Friday, January 29, 2010

For Old Times' Sake

'Twas chatting with my buddy Wilson today about what a pussy A-Rod is when the subject turned to baseball fights. We naturally agreed that Nolan Ryan's pummeling of then rising-str Robin Ventura was the best ever.

To this day, I'll never understand what Ventura was thinking. Of course, thinking after being plunked by a 96-mph fastball is never really top of mind, so in that regard I understand his rush to the mound. But this was Nolan Ryan. Fireballer. A rancher. A Texas folk hero. A ferocious competitor. He was Crash Davis, Davy Crockett and John Wayne rolled into one and then some. You take your welt and go to first like a good little boy.

And every time I see this video, I can clearly hear a calm yet stern 46-year old Ryan saying to Ventura in his Texas drawl, "Boy, don't you come out here...get on down to first now, hear me?...Ah I reckon not...all right then..."

And wham! Ventura goes down in baseball history as the youngster who got his whoppin'. Good stuff.

Robin Ventura Charges Mound Against Nolan Ryan from CoasterNick3157 on Vimeo.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Sums Up The Past Year, Nicely

Although a tear or two should be added under the exclamation mark.


Saturday, January 23, 2010

At Least it Rhymes

From the "Stay Out of My Womb, But When it Comes to ObamaCare, I Willing Give You The Rest of My Body" crowd:

"Get off our ovaries, keep your rosaries!"

I'm anti-abortion, but pro-choice. And always pro-exposing hypocrites.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Gitmo On My Mind

One year ago today, a then-newly crowned President Obama signed the executive order to close the illegal combatant detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba within one year.

That's happened. Sort of. Kinda. Well, not really.

We'll get there, but first, let's hit the rewind button.

Ever since Gitmo opened for business in early 2002, the prison has acted as a symbol for hyperventilating liberals and antiwar protesters who bellowed that that the prison sullied our moral reputation around the world, was Bush's and Cheney's personal den of torture and inhumanity and has been used as a recruiting tool to create more terrorists simply by its mere existence.

Every last bit of which is unquantifiable hogwash and (even more) hateful liberal rhetoric. And it hasn't been liberal and antiwar/anti-US pundits who've made such outlandish claims with no basis in reality. President Obama himself has said, "Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda....In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.*"

Newsflash for The Commander in Chief: Al-Qaeda will say and make up any excuse to justify their attacks. How Obama doesn't know this as CIC is disturbing. Osama bin Laden himself changed his reasons for attacking the US and US targets multiple times: first, it was our support for Israel; then it was because President Clinton bombed Iraq; then it was because we had an air strip in Saudia Arabia. And this was all before Gitmo was even a twinkle in George Bush's evil eye. So when it comes to making up excuses for conducting their attacks, that's what AQ does: make shit up.

Second, Islamofacsicts watch what pushes our buttons. They are masters of exploitation. So it should be no surprise then that the AQ asshats in Yemen would cite Gitmo as a reason for their attack.

How otherwise normally intelligent people in the West buy into this game is....stupefying.

Next, there is absolutely no way to measure how Gitmo's existence has acted as a recruiting tool. It's unquantifiable; there is no way to measure it. Worse still, the logic is strained. Saying Gitmo acts as a recruiting tool is like saying that by having POW camps for Japanese soldiers (or even the west coast concentration camps during WWII) that those places "created" more soldiers. Well, duh. When you run out of people to fight, you need to find more. Believe it or not, this happens whether you kill or capture them. Funny that. But that doesn't mean the camp itself is the primary or even a minor recruiting tool.

But wait, Gitmo is more of a moral recruiting tool. Oh, please. Morals? Jesus H. Christmas, al Qadists kill innocent women and children without remorse. They strap bombs to the retarded, send them into markets, then detonate them. They've flown planes into buildings. Cut heads off on posted them on the net. Morals? That's laughable. In comparison, the fact that the vermin at Gitmo are alive alone speaks to our humanity as a culture. It's pseudo moralizing and unintelligent.

For all of the alleged horror stories that have come out of Gitmo, one might think the mere thought of potentially ending up in such a torture hell would be a deterrent. And maybe it has. Who knows, there's no way to measure that either.

I won't even address the juvenile claims that Bush and Cheney got off on waterboarding the likes of Khailid Sheik Mohammad. Those claims are sick and moronic on infinite levels.

Anyway, back to the present. On December 15, 2009, Obama issued an official memo to move the prisoners to the Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois. When that happens is largely open ended at this point.

Now if there's one thing consistent about AQ's numerous and ever-changing reasons for attacking the United States, it's this: They fucking hate us. Period. And I believe them.

Now, dear 2.5 readers, I ask you this: Let's take Obama's belief that Gitmo is a recruiting tool. How is changing the title and address to the middle of the country (at least it's in home state of Illinois) going to keep the "people safe and secure?" By his own deeply and dangerously flawed logic, why would he do this!? To make us more of a target. I have no idea.

Now, instead of this tiny and hated prison tucked away in the Caribbean, he's put it on American soil. Fab-u-lous. Maybe Obama should put a big Post-It on a Thomson water tower that reads "kick me!" while he's at it.

In the end, this is what happens when you start believing your own righteous and simplistic campaign rhetoric: You act hastily during your second day in office to please the fringe base that helped lift you to power, and raised the threat of another attack.

And that is very, very dangerous to us all.



* Why can't he just say "Yemen" if that's what means? Unless he does mean the entire Arabian Peninsula because, geographically speaking, the Arabian Peninsula consists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Baharain, UAE, and Oman. It's an important distinction to make because in the context of what he's saying, Obama makes it sound like the very formation of AQ happened because of Gitmo, which is completely and utterly false. AQ was formed in the early 1990s.

Mr. 57 States is about as much of whiz with geography as Sarah "I Can See Russia From My House!" Palin, so he probably means Yemen and was just trying to come across as worldly.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

"She's a Horrible Woman"

Yes, Mr. Caffertry, she is.


Dear 2.5 Readers....

Work. Nuts.

Ability to blog. Minimal.

Must go.

Back soon.

I promise.

Not that anyone cares....

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Worthless West Seattleites

I love where I live. We have fantastic restaurants, stores and shops and quiet, rolling streets to take strolls down.

The place, however, is filled with elitiest, pseudo-intellectual, anti-military/business/American, eco goose-stepping liberals that annoy me to the nth degree.

Take for example "lina" who left this grating comment on the West Seattle blog regarding a report about 2 Blue Angels who were in the sky over our fair hamlet yesterday:

i do love summer, but i do hate the blue angels. no doubt the feats they perform are totally amazing but in this economy and time of war- the excess, noise and visuals of planes flying low over a major metropolitan city make me feel ill. thanks for the providing the date though- i now know when i need to get out of town for the weekend. sorry to be a party pooper.

There are about a 137 comments I could have left to put loony lina in her place, but I chose her last sentence because it cheesed me off the most. I responded thusly:

lina, if you were actually “sorry” about being a party pooper you would have kept your negative and worthless comment about our military to yourself. Don’t be sorry for something you’re clearly not.

Pardon the crappy grammar of my last sentence. I was, as I noted, cheesed off.

Oh, and lina, please do all of us a favor: Get the fuck out of town. Not just for summer, but permanently.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Story Time

From the West Seattle blog: Delridge Library adds something new: Vietnamese Story Time.

Whatever happened to assimilation?

If I moved to Phon Phom, I'd feel surprised and more than a little awkward that the local Vietnamese library felt compelled to have an English Story Time—the kind of story my parents should be reading to me at home.

So what bugs me about this seemingly little half-hour? It's this: It doesn't help a minority group feel a part of a new society. On a grander scale, it's another step in the glacial, but perceptible dissolution of English as being the official language of the United States, which is something so-called progressives in this country have little issue in diluting.

Given the political makeup of where I live, I have little doubt this class was organized by some English speaking, do-gooding liberal local politician who proudly proclaimed it was "for the children!" and founded the class. They mean well, of course. But like too many liberals, they fail to see (or possibly could care less about) the trouble with their good intentions: the unintended consequences.

It is well-known that traditional Vietnamese families, like many Asian families, are fiercely loyal when it comes to speaking their native tongue. This is fine at home. However, outside the home, what motivation is there to learn a language when local government entities are reinforcing the notion that you don't need to learn the official language outside the home. That's a problem because it slows the assimilation process, which in turn creates a barrier to that family/group's success. That is the unintended consequence.

But it's just a reading class, you say. What harm can come from a little old reading class? Plenty, because it won't stop there. And it hasn't stopped there.

Ever been to certain sections of California and see the street signs if English and Spanish? How about a voting ballot or pamphlet?

Lest you think I'm being "hateful" (the courteous liberal's catch word for what they really want to call you: "a racist/bigot right-wing douchebag"), I fully support teaching languages in school and for businesses to be bilingual or multilingual. If banks want to have language choices on their ATMs or recordings, no problem. Banks are private entities (at least until the Obama Administration took many of them over) and if they have research that shows a cost/benefit to having multilingual ATMs, then fabulous—have multilingual ATMs.

But a local, state or federal government entity actively yet silently promotes the notion that it's okay not to learn English or immerse oneself into American culture—and by God you bet your ass we have one—that is 100% unacceptable.

Capice?