I had a feeling yesterday would suck, and I was correct. Got a notice from my bank that there was ‘suspicious’ credit card activity, and they were correct, too. So, card canceled. Now I have to figure out all my auto-pay stuff and make sure it’s all set up properly. The park is still closed, so I was unable to get the dogs out for a walk. They haven’t been able to run around out there since last Tuesday, and they’re very bored and depressed (and wondering why I’m being so mean to them). This really sucks. Then, my van was finally done, so I picked that up (and it cost way too much money, but at least I can fill the gas tank up – though that costs was too much money, too). Of course, sans credit card, I had to find my damn checkbook, and figure out how to make out a check (which I almost never do anymore). Work sucked as well (I mean, more than on a typical Monday).

On the brighter side of things, our NYS Legislature managed to pass another weekly emergency spending bill, so NY doesn’t have to shut down yet. Maybe next week.

The President will be on the teevee tonight, telling us how we’re gonna fix the Gulf of Mexico and get off fossil fuels. Unless he’s announcing an Apollo-style program to get us off oil by the end of this decade, I don’t expect to be impressed.

Well, I hope things start to get better today.

We all know that Arizona Republicans hate Mexicans. Sadly, they also hates kids. Well, Mexican kids, anyway. And now they’re trying to pass a bill that would deny birth certificates to children born of undocumented immigrants (aka, those godless Mexicans). AZ Governor Jan “Prune Puss” Brewer says they can just “take their kids back” to Mexico. This is all just crazy talk, since the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment is pretty clear in saying…

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States

And of course all Republicans are “strict Constitutionalists”, so they’d never go for it.

On Press the Meat today, it’s David Axelrod, plus a roundtable with Carly Fiorina (who’s really got a lot of nerve making fun of anybody else’s hair), Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Roger Simon, and Chuck Todd.

It’s a Governor’s of the Gulf kinda day on Faze the Nation with Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Mississippi Governor Haley “oil? what oil?” Barbour, and Alabama Governor Bob Riley, plus U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen.

Carly makes her way over to chat with Weaselface Wallace on Fux News Sunday. Also on, Ambassador Susan Rice and “Power Player” Barbara Bush (not the old one, but the young one). And lots-o-fuxheads, of course.

At the Goebbels network, it’s Steny Hoyer, Papa John Boehner, and Bill Gates. Plus a roundtable with George :jerk: Will, Donna Brazile, Robert Reich and Tom Davis (it would be nice if it was Al Franken’s old partner, but I fear it’ll be that schmuck Republican from North Dakota instead.

Over at CNN, Fareed Zakaria gets mad at the media’s demand that Obama “show some emotion” instead of actually doing something. Plus an interview with Paul Wolfowitz (hide your comb, Fareed), plus the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, the tragic story of Neda, who, you may recall, was the woman killed a year ago by the Iranian government during the post-election demonstrationsa and a look at how the financial district of Shanghai has transformed into a breathtaking new skyline.

Of course, none of that really matters, because later on tonight it’s the Season 3 premiere of True Blood on HBO. That Sookie is just so gosh darn cute.

Have a good one.

I watched “Apollo 13” last night. Not all of it – I stumbled into it at about the halfway mark. I’ve seen it a few hundred times before, but always have a hard time passing it up when it’s on. For one thing, Bill Paxton’s in it, and it’s always fun to try and decide which is more dire: being stranded in a freezing, crippled, and dying space capsule a quarter million miles from earth, or living in Utah with three wives. Tough call, but if forced to choose, I think I’d opt for the space capsule (unless you let me pick chasing tornadoes with Helen Hunt). Seems a bit safer – especially if you’ve got a pissed-off Sissy Spacek after you.

Of course, I also enjoy watching that movie ‘cuz it’s set “back in my day”. I was about 10 years old at the time, and – like most boys my age back then, I guess – I was big into all that space shit (still am, truth be told; we’d be a lot better off spending more money on space and less on trying to kill everybody who lives on top of our oil). It’s fun to watch all those people in the old 60s-ish clothes and haircuts (and cars), all smoking cigarettes constantly (stomping out the butts in those plaid sandbag ashtrays – remember them?), sitting in front of those Mission Control “monitors”.

I guess the thing I like best about those days is that it seemed like the good old US of A could do just about anything. And if we couldn’t do it yet, by golly, it wouldn’t be long before we’d figure out how (well, except for that whole Vietnam thing, but even that wasn’t all bad – a lot of good music came out of it, not to mention free love and pot). You know, “American ingenuity” (for you younger folks, that’s a phrase they used to say about us back in the olden days) and all that.

We were actually known for being smart and and having a “can do” attitude back then (and by “we”, I of course refer to the generation one or two before mine).

If there’d been an oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 1969, we’d have locked a couple dozen white shirt and tie-wearing, crew cut-sporting egghead engineers in a room, tossed in a couple cartons of Luckies, and in a few hours they’d have come up with a way to make a plug out of cardboard, plastic bags, vacuum cleaner hoses, and duct tape. Then John Wayne woulda dove down through the burning oil with a knife between his teeth, plugged the hole, and then come up and give Maureen O’Hara a nice big wet one smack on the lips. All on one breath

Now, well, we don’t seem capable of doing much of anything any more.

I blame Reagan.

Big news (apparently; the biggest news of the day – at least if the Today Show is any indication), as Abby Sunderland has been spotted. She’s a teenager attempting to sail solo around the world, I guess. I vaguely remember hearing about this before, but, well, I wasn’t really paying attention. I’m mostly just trying to get through the day these days, and today, another work week comes to an end, which is always a good thing.

Those of us who work for the State of NY are kind of wondering how many work weeks we have left, though. A new emergency spending bill is due by Monday night, and if our hardworking legislators fail to pass it (as they’re making more and more noise about doing it), or fail to pass a budget (which they appear incapable of doing), then NY runs out of money.

Nobody’s really sure what happens at that point. Half a million NYers on unemployment won’t get their checks. They won’t have money to pay State employees past June 23rd (whether they’ll tell us all to stay home or try and pay us with ‘script’ – which they’ve done in the past – I don’t know). Will they shut down State prisons? Tell the State Troopers to stay home? Maybe mobilize the NY State National Guard to patrol the highways and run the prisons? What happens to hospitals? Things could get very interesting around here.

For now, though, it’s just another week of life over. 2,588 down, 1,325 to go (give or take).

So, I mentioned yesterday that they were doing a poll on whether or not adultery should be illegal. It wasn’t until later on in the day that I found out why. Seems a woman in Batavia, NY (famous for its turf farms) was charged with adultery and public lewdness for doing some guy on a picnic table bench in a public park (only the 13th person to be charged with adultery in NY State history, going back to 1900 when it became illegal; makes you wonder what was going on at the end of the 19th Century that made NYS feel compelled to enact that legislation). And she’s not even a politician.

OK, I can understand the public humping charge, but adultery? Was that really necessary? Her rather understanding husband says he’s “sad and hurt, but he forgives his wife.”

“I’ve got 40-some more years to spend with my wife, [and] I’m not going to throw it away over one incident,” he said. “I wish that the charges were dropped and that we could resolve this as man and wife. It’s more of a private matter.”

Uh, yeah, dude. It was just this one incident. I mean, who hasn’t been sitting in the parkm minding their own business, when suddenly they find themselves having sex? It happens (at least, in certain movies I used to run back in the day). My only advice would be to suggest that your wife not to tend to her private matters at public picnic tables. But then my wife never listens to me, either.

We found out yesterday that the SU Basketball program had the dubious distinction of falling below NCAA academic standards (them, and Colorado). That’s mostly because three kids decided to quit school a year ago and turn pro, which counts against you somehow. Now, I could give a shit about academics (I mean, lots of people go to college so they can get a job, so if you can get a job w/o graduating, then good for you; hell, I dropped out and got a glamorous job in a foundry), but they didn’t even win the National Championship. The sooner we drop this whole “academic” pretense and admit these kids are just money-makers for the colleges, and the programs are just farm teams for the pros, the better.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t let them take classes if they want to, but in the end, it’s all about the money. Better to go through life fat, rich, and stupid than, um, just fat and stupid. That’s the American Way, isn’t it?

Lots of primaries yesterday. Blanche Lincoln won, which sucks. Her opponent got lots of support from Organized Labor, but unions in the motherland of Wal-Mart don’t really have a lot of pull these days. The chicken lady went down, and Harry Reid will get to run against a teabagger and “oath keeper” in Sharon Angle. Nikki Haley won by a large majority, but didn’t get 50%, prompting a runoff in SC (so there’s still plenty of time for more people to come out and claim they had an affair – or at least a quickie – with her and call her a f*ckin’ rag head). Of course, the big news from last night came in baseball.

Former Syracuse Chief (OK, he was only here for like a month, but still, I’ll be able to say I saw him when he was in the minors. Not that I actually went out to see him, but I can still say it) Stephen Strasburg had his Major League debut with the Washington Nationals. Although he gave up a 2-run homer in the 4th (welcome to the bigs, Steve), he also struck out 14 batters with no walks in 7 innings, getting the win. Not too shabby.

The lo-cal news is running a poll this morning on whether or not adultery should be illegal (which it is in NY State, though I don’t think there are enough jails to actually enforce it). So far, it’s running 61-39 against it being illegal. I guess they couldn’t think of anything else to poll. They ought to try asking if the Israelis ought to get out of Palestine, as the late Helen Thomas suggested. That would get everybody all riled up.

More spending cuts from our Governor, whose latest emergency spending bill (still no budget here, in case you were wondering) includes $775 million worth of cuts to health care. Where I work, that means $1.5 million less from NY State, plus about the same amount in matching Federal funds. Next week, the Guv is expected to announce a $1 a pack cigarette tax (which would be fine with me, personally), but our hero and Senate Majority Leader Pedro Estrada (who acquired his position, you may recall, for his role in the rather short-lived coup that allowed Republicans to briefly take control of the NYS Senate. He was the one who didn’t assault his girlfriend – or at least hasn’t been charged and/or convicted of it) is saying he’ll vote against the next spending bill, so either we’ll get a budget or NY will shut down.

Estrada, by the way, is being sued by NY AG Andy Cuomo for embezzling some $14 million from a network of nonprofit health care clinics he founded, as well as for vastly underpaying janitors at his Bronx health clinics – some getting paid as little as $1.70 an hour. Which means you’d have to work for 4 hours and 42 minutes to pay the toll to cross the George Washington Bridge (on the bright side, it’s free on the way back).

NOAA says there’s – get this – oil in the water in the Gulf of Mexico. BP CEO Tony Hayward is positively gobsmacked at this news. Still, despite what appears to be oil gushing out rather profusely, BP is confident that the gush will be reduced to a “relative trickle” soon.

On the bright side, BP engineers are developing a car engine that runs on seawater. Assuming the seawater comes from the Gulf of Mexico, of course.

A former Citibank employee in NYC is claiming she was fired because she’s “too hot” and was a distraction to the other employees. Now, she’s certainly not ugly, but assuming she wasn’t coming to work in a halter top and Daisy Dukes, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s the “other employees” that have the problem, and not her (I think this sort of thing was also responsible for Helen Thomas’ retirement; she was just too hot), but the boys at Citibank apparently couldn’t handle it, and told her she needed to start wearing baggier clothing..

“I don’t have the money to buy a new wardrobe,” she says, referring to her work outfits. “I shop where everyone else shops—at Zara!” Lorenzana recalls leaving the meeting feeling humiliated. Other female employees “were able to wear such clothing because they were short, overweight, and they didn’t draw much attention,” she later wrote in a letter describing the meeting to Human Resources, “but since I was five-foot-six, 125 pounds, with a figure, it wasn’t ‘appropriate.’ ” She was also furious. “Are you saying that just because I look this way genetically, that this should be a curse for me?”

Yes, sadly, the curse of the good-looking people strikes again. I pity them all – men and women alike. Never getting the good jobs, never special treatment, never getting out of speeding tickets. Not everyone is blessed the way we short fat people are.

After a four-day weekend, it’s back to work again today. That sucks. Hopefully nobody will complain that I’m too sexy for my shirt.

In somewhat fitting fashion, a storm with high winds tore through the village of Chittenango yesterday, putting a premature end to this weekend’s Oz-Straveganza festivities. No, this wasn’t an homage to Ozzie Osbourne. Chittenango is the birth place of L Frank Baum, who wrote the series of books made famous by the Wizard of Oz. You’ll be glad to hear that, although there was a bit of damage, the Munchkins are all OK (and, yes, there are still a few of them left, though they’re definitely getting up there in years, if not inches).

Of course, Chittenango wasn’t the only place with bad weather this weekend, as tornadoes tore through the Midwest in typical tornado fashion. As I’ve learned from televangelists over the years, this is apparently because God hates the Midwest. In fact, just based on weather patterns, I’d have to say that God is really f*ckin’ pissed at the entire bible belt, ‘cuz between floods, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes, God’s pretty much throwing everything He’s got a these people. Except earthquakes, but we know He saves that shit up for the Godless State of California.

If you’ve checked in on the ‘Oil Cam’ lately, you might think the cap BP put on their hole in the ground (is it a hole in the ground if it’s under water?) isn’t doing a damn thing. That’s because you’re stupid. The folks at BP assure us that not only is it doing something, it’s capturing a ‘vast majority’ of the oil spewing out. Uh, OK. They’re the experts, so I trust them. I mean, who you gonna believe, the oil industry, or you’re lying eyes?

It’s odd. You remember the outcry from the wingnuts about “free speech” and stuff when that bimbo with the fake boobs made her proclamation about ‘opposite’ marriage? Well, I figured they’d all start yammering again in defense of Helen Thomas’ right to say that the Israelis ought to all go back to Germany and Poland. Shockingly, they appear to have remained silent. Well, not silent so much as ‘outraged’ (sorry, did I say outraged? I meant to say OUTRAGED!!!). And of course Ari Fleischer says she ought to be fired. And when Ari speaks, I listen. I mean, I respect him almost as much as I do BP CEO Tony Hayward.

In a refreshing act of contrition, Illinois Republican Mark Kirk sat down for an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, and apologized for slightly exaggerating (also known as outright lying about) his military record.

“I simply misremembered it wrong,” Kirk said….

Ah. Understandable. If only he’d misremembered it right.

Kirk also apologized for claiming that, in the future, he’ll move his family to Riverside Iowa and eventually become the GGGGGGG-Grandfather of James T. Kirk.

In preparation for the upcoming Football World Cup, South African soccer fans practiced rioting over the weekend. Only 15 people were injured and none were killed, but it’s still preseason, so we expect their stats to improve dramatically once fans get into full World Cup form.

Oh well, another day off, so I guess I’d better do my laundry or something.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no Press the Meat today. Instead, commie pinko NBC will broadcast the Cheese-Eating-Surrender-Monkey French Open. Tennis. Not even a regular American sport.

It’s an oil leak kinda day over at Faze the Nation, with Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, Florida’s Bill Nelson, Sharyl Attkisson and Jan Crawford of CBS News, and the WaPost’s Dan Balz.

Over at Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace also has Thad Allen, plus the rather oily GOVERNOR from Mississippi, Haley Barbour. Also, Israel’s capture of the humanitarian aid flotilla: great, justified military operation, or thethe greatest, most justified military operation ever? A fair an balanced debate with Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren.

Thad Allen hits the trifecta as he heads on over to the Goebbels network along with John Kerry and Krazy John Cornyn. Plus there’s a roundtable with George :jerk: Will, creepy little Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington and spawn of evil, Liz Cheney.

Over at CNN, Fareed Zakaria tells us what he thinks of Israel, and he’ll also talk about Afghanistan, asks if you’d like a nuclear reactor in your back yard, and also talks volcanoes.

Have a good day.