

I tell you, my friends, I hope the officials and civil servants of New Orleans enjoy their vacation. As they keep hanging themselves in the press, the word will eventually leak out despite the mainstream media’s attempts to completely ignore their culpability and instead pursue the ‘everything is Bush’s fault’ line of hogwash. Once that word is out there, Ma and Pa Kettle in flyover country will be joined by John and Jackie Liberal in Manhattan as they wholeheartedly cry for the heads of these men to be posted on the outskirts of the city on long poles, as a warning to the others.

Ben Stein's Wisdom

Ben Stein’s Wisdom

Once again, Ben Stein unleashes his gi-normous brain on us and proceeds to out-think most of the country.

In this short piece, he lays out everything I’ve already said and more.  I’m telling you people, this is where the event is heading, whether anyone likes it or not.  Negligence of a criminal stature was absolutely perpetrated in the days surrounding Katrina, but NOT by the Bush administration.  

The media is, big surprise, lying to us.  Intentionally glancing over the very, very obvious problems on the ground in Nola before and immediately following the storm while focusing exclusively on any anti-Bush story that comes up, even when the source for that story is someone who has a vested interest in seeing to it that all blame for the problems shifts north to the Feds and doesn’t get anywhere near them.

Read Ben’s piece and chew on it awhile.  Even if you’re a staunch Bushitler moveon.org automaton, I defy you to refute the very simple, elegant logic contained in it.