Patrick’s Rants

Cindy Sheehan has given up. Our employees, who we hired in the last election have ignored their marching orders from their bosses, us, to end the involvement in the Iraq war. We let “I haven’t seen a bill I didn’t like” Bush bully our employees into giving up. I have news for you, the customer is not always right; and in this case Bush is the customer. If your representative laid down for Bush tell them how you feel. We sent them there to get our troops out of Iraq – to force the focus back on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead, we are giving them more and more reason to hate us. Would we do something if our representatives walked up to a soldier on the streets of Washington and shot him or her? Hell yeah we would! Just because it’s half a world away doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for pulling the trigger on each and every one of the needless deaths they are responsible for. Congress is laying down and our troops are the ones getting screwed. Tell your representatives to stop pussy footing around with feel good legislation like minimum wage and “foreign worker plans” and do what the hell we sent them there to do. End the war authorization and get rid of the worst president this country has ever seen.

After seeing Iacocca on a TV interview I decided to get this latest book for my library. Mr. Iacocca is bold and to the point.

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff… But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”
Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

And with that Iacocca starts his 263 page look at our so-called leaders. At 82 years old Lee is trying to inspire outrage at the status quo. He falls short of calling Bush a moron or imbecile but it is blindingly obvious that he has no love lost for the president. This is a no-holds barred call for sensibility, intelligence and a demand that we hold our leaders accountable. In the process he gives us a simple check list with which to judge our next leaders. Unless you are dead, this book will cause your blood to boil. If you are the least bit upset about where the country is headed you will be absolutely outraged once you reach the end. It is a call to arms, a challenge to apathy, a road map to righting the “ship of state” as he so eloquently puts it.
Buy it.

The story is simple. A single man helps to shelter over 1200 fellow citizens; sparing their lives. The effect is gut-wrenching and hard to watch. In scene after scene, Paul Rusesabagina – played by Don Cheadle – does everything he can to prevent the death of his Tutsi family members, his neighbors, and even strangers at the hands of the Hutu militia. It is at once an uplifting story of one man’s courage and a picture of genocidal atrocities. I found myself appalled at the apparent inability of the UN “peace keepers” to prevent these killings, outrage that any government in the world could allow these actions to go unanswered, and a sickening realization that whatever I wanted the outside soldiers to do also applies to our own troops in Iraq today. We didn’t create the civil war in Rwanda – but if our sensibilities begged us to have something done about it those same sensibilities now must tug at us – at least a little – to do something about the civil war in Iraq. This is an incredibly powerful movie that surely will leave a mark on anyone who has seen it.

I have a really hard time with giving praise for just doing your job. My mom didn’t heap tons of praise on us kids and I think we turned out OK. Give everyone a trophy for just showing up? I thought it was a problem before, now I know it is. (Oh, look what a good job I did thinking that up… )
CareerJournal | Most-Praised Generation Craves Kudos at the Office

Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a man at a turning point in his life. As he struggles with his family while trying to sell medical equipment, Smith has to make decisions about the path he is to follow.

I watched this movie with a little trepidation. It has received many great reviews, but a single personal view caused me to watch it just a little more critically. Gardner was criticized for not, “doing everything he had to do for his son”. This was the viewpoint of an idealistic twenty-something. Age has a way of changing your perspective. During the Great Depression, some people would not do work that was beneath them, while others would do anything and everything to put food on the table. The young view of this movie is that Smith’s character should have gotten whatever job that he could – no matter what the pay. (more…)

I’m not talking about faith in an invisible being, but the faith that Dubya places on the people he has working for him. When he says he has faith in someone they might as well quit their job that day.
John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Mike Brown, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales. Maybe they haven’t all fallen yet, but it looks like a pattern to me.

Rachel has gotten herself into “trouble” posting
fake IDs on her blog.

It is not everyday that an ordinary person such as myself discovers himself in the presence of a published author. Scott Douglas, who drives a school bus here in Flagstaff, is an unassuming character with tired, life beaten eyes. He is as public as a bus driver naturally is and yet there is a certain seclusion about the man as well. His book, Moby and Ahab on a Plutonium Sea: The Novel Which Ended the Cold War is a fictitious account of what might have happened leading up to or following a purported event in 1979.
(more…)

Desparate
bartenders
seeking new owner
inquire within

And yes, it was spelled that way. So anyone wanting to buy Crazy Bill’s, step right up.

In AZ we have the one man one woman bumper sticker. It shows the universal bathroom signs for a man and a woman.

Marriage (man) + (woman)

I saw one recently that was the profile of Godzilla and Alien:

Marriage = (Godzilla) + (Alien)

Awesome. Actually it could have been Godzilla and Predator, but still it’s a great sticker.