France, our national first wife

In baseball there is a little known implement called the fungo bat. It’s a light thin bat, about only inch thick except for the the top end where about a foot of it two inches thick. Never seen in a game, it is used in practice to knock pop ups and line drives to infielders and sometimes even outfielders to sharpen up fielding skills. Many coaches are very skilled at using it to place balls exactly where they want -- usually into the “gap” between players to see how the players react.

Today, I feel like peppering you with little items, like fungo practice.


This morning got off to a cheerful start as I watched China struggle hopelessly against Lithuania in the Olympic Basketball quarter finals. The greatest of nations with a billion people was down worse than the score since the Baltic five was dogging it, wanting to win, but not humiliate their opponents. The Lithuanians are a diffident people, not quarrelsome nor trouble making. They do play basketball well -- they beat the USA five too. Not bad for a small country of only a few million people.

This morning it looks like the cabrones were up to it again, blowing up two local flight planes coming out of Moscow’s suburban airport a few days ago. The Russian authorities have found explosives residue and some fools have taken credit (if that is the word) for it. They chalked up a 89 innocent victims, not a bad days work for the sorry ass delusional villains. May these dogs burn in hell!

What kind of religion demands human sacrifices? They say they are Muslim. I say they are not really Muslims, they are not full immersion Baptists nor mystical Sufi’s, nor Sephardic Jews, jack Mormons, militant Lutherans not even deranged Unitarians who have turned to the Dark Side. These dogs worship BAAL the evil god of their ancestors who demanded the blood of children and innocents. In case they missed it, the God of Abraham forbad and rejected human sacrifice thousands of years ago. It happened in what is now Iraq, the Iraqis can even show you Abraham’s house in the ruins of Ur of the Caldees. But I guess like Master Chief Boatswains mate Dooty used to say, “There always some sorry bastard who didn’t get the message.”

Did you hear, Sad'r , the Elmer Gantry of the Shi’a -- the one who never finished his clerical training and doesn’t have any right to clerical status -- and his boys (whose normal occupation is stealing hub caps and purse snatching small change and vegetables from widows and orphans) left the sacred mosque defiled with a couple dozen corpses of victims of their blasphemous “Islamic Justice.” He and his lads also looted the mosque of cash and ripped off as much treasure and art as they could jimmy off the walls. They are dogs -- no, that's too good and I didn’t mean to defame our noble and loyal canine comrades. They are pond scum. If they lived in LA they would be gangbangers who shoot down six year old girls in school yard playgrounds and kill eighty year old grandmothers sitting on their front porches. You know the kind of vermin I’m talking about.

Speaking of other species, this morning Cinder, our 14 year old front yard cat died in his sleep. Cinder was the monarch of the front yard -- ours and our neighbors. He adopted us, as is the way with true felines. Glossy coal black, he was a tom cat with attitude, a top of the food chain predator, junior grade. We fed him and he occasionally brushed against our legs or let us pet him. He maintained the good order of our front porch and yard, kept squirrels and pigeons at bay and possum and rodents out of sight. Hail and farewell, old friend, you were a cat among cats.

How about you, but if I never hear another word about the Peterson murder case or Michael Jackson’s misadventures it will be good news. With the world in turmoil, genocide in Sudan, war and terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, mayhem in Palestine and Israel, a simmering and bloody civil insurrection Saudi Arabia, increasing friction in China between a bare knuckles capitalist economy and a crooked Communist party that has degenerated into a Trade Union for oligarchs, a lunatic dictator with A Bombs in North Korea, youth gangs out of control in LA -- they knock off twice as people per year than the Iraqi insurgents -- not that the L A Times notices -- what is the fixation with these two lousy stories? If you realize that just in LA, gangs kill and maim more people that the professionals do in Iraq and Afghanistan, you wonder what is going on with our news media. Why do they hide this story. These punks are killing thousands every year and nobody cares. Most of the victims are black and latino, apparently only white deaths get establishment media ink and screen time. If this is not ugly bare faced racism, I don’t know what is.

Here we are in the dog days of August and the tomato vines are in full production. Enjoy them while you can -- fresh intense perfumed tomatoes great sliced with some sweet red onion and a tiny bit of salt. We eat so many commercial quasi tomatoes most of the year, enjoy it now along with white corn, sweet melons, and rich plums.

I agree with Dennis Miller, let’s drop of the fiction that France is an an ally. They are not, they haven’t been for years. They have a foreign policy based on an odd blend of Cartesian high mindedness and brazen opportunism that would shock New Jersey pol’s. They are not friends -- old acquaintances, but not really friends. Sure they holler for help with they are over their head in trouble-- twice in the past century. But other times they hang out with our adversaries and pimp us until those guys turn on them, which they always do. In reality France is America’s first wife. There were moments, but overall they are a pain in the ass.

For most of my life it has been an article of faith among a certain class of Democrat that Republicans are stupid. I think it began with bad feeling when Ike beat Adlai Stevenson. Now Adlai was a bright man whose family had been prominent in Democratic politics all the way back to the Civil War. Ike was obviously an intelligent man -- he ran WW II for our side.
In the case of Kennedy and Nixon, any fair observer would tell you both were exceptionally bright men. Thing got screwy when Jerry Ford become President and these snobby Democrats chortled Ford was a dunce and a spastic. I once drove Congressman Ford around the Bay area on a series of speaking engagements. He may not haven an astrophysicist, but he was an engaging and bright man, He has a degree from Michigan State. As for his being a spastic, I only point out that he was an All American Center and he later played pro football -- I believe, for the Chicago Bears before WW II.

In Reagan’s time, the snobby Democrats assured you he was a dunce. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so dumb he put the Communist Party out of business and ended the Cold War. The same know it all's tried the same line against George H. W. Bush, but for his tangles with English grammar, he had fine grades at Yale and was also an All American Athlete, indeed his senior year he was considered the finest intercollegiate baseball player and turned down an offer to play with the New York Yankees. Both he and Michael Dukakas were smart serious guys who were honest, hard working and dull. After eight years of Bill Clinton honest hardworking and serious look pretty good.

Then we have the nineties and the era of Clinton and Gingrich -- if anything they were too smart of their own good. Both performed way below potential and for all they did accomplished its sad to think what they could have done if they would paid attention to business, especially during Clinton’s second term which end up an example of the unintended wisdom of total partisan gridlock. Nothing of lasting importance happened and now we are told it was a Golden Age of economic prosperity. What happened was that Congress wouldn’t let Clinton spend more money and Clinton wouldn’t let the Congress cut taxes. Ergo a miracle -- revenues soon surpassed expenditures and Clinton took to boasting he was the most skinflint President since Calvin Coolidge. A very odd thing to say, but then Girgrich was always praising FDR which was a singular novelty for Republicans.

Now we have George W. Bush. Michael Moore, a guru among Democrats, assures us he is only a step above being a drooling imbecile. Indeed, among all the smart, so cool, ahead of the curve savants in the New York Times it is dogma. Only Maureen Down in her unique and perverse way said on Tim Russert’s show that she had interviewed Dub’ya at length and she found him intelligent, not in a bookish way to be sure, but intelligent. Russert pushed her on this and she said, no he is intelligent. She sees him in light of Shakespeare’s young Prince Hall turning into Henry V. In her red haired wrong headed Irish way she is not bowled over by John Kerry either. She has scuffed him up a few times and who knows what Shakespearian character she will use to torment him. I will not say Hamlet beauce that is too obvious -- the prince who couldn't make up his mind.

While he may be dyslexic, George W. Bush is intelligent. First, he graduated from Yale and later got into and received an MBA from Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School is not hardly getting a GED from the local night school. Harvard Law did not receive Kerry so he went to Boston College Law School with the shanty Micks. I suspect his actual Yale grades are not that different from Bush’s. This indicates he was at least above average in brains.

His must despised service in the Texas Air National Guard indicates that he passed the Air Force flight physical and psychological examination. This is a big deal. It tells he had 20/20 vision, exceptional hand eye coordination. was not color blind, overall was in exceptional physical shape and he was checked out and verified not crazy. The Government is very careful about who they let fly jet planes and they let him. If he really was a dunce, he would have spent his Air Force career waxing planes in San Antonio. His career at the Texas Rangers baseball team also indicates real ability. Of all the pundits, only Boston's Mike Barnicle is the only one I know who has looked at Bush's time as General Manager and he thinks it indicates real ability. Bush took a team from the celler to a pennent. The sale of the team make him a rich man.

I imagine Senator Kerry did not fly because he had some otherwise irrelevant physical flaw that kept him from passing a military flight physical. Kerry does have a civil aviation licence, so he can fly. Very few people pass a military flight physical. Most athletes have enough injuries by the time they are old enough to take one that they would fail because of a bad knee, a dislocated shoulder or some other failing. My memory of the Vietnam period recalls that most of the exceptionally gifted jocks I knew failed the much easier Army physical. The second string guys and bench warmers usually passed. It seems counter intuitive but if you think about it, it makes real sense.