ROAD TRIP!

Finished packing much later than expected. Stopped at Tim Horton's for coffee, iced cappocino, and two days' worth of Tim-bits. Stopped at Mickey D's for bacon cheeseburger and fries. With a car running on vapors, stopped at the gas station to fill up -- not a personal best -- only $90.

Then -- pedal to the metal!!!






For the first time in nearly six years, I head for beautiful New Hampshire to learn how to do this.



After 45 minutes, hot and yawning, at the very crowded border crossing, feared that I might have to stop and take a nap ten minutes out of Ontario. However, caffeine kicked in, with a massive dose of Atlantic Canadian fiddle music, and the hours sped by, alert, relaxed, breathin' in the scenery.

Beautiful day for a drive across New York State. Following (in reverse) the path described in the folk song about the Erie Canal: "From Albany to Buffalo... we'll make Rome 'fore six o'clock..."

Rome -- we're planning to go there in the fall! -- yet here I am, driving through New York, and there it is: Rome! And then -- wait for it -- Verona! Well, I gotta check this out. Besides, I haven't looked at a map yet and am not too sure where I am. So I head off the highway, and off to Rome/Verona.

Oops. Forgot about the part where a departure from the Thruway on a "whim" means paying a big old toll to get off. Okay. All roads lead to Rome.

Or not. Rome is 8 miles off the highway. So I'll settle for Verona. Not much to Verona, as it happens (not that I really got into the town, just a highway junction). But it did offer one outstanding attraction.


God bless America.

Now I reside in a hotel in East Greenbush. Just past Albany, home of the profoundly dysfunctional state government, which spends its time seeking ever more ways to squeeze the life out of the whole state with some of the most outrageous taxes in the country. But as of yesterday, they've apparently found a perq they can afford: now I can marry my girlfriend.

Dude at the Daily Caller sums up the paradoxes of New York life purty good.

You can marry a person of the same gender in New York City, but you can't eat your own wedding cake without Bloomberg slapping it out of your hands.

Transgender = no problem. Transfat = illegal.

Heh.

Getting late.

THE DAILY CALLER REPORTS:

OBAMA FLUBS ON MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT


Dead? I didn't even know he was sick!



Yes, the Commander-in-Chief was so pleased and impressed to be handing out a Medal of Honor last November to Staff Sgt.Salvatore Giunta (2nd Battallion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade -- still serving), he got him confused with a dead man -- the late Sgt.1st Class Jared Monti, 71st Cavalry, 10th Mountain Division, killed in Afghanistan June 2006, MOH presented September 2009.

An easy mistake -- anybody could make it. After all, there have been two Medals of Honor awarded by the current President, in 2.5 years -- that can get confusing, man. I mean, it's only a Medal of Honor, for cripes' sake -- it's not as if it's the Nobel Peace Prize or something.

It's one of those days, folks, when I think the only thing about this President that isn't fake is the fact that he's an effing JACKASS -- a man who put the froid in sang-froid. He's like a droid with an electoral reflex and little else zipping through his wires. C-Creepy-O. Who knew that Michelle's White House garden could grow such a 24-carrot phony?

We salute our Medal of Honor recipients, living and dead, and we hope their Commander-in-Chief will make a concerted effort in the future to tell one from the other. Or at least a convincing effort, for the sake of their families, to pretend that it matters -- that brand of fakery would at least be a sort of compliment.

"I don't profess to know the right thing to do, but whatever it is, that ain't it."

I yield the floor to the smart guys, as Powerline weighs in on the White Flag of Obama. Money quotes:

That's some centered course you've got there, pal. In your brilliant efforts abroad, you have managed to produce a months-long stalemate with a fourth-rate Third World dictator. If you haven't yet become a laughingstock, you are nevertheless doing a fine job helping the United States to become one.

As for our union: let us seek union in the understanding that cliches are the enemy of clear thought.

Obama's cheap echo of Lincolnian rhetoric at the end of the speech sounded to me like fingernails screeching across the blackboard. I've read Lincoln's speeches. I can't say I knew Lincoln, but I know the history of his presidency and of the Civil War. And Mr. President, you're no Abraham Lincoln.

Indeed.
P.S.: With the recent disclosure that Sarah's Palin's 24,000 emails revealed a "clear and concise" writing style at an 8th grade level (8.5, on a scale where King's "I have a dream" scored an 8.8 and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address scored 9.1), one wonders where Obama's customary pile of incoherent cliches would come in. One may speculate that Palin has him shellacked. One is just sayin'.

OBAMA ANNOUNCES AFGHANISTAN SURRENDER
AND OFFICIAL POLICY OF ISOLATIONISM

...except for that Libya thing.... and maybe that Yemen deal.

(More on that when my LTJG Navigating F-18 WIZO gets back from Arabian Sea deployment. Steaming home even as we speak.)


Steven Green customarily drunkblogs the Afghan speech. Money quotes (from Green, not from the Speecher):

5:07PM “Peace needs… a political settlement.” If I were Karzai, I’d start sleeping in a bunker. In Pakistan.

5:08PM Wow. Kabul is going to start functioning like a real national government, because Obama said it “must.” And it will do so with less support from us.

Come again?

5:09PM “This has been a difficult decade.”

Well — yeah. Duh. But, please, Mr. President, say it like you mean it. It’s like he’s announcing a “worthwhile Canadian initiative.”

5:10PM “The tide of war is receding.”

Churchill, he ain’t.

5:12PM “We will support those Arab revolutions by setting a nice example and saying nice things.”

5:12PM Oh good lord. It’s turned into a Model UN speech. High school Model UN, not college.

5:13PM “Nation-building here at home.”

Seriously, at my model UN, he’d have been laughed off the stage, and we were stupid earnest back then.

5:16PM Wolf Blitzer called it “short but upbeat.”

If that’s upbeat, MacBeth is a light comedy.

SuperSchmuck Wesley Clark goes on the O'Reilly Factor and rationalizes the Libya gum-up, plus the ignoring of General Petraeus, with the excuse that "the President has to look at the broader picture -- as if this monumentally ignorant golfer-in-chief has ANY idea what a broader picture of ANY aspect of American life and policy looks like.

Dennis Miller on O'Reilly continues with his mantra: "Who cares what the guy says -- it's what he does that counts -- and so far Obama is a KILLING MACHINE." Just keep saying it, Miller -- because it's so true, and it gets the whole left phalanx so pissed.

So -- he ignores his lawyers about the War Powers Act, he ignores his generals about how to win a war, he ignores his wife about a healthy diet of figs'n'twigs. OMG, before we know it he'll be ignoring his pack of Chicago thugs, his pastor-of-choice, and his magic mirror.



Local News:

BEYOND HILARIOUS

STRIKING CANADA POST WORKERS seen today, on the picket line at Dufferin and Lawrence, in 75 degree heat with 80+% humidity, standing around the ritual fire in an oil drum.

Because, hey -- it's what we do, in the name of the oppressed worker, facing down THE MAN. "Save our Sick Days!"



What can Brown do for you?

DA-NILE AIN'T JUST A RIVER IN EGYPT
[UPDATED]

MOUTHY CONGRESSMAN WEINER DEPARTS,
WITH THE PUBLIC MOUTHING OFF AT HIM


With barely a soupçon of humility, Rep. Anthony Weiner announced his resignation from Congress, to which his "neighbors" (as he referred to his constituents) hollered out "Bye-bye, pervert!"

Cruel, but accurate. Anthony Weiner is a habitual, long-term practitioner of the cyber version of standing in the shadows and opening your raincoat to reveal your erection to unsuspecting and unwilling passing ladies or children. He's an exhibitionist. Had he done it the old-fashioned way, he'd be headed for a stretch in County Jail and a permanent record as a sex offender.

As someone who was a victim of one of these old-fashioned pervs when I was a very young girl (Lloyd Center parking lot, Portland, Oregon, early 1960's), I wouldn't claim that I've been done any permanent damage, but let's say it's a lasting photo on my mental wall.

Despite his physical proximity and direct in-the-flesh exposure to the victim, I think the guy in the parking lot was actually engaging in the more anonymous and less risky pattern of behavior. Weiner, as a public figure, operating through a medium which (any half-wit knows) leaves a traceable signature with every act, was doing something infinitely more dangerous than standing around in a parking lot -- and therefore more stupid.

[UPDATE: Apparently I have violated the Prime Directive by using a copyrighted image which the owner wishes to protect. I'm guessing it's not the photo above, since that is still all over the 'net in use by amateur commentators like me. So my other choices were (a) a picture of hot-dogs; (b) a picture of the Vienna skyline; or (c) a sample of a page border in the design of a grape vine. My Googly friends inform me that a complaint was filed at some point, but I am unable to find it at the designated link. So I'm working on guesswork here, and have dutifully removed the obvious offenders. If I'm wrong, I'm sure Google will be on my case toot sweet. Please feel free to continue....]

Dare I say it? With what little I had seen of politician Weiner in action, I had already found him a repugnant human being -- aggressively abrasive, posturing, filled with manufactured righteous anger when the cameras were rolling. Yawn. A television stereotype of the passionate politico, with an irritating whine. He exuded the kind of needy arrogance which made it not at all surprising to find out that he was addicted to seeking the approval of a bevy of long-distance fans, whom his fantasies had morphed into a personal harem that surely craved images of his excessively toned and waxed bod.

This guy needs treatment, and some restrictions on visitation with his child as yet unborn. He would probably suffer a lot were he incarcerated under the traditional circumstances, and for his own safety I'd recommend that, at worst, he should spend some time in a "country club" prison or wearing a house arrest anklet. He's a garden variety pervert, even if the garden is now virtual and global.

No doubt there will be speculation as to what extent the Congressman's last name was the subject of childhood teasing, and if that ridicule caused him to obsessively seek approval and respect. (Armchair psychology, awa-a-a-y!!!!)

Sigh -- here lies the only genuine tragedy of this entire sordid affair: the fact that vast numbers of people will now come to believe that the way you spell this....

[INSERT PICTURE OF FOOT-LONG HOT-DOGS HERE]

.... is W - E - I - N - E - R.

W - R - O - N - G.

This is a gross error which will rob the noble sausage of its ethnic origins and identity as a .... uh .... "son" of the gleaming Austrian city of Vienna, or WIEN, as it's spelled in German.

[INSERT NICE PHOTO OF VIENNA HERE]

A person, or thing, with origins in Vienna is a WIENER -- including that meaty dish we know as the WIENERSCHNITZEL.

I have no idea where Representative Weiner's forebears came from, or what exactly his last name might mean for them, but one thing is for certain: had he or his family insisted on the proper pronunciation of their last name, and perhaps even chosen to change its spelling in order to insure the preservation of its pronunciation, we would have spent the past few weeks chatting about the trials and tribs of a Congressman named VINER.

That's VINER.

Sorry, folks -- nothing funny to see here. No silly jokes with which to persecute little Tony Weiner from Queens.

VINER.

Got it?


Now class, review:

WEIMAR Republic

Kurt WEILL

WEIN, WEIB, und GESANG (Wine, Women, & Song)


WEINER

[INSERT DRAWING OF GRAPE VINES HERE]

(rhymes with VINER, Yiddish for "winemaker," Silesian German dialect for "wheelwright," like Wagner)


m'kay?

Can we just stop the weenie jokes? Can we give the kids a spelling test? Can we get back to the term "hot dog", with mustard and no sniggering? Please?


Pre-press conference headline at the bottom of the FOX News screen this afternoon: "Suspicious package found outside Rep. Weiner's office"

Enough with package, Tony. Time to call it quits.